Confronting Climate Change

Confronting Climate Change

My good friend and colleague Tom Dutton at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, has been working with his architecture students for several years in Over-the-Rhine, a downtown ghetto in Cincinnati. Over-the-Rhine is a national heritage site, with 493 buildings listed with the National Register of Historic Buildings. It has the largest collection of 19^th Century Italianate apartment buildings in America –many of which are largely in a state of decay as a result of City Council and financial sector disinvestment and redlining. This historical process of disinvestment (as in many US cities) has resulted in urban decay and very low property values – providing a cheap and profit-generating opportunity to the development community. In the last few years, this potential has begun to be realised as the City, in partnership with the development community, have embarked on a process of gentrification that is displacing the almost entirely African American existing community of residents. Tom is the Director of the Miami University Center for Community Engagement in Over-the-Rhine and through the Center has been working with service agencies to support the residents in resisting displacement.

In the Spring Semester of 2010, Tom and I co-taught a design studio in Over-the-Rhine, the purpose of which was to explore issues of urban sustainability – to look at alternative models of development that would include not just new economic and environmentally sustainable options for development, but also options for social and cultural sustainability – that would allow and encourage development to take place, but that would also ensure that the existing residents would be able to continue to live in the area, and to maintain their social and cultural roots and relationships.

The 30 or so students in the studio program were self-selected. That is, they had chosen this particular topic out of a range of available options. Since the goals and aims of the studio had been made explicit in the course description, Tom and I presumed that the students would be highly-motivated about sustainability – an assumption that was to be called into question as the project proceeded.

The process of investigation and analysis into issues of urban sustainability was wide-ranging. Our intention was to move beyond the normative narrow definitions of sustainability and to include in our work proposals for social sustainability – for models of development that would protect the interests of the resident community while at the same time allowing for the economic revitalisation of the area. Our aim was to find solutions to the problem of housing diverse cultural and economic groups in an environment that is conducive to harmonious social and environmental relationships into the 21^st Century.

Half-way through the project, both Tom and I began to share a real disquiet about the apparent lack of progress being made by the students. Each week we would have a pin-up of their work at which they were to describe that they had learned and to explain their forward-thinking. Each time we seemed to see the same old superficially thought-out schematic drawings, with no co-ordinated plan to synthesise their collective work into a meaningfully whole development proposal. Eventually, during one of these pin-ups, I called a halt to the discussion, and explained my disquiet. I told the students I wondered why it was that they didn’t seem to be really “engaging” with the issues, didn’t seem motivated or passionate to explore solutions enthusiastically on their own. Insterad they seemed lacklustre and bored. Acting on intuition, I decided to check out their acceptance of the centrtal and basic issues of sustainable design – the need to dramatically change the way we live and the kninds of environments that will be needed in the future:

“Here’s my understanding of the situation we face,” I told them.

·      We live in a time of impending crises.

·      World population continues to increase

·      Supplies of oil have reached their peak, while demand is rising

·      With the loss of petrochemicals, fertiliser production will cease

·      Global warming is changing the world’s climate dramatically

·      We may be facing potentially catastrophic food shortages

·      Sea levels are rising

·      These combined factors will cause mass migrations

·      There may be increased social conflict for diminishing resources

·      Distribution of food and resources to suburbia will be unsustainable.

·      The majority of the world’s populations live in cities

·      The best (and possibly only) way to resolve thesse problems is to design sustainable cities.

When I finished my monologue, I asked the twenty or so assembled students how many of them agreed with my portrayal of the sustainability issue.  

Less than half of them raised their hands.

Remember that these were students who had self-selected the course, who were to be presumed to care about sustainability. Furthermore, they were, for the most part, students from the farming community of the Mid-West – the Corn Belt – who had grown up close to issues of food production etc. To say that I was profoundly shocked would be an understatement. I asked myself, if these students don’t believe we face a problem, how are we possibly going to reach those millions of others – being educated like these, to become leaders in their community? And it we fail to convince them of the impending catastrophe, what hope do we collectively have for the future of the human race?

In their defence, my question did bring to the surface the root cause of their inability to engage witth the material at hand and did, after that, allow for an ongoing dialogue about the issues themselves. In the event, the majority of students produced commendable work that contributed significantly to our understanding of the way that cities like Cincinnati might approach development in ways that are significantly more sustainable. Some of the reasoning that came out of the class is shown below.

Sustainable Urban Housing Development

The project involved design at both the urban scale as well as the design of individually sustainable building complexes including proposals for urban farming, sustainable housing, local and neighbourhood commercial facilities and community facilities. Given the emblematic nature of Over-the-Rhine – its typification of so many urban cores across the United States - our hope and intention in the long term was to be able to provide development policy guidelines that might influence urban policy beyond the borders of Cincinnati and indeed, Ohio.

Block Housing Project

Designs included a number of innovative spatial organisations (Patterns) These included:

 Internalised Communal Block Courts

Privatising the inner areas of whole blocks, making them inaccessible to non-residents.  Providing these collective spaces with communal gardens, childcare, basketball hoops, community buildings and urban farming opportunities.

Infill Housing

Renovating and reusing existing building fabric where possible. Avoiding unnecessary new construction, building infill developments to supplement existing urban fabric.

