About : standard furniture roxbury
Title : standard furniture roxbury
standard furniture roxbury
all right, everyone. we're going to get startedsoon because we really are crunched for time today. we have a lot ofpresenters and speakers. so if everyone wouldjust find their seats. if you're one of ourguest commentators we have some reservedseats up in the front so you can easilyget to the panel. awesome.
there should be astash of chairs. maybe one of our--oh, no, no, it's good. we'd like everyoneto have a seat. there are also more chairsin the back if you fill in. yeah, try to fill in the tables. tight quarters, tight timing. ok. all right. good.
looks like we have enoughchairs so i'm going to go ahead and get started. thank you all so much forwaking up early on a friday and coming to designing justice. on behalf of the teamthat helped organize this, we are just so excitedthat this is happening and we're really excited tohave such a great turnout. for those of you who don't knowme, my name is annie white. i'm a second yearmup-- planning student.
and i'll just give a briefintroduction to the event today because we have a lotof amazing projects to discuss and amazing guest to hear from. so i realize i'vealways gravitated toward places and peoplewho act and design like they give a damn. this is why i fell inlove with st. louis. when you're therethe burning desire desire that you feel ofpeople trying to make the city
a better place ispalatable which i think has been obviousover the past two days at the st. louis conference. and while i wasskeptical at first, this is also the reasonwhy i now love the gsd. i am consistently inspiredby my friends and classmates, their passion for improving thelives of people in the cities in which we inhabit. this is the energy thatwe hope to highlight
through designing justice. this is an organicstudent-led organization that hopefully this is justthe first stop, the first step in a continuing project. it is so rare for us tohear from fellow students in differentconcentrations, to hear about how they are thinkingabout social and racial conflicts, and how,as designers, we can hope to createmore equitable cities.
today we'll hear fromover 12 students who have been wrestling withthe issues of justice in the built environment. we are so thankful to welcomeour notable guests, atyia martin, who will begiving the keynote speech after the first panel, anddavid harvey and quilian riano. they will be speaking andgiving guest commentary after the student panelsduring the discussion time. we would also like to thankthe faculty-- stephen gray,
dan d'oca, dianedavis, and others-- who both supported this eventbut who continuously hold the gsd responsible for bringingissues of social justice into the curriculum andto the consciousness of the department. and as students we aredeeply appreciative of that, but we would also liketo thank the students who made the decision that whetherit was in the curriculum or not, they were goingto bring these issues
to the forefront of theiracademic and professional projects. now lindsay woodsonand marcus mello will further introduce theconcept of designing justice. thank you. hello everyone. i'm marcus mello. i am a third year student here. i am in the architectureand urban planning program
and i help to co-lead the mapthe gap project with lindsay. yeah. i'm lindsay woodson. i am an mdes, masterof design studies, risk and resilience studentand master in urban planning. i as well co-leadwith marcus, and we're going to show you acouple projects oriented around designing justice,the first of which. map the gap.
so we think it's reallyimportant to kind of begin this conversation and kind ofpiggyback off of the last two days to really definea couple topics. so equity and equalityare two different things. we aren't saying orwe aren't proposing that they're necessarilyopposing issues, but they need to befleshed out if we are to continue thisconversation about defining justice.
and so if we look at differentdefinitions of justice, i think it's importantfor not only the design school and designers to have aparticular notion of justice, but to do it collaboratively andreally include as many voices as we can. so while these are the more kindof run of the mill definitions, i think that we are hoping toreally start a conversation specifically around design. and so we have been doing thiswithin the african-american
student union thatwe're both a part of. and this is a quick timelineof some of the events that we have put on throughoutthe last couple years. i don't know if you want to-- so our activism and our concernwith justice in the built environment really startedin november of 2014 after the failure toindict darren wilson. i think that was reallythe event that really got our student groupreally just asking questions
about equity and how we can,as designers, contribute to this overall conversation. from then on, in 2015, wehelped to organize an informing justice panel which was a great,collaborative event in piper auditorium that brought togetherdifferent designers to really just push these differentconversations forward. over the summer of 2015we did some research and really tried toground what we were doing. we had an exhibit on thefirst floor of the gsd called,
bang, bang, bang: housing policyand the geography of fatal encounters. and for the pastsemester we've really been turning all theseefforts into actual research that we'll be sharing further. and then just inoctober, the asu organized the blackand design conference which was a great eventwith a really big turnout. and so it's kind of funny forus because we've also really
been thinking veryintently on injustice and how that really impactsthe built environment. and so we have beentrying to, i guess, interrogate amethodology for this. so often thisconversation starts with kind of a statistic orkind of a single data point. we were really interestedin bringing the conversation full circle to really thinkabout this as a human issue, but again, becausewe're designers,
think about it as acommunity issue as well. so this is an image from ourblack lives matter installation that we held in gund. this is an image of ourexhibition, bang, bang, bang, that was up closeto the lobby here. this is an image ofinforming justice and this was two images fromblack in design conference that just recently took place. and then this is kind oflike our bread and butter.
this is the research thatwe've been focusing on and this is reallywhat we're going to try to corral thetroops and really try to understand and breakdown understanding equity yes, so our product wasreally, like lindsay said, looking atdifferent fatalities and trying to break down thenotion that these people are just data pointson a map and really try to focus on thecommunities in which they live.
and like i saidearlier, michael brown was really the firstcase that got us going. we're going to gothrough a couple images from our current researchproject, map the gap. so in the book, we've basicallystructured it around an atlas. we're looking at three differentcities, boston, st. louis, and baltimore and reallytrying to build a narrative around each of these peopleand then sort of using their stories to then makesome more investigations
into the built environment. so we decided to look at housingand urban renewal, education, and then jobs andaccess to transit. so some of these maps arereally just looking at st. louis and looking at wheremichael brown lived, what st. louis as acity looks like in terms of its racialdistribution, and then looking at where these fatalencounters are starting to happen, looking at thedifferent-- not only did
the demographics of st. louis,but also what is the police force look like, lookingat median household income, trying to just reallyget a sense of what these communities are ouractually like [inaudible]. so some of thefindings for st. louis was looking at the fatalencounters block group, which is the bar all theway to the left, you can see that in comparisonto the rest of the city. the block group in whichthese encounters are occurring
have very low medianhousehold incomes, 0% of attainment of abachelor's degree, and the most reliance on publictransportation to get to work. and just hearing aboutthese different encounters, i think lindsay and iboth feel like these are different findings thatyou don't really think about or that you don'treally know, but that really can play a huge rolein some of these outcomes. so we actually hadthe atlas group
who really looked atnine different cities and this is just someof the urban fabrics of the different cities. and i think theconclusion here was that these fatalitiescan really happen in any type of urban fabric. and so we also have a chapteron urban renewal specifically. and, again, really this bookis about a comparative study. and we'll quicklyrun through this.
i think i'll runpast this timeline. but it's really looking atthe impacts of housing policy within the built environmentand specifically we wanted to look atthe black population. so this image hereshows the statistics across the top of the blackpopulation within boston. and then if you look atthe second row of images, second row of maps, it tracksurban renewal designations throughout time, so from the'50s to the '80s within boston.
and then the last series ofmaps overlays those designations over time with the blackpopulation's migration over time within the city. and, again, we do thesame thing for st. louis. yeah and, i mean, our maintakeaways from our chapter were that urban renewalplayed out differently in boston and st. louisand that it was really a tale of two cities. you can see that for the urbanrenewal designations in st.
louis, the black populationhas been concentrated there in these areas that havebeen basically designated as of late. so really, how have thesedifferent major infrastructure investments indifferent projects been affecting the blackpopulation in st. louis? so you can see thatin st. louis it's been extremely concentrated,whereas in boston you can see a migration from someof the urban renewal tracks down
into other neighborhoods. so it really did play outdifferently in boston and st. louis and i think lindsay andi were really just interested in unpacking how and why. and so our kind of largertakeaways from our work is really being able toground this work and very kind of rigorous methodology butalso have clear takeaways that can be instituted for policyaction, policy reform, and really try to bringit down to the ground
with a very actionablerecommendations to policymakers. [applause] could you talk aboutwhat's going to be-- yeah, so also marcus and i aregoing to host a lunch, i guess, and we're going to do abrainstorming session. so we're having a hackathontomorrow on these issues and to further our research. and the brainstormingsession is really
to get a feel on how we thinkthat hackathons and data are useful to designers. i think there's alot of mixed feelings about that and i think thatmarcus and i are very, very dedicated to takinghackathons out of a traditionalnotion of coding and really make ita participatory tool for engagement and learningand teaching and less about kind of this rigorousdata set collection tool,
and really make itabout communities. so we're going tohost a lunch today, and if you can stickaround tomorrow. our hackathon starts at 2:30. so now we're goingto get started with the studentpresentations and discussion portion of the event. so [? azura ?] is up firstand if you're presenting, if you could just be readyto kind of jump on the podium
after the next person is done sowe can make sure to leave time for discussion. hi everyone. thanks for showing up. i know it's early. let's see, i guess. ok, here. and i apologize in advance. there is some texton the slides and i
didn't realize the screenwas going to be so small so i hope it's legible. so i'm [? azura ?]. i'm in my last semester in thelandscape architecture program here. so i'll start with this poem. the poet ross gaywrites of plants as a source of inevitabletemporal continuity. although his word choices dwellon the lyricism of chance,
the plants do theirwork slowly, the poem spins around someunlikely and perhaps gay is, after all,stating a fact. plants will grow andby means of that growth will evoke not only nature'srelation to architecture, plants do like house, but moretangibly the human's sensorium. plants also providethe ultimate guarantor of human sustenance,oxygen, which was forcefully denied eric garneron july 17, 2014
when he became yet anothervictim of systemic police brutality. the other fact fact atthe heart of this poem, that garner was ahorticulturalist, was sourced from an obituary. gay's poem thus reads asa project of remembrance and epitaph, but also a reminderthat this project may well thrive all aroundus as continuity in the natural world.
as the ultimate spatialreification of that project, the cemetery aslandscape type renders palpable the metaphorical cyclebetween landscape and memory. my research considers questionsof remembrance and design in the case of greenwoodcemetery in hillsdale, st. louis. it engages the site'simaginaries, its design history, and its present contextboth in st. louis and more broadly.
today i'm going to briefly tellthe story of the site which i am aware is notmine to tell but which i hope can raise importantquestions about sort of the layered narrativethat live in landscape and how we might engagethem as designers. so greenwood cemetery,which you can see in the little squarein the large aerial and then here to the rightin the more zoomed in, was established in 1874 asthe first non-denominational
commercial cemeteryfor african-americans in the st. louis area. its 32 acres house 6,000 markedgraves and up to 50,000 burials including harrietrobinson scott, who was dred scott's widow, musicianwalter davis, civil rights leader charleton tandy,and many, many others. it's worth noting thatgreenwood was founded as part of the rural cemeterymovement which started right here with mount auburn.
these landscapescelebrated the picturesque as a stage set fora commemoration and were based on the principleof one person, one grave. greenwood's gridded layout,which you can see on the left, is immediately noticeable amongits more picturesque features such as the curvylinear paths, perhaps hinting at a moreegalitarian impulse than mount auburn and amore deliberate engagement with the surrounding socialfabric which is also a grid.
interestingly, it also seemsto reference a pere lachaise cemetery, which isthe one on the right, in paris whichinspired the notion of the american rural cemeteryas a democratic public space. so greenwood was avibrant community space through the jim crowera, although, of course, it was segregated. and then upon de juredesegregation the cemetery saw a sharp decline in usedue to sort of a shrinking
market, if you will, after whichdivestment and rising poverty engulfed both it and thesurrounding community. today greenwood standsderelict and overgrown and one of the poorest,most segregated communities in the metropolitan area. so, as you can see here,there is sort of a belt. they are called the northernsuburbs of st. louis and hillsdale is one ofthem that are highly, highly segregated and generally poor.
hillsdale is 96%african-american, which is typical ofsome of these suburbs, and its estimated medianhousehold income of 21,000 is less than half ofmissouri's median income. ferguson, where michaelbrown lived and died, and where black livesmatter was born, lies a mere five milesaway from the state. so thanks to the efforts ofdedicated community members, greenwood has listed both on thenational register of historic
places and as one of missouri'smost endangered historic places today. a nonprofit citizens group, thegreenwood cemetery preservation association, is nowadvocating for its clearing and restoration. the group has begun to maphistoric graves onto the site and a simple overlay, as youcan see here on the right, reveals a haunting palimpsest. greenwood cemetery and thepossibility of its restoration
prompt deep questions aboutremembrance and the narrative and politicalagency of landscape. 32 acres of an important placeof african-american memory have essentially beenerased from the map. and this is quiteshocking, you can see just that sortof center is even just the sort of commongreen that on google maps designates a green area. by means of itsecological dynamism
the landscape isdeleting itself. when considering sites whichhave fallen into disrepair the narrative of wildernessoften frames such ruins as the apex of a naturalprogression of events. here you see detroit'sfamous feral houses. geographers denniscosgrove calls this the duplicity of landscape. so when we see biomass wetoo often forget design. so i'm arguing thatthe state of greenwood
today is just as much a productof carefully managed systems, in this case racial segregationand discrimination as well as local and nationalpolitical decision, as were [? umstead's ?] parks. and in other words,it is designed and that this sort oflegacy, and this history ought to be readin the future site. and this realityrequires us to challenge the very notion of heritage.
what are we trying tohold onto in these sites and what are we tryingto reverse and why? taking as a given thatlandscape is telescopic, my research pushesa critical stance on restoration and onthe projective role of the landscape architect. it positions aproject of greenwood as one of activeremembrance and change, rather than simple restoration.
so how can the ecologicaldynamism of plant life act as an allegoryfor social dynamism? what does it mean for thetwo to collide and coalesce? what does it mean to introducenew social life into a space with so much life alreadyrooted into its soil? to what extent can landscapehelp embody greenwood's many legacies? and, most importantly,what is the role of the designer as bothan outsider and an ally?
in a recent article inthe nation community member in hillsdale, ettadaniels, said of the cemetery, "you find a rich historyof black st. louis that we don't even talk about. the issue here is that somuch stuff gets covered up." and you can see thatvery physically there. this history, though, i'm sayingis both covered and spoken by the tangled massof greenwood cemetery and that it's up todesign to sort of make
that legible in a way thatmakes vibrant public space. the conditions that have ledto young greenwood's disrepair have also increased its valueas a site for biodiversity and made it apotential urban oasis. but if the future of greenwoodentails not restoration to an idealist moment in time,but a dynamic place and space, what might it look like? that's hopefully my next step. such a landscapewould pay homage
to the cemetery's richhistory as a burial ground, take advantage ofits biodiversity as a community resource,and at the same time also engage directly with thesite's recent painful legacies. this would necessitateshifting the emphasis away from clearing, which is sortof the language of renewal and urban renewal as well, andthrough landscape architecture, strengthening the dialoguebetween abundant life and the awareness of death.
design should also helpleverage the profile of this site as a valuableplace of memory in st. louis and help leverage the sortof power and resources of its community, connectingit to other cultural nodes. in her nobel prizeacceptance speech in 1989, toni morrison askedwhat intellectual feats had to be performed forthe author or his critic to erase me from a societyseething with my presence. greenwood cemetery todayseethes with a presence
and many stories. through design, those storiescan be curated and amplified rather than neutralized. hello, i'm [inaudible] andi'm a [inaudible] student in my final year. and i'm presenting myresearch project and also my thesis for the cityof saigon, vietnam. so saigon has a history that ismore complex than any other one in vietnam.
