Review and Reflect (Asynchronous Session)
From K Street to Eastern Avenue : An Ethnographic Study of Black Trans Women Placemaking in the American Capital
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Shahab Albahar
This paper explores the shifting geographical contours of the "trans stroll" - a countercultural gendered and sexualized urban landscape that challenges dominant conceptions of spatial order rooted in heteronormative ideology. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, K Street had a notorious reputation as DC's "open-air market" for sex work. Black trans women and trans women of color appropriated the public spaces of the streetscapes using creative placemaking tactics to affirm their identities and invoke their citizenship rights. In the early 2000s, this started to change as urban policies and planning interventions in the District of Columbia, such as enacting the Prostitution Free Zone (PFZs) ordinance in 2006, functioned to exclude and displace "unwanted" bodies from space. This paper interrogates the racialized and gendered, albeit silent, undertones of planning interventions and how they engender urban landscapes that concurrently challenge and reproduce heteronormative ideologues.
Spatial History and Identity in Tripartite Sustainable Development: The Mining Town of El Triunfo, Baja California Sur View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Benjamin A. Bross
El Triunfo, Baja California Sur (Mexico), presents a compelling case for preserving localized spatial history as an important tool in achieving tripartite (environmental, social, and economic) sustainable development. Today, El Triunfo is a mining town of less than 400 people nestled in the desertic La Laguna Sierra along an isolated stretch of Mexico’s Highway 1. Its current solitude, however, belies the complex history embodied by the town’s built environment. When silver mining reached a production apex between the 1850s and 1880s, the town’s population grew to nearly 10,000 people as miners and merchants (supplying goods and services) migrated from other parts of Mexico, England, Italy, France, China and the United States. Each group brought its own sociocultural spatial practices of producing and using the built environment: the whole of El Triunfo’s spatial identity became greater than the sum of its component parts. Now, with ever-increasing tourism-driven market demand for spatial experiences rooted in site-specific geography, sensitivity to social groups’ sociocultural values, and urban history, the town has become a locus of identity-based spatial production. Over the last 10 years, private foundations and government agencies have begun to redevelop El Triunfo’s built environment: Projects like the restoration of La Ramona, a 19th century 47 meter tall mine smokestack, and the newly inaugurated Silver Route Museum, prioritize the town’s spatial history as a main traffic driver, but this success has also sparked new construction and business openings that, left unregulated, threaten to undermine long-term sustainable redevelopment goals.
Urban Space and a Sense of Un-rootedness: Migrant Descendants’ Experience in Contemporary Literature View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Katia da Costa Bezerra
Published in 2007, O sol se põe em São Paulo, by Bernardo Carvalho, is narrated by a Japanese descendant who is hired to write a story by the Japanese woman, owner of a restaurant. The urban space emerges in the novel as a performative space implicated in the location of individuals, unveiling the presence of physical and symbolic borders. The novel invites the readers to reflect on movement and displacement in order to understand the dynamic of a divided self. This communication examines the interface between urban space and a sense of un-rootedness. More specifically, I focus on the role played by buildings and monuments in the construction of a sense of displacement and non-belonging.
Lockdown Didn’t Make Us Lonely: Negotiating Space for Social Belonging View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jerry Hacker
Under implicit and explicit social contracts, individuals are oft willing to concede certain personal freedoms if the maintenance of social order or other freedoms are protected. But what about our collective spatial contracts? How much should individuals, groups, and cities be willing to negotiate individualistic, personal spatial freedoms, in exchange for a more publicly robust, interconnected, and meaningful way of living? Prior to the imposed isolation of the pandemic, a troubling global trend was emerging: the 21st century is quickly becoming the loneliest century we have known. And although people are now migrating to cities at unprecedented rates, living in close proximity to one another does not appear to be a substitution for meaningful belonging. Available research, largely situated within the social sciences, indicates this weakened social participation impacts our physical and mental health and well-being. Despite entrenched beliefs that physical space affects well-being and behaviour, when it comes to loneliness, architects tend to rely on a combination of experience, intuition, and post-occupancy evaluation to gain anecdotal evidence about the qualities of collective places and spaces. Inspired by curator Hashim Sarkis’ 2021 Architecture Biennale theme How Will We Live Together?, this pedagogical research uses human simulation software (FLUID) to evaluate how architecturally driven changes to four common residential typologies promote heightened interaction and belonging. The result is a comparative working methodology whereby architects can evaluate design options from the perspective of social connectivity, and thereby provide enhanced design rationales to proactively combat the next pandemic: loneliness.
Remembering the City: Narrative Structure and Translation in the Built Work of Giancarlo De Carlo in Urbino View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mark Blizard
After World War II, the architectural polemic in Italy was shaped in discourse with history and memory. Not Imperial history glorified by Mussolini, but vernacular history, whose oral narratives connected people to the land transfusing their identity. Cities were devastated, existing as ruins or shells whose populations were depleted by the war and the promise of industrial jobs following the war. Their continued relevancy was debated. The reassessment of the city became a means to confront the immediate past and the need to reclaim a lost identity. The resulting dialogue was a counterpoint to the International Style––in the words of Giancarlo De Carlo, a need to study spontaneous architecture. For De Carlo, the city of Urbino––its armature of streets and urban rooms, its singular buildings and its typical fabric, seemed to be speaking of the very substance and structure of the land itself. This paper focuses on De Carlo’s translation of Urbino and his appropriation of the narratives enmeshed within its urban fabric. These dense webs of signification bind elements to a geometric framework. Within his built works, references ramify and suggest multivalent and frequently ambiguous readings. Drawing from Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and other structural approaches, this paper offers a critical examination of De Carlo’s work from outside of the architect’s own writings in an attempt to understand his complex thirty-year relationship with the city of Urbino. Beyond this, the translation––the remembered city––provides a new filter that redefines the city as both contemporary and relevant.
