by Rene Cuenca
For me, social innovation is experiencing a resurgence at a time when cultural boundaries are shifting. A wave of new social initiatives is coming into view world wide, where we are beginning to “design” different kinds of living environments that are more collaborative, more socially just, and specially more sustainable. During my undergraduate career I have always been trying to ride that wave, tying Environmental Policy and Architectural thought to provide my own idea of what sustainability could mean for different contexts in the built environment. The idea that sustainability emerges from the overlapping intersectionalities in a Venn Diagram of three separate circles has been something I have challenged from the beginning of my studies. Now, as I delve deeper into how design and policy could, simultaneously, prove solutions to difficult social, technological, and economic issues, it has become even clearer to me that a sustainable approach does not come from disparate realms of environment, economics, and culture. It is all a continuum. A sustainable approach places itself on none of these things and in all of these things at the same time. This is such that everything is interconnected, interdependent, marking a new sort of ethos in the design and architectural design thinking.
My interests have rarely been admiring highly awarded buildings for their design. Instead, I am very interested in the notion of how can overall community processes and autonomous architectural modes can start to define the built environment as well as aspects of life in the city. How does the mapping of complex social relation start to give a clearer sense of community or city life? Many times this can be physically evidence in cities with high use of public space, a positive public arena based on placemaking techniques and healthy public space where common ownership and stewardship come to define healthy community values. Other times the evidence is less clear, a sort of Software urbanism where the intervention of social relations and social programmes create a greater representation of a good city This is what first drove me to the issue of blight in the city. In a sense, blight represents a rupture in this public system… a reversal of community histories… a place in the community that is not in the community. The reason I took this class was because this is the way I feel architects should approach the realization of building form and projected urbanities: design and policy for humanitarian impact.
Major Peduto makes it clear that in the issue of blight, a lot could be done to improve the quality of our cities. What’s more, the Land Bank policy and other socioarchitectural initiatives set forth by the many organizations tackling this issue have made it clear that communities are in clear risk of different market forces including property rights, gentrification, deteriorating infrastructure, and community development. I was attracted to blight because the term itself connoted the process that happens to plants whereby they get infected by pathogenic organisms. Yes, the answer could be one design solution that we could propose, but in the end the problem is system and organic in much the same ways. Much talk about passive design and interactive technologies has been made to make architecture a living organism, but in the context of social innovation I am also interested on how the architectural process can become a living organism in itself.
Currently my group, Team 2, has made significant findings in the issue of blight in Pittsburgh. We have met relevant professional in field and came across significant policy leads that can start to open the door as to how our group might fit in into some sort of creative solution. One of the things that stuck out to me the most while having these meeting with people from EvolveEa or GTECH was the idea of how to redefine the concept of ‘Blight’ not only as an opportunity for city-wide development and community empowerment, but to also think critically to what it means to be blighted. We might think, as an outsider, that a certain community is blighted because we don’t wanna walk through it or because we see vacant lots and unusable space… but at the end of the day there are people living in that community that must deal with aspects of their neighborhood in a way that they do not themselves would describe their communities as such. The same has been true for other equity-driven terms like the ideas of a ‘Food Desserts,’ which a variety of social designers and architects have used to back up bring-healthy-food-to=poor-communities project which study after study has shown that the fresh-food push does nothing to improve the health of poor people, who continue to live markedly shorter and sicker lives than better-off Americans. In this example the standard way “food deserts” have been defined may overemphasize — and in some cases mischaracterize — the problem of access and draw attention from other factors that influence what people buy and eat, like food prices, preparation time and knowledge, marketing, general levels of education, transportation, cultural practices and taste. This sort of thinking is what I want to welcome to our project proposal: a way to reimagine blight and gentrification so that we are talking about the relevant policy, cultural, and economic systems that make it so.
One of my initial suggestions was to redefine the idea of the Community Land Trust so that we can design a program away from a Trust (that is the legal entity) into trust for each other, our community systems, individual goals, and overall value. What if we design a system parallel to the Land Bank through the use the Conservatorship Law in order to use blighted properties for short term ‘pop-up’ solutions. This programme could be all compiled into community efforts to create small autonomous Land Trusts that empower community members. In this way different types of communities can come together under a Land Trust outlining common community goals for the use of urban space in/close to their houses, making the process of acquiring land more determined (and perhaps easier) while solving the fact that the land bank might take a while to be implemented or struggle to give voice to various community needs. In this way we can redefine the idea of Land Trust to incorporate social inclusion and community empowerment as well as allow community members take active use of the land. Of course, these ideas are preliminary and could work as ideological extrapolation from the ideas of my other team members. As we move forward on the project I am excited to figure out how a system sustainable strategy could entice us to come up with a creative solution to the issue of blight in the city.
Design and Policy 