This studio challenges the common understanding of property as a commodity for generating profit and a haven for self-interest. Instead, we will explore property as a legal and spatial tool for fostering a regenerative economy. Our goal is to leverage our skills as architects to reframe the boundaries, temporality, and cultural expression of land ownership. The subdivision of land as property has structured racial and social justice—and injustice—by shaping the way wealth is distributed. The Jeffersonian grid, for example, accelerated the seizure of Indigenous land and lives by colonial settlement in the American West. The single-family home has banked on discriminatory loan policies and zoning laws written in the name of protecting property values. These and many other exclusive systems still endure, especially preventing Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color from generating wealth. There is a flip side to property, however. Many of its underlying logics—the commons, liability, maintenance, belonging, and yes, even profit—can be altered towards more inclusive ends. Community Land Trusts, for example, take land off the speculative market and enable their residents to manage land collectively. In another example, Usufruct Rights reserve Native American tribes’ ability to access resources on land that was ceded to the US government centuries ago. In other words, property can redistribute wealth, not just hoard it. It can proliferate resources, not just extract them. Property can play a crucial role in shaping jobs, justice and decarbonization—goals framed by climate justice and Green New Deal activists to turn away from an extractive economy based on the “depletion and degradation of natural resources, the exploitation of human labor,... and the accumulation of wealth by interests outside the community,” and towards a regenerative economy “based on reflective, responsive, reciprocal relationships of interdependence between human communities and the living world upon which we depend.”Doing so requires an entirely different spatial condition. Traditionally, private property has defined a one-to-one correspondence between parcel boundaries and a landowner’s rights and responsibilities. In fact, however, these alignments are never so clean. Stormwater might flow from your garden into my basement. A church might sell its air rights to a condo developer next door. A “town fridge” installed on the sidewalk might distribute prepared meals to neighbors in need. In this studio, we will crack these fissures open, to embrace unexpected alignments and misalignments across architectural elements such as land, foliage, foundations, walls, roofs, furniture, and fixtures.  Students in this studio will be asked to redesign a single property (or cluster of properties) located anywhere between West Oakland and Piedmont (an enclave city in the Oakland hills). Designs will focus at an architectural scale (but with an urban impact), and could involve new or retrofit construction for programs such as affordable housing, food cooperatives, a marketplace, urban farm, or arts center. Students will work in teams of 2-3 people to develop research presentations, open-ended design tests, and design proposals culminating in the creation of ¼” scale physical models depicted in stop-motion videos. We’ll use these videos to reveal how the tools of architectural design can reimagine the legal device of property to spark deeply-rooted new forms of generosity and delight. Note: this course is aligned with the Urban Works concentration.

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