What is RSELVES?
access >>> excess
RSELVES is transforming leftover spaces into public places through a unique process it is actively defining, known as sp/acement. This methodology relates to existing cultural and physical landscapes, maps assets, and identifies resources to understand context for social innovation and spatial iteration.
Our mission at RSELVES, making [art] do [work], informs this derivative and iterative process of making sp/ace, by working with local available resources in a physical space to sustain old practices and develop new methods of value, relating and learning from one another in the activation and iteration of space. It is our hypothesis that this experiential threshold in between space and place is ultimately and authentically what creates place.
In contrast to master planning, sp/acement explores potential of an urban condition for staging temporal processes rather than premeditating a permanent development. In this way, it establishes a solid foundation for cultural exchange to inform initiatives that are engaging, empowering, and educating to all involved, despite our backgrounds or knowledge base. It then examines latent potential, establishes dialogue, and experiments physically and iteratively onsite.
sp/acement is initiated by a curious and perceptive relationship with a site and its context. After identifying the where and why of a space, RSELVES’s applied research of a particular geography’s assets informs with whom, how, when, and what it can construct. Though ambiguity is intended to exist throughout the process, embracing the unknown lends itself to cultural exchange and the flexibility to maximize resources; this collective challenge resolution forms a bond, leading the process to inherently transform a space into a place through our relationship to it and one another. In doing so, this design process breeds relationships and trust allowing neighborhoods to more authentically connect, to thrive in place, and to develop methods towards more sustainable development.
RSELVES’s unique process to place-making has catalyzed a number of incentives and opportunities that are made possible only through these authentic relationships with existing residents, neighbors, and stakeholders in the mutual, ideation, creation, and realization of our public spaces. Not only can this methodology of sp/acement connect and bridge gaps in building community, but is is an exceptionally resource efficient model for both economic and neighborhood development without the attrition of gentrification.
