Tenth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

On one hand, an aspect of globalization is the increasing numbers of transnational migrants, where individuals and groups primarily reside and participate in one nation-state, but maintain a socio-cultural and physical link to their nation-states of origin. On the other, as Lefebvre pointed out, “secreted” spaces reveal the value systems of the societies that produce it. The combination of these two phenomena enables us to analyze the spatial production of transnational communities through their production of typologies. Because spatial typologies are synchronous with human spatial production, they mark the emergence, evolution, and extinction of a society’s material culture at specific places and times. Furthermore, Rudofsky, in Architecture without Architects, noted that spatial production was not the exclusive domain of the formally trained designer but, more importantly, that vernacular space itself was a legible representation of a society’s values. Therefore, transnational communities, such as the major Hispanic neighborhood of Pilsen in Chicago, IL, are environments that permit use to investigate how communities establish a sense of place by producing context-specific building types that embody the transnational phenomenon itself: the mediation between the sense of origin place and the reconfiguration of the destination migrant space. This paper documents emergent typologies that exhibit how transnational migrant communities actively engage in place-making. In doing so, it may help inform designers on how to apply these spatial lessons in order to strengthen the sense of place identity.