it started out as acollection of crafts villages along the river of saigon thenturned into a feudal sea port then into the mostdeveloped city in indochina colonizedby the french. and the french, whenthey came in, they really started to erase a lotof saigon's old fabric as well as segregatedthe people, put the locals outside the city. so here you can seethat they destroyed
the vietnamesecemetery and turned it into a european cemetery. they destroyed alot of architecture, almost like homonizedsaigon and built miniature french architecturelike the hotel de ville or the [inaudible]. and then, nowadays,the communist party is doing the samething with saigon by trying to erase architecturallegacy of the french
and, again, increasingrent and real estate, trying to buildexpensive structures. eventually thepeople can no longer afford the place wherethey used to live, so they had to moveout of the city. and architecturally, a lotof saigon's architecture has picked on thedifferent characteristics of styles fromdifferent regimes, from the feudal to the frenchto american occupation,
and now being confusedwhen the communists come, not knowing what to do. and they started destroyinga lot of the legacy. again, this is the shipyard,one of the most respected sites in saigon is going tobe destroyed this year. and that's where mythesis site will be. and the result of thisgentrification and development that is ignorant of all thefiner fabric of the city and history in thislocality resulted
in the diminishing of theoriginal crafts communities, very confusing identityin terms of architecture, overpopulation,overpollution, lack of green space--public space, you can see the children justplaying on the street or in constructionsites-- and also a threat to the small vendorsor the small businesses. a lot of activities thatused to make the city so vibrant, when thegovernment started
to ban such activitiesin the city, the red streets arethose that allow for that kind of business andsuch and the rest are banned. so my proposal is to lookat how design can really help a city rememberits past, how to bring back the green spaceand public space to the people and claim part of the culturethat is being destroyed or threatened to be destroyed. and i look at theshophouse typology.
this a type that is obliviousto all the political regimes in power and really is selectiveto the lives of the people in the climate. there is a view of the shophousetypology that has been changed and now is kind of losing allof the characteristics that used to make it sorelevant to the people. so i map out of theshophouse in saigon and most of the gray spaces. and this isdevelopment over time.
so these are the characteristicsof the shophouse typology. first there is corridor on thecourtyard that really helps with ventilationand also lighting and creates a kind ofsmall semi-public space within each house. but on the urban scale youcan see that these courtyards create kind of corridorswithin the city, creating a public space. and also a lot ofcalibration regarding details
within the house. oops-- ok just go quickly. so my proposal[laughter] is basically compacting thosevillages along the river into this new culturalcomplex and trying to bring back thecharacteristics of the shophouse, butin a larger scale, testing it in the culturalor institutional scale. and that's it.
[laughter] hi, my name is eddie keller. i'm a second year [inaudible]history and philosophy student. and i'm going to bepresenting some research as part of the harvard-mellonurban initiative seminar on berlin. so incessantly and inconstantly growing numbers, refugees arestreaming into berlin. so this sentence wemight wrongly think
is not a recent one, rather it'staken from an official document of the senate of berlinin 1953 regarding the influx of refugees fromeast berlin to the west. today berlin isdealing with the sort of same situation of a growinginflux of syrian refugees. and with its troubling historywith its past world wars, something can be learned fromthat sort of approach taken in 1953, viewing therefugees not as a problem, but rather as aresource, encouraging
the influx of refugeesinto the city. the aim of this project isto analyze the relationship between both the formaland informal approaches that appear in the citythrough the specific lens of transportation and mobility. so one of the firstdocuments that we see that kind ofexemplifies this approach is a map produced by the cityand the office for migration and refugees in whichcertain stations
and locations within the cityare proposed for the refugees by simply marking them inthe arabic language, not a limiting decision, butdefinitely directing, and one that shapes theperception of the city for those who use the map. another approach isa semi-formal map designed by refugeesbut sponsored by the government in the cityin which, again, the information is obviously partial but morerelated to the experience
of the refugees themselves. in berlin what wesee lately is a sort of growing approach bythe citizens themselves to accept refugees andwelcome them at times at the cost of tourists. but we can see thosethings especially appearing in various blogs onlinein which i mined for data to sort of viewdifferent demonstration activities, guides forrefugees on how to incorporate
themselves within the city. so this project isbasically making a kind of juxtaposition betweenthe two strategies, the formal and the informal. we start by looking at thetransportation map, mostly public transport, busesand tram lines and subways and comparing those withdifferent activities which at times correspond towhat the official map offers and at times contradict, variousthings like soup kitchens,
libraries, language lessons. further on whati did is i mapped a sort of time frameof the, let's say, the week in thelife of a refugee, of course, partial andlimited to a specific time but again we can see akind of correspondence between certain times in thelife of the local citizens and those of the refugees. the weekends are moreheavy on activity,
the weekdays less of course,and fridays are kind of empty, suggesting the germanseven need some time to rest before the weekend. the last kind ofpoint was to look at one of the main spotsfor refugees and citizens to interact and examine theabundance of public spaces in this place, theconnections to other places in the city, transportationconnections and the wide array of different activitiesthat happen there every day.
and i would like tofinish sort of with how i started this projectin sort of theory and deep history looking intothe story of cain and abel. after cain hadmurdered abel, god had banished him fromthe earth and sent him to a sort of different kind ofmovement, a movement of refuge, but what cain didwas build a city and not sort of submit himselfto this god-given nomadism. and in this way we can startthinking that maybe cities
themselves has alwaysbeen designed for refuge for refugees as an israeliand a jew studying in america, working on berlin, i cannot helpbut to think about this history of refuge and as berlin as aplace with various histories to be learned from. my name is claudette[? amadeo ?]. i'm in the first year inthe master of architecture and urban design. today i'm going to presentto you my research that i
did during thelast fall semester under the framework ofre-conceptualizing berlin as a laboratory. so the first approximationto this research i borrowed the idea fromdianne davis in her article "urban informality: remnant ofthe past or wave of the future" as rethinking informality as notonly as a morally and legally questionablenon-regulated matter but also as an urbancollective cultural asset.
so what i'm goingto do is to analyze some informalinterventions in berlin as a way to create a diverseand active atmosphere but also to createbridges between society and governmental institutions. the first objectiveof this research is to analyze the relationshipbetween governance and citizens' participationand the rights and obligations that the citizenshave in the city.
and to understandthe materialization of governmentality, to havekind of an alternative way of the mainstream of how thegovernment regulate the city. so the basic questions aredoes the power of the state is diminished of theemergence of plural actors active in governanceissues or participatory practices as an internal elementof the modes of governance necessarily lead tocitizens empowerment? i work with two main theoreticalconcepts about governmentality
which is basically howthe government manage the strategies used togovern in different contexts, and the right to the city whichis basically which citizens has the right to have rightsbecause they signify a cultural asset oran economic asset or which citizens doesnot have this right. after the fall of thewall and the reunification of the city in 1989,an intensive program of urban developmentstarted in berlin.
visitors and investorsthrough city marketing events promoted transformation. since the reunification,forces such as economic growth and competitiveness havebeen shaped urban policy. in contrast, leftover spaces appeared in consequence ofthe fall of the wall and had been taken byan informal settlements. since then, thelack of the control in the areas betweeneast and west
made this phenomenon happen. so this is [inaudible]and i'm going to analyze princess in agarden, holzmarkt and limeil. princess in a garden is a socialand ecological urban farm. nomadic green, which isa nonprofit organization, launched the project as apilot for the summer of 2009. so this basicallyapart from the idea of urban agriculture,the project has an educationalagenda for the city.
the objective is to createa space of common learning among [inaudible] citizens. therefore they usegardening as a tool to provide educationand workshops. it is a tool forsocial processes. so this is part of thediagrams that you can see later in the exhibitionbut basically i analyze the concept of eachproject as social structure, the management, andthe economy, and how
we can grade from commitment tothe achievement of the project. so basically themunicipality leased the land to nomadic green, which isa nonprofit organization, and they created acommunity or farm which is leased for five years. so the question is, whatis going to happen next? they also have a veryclose relationship with media, facebook,and, of course, a very basic cultural agenda.
this is a timeline of theevents they do over the year. then hozmarkt was amarket based or temperate this time flows andthe lily has been kind of formalized andtoday's picture as an over and quarter organized as acomparative community instead of singular interests. so again, this is thesame kind of analysis. what i want to highlightabout this case is that the previous is abusiness where investors again
profit out of it by creatingan addition of value to city and citizens. therefore thesocial structure is based on lease policies whichis based on the contributions that the applicantcan do for the place and there are threetypes of lease, indefinite from five to 10years, and short term lease. and finally lomeil,which is a trailer camp that was established rightafter the fall of the wall.
and since then theirforts are directed to challenge the capitalistconsumer society. they promote alternativeliving spaces based on the principles ofcollectivism, sustainability, and alternativecultural production. they justify its urbanrights by stressing its economiccontribution to the city. and then, of course,the vc, cultural agenda. so to finish i want to highlightthat the municipality kind
of borrowed these spacesfor this case studies. to finish i just wantto say that we should embrace hybrid formed uninformedinterventions because they show diversity andchallenge decisions and start importantconversations about the city. hi. my name [? sonya ?][? bengeli. ?] i'm an mla-- hi. i'm [? sonya ?] [? bengeli. ?]i am a graduating student in my last year.
i'll be talking aboutself-built housing which has been a research interestof mine in the past few years and the topic of a recent paper. self-built housing is oftenseen as a marginal practice in the shadow of marketand public housing yet it has been the natural waythat people have built shelter for most of human history. in the past few centuries,industrialization, modernism, and neoliberal economicshave transformed housing
into a standardised,mass-produced commodity, prioritizing exchangevalue over the actual needs and preferences of the usersand mostly disregarding context. land speculation, risingprices, and competition by foreign investorshave made home ownership in the city increasinglyunaffordable for low to middle incomepeople and families. they're forced to choosebetween renting small apartments in the city or buying tracthousing in distant suburbs
while neither option trulyfulfills their needs. self-built housing couldprovide an alternative option that is better suitedto people's needs and produces a more diverseand dynamic built environment. yet currently it is framed as adesperate option possible only in the developing citiesof the global south, rather than as a realviable choice for everyone. when supported bydesign and planning, self-built housinghas the potential
to be an alternative thatenables the creativity, skills, and ambitions of people toimprove their living conditions and build more successfulcollective built environments. sorry, this is not the rightversion of the presentation but it's ok i'lljust keep going. how could design and planningenable self-built housing to become a viable alternative,creating housing for people rather than for profit? two examples thati'll be talking
about from very differentcontexts-- one in lima, peru and one in thenetherlands, in almere, show how a balance of bottom-upand top-down strategies can produce successfuldiverse and adaptable self-built communities. so via salvador, which yousee the beginnings of here, is an urban district at thesouth edge of lima, peru that began as an informalsettlement of urban migrants in the 1970s but has evolvedinto a thriving mixed-use urban
district of the city. it began as a typicalinformal settlement starting with the illegal invasionof undervalued land, initial construction of shacksmade of simple materials to claim the plot, and overtime, incrementally building and expanding two tothree story houses made of concrete and brick. the infrastructure,schools, and public services were also self-builtand continue
to be managed bythe community which has been internationallyrecognized for its self-organization. the process was assisted earlyon by architect miguel romero who designed the modularblock morphology of housing parcels organized arounda common open space which also corresponds to a unitof community organization. he also planned the overallland use, zoning, roads, and open space frameworkincluding a large district
park, wide greenways, greenwayavenues, and courtyards within each block thatprovide the urban structure of the district. the design frameworkmade a huge difference in allowing what began asa poor informal settlement to evolve over time into asuccessful urban district that has become incorporated intothe fabric of the formal city and continues togrow and improve its quality of thebuilt environment.
in a completely differentcontext in the netherlands where there has been a longtradition of mass housing built by the state, there has been arenewal of self-built housing as an expression of freedomof choice and individuality. self-built housing hasbecome a popular strategy in new development areassuch as homeruskwartier and europuskwatier inthe new city of almere. the process is guidedby planning strategy to design the basicframework, subdivide the land
to be sold to free buildplots, and design built form rules to guide the processso that individual freedom is maximized withoutundermining collective goals. driven by thecreativity and ambitions of the many individualowner-builders and guided by theframework and parameters, the area isgradually building up into a diverse community thatcontinues to grow and change. another expansionarea of almere called
oosterwold is guided by amore radical strategy called free land which extendsthe ambitions of self-build from housing toinfrastructure, services, and open space tothe whole community. the strategy provides anoverall area framework and regulates a set mixof land use proportions for every plot of land,encouraging diversity of uses while preserving theagricultural character of the site.
different sized plots canbe bought individually or collectively by peopleinterested in sharing the land to develop differentuses and collaborating to build the roads, off-gridinfrastructure, and services to fit their needs. the strategy now formalizedin planning policy is intended toencourage the emergence of new forms of utopianself-sufficient, self-organized urbanism thatminimizes top-down regulation
and maximizes individualfreedoms and creativity. since it's stillrelatively new it remains to be seenwhat forms of urbanism it will actually produce. as shown by these verydifferent approaches from different contexts,self-built housing has a lot of potentialand flexibility to provide newcreative alternatives to dominant modelsof development,
not only in developing contextbut also in our north american cities. by providing ambitious youngpeople with opportunities to build their owncustomized housing they are transformedfrom passive consumers of the housing marketinto active citizens participating intheir communities, creating value, and fulfillingtheir human potential. by engaging more people inthe production of the built
environment and providing thenecessary support and tools through design andplanning, self-built housing could lead to new forms ofmore diverse, inclusive, just, and adaptable city building. good morning. so we're really gladto be here today we're going to take aslightly different approach because we're presentingon behalf of our class and some of thethemes that we've
explored throughout thecourse so far this semester. and we wanted to do thatbecause the conference is called designingjustice and our class is design for the just city. so really goodparallel, thank you. but sincerely, we reallywant to thank the organizers for bringing such adynamic group of people together to talk aboutwhat we have felt and we know to be the mostimportant issue facing
our society today. the presence orabsence of justice is felt on all frontsfrom the economy to the built environment. and it's really upliftingto witness designers work in interdisciplinaryfashions in the pursuit of that justice. so thank you to everyonethat's participating. after a briefintroduction of the course
and its affiliation withthe just city project, we'll walk you through some ofthe themes our classmates have been tacklingthroughout the semester. i'm [? shonni ?] carter. i am a graduating student inthe urban planning program. and i'm amanda miller,a first year master in design studiesstudent and urbanism, landscape, and ecology. so we are both contributors tothe just city project, which
is a research initiative startedthe j max bond center on design for just city, formallyaffiliated with the city college of new york. the project is designed toinvestigate the role of design in facilitating greaterurban justice in our cities and neighborhoods. it's now housed here at thegraduate school of design and the initiative willcontinue to investigate the definition of thejust city, create tools
for measuring design's impacton justice and injustice, and develop a value-basedpractice model for improved participatory planning methods. toni l griffin, professor inpractice in urban planning here at the graduate school ofdesign created the initiative and teaches the designfor the just city seminar. so as part of thislarger project, the course aims toinvestigate the roots and current conditionsof injustice in cities,
as well as conceptsof urban justice, and the possibilities of designmovements to affect justice. to that end, we aredeveloping metrics to assess how designcan facilitate greater urban justice and use datacollection tools to assess the presence of justiceand/or injustice in local neighborhoods. so we'll start by kindof just taking you through the timelineof the course so far.
