Thanks to the people who responded.
Some thoughts in the context of some of your observations (I will try
to be as specific as possible even though I suffer from being a
generalistŠ):
Intro: Since when are we all not implicated in the power structure? We
all, in one way or another, circulate through the institutions of
power, from the classrooms of the university, the white walls of the
museum, to the collector's living room. I am NOT interested in EVADING
power. I want to confront it head on. In fact, the first task, I
think, for artists and architects interested in public art and space
is to reveal power. The invisibility of the power inscribed on the
territory: WHO OWNS THE RESOURCES, WHO ARE THE STAKE HOLDERS, WHOSE
PROPERTY IS THIS ANYWAY? WHO PROFITS? This, I would argue, is the
first 'critical' act. Otherwise, we will continue perpetuating public
art as an afterthought, an instrument to decorate the mistakes of bad
planning.
Maybe I should be more specific:
These are some problems / conflicts that have re-defined my practice:
1. In San Diego, where I practice and teach, there is a crisis of
housing affordability. The reason private developers have not built
ONE affordable housing project in many depressed neighborhoods in this
city -even during a period of unprecedented construction boom in
California- is because A DISCREPANCY BETWEEN ZONING POLICY AND
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT. In other words, for a developer to make a 100%
affordable housing project profitable, he or she would have to be
competitive, against other developers, in terms of obtaining tax
credits and subsidies. In order to be competitive, to make it
feasible, this project would have to have an average of 50 units. 50
UNITS ARE NOT ALLOWED BY CODE IN MANY OF THESE COMMUNITIES, and mixed
used is prohibited by zoning. Housing affordability is trapped in this
contradiction. Therefore there is no way out of this crisisŠ it's a
catch 22Š
As an architect interested in re-defining what we mean by housing
affordability, density and mixed- uses, challenging the discriminatory
zoning policies in San Diego, I am convinced that the project I need
to engage is to brake into the 50 unit construction loan, how to
shatter it, how to re-define the tax credit system, how to negotiate
with the municipality in this city, how to produce a more flexible
zoning policyŠ
And this is what I have been doing in the last six yearsŠ working in a
particular neighborhood at the border. Understanding the logics of
these contradictions. Collaborating with a non-profit organization to
design a political and economic framework that can allow us to produce
alternative modes of housing affordability. Opening the question: can
a neighborhood be the developer of its own public infrastructure and
housing stock? Negotiating with the municipality to modify density and
mixed use by allowing the many illegal units built in back of houses
to be legitimate, and in so doing allowing them to be considered
affordable housingŠ and with the banking industry to brake down the 50
unit construction loan into micro-credits as long as the non profit
takes liability and facilitates these small loans to pay for those
small unitsŠ. In other words, before 'designing' the housing projects
I was commissioned to develop, we needed to design the process,
political and economic, that would make those housing projects
sustainable. Also to design the actual collaboration across agencies
and institutions involved in the development.
In the united states where the government, at this moment, does not
give a dam about investing in public infrastructure and housingŠ to
re-think these socio-political and economic processes is the point of
departureŠ This is what I meant by entering the institutions of powerŠ
to mobilize their resources and their logics of organization.
Everything is out thereŠ we cannot pretend to re-invent the wheel, we
need to find ways to re-think collaborations across institutions,
agencies, jurisdictions.
2. We need to challenge conventions of representation. We need to
redefine the way we construct information in order to expose such
contradictions, and to map the invisible forces that are ignored by
the institutions of planning and juxtapose them with the actual,
official maps produced by municipalities. In San Diego, for example, I
set up an effort to prove that the official land-use maps produced by
the city were essentially lying in the way that they represent some of
the neighborhoods impacted by immigrants. The municipal maps typically
use a yellow color to denote a residential area, red for commercial.
Usually in the land-use maps that you get of neighborhoods with large
numbers of immigrants, you find a lot of yellow and very little red,
maybe in some avenues where retail might be allowed. But when you take
these official maps and you actually walk parcel by parcel, block by
block, you realize that two types of colors-and two strategies for
organization-are not enough, and that there should maybe be six more
colors, or even ten more colors, and that they are layered on top of
each other. The cultural or economic intensity of these informal
densities begins to create a very different picture of each
neighborhood. You realize then that there is a clash between the
reality of everyday life in those neighborhoods on one hand and their
idealization by planners on the other. Most important, though, was the
fact that by mapping the reality of those spaces, we forced the city
to acknowledge them, to accept that the new density regulation could
take place in the neighborhood. In many of these inner city
neighborhoods in San Diego, the official minimum parcel size is 5000
square feet per dwelling, and this is a ridiculously grand suburban
scale. Our mapping began to expose the fact that in many of those
parcels two or three more illegal units were coexisting, sometimes
even with small businesses. The density and mixed use that was
happening on an informal, organic basis actually made sense. It makes
sense that the minimum parcels should be 2500 or even 1500 square feet
for a single house, not 5000. This is why our project began by mapping
unconventional and even illegal building trends, in order to pressure
the city to revise existing policy. So what I'm suggesting is that one
task of critical spatial practice is one of a re-appropriation or
occupation of the reality of these specific socio-political and
economic forces at play in the city, but ignored by the institutions.
Otherwise, mapping becomes a self-indulgent instrument only producing
the metaphorical or the poetic-which is, admittedly, also part of what
we do. In the context of architecture, there is a satisfaction in just
drawing as a way of reproducing or representing things as opposed to a
way of constructing the conditions that can open up new ways of
-critically-intervening in the territory. Who ever said this was
right: As architects we are obsessed with the conditions of designŠ
instead, we need to design the conditionsŠ
3. In this case, and risking sounding incredibly naïve: true agency
begins by changing the way we think. For me, the essential question
is, how do we dismantle concepts that have become clichés? For
instance, what do we mean by "community," "density," "affordability,"
even "housing"? Density is not just an amount of units or people per
acre, as all our institutions have defined it. What if we were to
redefine density based on the amount of social exchanges that take
place per acre? There is a similar problem with defining "mixed use,"
which we conventionally think of as people living above retail spaces.
But it can be more than that. What about imagining it as social
support systems connected to housing? for example? From there, perhaps
we can begin to imagine social services in exchange for rent. In
essence, I am interested in a project of intervention into the
rigidity of institutional thinking-how to rethink the established
political and economic procedures that our institutions have
predetermined as prerequisites to build a city.
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