Page Array – Community Engaged Design in America . . .

Designers and Social Justice

CED — Fri, 10 Mar 2017 23:33:30 +0000

In Surdna’s newly released video, architects, designers and urban planners speak about the critical role of community- engaged design in creating just and equitable communities. Theresa Hwang, Executive Director of Department of Places, specifically asks designers “to think about how [they] can start dismantling methods of oppression that are physically manifested in where people live, work and play.” As the Trump Administration proposes a massive infrastructure overhaul, the professionals highlighted in this short video discuss the ethical responsibility of designers to avoid “the sins of the past” and reject development strategies that privilege cars over people, speed of constructive over quality, and ultimately profit over social good.

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What’s Next in Community Engagement?

Jess Garz — Tue, 09 Aug 2016 22:01:45 +0000

Kofi Boone, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at North Carolina State and active member of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) offers a detailed description and reflection on the Designing Equity held in May 2016. Boone describes that event as one that “was diverse in the broad sense; all parts of the workshop contained meaningful participation from women, people of color, and people with a wide range of expertise. In an interpersonal sense, there was also a diversity of thought and ideas.” This two-part article provides context for landscape architects to engage in the conversation about community engaged design and ends with a call to action for practitioners, in the “interest in the future of our relationships between each other and the Earth.”

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How Urban Design Perpetuates Racial Inequality—And What We Can Do About It

CED — Mon, 18 Jul 2016 15:09:28 +0000

This piece, woven together by design writer Diana Budds, highlights the voices of eight contemporary urban designers speaking to the issue of racial (in)equality and the built environment. She opens the article by contextualizing the conversation within our contemporary “era of social protest, when movements like Black Lives Matter are bringing inequality back into the national conversation, it’s time to reassess the practices that have perpetuated these problems—and how we fix them.” Spend a few minutes reading these 3,000 words to hear from a number of smart minds from around the country thinking about how to design, and re-design, cities with both equity and equality in mind.

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Power to the People: Empowerment and Disruption in Community Engaged Design

CED — Mon, 11 Jul 2016 15:12:28 +0000

In Summer of 2016, Toni L. Griffin of Urban Planning for the American City facilitated the Designing Equity convening – an event focused on community engaged design practice co-hosted by the Surdna Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. The day-long discussion included designers and community activists, and academics, as well as representatives of governmental and philanthropic organizations. In this blog post, Griffin reflects on the take-home messages from the session; distilling them down into what she calls the “essential ingredients” for advancing community engaged design and its impacts: 1) Power: recognizing where decision-making power lies, and where it’s absent; 2) Restoration: restoring acceptance of difference between and across practitioners and the communities we serve; 3) Ownership: building ownership of process, outcomes, and material and non-material benefits; and 4) Disruption: undoing the fundamental frameworks of “classism, power imbalance, environmental injustice, unconscious bias, and imperialism” that shape the unjust conditions that community engaged design aims to transform.

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The Choices We Make: Democratizing Development in NYC

CED — Mon, 13 Jun 2016 13:42:58 +0000

Watch this 10-minute documentary film, directed and produced by Luisa Dantas, about the community engagement process that generated the East Harlem Neighborhood Plan. The Neighborhood Plan was developed in response to Mayor de Blasio’s plan to increase density, and along with it, affordable housing through rezoning. Concerned that what the Mayor’s plan calls “affordable” does not represent the economic situation of the existing community, The Neighborhood Plan offers over 300 recommendations for mitigating displacement advancing the residents’ own vision for the place they live. The process proves that, as Michelle de la Uz, Executive Director of the the Fifth Avenue Committee (FAC) states, “when people are presented with the opportunity to participate in a genuine negotiation of trade offs, they can embrace change”.

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Designing Equity interviews

CED — Thu, 19 May 2016 14:22:34 +0000

In this 5-minute video, you’ll hear from leaders of the community engaged design field as they share deep insights about what community engaged design means to them, the value of design in social justice work, and their vision for the future of the field. The video is comprised of excerpts from interviews with participants at the designingEQUITY convening in Spring of 2016. The day-long discussion, co-hosted by the Surdna Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, brought designers, activists, academics, philanthropists, and government representatives together to reflect on community engaged design, learn from case studies, and brainstorm strategies for advancing the field.

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How Community-Engaged Design Is Changing Development

Jess Garz — Wed, 18 May 2016 16:50:14 +0000

“Many of us entered this career because we see conditions of injustice. So what is the role we play as designers and planners to knock injustice down?” This is how Toni Griffin, an urban planner and professor of practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, framed Designing for Equity, a 2016 convening of designers, community organizers, developers, and philanthropists hosted by the Surdna Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. This article, by Danya Sherman, provides a synthesis of the convening’s major themes: the need to explicitly recognize racial injustice, to value community knowledge and experience alongside “expert” technical analysis, to empower affected citizens to call the shots, and to update design pedagogy to include principles of community engaged design. The convening highlighted how CED practice distinguishes itself from other project-based design work, with a focus on achieving systemic change through an emphasis on community capacity and empowerment.

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Skid Row Residents Re-Imagine the Streets They Call Home

CED — Sun, 08 May 2016 15:41:28 +0000

The Our Skid Row neighborhood vision plan, put forward by the residents of Los Angeles’s Skid Row, underscores the fact that some of the most relevant and innovative planning solutions can come from community members themselves. Organizers expected that Skid Row residents, many of them homeless, would request more housing. They were surprised to learn that the community really wanted enhancements they didn’t anticipate: amenities like cellphone charging stations, community bulletin boards, and meditation centers. Architect and community organizer Theresa Hwang spearheaded the series of inclusive participatory design workshops, which were hosted by Skid Row Housing Trust. Read Wendy Gilmartin’s article to learn how Our Skid Row achieved this remarkably participation-driven plan, which is currently being considered for adoption into the community general plan for Downtown Los Angeles.

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Secretary Foxx Pushes to Make Transportation Projects More Inclusive

CED — Thu, 28 Apr 2016 14:56:08 +0000

This four-minute radio story, reported by Brian Naylor, highlights the work of community activists fighting to reverse the damage caused by transportation-planning decisions of the twentieth century, and the unlikely alliance between these grassroots organizations and Anthony Foxx, the U.S. secretary of transportation. During the 1950s and ’60s, highway infrastructure in cities across the country was frequently located where negative impacts would asymmetrically burden communities of color. Today, neighborhoods like Hunts Point, in the South Bronx area of New York, which is cut off from the rest of the city by the Sheridan Expressway, remain physically, socially, and economically isolated. Listen to this piece to hear multiple voices, including that of Secretary Foxx, speaking about the racist legacy of transportation planning and optimism for the future.

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Neighborhood Time Exchange

CED — Mon, 18 Apr 2016 21:29:35 +0000

This written catalog documents the artist residency program organized by the art collective Broken City Lab and co-hosted by the People’s Emergency Center, a West Philadelphia-based community development organization, and the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program. The residency program provided artists with free studio space in exchange for skill-based contributions to community service projects along the Lancaster Avenue corridor in West Philadelphia. The Neighborhood Time Exchange is a great example of how a community development corporation has partnered with artists and cultural nonprofits to infuse their work with the arts while remaining sensitive to market dynamics in a historically African American neighborhood facing the pressures of gentrification.

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