Harvard Design Magazine, issue 49, Publics, Fall/Winter 2021

F/W — 21 No. 49

HARVARD DESIGN MAGAZINE

978-1-934510-83-4

49

What is the fate of “the public” in a world where xenophobic thinking and challenges to communal responsibility are becoming ever more dominant, and in which individualism poses a corrosive threat to collectivity and unity? In the wake of the crises of the past two decades, we examine the territoriality, the physicality, and the materiality of the public, and attempt to grasp where it is and where it is not in today’s deeply divided world.

ISSUE 49 F/W 21: PUBLICS HARVARDDESIGNMAGAZINE.COM

PUBLISHED BY THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF DESIGN

ISBN: 978-1-934510-83-4

$ 16

Washington, DC, January 6, 2021.

Black Trans Lives Matter, Brooklyn, NY, June 14, 2020.

1

Taryn Simon, An Occupation of Loss, installation view, Park Avenue Armory, New York, New York, 2016.

2

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

Peter van Agtmael, view of a peaceful protest outside the Lincoln Memorial on the 57th anniversary of the March on Washington, DC, 2020.

Dorothea Lange, Wanto Co. Grocery Store at 401-403 Eighth and Franklin Streets, Oakland, California, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 8, 1941.

4

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

Mel D. Cole, Houston, Texas, June 9, 2020.

Krzysztof Wodiczko, Bunker Hill Monument Projection, Boston, Massachusetts, September 24–26, 1998.

Organized and produced by Let Freedom Ring, a public art program, and the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, with assistance from Charlestown After Murder Program, an association of mothers who lost their children in street violence.

Assemble, Rise & Win Microbrewery, Shikoku Island, Japan, 2017.

HARVARD DESIGN MAGAZINE EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Julie Cirelli

PUBLISHER Harvard University Graduate School of Design

PRODUCTION MANAGER Meghan Ryan Sandberg

DEAN AND JOSEP LLUÍS SERT PROFESSOR OF DESIGN Sarah Whiting

GUEST EDITORS Anita Berrizbeitia Diane E. Davis

ASSISTANT DEAN AND DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS & PUBLIC PROGRAMS Ken Stewart

GRAPHIC DESIGN & ART DIRECTION Alexis Mark

ART DIRECTOR Chad Kloepfer

COPYEDITOR Rachel Holzman RESEARCHERS Kim Cordova, Shira Grosman, Hattie Lindsley, Barbara Miglietti PRINTER Flagship Press, North Andover, Massachusetts, USA SUBSCRIPTIONS & BACK ISSUES Bruil & van de Staaij info@bruil.info DISTRIBUTION ANC (United States) Accelerate360.com (800) 929-8274

ISSN 1093-4421 ISBN 978-1-934510-83-4 © 2021 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without prior written permission from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Harvard Design Magazine is published twice yearly by the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Harvard Design Magazine is abstracted/indexed in the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals and ARTbibliographies Modern.

The editors have attempted to acknowledge all sources of images and apologize for any errors or omissions.

Disticor (Canada) ndalton@disticor.com

Harvard Design Magazine 48 Quincy Street Cambridge, MA 02138 USA

Central Books (International) magazines@centralbooks.com

info@harvarddesignmagazine.org www.harvarddesignmagazine.org

Idea Books (International) idea@ideabooks.com

Mel D. Cole, New York, New York, November 7, 2020.

Harvard Design 10

EDITORS’ LETTER Anita Berrizbeitia & Diane E. Davis

ARTIFACTS 14

FIND A STREETLIGHT, STEP OUT OF THE SHADE Bonnie Honig

SITES 46 HOW CAN WE SHARE SPACE TOGETHER? Walter Hood & Sara Zewde

20 ASSEMBLE Fran Edgerley, Louis Schulz & Matthew Allen

50 THE OBJECT OF APPLAUSE: PRODUCING A PUBLIC Taryn Simon & Charles Shafaieh

26 ON GRASS AND PAVING STONES: PUBLIC ARENAS AS CONTESTED GROUNDS Rodrigo Pérez de Arce Antoncich

56 SOUTH SIDE LAND NARRATIVES: THE LOST HISTORIES AND HIDDEN JOYS OF BLACK CHICAGO Toni L. Griffin

32 THE PERPETUAL STRANGER Elijah Anderson

64 PROTESTING IN TIMES OF SOCIAL DISTANCE Tali Hatuka

with photographs by Mel D. Cole

38 OWNER, OCCUPIER, INTRUDER: THE FIGHT FOR PUBLIC LANDS John Dean Davis

SPACES 74

BEYOND PLACING AND DISTANCING: PUBLIC SPACES FOR INCLUSIVE CITIES Ali Madanipour

80 WHOSE SPACE IS IT? Frida Escobedo & Sala Elise Patterson 84 LATINIDAD AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF A NEW PUBLIC IN PENNSYLVIANIA A. K. Sandoval-Strausz with photographs by Michael T. Davis

Magazine SCALES 94 AS OF RIGHT: FIRST NATIONS RECLAIM THE CITY Daniel D’Oca, Khelsilem, Toby Baker, Gil Kelley & Andrea Reimer

49 CALL & RESPONSE

104 JANE JACOBS, JEFF BEZOS, AND THE POLARIZED CITY Sharon Zukin

146 “WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PUBLIC SPACE WORTH PRESERVING NOW?” With Margaret Crawford, John R. Stilgoe, Christopher Hawthorne, Alejandro Echeverri, Ethan Carr, Sara Jensen Carr, George E. Thomas & Susan N. Snyder, Alex Krieger, Silvia Benedito, Nicole Lambrou, Lizabeth Cohen

108 THE CRISIS OF AMERICAN PUBLIC HEALTH Abraar Karan, Diane E. Davis & Anita Berrizbeitia

154 INDEX

116 RETHINKING URBAN ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE: WHO BENEFITS FROM GREEN CITIES? Isabelle Anguelovski

SUBJECTS 124 DESIGNING FOR PUBLIC TRUST: FROM BOUNDED RATIONALITY TO UNBOUNDED POSSIBILITIES Jia Lok Pratt & Emmanuel Pratt 130 FOR THE PEOPLE, WITH THE PEOPLE,

BY THE PEOPLE Krzysztof Wodiczko, Malkit Shoshan & Alex Anderson 138 WHO IS THE PUBLIC FOR WHOM WE DESIGN? AND WHO ARE WE TO DESIGN FOR SUCH A PUBLIC? Thaïsa Way

10

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

Editors’ Letter: Whither the Public?

Anita Berrizbeitia & Diane E. Davis

This issue of Harvard Design Magazine was born out of deep concerns for the status of our shared commonwealth in the wake of the multiple political controversies and social crises of the past two decades. As educators, scholars, and practitioners in a school focused on the design of the built environment—through urban design, planning, landscape architecture, and architecture—we are motivated by the very idea of the public. We are inspired by what it enables in the lives of individuals and their communities; by the spaces, places, and the objects it provokes and produces; by the systems and ecosystems from which it emanates; by the fights it arouses; by the aspirations it seeds in the imagination; and by the loss we collectively feel when it comes under threat. With this issue we want readers to think about the territoriality, the physicality, and the materiality of the public, and to grasp and comprehend where it is and where it is not in today’s deeply divided world.

As a concept, “public” is easy to understand but not easy to define. In one sense, it is everywhere: public streets, public health, public parks, public transportation, public libraries, public schools, public security. Yet broad accessibility and availability of all things necessary for basic sustenance—medicine, education, connectivity, opportunity, shelter, clean air, and water—require sustained effort, processes, and politics. We must think about publics in the same way. If we seek to construct conditions that enable a better and more equitable life for all, producing a vibrant public realm is essential. Spaces, institutions, objects, grounded matter, private citizens, elected officials, the biological and ecological functions of the earth’s systems—including human and non-human life of all types—are part of that mission. And indeed, the plural form we’re using in the title of this issue is a reminder: publics is spatial and material, it is the plurality of people, it is democracy, it is politics, it is the action of debate, it is the biological and the manufactured, it is manifested everywhere—it is never only one thing.

Even as we see the public everywhere, we also see evidence of the idea of a public being threatened, challenged, and contested. In a world of increasing polarization and boundary-drawing manifest at multiple scales, what has happened to the notion of the public? Is there evidence that collective understanding is changing in terms of who belongs in our neighborhoods, cities, regions, and nations? And to what extent have the planning and design professions enabled or constrained any such transformations, either by accommodating greater exclusivity, and perhaps even narrowing venues for public engagement, or by proactively challenging such trends?

