While cemeteries are often perceived as non-renewable resources, as they close their gates to new burials, opportunities for transforming them into multifunctional environments for both the living and the dead arise. By reimagining cemeteries as more than mere burial grounds, I envision them as dynamic urban amenities serving local communities. The Design Guide imagines a cemetery revitalization project from ideation to implementation and provides tools, guiding questions, and strategic approaches to breathe new life into urban cemeteries closed to burial. It's accompanied by a Decision-Making Canvas intended to be printed and used in person for reflection, approximate task tracking, and design thinking communication. The Design Guide and DMC are living, breathing entities that adapt and grow alongside the communities they serve, building connections between traditions, present communities, and future generations through cemetery revitalization.
I had the opportunity to design a cultural probe — a dynamic research tool that provides valuable insights into participants' daily lives and experiences. Guided by the principles of playfulness and reflection, I engaged in a design process that involved user interviews, developing research questions, and iteratively designing the cultural probe. By implementing the probe and analyzing the gathered results, I gained unique insights about participant's relationship with hobbies and patience, identified potential improvements to the research tool and suggested nascent design ideas based on the probe's outcomes.
Reimagining Crypt’s Purposes at Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires: Proof of ConceptI completed this project with Andre Vacha as part of the Interdisciplinary Sustainable Design course at Minerva. Our visit to Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires revealed the challenge of predicting the future of decaying crypts at the site, despite its cultural significance. By prioritizing decay over disposal, upcycling, and a system-oriented approach, we aimed to enable Recoleta Cemetery Operations Management to modify crypts' purposes while preserving their aesthetic, cultural, and national value.
Volyn Folk Accessories in the 19th-20th Century: a mapping project about the fuzziness of our knowledgeMy understanding of my ancestors' clothing beyond the vyshyvanka is limited due to the impact of Soviet myths and Russia's ongoing efforts to erase Ukrainian culture. Exploring the adornments prevalent in Volyn oblast, my place of birth and upbringing, proved challenging due to the scarcity of available information. Thus, this mini project focuses on utilizing a map to convey our knowledge about Volyn's 19th-20th century adornments, while also acknowledging the inherent uncertainties in our understanding. Since regular data visualizations fail at showcasing uncertainty, I wondered if using a map will have the same shortcoming or if there are ways around it.
I continued working on San Francisco’s Parks and Recreation Department public-facing data on green space properties managed by the authority. In the first article, I cleaned two data sets provided by the Department to exclude properties that cannot be qualified as parks, such as playgrounds, recreation centers, golf and tennis courts, libraries, and the zoo.
The guiding question of part 2 of 2 is, “Are there differences between the cleaned and original park data shown in the 10-minute walking distances around green spaces?” This article aims to create two primary data visualizations based on the cleaned and the original data, which would show the audience the 10-minute walking distances (half-a-mile radius) from each mapped green space.
In 2017, San Francisco became the first city in the United States where 100 percent of its residents live within a 10-minute walk to a park, assessed by the Trust for Public Land based on park inventories taken from park-owning agencies. Still, instead of considering the number of parks per city, the ParkScore assesses the green space land area. Due to this, comparing the number of green spaces in San Francisco to the Trust for Public Land’s analysis is not very straightforward. Luckily, San Francisco P&R Department’s website provides various datasets on the parkland it manages in the city. Yet, after browsing the data, I began questioning whether each San Franciscan actually lives 10 minutes within a park. This is part 1 of 2, in which I explore the question: How does our understanding of green space in today’s San Francisco change once we examine recent public-facing green space data provided by San Francisco P&R Department?
This is not your regular tour of Berlin! Berlin's Colonialist Present is a tour of the African Quarter's toponymy, in which all the stops encompass street and place names that have a colonial legacy. During this walking tour, I invite the audience to challenge the right of these place names to exist along with the current democratic principles. I argue that by staying up these names not only keep the power dynamics between the oppressor and the oppressed alive, but also contribute to the intergenerational trauma of those who live in the African Quarter or visit it.
The Spark Page includes the links to the map of the tour with the stops, their descriptions, audio recording and the source files attached, as well as a Reflection essay on the process of making a walking tour.
Ahmed’s writings on the philosophy of happiness and feminism provide a unique lens through which we can view the ethical issues of distanced tourism in Brazilian favelas. I weave in arguments from Ahmed's 2010 piece Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness to study the introduction of cable cars in Rio de Janeiro's favelas by viewing happiness as a tool used by those with the most power. Extending Ahmed’s idea of killjoys to this case study does not only allow us to see what killjoys have been asked to give up but also what they have not received despite sharing their priorities regarding the improvement of favela life. This prompts us to think about who our cities are built for and how the top-down power dynamics penetrate and stay in our urban environments.
Is the 1906 Earthquake to Blame? Digital Humanities tutorialThis is my first try with spatial analysis using QGIS! In this tutorial, I use Census records and Sanborn insurance maps of 1900 as primary sources to form a historical question for a research project. I georeferenced the Sanborn map onto San Francisco's South Market neighborhood and geocoded the points from the Census records. As a result, I created a map that showcases the diversity of building usage and the variety of occupation types in South Market. I use this snapshot of the socio-economic landscape to hypothesize a certain "flattening"(decrease in diversity of occupation and building use) and suggest further guidelines for extending this piece to a research project.
It's impossible to ignore the injustices that informal housing settlements or squats face in Berlin and around the world. In this critical essay, I have used philosophical concepts of property ownership, the state of nature, social contract theory, and the fair play account of political obligation to discuss the future of KØPI - a 32-year-old squat in Central Berlin. I have studied two main stances regarding the topic, one that supports KØPI’s current state and location, and another that is in favor of the formalization of KØPI’s informal housing. For both positions, I've studied the potential limitations, assumptions, and implications that could follow from the decision-making processes.
