On January 7, 2015, CHPC staff and a few board members had the wonderful opportunity to accompany Bradley Samuels of Situ Studios on a tour of Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Mega Cities at MoMA.
The exhibition is broken up into six urban case study teams: New York, Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, Lagos, Hong Kong, and Istanbul. Walking into the gallery, the visitor experiences a cacophony of sounds and a variety of visual experiences. Full-scale maps and illustrations cover the walls; tucked in the back corner is the area devoted to New York City.
Our fair city itself happens to be the least dense of the group but Situ Studio explored, “the hidden density of New Yorks informal housing not by trying to shift residents elsewhere, but rather, by proposing a way for communities to thrive within the neighborhoods they already inhabit. By focusing on tactical interventions, additions, and renovations of existing housing stock, we envision a landscape of accretive architectural proliferation that populates rooftops, backyards, industrial buildings, and other available spaces.”
They were able to utilize some of CHPC’s data from Making Room to analyze the changing household composition in the city and highlight the persistence of shared housing, and the growth of singles living alone.