When it comes to discussing informal housing, it is generally cities in countries that take the spotlight in development - however, as revealed by the contribution of Situ studio exhibition uneven growth of MoMA, issues of informal settlements are indeed present in cities across the spectrum of development. In this interview, posted on Arup Connect as " inequality and informality in New York ," Sarah Wesseler speaks principle Situ Studio Bradley Samuels about their unconventional proposal to address an issue that is often neglected in New York politics
uneven growth. Urbanisms tactic for expanding megacities , a newly opened exhibition at the New York Museum of Art modern, focuses on the complex relationship between urbanization and inequality. during the 14 month period preceding the launch, six interdisciplinary teams have explored how these issues play in different parts of the world, each developing a architectural response to a specific city.
architecture firm Situ studio (with cohabitation strategies [CohStra]) was to study his hometown , New York. (Arup transport planner Michael Amabile also consulted the team.) We spoke with main SITU Bradley Samuels on the project.
10
As a New Yorker, what have you learned from this project that surprised you?
The New York City Housing issue gets a lot of attention - everyone speaks in a crisis - but there are a large part of the population that is is away from the conversation. There are about 0,000 people or more, depending on how you count, illegally converted residential living in New York. They do not show up on the census; this density condition more or less hidden. It occurs in existing housing, so it is not very visible and present in our lives as New Yorkers.
Much of what we have done from the beginning of the project was to try to establish where this is going. It is particularly in immigrant communities, mainly among the lowest paid people - somewhere above homeless, but in the lowest scale of the average median income levels. And it is a very large number of people.
This was a kind of revelation for us. There were also certain parallels with other cities that have focused on the exhibition. If you talk about Mumbai or Rio or Lagos or other places in the world where the density issues and informal get much, the conversation goes fast in slums or favelas. I am not trying to argue that those security issues are also acute in New York as they are, say, Mumbai, but there is also an informal housing market in New York. We wanted to say that this is a subject that must be highlighted and be part of the conversation housing.
The first half of the project was essentially to find ways to document the issue. It is an interesting problem, because as a hidden condition, it is by definition not visible, so you must find the proxy settings as opposed to using all that NYC Bytes or the city could make available typical data.
one thing we did was to use 311 illegal conversion complaints - not a set of perfect data, because it tends to be biased towards places where there a lot of tension between rich and poorer communities. But if you look at the heat map, it gives you a general idea of where the concentrations are. No wonder they are mostly in the outer boroughs, in the most distant parts of the city where immigrant communities live.
We have also sought to use the American Community Survey (ACS) data set. ACS put us household composition, and more granular look at things that are not included in the census of 2010. And what you see is a very strong correlation between the ten places in New York where he are the most shared and where illegal conversions are reported. These are places like Elmhurst, Sunset Park, Jamaica :. outer boroughs, immigrant communities, people working in the service sector
As part of the exhibition is really important. We live with the legacy of the city of luxury Bloomberg, and the question is, who supports this city, which continues to maintain it? And it is the service sector, right? These are the people who live in these neighborhoods, mostly. So it was a way based data to get to some of these questions; not an ideal way to measure it, but certainly enough to give you an idea
We also worked with community organizations to actually get access to the apartments to see how they .: subdivide what it looks like in a basement where many people live, how the spaces are shared. We wanted to photograph and document these spaces so that it is not just a set of abstract data you are presented with, but a form of documentation that gets in the way people actually live.
We have also modeled these spaces. If it is a divided house, it gets to be very tight and very difficult to photograph, so we made a series of axonometric drawings which show you the space in its entirety. They show the number of people living in this space, how much they pay to live, etc.
, we have adopted a multidimensional approach to the documentation of this condition, both quantitative and qualitative, and drew on the different tools we to us as designers to make visible this condition hidden.
one of the biggest revelations was parallel to the work of Jacob Riis. Put very simply, we feel like you could do the project of Jacob Riis all over again and it would be as relevant as it was in the 180s is just happening in another part of town.
There is a subtle problem because it is not that we say, "these are all the abominable conditions that put people in extreme danger and this is a matter of life safety "part of the problem is dangerous conditions. some of it is simply that New Yorkers, we must accept that we will have to live with a higher density in the future.
And the biggest takeaway is that there is a misalignment between the existing housing stock and demographics that are actually occupying these spaces. In Jackson Heights or similar places, houses that were designed for a nuclear family are actually inhabited by three or four or five families. And these families are not nuclear families, extended families are the contemporary immigrant families: you might have mother, father, children, grandmothers, cousins, aunts, uncles. So we have to rethink the relationship between certain spatial typologies and spaces people live.