In this issue of Harvard Design Magazine we address “the status of the public” in political and social discourse, in design thinking and practice, and in the built environment itself. We ask leading public intellectuals, scholars, and practitioners in architecture, urban planning, landscape architecture, as well as in the social sciences and humanities, to join us in pondering the fate of the public in a world where xenophobic thinking and challenges to collective responsibility are becoming ever more dominant. We are interested in both analytical debate and propositional thinking, as well as in materialist inquiries into the empirical conditions that sustain a concern with the public.

11

A few key themes flow through the essays, interviews, images, and responses, regardless of the context or the scale of the place. The first and perhaps most relevant for the design fields is that ideas regarding the public need expression in physical space. Without that presence, they have limited or no traction. The second is that public spaces typically emerge through contestation and even conflict, and as such they are acts of will. Just because something is considered to be public does not guarantee it will always stay public. The struggle to create and strengthen the public realm is alive and ongoing, and we have tried to capture a wide range of approaches.

This is where scale fits in. Public space is inherently a space that belongs to everyone, but such pluralistic spaces can be miniscule or expansive, circumscribed or vast, whether territorialized in the form of a street, plaza, park, or national conservation land. To create a public good—at any scale—is an intentional act that needs oversight and enduring protection in the form of governance or collective action.

This is especially the case in capitalist societies where the tensions between private ownership and public stewardship are common, and where economic development frequently fuels efforts to privatize spaces long held or believed to be public.

A third theme that emerges in this issue is that in the Anthropocene, society appears to be moving toward greater diversity in the types of public spaces that are desired, required, or at threat of disappearance. We are reaching beyond traditional forms of the public realm visible in the design of city spaces to those defined by collective access to trees, soil, and the air. In the context of severe and widespread environmental degradation, possibilities for a public can be realized in the ecological and the biological. Protecting elements that are essential to supporting the metabolic functions of all life forms produces new kinds of spaces, landscapes, and governance models through which to expand the realm of what constitutes the public.

At the same time, the climate crisis has exacerbated environmental inequities in the public realm itself. Green spaces are seen by many as necessary for thermal control, environmental justice, and our guaranteed collective future as a planet. Yet even as greening can counter excessive heat in neighborhoods, it also causes gentrification, displacement, marginalization of peoples, and fissures. Different populations will not always agree on which public must be prioritized, and race, class, ethnicity, and other identity matrices will play a fundamental role in the struggles over whose view of the public good should prevail.

All this suggests that defining—or realizing—a public is not about consensus; it is about debate and the necessity of interrogation, reflection, and ongoing struggle.

We hope this magazine inspires you to join in this endeavor. We ask you to read these pages with an eye to the materiality and creativity of design, with an appreciation for the struggles involved in guaranteeing publics, and with compassion and solidarity for those who feel outrage when publics are circumvented or denied.

ARTIFACTS Bonnie Honig, Matthew Allen, Fran Edgerley, Louis Schulz, Rodrigo Pérez de Arce Antoncich, Elijah Anderson, John Dean Davis

BONNIE HONIG

FIND A STREETLIGHT, STEP OUT OF THE SHADE

Jim Shaw, Trump Smear #1, 2018. Acrylic on plywood, 134.6 x 142.2 x 5.1 cm (53 x 56 x 2 in).

Artifacts

Some rare people are strong enough to survive assaults on common sense by relying on their moral compass or sense of justice. But most people, especially in dark times, need reality checks from trusted others with differing perspectives on a shared world. Political and institutional spaces, the publics they convene, architecture, art, trusted media, streetlights, and public signage, all play a vital role in holding our shared world together and orienting us in it. Hannah Arendt, the political theorist who survived the destruc­­­­­­tion of the shared world as the Nazis rose to power in her native Germany, highlighted the importance of such worldly things to what she called “the world of appearances.” She understood the fragility of the world and the need to care for it, and for each other.

For those who gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 to chant “Jews will not replace us” and three years later in Washington to shout “Stop the steal” after Trump lost his 2020 bid for reelection, the reward of the Trump years was the chance to claim a place in the world. They wanted to appear in public, to be on mainstream TV and Twitter and not just on 4chan, Newsmax, or Parler. This meant moving out of the shadowy world of paranoid politics where only the select few are in the know (where “Q” is real, the Russia investigation is a hoax, and Trump won reelection). But the real world, with its plurality of opinion, clashing perspectives, and demographic diversity, is intolerable to the paranoid mind. Paranoia requires a single story, not many, and determinate causation, not the contingency that Hannah Arendt saw as characteristic of political life. Contingency is a threat to the knowingness in which the paranoid take particular pride.1

Knowingness (in which everything is known and nothing is a surprise) and its double, nihilism (in which nothing can really be known anyway so why bother?), are the twin offspring of shock politics.

Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine details what I call “the shock politics two-step,” in which whole populations, or detainees subjected to torture, are first deprived of sensorial stimulation (for a population, communications are shut down; for a detainee, a hood is placed over the head) and then, later, once their sensory guard is down, subjected to overstimulation (the public is bombarded with propagandist messaging; the detainee is subjected to bright lighting and deafeningly loud music). During deprivation, the victim may actually come to crave any stimulation, regardless of whether pleasurable or painful; anything to offer some point of orientation in the dark or the silence.2

Trump’s shock politics followed the contours of the shock two-step. First, American citizens and residents were deprived of points of shared orientation: the federal government, post office, public lands, and public education were weakened with the stated aim of dismantling them.

Then, we were subjected to too much stimulation, as Trump followed Steve

Bannon’s formula, to “flood the zone with shit.” The flood creates a sensory overload that makes it difficult to know or care about what is happening. We may suddenly find we are debating whether the violent January 6th attack on the US Capitol might not have been just some tourists passing through. The point in shock politics is not to win the argument but to make people lose faith in the power of argument. When everything feels off-kilter, people throw their hands up in a gesture of exhaustion that might look like surrender.

At his inauguration in 2017, Trump spoke of “American carnage” in such dire terms that George Bush, who was in attendance, was heard to say afterward: “That was some weird shit.” The speech’s departure from the usual bromides of inaugural address is now said to be one of the first indications that this presidency would not even pretend to be like others.

The lies about crowd size were the second worrying signal. Initially thought to evidence the new president’s incapacity to tolerate loss or insult, this was in fact an early test of the public’s capacity to tolerate disinformation and of the willingness of politicians and federal government employees to facilitate its spread. The weird speech and the strange lie (the National Park Service’s own images contradicted Trump’s claims about crowd size) were preceded by another inauguration incident that was also an augur of things to come: the replacement of an icon with a crony, a hallmark shock politics move.

Charlie Brotman, was fired by email shortly before the Trump inauguration.

Brotman, 89 years old at the time, had been announcing the inauguration parade since the second inaugural of President Eisenhower in 1957 but, in 2017, Steve Ray, a Trump loyalist and broadcaster, was put in Brotman’s place. Network and cable news noted the unkindness of the move.

Even Ray had to admit something was wrong, saying, “You can’t just let a man go after all this time.” As Ray himself said, Brotman was “an icon here in D.C.”3 To thrust him aside was to destroy a point of orientation in a shared world.

The shock two-step is familiar to feminists who study the (in)delicacies of patriarchy. Naomi Klein’s focus is on the use of shock in “disaster capitalism,” but the techniques she traces are traits of disaster patriarchy too. In the classic 1944 movie Gaslight, which gave us the term “gaslighting,” Paula is made nearly mad by her new husband, Gregory, who has designs on her fortune. His method is the shock two-step. He imprisons Paula in her own home, depriving her of worldly orientation, and saturates her senses with his talk and his moods.

She doesn’t fully understand what is happening, but she yearns to go out and be among others, perhaps sensing that may help. She is right and her husband knows it. Two outings end abruptly, with Gregory returning Paula quickly to the isolation of the household where he is more fully in charge.

15

Paula comes to doubt the evidence of her own senses, the very ones on which John Locke, the 17th-century empiricist, argued in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, we must rely for certain knowledge.4 Sensory knowledge, however, depends on more than the senses: its postulates are a plural and diverse public where reality-checking is routine, where we can see ourselves through the eyes of plural others and ask, as we do from time to time, whether they see what we see. Without this, individual sense perception cannot alone provide certainty. That is why, Arendt argued, the five senses of the empiricists depend on a sixth sense that escapes them, what she called the common sense. It is actually, she said, “by virtue of common sense that the other sense perceptions are known to disclose reality and are not merely felt as irritations of our nerves or resistance sensations of our bodies.”5

When Locke argued that we must rely only on direct sensory experience, he did not anticipate the refrains of the Trump years: “Don’t trust what you see or hear!” and “fake news!” Locke thought it enough to warn we should take in sensory data only through what he called “the proper inlet” and ward off confusion by using words in the right ways. But conspiracies and alternative realities now seem to slip extrasensorially through the transom of consciousness, bypassing Lockean and Arendtian defenses.

