Thesis

The Doubly Peripheral

A Thesis

Presented in partial fulfi llment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Landscape Architecture in the Department of Landscape Architecture of the

Rhode Island School of Design

By

Andrew Liang

Rhode Island School of Design2013

Masters’ Examination CommitteeApproved by:

Scheri Fultineer, Department Head, Department of Landscape Architecture, Primary Advisor

Katharine Martin, Professor, Department of Landscape Architecture, Secondary Advisor

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THE DOUBLY PERIPHERAL

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THE PROBE

THE EXISTING BODY OF RESEARCH

THE PREMISE

THE TESTING GROUND

THE RESPONSE

THE CONCLUSION

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THE PROBE

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to be able to stake claim to more than one community, yet unable to fully integrate into either.

DOUBLY PERIPHERAL

This thesis investigates doubly peripheral populations and the fringe spaces they inhabit. Often they are old urban infrastructures such as piers, bridges, and overpasses. The thesis uses one particular population and one particular site to test how these spaces can become crystallized. No longer are they self-segregating islands, but places where doubly peripheral populations can access their specifi c needs and gain the opportunity to participate in the larger urban context.

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The constant evolution of urban form is the direct result of the human will to establish self-referential space. Cultures seek to defi ne themselves through their intentional mark on the landscape, creating an urban pattern loaded with the registrations of contested space. This catalogue manifests in every scale – from a hole cut into a bathroom stall divider, to a visual experience of street awnings, and upward to a regional planometric of the city. Cultures build, transform, and subvert spaces according to their needs, always with formal and fi gural proof.

In this contestation of space, peripheral groups seek footholds in the urban fabric. There is power in the perception of permanence. However, for those who fi nd themselves peripheral to the periphery, traditional modes of establishment are inaccessible. They are orphans in the patchwork of communities. Spaces in which these populations often fi nd themselves are fringe, informal, and transient.

This thesis uses the built environment of existing infrastructure as the mediator between this marginal spatial condition and its larger urban context. It explores the physical manifestation of a periphery to a periphery, and proposes how it can not only exist in, but also mark the urban form.

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THE EXISTING BODY OF RESEARCH

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PARASITE TRANSIENT SHELTERMICHAEL RAKOWITZ

Homelessness often manifests as a symptom of the doubly peripheral as they are unable to fi nd an established community. Rakowitz proposes here a nomadic home that one carries in lieu of a more permanent option. The shelter functions parasitically, borrowing heat and security from existing structures - embodying the opportunistic and unstable living strategies on which these populations must rely.

/Individual Scale

Source: Michael Rakowitz

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HUDSON RIVER PIERS

The notion of doubly peripheral space is an extension of queer space. Queer theorist Aaron Betsky equates gendered space, particularly the masculine variety, with the demonstration of power by hetero-normal society. Hence the domestically-rooted term “in the closet” that developed during the rise of dandyism during the Victorian era. The phenomena of gay gentrifi cation is the act of queer populations creating community in pockets of city forgone by this established hiearchy of power. Or, they subvert the hyper-masculine space with queer codes of conduct, turning mens rooms, locker rooms, and truck stops, into areas of gathering or sex.The Hudson River Piers are an example of subversion by the doubly peripheral population of LGBT teens of color. Unwelcome at gay loci embedded within the urban fabric, they are forced onto a derelict infrastructure that is fi guratively and literally fringe.

/Grassroots Community

Source: Creative commons

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RAINBOW APARTMENTMichael Malzan

For particular doubly peripheral populations, especially for those whose condition is not borne by their identity, the goal of creating space may be to reintegrate. Ex-inmates become doubly peripheral after they have exited the penal system. They bear a new mark that renders them unable to partake as citizens in their original communities. Malzan designs a halfway house that welcomes in the surrounding neighborhood with an urban agriculture program. Through interaction with those living within, reintegration becomes possible.

/Architectural Response

Source: Maltzan Architecture

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THE FORTUNE SOCIETYDavid Rothenberg

Rather than creating a spatial condition that invites reintegration, Rothenberg creates a non-profi t network of services otherwise inaccessible by ex-inmates and other doubly peripheral groups. This amorphous strategy relies on an intangible system of reference and support that is tailored to recreate a functioning member of society.

