Smell
Modify. Deploy. Mix.
URBAN INJECTIONS aims to navigate Brownsville, Brooklyn through a series of interventions that are to improve the residents’ perception and everyday interaction with their public and semi-public spaces. Open spaces are not scarce Brownsville, but they are rendered inaccessible as a result of boundaries -both physical and psychological. The design interventions, starting from a tactical approach and proceeding to larger gestures, are to be implemented along Sutter Avenue as a pilot site, in an attempt to ease the everyday transitions from public space to NYCHA developments.
Phase 1: Modify
The first phase attempts to create a better, more enticing threshold that will attract people’s attention and residents themselves to start using the already existing network of open spaces in their immediate surroundings. This new boundary, even more permeable, engages the elements of the fence, and takes advantage of their replicable nature. Through various combinations and along with the insertion of a cubic element, a new, low-cost urban equipment can be deployed immediately.
Due to the open-ended character of the railings as well as the multiple uses that one can apply to a cube, the combinations are virtually endless; this new urban equipment, with cubes as benches, lights, charging stations, recycling bins, and planter boxes, can be a quick, easily implementable and adaptable way to transform the NYCHA common spaces into pedestrian-friendly landscapes.
Phase 2: Deploy
The parking lots, as a vast infrastructure around NYCHA developments that remains underutilized, are the ground for the second intervention. A temporary grid with plug-in modules of various uses is applied, aiming to the creation of spaces for the Brownsville community to come together.
Phase 3: Mix
As a final yet more permanent and invasive intervention, the change of ground floors’ use in proposed. This is characterized as a long-term approach, since its feasibility its minimal due to the various economic problems that NYCHA is facing, and tries to resolve everyday urgent issues in the developments.
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