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Ettore Santi and his architecture students are working with people in Massachusetts’ Pioneer Valley to find creative solutions to the region’s challenges.
At a time when the U.S. is divided on so many key issues, the greatest divide might not be any specific political or social issue but where someone lives.
Ettore Santi, an assistant professor of architecture and cultures, societies and global studies at Northeastern University, says geography is more important than ever, especially when it comes to urban and rural life.
It’s a divide he hopes to address using the tools of his trade –– architecture –– mostly by recentering urban people and the challenges they face in the conversation around some of the biggest issues facing the country, and world, today.
“This is absolutely essential right now because what we see in politics and what demographic data is telling us is that really the biggest divide in the U.S. is the urban and the rural,” Santi says. “I think we need to factor the geographical component of where you come from to really understand American society right now and how to make it better.”
At Northeastern, Santi has developed a course that is designed to bring attention back to rural areas and people. His master’s thesis class in the school of architecture is the culmination of his novel approach that views architecture, design and infrastructure as tools for transforming rural life.
“It was very important to me to bring into the conversation the fact that rural areas are fundamental for the existence of cities and the existence of our own life as a species on the planet,” Santi says.
“Designing the Rural” connects students with people and organizations to design solutions to problems facing the Pioneer Valley, the portion of the Connecticut River Valley that runs through Massachusetts. It’s a region with a rich agricultural and industrial history that now faces existential issues.
The northern Pioneer Valley suffers from flooding, caused by climate change-induced heavy rain, and cycles of pollution that stem from the Connecticut River being the most heavily dammed river in North America.
The southern part of the valley is a post-industrial ruin many years removed from the region’s legacy as the “Silicon Valley of textiles,” Santi says. The many industrial paper mills shuttered, leaving behind unemployed workers and toxicity in the soil and river.
Spread across two semesters, the first half of Santi’s course gives students time to understand the socio-economic context of the Pioneer Valley and its people and figure out which local issue they want to focus on addressing in their project. Part of that research process involves a weekend trip to the Pioneer Valley where they meet with local partners to better understand their perspectives on local issues.
Students hear an array of perspectives from farmers, community organizations focused on relocating climate refugees from Puerto Rico, people who work on communal land projects, winery owners, chefs and even members of the cannabis business.
They end the semester proposing a broad regional strategy to address a specific issue that they’ve chosen to focus on. They then hone that strategy into a detailed architectural design proposal during the second semester by working more closely with specific local partners.
The projects that have come out of Santi’s course have been ambitious and creative in their approach to solving issues in the Pioneer Valley.
Architecture graduate student Christopher Beck proposed creating the Pioneer Valley National Culinary Heritage Trails across 50 miles of trails and several thousand acres in the valley that would also serve as the site of curated culture tours.
The core of the project would let local farms and businesses reap the benefits of the experience, selling goods along the trails and offering tours, overnight camping stays and volunteer farm stays. Beck worked with the National Park Service and local partners to create a detailed plan of what the heritage site could look like and even crafted seven-day itineraries for potential tours of the valley.
With Valley Singer, Qingyuan Wang designed a music festival on one of the Connecticut River islands that would bring money, housing and attention to the region. The festival would be a major annual attraction.
“The Coachella of Massachusetts,” Santi says, would be run by a nonprofit that would recirculate the money generated by the festival to “provide affordable housing for the valley, especially for the agricultural workers that come to the valley from the Caribbean and Mexico.”
By studying cycles of production, Wang created a calendar of when the new housing could be used by agricultural workers and when it could be used by the people who come to the region for the festival.
“What I really like about this project is that it really tries to take rural areas and rural people and their problems seriously,” Santi says. “I hope that this can become a method of operating to gather knowledge and create climate solutions, sustainability solutions, economic development solutions together with rural groups of different kinds.”
While the issues that Santi and his students are tackling impact rural areas most immediately, he says that the downstream effects hit every area of American life.
“The battle [around] climate change, sustainability, environmental justice has now shifted from cities to rural areas, so addressing rural areas becomes addressing the planetary crisis and environmental crisis,” Santi adds. “If we have a river like the Connecticut River that is extremely polluted, of course the communities that live there are heavily impacted by it, but this is a national problem and planetary problem.”