369 / Osman Ural: A New "Square Deal": For the "Soul" of East Harlem's Social Housing Projects
Osman Ural from Istanbul, Turkey; “Osman Mürsel Ural is a Turkish/American architect and urban designer with over 6 years of experience in various scales of design. He graduated with his MSc degree in Urbanism from TU Delft, and obtained his bachelor’s degree in Architecture from The University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Before working as at Jvantspijker, he won multiple national and international competitions at the offices of Aboutblank and Emre Arolat Architects in Istanbul, Turkey.”
Website: https://issuu.com/osmanural/docs/p2_report_omural_isuuu
University: Technische Universiteit Delft
Professor(s): Teake Bouma, Luisa Calabrese, Wouter Jan Verhel
Instagram Username: @studio_osmosis
Name of Project: A New "Square Deal": For the "Soul" of East Harlem's Social Housing Projects
Project Description: New York is currently going through a construction boom as developers try to take advantage of rising land values and rents caused by economic growth, resulting in a lack of affordable housing available to middle-income families. The current Mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, has made it a priority to meet the demands and challenges of the housing crisis by incentivizing private development through various methods, such as changing zoning laws and cutting red tape for access to abandoned lands, as a way to inject steroids into the housing market (Kaysen, 2018). This has unfortunately caused issues such as gentrification and speculative development, which has led to the disenfranchisement of low-income inhabitants in the city (Kaysen, 2018). These policies have marginalized people by either forcing the poor to either live in the periphery of the city, or be crammed into social housing projects that were built more than half a century ago.
This is worrisome due to the fact that these aged dwellings display a variety of health and safety issues that the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) is having a hard time managing. The low-income families which rely on these projects have a hard time paying the minimum rent to begin with, and when you couple this with unacceptable living conditions, you end up with the spatial manifestation of an increasing divide between the rich and poor which now defines New York City. What is more shocking is that when you look back in history, the social housing projects were originally seen as a solution to poverty and slumification, but they ended up just being vertical versions of the slums which they took place of (Ferré-Sadurní, 2018).
In order to help these disenfranchised people living in the projects, there must be an effort in place to help increase their quality of life. In order to achieve this, the monofunctionality of their public space needs to be made more functionally diverse. This is because the lack of diversity in both social and programmatic elements results in low public activity, which in turn leads to crime and vandalism due to a lack of self-awareness which tends to not exist in places of high public activity (Jacobs, 1961). In addition to this, the problem of public space is exasperated by the design philosophy that was used to create the projects. Planners used the International Style, which was a popular urbanist theory during the time that the dwellings were created. By clearing the tenement slums that were defined by a spatial hierarchy created by the street grid of New York City, he accused the planners of intentionally destroying the rich hierarchy and variety that existed in the contextual public realm (Kunstler, 2004). He also argues that the high-rises of the projects themselves destroyed any sense of human scale, which in combination of his other concerns, eradicated the inhabitants connection to the public realm (Kunstler, 2004).
By looking at these failures of the social housing projects, a transformational framework needs to be produced that acknowledges these issues of monofunctionality, scale, and safety. This framework should also act as a blueprint of rehabilitation for all NYCHA projects, including what needs and characteristics need to be created in order to activate a public space that increases the inhabitants quality of life. By providing a framework that brings the “soul” of public space in these projects back to life, the original intent of the projects - or the promise it made to the people who would live in them - can be met and achieved.
Image Explanations: The location of the proposal is in East Harlem, a project called the King Towers. This neighborhood has major issues with crime, air quality, and poverty, all while existing at the corner of Central Park - literally the spatial realization of social inequality. The site has a repetitive tower typology that is typical of NYC social housing, and therefore could act as a blueprint for other projects in the city. The single large public space also makes a proposal more flexible to implement.
In order for a rehabilitation intervention to work within the social housing projects, there needs to be a proposal that is beneficiary to all parties involved. Each one of the stakeholders have a motivation to work together to find the most optimum solution regarding various issues, such as responsibility, funding, and their role within a regenerated social housing project. Using an egalitarian approach such as this will nourish the “soul” of their public space. Overlaying a grid over the site will transform the public domain from a space that is passive and void, to one that is vibrant and full of life. The grid sets out to provide design solutions at multiple scales, mostly due to both its ability to be modular and flexible at the same time. Public spaces will become more active due to an influx of new functions, in turn creating a hierarchy of various public spaces, better sense of a human scale, and ownership for the inhabitants of the projects. The transformational grid provides a clear separation of public and private, as it removes ownership confusion that existed before. New apartment buildings have their structure dictated by the grid, allowing for modular and adaptive solutions for future development, while also increasing activity with ground floor arcades. Palimpsest interventions in the towers achieves similar goals by providing large entrance lobbies, in combination with open spaces that adapt to the wishes of the inhabitants.
The preexisting concept behind the greenery is based on a modernist binary relationship between public and private. Like our current society, layers of complexity are needed to add diversity of people and functions. A goal of the grid is to create an active landscape that is free to the public realm. This was achieved by adding urban gardening to the landscaping, where residents and locals alike can come and grow, strengthening the bond between the resident and their neighborhood.
