Amazon Earth
Spring 2021 | South Boston, Massachusettsinstructed by Rosalea Monacella
Amazon Earth reconfigures the urban assemblage’s relationship to ground and logistics in order to create a system that provides greater care for the vulnerable, overlooked, and overworked.
South Boston sits on constructed land, a layering of soils, sands, concrete, and wood that forms a mass to support the modern infrastructures of the past three centuries. Roads and rail lines have dictated not only how we move around the city, but also what form the city takes. During the pandemic, these movements were changed drastically. As many of the city’s residents stayed home and had goods delivered to their doors, online retailers like Amazon profited at the expense of overbooked delivery workers. Given these conditions, this project takes a closer look at Amazon’s logistics operations and asks how a deep reading of the land, and a potential unraveling of the historic infrastructures of the city, can make way for new, equitable, sustainable, and resilient forms of collective living in the near-future city.
Guiding this project is a Manual of Care: care for the ground, the worker, the resident, and the non-human. Proposed Care Stations reconfigure the urban assemblage to create new infrastructures that leverage Amazon’s success into greater care for South Boston, from the microbiota living in the soil to the children playing in the street to the delivery worker making their rounds through the neighborhood.
Exchange Stations allow the functions of delivery and waste removal to be decoupled from the residential street, opening up new possibilities for the spaces between dwellings while also reducing the burden on the delivery worker.
ReCreation Stations continue the process of landmaking by liberating the ground from its asphalt coverings, allowing healthy soils, natural hydrologies, and human and non-human residents to reclaim land that had been given over to global logistics in decades past.
Energy Stations recharge the soil and offer rest to essential workers and residents while also accomplishing an urban system that does not rely on extraction and exploitation of remote landscapes.
These reconfigurations allow an alternative vision of collective form to emerge in South Boston, one in which the logistical unit shifts from the individual residence to the neighborhood block, helping distribute labor and care more equally among workers and residents.
Recharge Park
Exchange Station
The introductory work for this project was a collaboration with classmates Jingyi Jia and Xue Bai.