Excerpt: How to Build a New Civic Infrastructure, by Ben Hecht
Excerpt: How to Build a New Civic Infrastructure, by Ben Hecht
“Five years ago, the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Just City Lab published The Just City Essays: 26 Visions of Inclusion, Equity and Opportunity. The questions it posed were deceptively simple: What would a just city look like? And what could be the strategies to get there? These questions were posed to mayors, architects, artists, philanthropists, educators and journalists in 22 cities, who told stories of global injustice and their dreams for reparative and restorative justice in the city.
These essays were meant as a provocation, a call to action. Now, during these times of dissonance, unrest, and uncertainty, their contents have become ever more important. For the next 26 weeks [starting June 15, 2020], the GSD and the Just City Lab will republish one essay a week here and at designforthejustcity.org . We hope they may continue conversations of our shared responsibility for the just city.
We believe design can repair injustice. We believe design must restore justice, especially that produced by its own hand. We believe in justice for Black Americans. We believe in justice for all marginalized people. We believe in a Just City.”
—Toni L. Griffin, Professor in Practice of Urban Planning, founder of the Just City Lab , and editor of The Just City Essays
How to Build a New Civic Infrastructure
By Ben Hecht
In the United States of America, cities have long been gateways to opportunity. For centuries, people from all over the country and the world, including my own grandparents, came to our cities chasing the promise of a better life. America’s bargain with its citizens, rich and poor, was in many ways a model for the world.
Today, U.S. cities produce 85 percent of the nation’s GDP, are home to more than 50 percent of the population, and spend billions of dollars annually to educate, house and protect their citizens. Meanwhile, American cities are undergoing a major demographic shift. By 2040, America will be a majority-minority nation . And events in Ferguson and Baltimore have underscored the destructive nature of existing disparities of income, education and opportunity between whites and non-whites.
Addressing these disparities is one of the key social issues of our time. But our current trajectory is too slow , obsessed with short-term wins and incrementalism, where leaders are constantly reinventing the wheel instead of building on the work of those who came before them. We celebrate improvements in one school on one block while tiptoeing around the fact that it is the entire system that needs fixing. We tell heartwarming stories about 100 kids served or 100 young adults placed in good jobs while averting our eyes from the millions more who remain disconnected from opportunity. We talk about how far we have come since the civil rights movement, but are uncomfortable with discussing how far we still must go to achieve true racial equity. Unless we ferociously change course, the new American majority will be less educated, less prosperous and less free.
To build truly just cities, we need a new type of urban practice aimed at achieving dramatically better results for low-income people, faster. This new urban practice will require cities to get key public, private and philanthropic leaders to work together differently, to better harness impact investing dollars, and to leverage technology to engage all residents in solutions. Continue reading on designforthejustcity.org …
With study of urban sanitation and flooding in Bangkok, Tina Yun Ting Tsai receives 2020 ASLA Award of Excellence
With study of urban sanitation and flooding in Bangkok, Tina Yun Ting Tsai receives 2020 ASLA Award of Excellence
Tina Yun Ting Tsai (MLA ’20) has received an Award of Excellence in the Residential Design Category in this year’s American Society of Landscape Architects Student Awards . Her project, Informality as Filter: A Renewed Land Sharing Plan for Khlong Toei Community , examines informal settlements in Bangkok, specifically the Khlong Toei Community, as a way to understand and solve problems of urban sanitation and flooding. The project aims to preserve and protect local culture and citizens by introducing a land-sharing plan that promotes improvements of the existing water supply and food production chains. Professor of Landscape Architecture and Technology and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Niall Kirkwood and 2020 Design Critic in Landscape Architecture Kotchakorn Voraakhom were instructors in the option studio for which Tsai completed the project.
The ASLA jury explains: “Bangkok’s Khlong Toei community—an informal settlement along one of the city’s many canals—suffers from contaminated water, degraded health conditions, and the constant threat of relocation. But if this impermanent community were made a permanent and planned part of the city, as this project proposes, a mutually beneficial arrangement between inhabitants and city government could blossom. Starting with a multi-functional infrastructure of shared toilets feeding a wastewater treatment plant, greywater would be generated for use in community orchards. A retention pond and storage tanks would collect excess monsoon rainwater to be used during the drier months. By addressing this community’s needs, rather than shunting it to another temporary location, the local government would advance social equity while improving urban hygiene through a new, sustainable ecology.”
Students, Faculty, Alumni Honored with 2020 Boston Society of Landscape Architects Awards
Students, Faculty, Alumni Honored with 2020 Boston Society of Landscape Architects Awards
Harvard University Graduate School of Design students, faculty, and alumni are among those to receive 2020 BSLA Design Awards from the Boston Society of Landscape Architects. The awards honor projects that show a “demonstration of excellence and reflect the careful stewardship, wise planning, and artful design of our cultural and natural environment.” In order to be considered for the award, projects, students, or landscape architects had to be located in Massachusetts or Maine.
