COMMON GROUND: Re-Making the Ground Floor

Class: Advanced Urban Studio, California College of the Arts, Architecture Division
Date: Spring 2021
Instructors: Julia Grinkrug and Christopher Roach

This advanced urban studio re-envisioned the figure-ground relationships of the “Post-2020 City” by exploring strategies for reclaiming the urban commons from within the crisis of the neoliberal metropolis. The studio centered on the role of social infrastructure in building a more just, inclusive, and thriving city. It followed the premise that social infrastructure, produced on the city’s ground floor, is a common good that should not rely solely on the market forces in the provision of its physical, financial, and organizational frameworks. This approach compelled us to rethink the fundamental notions of property and ownership, forms of governance and their spatial boundaries, as well as the physical configurations of the ground floor itself. Beyond the dialectics of private and public, this studio centered on the importance of civic agency as the generative power for structural change in the re-awakening society. 

Commons and Commoning: This studio continued a series of explorations on the agency of the commons in reclaiming the right to the city by the local communities. Our studio research aimed to tackle the intricacies of property and commons, seeing them as the cornerstones of contemporary urban politics. In this way, commoning can be seen as an agonistic practice whereby the community organization of land asserts an alternative to the organization of land by capital or the state.  While the theory of the commons is still emergent, communities and collectives around the world are already enacting them defining unique forms of co-ownership and co-governance. Prof. Sheila Forster describes these experiments as Co-Cities joining other contemporary scholars of the commons such as Stavros Stavrides, Stephan Gruber, and others.

Responding to this previous research, this studio interrogated the possibility of redefining and reclaiming the commons, disrupting and reimagining the current status quo. How can our cities look beyond the market and the state, allowing open access to common resources, shared among all citizens? How can all citizens be equally involved in governing and distributing the urban commons invoking their civic agency and the “right to the city”? 

Ground and Grounding: The focus on the ground floor was driven by an interest in seeing urbanism not merely as a collection of buildings, but as a field of relationships among systems, spatial conditions, programs, and inhabitants. This approach allowed us to envision the city as a more holistic and collective design project. The previous iteration of the studio (Spring 2020), titled “Apocalypse Now! – Project for the Post-Retail City”, examined the Retail Apocalypse as an alibi for re-thinking the ground floor of the city. In the current political context, the studio shifted to re-examine the ground floor and its relationship to social infrastructure through an equity and justice framework, and thus to explore ways of grounding the urban design discourse within the real-world situations, joining the forces on the ground and grassroots initiatives, who lead social struggles asserting communities’ right to the city through their lived experience. 

Spatial Contract: Echoing Hashim Sarkis’s articulation of the spatial contract, this studio was focused on exploring the professional efficacy of architecture not only in space making but also in forming relationships. To achieve that, the studio formed partnerships with three community-based organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area addressing them as institutional equal and evolved as in a fully community-led and community-centered process, in which student projects were identified and formalized in close collaboration with these community partners, co-creating the common ground for an inclusive city.