I lived in Brooklyn for 20 years in the same six block
radius.
I've seen this neighborhood change dramatically over that time.
In Crown Heights,
the new gentrifying inhabitants and the longtime residents literally occupy the
exact same streets-rarely do they interact.
They exist in two separate worlds, right in the same neighborhood.
And so I've always wanted to work on something
that looked at those changes and considered what it might look like,
had the community not been gentrified so rapidly.
The name of my project is "The Frozen Neighborhoods," and it
examines a speculative world here in Brooklyn
through a series of renderings.
In this world climate change has exacerbated to the
point where the government has granted the individual a certain amount of
mobility credits that determine where you can go and
how far you can travel.
But the rich have purchased much of the mobility credits in poor,
marginalized communities are left without them.
They're now cut off from the larger world.
And so these communities develop sustainable practices,
and new technologies serving the needs of the community.
The inhabitants of this community have overtaken the MTA.
The MTA now stands for "Main Threshold Access."
Trains instead of shuttling you from one place to the other are now virtual
kiosks, where you can go and engage in virtual travel,
meet family around the world, take educational lessons,
job training.
So really imagining this new self-contained world in Brooklyn.
Another rendering has a row of storefront churches,
but it's also a seed vault.
And at the base of the building is a kind of farmer's market.
It has a large billboard at the top that says,
"Plant Seeds Grow Blessings."
I'm very much fascinated with storefront churches in Brooklyn and how they
have existed as spaces for not only religious services,
but also they took a lot of responsibility of providing social
services that the government doesn't provide.
Thinking of highly self-organized spaces and communities
is a way of opening up the idea of
public versus private of power versus authority.
NIMBY-ism is "Not In My Backyard." And that is the kind
of entitled, meddling,
busybody that is so concerned with where
someone is going. And
in the world we live in oftentimes it is a white person who's
concerned with how many Black kids are congregating in a mall,
or whether these kids have a right to swim in this pool.
There's a policing around public space, around access.
The powers that be will always say,
you need to monitor and to control people.
And the reality is you don't need that when you provide the basic
needs of a community and a population.
So in this speculative world that I'm creating,
there is a very sustainable communal practice.
So all of these public spaces are no longer being policed or watched
or controlled.
People will simply act in good faith as participants
in this community and in this world.
Creating the solution it's about setting up scenarios that might elicit
discourse.
There isn't necessarily a story or a character you're following.
I'm just interested in setting up glimpses into this
world that allow for interpretation. For me,
speculative fiction allows me the necessary flexibility to
examine contemporary issues,
but create new frameworks for exploring them. Fiction
and speculative works have a way of informing reality.
Almost all technology that we have has come through science fiction,
has come through narratives, has come through imagining.
So there's more of a relationship to creative,
open-ended thinking and design and architecture than we
tend to think.