in my work i am interested in class not just as inequality but also as social condition. this was the starting point for my work in housing, and now as an urban planner.
from the constructed i moved to images and film, conceiving these mediums as the representation and synthesis of the built and the body. understanding photographs and film now as spatial practices that underscore the meaning of the spaces which we inhabit and the people who inhabit them, my work as planner has gradually become reflexive.
just as design of the urban can be shaped by the community’s input, my practice aims to foreground images and videos as community-constructed documents. my urban planning practice, then, interacts with these methods, forming and reforming as, say, photographs of buildings are taken and their material form is questioned as a politicized archival object. or straightforwardly, my planning work engages community members as they co-create a project.
least experimental of my practices is urban planning, and with good reason for so: i work for the State, where bureaucracy is an issue, and innovation can be slow as we constantly gain fluency in the system’s rules, often not fast enough to rework them entirely.
it is urban planning then, that i hope to ideate from. i have taken up a speculative practice whose aim is to build spaces of gathering, whose form takes less a physical and more a conceptual infrastructure.
comunitopics, the name of this project, aims to activate spaces as experiments in living through being in community together in a variety of forms.
for instance: certain activations may be held in spaces about to transition into something else – empty storefronts about to be occupied, a crumbling townhome about to be redeveloped into condos, or a vacant lot serving as a guerilla garden for its surrounding residents.
within these spaces of transience, the project aims to ideate material and social interventions, and promote collective agency and self-determination.
the project’s work is in conversation with itself and the world. comunitopics embraces the feedback loops created between images and space; words and ideas; and systems and networks.
in this exponentializing world where third spaces disappear into thin air once the rent is raised every 12 months, i see an opportunity to create an organization of a movement of people who live out their relatedness with resilient infrastructure that transcends the strength of physically permanent space.
such transient occupations would build from spaces of liminal ownership, whose status would function into both the practicality of hosting an activation in the space and the meaning of the activation itself.
two experiments are currently in the works.