Situated Scenarios (Asynchronous Session)
Call for a New Ethic: A Comparative Analysis of Portland, Oregon and Varanasi, India Respective Value of Water and Policies View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Katherine Kraszewska
Policy is a direct product of social ethics. Stormwater policy historically reflects how a community views their relationship with nature, specifically water. This also informs how designers integrate into the landscape – be it removed and detained, or interactive and coalesced. Nascent ideology sweeping the field of landscape architecture encouraged designers to adopt a methodology that supports the agency of the greater bionetwork to thrive within a design rather than compartmentalize and contain. This study explores two unique communities and their value and policy regarding stormwater; Varanasi, India, and Portland, Oregon. Both these communities have unique views regarding water and water management and these values have manifested in unique design opportunities and challenges. The implications of these divergent values on designers, policy makers and planners are discussed. Conclusions include: modifying policies to better reflect the shifting values of communities, allowance for more direct interventions by designers, and designing stormwater landscapes that consider the non-instrumental values of nature and water.
The Local World's Fair: Staging Neighborhood in Queens, NY View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Daniela Sheinin
This study details how representations of modern city planning were incorporated into the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and how the construction of the Fair bolstered a residential building boom in Queens, New York. Through both exhibition and promotion of the surrounding area, modern suburban living was on display. A proposed exhibit of a “real world” urban neighborhood, spanning 10 acres with 35-50 dwellings and other neighborhood features, served as both entertainment and advertisement. The arrangement of the buildings, gardens, parks, and streets were carefully planned, appealing to the visitor’s eye and indicative of the order they might expect from the modern neighborhood. Exhibit planners hired actors and circulated pamphlets describing the kind of people and families that might inhabit these homes, emphasizing the importance of “normal” and “average” in detailing house design. Such rhetoric determined the social and cultural meaning of particular building materials, home layouts, and homeowners. The class, race, gender, and sexuality of the imagined residents occupying the future display homes were entirely prescribed. The neighborhood and neighbor were engineered, designed to fulfill a specific purpose and to function in a particular way. But this reveals more than merely the activity of a World’s Fair, operating instead as a reflection for the neighborhoods around it, and for the neighborhoods from which their audience would come.
Volunteers in Service to America Within the Englewood Community of Chicago: Social Anthropocene View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Douglas A. Williams
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.
Mapping the Meaning of the Isla San Marcos: Correspondence Analysis of Descriptor Categories View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Miguel Angel Sahagún Padilla
This paper is focused on the results of a study of meanings attached to an emblematic place in the city of Aguascalientes: the Isla San Marcos. This place is mainly used during the San Marcos International Fair, hosting events, articles, exhibitions, mechanical games, gastronomic offers, and others. An online survey was applied to 300 participants, asking them to write three word or short phrases with spontaneous thoughts about the place. These expressions were thematically coded and then submitted to correspondence analysis according to their co-occurrences. Results show that, one one hand, mainstream categories are the ones attached to the main event (the fair); on the other hand, there are some categories regarding emergent practices that show potential, day-to-day uses of the Isla San Marcos that reclaim this space for the city's inhabitants.
Effects and Impacts of Sustainability Initiative on the Environmental Performance of Residential Buildings in the Borough of Manhattan: A Comparative Study and a Model for Future View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kushagra Varma, Bobuchi Ken Opurum
Residential buildings remain the largest energy and water consumer, the need to increase efficiency of buildings was a contributing factor for the formulation of several green building rating systems. New York City has displayed its commitment towards achieving higher standards of energy efficiency through its Local Law 84 (Benchmarking Law). Local Law 84 (LL84) requires private buildings larger than 25,000 ft2 and public buildings over 10,000 ft2 to record and share their annual energy and water consumption data with the city. Data sharing helps building owners and facility managers to set annual performance improvement targets. However, the data collected does not clearly indicate how the environmental performance of the buildings has changed over the years. To address this gap, this research leverages the publicly available data collected through LL84 to demonstrate how the energy use intensities (EUIs), water use intensities (WUIs), and Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions of residential buildings has changed over seven years from 2011 till 2017. The research also compares the performance of older buildings with new buildings. The data was analyzed using both descriptive and inferential statistics to determine how adoption and implementation of sustainability laws into design and construction practices have influenced the EUI, WUI and GHG rates of residential buildings in the borough of Manhattan in NYC. This method can be used as a model by all major US cities for assessing the viability of formulating and implementing the benchmarking laws similar to NYC for improving the performance of their existing residential building stock.
