Jennifer Busch, Director of Client Partnerships, Eventscape
Even in the years leading up to this transformative time of intense focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion, the lack of diversity in design professions was obvious and under attack. As a 2016 article on the Inside Design blog quotes, “More perspectives on race, color, economics, and religion expands design priorities. We can afford a bit less money and attention on apps targeted at 25-year-olds living in the Mission, and focus more toward critical issues like healthcare, economic inequality, education, and the environment.” This particular observation mentioning “apps” was that of Nick Schaden, at the time a UI Engineer for Square. But the sentiment reflected an issue that designers across multiple industries were beginning to grapple with.
Schaden went on to say, “Design is having a huge impact on the world, and we can do better on the diversity front. We’re in an industry that’s about empathizing with our users, but that only works as far as our community can extend. In light of this, we have a responsibility to do better.”
Fast forward to an October 2020 article in Fast Company titled “4 Steps to Design a Better Future After COVID-19”1 in which four design luminaries from different fields were asked to comment on what role designers will play in a more inclusive, empathetic future. Bobby C. Martin, Jr., cofounder of graphic design firm Champions Design, responded, “What’s more important is to go beyond empathy and make sure that the people that are creating the work—that are thinking and strategizing—are coming from diverse perspectives.”
As these sentiments took root across multiple industries, they also gained momentum in the building industry, so that over the last several years, diversity has had an increasingly important role to play in our thinking about how physical spaces are designed and built. The logic is that more diversity represented among building industry professionals will result in a higher level of empathy for user populations with a diverse set of physical, psychological, cultural, or economic realities. Ultimately, empathy moves us toward more equitable outcomes in the built environment to better accommodate these human differences. This thinking applies whether you are talking about a corporate headquarters, an education or healthcare facility, or an urban development. The theory carries particular weight when it’s applied to the built environment for people who typically have little exposure to good design and the associated benefits.
Billed as “The people’s design firm,” award- winning, Washington, D.C.-based Determined by Design2 focuses on affordable housing and shelter for marginalized communities— low-income users, often people of color— that might not normally have access to good design, much less a voice in its creation. “The people who need access to well-designed space the most don’t know they don’t have it, don’t know they need it, and don’t have an advocate,” said Determined by Design’s founder Kia Weatherspoon in a recent video conversation with ICFF (The International Contemporary Furniture Fair). “I’ve built my entire career around being that advocate.”3.
The firm’s foundational principle, Design EquityTM, underscores Weatherspoon’s commitment to elevating the quality of the built environment for everyone. Her team introduces innovative practices, concepts, and workshops that help them best represent the people for whom they design. The process allows for “radical hospitality, compassion, and a shared community understanding” to guide designs that “reflect and respect the stories and spaces of end users,” according to the firm’s mission. “Design is not a luxury for a few, it is a standard for all,” says Weatherspoon. Informed by time spent visiting her incarcerated brother in prison, her military career as an Air Force veteran deployed four times in the Middle East following 9/11, and her subsequent experience creating high- end hospitality spaces, Weatherspoon has devoted her design career and teaching career (as a professor at the Savannah College of Art & Design) to addressing social and economic inequities through design.
“There is a bias that exists when designing for low-income communities, and predominantly people of color,” Weatherspoon says. “I don’t see demographics, I came from a luxury hospitality and multi-family space, so the only way I know how to design is how I design spaces for everybody else. I wouldn’t wash it down based solely on a group of people’s socioeconomic standing. It’s up to us collectively to elevate [design] for everyone.”
Weatherspoon represents a growing group of socially responsible professionals who are empowering marginalized communities to determine their own spatial destinies. Another is Open Design Collective, an Oklahoma City- based, not-for-profit firm that brings together underrepresented communities and the design and city planning resources necessary to promote social and spatial change. “Empathy is an important value, especially working in communities that have been harmed,” says Vanessa Morrison, chief executive officer, who co-founded Open Design Collective with her partner Deborah Richards, chief design officer. “Another value that is equally if not more important is shared power.” Morrison points out that as professionals in the building industries grapple with how to address patterns of inequity in marginalized communities, translating solutions to actual practice can be elusive.
“One of the best ways we can address those challenges is by working alongside community members and creating space for them to be leaders in the shaping, planning, and designing of their physical spaces,” Morrison continues. “Deborah and I reflect on how our professions—she as an architect and urban designer and myself as an urban planner— have activated social and spatial harms, particularly in the communities where we work. Every time we step into a neighborhood we have to lead with that sensitivity. You can’t do that if you’re not working with the people who are most heavily impacted.”
History is rife with examples of urban development that have caused social and spatial harm. Very close to home, for example, when David Geffen Hall recently celebrated its grand re-opening following a $550 million renovation, Lincoln Center chose to address the questionable history of its site head-on. Once known as San Juan Hill, the neighborhood was home to thousands of Puerto Rican and Black residents and hundreds of small businesses in the 1950s, before controversial urban planner Robert Moses oversaw its destruction to make way for the development of Lincoln Center. (The complex social issues of the time were memorialized in American popular culture by Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story.) The renovated hall reopened last October with a performance of Etienne Charles’ San Juan Hill: A New York Story, an immersive multimedia work that honors the history of the San Juan Hill neighborhood and the indigenous and immigrant communities that populated the land on which Lincoln Center was built. Simultaneously, Nina Chanel Abney’s San Juan Heal, an art installation on David Geffen Hall’s 65th Street façade, was inspired by the rich cultural heritage and complex history of San Juan Hill. Abney’s installation features portraits of San Juan Hill’s pioneers and musicians and text derived from protest flyers from the time.
