THE TERRITORIAL CITY: Edge of the Megalopolis

Every foreground has a background. In California, the background is the Central Valley–a flat landscape that is used to harvest and extract resources to support other regions. It is no surprise that within the State, the greatest political, economic, and cultural divide manifests itself between the coastal cities and inland valley’s hinterland regions. Coastal California adorns an image of scenic landscape, progressive environmental movements, liberal culture, and density, while inland California is characterized by resource harvesting and extraction, conservative values, and a depravity in social infrastructure. With distinctions in labor, wealth, race, climate, and education, these two regions are emblematic of the increasing divide between geographies of immaterial labor/ resource consumption and the exploitation of land and communities to extract/ harvest these resources. While these ‘two Californias’ have remained relatively distinct, the ongoing construction of the high-speed rail (HSR) infrastructure to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles will run through the Central Valley. Accordingly, this infrastructure will produce a spatial collapse between these two worlds and foster a new type of urbanism to the American context — the territorial city. 

The territorial city is comprised of extreme density and diffusion; of only network and nodes; of both rural and urban. Most importantly, it is a city made up of networked building complexes that can leverage architecture’s capacity to impact territorial issues. This studio will focus on collective housing complexes in the Central Valley to address the growing needs of the state and ongoing struggles with housing affordability. Specifically, the studio will examine how to expand the domestic commons into a networked urban commons to produce decentralized models of care. Leveraging the network of the HSR, new forms of sharing physical and non-physical resources as well as engaging the benefits of scale can offer new forms of support that were not previously tenable in hinterland environments like the Central Valley. Students will identify precarious subjects in the Central Valley and consider how the high-speed rail can redistributed resources more equitably. Ultimately these complexes will ask how architecture can foster empathy between these two Californias.