The GSD student awardees are:
Xue Bai (MLA ’23) for “From Trash to Fish” with a Student Merit Award
Anson Ting Fung Wong (MLA ’19) for “Stone Wall Trees 2040—Hong Kong” with a Student Merit Award
Estello-Cisdre Raganit (MLA ’19) for “Returning to the River: Water as Public Space—San Agustin Amatengo, Oaxaca, Mexico” with a Student Merit Award
Tam Banh (MArch, MLA ’18) for “Water Assemblage—Mekong Delta, Vietnam” with a Student Honor Award
Amanda Ton (MLA ’19), Wei-Hsiang Chao (MAUD ’20), and Xin Qian (MAUD ’19) for “Mobility is Equality—Los Angeles, California” with a Student Honor Award
Tina Yun Ting Tsai (MLA ’20) for “Right to Remain—Willis Wharf, Virginia” with a Student Excellence Award
GSD faculty and alumni were among the professionals awarded by the BSLA. GSD affiliated winners include:
- Agency Landscape + Planning , led by Gina Ford (MLA ’03) and Brie Hensold (MUP ’07)
- Coyle and Caron , co-founded by Sally Coyle (MLA ’95)
- Crowley Cottrell , co-founded by Naomi Cottrell (MLA ’02)
- Halvorson , led by Cynthia Smith (MLA ’84)
- Landworks Studio , founded by Michael Blier (MLA ’94)
- Merritt Chase , founded by Nina Chase (MLA ’12) and Chris Merritt (MLA ’17)
- Matthew Cunningham Landscape Design , founded by GSD alum and lecturer Matthew Cunningham (MLA II ’06)
- Reed+Hilderbrand , co-founded by Peter Louis Hornbeck Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture Gary Hilderbrand (MLA ’85)
- Sasaki Associates , led by James N. Miner (MUP ’01) and other GSD affiliates
- Stimson Studio , co-founded by Stephen Stimson (MLA ’87)
Browse the full list of 2020 BSLA Award recipients .
Art, Design, and the Public Domain Publication Features Class of 2019
Art, Design, and the Public Domain Publication Features Class of 2019
Excerpt: Cape Town Pride; Cape Town Shame, by Carla Sutherland
Excerpt: Cape Town Pride; Cape Town Shame, by Carla Sutherland
“Five years ago, the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Just City Lab published The Just City Essays: 26 Visions of Inclusion, Equity and Opportunity. The questions it posed were deceptively simple: What would a just city look like? And what could be the strategies to get there? These questions were posed to mayors, architects, artists, philanthropists, educators and journalists in 22 cities, who told stories of global injustice and their dreams for reparative and restorative justice in the city.
These essays were meant as a provocation, a call to action. Now, during these times of dissonance, unrest, and uncertainty, their contents have become ever more important. For the next 26 weeks, the GSD and the Just City Lab will republish one essay a week here and at designforthejustcity.org . We hope they may continue conversations of our shared responsibility for the just city.
We believe design can repair injustice. We believe design must restore justice, especially that produced by its own hand. We believe in justice for Black Americans. We believe in justice for all marginalized people. We believe in a Just City.”
—Toni L. Griffin, Professor in Practice of Urban Planning, founder of the Just City Lab , and editor of The Just City Essays
Cape Town Pride; Cape Town Shame
By Carla Sutherland
I have lived in an array of fascinating cities, and visited a host of others. I have loved many (New York, Hong Kong, Harare and Berlin); been miserable in a few (London and Pretoria); oddly disappointed by some (San Francisco, Dublin and Sydney); overwhelmed by others (Shanghai and Cairo); and frankly terrified by at least two (Port Moresby and Lagos).
But there’s only one city I have ever really called home: Cape Town. When asked where I am from, I never say “South Africa,” always just “Cape Town.” Despite the fact that I have not lived there for the past 15 years, it remains my cultural and geographical touchstone. Last year, the New York Times and the Sunday Telegraph both named Cape Town as the most desirable city in the world to visit:
You can go almost anywhere to experience the city’s in-your-face beauty— adrenaline junkies plunge into the marine-rich waters around Dyer Island to go nose-to-nose with Great Whites; shoppers scour Woodstock for the latest in Afro-chic design, then quench their thirst with local craft beer; foodies are spoilt for choice in valleys carpeted with vines, where worldclass chefs prepare Michelin-rated fare at bargain prices.¹
And much of that is true. Each time I return to Cape Town, I think to myself, “it can’t be as beautiful as I remember.” But when I sweep over the curve of Mandela Boulevard, and begin the descent to the City Bowl, I always catch my breath in wonder. On the left, Table Mountain with a rolling white table-cloth of cloud; the pink evening sea-skyline broken only by the umbrella cranes of the harbor on the right; and our brooding Lion’s Head on Signal Hill peering down over the multicolored houses of Bo-Kaap and District Six.
