CEIT URBANISM

CEIT Urbanism illustrates an alternative urban ecology driven by Real Estate Investment Trusts by inserting cultural programs into their realm.

Today’s urbanism is largely determined by the specificities of global investment strategies and their underlying financial agenda. Changing the rule-sets practiced by business models will produce different modes of urbanism. REIT, as a highly dominant type of investment vehicle, has configured a vast portion of American cities. While REITs have been proven an economically successful model, their resultant urbanism has shown undesirable conditions. Being structured first and foremost as financial instruments, the viability for producing culturally and socially enriching functions necessary in the city is compromised to guarantee maximum profitability. Their hyper specialization in mono functions, the genericism and replication of vulgar forms and aversion to innovation have reduced the city components to dull enclosures for monetary investment.

REITs’ primal archetypes include office complexes along with repugnant replication of logistic warehouses in close proximity to residential apartments to power centers and grocery anchored neighborhood centers that sit dead as big box stores that are not transit-oriented, scattered in low density fashion. CEIT projects a utopian urbanism with the premise of REITs investing in cultural archetypes in juxtaposition to their former products. Therapeutic Hubs, Gastronomy Halls, Leisure Clubs, Digital Detox and Public Art Plazas are the proposed programs in the CEIT scenario. Each of these has an innovatively charged function prompting new and unexpected possibilities that promotes vital links between sociability, self-determination and pleasure within a prosperous and diversified city ecology.