Seeking Balance Between Individual and Group Rights: a Response EssayIn her 1997 essay Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, Susan Okin argues that individual rights should be prioritized over group rights because multiculturalism fails to protect the rights of in-group individuals while providing the larger umbrella group rights and privileges. I argue that individual rights should not have higher significance than group rights, but instead, there must be mediation between individual and group rights, leading to the compliance with these rights developing through the inner dynamics of a group to maintain its cultural integrity.
Small Urban Scenes: an evergrowing collection This gallery is a small collection of things that interest me in our cities. These things, I think, say a lot about those inhabiting the environment, their values, and attitudes. There is a large variety of observations captured here: from bug hotels to hostile architecture
to community efforts. It has it all (or most of it).
I agree with Trouillot that past is not a fixed reality as we have the power and agency to rethink it and highlight the underrepresented voices. Unsilencing the experience of Seneca Village was my primary focus for this project. The narrative of the Central Park's creation is centered around "important men" who destroyed an African-American and immigrant neighborhood of Seneca Village. In this paper, I use hegemony(Gramsci), representations of space(Lefebvre) and utilitarianism to study the significance of Seneca Village and showcase that it's destruction was justified by eco-gentrification performed by local elites.
An interesting realization from this project is that the construction of Central Park was essentialy the first instance of massive environmental gentrification in the US.
I have created this template for anyone studying urban planning on their own. Having struggled with structuring my learning, I tried all these methods and formats on myself, thus combining the best practices, tools and resources in this passion project. The Template can be duplicated, and modified to your needs. It is also pre-filled with some of my favorite podcasts and books.
Green Guerillas in Urban Order: Case StudyFor a couple of years now I have been fascinated with DIY urbanism. I believe that there is so much power and individual agency within these DIY urbanism practices. After watching the VOX video on guerilla gardening in NYC, I felt inspired and wrote a case study about Green Guerillas and Lefebvre's concept of "the right to the city." Despite always viewing such community-led efforts as essentially positive, in this paper I get a little critical and develop a point about formalization of some aspects of guerilla gardening for the effective long-term development of the practice. This project also provided an opportunity to view something I agree with and believe in from a critical perspective.
I learned about deep mapping and psychogeography in spring 2020 while researching about cartography. I was immediately fascinated by deep maps and their ability to shift the "traditional" power dynamic embedded in maps. By diverging from the original usage of maps(for conquest, control, exercise of political power), they challenge those practices and offer an alternative use of maps: for creativity, self-expression, discovery of your feelings and thoughts about your environment. In this paper I study the emergence of deep maps by discussing French Situationism, digitalization and the need to see cartography as a process rather than an end. I explain my understanding of the deep maps' increased popularity through media and cultural convergences. I also provide a short analysis of three deep maps, pointing at their diversity.
What the City? Podcast about Subarbanization &If you know me personally, you have definitely heard about my opinions on car-centrism. In this podcast, my classmate Nathalia Bertolo Silva and I discuss the suburbanization and the following rise of the car in the US. We touch upon a lot of difficult topics, such as the effects of the car-centrism on minority communities, the emergence of the white flight, the causes and outcomes of suburbanization and power dynamics that shaped racial relations, gender roles, and American identity.
Causal Inference: Study Replication and ExtensionThis project was completed as part of my coursework in Causal Inference course at Minerva. For this project, I read an encouragement design study(a fascinating thing in itself) called "Social Networks and the Decision to Insure" (2015) by Cai et. al and used R to replicate some of the results of the study. I further extended my replication of the linear regression results by performing three types of matching: Mahalanobis(multivariable) distance matching, genetic matching and propensity score matching.
This project was completed together with Andriy Kashyrskyy and Serhiy Khaimyk during the IV Urban Hackathon of Synchro Space. We were tasked to solve an urban planning challenge of a Ukrainian city. Our work was centered around the lack of bicycling navigation on Khortytsya island. We prototyped a model consisting of a digital and a social solution for sustainable development of cycling on Khortytsya. I was mainly responsible for the social aspect of our prototype, planning the VeloSich Quest for 500 cyclists to engage with Khortytsya, for which I evaluated business strategies and analyzed navigation maps and local cycling events.
Public Space Development Analysis:I initiated this research project while interning at State Cultural and Historical Reserve "Ancient Volodymyr" in my hometown in Ukraine. In this research, I studied the same street but about a century apart and analyzed the functions of the street, specifically function loss, weakening and persistence. I defined a "successful" public place and use The Place Diagram by the Project for Public Spaces as a tool for comparative analysis of the street in different time periods. For assessing the components of The Place Diagram for Knyazya Vasylka Street, I used qualitative and quantitative data I collected through an online survey and for assessing the same components of Farna Street, I interviewed a history researcher from "Ancient Volodymyr." I have also used concepts from complexity science, such as feedback loops, phase spaces and pushing force to strengthen my analysis.
It's Time to Rethink Cemeteries Having lived next to a cemetery for majority of middle and high school, I started wondering: what is the future of cemeteries, what do we do with them? In this article I touch upon the history of cemeteries, use symbolic-interactionism and structural-functionalism to study cemeteries as part of our built and social landscapes. I raise a question of why cemeteries are not considered public places and suggest that we have an opportunity to rethink the way we perceive and interact with cemeteries, further proposing solutions on how to achieve this.
Note: due to a lag in the system, Anh Chu is incorrencrly assigned as a coauthor;
I am the only author of this piece.