Sadly though, my home-city, like many a family home, is deeply dysfunctional. Putting on its Sunday best for visitors, it works hard to sweep undesirable realities under the carpet. In particular, this means hiding family members who can’t (or won’t) be part of its pretty façade, behind closed doors. Continue reading on designforthejustcity.org …
Addressing COVID-19 world, students take top honors at World Landscape Architecture competition
Addressing COVID-19 world, students take top honors at World Landscape Architecture competition
Harvard Graduate School of Design students Joanne Li (MLA I ’21) and Tian Wei Li (MLA I ’22) won first place in the World Landscape Architecture international competition Reimagining the Spaces in Between . Their project, “Biodiversity Bank,” was supported by a GSD Summer Emergency Fund grant and advised by Design Critic in Landscape Architecture Rosalea Monacella. The ideas competition challenged students to redesign an area in a fictional city impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
In their entry, the students explained: “When you visit our project, you will see open spaces between buildings transformed into a living interface where the microbiome grows. Have you noticed that during COVID, alimentary and organic disposables have become more abundant, now that your home and kitchen are the center of your life? The ‘Biodiversity Bank’ interface is a receptacle for organic food leftovers. The Bank produces nutrients for the bacteria and soil. Then, the spatial design incorporates these nutrients to support macro-scale biodiversity, producing social and ecological benefits.”
“An innovative response that highlights the (often-overlooked) importance of soil and bacteria for health and well-being and maintenance of life,” noted the competition’s jury. “The solution presents the concept of city as a mutually symbiotic organism with everything inter-related. Interesting solution and compelling graphics. Appealing typologies such as orchards, meditation gardens and compost gardens that come together to create a startlingly different type of city solution.”
The runner-up prize went to Xi Chen (MLA I ’21), Sophia Xiao (MLA I ’21), Siqi Zhu (MLA II ’22), and Xuezhen Xie (Cornell) for “LIVING GROUND: Redefine six-feet distancing.” Their project looks at different scenarios for organizing outdoor activities on a six-by-six foot grid. “An aggressive scheme that reclaims public spaces for the public,” commented one juror.
The Ugliest Building in Washington
The Ugliest Building in Washington
In late July 2020, Congress could not reach a compromise on a new coronavirus relief package. One reason for the deadlock concerned an item in the bill unrelated to any pandemic concerns: the $1.75 billion earmarked by the White House for a new FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue. It infuriated Democrats, confused a number of rank and file Republicans, and even seemed to put Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on edge.
For years, it has been widely acknowledged that the J. Edgar Hoover Building requires attention. Since it opened in 1975, Washington residents, tourists, and architecture critics have derided the aesthetics of the 2.8-million-square-foot Brutalist structure designed by the Chicago firm Murphy & Associates. The travel website Trippy.com once declared it “the ugliest building in the world.” But much more critically, the concrete edifice is crumbling, with netting installed to protect pedestrians from falling debris. The fire-alarm system and other infrastructure have long needed maintenance, too. And then there is the ideological desire to shift away from the oppressive tough-guy, Big Brother persona inculcated by Hoover that the building’s hulking design perpetuates. The FBI instead seems to want to exude a more subtle, streamlined, cybersecurity-focused expression of power that would require new technology which the building, as it stands, cannot support.
A proposal was put forward in the early 2010s to raze the Hoover building and move the FBI to a nearby suburb. But the Trump administration shelved the plan, and the president continues to insist that the bureau will remain on Pennsylvania Avenue, across from the Justice Department, on an edge of the area known as the Federal Triangle. The administration may want a new design in “the classical architectural style,” in the words of Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again, the leaked executive order draft from earlier this year. (The draft is a total deviation from New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s insistence in his Building Principles for Federal Architecture, written in 1962, that “design must flow from the architectural profession to the government.”)
Or perhaps Trump, whose predilection for the Rococo is out of tune with Brutalism, wants to keep at least the skeleton intact (or, arguably more likely, any plan in limbo) because he believes the structure’s presence heightens the attraction of his Trump International Hotel in the nearby Beaux Arts–style Old Post Office. It also means that a competing hotel won’t be built on the site.
Whatever the reasons for the back and forth, one thing is certain: every moment the FBI headquarters stays on the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue, the space it occupies remains separate from the commercial, social, and private lives of the city’s residents. Negotiating this clash between the federal fabric of Washington and the lived experience of its residents was a primary focus of Thomas Luebke’s spring 2020 studio , Public Figure/Private Ground: Redevelopment of the FBI Site in Washington, DC.
