Activating Capacities
Activating Capacities (2012-2015) is a collaborative research investigation into the issues and potentials of typical American de-urbanized post-industrial city space by re/defining (expanding) the term “capacity” through the combined lenses of energy, infrastructure, and community.
Through this collaboration, we received a creative research grant from the Sam Fox School and entered the Sustainable Cities Land Lab competition in fall 2012 in which we were selected as finalists in the first round. Beyond the competition, the research was presented locally in 2014 and then at two conferences - the 2015 Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture [CELA] conference (“Activating Energy Capacities of Urban Vacant Land in St. Louis”) and the 2015 Urban Affairs Association annual meeting (“Activating Capacities: Eco Strategies for Vacant Land in St. Louis”).
Presented here are works from the competition and further research. Beyond the research, the work manifested in, or contributed to three studios. Two focused on the former Pruitt Igoe area in North St. Louis and a broader studio focused on landscapes of energy.
The current urban geography is described by centralized energy production and distribution. The St. Louis region uses 32.6 billion kWh of electricity per year (or 106.6 million BTUs of energy, gas and electric, per household in 2011). 81% of the city’s power comes from coal. This creates a fragmented landscape of charged and unequal zones that is also dependent on a polluting and limited resource. 97% of the coal powering St. Louis is transported into the city from the Powder River basin in Wyoming - over 1000 miles away. This basin extracts 80 unit trains per day of coal to power plants all over the US. Each unit train contains 100 train cars, meaning 8000 train cars leave here per day. Each train car carries 100 tons of coal which produces only 20 minutes of fuel for a city like St. Louis. The St. Louis power company Ameren spends 650 million dollars every year to bring St. Louis’ coal in on the trains. The city consumes 40 million tons of coal per year. The mines only have an estimated 20 years left to operate, therefore finding an alternative is imperative
North St. Louis holds a disproportionate amount of vacant land and abandoned properties. Over 1400 blocks have some form of vacant land or building. Approximately half of these properties have a structure on them.
BACKGROUND
St. Louis is considered one of the “Rust Belt” cities along with Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Detroit, characterized in general by urban decay, population loss and economic decline due to the departure of major industries.
The St. Louis region is comprised of St. Louis County, which is made up of 90 municipalities and 10 unincorporated census areas, and St. Louis City. St. Louis City experienced the single largest percentage of population decline of any major US city – shrinking 63% from its peak in 1950 of 857,000 people to its current population of 319,000.
St. Louis has a large amount of vacant land and buildings – approximately 24,000 vacant parcels and 7,000 abandoned buildings in the city proper. The Land Reutilization Authority (LRA) of St. Louis receives title to all tax delinquent properties not sold at sheriff’s sale and holds about 13,000 of these properties. It falls under the Real Estate Department of the St. Louis Development Corporation (the economic development arm of the city) to maintain, secure, market and try to sell these properties with the goal of “bringing all city property into productive and effective use…”.
the cost of Vacant Land
Between 1996 and 2001, St Louis demolished 790 buildings at a cost of $15.5 million. Additionally, it is estimated that the city spends at least $110 per lot per year for upkeep or almost $2 million annually. This does not include figures regarding the cost of crime in these areas and public safety hazards like fire and injury.
It also does not include the costs of maintenance and upkeep of the infrastructure for the residences and businesses that still remain in the area. Vacant lots continue to have streets that need repairs, electric, gas and communications utilities, sewer/stormwater systems, waste collection, police protection and other related quality of life services.
rethinking vacancy
Traditionally, urban development is associated with the economies brought by new building infill and increased employment. Our investigation seeks to challenge this limited framework through the exploration of alternative models based instead on environmental, infrastructural and programmatic densities. The proposition expands the term “land value” so that natural resources, environmental quality, social sustainability, livability, spatial and aesthetic concerns are included, if not made primary, over speculative revenue-generating potentials alone.
In St. Louis, this provides an opportunity to rethink the form of the city and to redefine perceptions of vacancy; to understand it not as disengaged waste space, but rather as flexible, dormant pockets of potential that have capacity to accommodate and stimulate a new, scalable form of urbanism. The vacancy of the land becomes a resource, a found condition where there is potential to map an intensity of functions onto the terrain.
We imagine a shareable public utility network, controlled by individuals. What might an open-source urban infrastructure look like? Could a city leverage vacant land while empowering energy users, and generating utility cost and carbon emissions savings?
land as generator
On a smaller scale, a single lot can demonstrate what is possible for a single site, however be potentially replicable to create a new network and an entirely new public utility. The aggregate effects of combining acres of energy-generating lots across the city could provide the ability to run streetlights, power city blocks, power events, support public housing, generate heat for residents in winter, and cooling in the summer.
We envision a kind of ‘energy capacity building’ as a ‘civic capacity building,’ a new sharable, public utility network that is controlled by individuals from the ground –up as opposed to the existing top-down centrally controlled network.
SOLWEIG Trials
Construction in progress...