Trump is not the first president to seek to displace the so-called “realitybased community” with his own world of what Kellyanne Conway called “alternative facts.” Back in 2004, journalist Ron Suskind reported that an aide to President Bush had said to him that he [Suskind] was in the “reality-based community,” which “believe[s] that solutions emerge from [the] judicious study of discernible reality.” Suskind was shocked: he “nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism.”

Perhaps he had Locke in mind. But the aide interrupted him: “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will— we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”6

We’re an empire now are words that could have crossed Locke’s lips, too.

Perhaps they did. He wrote as England’s growing empire established colonial settlements and a system of plantations in the West Indies and the American colonies.7 Empiricism’s entanglement with empire comes up in Locke’s Essay when he says that pineapple—a fruit only recently imported to England from Barbados—has a taste or “relish” that can only be known from direct sensory experience. Don’t believe travelers’ reports, Locke warned; only tasting is believing.

Locke does not ask, however, whether that

Inauguration of Barack Obama, 44th president, National Mall, Washington, DC, January 20, 2009.

Inauguration of Donald Trump, 45th president, National Mall, Washington, DC, January 20, 2017.

“DISASTER CAPITALISM”

“AMERICAN CARNAGE”

“FLOOD THE ZONE WITH SHIT”

“ALTERNATIVE FACTS”

“DON’T TRUST WHAT YOU SEE AND HEAR!”

“FAKE NEWS!”

18 Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

7

6

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 208-9.

Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004.

In the 1670s, Locke was secretary and then treasurer for the Council of Trade and Plantations which managed the English colonial plantations, and in the 1690s he served on the Board of Trade. On the brutalities in Barbados and then Carolina, see Elisabeth Anker, Ugly Freedoms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022). On Locke’s implication in American slavery as he theorized liberty, see David Armitage, who writes: “The Fundamental Constitutions [of Carolina] were the only printed work with which Locke’s name could be associated before the annus mirabilis of 1689-90, when both the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and the Two Treatises of Government first appeared in 5

Headline: Dire Straits, “Romeo and Juliet,” written by Mark Knopfler, recorded 1980, Warner Bros. Records BSK 3480, 1980, track 2 on Making Movies, 12-inch LP. 1 On paranoid politics, see Noga Rotem, “World-Craving: Rahel Varnhagen, Daniel Paul Schreber, and the Strange Promise of Paranoia,” Political Theory (August 2019): 192-217.

2 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Knopf, 2007). For my reading of Klein and a more general account of Trump’s shock politics, see Bonnie Honig, Shell Shocked: Feminist Criticism After Trump (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021).

3 Melissa Mahtani, “Trump Inauguration Announcer: I didn’t buy my way into position,” CNN Politics, January 16, 2017.

4 John Locke, Essay on Human Understanding, Book III (South Yarra, AU: Leopold Classic Library, 2016).

Can’t find a streetlight? Be one, put one up, or work to elect a new mayor who will lead on such things. But that cannot be the end of the story. Once the lamp is up and the way is lit, it is still up to us to step out of the shade. There is always shade.

And there is always more to do: bulbs need changing, posts need repainting, tree branches need trimming. If we care for the world with such ordinary (and sometimes extraordinary) acts of maintenance, the world will repay the kindness by offering the illumination, orientation, and shelter we need to advance democratic equality for all.

NOTES

acquired taste might be the sweet taste of acquisition; nor does he ask whether the senses to be trusted were trustworthy because they belonged to those who at that moment were finding ways to remake reality, converting Indigenous lands into brutal plantations for profit.

If empiricism is an instrument of empire, and Enlightenment its alibi, then Suskind’s murmur, which seems embarrassed, makes sense; even if inadvertently so. But why did he also nod?

American politics have always been shadowed by conspiracies that seek the nod of acquiescence. Their real challenge to democracy lies not only in their specific (usually racist, sexist, xenophobic, or anti-Semitic) programs, but in their general aim to replace democratic aspiration with acquiescence to domination and control. The challenge for democratic politics is to resist such efforts by building a shared world worth caring for, compassed by common sense.

After a rupture, or in its wake, the primary task is to reinstitute a democratic common sense, which presupposes and requires the shared experience of public things.8 It can start with something as simple as streetlights, which have their own enlightenment to offer. Here are two small examples.

Gaslight has been much commented upon but it is seldom noted that the evil husband is not the only gaslighter in the film. The film opens with a public servant lighting the streetlights as darkness falls.

This good gaslighter works in the public streets and is part of the infrastructure that supports a community with common sense, living in one world, together. He lights the way. The streetlights and the man who lights them epitomize what shock politics are out to destroy.

In the fall of 2020, the wisdom of the good gaslighter popped up in a surprising place: a woman who worked as the town hall cleaner in a small city in Russia was unexpectedly elected mayor. The corrupt mayor up for reelection had put her name on the ballot to give the false appearance of electoral choice. And she won! Asked what would be her first order of business, she joked that first she had to find a new cleaner for the town hall. But then she said, her second priority would be to bring streetlights to the village. “That,” she said, “is something people have long been asking for.”

In this small story which, like all such stories, may or may not end happily, we have a kind of real-world parable of an Arendtian politics of public things.

Streetlights here illuminate government responsiveness to the people, while serving as daily reminders of the contingency of politics in which an election can surprise a man who believed he was in charge. A woman he thought of as nothing can be elected to a public office he treated as his own personal property.9 It is a parable of the politics of responsiveness, contingency, and equality. It lays the groundwork for a new common sense in which a cleaner, or anyone, can govern.10

19 print.” “John Locke, Carolina and the Two Treatises of Government,” Political Theory 32, no. 5 (October 2004): 602-27.

8 For the details of this argument, see Bonnie Honig, Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017).

9 Andrew E. Kramer, “She Used to Clean City Hall. Now, She Runs It.,” New York Times, October 24, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/24/world/ europe/russia-election-mayor.html.

10 As in C.L.R. James, “Every Cook Can Govern,” in A New Notion: Two Works

by C.L.R. James, ed. Noel Ignatiev (Oakland: The Charles H. Kerr Library and PM Press, 2010).

Artifacts

ASSEMBLE Fran Edgerley, Louis Schulz & Matthew Allen

Assemble is elusive in a way that parallels a certain vagueness in the concept of the “public.” At first glance everything makes sense: Assemble—with 16 partners, 7 employees, and a minimal hierarchical structure—is a multidisciplinary collective that specializes in making projects with and for communities. Scratch the surface of their projects, however, and Assemble becomes more enigmatic.

They are public architects—architects that have the public as their primary client. And the public is—what exactly? Local residents?

The sum of all communities? The shared values and beliefs of a nation? A codeword for government funding sources? In London, where Assemble practices, what could possibly give coherence to such a sweeping term?

Assemble’s Fran Edgerley and Louis Schulz discuss organization and design—and their connection to the communities they partner with. By enacting a method of design appropriate to a shared life, Assemble is a model of how to productively conflate the spheres of the broad public and the intimate collective in the contemporary global city.

Artifacts

MATTHEW ALLEN

FRAN EDGERLEY

Do you use the term “public” as you’re working on projects? Or do other terms come to mind?

At the very beginning, when we didn’t really have clients, we talked a lot about the public. Then later when we did have clients, the way we tried to think about it was that the project wasn’t for the local authority, or the arts institution, it was for the public.

LOUIS SCHULZ

FRAN

MATTHEW

21

I feel like people in the industry use the word “community.”

“Public” is more of a technical term, like “being open to the public” or “public transport.”

“Public” is used more in an institutional or civic context. When we’re trying to do projects around a specific place, we tend to talk about communities and plurality rather than the public. We try not to generalize too much.

How have you organized your own workspace—top-down or bottom-up? Do you find that a framework is necessary to bring people together for a common cause? Conversely, how much openness is required for people to feel that they really own a space?

LOUIS

It’s worth saying that Sugarhouse Studios is not all that bottom-up. I suppose this is because we moved from the Yard House site with a lot of the tenants, so we were able to work with them to design the spaces for their purposes. Building just a skeletal framework meant that the tenants could build out their physical spaces themselves—like the walls, for example. They have a sense of ownership because they literally do own it, and they built it themselves.

But we also have quite a permissive atmosphere. There’s not such a strict distinction between the communal and the private spaces as there is in most studio complexes. Normally, the communal spaces are completely sanitized, empty corridor spaces that are there purely to give access to the private spaces.

If no one owns it then you can’t let people make a mess there.

Sugarhouse Studios is not like that. There’s workshop space that’s shared between tenants. There’s corridor access space that’s also used as storage. There’s a larger space for bigger projects that’s also part of the circulation. It’s not as straightforwardly laid out as most places, which means that people are much more likely to run into each other, to see what each other is doing or working on.