/Social Support System

Source: The Fortune Society

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THE MILLION DOLLAR BLOCK PROJECT

Columbia GSAPP

The Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation produced a block-by-block mapping study of prison expenditure costs in New York City. The cost to house one inmate is rougly $30,000 per year, effectively making a distant prison away the most expensive piece of infrastructure in certain communities. An ensuing workshop reimagines this current penal system and focuses on how a city can more effectively house its incarcerated without bestowing upon them the double peripheral condition that perpetuates the cycle of reincarceration and social poverty. Along a matrix of closed to open community, and central to localized governance, new prison architectures and social systems were constructed.

/Research and Theory

Source: Columbia GSAPP

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PAVEMENT TO PLAZAS

New York City Department of Transportation

This city-wide program utilizes inexpensive and often temporary materials to transform underutilized or neutral spaces into vibrant public places. Times Square Plaza and Putnam Triangle for example have been turned into pedestrian-friendly zones for lounging with just paint, chairs, and umbrellas. Public places can appear overnight with this inexpensive event-based strategy. It offers opportunities for staking claim through limited resources by doubly peripheral populations.

/Tactical Urbanism

Source: NYC DOT

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Annotated Bibliography

Shepard, Benjamin Heim. The Beach Beneath the Streets: Contesting New York City’s Public Spaces. N.Y. : Excelsior Editions/State University of New York Press, 2011.

This book examines the activist struggles of communities in New York City— queer youth of color, gardeners, cyclists, and anti-gentrifi cation activists— as they transform streets, piers, and vacant lots into everyday sites for autonomy, imagination, identity formation, creativity, problem solving, and even democratic renewal. Through etHnographic accounts of contests over New York City’s public spaces that highlight the tension between resistance and repression, Benjamin Shepard and Gregory Smithsimon identify how changes in the control of public spaces—parks, street corners, and plazas— have reliably foreshadowed elites’ shifting designs on the city at large. With an innovative taxonomy of public space, the authors frame the ways spaces as diverse as gated enclaves, luxury shopping malls, collapsing piers, and street protests can be understood in relation to one another.

Architecture and Justice. New York: Spatial Information Design Lab, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, 2006.

This is the starting point for my research into prisons and the incarcerated population. Using rarely accessible data from the criminal justice system, the Spatial Information Design Lab and the Justice Mapping Center have created maps of these “million dollar blocks” and of the city prison city prison migration fl ow for fi ve of the nation’s cities. The maps suggest that the criminal justice system has become the predominant government institution in these communities and that public investment in this system has resulted in signifi cant costs to other elements of our civic infrastructure — education, housing, health, and family. Prisons and jails form the distant exostructure of many American cities today.

Sennett, Richard. The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities. New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 1990.

Sennett seeks to relate architecture, urban planning, and sculpture to the cultural life of cities. The central thesis is that modern humans suffer because of the dichotomy between their subjective private experience and their outside public life. He writes in-depth on the meaning of refuge in an urban environment and or neutral spaces.

Mellow, Jeff, et al. Mapping the Innovation in Correctional Health Care Service Delivery in New York City. New York: John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 2008.

John Jay College of Criminal Justice performed a comprehensive

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mapping of all available health resource facilities for formerly incarcerate individuals. Using GIS data provided by the City of New York, they found each point and categorized the type of health care each offered, how each would be made known to the user group, and to which organization each one belonged.

La Vigne, Nancy, et al. Release Planning for Successful Reentry. Washington DC: Urban Institute Justice Policy Center, 2008.

This report is designed to help the corrections community, service providers and community groups prepare prisoners for the moment of release from prison and the time immediately following release. It describes the eight most basic and immediate needs returning prisoners have when they exit prison, recommends minimum policies practitioners can institute to meet these needs, and highlights the opportunities and challenges practitioners face when trying to improve their release planning policies. The report also uses the results of a UI survey of 43 departments of corrections to illustrate what release planning procedures are currently being implemented across the country.

Nelson, Marta, et al. The First Month Out: Post-Incarceration Experiences in New York City. New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 1999.

In 1999, researchers at the Vera Institute followed a group of 49 people who had just left a New York State prison or New York City jail to discover exactly what happens to them in the fi rst month after release. Their stories reveal patterns of success and failure in the effort to fi nd a place to live and land a job, to comply and feel satisfi ed with parole supervision, to reunite with family, to stay away from alcohol and other drugs, and to avoid a return to crime. This study reveals why and how the initial reentry period is so diffi cult. At the same time, it provides evidence of the strong desire among most recently released individuals to turn their lives around. The report offers concrete suggestions for how to prepare inmates for the predictable challenges they will encounter the moment they return home.

