Judul : ann arbor center for yoga
link : ann arbor center for yoga
ann arbor center for yoga
so my name is courtney sharpe. and my name is cara michell. and-- welcome to the blackin design conference. [laughter]
ann arbor center for yoga, [applause and cheering] so we think it'sparticularly important, not only because of the eventsin ferguson and baltimore that made nationalnews last year,
but because these events areunfortunately not uncommon, we felt that it was imperativeto make a new contribution to this conversation, and touse our training as designers to convene a conversationabout how to intervene in these cycles of injustice. we are particularlygrateful to everyone who organized, protested, andacted to raise consciousness to bring the conversationabout social injustice today to the forefrontof a national discourse.
so here at the gsd, theafrican american student union participated inmarches in boston. we went to vigils thatwere hosted around harvard. and we also had a project,map the gap mapping project, which you can see out by theelevators on the first floor. and we really wanted to-- whoo. we created the installationto honor the lives that were lost to police brutality. and we thought it wasreally important that we
make a memorial to that. we would like to thankthe administration for providing financial supportto make that project a reality, as well as an installationwe had that commemorated the lives that were lost betweenthe passing of michael brown and freddie gray. and we also would like tothank them for their support in making this a reality,without which it would not have been possible.
in particular, we'd like tothank the public programs office and shantel blakely,who works tirelessly to help make sure thatthis logistically went very smoothly. yes. so thank you to shantel. [applause] so dean mohsen mostafavi,during his tenureship here, established a committeeto address diversity issues
within the schoolthat has contributed to making this institutiona more inclusive space. and we would like him to come upand introduce this conference. but before he begins-- --i'm going to readhis bio to you. i feel we must. we must. we'll give you your due credit. so dean mohsen mostafavi isan architect and educator,
and he's our dean here. he was formerly thedean of the college of architecture and planningat cornell university. and he has taught atnumerous institutions, including universityof pennsylvania, university of cambridge, andfrankfurt academy of fine arts. and he serves on the steeringcommittee of the aga khan award for architectureand has served on the design committee ofthe london department-- sorry.
the london development agencyand the riba gold medal. he is a consultant on a numberof international architecture urban projects. so thank you so muchfor your contributions to the design field. thank you so much. thank you. so that was a littlebit of an old cv. i don't really do anyof those things anymore.
but it's ok. i just wanted to tell you howhappy i am that you're all here, that this event ishappening, that tomorrow is going to be happening. and i really want forus to take a minute to thank the committeeco-chairs, the committee members. this is cara michellthat you just met, courtney sharpe, azzurracox, blair storie-johnson, dana
mckinney, francisco lara garcia,katherine curiel, megan echols, and shani carter formaking this possible. i also want to takethis opportunity to thank a few members ofthe old asu, other friends of the school. [inaudible] here. we had the pleasure of seeinghim in chicago recently. sarah [inaudible],hector tarrido-picart, ethan lassiter,eric shaw who's i
think the fourth gsd graduatedirector of planning in dc, omar davis, and many otherswho are here this afternoon. i think what is so wonderfuland exciting about this event is that not only thetopic that it's dealing with, but alsomany of the people that it's bringing together. and i'm so honoredand so pleased that if you lookat our brochure, that such a large proportionof these people who
will be speaking tous today and tomorrow are actually connectedwith the gsd. we have, of course, among usdavid lee, who has taught here for many years in the past. stephen gray, who hasjust joined us at the gsd as a new assistantprofessor of urban design. liz ogbu, a graduateof the school. teman and teran evans. michaele pride is agraduate of the school.
sarah, i already mentioned. nat belcher, whois now the chair and professor at penn state. william williams, and many,many, many other people. and as i said, other speakers. [? satu ?] [? brentlegs ?],phil freelon. and so the list goes on. so i'm mentioning thosenames specifically because i think it's reallyimportant to recognize
the enormous contribution thatpeople have made-- i see toni griffin here in front ofme-- and so many people who have really made a significantimpact towards the built environment, towardsthe kinds of issues that will be discussed. and i think that,for me, is also a celebration oftheir contribution, of their commitment,of the fantastic work that they have done.
it's a kind ofinteresting moment for me personally, becausei just remember that it was exactly 20 yearsago that i helped organize a conference in this room calleddenaturalized urbanity, race, gender and ethnicity in thelandscape of the american city. and the purpose of thatconference exactly 20 years ago in 1994 and 1995 was to examinethe relationship between race and space, questions ofgender, the role of ethnicity. so for example, we dealt withthe way in which a synagogue
was turned into a koreantemple, and the relationship between the iconology of thesynagogue and its erasure in order to becomea korean temple. this is like a spatialproject that deals with questions of ethnicity. we had a fantastic presentationabout race and space that was actually aboutthe movie the lion king, and their connection of thelion king to the degradation, if you like, ofthe american city,
and how the movie industrywas really using entertainment to reinforce certainideological constructs. and what was the connectionbetween the movie industry and it's kind of affirmationsand the landscape of the american city? and you know, yesterday we had agroup of are visiting committee go to see the work thatsome of the students are doing withprofessor dan d'oca upstairs on the martinluther king boulevard,
which is something thathe will also touch on. my point is that on onelevel, nothing has changed. that there's 20 yearssince then, and the issues remain reallyabsolutely pertinent, and that the relationshipbetween race and space, the way in which one could saythat the racialization space is becoming even moreextreme, is continuing. and so i think it's fantasticthat this group of students and alumni have come togetherwith the support of so
many other people, so many ofyou from other institutions, to really help us think throughthese really critical questions today. but at the same time, to reallyopen up new possibilities to help celebrate all thework that you are doing. i think theorganizers reminded me that it's important that thisis not only something that is focusing on the difficulties. but it's alsoimportant to recognize
the positive aspect, andreally the celebration and the commitment of all thegreat energy that you have, and all the fantasticwork that you do. i think in theschool, it is true that over the last, let'ssay, seven or eight years, we've tried to have, withthe support of a large group of students, faculty, andstaff, a systematic kind of reexamination ofthe way that we operate as an institution,how we can really
be a more diverseinstitution, and how the question of diversityis a fundamental issue, a fundamental aspect ofour creative endeavor. in other words, we do not seediversity as a kind of problem solving thing. we see diversity as anopportunity, which really is critical in terms of howwe think about our cities, how we think about the wayin which, in our field, we think about scenarioplanning of the kind of sets
of relationships, sets ofconnections that can happen. and i think that that'sa really significant part of what we are about. i think we've had some success. we obviously needto do a lot more, especially i think from theperspective of the students when it comes to the way inwhich our curriculum is being tuned to respond to someof these issues that are so pertinent andso critical today.
and i think we will bereally focusing on that. so we're really optimisticabout today and tomorrow, and hope and knowthat we will learn a great deal from all of you. and we're really excited andgrateful to all the organizers for making this possible. and i, for one,am looking forward to an incredible dayand a half, or whatever is left of this event.
so thank you again verymuch for being here. and that's reallycelebrate and move on, move forward with thisreally important project. good evening. i'm michael hays, the associatedean for academic affairs. and i'm really honored tohave been invited to moderate the panel for tonight. but you're probably wonderingwhy all these white guys are introducing black in design.
so i'll try-- [laugh] --i'll try to--i'll try to explain. and of course-- i'm going to, of course,quote dr. martin luther king. and i'm going tokeep-- i'm not going to edit the racialengendered language that he uses of the 1960s. "to find the originsof the negro problem,
we must turn to thewhite man's problem." now i think what dr. king mayhave meant by the white man's problem is what i want to callthe white spatial imaginary. and this is the problem. in the white spatialimaginary, whites are not represented tothemselves as white. we are variously-- we canbe from different classes, we are gendered, we mightbe differently abled and differently sexualized.
we might even recognizeracial minorities. but in the white imaginary,white is not a race. so this spatialimaginary has prevented-- it has certain consequencesthat are central to design. it's prevented some ofus from understanding fundamental features of thesocial spaces in which we live. the white spatial imaginaryhas produced the neighborhoods, the workplaces, the schoolswhere white people-- some know very little about blackpeople, which in turn produces
the kind of defensive localismthat dominates decisions about public interventions andhow services are distributed. and of course, itproduces that privatism, which sometimes turns hostile. the radicalized place thatblack americans live in have compelled them todevelop a different optics. george lipsitz fromuc santa barbara stresses this andsays that black people have had to, out ofnecessity, turn segregation
into congregation. and this has produceda very different kind of spatial imaginary thatcounters this privatism and localism. so what i want tosuggest-- and remember that this first panel isabout issues of pedagogy, and we were chargedby the organizers to speak to howpedagogy can address issues of social injustice.
and i want to suggest that thisidea of a spatial imaginary helps us get to pedagogy. i want to borrow fromthe french philosopher jacques ranciere who talksabout the distribution of the sensible. now sensible justrefers to what can be apprehended by the senses. it's very, very centralto design and even to art. the distributionof the sensible,
it makes aestheticscentral to politics. and this distributionis just a framework, the physical, spatial frameworkthat ultimately produces that spatial imaginary thatdetermines, ranciere says, what is even possibleto see or not see, what is possible tohear or not hear, what is even possible to say oreven to think, to do, to make. now there's no politicalparty involved here. there are no policeforce and hummers.
what's importantis that which is possible to apprehendby the senses literally determines thecondition of possibility for perception, thought, action. it determines thespacial imaginary. so what i want to submit, ifwe can think about teaching, if we can teach thetechniques, the practices, the forms of design thatdistribute space, time, that distribute subjects andobjects with this in mind,
then we can have--pedagogically, can have a very real effect onplace-related opportunities. i was done. i was going to go. but i have tointroduce the panel. so i'm going to introducethe panel in the order that they will speak. it's also listed inthe order that they will speak in your program.
and i'm going to makevery short introductions, because the whole cv is--[inaudible] the bio is here. amber wiley will beour first speaker. she's assistant professorof american studies at skidmore college. just having a piecein a book coming out this-- is it out yet? just about out calledwalking in cities: quotidian mobility as urbantheory, method, and practice.
there are a numberof other publications she's involved withabout designing schools and about space, place,and pedagogy that's also forthcoming. after amber will be dan d'oca. he's an urban planner,and ha mohsen said, he's teaching at optionstudio this semester at gsd. he's principal and co-founder ofthe new york-based architecture planning and research firmcalled interboro and partners.