It’s not like everyone’s working towards a common goal—it just means that when it comes to craft and manufacturing, people have very specific skills and things they’re good at. When you make that visible to other tenants, it’s a lot easier for them to see how they might be able to work together and to create kind of an economy.

MATTHEW

FRAN

MATTHEW

FRAN

There’s very little that’s fixed or permanent in Glasgow’s Baltic Street Adventure Playground, so I imagine a lot of the work was in setting up processes that bring people together. Are there certain types of play, for example, that are more inclusive?

We did talk about types of play, but this project was more about the children feeling like they have agency and can affect change in their environment—feeling that they know what’s going on in some part of the world, having ideas and conversations about it, having control over it, and feeling that they can take it apart and rebuild it in a different way. I guess it was a response to seeing the impact of top-down masterplanning processes, which can be really thoughtless about the lived experience of local communities. The time frames involved mean so much in the context of people’s lives—they can lead to an entire childhood being surrounded by demolition and disempowering change. Without access to those processes, people can end up losing their community infrastructure—shops and people and services, for example.

Was the history of playgrounds a guide?

We did look at how adventure playgrounds emerged out of the Second World War, with adults observing kids playing in bomb sites and making their environment around them. That evolved

22

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

into more protected spaces where kids could build in more supervised ways. Then slowly over time they ossified, became more sanitized and institutionalized, and more dependent on funding from councils or grants. It’s a very precarious revenue model and so vulnerable to state budget cuts.

The learning for us really came from trying to think more deeply about what we were there for as designers. If you’re creating a space with the ambition of generating a relationship where people have agency over the space, how do you do that?

Eventually we came to the answer of trying to do the bare minimum—securing the land, providing basic infrastructure and safety—and then most of the work was done around knowledge building, organizational support, relational staff work, and bringing staff to a bunch of playgrounds where the kids really were constructing things. It’s difficult to explain how powerful it is to be in a child-led space. You can tell the story and people can imagine it, but it’s very different to be in a place where you can witness that actually happening. We have a lot of respect for the people who pursue those kinds of spaces all over the world.

MATTHEW

LOUIS

FRAN

MATTHEW

LOUIS

FRAN

The Granby Four Streets project in Liverpool is unusual in a few ways—for instance, it’s clear that there was a lot of passion on the part of the clients, and they’re not really the typical kind of client. Did Assemble end up taking on unusual roles, like acting as activists or facilitators or organizers?

You’re right to point out the involvement of the client—the Community Land Trust—because they were absolutely crucial. It was really their project. What we needed to give initially was a kind of technical legitimacy to what they wanted to do, which was to reoccupy their streets after they had won the fight to save the houses from demolition. Previously, the council and all the developers who had looked at that area had said, “You can’t save the buildings. It’s not economically viable. You have to demolish them.” We were able to put together a masterplan that made the argument about how there could be a different approach. So I guess it did have the form of a campaign, in a sense.

I’d say we came in as a kind of technical service provider initially.

We didn’t do anything that’s recognizably activist. They had done all the work. They’d done all the protesting, they’d done all the actions, they’d done all of the stuff on the street. They maintained and protected their position not always because of the fight that they had fought but also due to luck. It was a series of fortuitous events. A guy who wanted to invest in developing different forms of social housing got in touch with them, then he got in touch with us, then we got in touch with the CLT, and over time the relationship evolved from being a consultant developing a masterplan to being co-authors of the project. Plus long-term friendships came out of it.

Looking at the details of the houses on Cairns Street, I wonder how it was designed. Was it a sort of collaborative art project with the people who were living there?

I don’t think we’ve ever really seen it as an art project. To me it’s a housing project. The way it’s set up with the Community Land Trust means that it’s really just a great housing project—houses that are going to be affordable in perpetuity. I guess there are aspects of it that are, I don’t know, a little bit more arty than most architects, like the fireplaces. . . .

I think it depends who you ask. Definitely for some of the people who live there. . . like one of the women we were working very closely with, for her, it is an art project, partly because of her politics around what art is, how it should be done, and what it should be for. I don’t know if I’d call it art but that’s just because I think I’m scarred by past interactions with the art world. For me, it’s a relational practice that operates at many different levels. Sometimes it’s producing architectural design projects or the products we make. Sometimes it’s the personal connections that can produce opportunities to make a business or to build new relationships. I think if I had to pick a word, I’d probably call it design. I guess we probably shouldn’t feel so bad about art, but—

Artifacts

Assemble, Blackhorse Workshop, London, 2014.

LOUIS

MATTHEW

FRAN

LOUIS

FRAN

MATTHEW

23

Assemble with Material Institute and Duval Timothy, Tufting Gun Tapestries, exhibition, Chicago Architecture Biennial, 2019.

—but art’s trying to claim it. Something that’s a grassroots political campaign for housing for people on low and middle incomes has now been claimed by some kind of art establishment. Do you know what I mean? To me it doesn’t sit well.

It’s clear that you’re very interested in plurality—in not imposing a singular vision. How do you approach exhibitions and the demands of curation?

Historically our attitude to the access we’ve had to art and cultural spaces is to try and use the platform to talk about the things that we’re doing elsewhere in the world. For the exhibition Ways of Listening, we tried to give all those people who really make the projects happen a space to have a voice. Lots of people were excited to be able to exhibit work, and it was really cool to see the mixture of stuff that came out of those communities.

One example is the exhibition that we did in Chicago as part of the Biennial. We used that as an opportunity to do an exhibition of work by students at the fashion college that we had helped set up in New Orleans. It was about passing on that opportunity to them.

We try to open up the public art and culture spaces we have access to for other people who are involved in the projects—and actually the people who are the projects. We do that through the architectural spaces that we create as well. For instance, House of Annetta, where Louis and I are now, is a different kind of platform. It doesn’t work in the pictorial representational way of a gallery, but it’s a platform for people to amplify work that they’re already doing.

At London’s Blackhorse Workshop, I’m struck by how a sense of collective coherence comes from a graphical use of objects. Is creating a visual identity for a project something you strive for?

Or do you tend to allow what a project looks like to emerge out of ongoing activities?

24

LOUIS

MATTHEW LOUIS

FRAN

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

There’s something about a workshop, a space for making, an industrial space. . . . There’s a movement of material, a movement of things. There’s stuff everywhere. There’s dust, there’s noise. It can never be like a gallery where all of that stuff is shielded and then the day that it opens, everything is just clean and serene. These kind of spaces are always messy. I think that creates a sense of permissiveness.

The adventure playground has the same kind of vibe.

There’s nothing formal about it. It doesn’t look like a clear object. There’s an old piece of pipe and then a shopping trolley upside down and then a plank of wood that’s balanced awkwardly on top. . . . That kind of flow of objects really is an important part of these projects.

It’s the same with Granby, too, with the benches and planters that people put out on the street because the council wasn’t looking after the area. That kind of thing is obviously not done by the council—they would never put out a planter made of tires. Immediately it symbolizes the permission that the local residents have to do that. As soon as you walk there, you can see that this is not a normal place—it’s a place where people have ownership over the streets.

What are the models for practice that you look at?

There’s something of a 1970s-style utopian collectivist kind of thing. We’ve looked at specific groups, like the Matrix Feminist Design Cooperative. The cooperative movement of that era is definitely an inspiration.

But we kind of revel in the confusion. Sometimes we say, “But people don’t understand and that means we’re not getting the right work” or “People are asking us to do the wrong things” or “That’s why people don’t pay us enough money.” But then also we’re like, “Yeah, but it’s nice to be anonymous and just to have this thing with you.”

Assemble, The Cineroleum, street elevation, London, 2010.

Artifacts

LOUIS

FRAN

LOUIS

MATTHEW

LOUIS

FRAN

LOUIS

25

We’re constantly changing as well. We set up a new company structure in 2017 and that already feels like ages ago, and we’re talking about changing it. What it means to be a collective—the machinations and administration of it—is something that we’re constantly working on.

We’re kind of like a horoscope: people can see what they need or find what they want. There’s so many of us, and we want slightly different things, so we’ve ended up with something that’s an amalgamation or approximation—that’s a bit vague. We don’t hide it but— It’s confusing. We’re very thorough with all of the details of policies and things like that, but if you just see it at a high level, you end up asking yourself more and more questions about how it works.

Do you end up censoring or overly curating yourselves for the public sphere?

Obviously, yeah, I’m going to want to say something that I feel like the rest of the group is going to be comfortable with me saying. There’s always going to be parts of the organization that are too deep inside the sausage factory—not necessarily something you want to have on display.

We used to be much more rigorous and careful about that type of thing because we were only doing one or two things at a time.

