Camille Wimpe
Design
Fall 2024 | Professor Kearon Roy Taylor | thesis work in progress
This project represents the research half of a master’s thesis studio was based on research about the financialization of land and the seemingly spontaneous creation of private property. Specifically, by researching fill projects in Boston, and unpacking the funding strategies that spawned the creation of land, I began developing schemes to improve, rather than create, city-owned parcels. By experimenting with different formats, I decided that a game was the most productive way to share my findings, and highlight the absurdly abstract relationship that we have with land today. By flattening natural landscapes and representing them simply as rectangles, we are erasing natural edges, prioritizing profitability and uniformity over transformation and ambiguity.
My research primarily involved Back Bay as a “golden spike” of land-making for speculative development. Developing a strategy for future exploration, I worked on a scheme to leverage the value of city-owned vacant parcels, the assets which they retain in their portfolio acquired primarily through eminent domain or foreclosures. The scheme entails the City strategically selling off some sites for profit, then using that money to make improvements to other parcels that they also own.
Back Bay Fill Research // The studio began with a research phase, during which I worked on understanding the expansion of the edges of the Shawmut Peninsula, and the justifications for each project. Back Bay, a speculatively build project, relied on selling “parcels” - pieces of marshland - to developers or prospective homeowners, and then using this money to fill the streets, and the land to a certain height. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts owned a significant portion of this area of the marsh and profited off of this process.
The Game // Inspired by the speculative land-making project of Back Bay, which was a profit-making engine for the state, but was branded as a means to improve the quality of surrounding areas by eliminating the sewage filled cesspool that had been created by damming the marsh, I endeavored to create a process by which the city could use it’s vacant landholdings to improve a neighborhood overall. This process, rather than trying to decommodify land, emphasizes it’s financial value, and leverages it for “public good”.
Deploying the Game // As a test site for “the game,” I sampled parcels in Fort Hill, drawing speculative “profit sites” as a developer would - purely GSF, and drawing “repair sites” as the city might envision them.