DSGN AGNC in 2011

No better way to tackle a new year by taking a quick look back at the year that was. And it was a busy one for us here in DSGN AGNC.

This Year DSGN AGNC and its AGNTS:
-01.10 -Worked as part of #LGNLGN on the New City Reader
-02.14 -Released a short Valentines day video and blog post with information on the flower industry of Colombia and consuming habits in the U.S.A.
-02.21 -Presented at Harvard University's GSD - What's the FACA?
-03.25 -Presented at SFI 10+1 in Chicago
-05.01 -Consulted to the group designing Anam City

-06.03-04 -Worked on setting up social media and documenting the Political Equator
-07.15 -Began to work with 596 Acres on community gardens in Greenpoint
-08.10 -Helped build a community and homes in La Prusia, Nicaragua (10 houses were finished on this date)
-08.22 -Presented a follow-up video about Colombian Flowers at the Queens Museum
-08.26 -Worked as part of #LGNLGN with the IFUD to moderate the online discussion of City Sessions
-09.15 -Worked as part of #LGNLGN with the IFUD to moderate the physical discussion of City Sessions
-09.23 -Helped launch the Java St. Park in Greenpoint, Brooklyn

-09.30-10.02 -Distributed copies of our FACA booklet at the PS1Art Book Fair at the NoNow booth
-10.10 -Presented on two panels at the Design in Action Conference
-10.10 -Helped produce, craft, and deliver A Call to Action for the Rights of the Neighborhoods
-10.14 -Participated in the Storefront for Art and Architecture's Architecture For Free 
-10.15 -Participated in a panel at the Tactical Urbanism Salon
-10.16 -Led a "Beyond Occupation" tour of Chinatown with CAAAV for Living as Form
-10.26 -Provided initial vision for #whOWNSpace and set up an initial collaboration with DoTank:Brooklyn and Not an Alternative. Many others have joined
-10.26 -Worked on the WEOWNU maps of public and open spaces for #whOWNSpace
-11.19 -Helped organize and lead a #whOWNSpace studio class with The Public School NY and DoTank:Brooklyn
-12.15 -Helped launch #occupyDOB with a legal team headed by Paula Z. Segal from 596 Acres
-12.17 -Traveled to Facatativa, Colombia to continue research on the flower industry and its role on urban form and work on a community design project for 50 families.

DOWNLOAD THE FULL DIAGRAM OF DSGN AGNC IN 2011
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We at DSGN AGNC thank you for your support in 2011 and look forward to the new year. We are already planning new calls to action, events, and design projects. To keep abreast of all our happenings sign up to receive our email blasts at dsgnagnc@gmail.com, follow us on twitter @DSGNAGNC, and "like" our DSGNAGNC facebook page.

Casas de la Esperanza: The flexible grid

LA PRUSIA AND PROJECT CONTEXT
La Prusia is located along the road that connects the city of Granada and Lake Apoyo, both among the top tourist attractions in the Central American nation of Nicaragua. This neighborhood, however, does not share the benefits of the tourist industry and has fallen into levels of extreme poverty. For many years the nonprofit Casas de la Esperanza has been helping the inhabitants of La Prusia by building homes, teaching children, and providing technical training to the local population. As part of their mission, Casas de la Esperanza approached Harvard University's Graduate School of Design in 2009 to propose a housing community design studio in La Prusia for 70-80 families.

The studio was led by architect Teddy Cruz, assisted by Andrew Sturm, and included a multidisciplinary team of students (see below for the full list of names and programs)**.  The studio traveled to La Prusia to learn from about the community needs as well as study the context. The information gathered from the community, Casas de la Esperanza volunteers, city officials, and others was key in the design of the new housing community.

A few months after the studio ended the project was rethought and redesigned in a collaboration between DSGN AGNC's Quilian Riano and Estudio Teddy Cruz (Teddy Cruz and Cesar Fabela) with landscape assistance by Simon Bussiere and other support by the PARC foundation. What is shown below is the result of the redesign in 2010 and what Casas de la Esparanza is in the process of building.

The Casas de la Esperanza site is located in Nicaragua between the city of Granada and Lake Apoyo

Community Meeting in La Prusia

This is a list of issues that the community identified as the most important for their new community

LA PRUSIA COOPERATIVE CONSTRUCTION Co.

