Rockaway’s Housing Superstorm brings together concerns for coastal neighborhoods in New York City that are under threat from both rising sea levels and processes of gentrification. The report follows the three-part journey of the project: firstly designing community workshops, supported by the community organization RISE (Rockaway Initiative for Sustainability and Equity); secondly, developing a public space plan that connect areas of housing—in particular public housing—with Jamaica Bay; and thirdly, in the context of predicted sea level rises, forming longer-term spatial strategies that address needs for repair, elevation, and relocation.

While many questions were posed through the semester, one concern repeatedly reemerged: From planning the project to editing this report, we consistently asked how we can develop fair and meaningful conversations that can empower the communities we worked with. This report describes our endeavors to achieve this.

The project was initiated by the Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design, Gary R. Hilderbrand; it was generously supported by David Luberoff and Chris Herbert at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies; and it was made possible through a collaboration with Jeanne DuPont at RISE (Rockaway Initiative for Sustainability and Equity).

Read this report in full on issuu.

Some of the largest architecture firms have effectively become war corporations. At the same time as designing Olympic parks and world-famous buildings, they have constructed military bases, maintained weaponry, and trained personnel for wars in which hundreds of thousands of people have been killed. In some conflicts, the same firms have been contracted from invasion to reconstruction, including facilitating military attacks, rebuilding war-damaged infrastructure, and establishing new governments. Architecture for Warfare tells the story of a form of multidisciplinary corporation that employs architects skilled in designing structures alongside former military personnel with experience handling live-fire weapons. It highlights the tensions and contradictions within these architecture-led firms that claim to make the world a better place. The book combines personal narrative with detailed research to reveal unsettling relations between design, planning, and armed conflict.

Ed started the book 5-years ago when he was awarded a research grant from the Graham Foundation-but the book goes back about 20-years when the firm he worked for was bought by what Christian Sorensen calls a “war corporation”. It examines a form of architectural corporation that profits from conflicts and reconstruction.

[Image credit: Cover of book featuring tapestry by Rachel Clements, 2023]

This drawings are developed from a keynote address to the I.A.L.E. (International Association of Landscape Ecology) annual conference in Milan (2019) and subsequently developed as a keynote lecture at the Architectural Association (A.A.) in London (2021). Many thanks to Antonella Contin, David Grahame Shane and the organizers of I.A.L.E. and to Alfredo Ramirez at the A.A. for the invitations. I am also grateful to Gareth Doherty and Charles Waldheim at Harvard Graduate School of Design for the opportunity to develop the research further, including the drawings for a book chapter, for a forthcoming book they are editing.

Outline: Realising the possible requires gaps left open in the intersection of lives and aspirations, ecologies of places and designs, relations and things. It necessitates identifying somewhere to contribute to, navigating space where there seems to be none, and interjecting during pauses in conversations even when the first words are clumsily composed. Making possible also involves struggles—forcing open space for things to happen—and defending that space from occupation, ensuring opportunities for lives excluded and futures denied.

Hope and actions towards making possible require a view of the future: Whether a full perspective of what can be achieved or a partial, constrained, and fleeting interstice, making possible requires a belief in future worlds. Lands taken back from oppressive rule demands belief in a different future, it begins with moments seized and fragments reclaimed. Finding presence in congested cities requires seeking out spaces uninhabited, workplaces left vacant. Contesting emergent publics requires being present, setting forth visions, establishing new relations.

Making Possible, is a 1-day symposium (16 May 2024) exploring how, within austere regimes of tightening controls and oppressive surveillance, possibilities can be identified and constructed, potentialities realised. It is a symposium that explores situations, spaces, and actions of making possible, a discussion of other futures constructed from care, generosity, and compassion—with determination. Between theoretical investigations and grounded empirical research, speakers will discuss what AbdouMalique Simone describes as the ‘possibility for propositions and the rehearsal of experimental ways of living that circumvent debilitating extractions, surveillance, and capture—for the time being.’ (Simone 2022:6)

Speakers: Anushka Athique (Spatial and Digital Ecologies, University of Greenwich), Elisa Cattaneo (Domus Academy / Politecnico di Milano), Kate Davies (Unknown Fields / Architectural Association), Stephen Kennedy (Sound and Image, University of Greenwich), Maria Korolkova (Spatial and Digital Ecologies, University of Greenwich), Justin McGuirk (Future Observatory – Design Museum with AHRC), Victoria Pratt (Invisible Flock), Natasha Trotman (Royal College of Art), and chaired by Ed Wall (Spatial and Digital Ecologies, University of Greenwich).

Publication: A publication will be produced from the discourse, published by the Centre Press in collaboration with Testing-Ground journal, also including contributions from Anna Antonova (Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society), Catherine Maffioletti (Spatial and Digital Ecologies, University of Greenwich), and AbdouMalique Simone (University of Sheffield / Polytechnic University of Turin).

Organisers: The international interdisciplinary symposium is organised by the Centre for Spatial and Digital Ecologies at the University of Greenwich.