and the class has really helpedus evaluate a new framework for thinking about justice. for instance, we startedoff by asking ourselves, what does the justcity look like? and pretty muchthe class, everyone approached it from areally social perspective but at different scales. so where do we start? omar [? carrillo ?] dida really great mural
in terms of thinkingabout human dignity and what does that look likewithin the space of the city? this is set in thesetting of a park. and then [? jemena ?][? vellos ?] really looked more at the systems approach,like what is needed in terms of basic infrastructure andproviding that for housing and for the societal aspectsthat present justice. whitney [? handsley ?] tooka really complex approach and started to reallythink about how the hope
and how reality interplaywith each other. and we thought that thiswas amazing and looking at it from more of an individualand personal perspective. and karen michellereally took it to looking at the lensof life and her brother as a young black man. how does he walk through life? and how does that impactjustice within our society? we then did a typicalmillennials' activity
which was to use instagram. you can see some of thateffort on the back wall here. and i'm not actually reallymuch of an instagrammer, but it was great to seethe possibilities of using a social media platformtowards the important mission of justice in the city. and i think as acollective whole we realized thatfrom this exercise that justice isn't alwaysso clear cut and simple.
so a few quickexamples, this first is an image of themcgrath highway that is on the westernside of the east somerville neighborhood. and so we all know that highwayscan be connective but clearly in this example it'salso very divisive. it disrupts an existing streetgrid and is reducing access. looking then atan interior, this is a local brazilian grocerystore in the same neighborhood.
it's in the main commercialarea and also a very diverse district. so allowing opportunities forthese types of local businesses is a great story of justicethrough food access. these are someexamples of parks. they look like great amenitiesbut then some of the questions that we have are,what types of parks that they leave behind wheneverthey build in a new space? how are they maintainedand who uses them?
and, finally, assembly square. this is a new development onthe former ford manufacturing plant. and it provides a much neededretail and potentially job opportunities but many questionits true social value, who its for, and whatcommunities it's serving. so a lot of our researchinvolves critique of the built environment but theprocess goes beyond design itself to also understandthe human experience
within these environments,how they shape them, and how they areshaped by them as well. so we've all built off ofour personal manifestos and collages from thebeginning of the semester to further our opinionsabout the just city and layer on specific attitudesabout the role of design on the city at different scales,whether geographic, structural, political, or social. on the screen is an example ofone of the written manifestos
and there are alsovideo ones that will be playing throughoutthe exhibit later. so some of the most compellingissues that were presented were access, freedom of choice,safety, security, neighborhood change. and we all expressed theseideas through video and writing. so we mentioned ourinstagram exhibit over there and we want you guys toparticipate in that later, but also please view the videos.
and if we can justgo to the next slide, we are really promotingheavily the class' instagram account,@justcityornot, but then also please join theconversation on #justcityornot with the hashtag becauseyou're contributing to our understanding butalso to the broader public's understanding of what ajust city looks like to you and i think that that'sreally the best tool that we can use at this moment.
and i guess we sort of thank allof the wonderful guest speakers and tony for coming in. you can see some oftheir concepts here. they are too numerousto name right now, but we very muchappreciate your assistance in helping us develop our ownpersonal frameworks in how we see justice. so moving forward we're goingto leave you with two questions. how can we map andrecord justice?
and how can wemeasure and diagnose design's impact on justice? so now it's time tohave a brief discussion. so i'm going to ask allthe presenters and one representative fromthe just city class to come up and siton the panel and also the moderators,student moderators, who will be introducing theguests for the discussion. thank you all forcoming [inaudible].
ok, there we go. thank you for being here and toall the students who presented, thank you so much. my name is courtney sharpand i'm a graduating student in urban planning. miriam keller, i'ma first year student in urban planning andpublic policy here. to kick off ourconversation, we're going to begin by introducingour guest commentators, david
harvey and quilian riano. so please excuse me when iread the bio from the phone. so i'm introducing davidharvey and to begin with the words thathave been shared with us throughout theweek from the school, it is his contention thatthe production of space, especially distribution andorganization of the territory, constitutes a principal aspectof capitalist economies. his writings on thetheme have contributed
to the ongoing politicaldebate on globalization and on the different spatialstrategies associated to global processes. a foundation of harvey'sintellectual project is close readingand interpretation of karl marx's captial which hehas taught and read for decades and documented in hiscompanion to marx's capital. but harvey's work isdistinguished by the way he has brought marxismtogether with geography
with productive resultsfor each discipline. among other ideas,harvey is known for his critical interpretationof the ideas of henri lefebvre and on his formulationon the right to the city. his book, spaces ofhope, explores a role for architecture in bridgingbetween the human body and uneven developmentthat is characteristic of globalisation. i know many of us have readyour works in classes here
and before so we're amazedto have you with us today. and quilian, thankyou also for joining. i have the pleasureof introducing you. quilian is an architecturaland urban designer, researcher, writer, andeducator working out of brooklyn, new york. he is the founder andprincipal of dsgn agnc, a collaborative designresearch studio exploring political engagement througharchitecture, urbanism,
and art. a practice inacademia, quilian works with stakeholders andtransdisciplinary teams to create comprehensiveresearch that can be used to propose avariety of spatial designs and targetedpolicies and actions, very action-oriented i couldtell by looking at your work. quilian also has hadexperience teaching here and across the nationin design and architectural
schools and studios. so we're glad to have youhere with our students today. so i think ourgoal of the format here is to kind of starta conversation about how all of the great work thatwe've heard about this morning starts to engage broaderissues of justice, how we think about justice, andwhat is the role of designers in advancing that both herewhile in school but also, of course, in practice.
and i have one questionto start us off. just based on beinga little bit familiar with your work as we arecurating and learning about it and also listening today. so in lindsay andmarcus' presentation, one of the definitionsof justice they had i wrote down because i liked it. conformity to truth,fact, or reason. and a lot ofstudents' work today
touched on how weactually address and look at history and thetensions in design, which is a practice that isabout change in some way. and so how do webalance and think about critically preservationand history as designers. yeah, so this conversationis open for students to reflect on that and,yeah, definitely want our discussants, our respondentshere today to sort of-- you've spent so much time thinkingabout these questions
and what did you heartoday in the student work that prompted reflection onwhat you've written or practiced throughout your career. i guess i'll take a crack at it. is this ok? it sounds a little robotic. [laughter] ok i'm not 100%sure how to answer that. it's a big question, right? it's talking about how do youdeal both with the history,
especially in theamerican context that is going to have alot of complexities in the currentcondition and then begin to push that forward. and i have to saythat for example, for me, what becameinteresting is to see a coupleapproaches that seem to be developing that couldbegin to help out with that. i was especially taken withthe just city presentations
of the collages thatthey made about what just city meantbecause it seemed to be collapsing many things. so often, for example, whenlooking at this information one of the things thati'm very conscious of is that either we're lookingat a snapshot in time or that whenever we get tothis point of justice and i think this is one of thequestions that's coming around here, is justicefor whom, right?
we have to beginto describe that. then we have to begin todescribe what community means. and depending on howwe describe that, we might be puttingup some walls. and then how do thosethings allow for change over time but a changethat makes sense. because the other--new immigrant groups-- are going to come. things are going tochange on the ground.
how would the spaces there beganto be able to accommodate that? so our notion ofjustice and neighborhood and community changes that way. and for me, i've been studyingfor awhile a place in new york city, jackson heights, andnorth corona in queens, what people call themost diverse place in the world-- you know, 160something languages spoken. one corner is little india,bangladesh philippines colombia, ecuador korea, china.
so in those momentsit's about trying to understand how people withmultiple kinds of bodies, people have different needs,different subjectivities can begin to aggregate, tocreate larger political ideals without giving uptheir identity per se. so beginning to explore that newidentity, that new community-- one that is flexible,its walls are permeable, however that it'sunderstood that there are certaincommunities that need
more agency, that need moreactual-- that they don't have control. my thing is to say thatchanging community is also sometimes a red herring. you know, bed stuy andthe upper east side, they change invery dramatic ways. and it's because ofthe power that each of those-- the people thatlive in those communities have and the control theyhave over the change
in their communities. so, for me, it's alittle bit of that-- is to understand agency, power,and the meaning of that-- and then alsobeginning to project, how is this going to change? how do people on theground-- and then it becomes a setof negotiations. so we go into designing,perhaps not the things, but the moments in which peoplecan negotiate with each other.
yeah it's actuallyrather difficult to respond to what youguys have done in a sense, but there are some thingsi didn't hear that i would like to find out more about. one thing is, well,what particular way of understanding justiceframes what you're doing? what i would do if i was youi would read doris marion young on justice and thepolitics of difference and say, ok, this basicallysets up dimensionalities
of how to think about justiceand i'm going to try and follow through on some ofthe ideas like that because otherwise weall know that justice is a very-- as plato oncesaid in his dialogues, he had trusted marcus,"justice is whatever the ruling class says it is." on that basis i wouldthen ask another question, is justice something thatis close to the individual? most of the presentations,it seemed to me,
had a conceptionof the individual at the base of whatyou were doing-- the authenticity of theindividual-- i didn't hear too much about the buildingof solidarities, the development ofcollective action, i didn't hear very much in therole of the design process, of actually bringing peopleinto a collective vision of what their city should be like. now maybe some ofyou are doing that,
but this is the kind ofquestion i think i want to pose. thirdly, there is thisquestion of history which is very complex. again, it might be useful foryou to reflect a little bit on the role of this. i tend to be a bit of a fanof walter benjamin on this and he might beinteresting to read. i mean, he distinguishesbetween history and memory. and, for him,history is something
that gets formalized andactually freezes things in a certain narrative. memory is something,as he says, erupts at certain moments of dangerand is uncontrollable. and what you see frequentlyin mass movements is a sudden eruption of memory. and i think that thedistinction between the two, of history and memory, ismaybe worthwhile thinking about in whatever it is you're doing.
and in doing that, i'm alwaysof a mind, you know-- sorry, i can never talk for very longwithout citing marx, you know. it's one of my habits. but in the eighteenthbrumaire, he talks about the wayin which history weighs like a nightmare onthe brain of the living. but he doesn't go on fromthere to say, therefore, the history should be junk, buthe does talk about we shouldn't be trying to dress up whatit is we're doing today
in the poetry of the past. we should be creating thepoetry of our own future. and that's the question, is whatdoes that poetry of the future, how does it approach thequestion of historical record? and my own sort of answer tothat in something like spaces of hope was i useda phrase from balzac who said that hope ismemory that desires. and i think that-- forinstance, if you're thinking about thesymmetry and how
to use that, you're thinkingabout how to resurrect things-- there's a big distinctionbetween the power of collective memory as apolitical force and nostalgia as a restraining force. and so it's problematic. and i think both theconception of justice and the conceptionof history, memory, and so on is problematic. and i would sort of want toask some questions about, well,
how are you thinkingthrough that problematic and how are you approachingit because i think many of the thingsyou're trying to do are kind ofresurrecting the history and you see it asa positive force but it's not always that way. it can, in fact, bea negative force. yeah, one finalpoint i would make is that i sympathize verymuch with the whole history
of trying to sort ofreshape the city by doing these kinds of things and itried many years in baltimore to participate inmany things like this. and you can see thelast year how successful i was in transforming that citybecause it went up in a riot just as it had about thetime i arrived there. but one of the ideas thatkept on washing over me is as i got more and more--i don't want to call it-- cynical conclusions,the experience
was that a lot ofpolicies you find are extremely successfulwhere they're least needed and they're least successfulwhere they're most needed. and this means thatyou're always confronted and you're dealing with thoseplaces that most need it and therefore you're alsodealing with a situation which is almost-- notdestined to failure, but is going to be hardest ofall to make something stick. and so, again, ithink that recognition
that certain policies over,say, affordable housing, or whatever it is, can workin certain kinds of ways in certain kinds ofplaces but not in others, that in itself, there'san inequality built into the way in whichpolitical interventions, staged interventions,or even communal action can really work. so from the verybase, you really have to go to the roots of thatinequality, deal with why is it
that the state can solvethat kind of problem but not that one? why is it that communal actioncan actually rise and do this in this part of the citybut it fails somewhere else? so this is kind of the context,i think, in which many of you are working. because the root of theinjustice, it seems to me, is that. these are justideas you might want
to bear in mind as you goforward to sort of think a bit further about. i thought this was the-- give me the second. is it working? is it? i can hear it. i don't-- i can't-- hello? no?
yes. ok-- it's on. whatever, anyways. thank you for your comments. and i think the tensionbetween history and memory is something that i've beenthinking a lot, especially in the context oflandscape because i think what differentiateslandscape maybe
than other modes ofbuilding an environment is that the very materialis always changing. so there is no realway of freezing. i mean, you can go back, youcan clear and start over, which i think is one sortof view on restoration that is perhaps moreabout nostalgia and kind of coming back to the past,but i think with landscape you also have the chanceto be more selective and kind of feed into thisprocess of constant change
which i think, in thecase of greenwood given its dramatic changeover time, i think is worth consideringas an approach. and i think on thequestion of justice, when i was thinkingabout this place, i mean, what strikes me is that thisvery important space of memory and of collective memory forthat particular community has essentially been engulfed. and i think that that initself is an injustice.
that narrative,because of various, sort of structural--i think rooting from structural processes--has sort of been erased. and so maybe one wayof looking at justice is the chance for creatingspace for many, many narratives to come through. and that kind of worksindividually and collectively, right? because within acollective narrative
there are by nature many, many,many individual narratives, but i think the importanceof not sort of privileging one over the otherand then also, obviously of likeprivileging one strand over many others which isthe case in many places. and then burstsof memory i think also-- i would say that we'rein the benjamin conception. we're in the middle of oneof these bursts of memories, i think, in termsof race in america.
and i think that isalso another context. so on that note, i've beenthinking a lot about history and memory as well. and so like just in thecase of the vietnam, the history has been rewrittenand written the whole time, each time a new regime comes up. so like as benjamin said,that kind of history covers up marks of suffering orlike torture or incompleteness of this war.
so there's a whole, basically99% of the people in vietnam, their history, theirmemory is never written. and i was looking atthe shophouse in a way because by virtue of adaptingto the lives of the people, i believe that it holds in itthe memories of their lives throughout the year, justthe way it is organized, how they move withinthe space and that's where memory lies for me. i think in a way thisis sort of revolving
around the questionof definitions and neo-negotiations theway you kind of mentioned it in the beginning. and i want to mention too, imean two different professors that kind of mentionhistories in their own words. one said historydoesn't repeat itself, but it definitelyrhymes and the other said history is not onlywhat we write about, it's also what we write.
