Architecture has long been perceived as a discipline that shapes the physical environment in ways that reflect social values, political structures, and cultural practices. Yet, as urban spaces continue to evolve under the pressures of globalization, neoliberal policies, and environmental degradation, the question of how architecture can contribute to building meaningful and resilient communities has never been more urgent. This research seeks to examine how architectural practices can foster more equitable and democratic relationships between individuals, groups, and the spaces they inhabit. It also aims to understand the processes of architectural design and its interaction with community members to address problems of connectivity and well-being. To this end, the CDRC has interviewed professionals and students and compiled appropriate literature to decode these issues specifically and ultimately understand the role of the institution in design, aiming to contribute to a broader body of literature which considers architecture and planning to be fields of critical theory.
The central inquiry of this work revolves around the definitions and dynamics of "community." What does it mean to belong to a community? What are the social, economic, and political forces that bind individuals together, and how can architecture respond to these needs? In contemporary discourse, community is often discussed in abstract terms, but it is far more than just a collection of people living in proximity. It is a set of interwoven relationships that are constantly evolving, shaped by shared experiences, resources, and ideals. Our challenge is to rethink how architecture can be a catalyst for a more inclusive and participatory model of community-building, one that is rooted in democratic ideals and mutual care. In doing so, we hope to offer a vision of architecture as an active participant in the formation of communities that are more democratic, more inclusive, and better able to face the challenges of the future.
Written by Ana Hernandez
Setting the Context: Boston
Wentworth Institute of Technology is situated in one of the most vibrant and diverse cities in the nation. It contends with issues of historical racism, housing affordability, density, and ecological threats due to our proximity to the coast. This research must recognize the broader group of people that make this city in order to understand it.
As of 2023, 27.3% of Boston, MA residents (181k people) were born outside of the United States, which is higher than the national average of 13.8%. In 2022, the percentage of foreign-born citizens in Boston, MA was 27.9%, meaning that the rate has been decreasing.
The following chart shows the percentage of foreign-born residents in Boston, MA compared to that of it’s neighboring and parent geographies.
“Boston, MA | Data USA.” n.d. Data USA. https://datausa.io/profile/geo/boston-ma/.
In 2022, the most common birthplace for the foreign-born residents of Massachusetts was China, the natal country of 102,973 Massachusetts residents, followed by Dominican Republic with 99,956 and Brazil with 93,519
To Define Community, or, On Space, Democracy, and the Unfinished Practice of Belonging
Written by Ana Hernandez
The question of what defines a community speaks to fundamental inquiries about being, power, and relation. In the context of urban development shaped by abstraction, neoliberalism, and algorithmic logic, revisiting the theoretical foundations of community becomes an important act.
Drawing on a range of thinkers from Jane Jacobs to Henri Lefebvre this literature offers a dense terrain where the idea of community emerges as a field of ongoing production. The following essay argues for a theory of community grounded in spatial stewardship, where bodies, histories, materials, and environments converge in practices of mutual care. To speak of community today is to enter into contested terrain, where the language of civic cohesion is routinely appropriated by market forces, and where the public realm is carved into parcels of privatized visibility and control. And yet, within this fragmentation,
something else persists: the urge to assemble, to dwell, to share space meaningfully and to participate in our cities.
Jane Jacobs provides an initial and essential entry point. Her invocation of “eyes on the street” signals more than neighborhood surveillance; it names a condition in which everyday life becomes the basis of safety, trust, and familiarity.1
The sidewalk, in Jacobs’ vision, is a site of continuous encounter. The street becomes a space of civic authorship, where the repetition of small acts—greetings, glances, informal checks—produces a kind of public intimacy. Here, community forms through shared presence and tacit responsibility, rooted in the patterns of urban life. Jacobs’ theory resists abstraction. She does not speak of community as a demographic category or moral ideal, but as something enacted within the messiness of the city
1 Jacobs, Jane. The death and life of great American cities. Vintage, 1992.
2 Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Wiley-Blackwell, 1992.
3 Sandercock, Leonie. Towards Cosmopolis: Planning for Multicultural Cities. Chichester, England: J. Wiley. 1998.
4 Miraftab, Faranak. “Insurgent Planning: Situating Radical Planning in the Global South.” Planning Theory 8, no. 1 (January 12, 2009): 32–50.
6 Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon and Schuster, 2000.
block. Community, for Jacobs, takes form in repetition. In neighbors passing on streets, in the soft observation of children playing, in the unspoken trust forged by the sheer regularity of seeing one another. She names the city not as a machine but as a commons: unofficial, improvised. Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space further supports this framing. Space, for Lefebvre, does not precede social life but emerges through it. The physical environment reflects and reproduces relations of power, but also holds the potential for alternative configurations.2 Community, therefore, becomes tied to the way people intervene in and shape their surroundings. It exists within rhythms, repetitions, and interruptions, not within specific typologies.
From another angle, thinkers like Leonie Sandercock, Faranak Miraftab, and Robert Putnam approach community through its social architectures. Sandercock envisions a pluralistic urbanism that does not seek uniformity. In Towards Cosmopolis: Planning for Multicultural Cities Sandercock defines community in the context of cultural diversity,3 arguing for planning approaches that embrace pluralism rather than imposing homogeneous urban forms. Miraftab points toward grassroots configurations, informal collectives, and practices of resistance as legitimate forms of spatial production in Insurgent Planning: Situating RadicaPlanning in the Global South. 4 These approaches challenge the hegemony of professionalized planning and instead elevate those who inhabit, contest, and reimagine the city through their own tools. Putnam’s analysis of
social capital registers the erosion of these ties in the contemporary moment. He discusses community decline in urban environments through the concept of social capital, which refers to networks of civic engagement.5 Civic life becomes thin, networks dissolve, and the individual becomes increasingly atomized. These perspectives underscore the fragility of community in contexts structured by private interest and spatial commodification.
Participatory processes
reorient planning away from top-down impositions and toward co-production, where community becomes an emergent product of shared agency. In this way, the act of planning becomes a space of encounter, a political practice that holds the potential to foster solidarity, redistribute power, and sustain the infrastructures of care that communities require. To define community this way is to assign to participants in communities responsibilities for their own spaces which is a way of building bonds between people. These links and ties tether us to one another in a mutually reciprocative form. Indigenous epistemologies ask different but still important questions. They refuse definitions of community grounded in ownership or identity for example. Some theorists highlight relations to land as foundational and primordial. Community does not reside in fixed settlements or contractual bonds, but in kinship across time, species, and territory. Perhaps inscribed in this territory. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Kim TallBear fuse these indigenous narratives with a critique of Western individualism, emphasizing that relations of care and obligation cannot be reduced
to biology or property.6 These perspectives locate community within networks of reciprocity that extend beyond the human and exceed the state’s frameworks.7 Post-humanist thought is actively attempting to de-center the human as the center of purpose and look at our relationships to not just land, but animals, the air, our water, as decentralized networks which all take and give from and to one another. To deny the agency of human beings, however, is to be complicit with the denying in our role in the Anthropocene, so rather than claim that humans are not managers of nature, what we can learn from these thinkers is that it is our role to restore these bonds and in fact re-center our relationship to land and resources in our attempt to understand one another and define the links that create community.
