The Design Studio for Social Intervention

Cross-posted from John Emerson’s Social Design Notes.

At the intersection of urbanism, DIY, food justice and sustainable agriculture, a crop of artists are making open source gardens and sharing instructions on the web and beyond.

Britta Riley and Rebecca Bray build hydroponic Window Farms from recycled materials. The farms are specifically designed with New York City apartments in mind, and the website invites window gardeners to share photos, plans, designs and information.

Edible Estates is a project to convert the classic American front lawn into a productive vegetable garden. Initiated by architect and artist Fritz Haeg on Independence Day, 2005, several prototype gardens were created in different cities across the United States, with instructions and documentation of the prototype gardens posted to the site. 2009 sites have not been announced, but the group is ideally looking for “A monotonous housing development of identical homes… where the interruption of the endless lawn would be dramatic and controversial.”

The Future Farmers’ Victory Gardens project is fought on two fronts: to deliver urban garden kits to urban farmers across San Francisco, and to ultimately develop and maintain a portion of the original Victory Garden space in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

The Garden is a feature-length documentary film about a 14-acre community garden in South Central Los Angeles that emerged in the wake of the 1992 LA riots. The film chronicles the origins of the plot and the South Central Farmers struggle to prevent it from being demolished.

On the more underground tip, Guerilla Gardening is illicit, nocturnal gardening in a space not your own. guerrillagardening.org lists projects, mostly in London, each with a description, location, photos, and budget. The site includes tips for making your own.

Seed bombing is packing seeds in compressed soil and throwing it into inhospitable or hard to reach places. Artist Liz Christy was the first to use the term in 1973 when she fought urban decay by tossing seed grenades full of sunflower seeds into abandoned New York City lots. Here’s a scan of her original instruction sheet. Christy also co-founded the first community garden in New York City.

Moss graffiti is also good for damp, urban corners. Anna Garforth has done some beautiful work here. Here’s how to make your own.

And onto Gardening 2.0: Landshare is a UK website matching people who want to grown their own food with homeowners with underused space. The site also hosts an active forum for sharing tips and answering questions.

And with your veggies in hand, VeggieTrader is a website for trade, buy or sell homegrown produce.

I’m sure there are many more sites and projects, too. Between the recession and growing concern about industrial food systems, there seems to be something of a renaissance going on here.

I was just looking in my copy of Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde. It’s one of the Studio’s favorite books! Here’s a little quote from it.

“Beware the social system that cannot laugh at itself, that responds to those who do not know their place by building a string of prisons.”

Bite Size Life

With the foreclosure crisis now in full swing, there are almost as many opinions about placing blame as there are folks losing homes. While the folks getting the biggest heaps of blame (and losing their homes) are poor and working class, both the right and the left are also figuring out the multiple ways that shady loans and sketchy banking practices deserve blame as well. We agree wholeheartedly, but we also know that as long as The American Dream is to own your own house, folks will struggle and strive (and get taken advantage of) to do just that. We say, let’s get more imaginative with the dream!

If a big part of the American Dream is owning a house, let’s rethink ownership and let’s reimagine the house. What if what you owned was a super-fly bedroom+ unit, one that could be yours for more like the entry cost of renting an apartment? What if what you shared were spacious kitchens and well-cleaned bathrooms? What if instead of owning that big screen TV—or even the room you watched it in—you checked out your favorite show at the nearby multiplex, for free? If the American Dream includes health and happiness (as well as home ownership) what if the local healer got to live in his room for free?

Or if we wanted to shake up the Dream even more, what if the Dream was to live in as many different homes as possible? Renting would clearly be the move. Or if it was to live as close as possible to the ones we love, sharing parts of our living spaces might be seen as living richly. We think testing some uncoupling of the bed + bath + kitchen = home could be as useful as the uncoupling of ownership + home = dream. And we’re ready to get our there and do some uncoupling…before home + dream = nightmare!

Our first Idea of the Week post is in Youth Urbanism. To get a sense of how we think about urbanism please read this story about Orange New Jersey featuring our favorites! The Fullilove’s and the urbanist Michel Cantal Dupart.

Youth Urbanism

We came up with this term as we thought about the question: How do we—as folk who care about civil society and young people—think about the ways in which cities impact youth? And how do we think about how young people impact cities? It came from a long-term conversation we’ve been having with our colleagues about how we work on population-wide concerns, particularly for youth. Cities tend to be constructed from the perspective of adults, and youth tend to get a bad rap in and from cities. Young people function ideologically as “matter out of place” in many cities, to quote Mary Douglas. Their presence is often reduced to nuisance, and their activities and habits of congregations in cities are suspect to adults. We think that the ways in which youth then become situated and create places for themselves in cities, places from the margins, leads to population-wide problems for youth.

If what we just said in any way rings true to you, and your work in any way intersects with youth and/or cities, we ask you this question: How are youth affected by places that see them as a detriment, a detractor to that place’s imagined set of user experiences? We all know when we aren’t wanted; what happens when this attitude is carried out structurally in real space and time?

Now turn that on its head! If cities were imagined to help youth have a generally good experience of being young and for youth to contribute to everyone’s experience of the city, how would cities look, feel and function? What would need to be different for design to include youth from the get-go? What would be the end result? We think it would be cities that were more interesting for all of us!