and i think we kind ofhave to keep that in mind that there is a question ofnegotiation and concession in what we define as history,as justice, as the narrative that we choose,and a negotiation between the individualand the community and how do we let goof certain narratives or how do we accept subsequentlyan opposing narrative perhaps or letting go of the notionof opposition of narratives? and how we always recognize thatevery document that we produce
whether written or graphicor a built document becomes a historicaldocument in its own right, becomes a sort of expressionof a specific history which is something that i thinkis a bit of a danger when we deal with thesekind of grand ideas, when we say justiceas a slogan and we don't delve into what thatactually means we're always in the danger of privilegingone type of justice over another and it always comesback to, i think,
a notion of tryingto encapsulate all possible justices orall possible narratives or all possible histories whichi'm not sure is even possible. are there any othercomments from the-- yeah. i was thinking abouthow this justice can be understood as close toindividuals and authenticity. so in the case, for example,in berlin, these community are trying to make statementsand critique society but the question is,how far away can you
go from the mainstreamof the government to address this diversityand maybe under the framework of the spaces ofhope which will be the potential of these informalor maybe refugee spaces to build justice. because, for example, in berlina lot of informal settlements have their own statementsbut a lot others, they are very intothis motto of berlin as a creative cityso at the end maybe
sometimes is kind ofmarketing for the city, like building this trendy imageand not what it is supposed to be, like to make statementsand critique the society and trying to buildthis alternative way. can i just addone thing which is i think somethingthat keeps coming up and i love that kind ofbeginning to understand from individual to collective. and often beginningwith the individual has
even a strong history withinfeminist and postcolonial theory it's veryimportant to see the body as a site of politic,but the problem is when that stays that way andit doesn't begin to rise up to thecollective, doesn't rise up to the systematic. and maybe that'swhere history, where some of the things that we'recalling history makes sense. it gives us contextto the current system
that individuals play within. and in that it couldbe quite helpful. and one thing that i thinklittle bit of something that i saw in theprojects, something that you see in manyurban design programs right now is thisquestion of how much do you begin to opt outof the system, right? so the informal,all these questions, which the informalalways has form,
it's just a differentkind of form than the one that is clearer. and then the questionthen becomes, how much do we detachfrom that existing form and how much do wedouble down on it? and it also seemslike that has also a history that herein the us it matters to talk about thenpeople of color and people that are outsideof the structure of power
often kind of stillrelate to power. people within power wantto create their own thing because even outsideof it they will have a little bit of power. so these are someinteresting questions because at the end of theday we're questioning, how do we collectivize? what does that mean? what scale?
and then at what point do youbegin to care about that other? again, like, we can createa little commune here, do we care about the communedown the street at northeastern or whatever? and at what pointdoes it matter? if i can slip in here i justwant to make a bridge between this conversation andyesterday if it's possible just because that's oneof the reasons that we're-- presentations areamazing and i loved when you
asked, mariam, thequestion about history. if i can say, it's notan abstract question. and in fact, the whole pointof yesterday, the conference, here we've got[? collin ?] who was like presenting in themorning, the whole point of the conference yesterdaywas to actually answer that question in thecontext of a real place and real struggles andreal structural conditions. so, i mean, somebodyasked me yesterday
after the conferencea general question. we are constantly inplanning and design having these generalquestions, but i do want us to think about inaddition to the insights in all your comments, the importanceof linking those questions to real world time and place. and so i want to kind of oneup david harvey about marx and remind us in theeighteenth brumaire, karl marx says men maketheir own history but not
in conditions of their choosing. and it seems to me what wewere trying to do yesterday in the conference wasstart that conversation, how understanding the history ofspatial segregation, exclusion, empire, civil war, thecivil rights movement, etc. in a place likest. louis then laid the conditions for strugglesfor appropriations of memory, for differentdefinitions, laying out possibilities and constraints onwhat's possible in the present.
so i just wanted to remind usthat one of the reasons we're here is to kind ofgo back and forth between individual projectsthinking about insights but also learning deeply fromcertain places that give you insight into answering thosequestions about how history enables or constrains you. thank you so much for providingthat link between the two. ok, thank you somuch for providing the link between theconference and today.
building upon some ofthe things that we've heard from the panelists andthrough the presentations themselves, i have aquestion for all of you about the subtext hereof responsibility. so it seems that people havea very strong inclination to do this work becausethere is a personal sense of responsibility. my question is how much agencydo designers really have? what is our power?
and to that point as well canwe talk a bit about designing with versus designing for? yeah, i mean, i thinkthat's at the center of my-- and i think it also goesto diane's comment which is maybe about, that's wherethe importance of site comes in versus sort ofbroad theoretical ideas which are super importantto ground any intervention but then i think sitespecificity is where you're going to get into the very, veryspecific mechanisms of change
and power and the dynamics thathave formed certain a built space over time. and so what i'm superinterested in the site that i kind of stumbledacross last spring when i was in a class oncultural landscapes, and i mean i think it'ssuch-- since then, i have not been able to go yet, whichalready is just makes me feel like, what am i even doing? so i've been looking atthe history of the site
as far as i can tell fromrecords and from reading about it but i thinkthe agency of a designer maybe only starts--i mean, i don't know, maybe this is upfor a question-- like does it only start whenyou actually finally set foot on a site? like can you even bea designer before you know a place physicallyand sort of intimately? and then, yeah, i meanobviously what i was saying,
it's not my storyto tell, but i think it raises important questionsfor everyone to consider. and so that's where i thinkthe role of people who actually care for the site andhave memories and have a history in it thatare very personal, what is the interactionbetween someone who is interested and feelsa sense of responsibility but doesn't have any ofthe sort of, i don't know, the connection to it.
so that's a questionof designing with. is the designer an ally? like, do you just startas an ally and i think you start by learning bylistening and learning and maybe that takes areally, really, really long time before you actuallybecome very projective. i know we're running out oftime but just to build off of that i think that that'ssomething that especially is relevant for the design forthe just city course in terms
of designers looking at aplace trying to understand how to create that narrativeor provide that story and then even to validate whatsome people might be feeling within their own spaces. and i can make this a littlebit like a legal battle or the battle youknow for feminism or against sexual discriminationor anything like that. you have professionalsthat are looking at this from astandpoint of, what
does it like on the ground? how can we reallycreate this narrative? but then you're alsoworking with the community to build that powerand build that capacity and get them to understand andto feel like this is validating what i've been doing, thisis validating what i've been feeling allalong, but also getting them to see thatthey're not alone and that there are other peoplethat are feeling the same way
and taking thatinformation and then using that to then re-framethe narrative and re-frame the story ofwhat they're trying to do. and i think thatespecially dealing with american culture that'ssomething that is really just so powerful because you canchange formal institutions just by changing the narrative. and i think thatthat's what designers have a reallypowerful way of doing,
whether it's throughvisualization or just through the simplecollection of data itself. can i just a little biton this because i think this is the question, right? honestly, even the question formy entire practice, for the way i teach is exactly this, right? and i'm going to sharewith you an experience. and the experience was taking12-- something, 13 students-- to medellin, colombia.
i taught a studio lookingat [inaudible] of medellin, colombia at parsonsand i co-taught it with an anthropologist. the students had to stay in thecommune where we were working and it actually was inpartnership with one of the [? love ?] fellows,alejandro [inaudible], and as he was beginningto form a bond and it was actuallya great experience. but we were workingthere with a group.
that group had been workingon the ground for 30 years doing theater of theoppressed processes. and theater ofthe oppressed then became a reallyinteresting [inaudible] to begin to think about someof these questions for me even today. in which they go and givepeople that have training, have expertise, they don'tnegate that from themselves, and it's all about thecommunity, whatever they want,
because that's also a littlebit of a falsehood at times. and it can, again, communitiescan do pretty crappy things. sometimes you've got to havea critical point of view. facilitation matters. that's something that i reallyenjoyed out of their process. beyond that, it wasa group that was able to negotiate peaceprocesses between drug lords that had really takenover the neighborhood throughout medellin'shistory and now
was beginning to getinto urban design. but when they got intourban design in a funny way they were beginning todo it in the most kind of traditional way possible. so we were there tryingto learn and trying to use the same processes bywhich theater of the oppressor allows people to replaypotential futures in a way that we're talking about herethat come out of the ground and discussed presence and itbecame a very helpful thing
to see, to begin to think ofthe designer as a facilitator. and that facilitationmight matter and it might change anddiffer in different purposes. often you set up the conditionsand you allow things to happen and from that you go back,you continue working. you go back and it'sa back and forth. and the final thing i'llsay about this, because this is an important question inthe issues of authorship, even the way we practice in the us,all this becomes part of it.
it's very complicated todo these kind of things some of the things that in othercountries-- in latin america, in europe-- you're beginningto see practices that are beginning to work incompletely different ways, that are not the master planer, thatare not the master architect, but are really embedded. artists are askingthis question. so i would suggestthat you guys take a look at some of theartists in the way they're
beginning to solve. so look up [? chantel ?][? muth's ?] writing, claire bishop's. a whole bunch ofpeople are beginning to theorize these exactsame questions from the art perspective. finally, the lastthing i'll say is that i think that thejob of the designer is not done when thedesign, the design
should continue to givethat agency for it. it is never seen as a completething, rather the beginning. the beginning maybestatement through a very kind of comprehensiveand rigorous process that includes thesekind of conversations but then that statementgets rethought and you literally beginto play with the history. and you don't evenknow exactly what is going to happen to the thingyou did 10 years from now,
15 years. maybe even make itpart of the design, that this is meant tochange within five years and a new set ofnegotiations happens etc. yeah this is agreat conversation and unfortunately inthe interest of time we're going to haveto cut it short. but isn't that always the way? and i think also a really greatchance, like diane was saying,
to dig in more onthe issues that were unearthed in the lastfew days of the conference through the lens of student workboth in st. louis, but really around the world too. so thank you somuch for everybody and we're just next goingto hear a little bit more about work in the cityof boston, of course our home region, to addresssome of these issues here. can i make one comment?
i'm just thinkingfrom what diane said. ken reardon yesterdaytalked about east st. louis and the successes they hadgoing to east st. louis. i was thinking aboutken reardon's discussion yesterday on eastst. louis which was in desperate situations. much of it, thechange there, came out of the civil rights movementand even deeper memory. but what he talkedabout, about academics
going in when the firstthing he's greeted with is the last thing we need,is more academics telling us what to do. and what they wind up with ishaving a school for planning for the people who live there tohelp plan their own community. so drawing on that, i thinkthat's one of the things you're talking about. and i think it really linksback to what was yesterday. thank you guys so much.
again, i hate cuttingthis off, but we do have an excellentkeynote speaker coming up. so if everyone, whilei get her set up, if we could have thedesigning justice helpers try to bring morechairs out into kind of the center of the roomso everyone can have a seat. thanks. i think there's likea pocket of space back there between those tables.
thanks, guys. ok i think we probablyhave enough chairs so if everyone can juststart finding their seat in the interest of time. ok everyone. we're going to get startedwith our keynote so if everyone could please find aseat and there'll be a lot more time to mix and mingle afterthe student presentations at lunch over pizza.
all right, thanks so much. so we're really excited towelcome dr. atiya martin here today and i'll just givea brief introduction before she gets started. so dr. atiya martin is acertified emergency manager with experience in publichealth, emergency management, intelligence, andhomeland security. mayor martin walsh appointed heras the chief resiliency officer for the city of boston as partof the rockefeller foundation's
100 resilience citiesinitiative where she is responsible forleading the development and implementation ofboston's resilience strategy. boston will focus onadvancing racial equity as the foundation of theresilience strategy process to increase our shared abilityto thrive after emergencies. dr. martin is alsoadjunct faculty at the master of homelandsecurity at northeastern university.
she was previously the directorof the office of public health preparedness at the bostonpublic health commission. her professionalexperience includes the boston police department'sregional intelligence center, city of boston mayor's officeof emergency management, the federal bureauof investigations, and active duty air forceassigned to the national security agency. dr. martin is doing reallyexciting work here in boston
and we are so thankfulthat she decided to join us for ourdesigning justice event. ok i'm going to bring thisdown for a short person. how is everyone doing? yes, are we ready? yes? so i'm a pacer so i'm goingto try to contain my energy to behind this podium so bearwith me as i try to do that. so what i'm going to do todayis talk a bit about equity
so that we're all on thesame page of when i say it, what i mean. we'll talk a bitabout resilience both in the context of100 resilient cities and how they talkabout resilience as well as how i talkabout resilience, which is very much related,a little bit different. what is responsibleresilience which is not a thingexcept for what i've
made up for thepurposes of this process but will become athing because it's something that's sorely needed. the connection betweenrace and trauma and how that playsinto resilience, how that plays into how weneed to look at policies and practices in the way thatwe approach doing business as a government, as institutionsengaging with communities, as well as communityorganizations
also engaging with communities. is that not loud enough? was i not loud enough for folks? oh, ok. just making sure. and then lastly, i'll talkabout boston's approach to the 100 resilientcities process and what we've learned upto this point, what it means for ourpriorities, as well as
what's coming up in the future. so when 100 resilient citiestalks about resilience they're usually talking aboutthe ability of individuals, communities, organizationsto survive, adapt, and grow after emergencies. and they usually talkabout it in two ways. one is the chronicstresses in communities that are tearing at thefabric of communities. and we've seen this.
you all have been talkingabout these types of things, i believe, overthe last two days which are things like racism,things like disinvestment, things like highunemployment rates. so this whole range of issuesthat our communities are dealing with, poorinvestment in infrastructure and built environment,so all of these things that culminate in order to tearat the ability of communities to be able to meet basicneeds, move beyond survival
and into being able to thrive. on the other sideof that, we have the traditionalemergencies and disasters, the things that are more likethe tornadoes and hurricanes, terrorism, all of those things. and what's interesting aboutresilience in this framework is that it doesn'tmake a distinction between what happensafter emergencies and what happens before.
and i think that'sreally important because it's a differentdirection than we've taken within this fieldover the last several years. so i use this quote a lotbecause it just reminds us of the fact that when we talkabout resilience oftentimes it's really about prioritizingand doing the hard work, right? and that part ofunderstanding our resilience is our ability to diginto the difficult issues, roll up our sleeves, and beable to work through them.
there's a greatquote that someone shared with me that allegedlycame from eric holder's grandfather which is this ideathat it's impossible to wring your hands and roll up yoursleeves at the same time so you might as welljust roll up your sleeves and get to work. and so i've found a wholelot of value in that. and you'll see a bigtheme around getting to work in terms of how italk about this approach
that we're taking in boston. so before i get into equitythe second thing i'll say is 100 resilient cities hastheir framing for when they talk about resilienceand it's in the context of bad things happening, right? and so in their contextthe understanding that also those chronicstresses-- racism, poor infrastructure,investments-- actually can lead to disastersin and of themselves.
and you all have talked aboutsome of these things, right? so flint, right? minneapolis bridge collapse,baltimore, ferguson. so we can keep goingat these things that turned into these much largerevents that required us to pay attention and address kindof the conflagration of all of those things coming together. so when we talkabout equity, just to make sure we'reon the same page
i'm going to beillustrative about this. so for those over here whocan't see, i'll read it to you. i don't usually read this. "for fair selection everyonehas to take the same exam. please climb that tree." and for those whocan't see the picture, it's a monkey, a penguin,an elephant, a goldfish. so i'll leave it there. and the next one is, "it's fair,everyone gets an equal amount."