Even before anything was designed or constructed, a major issue had to be dealt with: the road connecting La Prusia and Granada was in such disrepair that it could not be used for most of the year. This was a major problem for the inhabitants of La Prusia as they could not reach vital health, employment, and education centers in Granada. To begin to solve this problem in 2009 the GSD studio, along with Teddy Cruz and the Parc foundation, developed a plan to send a tractor and other tools (donated by PARC) to La Prusia. The goal was to help Casas de la Esperanza and the local inhabitants fix their road and at the same time jump start a local construction business. La Prusians were trained on how to use the machinery that acted as a seed on a budding construction company owned by La Prusians for their benefit.

Housing at the first Casas de la Esperanza project, showing the importance of the local trees.

A FLEXIBLE MASTERPLAN
The design of the masterplan was complicated by one major issue: a lack of reliable information about the site. It was known that topographic conditions and the location of trees were key to the design, yet such information was difficult to obtain. This was seen as an opportunity to challenge the hard-lined masterplan that sometimes dictates even the most minute details of a community.

The masterplan starts out with one goal in mind: to save as many trees as possible while creating safe and flexible housing clusters. To reach this goal a set of simple directions are given to create a flexible urban armature, within which each house can be sited according to conditions on the ground. These instructions are simple and can be applied by anyone building the houses (local inhabitants, volunteers, or a professional construction crew) without much training.

Instructions of how to create the urban armature for La Prusia. From the top: 1. site, 2. make a line in the middle of the site, 3. move that line to avoid topographic areas unsuited for construction, 4. move the line every three meters to create the road, 5. make a line parallel to the existing volunteer's house, 5. move that line every seven meters -- giving space between each house and creating mini-clusters of four houses, 6. full urban armature

Square diagrams descriptions.
Top left:  First all the trees in an area are mapped
Top right: Build the road around the trees
Bottom left: Place housing around the trees
Bottom right: Complete construction of La Prusia community

HOUSES
In their first housing community, Casas de la Esparanza built 6m x 6m cement block houses with zinc roofs. We sought to maximize the potential for the houses to expand over time. To do that we broke the spaces of the houses and shifted them slightly to allow for the growth of two more rooms at either end. We then created a roof that is angled to one side, allowing for more light and air to penetrate the houses and for water to be collected in vegetated areas. Casas de la Esperanza has built 10 of these new designs and is starting the process to build another 60-70.

Diagram showing the changes to the houses that allow for up to 3 more rooms to be added to each house.

Construction Sequence

Systems Diagrams

The houses built around the trees that surround them and provide many functional uses.

SHEDS FOR COMMUNITY MICRO-ENTERPRISE

This project also includes an area for the development of local micro-enterprises. The sheds are currently under construction.

Community Shed (model by Estudio Teddy Cruz)

Community Shed Rendering (Produced by Estudio Teddy Cruz)

Ongoing construction.

** Full list of 2009 Harvard University GSD studio that began research and initial design in La Prusia:

Julia Watson MLA, DK Osseo-Asare MArch, Juliana Silbermins MAUD, Anne Vaterlaus MLA, Christine Canabou MArch, Quilian Riano MArch, Simon Bussiere MLA, Chris Ryan MArch, Sara Lynch MArch, Brian Yang MArch, Aron Chang MArch, Kristen Von Minden MArch, Doug Miller MArch; Directed by Teddy Cruz, assisted by Andrew Sturm

2010-ongoing Design team:

DSGN AGNC: Quilian Riano

Estudio Teddy Cruz: Teddy Cruz, Cesar Fabela, Mark Gusmann, Nikhil Shah

Simon Bussiere and 2011 Ball State landscape design studio

Anne Vaterlaus (consulting on upcoming book)

#whOWNSpace

ANNOUNCING:
http://whownspace.blogspot.com/

and

MAPPING NYC

#whOWNSpace is a collaborative started by DSGN AGNC with Not An Alternative and DoTank:Brooklyn -- three organizations that have been dealing with spatial politics.

Our goals are:
1- TO REVEAL conflicting rules and ownerships in the increasingly privatized and commercialized spaces that make up the contemporary neoliberal urban condition
2- TO QUESTION those rules and the current state of our "public" space; discussing the intentions and conditions surrounding our open spaces
3- TO ADVOCATE FOR AND PROPOSE new uses and designs that encourage more public and open spaces for neighborhood uses in accordance to the Call to Action for the Rights of Neighborhoods 
4- TO INTERVENE in urban spaces, turning ideas and research into material action

We Create Tools that Reveal Spatial Conflict
We Question Private Space
We Question Public Space
We Advocate for Change
We Conceive of Alternatives for Collective use

#whOWNSpace

A Call to Action for the Rights of the Neighborhoods

The following statements were read at the Friends Center and at Occupy Philly in Philadelphia's City Hall grounds on Monday, October 10, 2011, in conjunction with the 2011 Design in Action conference.

