For Non-Profit, Connect Community

Gulfton Placemaking: Roaming Cart-Ographies

2022 AIA Texas Society of Architects Design Award Recipient

2022 AIA Houston Design Award Recipient

Category: Civic, Urban Design

“Supports Local Entrepreneurship”

Across Gulfton’s ~90 apartment complexes, over 50 languages are spoken by residents from across the world. For the past several decades these multi-family units have provided Gulfton with secure affordable housing, leading the southwestern neighborhood to become one of the most diverse and densely populated in Houston. Today, however, aging properties partnered with Houston’s ever-present hunger for new development put Gulfton’s affordable housing stock at risk.

As part of a feasibility study that will determine potentials for new affordable housing alongside renovation of existing multi-family units, UltraBarrio has been hard at work on a project that celebrates Gulfton’s dense urban patchwork.

Informed by our partnership with local nonprofit My Connect Community, and a task force made up of property owners and residents-- along with our own principal Amna Ansari’s personal experience growing up in the neighborhood - we have created a kit for placemaking that will be tested out in one of Gulfton’s many apartment complex parking lots.

Gulfton is a community of sharing. The carts and stools that make up the kit formalize this sensibility through versatile forms that can adapt to host a wide range of programs, such as market days, community story days, movie nights, and so on. Food carts and trucks with ad-hoc seating strategies are already a predominant typology across Gulfton, serving as proof positive that the kit will sit well in the neighborhood’s fabric.

“The parts are carved with dynamic patterns borrowed from textile art in a few of the many countries that Gulfton residents most often find heritage.”

An astroturf carpet and canopy of bright balloons frame the carts and stools, transforming just four parking spaces into a vibrant space for residents and visitors to come together and acknowledge all of the things that make Gulfton great.

Following a series of events hosted by the project team in cooperation with area property owners, the carts and stools will be dispersed across neighborhood organizations and entrepreneurs to support future placemaking efforts - adding another layer of vibrancy to the Gulfton community.

“The carts will help support local entrepreneurship.”