The Commons in Crisis

Retelling pandemic in Philadelphia

Instructor: Eduardo Rega Calvo

Collaborative Narrative + Individual Design [Phase 3]

In the format of a board game, Commonspoly illuminates alternative non-exploitative processes of city-making. For its capacity to broadly educate on the overall dynamics of urban development by questioning current regimes of land ownership, this studio redesigned the board game to address the specificities of Callowhill. Callowhill’s Commonspoly will serve as a launchpad for our critical discussions around architecture’s entanglement in the systems of power that produce the city. Through the act of playing, we will be exposed to various systems of exchange and forms of land ownership, where profit is replaced by benefit, market value by use-value, and where accumulations of capital and private property are challenged by the collective reclamation of the commons.

Each group derived a narrative from events that occurred during the gameplay, and also used the spatial tactics and precedents that were unlocked. Commonspoly is won by communizing all goods on the board. If there is a mix of common and public goods, it is a draw. If there are one or more private goods, then the result is a loss. As opposed to the well-known monopoly, where a player wins by making all other players bankrupt, commonspoly can only be won collectively and through strategies of cooperation, with all players working together against the speculator.”

Phase 3 was built based on the site conditions from previous phases particularly phase 2. Since the pandemic situation is over, immense mobilization and production are no longer required. Now what become immediate needs for the community is a fully open and welcoming plaza on the ground so that people can get a chance to communicate and get recovered from the social distancing. Since there is massive structure columns leftover on the site from phase 2. Phase 3 will take advantage of some of the structure as a service core for the hanging system. After taking away some of the vertical structures and slightly re-arrange some of their locations, now these structures are formed into four main service cores and huge partition walls for dividing the ground space. Thus, step three is to design a mega-roof system to hang educational and cultural programs above the plaza. And the system and hanging volumes will interact and impact the activities on the ground as well. I will elaborate more on how the design of phase 3 will provide a spatial therapy for the resiliency of the community in the future.