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By Pim Pitchapa Jular

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This project’s notion of ‘Living Arts City’ aims to bridge the gap between cultural micro community and the fast growing industry of the new development within the Bronx.  While the neighborhood is understood to be the next ‘to-be-gentrified’ target, the project introduces an incremental strategy for both micro livelihood of the local and the emerging industry to live together mutually upon its own urban infrastructure, the 4 Train.  Both entities are required to be dependent upon one another in order to create a new model for a creative urban platform. I see the Bronx, which uniquely consists of diverse built environment and cultural forces, as a new cultural corridor for the expanding businesses from the surrounding influences. The prominent culture of food and eating, informed by both small and large food distributors throughout the Bronx, has been chosen as a way to kick start a new urban vitality. The unique immigrant locals are encouraged to present their everyday culture with food events on their own rooftops, transforming the space into an incubator of new development roofscape magnet.

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The ‘spine’ which cuts across the borough, linking South to North Bronx, becomes a suitable gateway to capture the ever changing movement of the city, both tangible and intangible. The train offers multi-layered connection to the vacant roofscape at a higher level along its lining, yet, connects to the intimate domestic life of the locals on the ground floor. The aspects add values to the property and shift the position of the power holder to the micro community instead of the top down corporate structure.  Using the train as a tool to observe, it is as if the ‘spine’ is a scanner for the city, archiving and monitoring the endless adjustment of micro and macro urban form.