Digital Spaces complicates things further. The rise of networked communities through platforms like Reddit, Discord, and Wikipedia suggests that communal ties are increasingly structured through infrastructure rather than place, and this does not mean that they are any less valuable. To the contrary, many of these communities would be practically impossible to maintain in the physical world, not to mention the scales of operation. Although these platforms appear disembodied, they often carry the same patterns Jacobs described: repetition, mutual observation, and trust. The city block is not gone but rendered differently. It is built in browser tabs, group chats, shared documents, and opensource protocols. These spaces remain political and deeply social, even if their spatiality is virtual. Across these varied contexts, community can be described as an ongoing, relational process. It relies on practices of maintenance, encounter, and narrative. It forms in the garden planted on a vacant lot, in the subtle markers etched into sidewalks, in the stories passed through generations. It does not appear fully formed, rather it can never be fully formed. It gathers slowly through participation and through struggle. In this view, community becomes visible in the small acts of care that sustain space as something lived and remembered.
To borrow from economic theorists, and to foreshadow our conversation with Ben Peterson, there is one key aspect which underlies many of our relationships to one another, something elusive and surprisingly fragile but without which no economy in the world would survive: trust. In Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argue that the prosperity or failure of nations hinges less on their geographic luck or material resources and more on the trust of people in its institutions.8
Inclusive institutions, they contend, create the conditions under which political power is broadly distributed, the
6 TallBear, Kimberly. Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science, 2013.
7 Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance, 2017.
8 Acemoglu, Daron, and James A. Robinson. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. Crown Currency, 2012.
rule of law is upheld, and economic opportunities are accessible. Without trust, rules become arbitrary, and participation feels futile. This is what allows individuals to surrender a degree of control in exchange for collective stability. And while Acemoglu and Robinson focus on political and economic systems, the same logic extends to the spatial and communal realm. Parks, transit systems, public schools—none of these are truly public without the assumption that others will uphold the shared use. People are willing to participate in the design of their shared spaces when they trust these wishes will be respected and we become cynical when this trust is violated. In this sense, to meaningfully design with community in mind is inherently an act of trust building. This essay proposes an orientation: community emerges through spatial stewardship, through repetitions and trust. It involves the tending of environments, the honoring of memory, and the fostering of presence. It includes those we live with and those who came before and after us. It also makes space for the non-human, for soil and wind, for all the things we have in common. Jacobs reminded us that democracy begins on the block. Today, we must ask how that block might be imagined across difference, across platforms, across ecological thresholds. The answer may be found not only in the eyes on the street, but in the hands that care for the land, in the voices that question what counts as history, and in the bodies that gather, persist, and remake the city—again and again.
Louis I. Kahn, Traffic Study, Project, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Plan of Proposed Traffic Movement Pattern, 1952. From the Collections of the Museum of Modern Art, 389.1964.
Discursive Diagram. Graphic credit: Ana Hernandez
Conversation with John Parman
CDRC Interview March 27th 2025
John Parman
Ana Hernandez
Michael Palady JP AH MP
In the midst of an accelerating housing crisis and the proliferation of generic, developer-driven architecture, John Parman offers a timely and thoughtful critique of how contemporary urban design has lost sight of its most vital purpose: fostering community. Through his essays—“On Our Organic Dependency,” “Don’t Call It Progress,” and “Boris Johnson’s Wake-Up Call to Housing Advocates in California”—as well as his personal interview, Parman insists on reframing the conversation around housing. Rather than prioritizing density or profit, he argues that the design of our cities must be grounded in the lived realities of people, in their encounters, in shared space, and in the everyday acts of neighborliness that make urban life meaningful. Community, in this view, is not a vague social ideal but a material and spatial condition—one that architecture and planning either enable or erode.
Parman’s understanding of community is rooted in spatial familiarity and informal interaction. In the interview, he recalls how commuting on the same train with an acquaintance led to a casual, enduring recognition. These kinds of relationships, he argues, are not planned, but they are enabled by the environments we inhabit. This is why he believes design and planning should “make that more likely to happen”—through walkable cities, shared spaces, and mixed-use environments. These anecdotes are not just nostalgic recollections; they are arguments for a design ethos that values proximity, chance encounters, and human-scale development.
He sharply critiques the policies that have allowed market-driven development to dominate the urban landscape, especially in California. In “Don’t Call It Progress,” he dissects the state’s recent upzoning laws, particularly Senate Bill 50, as a neoliberal maneuver disguised as housing justice. Though intended to alleviate the housing shortage by overriding local zoning restrictions, these laws have, in Parman’s view, primarily empowered developers while sidelining communities. “No density without urbanity,” he declares a warning against the blind pursuit of unit counts at the expense of shared life. The built result, as he explains, is “refrigerator” buildings: soulless, fully-maxed-out structures with no setbacks or common spaces, optimized for profit but hostile to conviviality. In contrast, Parman points to alternative models like those found in Denmark, where building societies and cohousing arrangements prioritize the social fabric over market logic. These case studies reveal what’s possible when housing is approached as a civic, not just commercial, endeavor. What underpins all of Parman’s work is a profound concern for how governance, regulation, and design co-produce the built environment. In his Common Edge article, he
compares California’s top-down rezoning strategies with the UK’s similar moves under Boris Johnson. When housing becomes a matter of streamlined approvals and legislative overrides, the qualitative aspects of urban life like identity, memory, and community, are lost. As Parman notes in the interview, metrics like “units per acre” flatten the complexity of density into something measurable but meaningless. Instead, he calls for “organized complexity” in the spirit of Jane Jacobs—an urbanism of layered uses, overlapping communities, and spaces that evolve with their inhabitants.
In the end, to center community in design is to resist the reduction of housing to commodity. Community arises from the design of thresholds between public and private, individual and collective. The simplicity of human life—walking to a neighbor’s door, bumping into someone at the corner café, knowing the sound of a child playing in the courtyard—sits in friction with the kind of mechanistic thinking that governs most development. Market logics demand efficiency, legibility, predictability. What we call “community” might actually be our word for a kind of resistance to that mechanization, It requires care, mutualism, and a certain slowness. And if we begin to think of design as tending to this ecosystem, rather than controlling it, maybe we can reimagine not only how we live together, but what we owe each other and the places we inhabit.
The old culture war between suburbs and cities has given way to topics like globalization.Illustration by JOOST SWARTE The New Yorker 2011
John, so nice to meet you!
Tell us a little bit about yourself, about your background, where you’ve worked, the types of things that you’ve been writing about, and how you come to define community.