most people have seemsome version of this one usually in the invertedlooking over the fence. i have that one too butit's a different spin on it. but really it's this ideathat we live in a time where we have to be clearabout what we're talking about. lots of people get equityand equality confused and it makes fordifficult conversations when we're not usingthe same language. so when we're talkingabout equality
we're talking about givingeveryone the same thing irrespective of the history,irrespective of the fact that people are notstarting in the same place. equity is reallyabout making sure that folks get what theyneed with the context of what the historicalpieces of our history or historical context ofwhat our communities have experienced. and this is a different spin onthe equality, equity baseball
example. and this is howmost residents feel, how most people, especiallyin marginalized communities, feel in terms of their realityversus these other two pieces, this is kind ofintellectual debate about equality and equity. so the reason i startthere is because when we think about allof the inequities that we see across communities,whether we're talking
about boston or whether we'retalking about some other city anywhere in theus and many times across the world, thatmany of those challenges are concentrated in ourcommunities of color, not because of individualbehavior, right? it's because of a long historyof policies and practices that led us there. so being clear aboutthat because it matters in how we think aboutsolutions and ways
that we can collectivelywork together in order to bring communities together,in order to have government and other institutionswho are policymakers also think differently about howwe approach these issues. everyone still with me? so in resilienceup to this point it's really beenvery much focused on-- both in terms ofhow we think about it and what people do, peoplethink about climate change,
people think about the economy,critical infrastructure, built environment-- theythink about stuff and place. we usually leave out the people. and that starts right fromthe beginning, usually when we do vulnerability assessmentsand we're trying to figure out how do we prioritizeour resources in dealing with the threats andhazards that we face. and you all go throughthese processes when you're thinking aboutdesigning projects as well.
and so people haveto be part of that and the reasonthat's so important is because all ofthe people that we're looking to support actuallyshould be informing the way we're thinking aboutall of these different issues, people are at the core and allof these things work in concert with, thinking about, what arethe circumstances of the people that we're trying to serve,that we're trying to work with, that we're tryingto partner with?
and so it is notthat they're equally weighted in thatpeople, it's just one of those things we consider. it actually shouldbe anchored in that. and that social resilienceis the foundation of all other typesof resilience. so that's theframing, that's where we're at for how we'retalking about this in boston. so when we're looking at thosechallenges of our communities
i want to give yousome specific examples so that you have context onwhy we're talking about race because most people feeluncomfortable with that. i know, i get it. we feel uncomfortable when thewords race are said, racism, and when we start talkingabout these things. and the research showsus this that there's a physiological reaction, mainlybecause we don't really talk about it in meaningful ways.
we don't talk about it in away where all voices are heard, where we're usingthe same language, where we're actually inthe same conversation. and so, yes, it's uncomfortablebecause those conversations usually don't go wellbecause no one ever taught us how to have those conversationsor what the language actually means. so getting to the same place--but before we get there and before i go completelythere i'm going to talk
a little bit about howsome of these inequities are playing out inthe city of boston. so what i'm showing you rightnow is called a hot spot map. usually you seeit for crime data. for these purposesi'm using social data. and it's really aboutthe statistically highest concentrations of thesedifferent categories of circumstances our communitiesare dealing with or living in. so the darker the redthe more people there
are statistically significantly. the darker the blue,those are cold spots that means those are where theleast amount of people who are dealing with these issues live. so you'll see there aresome geographic patterns. how many people arefamiliar with boston and the neighborhoods? we've got some hands here. ok, so what i'll dois use this as a way
to just show thepattern and i won't go into the weeds on thedifferent neighborhoods. is that ok? so social isolation, thereis no data explicitly on social isolationbut the research shows us that the most sociallyisolated people are generally older adults who live alone,single parents who don't have another adult in the household. so when we mapthat, that plays out
in the same neighborhoods--roxbury, dorchester, mattapan, parts of hyde park. so then we think about lowto no income, that again becomes a similar pattern. it gets us dorchester,roxbury, a part of south end which is adevelopment why that's lit up-- or a series of developmentsin that area-- east boston-- development plus lowincome community-- alston-brighton-- developmentsplus immigrant communities,
both russian andbrazilian and a few others as well as lots of students. and as students you'll know thatdoesn't help with the numbers. so the conflagration of allof that in allston, brighton is why you see that hotspot. people with disabilitiesare concentrated in roxbury,dorchester, mattapan, that piece of east boston, partof south end where the housing developments are becausethey accommodate people
with disabilities. limited english proficiency,same similar pattern. where do most peopleof color live? similar pattern. and this is highstatistical concentration. that doesn't mean therearen't any people of color in any of these other areasor for any of these issues, but high statisticalconcentration. and where are mostof our children?
same neighborhoods. so we have some work to do. this is the urgency. this is the call tourgency because we are a city that ispredominantly people of color and we have ourhighest concentration of children coming into a worldwhere the presence of racism presents a number of barriers tothose traditional trajectories of opportunities to success.
so when we think aboutwhat racism actually is, i want to just beclear, i want to be explicit what i'm talking about. and so we're talking abouta historically rooted system of power-- i'm going toread this definition which i don't usually do but ithink it's important to use the specific words--is a historically rooted system of powerhierarchies based on race infused in our institutions, ourpolicies, and our culture that
work better for white peoplethan for people of color, often unintentionally. so i want to be explicit aboutwhat we're talking about here. and this is not about blaming. i am not the race police. i'm not here to callanyone anything. what we're focused onhere is the inequities that we actually knowexist in our communities based on the dataand the research,
not because atiya saysso but because lots of people across the worldand across this country have come to thesame conclusions. and that we arereally looking at how do we make sure that we'reable to have a boston that is united, a bostonwhere everyone has access to thoseopportunities i mentioned. so that means we focus on whatwe're going to do about it, not get lost in the history--informed by history, informed
by those things-- but makingsure that we're focusing on, how do we advance racial equity? and surprisingly, thereare things that we can do. sometimes folks feellike it's hopeless, feel like, well,you go to a thing and they're talking about racismand you end the conference, you end the workshop,and they're like, ok, so what do we do? and then there'susually crickets.
so from this perspectiveit's about making sure that we're closing gapsso that our race doesn't predict our success. i mean that's fundamentallywhat we're talking about, our outcomes. and the challenge thatwe face is making sure that we have in placedeliberate systems and processes and procedures that shift ourpractice from status quo, which perpetuates inequities, to beable to make sure that we have
a customer service focus. and what i'm proposingisn't anything radical. it's nothing pullingit out of the sky. really, we're talkingabout something that businesses do all the time. what is your target market? who is this productor service for? so that you can makesure that it's actually going to meet their needsand you can't do that
without engaging people. you can't do thatwithout acknowledging what their circumstances are. you can't do thatwithout understanding how you can develop arelationship with them to build that trust forthat brand long-term. so this is something that's verylogical in standard practice, we just don't think about inthe context of social challenges or government's role inadvancing racial equity,
but that's whatwe're trying to do. so as we think about race andtrauma, what i'm going to do is talk about howimportant this is and how we move forward in theconversation and into action. i'm not going totalk about that. so there's this amazingreport that came out called the adverse communityexperiences and resilience and it's basically a frameworkfor addressing and preventing community trauma.
has anyone heard of communityor collective trauma before? what is it? just quickly. what is it if youhad to sum it up? it's the fact that, you know,environmental and social effects on a largecommunity which then does go to individuals. it could be increased asthma,it can be increased stress, it could be all thosekind of things--
so all the typesof things that are based in the environment andstructure that contribute to the poor outcomes. anyone else haveanything to add to that? so usually when they'retalking about collective trauma it's not just the sum,as he pointed out, it's not just the sumof individual trauma which we tend to focus on kindof when there's a suicide, when there's a homicide, whenthere's a shooting, swoop in.
how do we give bettertrauma services? that's one piece andthat's a necessary part. the other part is recognizingthe structural violence. most people understandwhat that means in the context of howdo we better understand the way that structuralinequities based on systemic oppression,systemic racism has led to certainoutcomes in communities. and what thisreport very uniquely
does is takes lots ofdifferent approaches and pulls it alltogether and says there's actuallysymptoms of this and you can look ata community and tell if they're suffering fromcommunity trauma which is something that i hadn'theard framed in that way before. and i think it's just veryhelpful for conversations about working with communitiesand in communities. so when they talk aboutthose committee symptoms
they talk about three majorareas, equitable opportunity, they talk about place-- whichis very relevant for here-- and we're talking aboutpeople, and the relationship between the three in that whenyou look at communities who have been affectedby community trauma there's usuallyintergenerational poverty. none of this is goingto surprise people because we see this all the timeif you've been in communities. unemployment, disinvestment,deteriorated environments,
and unhealthy dangerouspublic spaces, crumbling builtenvironment, disconnected damaged relationships,destructive social norms, and low sense ofpolitical social efficacy. that's kind of alot that they've kind of packed all inthere that i've never seen kind of quite pulledtogether in that way, but, again, it's groundingfor us to make sure that we're taking thisinto consideration
and using it as a foundationfor how we engage with folks. so then we have, wellwhat do we do about that? how do we better understandwhat we should be doing and what a resilientcommunity looks like based on the contextof community trauma. and so we have thisequitable opportunity. what are the types of actionsthat we should be doing to make sure that happens? so making sure there'seconomic empowerment, workforce
development, investmentand resources, and that the waywe approach justice is in a restorative way inthat it's very much rooted in cultural normsand in approaches that are relevant to thecommunities that we're serving. also looking at how we helpto rebuild relationships and networks andcommunities, how do we strengthenhealthy social norms, promote communityconnection-- which
is a huge part of the resiliencestrategy, how we're looking at it-- as well as kind of allof these pieces around place that you all are veryfamiliar with in terms of the importanceof green space, importance ofquality safe space, the importance of investingin housing and improving built environment and theway that all of those pieces come together. and, on the other end, whatdoes a resilient community look
like from the context ofaddressing community trauma, which again is coming fromthose structural and systemic inequities. and so this has beenvery helpful for me as i think about what ourcommunities are struggling with. and as we think aboutcommunity engagement, whether you're governmentor another institution, whether you're doingdesign or planning,
working with communities, thatwe recognize that when we talk about building communitytrust, the way we frame and the way it'soften talked about is in a way thatindicates, i don't know why there's no community trust. we just have to figureout how we build it without a recognitionof the history, without a recognitionthat there's a reason there's lack of trust.
and there's a history ofpromises not being kept, there's a history of purposefulpolicies and practices that have led to the inequitiesthat these communities are facing and dealing with. and so the idea thatwhen we're going in and we're trying to buildrelationships that there's a recognition of those things. that's kind of thebeginning and that the idea is that the relationship isas long-term as it can be
or rooted in relationshipswith other organizations who do have those long-termanchored relationships within communities. so the reason why that isso powerful in the framing is because what we usuallydo is we chase symptoms. we say there is violencein these communities and so there must be thingsthat we can help individuals do and therefore we'regoing to have this program or service that's going to chaseall these different symptoms.
but really what we want todo is look at root cause. public health has been doingthis since its inception, looking at root cause, lookingat how issues are impacting our communities,our populations, and looking at whatpolicies, institutions, and the structures thatengage with communities, serving communities,what they can do in order to address thebigger picture of root cause issues.
and in this case, what we'rereally talking about is racism. so the way boston'sapproach is is because we have 100resilient cities, the grant, which was pioneered by therockefeller foundation. i won't get intothe weeds on this. i will say that the idea here isthat the rockefeller foundation wanted to make sure thatcities were using a resilience approach that waslooking at the most pressing issues and challengesthat we tend to shy away
from to be able to make surethat we're focusing on them and looking at how dowe work collaboratively across the issue areas,across different sectors to be able to do this workand that it would spark the willingness of othercities who weren't part of 100 resilient cities in orderto kind of take that same path. and we're already seeing someof that with some cities, even in the us, who are hiringchief resilience officers even though they don'treceive the grant.
and so for thisprocess-- i won't get into the weeds onprocess for time's sake-- but what i'll say isthere are three phases. it's not a lot of time. the first phase isabout five months. and i'm wrappingup that first phase now because today is april 1st. and so we'll be releasingour preliminary resilience assessment which talksabout what we did,
what we heard fromcommunity members, i'll talk a lot aboutwhat that engagement was, what we're doing in boston--not just in government, but with some of ourcommunity partners-- and what does some ofthe research tell us that can help uswith the framing. the second phase isreally about digging deeper into the priorities thatfolks identified, making sure that we're using research,making sure that we're using it
as an opportunityto really understand at the core of these issuesso that a working group can help us with actionablestrategies rooted in community context. so there will be aseries of engagement to make sure that weget community's feedback on the differentpriorities and what they would want a workinggroup to be thinking about as they look to collaborateand bring resources together.
and then we'll be finishedwith that process starting july/august. and then we will dosome work planning and then we transitioninto the doing of things. that's really fast. anyone who has done astrategic planning process, even just for an institution,knows that this is really fast. and we have the fortune andthe great privilege in boston that there are so manyplanning processes that
have happened in the past, thatare happening, that it allowed to be able to pull from a lotof what people have already done because communitieshave been telling us the same things for a long time. and so when i looked back andthen i looked at the engagement that i did, it was veryclear that people are still saying the same things. so that means westill have some work to do around these very specificissues-- which i have all
of this like built up suspense. you're like, whatare the issues? it's coming, i promise. so in order to get tothem, to those resilience themes, those priorities, i had164 meetings between september and january with over 500stakeholders within government leadership, our cabinetmembers, our department heads, met with communityorganizations, advocacy groups,private sector partners,
met with someresidents, in order to really think aboutwhat are we doing well and where there's lotsof room for improvement. and people were very vocal aboutletting me know those things. and so i also did five workshopswith another 123 people really focused in on thisspecific conversation. the rest of them are justlike high level engagements to get people up to speedon what we were doing and how we weredoing the process
and what stage we were at. so this is forillustrative purposes only. so this is what we didwith all of that feedback in order to seewhere we were going to focus our efforts inthe whole spectrum of what the ecosystem of a cityis and how it operates in the context of resilience. so we'd be able tofocus in on where it was the weightin terms of what
people wanted to talk about. so then we looked at what arethe existing things happening in the community, in governmentand compared the two, right? so there is somecomparison that happened. and then we said,well let's take up some preliminaryoverview of the research to make sure we havethe context right and we came up with this--resilience themes, yay. we got here.
so really i alreadytalked about this, that our cross-cuttingtheme is really about advancing racialequity and strengthening social cohesion. this is what anchors everything. it is a body of workin and of itself because there's a lotto do around this. i'll share withyou just a handful of things thathave been proposed
and some things thatare in the works just by the nature of beginningto have these conversations. so the city of boston will bejoining the government alliance on race and equity, which isa national coalition of cities and regional government, likecounties, and some states who are really looking at howdo you operationalize equity in government? what does that actuallymean and look like? and this is reallyimportant, not
just because it's theright thing to do, but because equity is one ofthe four pillars of government, which most peoplearen't aware of. it is what we aresupposed to be doing, we just haven't been doing it. and since 2005, it has beenone of the four pillars are government. and before then itwas about economy, how much we're spending.
it was about efficiency, how areprocesses and systems working? it was about effectiveness, howare the outcomes of the things that we're doingare we achieving what we wanted to achieve? and, now, equity, askingthis additional question of for individuals we knoware disproportionately burdened by inequities-- inthis case, people of color-- how will this policy orpractice burden them further and if it does, why?
