 Hi everyone, I think this might be the most punctual GSAP lecture 630. We're starting. Thanks everyone for for being here Good evening, I'm Professor Kate Orff. I'm the director of the Columbia MSAUD Masters in Urban Design Program here at GSAP and I'd like to extend a warm welcome and thank you to Dean Andres Hake and To all the faculty and students here today from Columbia and from other universities We have a nice mix in the house And also all of our invited guests. You're a warm welcome to the 2024 urban design lecture So I'm extremely pleased to introduce tonight's speaker Damon Rich Damon Rich Damon Rich and his partner Jay Shin who is on the way From Philadelphia our partners at Hector an urban design planning and civic arts practice whose projects include the Memorial for Ecofeminist Sister Carol Johnson housing crisis learning center within the Queens Museum a youth centric development plan for Detroit's west side Feel free to come in don't worry We're all friends here if folks have coats on seats you might have to put them at your feet Come on Yeah, okay a housing crisis learning center within the Queens Museum and a youth centric development plan for Detroit's west side Recently recognized with the 2023 national planning word Damon previously served as planning director in chief urban designer For the city of New York, New Jersey But let's pause for a moment. What is urban design today? Shaping the physical setting for social life We might think of the Manhattan gridiron plan of 1811 as it laid out a physical Scaffolding for the city to take shape or we might think of houseman's radical demolition and reorganization of Paris in the 1850s big moves moves that combine planning architecture and physical design but Today in a petrochemical age boosted by fossil fuel extraction and increasing in equity Those physical big moves manifest in efforts like neom or the line a mirrored linear city in the Saudi Arabia desert Or here in the United States where flannery associates is buying a 55,000 acre utopia Dreamed by Silicon Valley Super elites in northern California farmland, right? We now have a new context and we need new approaches and Damon rich is showing us the way Urban design became a modern interdisciplinary field in the 1950s But in recent decades pockets of billionaires and deep deprivation have been carved out around the globe Inside pockets of varying degrees of democracy control and dictatorship This is an incredibly charged urban environment that we find ourselves Navigating and the stakes are high the climate emergency will have winners and it will have losers Some will live inside the neom But the tribal peoples who were displaced to make way for it are also part of this messy World that we live in as are the laborers from Tamil Nadu and other places who will labor to build it But back to the United States and urban practice urban design practice today here and now To be an urban designer today in this messy messy democracy that is United States is to engage in politics and public space To be visionary is to hold power accountable This is what Damon rich does Rebecca Solnit wrote democracy requires equal opportunity in order to participate and extreme wealth gives its holders unfathomable advantages with little accountability I've long believed that democracy depends in part on coexisting with strangers and people unlike you On basic feeling that you have some something in common with them So Damon founder founded the Center for Urban Pedagogy or cup an internationally recognized Non-profit organization that uses art and design to increase meaningful civil engagement He is showing us the tools and providing the tools for finding these points and places that we have in common advancing Places and tools for people to discuss debate find points of common ground and engage in this messy debate about our shared future In an academic context, we can feel good about ourselves when we lean into diagramming urban systems crafting gorgeous Accentometric drawings that describe what seems to be totally beyond our control But I would say merely representing urban systems is not enough We have to build coalitions and the conditions for their transformation and in this case in this again messy Democracy that means dialogue Dialogue that moves out of the four walls of the institution here in Avery Hall and go into the wild and Damon's a seminar here at Columbia GSAP was titled urban design in the wild We have to go invade and participate in the community board meetings church basements school auditoriums Developer showrooms newspaper op-ed pages and the many sites where complex urban decisions are being made Damon's work has been recognized by the MacArthur Fellowship the Cooper-Cewitt National Design Award and among many many others And so we are so happy to have Damon here this evening And thank you in advance to faculty urban design faculty Chalissa Blumberg and Nina Cook John for facilitating Discussion after the lecture with that welcome Damon. We're so happy to have you All right. Good evening, Columbia Good evening, Columbia All right. All right. I got to say thanks to the dean to Kate for a generous introduction to Nina and Jelisa Pointing to chairs got chairs are over here for the conversation And everybody here from coming out It's amazing to see so many people that I've known for a really long time and some new friends and students too So tonight I want to talk about freedom schools for accountable architecture freedom schools as in the US tradition of adult education and Accountable architecture as in first struggles over to whom development is accountable and Second how design carries accounts of that struggle Now I grew up in the Western suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri a Largely segregated place despite its nationally renowned voluntary desegregation busing program a Wonderful place in many ways. I love my family Solid schools where my mom was a teacher But it was also a place full of architectural mysteries Where especially as a young person? Spaces were used all the time in ways that seemed completely Unanticipated by the architecture Like ours spent as a teenager hanging out in 7-eleven parking lots where especially Long nights and tickets for golf course trespassing left me with questions about the hows and why's of environmental design Which led to finishing my formal education in architecture here at Columbia in the 90s Where I learned many disciplinary justifications for making design decisions David smiley taught me about horizontal versus vertical windows Privacy and publicity criticality and post-humanism and I still love all that stuff It was though another world when I began practicing First in the architecture office of New York City parks eventually serving as chief of staff for capital projects Beyond the dizzying scope of designing and building on 29,000 acres and nearly 2,000 properties and my introduction to bid sets and specs and change orders That's a joke how you learn about change orders at the parks department. Anyway, I saw design put to work in ways I never had before how the design process inherits perpetuates and alters all kinds of political conflicts That don't easily fit in the studio presentations Like there was the metal in the middle episode when city council allocated a few million dollars for a park in Queens and Soon the local council members showed up with representatives of the predominantly Italian-American softball week and Unusually they brought a drawing of their own design, which they called the flower plan Its big move was rebuilding the parks Softball fields, which you can see right here At that time which were arranged so that the home plates and the metal backstops were at the perimeter With the outfields merged together in the center as a big open space The flower plan proposed rotating each softball field. I guess they were the pedals 180 degrees to place home plates and metal back stops in the center Seeing how this would really screw up the grading and the drainage and puzzling how it could ever be the highest priority in this 50-acre park It took some asking around to figure out the primary motivation Was making it difficult For the neighborhood's increasing number of Latin residents to play soccer in the middle of the softball fields So maybe like cool house felt at the Berlin wall I was at the same time upset at the divisive and cool function imposed on this simple layout and structure and Deeply impressed by the built environments ability to make devious Intentions hard to tell apart from bureaucratic randomness or inconsiderate defaults like I grown up with Moments like this troubled