“The cemeteries were here first. Then everyone else moved in.”
– Colma Resident
Rites of Passage borrows from the anthropological concept of rite de passage–a ritual or ceremony marking change in societal status or identity. The theorist Arnold van Gennep explains a rite of passage as a transition between stages of separation, liminality, and incorporation. A group research and design project, Rites of Passage focuses on the cemeteries of Colma and their role in community identity. The team was tasked with preparing a competition design brief to guide an urban design project on our “site.” Throughout the semester, group members conducted research and gathered analysis on the cemeteries, covering morphological studies, interviews and ethnographic research, and mapping.
Colma is a necropolis–or city of the dead–located just south of San Francisco. Its buried resident population outnumbers its living population by 1.8 million. The design brief’s intent is to shed light on the cemeteries’ contentious history, which involved the relocation of buried dead from San Francisco (as San Francisco grew in the 1800’s, graveyards were banned). This process was exploitative and haphazard; unclaimed bodies were placed in mass graves or left behind, with higher burial costs placed on immigrant communities. However, Colma’s history is also about identity- and agency-building among immigrant and religious minority groups in the face of this discrimination. The brief’s goal is also to celebrate Colma’s tremendous cultural diversity among its living and “underground” residents.
Morphological analysis of cemetery headstones and land use analysis of Colma
The project proposes a system of public spaces (termed “nodes”) for community activities and programs, using parts of cemetery (and other associated) land to make them a celebrated, relevant part of Colma’s 21st century life and identity. The brief puts forth suggested nodes that encapsulate aspects of Colma’s identity–and change in identity–and that, collectively, transform the user’s understanding and experience of Colma. Each node plays on one of Van Gennep’s stages (separation, liminality, incorporation). In the brief, designers were also asked to suggest a system of paths to connect the nodes into a cohesive experience. The brief preliminarily proposed a central axis “spine” along El Camino, which once hosted a rail line carrying the coffins of the exhumed dead from San Francisco, as well as other path combinations.
Node, path, and spine diagram
