Reworking Precedents and My Foundational Thinking
02.15.2022As a student of the built environment, I was always taught to work with precedents. In architecture classes, we study the aesthetic history of buildings designed in previous generations. In urban planning classes, we study policies from other cities. In real estate classes, we use structures of similar size, use, and location to predict construction, sale, and operational values.
Over time, I started to realize there were certain places that held a seat at the top of the pedestal of “good design”. Think: bike lanes in Copenhagen, collective housing in Dutch suburbs, and educational models in Finland. Or, closer to home, pedestrian-only streets in Boulder, green acupuncture on NYC’s High Line, and Evanston’s school desegregation policies of the 1960s.
Maybe, surge pricing in Singapore or participatory budgeting in Curitiba would be sprinkled in the lecture. If lucky, a textbook might include public transportation in the form of gondolas in Medellin. Or, on a particularly radical day, we may learn about the effectiveness of matatu buses in Nairobi.
The cannon of architectural education is reductive and incomprehensive. It will do nothing to help future urbanists effectively design for engaging with differing ideas, opinions, values, and histories in their own vastly divergent contexts. It does not help us develop critical problem-solving skills for engaging with fractured cultures, tense after centuries of conflict, exploitation, and suppression. We are global, connected, and very, very different from each other.
I am absolutely not the first to make this critique. Centering white, European places and people in the design of our cities has been deeply interrogated. There are countless instances where narratives beyond white and European precedents have been gracefully and effectively woven into curriculum and design - I am a benefactor of this education. In fact, the question at the core of the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennial engaged precisely with this question about engaging with difference, with the exhibition titled, “How Will We Live Together?”
My research and experience in Belo Horizonte, Brazil simply aims to add to this larger movement of reframing “good design” by looking at the connection between the planning of Chicago and Belo Horizonte. Belo Horizonte originally wanted to look like Paris, Washington DC, and it’s contemporary, Chicago. All these cities embodied “good design” but what happens when those ideals are transported to a vastly different geographic and cultural context? Did all go as planned?
Particularly, I am interested in exploring alternate values of city building, with a particular focus on the design of public space. I define public space as the arteries, corridors, rumbling boulevards, plazas, gray spaces, third spaces, nooks and crannies where we transition from the private realm to the public. I’m looking at public space beyond just grandiose plaza or a $50 million rail-to-trail refurbishment, instead observing everyday people’s relationship to their stoop, to the sidewalk. To their corner store, local bar or nearest intersection. I am interested in how the planners of Belo Horizonte in 1897 envisioned their future citizens would interact with others outside their front door.
As an urban designer, I want to focus on the design of these spaces because I believe they can be a site of culture shift. I am particularly invested in shifting the following three cultural values that have defined some of my experience:
- Excessive consumerism
- Individualism
- Scarcity mentality
(Warning: scale jump!) I am invested in reframing these values because I am invested in the sustenance of human and non-human life. I believe that humans have the potential to structure ourselves, our communities, and our relationship to non-human beings in a way that achieves social, economic, and ecological balance. I am coming of age in a time that requires critical changes in commonly-held personal values in order to affect the catastrophic trajectory of our civilization.
The connection between white supremacy, capitalism and climate degradation has been extensively studied and confirmed. This project does not aim to prove this connection, rather build upon evidence that the social values that uphold systems of excessive profit accumulation are intimately intertwined with the steady increase in temperature of the earth. I aim to ground this lofty thinking in the design of public space, drawing connections between our aspirations for society with the small-scale ways that communities are designed and developed.
Constantly humbled by my scale as a lone gal tromping around this massive rock, I feel the urges of capitalism within me every day. I often succumb, indulge and consume. I gossip, I lie, and at the most innocent, I buy toilet paper on Amazon. Human and fraught with contradictions, I know my attempt to design and build effective public space will likely be another dream lost to the cosmos when this all goes up in flames. But, while I’m here, I believe in hope. I believe in love, playing, exploring, and belonging. Most importantly, I believe in connecting with others. I believe life is only as rich as the connections we build.
And so here is where I land. I want to design the physical space that can serve as a catalyst for connection.
So, please join me on this journey to better understand the world that we created in the past in order to better design a world for the future.
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