my faith in disciplinary stories and the John Haddock books that I held dear And my bootleg Xerox copy of Manhattan transcripts I needed something more to keep going and thank goodness that's when I learned about September Clark At parks I saw the intensity of devotion and conflict that can be sustained by a place And how interests advocate their spatial agendas for programs funding maintenance and influence It was also an introduction to other areas of built environment advocacy and conflict affordable housing Environmental justice historic preservation gentrification industrial retention Struggles over accountable development attempts to hold building activity responsible and change to whom it responds September Clark a teacher like my dear mother was fired from the Charleston school district in 1956 for open membership in the NAACP And advocacy for enforcement of 1954 Supreme Court decision outlying racialized segregation of public schools She then became director of education at Highlander Folk School an adult training and cultural center in Grundy County, Tennessee Where since 1932 labor organizers from across Appalachia and the south visited for workshops traded tips and prepared to return to local struggles In the 50s Highlander gave similar support to people working on desegregation and civil rights like Rosa Parks, Julian Bong, John Lewis and MLK With Highlander as her base and later the Southern Christian Leadership Conference between 1957 and 1970 September Clark and colleagues created a network of nearly 700 citizenship schools Working with thousands of adults on reading writing and politics and claiming the right to vote equipping participants to take on due powers and responsibilities as democratic subjects Building the constituency that would end legal racialized segregation in the United States These citizenship schools used experiential approaches to teaching and learning that recognize the value of everyone's experiences and existing knowledge about a subject. That's a quote So it's not just the news you can use but because their adults working with what people already know and analyzing interpreting and theorizing from there Which by the way is the condition of all buildings and landscapes where everyone knows something about them even before they know about architects or engineers Popular educators see conflict situations as resources for education, not just something to be solved or resolved But a way to understand the fundamental structure of the world and explore how it might be changed in ways that do not evade issues of power This meant using everyday life and its physical setting as primary material Clark's biographer explains that her conviction that lasting social change had to simultaneously emerge from and radicalize everyday experience This kind of citizen education unpacked concrete observations and connected them to abstract structures values and potential actions Freedom schools and adaption of citizenship school approaches taken up by the student nonviolent coordinating committee SNCC and other groups Aimed to provide an educational experience for students, which will make it possible for them to challenge the myths of our society to perceive more clearly its realities and to find alternatives and ultimately new directions for action Teachers and students found ways to transform architecture and infrastructure always both physical and civic into teachable moments for purposes of political education and organizing Their conversations grew in the gaps between promises of a democratically determined and regulated environment, one that responds just like voting should To the fundamental humanness of residents in contrast with existing realities and inequalities justified by racialization exploitation and expertise When citizenship school teachers wanted to start conversations about power and politics voting and violence, they often turn to the built environment with the question, where do roads come from Andrew Young recalls quote one little exercise that everybody understood if you go to any southern town where rich white people live the streets were paved with concrete where black people live they were dirt The conversation could then move to the question of who decides where streets are built and which ones get paved to voting and accountability structures for public works Freedom school students studied laws and organizational charts with the goal to imagine that they themselves and people like them can run a democratic government In other words to imagine a regime where the answer to questions about where roads come from their alignments design and materials opens the possibility that a road could be a manifestation of collectivity The question where do roads come from raises further questions between physical reality and intentions resources and power structures Ambiguities where new meanings can be made rendering social holes visible through abstractions and approached through figures like a road It offers a necessary supplement to architectural theories of meaning inherited from days of modernism, homo and theory like the 90s So I stay trying to learn from Septima Clark and how her work expands our understanding of what the environment can be and mean and asking if architecture can serve as reference material for freedom schools, how can freedom schools serve as reference for architecture This educational tradition highlights political work necessary to fabricate meaning and power in designed environments, how to continue pushing back the feudalism that continues operating under the regime of private property and with Walter Benjamin the work of politicizing art to push back fascism Architects, we need help, not to dominate conversations in our desired roles in the service of clients or good design or the flower plan, and we must work to understand our potential usefulness within broader movements and stop trying to separate architecture from building So my earlier career eventually included teaching with all kinds of people at the Brooklyn Center for the urban environment and starting up like Kate mentioned, providing more chances to work with young people and organizers exploring the educational potentials of design And making a set of exhibitions on the architecturally evolving conditions of possibility, like about building codes, mortgage finance, trying to physically model spaces that show the origins and the effects of these social political financial systems These days, I'm a partner with Jason who arrived from Philadelphia at Hector Urban Design, where we serve all kinds of clients who are looking to plan and build in complex and contested situations, like this recent work with the GES Coalition and TR Collectiva Land Trust to reclaim portions of the National Western Center on Denver's north side that were once part of their neighborhood So now I'd like to share three projects so you can judge our success at learning from popular education for practices of architecture, landscape and planning in the processes and products of our work, like Miss Clark would ask, don't take our justifications or good intentions as substitutes for your own critical examination The first project on the far west side of Detroit has lots to do with figuring out where streets come from. These drawings are by elementary school students of areas around their schools and convey lots about how someone processes their surroundings You can see varying intensities of details, environmental character dominated by roads They were produced under the Detroit City government's most wide-ranging attempt to date to involve young people under the age of 18 in official neighborhood planning For five square miles, home to 36,000 people with thousands of modest single-family houses laid out on wide streets developed after World War II Which Hector was hired to lead with the city's planning department and a team of other architects, designers, planners, educators and housing and finance experts The project's leadership included a steering committee of 11 resident organizations and 13 teenagers all compensated who agreed to meet every month for two years to guide the study, negotiations and decisions for spending $15 million so far of public and foundation money These young people documented the landscape, built a wood shop and an empty Catholic school classroom, and labored with their neighbors and our collaborators tiny WPA to construct public amenities Maybe most importantly, they conducted critical interviews with city and neighborhood leaders and decision makers Known as Neighborhood Framework Investigators, they formulated and researched questions that had come up a