Now we’re all doing lots of things so there just isn’t the time.

Also the way we manage our projects now, the people who are working on a project are the ones who write about it. And actually, because everyone is doing a distributed set of projects, no one is in a position to say, “I don’t think you should talk about it like that.”

It’s always clear that we’re all just one voice within the larger group.

Assemble, The Cineroleum, front elevation, curtain raised, London, 2010.

On Grass and Paving Stones: Public Arenas as Contested Grounds

Rodrigo Pérez de Arce Antoncich

Artifacts

1 To confound matters, there are two renderings of the square from that time: in an 1836 lithograph by French naturalist Claudio Gay, the single specimen is described as a palm.

Meanwhile, the Bavarian painter Johann Moritz Rugendas depicts it as a shady tree in his 1839 oil painting. As a noted naturalist, Gay was certainly attentive to the plant species, but Rugendas is usually credited with a faithful depiction of reality—both artists shaped our perception of early 19th-century Chile. The lithograph is a second-hand rendering, however: it’s possible that someone in a remote workshop substituted the shady tree for the palm.

2 See, for example, Barcelona’s and Paris’s current municipal plans to turn road space into gardens, increase the urban forestry, and substitute hard paving for draining ones.

3 The Spanish language conveys this idea in a clearer way: emplazar (to fix or establish something on the ground) and desplazar (to cast away, to remove).

4 Robin Evans’s argument about the relationship of spatial arrays in bourgeois interiors to social agendas can be easily transferred to the public sphere. See Robin Evans, “The Developed Surface, an Enquiry into the Brief Life of an Eighteenth-Century Drawing Technique,” in Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (London: AA Publications, 1997), 194-231.

5 Guarda lists 14 squares—Lima, Cuzco, Guamanga, Arequipa, Sucre, Quito, Santiago, Mexico City, Nueva Guatemala, Santa Fe Bogota, Caracas, Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Montevideo—that were all barren in their colonial guise and all planted following independence. See: Gabriel Guarda, “En torno a las plazas mayores” in Congreso internacional de historia de América (Buenos Aires: Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1982).

6 I have drawn this narrative from The Square, news reports, and personal site memories.

Downtown Cairo and Santiago share a certain predominance of robust, stripped neoclassical buildings.

7 In May 2021, Tahrir Square was reportedly renovated into “‘Egypt’s new open museum’ featuring a sphinx, a 17-meter-tall obelisk, and ‘pharaonic era plants’ such as date trees, olives, fig and carob trees, in addition to papyrus.” As reported in https://www.elbalad. news. Accessed May 2, 2021.

27

A 19th-century lithograph shows a single palm tree rising in the middle of the main square in Andacollo, a mining village tucked in northern Chile’s hilly and barren landscape. This haunting image can be read either as a celebration of the substitution of statuary for vegetation, or as the minimal expression of the garden square.

Either way, it portrays a liminal condition of the public arena, just one step away from the empty stage.1 Almost two centuries later, the negotiation between the “mineral” (meaning hard paved surfaces and the like) and the “green” identities of public squares (and, by extension, all public arenas) continues unabated. Moreover, it has taken on a sense of urgency in the face of widespread ecological anxieties and the current reevaluation of public space following worldwide upheavals and the pandemic.2

The distinctive meanings attached to emplacing (putting in position) and displacing (a form of banishment),3 suggest centrifugal forces of attraction and centripetal ones of dispersion, as if the square acts simultaneously as magnet and repellent. Material changes that so affect the public domain inevitably touch those “interactions of things visual to things social” that Robin Evans scrutinized in relation to late 18th-century English domestic interiors.4 Over time, many squares’ monuments, furniture, trees, kiosks, shrubs, lawns, ponds, and hard paving have played a game of musical chairs, being added and subtracted in the wake of evolving political, social, and aesthetic agendas. The current removal of statuary as prompted by political upheavals in countries including Colombia, the United States, Britain, and Chile seems to follow similar patterns.

The case of the Latin American principal squares is notorious: over the course of the 19th century, gardens were laid over their formerly barren expanses, as if responding to a collective horror vacui. Their meandering paths embraced the choreography of the stroller, while also inducing unprecedented cadences. In these layouts, the arabesque made an entry, so to speak, into the lexicon of public walks, as a singular armature of curvilinear elements in contrast to the relentless gridded matrix of streets. Exotic flora supplied color, texture, and shade, with the music kiosk (a pavilion of Ottoman lineage) adding an aural dimension and the streetlights an atmospheric one.5 Mexico City’s Zócalo is a spectacular case, but Cuzco, Lima, Santiago, and Buenos Aires followed similar trends. Santiago’s arabesque is intriguing in how it counterpoints the grid: it elongates the walks where the grid shortens them, it unveils changing prospects where the grid just reiterates the views, it complicates where the grid simplifies.

Over time, foliage filled up the empty areas. By privileging the leisurely strollers—inevitably, a select group of well-heeled neighbors—these changes displaced a cohort of everyday, ceremonial, and ludic activities. The management of the lawns and the herbaceous stratum helped rearticulate the public access, restricting it to the pathways, with planting often deployed as deterrent. With their dual purpose of grounds to be used and ornaments to be kept away from, lawns can readily conceal more complex levels of behavioral management.

Even today, gardens and grass can be used to assert control. Jehane Noujaim’s 2013 documentary, The Square, gives an account of the dramatic events that unfolded in Cairo’s iconic Tahrir Square during the Egyptian uprising of 2011, for example.6 With its unequal geometric armature, the vast roundabout—and its converging avenues—were overwhelmed by protesting crowds, who gradually turned it into a massive campsite. The government reacted to the protest with brutal repression. They also resorted to subtler tactics: during a lull in the action, teams of gardeners swiftly unrolled a lawn and planted flower beds over the roundabout. Planting was a means to obliterate the protest while symbolically turning the arena into an object of contemplation. The Square captures a dazzled citizen who claims his right to protest, while pledging not to challenge beautification. According to the film, the strategy succeeded in undermining the protest. Ornament subverted action. Such a ploy had a greater chance of going unchallenged than barriers, for example. In a city so deprived of gardens, who could defy such “green” embellishment? Even if other repressive measures were exerted, the notion of the garden supplanting the arena of public dissent stands as a significant one.7

But laying a lawn over a square may also lead to the opposite results, as happened in Madrid’s 129 × 94-meter Plaza Mayor, a space that epitomizes the concept of a public salon. In autumn 2017, after 81 years of having no plantings, a 70-meter round lawn was unrolled over its paving. The current arrangement is just the latest in a 400-year series of adjustments. The rectangular void of the plaza cuts a formal

SpY, CESPED, 400th Anniversary of Madrid’s Plaza Mayor, Madrid, Spain, 2017.

Caption to the image goes here.

30

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

clearing within an urban texture that is seemingly fashioned by accident. The famous Teixeira axonometric view from 1656 shows the square with an irregular cornice line and a discontinuous perimeter, breached by seven approaching streets. A chronology reveals distinct moments and changes in the plaza’s design over the centuries.8

In the 16th century, the square was periodically used for bullfights and other manners of public entertainment. In 1790, in the aftermath of a fire, Juan de Villanueva lowered the building heights, regularizing the cornice line, while fully enclosing the perimeter, with monumental archways spanning the entry points. By 1843, a public garden was laid on an elliptical plan. Generously furnished with trees, promenades, and furniture, it was an island of greenery. Around the edges, a tramway turned the area into a transport hub. The wide and open landscaping fit in with the 19th-century fashion and, like in the Latin American squares, planting was conspicuous, but walking over it was off limits.9 Also during the mid-19th century, the 1616 Philip III equestrian statue was installed in the plaza’s geometric core, where it still stands. But by 1936, architect Fernando García Mercadal had banished all plants and objects—as in Mexico City’s Zócalo—except for the statue, and had put down edge-to-edge paving of gray, sand, and terra-cotta ashlars. Later, Plaza Mayor was fully pedestrianized, with parking spaces fitted in its undercroft. Spreading around the edges, café tables and umbrellas bring the picture to date.

When seen from the air, one notices how skillful is the plaza’s present configuration, with the perimeter negotiating irregular plots, and how, in order to strengthen its cohesion, the single pitched roof that projects over the square configures a uniform bevelled frame. A closer look reveals some false attics. However, when looking upward from inside the plaza, the sharp-edged rectangle leaves no room for picturesque distractions.