How did you decide to focus on this issue? New York accommodation is a complex subject; you could spend a lifetime studying.
Exactly, and that's why we chose a very specific element to address here. We began our research by talking to experts on housing and housing advocacy; CHPC [Citizens Housing Planning Council] was an extremely important conversation. We could go in many different directions, but we felt like we became aware of something that there was an emergency around and closely linked to the issue of inequality and informality. How do you define informal in New York? You have an exhibition addressing informality and density in all these cities, and as CHPC began speaking of this condition hidden in New York, we felt like he related particularly well.
You have developed an architectural project focused on increasing the density of the neighborhood a safe and affordable way. Do you think these strategies include New York, or could they potentially be applied elsewhere too?
We actually looked to other contexts to inform what we proposed in New York. This idea of what is top-down and bottom-up which is interesting and important. One of the conversations in the orbit of the exhibition was to know where they meet. How informality exists in other cities has become a part of the question that we put forward for New York.
When talking about density and how we house one million New next Yorkers, the conversation almost always ends up going to the vertical concentrated development on a scale that actually only a very limited number of players could participate. only a number, maybe the top five developers could even think about the construction on this scale. So we were interested in thinking about what other types of growth, perhaps a more progressive or accretive growth, could work in New York: the strategies that could allow other types of development to enter the question, which are not only focused on very high towers. It was out of that desire that this infill typology emerged.
We will certainly go up a line here between provocation and something that could be implemented. It is intended to be somewhat ambiguous. But all we're talking a real relationship with the policy issues that are on the table. For example, de Blasio ran on a platform that spoke of the grandmother of apartments and legalization of apartments in the basement. We made this great axonometric drawing which we considered a whole district where the accessory housing units to their maximum spread throughout. What would that look like?
In some ways, that is to anticipate the density, but in other ways it is just to accept the density that is already there, but relieve the pressure on the spaces that many people are crammed into now, basically.
Thus, the functions of proposals on two levels. There is a small-scale low filling height typology that would require some sort of involvement of a developer; could be non-profit, could be for profit. But there is a housing element that might exist at the scale of a lot or some lots in these low-rise neighborhoods, and with it comes the housing which is much better aligned with the demographic needs of this district.
But the other part of this typology that we propose provides access points to the unused space in these neighborhoods, whether backyards or roofs. So it's sort of an extension of the common corridor of the sidewalk to the other spaces.
And again, we walk this line between reality and a kind of fiction, because obviously this requires rethinking lot lines and property and things like that. But we felt that the show was the right place for this kind of thinking. political organizations have only about four years to get something through an administration, whether legalizing cellars or meet a certain target for a number of new units of housing or something. Their work tends to be on the low-hanging fruit; things that could actually be done reasonably. But this does not mean that there are not much larger problems that need attention. We felt like the show was an opportunity to highlight the major issues without emergencies and political liabilities do things quickly. And it was very well the Commissioner's mandate and
What you end up with -. And yet, in a sense this was more of a provocation - is an incremental part of the picture -Driven growth. So you have your fill type that creates all these access points to various parts of the district, but then you have all these home accessories DIY units popping up a local contractor who could build or residents themselves - so that a local individual combination of actors and development to smaller locally.
Then there is a whole other side of which is facing this type of property and development could finance such work.
as an architect, how do you see the relationship between this kind of speculative work and construction projects you take?
I think they are really completely separate. Look at the work of Aldo Rossi or Venturi; many have attempted to try to reconcile their theoretical work with their integrated work. Once you study, the conclusion is that these are separate things. They are both important, but very different.
What we propose here is very consciously not an architectural proposal. Not that we said "this design is a solution to this problem"; we thought it would be a ridiculous way to approach this. It is the design of a typology, design a strategy that could be played on an infinite number of ways by countless designers - or non-designers, in the case of DIY fabric; Returning agency for people who will live there.
I must say that we shot much of our expertise and knowledge base to develop a proposal that we believe would actually work on some level. There is a conversation about how the local production could play a role in the effective delivery of small scale residential units in these areas and how it could be optimized through BIM and parametric platforms. This is very much a reflection of how we like to work here as a practice, and as this kind of capabilities we have in the studio. We have a manufacturing division, and we have a large production facility. This background, the designers and builders, informed our proposal.
But it is certainly a distinct architectural proposal as such. Although it is a subject with spatial dimensions, it is not a question of architecture, but rather a social problem.
Posting Komentar