thousand times in their lives about unsafe streets and vacant buildings, how much money real estate developers make, and how a local government works and doesn't After analyzing what they found, they shared it with peers, families and neighbors, eventually leading a two-hour public kickoff for their neighborhood's first official plan since it was laid out and annexed by Detroit a hundred years ago So let's take five minutes to hear from Lily Smith Reynolds and Yusef Sabor on the topic of streets and getting around So the bench I am sitting on is a bench that I helped build and the project now stands on Right now, the place where we're at is Henderson Middle School in elementary I used to go to the school sixth and fifth grade My little brother, he actually goes here now, he's in kindergarten It's a special place to me because I had a lot of experience here during the summer and school year Being that my little brother goes here, I come up here a lot too This is one of the places in the neighborhood where it's starting to get a little nicer I hope that this is a place where people can look at and say, well, if we could do that with Henderson, we could do that anywhere else too Well, we're on Ashen and Van Buren Right behind me, you could see a vacant lot and maybe a vacant house that was caught on fire Not sure it looks like it looks so It's very common, if you look down there, there's a vacant house And these two vacant houses are side by side, there's trash all over the floor And you could see a vacant garage right over there And the roads are so bumpy Well, this road condition is actually okay But it's bumpy, if you go on different streets, there's going to be cracks everywhere It looked like there was an earthquake on that street Take it from me We're in the River Rouge area And we wanted to show the parks, the hills, and the hills over there And it's like on the other side of River Rouge is animals Like horses and many more and swimming pools on the other side Good evening everybody, I'm Yusuf and X-Maze Lily Say hi Lily Hi Okay, here's what I know about streets and getting around When I'm on the sidewalk, I tend to get in the street because there is no room And I don't like walking near abandoned houses I know a little bit about cars and trucks and if you see here, my etiquette piece of drawing So this is a video clip of us driving down Warren Avenue like other Warrandale people do And there's always so many potholes and there's cracks It gets so rough on the road And most people drive too quick, it's dangerous I agree, I had three childhood friends died from an accident Just like this person said, I'm very scared when it comes to crossing the street Wow, really, I'm very sorry to hear that We need a lot more time for pedestrians to cross Because there's not enough time for elderly and young youth to cross the streets This is a sixth grader at Carver Also thinks that the streets and sidewalks are kind of dangerous to walk on Right now, near the railroad, it was kind of fun Near Rutland and Longacre used to do dangerous stuff on the tracks But I didn't think it was dangerous So here in Detroit, we got some of the nicest sidewalks we got No, we don't, we really don't But we do have some nice stuff And in wintertime, you all know when it snows The snow makes the streets look very nice And sometimes looks like a winter wonderland Well, in 2016, there was a survey going on about top three most safety priorities And the third one was speeding That's more worse than gang and drug activity We saw this map of all the car crashes on the black dots or the crashes And Warren Dell and Cody Rogin 2017 Well, that's a lot of crashes if I don't say so myself And I do say so myself But we wanted to know who could we talk to To find who can tell us about streets and who could tell us more about fixing them So my name is Richard Dougherty I'm a city engineer for the city of Detroit A city engineer is the division head of the city engineering division And we are a part of the Department of Public Works We are the stewards of the public right away That anybody who wants to work on our roads Needs to come to us and get a right away permit To do the work in the right away If they want to alter the right away in any way Or if they want to build in it Like permanent structures in that Then we have to go through a petition process to either close a road Vacate the road, vacate the right away from the road Vacate an alley So we file a petition with the city clerk And then we process it to see if anybody else in the right away May have objections to it There's water mains underground There's sewer lines There's gas lines The telecommunication lines are under there So they all get to respond to any concerns Okay, Richard told us He told us a whole lot more than we could take in That's why I'm glad that Taylor asked him to break it down And send a non-expert language Would you mind explaining that in a way where someone who doesn't have knowledge In your work field might be able to understand it? So, you know, so you own the land on your property And usually, like if you have, if your house you own To typically a foot behind the city sidewalk And then the city, the sidewalk that is in front of your house Is in city property And the road is And then the sidewalk on the other side of the street Everything Between the two sidewalks the city owns So that everybody can access and get around the city So public right away is the means by which the public gets to Move around I mean not be blocked So that's the last video of Nervous bureaucrats That I'll share with you tonight So when complete, this neighborhood plan Projected into the 20th century landscapes Of spaced out single family bungalows and wide streets New assemblies of buildings and people to retrofit suburban space Adapting commercial buildings into a youth-run day club Supporting organized residents using open city land Coordinating business support and bus infrastructures Opening protected travel spaces to connect large existing The isolated institutions like this Boys and Girls Club Funded by the National Football League I'm using this really large football on it right there Parks redesigned to accommodate all genders And activities in addition to team sports Local institutions reworked with more provocative And welcoming public faces and social systems To hold accountable the city government and its many appendages So that for future shopping streets through signs Street furniture and public art fabricated by young people Everyone will know where this road comes from So now number two to the riverfront of New York New Jersey and a series of projects that created The city's first public access to the Pisaic River In a century Which was made possible only by a generational Resident movement for environmental justice In groups like the Ironbound Community Corporation And the Committee Against Toxic Waste Since the late 1970s, Newark's Riverfront Within sight of Manhattan's skyline Has been the object of fierce debate Over how it might best be used to create value How it could be transformed from a view You might have seen in the opening sequence to the Sopranos Generating a huge stack of unrealized plans Most imagining the riverfront as a space To make a new self-enclosed start Without much reference to the city's long history Of black and working-class cultures That to this day testify to the extreme productivity Of post-Great Migration American cities But the furthest these plans got Was a deal for the Army Corps of Engineers To rebuild a concrete and steel bulkhead To fortify the riverfront's structure Without any furnishings like benches Or emergency ladders to climb out of the river If you fall in, that would support human or other life And it was this situation that pushed the Ironbound Community Corporation To invest their own funds in other visions Which eventually led to the city's first riverfront parks Where today you'll find a monument To eco-feminist environmental justice activist Sister Carol Johnson Commissioned by her admirers consisting of a stone A panel of her writing And a weeping birch tree Located on a hill with views of downtown Newark A city native, Sister Carol, was a prominent voice In debates demanding the river's remediation In the aftermath of the industrial urban economies Along its banks She was part of an ongoing tradition Of organizing in the city against incinerators Hazardous substances and garbage dumps Waste produced and disposed of everywhere But unevenly in this world And organizing for things that people want Like a riverfront park Which Hector worked to design alongside WineTrop Diaz Landscape Architects Hatchmont