and he'll be talkingabout some of the-- i think some of thework with interboro. diane davis is our chair of thedepartment of urban planning and design, and charles nortonprofessor of regional planning and urbanism at the gsd. and she's published widely. i won't list them here. but just to say thather current work often involves issues of violenceand spatial defense in mexico,
but also-- and i think you'lltalk about the st. louis project-- the turnto american cities. and then also a professorof landscape architecture-- associate professor of landscapearchitecture at gsd, sonja duempelmann will followed diane. sonja has just had apublication of a book out called flights of imagination:aviation, landscape, design, and also has recentlyco-edited women, modernity and landscape architecture.
and then finally, toni griffin,who was also mentioned. toni is right nowprofessor of architecture and also the foundingdirector of the max bond center on design at citycollege in new york, is published widely,and is dedicated to teaching on issues ofadvancement of education, research, andadvocacy in ways that make communities sustainable. so amber, if you'llstart us off.
ok. well, look at that. fabulous. hello, everybody. amber wiley. i am from skidmore. i just started thatposition, though. i previously wasteaching at tulane in the school of architecturefrom 2011 till 2014.
and then i just spentthe last academic year traveling on the society ofarchitectural historians, h allen brookstraveling fellowship. i went to six countries. mexico, guatemala, ghana,ethiopia, india, and vietnam, studying architectural history,looking at sites firsthand, really trying tofigure out-- or get a firsthand experience ofthe non-western tradition of architecture.
but as i told somefolks earlier today, every country that i went tohad been colonized in any event. so then i was stilllooking at spanish colonial as well in addition to mayanand aztec architecture, or looking at british colonialand dutch and danish influences in ghana. the italians were in ethiopiaand did some things as well. the british in india, as wellas the french in vietnam. so it was trying to lookat the indigenous histories
of architecture, butalso understanding the colonial aspects andhow those are interpreted and reinterpreted in publichistory as well as preservation projects. now my job at skidmore,i'm in the american studies department. and so i'm teaching two courses,one called the american city, and the other is calledafrican american experience. and i'm trying to take some ofthat architectural and spatial
background andknowledge into informing how those classes get taught. before i talk a bitabout skidmore though, i would like to talk about thetime that i spent at tulane. and i was teachingrequired courses at tulane, two of the requiredhistory courses for sophomores or second years. in this particular case itwas a five year program. and i tried to make thehistory class more engaging,
a little bit more fun,thinking about architecture in any number of ways,very basic, simple ways. architecture is major. architecture is afterlife. architecture is ritual. trying to move away fromthe dates and facts approach that many of ourstudents felt that the history class, thatthat's what it was about. i'm not even really good withdates myself, so i understand.
now you know, it was put uponme to teach the course in a way that i actually wasn'twholly prepared for. because i was told that i hadto teach the global history and even when igraduated from undergrad and got my master's,it was really about the westernhistory of architecture. and i said, ok. so i'm going to learn aboutindian buddhist shrines, and then nothing about indiaor nothing about buddhism.
but i can talk about itonce i read about it. and so that's part ofwhat that trip was, was to really gainan understanding of this non-westerntradition of architecture. but of course, aslife would have it, i ended up in americanstudies program after that. so one of the reasonswhy we were really pushing for this globalhistory of architecture is because of naab.
now i was only threeyears into my job at tulane when i had to dealwith naab accreditation. and maurice is in the audience. he was there with me. he understands. and we had, as faculty, tolook at student performance criteria. what were thesestudents learning? these are the things thatthe national architectural
accrediting board wantsthe students to learn. and they have toproduce-- or we have to produce foldersthat show they have the ability, throughstudent work, to hit these key pointsthat naab wanted, or they had an understanding. and so we had to spenda lot of time thinking about these differentrealms of learning. realm a-- and this is 2009.
they've updated itsince, 2013, 2014. critical thinkingand representation. integrated buildingpractices, technical skills, and knowledge. and leadership and practice. i think they renamed itto professional practice. so i had a steep learningcurve in the first three years of teaching there andtrying to understand what it is that the professionalaccrediting board wanted
our students to know. what was critical tomy courses, the history courses, the requiredcourses i taught, i found that tworounds in particular were useful to think about. this is not going tobe a naab workshop, so i'm going to skipa couple slides, because y'all don't needto know all the details. but if we go down to the bottomof this one, theoretical,
social, political, economic,cultural, and environmental context, that meanswe expect our students to be able to work in a wholeload of different contexts. and i was like ok. this is good. because we do that in my class. cool. and i'm going to skip this one,histories of global tradition and culture, and move toanother one, cultural diversity.
this is one of thethings that we had to say our students knew about. this is required by thearchitecture accreditation board. students should showan understanding of the diverse needs, values,and behavioral norms-- this is very long-- socialand spatial patterns that characterize cultures andindividuals and the implication of diversity on the societalroles and responsibilities
of architects. they say it. they want us to do it. and i was like, yes. so this right here is fodder. if you ever get the argumentthat it's not really important, that's not what we'reabout in design school. oh, no, no, no. naab says that'swhat we're about.
we have to do this. ok? another one-- and this has beenrenamed in realm c, leadership and practice, they talkabout managing, advocating, acting legally,ethically, and critically for the good of the client,society, and the public. this includescollaboration, business, and leadership skills. again, if you everget any pushback
about what architecture is orwhat our role is as designers, or in my casehistorian, say, no, no. our accreditation boardsays that our students should be able toadvocate and act legally and ethically, and thinkcritically about the impact of design on society. yep. it's in there. i spent a lot of time withthis material, so i know.
and finally-- i'mskipping those two-- it brings us to the idea-- andi do know that we get pushback. so if you want to engage,say, the black lives matter movement as designers, ashistorians, as urban planners, and people say, whatdoes black lives matter have to do withdesigner urban planning? you can just say, well,naab accreditation says-- and then go from there. so i was part of a project,a digital humanities project,
the aggregate website, where anumber of different historians, preservationists,planners were asked to talk about the issueof black lives matter. and it was a reallypowerful portfolio, and it was reallyheartening, in a sense. this came out, i think, inthe spring of this year, because people really wantedto talk about these things and give some sort ofvoice to the struggle. i'm going to talk abit about two classes
that i taught that had noeffect whatsoever on our naab accreditation, and that'stwo electives, upper level seminars that i taught. one was called sights andsounds public history. in new orleans, everythingis touched by music. and so i wantedmy students to be able to talk abouthistoric narratives of new orleans, the musicallandscape, the parks, the pubs, the warehouses turned intoclubs, all of these things,
and give some sort ofbuilding history about it. and also to engage inthe digital humanities. so what we were able to dois take a digital humanities program platform that was beingproduced in the communications department attulane, and engage it with our own architecturalhistory and building history work, and think aboutthe way the music and the built environmentoverlapped in these ways. and so i'm goingto skip that part.
i had students who wereable to meet students from other departments outsideof the school of architecture, because they wereengaged in this much larger project within tulane. i'm so happy that i havethis dew drop inn slide. so they used the platformto produce histories of particular sitesthroughout new orleans that have the history of musicembedded within them. maurice cox actually did atulane city center project
with the dew drop inn, buti had individual students doing research on it. and there was a strongerimpetus for them to do the work rightbecause it was public and someone wouldhave to read it. and that made them workharder and think harder about the thingsthat they were doing. so they were socialhistories mixed in with the architecturalhistories, histories of space.
i had graduate students whowere my research assistants who helped me with my own researchas it related to music and the urban landscape. and the research wasactually picked up by citylab just recently aspeople were looking at the anniversary of katrina. finally, we also had apublic history program dedicated to someof the findings that the students madedoing their research.
we engaged the national parkservice in this conversation, and we actually hadpeople who were involved with these various sites that weresearched, talking about what the site was before katrina,how it changed after katrina, and some of the struggles thatthey were dealing with now. five minutes. and so it was reallywonderful because we were a, able to produce public history. b, i was able to engage graduateresearch assistants with it.
and c, include the publicin this larger discussion. and it was really kindof invigorating for me, and it was great forthe students as well. we also had music. finally, to talk about mysecond class elective course, i stole this name from cornell. i was looking-- when i waslooking to do elective courses, i was trying to thinkof different topics and what to talk about.
so i was looking atdifferent schools of design and seeing whattheir classes were, and if it make anysense to [inaudible]. so i took the architecture,culture, and society. i don't know what thatclass at cornell is about, but i know whatmy class is about. and so there's alot of text here that i'm just goingto skip through. but i want to talk about someof the underlying theory.
i was able to givevoice to some theory to talk about therelationship of architecture to culture andculture to society through my americanstudies training. michael came up here and hequoted a reverend/political activist, he quoted anamerican studies scholar, and he quoted a philosopher. and so in this coursehere, we looked at philosophers, interpretationsof the built environment,
scholars who lookedat capitalist society, and also the socialproduction of space. and we used this theoryto give my students a means of talkingabout the built environment in waysthat they might not have talked about it before. also, granted, a benefit ofmy american studies background is that i was able to use film,music, poetry, novels, and art. i said, these people whoproduce these films, who
produce this music, whoproduce this poetry, they're talking about thebuilt environment too. and we should seethem as people that are informing our understandingof the built environment. so fast forward. i did different themes. one theme was housing projects. we looked at raymond williams'definition of community, what it means to be a community.
we read the scholarshipof arnold hirsch in making the second ghettoand public housing in chicago. we talked about the meccaflats and its relationship to the constructionof the iit campus. but we also heardfrom gwendolyn brooks, because she could tell us abouteveryday life in the mecca flats. we looked at the majorfigures in design, and we looked at the peoplewhose voices hadn't been heard,
people who were struggling notto have their homes demolished for the expansionof the iit campus. you rarely hear their stories. but we heard aboutthem in the class. we looked at thekey legislation that informed the shapes of thehousing, how legislation and form scale, how it informsdistribution of housing throughout the city. and finally, we lookedat reinterpretations,
artistic reinterpretations. kerry james marshall-- oneof my favorite artists-- and how he came tounderstand the spaces. so it wasn't just aboutthe buildings themselves. we talked about the issuesof what community is. we talked about how legislationaffects these things. we talked about thetheory behind capitalism and how it movesand shapes the way our built environmentworks, and also
about how artists areour informants in some of the results. so issues to talkabout or think about, issues in the academy, thepublic digital humanities project was great. it reached a lotdifferent areas. but there's, unfortunately,a devaluation and distrust of digital humanities. the print world still rules,and books still reign supreme.
