Contested Territories
BAC Studio
To whom does public space belong?
Some areas we’re interested in further investigating in Contested Territories studios:
Building, or resisting building, to reduce retraumatization
A language for navigating thresholds (i. e. child’s court, medical assessments, DCF hearings)
Politics of care and public safety
Histories of confinement, quarantine, and segregation
Scales and Locations of Inquiry
THE BAC
Contested Territories studio was developed at the BAC.
In Spring of 2020, design students at the Boston Architectural College (BAC) engaged the City of Boston’s Office of Recovery Services (ORS) and the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics (MONUM) to explore the production of several resources (a guide, map, database) that might assist service providers and individuals seeking services as they navigate the complex ecosystem of public health and social services in and around Mass Ave and Melnea Cass. The visualization of information is frequently produced by a series of everyday decisions that seldom make their positions or motivations transparent. Cartographies harbor contested interests, appeal to divergent constituencies and, through omission and inclusion, cultivate or
reinforce biases. However, as charged artifacts, they allow for a type of inquiry that makes visible, otherwise obscured, the systems, spaces, and structures that assemble experiences of the city. In order to understand the intersections of housing insecurity, substance use disorder, public health and community well-being it is imperative to consider how the characterization of “social problems” are constructed and represented. Without this examination, the solutions to such problems may implicitly or unintentionally reify their persistence.
The student work is intended to generate conversations that might critique the ambitions of the product to be designed and inform the process that leads to its eventual development. This is not a conclusive, nor exhaustive, body of research and should warrant further study. This is not yet a “draft” of a tool or designed artifact to be immediately operationalized but could be.
CT offered a series of observations and recommendations for Mass and Cass planning
1. Information about services and service providers should be frequently updated, maintained, made more broadly accessible, and centralized. As students attempted to develop a consistent framework for cataloging types of services provision, critical information often remained difficult to access or was not located.
2. There are multiple city agencies, organizations, and governing bodies implicated in the provision of social services and in the oversight of Mass Cass 2.0. It was frequently noted that many city departments and agencies remained siloed. Roles, responsibilities, and decision-making power should be clearly articulated and publicly communicated in an attempt to understand alignments, priorities, and motivations.
3. Information is consumed differently by different audiences. Rather than attempting to standardize or universalize this tool for all audiences, all the time, multiple platforms and channels for dissemination (more than a map or a database) should be explored.
4. The process of mapping should be one that centers, privileges, activates, and supports the subjects and bodies it attempts to map or represent. Those most intimately connected to the experiences of service acquisition and/or provision should play an important role in the development of this resource.
contest
con·test \ ˈkän-ˌtest \
v | To call into question and take an active stand against; dispute or challenge.
v | To compete or strive for; struggle to gain or control.
n | A struggle for victory. A competition in which each contestant performs without direct contact with or interference from competitors.
territory
ter·ri·to·ry \ ˈter-ə-ˌtȯr-ē \
n | An area of land under the jurisdiction of a ruler or state. An area in which one has certain rights.
n | An assigned area. An indeterminate geographic area
n | An area of knowledge, activity or experience.