Hyperallergic Interview
Conducted by Danni Shen, March 2016
On SubUrbanisms: Stephen Fan Talks Representations and Appropriations of Suburbia
In the wake of the downsized Lower Manhattan garment and restaurant industries after 911, scores of Chinese immigrants were displaced to Connecticut seeking employment in the region's expanding casinos, including the second largest in North America, Mohegan Sun. Many of these casino workers have transformed single-family homes in nearby Norwich and Montville into multifamily communities. Currently on view at the Museum of Chinese in America located in Manhattan Chinatown, the traveling exhibition and publication curated by Stephen Fan entitled SubUrbanisms: Casino Urbanization, Chinatowns, and the Contested American Landscape, is a fascinating combination of NIMBY concerns, photographs, models, infographics, interviews, speculative housing designs, and modernist and contemporary art references that look to the ever-evolving American suburbs beyond socially-constructed standards of the Anglo-Saxon single nuclear family and binary notions of home.
With today’s occupancy laws and crowding standards originating from Anti-Coolie exclusion efforts in San Francisco during the late 19th century, how can physical infrastructure, social values, and public policies transform to face the issues of today? As increasing diversity and changing demographics challenge conventional American assumptions of suburbia within American SubUrban areas, such a case study proposes one of a multiplicity of alternatives to the cultural constructs of suburbia within the 21st Century American Dream. In learning about how other people occupy and inhabit, as well as appropriate a built environment, SubUrbanisms illustrates how we can begin to question our own norms and assumptions that shape not only suburbia, but also how we all live, regardless of cultural background, planning models, and geographic locale.
Via Skype, Stephen and I sat down to discuss the dynamics of American suburbia and suburbs across the world, from shifting Chinatowns, the New York housing crisis, community gardening, cultural and architectural hybrids, to a nation of casinos. What follows here is an interview that has been edited and condensed.
Would you describe SubUrbanisms as a residential or community system? Why SubUrban-ISMs?
SubUrbanisms challenges conventional American assumptions of suburbia, which is often tied to low-density, single-use, car-oriented development. The term refers to multiple forms of marginal or subliminal urbanization that occur in SubUrban areas, broadly defined as the urban periphery, which includes suburbs, exurbs, and beyond, such as second-tier cities or marginal centers that lie outside of metropolitan areas. This particular case study on “casino urbanization” describes the proliferation of the culturally and geographically marginalized gaming industry, and the concentrated flows of people, capital, and goods—the basic definitions of a city—that these casinos bring into SubUrban areas. Additionally, it examines casinos such as Mohegan Sun that draw Chinese casino workers who introduce urban notions of density, diversity, and dynamism into the seemingly suburban fabric of residential subdivisions surrounding the casino. But it's also about the production and appropriation of new urban experiences. As casinos seek to differentiate themselves in an increasingly saturated market with urban experiences like farmers' markets and professional basketball games, many patrons purchase subsidized casino bus packages that include food and retail vouchers to not necessarily gamble, but to socialize, people watch, even walk around for exercise. It’s a safe, sanitized environment, which is often critiqued as overly-surveilled and manipulative; while this critique may still be valid, casinos also provide an alternative public/private space in which non-gambling casino patrons can game the system.
As you travel through the exhibition, which seemingly emulates the interior of a suburban ranch home, the reoccurring imagery of this hulking, metallic casino tower is quite eerie. Framing and juxtaposition of photo-documentation and art historical references seem to be key devices in the curatorial process.
Exactly, and it challenges what we conceive of suburbia. The images from the casino tower series are purposefully untitled. There’s one photo that’s the shadow of the Mohegan Sun tower over a wooded landscape. At first, it appears as an innocuous shadow of a cloud, but it can be read as this ominous, dark patch—the casino's literal, and figurative impact on the landscape. The reason I didn’t include titles was because I wanted people to look closely and make their own interpretations of not only this casino urbanism landscape, but also the landscapes of their own homes and communities.
As the exhibition was first mounted at a fine arts museum, I wanted to engender a similar questioning that critical art practices provoke, but applied to the everyday built environment. One example is “KEEP OFF THE GRASS: The Green Lawn Aesthetic.” In reference to Magritte's La trahison des images, conventions of representation are undermined to reveal the artifice of representation, and in turn, the artifice of the lawn, represented in the exhibition by plastic turf. As a cultural construct, the grassy front lawn and often the grass seeds themselves, are historic imports that have been repackaged and re-branded as “American.” So can cultivating produce, or drying fish in the front lawns of these Chinese residents be coded as “American” in the future?
Appropriation also seems to be a critical modality throughout the exhibit on multiple levels.
Definitely, both in terms of content, as in Chinese immigrants appropriating an American housing type, and in terms of representation, such as appropriating critical or commercial art practices. The diptychs that juxtapose text and image--same image, different text, or vice versa--which I developed with the graphic designer Shane Keaney, reference Barbara Kruger as well as an HSBC advertisement campaign. Appropriating a commercial ad campaign helps draw visitors in with simple messaging strategies to unpack more complex ideas about cultural perspectives and built environments.
