Where has the Project Been?
These past couple of weeks have been really insightful in trying to understand the situation of blight in the city. There is this weird feeling of melancholia and wonder that happens when you walk around a blighted community like Wilkinsburg and see the beautifully historic houses and buildings being left to destiny. This is when I truly understood the issue of blight, not from the research (which left it more inconclusive), nor my own preconceptions. At the beginning of the project my thinking was specifically focused in understanding blight in terms of the actual structures that have come to become unoccupied inefficient parts of the neighborhood. I would think about abandoned houses, broken windows, empty streets. Blight was structural. But as I toured the neighborhood I understood that blight is beyond structure; it is the visual, psychological, and physical effects of living among empty lots, buildings and condemned houses.
There has been a lot of momentum by all types of community organizations and city-wide initiatives to deal with the issue of blight in a creative and effective manner. Of specific concern to Pittsburgh has been turning this vacant lots and brownfield sites into productive parts of the community through greening strategies, community gardening, and the like. In that process the actual houses and abandoned buildings stand off even more. “If I want to own the property next to my house, I don’t want to deal with the building on the site,” a community member mentioned in Wilkinsburg. But those artifacts are key components of the neighborhood identities. Demolishing all abandoned buildings and constructing everything new is as much, if not more, a problem as blight itself. Eleni mentioned the “Broken Window Theory” whereby one broken window will lead to another and another, which is relevant in understanding that the well-being of a community not only depends on the buildings themselves, but also on our idea of safety, appearance, and community. A theory I like to subscribe more in the issue of blight is perhaps a Swamp Theory: How does a community like Wilkinsburg become blighted? As it turns out, the same way a lake or pond can become a swamp. I like to think about the urban fabric as an organism which therefore has an inherent ecology. If you add chemicals to the pond without any safety nets or a correct balance, then it can quickly become a swamp. As the decay increased, all the nutrients fell to the bottom and more harmonious plant life that could bring oxygen back to the water were deprived of oxygen through the decomposition process. They couldn’t reach the light for photosynthesis.
Regardless, a swamp can still be a very healthy ecosystem. A swamp is actually critically important for providing fresh water. I think the same is true about blighted communities. Blight does not have to be bad. Vacant can be vibrant. Abandoned can be Awesome. There is a lot of opportunity. After a lot of statistical and policy research we have found a lot of complicated legal processes that blighted communities must deal with in top of the daily reminder that their community is blighted. While system-based initiatives can start to give way to long-term solutions and fit in with future redevelopment goals, we are concerned about short-term solutions that can redefine blight and empower communities. Can we change our understanding of blight? Can that start changing the community?
Where can the Project be drawn from?
In so far this project has been really intimidating. The problem is so big that I sometimes feel myself being lost within a greater system. Sometimes I have to just sit there and ponder as my other team members discuss details in order to make sense of what parts of the system to focus on. One major draw back to our creative process, I think, is our timeline. It is hard to be encouraged enough to suggest really out-there ideas and think outside the box when there are very tangible requirements to meet. For this I am drawn back to the writings of Bruce Nussbaum about “serious play” as a paradigm for the design process. This is something that we have lacked as a group, and as a class, I think. We need start thinking beyond the structures here too. We need to start embracing engagement, creativity, and action.
The many design and cultural probes that have been presented in class have been really useful at filling this gap a little, however. The most difficult aspect is conceiving what our project wants to be. Will it be a service like allowing communities to envision what sort spaces abandoned buildings could be? a physical product like a pop-up space? a policy to ease the land acquisition process? or information like showcasing the architectural histories of the blighted property in the neighborhood?
Kriss’ presentation was really helpful, because her ethnographic and community research is relevant to the ideas we want to have implemented with blight and communities. This thought in the design process led me to think about Bryan Bell, the director of Design Corps, and his design methods of tackling a project. His views are backed up by the fact that while architecture affects every aspects of a person’s life and neighborhood, only 2% of home owners and home buyers work directly with an architect to design the place in which they live. But, when thinking about design for human impact his successes come from the mutual respect, mutual benefit, and long-term relationships between designer and client. This became evident when we visited Wilkinsburg and the community members told us that many CMU students with grandiose projects had come and gone in the area, leaving behind no useful solution nor positive social impact. I want or project to be completely immersed in the outreach of community members and how blight is affecting them.
Where is the Project going?
With this in mind, we have drawn inspiration in the work of Candy Chang’s “I Wish This Was” Project, which starts to open up the dialog about what community members want to see in their community. The biggest design method that we could apply to our project is the idea of story telling to start understanding the neighborhood histories. The idea is a sort of Gardening Principle: that which you tend and nurture grows while that which you starve or otherwise abuse either dies or grows out of control to strangle what’s good. It’s not always an intensive focus so much as consistent consciousness, a vigilance that develops into intuition and wisdom about when to summon compassionate patience and when to intervene. In this way, it is time to start weeding out the present to make way to what has been there… and therefore at what could grow from it. Could better shared histories and increased community engagement in the community they live start to move beyond the structures that have made it blighted and start to reconstruct itself?
Design and Policy 