and is this what weshould really be doing? and if it's somethingthat we can't figure out another alternativeto doing, how are you going to mitigate theburden on those communities? so asking someup-front questions because these arethe things that are going to comeback to us anyways, so might as well beup front about them. and there's some veryspecific opportunities
around budget filters,around thinking differently about basic practices. i'll give you an example. does anyone knowhow sidewalks get fixed in terms of the process? most people calla number and say the sidewalk needs to befixed and then they come out and they fix the sidewalk. but who are the folks who areconnected to the systems that
make those calls? the people who arealready in-- if we have disadvantagedneighborhoods, we have advantagedneighborhoods, right? so it's the folks in advantagedneighborhoods prominently making those calls. so that means theother neighborhoods aren't getting theirsidewalks fixes regularly. and so instead of relying ona complaint-based approach,
what's the policy levelapproach that we can take? and that policy levelapproach is to say, well, the folks who aremost dependent on sidewalks being well kept together arepeople with disabilities. and so we need to makesure that we understand within thoseneighborhoods where there are high concentration ofpeople with disabilities that we've actuallygone in and fixed the sidewalks in those areasbecause those people depend
on them the most. where are the most families? and looking at thewhole map to see, where are the places wherewe've invested a lot in and where are the places wherewe haven't invested as much in? and being veryintentional and then once you get thaton the cycle where it's everyone on a regularbasis is getting their sidewalks maintained once kind of levelthe playing field of address
the equity issue,then it becomes a policy that benefitseveryone because now no one has to call 3-1-1 tofix the stupid sidewalk, right? so it benefits everyone when wetake a higher level perspective and one of the reasonswhy this so important is because many timesthe systems that don't work for people of colorare the systems that don't work for everyone anyways. so this is the type ofthinking, new ways of thinking,
of just asking someadditional questions and raising the bar in terms ofwhy we're doing certain things. the other piece ofthe resilience themes came in the conceptsof folks who wanted to make sure that thisprocess was institutionalized, that the things we werelearning from going through how we did this as well aswhat recommendations come out of the working groups,that there was a way to make sure thatwithin government
as we were looking at planningprocesses that we we're aligning with these differentissue areas that rose up to the top and thatwe were sharing that with our otherinstitutional partners and with othercommunity organizations. household economicresilience, how do we make sure that there'saccess to asset building? what are the barriersto asset building and how do we betterunderstand those?
critical infrastructureresilience, how do you make surethat the infrastructure that our communitiesdepend on is actually serving all residents,particularly those who are most vulnerable? community governanceresilience, how do we facilitate communitygovernance in the delivery of city services? so this is the importanceof voice being heard.
this is also important toaddressing that community trauma because part ofthe community trauma is being used to yourvoice not being heard. and so when there's anopportunity for the voice to be heard andthere is actually action taken basedon that input, it begins to rebuildthe type of trust that we're talking aboutwith our communities because at the end of theday, in order to build trust,
it's in the doing,not what you say. we tell our children all thetime, listen with your eyes, so that's what reallyhappens in real life. and so it's inhow we're actually working on projects andinitiatives with communities. and then also how aresupporting the building of support ofcommunity leadership and civic engagement. and the last oneis about community
psychological resilience. i won't go into this becausei went into it earlier, but it is a priority bothat the individual level and at the collectivelevel as it relates to the cross-cuttingtheme of racial equity and social cohesion. so i'll just wrapup in two slides. one, by saying that in boston weoften talk about one boston as if we mean everyone, but we knowthat everyone is not included
in that one boston,and so this is about getting us to the placewhere that is the process. and i am under no illusionthat this grant funding is going to fix all of this. the idea is that welay the foundation and the infrastructureand the structure to be able to make sure thatit gets institutionalized and that we'retracking and we're being methodicalabout measuring,
about looking at outcomes. and so i'll sharemy favorite quote that went along withthis theme of work because we have work to do. that "most people don'trecognize opportunity because it comesdisguised as hard work." and this is therelationship of all of us rolling up oursleeves and being able to get in, put ourbrains together, put
our experience together,rooted in research, rooted in data--not opinions, not anecdotes, but in conversationsthat we had with constituents, like three constituents-- butmaking sure that we are really rooted in the methodicalapproaches that will get us to the outcomeswe're trying to achieve. and we're measuring our progresstoward this on a regular basis. so i'm going to be quiet therebecause i'm sure it is hot. people are probablyready for me to stop now.
and we're going to transitioninto the next portion. so, good? ok so in the interest of time,we're going to hold questions. atiya will be joiningus for the discussion after the presentation. so if you have questionsfor her there'll be an opportunity to discussthat after the presentation. so if everyone wants to takea quick stretch and reorient and try to get somepeople on the side
the room so everyonecan have a seat. we'll start pretty quickly. i know there's lots of goodconversations happening, but we want to make surewe have time for questions in the discussion. so i'm going to please askeveryone to take a seat and we're going to get startedwith this second student presentations and discussionportion of the day. i think there shouldbe-- so for now we're
going to have sixstudents are just going to come up and present andthen we're going to call people back up for the panel. so yeah, just have a seat. all right, thanks. hello everybody. my name is andy [? rahat ?]. i'm an marc2 student. the project i'm going topresent today i probably
should be calling itequitable opportunity housing, i'm realizing, but it wasdone in dan d'oca's studio last semester for the mlk way. it was a studio looking at raceand the history of segregation in american cities, particularlyin st. louis and washington, dc. so basically my projectstarted on the ground realizing the disparatehousing in st. louis. there's a lot of affluent whitesuburban housing in st. louis
and a lot of impoverishedafrican-american housing in northern in st. louis. it started as a mapping exerciselooking at race distributions within st. louis. so this is a map showingdark blue is african-american and then the lighterblue is white. and you can see that there'sa direct correspondence between areas oflow opportunity, areas of african-americansand section
8 and voucher-based housing. it's really unfortunate andit's a situation that affects a lot of american cities. recently it's been ruledby the supreme court as being in violationof the fair housing act and something that local cdcswill need to be addressing, but there's a largekind of instance of sort of distributions ofunequal opportunity in relation to race and income.
some of the lowestperforming schools are in predominantlyafrican-american neighborhoods. there's not a single hospitalin north st. louis that serves the african community. access to financeis also segregated. and so the project startedlooking at basically developing mixed income housingdevelopments in search of a better neighborhood. and so this was sort ofthe hypothetical people
we were designing for. people from northst. louis and also people from the suburbsin order to sort of create a more integrated city. and we're lookingat sort of trying to find these elementsof a good neighborhood and where to locate them. and so the strategywas instead of taking these kind ofdepressing maps and sort
of just not knowingwhat to do with them, it was sort of flipping themand using them as a filter. so basically looking atareas of highest opportunity then looking at areas ofgood education outcomes, areas of good health, areasof higher employment, higher income, and sort ofusing that to filter down to find a site for a mixedincome housing development. so kind of as proof ofconcept, this is the site just sort of really just based offof raw data looking to find
a place of high opportunity. and this is what itlooks like on the ground. so i think it's kind ofobvious that this is maybe an area of higher opportunity. so then the projectwas basically about trying to developa mixed income housing development within this area. there's fortunately a lotof large vacant public land that could be used for acertain development like that.
and this sort of walkedthrough the design, developing some typicalsuburban units focused around a community center. when we were speaking to peoplein st. louis, especially people working at the cdcsthey had mentioned that there is-- becauseafrican-americans for the longest time have hada history of being excluded from the suburban environmentthere is this kind of a desire to be living in aless dense area.
so this is a just sort of someslides of the developments. so i'll have to go quickly. and then i also did adesign for a proposal in the city thatwould be for students at the university of st. louisin the social justice school. it would be a co-housing unitfor african-american residents, locals, and then also students. just kind of quickly goingthrough the slides, there'd be sort of an openmarket there too as well.
and then sort of allof this was compiled into these two packages thatare going to get sent over to the cdcs in st.louis so they can start to use this project asa way to kind of start some internal discussions tostart thinking about locating developments outside oflow opportunity areas and into higheropportunity areas. and so i made somepackets as well for that. thank you very much.
hi, i'm [? shawn ?]. i'm third year marc1 student. so these are scenes thatwe are all familiar with, the divide between those whohave and those who don't. and this is nodifferent in indonesia. for those of you whodon't know where it is, i googled it for you. so what we see as greenfields and brochures for new urbanism-style gatedcommunities are in reality home
to a thriving healthy community. we have the divide, themiddle class and people from the lower class. the developer steps in andthe lower class is evicted. when we destroy aninformal settlement we also destroy theembedded logics and networks of codependency that havebeen built up over time. as much as the city continuesto reject and push these communities furtherinto its peripheries,
the city cannot existwithout its shanty town. the project asked us, is thedivide between the classes softer than we imagine it to be? and what if we acknowledgedthis codependency and celebrated thisparasitical marriage. this project investigatesthe possibility of expanding a citywithout expunging its informal settlementsthat surround it. in other words, themiddle and lower classes
are moving in together. what then is the containerfor this to happen? and there are lessons frompast attempts to house people from compounds, whichare informal settlements. so a lot of it has to do withthe way it's been approached from modernist point ofview by building high rise, high density buildings. sorry. and we can look at what istypically done by developers.
what we have are just stylizedfacades on very generic floor plans. and perhaps this is when theintervention can take place. so the main idea is toreconfigure the middle class house as infrastructure forself-help incremental housing to take place. so, you know, it's abit of architecture there whereby modifieda typical middle class house to form infrastructurefor and filled
by the lower classes. so depending onyour economic status you can put in whatevermaterial that suits your budget. and what you have islike a two classes house in a single compact unit. in the aggregationof this unit, studies were done to ensure thatissues of access and privacy were accounted for. and this is what itlooks like in plans.
so a lot of the difficultywas trying to figure out what each class values. so the middle classesmostly value just the idea of a pristine front,but in reality they still love a bargain. so this is what itlooks like on the front. and in the back is where thesere-house informal settlements are. and so that's whatit looks like,
full of life and activity. this is a sectionthrough it, so. urbanists andsociologists have long called for a mixing of classessince segregation ultimately ends up in socialdisease, but if you forget about hightheory for a while, but instead lookat what's happening on the streets of jakarta, andtake an ethnographic stance, we already seethis mixing that's
happening even in moreexpensive neighborhoods. and perhaps whatis proposed here might not seem to betoo far from reality. hi, everyone. my name is elaine stokes andi'm part of the landscape department here. and i'll be showingsome of my work from my currentin-progress thesis which is titled restructuringthe edgelands
and is sited alonghodiamont right-of-way which runs through north st. louis. so at its core,this thesis asserts that in cities of dispersalwhere populations are declining and open land isbecoming abundant, the landscape architectis uniquely positioned to operate at ascale that addresses the minimalproductivity pervasive in these urban environments.
specifically, thespatial boundaries that organize citiestoday frequently limit rather than facilitateinnovative use and occupation of land, particularly dueto the standard practice of maintenance regimesfor vacant property. so by merging privatelyand publicly owned land into a continuous networkand using the hodiamont right-of-way as aprototype, a wider variety of incubator industries canco-inhabit the urban space,
establishing a commerce thatsupports local residents while also forming a newtypology of urban space that's centeredaround production. so here you can see thewestern-most entrance of the hodiamont. and when i'm talking aboutminimal productivity here, i'm referring to a kindof threefold aspect. so the value of themajority of the vacant land along the hodiamontdoes not promote
a productive socialenvironment because there's very little programmingof these spaces and it really does notfacilitate interaction amongst neighbors. it also does not promoteecological productivity because most of the vacantland along this site is simply mowed interms of maintenance so it doesn't allow theproduction of habitat. and, finally, there is verylittle economic productivity
because the intensevacancy here is really detracting from land value. however, the hodiamont isvery uniquely positioned within the city. so the hodiamont zone ishighlighted in yellow here. and it runs between severalmajor educational and cultural institutions, connectingwashington university, st. louis university, andthen grand center which is kind of on the farright of the image.
and so it also runs through andabuts several very low-access neighborhoods where thereis really low income. those are highlightedin the hatched gray and also the lowestcar ownership. so these neighborhoodshave very limited mobility. so what i'm workingon currently, and this is inprogress, is seven types of industries seenhere which would serve as the driverfor social, ecological,
and economic engagementalong the hodiamont. so here i am evaluatingthese industries on a number ofcriteria and proposing a method of gradual phasingwhere each activity feeds into the next. so, in this way,a variety of zones would emerge alongthe hodiamont, each with unique internalfocus, but also overlaying into a complex system whereagroforestry, composting,
residential deconstruction,land, art, and transportation would build upon one another. and while this proposalfocuses primarily on the hodiamont, whichis in the brightest green along themiddle, it is also understood as a resourcefor the neighborhoods both north and southof the line where there is very diversesocioeconomic and racial neighborhoods.
so, most essentially, it wouldcreate a network of open space that encourages a safe publicsphere while also embracing productive landscapes. and rather thansubdividing the corridor into sections of recreationor transportation or industry, the idea is to overlay apalimpsest of all three such that there is adynamic corridor that evolves along the threeand a half mile site. and so, just to wrap up, thehodiamont in this project
is not consideredan insular space. rather, it is understood as aprototype for other corridors of vacancy within the citywhere these industries that are being exploredalong the hodiamont could be expanded andtested at a greater scale. in this way, thehodiamont produces a new ecological industry forst. louis while also providing a highly accessible corridorof public space that establishes a greater sense ofownership in north st. louis.
can everybody see me? my name is [? ina. ?] i'ma marc1 graduating in may. i'm presenting my thesis,"losing its frame-- the cruise terminalas a landscape of cultural production andsustainable development." traveling used to be allabout the destinations. the idea that theocean can be crossed and the other side can bereached used to be exciting. the ocean liner thatdistinguished tool of ability
that enabled industrialized,development, and trade is today a relic of the past. when commercial jet planescame into market in the '60s, many of the displacedocean liners were then remodeledinto cruise ships, giving rise to thecruise industry. and then over theyears the ships become heavier and bigger,carrying more and more passengers at once.
the ship as anartifact has changed from a symbol ofindustrialized infrastructure to a symbol of leisure. the proliferation of theship has grown to the extent that some writerswould argue that there is no destination anymore, thedestination is the ship itself. but this thesis makesthe case for the revival of the destination and afuture cruise industry. krista thompson was the firstto use the term tropicalization
to describe the complexvisual systems through which the islands wereimaged for tourist consumption and the socialand political implications of these representationson actual physical spaces. the way that cruiseterminals are designed today and represented continueto support that. the image of the terminal ishighly controlled to the extent that a physicalboundary is imposed. so this is a current terminalmap of my site in belize city.
