| FORMLESS | PROCESS | SUBTRACTION |
Specific, Yet Universal
| Transformation of New Bedford, MA |
RISD, Fall 2023
“So not only is radial utopia inherently impossible, it is, for architecture, also inherently destined to be common.”
— Keller Easterling, “Impossible,” in Utopia/Dystopia: A Paradigm Shift for Architecture.
In Collaboration with Kuem-Hee Rhee.
New Bedford is a coastal city residing in the State of Massachusetts and is considered part of the Territory of the Wampanoag Indigenous Nation.
Since the Wampanoag people, the area has been widely known for its whaling industry. Even during the colonial period in North America, whaling and fishing remained the primary industry of the region, peaking in 1840 and noting New Bedford as the wealthiest city in the world.
After 1840, as whaling decreased in popularity, the coastal land of New Bedford transitioned into textile manufacturing and persisted into the early 1900s.
As its own, this coast is home to a variety of fishing species. But today, the water quality along the Acushnet River and coast is extremely poor. The textile industry declined in the 1920s due to unresolved striking efforts and the industry of electronic capacitor manufacturing took over. The primary producer, Aerovox Corporation, dumped their PCB and heavy metal waste into the waters from the late 30s to the mid-70s until the federal Environmental Protection Agency stopped them. While water remediation efforts persist, the water remains toxic to local ecology and human consumption. In addition to the coastline, the Acushnet River lines the edge of the city and provides a marshy ecosystem. Currently, these waters experience harmful algae blooms which disrupt the local wildlife. New Bedford remains mostly undeveloped, consisting of mostly forested, wetland, and agrarian land. New Bedford’s climate is consistent with The NorthEast Coastal climate of North America, being mostly overcast, wet, and windy. Because of this condition, the region experiences a lot of flooding.
The coding prioritizes public safety, regulating building practices, land use, and environmental protection. The most recent update to the code addresses the city’s condition of residential overcrowding and fires, holding landlords responsible for relocation costs and penalties. The zoning of New Bedford shows how the waterfront (bottom edge) is reserved for industry and commercial use. Other areas are largely residential and mixed-use. This development map highlights the residential use in blue, the commercial in yellow, and the industrial in light orange. Since 2015, the emerging waterfront industry has been of offshore wind energy.
The population of the city saw a continuous rise until the 1920s Textile strike and the Great Depression era. The population has been decreasing gradually since the 2000s when the city enacted redevelopment policies to promote tourism and attract new, middle-income residents. 18.6% of the population is considered below the poverty line, represented by mostly children and seniors. The city experiences a constant trend of incoming immigration. The current population reflects this, being mostly from Latin America and Europe, primarily Portugal. Lastly, we will end with the two main renewal projects of the city. In the 1970’s, the city built its I-195 highway structures and a hurricane barrier.
Through this process, we observe the familiar item of “economic potential,” demonstrated by the Port Authority, and the historical charges of renewal and land commodification. Here, the waterfront— the heartbeat of New Bedford— is the sign of industry. This normalized case of city centricity shows how the obsession with new capital minimizes the complexity of its condition. As a city frames its own identity through the economy, industry, and global potential, it generates a language of “problems” and “crises”— descriptions of cost, efficiency, growth, and burden. The city performs optimistic impressions to the global scale of economic competition. But through that, the non-economics falls through the label of “vulnerability,” a title that reduces individuals to just their economic contribution or burden to a city.
In such a city, individuals are either celebrated for their optimized efficiency by income or condemned for burdening a city and fellow residents with economic needs. In this business model, those considered invaluable bear the fabricated cause and blame for a city’s success or failure. But to the individual, economics loses its value as additional relationships become visible… those of a child, parent, neighbor, etc. In this granular scheme, we are reminded by Francelina and Joe that living is not how a city frames it to be…
To live in a city is not to live for a city.
But as we journeyed the New Bedford neighborhoods, we observed an order that separates… where people live apart, not together. In the city's efforts to optimize growth, preservation, and safety, there is little to no space left for living.
While a city’s economic prosperity is important, it shouldn't steer the way to live. A city must realign its values to make the granular lives seen… to identify itself through the means of living, something so person-place specific, yet universally understood.
What we propose is not a solution but rather a re-envisioning of a neighborhood in New Bedford where a city prioritizes people over industry.
“How do you initiate, not master plans, but chain reactions that are deliberately partial and constantly tended? How do you diagram, not solutions, but things that shouldn’t always work—not because they are marginal or weak, but because they need to be agile enough and with sufficient temporal dimensions to be able to respond to the moment when they are outmaneuvered—or remain in place to repond to a countermove?”
— Keller Easterling, “Impossible,” in Utopia/Dystopia: A Paradigm Shift for Architecture.
“What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities.”
Ruth Wilson Gilmore.
Following Joe’s story, we see traces of activity presenting all through time, existing in the past through stories and in the present. Today, in New Bedford, these vines of grapes and passion fruit are embedded into the normalcy of the New Bedford environment, in which its roots trace back to generations of culture and care.
In our imagining, we see vining as the non-plan strategy, a practice of loyalty to the unpredictable, to the formless, to the spontaneous... A form of city imagining without the enforcement of lines, without the expectation of a capital return.
We begin with being subtractive instead of additive. Instead of introducing additional buildings, we propose to lift the privatized ownership of land defined by parcel lines, laying a network of connective paths that provide opportunities for spaces to be taken by the residents, animals, and ecologies. Over time, these spaces would swell over time and earn their priority within its inhabited land and neighborhood. The spaces inhabited by physical residences begin to shift, aligning themselves into an organization apart from vehicular streets and into its own. This realignment between private residencies and public spaces insinuates a communal responsibility to steward the land, caring for its health, safety, and welfare. This neighborhood transformation would offer the space for connection to happen, normalizing the value of relationships, intimacy, and communal care in the public realm.
