Tenth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

At the precipice of Americas’ 1960s Civil Rights Movement, where foreign shores were ubiquitous for services missions in developing nations’ favelas, shanties, and trench towns, President Lyndon Baines Johnson created AmeriCorps – Volunteers in Service to America. For over 60 years, V.I.S.T.A. has been an equitable domestic resource champion for strengthening neighbors linked to hoods, for their self-sufficient sustainable investment to reestablishing neighborhoods of belonging. With growing disparities of class and race, reminiscent of spatial geographies of the past, many well intended programs maintain paternal dependency. Recently, one of the largest numbers of V.I.S.T.A.s in a Chicago neighborhood has been building numerous non-profit organizations’ capacities to turn the tides of climate change. What role do architects have in serving expert citizens for the positive transformation of their environment? This ethnographic case study is a part of a longitudinal evaluation of the Englewood Chicago AmeriCorps V.I.S.T.A. program, sharing local people’s place-keeping stories in the inner-city. These findings support social capital theory: when socioeconomic crisis persist, communities come together (Putnam, 2000), using the built environment to foster a more sustainable and healthy community (Fullilove, 2016) and social-cultural relationships of claiming space (Allen, 2001; Finney, 2014; Glave, 2010; White 2018) are values of invested in communities.