Engineers Monday through Friday Designers and more And where you'll find these legally required signs Warning in three languages Not to eat anything from the river And in the spirit of Septima Clark Not just immediate news you can use But also stories you need to hear To exert democratic control Such as how the river became so polluted And the nature of the debate to restore it Narratives cut into the park's surfaces Include resident stories of waking up To find men in spacesuits Vacuuming dioxin off the streets And how the black mayonnaise At the bottom of the river affects animals That live here Like many public projects The park required a long-term constituency To demand it and lay groundwork And an early design contribution To that effort was this riverfront guide After noticing that every traditional Panorama and illustration we could find Obscured the riverfront itself By looking towards the Manhattan skyline What Manfredo Tufuri called The image of development The guide begins with a drawing Turned 180 degrees Revealing the complex social hieroglyph Of the actual landscape From fat rendering operations And sewage plants To recognizable buildings across the city And against the frequent experience Of disconnection and disjoint Relationships between river and city It depicts a potential future Where newer gets together down by the river Also laying out what organized residents Want other residents to know About what's needed to create parks And public access And the ecology and political economy Of the river itself This is the mayor, Raz Baraka With friends of the riverfront Who have taken the lead in organizing events Like Newark walks to the water From city hall to the riverfront Concerts and parties People are playing an important role In updating zoning laws to require public access In new development Writing the petitions And getting politicians attention For design education projects Like this speculative model That's a previous mayor cutting a ribbon on it Which shows the Newark riverfront In the year 3000 Also ongoing boat tours That have taken thousands of residents Onto the water Writing this first segment Felt like a mission to reattach a severed limb To physically and spiritually connect A whole mess of veins and arteries And nerves and muscles First off the entire site was separated From the adjacent neighborhood by a high speed road So scary by the 1920s That the Olmsted brothers drew this Unrealized plan for a tunnel underneath it And even as the park was in construction The traffic department was hesitant To install a light or crosswalk That might back up the cars Though they eventually relented with the compromise That the park budget could cover The hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for it So when you cross the street You enter the park's western end Completed just after an area to the east Focused on sports and fitness The plan here exists on a narrow 7 acre site Manages a steep grade Extends the 100 year old riverbank park Extends it to the north That's the park that the Olmsted brothers did build So you arrive at this asphalt and granite entry Which is marked by a figurative railing Introducing spirits of the park Like the dioxin and the mules Who once pulled cargo along the Morris Canal Creating the railing was opportunity to test Who should be carved there And what shapes could be recognized At other points the railing extends up To depict the entire city Through recognizable features Routed and painted In the granite stripes at the entry You'll find an Afrocentric river dream By Langston Hughes And instead of only listing private contributors Commemorating all public resources That created this place Including New Jersey's poetically named Hazardous Discharge Site Remediation Fund And when you show up here for a tour Or performance You'll often find a table with volunteers From friends of the riverfront Like my man Lenny Thomas So as far as we can tell the grade at this section On the scouring side of the riverbank Has always been steep The elders who told us about swimming there At the butt naked beach So it was clear that hills were going to be a part of the design To shape the paths and manage the grade To bring people smoothly down to the river's edge Which required removing a significant amount of soil Which happened to be contaminated with heavy metals And other dangerous substances And the rules we've devised for overseeing Movements and disposal of these things Are intense and expensive From the mid-1800s through 1920 Alongside the Morris Canal The ball box smelting and refining company Used its patented methods To separate valuable metal from base materials So as we cut the earth to match the design grade Our finance friends informed us That the level of contamination in the soil Exceeded the spot tests Making it so we didn't have enough budget To pay for moving and disposing The amount of material we wanted They recommended we adjust the plan For a steeper grade And at this point the value of an organized constituency Was clear It took only a few calls to turn out a group of moms Shaking their heads at the proposed steepness Saying they'd never let a baby play there And roll into the river Which convinced the team to spend At least a bit more money On this additional small retaining wall Which allowed us to keep closer To the originally designed grade And also serves as a bench And a secret path Closer to the roadway there's these humps For picnics and play that also served As environmental caps for soil That we could not afford to dispose And nestled into the landscape Are stories of the technology And politics of ball box smelting Horrifying incidents Covered with hot metal And laboring bodies So these hills Narratives in land and soil Organize and inform the circulation And as an ode to the archigram Log plug Which is reminiscent for me at least Of New Jersey's metropolitan nature As well as national park designs For disguising water service as boulders Logs hold explanatory drawings Screamed in enamel onto metal plates Like depictions of Lenape peoples River technologies and survival Through colonizing violence And the intricate mechanisms And scandalous businesses of the Morris canal And also since residents who Organized to create the space As for a nice park but not so nice As to make their struggle disappear The design depicts conflicts From the early 2000s When with long odds residents Preserved the existing park Against the threat of a proposed Minor lead baseball stadium Which required illustrating These living individuals Who really made sure we got their Hairstyles and their fashions right So at the annual river day Celebration Diasporic practices Of capoeira, gospel, Praise dancing And they come back together While conflict and struggles Continue all around The first funding secured for the project Was designated for creating the city's Only public floating boat dock Out of state boat license fees The installation of which required Untangling these complex Agencies and instruments used To track property rights at the water's edge Attempting to make stable And governable territory out of Natural systems Taking advantage of one of the few Riverfront stretches without a bulkhead A gently curved boardwalk traces the edge Along with a continuous bench Which after we decided to avoid Tropical hardwoods is finished With extruded high density Polyethylene plastic planks Petrochemical age as Kate said Which is made from recycled milk And shampoo bottles That then recurs episodically At overlooks and stopping points As well as defining furnished nooks Along the boardwalk Which serve as spots for fashion shoots Morning walks Seeing the city from different perspectives Staring at the river Celebrating first communion Festivals, families And the railing keeps telling Of how this place happened How infrastructure is a social construction Like this, legally mandated Installation of a sewage Screening facility Basically a big filter to partially Mitigate sewer overflows by Catching the big chunks And rather than remaining a mute presence You might notice a person on the toilet Explaining social investment over 150 years to deal With human waste in Newark You might see a similarity Between a cormorant celebrated In illustration and some bird passing by Amazing mechanized bridges Spinning around And this place's history of industrialization Students might visit, make a rubbing People start conversations Sometimes make their own additions Rich game, that was for me I think And since social meanings aren't fixed The orange can be the color Of the mayor's favorite tie Or the water chakra Or a wikweak high school Or Agent