More recently we’ve tried to do better. Steven Pedigo, executive director of LBJ Urban Lab and professor of practice at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, points out that in the urban development space, there’s an acute awareness about issues across communities related to real estate development. “The issues of urban development have become much more front and center, and the public is demanding community engagement,” he says. “15 years ago, community engagement was nice to have. Now it’s a must-have because of our political process.”
Pedigo has consulted on some significant developments in New York, including, most recently, Innovation QNS, a proposed mixed- use development in Astoria by Kaufman Astoria Studios, Silverstein Properties, and BedRock Real Estate Partners. One of the reasons for developers, planners, and designers to engage communities, he says, is that real estate has moved beyond singular developments to city development, large-scale community development, and neighborhood development. “There are larger implications,” he says. “We’re building out destinations with mixed-use public amenities that are taking advantage of public incentive dollars. All of that has required a new level and type of engagement to service the needs of the community.” Community engagement allows real estate, planning, and design professionals to understand the needs and desires of the community, to understand where the gaps are, and to ensure that a development remains a good community partner and a good community anchor. “Through co-creation, developers can also address fears that come along with gentrification and displacement,” adds Pedigo.
Though real estate development is not new to community engagement, “the newer facet is the question of how you achieve your community development goals and also your economic development goals in the process.” says Pedigo. In fact, there are very real economic arguments for empowering communities to help determine their own built environments. “From the developer’s standpoint, the sustainability of a project benefits,” says Open Design Collective’s Richards. “When you see projects really being accepted and loved by the community they last longer, and you can foresee the area developing faster.” Richards is also a transplanted New Yorker. “When you start to gather the opinions and desires of a specific community, their cultural identity is going to be expressed through that project,” she says. “That’s what makes Pedigo has consulted on some significant developments in New York, including, most recently, Innovation QNS, a proposed mixed- use development in Astoria by Kaufman Astoria Studios, Silverstein Properties, and BedRock Real Estate Partners. One of the reasons for developers, planners, and designers to engage communities, he says, is that real estate has moved beyond singular developments to city development, large-scale community development, and neighborhood development. “There are larger implications,” he says. “We’re building out destinations with mixed-use public amenities that are taking advantage of public incentive dollars. All of that has required a new level and type of engagement to service the needs of the community.” Community engagement allows real estate, planning, and design professionals to understand the needs and desires of the community, to understand where the gaps are, and to ensure that a development remains a good community partner and a good community anchor. “Through co-creation, developers can also address fears that come along with gentrification and displacement,” adds Pedigo.
Though real estate development is not new to community engagement, “the newer facet is the question of how you achieve your community development goals and also your economic development goals in the process.” says Pedigo. In fact, there are very real economic arguments for empowering communities to help determine their own built environments. “From the developer’s standpoint, the sustainability of a project benefits,” says Open Design Collective’s Richards. “When you see projects really being accepted and loved by the community they last longer, and you can foresee the area developing faster.” Richards is also a transplanted New Yorker. “When you start to gather the opinions and desires of a specific community, their cultural identity is going to be expressed through that project,” she says. “That’s what makes even react. Transparency is important.”
Pedigo suggests there are three factors that developers, planners, and designers need to understand and practice to create successful community engagements. “First and foremost, be authentic in your community engagement,” he says. “Don’t just do it to check a box. Do it in a way that’s thoughtful and intentional. Second, make a commitment to letting that community engagement influence the project or change its direction.” For example, authentic community engagement around Innovation QNS led to changes in the physical design of the project but also an adjustment to the types of public offerings and the types and ratio of affordable housing to market-rate housing.
The third point, according to Pedigo, is where many developers experience missed opportunities. “Communicate impact,” he says. “Be very clear about how that engagement shaped that development and communicate that back to community stakeholders.” Too often, he says, developers miss the mark by communicating changes to policymakers, city officials, or planning departments, but failing to communicate the outcomes of community engagement back to the public.
Does it take a special type of client or a special kind of developer focused on social responsibility to execute a successful community engagement process? “This process can be translated and implemented for a lot of different types of projects, but the developer has to want to create time and space for these kinds of conversations,” says Richards. “I don’t see any other limitations,” she says.
However, “Financial success is the only way these projects are going to get built,” Richards emphasizes. This begs the question of whether or not a developer that is particularly predisposed to social responsibility is a necessary ingredient for an intense community engagement process like that of Open Design Collective. Reflecting on the firm’s recent project South of 8th–a master plan commissioned by the Oklahoma City Redevelopment Authority for property owned by the Oklahoma City Urban Renewal Authority, to repair damage from decades of misguided urban renewal in the largely Black community of South of 8th Street–Richards points out their clients were what she considers to be “typical” developers. “Through this process, I think they have become really interested in working with us as their other developments move forward,” she says—suggesting that this very human-centric process can be simultaneously profitable and transformative for all stakeholders.
1 https://www.fastcompany.com/90552191/4- steps-to-design-a-better-future-after-covid-19
2 https://www.determinedbydesign.com/
3 https://hospitalitydesign.com/people/ podcasts/kia-weatherspoon-determined-by- design-what-ive-learned-podcast/