To mark the square’s 400th anniversary, this unyielding courtyard was the site for Cesped (“lawn”), SpY’s installation of a circular lawn in the autumn of 2017.10 SpY claimed to be echoing the earlier garden, but the design was far removed in concept, outline, and spatial qualities from its predecessor. With abstract, geometric, flat, and uniform textures, the lawn beckoned to the public, breaching the traditional notion of the garden as off limits. People instinctively used it for recreation and relaxation.11 Such détournement recalls Aldo van Eyck’s ruminations about snowfalls turning civic places into impromptu playgrounds: in today’s leisure society, grass induces relaxed moods—and selfies. The story could have ended here, but Madrid’s mayor has declared her intention of greening the square for environmental reasons.

As in Cairo, Santiago’s Plaza Baquedano has been the epicenter of serious upheavals. The setting—which is somewhat similar to Tahrir Square—combines an imposing formality with a prosaic traffic roundabout. Performing as an urban threshold and articulating disparate social districts, it attracts assorted rallies: soccer fans periodically adopt it as a gathering spot, for example. While its composition lacks the sophistication expected from its beaux arts lineage, it benefits from its prospects of the Andes. Until recently, an equestrian statue stood in its center, with local hero Baquedano facing due west toward downtown. Like Tahrir Square, it would have been criticized by Camillo Sitte for its loose spatial array and for the placement of the sculpture right in the middle of the plaza, which robs visitors of the privileged viewpoint.

In October 2019, a series of events unleashed a massive uprising and serious riots. Rage was mixed with a festive mood when more than a million people trampled over the parterres, filling the space. Filmed from above, an oceanic flow of bodies in movement was shown in real time. The equestrian statue, covered under layers of graffiti and loose drapes, was confirmed as the symbolic focus. The display of heraldry in the form of flags, banners, and icons charged the space. Events turned more dramatic, to the point where the very stability of the political system was brought into question, until an emergency formula for a new constitution somewhat defused the accumulated anger.

At daybreak, an organized collective unrolled a white cloak over the square, entirely covering its oval. The white symbolized peace and the end of violence. And the blankness evoked a primeval calm, a ground zero of opportunity laid over the ground zero of contestation. While the Christo-like installation was soon cleared away, what remains is the uncertainty about the future shape—and character—of this iconic space, rechristened Plaza Dignidad (Dignity Square) by the protestors.

Calls for it to be used as a people’s arena for mass rallies will surely confront alternative ones for extensive greenery. And both concepts will run up against the state’s concerns about law and order.

8 This was a prime space for spectacles and civic events. Francisco Rizi’s 1683 Auto-da-Fé shows a large wooden plinth raised well above the ground, flanked by monumental ranks of seats left and right, and with twin sunken courts hollowing out the platform. A white awning is stretched between the facades.

9 See Oscar Jürgens, Ciudades Españolas: su desarrollo y configuración urbanística (Madrid: Ministerio de las Administraciones Públicas, 1992), (original edition, Hamburg, 1926). Jürgens shows the garden and traffic layout of Plaza Mayor in 1926. The equestrian sculpture was brought from the Casa de Campo royal grounds.

10 SpY is anonymous “urban artist” in Madrid.

I would like to acknowledge SpY’s generous collaboration in sharing the image and supporting texts. See: https://www.dropbox. com/s/sebgjj6y8hce7e8/SpY_CESPEDMadrid.pdf?dl=0.

11 This is based on firsthand knowledge of the square and secondhand reports about this event. See, for example, Rubén Bescós’s photographs and video at http://spy-urbanart. com.

Artifacts

31

Plaza Baquedano/Dignidad now stands empty of all greenery and objects. Even the central equestrian sculpture has been removed to prevent further damage. Paving stones—along with the steel rails and traffic control devices deployed over time to manage pedestrian flow—have been turned either into barricades or missiles. This détournement has turned the plaza into a sad, albeit fluid, tabula rasa: a rough and elementary space where street and sidewalks meet without mediations. Neither “mineral” nor “green,” its scarred surfaces await renewal.

There is no doubt that in public plazas around the world, the competition between artifacts, representation, and nature will continue to provoke political, social, aesthetic, and ecological debate in the coming years. With passionate advocates on all sides, the frontiers between the “mineral” and “green” urban identities are now subjected to fiercer public pressures than ever before.

Views of the Plaza de Armas in Santiago, Chile, over five centuries. The top shows the colonial square in the 16th century. By the late 19th century, a dense mass of foliage covered the space. The bottom rendering shows the 1997 plan to reconcile the two traditions by decentering the planted area and reconfiguring the paths.

The Perpetual Stranger

Elijah Anderson

Artifacts

33

What is driving the surge of incidents in which white people have called the police to report Black people who are simply going about their business—hanging out at Starbucks, birding in Central Park, or as was the case recently for a small group of middle-class Black women, talking too loudly on a train in California wine country.

Part of the answer has to do with the ubiquity of cell phones, which facilitate rapid reporting of racial incidents to police and the news media, along with social media, which bring news of the same incidents to the public with nearly equal speed.

Yet there is also a sociological explanation.

White people typically avoid the Black space, but Black people are required to navigate the white space as a condition of their existence.

And many white people have not adjusted to the idea that Black people now appear more often in “white spaces”—especially in places of privilege, power, and prestige—or just in places where they were historically unwelcome. When Black people do appear in such places, and do not show what may be regarded as “proper” deference, some white people want them out. Subconsciously or explicitly, they want to assign or banish them to a place I have called the “iconic ghetto”—to the stereotypical space in which they think all Black people belong, a segregated space for second-class citizens.

A lag between the rapidity of Black progress and white acceptance of that progress is responsible for this impulse. It was exacerbated by the previous presidential administration, which emboldened white racists with its racially charged rhetoric and exclusionist immigration policies.

THE CIVIL RIGHTS REVOLUTION UPENDED LONG-STANDING NOTIONS OF WHAT SPACES COUNTED AS “BLACK,” “WHITE,” AND “COSMOPOLITAN” Over the past half-century, the United States has undergone a profound racial incorporation process that has resulted in the largest Black middle class in history—a population that no longer feels obligated to stay in historically “Black” spaces, or to defer to white people. When members of this Black middle class (and other darker-skinned Americans, too) appear in civil society today, and especially in “white” spaces, they often demand a regard that accords with their rights, obligations, and duties as full citizens of the United States of America.

Yet many white people fundamentally reject that Black people are owed such regard, and indeed often feel that their own rights and social statuses have somehow been abrogated by contemporary racial inclusion. They seek to push back on the recent progress in race relations, and may demand deference on the basis of white skin privilege.

As these whites observe Black people navigating the “white,” privileged spaces of our society, they experience a sense of loss or a certain amount of cognitive dissonance. They may feel an acute need to “correct” what is before their eyes, to square things, or to set the “erroneous” picture right—to reestablish cognitive consonance. White people need to put the Black interlopers in their place, literally and figuratively. Black people must have their behavior corrected, and they must be directed back to “their” neighborhoods and designated social spaces.

Not bold enough to try to accomplish this feat alone, many of these self-appointed color-line monitors seek help from wherever they can find it—from the police, for instance. The “interlopers” may simply want to visit their condo’s swimming pool, or to sit in Starbucks or meet friends there before ordering drinks, something white people typically do without a second thought, or take a nap in a student dorm common room, make a purchase in an upscale store, or jog through a “white” neighborhood.

For the offense of straying—for engaging in ordinary behavior in public and being Black at the same time—they incur the “white gaze” along with a call to the police. And we all know what can happen then. When the police have killed Black people—which seems epidemic—they have almost never been held accountable.

The George Floyd case was an exception.

In times past, before the civil rights revolution, the color line was more clearly marked. Both white and Black people knew their “place,” and for the most part, observed it. When people crossed that line—Black people, anyway—they faced legal penalties or extrajudicial violence. In those times, to live while Black was to be

34

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

American and nominally free but to reside firmly within a virtual color caste—essentially, to live behind the veil, as W.E.B. Du Bois put it in The Souls of Black Folk.

THE ROLE OF THE “ICONIC GHETTO” IN THE WHITE IMAGINATION Social iconography is more complex today. Many urban dwellers now understand a city’s public spaces to be a mosaic of Black space, white space, and “cosmopolitan space”—the last designation referring to virtual islands of racial civility in a sea of segregation, or what I have described in my previous book as “cosmopolitan canopies.” In Philadelphia, for instance, where I have based most of my ethnographic studies over many years, examples of these cosmopolitan spaces are some large areas, such as the Reading Terminal Market and Rittenhouse Square, local university campuses, and smaller areas, such as offices, department stores, restaurants, and certain coffee shops (including some Starbucks locations).

In this sociological context, the urban ghetto is presumed to be, descriptively, “the place where the Black people live.” But it’s also, stereotypically, a den of iniquity and insecurity, a fearsome, impoverished place of social backwardness where Black people perpetrate all manner of violence and crime against one another.

Between Black and white space, travel usually goes in one direction.