Orange, the production of which Created the deadly dioxin It can be a symbol And a signal that something is different A marketing device, a subject of artwork Its logic can extend to matching t-shirts Celebrating the creation of a new place For the public When an ad alt pavilion structure Became infeasible, another change order Released it with a ring of wooden piles Now irrevocably named the orange sticks Sometimes a DJ booth Or a drum circle Or a theatrical stage Or front row seats And a ritual setting That's DJ Omar Abdallah on the wheels of steel So also the orange sticks become Another character in Jersey's metropolitan nature An object of speculation An antenna of love for a place And so when the gas company insisted On building a new enclosure For their cool riverfront gas pipeline They upgraded their standard precast concrete box With glazed bricks, not so bad Sending another signal along the river A Venturi-Scott Brownian inflection Of social accommodation So now third stop Is a design for reconstructing a neighborhood park In South Philadelphia Just underway as protesters filled airports To crying US executive order 13769, the so-called Muslim ban A group of neighborhood cultural education And service organizations were working Was working to address spatial conflicts And human movements on their own neighborhood scale Focus on 130-year-old Mifflin Square Park Four acres of public open space Set among dense row house blocks The coalition represented and served residents Reflecting 130 years of working class people Arriving as migrants The diversity of the area is often articulated As block-sized portions of turf With the park sitting amidst boundaries Between concentrations of long-standing Irish, Jewish, and Italian African-American communities And since the 1970s, many residents arriving As immigrants and refugees from Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia And more recently, Bhutan, Burma, Mexico, Honduras Old-timers talk about 1950s rumbles in the park Between black and Italian gangs And today, some people refer to one side of the park As the Asian side And just the summer before, a rare and traumatic Gunfight in the park was followed by police sweeps That also displaced beloved, if unlicensed food vendors So the work began with a phase zero By hiring a group of high school students To work the summer, charged with investigating What the coalition would have to do To get the park rebuilt how it wanted The group began at the square, documenting activities And life of the place Taking special note of conflicts between uses And tensions between the design and the use of space Elders who resorted to sitting on curbs Or who brought their own chairs for card games While others looked on from inconveniently placed benches And clouds of dust and curses and alcoholic fumes Drifted over from the dudes on their self-built volleyball court How people adapted benches as workout equipment And how many spaces felt chopped up like a pizza With unneeded paths and curbs Sidewalks used as stage How people built their own Takra foot volleyball courts Which turned mud holes in the rain The group tried to figure out how long the playground had been broken Leaving kids to figure out other kinds of play As well as bully all the younger kids At the free library we learned about from maps That linked the creation of the park to the early development of the neighborhood Interviewing community and city leaders The group heard conflicting accounts of what caused all these issues in the space Whether it was people's low incomes Or that maybe Cambodian immigrants just needed lessons in using trash cans In spite of this blame place on the recent arrivals The group documented the garbage And periodic violence had existed throughout the park's history They interviewed the city council person And diagrammed exactly who holds various powers over park operations Their findings were conveyed by a series of large-scale drawings Laying out systems of accountability And raising questions about their effectiveness based on concrete experiences Other lines of research inventoried the organized groups in the neighborhood And how they might come together in a larger coalition represented by the Cookie Man In order to press their case with city authorities for funding Drawing various people we met Then led to studies of how the park might be redesigned If the process were controlled by only one group Like old people, lots of benches Or gangsters, lots of sheds to hide in Or rats, lots of garbage Drawings of the observed physical conditions were accumulated into conversations starting drawings Like park dreams and nightmares named in honor of the song by South Philly's Meek Mill They then shared their results with park's capital project staff, elected officials, and people in the park The coalition used their work for a full-out poster Putting out there the causes of conflict and challenging neighbors to confront them in order to create potential futures Inviting resident groups, churches, and temples to dig into these discussions with their constituencies often in two or three languages Thinking and interacting through objects as we were taught by James Rojas Weighing trade-offs and imagining altered landscapes Like more places to sit Sports areas where dudes can drink without bothering kids or elders And sometimes sharing memories, observations, and cultural practices Identities unexpectedly overlapped Like recent Korean people from Burma hearing their own story in the Black Great Migration from the South generations before New leaders emerged from these conversations, committees to restore food vending, to install more benches People were excited to share their proposals and concrete suggestions, some of which gained enough support to be realized immediately As pilot projects for seating and play equipment, and new ways to sell food Though it was clear that the park had some serious spatial challenges Because after being built as a purely passive space in the 1890s, various features had been added over 100 years Officially and unofficially within the spokes of the pathways Which produced many inefficient spaces and strange geometries and created awkward, unusable pieces So one goal of the design became to repack the suitcase Increasing the perceived size of the space by laying out programs more efficiently Removing unneeded pathways, moving active sports with their swearing and gambling to the east side of the park Creating larger spaces for quieter activities and expanding spaces of play to the south Could the park remain as active and alive and make room for everyone? Well before we could find out, we had to discuss and deal with various groups, the kids, the parents and the guardians, the volleyball players, the tough guys And finding ways that their desires might interlock Some decisions like where to put the bathroom were subjects to heavy lobbying With the decision that it would not work for it to be too far on the so-called Asian side or on the so-called American one And slowly a workable plan emerged to correspond to the complex identity of its complex constituency For sports and fitness, rather than the standard park's approach of each activity in its own fence court The plan calls for a sports yard surrounding the existing basketball court where teams can vie for glory For play areas, the push was for an improved playground that undermined inter-age bullying through clearly designated spaces and extended play circuits Through wider areas of the park Along with a relocated spray shower and the quieter quadrants feature a meditation circle Boulders for sitting and jumping along with new trees to discourage active sports from taking over Other landscape features spoke to specific references like the Corinne Hills in Myanmar and creating humps in the currently flat landscape New gathering spaces designed to support different groupings from intimate conversations to raucous card games Reconfigured popular seating spots along the seam of park and sidewalk in a variety of cultural forms like this stone platform The park corner entries expand into more welcoming and comfortable hangouts And at the center, currently the park's main attraction as crossroads and spray shower, the scale tightens From the locus of many competing activities to emphasize the junction and jostling at the park center Of the quieter and louder quadrants, a point of formal unification in difference With vertical markers and a location for the long sought building which holds the corner Absorbing and reflecting the complex cultures of the place with a cornice borrowing motifs from nearby buildings In order to accommodate