Advanced Option Studio: Repair in Toxic Systems — Urban Design Studio II
Working closely with local residents and grassroots activists in the town of North Braddock, Pa., this studio develops proposals for multiscalar repair that think with and build on the community's practices, expertise, and desires for place-making.
Community meeting at North Braddock Borough building with model of Edgar Thomson Steel Works site. Photo by Seyoung Choo, spring 2023.
Working closely with local residents and grassroots activists in the town of North Braddock, Pa., this studio develops proposals for multiscalar repair that think with and build on the community's practices, expertise, and desires for place-making.
In recent years, frameworks of repair have gained important traction across fields of research. Drawing from scholarship in Black geographies and environmental (in)justice, we attend to local histories, embodied knowledges, and political ecologies. The studio engages architectural and urban design methods to support the important work of spatializing desires, relational repair, and future-making that frontline residents have long done and continue to do in the face of toxic harms and structural abandonment.
We situate a design methodology for repair grounded in careful learning and observation: of sidewalks, zoning laws, vacant lots, ruderal ecologies, civic spaces, corner shops, building materials, porch furniture, and, importantly, local practices. Crucially, we leverage architectural methods to not only learn about places (i.e. contextual analysis), but from place — what Leanne Simpson (2014) calls "land as pedagogy."