so even though all that work wasput into the elective course, it matters for not if you'rea young scholar, maybe on the tenure track,and you say, hey. i did this publichistory project. that's great. but is it an article? is it a book? no. and so it'sdiscouraging in a sense
when you want to havethese kinds of discussions and engagementswith your students. and what i also realized isthat for the elective courses, they are considered centralto my students' understanding, and they didn't even contributeto naab accreditation. and they were fluffto the real work of the architectural education. but we can make the argumentthat these kinds of courses are necessary, and in fact,that naab requires them.
and so whenever you're put upagainst the wall in that kind of way say, no, no, no. naab wants it. finally, i just want toinvite you-- this is a plug. it's shameless-- thevernacular architecture forum on the board. we have a conference comingup in june in durham, north carolina fromfarm to factory: piedmont storiesin black and white,
architectural historians talkingabout the racial landscape. please come. we need more architectsin our midst. all right. let's see. oh. perfect. hi. so thanks for theinvitation to speak
at this amazing,awesome conference. i'm so thrilledthat it's happening. i feel like we should giveanother round of applause to the organizers. this is just so exciting. the format's amazing. the round tables. it's great. and i want to say,i'm also really
happy i've been askedto talk about pedagogy, which coincidentally enough,is one of my favorite things to talk about. my simple message is,let's give students more opportunities toaddress race, place, power, and privilege. please. pretty please. in my experience, racegenerally is something
that a lot ofstudents have to be asked to ask questions about. but in my experience,when students are encouraged toexplore what design can do to undo the effectsof forced segregation, they knock it out of the park. so let's give them a chance. there's a lot at stake here. so i'm going to talk about a fewprojects that students of mine
have done. you know, before i startedteaching here at the gsd, i taught at the marylandinstitute college of art in baltimore, mica. my students therewere architects, sculptors, photographers. they were overwhelmingly white. mica is in aneighborhood, bolton hill, which is white too.
interestingly, bolton hillis surrounded on all sides by neighborhoods thatare overwhelmingly black. so you may have seenthese judgmental maps. this is one of baltimore. so there's micaindicated by art nerds. so zooming in, wesee it surrounded by nothing but trouble. drugs and prostitutesand the wire. i didn't make this map.
so here's a typicalblock in art nerds. here's one innothing but trouble. here's one in the wire. the first class i evertaught at mica in 2005 was a survey class thatlooked at the policies, plans, and practicesthat have shaped cities in the united states. since this classfocused on race, i thought we should start bythinking about bolton hill.
why was it so white comparedto the neighborhoods around it? why was it so wealthy comparedto the neighborhoods around it? why were life expectanciesso much higher? actually a 20 yearlife expectancy difference between thisneighborhood and some of the surrounding ones. and why were the streets sorelatively well maintained? these are prettybasic questions, and by now we have somepretty basic answers to them.
we know that racial segregationwas the product of dozens of local, state,federal policies aimed, explicitly sometimes, atcreating two americas, separate and unequal. we have racial zoning. we have redlining. we have highway construction. white man's roads throughblack man's homes. urban renewal, whichjames baldwin famously
called negro removal. suburban incorporation, whichformed a white suburban noose around our cities. racial covenants that definedwho could and could not live in a house. racist code of ethics thatbrokers swore to uphold. and racial violence thatconfronted individuals who dared cross the color lines. so it was not difficultto tell a story
about why these neighborhoodsoutside of the mica bubble were so different. and this is what wetalked about in class. interestingly, though, ifound that the students had to be taught to askthese questions about why these neighborhoodswere so different. i think one reason hadto do with the fact that this class was thefirst class they ever took in which theywere asked to ask
these questions about thecauses and the consequences of segregation. i'd like to think thatthe uprisings in new york, ferguson, and baltimorehave helped put segregation back on the agenda. let's hope that thisconference marks the beginning of arenewed interest in race here at the gsd,where it's clearly not talked about enough.
in fact, just totake a step back, i think we don't generally talkabout socio-political issues enough period. i think many of usin the design field make the mistake ofseparating something off. and marginalizing,i would argue, something calledsocial design, as if not all design was social. as if our choicesabout what to build
for whom and whereand in what style weren't political decisions. of course they are. you can't be apoliticalin this business. so let's embrace this fact. let's train designersand planners to be politically literate,to scrutinize and question everything. when it comes to race,more specifically,
it's important to rememberthat designers and planners from previous generations helpedus get into the mess we're in. and we desperatelyneed, i would argue, the best and brightest-- that'syou guys-- to help us out of this mess. so the first projecti want to talk about is this project calledbaltimore: open city. and i'm just going totalk about it quickly, because i didn't do it here.
i want to focus on theprojects i'm doing here. but in 2011, my lastyear of teaching at mica, i worked with 28 studentsover the course of a year to mount a publicexhibition about segregation called baltimore: open city. here's the cover of our book. here's some spreadsfrom the book we made. interestingly, itactually started as a seminar, just bunchof us sitting together,
reading books about race. but we wanted to do more. so to make a longstory short, we found this cool oldabandoned market space. we raised the money,we fixed it up, and we had an entirelystudent produced, student curated exhibition. these are undergrads. so here's our entryway whereyou see the clever logo
that the students came up with. adjacent to this is ourcuratorial statement, led with the statement, "citiesexist to bring people together, but cities can alsokeep people apart." and then went on to explainthat baltimore has historically been something of a pioneerin the keeping people apart business. so this is somethingwe explored. you see also here our calendar.
we had lots of events in thisspace starting with our opening party where we invited alocal marching band to parade through the space. it was really loud. we also used thespace to raise money for local progressivenonprofits. we had historians lead tours ofhistoric sites of segregation in the city. the work itselfwas really varied.
this was all studentwork, undergraduate work. so some students did a timelineof segregation in baltimore. we had a map thatintroduced visitors to contemporary nimby battlesbeing fought across the city. one student did theseportraits of people who fought for integration in baltimore. again, student work,undergraduate student work. so we also used thespace to encourage people to be activists.
so for example, by helpingus build this house out of we buy houses signs,these predatory signs. so we asked people toremove them from poles and sort of help usbuild this house. we asked people tocome and help us get involved withlocal nonprofits who were combatingsegregation in the city. there's a strongpublic component. so one student made theseamazing murals of planners
on the infrastructurethat they planned, along with someincriminating quotes about why they planned it. so here's an ad for the show. we pasted these postersaround the city. each one was site specific. so this one wason fulton avenue, which represented the colorline until it was busted by blockbusters in the '60s.
so we had about ahalf a dozen of these. again, some spreadsfrom our book. we invited local historians andactivists to contribute to it. and i'm sure this projectreflects my overall theme. so i mentioned earlier thatmost of the students who took my classes had tobe asked to ask questions about segregation. but what you see hereis what students can do, even undergraduates,when given the chance
to ask these questions. that's nice. but this is design school. we didn't come to thegsd to make exhibitions. we came here to get stuff done. gsd. so-- i want to spend myremaining time-- --showing a project thatcame out of the studio
i taught in 2014. the studio was called the storm,the strife, and everyday life: see changes in the suburbs. and it invited studentsto work with nonprofit and community-based partners toupdate long island's built environment for today'sdemographic realities. so here we are onour field trip where we talked to people forwhom long island was not working well.
long island built primarilyfor wealthy, white, car driving nuclear families. but that's not increasinglythe demographic profile of long island and alot of other suburbs. so one person we talked toon the trip was elaine gross. she's the executivedirector of this great group called erase racism,long island-based group. and she made a pitchto the students. it was a tough one,but can you come up
with ideas for buildingaffordable housing in predominantlyhigh opportunity white communities that,because of nimbyism, don't provide their fairshare of affordable housing? marcus [? polcifur ?], who is amod student, he took the bait, and he did a totallyextraordinary project called the schoolhouse project. and its solution is to takevacant school properties that are located in these white,high opportunity areas
and convert them into a mixedincome suburban centers. so working with elaine andalso a civil rights attorney, he identified a schoolto serve as a prototype for this experiment. his proposed design ofthe school and the grounds was amazing. but the projectdidn't stop there. he spent a lot of timethinking about implementation and ended up creatingfour brochures and four
presentations that made a casefrom left to right, down below, for the ethical importance,the legal necessity, the financial feasibility,and the attractiveness of this project. so each brochure wascreated from the perspective of a different actor, and wasaimed at a different audience. so the graphics areall really different. so let's take a look quickly. so the first presentationwas from erase racism to hud.
marcus did somerole playing here, which isn't going to translateas i represent this project. but this was apresentation to hud to get them tosupport this idea. so it starts bylooking at-- so this is the brochure--starts by looking at segregation on long island. what you see is aterrible problem. here's the part wheremarcus would say,
is this the productof preference? of course not. all the studies done show thatpeople want to generally live in mixed race communities. here's where he would gointo what caused segregation on long island. no time for that now. what are the consequences? so educational disparitieswould be one consequence.
the blue numbershere are scores that are granted to schoolson long island. the dots are african americans. the background is income. and so what you see is that theschools with the most african americans are the poorest. and these get thelowest test scores. they're given theleast amount of money. they have the lowestamount of resources.
on the right you seean incredible contrast between two bordering towns,garden city and hempstead. so how are we going tobreak through this wall? we're going to use schools. there are a lot of schools. there are a lot of abandonedschools on long island. and they're great,because they're connected to their neighborhoods. they're totally adaptableinto all kinds of things.
so now he's goingto ask, what school? so he went through a numberof indicators, which i'll take you through really fast. you want housing to be ina good school district. you want the housing to be inan area with a low crime rate. you want it closeto transportation. you want it in alow poverty area. you want it to be safefrom flooding, right? low poverty andsafe from flooding.
so you overlay all of these. and to make a longstory short, he landed on this shuttered schoolin smithtown, long island. by the way, another factorhere was, where could this actually happen? so he was working witha civil rights attorney to determine this, and thisis still an active case, which is really exciting. so here you see some of thegood things about smithtown.