Are you going to play by the rules or break them? Are you going to uphold the underlying sociopolitical constructs of this power landscape or invert it into something that’s a natural system?
on challenging students to question how public space manifests itself, and for what audience
Luebke has served since 2005 as secretary of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, where he leads federal design reviews for projects in Washington, DC. He considers the 7.5-acre site, and the capital broadly, an ideal case study for students to consider what they believe urban form and space should be. He explains:
“Washington is a little bit inverted compared to other cities in terms of its res publica and res privata, as formulated in the 1790s by Major Pierre Charles L’Enfant. Most often in cities, the private realm—where what people normally do takes place, in commercial, residential, and other buildings—is the urban figure. But in DC, which has a national rhetorical role, the figure is actually the streets as diagonals, circles, and squares; the intersections; the monuments; and the federal buildings. DC is also one of the few places in which this relationship is readily apparent and strong, as other cities have a much wider range of acceptable urban formal expression. That DC never abandoned its height limit, which pushes development into squat boxes, contributes to this. Federal buildings tend to try to announce themselves. There’s a wonderful tradition in Washington that starts with 19th-century classical revival temples and carries into the 1950s and even ’60s. They don’t have a Miesian kind of expression but rather tend to gravitate toward heavier masonry expression. This DNA of the august federal box remained a DC phenomenon until about the early 1970s.”
The fortress-like Hoover building serves as one of the last vestiges of that culture, though it sits somewhat in a liminal space within this figure/ground inversion. Pennsylvania Avenue connects the Capitol building with the White House and serves as the primary thoroughfare in the nation for major processions, most prominently as the path taken by presidents following their inaugurations. It also acts as the northern border of the Federal Triangle that includes Constitution Avenue to the south, which stretches along the National Mall.
Pennsylvania Avenue’s federal identity has long been considered as restricted to its south side, though. “The avenue is part of the figure of the city, but it’s also a divider,” says Luebke. “The way it gets used, it feels like an edge rather than a street with a strong double-sided character. It doesn’t compare well to other great ceremonial streets like Paris’s Champs-Élysées or La Rambla in Barcelona because it doesn’t have that embracing grand retail experience. Retail doesn’t do very well there because it’s so single loaded. As a result, the Federal Triangle generates a kind of asymmetrical quality to the avenue.”
A singular exception to this Janus-faced nature is the Hoover building. Hoover, who allegedly referred to his department’s home as “the greatest monstrosity ever constructed in the history of Washington,” wanted it situated across the street from the Justice Department. This position held a degree of practicality in the 1970s in terms of ease of communication between the offices. The same held true for the building’s massive size. “There were telex machines, paper files with carbon copies, fingerprint files for hundreds of millions of people, shooting ranges, and secretarial pools the size of cruise ships, all of which had to be contained in one big building,” says Luebke. “It’s hard for modern office workers to understand how different it was, by necessity.”
The building’s symbolic potency was no less effective. As a metastatic growth of the Justice Department that results in the department flanking the avenue, the design and its location suggests to anyone there—new presidents included—that Hoover’s ghost and his institution always watch over the country.
That this creep of the federal was permitted may have been helped unconsciously by the building’s Brutalist design. It exudes strength and simplicity, as advocated by Gordon Bunshaft, a key figure in the Commission of Fine Arts in the mid-20th century, whose influence also resulted in the stark uniformity of Washington’s Metrorail. And the structure resembles, at least abstractly, the nearby neoclassical monuments and offices—none of which are built on a human scale either. So the Hoover building, despite its aesthetic differences, paradoxically fits into the city’s urban figure and expands its boundaries rather than reinforcing the existing dimensions of the Federal Triangle in the way, for example, a postmodern building might.
This intrusion of the institutional federal identity into an area that was historically subdivided and comprised of smaller commercial lots was not the only proposal for the avenue discussed at the time. Luebke explains:
“Some of the models to redevelop, in a grand way, what was considered a tired, shabby area were pretty radical. In retrospect, a few looked very Soviet, of the Khrushchev era, in that they were abstractly modern, with an underarticulated massiveness. GUM department store kind of plans. The era had extremely optimistic ideas, and they were putting all the eggs in the ceremonial basket rather than the Jane Jacobs basket. But this is the only block where it really was done with no holds barred. By the time they got around to redeveloping the other sites, we were into the late seventies and early eighties, and the postmodernist sensibility started to kick in, which meant a dialing back on that superimposition of scale.”
The studio gave the students the opportunity to reconceive the site once again, but in their case without restrictions. “It was perfectly acceptable to keep the building or destroy it completely,” says Luebke, who was curious about how the students would navigate the questions that this site, on an undeniably ceremonial axis, prompts. “It leaves you to ask what you value in urban design. Are you going to play by the rules or break them? How does the public space manifest itself and for what audience? Are you going to uphold the underlying sociopolitical constructs of this power landscape or invert it into something that’s a natural system?”