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THE PREMISE

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Prisoner migration patternsSource: Columbia GSAPP

Currently 27,000 inmates re-enter New York City communities annually. Arrest rates for this population are roughly 65% within 3 years, and over half are re-incarcerated within the same time period.

Studies by the Vera Justice Institute show that if a released inmate has a family to which he can return, recidivism rates drop 7-fold.

The power of human contact and structure is evident.

The same Vera Justice Institute follows a typical daily inmate release cycle for Rikers Island, the largest jail facility in New York City. 75% of inmates re-entered the general population alone, and only 15% were met by a family member.

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Source: Vera Justice Institute

Source: Vera Justice Institute

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BEDFORD-STUYVESANT

EAST NEW YORK

ROCKAWAY

HARLEM

SOUTH BRONX

CONEY ISLAND

BEDFORD-STUYVESANT

EAST NEW YORK

ROCKAWAY

HARLEM

SOUTH BRONX

CONEY ISLAND

Source: John Jay College of Criminal Justice

Source: John Jay College of Criminal Justice

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30-50% of all returning inmates are released into homelessness. They become stranded in a system of transient shelters, inadequate care, and eventual re-incarceration.

Those lucky enough to return home, return to the high million dollar block density pockets of New York City - The South Bronx, Harlem and East Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, East New York, Rockaway, and Coney Island.

There they may access health services, psychiatric care, employment, and housing, either within the community itself or by public transit. Regular participation in these post-release resources, along with a stable family condition, is the engine behind the recidivism drop if one not released alone. They have the potential to reintegrate.

Upon release, inmates face a plethora of problems: they rarely have legal identifi cation, have become dependant on medication administered during their stay, are unable to qualify for Section 8 housing, have a diffi cult time fi nding legal employment, require heavy family and crisis counseling, etc.

These factors prevent them from reintegrating into their original communities. The jail or prison becomes their proxy home. Between these two unviable poles, the ex-inmate has been rendered a doubly peripheral individual.

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Rikers Island is the most prominent correctional facility within the 5 boroughs of New York. It is sited on an island between Queens and The Bronx, is operated by the New York City Department of Corrections, and houses 14,000 inmates. It holds a budget of $860 million per annum and employs 9,000 offi cers. THe vast majority of inmates stay for under 3 years, as they carry out these short sentences, or are held until their trial date.

The island is 413 acres and is connected only by bridge on its southern edge. It is accessible by car and by a single bus line, the Q101.

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The current release strategy for Rikers Island inmates is as follows:

Around midnight, in-house release processing begins. Depending on how many are being released, between 10-30 men, they leave the island within 1-2 hours. The bus then makes the half hour trip to Queensborough Plaza, a major transportation node, and drops off the men in a parking lot. Drop off time is between 2-6 am. They are given a single-ride metrocard.

The strategy is thoughtless. Loved ones are unable to reach their released men during early morning hours when public transportation is scarce. Common questions asked in online prison community forums:

“Is the drop off time really 4am?”

“How can I get money to my guy beforehand so he can take a car service home?”

“How can I get a jacket to him?”

“What is open at the drop off point at that hour?”

Anecdotal evidence suggests that this hard landing sets up these men for failure the instant they re-enter the city. Many “go hang out” until the resource networks open during regular business hours and lapse into habits that lead to recidivism.

This thesis is a rethinking of this landing condition.

It proposes a soft landing response ingrained in the neutral spaces of unused urban infrastructure. This typology of space has historically been occupied by those on the double periphery. What can these neutral spaces achieve?

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THE TESTING GROUND

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Source: nycsubway.org

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Queensborough Plaza is currrently serviced by two separate tracks, one elevated and one below grade. The 7, N, and Q lines run on the elevated track to stations several blocks away in either direction. E, M, and R lines have an active station directly beneath the drop off site.

The historic N track was originally built approximatey 20’ off the ground. With the later development of the 7 line, the original track was decommissioned and both lines shared a new route built directly above, adding an additional 20’ of ad hoc track infrastructure.

At the intersection of the old and new track is a two-level, quadruple-story height jumble of beams and columns hovering directly over the site.

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Understanding the structure through model and drawing

Mediating the track split

Scaled to a human

Scaled to a Rikers Island cell block

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The track split divides the larger site into three distinct zones.

The northern portion is composed of small to mid scale business which gradates towards traditional housing stock.

The western zone is slated for a future high-end, large scale development named Gotham Center, of which the fi rst glass clad 40 story building already exists.