so now we've made the caseto hud, put on another hat. so here marcus has to makethe pitch to investors. so we switch to a verydifferent presentation, complete with clipart. i don't want to gointo details except to say that he did a really gooddiscounted cash flow analysis. he really workedwith long island to identify fundingopportunities. he ran the numbersand looked at the irr,
given differentfunding opportunities. the next presentationwas that to smithtown. and this was hud to smithtownsaying, you're in trouble. this is the stick,not the carrot, right? comply or else. so he made this brochureand this presentation about how fair housingis a matter of law. so he did a review offair housing policies. point is, you can'ttry to keep people
from moving into your town. he looked at long islandfair housing rules. the tide of exclusionis changing. he looked at recentcases that hud has brought other wealthywhite communities. hud's getting serious aboutenforcing fair housing policies. he looked at the town itself,and he uncovered a history in this town of smithtownof racial exclusion.
he looked at how actually it hasa lot less affordable housing than other suburbs just like it. the writing's on the wall. let this happen, smithtown,or else you're in trouble, and hud's goingto come after you. so the next presentationis from the developer to potential buyers, right? so here he's got a brochure. and of course, this doesn't lookvery gsd, what with the drop
shadows and the argyle. but we worked very hardactually to identify a style that we thought the potentialbuyers into this development would like. so it started out veryslick and gsd-like. and we sort of said, how aboutsome argyle, some drop shadows. anyway. so i'm not going to gothrough it in detail. it was a really nice project,a very thoughtful project.
and this is the glossybrochure, right? shows the kind of site plan,it shows the amenity mix, the standard floor plans. sells this in termsof, this is near dining and it's near health clinics,and so on and so forth. and the unit price andso on and so forth. so there are a lotof takeaways here. one of the reasons i thinkthis project is so brilliant is because it positionsthe designer as someone
who can bring things together. the urban designerisn't just a form major. he is innovating inpolicy, politics, finance. i also appreciate thathe made deliverables that were suitable to the project. in this case, brochures. presentations that heleft with the client. i also appreciate thedecision to change the style of the projectto suit the audience
and make representationsthat are likely to resonate with that audience. and of course, thiswas his project. this is not my project. he scoped it. he decided to do it. just to put mycards on the table, i think this is how we shouldbe training our designers. this is the kind ofinterdisciplinary thinking
that we need if we're goingto start chipping away at structural racism. what was my role here? introducing him to elaine. you know? giving the studentsthe opportunity to chip away at structural racism. the point being is that thisis what we need to do, i think. give our students theopportunity to do this.
the more we let them do this,the better the solutions are. these are solutions thati never would have had. so i'm not going to talkabout my studio this semester, but i'm giving my students theopportunity to do this again. this semester we'relooking at streets named after martin luther king. king is super popular. there are 900 streetsnamed after him, right? and a lot of themdon't necessarily
reflect the legacy of king. and so we're lookingat, how might you make streets that betterreflect the legacy of king? so you can see some ofthem across the country. we're looking atdc and st. louis. eric shaw, who ithink is here, is one of our clients at theoffice of city planning. same deal where we'rebasically out with the students all the time, talking to people,trying to make connections,
and giving the studentsthe opportunities to come up with the solutions. they're better solutionsthan i could ever have, so let's give the studentsa chance, basically, is what i'm saying. thanks. i don't have any slides. so well, i stand beforeyou with immense humility, thinking about all theawesome and important work
that's just been presented andwill be presented after me. so i'm going to be really short. i almost feel fraudulentbeing up here. i think i was asked to talkabout the more official pedagogy as chair of thedepartment of planning and design. and i don't have slides, soi'm really fraudulent here, in a planning and design school. the organizers asked me to talka little bit about-- actually,
they wanted me totalk about the ways that i incorporate issuesof diversity, racial, and spatial justice,and other related themes into my own work-- and myown work and my own research. i'm going to try todo that, and i'll end with somecomments about myself. but i did think it wasimportant to start first by discussing these issues fromthe lens of the urban planning design department.
so i'll be saying alittle-- just a few words about pedagogy intheory, not in practice. some of the rest ofthe presentations are pedagogy in practice. and i really hopewhat i'm saying is not going to be toounbelievably trite. it's something thatwe probably all know, but it's worth repeatingbecause this conference just attests to theenergy and enthusiasm
and leadership of the students,many from planning design, but also from architectureand landscape, that really is emerging upfrom the trenches of the school students here. and i think theleast that we can do as the administratorsof the department is to respond to theirwork in meaningful ways, and try to do what wecan to kind of move it to the next step.
so what i wanted to sayabout what we're trying to do in urban planning and design isreally recognize the fact that is a multifaceted endeavourthat involves integrating into the curriculum wheneverpossible questions of race, space, justice, exclusion. the list goes on and on. in theory, this may be happeningmore in the urban planning program than in theurban design program, although that is astatement in theory,
and there are plenty ofclasses being offered in urban planning thatare not stepping up to the plate in theways that they should. and i'm sure thatalso in urban design there's more movementtowards these questions. but i think,though, what we need a little more in our departmentand in the school as a whole is a more constructive--and even can be combative-- dialogueacross these programs
about methodology, aboutconcepts, and about assumptions, and whetherthe concepts, methods, and assumptions usedin the disciplines, in the differentsub disciplines, are enabling or constrainingattention to diversity. sometimes i fear that weare too readily ghettoized into two camps, those who havesocial concerns versus those with design concerns. or those who focusedon process versus those
focused on product. or those with ethicalpriorities and those with aesthetic priorities,and other antinomies. and i think we justhave to constantly be struggling to breakdown those polarizations and those dichotomizationsnot just in conversations, but in every project that we do. every curriculum,course that gets offered, we have to havethat critical interrogation
of those kind of dichotomies. i think that some-- and aswe've just seen from dan's work, that some of this can bemore easily accomplished by the framing of asubject or a topic that you throw differentdisciplines at. and that often happensin an option studio maybe more readily thanin the core curriculum. and this issomething-- we've been talking about this this weekendwith the visiting committee.
but i do think that the issue ofthinking critically about what subjects can most draw thevariety of spatial, racial, justice issues onto thetable in a more organic way is what we need to be thinking. we shouldn't be thinkingabout the skills that need to be offered. let's think about complexand controversial topics and subjects that those skillsare used to disaggregate. of course, insuring diversityin the faculty and student body
is absolutely central toall these advances and aims, but that's all reallyobvious and not original. and everyone hereknows this, so i'm not going to say anythingelse about that. so what i'd like to donow is just spend my last, like, three minutes or somethingto answer the first question about myself and howi try to integrate these issues intomy own scholarly and professional life.
so i guess first andforemost, i would like to-- and i hopethis isn't too personal, but i don't have alot else to share, so i'm going to sharemyself with you-- that my own consciousnessand knowledge was sparked by my own history andbackground as a student of urban sociology, aswell as my love of cities. i grew up in asuburb of st. louis, but learned early on that citieswere different than suburbs,
because i was fortunate to havea mother that would take me to downtown st.louis all the time to old bookstoresand areas of the city that people in the whitesuburb i grew up in never, ever ventured into. nobody went to downtown st.louis when i was growing up. i grew up in a western suburb. and i learned thatif i had a choice, i clearly wantedto live in a city.
and that's, in fact, why i choseto go to college in chicago, because that city literallytook my breath away. every time i drove throughit during my family holidays, because my grandparentslived in milwaukee and i lived in st. louis, andwe drove our station wagon from st. louis to milwaukee. and you would just come up onthe city on lake shore drive. and i still get chills wheni think about the built environment and theskyscrapers and the landscape
of a city like chicago. and of course, we wentinto the city too. and then i went to college inchicago, and at that moment, i knew i never wantedto live anywhere but a diverse, thriving citywith a lot of difference. later when i studied urbansociology at northwestern, i learned about theoriesof cosmopolitanism among othersociological frameworks to understand the urbanexperience and other theories
that underscored thepower, connection, and even socialsatisfaction that comes from livingwithin diversity and through connectivity. of course, i read someof the other authors who've been noted today. i mean, we really siton the same page, amber, about thinkingsociologically and not just culturally about cities.
but also chicago, the home ofthe chicago school of sociology and urban sociologywhen i was studying, i learned to thinkabout physical space in a very different way. and i realized thatsocial relationships were both products and producersof physical spaces and vice versa, for bothgood and for bad. and i do remember one assignmentin an urban sociology class where i rode my bike to ablack neighborhood in evanston,
illinois in orderto complete a paper about the community, a bigconcept in urban sociology. studied it from so manydifferent dimensions. and in the process,discovered how spatially isolated the neighborhood was. i had no idea beforei got on my bike. cut off by train tracks, nogrid, difficulty to traverse, environmentally unstableconditions everywhere. so in short, at thatmoment it was clear to me
that the spatialcontext of social life was something that i'dnever really thought about, because i had, iguess to what michael was saying, that i hadthought about spaces through the white spatialimaginary all the time. those were thespaces i knew, and i didn't know how to see or reador experience other spaces. and thinking about thesocial and spatial imaginary has become a partof my own work.
as some of you might know, idon't work on american cities. i'm a specialist ofurbanism urbanization in the global south,particularly latin america. but the same set of analyticscontinued to mark my thinking. in latin american cities, thehistory of spatial exclusion is as powerful as andrelated to social exclusion as it is here, if not more. it also-- well, i'm goingto come back on that. not more.
it also is directly relatedto planning practice, because planning practices,particularly modernist planning practices, have reinforcedsocial spatial exclusion in ways that fuels amultiplicity of problems for the cities that i study. and for the cities as awhole, and not just the people who live in thoseexcluded neighborhoods. so i made somearguments, some of you have heard about the ways thatmodernist planning is connected
to social spatial exclusion,which in turn is connected directly to violence. now to be sure, inlatin american cities the most excluded are definedby class and ethnicity. and slightly lessso race, depending on which country you're in. brazil's different than mexico. i work mostly in mexico. but the same principlesof thinking about the ways
that spatial conditionsenable or constrain justice and inclusion are justas relevant in american cities as they are in cities that istudy in the rest of the world. and so i'll just have a little,like, promo or a side comment here that now infull circle-- michael was mentioning earlier-- i'mcoming back with the same lens that i've been using to lookat latin american cities and violence, and lookingat st. louis, missouri, where i grew up thatstarted me on this journey.
and so many peoplein this room are going to be helping withthat conference that we're having your march 30 and 31st. and we're going to be thinkingabout the way that the history of violence, goingback to the civil war-- so violence on thenational scale, violence on the local scaleare all interconnected in the production of space thatreproduces more fragmentation, exclusion, and violence.