Many students chose to blow out the middle of the existing structure and create a courtyard building. Their designs varied considerably in aesthetics and programs, though. Among them were an apartment building that would help address the city’s housing crisis; a hub for buses as a solution for declining bus ridership; a site that explores DC statehood and the split between local and national culture through a meditation on open, public spaces; and an urban-landscape project that utilizes the building’s sense of impermeability to create a fantasy world that encourages joy and freedom over surveillance and power.
Yifan Wang (MLA ’20) was most engaged with the public persona of Hoover’s FBI, especially as it manifested in popular media, and how the building acts as what he defines as a “protuberance of the Justice Department.” “The fantasization of the FBI became very dominant in my personal interests,” he says. “The ‘masked’ character of the agents, the mysteriousness of the national apparatus as it was built up in Hollywood movies. Part of this story was built up intentionally by Hoover, and that’s also why the building became a top tourist destination.”
Rather than obliterate this notion of masking, in which the Brutalist structure acts as a physical manifestation of the bureau’s ominous public face, Wang instead calls attention to it by installing a double mask made of semi-transparent fabric that wraps around the largely intact exterior. This layering preserves the building’s historical identity while also drawing attention to, and even critiquing, the ways it helped sustain Hoover’s objectives.
Among Wang’s other concerns was giving the site back to the public in a manner that restores the avenue’s original redevelopment plans in the 1960s, in which an open balcony on every building, for parade viewing, was required. “Interestingly, the Hoover building was one of the first to follow that design while others abandoned it,” he says. “The initial design of the giant bunker allowed people to go directly to the balcony via the courtyard without any security checks or gates. I’m trying to give that free-flowing, modernist ideal back to the public by creating an open urban-nature environment.”
The landscape of Wang’s courtyard, separated into distinct sections with unique topographical manipulation, also resurrects a lost form of the site, albeit one much older than any existing structure in the area. As an ode to a spring that once flowed from nearby Franklin Square down to the Tiber Creek, he inserts a small stream between areas of grass and gravel. “It’s a kind of nostalgia for the original geology, a natural story I’m telling through the landscape,” he says.
Cecilia Huber (MLA ’20) embraced this waterway as a focal point of her urban-park design. “Through an abstraction of the ephemeral line of the spring, I created a masterplan connecting Franklin Square to the FBI site, which becomes a public living museum of trees for the residents of DC,” she explains. “It provides them with a space big enough to occupy and gather. In this bridge between the federal museums on the Mall and the life of the city to the north, the residents of the city and city agencies can come together and actively participate in local cultural events and daily life.”
Huber utilizes multiple iterations of water across the plan in ways that she says “surface the past,” in that they have historical precedent at the site. These include mist, wetlands, and a basin as a reference to the area prior to its development, as well as runnels that recall a water system for the White House used in the 1800s. She also repurposes the multistory underground parking lot for the management of water along the entire avenue.
Layering past eras onto the current site to suggest the possibility of union and a cohesive whole through heterogeneity was not her only intention. “I also sought to create a personal sensory experience that would draw a sharp contrast with the monumental scale of the Federal Triangle,” she says. “That scale is so hard to experience with your body.”
Through conversing with the site’s previous identities, Huber also conveys an awareness of time and evolution otherwise absent from the ossified character of Washington’s federal fabric. This is especially true with her use of trees. “The climate is rapidly changing the region and the urban forest will change over time, not just in DC but in many cities,” she says. “This park is a place to cultivate and observe the trees that will come to define the streets in the next century. As opposed to the Hoover building that now needs to be held up with netting, it doesn’t have a finite timeline as a structure because it’s full of living things.”
By designing a space in downtown Washington in which residents (and tourists) can meditate on change, Huber is breaking away from the notion of the country as a frozen utopia that the nearby federal buildings suggest.
The foregrounding of evolution in Huber’s design and its aleatory program, as well as the plans of many others in the studio, counter the fossilized federal architecture that surrounds it. Emphasizing elements of nature implies, too, that a nation’s identity is defined by much more than what humans can control. But whether those in power in Washington will resist more “museum building” in honor of their hubristic conception of the American empire and instead focus on the needs of living beings remains an open question.
A Guidebook to an Empty Land
A Guidebook to an Empty Land
“When an area is empty, there’s a desire to fill it in—it’s the colonizing mindset,” says Angela Mayrina (MDes ADPD ’20). She recently won the 2020 Design Studies Thesis Prize for a 200-page project that responds to the Indonesian government’s intention to move the country’s capital from Jakarta—where she grew up—to East Kalimantan on the island of Borneo, within five years.