We've also appropriated the Dadaist tactic of making the familiar unfamiliar through re-contextualization; Duchamp famously placed a familiar object—a urinal—within the unfamiliar setting of a gallery to foster reflection on how we engage with that object. By placing what many perceive to be substandard housing or blight within the context of a museum reframes, elevates, and potentially legitimates these practices. In addition, it challenges conventional museum visitors to examine seemingly everyday practices and objects as a cultural and social art form. This defamiliarization opens new interpretations of the familiar: a door on a pedestal may seem odd within a gallery, and from one approach it appears like any door from Home Depot, but from another it's adorned with good luck charms, a symbolic threshold that regulates good and bad luck flows and demarcates the honorific space of the private domestic interior. This demarcation is embodied and practiced by the removal of shoes, not at the front door, but at the bedroom doors, within the public “outdoor” spaces of the “interior” hallway. Reflecting on this multiplication of thresholds opens a conversation on how we demarcate public and private spaces, and how we structure our sense of communities: should it be a simple binary?
You point to density as an objective quantity and crowding as a subjective condition. Some people see a populous community as vital with signs of life, and some as detracting from the quality of life.
According to some Chinese workers, living in Connecticut is too quiet. Walking by the often uninhabited front lawns or wooded areas lacks the sense of security that vitality brings, like Jane Jacobs idea of “eyes on the street:” if you know people are in the other houses or are out and about in their front yard, you feel more secure. Privacy can be scary.
Right, and then another side of the argument is that too many people in one space deteriorates mental health, and increases stress or anxiety levels, or just lack of privacy. But you’re saying if there are these cons, why not just address the cons?
Certainly there are inconveniences associated with higher density, communal living. But for many of these casino workers, it's a choice, whether to save money, or to live with the comfort of living with those who share a language and culture. The problem with regulating crowding is that there are different cultural thresholds as to what is perceived as crowding, and that regulations can be used to exclude specific types of people under the cover of regulating nuisances associated with higher density, such as noise, traffic, and parking. As many of these casino workers don't drive or host loud parties, these nuisances are not an issue, though septic systems do need to be expanded in some cases.
Your own speculative hybrid models seem critical to addressing the problems via multi-functional spaces.
With hybridity, this idea of SubUrbanisms breaks down the strict binaries between urban and suburban, single family and multifamily. Hybridizing building types, social structures and communal obligations can open new possibilities for living and community, which pushes architectural discourses on hybridity that isn’t confined to just formalism.
One of the designs takes the model of commercial/residential towers set on a retail podium—think of Boston's Prudential Center—but scales it down to incorporate a big box store, transportation center, communal living, productive gardens, and SRO towers, which emphasize quality of design and community amenities. In the living areas, it takes the planar logic of raised ranch houses with open floor plans and public spaces, dining, living, kitchen, and the segmented spaces of the bedrooms, and flipping that planar logic vertically in section. So you have these open plans of communal spaces, and these segmented private towers for single occupancy units (SROs). In the communal levels, you have space that is ambiguously defined and can accommodate multiple uses. The design also is a wink and nod to Steven Holl's Linked Hybrid project in Beijing.
The idea was also inspired by cultural hybrids, such as the kaiping dialou in Guangdong, China. Built in the 1920's by returning overseas Chinese, these single-family, multi-story homes appear almost like urban towers, yet they’re set within a rural landscape, thus hybridizing urban and rural types.
The exhibit attempts to be provocative and speculative with those housing models, but I think potential pragmatic approaches would allow for accessory dwellings, additional or mixed uses, or revisions to overcrowding standards that accommodate cultural preferences for sharing space, preferences that can inculcate values of sharing, deference, and cooperation. In addition to the increased efficiencies, these values align with the growing sharing economy, where co-living or co-housing are gaining some traction as alternative models.
Your addition of rooftop gardens to address sustainability and reduce the ecological footprint really caught my eye. Can you talk about that addition in relation to the exhibition segment dedicated to front lawn gardening in these Connecticut communities?
Rooftop gardens can also serve as a type of social sustainability, as evidenced by these front lawn gardens where neighbors cultivate not only produce, but cultivate social relationships. I’m a huge proponent of community gardening because it's one of the few activities that spans different socioeconomic backgrounds, and cultural and linguistic barriers. Yet, in many communities in this country, front lawn gardens are banned because of the suburban aesthetic, social, and financial codes that ties productive uses to poverty. Given the ecological costs of our global food supply chain, why can’t people have the choice of using their front lawn as a productive garden or a place to dry clothes?
Are you optimistic about the future of housing?
As a traveling exhibition, SubUrbanisms tries to address issues relevant to its host communities. In New York, I hope the Connecticut example provides a foil to engage conversations about overcrowding, multiculturalism, and affordable housing. Understanding and legitimating best principles rather than best practices of the ongoing transformation of existing housing stock, say subdivided housing in Jackson Heights or SROs in Chinatowns, can be another source of providing new ideas for housing alternatives. Yet when it comes to the suburbs, there’s this persistent mythology of stasis, partly due to suburbia’s promise of social and financial stability through homogenous communities and home ownership, which is tied to values and aspirations that haven't changed as suburbs have changed. By bringing these issues to light through representation and appropriation, the SubUrban can inform the urban, and vice versa.
SubUrbanisms: Casino Urbanization, Chinatowns, and the Contested American Landscape began at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum from where it traveled to its current home at the Museum of the Chinese in America in New York, on view through March 27th, 2016. The publication is available on Amazon.com, at MoCA, or Stephen Fan’s website.