WAL-MART INTERVENTION MEDITATONS

WAL-MART HARRISON, NJ

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Elaine Choi

Team: Commercial Ecology

Site: Wal-Mart, Harrison, NJ

Project: Creating Networks on Wal-Mart

This project initially was a mapping project, maps that needed to have selective and filtered data for us to convey a problem or a condition. Right away the site had 3 recognizable "hearts" that functioned as local businesses, a redevelopment project, and a globalized flag-ship store. The findings after arranging, visualizing, and organizing the data of the place showed that the already existing local economy in Harrison New Jersey was functioning, with diversity in geographical arrangements and relatively an animated landscape....

The existing conditions of the site Wal-Mart expressed certain views on the landscape it inhabited. A consumerist center that created underutilized as well as polluted industrial patches that were sectioned off, offering a view of a vast flat parking lot, and a hidden marshes around the edges. My initial approach was connecting many elements of hidden ecologies with Wal-Mart, an aim to translate what physical structure, or proposal needs to be made to the site. After a bit of unsuccessful attempts to come up with a blue print for a park, the approach was later on focused on designing a political and spacial process to engage the space as well as who inhabits it. There was quite a bit of exploration, with situational humor that ended up being polemical cases of the site,extremes being a squatter or a settlement and another being a mega-shopping complex. Through many different diagrams, and studies, I envisioned possible transition of a consumer to a citizen and the network of programs and community involvement that gave away clues to a physical interpretation.
The project overall for me was experimental, meditative, involved organizing of many political ideas of civic engagement, and research methods to translate ideas to the physical . Although there are jumbles of theories, in this project, it gave some meaning to the paradigm of research and practice.

Elaine Choi