The plans are designed to help relieve the problems of Java, the island on which Jakarta is located—overpopulation and the fact that the city is rapidly sinking into the ocean—and to forge stronger connections with Indonesia’s eastern provinces, including those where there are separatist movements. In 2017, Mayrina reports, there were fewer than 95,200 people living on the land earmarked for the new capital; up to 2.75 million people are due to be relocated there after the move.
“I was intrigued by the political and media narrative around Kalimantan, because they talked a lot about how the move would help solve the problems of Java, but nobody was talking about Kalimantan—except to say that the government owns a lot of empty land there, on which it can build a new future,” Mayrina says. “But if you look on Google Maps, you’ll see that a lot of the area contains only patches of forest; in many parts of Kalimantan, this idea of it being empty, wild jungle is not real.”
A Guidebook to an Empty Land: Kalimantan and the Shadow of the Capital City is a compendium of essays, archival material, images, and maps that challenges the image of Kalimantan as uninhabited, dense forest and spotlights the people who live there and the natural environment. The publication itself references the guidebooks published when the Dutch colonized the archipelago, which was when the notion of Kalimantan as empty was manufactured. Mayrina used the traditional format of the guidebook, while also challenging it—showing maps while also highlighting that they are limited and simplified interpretations of reality, for example. “The books I found in the Harvard library promoted tourism to Java, but the other islands were under-researched, so this idea of the interior as empty and Kalimantan as backward was embedded in the discourse about Indonesia from then,” she says, pointing to texts that painted Kalimantan as inhabited by wild animals, poisonous plants, and scary tribes.
The trope of emptiness, she demonstrates, lends itself to development. The Dutch adopted the German scientific forestry method (which was used around the globe because it was so efficient), and brought in foresters to cultivate the land and categorize it for different uses. Subsequently—particularly since Indonesian independence in 1945—the Indigenous people of Kalimantan have been pushed out of the area by the oil, coal, timber, diamond, and gold industries. The desire to extract and exploit the area’s natural resources continues today. “Indigenous people like the Dayaks are still trying to map their land and make the government recognize their rights over the areas, and if the new capital moves there, they will be even more at risk,” Mayrina says.
There have been previous attempts to move people to Kalimantan from Java. In the 1970s, the post-independence government revived a colonial-era program called “transmigration,” under which landless people in Java were given plots on the other Indonesian islands, a few months’ worth of food and supplies, and resources for development. The law mentions that the program was meant to fill in the “empty areas” in the rest of the archipelago. But these newcomers—who were not guided by the government following the relocation—found the soil conditions to be too difficult for farming, so they ended up abandoning rice fields to make a living from the land in other ways. In East Kalimantan, the establishment of different extractive industries brought in more newcomers to the island in a short period of time. “It created a lot of conflict because many Indigenous people were pushed aside by the newcomers, who became the face of the government on the island,” Mayrina explains. The transmigration program eventually ended, but Mayrina points out parallels between that era and what is being done today: “The capital city move itself is an iteration of transmigration.”
She says that NGOs report mixed feelings in Kalimantan about the move: on one hand, local people can see that it’s a change from years of being neglected by the government; on the other, development presents threats to the environment and their livelihoods, including the prospect of competing with and having to catch up to more developed parts of the country.
There are other dangers to moving the capital, Mayrina points out: the threat to biodiversity in Borneo and to endangered species such as orangutans, for example. Then there are the difficulties of cultivating the land and the dangers of building a new city on areas that have been deforested and on peat swamps, which pose a fire risk.
All this makes it even more crucial that Indigenous people, with their knowledge of the terrain and conditions, are involved in the conversation about the development of Kalimantan. “There’s a lot of knowledge that the Dayaks have about the land—how to cultivate it and manage it, with its ecological limitations—but they are continuously being pushed aside by the government,” Mayrina says. “Why not involve them in the conversation and conserve their knowledge, rather than imposing knowledge from elsewhere?” So far, she has mostly witnessed a top-down approach to consultation. “They are talking to elite groups in Kalimantan, but not to the people who will be most affected by the move.”
In putting together her project, Mayrina visited Kalimantan twice. Since then, she has been awarded a research grant, which she will use to involve NGOs working in Kalimantan that are fighting for official recognition of the Indigenous peoples’ rights to their land—a process that may now have more time because of delays to the project caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
At the same time, she is striving to bring greater awareness to these issues by speaking to publishers about distributing A Guideboook to an Empty Land and giving lectures. “The resources, the nature, the people—everything is interconnected, which is a perspective that’s missing in a lot of the conversation,” Mayrina says. “My goal is to bring these stories and these complexities to attention.”