JP
I was born in New York State, and I spent my childhood in Singapore, so by the time I was 6 I had been around the world by ship and train, so I have this kind of childhood cosmopolitan background. But I have lived in California since 1971. I’m an architect and planner by training. I worked in planning because I worked as a marketing director editor at SOM. Then I joined Gensler when I was 50, and was their editorial director for 22 years, and I retired just before the pandemic which was very good timing! Since then I’ve been writing, and I’ve always written on urban topics. My professor at Berkeley, Richard Bender, who died in 2022, was my writing partner, and we always did stuff together. So, I always kept writing, and after I retired, I just kept writing more. I also started writing fiction, which was quite fun and my fiction has a kind of urban aspect to it, actually. I was thinking about how the way you meet people is basically through familiarity. For example, I met Alice Waters (she’s a restaurateur in Berkeley) because her daughter Fanny is the same age as my 3rd son and Fanny used to take the train into San Francisco because she went to a high school there. So I got to know her, because we always were in the same car in the morning commuting, and I don’t know her well, but I knew I knew that my 3rd son knew her, so I just introduced myself, and then after that we always would say hello to each other. It’s very, very casual, but I think it does actually build a sense of community. And there are many shades of meaning to that, but it all has a place or space aspect to it, and I think that design and planning can make that more likely to happen or less likely to happen depending on the settings in which we become familiar with people
Let me give you another example, I actually helped SOM get the international terminal at the San Francisco Airport. Well, that that project saved the office. It was during the early nineties recession, and if they hadn’t won it they would have been closed. So, it was very important project and it’s a nice project! Every time I go, I always end up seeing somebody I know. The last time my wife and I went to Italy there was this friend of mine from work, and so we talked. She was going to Singapore. I was going to Italy. It was just funny, but the place lends itself to that because there’s a lot of places you can meet with people.
And I think that from the standpoint of designer or a planner, you have to have that idea in mind: that helping people encounter each other and making it positive— which can also mean, by the way, making it safe— is important.
You’re approaching it in a sense, maybe, of improving walkability in cities that can lend itself to more interactions where people get to meet each other. I often wonder about the legal frameworks around doing things to our urban environments. there are certain things that we’re just not allowed to do to our homes or to our apartments or our buildings, because of certain laws and regulations.
Could you speak a little bit to the idea of the governance of that public space as something that maybe we need to rethink?
Yeah, that’s an issue I’ve been trying to write about. My slogan is no density without urbanity, and I think that what is happening is that development was log jammed for a long time, especially in California. It was very hard to get stuff built because everything was more or less politicized actually, and cities had a kind of death grip on development. You had to be politically connected, you had to have enough resources to last through an entitlements process which was really stretched out. And there was this legislation starting in 2016 which shifted it all. Basically, the developers bought the state legislature, and they passed a huge number of laws, so the pendulum swung the other way and now state laws override local laws on development. But it has resulted also in some negative things because too much was given to the developers so you have a kind of neoliberal situation currently,
especially the Bay Area which has a lot of so-called progressives who were actually neoliberals, wolves in sheep’s clothing, as I call them, so urbanity is often not present. When I worked at Som there was an expression EFF that meant “every fucking foot” because some developers would want to build the whole envelope out and of course, the architects hated that because you get these buildings which they refer to as refrigerators, because that’s what they look like!
A lot of the stuff that’s getting built is essentially: If they can do 11 stories they’ll do it. They can bonus their way to that, and there won’t be any setbacks. The state law has minimized a lot of stuff, so architects just build out the envelope and the result is not good from an urban entity standpoint.
It also makes me think of the very specific qualities that come out of the way in which the market regulates certain urban forms and strict boundaries to be able to value and control properties and make sure that everything’s given its right program at its right time, and to ultimately to make money off of it. And then I wonder about self-produced environments in that sense, because they defy these logics.
We can look at older, especially pre-war housing. One example is industrial and loft buildings that you see all over the place, they’re inherently extremely flexible buildings. They have typically 14, 15 foot floor to ceiling height so you can do a mezzanine. Even though they have columns, they’re relatively open spaces and they can be very easily converted to some other use. They’re what Albert Rossi called artifacts. That’s 1 example. And then the other example is maybe things like pattern houses where there’s a sort of inherent flexibility to them.
It’s interesting to me to compare housing in places like Denmark, for example, like Copenhagen, you know some of these Northern European countries where they have building societies. They typically work with identified residents when they plan projects.
I actually worked with David Baker Architects on a book called 9 Ways to Make Housing for People and they used to joke about marketecture, they would call it. They claimed that Architecture was actually better in San Francisco than it was in many other places because they looked at what the nonprofits were doing. The nonprofits were doing actual family housing more or less along European lines, and David Baker, who was my classmate in
graduate school, said that if you talk to the residents, they always say my unit doesn’t have to be so big but I want to see community. I want to see shared space for my family. And that’s the thing that’s missing with market architecture will not allocate for those spaces. They always allocate space to the units or amenities. It’s a package. And the package in Berkeley is basically aimed at students and at single professionals.
There’s a project in Tempe- Arizona called cul-de-sac. I talked with the people who designed it, and they said “yeah we tried to get them to think about the fact that it’s all young couples and well, they eventually have children!” And they said the developer was not really thinking about this. And now, of course, there are a lot of kids there, thankfully there’s a lot of open space but it’s just funny that developer thinking is very short term.
One interesting thing about the Denmark model is co-housing. The idea that the shared space is part of your home, and that that is something that you are also responsible for, and you contribute to. I think that flexibility definitely lacks from the housing that we see in the United States.
There are some examples in Seattle by the way. There’s a developer called Frolic and what they do is they do deals with homeowners where they guarantee them a place to live in the completed project and some return on their equity so they treat the residents as investors. One interesting project is this cohousing project along 2 contiguous lots and normally, in Seattle, you’re allowed to build three units per lot, or something along those lines. So they consulted with the planning department and proposed an idea: What if they did a cohousing project across both lots. By designing it as a cohousing model (where some facilities like the kitchen are shared), they were able to get approval for around 10 units total across the two lots. Even though individual units still had small food prep areas, the shared kitchen and communal features allowed them to maximize space and create a more diverse mix of residents—like elderly people aging in place alongside families. They said that the planning department is much more willing to play ball with them. that’s my impression of Seattle. Seattle has. Seattle has pretty interesting housing examples, partly because there are tons and tons of architects there, and there’s no real one big developer. It’s much easier to build there than in San Francisco.
Even in even here in Boston, it’s getting harder and harder to build. Of course, we run out of land but also some large universities have a lot of real-estate so it’s been difficult. But Boston is a very diverse city and one of the questions that we have has been around identifying ways in which we can impact those communities.
How do we measure the impact of community design?
I’ve been thinking of Space Syntax. It’s a branch of urban morphology that comes out of University College, London. A guy named Bill Hillier was the pioneer of it and it’s influenced directly by Jane Jacobs and to some extent by Christopher Alexander also, especially his book on form, becaus Alexander was a mathematician, and Bill Hillier is also a mathematician, so his methodology is based on graph theory and it’s meant to lend itself to automated data analysis. He can scan a street and he can tell through automated analysis how complex it is. His argument is that more complexity adds urbanity up to a point. It’s what Jane Jacobs calls organized complexity. There’s this book called Rebuilding Urban Complexity the author is Francesca Froy. It talks about Manchester and Sheffield, these 2 old industrial cities, and how they were basically destroyed in the post-war period by top down efforts to redevelop the city which ended up ruining it in many ways.
Bill Hillier claims that his methods would reveal certain things you couldn’t get through observation but the problem with quantified measurement is that it’s kind of a trap. It’s like how density has become units per acre. It’s a way of optimization that sometimes leaves out a lot of important factors. You’ve got to have a qualitative assessment also, it has to matter, because like the new State legislation, you can’t argue with it.