Download as PDF


A Call to Action for the Rights of the Neighborhoods   

"It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for rethinking the American Dream. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure. Communities in need are not free communities. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made."

This new social contract is based off of the historical model of the Second Bill of Rights that was delivered by Franklin D. Roosevelt on January 11, 1944, which this a quote from.

The right to a useful and remunerative job;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The right of every community to produce its own resources with a rate of return that will give it a decent dignity;
The right to enable an economy that is inclusive of the small, free from domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to culture and a practical education.

Design AS Action

We demand that institutions of power rethink themselves together with communities;
We demand that the municipalities rethink their own fragmented bureaucratic silos and resources;
We demand accountability of municipalities to invest in marginal neighborhoods;
We demand the political and economic tools to develop our neighborhoods incrementally.  We demand the political support to temporarily activate vacant spaces and to incubate new social organizations;
We demand the restructuring of tax credits, subsidy financing, and zoning codes to enable small and inclusive development;
We demand the power to deny developments that do not plan for social and economic benefit;
We demand the re-invention of housing beyond abstract units;  We demand the rethinking of lending practices;  We demand the taxing and accountability of the wealthy 1%;
We demand intelligent public spending on education, culture, and transportation;
We demand other forms of property, and the valuation of memory and social relationships;
We demand the right to culture and education, not as expendable commodities but as civic responsibilities;
We demand a new political language that includes public culture;

We, the undersigned,

Teddy Cruz, Aaron Levy, Diana Lind, Quilian Riano, Elizabeth Grimaldi, Sally Harrison, Aviva Kapust, Mimi Cheng, Megan Schmidgal, El Sawyer, Melissa J Frost.

Collectively representing: Slought Foundation, Estudio Teddy Cruz, the Village of Arts and Humanities, Next American City, the Urban Workshop at Temple University, and DSGN AGNC.

Teddy Cruz, the signees to this call of action, and many designers, architects and urbanists recite the Call to Action for the Rights of the Neighborhoods at Occupy Philly.

ON THE POLITICAL EQUATOR 3

Over at BLDGBLOG, Geoff Manaugh published a blog entry on the Political Equator 3 border crossing that took place this weekend. The entry included some images I took and thoughts I had during the weekend's conference.

The Mexico/US Border

My thoughts on the border as quoted by BLDGBLOG:

"Architect and designer Quilian Riano was on hand for the crossing, and these are his photographs reproduced here. By way of email, Riano described the physical terrain where they crossed beneath and through the border, remarking that the hydrological status of the land there "really makes you think about how arbitrary borders are."

On one side of the border there is an emphasis on surveillance while, on the other side, a series of systematic social, economic, and environmental policy failures have created a hazardous living condition for thousands of Tijuana's poorest. The failure, however, can be felt on both sides, as the watershed pushes the sediment and trash from the illegal settlements in Tijuana's Los Laureles Canyon directly across the border into the Tijuana River Estuary State Park. While politicians on both sides demagogue, the lack of communication and collaboration between the two nations leads to social and environmental catastrophe.

The border crossing itself thus aimed "to follow the path of the water, trying to understand the border through its ecological and social impacts," and opening, in the process, a negotiated pore in the outer edge of sovereign geography through which human beings, like imperial sweat, could flow"

I know this context and its socio-ecological problems well as it was the context for my GSD thesis: GROUNDED: Ecology as Frame for an Informal Community in Tijuana, and it was nice to see it again. It is also important that the ecological and social situations were highlighted to the point that the AP picked up the story and the Washington Post (among many) ran it.

Image of GROUNDED: Ecology as Frame for an Informal Community in Tijuana  GSD Thesis

I will write more thoughts on the PE3 conference soon.  But, as the events social media curator, for now I will simply refer to the conference's official facebook page and twitter feed for images and live updates that were produced during the event:

PE3 TWITTER

PE3 FACEBOOK 

I am also now helping organize an ongoing conversation with the participants and attendees on all the issues raised by the conference in the PE blog: http://politicalequator.blogspot.com/


The discussion will reflect the theme of many of the conversations that took place during the conference: what is the appropriate role that artists/designers/architects in difficult social, political, and ecological contexts?

FACA AND THE FLOWER INDUSTRY

This Valentine’s day, do you know where your flowers come from?

On a daily basis most of us participate in a highly complex and networked global market that tends to obscure the real costs of the products and services we buy. DSGN AGNC believes  designers can help uncover the hidden externalities of everyday life and challenge the inherent inequalities and injustices that they produce in society.  

