Koban Bus Stop
Koban is a police box system in Japan that has been generally regarded as a neighborhood policing model. By adding social programs and improving its functionalities, the project proposes a new design for a bus stop that would cure the entrenched systematic issues with crime, transportation connectivity, and serving as an alternative to traditional authoritarian police stations in the United States.
Identifying the problem:
The project identifies East Oakland as a potential project location because its high crime rate and public distrust against the police activities have intertwined so that there is a constant obstacle against building a viable neighborhood. Even though the neighborhood suffers from one of the highest crime rates, the neighborhood district has no police station within the district limit; the Oakland police stations are centered only around the western part of the city where there is the downtown.
Site Selection:
Oakland, CA has only 493 people short of Minneapolis’s population in 2018; however, Oakland Police Department takes up about 20% of the city’s total budget, while Minneapolis does it only 12.6%. Oakland still is troublesome in crime data: Oakland has 1,274 violent crime cases per 100k inhabitants in 2018, while Minneapolis has 793 using the same method.
Police Killings & BLM & Defund the Police:
Since the Killing of George Floyd in 2020, Minneapolis has gone through massive public protests calling for justice and demanding police defunding. The Black Lives Matter movement has produced Defund the Police as one of their slogans. Oakland, the birthplace of Black Panthers, has seen imminent protests throughout the city since 2020.
Defund the Police & Flaws in Existing Bus Stops:
Community Building by bringing community safety with the improved lighting system and more public eyes watching, improving Oakland’s transportation connectivity between bus routes and BRTs, and placing community trust from allocating police defund to contribute to the community. In conjunction with an architectural investigation to create a safer and economical bus stop design, the project looks to a social level engagement for Black Lives Movement and Defund the Police Movement in the United States. By proposing the efficient, easily-reproducible modular design for the bus stop in Oakland, the project seeks other cities with similar narrative and urban planning vision. This will make the two cities connected architecturally simultaneously, allowing them to be Sister Cities together virtually.
Organization Level:
The project first works at an architectural level by proposing a new concept and remodel for the existing bus stops. This look into a small node of public transportation attempts to convert an architectural level of organization to a larger urban-level catalyst that works towards the community at the neighborhood scale.
Expansion Plan:
The benefit of this project having to do with modular construction is the possibility of expansion and relocation. The project aims to create a modular system that any other cities with similar site locations and city vision of defunding the police to allocate funds for the public good. For example, the whole project’s design can also be applied to the intersection of 38th and Chicago in Minneapolis, MN. This intersection is now a place for a memorial and occupation protest for BLM movement.
