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| FIFTH WARD INTERSECTION, LYONS AVENUE |
INTRODUCTION TO FIFTH WARD PROPOSAL. This project takes up the systematic production of urban space through design work on a notorious, inner-city slum, the Fifth Ward of Houston, Texas. Based largely on a project funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the following postings extract the strategy employed in rehabilitating a dilapidated urban district through the manipulation, not of its architecture, but of its infrastructure. The intention was alchemical. Working at both a conceptual and physical level, the project seeks to transform urban “blight” into that most cherished of commodities, urban open space.
index of ICNT postings
INNER-CITY NEW TOWN. In contrast to the slum clearance projects of the 60s and 70s, the Fifth Ward project took the position that the reform of urban districts was not a problem of architecture but was first and foremost a problem of infrastructure. Because modernism is, by definition, a unified project, modern housing cannot succeed if it is embedded within an outmoded street infrastructure. The fatal flaw of all urban renewal schemes is that they were typically limited to the renewal of outmoded housing stock instead of the renewal of outmoded urban infrastructures. With regards to the urban redevelopment, I will argue that infrastructure matters more than built space because of its pervasive yet subliminal operation. The spectacular failings of modern housing projects in Chicago and St. Louis, for example, were not the failings of the architecture, but the failing of outmoded urban infrastructure that was unable to support the radical architectural propositions that were being put forth. The following project attempts to shift the focus from architecture to infrastructure by proposing a base-line reorganization of a notorious inner-city slum. The project was conceived as an attempt to reform the methods of modern urbanism and begin a recuperation of its discredited legacy. Such recuperation was driven by the belief that modernism cannot move ahead without a viable urban component.
Houston’s Fifth Ward is an appropriate test case insomuch as its infrastructure is literally torn to tatters. Once possessing a continuous gridiron street network, the Ward has been subject to the imposition of rail infrastructure, two major freeways, unrestrained street widening and accelerated dilapidation. These interventions have poignantly “devolved” the Fifth Ward bringing to it the qualities of openness and space that are apparent in newer and more modern infrastructures that exist throughout the city. Our project seizes on these qualities, however tragic or inadvertent their origin, and attempts to systematically deploy their effects in restructuring the blighted environment. Being reorganized from the ground up suggests a more complete exercise in “redevelopment” prompting our ambition to create an Inner-City New Town. As a model for ground-up development, the project becomes a test bed wherein the qualities of contemporary Megalopolis can be identified and promoted absent the constraints of habit so ingrained in new urban construction. Using an inner-city new town as a model for megalopolitan development may seem ironic, if not cynical, yet it is intended to demonstrate that privileged access to nature, freedom of (high speed) movement, and a frictionless agency associated with openness and space are the undeniable existential demands of a contemporary urban environment and should be available to all irrespective of class and ethnicity.
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| EXISTING FIFTH WARD STREET GRID |
FIFTH WARD. In spite of the insulting nomenclature, the Fifth Ward is frequently characterized as a blighted inner-city slum. The Fifth Ward began as a “Freedman’s Town” founded in 1866 by the regions freed slave population. It is located adjacent to Houston’s Central Business District yet it is a world apart from the corporate ethos that prevails just a few blocks away. For many decades the Fifth Ward served as the center of the Houston African-American community. With over one hundred churches and a concentration of Black-owned businesses, the district reached its population peak in the years leading up to the Second World War. With sizable rail yard and an active port facility on its southern boarder, the Fifth Ward was supported by good jobs all within walking distance. At that time, the Fifth Ward was a destination in Houston affectionately referred to as “the Nickel” throughout the city. Four members of Congress came from the Fifth Ward including Barbara Jordon and Mickey Leland. It was also the birthplace of George Forman and Dr. Ruth Simmons.
In the early 1960s things began to slide for the Fifth Ward as it did for most of urban America. Owing to ever-increasing economies of scale, the port moved further out toward the Gulf of Mexico, jobs disappeared and the crime rate rose. In the early sixties, the Fifth Ward was sliced up by freeway construction. Major pollution in its southern section came to light leading up to the declaration of a major Superfund Site. By the 1980s, the Fifth Ward was being referred to as the “Bloody Nickel.” The 2000 census lists the Fifth Ward as a community of 21,640 people: 60% African American, 37% Hispanic and 2% white. The majority of residents (51%) have yearly incomes below $18,300.00. 67% of the population rents, with a vacancy rate of 14%. 55% of the lots contain single-family houses, 71% of the lots are valued at less than $25,000. A full one third of the lots in the Fifth Ward (32%) are vacant, drastically increasing the district’s amount of open space. Instead of seeing this openness as a problem needing correction, it will be taken as a unique opportunity to bring to the Ward qualities that it did not historically posses.
DIS/CONTINUITY OF SPACE. The fractured, discontinuous street infrastructure of the Fifth Ward defies easy analysis especially if that analysis is predicated on a spatial rather than a formal bias. Traditional mapping conventions such as the figure/ground diagram privilege built form with indications of space being limited to those legible shapes or figures that form bestows upon it. It is perhaps unnecessary to say that space cannot come into its own as an organizational element if it is defined, from the start, as secondary to form. We attempted to confront space directly by focusing our analysis of the Fifth Ward, not on built infrastructural form, but on infrastructural continuity. Imagined as a spatial field, the street system of the Fifth Ward can be understood as a network that is variegated by a combination of linkages and stops. The most direct way of mapping these dis/continuities is the mapping of street intersections treating each intersection as a node or “switch” in a spatial network. Combining those nodes we were able to generate a “switch field” that reflected the overall dis/continuity of the existing urban fabric.
SWITCH FIELD. In the upper left corner of page 262 is the existing street plan of the Fifth Ward. In the upper right corner is a translation of that plan into a point field of street intersections. With regards to mapping spatial continuity, the very first consideration we made is that the points in the field are not equal to each other. Each point has a different “status” as regards to its ability to connect to adjacent nodes. The status of each point can be determined for the present configuration of each intersection whereby a four-way switch is an intersection that is open in all four directions. A three-way switch is a T intersection. A two-way switch is a simple bend in the road, and a one-way switch represents a terminal node. The final switch is a “null” point where the intersection was completely demolished or never built in the first place. With regard to these five states, the term “switch” reflects a varying status. A switch suggests that actual street intersections are not only variable but that their status can be flipped or otherwise altered. Moving directly from analysis to design, the switch field becomes a tool for the active manipulation of urban continuities based on the relative status of a given intersection. In other words, the switch field made a spatially biased reform of urban infrastructure possible. It also delivered the specific means of intervention.
The Switch field is the basis for the entire Fifth Ward project. The status of intersections measured in terms of relative continuity and discontinuity are, at one level, a simple diagram of physical access. On an entirely other level, however, dis/continuity of intersections is an indicator of the dis/continuity of space. In this regard, dead-end cul-de-sac streets are not automatically “bad,” and open (four-way) intersections are not automatically “good.” Such prejudices operate off of outmoded urban assumptions and ultimately limit the number of viable options. In the context of the switch field, the so-called dead-end street becomes an important device used in the production of spatial continuity. Considered as a switching mechanism functioning within an overall urban network, the dead-end is redefined by its capacity to mark the end of form and the beginning of space. The capacity to quantify and manipulate space is the single most important factor in the design of Megalopolis — an urbanism that is, first and foremost, dominated by space.
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