and i'm extremely excitedabout that project. and i think i'mcoasting on the energy that the black indesign organizers have already started here at thegsd to move forward to spring. i think it's going to bean amazing year for us here at the gsd. so to close, letme just say that i want to loop back in terms ofpedagogy to the sensibility that urban sociology cultivatedin me as being absolutely
critical in forming andreinforcing my views, as well as my definition ofthe pedagogic aims of a design school like ours. i know it's not commonfor design schools to showcasesociological thinking or have faculty with abackground in sociology. but i firmly believethat all students here should be exposed tothe classical theories and methods of urban sociology.
and that a sociologicalimagination and consciousness should be more emphasizedand better articulated in our curriculum. you have it already inyour classes, amber, and we have to doa better job here, not just in planningdesign but landscape as well as in thearchitecture program. for me, a sociologicalimagination forces us to think aboutthe experiential connection
between people in the builtenvironment, as well as people and the urban experiencemore generally. and this is the veryfirst step in thinking about how people can livetogether, and under what conditions, and withwhat ethical or justice needs met are ignored. and i'm hoping to be able toadvance these pedagogic aims more conscientiously here atthe gsd and the months and years ahead.
good afternoon, everybody. so i would also like tothank the organizers. you've done an incredible job. i was contacted, i believe, veryearly on in the organization. and i was justobserving with great awe the way you weredoing everything, the way you werehandling everything. and really tirelesslykeeping people on track for these one and ahalf days that we are into now
and that we still have ahead. so i would like to say thati'm also greatly humbled in following diane here tobe part of this conference. i'm incredibly-- i considermyself incredibly lucky, of course also. but really veryhumbled, especially because my formaltraining was not in african americanstudies or american studies or american history ingeneral, for that matter.
i should probably alsomention in this context that i'm not american. and my country thati'm from, germany, has its own challengesat the moment, which are probably actuallynot that dissimilar in many respects. but regardless, i ama landscape historian interested in the politicsof design and space, and also identity politicsbesides many other things.
and so it is inthis capacity that i will present to you someof my concerns with regards to the pedagogy of the field. and i should alsomention at this point that i'm going totalk a little bit more about content, which mightbe familiar to some of you, but i consider as ahistorian, as a scholar, not sufficiently studied yet. and i will comeback to that point
a little further alongin my presentation. so landscape architectureis a relatively young field. the first professionalorganizations were founded in thelate 19th century. it's also a fieldthat is very fuzzy. but in all its fuzziness itis social, it is political, and it is cultural,amongst many other things. so as a result of allthis, its historiography is young as well, even if thehistoriographic accounts, often
part mythical and part factual,go back to the 18th century. and i consider landscapehistory at the moment to stand at acrossroads where we have to look backwards, but alsoforwards, learning from earlier historiography thatwithin its limitations, of course, was on occasionsurprisingly inclusive. for example, byway of integrating material history and thehistory of labor and technology. and what i'm showingyou here is actually
a page from john claudiusloudon's treatise-- or encyclopedia of gardeningfrom the early 19th century. and you see that materialand labor, even looking back into history, is actuallydealt with already in the 19th century. but especially, of course whatbecomes important in my field is also taking to heart thenew perspectives and openings that critical theory has offeredus in the last half century or so.
in short, i would say landscapehistory needs to become more inclusive and pluralist. it needs additions,more research, new critical scholarship,and new perspectives. but it also needs revisions. revisions to includenot only, for example, the histories of womenin the profession, but also the lives of africanamerican women and men who shaped, designed, built,and used design landscapes,
and for whom designedlandscapes could mean segregationand discrimination, but also empowermentand emancipation, as we heard before as well. in particular, i believe weneed inclusive and integrated histories that focus on therelationships between people of differentethnicities and races, and the relationshipsbetween them and the landscapes theycreated and inhabited.
and i believe that itcertainly makes sense to teach courses thatlook at landscape history through the lens ofafrican american studies or black studies. and we've heard about somebeautiful examples that may or may not, however,been focused maybe more around the actual built artifactand constructed buildings rather than the open space. but what happensin the big survey
classes is really a questionthat i want to address here. so it is here where we reallyneed to provide an overview. and this overview has toinclude matters of race. as it stands atthe moment though, what can be and isincluded is based upon extensive andoften primary research by the respective lecturer. as only few landscape historieshave addressed race more explicitly, i should mentionsome of them at least here.
there are others of course also. but diane harris, alandscape historian, cultural geographerrichard [? chine ?] and environmental designerrichard westmacott are some of the authors who havedealt with the subject matter and have startedto lead the way. by focusing on orincluding race, it becomes clear thataspects of labor, social, and political history needto move to the foreground.
many dominant narratives canbe revised and diversified in this process. so for example, while formalhistories of antebellum gardens in the deep south would focuson the elaborate boxwood knot gardens modeled on patternsand similar practices in european gardens of the16th and 17th centuries. looking at the larger contextof the plantation home of course shows how thepower relationships between the planterand his slaves
are revealed in the spatialdistribution of slave quarters, and how the slavequarters and their labor are hidden andcamouflaged by vegetation. so the slave quarter'shere in the back. and then that kind of almostliteral hiding, of course, also of these sameconstructions. so spatial segregationaffecting african americans in the use made of landscapedesign and vegetation for this purpose becomeseven more unobtrusive.
and another period of context. parks were used in early20th century southern cities like atlanta tosegregate, but also to conceal racial segregation. parks were builtas spatial barriers between white andblack neighborhoods to prevent africanamericans from entering the white neighborhoods. following jim crow laws, therewere parks and park systems
for the white and blackparts of the population, like frederick douglasspark in louisville, kentucky that you see here. and summer camps dividedby race and gender, as you can see in this caseof the colored girls patriotic league of louisville. when the armstead brothers werehired to draw up a park system plan for birmingham,alabama, they noted that 40% of the populationwere african american.
and that while they had not madeany specific recommendations for what theycalled negro parks-- you see it in themarked area here-- provisions for the recreationof african american certainly should be made. but yet they were onlylimited to one paragraph. if the same facilitieswere used, for example, in this 1920s golf course inwashington's east potomac park, they were open toafrican american citizens
only one afternoon per week. in the late 19th and wellinto the 20th century then, the use of urbanpublic open space was largely divided byrace, and in contrast to what some commentatorsargued in the 1920s. parks and public open space inthe south and the north, east, and west were also abattleground between the races. so obviously this isa gross overstatement that the author is makinghere when he published
this photograph in 1920. so as scholars like galen cranzand [? robin ?] [? becken ?] have pointed out, racialconflicts and tensions were not only caused bymetropolitan park politics, but they were also often playedout in the parks themselves. in chicago at the beginningof the 20th century, for example, white gangsterrorized african americans who tried to use the baseballfields in washington park. in the sprawlingmetropolis of los angeles,
racial tensions led to thesegregation of many recreation grounds, including swimmingpools, beaches, and parks, until into the secondhalf of the 20th century. in the national capital in the1960s, [? marie ?] [inaudible] park, a icon of neoclassicalpublic urban park design in the united states that wasplanned as the northern portal to the city amongst embassiesand big mansions, finally became the location ofafrican american rallies against urbanrenewal projects in
the nearby african americanneighborhood of shaw. thus, landscape andits various forms has been contested ground,exclusionary space, but also space forprotest and empowerment. so i would like to endthis short presentation with a small vignette formy current book project. and for this purpose, i'm goingto describe to you briefly the content of achildren's story entitled what are we goingto do, michael?
and it was written in the1970s by nellie burchardt. so in this story,10-year-old michael whom you see heresitting on the stoop, together with his adultfriend, mrs. jacobson, helps to save an 80-year-oldsouthern magnolia tree that is threatenedto be cut down to make way for an urban renewalproject in the neighborhood. nellie burchardt's storyis based upon true facts and events occurring inbrooklyn's bedford stuyvesant
neighborhood in the1960s and early 1970s. yet the way in whichburchardt portrays her fictional young hero michaeland his friend mrs. jacobson, belie parts of the true story. as you can see, inthe children's book, the two protagonistsappear as white residents. they are also portrayedas residents of a rundown, racially diverse neighborhood. in reality, however,mrs. jacobson
was [? hattie ?] [inaudible],an african american woman in her seventies living ona deteriorating neighborhood block in bedford stuyvesant. by 1970, bedfordstuyvesant had become the second largestafrican american community in the united states. and as [inaudible]wrote in 1977, the code word for america'sunresolved urban and race problems.
regardless of whetherburchardt's choice to change the raceof her protagonists had anything to do with thebooks' aspired sales numbers or readership, or withthe more idealist, educational, andegalitarian aspirations to cultivate whitechildren's empathy and awareness ofnature in the city and of its ethnically andracially diverse citizenry, or in turn, even withan unabashed racism,
both the choice is thestory itself, as well as the changes made toits principal characters, reflected the social concernsand anxieties of the time. but changing the race ofthe principal characters, while perhaps makingthe story more accessible to the anticipatedmajority of readers, also covered up one of themost important facts about it. by rallying for the protectionof the southern magnolia, successfully saving it andthe three historic brownstone
buildings behindit, and by founding and running the neighborhoodtree corp for the planting and maintenance ofneighborhood street trees, african american citizensof bedford stuyvesant turned trees into a means ofempowerment and emancipation within the civilrights movement. while the planting, maintenance,and conservation of trees became a grassroots initiativeof bedford stuyvesant's african american citizens toassert their rights to the city
and to spaces in general,the tree planting and conservationactivities provided, in particular, the mostvulnerable and powerless groups, women andchildren, with a way to make themselvesheard and seen. tree planting andplant-ins became their tool ofcommunity building, as well as a civilright that could be used against ghettoization.