bathrooms and a small community space Continuous with the sports yard fence with adult and kids sized portals And in 2022 we succeeded in bringing the first phase to materialization with an unexpected opportunity The city's famous water department approached the coalition with their plan to install stormwater retention basins and a rain garden at the four corners of Metham Square Park And then restore the corners just exactly as they found them But the coalition had already invested in redesigning the park, so we began looking for ways that this infrastructure project might not only contribute to the park's ecological function, but also its production of meaning Building political leverage by making the reconstruction a broader conversation a project, say for after school programs where proposals proceeding for water features And multi-colored pavements were put forward and resolved into materials The water department was willing to cooperate but were not allowed to spend any of their budget on anything decorative So they proposed opening up the entry with a concrete surface And in turn the coalition raised about $8,000 to purchase some bricks Though to get short runs of wide variety you have to go to Hanover, Pennsylvania to the factory and pull up at the overstock pile So once we adjusted the design to the actual bricks that we got, the water department made good, lowering their slab to accommodate the pavers and having their contractor install them Over at the rain garden, the water department agreed to introduce a stone pathway, as well as additional seating And the entry also includes blocks and rocks for resting and play And if you go there you might notice two engraved stones The first describes the coalition's efforts And the second, the social technology that lies below the surface That prevents sewer overflows as well as thanks the water department The entry serves as a promissory note for further transformations through politicking and popular education So in a conclusion and a transition to the discussion I look forward to your reactions to our attempts to learn from Septima Clark in popular education through our project structure, figuration, servicing of conflicts, playing with vernacular symbolizations of place, and multiplying representations At this time of mainstreaming community design, participation, and all this equity talk When many residents are already sick with sticky dots, post-it notes, and my wish is signs When scripted photo engagement presented as democratic decision-making is so frequent that it's easy to lose the point And do-gooderism easily slides to managing the appearances of doing good Ms. Clark reminds us there is no access to democratic architecture without disassembling expertise and generatively de-idealizing design And that there's an awful big difference between tell us what you want for your place and developing the capacity to make group decisions for all of us Bottom-up is not enough To gain at an early point, maybe 70 years in, on the arc of bringing democracy together with how we design and build And rather than carry on community design traditions in the margins, our goal has to be to communitize all design We're not focusing on the often celebrated community engagement scope, designing tools and games, or our fantasies of gaining trust of the people on the ground Needless to say, this will require lots of work at an architecture school like this one that has no street frontage Sometimes we forget that we are in spatial politics right now Thank you Thank you so much for that. I think it was great having you walk us through from the citizenship schools through each of those projects And really seeing how they, just your entire process of engagement actually comes through to the constructed project in the end That was amazing. I loved being in the audience, but now I have to ask you questions or speak about it So I wanted to start by this idea around the citizenship schools and then idea of full citizenship And this, through a literacy program that started in those communities, how this, what we would normally think of literacy giving us economic access is actually a path to political access And so when we link knowledge to power, it encourages more participation in this specific process And similarly, you know, the community engagement process in how it starts to interrogate existing conditions within the communities in which you live How it might kind of promote this accountability, not only in the immediate sense, but in the future But ultimately, you know, I landed on this comment you had in terms of love for place, right Because ultimately this engagement in the civic process really touches on the ideas of belonging and the love for place And how you talk about it coming to life in the Newark Riverfront Project And how it wasn't only about giving people the access to the river, but embedding it with those stories was really important, right The stories in etched in the ground, the everyday life of the stories, but why are those stories in the kind of final product so important to this love of place as it's layered with, you know, activation through the parties and other kinds of activation Why is it, why embed the narratives in the place Well, I mean, it's funny like when I first showed up here for school in 1995, I think, you know, the first thing I learned about architecture is that postmodernism is bad just like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher And, you know, I think I understood where that was coming from. And of course this was, you know, late into its history, but it wasn't till much much later actually through like some UK people like, like fat or like Muff, if you know any of these firms, I feel like that I was exposed to someone who was willing to give a generous account of like where all that postmodern stuff came from right And in many ways I feel like you know what I have learned from popular educators and organizers and I gotta give credit to the Queen's library. I worked with adult reading and writing group. And that was really my first like really strong, you know, exposure to this kind of thing. And so, you know, the idea that that we as designers are operating within a horizon of certainly shifting but also shared means, and that like somehow we need to understand our sites are programs, our clients are constituencies through that, you know, hit me really hard in a really strong way. And so, you know, certainly like those explicit stories are one part of it, but, you know, I think even aside from their function in what we call in the Hector Office, the Whippet test, which stands for who put that there, you know, meaning, like once all the architects or designers are off the scene, and there's just like some people hanging out and someone's like orange sticks like who put that there. You know, the test is like what is the answer to that, you know, besides like well, what do you think who put that there. You know, I think that when it works, and you know, usually it's the credit of the client right and not the designer. Those stories and forms and places enter into that lineage right and come out of a discussion with it. You know, I mean, even in the smallest of ways and probably a lot of us have been there where some of the strongest activists you had fought to save this historic park, and they're like so this like new part like you're definitely going to use the historic light fixtures right. And, you know, it's sometimes you compromise and sometimes you don't. We did not use the historic light fixtures. And yet, even still it was the greatest compliment when that person who still remains a skeptical person into her 80s said, Hey, you know, it's not the historic light fixture but I can feel sister Carol spirit here. Right. I was thinking a lot while you were speaking about accountability from the beginning, and just how accountability is related to accounts and accounts are stories and how storytelling is a huge part of your practice I can see just based off of not your stories, but others, other people's stories. And I found that really interesting thinking about pedagogy as something that's active so it's not that pedagogy is a part of your practice but it is the practice that's not that part of your process sorry pedagogy is not a part of your process. It's your practice. And so I was struck that like I wasn't interested necessarily in like when is it done or what's the finish results because just hearing young people ask questions with so much confidence I think is the is the practice is so amazing. And I think that's such a good example of, like I was thinking about