Nicholoas de Monchaux’s Local Code project is an effort to find way to utilize the forgotten and neglected spaces in a city.
Cities are filled with parcels of land that belong to the city, but are neglected because they seem to have little practical value. These are the little bits and pieces that fall by the wayside when a neighborhood is re-zoned, or when an alley is closed off, turning it into a dead-end, or when a street is narrowed by new construction, making it useless to car traffic.
De Monchaux points out that thanks to the digitization of public records these interstitial spaces are much easier to locate. Now that they’re easier to locate shouldn’t we consider doing something with them?
WPA2 : Local Code / Real Estates from Nicholas de Monchaux on Vimeo.
De Monchaux was inspired by Gordon Matta-Clark‘s Fake Estates project in NYC in the 1970s. Matta-Clark purchased 15 small slivers of land that the city considered unusable. Matta-Clark cataloged these spaces by collecting historical information about them and photographing them, but died before he could follow through on his vision of turning them into little zones for art and “anarchitecture.”
From Cabinet Magazine –
“Gordon Matta-Clark and Fake Estates
In the early 1970s, Matta-Clark discovered that the City of New York periodically auctioned off “gutterspace”—unusably small slivers of land sliced from the city grid through anomalies in surveying, zoning, and public-works expansion. He purchased fifteen of these lots, fourteen in Queens and one in Staten Island. Over the next years, he collected the maps, deeds, and other bureaucratic documentation attached to the slivers; photographed, spoke, and wrote about them; and considered using them as sites for his unique brand of “anarchitectural” intervention into urban space. Matta-Clark died in 1978 at the age of 35 without realizing his plans for Fake Estates, and ownership of the properties reverted to the city. The archival material that he had assembled went into storage and was not rediscovered until the early 1990s, when it was assembled into exhibitable collages. Thus,Fake Estates has emerged not only as a mordant commentary on issues surrounding property, materiality, and disappearance that marked the whole of Matta-Clark’s career, but as artifacts of his own estate, reminders of the powers of absence and presence that govern our relationship to the past.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, the parts of the city with the most neglected spaces are also the poorest parts of the city.
“If you look at the unaccepted streets, it is like heat map of all the areas with health problems, pollution issues, and neglected spaces.” – de Monchaux
Tampa should adopt its own Local Code project. The first step, I suppose, is to locate and map the forgotten slivers of space in the city.
Here’s more from the New York Times – Space: It’s Still a Frontier, and San Francisco’s Streetsblog.
“A gentrified neighborhood is a complex ecosystem becoming a monoculture,” he said. “Monocultures are fragile–they may be good in the short term, but not forever. When we have cities that are theme parks, they are not going to be able to accommodate change.”
“When there is change in living systems, to accommodate these circumstances, the things that were least valuable become the most valuable.”
