502 Design Studio - MArch Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania
Spring 2019
Prof. Eduardo Rega, TA: Prince Langley
As cities become densely populated, technology advancements and global economic and sociopolitical tensions become a threat to personal health. Like Herbert Marcuse points out, people are constantly living in an “artificial state of nature” were social, natural and playful interactions are replaced by virtual and artificial interactions. Human health has been put at the sake of aggressive global development models benefiting mainly the smallest and wealthier segments of society.
Our market proposal, conceived as an “ágora”, is an attempt to deal with this urban and social issue. In this context, health is not only referring to physical treatment of the human body, but to health at the social level, at the urban level, at the mental level. The project is meant to remind people about the importance of health in front of an aggressive capitalist system and media culture that are destroying it. Looking at the contemporary culture of the bottom-up and cooperative economies we are attempting to expose people to alternative modes of living, working producing and learning, not completely disregarding capitalist models of consumption but trying to reveal its flaws and proposing potential solutions to tame them.
The proposal integrates an educational agenda on the long term, showing and inciting people to try sustainable, small scale, more local models of living the city. With the support of three main Cooperatives: a Food Coop, an Arts and Humanities Coop and an Energy Coop, a set of inclusive micro systems of living, moving, working, reusing, consuming and disposing will be deployed throughout the timeline. All rounded on knowledge-based economies, material and immaterial production, and non-totalitarian or too holistic models.
Game tactics as Site Analysis
Manayunkspoly: Politics of Cooperativism
In this project, the Market space is treated as an Agora, a typology where principles of distribution, cooperation and access prioritize public benefit and oppose private profit maximization. To do that we designed a version of the game Commonspoly (https://commonspoly.cc/) specific to Manayunk. In this game, as in the real world, the Agora is a space where collective uprisings against state and corporate dominations can be staged.
Manayunkspoly is a cooperation game inspired by Commonspoly and designed to understand how Manayunk’s socio-economic conditions work from a perstective of collective organization and cooperatism. In order to win, all the players must be willing to cooperate.
Manayunk’s version of commonspoly is a result of mapping the game’s goods in the context of Manayunk, which are real places and institutions in the neighborhood.
The Groundroots of the Program
From game results to Actor Network Diagram
The Groundroots of the Design
Proto Drawings
Final Proposal
Manayunk’s site is occupied with an integrated scheme. The spatial conditions in this campus-like facility allow for social activations of different levels and for ad-hoc models of energy, water and food consumption.
