(Re)claiming
In collaboration with Naima Liang Blanco-Norberg
Scales of Design with Bimal Mendis
Spring 2022
It starts with an empty warehouse. An emerging tech company crawls into the space, with employees that sign 2-year leases, buy $7 coffee, and relax during their lunch hour. Developers jump on this routine building blank mixed-use buildings, displacing the residents, and showing off the trendiest café franchise. A subway once a sign of accessibility now displaces dozens of homes and giant parking lots trying to attract drivers into paying expensive ticket fares.
For this project, we wanted to take a snapshot during the 5 years when businesses and amenities creep into our communities with no intention of serving those who already dwell and flourish in the space. We want to celebrate the mom-and-pop dim sum restaurants, the fruit vendors on the curbs, and the panaderia and tamale sellers in the backs of their trucks. We also highlight the intense disturbance of gentrification and the repeated formula we witnessed in our very own neighborhoods in San Francisco and Los Angeles, California. This is before the massive single-family homes, before the Whole Foods market moved in, before the complete obscurement of the vibrancy of low-income immigrant communities.
We want to question the concept of gentrification as a ‘smooth process’ that sees no resilience against franchise giants and emphasize the (re)claiming of community spaces. The formation of underground transit laying out avenues of commerce, the empty lots waiting for the next apartment high-rise, and the sidewalks meant to be “clean”... which we all know means empty.