Also the pandemic brought up the stupidity of monocultural space. Single use districts which are, again, a post-war product. By and large there were always financial districts and things like that but they were usually tiny and a famous district like the square mile in the city in London still had all kinds of stuff going on, it had restaurants and the scale was not enormous. And then they built Canary Wharf and they came back and started tearing up the city and making it into a new into a New York style financial district. The pandemic showed that it’s all just a real estate move. I mean, I’m not a radical, but I have to say that neoliberalism is a
AH
JP
In Boston we’re thinking about all of our downtown buildings and how to reuse those now that they are empty, and a lot of the problems come from the fact that office buildings don’t lend themselves very well to housing.
When I was a student in the sixties there was a whole interest in Italian designers. There was a designer named Joe Colombo, for example, who did these pieces of furniture you could live in. There were a lot of loft buildings at that time in New York, and people were taking over these spaces, and at the beginning they, you know, they just kind of made it up. So I think you could look at that problem completely differently. It comes back to the question, what does it mean to live in a place?
There used to be other models of residency when I was a kid. There was a famous hotel in New York: Barbizon Plaza, which was a hotel for single women and they could live there while looking for work. This was the time when women were starting to work and in the time of maximum immigration to places like New York. So there’s a lot of intermediate sorts of housing where community was actually happening, and meals were provided, etc.
AH
I’m fascinated by the idea that we need to rethink the ways in which we do housing. because we’ll be writing about it! Thank you so much John, it was wonderful to meet you!
Graphic credit: Michael Palady
Conversation with Ben Peterson
CDRC Interview March 14th 2025
Ben Peterson
Ana Hernandez
Michael Palady BP AH MP
In an era of increasing fragmentation, the question of what it means to be a community has never been more urgent. This conversation with Ben Peterson engages with fundamental issues of human connection, the built environment, and the underlying epistemologies that shape our collective lives. At its core, the discussion interrogates how architecture and urban design mediate relationships, structure shared resources, and define the boundaries of belonging. These themes open into broader questions: What does it mean to live together? How can architects be better engaged with the communities they serve? And can architecture serve as a medium for fostering deeper democratic engagement?
As the discussion reveals, the very nature of being human is relational, we exist within networks of care and agency. This notion recalls the work of theorists such as Hannah Arendt, who argued that politics is, at its heart, a space of collective action, and Jean-Luc Nancy, who suggests that community is not something we build but something we must always be in the process of reencountering.
Furthermore, the conversation touches on the material conditions that shape community participation, the responsibility of the architect and the importance of humility in design. Underlying these discussions is a deeper philosophical provocation: Is community an organic, emergent phenomenon, or is it something that must be actively constructed? This question bears practical implications, particularly in the realms of participatory design and urban governance. Can communities form through spontaneous acts of solidarity, or do they require institutional scaffolding to endure? And in a world shaped by historical injustices, how do we ensure that communal spaces are not just inclusive in name but in their very structure? Ultimately, the conversation serves as a call to rethink how we conceptualize and cultivate community. It challenges us to see architecture not as a static discipline concerned merely with form, but as an active participant in shaping human relationships and democratic life. In doing so, it invites us to imagine new possibilities for living together—ones that transcend economic imperatives and embrace the full complexity of human interdependence.
We’re graduate students at Wentworth Institute of technology and we’re researching definitions of community and ideas that different people, professionals and students have of what a community means or can become. The CDRC, for a little bit of background, is interested in eventually taking on projects in different communities and so we’re trying to understand, first of all our role and how to do that in a meaningful way. So that’s how this sort of research has come about. And I want to start by asking you for a little bit of your background and what you do at the BSA and what your ideas are on the meanings of community.
Cool, well, good to meet you. Lots of questions on your first question. Let me start, so I’m Ben. Currently I am the Community design director at the Boston Society For architecture. . I’m trained as an architect, so I studied architecture and landscape architecture as a graduate student. And prior to going to grad school for architecture, my undergraduate degrees were in anthropology and environmental studies. So from the very beginning of my entry into the design fields, I was always carrying with me the knowledge and learning I brought from my experiences in undergrad and thinking about people, place, environment. The intersections of those things. So I’ve been at the BSA for five years. Started just around the pandemic and prior to that I was a full-time educator. I was an education director at the BAC, where I was responsible for BAC’s Gateway program. Which is the BAC’s community design center for lack of a better way of describing it, but managed over 100 Academic community partnerships in and around Greater Boston in the state interdisciplinary. Semester or year long collaborations with students from architecture, interior, architecture, landscape architecture, working on projects of various scales and scopes. With an array of different kinds of organizations and groups. And also, I was the director of the Huxtable Fellowship, which was a year long cohort each year of students who were selected or demonstrating like an intentional interest and passion about the intersections of design and social impact, civic practices. And through the Hucksville fellowship the first cohort was really focused on building resiliency, we were working in East Boston as a precursor to the Boston climate adaptation. And we were working really intentionally on the ground with eastie residents. Demystifying the complications of climate. Understanding what
those impacts and consequences meant for everyday life and developing tools for playbooks for eastie residents to take strides to make their own livelihoods more resilient to pending climate change and building social infrastructure for more resilient neighborhoods in eastie. The second cohort we were working with mass Design group and specifically focused on the geographies around mass and looking at the really complicated challenges of public space. Contested public space, the lived experience of individuals who were working, living, experiencing life on the street daily and So many folks that we were working with were experiencing chronic or conditional homelessness. Many folks in Massachusetts are. We were trying to understand the role designers might play in mitigating those really competing interests and claims to public space and thinking about how design situates itself as a kind of mediator.
My approach to the work that I’m doing at the BSA is really about building pathways and relationships for community organizations and neighborhood groups to work in tandem and alongside professional architects and designers. Exploring the kind of spatial challenges and complications of things that might be inherently related to their own organizational missions and designers, in turn, are understanding that design practices are elevated and amplified when we start acknowledging lived experience as expertise that’s really on par or of equal value to the kind of professional experience we hold so deeply, as you know, our credentials as experts in the field. So thinking about community is complicated and in a lot of ways, I’m becoming more and more averse to the kind of uncritical thinking where community becomes a placeholder for other things, “community” becomes a placeholder in a way that architects and designers see themselves as other than the communities that they are serving.
And so my work is really about understanding how design practices can be situated as vehicles for mediating complex scenarios for translating the way the built environment is made or breaking open access to decision making about the built environment and those are things that are less about the outcome that resolves in a building and more about how making it possible for more folks to have agency and ownership around how their livelihoods are impacted by decisions that are made in the built environment.
Thinking about community, for me, community exists in so many different scales and both temporal and geographic and one of the things that’s paramount to how I think about this is a kind of reflexive thinking about my own positionality in these scenarios
where I am often entering into it as kind of a tourist or a guest. Acknowledging the communities that I belong to and don’t belong to, and acknowledging the communities that I am invited into versus those that I’m not.
For me community as a verb is really about relationship building. And encouraging architects, designers, students, those of us who are really, I think driven by understanding design as a social practice, encouraging all of us to recognize that we can be working in a way that moves away from kind of transactional practices where I do one thing for you and we’re good or the typical historical model of an architect as a knowledge holder and a savior jumping in to a place that he or she or they might not be part of.