Black ghettos, and whites’ attitudes about them, emerged after slavery, and reinforced what slavery had established—that the Black person’s “place” was at the bottom of the American racial order. For the white majority, ghettos helped to fuse inferior status with Black skin, and they became fixtures of mental as well as physical space. Each generation became socially invested in the lowly place of Black people; these white people understood their own identity in terms of whom they opposed, and this positionality was passed down from one racist generation to the next.

In practical terms, whites know little about the iconic ghetto and the people who inhabit it. But for many whites, the anonymous Black person in public is always implicitly associated with the urban ghetto, and decidedly “does not belong” in the white space. The link to the ghetto is so strong that it becomes the “master status” of the typical Black person, to use a term coined by the sociologist E.C. Hughes.

It’s the feature that most defines Black people in the white imagination.

In this system, Black people move about civil society with a deficit of credibility; in comparison, their white counterparts are given a “pass” as decent and law-abiding citizens. Black people wage a constant campaign for respect, which is lost before it begins. The judges are most often the contestants who compete with Black people for place and position in our increasingly pluralistic and rivalrous society. Thus, the issue here is not simply the white supremacy of old. It’s also a powerful new form of symbolic racism that targets Black people for being “out of their place,” or essentially, for behaving in ordinary ways, and especially in “white spaces,” while being Black at the same time.

Strikingly, the iconic ghetto impacts the image of almost every Black person— especially as Black Americans increasingly inhabit all levels of the national class and occupational structure. They attend the best schools; pursue the professions of their choosing; and occupy various positions of power, privilege, and prestige. But for all Black people in public, the specter of the urban ghetto always lurks—it hovers over American race relations, shaping the public conception of the anonymous Black person.

WHAT BLACK FOLK KNOW Almost every Black person has experienced the sting of disrespect on the basis of being Black. A large but undetermined number of Black people feel acutely disrespected in their everyday lives, discrimination they see as both subtle and explicit.

In the face of this reality, Black people manage themselves in a largely white-dominated society, learning and sharing the rules of a peculiarly segregated existence.

In white spaces, Black people are often tolerated, but seldom feel accepted, or know exactly where they stand with the white people they meet. The persistent question is whether the white people in their presence are friends or foes, whether they mean them well or whether they are out to block them. This uncertainty is typically left unresolved by the onslaught of regular, everyday public racism, including occasional yells of n****r from white passersby or their strong encouragement to

Glenn Ligon, Untitled (I Lost My Voice I Found My Voice), from the Door series, 1991. Oil stick, gesso, and graphite on panel, 80 x 30 in (203.2 x 76.2 cm).

36

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

“go back where you came from”—the ghetto. Out of the blue, and from complete strangers, unknown Black people receive occasional scowls and dirty looks, or expressions of outright fear, especially on elevators, which some white people refuse to enter if only Black people are there, choosing to take the stairs instead.

In upscale stores, young Black people—regardless of social class, and especially if they are male—are profiled and followed around. On the streets and in other public places, white people shun them or cross the street, and white women clutch their pocketbooks. Black men often feel they are regarded as criminals until they can prove they are not; one false move, and white people may call the police, and then, when the cops arrive, anything can happen.

Moreover, Black people generally are convinced that they must work twice as hard to get half as far in life. This sense of inequality is built into the working conception of the world that Black people share, providing a ready explanation of their relatively disadvantaged position in American society. And yet, they typically remain civil and are inclined to give the next white person the benefit of the doubt, while never really knowing for sure whether their trust was misplaced—at least until they are let down.

Upwardly mobile Black people who become professors, doctors, lawyers, and businesspeople are required to navigate a peculiar terrain: They are part of a prestigious class, but their Blackness marks them as stigmatized; and until they are able to prove themselves, they are burdened with a deficit of credibility. After successfully performing respectability, they may be granted a provisional status and, depending on their audience, they can always be charged with something more to prove.

In the white-dominated professions, Black people often feel marginalized by their white colleagues, but are constrained to keep their concerns to themselves for fear of appearing “racial” or troublesome in the workplace. So they keep their complaints about race to themselves, while giving their white colleagues who might be encouraged to improve the environment the message that all is well and things are just fine. Meanwhile, backstage, among their Black colleagues and friends, they vent.

Among their own, Black people affirm and reaffirm this central lesson and, out of a sense of duty, try to pass it along to others they care about, especially to their children. The white majority, in large part, does not easily apprehend such lessons, because it has little ability to empathize with the plight of Black people, and also because many see themselves in competition with Black people for place and position.

For Black people, experience is a dear school; the knowledge that Black people acquire is based largely on the experience of living while Black in a society that is dominated by white people. Strikingly, this cultural knowledge is most often inaccessible by white people, and when confronted with it, most whites are incredulous.

American society is ideologically characterized as open, egalitarian, and privileging of equal opportunity, but Black people are deeply doubtful. The everyday reality of Black people is that of being peculiarly subordinate in almost every way. In this social, economic, and political context, white people appear utterly advantaged, and Black people view themselves and their people as profoundly disadvantaged, and see white people—especially racist white people—as the source of their racial inequality. This reality becomes for many Black people their “working conception of the world,” or their “local knowledge”—what they know as they go about meeting the demands of their everyday lives.

Systemic racism is an intractable condition of American life. It is alive and well, and both subtle and explicit, a fact that is illustrated by the racially segregated patterns of everyday life in American civil society, as well as the color-coded occupational structure, through which all Black persons are racially burdened solely on the basis of their Blackness. Hence, racial equality is elusive, for no matter how decent or talented individuals are deemed to be, ultimately, they occupy only a provisional status, a place that is conditioned by the aftereffects of the original sin of slavery centuries ago.

These effects are manifest in today’s segregated civil society, and especially in the persistence of racial disparities in residence, education, health, and employment—racial inequality. Moreover, a strange, but powerful loop has been created.

The iconic ghetto, the place “where the Black folk live,” symbolically denigrates Blacks as a population. White people typically accept and justify extant racial apartheid, which then works peculiarly to justify itself. Consequently, Black despair and alienation become ever more entrenched. A self-fulfilling prophecy has been set in motion that defines Black people as inferior to white people, which then becomes

Artifacts

37

“proven” by the sight of the existential condition of the most disenfranchised elements of the Black community.

The old racism of slavery and white supremacy created the ghetto. The civil rights movement opened its gates, and a new Black middle class emerged. But the new form of symbolic racism emanating from the iconic ghetto hovers, stigmatizing by degrees Black people as they navigate the larger civil society and, especially, the “white space.”

• • • • Early on a cool weekday morning in spring 2021, I parked my car near the docks in Martha’s Vineyard’s tony Edgartown. In the middle of the pandemic, I wanted to get out and about and to enjoy the ocean view. After pulling up to a metered spot, I realized that one thing was missing: coffee. I had passed a bookstore with a sign that promised coffee, and now I wanted a cup to make the morning complete.

I decided to walk the mile or so back to the shop, to get one. Passing one establishment after another, I saw workers inside busily cleaning up or servicing the equipment. Most were not yet open for the season, and their roped signs said as much. The quaint streets of Edgartown were unusually deserted that day, but I spotted a white couple here and there, then an older white woman who was walking her Yorkshire terrier. As I passed her, she scowled at me. A young white kid on a bicycle sped by me, perhaps on his way to work.

When I reached the bookshop where I’d spotted the coffee sign, the front door was open and I stepped inside. The lights were on, but the shop itself was deserted. As I walked amid the rows of bookshelves, I called, “Hello! Anybody here?”

Silence. I was feeling somewhat out of place, even a bit vulnerable, and thought I might be vaguely threatening in my jeans, sneakers, and black hooded sweatshirt.

But I continued to walk around the apparently empty store, looking for a clerk. I was just about to leave when suddenly, a middle-aged white woman appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. “Can I help you?” she asked. “Yes, I’d like a cup of coffee,” I said. “Oh, we’re not quite open for coffee,” she replied, despite the large sign outside to the contrary. “Oh,” I said, puzzled.

She began to tell me about a place down the street and around the corner where she thought I could get coffee. I listened intently. Then, graciously, she said, “Do you have a phone? I can Google it.” With that, I pulled out my iPhone, and handed it to her. She found the place’s website, and set me up with navigation. Pleasantly, we said our goodbyes, and I was out the door, continuing my search.

On the way up the street, I encountered a white man of about 40 with a cup in his hand. “Excuse me,” I said. I wanted to ask him where he got his coffee. “Excuse me,” I said again. Clearly, he heard me, but looked away, ignoring my voice. I tried one last time, and then gave up, and proceeded on my way.

