Re:Play Reclaiming the Commons through Play
Manhattan and Brooklyn, NY
Re:Play for CfA:
In Re:Play, young residents of three New York City Housing Authority campuses reimagined their public spaces through play, addressing the need for intergenerational space for healing and gathering. The intersecting impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, structural racism, and decades of disinvestment disproportionately affected the health, safety, and social fabric of NYCHA public housing residents. In this project, young residents describe the toll of these impacts including the violence that can follow from disinvestment. Too often, the official responses to local crime focus on “hard” security such as floodlights and cameras. The young resident designers replace strategies of criminalization with those of care and investment and reclaim their public spaces for the communal joy fundamental to well-being,
From June to December 2021 and then again from August to October 2022, we engaged young residents of three East Harlem NYCHA campuses that often find themselves in conflict. We asked how might public play loosen our socially constructed identities and absorb us in more equitable and peaceable encounters? What fosters intergenerational and communal public play? We used weekly workshops, storytelling, listening/discussion sessions, and filmmaking to find the answers. Excerpts from the exhibit follow; Click here for the digital exhibition viewing in its entirety, including the films and animations.
PLAY exhibits our young artists’ collages, some of which are animated. These are small, implementable interventions that imaginatively transform the public spaces of NYCHA and East Harlem and also embody larger aspirations for places of nature, beauty, exploration and connectivity.
OUR HOME is a map with accompanying videos that provides the larger socio-political and cultural context of East Harlem both past and present. The map identifies key moments in the young artists’ vibrant urban life in East Harlem. But we also see the impact of the historical redlining that ultimately destroyed neighborhoods and cleared the ground for public housing. As the city becomes simultaneously denser and more vulnerable to climate change, the challenge lies in ensuring that this increasingly valuable landscape will justly benefit its residents.
Field Notes from the Future zooms out in time and space to imagine the future of NYCHA. Taken together, the works portray NYCHA as a self-sustaining oasis amidst a larger urban context best by disinvestment, and climate change thus turning the tables on its current dysfunction.
Re:Play Project Team for CfA
Gans and Company: Deborah Gans, Jared Rice Corey Arena, Victoria Jaimie , Fabrizio Ungaro,
Pratt Institute Faculty: David Burney, Caitlin Cahill, Jerrod Delaine
Pratt Institute Students: Catherine Chattergoon, Onyi Egbochue , Sydney King, Jared Rice
Nancy Owens, ASLA, LEED AP, Nancy Owens Studio
Robin Moore, The Natural Learning Initiative, North Carolina State University
Resident Designers Project 1: Aboubakar Cherry, Karim Couser, Bobbye Hall, Devvon Howell, Brendon Valerio
Kate Levy, Documentary Filmmaker
Cecilia Sweet-Coll, Animator
Community Partners Neighborhood Safety Initiatives, Center for Justice Innovation: Eugene Rodriguez, Program Coordinator, East Harlem Safety Plan, Layman Lee, Project Director
Re:Play for PRATT:
Following the work with young residents that became our exhibit at the Center for Architecture, the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice (MOCJ) approached our local partners The Center for Justice Innovation and asked if we could continue under the sponsorship of their summer VIBE program 2022. For that program, the initial Pratt student mentors organized and led the sessions while the first young artists became mentors to the new cohort of youth. Ongoing Project documents process from both sessions, including the tent pop-ups at Wagner and Jefferson Houses where we brought the exhibit “home” to East Harlem and gallery panel discussions centered on the young residents. All these activities constitute play as urban healing and as leadership training.
The Pratt Exhibit featured a new exhibit design by Gans and Co where we brought the collage “Yellow Brick Road” by Aboubaker Cherry to life as a seating area for viewing Creating While Remembering, the video by Kate Levy. It also included a new setting for the sculptures that combines the young artists’ visionary sense of landscape with their deep interest in the cultures of African diaspora represented in totems and monuments.
Re:Play Project Team for PRATT:
Gans and Company: Deborah Gans, Jared Rice, Corey Arena
Pratt Institute Faculty: David Burney
Pratt Institute Students: Catherine Chattergoon, Onyi Egbochue, Sydney King, Jared Rice
Nancy Owens, ASLA, LEED AP, Nancy Owens Studio
Resident Designers: Michael Ayers, Aboubakar Cherry, Amiah Geigel, Devvon Howell, Nyesha Harris, Harold Johnson, Kaniyah Johnson, Tyrell Lyles, Isaiah McCants, Rachel McQuire, Laura Ramjit Patrick, Dennis Quinn, Mouhamed Sidibe
Program Mentors: Bobbye Hall, Devvon Howell, Brendon Valeria
Community Partners Neighborhood Safety Initiatives, Center for Justice Innovation: Eugene Rodriguez, Program Coordinator, East Harlem Safety Plan, Layman Lee, Project Director
Selected Awards and Publications:
“An Exhibit Imagines How Design Can Reconnect Communities.” Davidson, Justin. Curbed, 27 Apr. 2022
“Towards a New Commons, Away from Silver Bullets.” The Avery Review, Oct. 2022