It’s
about making sure that community design practices are rooted in these relational practices. Acknowledging one’s own positionality, acknowledging the expertise and knowledge experience that comes from lived experiences. The folks who are most likely to be impacted by design decisions should have the most agency or power about what they look like.
AH
Yeah, I have a couple of follow up questions on some of the things that you said. One the of the things that really stood out was how you mentioned how we have to move away from transactional relationships in terms of community building. How do you envision that taking place?
Yeah, so I haven’t like made a building in a very long time. And I say that to you all to remind you and encourage you that Architecture and design practices are expanding in ways that you might pursue different avenues towards what it is you’re passionate about. So relationship building, I think one of the things that’s really important when we think about community design is that they are fundamentally about moving at a pace that is rooted in trust and you can’t do that overnight. There’s a time and a place for a scope of services that’s really about resolving a particular thing. And architects do that really well. But I think in making architectures practices more relevant and more accessible requires shedding the mystique of what architects do, and then also finding ways that architects as knowledge holders can amplify access to avenues of decision making that may have historically been closed off to folks. I’ve been working for several years with an organization in Matapan called the Woodrow Ave. Neighborhood Association and not sure if you know, but the city over the last few years has been conducting a citywide audit of city-held vacant parcels. “Public land for public good” audit, and 25% of those are in Dorchester and Mattapan. Historically, neighborhoods like Mattapan have been strategically and systematically excluded from decision making about their own land. Starting back with the practices of blockbusting and redlining and real estate speculation and those things mutated into the way that we see how development practices happen still where residents, neighbors, those most likely impacted by those development transactions are recognized only as like afterthought consultants. I’ve been working with Woodrow for several years and understanding neighbors, residents and folks who are really civically engaged and how to expand access to those practices that most likely impact them by acknowledging that folks in his neighborhood hold the most knowledge and most insight about how they want their neighborhoods to look, feel, and be shaped.
But then also making it possible for those really opaque practices like development and disposition to be understood. And so, whereas the development practices in Boston may have conventionally looked to developers coming in, presenting some options and then saying, do you like it or not? Historically this has built up a ton of resentment and istrust for the city. We’ve been working on creating and defining a neighborhood led and community driven vision for development that is strengthening pathways to advocacy for neighbors in Woodrow and also building in that kind of agency. So articulating this vision in a way where their needs and desires are now written into City Rfp’s for example. And rather than a developer or city policy maker dismissing their needs because it doesn’t fit with the proforma. Those things can actually be codified into the procedures that make the disposition of public land happen. And there has to be some building of trust that I am always an outsider in these places, but I’m also an ally.
And it’s been tricky. You know, and the BSA can masquerade as a kind of neutral entity that operates in between city, laborers, architects, but the end of the day, as an individual, I have to be mindful of where my commitments truly are ethically. Personally, in terms of respect, care, love, those things that I think are often missing from professional dialogues. I’m always going to be leveraging my own position both as an individual who is a white cisgendered male and as someone who holds some professional allegiance to use those levers. To support and amplify folks who don’t have those levers to pull. AH
Yeah, it comes back to having to reframe the practice of architecture just generally. There’s been a lot of talk mostly in academia, about what the architect really does, and where their interest should primarily lie. And there’s some architects that say that it should always be society, but even though we say that a lot of the times we don’t practice that. I think that there’s something really interesting in finding avenues to practice that are very concrete, because I think there are a lot of us. Coming up into the world thinking architects just design. So, to be able to grasp those really concretely, I think is really important and I appreciate the ways in which you’ve illuminated that.
Residents being able to engage in design is obviously crucial, but how can we also amplify decision making?
AH
I think it’s important to remember that participation is not the same as power. And that you can participate in something but still have no power over its outcomes or its consequences. Part of the tools that I think are really exciting about architecture and design like our ability to envision alternative futures. Our ability to translate complex ideas into accessible realities, those are the tools that I hope to distribute.
I think fundamentally it’s about accountability. As a designer who am I accountable to and who are my actions held accountable to? Well: folks that I’ve committed to working with and alongside. That means being transparent, it means being a human being first and foremost and often the thing that’s most ignored when we put on our professional costumes. There’s a tremendous amount of civic will and a tremendous amount of historical and institutional legacies of neighborhoods convening to advocate for their own livelihoods and their own behalf, specifically in Boston. Boston, has a fascinating history of decisions made by folks who said like, no, we’re not going to let you build a highway through our neighborhood. And I think that actually happened alongside some really active, committed and careful designers. A lot of that early coalition building was sprung by conversations with their neighbors.
Academic institutions have a really interesting role to play here. I think in in some ways they can absolve themselves of accountability, but they also frequently present themselves as the holders of ethical standards and advancing discourse and dialogue about things like design in the public realm and practices related to design. But at the end of the day, academic institutions are also still institutions that are governed by boards and bodies and finances. As you move through this research recognize your person, your individual person, your humanness. You may be a student now, but you’re also Ana and Michael.
That’s a great way to put it. You mentioned before the Woodrow ave example, can yo uthink of other ways in which communities can be connected through desig?
BP
Can I ask you guys how you’re thinking about what success looks like and what successful means?
AH
I’ve been thinking about it as something that enhances the ability for people to make human connections with others and I keep thinking of that “transactional” word because I think it’s important to focus on activities that are explicitly not transactional. Whether that is public activities or art programs or things where people get together and do something, or even if it does involve valuable labor, to me it matters that people feel like their labor contributes to the betterment of their communities. Or even gifting economies I think are super interesting.
I mean, I think a lot of the work that I do is really fundamentally about building infrastructures for civic and public life where we’re seeing a world erase those things or close those things off making it impossible for us to have dialogue about it.
The projects that I think are successful in the way you’ve described are like for example designing tools and artifacts, things that could be accessed in multiple languages that made the scariness and complexity of climate change something that we could identify in our own homes. Those really simple things that we designed and developed alongside neighbors and residents in Estie allowed for more intentional civic dialogue with things like Climate action plans that were coming into East Boston from the city. Residents were not only fluent about those conversations, but also had ideas about things that I think we hold as blind spots as professionals. A lot of the work in East Boston around climate resiliency has been generated and led by folks who aren’t architects, designers, or planners. They know their city and they know that their basements are flooding.
Members of the Malden arts community pose for a photo-op. Courtesy of Debbie DeMaria.
Graphic credit: Michael Palady
Conversation with Ignacio Cardona
CDRC Interview March 27th 2025
Ignacio Cardona Ana Hernandez IC AH
Community is a term so frequently deployed that it risks dilution, yet its meaning remains elusive in practice. We like the idea of community, and it’s a persistent truth of our times that we live in a properly individual world. We all want its promise of connection, its implicit critique of atomized neoliberal existence, but what does it actually mean to be in community? What is its political implication if we consider the scale of our metropolitan societies?
At its most tangible, community seems to be about proximity. We live together in buildings, in cities, in neighborhoods. And yet, as Cardona pointed out, proximity alone does not create community. You can share walls and remain entirely disconnected. Here, space alone is insufficient; there must be something beyond adjacency that binds people together. This “beyond” is where politics enters the conversation— because community is not simply a spatial condition but an economic and political proposition. It is a question of shared resources, shared responsibilities, and ultimately, shared power. That we find ourselves in a time of crisis is important to contextualize this conversation. There is a fundamental crack in our democratic systems that seems to lean in the side of authoritarianism and weakened political participation. This is manifested in planning processes where architects and planners act as experts and our medium of communication resists community feedback.