Currently DSGN AGNC is working with a community in Facatativa (FACA), Colombia to build a housing project. We believe that it is key for us, as designers, to understand the economic and social tensions that exist on the ground to be able to respond to them with appropriate design solutions at a systems and physical scale.

There is perhaps no larger player than the flower industry on the everyday life of Facatativa. While flower producers provide many people with employment, they avoid caring for the health and well being of their employees and their communities. 

Today DSGN AGNC, as a valentine, wants to share some of our research and tell you where your flowers came from. 

The flowers you may have received today most likely came from Facatativa, Colombia and its surrounding areas. The person who grew and handled your flowers was most likely a woman and she may have been exposed to as many as 127 carcinogens and toxins that have increased her chances of a miscarriage or giving birth to child with birth-defects. This woman worked long hours to handle over 400 flowers and earns a daily salary equal to just what four of those flowers cost to you and me in retail - about $4.

The flower industry is mostly housed within sprawling greenhouses that have displaced many small farmers and whose footprint is larger than both the surrounding urban areas and the local farming lands. This means that large swats of arable land are used for a flower monoculture that relies heavily on toxins. The sheer size of the industry is also putting a strain on local water resources. There are currently over 5,000 wells, many dedicated to the flower industry, that tap into the local aquifer. The water table was once reachable by drilling 20 meters into the ground, now one would have to drill 200 meters to reach fresh water. Even then, the water may not be so fresh as tests have found residues of toxins outlawed in the U.S. and Europe in the water.

The industry, however, has began to notice their problems and self-regulate. Though it will be important for them to understand that the problems they have caused have larger consequences than just within their greenhouses -- they directly affect the flower industry's employees, their families, and their communities. Over the next several months we will continue our research not only to uncover the current state of the flower industry but to also understand how they can be part of a more ecologically and socially conscious city in Facatativa -- using the La Union social housing project as a catalyst.


Happy Valentines,


DSGN AGNC

For sources and more information see:

-McQuaid, John. "The Secrets Behind Your Flowers." Smithsonian Magazine. Smithsonian, 01 Feb. 2011. Web. 14 Feb. 2011. com/people-places/The-Secrets-Behind-Your-Flowers.html>.

-Watkins, Kevin. "Deadly Blooms: How Colombia's Flower Industry Exploits Its Workers." The Guardian Online. The Guardian, 29 Aug. 2001. Web. 14 Feb. 2011. society/2001/aug/29/guardiansocietysupplement5>.

-Miller, T. Christian. "Guns and Roses: Colombia Flower Industry Counters Cocaine's Stigma." The Seattle Times. The Seattle Times, 14 Feb. 2003. Web. 14 Feb. 2011. seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20030214&slug=roses14>.

Music on video thanks to Hot Sugar

NCR classifieds #lgnlgn

The New City Reader is a temporary newspaper that was published from October 6, 2010 to January 9, 2011 as part of the Last Newspaper exhibition at the New Museum 
Leagues and Legions (lgnlgn) guest edited New City Reader's Classified Section - Download the PDF

Respond to any classified or other content at: http://lgnlgn.com/

"The Leagues and Legions' New City Reader Classified section maps longing, desire, guilt and regret in the city, as well as the city’s perceived losses and expressed desires through advertisements. The classifieds, while historically and economically tied to print, predate and postdate newspapers. In fact, the slow wasting of daily papers and alternative weeklies tracks the hemorrhaging of classified ads from ink to online. Still, they offer a charged platform for exchange: where personal concerns meet the commerce stream. The most intimate of commodities and announcements are made public. Yet the homogenized format of print classifieds and the resolute non-design of Craigslist provides a balm to modern afflictions, whether loneliness (personal ads), pain (runaways) or seaminess (rooms for let). By collecting ads --the wants and needs, lost and founds, missed connections and notices of New York City, Boston, Chicago and farther afield--we hope to momentarily capture urban desires. within this fleeting medium."
--from #lgnlgn editorial 

edited selection of #lgnlgn tweets and images

#lgnlgn #NCRclassified editors are 
@fitnr @gbrowning @jrdngggr @microkubo @mimiz @quilian @solis
w/ ideas, contributions and chatter from:
@agpublic @bryanboyer @callahan @chrisgrimley @criticalterrain @egr1971 @iker_gil @irenehwang @jcantwell @jimmy_luu @liam_young @lifesansbldgs @markasaurus @mustela @ruchill @sdockray @serial_consign @sevensixfive @solidk @the_letter_d

Find more images in a flickr set by mimiz: Classifieds section-New City Reader #lgnlgn