‘Urban Studies After The Wire‘ is a four-part lecture & discussion series I presented to Lisa Brawley’s Introduction to Urban Studies course in Spring 2011.  The series was developed after six months of independent research on The Wire, uneven geographical development, governmentality theory, representation, and the recent history of Baltimore.  Under the direction of Lisa Brawley, I narrowed the focus to representation & power.  I asked the class how we can use The Wire to fracture representations and to rethink our education on the city through representations.

Day One: Watch Season 3 Episode 1 “Time After Time”

Day Two: The Wire’s messages • ‘A General Matrix of Spatialities’ • Presentation

Day Three: Representation & Power • Presentation

Day Four: The Wire, Representation, Teaching, & Learning • Presentation

The Presentations are admittedly confusing without the accompanying lecture, but they allow you to get a feel for the material.

The Toolbox for the Power Kingdom is the final result of a nine month series of collaborations and interventions on Main Street Poughkeepsie.  The Toolbox proposes a system for developing community-oriented temporary use projects on Main Street Poughkeepsie.  This project offers a three-pronged approach:

• Establishing a network of networks.  Engaging property owners, formal & informal community groups, and local government & institutions.  Creating a database of potential collaborators, keeping up communications, and proposing matches when opportunities arise.
• Distributing set of form contracts and a proposed permitting system to legitimize temporary use, thus relieving legal anxieties and making it easier for everyone to participate.  Contracts are tailored to temporary, opportunistic uses.  There are twelve different contracts, each a different permutation of three variables: fixed term or perpetual occupancy, rent and other fees, and liability.  (Download sample contract here.)
• Building a discourse among all stakeholders that emphasizes mutual benefits of the project (economic and social), as well as the ease, efficiency, and potential of temporary use on Main Street.

New Industrial Poughkeepsie is a comprehensive plan to reindustrialize Poughkeepsie’s waterfront district.  Once the nucleus of the city’s shipping and manufacturing, the waterfront is at the forefront of the area’s redevelopment efforts.  Mainstream and progressive proposals both remake the waterfront for recreation, shopping, and other pleasures, with the concomitant idea that such a district will revitalize the whole city.  Are these proposals realistic?  Are they even desirable?

This project proposes to use Poughkeepsie’s assets realistically and strategically, fostering a neo-industrial hub, creating skilled and unskilled jobs, and moving towards true sustainability.  The “All Work and No Play…” doctrine holds true here as everywhere, though, so we’ve created a three-zone plan that encourages both labor and leisure.  Each zone is reparceled and rezoned, allowing for optimal private industrial development.  Architectural and programmatic interventions are inserted throughout to create recreational options that are athletic, aesthetic, and/or historical.

This project was produced jointly by me and Willy Mann for Architecture III with Tobias Armborst at Vassar College.

Explore the plan over at Willy’s site [flash].

Renderings.

Download the full presentation. (Beware: This PDF is 78Mb!)

Nature Reworking the City is a packet that portrays a semi-fictional area of Manhattan experiencing the mostly mundane but sometimes extraordinary consequences of living in a world whose environmental woes are refracted in politics and culture.  It is delivered in narrative form, following a few people who inhabit the neighborhood.  Concept and narrative by Leander Brotz, Willy Mann, and me.  Brilliant surgical illustrations by Willy Mann.  Prepared for New York City as a Social Lab: Plotting the Invisible City

Download here [pdf].

NB: This packet was one part of a project that attempted to critically locate and relate sustainability and ecological disaster in contemporary urban discourse.  It was not meant to challenge the reality of disasters or the need for sustainability, but rather to gain a sense how these discourses interact with urban development and governance.

Through the Land Acquisition Program, the NYC Dept. of Environmental Conservation purchases land and development rights throughout Upstate New York to protect the City’s drinking water resources.  This map rearranges the many tiny parcels protected by the LAP into the map of New York City.  The map hopes to show how, through exchanges of water, money, and political capital, the people of New York not only claim remote territories for their metabolism, but engage the City’s “first nature.”  This project was developed for New York City as a Social Lab: Plotting the Invisible City with Lisa Brawley and Tobias Armborst at Vassar College.

Download Part I [pdf].  This is just the map pictured above.

Part II of this project (the full poster) is forthcoming.  It will detail both the absolute geography and geographies of exchange.

Main Street Assets is a map of activity along Main Street Poughkeepsie.  It serves as a catalog of storefront use, but also notes other important resources.  Prepared for Cartography with Mary Ann Cunningham at Vassar College.

Download here [pdf].

This poster is a catalog of resident households uprooted by eminent domain in the construction of an elevated highway (US-9) through the City of Poughkeepsie in the late-1950s and early 60s.  The collage is the result of cross-analysis of current & historic aerial maps, highway plans, and the 1956 Polk directory of the Poughkeepsie area.  (1956 was assumed to be the last year before relocation would begin to move people out of the area.)  In truth, the poster shows only about 2/3 of the evacuated households.  Prepared for Architecture III with Tobias Armborst at Vassar College.

Right click -> Save Link As… to download full size JPG.

Exploring Rt. 9 is a visualization exercise, cataloging how one can experience US Route 9 in the City of Poughkeepsie.  Rt. 9 is an elevated highway that cuts through the Western edge of the city.  The highway appears positively in the lived experience most often in two ways: (1) from the drivers seat on the road and (2) from a number of visual-topographical access points off the road.  Experience one is on the right, in a View from the Road-style display.  Experience two is on the left.  Screen-captures from video are used to display the two views; they are graphed on an imprecise cartographic rendering of the area around Rt. 9.  Prepared for Architecture III with Tobias Armborst at Vassar College.

Right click -> Save Link As… to download full size JPG.