If community is no longer solely determined by geography, then our engagement with space must change accordingly. A Community Design and Research Center, as we discussed, is not merely a site for producing physical interventions but also a platform for negotiating and building relationships across different scales of belonging. The real work, then, is not just in designing spaces where people gather, but in designing conditions where sharing—of resources, decisions, and accountability—becomes possible. Without this, community remains an abstract ideal rather than an operational reality.
Here lies the deeper political tension: sharing implies a redistribution of agency. In a framework that valorizes individual accumulation, the act of sharing—be it land, infrastructure, or even decisionmaking power—becomes inherently disruptive. It is not simply a matter of generosity as much as it is a matter of reconfiguring social and economic relations. This is why community, in its most radical sense, is a challenge to the logic of privatization. Without the means to share and enable collectivity community collapses into rhetoric.
Yet, as our conversation revealed, even those
who value community struggle with its demands. It is easier to retreat into isolation, to avoid the slow and sometimes frustrating work of negotiation that comes with participation. As Cardona noted, working alone can feel more efficient. But efficiency is a poor metric for human well-being. The most fulfilling forms of engagement require entanglement and dialogue. They require time and an ability to deal with uncertainty, which our institutions so often resist.
If we accept this, then the role of architecture, urbanism, and participatory design must be to cultivate the conditions for this entanglement. The goal is not just to create spaces for occupation, but to create systems of relation, frameworks that encourage and sustain shared responsibility.
AH
Hello, Ignacio. We’re researching definitions of the word “community” and exploring ideas from theorists and industry professionals about what community means and how to effectively design for and engage communities. Could you share a bit about your background, your experience, and how you define your role within the area of community development?
IC
Sure. I’m Ignacio Cardona, currently an Associate Professor at Wentworth Institute of Technology and one of the promoters of the CDRC, along with Anne Catrin and Robert Trumbor. I’ve been at Wentworth since 2018, initially as an adjunct professor before applying for a full-time position. In my interview, I discussed with Sadef, the Dean, the importance of amplifying the community’s voice and strengthening the connection between Wentworth and the local community.
I also run a lab called the Spatial Opportunity Lab, though it has been on hold recently as I focus on the CDRC. The lab stems from my thesis project at Harvard Graduate School of Design, titled Spatial Opportunities for Self-Produced Environments. The goal is to understand how physical environments provide both psychological and physical resources for communities to improve.
My background in community work dates back to 2004. At that time, I was working in banking in Venezuela but shifted to urban design due to the country’s political crisis and street violence. I pursued a Master’s in Urban Design, and since the beginning my master was on community-based projects. Then I ran an office called Arep: Architecture, ecology and participation, where we developed projects in underprivileged areas, particularly in selfproduced or informal settlements in Latin America. My main focus
here was participatory democracy—whether described as direct democracy, open democracy, or participatory design. My work in this field earned international awards, which ultimately helped me get into the PhD program at Harvard GSD. Since moving to the U.S. in 2015, I have continued working on participatory design as an academic.
Currently, I serve as the Chair of the Board for the Somerville Community Corporation, and I also run an NGO, which connects community leaders from seven Latin American countries through weekly Zoom meetings to discuss the intersection of democracy and urban projects. AH
One of the key topics we want to explore is the idea of democratic participation—what it truly means. In the U.S., community participation often amounts to public feedback sessions where residents say “yes” or “no” to pre-designed projects. Even in more engaged processes, there tends to be a disconnect between the needs of community members and the goals of developers, architects, and planners.
How do you conceptualize democracy in relation to design?
IC
In my view, the answer requires examining two things: how we define democracy and how we define participation. Though they overlap, they are distinct concepts. Democracy, historically, is still a baby, only about 200 years old. For most of human history, societies were governed through authoritarian or autocratic ways of running societies. Actually, I have the feeling that now we are coming back to that autocratic theme, we can see it in this country with Trump’s administration, that democracy is in a big crisis.
We have to remember that democracy started as participatory democracy in Athens, close relation to public space and Athens was a really small society. So when societies started to expand, which I think there is close relationship between democracy and territory and space, democracy didn’t work anymore and we started to create empires because it is difficult to create democracies with large territories. Later, thinkers like Madison, Hamilton, and Mason in the U.S. introduced the concept of representative democracy as a solution to governing large territories.
Representative democracies are in crisis and that crisis in my opinion began in 1968. With the French May 68 and all the civil
rights movements. People increasingly feel that their voices are not truly represented, leading to a crisis of representation.
I can summarize 2 ways in which we can solve this. There is a book called Against democracy which argues that it doesn’t make sense for people to be represented. That someone who knows what they’re doing can run the government (epistocracy). The other possibility is participatory democracy and actually expanding the ways in which the voices of people are heard.
One of the issues we’re having in architecture is that communities usually can only talk about a limited space. We’re coming back to the problem in Athens, Greece. When you engage in participatory meetings, as I have many times, If you ask a community what they want or need, they usually talk about their backyard, their street, their front yard.
But what if the source of their problem is miles away? They might not see it. So there is a problem of the scale of participation. You also have a problem with the knowledge of participation. The knowledge that we have as architects is different from the lived knowledge of community members. Both are valuable but are completely different. In that sense I participation as a dialogue rather than just a listening process.
Too often, participatory meetings focus on listening to the community and what they want and because of the scale sometimes they don’t have the ability to understand the community in a broader sense, like for example climate issues. For example, a local flooding issue might be tied to environmental policies or infrastructure failures occurring far away and can be addressed far away. For that reason, it is important to listen to communities but they should also listen to architects. You have to ask that they listen to you. If you want to engage with a community we must create a dialogue.
People like Maritza Montero and Paulo Freire, who emphasize that we have:
1. Normative needs (necesidades normativas)— Technical needs identified by professionals.
2. Felt Needs (necesidades sentidas) — The lived, immediate needs as experienced by community members. sometimes, these two needs are in tension. The goal of participatory design is to bridge this gap, where architects participates, community participates and they create a dialogue. And then they find a solution or an idea out of this dialoge. And in my opinion that is the only way to save democracy.
There are theorists who argue that information systems have historically played a key role in this expansion of territories. The printing press, for example, enabled the spread of democratic ideas. Today, AI and digital platforms might hold similar potential. However, ensuring that such systems remain decentralized is crucial to avoiding authoritarian control. More broadly, the question is:
How do people come to understand the world? How do they learn about issues like climate change? That knowledge informs their participation in their communities and their ability to recognize problems beyond their immediate surroundings.
IC
That is a great point. I told you before there were two possible solutions to democracy’s current crisis. One is epistocracy, as proposed by Jason Brennan in Against Democracy. So basically, a group of guys who know to do things can run the world. And in my opinion this is what is trying to run the current administration. If I can recommend a book on this it’s Open Democracy, by Elena Landamore. She’s a wonderful scholar from Princeton University. She says that digital technology can resolve the scale issue that has historically made direct participation impractical. She suggests that representative democracy is in crisis and that a more participatory model is needed. So she argues that in an open democracy we can address participation through technology.
