Democratic Impermanence

Abstract

Democracy is a word that generally provokes perceptions of freedom, choice, or the understood ability to have an effect on your environment. However, the actual composition of our physical environment is largely the product of forces that are outside of our control and often leads to a condition which is not representative of the individuals who use that particular place. We use a democratic process for selecting individuals who contribute to the creation of our environments, so why can we not use a similar democratic process to directly create our physical environment? The term democratic is used to illuminate the possibility of how the local users of a place can directly create an environment that is suited for and driven by their needs. Contemporarily, traditional real estate development patterns have created a dramatic hindrance as to how individuals can organize and reorganize their physical environment. This is the very condition that this thesis intends to revoke, by taking a more proactive role in the regeneration of our environments. Through the democratic participation and installation of temporary infrastructure people and program this thesis seeks to recontextualize disengaged fragments by using a state of temporality as a tool to initiate a process that triggers the manifestation of not necessarily a physical form but perhaps the framework for a future programmatic fixture.