Designing for Transitions

Poor Air Quality in Pittsburgh

Carnegie Mellon University / Transition Design Seminar 2022

Team Strange Attractor: Kristian Pham, Hannah Kim, Emily Edlich, Alexis Morell, Shariq M. Shah

Our team has coupled strategic and actionable ‘facets’ of futuring with larger mindset and regime shifts. The ecological, social organizational, economic, and political changes are mapped to shifts in cultural understandings of each level.

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In speculating future developments, it is clear that the attitude of developers, designers, and policymakers often fail to acknowledge the existing circumstances and communal networks already in place from across these levels. Future facets, then, must take an active role in community led efforts of improvement, as this enables forms of futuring that are not reliant on the displacement of people who make up the rich levels. In this way, we can bring about the collaboration of various cultures, backgrounds, and occupations for the renegotiation of a just future.

Our team’s process has focused on focus areas that we believe are key in advancing just transitions across each level.

1. Participatory Design methods to co-create and co-speculate equitable futures

2. Actively engage with current conceptions of neighborhood identities

3. Design access to key social services, public spaces, and resources

5. Challenge conventional modes of knowledge, skill, and capital extraction

Our design approach centers on access and agency, where our future facets will integrate into existing networks of community leadership, and connect them with tools and resources for community empowerment. Embedded within our framework will be shared modes of collective food production, an effective mode of pursuing socio-economic solidarity. These acts of co-futuring seek to propose a post-capitalist conception of equitable growth.

The Household

The “household” is traditionally described as something individual, owned, and based on histories of colonial land ownership. This ownership creates distinctions between the household and the environment it occupies. If the household is predicated on individual ownership of resources and land, our future scenarios must champion shared ownership and our responsibility to resources and land. Commonly shared spaces are collectively maintained. Individual households plug into and are integral parts of the social organizations of larger housing communities.

Housing is a right, and carries with it the complexities of political and economic gatekeeping to this right. Throughout the current pandemic, we’ve seen rent strikes in cities around the country coupled with record unemployment and the news that minimum wage cannot pay for rent in any U.S State. At the same time, thinking of the household as only infrastructure or commodity shapes the way design solutions ignore the complexities of the household.

1. Households will share and carpool renewable energy powered vehicles if they are necessary.
2. Households will have access to public transportation with the first checkpoint within 10 minutes walking distance.
3. Each household uses their compost to enrich the soil of backyard gardens, maximizing the soil’s ability to store carbon. While food waste sent to landfills used to contribute 8% to global methane emissions, households now produce very little food waste and in turn reduce the CO2 in their air. Src

Mill City Grows, an urban agriculture program in Lowell, Massachusetts, is a hub of community connection.

The Neighborhood

The “neighborhood” becomes a network of housing, food growth, and production based on a sharing of resources, collaborative co-creation, green energy job training, and collective housing aimed at community driven economic empowerment.

The post industrial labor force of cities like Pittsburgh hold various sets of skilled, yet displaced, craftsmen. Through makerspace courses, previously displaced workers can pursue certifications and skills for clean energy jobs.

People have historically been entirely removed from their neighborhood’s means of energy production, where extraction contaminates landscapes and smokestacks pollute horizons far away. How can new energy infrastructures craft a symbiotic relationship between neighborhoods and their means of energy production?

We understand that new energy infrastructures are socio-cultural as much as they are ecological and technical. The integration of community leadership and local economies will drive the systemic organization of new energy systems and their relationship with communities.

1. Regenerative agriculture is used in community and backyard gardens to maximize soil’s carbon sequestration.
2. Solar, wind & geothermal energies are produced to create hydrogen + electricity for that neighborhood.
3. Green infrastructure is used as one of the main methods of producing wind energy.
4. Sidewalks and walkways are lined with vibration panels that transform the kinetic energy.
5. Neighborhood makerspaces allow for the sharing of information and resources, providing an educational basis for clean energy jobs and for reparative and generative skills that lessen the need for mass production.

A Guidebook of Alternative Nows

The City

In our cities, infrastructures build on one another. Our cities collect data on virtually every aspect of human life: pedestrian flow, traffic, air quality, energy production and consumption. This data is then used to generate the implementation of subsequent infrastructural systems for waste removal, power generation, and transportation.

This resulting data can be made open source and is used to formulate innovative solutions by engineers, designers, and policymakers. This approach allows for a long term investigation of trends and relationships in our cities.

Noise levels can be mapped to changes in zoning or how air quality changes following investments in clean energy. In our future smart cities, designers and policymakers can use open source data to develop design applications for climate change and social justice. However, it is important that we question both the data that we use to develop these new infrastructures and the subsequent biases that our new infrastructures generate.

1. Greater investment in public transportation to lower use of fossil fuel reliant cars.
2. There will be solar powered infrastructure in parking lots. These infrastructures will provide shade for parked cars, generate energy for EV charging infrastructure, and generate energy for the grid.
3. Other than the transport in and out of the city, there is a no vehicle zoning law within the city. Instead, the city has public walkways, bicycle lanes & green spaces
4. Main method of travel between cities is through high speed magnetic rail transportation.

The Region

Across the region, there will be ecological rehabilitation of overgrown and contaminated lots, access to usable green space and park infrastructure. Material reuse strategies will harvest building materials from homes that are set to be demolished. Region rehabilitation plans will bring together city partners like Tree Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy, and Western Pennsylvania Conservancy for meaningful collaborative rehabilitation across the region.
Important regional actors in this process are the City Planning Commission, the Pittsburgh Housing Authority, and the Urban Redevelopment Authority, who are integral in purchasing vacant lots that are owned by the city. These government actors prioritize the long term growth of the region while incorporating policy preventing displacement and gentrification through practices like rent ceilings.

1. Steel is no longer produced. Most building materials are recycled from existing structures. New materials are exclusively ‘biomaterials’ such as hemp, mycelium, wood, or bamboo.
2. Moving away from horseshoe model of extraction and exportation of material to circular economy promotion of local.
3. Recycling facilities are robust and thorough — returning materials back to cities and neighborhoods for public use.
4. Trees are planted in new areas and replanted in deforested areas to sequester CO2.
5. Labor and materials are tied to local cultures and governance structures.

The Planet

Across the planet, there is more focus on locally available materials and resources. Ideas of neoliberal globalization and extraction based economies are no longer viewed as sustainable or viable. Global efforts toward reducing emissions and carbon sequestration have improved air quality significantly and helped limit other effects of global warming. Shared resources among neighborhoods has increased senses of community, and have led to an increased desire for recycling and preservation. With more of a focus on local communities, there is a resurgence and celebration of regional culture.

1. Global shift away from neoliberal globalization and extraction based economies.
2. Moving away from horseshoe model of extraction and exportation of material to circular economy promotion of local.
3. Atmospheric CO2 has reduced significantly through carbon sequestration and reduced emissions, limiting the occurrences of droughts and extreme weather cycles due to climate change.
4. The sharing of resources leads to a better sense of community, and wanting to preserve and conserve what we have.