[INTERIOR] + [URBANISM]

Interiors as ‘common’ SPaces’ - design thinking across scale

This section is open-resource and reading supplement for BID students enrolled in DIDS 420: Studio Thesis II (Concept and Design Development) for activating/deepening socially-responsive design thinking. It is also for an audience that is genuinely interested in housing affordability and design for an impact.

Interiors and Urbanism are frequently seen as polar ends on the built-environment spectrum in spatial practice, with architecture serving as the intermediary between the two. Yet, there is a growing trend towards the merging and overlapping of the interior and urban realms, which functions as a strategy to counterbalance top-down planning with bottom-up power dynamics. This shift in scale is most evident in the often-discussed SSMUH (small-scale, multi-unit housing), but is also highly relevant in adaptive reuse of existing large infrastructures such as shopping malls or industrial buildings. The interiority of spaces as important interstitial gradients between the public and the private, threads through an urban fabric, playing a pivotal role in shaping the collective experience. Incremental changes to the interior of the urban fabric can collectively reshape the broader urban environment. By exploring the intersection of the interior and urbanism, our inquisition begins with:

How can we rethink and reinvent the city from the inside out?

RE\WRITE THE PRO FORMA: juggling Feasibility and AFFORDABILITY

Between historical redlining and today’s structural inequality, past racial exclusion mirrors increasing present-day equity exclusion for the middle-income sector of urban geographies. Growing polarization in urbanization due to a systemized, uneven distribution of wealth (and the ability/possibility to accumulate wealth) continues to erode the common good, unravelling the moral lining that underlies the urban fabric. What fuels structural inequality?…which inevitably results from market-driven asset urbanism in densifying urban geographies? The developer has a much broader roles to play in empowering urban affordability through a market approach (for-profit, self-reliant model) than ever. Rewriting the real estate development pro forma is an invitation for rethinking socially-responsive development practices. System-thinking leading to systems-changes, putting society’s long-term wellbeing at its forefront is fundamental.

The moral underpinning here is a recall of civic virtue by which recognizing the dignity of work must be met by ensuring accessibility to housing (and its equity-growth capacity) in desirable urban geographies: for those who may not always be the ‘highest bidders’, but who are highly essential to the operation of the city and its economic growth, are equally significant as measured capital dynamics in manifestations of society’s aggregate socio-economic wellbeing.

How do we strike balance within a market framework?