and the city properhere is rendered formless in its representation. so basically the sky area isthe city and then, you know, it's the city and the sea. the tourist,therefore, literally does not move beyondthe artificial boundary of the cruise terminal,while the locals are banned from entering. so this is a real picture thata tourist took of a barbed wire
in haiti. and economically,although the host country receives some money fromrenting out the port land, not a single dollar spent by thetourists within the terminals actually flows intothe local economy. so here we see the greenbar representing other ship expenses, port fees, etc. are literally vanished by 2015,too thin to be represented. but at the same time,although cruise companies
are pocketing a lot of moneyfrom the current passengers who are typically babyboomer americans, the thesis argues thatthe business model is not sustainable unlessthey start designing for the future cruiserswho are really us today here, the students, whoare millennials who prefer experiences and authenticity. some of these future cruisersare extreme explorers who actually spend months oncargo ships to see the world,
so the ship becomesirrelevant in reality. it's time to involve thedestination in the design of cruise terminals. so this thesis takesthe case of belize city. belize is a smallcountry flanking the east of other popularcaribbean destinations. it's still a small marketin terms of tourists, but their tourist sector hasgrown over 1,000% since 2001. so the thesis takesthe opportunity
to offer a re-imagination ofthis existing cruise terminal and propose a designmethod that can be and should be tailoredto the opportunities at different destinations. so in the case ofbelize, their livelihood depends on its rich forestand its development need can be addressed by anincrease of skilled laborers to add value tothese raw materials. so the cruise terminal isnot just a cruise terminal,
it is of vocational schoolfor both belizean middle to high school students. the main move inprogram adjacencies to pair each market withits production facilities for the production ofthe very things they're selling in the shops, which areat once training facilities. local skills can be cultivatedin these production facilities but the spectacle of both alsocreates a didactic experience as the tourist movesthrough the overlap spaces.
so this is the general planshowing the market spaces here flanked by productionsspaces and the experience really about kind ofgoing through them as an urban experience. here is some diagram supportingthe design of campus and market being also both adidactic path of kind of ordering disciplineor ordering trades. and this is acollage of the path and some studies of howto redesign that boundary
in an urban scale. so lastly i would saythe project is really about kind of curating thisreciprocal relationship where the ship represents a dynamicreservoir of constantly renewed information andknowledge manifested in each ship loadof tourists arriving from all over the world, justlike the internet in a way. and it's a relationshipthat continually generate change in each other.
every day there'sa cruise docked off the shores of belize city fornine hours with an average of 3,000 passengers. how might we better capture thepotentials in this interaction to generate benefitsfor both sides? these nine hours can be spentin learning about local trades and resources and evenoffering impromptu lectures and conversations. thank you for having me here.
my name is donald [? zito. ?]i'm a marc2 second year student. and i'm presenting the optionsstudio of last year instructed dan d'oca. and the title is makingcommunity out of space together. and the site wasthe [inaudible]. it's one of the suburbancommunities in suffolk county, long island, new york.
and this ismargarita espalda who is an artist and dealing withsuch kind of social program, which is very typical in thesuburban long island context, like weak immigrantintegration-- immigrants from thedifferent countries-- or lack of parenthood forchildren, school segregation, and aloofness topolitical engagement. and she wants toestablish a community art center to integratethis community together.
so we met margaritain september and she wanted us to design one stageto establish an art center. so this is a site which hastwo buildings and huge gardens and touches to the street. and this is just aquick look of the site. and this is a building. and in this is an interior whichis going to be a theater space or staging space. so after the visitwe tried to design
a three scale ofthe design, which also in terms of thescale and which is also in terms of the timeline. and step 1 is a very small one,stage or furniture or interior as a quick step. so based on their visionof the art center, they actually wantnot only a theater, but also they wantsome grass hall art or like a painting grassor a guitar concert.
so we visionedlike a transformer with furniture and thediscussed the margarita and the [inaudible]stakeholders like this. and finally we came upwith the idea of the four units of furniturewhich can be a stage but can be also set upas table and chairs. and we [inaudible] themodular coordination so that it can have manyarrangements which can be very different arrangements.
and the color scheme came fromtheir home countries' flag. and the middle scale isabout exterior space, but i'll go quicklyjust to basically be responsible to theneeds and desires. and [inaudible]about how to engage the community in [inaudible]. and we proposed someinventory system thinking about the art center ascorrective social capital which exchange not onlyfurniture or like a people
who runs a [inaudible]who can go to the concert. and we wanted to realize thefirst step within the semester. and we arrangedseveral workshops. and one thing isan online survey. and two and three isa local construction and a publicimagination workshop on site we did in thethanksgiving break. and we prepared someconstruction money and some tools and madefurniture, actually, together
with local people. and this event wasactually one aspect to integrate thecommunity at first. and we painted and wecompleted and this is a stage. and at the same timeof the construction we did some [inaudible] workshopusing the 1 to 10 scale model and engaged thoselocal people to how they want to use thatfurniture in the future. and we proposed a togand they all write down
and published in the wall. and we made some prettypartition and some trial for our exterior design. and we also did a survey inaddition to the online survey. so we learned a lotfrom that design process and the workshops. after the workshopwe wrapped up some what we learned fromthat workshop experience. and we wanted to improve somehowabout our next step design
but the semester close is reallynearly the end so we cannot stay at the site all the time,but we want to have some, like a proactive design into thecommunity to have some catalyst for people to think and imaginetheir future of the design. thank you so much. i'm michael [? male ?]. i'm an architecturestudent here. and i'm presentingmy thesis work which is a project called"todos en bici," which
means everyone on bikes. and it's a nomadicexperiment of sorts in design in which i led a group of22 cyclists of all ages and abilities across one ofthe most rural roads, one of the most rural desertroads on the continent, through baja california. and through the journeywe collectively created a platform for exchange, forexperience, for storytelling. and the projectcomes from-- well
it stems from-- an urbaninvestigation called en bici, which is madepossible by the mexican cities initiative, in which me andmy research partner carlos [inaudible] were exploringthe bicycle as a critical tool of urban resiliencein mexico city, one of the most congestedcities on the planet. so we were exploringthe ways in which people are using the bicycle, notonly to survive in the city, but to thrive.
as everyday urbanists,our bicycles were our mobile research camp. basically all of ourtime, 10 hours a day, were spent on bicyclesmeeting cyclists from all over thecity, cyclists of all walks of life-- from peoplewho either found their bikes in the garbage, peoplewhose entire livelihood is their bicycle, bakers, watervendors, water delivery people, selling things offtheir bikes, mechanics,
hipsters on bicycles--trying to really discover the whole ecosystem of bicyclingsubcultures in this really dense, congested city. an important elementof our research was joining people intheir urban journeys and filming all the while. the camera was animportant lens for us to help communicatethe story of each and every individual cyclist.
and then, also, there wasthe quantitative component where you're mappingpeople's rides and then the more qualitative componentwhere we were exploring notions of how the bicyclehas transformed one's experience of thecity, how it's rendered certain areas of the citymore accessible to them, how it's transformedtheir perception of scale, speed in the city. and so the spaceof the interview
really became thespace in which people were able to communicatetheir stories. and throughout thecourse of the research we biked over 6,300kilometers all over the city and developed this incrediblenetwork of collaborators-- of bicyclists, ofactivists, of policymakers working with mobilityinfrastructure-- basically bikers of all kinds. and so this is where"todos en bici" comes from.
so what i was seeingfrom this urban research was this latentdesire, this potential, to start to connect a lot ofthese disparate constituencies, all sorts of differentorganizations and bikers, through the designof an experience. and so "todos en bici" isreally premised on diversity, inclusion, and accessibility. so in this group of 22,there were blind cyclists, there were deaf cyclists,there were amputees,
there were riders as young as12, there were riders as young as 60. and what we'rereally trying to do is bring together people whohave very, very distinct ways of perceiving their world anddiving deep into this platform that we were creating, this safespace that we were creating, the space ofinterrogation and sharing. and so a really importantelement of this project was designing the group, wasfinding the participants.
and so i'll just introduceyou to a couple of people. this is jose conejo whichmeans rabbit in spanish. he plays with the amputeesoccer league in mexico city. he lost his leg 10 years ago. he hadn't been on a bike since. and what's interesting, whatyou see in this project, is basically a lotof the participants are a minority ofsorts trying to adapt and live in a world that'sbeen designed for majority.
so, for example, with josehe has a very particular way of moving about the city, a citythat's very inaccessible, very dense and congested. and so we started bikingtogether on a tandem bike on weekends in mexico city. and the first time we hoppedon a tandem bike together we were both a little bitnervous because we didn't know what the dynamic would be,if we'd be able to stay up or anything.
we launched, i turned around,we both started to cry. like it was one of themost beautiful moments i ever had on a bike. you know, thisperson that has been walking very slowlythroughout the city is now cutting through it. i really believedeeply in the bicycle as a vehicle for socialchange, as a lens, as a way ofperceiving your world.
this is brisa. her name means breeze. she's a computer scientist. choco is in front. he's an activistand bike mechanic. brisa was actuallytaught how to ride a bike by another participantin the journey who runs this feminist bikingcollective that teaches women how to bike inbusy urban streets,
on mexico city highways. this is israel, theyoungest participant. he's 12 years old. he's from iztapalapa. and the other interestingthing about this design project was also designing trust. the proposal wasquite outrageous, you know, asking people tobike 1,000 miles across one of the most rural roads inthe continent on a bicycle.
this is hernan and marta. hernan is a deaf cyclist. marta is a blind cyclist. marta was my partnerin the journey. we rode on a tandembike together. one of the most beautifulthings about this project is you start to see allthese new languages emerge because you have blindcyclists communicating with deaf cyclists communicatingwith spanish speakers
communicating withenglish speakers. and so the most common languagebecame this language of touch, this language of movement. everything kindof became a dance. people use less words andtheir actual communication became more big, more bodily. in making thisproject possible, i mean it was very mucha design project, an architected project.
i had to design an identityfor the project, design a way of communicating this project. as an architect i very muchidentify as a storyteller. i use storytelling as a vehiclefor moving projects forward. and that's how i build trust. that's how i created buy in. for this particularproject i had to raise $15,000 in twomonths to keep it accessible, you know, find 12 bikesfor half of the people
that didn't have bicyclesthat wanted to participate because accessibilitywas key in creating the diversity necessary forthis project to really thrive. and then there was a wholeseries of design tools that i incorporate into theproject in a pedagogy of sorts that really catalyzed theexchange that was happening. so one of these elementswas the collective camera. i'm producing a documentaryabout the whole experience and the documentary is verymuch a participatory work.
so we had thisparticipatory camera and every morningone of the partners would pull out ofa bag an element. and these elements we haddecided upon before the trip as a group. these elements included bodies,language, earth, wind, water, food-- the elementsof our journey. and so every day somebody wouldpull an element out of the bag and that be the focus forthis collective camera.
and then a really importanttool was this participatory map, this piece of canvas that becameour platform, our storybook of sorts, it was both aretrospective tool and a tool that projected forward. if you look closely, it'sbasically the original map was just the outline of bajacalifornia, the peninsula, and then the highway itself. and it was sewnon to have texture so that the blind participantscould also read the map,
they could see the proximityof the road to the coast, they can feel the beadswhich were cities, the distance between towns. and then also what it didwas it created a new standard of language becausewhat this trip really did was destroy theidea of normal-- of a normal body, of normalbeauty, of normal language. and so through thismap people were able to communicate equally.
the deaf participantswere able to draw. people who could hear with theirears, speak with their mouth could could see the map. and then also thelast element were these empatheticactivities, these activities that we designed togetherthat really provided a bridge between your distinctway of viewing the world and my distinct wayof viewing the world. so this is the most importantpart of the journey.
so, for example, new year'seve we spent the entire evening blindfolded. we went into the newyear blindfolded, all 22 of us, which was a reallyimportant initial exercise in helping us to empathizewith the experience of biking across a desert blind. so there were 22 of us cooking,eating together, moving about the desertall blindfolded. after all theseempathetic activities
there would be aspace for discussion. this was one of themost exciting days. it was two weeks into the trip. it was mile 900. we spent an entire 24hours without speaking a single spoken word. so imagine that 22 people wakingup on a rural desert beach having to cook together,having to take down camp, having to bike 100 miles, havingto go into a taqueria and order
tacos without speakingeven though you've never faced that form ofcommunication before. this was an activitythat we designed with conejo, the amputeefootball player, soccer player. he had everyone put theirhands in their pants and we played a soccergame because basically when you have an arm tied behindyou, you move very differently. you kind of lose your balance. and so after that, wehad a whole discussion
about conejo'sexperience of having to adapt his body to a toolbuilt for somebody with two legs. i spent an entire dayand a half blindfolded with my ridingpartner marta which was an incredibleexperience for me and she was my guidefor that entire day. and then this whole projectbeing communicated through what i'm producing, thisparticipatory documentary that
explores perceptionsof bodies of language and tries tocommunicate the space of our collectiveimagination that we built through this journey. and there's more on en-bici.com,lots of narrative videos and interviews. and the debut will beapril 27 at the gsd. wow, thanks so much. those are allincredible and inspiring
and i know everyonesmells that pizza, but we are going to havea brief discussion period. so if i can ask all thepresenters and our guest commentators, davidharvey and atiya martin to join us back up onstage at the panel. yeah, is this on? yeah, it sounds like it's on. great. ok, well i want tostart by thanking
all of our presenters one moretime, really great projects. and i want to thank atiyaand david for being here to think through thema little bit with us. so just to startoff, i think one of the things that i observedin most of these projects is that they seem to bothpresuppose and respond to a certain tension. on the one hand,they recognize, i think, the fact of unevengeographical development,
the segregation ofprivilege from poverty is something thatsomeone like david, for example, has gone lengthsto sort of demonstrate and try to explain in his work. and on the other hand,they seem to all be invested in the beliefthat atiya mentioned in her presentationthat equity is one of the pillars ofgovernment and it's one of the preconditionsfor resilience.
and they all seem to meto respond to this tension through integration,mainly spatial integration, through putting housingin affluent neighborhoods, through using landscape toconnect spaces, bicycles, cruise ships, you know, etc. so i think onequestion that i have that we might want toexplore is, how do we think about spatialintegration as a response to uneven geographic developmentas a tool for achieving equity?
what can presentations likethese, projects like these do for us to help usassess the capacity for spatial integrationto address inequity? what are the uniqueopportunities of spatial interventions,design interventions to achieve equity? and what might some of thelimits to spatial interventions be? and so if any of our discussantsor panelists want to open up,
feel free. since i'm holdinga mic, i guess i'll talk while we figure out whothe next person is going to be. so first of all, thank youall for your presentations. they were amazingand very thoughtful in terms of theexperience, in terms of trying to think about howthese very difficult situations could be looked at froma different perspective. i think that's the type ofthinking that we need in order
to support moving towards equityand really challenging some of the current status quotypes of thinking and ways of doing business. so thank you all for that. what i'll say in directresponse to the question is, what are theopportunities, right, for bringing thesepieces together to help address equity? i was actually meetingwith an organization that
is one of the few nonprofitarchitectural firms in the country and we talked,actually, a lot about this. and we talked a lot abouthow the built environment, the landscape,the open space are manifestations of whether ornot equity is present or not. and so the opportunityis huge there and i think youtalked-- i forget who talked about it--was it you that talked about opportunity maps?
who talked aboutopportunity maps? you did. you talked aboutopportunity maps. and so getting abetter sense of where are those opportunitiesfor us to really leverage this type of approachto making sure that when we walk through a landscapethat we've normalized equity in meaningful waysbecause right now we're in a space wherewe've normalized inequity.
