PATTERNS OF INHABITATION: A STUDIO ON INTENSIFYING THE SPRAWLING DESERT METROPOLIS
(Poster description presented at the ACSA annual conference “The Value of Design”, held in Portland, OR, March 26-28, 2009)
This is the work of a multidisciplinary studio (architecture + urban design + landscape architecture). An exploration of a critical method/approach in response to the contemporary challenges posed by the suburban paradigm of the sprawling desert metropolis. The studio is a landing and grounding effort striving to configure a research index and basic map of the site-specific capabilities of the city to be re-founded within its repetitiveness once the new urban challenges of the world manifest after land/economic availability wears down and the energetic renewal arises. The main operational idea of the studio was to identify, map, analyze, interpret and deploy design strategies “informed on the informal” matted over the formal generic landscape.
How can we propel the soon to be certain post-sprawl metropolis and rethink the city through architectures and urbanisms that integrate and activate the ongoing adaptive processes growing to become a mainstream physical culture?
We worked in (sub)urban areas that have inhabited and collected cultural practices for a long time (we determined a timeline starting after World War II). We established fertile grounds for future development in often forgotten or socially disenfranchised environments revealed by mapping spatial potential for new densities. We characterized and isolated the facts of human inhabitation – adaptation to improve and intensify the built realm looking into the future energy transformation and the forthcoming demographic re-composition of the American Dream. We processed our semester through the experimentation of alternative or informal development patterns in sections of the city’s fabric where time/inhabitation have done the often invisible/overlooked work of place making; but at the same time still remain generic and unattractive to most of the population. We embraced sites with integral urban conditions that could be invigorated both through the means of dwelling intensification -the private domain- and also with site specific actions of public space/urban structure where action in the collective realm became urgent after the mapping analysis and community interpretation.
Three were chosen: Downtown Phoenix as a place under a de-habitation process but enjoying a history, a culture and meaning. The City of Guadalupe as a cultural enclave in dire need of socio-economic stimuli. And Maryvale as one of the original expansive suburban mantles where the development surge is long gone substituted now by the overlaying of densification derived from immigration patterns adding a new cultural practice in the re-composition of the social basic units: multigenerational families, groups of males living together as a result of primary migration processes, and the grouping of people of similar origins.
The studio thinks of the inhabitation of the city as a system of thresholds: a construct of spatial grading articulated through patterns, both physical –revealed by mapping techniques- and abstract –negotiating socio-economical boundaries within the city-, both formal and informal. Ultimately, managing to distill this outline of the human essence of Phoenix’s inhabitation will become a larger studio based design research concurrent with the change of the times. studio-patterns-of-inhabitation
