In the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School Massacre, Newtown, Connecticut, a town of 27,000, was suddenly impacted by an inconceivable tragedy. While the immediate impacts of the event were unimaginably difficult, public health officials immediately began with the community to prepare for long-term mental health and wellness care. 

What kind of civic spaces, restorative environments and community landscapes foster recovery? How does the design of a Memorial contribute to the restoration and healing of the community? How does the Memorial recognize the event without reframing the trauma? 

Networking Civic Spaces: The environment where one builds resilience is as significant as the memorial that commemorates the event. The memorial n aligns Newtown’s proposed Sandy Hook Elementary Memorial with the broader community health goals of wellness, mental health and compassion. It links together underused civic spaces by providing a landscape network between public parks, the Pootatuck River, Sandy Hook town center and the state forest preserve. By connecting the memorial to other recreational spaces, the memorial fosters exploration, health and community interaction....Continue Reading

The legislation that empowers Rio Grande river as the rhetoric and infrastructure of the U.S. / Mexico border can be exploited. / Mexico border.

BORDERLANDS: An Exploitation of the U.S. / Mexico Political Geography

By Cesar Lopez

ESTRANGED

The border cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez lie next to one another estranged. Once a single thriving community now severed by the U.S./Mexico political geography. The boundary between the two cities is not an abstract line on some map but rather the Rio Grande river. A powerful river that now flows through concrete channels built to put an end to the rivers natural habit of shifting course and blurring the boundary.

Since the outbreak of the Mexican Cartel war the border/river has been sealed - severing what used to be a strong and vibrant bi-national community. The violence has strangling an economy largely dependent on transborder foot traffic. The abandoned homes left behind by citizens fleeing to safety has become the breeding ground for the cartel’s colonization of the U.S. / Mexican borderland. As a result, the Rio Grande runs dry due to a system of upstream levees holding line between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez....Continue Reading

Figure 1_Human infrastructure transforms the city

Mobile Loitering: public infrastructure for a highly gendered urban context

By Mariam Kamara and Elizabeth Golden

Niger’s capital Niamey, like other cities in sub-Saharan Africa, is growing rapidly, and the implementation of the government’s current vision for the city–Niamey Nyala, or the ‘Niamey Beautiful’ plan–provides the impetus for this project. By navigating the line between formal and informal, permanent and fixed, the city is calibrated to increase the participation of women and girls in urban public life.

City Streets in Africa

Currently, unprecedented growth is transforming many urban areas in Africa. Strict colonial planning has given way to a more complex network of human infrastructure that has reshaped city streets to meet economic needs and satisfy social desires.1 Streets have become a mega-public space, and a source of infinite loopholes, to be exploited by a city’s inhabitants in imaginative ways. (Fig. 1)

But streets in many African cities cannot always be defined as ‘public’ in the traditional Western sense, as their occupation is often segregated along class, gender, or age lines. In the context of a Muslim city, situated in a predominantly Muslim (albeit secular) country, a woman’s presence outside of the home–for purposes other than running errands, conducting business, or going to school–is easily questioned by society. 'Mobile loitering', is one tactic developed by women and girls in Niamey to circumvent this type of public scrutiny. Women are able to inhabit the street by using their journey to and from social calls as a pretext, while enjoying relative privacy by simply remaining on the move. These flâneries féminines are a valued source of entertainment and knowledge in a city where little space is allocated to leisure or educational activities. (Fig. 2)...Continue Reading

Keystone Pumping Station | Steele City, Nebraska

Contested Energies

By Stephen Mueller and Ersela Kripa

This article seeks to extract the logics of action in newly contested territories, given recent transformations in US energy exploration and distribution, to uncover and affect how they will shape the city to come.

The proposed Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline has constructed a multivalent, contested territory - a potential stronghold in a new energy economy and a site of existential risk . KXL’s detractors have capitalized on the unique spatial qualities and protocols of the increasingly globalized energy landscape, in order to transform public opinion to their advantage. Bill McKibben, a staunch opponent of KXL, speaks readily about the pipeline’s ability to galvanize action from a diffuse and heterogeneous set of environmental, economic, and political actors.  Not only has he spearheaded the conception of KXL as a detrimental ‘act’ against the environment, but he also understands, as Arendt suggests, the ability of such an identifiable territory to provide a context and a site for ‘action’.

The article will demonstrate the unique spatial protocols which promote a productive disequilibrium in this contested territory, among them the conception of the pipeline as a ‘transnational transect', an ‘expanded datum’, a ‘singularity’, and a ‘bypassing vector’.  

We argue that the territory is a victim of ‘conflict by neglect’ of its organization, ‘top-down’ mechanisms which blindly perpetuate and accelerate inherent conflicts of the current energy economy, while doing nothing to shape the resulting transformations - ignoring Arendt’s mandate....Continue Reading

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