| Summary: | This story begins at the site of The Tombs, a jail in Chinatown that is currently being doubled in size as a part of a distributed alternative to the Rikers Island Jail. The new megajail will have capacity to house up to 886 people in detention and will include space for on-site services and programming, staff facilities, and publicly accessible commercial and community space on the ground floor. This exposes how architecture behaves as a mode of cultural production and acts in service of capitalist and carceral systems. Nowhere else is this more evident than in New York City’s Chinatown - often called the final frontier for development in Lower Manhattan. Immigrants, who’ve long come in search of land, green pastures, and single-family homes, find themselves Downtown and within ethnic enclaves, where homeownership is historically and canonically low. At this site, generations of indigenous tribes, freed African communities, and various immigrant communities endure a cycle of settlement, disenfranchisement, and eventually, destruction. The city, rather than invest in its communities, responds each time with a new jail. Under this urban mode, architecture provides few forms of accessible inhabitation beyond the neo-feudal rental system and racialized prison industrial complex. It exists to extend exploitation by selling the dream of homeownership, yet only makes room to support a select few. This thesis is interested in the limited means of shelter that are encapsulated within the architectural imagination - it asks to reconsider new value systems beyond ownership and incarceration. If architecture were to reimagine how it produces - culturally, tectonically, morally - how could it act in service of the people of Chinatown, and in earnest support of the Dream that the profession has helped to proliferate? Or better yet, this thesis will reject and reverse the pattern of the site to wholly reimagine Chinatown and its dreams: first, to destroy the jail, then, to facilitate reconstruction, re-enfranchisement, and resettlement of communities lost.
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