 Now I'd like to introduce Damon and Jay. They are going to talk to us about also young people, as they call it, which I want to also use this from now and also in Philadelphia, and a project that they're conducting there. We know them as also Hector professionally, so please take this page Hector, thank you already. Merhaba, I'm Jay Shin. I'm Damon Rich. We are happy that you're having even happier to be here with you to discuss how we can make cities better for young people as a part of designing places that better support the desires of all people and other life. In our work as designers and planners, we have found that there are many ways for young people to play roles in understanding and making cities. We can be urban investigators looking around, documenting what they see, maybe as a city rebuilds its sidewalks, creating representation of the environment like this model as part of biology class, and analyzing the forces that shape it, like this analysis of how New York City gets rid of its garbage. And this kind of work can make the city more public and knowable for people of all kinds of ages. So for example, in our city where we live and work, when there was an attempt to build the political power to rewrite the development regulations for the first time in 50 years, over 200 young people and other residents built this model of the city, showing 30,000 buildings in different land use colors. The model was fabricated in workshops all over town, in churches, in mosques, in schools, and in living rooms where people came together to build their part of the city. It was put on display in the main library to celebrate the town's 350th anniversary and used as a focal point for sharing stories about struggles and fights around development, design, and architecture. So for example, the defeat after a long fight of a highway that was proposed that would have displaced 30,000 black and brown people. And we know that their work can contribute to the realization of built spaces, like this group of young people who investigated the city's waterfront, making maps, examining documents, and conducting interviews, learning from their neighbors about how people in this place have worked and fought to have democratic control of their living environment. And proposing ideas like this riverfront roller coaster and factories that just produced the smell of chocolate and unveiling their visions of the riverfront in the year 3000 and a press conference with the mayor and creating an installation outside the door where everyone pays their water bills in order to kick off a larger discussion about creating a new shared spaces at the waterfront. Eventually leading to the realization of the city's very first riverfront parks, which among other features focus on opening the city as a teaching tool. For example, with these engraved railings at the edge of the river that ask, what is that concrete platform? And say, well, if you want to answer that, you will need to learn about the history of Seward in this place that only 107 years ago there were no sewers. And when this caused problems, they built pipes that took dirty waters to the river, which in turn caused other problems. So they built a huge machine to clean the water, which works pretty good unless it rains, which makes it overflow in the river. So the concrete platform that you see over there is part of a filter to help control disease sewer, control these sewer overflows. So these can become places to learn and share stories. And these logs that carry stories about the past industrial uses of the riverfront, including labor disputes and explosive accidents, perpetuating these stories of struggle and self-determination into the future, creating places where the community comes together to better know itself. So one of the perspectives that we really want to share is that the view from 95 centimeters is not just a physical one, like you're walking around on your knees, but it's really an ethical one. And we think that young people's near obsession with process and fairness can really serve as important reminders for us older people so that even though we might find things like metrics and best practices and standards to be very useful, if they lose their connection in the process of creating democratic control of the environment, they might not be taking us where we want to go. So the story that we want to share with the rest of our time takes place in the city of Philadelphia, in the southeast. As you can see, it's a pretty dense neighborhood surrounding this park, about four acres in size. People live in these pretty dense row houses and shop on a street where most of the businesses today are owned by Cambodian immigrants who came to the city in the 1980s. And the neighborhood is really full of all kinds of people. Here you see a map where every dot represents one person in the color of the ethnicity that they marked on the United States Census. So since the 1970s, this neighborhood has received many, many residents from Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Syria, Afghanistan, Bhutan, in addition to the existing African American and Italian American communities that are there. So with all these people in not much space, this little piece of green is full of life and very important in the day-to-day rhythms of the neighborhood. With that said, it's a 100-year-old park that has received very little public investment. Since it was created. So everyone has long lists of complaints and dissatisfactions, like not enough play equipment for kids to climb on, resulting in knocking over bathrooms to get on top of other things. Not many places to sit, to catch up with your friends, except on the curb or on the grass. And in the face of these conditions, people have taken things into their own hands and made a do-it-yourself series of features. Like for example, this foot volleyball court that was built that satisfies that desire, but on the other hand kicks up huge clouds of dirt that float over to where these elders bring their own furniture to gamble on card games because they don't want to be seen by the small kids. And when it rains, of course, it becomes a big mud hole. Most recently, the most dramatic and traumatic thing to happen in the park is that there was a group of beloved, although not legally licensed food vendors, that were ejected by the police after there were some gunshots fired between two groups of people. Now when we were first involved with