Conflating Conflict: Stimulating the Social in Peter-McGill
This project conceptualizes social housing in the vaguest sense of the term. In his book The Capsular Civilization: On the City in the Age of Fear Lieven De Cauter speaks of contemporary society's continual push for capsularisation amid media propagated fear, state of exception logics and hyper-capitalist conditions. Interestingly, when the notion of capsularisation is projected onto debates of urban gentrification one finds it pertinent to both populated polarities typically at the heart of the discussion, albeit under different circumstances but nonetheless resulting in the same problem.
The Assisted vs. The Affluent, or Social Housing vs. Condos, or David vs. Goliath
The housing project and high-rise condo are made analogous when considered under the light of De Cauter's concept. Typically the inhabitants of both social housing and luxury condos are excluded by geography, economics, architecture and demographics among other factors. This fact is affected by one major difference: degrees of choice. While the upwardly mobile individual chooses to define and exclude themselves through their possessions – the newest car, designer condo, clothing – the socially housed citizen cannot enjoy such freedom and must, to a certain extent, take what is afforded to them. The problem both conditions share is a loss of social collectivity and diversity. While one battles the stigmatization of their excluded status, the other battles to exclude themselves to a further degree. We must move away from the objectification of our surroundings. The city is not an object but an objective. An innovative strategy must rely on the formative not on form.
I'll Have the Gentrification Please, with a Side of Intelligent Policy
To deny development is to deny the evolution of the city. Money talks. Condos will be built. We can argue against bureaucracy, ill-conceived civic policy, and ignorance or we can buy a Grande Americano at the newly opened Starbucks and begin developing social housing typologies that adapt to the impending reality, informing future policies and creating possibly new urban typologies, topologies and morphologies. This proactive approach views gentrification not as a good or bad process but as an opportunity to examine the idiosyncrasies inherent in urban collective living and possibly promote new ones.
Territorial Tactics in Montreal Mathematics
Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it and make it function in polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities.
–Michel De Certeau
This project reads the given site as a field condition that lends itself to specific, tactical operations which can begin to stimulate or repress existing conditions. A new network of relational typologies begins to emerge that operate at various architectural, material, scalar, social, individual and territorial levels. This typological model is not based on literal readings of site specificity but rather analyses how existing conditions help form specific social situations in aim of developing a specificity of potentials. Such a methodology encompasses top-down, bottom-up and lateral relationships that work horizontally and vertically between seemingly disparate individuals, groups, businesses, institutions and localities creating provocative and unforeseen possibilities. Within this framework of the possible, the various architectural interventions remain discrete to the system, maintaining a supporting role that ensures that individuation is maximized within the newly established social network.
Critically extending the typological lineage of Rossi, Ungers and Aureli this approach is utilized for its ability to adapt to given situations, and be translated across various scales. To this end, it is intended that while the proposal is specific to the given seven blocks of the Peter-McGill neighbourhood it displays an inherently prototypical aspect that lends itself to deployment in similar conditions in other Canadian downtown cores.
(Competitor's text)
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