AWARDS FOCUS: CRIMINALIZED FOR THEIR VERY EXISTENCE

LAM is highlighting pupil {and professional} winners from the 2021 ASLA Awards by asking designers to share an outtake that tells an essential a part of their challenge’s narrative.

Criminalized for Their Very Existence: The Spatial Politics of Homelessness

Pupil Analysis Award of Excellence

Picture courtesy Jared Edgar McKnight, Affiliate ASLA.

“A lot of my challenge’s basis was rooted in analysis into the Los Angeles Municipal Code and the info and statistics that exposed the criminalization that exists for unhoused people in Los Angeles, however it was not till I carried out my interviews with a bunch of LGBTQIA+ unhoused youths in Los Angeles that I actually discovered the soul of my challenge. These listening classes impressed the designs that populated my radical re-imagination of a streetscape in Skid Row. Every of the ‘pavilions to recharge your humanity’ that I envisioned extends supportive companies into the general public realm and was impressed by a singular story or concept that was shared with me throughout these interviews. These concepts, nonetheless huge or small, have been intimately narrated on the human scale by means of recollections or accounts of 1’s private experiences on the road, and in the course of the interviews, I began sketching and telling these tales by means of interventions that will finally prolong these supportive companies and assets in a welcoming and welcoming manner.”

  —Jared Edgar McKnight, Affiliate ASLA

About Criminalized for Their Very Existence:

Conceived as a “survival information” for Los Angeles’s unhoused neighborhood, this justice-oriented, ethnographic design analysis challenge spatializes the Los Angeles Municipal Code, the coverage that, amongst different issues, prohibits sitting, sleeping, or mendacity on sidewalks and in public areas, and proposes a brand new streetscape typology that’s extra human-centered. Knowledgeable by repeated web site visits to L.A.’s Skid Row and greater than 30 in-person interviews, together with conversations with LGBTQIA+ people, this challenge makes use of intensive mapping and knowledge visualization to synthesize the varied opaque, usually discriminatory guidelines, codes, and ordinances that govern human conduct and to vividly render the present-day actuality through which “virtually each occasion of 1’s day by day life and routine is punishable whereas unhoused.” The challenge engages a number of scales and approaches to make legible the quite a few authorized restrictions aimed toward unsheltered populations and proposes a framework—a community of protected areas that may evolve over the course of a 24-hour cycle to fulfill the distinctive wants of the unsheltered, establishing another infrastructure of compassion and justice. Via the recodification of city house, L.A.’s civic panorama transitions from one among criminalization to lodging.