this project, it wasn't just against that backdrop, but the backdrop of some of the politics going on in our country that you might have heard about, including the notorious Muslim ban that was proposed and eventually implemented by the President of the United States, which was a very direct threat to many people in this neighborhood. So the people there, we found, had very different relationships with the government. Some knew about it and were very familiar, but others, such as recent refugee arrivals from Bhutan, said, well, in Bhutan, we tried to talk to the government and they shot bullet salads. So we thought that collectively an important first step of the process would be to do an investigation of how do these things work, what is the social infrastructure behind a physical park, and we thought there would be no one better than young people to ask the hard questions. So a coalition of community organizations charged a group of young people between ages of 13 and 17 to go out into the world to answer one question, which is, what does Southeast Philly have to do to get Mifflin Square Park rebuilt? How it wants. So this was the group of us that spent about nine weeks, two summers ago, trying to answer this question, beginning with brainstorming and looking around what's good about parks, what is not very good, doing physical surveys trying to understand the neighborhood through the cigarette wrappers or other types of garbage that we found throughout the place, going to libraries to look at archival maps to understand the development of the neighborhood around this green space and how it looked over that time. And then digging through the news archive, and this ended up being very, very important, because many people said all kinds of things, maybe like you've heard, like, this place was very clean until the Cambodian people came, or this place was very peaceful until the Vietnamese people came. But these students found articles like these you see here. 1929, Campaign on the Way for Clean Streets. 1941, in this park, youth shock and new riot outbreak. So the racialization and this park as an arena of turf battles was something with a very long history. Taking these materials, we were able to cut them up and try to remix them to try to imagine what a memorial or what a manifestation might look like to the spirit and the qualities of this place. And then we got ready to go out and ask hard questions of adults. So beginning with brainstorming, how we were going to interrogate them, and then going out to their offices. First in neighborhood organizations, talking to various groups, the representative of the Cambodian Association, the Bhutanese Association, et cetera, talking to municipal workers like the landscape architects within the parks department. And then using our skills of observation to break down what we had seen. Did we believe what people were saying? Did we think they were lying to us? What did we learn? And again, with young people's I think focus on questions of ethics and fairness, they were very quick to focus in on say how a city official might have a very different attitude to an Italian-American woman selling food illegally in the park versus a Cambodian person. We went and visited the local council person who blew everyone's mind by saying that he didn't think that raising the money, about four million dollars, was going to be the biggest problem. He thought that getting 80% of the people in the neighborhood to agree on a single idea for rebuilding the park would be the biggest challenge. So the students began to think about how they would present what they learned back to their own community, studying the administrative structure of the parks department and wondering if big, wonderful sounding ideas kind of like Urban 95 could ever find their way down from say the mayoral level down to the park that they were looking at. Other students thought about what it would take to create a political coalition to have enough power to push this project to happen. Thinking about individual organizations, what could they offer and what could they receive and imagining their unity as a kind of strange giant person who would eat in all these organizations in order to express this power. People who worked at these groups then would come in and tell us what we got right and what we got wrong and in the end the students produced drawings like this one that tried to connect the individual residents as recorded by the census through the neighborhood organizations into that giant man again who instantly transforms to a superhero who's able to come and rebuild the park. Or this drawing that focuses on the process that the city uses to rebuild parks and especially emphasizes the moments at which residents can actually have the greatest impact in terms of speaking up or trying to work through the political process. They thought about how the park could actually try to satisfy all of the desires that go on in the park and you can see here that includes things like chasing squirrels, going to the bathroom and selling illegal stuff. They also focused on what they thought were the very good things and bad things and good characters and bad characters in the park from broken beer bottles to the houses that they liked and made drawings like this one that was named in honor of an emcee named Meek Mill who's from Philadelphia. This is called Park Dreams and Nightmares and it both focuses on wonderful visions of parks and painting and writing poetry, but also a very detailed obsession with all of the drugs that might be there and all of the kinds of violence that might be going on. The drawings were then shared with the authority figures that contributed to the project and then displayed in public with the goal of trying to stimulate more conversation about this place and how it might be different. And the second way we think that design with young people can be useful is in producing the public. We've learned from community organizers and the public that the public, this thing called public, doesn't just exist as a thing out there. It has to be patiently and sometimes painfully assembled by door knocking, firing, assembling email addresses and monthly meetings. The neighborhood coalition in our project, seeing the work of young people with the park powers, wanted their first general communication with the neighborhood about this effort would feature the drawings from them. So they decided to send home a fold-out