To start, let's talk about how Island City Lab approaches architectures of well-being, and what that might mean in the city.
We've been understanding city and urban structures as relational — as people relating to each other, but also as systems that relate with each other, such as natural systems and different social systems. Those relationships aggregate into us all being sort of connected in a city, even miles apart.
I agree, and in the Caribbean context, livelihoods have to be intertwined with that. Understanding infrastructure, land, and people's ability to make livelihoods for themselves feels like an essential relationship. In the Caribbean, a place that was born of colonialism, born out of slavery, where the idea of independence and autonomy has not been broadly achieved, especially for Black populations, the relationship between land, people, and infrastructure as it relates to livelihoods is really relevant.
What led you there, as a city planner and as an architect?
Being from Jamaica and going to planning school in the U.S., there is a disconnect between what you're being told and what you're seeing in your community. One of the things I missed learning was the relationship between people and the aspirations and beliefs put into infrastructure. A road isn't just a road, it represents a city's belief about who they are and who they're going to be. So much of the propaganda around infrastructure in the Caribbean is based on developed countries’ ideas about infrastructure and the notion that, to become developed, we have to have the same kind of infrastructure, too. The functionality of a road is almost irrelevant when the road itself carries so much promise and poetics. I don't think we talk about that in planning school at all.
Going through my architecture education, I didn't realize the extent to which it has maybe always been commodified by the status quo. Projects I worked on in New York were largely resulting in displacement of communities, though they were never advertised that way. They were always framed as progressive infrastructure or progressive public provisions. But those things displace, distort and remove entire populations.
Coming back to Jamaica and the Caribbean, we see how these aspirations of progress — the kind of architecture I was working on in New York — have become embedded in our psyche, and it becomes difficult to understand how we relate to land when land is packaged and commodified. We’ve had to unlearn this purely technical perspective and understand that all the moves we make are political. As built environment practitioners, every move we make has the potential to disconnect or to restore. That's never taught in traditional educational frameworks.
What happens when that rethinking meets the realities of practice?
It’s a big clash! I think many people who work in the built environment end up operating in silos. If you're an engineer you focus on a particular piece of infrastructure you've been trained on. As architects, designers, urban planners, we often operate in our own silos and we're not looking at infrastructures as relational. But there are relationships between a built piece of infrastructure and people: how they use it, how they view it, how they interpret it in relation to their own identity. By flattening that understanding, we're losing a lot of meaning. We're losing a lot of efficiency and productivity, even, because we're just looking at these infrastructures in a very isolated way.
The status quo is really good at being very reductive, and it does not deal well with engaging with complexity. Managing that complexity of relationships, of relating across systems, across social structures and networks in a city is hard. And too often the status quo in design and architecture just seeks to flatten, to reduce, and to package these broad concepts into things that can be sold, things that can be manipulated.
And commodified.
And commodified, yeah.
So how do you start to shift some of that understanding, at the level of the city?
I think it's a hard question. How do you move from individual perceptions or aesthetic preferences of infrastructure into a more collective understanding? One of the things we've been learning and seeing in practice across different communities, largely in Latin America, is the idea of identifying yourself around the infrastructure that you use.
In Jamaica, someone who's taking the bus is not necessarily identifying themselves as a bus rider. They're identifying themselves as someone who will eventually own a car. So car infrastructure appeals to them because they think, "In the future I will be a car owner."
What does it mean to instead identify yourself in relationship to the infrastructure that really impacts your life and quality of life and general experience? As architects, as designers, we're trying to find language that best expresses that. And the academic language we leave school with is not it. It's not useful enough to capture that. The goal is to figure out how to have people identify with infrastructure as the user, as someone on the front line of its experiences.
We've been trying to shift between community hyperlocal scales and municipal scales in the work that we do. We see them as entirely connected, because a problem that occurs in a community can have broader impacts across an entire city. It means understanding the complexity that there are broader political, social, and economic forces at play in that community. But also, when we're working at the macro scale, things impact communities at the local scale. Shifting between the two is a constant part of the work.
What does that look like in practice in Cassava PieceA community in uptown Kingston, Jamaica, located along the Constant Spring Gully, facing persistent challenges around waste management and flooding., in Kingston?
What we've been trying to do — especially through our collaboration with rearc — is developing processes, not necessarily a product. If you have a horrible process but a good product, well, the product isn't actually a good product. Is it really a well-designed public space if you had to shift ecologies and shift social relationships with the land? We're trying to understand urban and community processes: feel them, interact with them, and understand that they have been happening long before we arrived. We ask how we can flow with them, like water, and bring that Bruce Lee energy to processes as they continue before us and beyond us. That's the framework we're trying to work within currently.
And it’s hard to do that without understanding that this is a current phase of a historical process that, from the abolition of slavery, has separated Black Caribbean people from land and therefore their ability to derive a livelihood from that land — inhibiting independence and self-determination.
For example, the Environmental Wardens are a group of community members that have organized themselves to manage waste in Cassava Piece. We're working directly with them, understanding their processes, their rituals of waste collection, containment, and disposal, and exploring how we can intervene to support their initiatives while working towards developing decentralized cyclic processes that reinterpret waste as a resource. It definitely becomes an exercise in understanding logistics.
We understand our role as designers, not as authors of infrastructure in space, but as observers working in solidarity with a generational process of land intertwined in pursuit of livelihoods with the ultimate goal of self-determination and independence.