GHETTO was originally exhibited at the European Cultural Centre’s 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, themed “How will we live together?”. The exhibition considered the architect's role in creating spaces for inclusion. To continue the conversation, the project was recently reimagined for a location near downtown Vancouver – a city similarly challenged to Venice with issues of housing unaffordability, economic dependence on tourism, an influx of immigrants and the displacement of others.
In the effort to explore the responsibility as global citizens to care for one another and to find mutually beneficial financial mechanisms for social benefit, GHETTO is a theoretical series of five architectural islands. Each of the project sites are positioned near one of five locations. In Vancouver: off the shores of the ancestral Squamish Senákw lands at the head of False Creek. And in Venice: the Venetian Ghetto, Stazione di Santa Lucia, Piazza San Marco, and the Arsenale. These sites were carefully selected to parallel five influencing factors. In Vancouver: the project’s site acknowledges the historical displacement of Indigenous peoples who occupied the lands before us. In Venice: the historic Jewish Ghetto in Cannaregio as project inspiration, the refugee crisis, Venetian overtourism and challenging the traditional role of the architect.
GHETTO imagines a physical conduit for the redistribution of wealth from tourists to refugees by transferring the equity garnered in the development process. The GHETTO development proposes a timeshare model funded by tourists that provides a housing mix of temporary and permanent settlement, with approximately 2,000 housing units for both tourists and refugees. While this project explores one iteration of this redistribution model, it can be applied across a variety of geographies, scales and contexts to provide a myriad of social benefits.
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