we walk into certainneighborhoods and spaces and expect themto be certain ways and therefore have nodesire to change them. and so that's kind ofmy initial thinking. i'll speak to that a littlebit in terms of accessibility related to institutions andthe people who live near them, which was a topic that wasi think addressed really compellingly yesterday. but, again, goingback to st. louis,
there's often alevel of distrust due to lack of interactionand lack of integration through people who aremaybe perceived as outsiders for coming to an institution. they haven't lived there. they don't know thecommunities around them. so, to me, i see publicspace and the creation of public space, thatprocess, as a great way to facilitate interactionthat will then
kind of address theideas of integration that we're talking about. i have the microphone now. i guess just tocomment on that i think kind of my interest inthis whole subject or the idea is kind of-- i think it's reallyunfortunate that we sort of see integration in the us assome sort of utopian idea that simply living next tosomebody else who is not quite like you is-- it'skind of insane
that that's sortof aspirational. i think that should just be kindof normalized at this point. but what else wasi going to say? i think also,though, in st. louis there are some examples,definitely, of some housing developments and cdcsthat are actually pursuing some pretty realisticand successful, you know, approaches. i think my projectwas a little bit more
pushing the boundary towardswhat we sort of perceive as kind of normative, butthere's a lot of examples right now, evendevelopments that we went to look at that arepursuing mixed income housing as a very,very realistic housing model within a neoliberalcapitalist society, you know, that it's something that canbe done, it's being done, it's very successful,and you know i think at this pointit's just a matter of kind
of copying and pasting. i was just pasting it somewherethat maybe other people hadn't thought about at this point. there are a couple of ways onecan think about intervening in the contemporarysituation and i think that a coupleof projects here are suggesting an alternative. we might want to thinkabout this strategically. i have the impressionthat there's
a lot of impulse behindthe idea of trying to create what i wouldcall unalienated spaces in a sea of alienation. and that can often take theform of a very specific project. and it's a bit likeinstead of trying to deal with the whole cityor the whole neighborhood, you try to plant a seed thatmight flourish in some way. and i think the theater was avery good example of precisely that kind of intervention.
and i've seen a wholeset of interventions of this kind inlatin american cities where, for instance, thepedagogy of the oppressed is a very significantbasis for a lot of thinking and there's an attempt tocreate various places-- cultural centers orwork spaces or something like that-- which are outsideof the norm of society. and by this simple demonstrationeffect of being there they indicate that anotherfuture is possible in some way,
but-- and this is itseems to me to be very useful for a group like thisbecause you're probably better equipped to do thosekinds of interventions than sort of wholesalecomplete social re-engineering of the whole of boston or thewhole of the us or whatever. and i think that weshouldn't necessarily think that those seemingly smallinterventions are irrelevant. they're not. they can actually be centersfrom which something can really
grow. and this can bearound many things. in italy for example, there'sbeen a lot of women's centers that have been constructedin many cities that address the question ofwomen's right to the city. and it's done by kindof saying, ok, we can create these secure spacesor these secure possibilities and out of that can come somebroader kind of social change. because it seems to me thebroader social change right now
is very difficultto actually confront because the neoliberalconfiguration of how capital is working these days istaking on things like income streams in such a way. and there's such aninequality of income streams. and this is amacroeconomic issue which is actually very difficultto engineer at any local level. since, for example,affordable housing very often depends upon the populationhaving an adequate income
stream to supportadequate housing provision but if 50%of the population does not have that incomestream, that leaves you high and dry as to whatyou can do particularly when you've got statesand the federal government and everybody else getting veryparsimonious about the kind of monies it's going torelease for affordable housing so i think that drawingattention to these more macroeconomic requirements tomake some of these things work
is important but thengets very frustrating. if you're trying toget things reorganized in a local neighborhoodand the income stream is zero-- i mean itwas the map of boston, the sort of zero income--well if there is zero or very little income stream,it's very difficult then to build wealthand assets and that sort that sort of thing. so this is a macro problemthat has to be approached
at the at the macro level. but this other wayof approaching it, which is to create what i wouldcall the heterotopic spaces in a city where somethingdifferent can go on and where people canacquire a sense of identity, can build a sense ofrecognition of who they are and what they are,those kinds of things. those are interventions which,i wouldn't say they're costless, but they're not embedded in theeconomy in the same kind of way
that some other projects. so maybe the trickfor the designer is to look for thosekinds of projects which are about creatingthese, what i call, heterotopic spaces ina sea of alienation and hope that those heterotopicspaces can actually spark alternatives and possibilities. i just want to intervenebecause i want to make sure
that it's very clear about whati was talking about earlier and how it relates. so the importance of tacticalurbanism and having these kind of grassroots initiatives,whether they're designed based or otherwise, thatare meant to create the type of socialspaces and exchanges that are meant to shift,as you kind of talked about, the waymarginalized communities are able to engagewith one another
in the context of amuch larger system. and what i'm very clearabout is number one that i was atiya martinbefore took this position. and so i took this position,not because i needed it, but because i really believedin the approaches that have been shown tobore out that really have positive impactsfor communities. and so it's not anif or kind of thing, it's all we have tobe doing all of it.
so the tactical urbanism pieceand these very brilliant design projects and planninginitiatives, landscape initiatives that arereally about creating those type ofspaces are necessary and we need to make surethat we're also looking at the opportunities thatgovernment at the local level can influence becausewhat we've seen as a movementsacross the world is that a lot of thechange that can
have real meaningfor communities can happen at the local level. and so in the contextof a much larger macro, there's things we can'tdo anything about, but there are thingsthat we can do and so that we don't losehope and the traction that has happened here in bostonand-- well, i should say, well, we're in cambridge,but in boston-- and in some othercities across the world
so that we're not parsing thingsout as being competitive to one another but as beingpart of a larger movement in the directionof racial equity and in the directionof addressing kind of the differenttypes of oppression that communitiesare suffering from. sorry, i didn't knowif you had a remark that you would make to follow. oh, yeah.
i have one thing tomention the first mention and maybe-- hard tosay-- maybe putting some seed for the future ofthe local community or maybe no one decides of this. i had a teammate,[inaudible], he's not here but we discussed alot about, let's say, the quality idea of the seed. when it comes to attackingthe real situation or how to respond to the realsituation of the community,
we can easily say that we wantto hear the voice of community which we call aresponsible way to do it, but the more wediscussed, the more we feel we also needsome proactive vision as a designer to intervene. otherwise we cannot putsome good seed to envision for people, to make bettersociety or to imagine the better future for them. so that's what i'll say.
so i know a lot of theprojects were talking about solutions at thelocal scale of the community or of the neighborhoodand individual, but i think that whiletactical urbanism is great and we want to be sure thatwe're approaching everything from both the microand macro levels, i wonder then what arethe tools that planners and designers have in thentranslating these ideas. and what is theirrole in ensuring
the translation of ideas sothat we can take these tactical, you know, pieces and thenimplement them in other places? and i would be curiousto hear the students' perspective on how they feel. is this on? i guess one thing that itried to do in my thesis, i did think about thesystematic implementation of this particular design. and it's one of thoseprojects that really attempts
to span from, say,a single market, how do you design that tofacilitate local interaction and then saying, well, how dowe kind of take this as a design methodology and then applythis to the rest of the cruise terminals in the world. if the rest of the cruiseterminals in the world can be also designed withthe mind of local needs and resources in mind, whatwould that world be like? and i think that could bethe extension of the project
is to kind of takea few examples and then start toimagine that, but i think maybe theother panelists can contribution to thischallenge of like how do you take something localand then make it systematic. and i think that is kind ofthe strength of our training here as designers, urbanplanners, landscape designers. can i ask a question-- italk into this-- because i'm thinking about the same thing.
and i'm in st. louis. we're always trying tograpple with these kinds of interventions that areproductive on a local level for sure and we're alwaystrying to figure out what that means in termsof the city's role, the state's role, thegovernment in terms of affecting structural change, right? and i feel like the dangeris that while productive, are these projects supplementingdeficiencies in the system
and is it a way oflegitimatizing or accepting the fact that the system isnot as robust as it should be? are we, in a way, makingit easier for the state not to take care ofsome of these things by offering these projectsas productive as they are? so i feel likethere's this tension in these kinds ofprojects and what that means in terms ofaffecting structural change. so if any of our panelistswant to address that issue,
that tension feel free. and we can also continuetaking questions. we promised questionsfrom the audience earlier so ifanyone has questions on that theme or otherquestions that they'd like to address to ourdiscussant and panelists, please feel free to ask them. just make a comment on[? patty's ?] intervention that i'm answering,but i just want
to make a connectionto what you've said and what dr. martin said. and this also came up yesterday,sorry, in the st. louis conference, butworking simultaneously on scales at the same time. so rather than thinkingit's like either or? you do local-- and is thatjust going to, as you said, legitimize neglect onthe part of the state? how do we design those localheterotopic interventions
in ways that somehowstart a new conversation and connect up to otherscales of governance? i think it's really importantto think about governance. it's come up a little and havingyou here is really important. sometimes i don't thinkwe do enough of that here in the planningprogram, thinking about the absolutely centralrole of elected officials. it's not just civil society. we have to actually work withinstitutions of governance.
so the challenge becomesdesigning projects that can get implemented at avery local level that somehow make authorities takenotice or integrate or get involved orchange their practices. and so that's yet anotherlayer of implementation, not just getting theproject done at the space. if i could justquickly build on that. i agree and i think insome of these projects it's kind of students sort ofsaying what the public sector
sort of should be doing. so if you look atandy's project, for example, that is sortof saying in anticipation of recent rulings aroundfair housing where we're going to finally take seriouslyour obligation affirmatively further fair housing, buildfair housing, where it should be built, here's some goodideas for sort of how to do it, and here's some-- i meanyou really didn't have time to go into thedesign, but there's
a lot of thought behindwhere we should locate these kinds of developments, howmuch of a mix they should be, what kind of amenities should bebuilt in them, how they should be designed. so it's sort of aprovocation, in a way, to the public sectorwho will be doing this. so i think it's not so muchus, as designers, subsuming the role and in so doinglegitimizing neoliberalism, necessarily, but sort ofhaving a productive dialogue
with the public sector who weknow we need to implement some of these projects and to makemeaningful change in addition to the smaller, i think, moreheterotopic kind of spaces-- which i totally agree withprofessor harvey are absolutely crucial and a greatthing for students to focus on in studios. and i just want to say i'mso glad that we're using this as an opportunity to talkabout the thing for designers. what we should bedoing as students here,
we're all in this situation. this came up yesterday too. we want to designjustice, what's the best way we coulddo it in a 15 week chunk when we're here in cambridgeand people are over there in st. louis and thepeople in st. louis are never going to see us again? and we're not going to have asustained kind of commitment. we're not going to be part ofsort of on the ground movement.
and so it's really good thatwe're having this discussion and thinking about waysthat we can think about how to do what we do well given theparameters of being students, of being in school, soon, et cetera, et cetera. sorry, i just wanted toadd about the local context around when we thinkabout how we frame these issues that we'rethinking about it in a way that is seeing all of us as connectedand partners in doing this in that sometimesthat-- if we're
talking about local government--the realities of what's happening in local governmentand local leadership is sometimes a barrier. but there are a lot ofthings that you can do around that because what i've foundis that most top leadership, they come and go. but the people whoare in departments are within the cityfor many, many years. and so really understandingwhat motivates the folks who
are in those rolesand developing those types of relationships. sometimes it's not possiblebecause they're just not ready, but there are many times wherethe humanity of institutions, their space-- and i know thatsounds like an oxymoron-- the humanity of institutions,but institutions are just made up of people. and we sometimes forget that. a lot of-- especiallyin government,
at least in boston--the government is made up of peoplewho have to live in boston with some exceptions. so they're residents as well. there's this naturalopportunity to figure out how all that stuff comes together. so i may be betweenus and pizza again, but let me just makeone bridging comment from my colleagues andperhaps even the last comment
and maybe, hopefully,connecting to the scale issue too which is transferringfrom a scale issue to a scale of agency. and so, in listening toall the projects today, they each talked about aparticular sort of design as an outcome orintervention or design as process or thecombination of them, and i want to beginthinking about your agency as policymakers toobecause i can pick off
policy ideas from every singleproject i just listened to. and that maybepatty's question too and that perhaps in the pedagogyof us doing studio work where you are instinctively thinkingabout an outcome, right, and in some cases thinking aboutprocess that you might also be thinking about thepolicy implication of each and every projectwe saw, whether it's landscape, architecture,planning, or urban design because in some cases you'restarting by looking at what
those policies are and you'reproposing an alternative or, in fact, if you wereto retroactively look at your work, i bet youwill find a policy that might present a barrierto what you want to do and therein lies the opportunityto actually change that policy. so that is the way you beginto create the translation across geographies,across cities, and even potentiallyacross scale. so then connecting it back tothe last comment which is then
also as you begin togo into the world, see yourselves as peoplewho could actually be that public official. so my career pathhas taken me from som to being a planning director toback out in the private sector. and i went intothe public sector with the intentionof having that agency on the other side of thetable trained as you are. so think about yourrole as a designer,
and i often think ofplanners as designers too, as process, outcome, policyand also the different stations and places whereyou put yourself in order to have that agency. if there are no burning--there's one more. and after this we'll head overto lunch and the brainstorming session for map the-- now i feel really bad betweenmy question and the pizza. i look at designing justiceand one of the things that
comes to mind, and i amcoming from the real world, is that the issue ofinequity in cities is paramount in theproblem of homelessness. and homelessness isgrowing in leaps and bounds in many, many cities whereit's causing major disruptions. and some cities are takingdrastic steps towards it. i know that much ofwhat is happening in the actual process of it isthat poverty is big business. so, in many ways,developers are embracing
the idea of homelessshelters and providing them for cities at great expenses. so where does thedesigner approach this as to how to solve theproblem of homelessness? obviously it's homes, but howdo you address that within the construct of the existingstructures that have policies in place, exactly astoni griffin mentioned, that are impediments towardsout-of-the-box thinking or in some ways solutions thatare mixed uses and have some
of the creative ideas that thestudents have mentioned they are ways that are theyare prevented when you're addressing an issuesuch as homelessness especially in a city like st. louis orin boston or in washington, for example. if there are no responses--there are, but pizza. we can talk, youknow, during pizza. so just before welet you get pizza, i'm going to asklindsay to come back
and she's goingto briefly explain what map the gap wants todo during our pizza lunch. hello again. excuse me while i readoff my phone as well. all righty. so we just quickly want toget your ideas, your feelings, your concerns around hackathons. and so, again, we're hostingour hackathon tomorrow and we're specificallylooking at boston, st. louis,
and baltimore in our research. and we're looking at the fourcategories of crime-- housing, education, and transportation. and within all ofthose things i'm hoping that we could havea scribe at each table to just answer fourquestions for us. speak collectively withyour group at your table. and i'll actually type themup on here and project them but the first is kind of howyou guys define hackathons.
if you don't know whatit is, put that down. if you think you knowwhat it is, put that down. the second questionwould be, how do you think a hackathon isvaluable for designers as a tool forparticipatory engagement? and then-- well,it's three questions. so then the lastone would be, how do you think data isvaluable for designers and what kind of ethicalissues can that bring up
when you're studying people? again, i'll put this up soyou can read it as you eat, but if i could just haveone person from every table write down the three answers tothat, that would be fabulous.