If you say that to an American they would say, that is impossible. That is lottery democracy. She questions in the book things like why we need to have elections. Can we have democracy without elections? So she proposes something called lottery democracy similar to jury duty. So what if you have a duty to run the executive branch for 4 years. So there is a group of people who runs the country for 4 years.
We can have certain protocols with AI that permits and facilitates the engagement of people from broader skills.
So what can we learn? Maybe, from places that don’t follow formal planning logic that can inform the way that we, you know, design for engagement?
IC
Yeah, there, there are 2 things that comes to my mind is that I think the big issue of the big constraints when we try to do a participatory design process, one is media: the tools that we use to transform an idea into a design project. And what is happening in
AH
participatory design is that who dominates that media dominates the outputs, usually architects. So you go to a community and you present a nice render, so you have an idea. You translate that into a rhino model and then from that you create a render, and then you work, and then you have something that only you, as an architect can do. So you say to the community, I have this nice render, what do you think? They have no tool to say yes or no they have to say yes because the knowledge that we have as architects is overwhelming. So the tool itself is in some ways dominating the discussion. There is a complete power imbalance in that relation. For that reason, participatory meetings are basically consultations, less than that, they are information. So what I try to do is to understand that could be other tools like games or mapping or technical walks. For example I spent 3 years of my life designing a game like monopoly and I tested it in Petare in Venezuela and Queens NY to see how we facilitate this interaction. The second part that we can learn from self-produced environments is that there a certain things that have to be regulated. Graham Chain called that “armatures” in a book called Recombinant Urbanism. You can have certain armatures, for example, the flows of a river, or certain streets, or certain spaces that can be preserved. Some times what happens with design is that architects believe that we have to control everything, and we can learn that we don’t have to control everything. There are things that we have to control for technical reasons, we don’t want buildings to fall down or flood, but there are other parts that probably don’t need to be controlled. We can be open to things that are flexible and can be changed by communities later. It’s a different form of design. I call that self produced design. It’s challenging and it’s not really popular especially from architects and policymakers, because there is room for uncertainties and It’s not easy to deal with uncertainties.
Yeah, I mean, there’s so much aesthetic regulation that I think the question has to come back to the way in which we govern urban aesthetics, and the way that we think of what looks nice. So I think that it takes a long time and relatively large conversation to change our mind about our ideas of aesthetics, which are very old and rooted in historical processes and hard to change.
IC
I think, with the AI, what is happening now is that the whole coding part could be addressed by bots really easily and really fast. So now we have tools where we upload a plan and the and the tools tells you what you have to do in order to control codes.
I have the feeling that architects are moving towards “coders”, like controlling code and regulation all the practical architecture. And I think this, if we go there, architecture will disappear, because that will be done with the bots easily. The other parts, which is the creative part, the innovation and the engagement with communities and the way we improve the experience of communities in our buildings is something that many scholars say that is much more difficult to others by bots. So, in my opinion, this big change that is happening with AI will ask of us, or demand of us to move more towards human connections. Human relations, how we can innovate this through this engagement that is that that that is much more difficult to do with AI.
We agree that there is a risk If we don’t put our voice there. I’m going to give you an example. I was testing ChatGPT to draw a Latino person and It will come up with a typical Carmen Miranda with the fruits in on her head and flowers and I don’t identify myself with that person of course, but AI replicates the stereotypes of a dominant cultures. The risk is that if we don’t push for the recognition of diversity in communities they will be diminished and forgotten. So the market has this stereotype of Latino because they want to sell a product and in this process it homogenizes cultures and organizes the production of goods. In my opinion the orle of the CDRC is to fight these battles that are difficult to fight in other organizations, the role of the university is to listen to things that the market cannot see.
I was thinking aa lot about what defines a community as I was preparing myself for this conversation. I can probably change my mind, but now I would say that what defines a community are the common interests, the space we share and our neighborhoods. we’re sharing that interest because we want our backyard or front yard or side yard to be better. We’re sharing that space. There is a close connection between community and neighborhoods. There’s people who believe that if we’re not in the same neighborhood we don’t belong to the same neighborhood and that idea can be challenged for many reasons. For example residents of a building can live together but because they’re not sharing interests not be part of a community, they’re basically just living there. Now because of the digital revolution we know that we are sharing interest with other people through technology. There is this book, I’m sorry I don’t remember the name, that claims that we belong to multiple communities at once. Right now, we’re a community of people who believe community is important. I’m also part of a community of parents, professors, and the residents of my building in Cambridge. When we talk about a Community Design and
AH
Research Center, it connects design and research to communities through space, yes, we engage with neighborhoods, but how do we reach other scales of community? Maybe our role is to build community through spatial interventions while also engaging with broader forms of community through design, beyond just shared physical spaces.
That makes sense. Earlier, you mentioned the difference between communities and individuals. I’ve been thinking about the definition of community—specifically as a sharing of resources. Whenever I’ve seen strong communities, they share more than just space. They share food, cultures, materials—something beyond geography. With that sharing comes responsibility, you feel responsible for part of your community. In my building for example, I don’t know my neighbors. I don’t feel like I am responsible for anyone here, and I’m sure they don’t feel responsible for me. There’s a saying I love: Everybody wants a village, but nobody wants to be a villager. So that puts us in a place where we have to acknowledge that there is a very dialectical tension between individual people and the groups that they are part of.
How do you define, then, the difference between what people are individually and what communities are as a group?
IC
It will sound weird but actually it connects to happiness. Research shows that people with more social connections are happier. If you isolate yourself, you may produce more, but you’re less happy. That’s why I tie joy to participatory design. It’s about realizing that my voice is reinforced by the voice others.
AH
Right, and connections aren’t just with people—they can be with things, places, ideas.
IC
Exactly. Working alone is faster, sometimes more efficient in terms of time, but not necessarily in terms of output. If I collaborate with you, my thinking expands. The result is stronger. The challenge is that connections take time, and people see that as a constraint. But if we recognize that connections make everything stronger, we won’t stress about the time they require.
Graphic credit: Michael Palady
Conversation with Jennifer Gaugler
Carried over email in april 2025.
Essay by Ana Hernandez
Jennifer Gaugler
Ana Hernandez JG AH
Collective Memory and Other Forms of Relational Existence
Jennifer Gaugler’s work with the Boston Landmarks Commission reveals a profound truth about how communities form, endure, and evolve: through memory, spatial participation, and the preservation of shared histories. As an architectural historian, Gaugler brings not only technical expertise but a critical, humanistic lens to the question of what we remember and how that memory becomes fixed—not just in plaques or monuments—but in our relationships with the physical environments we inhabit together.
The idea that community emerges from practices of memory and memorialization challenges more transactional or individualistic definitions of community. Often, “community” is discussed as a network of individuals who share proximity or interest, sometimes framed in terms of utility or support. But Gaugler’s framing—particularly through her experience with landmark designation as a constituent-led process—suggests something else: community is an emergent, relational phenomenon rooted in shared acts of remembrance. It is not something given, but something practiced.
AH
Can you give us a brief background of your experience and your current role working for the city of Boston?