Excerpt: Justice that Serves People, Not Institutions, by Mirna D. Goransky
Excerpt: Justice that Serves People, Not Institutions, by Mirna D. Goransky
“Five years ago, the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Just City Lab published The Just City Essays: 26 Visions of Inclusion, Equity and Opportunity. The questions it posed were deceptively simple: What would a just city look like? And what could be the strategies to get there? These questions were posed to mayors, architects, artists, philanthropists, educators and journalists in 22 cities, who told stories of global injustice and their dreams for reparative and restorative justice in the city.
These essays were meant as a provocation, a call to action. Now, during these times of dissonance, unrest, and uncertainty, their contents have become ever more important. For the next 26 weeks [starting June 15, 2020], the GSD and the Just City Lab will republish one essay a week here and at designforthejustcity.org . We hope they may continue conversations of our shared responsibility for the just city.
We believe design can repair injustice. We believe design must restore justice, especially that produced by its own hand. We believe in justice for Black Americans. We believe in justice for all marginalized people. We believe in a Just City.”
—Toni L. Griffin, Professor in Practice of Urban Planning, founder of the Just City Lab , and editor of The Just City Essays
Justice that Serves People, Not Institutions
By Mirna D. Goransky
The purpose of this essay is to share some considerations about the meaning of “just city” from the perspective of a lawyer dedicated to the reform of justice administration and, in particular, to the design of systems that promote, encourage and facilitate the approach of justice for the people. This historically means not only a change in the rules and culture but also a change in the design of the spaces in which justice is administered.
It is also written from the perspective of a city dweller from Buenos Aires, a city in which more than 3 million people live, and where 1.2 million cars and 1.2 million people in public transportation arrive every day from the suburbs. Traffic and traffic violations are one of the most serious problems and affect our everyday life in a dramatic way.
The guiding principle of these reflections is that a just city is only achieved when its inhabitants have a sense of belonging, respect for the rights of others and for the place in which they live in. In no other aspect is this clearer than in transit, in which the disregard for the laws brings enormous cost not only in human lives but also can easily become a very heavy burden in everyday life, in which aggression and lawbreakers are the norm. For example, in Argentina it can be said that traffic rules are not respected and more than 7,000 people die each year in traffic accidents, and more than 120,000 are injured in varying degrees. This is one of the highest rates of mortality from traffic accidents and is significantly higher when compared with the rates of other countries in relation to their population and number of cars.
When I think of a just city there are some general issues that arise and are central to its development. First, is the need for an equitable distribution of resources among all the people and neighborhoods, in accordance to fairness. Fairness does not necessarily mean equal amounts of money everywhere but an adequate amount of resources to ensure that people from all parts of the city have the same opportunities to enjoy the benefits of community life, including access to education, health, safety, justice, etc. Continue reading on designforthejustcity.org …
From an Autosimulacrum to a new Transitopia, 2019-20 Irving Innovation Fellows share their post-graduate research
From an Autosimulacrum to a new Transitopia, 2019-20 Irving Innovation Fellows share their post-graduate research
Each year since 2016, the Irving Innovation Fellowship has enabled recent Harvard Graduate School of Design alumni to extend their research and discovery in the fields of design, architecture, urban design, and landscape architecture by continuing their affiliation with the GSD, long after commencement ceremonies are over.
The fellowship provides a full year of post-graduate funding and resources, granting recipients the opportunity to further engage with topics that emerge during their coursework and student projects. As a platform invested in curiosity, the fellowship also supports recipients in the exploration of the novel research inquiries and experimental projects that fuel design innovation. By pursuing focused research, teaching, iteration, and collaboration outside of the rigorous demands of a full course load, Irving Fellows can complete projects and publications and advance GSD pedagogy through instruction and curriculum development.
The Irving Innovation Fellowship was established in 2013 as part of a gift from the John E. Irving Family, and has funded the research of 17 GSD grads to date. This past year’s Irving Fellows (2019-2020)—though confronted with the logistical challenges wrought on a global scale by COVID-19—have, like their predecessors, made vital contributions to their individual disciplines.
Inés Benítez Gómez (MDes ADPD ’19): On Titled Cultural Artifacts
As an Irving Innovation Fellow, Inés Benítez Gómez expanded her inquiries into design as both a spatial and social medium, “interrogating the complex narratives through which design functions to mediate, perpetuate, and objectify culture.” Through interdisciplinary practices ranging from the production of studio ceramics to choreographed communal meals, Benítez Gómez sought to “question [design’s] boundaries, social impact and role as an actor inside the production of heritage, cultural identity and artistic discourse.”
Order of Columns, a sculptural installation and publication, emerged from her fellowship research and was exhibited in the Mexican Architecture Sample for Design Week (Abierto Mexicano de Diseño 2019). Conceived in conjunction with Nuria Benítez, Order of Columns reimagines the Classical order of columns as pillars made from accumulations of quotidian objects and industrial materials—stacked plastic step stools, a topiary figure, a cardboard concrete tube form—familiar artifacts from the urban landscape of the sisters’ native Mexico City.
