Ararat

Dylan Rollo Roth is a Master of City Planning candidate at MIT, whose research explores how storytelling and design can serve as participatory tools for dismantling opaque processes within the built environment. With a background in architecture, landscape, historic preservation, and urban design, he brings a multidisciplinary perspective to the complexities of urban systems and the social dynamics that shape them. 

His current interest focuses on unearthing human stories hiding within petrocultures throughout the Gulf South. Through his work, Dylan investigates the entanglement of environmental, economic, and social forces in sites of resource extraction, while seeking to amplify community voices often marginalized in these processes. 

Dylan's approach is grounded in participatory design and community engagement practices, with a particular focus on the Southern U.S., while remaining attuned to the broader systems of global exchange. His work is driven by a commitment to making planning and design more accessible and inclusive, fostering a more just and transparent built environment for all. 

This is the story of a man who lives in a world of bodily extraction,

a life shaped by the quiet erasure of history and the unspoken inheritance of sin.

Born into a paradox:

a life choreographed before birth,

each choice a shadow cast by decisions made long ago,

brokered over Bourbon Sidecars and dry-aged steak

with barons who carved out profit from the earth.

The events depicted are fabricated truth:

an assemblage of memories and borrowed voices,

stitched together to reveal a world where

cost is currency,

and the burden is always passed on.

A world where pride masquerades as purpose,

where morality softens into habit,

and apathy becomes a kind of survival.

In this land, prosperity is promised like a hymn,

recited again and again until belief becomes fact.

And in the end, all debts are paid,

not by those who profited,

but by those who stayed.