“My St. Louis”: Teaching to Transform Our Cities
by Ruben Segovia and Jeremy Hartley
This week, we sat down with Ruben Segovia and Jeremy Hartley, architects and urban designers completing their Masters degrees at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Last semester, they created a project called “My St. Louis!” that helps students become active citizens and engage in the creating of their city. Let’s hear more about it from them.
R2L: Tell us about your project!
MSL: “My St. Louis!” seeks to empower youth as citizens by providing tools for them to learn about and understand their built environment. These tools — in the form of a book and animations — use scale as a framework that kids can use to explore both new and familiar relationships with the places in which they live. Moving from the room, to the house, plot, neighborhood, and ultimately the city, this project visualizes and spatializes the social and physical relationships that made these spaces what they are.
R2L: What inspired you to begin this project?
MSL: As part of one of our classes, “ Affirmatively Further: Fair Housing After Ferguson”, my colleagues and I explored St.Louis and discussed the urgency of educating citizens on the histories of our built environment. When we returned to Cambridge from St. Louis, these words of Sylvester Brown, founder of the Sweet Potato Projects, sounded in our minds.
“We need to teach kids that there’s opportunity right outside their doors. We need to teach them to see value in their communities.”
R2L: What is the intention behind this project?
MSL: The future of St. Louis lies in the hands of the coming generation. It’s up to people like us, working together, to break through physical and social barriers and unite and rebuild the city. Kids deserve to understand why things are configured and designed the way they are; they need to learn the technical and social dynamics that led to the world we inhabit today. Education is the most powerful tool to shape future imaginations. By understanding the past, we can project the future.
R2l: As it currently stands, “My St. Louis!” is an interactive workbook with hands-on activities, and you have plans to make it digital as well. What was your thinking behind making the activities so interactive?
MSL: For us, it was very important to create our project in both digital and print media. Young people navigate most of their knowledge through online tools, but a physical book still has tactile relevance — you can can revisit it anytime! We hope to offer the two as a pair that includes animations, in-book activities, and experiments that will help youth better engage with their built environment.
R2L: What do you hope young people will take away from this project?
MSL: One of our main goals is to empower kids to learn their own urban histories. By offering tools to do that both online and offline, we hope to make it fun!
R2L: What are the next steps for the project?
MSL: By structuring the project from the room to the city scale, our ambition is to create a framework that can be applied to every major city in America — and even the world. The toolkit can be customized to each city’s history, general knowledge and “explore your city” activities. We believe that the future of the cities will be brighter, more sustainable, and just if we empower our youth with the tools to understand how cities are generated and their own agency in the city-building process.
Ruben Segovia is a Mexican architect from Tecnológico de Monterrey. He has collaborated in several design practices such as Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Landa Arquitectos, and rdlp Arquitectos. He also participates as an academic advisor with several institutions such as Tecnológico de Monterrey, Roger Williams University, Wentworth Institute of Technology, and CEDIM. He has been a Teaching Assistant in Harvard GSD for Diane Davis and José Castillo, Mark Mulligan, and John Peterson. In 2010 he founded Estudio Mantra a workshop focused on solving social problematics with architectonic design tools, aiming for an integral and participatory solution between the context, its inhabitants, and the projected solution. He is currently studying a Master of Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design and expects to graduate in May 2017.
Jeremy Hartley is an aspiring landscape architect, visual thinker and designer at the Harvard Graduate school of design. He is best known for his ability to visualize abstract concepts in both still and moving images (animations, filming,videography, etc). His representational abilities are what incentivized starting and co owning the visualization firm known as “UNToLD” with his partner Hannah Gaengler. When he isn’t preoccupied with visuals he is most likely delving into his passion for producing music and sound. His understanding of the fact that imagery is brought to life through sound and that sound in and of itself is very visual, is what fuels his passion for it. Outside of the music and images he spends his time people watching in crowded spaces as a way to contemplate and become inspired.