Benítez Gómez’s fellowship research also included Burra, a formal and poetic ode to the sawhorse that examines the material culture and semiotic complexity of this versatile, vernacular object. Benítez Gómez continued her exploration of forms in the ceramic studio, where she combined theoretical methodologies with artistic and cultural production. She also served as a teaching assistant for architecture professor Malkit Shoshan’s class “Exhibit: Design for Decentralization,” and, in response to the circumstances posed by COVID-19, produced a website with fellow Irving Innovation Fellow John Wagner that presents their work to the broader public.
Mark Heller (MLA/ MUP ’19): Autosimulacrum
Throughout the course of his fellowship term, Mark Heller focused on geographic-scale visualization as a tool to better represent our world and enhance the design of the built environment. His fellowship research expands on his MLA thesis project, “No Service,” which proposed a contemporary interpretation of the sublime in which “the grandest geologic formations have been imaged to a fraction of an inch, and our sense of awe and wonder has gradually eroded with this ever-increasing ability to see the Earth instantaneously from novel ways.”
While an Irving Fellow, Heller developed Autosimulacrum, a computer program that leverages this surfeit of geospatial information to instantly create renderings of any site in the continental United States, from virtually any perspective. By using an automated script fed by inputs from the National Land Cover Database, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and the United States Geological Survey, Autosimulacrum reconciles the fractured nature of data in landscape architecture practice, where designers must currently reference individual data sets for bathymetry and land cover, among other geographical measures, to create a composite map for analysis.
In addition, Heller continued his long-running collaboration with Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture Robert Pietrusko as a research assistant, aiding in the development of the manuscript and animated visualizations for <<Test Sites>>, a project that “advances a new form of geographic visualization by constructing a database of geospatial data entirely from grey literature.” He also served as a teaching fellow for “Landscape Architecture III: Third Semester Core Studio,” MLA Thesis Preparation, and “Mapping: Geographic Representation and Speculation.”
Evan Shieh (MAUD ’19): Autonomous Urbanism: Towards a New Transitopia
During his fellowship year, Evan Shieh expanded his thesis research in urban design with a new chapter of Transitopia, a graphic novel that proposes a paradigm shift toward autonomous public transit to combat the ills of the automobile-centric 20th-century city. Shieh was also invited to share his research in an exhibition he organized and designed for the Seoul Biennale of Architecture & Urbanism and the Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture.
Transitopia envisions a speculative future for Los Angeles by illustrating how the commuting patterns and mobility networks of different household archetypes (the suburban nuclear family, the composite household, the extended working household, and the business traveler) are impacted by a public transit plan incorporating autonomous vehicles. Shieh’s research and new chapter looks at the important issues of transit equity and affordability, including accessibility on a neighborhood scale, reversing highway construction that disproportionately impacts neighborhoods of color, building densification around transit stops without displacement, and transforming vehicular streets into human-centric play streets.
The fellowship also enabled Shieh to develop a research paper, “Urban Design after ‘The End of Utopias,’” which “examines the contemporary abandonment of utopian urbanism by urbanists and architects, and argues for a re-appropriation of utopian thinking by the urban design professions.” In addition, Shieh played a vital role in the GSD’s educational mission as a teaching fellow within Urban Design’s core curriculum, and he also aided in a program development effort to revamp the department’s online presence.
John Wagner (MArch ’19): Assembling Refuge: Social Space in Exile
John Wagner began investigating design strategies for refugee community spaces during the studio course “Architecture as a Tool to Improve Lives” in 2018. As an Irving Fellow, he continued this work with the Assembling Refuge research project, which set out “to identify a sustainable alternative to the existing practices of humanitarian relief efforts, and to better reveal and critically engage architectural practice that prioritizes the enabling of agency in contested territories.” Wagner trained his focus on “a site…where material, practice, and the primary purpose of building is of vital importance”—the refugee supercamp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, the largest refugee camp in history, home to some 860,000 Rohingya people.
Wagner’s research, interviews, and fieldwork in Bangladesh informed a contextual and critical understanding of design’s role in the current Rohingya refugee crisis and ongoing relief efforts. His project analyzed methods of architectural assembly and construction adapted from the vernacular designs and skill sets of Rohingya laborers, and examined the design processes of young Bangladeshi architects engaged in humanitarian collaboration with Rohingya craftspeople. Wagner also surveyed material precedents, provenance, and innovative uses of renewable, ecological assemblies in creating social spaces within camps, and reviewed a project proposal developed for the UN’s World Food Programme to be sited within the Rohingya refugee camp. As noted above, Wagner also worked with fellow Irving Innovation Fellow Inés Benítez Gómez to produce a website that presents their work to the broader public.