chimera urbanism
conceptual project by Sami prouty & amelia jarvinen
university of washington | winter 2018
Urban ecology is complicated. As designers, our instinct is to simplify, abstract, step out. We begin the decision making process from an imagined pattern, often disregarding the rich texture of life reflected in a space. Designers see urbanism as a problem to be “solved”. The condition on Seattle’s Jackson st. transect is an excellent example of how this complex collection of lives, when organized into a simplified, top-down order, creates an urban environment that fails in reflecting the voices of those who live inside. We measured the differences in neighborhood representation along the transect, using Instagram data from both hashtags and location. The differences in representation were dramatic, reflecting the discrepancy between those posting in the neighborhood, and those posting about the neighborhood. We traced a history of fragmentation in the area, finding that this corridor has always been a place of marginalization, constantly manipulated spatially for the benefit of downtown, or the region, or developers, but never for the benefit of those historically occupying the transect. We mapped the visual character of the neighborhoods along the transect and found an ever homogenizing pattern emerging where a rich tapestry had once been.
Course Faculty: Matthew Bissen, Gundula Proksch, Jeff Hou
Interdisciplinary Studio
**This work also served as part of a thesis prep independent studio with Nicole Huber
This discrepancy in agency is the subject of Lefebvre’s Right to the City, and the subject of our project, Chimera Urbanism. This project aims to imagine a future in which the urban condition of a space is in direct dialogue with the lives that inhabit it; that the urban condition can be a space of infinite possibilities rather than clear routes and throughways. We hope to achieve this by imagining a new urban-ecology based in a relationship of empathy between space and space maker, rather than reflective re-production. We believe that the power to change urban space lies in the ability to imagine how that urban space could be different. Our hope is that if a person living on the transect now were to see this work, that they could also imagine a future of infinite possibilities and infinite ways of living in their neighborhood.
Sited on the transect, we imagined a new ecology, the Chimera Plant, growing in the rich range of produce waste in the dumpster of Hau Hau market in Little Saigon. This plant was found to grow in ring formations, whatever social actions and emotions occur inside the ring, are reflected in the growth of the plant. The plant cannot be destroyed, when cut down it grows back with twice the strength.
The discovery of this new ecology feeds a revolutionary group, hoping to fight off development of the transept that will displace, once again, the communities in the area. The rebels distribute seed bombs carrying the Chimera plant and distribute them amongst their members. A giant ring of the Chimera plant is planted around the transect. To activate the plant’s first major growth they host a carnival, erupting the plant into a new environment, filling the spaces between businesses with otherworldly spaces and textures. The transect could never be developed again. The vacant space stripped of its monetary value.
“...the ‘spatial confusion’ of the modern city as a symptomatic of the violence inherent in capitalism is a configuration of the space of the production and reproduction of its social relations”
- Thomas McDonough
The Situationist Space
“The cognitive map’s normative function relies on the production of a spatial imagability that desires to assume what Rosalyn Deutsche has called, ‘a commanding position on the battleground of representation”
“...directly lived space (representational space) had moved away into the space of the conceived and the perceived (representations of space)”
-Thomas McDonough,
The Situationist Space