Mapping Urban Futures
Citation —
Fitzgerald, Susan. 2020. “Mapping Urban Futures. Lessons from Havana, Cuba.” In Design for Humanity: Yearbook 2019, edited by Angela Wells. Fordham University, Lincoln Center Campus, New York: Refuge Press, Fordham University.
Description —
Sites of urban food production in Havana, Cuba, are an adaptable and available land resource for supporting food sovereignty and access to green medicine. Originally generated by the crisis of the Special Period, they are increasingly part of everyday urban complexity involving the social, spatial, economic, and temporal. Hard to describe when viewed from above, it is important to get close to these sites to understand how they are made and re-made and whether there are lessons within them for this transitioning city.
Henri Lefebvre made the powerful supposition that cultures dynamically produce space over time, which in turn, shapes society. He started to develop rhythmanalysis as a tool to understand this relationship, providing a useful method to study this assertion at sites of urban complexity. Rhythmanalysis captures every day, heterogeneous, and evolving urban narratives of a city, making it an important orientation to participate in and interrogate these sites to challenge how they could help reimagine a transitioning Havana.
This workshop studies how social, economic, ecological, and spatial rhythms are entwined over time to create the oeuvre of everyday urban life. It focuses pm beats particular to city life in Havana: the quotidian, the seasonal, the slow decay of infrastructure, the sudden collapse of buildings, and the resourcefulness of everyday invention within the prevailing milieu of scarcity and documents the ways in which the urban everyday day is continually changing and important to this evolving city.