The eastern portion is railyard.

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A support network already exists on site for the released inmates. The Floating Hospital and the Fortune Society are both two blocks away from the drop off point. Unfortunately, they are both closed during the event timeframe.

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Following the merged track westward leads to the Queensborough Bridge. It then dips below grade as vehicular traffi c ramps up towards the bridge. The track exits Queens and enters Manhattan via tunnel.

The bridge is the main visual marker for this urban landscape. As long as one can see it, one can orient themselves within the city.

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THE RESPONSE

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Contact is the driving force behind the response to the hard landing.

If the ex-inmate has someone to meet him, someone to provide structure, he has a chance to acclimate from jail cell to free city in a safe and effective manner. He stands a chance against recidivism.

The project becomes a narrative of successive human points of contact. It follows the ex-inmate from the second he is dropped off into the next day when he is able to access more sustained forms of care.

The narrative recruits a cast of characters with whom the ex-inmate interacts as he moves through the new landing strategy. The strategy is programmed and timed to their very specifi c re-entry needs, and manifests spatially within the neutral zone of on-site infrastructure.

It creates a physical mark in the urban fabric that is no longer fringe, but instead, a viable place of harbor for this doubly peripheral group. It provides a place for them to fi nd humanity amongst themselves and their allies [the characters]. Most importantly, it provides a means for them to access what they need to become active agents of urban placemaking.

Approximately 15 people will cycle through the soft landing per night.

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the lovedone

the lunchcart man

the socialworker

the coffeecart lady

the busdriver

thedoorman

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Interviews provided vital information on re-entry needs, on the time scale of minutes to months. The needs are then addressed programatically and spatially. Due the limits of the existing infrastructure and nightly infl ux of ex-inmates, there must be a fi ssion between meeting the immediate and sustained needs.

The project becomes the quarterway house to the halfway house, focusing on the immediate.

A hierarchy of program fi lters the needs into singular, one-to-other, and communal categories. As one moves through the space, they partake in increasingly open program, and are able ease their transition back into the city.

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Single linear narrative study

Fifteen person narrative study

The night procession is tailored to the core program and the corresponding points of human contact:

A place to have a cigarette [with the bus driver]

A place to get a coffee [from the coffee cart lady]

A place to get your key [from the doorman]

A place to pick up your care package [from the loved one]

A place to shower [private/communal]

A place to sleep [private refuge]

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Expediency is the driver for the day procession. The discrete ascending stair system becomes a descending ramp system from the refuges and shower area down towards the elevator that lets out onto the Western busier side of the site. The ramp is interrupted for access to a meeting room where the ex-inmates may schedule an appointment with a [social worker][social worker], and a waiting room for their [loved one][loved one] to come pick them up. Otherwise, they reach the elevator and exit. On street level, [the lunch cart man][the lunch cart man] grounds the doubly peripheral architecture to the urban context. Here the ex-inmate can grab some lunch before he heads off, alongside members of the surround community.

The Western elevator is more public than the Northern one, due to site location and user groups. While the Northern one is used only by the ex-inmates from 2-6am, this one is used throughout the day by [the [the loved ones]loved ones] to meet their ex-inmate or drop off a care package for someone being released the following night. [The attendant][The attendant] is there to accept their packages. So goes the day procession

Anonymity is the driver for the organization of space and the thresholds in between. As an ex-inmate moves through each space in the procession he slips higher and higher into the track infrastructure, through a series of discrete stairs, until he reaches his fi nal place of rest. This is his refuge, his moment of privacy, nested just beneath the highest track and looking out towards the Queensborough Bridge.

The points in between:

The ex-inmates exits the bus and shares a cigarette with [the driver][the driver] and each other. They are on the Northern, less urban side of the site. From there, they head towards [the coffee cart lady][the coffee cart lady] next to the elevator. They get their hot drink, share some banter, and enter the fi rst level of the infrastructure. [The attendant][The attendant] greets them and gives them the key to their locker for the night. In the locker, they fi nd the hygiene bags and care packages left by their [loved ones][loved ones] earlier in the day. From the locker space they can shower and sleep in private. So ends the night procession.

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-> -> ->

Circulation throughout the architecture is guided by unique lighting conditions of the track overhead.

All the important moments along the night and day processions peak out from under the track - the night entrance, the locker box, the showers, the refuges, the meeting room, the waiting room, and the day exit.