so in the contextof today's event, i do not have time to gointo the further details of the story. they're also notimportant for the point that i want to make here. although historiographycan obviously not be compared to achildren's story, i hope this smallvignette about the story can help show how importantit is to write and tell
inclusive histories. in contrast in nellieborchadt's artistic freedom and the pedagogical intentsshe may have had with her book, and the pedagogy oflandscape history, we need to provide students withawareness and with the tools to ask critical questions sothat histories can be written that do not represent-- misrep--sorry-- misrepresent the facts, but that are firmly groundedin factual knowledge. and then offer appropriateanalysis and interpretation
and the opportunity formerging theory and history. so more inclusive historiescan lead to new perspectives, and ultimatelyalso to uncovering new ground that we did noteven know existed before. i stand between beer anddogs, so i'll try to-- --speed it up. unless somehow we can bringthe beer and dogs in, and then we can really talk. in 2011, i was named thedirector of the j. max bond
center. it took me a few minutesto get things set up. it was just me forthe first year. we had an official launchof the center in 2012. and i kind of renamed thecenter the j. max bond center on design for the just city. and in 2013, i created aclass by the same title. so why did i do this? so i did this because i wasapproaching the third decade
of my career, and actually hada body of work to look back on, both in the academyand in practice. and i was becomingreally reflective around the impact of mywork both as an architect and urban designer and an urbanplanner, on these issues that i faced in every citythat i worked in, from chicago, to harlem innew york, to washington dc, to newark, to detroit,to oakland, to memphis. and i was really beginning toscratch my head, particularly
around the time that we learnedthat dc was no longer chocolate city. was the work i was doing havingan impact on social justice really? and i know in our field,we are in the space of trends around our work. and we're nowbeginning to resurface this notion of social impactdesign and public interest design and designing for equity.
and i just reallywas itching to know, was i really doinganything about those things in meaningful waysthat was changing the trajectory ofcities and the people who were living in them as itrelated to those injustices? so i'm going to try tobriefly walk you through. and i'm going tospeed up because i have a video at the end that i'dlove to show all of it to you. it's about five minutes.
so we'll see if i can get to it. the course does acouple of things. and all the speakersbefore me have set up a lot of which i base thepedagogy of this class on, so i'll try not tobe too redundant. but as amber started us out,critical thinking is essential. the students in theseminar-- and there have been 45 over foursemesters, 45 students over the four semesters,five african americans, one
american-hispanic,19 women, 26 men, and four openly gay students. and so they're all comingwith different perspectives, and they neededthem from day one to really challenge theirthinking and actually the conventionaleducation and teachings they were getting in school. i needed them todevelop an awareness of their own self-identity.
and michael sort ofset up the notion of the white spatial imaginariesand how some folks don't have to think about theirself-identity or self-identify in such different ways thatperhaps i do as a black woman. there's my self-identity, right? michael doesn't introducehimself as say hi, i'm a white man, right? and i also neededstudents to develop a kind of cultural competency.
i often get students-- becausethe majority of my students are not students ofcolor, but they're very interested in workingin these contested spaces, and often feelsometimes self-conscious about their agency inneighborhoods for which people don't look like them, inneighborhoods for which they are not used to the experiencesand environments from which they are looking sodesperately to solve. and so the way of languageand the way of confidence
and the ways of engagingthese communities with a confidence, vis-a-visthis cultural competency, is something that was importantfor us to explore in the class. the students appliedthese learning objectives in three ways. they have to definefor themselves, what is the just city? yes, students, you are requiredto have a point of view and to articulatethat point of view.
and they do thisthrough a written format and a video format, andi hope i get to show you two examples of those. they have to analyzethe possible routes and consequences ofurban development. and again, amber has setup some of those conditions in her class, and dan hasspoken to them as well. and in the end, becausei was so fascinated around measuring myimpact, we actually
go on to develop anindicator measurement tool. i want it to explorein the same way that we're developingindicators for sustainability and resiliency and happinessand livability and all these other things. could you develop ametric for justice, for urban [inaudible] justice,and design to impact on it? so first we talkabout, let's set the context forwhy we're all here,
inclusion in architecture. my shameless plug isthe j. max bond center just recently publishedthis report called inclusion in architecture. and it is a compilationof statistics on inclusion and practiceand the academy for african americans and latinos. and there's far lessinformation on the status of hispanics in thisprofession than there
is on african americans. but as you all mayknow-- and these are 2012 statistics-- interms of licensed architects, there are about105,000 in the us. there are a hundred and--there are 1,600, roughly 1,700 african americanand 8,300 hispanic. so that's kind of howi sit in this space. last i checked, andi could be wrong, i was a registeredarchitect, and i never
kept up my registration. but i believe there are lessthan 300 black women in the us that have been licensedto become architects. here's where they practice. and we wanted tolook at the cities where there was this majorityof african american architects or higher percentagesof them-- and we took it over 20-- relativeto where there are the majority of black folks.
and they're still kind of thesouthern parts of the united states. and we go on and we publisha number of demographics like this in our report. let's look at the academy. there are about 44,000students in the academy. we see where they are relativeto historically black colleges, which you'll see is about 1,200. the remaining students are inother schools around country.
and we also look at itrelative to faculty. 154 black faculty ofarchitecture in the country. all right? 463. so this helps us put somenumbers around the things that we've beentalking about, and that was the whole purposeof our report. here i am again. so the only thing thatchanges substantially
from this photographdoing my rome studies program at the universityof notre dame in the '80s is that there'ssignificantly more women if we were to putthe picture up today, even though the imagesof folks of color might not change that much. so, hurray for girlpower in pushing through this discipline. and i wanted to contrast thatfor my humble beginnings, which
is going up on thesouth side of chicago where there-- it isthe exact flipped. if you squint, you can findthe two white and one hispanic student that was in my class. but i grew up in thesegregated chicago where all of my classmates, allthe way through high school, were african american. so i'm having toreconcile in the way that i view the world throughthis very different, upside
down, lopsided experience interms of spatial imaginary. so all of this has shaped howi have created this course. first thing we have to do isunderstand, what is justice? we go through a numberof different theories and literatures about breakingdown the term of justice. i'm very muchinterested in students being very specific withtheir words and terminologies. and if you're going to throw outinclusion or equity or justice, you need to tell mewhat that means to you.
so part of this classis developing a language and a vocabularythat is informed by all these different theoriesthat many of my co-speakers have spoken to. so are we talking aboutdistributive justice where we're talkingabout social fairness in the way we move thingswith equality or equity? are we talking aboutprocedural, fair play? did everyone gettheir fair shake?
did everyone get to speak? restorative. putting things backas they should be. 40 acres and a mule. oh, ok. retributive. are we talking about revenge? and interactional. the way in which we developmutual respect and trust,
and how our raciallysegregated cities don't often facilitate the opportunityfor us to build these respects and trusts, because we don'tspend time with one another, even though we think wemight because of our internet connectivity, if you will. so the conditionof the unjust city, i won't go throughthese because i think dan and amber and othershave referenced them so much. but we wanted to understandboth the spatial injustices
in the city that arecaused by abandonment, that are caused byblight, that are caused by racial segregation. these are racial segregationmaps of chicago, detroit, washington, dc. blue is black population orafrican american population. red is caucasian. orange is hispanic. and i dare you tofind green, but there
are dots for asian segregation. and what's fascinatingabout detroit obviously-- well, obviouslyto me and probably a few others in the room--is that that very straight horizontal line that you seein the middle map running east and west is the geopoliticalboundary of the city, the famous eight mile. so there's thestreet that literally reinforces the spatialsegregation of a city, right?
it's not a fence, it'snot a wall, it's a street. so while we thinkwe live in cities that are growing intheir inclusivity-- wow. i spent 10 minutes already? we don't. we're still separated by classas defined by unemployment, poverty, and education. and all theseconditions continue to create spaces of concentratedisolation and poverty
that are spatialized, but aregrowing populations of four generations since the middle'60s that have not integrated themselves into otherparts of the city and other parts of its economy. i'm also findingthen in these cities that i am encountering from asocial injustice perspective, the same classes of people. and so while we want totalk about justice for all, i believe there'sa least not to be
benefited from talking about ita little bit more specifically. that's women, that'simmigrants, that's children. that is growingsince the recession. the reduction of themiddle class and people who's levels ofaffordability have been cut in half in some cases. so there's a different andbroader scope of injustice perhaps to be discussed. and if there isan injustice to be
talked about aroundspecific classes of people. and at the moment,black men seem to be in the focusof how we're talking about inclusivity andperception of people in space. like others havespoken to, we go through a history of how urbanpolicy has, in some cases, enabled these conditions thatwe're so desperately wanting to change. and then we try to blend anotion of spacial and social
justice together to talk abouta concept of urban justice where, again, we pick apartthe specificity of what equity really means-- and i've hadstudents, say, you know, i just want equality. i'm like, do you really? or do you want equity? do you really? or do you want-- or whichones of these are just? when we begin to now breakdown many more values
around what justice might mean,and do you care who it's for? so we look at scholarslike david harvey and his conceptsof social justice, around seeking thiscooperation and dealing with processes of resolvingconflict and conflict claims. we look at thedistributive paradigms where justice is not just aboutthe distribution of material goods, but it's also aboutnonmaterial goods like right, power, self-respect.
in detroit, for example,we looked at that through our detroitfuture city work when we looked at theshare in a city that's 82% african american with apretty healthy share of black owned businesses, howover 15% of the revenues of those businesses are onlygoing to african americans. so there's an exampleof distributive justice. our former colleague, susanfainstein here at the gsd, wrote a great book calledthe just city where
she was very interested in thedemocratic aspects of justice, looking at thecriteria of justice specifically, thesedemocratic relationships. we're finding thatplaying out when we're talking about thepower structures in cities like ferguson. and then irismarion young, who's looking at it from a lensof acceptance of difference. not the erasure ofdifference to try
to make one normativesomething then the other, but how that getsreally incorporated as we talk about justice. and so we're not talkingabout this ideal community, but we're talking aboutthe ideal of city life where communities aresomehow coming together. but not devolvingtheir difference, but bringingdifferences together. i'm not going tohave time to finish.
one of the things thatthe students have to do, as i talked about, itwas important for us to through the classtalking about self-identity. and i think as michaelsets up this notion of spatial imaginaries isto recognize that we all have different spatialimaginary lenses. and so i asked thestudents, how would you each define justiceand prioritize elements of the just citybased on how we self-identify?
by gender, byrace, by ethnicity, by class, by religion,by whether you grew up in the suburbs or whetheryou grew up in the city? we do this littleexercise, which was quite controversialby saying, how do our identities inform howwe perceive others in the city? so you'll see on the far rightthere are these just very normative types of people. and then there are allthese perhaps perceptions
we make overlay onto them. and so i'm asking thestudents to check their bias. and so they were to draw a linearound some of these questions. so which individualdo you believe has the greatest privilege? so depending onwho you are, you're going to draw a lineto a different person. which of theseindividuals you believe does not feel they receivefair recognition in society?
