Conversations, ideas, and narratives shape experiences of the built environment. The ideas that influence the transformation of the built environment are affective, material, social, and their consequences felt in disproportionate measure across certain populations. Decision-making about the built environment remains obscured, opaque, and difficult to access. Fallow is passionate about designing and building infrastructures that amplify multiple voices and that broaden public discussion and action.

Designing Process | Mapping decision making, Naming gaps, Contesting Dominant Narratives

Our interdisciplinary approach to issues such as housing insecurity, environmental justice, and access to public space aims to improve decision making by anticipating potential conflicts of interest, by fostering more nuanced understandings of the places planners and architects hope to practice, by helping mission oriented organizations increase capacities and translate their visions, and by experimenting with new models of civic practice and public engagement. Services are tailored to meet the needs of specific projects and partner ambitions, but may include: geospatial inventories, narrative mapping, critical inquiry, policy analysis and translation, and historical research. Fallow is committed to unearthing the political, cultural, and social forces embedded in decision-making about the built environment and to making these networks legible. By developing a deeply contextual approach to envisioning scenarios, we work to amplify the voices and experiences that remain excluded from policy and planning agendas.

Theory-Praxis

Contested territories names a conceptual framework for identifying the often hidden and competing interests, values, and power relations in spaces of difference - with a particular focus on housing insecurity in the United States. Theories of the body, trauma, and public affects frame what constitutes contested and territories. I will map the competing interests and forces that shape (and are shaped by) space and its related discourses.

We are interested in how code-switching between discourse and implementation transforms ideas into new forms of practice. How might the mapping of theory inform social-spatial, material-immaterial, human-nonhuman relationships?

Our research projects explore the links between the built environment and social justice to reframe “the problems” of areas through transdisciplinary approaches to space, affect, trauma, and materiality. Some of our goals include pursuing institutional ethical responsibility, tracking decision-making accountability, and making housed-unhoused discourse more visible through the tools of critical design, geography, and cartography.

Our relationship to trauma-informed design.

Trauma-informed design (TID) research investigates how the power of space and the ‘vibrancy’ of materiality mediate hierarchies of life, create (dis)identification with place, and participate in the experiences of personal and social traumas. TID maps difference, poverty, health inequalities, religious and cultural identities, to visualize how social patterns inscribe the surfaces of place. This project moves from inquiry (excavation) to implementation (construction).

KW | I am interested in how code-switching between discourse and implementation transforms ideas into new forms of practice. How might the mapping of theory inform social-spatial, material-immaterial, human-nonhuman relationships? The public narratives surrounding homelessness are inextricably linked to embedded assumptions about mental health and substance use. Assumptions about agency, responsibility, morality, and charity shape approach to treatment and public policies. Philosophical and theological discourse can help contest bad policies and dehumanizing practices.

The people most vulnerable to housing insecurity often have a co-occurance of mental health or substance use disorder. I am interested in learning ways to reframe trauma and related health conditions. How might rethinking assumed roles of personal responsibility and health help offer more counternarratives to harmful stigmatization?

BP | The process evolves from asking questions to understand, clarify, and uncover - to asking questions that speculate, provoke, and make future imaginaries legible.

This process is rigorous, but nimble - specific projects require specific timelines, priorities, and choreography of method. Loose frameworks allow us to work intentionally in ways that may be replicable, but allow us the privilege of exploring new modes of representation - both in terms of the ways ideas are made visual, but also in terms of how collaborators represent their own voices in the work.