They act as beacons, marked by unfi ltered moonlight, sunlight, or urban light, The spaces of circulation in between are placed underneath the track. Whenever one walks from one piece of program to another, there is a dappled light fi ltering in from above to accentuate this movement.

->

Process models

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1 2

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Night and day sections

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3

5

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Arriving

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After getting a key and care package, turning towards the bathing area, dappled lighting marks the discrete stairs that lead up to the bathing space. Further beyond are the stairs up to the refuges.

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In the changing room looking toward the shower units. They are bathed in moonlight while shadows from the tracks above mark the corridors.

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Inside a refuge with the wall pulled back to reveal a view towards the glowing Queensboro Bridge. This monument is the visual cue for reorientation into the free city.

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During the day, the loved ones come here to drop off their care packages in the locker box. The track shadows pull the eye towards the locker, which is marked by bright sunlight. The opposite entrance used by the ex-inmates later that night can be seen beyond.

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The meeting room is the shared space for the ex-inmate and their loved ones and social workers. It is the most open space where the two tracks split open at their widest point. Behind the table an chairs is a glimpse of the ramp system that brings the ex-inmate down from the refuges.

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Descending

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The model

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THE CONCLUSION

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Opportunistic future sites. There exist fourteen unused subway stations and platform levels in the NYCT/MTA system. In addition are hundreds of miles of unused track and highway bridge infrastructure.

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ABANDONED NYCT/MTA SUBWAY PLATFORM AND STATION INFRASTRUCTURE

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Underutilized infrastructures currently represent an opportunity for establishment of community within an urban context. Groups who do not have resources for traditional modes of establishment are currently relegated to occupy these spaces. Structural framework, transient shelter, and word-of-mouth gathering become alternatives to neighborhood, home, and political clout.

How can these infrastructures do more?

They are neutral spaces. They have structure, contain volume, are the integral backbone of functioning systems, yet are not programmed themselves.

This thesis proposes a new typology of space that exploits this void.

The goal of the project was to test a methodology to claim the middle ground, the place that is neither here nor there, for those who do not belong neither here nor there.

I remember a passage in a Spider Man novel I read as a child. The author’s omnipresent voice describes the hero’s thoughts as he swings through the negative space between endless building facades. Above the cars, and below the planes, he is thrilled to be able to exist in this blank middle ground.

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This project creates an architecture that gives one particular doubly peripheral population a place to belong.

The proposal remains transient as it was never meant to be occupied by the same person for more than one night. Limited by scale, it is a tailored response to a problem faced by ex-inmates in New York. However, it is possible to imagine the same language of architecture imbued with more permanent program within other infrastructures.

The response strategy is layered, tapping the potentials of physical construction, social support networks, and event-based tactical urbanism.

Such a strategy can successfully engage the existing structure as well as the larger context of the site, creating a place that is fully ingrained within the urban fabric. Precedents of doubly peripheral space were subject to dispersion due to their inability to engage. Here, fi ne points of human contact confer that opportunity. The goal is to gain a foothold in the process of urban territorial contestation. It is an act of assertion.

Through assertion and engagement, community develops. Through community, the doubly peripheral fi nd permanence, and ultimately, a home.

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Bibliography

Architecture and Justice. New York: Spatial Information Design Lab, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, 2006.

Betsky, Aaron. Queer Space: Architecture and Same-sex Desire. New York: William Morrow &, 1997.

IN-EX: [review of Peripheral Architecture]. Basel: Birkhäuser, 1999.

La Vigne, Nancy, et al. Release Planning for Successful Reentry. Washington DC: Urban Institute Justice Policy Center, 2008.

Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1960.

Mellow, Jeff, et al. Mapping the Innovation in Correctional Health Care Service Delivery in New York City. New York: John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 2008.

Montero, Gabriel. Mapping the Universe of Re-entry. New York: The New York CIty Discharge Planning Collaboration, 2007.

Nelson, Marta, et al. The First Month Out: Post-Incarceration Experiences in New York City. New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 1999.

Pirmann, David. www.nycsubway.org. N.p., n.d. Web. 08 May 2013.

“Prison Talk - Prisoner Family Support, Information & Assistance Community.” Prison Talk RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 31 March 2013.

“Reentry Mapping Network.” The Urban Institute. N.p., n.d. Web. 08 April 2013.

Sennett, Richard. The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities. New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 1990.

Shepard, Benjamin Heim. The Beach Beneath the Streets: Contesting New York City’s Public Spaces. N.Y. : Excelsior Editions/State University of New York Press, 2011.

Thesis

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