Disruption: Urban Protest Culture and City Life

My current research addresses disruption of urban life during prolonged social unrest. In 2019, I left my home in Chile when unrelenting violence broke out between protestors and State agents in my neighborhood. The trauma of leaving forced me to re-examine my ideas about belonging, access to public space, and violence itself. In this project, I am concerned with how architecture and the physical environment are strategically used and functionally affected during riots/protests and the outcomes this has on quotidian city life. Drawing on similar protests occurring simultaneously (primarily in Hong Kong), I blend historical research and personal narrative to reveal disruption at levels ranging from the psychological to the social, in terms of destruction and defense of the material city and its relationship to 'home.'  

A related project looks at cases of building disasters across time and place, categorizing the methods by which buildings become weapons (war, terrorism, unrest, natural disasters, accidents, misconduct, etc.)

I am incorporating research from both projects into a novel.

History of Urban Housing Types in Santiago, Chile

This project was a precursor to what became a chapter in my doctoral thesis that traced the history of a building type known as cités from France to Chile through elite social networks, specifically through architects that trained in Paris. The larger project detailed typologies of buildings that were new at the time (late 19th century) to understand how certain types of housing for workers became differentiated from other types. I found that urban form, geographic location, and names of new building types mattered for cultural distinctions of both buildings and people in the city center.

Seminar Paper:

“Cités in The American Paris: Urban Architecture, French Culture, and the Creation of Worker Housing in Santiago,” Paper presented Latin American Institute Research Seminar, Stockholm University, Sweden, March 4, 2016.

Stoop-sitting in Harlem

In this project, which started as my master's thesis, I wanted to understand if stoop-sitting had an effect on crime in low-income neighborhoods where the culture of sitting on the front stoop is ingrained. I lived in Harlem at the time and it became my test case. However, back in 2010, there was no publicly available block-level data for crime in NYC. To get around this, I used a dataset that showed block-level instances of graffiti (an indicator for social disorder). I then used the architecture of the stoop as a stand-in for stoop-sitting and found that when the number of stoops on a block increases, the amount of graffiti decreases (with other variables constant). This is framed within the idea of 'eyes on the street' (Jacobs, 1961), where a neighborly gaze on the street was theorized to lower crime. 

Conference Papers:

“Signaling through Space: Stoop-sitting and Deterrence in West Harlem,” Paper presented European Sociological Association PhD Summer Conference, A Sociological Imagination for the 21st Century, York, UK, July 27-29, 2014.

“Architecture and Disorder: The Case for Stoop-sitting as a Mechanism of Deterrence,” Paper presented 17th Annual Aage Sørensen Memorial Conference, New York, NY, April 11-14, 2013.