Field Project Reflection Luca Zepeda

For our final project, our group decided to take on the issue of hostile/anti-homeless architecture in our community. My group consisted of Emily, Zahraa, and Ryan. Our project had two parts to it. One part, which Emily and Ryan were overseeing, consisted of pointing out and raising awareness about hostile architecture in the community. They executed this by making an informative document providing whoever accessed it with background information about hostile information and how it affects not only the homeless population but also everyone else wherever it is located. They decided to get their message out by making posters with a QR code link to their document and putting the signs on examples of hostile architecture. These posters were initially planned to be put up in downtown Champaign and the UIUC campus; however, Dr. O'Brien let us know that the architecture is friendly for the most part, and our focus was switched to campus. Zahraa and I handled the second part of our project. We chose to write a proposal for Uni to obtain more public seating on its campus. We spent about a week writing the proposal and finally emailed it to Ms. Kroenke. She will hopefully work on finding potential donors to fund the installation of the benches. 

Overall, I would say the project went reasonably well. We did have a minor setback at the very beginning when we discovered that our initial plan of joining Built for Zero backfired. However, we quickly switched over to hostile architecture and carried on from there. The other setback we encountered was more towards the final stages of the project when our posters were taken down soon after being put up by Emily and Ryan. 

The way things are going now, I would say our project has a chance of achieving its desired effect. We quickly received a response from Ms. Kroenke saying that she liked our proposal and would work to find us a donor or donors for the funding. The proposal side has ac chance of having a long-lasting effect; however, we might not see the same results with the awareness part of our project. The posters being taken down so quickly gives us an idea of how the university views advocating for issues like hostile architecture. The situation might turn into a constant battle with the university to keep the posters up to spread the word about hostile architecture on campus. 

I am incredibly proud of how the entire project turned out. Everyone did their part to ensure that the final project was something we were all proud to put out. I have faith that our proposal will reach the eyes of someone willing to donate and make Uni a better and friendlier place. I do not think I would change anything about how we went about our project; mostly, everything worked out the way it was supposed to. 

It would be complicated to remove all hostile architecture on campus, but raising awareness and adding friendly architecture is a way to let people know that it is an issue and there are alternatives. The next steps would be to make everyone on campus aware of an issue with the architecture. It affects the homeless population and the students at the university. 

Writing proposals will always be an important skill to have as it might be necessary to write one at any point in time. The biggest lesson I learned from this project is that if your initial idea does not follow through, there are alternatives out there that might deliver similar or better results; it is only a matter of going out and finding those alternatives.