JG
My background is in architecture, which I studied for both an undergraduate and a Master’s degree. I worked at architecture firms for a total of about five years, and my projects typically involved some elements of historic preservation and adaptive reuse in addition to new construction. I found myself really interested in the history of existing structures, and decided to go back to school for a doctorate in architectural history. For my dissertation I studied how tradition and modernity were expressed through the architecture and historic preservation of Rwanda (where I had previously worked for a year).
Having shifted my career path from architect to architectural historian, I began teaching at a few schools in Boston, and was then hired to work at the Boston Landmarks Commission in late 2020. (As of 2022, the Boston Landmarks Commission is under the City’s department of the Office of Historic Preservation.) My title is Architectural Historian, and my primary job is to manage the designation of new Landmarks and Historic Districts in the City of Boston. It’s a very constituent-led process which starts with a petition and proceeds through a study report and a public review process. I truly love my job because I feel like I am making an impact on the city by preserving important places for future generations.
AH
Some theorists argue that public spaces and infrastructures can be designed to encourage community bonds, however, the word can sometimes be used to stand as a buzzword that still assumes people are individuals first and that communities have to provide something to the individual. As we think of the definition of community, we have the intuition that something
must be shared between people, where we actively produce and maintain shared resources and that it is this sharing that creates a communal bond. Do you agree with this definition or have an alternative way to define this?
JG
I agree with this definition. In fact, the idea that we “actively produce and maintain shared resources” is very foundational to the ethos of historic preservation. Historic materials and sites can be considered “shared resources” in the form of tangible elements that have survived from the past and serve to remind communities of their place’s history, in addition to actively providing continued benefits to the current population (i.e. as shelter, infrastructure, revenue production, etc.).
However, there are some complications that we face in the historic preservation field:
1) How do we address that many populations are transient, whether on a short or long time scale? In other words, a community that lives in a particular neighborhood may not have always lived there. Are the artifacts of other past communities reflective of “their” shared history? How do we commemorate and recognize layers of history in a place? Can we create communal bonds across time?
2) What about intangible elements of history? How do we identify and preserve them? So many of our current preservation tools (databases sorted by address, photographic documentation, inventory forms) are suitable for fixed, tangible assets. And the process of documentation can effectively “freeze” a site in time in the records, when in reality it is always changing. These are questions we are currently asking ourselves at the City of Boston’s Office of Historic Preservation.
AH
Acknowledging the limited role of design, how might planners and architects intentionally design spaces that cultivate this kind of collective stewardship?
JG
I appreciate subtle site-specific art that connects people to the history of a particular location in space. For example, I enjoy the markings of the historic coastline near Quincy Market. They may be hard to notice at first but they are always open at all times of day to all who walk that way -- no tickets needed (although I do also appreciate a good museum). They spark the imagination. What would this have looked like when it was the actual edge of the city? There’s something democratic and accessible about this kind of design that I appreciate.
AH
Informal settlements and DIY urbanism challenge traditional planning models. What lessons can be learned from communities that emerge outside of formal planning frameworks?
JG
There’s definitely applicability to the historic preservation process (at least as it is practiced in Boston, which is what I’m most familiar with). While I would classify the Boston Landmarks system as a formal planning framework, it’s also a democratic constituent-led process. The Landmarks Commission doesn’t tell people what to landmark; rather, they review the petitions that come to them from the people. People of a community can look at informal settlements and DIY urbanism as inspiration for redefining the values of what is historically significant about where they live. Landmarks don’t have to be limited to monumental buildings or formal landscapes. For example, perhaps a group of neighbors want to preserve a site where they turned an abandoned lot into a community garden. There are opportunities for the informal to intersect with the formal in interesting ways.
The Embrace is a 38,000-pound monument capturing a historic hug between Coretta Scott King and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.Photo: Courtesy of MASS Design Group
The New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston, Massachusetts, is dedicated to the Jewish people who were murdered by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. Image Courtesy of Ryan Iron Wokrs.
morial/
Landmarks, in this context, are more than heritage objects or sites of nostalgia. They are communal anchors, physical manifestations of collective memory that allow present and future generations to engage with a shared past. This physical memory extends the community through time, connecting people horizontally across neighborhoods, and vertically across generations. When a community petitions to designate a place, they are asserting authorship over their narrative. They are saying: this matters to us. This is how we remember ourselves.
The importance of this process lies not only in what is preserved, but in how preservation itself becomes a social act. Gaugler highlights that the preservation process in Boston begins with the people. Residents initiate petitions; their voices guide the process. This reverses the topdown model of historical significance and allows for emergent values—those rooted in the lived experience of a community rather than in elite cultural valuation—to shape the city’s memory. It allows for spaces like community gardens, informal gathering spots, or culturally meaningful but architecturally modest buildings to become worthy of care.
This democratization of memory confronts the temporal challenges of preservation. As Gaugler notes, communities are transient; people come and go, and neighborhoods shift in demographic and cultural composition. What, then, anchors memory when the people who made the memories are no longer there?
Moreover, Gaugler challenges us to think about intangible heritage—stories, songs, practices—that may not map neatly onto a fixed place. The tools of preservation are still catching up to this challenge, often relying on databases and photographs that “freeze” sites rather than engage with their evolving meaning. Yet this very tension
opens space for creativity. Site-specific art, subtle urban markers, and grassroots initiatives all point toward new ways of embedding memory in space. This essay gestures toward a larger philosophical question: What kinds of relations make a community more than just a set of colocated individuals? Could it lie in the shared work of remembering, of choosing what to carry forward? To participate in collective memory is to participate in the ongoing life of a place—it is to belong, not merely by being present, but by taking responsibility for what we preserve, retell, and reinterpret together.
She raises the important consideration public art. Art in urban space can be a tool of state control and often functions a s a way to materialize a view of history which demands winners and losers. Art has the potential to be a counter-politics of memory. It could refuse the smooth narratives of nationalist myth or sanitized heritage. Instead, it often insists on presence—especially the presence of those excluded from official history. It creates openings for grief, for protest, for joy. It asks us to remember differently, together.
In a time when memory is under siege— flattened by algorithms, co-opted by spectacle, or denied altogether—these artistic acts of relational memory are not minor. They are infrastructural. They create new ways of knowing and being-with. They produce forms of community that do not rely on sameness but on shared attentiveness: to place, to history, to each other.
Graphic credit: Michael Palady
Student Survey
This study used a qualitative survey method to explore perceptions of community, design, and belonging, particularly within the context of Boston. It was intended for WIT students of various years and backgrounds but all belonging to the 18-25 age group. Participants responded to open-ended questions about how they define community, whether they feel part of one, and the role of design and research in fostering communal spaces. Word frequency analysis was used to determine important themes. Carried out over Spring 2025.
Community is Multidimensional and Rooted in Networks
-Respondents consistently define community through both emotional and spatial lenses—emphasizing shared values, mutual support, and sense of place.
-For these participants, community is less about geographic boundaries and more about relational networks and everyday interactions.
-Effective research isn’t topdown; it must emerge from lived experience to be relevant and impactful.
Emotional and Social Infrastructure Matter as Much as Physical Space
-The terms emotional experience, social infrastructure, and values appear repeatedly, highlighting a desire for design to support mental, emotional, and communal well-being.
-Communities thrive not just on buildings or parks—but on feelings of trust, purpose, and recognition.
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