Paolo, Paolo Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed, and how there's the banking model of education or you're just fulfilling people with with with knowledge but then there's the problem posing pedagogy or just having a seeing kind of understand their own knowledge and have the agency to to exchange with that knowledge is so powerful. And yeah I thought I was I was curious about how you got to this place and I know you kind of described it but how you got to this place where you're centering this and that is the practice is having others you know that's the that's so powerful to have others feel that confidence and what is the time scale of that what is the how long does it take to do this. Yeah, well, I mean, I feel enormously lucky to have showed up at several parties now at the right time, right. You know, people are pleasantly drinking or whatever, because all of these stories I mean, you know, and certainly it's one of the challenges of practice that we could talk about. When you're in private practice, you know, is because of those really long term commitments that, as you said, like we're not my commitments, right. You know, my, my challenge was to say, All right, cool, like, these people actually have gotten to a position where the funds are there, or the political support has come into line, right, and that's the moment, you know, when you actually can build something right you have to build power to build anything else. And so, you know, I feel like where, you know, where our focus at Hector is is is very much in that new moment of translation right where we're not activists like we're not organizers. Maybe we're more kind of like adjunct educators, you know, but I think our expertise has to be in the marshaling of forms and materials right that they can hopefully kind of pull up a seat to the table that has been set long before they existed. You touched a little bit on time and kind of showing up at the right time. But you also talk a little bit about these things take a lot of time, right, oftentimes you're moving through different administrations in perhaps in the same in the same city. So how do you manage this moving at the speed of trust. So what is the appropriate pace, whatever that might be, while not falling into the trap of, you know, I had an activist recently say to me, we have been overstudied. Right, they feel like different kinds of designers or otherwise come into their communities and study them. And they don't feel like they see anything come out of it. So how do you kind of essentially play that balance between really being thoughtful and engaged in a way, while also being actively engaged. You know, you have a bunch of different things that you did in Detroit, you know, throughout the process. So how do you, you know, balance the time that it takes. Well, don't get mad at me Nina, but I got to turn this one right back to you. You've, you know, you've just come through a process in Newark if people don't know of designing the Harriet Tubman Memorial that took the place of the Columbus statue. I'm on the board of an organization that has some of those, you know, elder Italian American proud new workers that would not stop talking about it. So I got to ask, like, you know, in that pretty fast calendar that you seemed that you went through like, how did you in coming from Montclair, no less. Well, I think because it was a very short calendar. So it was already, you know, I didn't have to worry about moving from one administration who was supporting the project into another administration who perhaps was not supporting it anymore. So it was very, very relatively short compared to the projects that you work on so that the support within that timeline could be there. But I could imagine. Yes, exactly. So I could imagine, though, if you're in a community for a much longer time and potentially your, your, you know, community board leaders change, you know, tenant association leaders change that those of you know, that those people who might have supported you being there are no longer there and then there's kind of pushback on you. Right. Well, I think that's what happens. Like, once you clearly see that any movement is got to be bigger than you, right. I actually speak to that I was actually thinking too about the urban scale, because I did not study design. But the urban scale, we talk about the urban scale always like it's like there's the urban scale, the architecture scale, the object scale. And I like that also in this year, you're still thinking about people because I think the urban scale usually is concerned with skylines, or just like overall ideas around the place that that's not at the scale of the person I guess and at least in my experience. And I think that's why sometimes on reviews you hear people ask students like where will all the cars go. But you rarely hear people say where where will the people go. And yeah, I was thinking about like the sign in Trenton on the Amtrak train there's like the sign that says Trenton makes the world takes or you know and I'm living in Baltimore which is a very similar. It has some similarities to Newark and to Detroit. And always if someone asks where I'm living I say Baltimore they ask it's dangerous there right and I always think that's so it's so unfortunate that there's this big blanket kind of ideas around places where it's either a place that's dangerous or it's the place of production for another place or this orientation to the skyline of Newark is sort of the the idea of Newark which is so not not just people centric but it's almost like creating a non-human place, a non-human idea of a place. That's not a question I'm sorry. I mean it was a Mary Baraka our mayor's father who wrote that a quarter million black folks mistook York for Ark and so instead of the big Apple all they got was the big prune. Bring back up this idea of conflict though and the messy and you're kind of embracing the conflict the complex and the messy because oftentimes as architects and designers and wanting to be able to kind of control the problem. We might you know either assign what feels well we assess and come up with a nice clean story. A nice clean package for the problem that we see but if we really center lived experience. It's much messier the reality on the ground right and it we can't really neatly package the experiences of the people in day to day, which is another benefit of really looking to these everyday stories to inform. So, you know, you talk about there not being a common denominator right but really leaning into this difference especially in Mifflin Park. So I wonder if you can tell us a little bit more about this process of leaning into the layered complexity and conflicts. I think the resolution if we can call it a resolution. I don't think there are always needs to be a resolution. But the resolution in Mifflin Square Park is almost this kind of mashup of possibilities right and kind of celebrating that central part where you say that all the parts are kind of overlapping in that central. But what do we get from kind of embracing this complexity and multiple perspectives. Yeah, I mean it's funny I feel like it's something I feel like I learned best from teenagers that maybe it's not so much a matter. Sorry, maybe it's not so much a matter of embracing conflict or complexity as stripping away sanctioned ignorance. Right and you know that's why it's great to walk into an interview with a bureaucrat with a crew of teenagers right because often times some of them at least have not learned these kind of like niceties and like little politeness. This is you know that constitute you know the sanctioned ignorance that you could grow up in Creve Corners area as I did and not be constantly being like how is this place like 96% people who have come to be known as white. Yeah and I was actually I wrote a note about jargon actually to jargon when the bureaucrat was speaking I was thinking about how jargon is a kind of learned way that you sort of keep people out because if you hear jargon you think that's not for me or I can't understand that. And it's sort of like a manufactured even if that person that man doesn't know that it's like a manufactured way for one to believe that they don't. They don't have a space in the conversation because you're like I don't get it I don't understand what this person is saying, but in reality the ideas are there because everybody lives here so where you should have a thought about it. And so it was kind of refreshing to hear to see those young people asking for him to explain it to be understood, not to just regurgitate the jargon. Yeah, and I mean I wonder also how we do this