which individuals do you believemost frequently self-identifies with their race or gender? who do you believe doesn't? my time is up. but you know, sothey have to do this. and i want everyone torecognize that we all come in with these biases,but i now love this term spatial imaginaries. and we have to own up tothose in order to, i think,
embed a sincerity in thework and the authenticity and confidence ifwe're really meant to go in and dig deepand do this kind of work in contested cities, andreally remove injustice. so they have tocreate a manifesto. this is one of them. from these manifestoswe're finding-- we're extracting a wholehost of really rich values that students feellike they're trying
to achieve in the just city,which goes beyond just equity. it's about tolerance,it's about inclusivity, it's about ownership. it's about beauty, it'sabout creative innovation. so i'm loving the richkind of catalogue of values that we're developingto describe this. they have to record secondaryresearch around conditions that my colleagueshave shown before. so how the city isracially organized,
overlaying that ontopoverty, and showing that people of color tendto be more marginalized. and then they createtheir measurement tool. they build it around aseries of critical injustices that they see. this is from a class that idid in berkeley last fall. they use different methodologiesof collecting information. so they can usesecondary research. they can useobservational surveys.
but one of the things thatwas really critical for them was to actually dointercept surveys, and going in andfinding out ways that communities themselvescould self-assess the ways in which they wereperforming around these issues. they then develop aframework of indicators. here the students hadequitable opportunities, shared power and process,spaces that delight. people create the city.
they then go inand really assign measurable evidence-based typesof metrics that can, again, be subjective because you'reobtaining them through survey, or they can be very hard data. and the combinationof those, i think, is what builds therichness for it. they assess a case study. i'm not going to showyou the case study. this is how a neighborhoodin oakland came out as unjust
around those categories. so it's beginning to giveme an evidence-kind based way of testing out andtaking the temperature and benchmarking. the next step of this would be astudio where the students would then begin to problemsolve around correcting one of those injustices. i can't show you the video. thank you so muchto all our speakers.
that was really inspiring. and thanks, stephanie, forcracking the whip, the timer. we're going to takejust 10 minutes, and i'm going to go straightto questions and comments from the audience. i hope you had timeto prepare them. who wants to begin? eric in the back. [inaudible]
ok. [inaudible] going. so how do you translatethis to planning directors and policymakers and mayors? so this is a greatconversation to have, but toni, i know you've workedin a planning office before. are these conversations thatthe system of development allows to happen? or how do you sort of insertthis into the dialogue as we do planning for citiesand as we create these policies?
well, real quick,what i would love to see as mayors and planningofficials and others speak to wanting to addressthese issues of injustice and speak to an inclusivecity and an equitable city, is to test that out. and one of the reasonswhy i developed the course is because mylarger ambitious is actually to develop a tool thatyou, eric, would use to benchmark the value-basedperformance of your city
around a series of valuesfor which you believe are important to you. so my 10 might not be your 10. and to really begin to ascribethe performance of your city around a set of values, andthen ascribe a set of solutions around those same values. so i would love to work withyou maybe as pilot project to develop these atthe city-wide scale. i have an addition to that.
when i was in theschool of architecture, i actually told my students--this is a confession-- not all of y'all hadto be architects. and i hope that some of y'alldo become politicians and sit in the planning officeand so on and so forth, and bring theseskills to these areas. you don't have tobe an architect. ok, sorry. i want to add-- and thenjust to complicate matters.
so i mean, i agree with[inaudible] that said, i teach a class here onpolitics of governance and implementation. and every example--eric, i don't know you, but i hope to know you soon. we can just pick on him. yeah. go for it. i mean, i think that alarge-- just to complicate
matters, a lot ofthe problems you're talking about-- exclusion andwell taken, the point about, how do we defineexclusion, is a consequence of the political structuresand territorial structures of american cities. st. louis, one of themany problems in st. louis is it's totally fragmented. there are so manymunicipalities. and so even if you couldget your local mayor
to listen to yourclaims and even do the metrics aboutvalue-based, there's a larger context inwhich all those problems are being focused in one place. so i guess i wouldsay that there have to be a coupleconversations at a couple different scales,going out at the same time. and one thing that's i thinkamazing about this collection of people, what wecollect at the gsd,
is work across multiplescales all the time. and maybe that's also somethingwe can cultivate a little more. who do you talk to you whenyou're doing a building as opposed to a neighborhood? and when do you want to talkabout redistributive injustice problems at the larger scaleof the municipality, the metro area? those are all open questions. my question is, firstof all, thank you
for whoever pulled thisconference together. it's really exciting. my question-- orquestions or comments regard the idea of all politicsare local, all design is local. so my question is-- andduring the '70s and the '60s, we had this thing calledurban renewal where designers were trained in the pedagogythe times to do design in a certain way. and we saw the results of that.
and i want to know, how arethe things that you are sort of studying and practicing,how is that translating to the architecture schools? because my experiencein evaluating architects is that thedesign is horrible for a lot i hate to say that. i'm sorry. but you know, when welook at actual product, it ignores fairness.
let's forget about--i'm not going to say, let's forgetabout racial fairness, but just human fairnesson so many scales. and i think thedesign schools need to reintroduce a lotof the issues we have as african americansin this country have to do with things thataffect not just us, but people across many sectors. and i heard a lot of examplesabout black neighborhoods,
but what about thosecities that were primarily african american cities? has anyone gone inand studied, what were the spatial relationshipsthey had that maybe informed those communities? and how can we lookat that and sort of to see how thatcan sort of inform what we're doing on our largercity scale in other places? just come in.
i would recommend the workof sarah [? zudi ?], who i know is in here. i see her. oh, you're embarrassed now. because she has done--her master's thesis was on something justlike that, looking at black urbanisms innew orleans and brazil and how that can translate out. so she'll speak on thathopefully tomorrow.
craig wilkins come? oh, craig [inaudible]. will he be here tomorrow. will martin be here tomorrow? i don't know. um, hi. right here. so my question istrying to connect the basic makeup of the paneldiscussion about pedagogy
and how to get these ideasinto architecture schools. but relating back tothe slide that toni showed about 164 africanamericans on faculties-- you added 10. or maybe-- maybe those are the10 that popped up over the last three years. fair. fair enough.
so how do we get-- howdo we get to a point where we have these typesof ideas in the schools where there's 150 somethingfaculty members in 150 schools? and how can those of us whoare the single representatives of our schools not have tofeel the burden to deliver that content ourselves? i mean, amber kind ofjokingly said, not all of you are going to be architects. but i think that should be anintentional kind of decision
that you're notnecessarily going to practice through your careeras a traditional architect. so i started my career asa traditional architect, and morphed into somethingi never would have. imagine-- and thereare likely a number of other professionals in theroom that have done the same. and why i think that'simportant to consider is because the issues thatwe have all talked about are larger-- andactually, diane spoke
to this-- large, complex,interrelated issues that required your agency in anumber of different sectors. and you should seriouslyconsider throughout your career the moments whereyou potentially need to change your stationto move your agency forward. there's a tremendous amountof skill you're developing and problem solving thatallows you to think complexly as a number of theseprojects that we've presented have represented.
and the way in whichyou can situate yourself at decision making tablesto further that, i strongly recommend. so to begin consideringthat i'm going to teach some point, which imade a conscious decision to do in my late 30s. and i wanted to integrateteaching and practice. begin thinking aboutthe multiple ways that you can use theseskills that you're learning
and the way in which you canshape the built environment from a number ofdifferent stations throughout your whole career. but you don't haveto do just one thing. we have one morequestion for tonight. yeah? i've been observing the hugeamount of wealth creation happening in silicon valley, andhow there's so much exclusion just in that micro zone.
and when you look at thescale, it's just tremendous. how can some of the ideasyou've been talking about be used in thatindustry, you think? i don't know anythingabout the problem. can you say a little more? i've been in venturecapital industry for the last two years. and i've been observinghow there's so many biases built into it.
who gets to getfunded, who's funding. and i'm not sure if it hasanything to do with the built environment. but i've been curiousabout everything you talked about in terms of frameworks. and the frameworksyou're talking about are just sodifferent than when i hear about inclusiveframeworks in silicon valley. so have you ever probed that?
apparently not. so sorry about that. i don't have a reallyspecific answer for you, but it's ironicyou mentioned that. because there's actuallya little docudrama on-- not docudrama. sorry. like a mini documentaryon hbo right now called san francisco 2.0.
and it's speaking in someways about the boom of silicon valley, and the way inwhich it has shifted some of the spatial and socialdynamics of san francisco, and why that sector'sstarting to move into the city and why it's pushing on it. at first it was staying outand creating these colonies out there, which was doinga lot of the same things that diane said, was that youhave all these municipalities, and so this is nota singular city.
it's a regional problem, right? and what was happening is theywere creating their own bus systems to move theiremployees who wanted to live in the city to work. so it was like thiswhole new economy of a transit system that wasnot a part of the public system. so you created thisseparation of classes just by that infrastructure. sort of a distributivejustice issue, perhaps.
but now-- then the mayorchanged policy and said, well, i want them. so sort of creatingincentives for those companies to move into the city. and now you're seeing a citywhere its black population is somewhere between6% and 3% perhaps in a very smallpart of the city, creating other kindsof spatial challenges. so while i don't havea solution to it,
i think it's a good example,and you might check out this documentary. because it's helpful torelate these economic trends and the effects thatthey have on place and the policies of place. can i add on to that too? thanks for-- well, i wasthinking about the same example toni said. it was amazing.
i guess i want to say that whati didn't-- it makes me think-- so the problem here isthe corporate world. silicon valley, theventure capitalists. not you personally,but, you know. the corporate world. because ultimately, it'slike eating into not just the spatial justice in thecity into the public sector. it's, like, colonizingthe public transportation system, other sets of things.
what didn't comeup in our panel, not that we could do everything,but hopefully will come up tomorrow or inmore conversation, is a little bit about thepublic versus the private sector context of thework that happens. i know it's a huge question,much more so for architects. most planners workfor the public sector, although many do workfor the private sector. but i do think whenwe start looking
at the complexityof these issues that we have toalso understand, how does that division of thosedomains-- what attention needs to be paid to that kind of axeswhen we're also understanding issues of injustice andinequity and lack of diversity in our disciplines? actually an issue inboston-- are you from boston? but here in cambridge,we've got area four, which is a neighborhood nearby,and it's in kendall square.
