Research

Disruption: Urban Protest Culture and City Life

My current research addresses disruption of urban life during prolonged social unrest. In 2019, I left my home in Chile when unrelenting violence broke out between protestors and State agents in my neighborhood. The trauma of leaving forced me to re-examine my ideas about belonging, access to public space, and violence itself. In this project, I am concerned with how architecture and the physical environment are strategically used and functionally affected during riots/protests and the outcomes this has on quotidian city life. Drawing on similar protests occurring simultaneously (primarily in Hong Kong), I blend historical research and personal narrative to reveal disruption at levels ranging from the psychological to the social, in terms of destruction and defense of the material city and its relationship to 'home.'

I am incorporating research from this project into a novel.

Design Processes in Contemporary Chilean Architecture

Together with Chilean architect Daniel Lazo, in this project we seek to understand and help define the contemporary 'Chilean School of Architecture' by analyzing design processes across building projects. Our essay in PLAT, "Economical & Elegant," asserts that a history of limited resources may have propelled elegance in design through simplification of construction methods, in a context where limited resources could easily lead to poor constructions.

Publication:

Lauren Dean and Daniel Lazo. 2019. "Economical & Elegant," PLAT journal of architecture, 8.0: Simplicity, pp. 44-53.

History of Urban Housing Types in Santiago, Chile

This project was a precursor to what became a chapter in my doctoral thesis that traced the history of a building type known as cités from France to Chile through elite social networks, specifically through architects that trained in Paris. The larger project detailed typologies of buildings that were new at the time (late 19th century) to understand how certain types of housing for workers became differentiated from other types. I found that urban form, geographic location, and names of new building types mattered for cultural distinctions of both buildings and people in the city center.

Seminar Paper:

“Cités in The American Paris: Urban Architecture, French Culture, and the Creation of Worker Housing in Santiago,” Paper presented Latin American Institute Research Seminar, Stockholm University, Sweden, March 4, 2016.

Uses of Cités in Santiago, Chile

This project later became the structure for my doctoral thesis by outlining various contemporary and historical uses of a residential building type known as cités in Santiago. While the buildings started as worker housing in the late 19th century, they morphed into housing for the poor during the 20th century as demographics changed and urban expansion left the old city center financially abandoned. Later, when the center began to repopulate, the buildings regained prominence as 'heritage' and the urban history of the buildings was used to market a new commercial district where residential buildings were converted to boutiques.

Conference Presentation:

“Building Culture: Historical and Contemporary Use of Cités in Santiago, Chile,” Presentation at European Sociological Association Mid-Term Urban Sociology Conference, Public Spaces and Private Lives in the Contemporary City, Lisbon, Portugal, November 19-21, 2014.

Stoop-sitting in Harlem

In this project, which started as my master's thesis, I wanted to understand if stoop-sitting had an effect on crime in low-income neighborhoods where the culture of sitting on the front stoop is ingrained. I lived in Harlem at the time and it became my test case. However, back in 2010, there was no publicly available block-level data for crime in NYC. To get around this, I used a dataset that showed block-level instances of graffiti (an indicator for social disorder). I then used the architecture of the stoop as a stand-in for stoop-sitting and found that when the number of stoops on a block increases, the amount of graffiti decreases (with other variables constant). This is framed within the idea of 'eyes on the street' (Jacobs, 1961), where a neighborly gaze on the street was theorized to lower crime.

Conference Papers:

“Signaling through Space: Stoop-sitting and Deterrence in West Harlem,” Paper presented European Sociological Association PhD Summer Conference, A Sociological Imagination for the 21st Century, York, UK, July 27-29, 2014.

“Architecture and Disorder: The Case for Stoop-sitting as a Mechanism of Deterrence,” Paper presented 17th Annual Aage Sørensen Memorial Conference, New York, NY, April 11-14, 2013.

Post 9/11 Fire at the Deutsche Bank Skyscraper

This paper analyzed the 2007 fire at the Deutsche Bank Building in Lower Manhattan as a case of organizational failure, rather than an unpredictable occurrence. Using newspaper articles and legal documents, I found that while the skyscraper was being dismantled, following damage caused by the terrorist attacks on NYC in 2001, a series of organizations involved in the deconstruction (the fire department, the department of buildings, the subcontractor, and the labor unions on the job site) followed their regular practices - which is not to say they followed regulation. Analyzing the structures of the organizations involved, I concluded that various common practices (such as task redundancy between organizations) led to the deadly fire.

Conference Paper:

“Dismantling Structure: Organizational Causes of Fire at the Deutsche Bank Building,” Paper presented Eastern Sociological Society 82nd Annual Meeting, Panel on Organizational Deviance and Failure: How Things Go Wrong, New York, NY, February 23-26, 2012.

Urban Food Shopping Study

Obesity Research Center, St. Luke's Hospital, NYC

This team-based project housed at the Obesity Research Center at St. Luke's Hospital in Upper Manhattan aimed to address the effects of healthy food subsidization on shopping, buying, and eating habits. After a short survey to assess enrollment, eligible shoppers received discounts on fruits and vegetables at two supermarkets on the Upper West Side. Bi-weekly interviews with participants, where they also turned in daily food logs and were weighed, showed increases in purchasing and intake of the discounted healthy foods, in addition to weight loss, over a period of 5 months, indicating that subsidizing healthier foods can affect lifestyle choices.

Publications:

Hernandez, D., B. Cole, L. Dean, S. Dove, S. Adler, M. Bertha, B. Dargis, B. Wald, M. Bernales-Korins, C. Ochner, and A. Geliebter. 2010. “Subsidization of Fruits and Vegetables in Two Urban Supermarkets Leads to Increases in Purchasing and Intakes of These Foods, As Well as Weight Loss.” Obesity Reviews 11 (supplement 1):60.

Hernandez, D., B. Cole, M. Bernales-Korins, L. Dean, S. Dove, C. Ochner, A. Geliebter, and L. Kolbe. 2010. "Subsidization of Fruits and Vegetables in an Urban Supermarket Leads to Increases in Purchasing and Intake of Fruits and Vegetables, As Well As Weight Loss." Obesity 18 (supplement 2):S182.