[UN]COMMON GROUND: PROJECT FOR THE POST-2020 CITY: ReVEALING the Ground Floor

Class: Advanced Urban Studio, California College of the Arts, Architecture Division  
Date: Spring 2022
Instructors: Uzoma Idah, Julia Grinkrug and Christopher Roach
Studio Partner: West Oakland Cultural Action Network
Related Programming: [Un]Commoning Architectural Language, Watch recording Here

This advanced urban studio explores the figure-ground relationships of the “Post-2020 City” in the quest to reveal urban commons from within the tensions of the neoliberal city. The studio centers on the role of the commons and their supportive social infrastructure as indispensable components in fostering a more just, inclusive, and co-authored city. It follows the premise that social infrastructure, produced on the city’s ground floor, is an [un]common good driven by a divergent yet collective civic agency. This approach compels us to rethink the fundamental notions of motive, property and method, in understanding the physical configurations of the city’s ground floor.

The studio views the city as a process rather than a product. It interrogates the relationship between the commons and the market as well as the tensions intrinsic to commoning. We will question the singularity of top-down systems, such as the market or the state, in the production and functioning of “social infrastructure” by revealing bottom-up networks and catalysts that contribute to its physical, financial, and organizational frameworks. Focusing on the “who” in the urban drama, the studio explores the internal dynamics and relative efficacies of various stakeholders in relation to systemic conditions of the physical, environmental and socio-political components of the city. How can we unearth alternative scenarios that re-evaluate current hierarchies and suggest new sets of relationships, decentering the authorship over the urban condition and considering a coexistence of divergent perspectives and “ideo-logics”? 

Through a series of immersive, investigative and creative explorations, the studio develops tools for reciprocal dialogue between architectural discourse and other spheres of cultural debate. Bringing questions of class, race, privilege and identity to the foreground of architectural inquiry, the studio is aiming to identify the glitches/breaches/hacks/surreal experiences of the citizens that the market neglects, to reveal the [un]common realities of the post-2020 city. The goal of the studio is to demystify the design process, opening up to a possibility of an inclusive city-making that seeks common ground in restoring the broken social contract between the city and its residents.

Sandbox Feel Around Game

As part of the studio, students created a community engagement tool that was rolled out at a community event celebrating Black History Month at Hoover Elementary School in West Oakland, on March 3, 2022. SANDBOX maps lived experience by bridging emotional + spatial accounts. The game is for residents and people who are intimate with the neighborhood. Piloted with leaders and youth in West Oakland, SANDBOX brings the emotional body into neighborhood planning and place-making. See game activation here.

Student Project Booklets:

AlarSpaceAlterSpace, by Shreya Shankar, Vishakh Surti and Manpreet Malhi

Bridging Blocks, by Suvin Choi and Alden Gendreau,

Multipli[City], by Chak Ying and Yue Liu,

Sensorial [Re]vest, by Adam Bissell and Iván Domínguez-Murillo