67. Local Code: Real Estates
San Francisco and elsewhere / Nicholas de Monchaux
When artist Gordon Matta-Clark created Fake Estates in New York in the early 1970s, he spent three years combing through public records to identify 15 fallow, forgotten city-owned lots. Using GIS mapping, architect Nicholas de Monchaux identified over 1,500 vacant public lots in San Francisco in a matter of months. In the U.C. Berkeley professor’s eyes, when considered together, these residual, unmaintained spaces are a vast untapped resource. Using parametric design to optimize thermal and hydrological performance, he proposes a landscape design for each parcel, resulting in a network of urban greenways that will enhance the city’s ecology and benefit citizens’ health. He has extended the research to other cities, creating a database of neglected sites that could be recuperated to create robust infrastructures that could mend ecological and social circumstances. 
Click the “Next” button to turn to the page to see the next Spontaneous Intervention.
