Relational Ontology and the Social-Architectural Production of the Projects

The Projects as represented, representational, and representations were simultaneously of a modernist, utopia design, as well as of the fallout of specific cultural and economic policies in U.S. cities. The two cannot be separated and, moreover, it seems necessary to consider how the two co-produced one another through the their respective generations of the 'city within city,' public housing, hoodlum city, modernist designs of social integration. Moving away from the notion of who is to blame--i.e. was it poor design, inadequate fiscal integrity, outright racism, etc.--it is pertinent to consider how this space engendered these contexts. To that end, it seems fit to ask what stories can the Projects, as an idea, form, population, and condition, tell about the relationship between people and the built environment? To what consequences is each implicated within the other in a kind of relational ontology, as Lefebvre indicates in The Production of Space (1974)?

What do people's relationships to space not only tell us about their social and material conditions but how such space constitutes a particular groups' understanding of their conditions? In other words, how are spaces representational as well as generative, affective in a sense that they are the means through which particular knowledges are crafted and disseminated. It is through this process, I believe, that something like the 'inner-city'-its spaces and bodies-become fixed objects of knowledge within and outside of the physical spaces of the projects. Historical and economic circumstances are certainly one extremely important way to tell the story of a place like the Stella Wrights homes in Newark, yet this tends to overlook the nuance of what happens between intentions, circumstances, and effects. I am concerned with the space between a perceived, conceived, and lived space trialectic, considering it, rather, as a continually lived space where architecture is a process of construction that is equally affective and social as it is material. What are the limits of knowing one's condition as a reflection and generative force of impoverishment? What are the possibilities of inhabitants knowing themselves through their material circumstances and the greater historical, cultural, and economic narratives circulated around and through their space?