Infill Housing and Refurbishment

Urban Farming

     Recognising that with the loss of carbon fuels, the suburbs will be harder to sustain and petrochemical based fertilisers will be expensive and in  short supply. Transportation costs will rise and urban populations will need to become food self-sustaining. Integrating urban farming into the residential matrix is therefore an essential ingredient of urban sustainability. We undertook detailed analysis of the food requirements and productive capacities of each urban block design in ferms of food sustainability.

Urban Farming

Green Roofs

To increase food sustainability, building designs were, where possible, provided with “green” roofs, for extras growing space.

 Green Technology

Emphasis in the new proposal was placed on the use of low-impact green technologies:

• Passive solar space heating
• District heating schemes
• Vertical farming
• Solar hot water
• Shading and insulation
• Natural ventilation

City as a Learning Environment

Providing opportunities in developments for community education for job training and for grass-roots education and on-the-job training, This suggests that each block have a small community education space, perhaps a collective workshop, drawing on local human resources and potential.

Increased Parking Accessibility

We recognis that in the short to medium term, the automobile will continue to be a facot in everyday life. We have therefrore included safe, private and direct parking to every residence in every block. However, we are also aware that eventually the use iof the automobile may become increasingly problematic. Hence our designs involved the creation of collective parking which could, in future times, be converted to more collective uses (small scale industry, manufacturing etc.

Section showing parking level

Mixed Unit development

Designs included a mix of household sizes and affordability allowing for a greater cultural mix. Unit sizes were consciously created to exceed the whyite, middle class norm, allowing extended families to live together, to share the costs and the available resources.

Commercial-Residential Mix

Block developments included a mix of commercial spaces at the ground level, to promote the development of small scale retailing operated by residents.

 Layers of Privacy

Each block was designed to allow a range of intimacies between residents, Each unit has its own private outdoor space. Each group of residents share a collective outdoor space where they can host larger outdoor functions. Then of course there is the great block interior which all of the residents share for the benefit of the whole block. This larger outdoor space is provided withindoor  social spaces fior communal child care, adult education, preschool education and community meetings.

Stoop Culture

Living and working in Over-the-Rhine in Summer, it is hard not to become aware of the extent to which the residents sit out “on the stoop” to watch the world go by, to commune with neighbours and to enliven the life of the street. Many new developments fail to acknowledge the importance of street life in the ability of a community to sustain  itself. The 3CDC development  at Gateway IV, Mercer Commons (below) is one example.

3CDC Development at Mercer Commons

In Mercer Commons, as in many developer housing prototypes, the first floor street frontage is filled with more profitable commercial spaces, while the residents live above, completely separated from the rest of the community. In the sustainable development designed in the studio, this social asspect of  street life is instead emphasised and celebrated – honouring the generations’ old traditions that exist in the African American community. In the design shown below, the affordable housing units are at the first fioor, each  with a front stoop. The market-rate units are  above.

Typical street level development showing stoops

Corner groceries

The suburban mall has largely displaced the corner grocery store throughout America. This has led to a loss of local retailing and the loss of in-community capital flows. Profits go elsewhere and reinvestment in the urban core declines. Whilen conscious of the need to re-enliven the street with residential development, we were also conscious of the need to support the local economy. Small scale commercial space has therefore been re-included in proposals, but has generally been restricted to corner locations. 

New Ownership Models

In the current economic  climate, home ownership is well beyondthe reach of individual families in Over-the-Rhine. Yet ownership remains a  key to   social and cultural identity, Families that own their homes have a stake in  the community. We therefore  attempted to  develop new and innovative forms of ownership: 

Shared Equity 
In which a proportion of the profits gained from City-promoted speculative private development are ploughed back into providing affordable, subsidised housing for existing residents. 

 

Housing Associations 

Many of the residents are Welfare recipients or beneficiaries. Although their weekly entitlements are not enough to allow for savings or for house ownership deposits they do represent a kind of guaranteed inclome. Taken collectively, this guaranjteed income amounts to a sizeable potential investment. Banked collectively, it would generate significant interest that could be used to subsidise individual family home deposits and to assist individual families into the housing market. 

 

Rental Accommodation

To facilitate home ownership for low income families designs often included an extra bedroom – available for the use of lodgers to supplement the family income.

Working with support from not-for-profit agencies like the Over-the-Rhine Community Housing Cooperative students completed plans for block-by-block development proposals that included these and other innovative models of urban development that both highlighted the social, environmental and economic deficiencies of current development models, and demonstrated in their place the possibility for an entirely new and socially equitable alternative urban development. Final presentation to the Cincinnati community included representatives from urban development and policy stakeholders as well as design professionals. A broader description of the studio’s work on Over the Rhine can be downloaded here.

Despite all of this good work, it seemed to me that the City-inspired program of gentrification, carried out by the Cincinnati Center City Development Corporation (3CDC) – the tail that wags the City dog – would press relentlessly on, ignoring local resistance and alternative proposals in its unremitting quest for developer profit. The problem, as I saw it, was that the resistance was being made by well-meaning non-profit and social agencies such as OtRCH, the Drop Inn Center and the CCEOtR on behalf of the actual victims – the remnant 6000 African American residents of Over-the-Rhine, Without substantial community organisation and the mobilisation on a broad front by the OtR resident community I believe the chances of influencing development policies are remote.

And for those of you that still think climate change is not an issue that needs to be addressed, read this.