and there's been a lotof tech development, and there's been a lot ofinvestment in the neighborhood. but it's clear that a lot ofthe residents from area four and some of the housingprojects around there are not benefiting in anyway from some of the growth. so you can assume thatgrowth is good for everyone automatically. so i think there's arole for us as people who think about theseissues, is trying
to make sure that tothe extent that we have this kind of investment inour cities, and we should, that people who livein these neighborhoods where this investment is formingbecome a physical benefit, right? and these thingscreate jobs for people who live in these places,and that these places don't escalate propertyvalues to such an extent that people get displaced.
so it is an issue. it took a while for the gearsto turn on that one, but yeah. so let's thank ourspeakers again, and then i'll askcourtney to come up and-- where's court-- oh, sorry. cara. so thank you all so much. those are reallyamazing presentations. really great to hear.
i think all veryimportant insights for us to keep in mind, especially aswe move forward as designers and continue to think aboutsome of the conversations we're going to have duringthe course of this conference. so thank you all once again. and now we're going tostart a workshop where we're going to talk about what ourresponsibility is as designers and as non designers, people whodeal with the built environment everyday, towards addressingissues of social justice
and race, as well asgender, class, sexuality, and all characteristics thatcan be attributed to someone and are used as formsof discrimination. so we want to think about, whatare our responsibilities moving forwards? and what kind ofpledges are we going to make to ourselvesto continue to address these issues of social justice? so i'd like to invitephil freelon up.
thank you so muchfor joining us, phil. if you wouldn't mind justintroducing yourself. well, my name is phil freelon. i'm an architect,a practitioner, a teacher downthe street at mit, and also an advocate forwhat's going on here today. and i just want to congratulatethe students for putting together a terrific program. and let's give them a hand.
it's been terrific. i'd just like to say, forthose of you who don't know, phil freelon isreally someone who has paved the path for a lotof african american architects and designers ingeneral in the field. he is working on the smithsonianmuseum of african american art, as well as the newstudio museum in harlem. oh, sorry. oh, just the--
but that's enough. you'll hear fromme later tomorrow where we presentsome of our work and talk about it in the contextof all that's going on today. but what i want to do-- it's anabbreviated workshop because we don't have a lot of time, right? and so things have beenlagging just a bit. so while we have youhere, the students have started a statement,a manifesto, if you will,
which you can readparts of it here. and the idea s to getadditional ideas as they try and flesh this out and turnthis into a document that can be carried forwardhere at the gsd. and we have severalgroups that are going to be providing facilitation. so if you needhelp at your table, you're unclear about thetopic or where we're headed, these groups will help.
first is the women in design. can you raise your hand ifyou're part of that group? the women in design? so they will be rotatingaround to the tables. and this is a form tointegrate dialogue and action advancing gender inequity. and they've been setup here at the gsd, and so they're going to bepart of the facilitation. there's also the working gsd.
where are those members? they are also goingto help facilitate. this is a group that advocatesfor financial diversity and affordabilityhere at the gsd. and finally, ourlast facilitator is someone we all know, and i'mjust tickled that he's here. m. david lee, faia noma. david, where are you? david is the principalwith stull and lee
here in boston where hedirects a wide variety of architectural and urbandesign and planning projects. and he's been an adjunctprofessor here as well as mit and the rhodeisland school of design. he has served on manyjuries, and has just been a champion for architectsof color and urban design. and so we're delightedto have him here. he's a chicago native,south side, ok? david earned his b.arch from the university
of illinois, champaign urbana. and then after working inphiladelphia for a time, he came to boston andjoined don stull's office, and now has been a leaderthere for many, many years. and so i know it's late,but let's take 30 minutes, if we can, and focus onthese scales of action. and you can readthem for yourselves. and at each table ithink you're designated for one of those scales.
and begin to thinkabout the issues that are started in the manifesto,and give the students more ideas. and let's build on that soat the end of this conference is something powerfuland meaningful that we can carry forward. and i'll be roaming aroundtoo and trying to help. and so we've got30 more minutes. sorry things are running late.
and if you could say, eachtable has a facilitator. each table has a facilitator,so you'll get some direction from someone at your table. so let's get started. so thank you all forparticipating in the workshop. we are going to takethe notes that you all have gathered todayand aggregate them into a manifesto, which womenin design and working gsd are going tocollaborate with the asu
to prepare and release inan open letters document. it's a biweekly publicationthat comes out at the gsd, and we will share itonline with all of you. and before we move ontobeer n' dogs, which is a weeklytradition at the gsd, katherine is going tointroduce a brief presentation. hi, everybody. i just would like tointroduce our next speaker, of a person that's going tointroduce a great opportunity
for young designers. and so she askedfor an opportunity to present one ofthe fellowships that her organizationis privileged to offer. and so katie swenson is the vicepresident of the [inaudible] for enterprise community. and she will percent anopportunity for young designers to participate in. what an absolutetreat to be here.
and i was really pleased. first jonathan evans,who i knew at uva, told me this conferencewas going on. and then i got anemail from katherine asking if we would helpsupport the conference. and honestly, i've beenso thrilled and impressed by all of these students, andcouldn't resist the opportunity both to support themand also to really talk about student leadership.
i work at enterprisecommunity partners. there are a couple, iunderstand, a couple of alumni here fromenterprise, people who got their start-- nowloeb fellows, et cetera. enterprise is a nationalcommunity development and affordablehousing intermediary. we have been lucky to sponsora program called the rose fellowship. and we've had twogsd grads who i
want to talk about tonightwho have been in our program. and i thought itwas great, actually, to be right between pedagogyand practice tomorrow. because our programsort of is feeling this very important moment ina career path out of school. but when-- and i wouldsay to dan-- when issues of addressingrace, place, power, and privilege throughpractice on the ground are so critically important,theresa was a member of soca
at the gsd, for those ofyou who remember that. she got her march here in 2007. soca who was called studentsof color association when she was first here. but at that time, there werenot enough students of color to make an association,and they changed the name to social change and activism. by the time laura got here-- shegot her masters of urban design in 2008-- she actuallysays soca was continuing.
here's laura. and at that time, it wasreally a very interesting time to be at the gsd becausethe gsd was actively recruiting students of color. and she worked with stevelewis, and they planned a trip to south africa. so there was a lot of energyaround sort of recruiting students of color at that time. so i want to just talk a littlebit about these two examples.
at enterprise, i would saythe community development field as a whole, weheard a little bit about affordable housing. you heard aboutdan's presentation. these are the kinds of projectsthat we work in practice on. so imagine thepresentation that dan made, only you're on theground for three years trying to make that happen. but i would say in thecommunity development field,
we're very focused on affordablehousing and affordable housing, kind of what it means in termsof connecting to opportunity. but we desperately need away more nuanced dialogue around the issuesfacing our communities. there's not enoughdiscussion about race. there's not enough discussionabout incarceration and all of thesesort of patterns that are shaping our world. so meanwhile, i wouldalso say that happily,
the question about whethergood design and doing good is possible is like, it's done. we're roommates with massdesign group, one of your most proud moments, i would assume. we know that the world inwhich good design, doing good, is no longer a question. this is via verde in new york,a spectacular project that is incredibly dense andwonderful for its community. so there are a fewthings that are shifting.
and i would say if you're astudent looking to sort of make this next path, how do youkind of carry your identity and your particular focusinto practice and communities? so for theresa, whenshe left here actually, she didn't think shewanted to be an architect. she worked with an asianarts organization in boston. and she thought, architecture isnot for me necessarily, right? and so she kind of wentoff the architecture path for a few years.
the rose fellowshipactually kind of allowed her to bring thesefields back together. so she moved to la. she was working withskid row housing trust. here she's pictured withmichael maltzen, who was the architect on her project. so she's really hisboss in this scenario. but she was the translatorbetween the architect and the communityneeds, and really
understanding and developinga sort of methodology for understanding what thespecific needs of community members are. so she not only has sort ofreengaged in architecture, but is also developing sortof her own personal version of this, which involves ahighly engaged community design process. and she's now opened adesign center on skid row, and she's doing aplan for skid row,
basically a landscape and urbandesign plan-- it's not just the buildings-- for allthe people who don't even have a house to live in. so it allowed her tokind of integrate this. laura worked in san francisco. here she's pictured with davidbaker and amit price patel, architects with whom sheworked on this project, which someone was talkingabout nimbyism earlier. this is affordable housing forchronically homeless, right
across from the city hall. and an exquisitely high level ofdesign in each manner, but all targeted to thesehuman outcomes. jobs, health, well being. all of these verytargeted sort of outcomes. so i wanted to just share withyou a few examples of this. i was so thrilled to hearfrom one of the loeb fellows who was an early enterpriser,that coming to enterprise sort of allowedher to really spark
a different kind of career path. and whether it'sthe rose fellowship or some other program, ithink as you get out of school and merge out of school,there are a couple of things that thisprogram and others really can allow you to do. and the first thingis to give yourself some time and somespace to figure out how your identity and yourkind of personal perspective
can play out in yourprofessional life. and toni referred to this. she said that yourvoice is going to be needed in reallydifficult situations, and that you might haveto change the station. so allowing yourself totry different stations, to try things a little bitoutside your comfort zone. the next thing i would saythat the fellowship does, but it's not uniqueto the fellowship,
is create thisculture of mentorship. and my guess is that you couldcall almost anyone in this room today if you're lookingfor advice or consult, and that you should be providingthat kind of mentorship to others. and the last thingi would just say is that the kindsof conversations that are happeningin this room need to really influence ourcommunity development
sphere much more broadly. we have focusedvery much on sort of a sense aboutdesign and design quality and affordablehousing, as you kind of see in some of these examples. but that conversation andthe kind of conversation that was representedhere tonight has so much more opportunityto grow and deepen. so i really inviteyou all to join us.
so hello, everyone. thank you so much for yourparticipation this evening. and katie, thank you so muchfor sharing the opportunity with us. we would like to inviteyou all to join us for beer n' dogs, whichwill be on the basketball court in the backyard. and for the food thatwill be provided, you'll use your blue tickets.
and before you leave,also want to let you know thattomorrow morning there will be a yoga workshop beforethe session really kicks off. wear your normal clothes. it's something yo can do seated. and you can sign up for that. and we will meet you outside. and we want to let you knowthat the food was being provided by fresh food generation, whichis a local food truck that
is based out of dorchester. and it is run bycassandria campbell, who is master of urban planning. and she'll be speaking tomorrowduring the lunch panel.
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