in our practices all the time to without knowing it. Yeah, all those kids by the way are geniuses. Take it from me. They should go here. They should they should go to the urban design program here. I wonder though if we should open it up to questions only because it looks like we have about 10 minutes left. We started out with a legend on the side, and the legend had a white skin and it had dirt, the only two that were filled out. So one of those drawings used those two symbols in the way which they depicted, which I think is is fascinating in the perspective of how we think people see that process. The question I have is that it's as much about designing the process that you're doing as much as trying to find or discover an outcome. And in that the process that is something that's meaningful to the community, not a characterization of the community or something that is inherently part of that community. Now as you can just explain more about how you look at the process yourself, there's obviously in each of your three particular case levels, it's very different in terms of how you look at it. Is there a consistency in the way in which you look at things that tries to hold together yourself a process that gets the most out of it? Well first you remind me of one of my favorite uses of the legend where it was like this drawing with these like brown dots everywhere. And it was like, hey kid, what's the brown dots? And the answer was pine cones. I think to your question, I mean I just think about something that I learned from that outfit muff that I mentioned out of the UK, which was that oftentimes you have to make the relationship around the thing before you can make the thing. You have to figure out how to talk to people, whether it's your boss or your kids or whoever, in a way that they will respond. It reminds me of Saul Alinsky, the kind of legendary community organizer in the United States originally out of Chicago, who as far as I know wrote like two books his whole life. And one when he was pretty young and one right before he passed away in like 1969. And Rules for Radicals, these days Steve Bannon talks about it a lot. But in there he's like addressing the hippies, and he's like, hey hippies, like you and me, we kind of like see some things like pretty similarly. But my one advice is that if you're looking to organize, especially people who have come to be known as white in certain communities, you can't show up with your shoulder length hair and you're like, weed joints. And so those are aesthetic practices. Right. And so, you know, I don't think it's a matter of like masking or playing a role as much as it, you know, as it is, you know, finding, you know, just like Charles Moore might recommend, you know, how our aesthetic practices might develop some kind of relationship with all these others around it. And so I stumbled upon you when you curated the exhibit on Frank Lloyd Wright, and I was walking down a lot into a different world. Your exhibit made me think a lot about violence, and it made me think about the harms of architecture. And I'm thinking about time and kind of how communities are transitioning over time and I say this having sat on the community board for eight plus years in this industry. I wonder kind of how are you seeing the rate of change and transformation shift from like a time perspective, the urgency of now the kind of severity of what's at stake. How are you seeing a shift, and how do how is that represented in approach in design process for the consideration that there are folks, neighbors who are are struggling to a degree like there's a degree difference in what our struggle looks like in certain communities in which those insights and that genius is kind of what you seek to tap into how does how are you seeing that show up how are you seeing that be experienced in those realities. And I kind of contrast that with the kind of institutional frameworks of, you know, time is effortless and time is everywhere. How do you see that friction showing up in the processes that you are undergoing. Well, I have a quick anecdote, but I don't have to answer all these questions. Do I? Surely you all have some like responses to what Ken is asking. That question was for you. I was going to say though that I feel like urgency is always existed. I just saw on tick tock recently, someone posted that I'm 22 when does the side quest and and I was like, I think you're going to realize that the side quest is always happening that the sort of idea that there's always something urgent happening. I'm like it's always like, oh yeah me coming. I'm coming to my own adult consciousness realizing oh it's always happening. It's always been there just I wasn't, you know, so I don't know that I was thinking that was my thought when you said urgency is like it's always been urgent though it's just a matter of when you wake up to it. I guess you're totally giving me Grace Lee Boggs vibes if anyone is a reader or a student of Grace Lee Boggs. What time is it on the clock of the world. Right. Or in Newark we might say it's nation time. When the land changes hands, nation time. Well the quick anecdote that I was going to offer to the quick to your question can was one of the young people involved in in the Mifflin Square summer project in the park powers project. He was like a very thoughtful guy you could tell, and the drawing that he wanted to make was. What happens if we succeed at rebuilding the park. And basically he was mad paranoid about New Yorkers coming and taking over Philadelphia, and he drew out this whole this whole scheme, where like the New Yorkers came to the neighborhood, and then made the park only for dogs. We have time maybe for another question. I'd like to maybe just ask you about the role of young people in all these projects only because you had a question about young people as well as about time and this immediacy. And he said that in the Detroit project, they, the town, the city actually wanted young people under 18 to be involved. That struck me mostly because you started with, you know, the freedom schools which was an adult literacy program and how it was so important to tap into their lived experience and their everyday experience being adults. Why do you think working with young people. What do they add to the process that you think if they weren't there wouldn't have happened. Well, I mean you'll probably know some teenagers right I mean I'll kind of go back to that sanctioned ignorance where you know I really believe in a perspective where we adults are in many ways deficient teenagers. Right. It was fun putting this together tonight to think about these projects that especially involve young people because usually there's at least some young people around or, you know, now that I'm kissing 50 I can call lots of people young people I guess. And you know, I'm not sure if I have much more to say beyond like the drawings themselves right. You know I definitely have architectural friends and colleagues who, I guess jokingly have been like some of these graphics make me nauseous. And you know as well as colleagues right who do planning or economic development, who in the most disparaging and marginalizing of ways will say either like oh it's God's work, or else they'll be like oh, those are just aesthetic details. That's more from like mayors and things. And so you know I feel like you know the, you know the work that has nourished me and that I mean I am very curious for reactions to presenting that work. Maybe if it can succeed in ways where we take those drawings, just as dead serious, as we do the voluntary prisoners of architecture, or, you know, any, you know, any you know nobody or anybody anybody that we might mention as like, you know the firmament of our practice. And it also makes me think that there's like in our role, it's not just about how good how well we draw, but how well we can read someone else's drawing or how well we can hear, because I feel like a lot of the drawings there's a lot of intelligence in the drawings and it's about if you're able to see it or because it's legible actually it's very clear what they're prioritizing. So I find that really that's really interesting. Thanks for good questions. Thank you for your work. It's really inspiring work. Yeah, I think I'm really most inspired by that ability to read the drawings right and I think we saw it in Mifflin Square Park, where, you know, in your role as an urban strategies urban designer, you're able to give the power to these constituents and be able to really read and convert what they were saying that they need to hear into the kind of final thoughts. Thank you. Thank you.