Criteria
04.10.2022Life goal: I want to work with people to move our cities from “closed” to “open”.
To do this, I am getting to know places in Belo Horizonte, the “Chicago” of Brazil, that embody elements of open cities. I’ve come up with a set of criteria that guide me as I wander the city. Whether I am going out with friends, buying a lemon at the municipal market, or hunting down a bus pass, I keep in my mind this list of criteria. Whenever I come across a place that hits enough of them, I return and try to understand the form, activities and sense that enable open city characteristics to exist.
Indoor.
It must incorporate indoor elements bc it’s cold as hell in Chicago and if I try to apply ideas from here (i.e. rich, dense, complicated, fluid outdoor public space) to Chicago’s tempermental seasons it’ll b fruitless cuz its so fckn cold in Chicago 🍇🚫️🍌Diverse in use.
Multiple kinds of commercial activities (i.e. guy who prints stickers and lady who sells bananas and person who records podcasts and yung fellah who preaches the bible while elderly gossip over coffee while lil sis waits for the bus after a dramatic day at middle school and my mom gets her shoes repaired by that broskie but also someone might b shooting up in the corner).📚🚌☕️🎸Diverse in ppl.
The closed city is rooted in anti-Blackness and arbitrary social deliniations to avoid interaction of difference along unfounded racial categories in the name of accumulating profit to wits end. The places I want to support and catalyze in the future will aim to deconstruct cultures of white supremay and center sense of authentic belonging over arbitrary belonging rooted in exclusion. I am also interested in places that are diverse in age because I’ve seen that gentrification in the US is not only racial, but also seperates people by age. I’ve nevr seen a tween in Fulton Market. Or a grandma. lol fail.A place where I go naturally.
I’m not trying to show up w my fancy white azz in a favela and pretend that I know what to do, pretend I belong which is HIGHLY probably behavior for someone with my background. In order to be the urbanist I want to be, I am resisting this tendency and studying places where my life and all it’s contradictions and biases and prejeduices and desires and histories takes me. This way I can most honestly confront the ways that my body moves through a city so to clearly understand the world that we have constructed so that I can ACTUALLY build something else.Public and private space.
I want to experience the collission of public interest and private interests bc that’s how we operate! I want to always have to navigate the balance between government control and support and private entrepreneurship. I don’t want to dwell at either end of the spectrum.Within the city center.
Belo Horizonte was founded with a rigid, gridded center that now comprises like .5% of the total city geographic area because city planners only built the city for like .5% of the actual people who lived here/constructed the city. So most of BH is not within the center. Parts of the city center defintiely still embody the cultural legacy of the original plan- wealthy, segregated, exclusive. However other parts have fully resisted the original homogeneity. For example, the “hipercentro” hold many other types of people, uses and are more accessible. What I am interested in is how people create fluidity and culture and vibrancy and diversity within the rigid center. We will always be living in the legacy of these grids (unless russia gets rly mad and clicks the red button) so I want to learn how people resist the conditions of the rigidity and introduce new cultures while physically operating within the grid.🌊
Commercial space.
The core of neighborhood disinvestment is lack of lending for commercial and housing. In my work in Chicago I found the most interesting projects to be those that try to bring commercial space to allow for local entrepreneurs to expand their businesses. I think that sustainable development is for-profit, non-profits are so reliant on outside interests to keep doors open. We need money to be independent. So, I look for dense, crunchy, overflowing commercial areas with local businesses where people are trying to make money.🤑
Reuse of an old building.
Everything we need is already here.Cultural work.
Culture builds cities so I want to understand where the cultural works lands and how it intersects with other uses. In the wise words of CCR who definitely didn’t say this first, “culture eats policy for breakfast.” Where do the millenials get high, where do the MC duels live, where do new rythms emerge, where do the influencers congregate?📸Where I feel good
Purely trying to hang out and get to know a space where I feel good. Feshow (brasil slang for “fechou” which means “it’s closed” like “that’s it”, “period.”).
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