poster to every school kid at schools around this park in eight different languages that shares what the students has uncovered, showing how the park exists, introducing organizations involved and civic information that the students have gathered and it folds out to a poster that invites everyone to record their views and visions using components drawn by students, resulting in a massive poster campaign that supports the goal of the coalition. And some of the initial work included the walk-shop with the neighborhood stakeholders with conflicting views. We walked around the neighborhood understanding what's working and what's not working, and these walk-shops are sometimes attractive people who were initially unfamiliar to the group like this man who happens to be the block club president. And then we looked at those observations recording them in drawings, and we also set up an advisory committee to start an ongoing and regular communication between community groups who may not have always gotten along in the past. And then trying to reach beyond the professionals and work with actual residents, we had to come up with a way that people would be comfortable, able to relate to people as people, to joke around, share stories, as well as some serious ambitions about ideas that what this place could be. So we went into school libraries, out-of-school time programs with these public conversations, and they were hosted by these small organizations who also share their knowledge and experiences about the neighborhood and the park. We had with us scale objects to show how big and small a valuable court or sacrificial did it to be. We also had these kinds of open-ended abstract objects to work with. All kinds of discussions happened in these conversations about how many seats we needed for a fun car game or whether we need to build a hill or not, and sometimes a lot of conversations was around playground, how might we build a playground that reflected the exuberant culture of this neighborhood. But the most important moments were in these conversations where a certain kind of interactions happened. For example, this man who said his family from generations ago moved from South Carolina straight up to the big city here. And the Korean woman from Burma said, that's so crazy, that's exactly what happened to me when I moved to Philly. So to further this effort and develop another kind of resident group, we were able to set up a program called Community Design Leaders. The coalition worked together not always agreeing or working well together, but to get nominations and applications for those community design leadership positions that were stipended and trained, and we began a day-long workshop on a Saturday. We talked about design issues, like reviewing and retelling the stories that the earlier park power students had dug up, and people invited, and then we had people divided into smaller individual committees on specific design goals, like restoring legal vending in the park, creating more comfortable places to sit, and then finally we organized a big day of neighborhood convening at the park where many people from the public conversations and community design leaders were brought together so that the neighbors could appreciate and sometimes criticize some of the ideas that we had brought up. And so for the final part of this that we want to share with you today, once you have all of these wild ideas, different visions of what this could be, how do you attach those to things like budgets and schedules and all of the administrative apparatus that it takes to get something done, which we call pitching imagination to administration. The place that we began was with some of the most common ideas that had come up in the discussions, like more places to sit, and created opportunities to create quick action pilot projects, like creating picnic tables or a gathering garden for some of the local day care systems to take care of, or prototyping and then designing this piece of play equipment called the superseding, collaborating with an organization called Public Workshop, and even bringing in a food truck so that legal food bending could be brought back to the park. Now one of the things that we've heard most often in the park is that there wasn't enough room to do the things that people wanted to do. And looking at the layout, one thing became clear that after all of these years of improvements, the space of the park could become very fragmented, and there were many spaces that were very difficult to use. Kind of like when you're in a hurry and you don't pack your suitcase very good, so not much fits. So the idea became how can we repack this suitcase to make more room for the things that people want to do. But what this required was actually going around so that they would actually agree to move the volleyball game from one side to the other if it would make the other situation better. So talking to the young children, talking to the moms, talking to the volleyball players, talking to the drug dealers who hang out on the table, and beginning to make drawings that tried to show what these kinds of agreements might manifest as an actual design. And then very importantly, obviously gone to the individual organizational meetings could come together and where the conflicts between what they wanted could become the engine of the design. So talking about what side of the park the bathroom should go off, talking about the fact that many residents in the neighborhood see one entire side of the park as the Asian side. You would think that they were in the stumble. But these were not all conversations. They involved things like racial identity and the racialization of space. But if there was going to be a park that served the entire neighborhood, we knew that having all these people in the room was really important. So most recently, about a month and a half ago, we released the concept design. And now the word really is about building the necessary power and coalition to raise the money and put the plan into action. It's already going to be built next year. But there is, of course, a broader ambition than that. All of this work took many hands, many more than Jay and I. You see them here. And the result, I think, was that this young woman is smiling not just because of the beautiful design work that we did, but also from the knowledge of the difficult, conflicted, but we hope, ultimately, democratic process that created it. Thank you.