In about 10 minutes, I reached my destination, but the place was closed. I turned back to retrace my steps. On my way, I spotted the white man again, but this time, as he seemed to hurry along, a middle-aged white couple from across the street yelled to him, “Where’d you get that coffee?” This time, the man stopped. Politely, he engaged them, and then gave what seemed to be complicated directions to a place that was a ways away, and too far me, so I headed back to my car.

As I settled into my car, tension I hadn’t been aware of released me. This incident left me feeling uncertain, somewhat estranged, and possibly unwelcome on those streets, a “white space.” The police could have been called on me at any point that morning, I thought. I was just lucky that they hadn’t been.

Adapted by the author from his new book, Black in White Space: The Enduring Impact of Color in Everyday Life (University of Chicago Press, 2021).

Owner, Occupier, Intruder: The Fight for Public Lands

John Dean Davis

Artifacts

1 The geological term batture describes a piece of land created by the accumulation of sediment, such as a sandbar that, after many years of deposition, finally breaks the surface of the water. Derived from a French word that means “river bottom,” batture entered English by way of the American South. Interestingly, the Oxford English Dictionary records the first printed instance of the term as made by one Frederick Law Olmsted in his writings on traveling in the antebellum South.

2 Merrill D. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 944–47.

3 Sara Ahmed, What’s the Use?: On the Uses of Use (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 45–48.

4 See Heather Cox Richardson, The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies During the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), esp. 139.

39

In the middle of his second presidential term, Thomas Jefferson ordered the eviction of a particularly litigious squatter on the Batture St. Marie, a shape-changing stretch of beach near New Orleans.1 When not completely underwater, as it was for half the year, the valuable alluvial land created by the ebbs and flows of the Mississippi River was popular among Louisianans for landing boats and gathering clay for building material. The squatter, Edward Livingston, had claimed the beach by dint of holding title to some adjacent land and had threatened to enclose the batture and build structures that would divert the course of the river, threatening the city with flooding.

Jefferson took it upon himself, after consulting with both cabinet and Congress, to act in defense of the public lands and expel the “intruder.”

After vacating the beach under threat of force, Livingston sued Jefferson himself as a private citizen in retirement. In his legal defense, the aging Jefferson described the line of reasoning he followed that motivated such a spirited and highlevel defense of this sandy stretch. Citing French and Roman riparian law, Jefferson argued that alluvium and any ephemeral deposition that the environment may spontaneously create was, by its nature, the property of the sovereign. Having purchased this French territory, along with the rest of “Louisiana” in 1803, it followed that the rights duly transferred to the new sovereign power: the people of the United States.2

This case marked the first of countless instances of forcible removal of “intrusions” on US public lands, setting up a tradition of those lands as defined by an act of displacement and never far away from the question of most fitting use. Who gets classified as “public” and who as “intruder” remains murky—a perhaps unsurprising set of twists and contradictions left as the legacy of the slaveholding third president.

US public lands are owned by every US citizen; evidence of that ownership—usually measured in access—is sometimes hard to come by. Some public land is explicitly inviting. The “Land of Many Uses” signs are familiar to anyone who has visited a national forest, asking you to imagine the many things you could do on this, your land. However, in managed resource areas like national forests and the 300 million acres of public land not explicitly protected from development, “many uses” usually means an inevitable exploitation as some sort of extractive site.

As Sara Ahmed has described in her study on utilitarianism, rhetorical framing matters immensely: unused or underused land becomes immediately vulnerable to appropriation under this sort of worldview.3 Indeed, it’s usually a select few of the “many uses,” particularly those most profitable, that win the rhetorical game eventually. In the late 19th century, the federal attitude toward public land moved away from barring exploitation by a small group of benefactors and instead saw divestment and dispersal of the public wealth as the best way to benefit the public.

Public land became something to dispose of as quickly as possible, almost as if it were too hot to hold in one’s hand.

Efficient and systematized disposal of public lands came during the Civil War, when wartime Republicans pioneered and weaponized the process. The antislavery and pro-Union politicians largely from the industrial North saw the vast public domain as a tool to use in stamping out the slaveholders’ rebellion. They funneled the wealth of the continental interior toward political constituents to buttress the war effort and concretize their vision of an industrial political economy that would come to dominate the United States in the Gilded Age. The Homestead Act of 1862 gave title of public land to farmers if they made modest improvements, and was one of the largest wholesale transfers of wealth in recorded history. The Morrill Act funded the creation of “land grant” polytechnic institutes across the country, forming the technical and military foundation of their expansive vision. Republicans enthusiastically awarded vast swaths of the Plains to railroad corporations to fortify their creditworthiness and gave tracts of timber and swamplands to individual states, where they soon made their way into speculators’ hands. That this domain came to be “public” after being soaked in blood from atrocities like Wounded Knee or countless broken Indian treaties mattered little. Republicans had gained a taste for righteousness and a sense of how effective putting public lands to use could be in the promotion of their modern, industrial image for the nation.4

This vision persisted in the protests against the “uses” of public lands that recently emerged in the western US. In Oregon in 2016, for example, the armed occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in protest of federal administration of public land was a spectacle made for social media streaming and included some 34 guns and over 18,000 pieces of live ammunition. Ammon Bundy, the occupation’s leader, spoke softly to reporters and invoked a return to agrarian principles. The armed

40

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

Batture dwellings, also known as a “Depression Colony,” outside the levee above Audubon Park in New Orleans, Louisiana, ca. 1940.

Artifacts

Batture dwellings on stilts on the Mississippi riverfront, New Orleans, Louisiana, ca. 1930s.

41

42

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

supporters who flanked him were blunter about their desires to participate in a long history of violent displacement. “Land is power,” said one of the occupiers—power which they demanded be returned to the states.5

In keeping with a tradition that stretches back to Reconstruction and Redemption, the states would dispose of that land quickly to those most prepared to take advantage of the situation: established capital interests poised to extract the land’s latent value. Supporters insist that this inevitable transfer is enshrined in the natural law invoked in the nation’s misty origins. Not long after the dust settled at Malheur, disposal enthusiasts put their hopes in the incoming Trump administration, which was in some cases more than willing to oblige. Trump’s last acting director of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), William Perry Pendley, revealed himself as an ideologue of persistent purity, writing in 2016 that “[t]he Founding fathers intended all lands owned by the federal government to be sold.”6 His ignorance of the actual founders like Jefferson notwithstanding, disposal and getting out of the stewardship of the public commons had somehow been written into the mythic core of the republic’s founding.

However, energy developers had made the 19th-century model of transfer of title obsolete, and Trump’s appointees worked from within the government to mold the federal administration to the new model. Trump’s interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, presided over the single largest removal of federal protection of public land in US history, slashing the footprint of Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments within months of taking office.7 Under the new regime, oil and gas companies found it increasingly easy to get favorable reviews of their BLM or EPA permits.8 Interior Department officials tinkered with the way “benefits” of recreational use versus energy development were calculated in internal budget documents.9

All of this was in the service of a 21st-century model of exploiting public land that acknowledged the new realities of maintenance burden under climate change.

The time window of profitability of much of the arid West has been shrinking steadily: one wildlife biologist pointed out that if all the public land was transferred to Nevada today, fighting one single wildfire would wipe out the entire state budget.10 Except for the federal government, there is no entity prepared to take on the huge responsibilities of America’s public lands. Under the current system of valuing certain uses, it simply makes more sense to part the valuable component of the land from the burden of stewardship—which is best left to the taxpayers—and to get in and get out before the house of cards folds.

The true scope of the “public” who benefits from the use of public land remains an open question. Even entrenched conservative groups, usually quick to side with business interests, have come to acknowledge that capital is quite a narrow public.

Recently, energy developers have met unexpected resistance from conservative western congressmen who recognize how wildly popular wilderness preservation is, and also balk at the threat to their own accustomed uses of hunting and fishing on public land.11 But merely recognizing the uneasiness with capital isn’t enough to alter a system that was built on displacement and extraction as its essential mechanisms.

The national discourse has come to hinge around a fine distinction: do we do something with this land (disposing of it, and altering something fundamental about it), or do we keep it in a state in which we can continue to do things on it (by retaining some elemental idea of expansive use). A number of recent, radical proposals have indicated that it’s possible to shift how we think about use and public land. The New Mexico writer Kyle Paoletta, for example, wrote that we should vastly enlarge the number of national parks, the sublime jewels and most stringently protected of our public lands.12 This would alleviate overcrowding in already packed landscapes like Yosemite and the Grand Canyon. It would also alter the way we see preserved public land: not so much as rare and holy exceptions, but as a ubiquitous presence—protected beauty as an everyday and essential part of the landscape’s fabric.

The Ojibwe writer David Treuer proposed an even more extreme shift, suggesting that we return the national parks (and indeed, perhaps all public land) to the control of the Indigenous peoples of North America. We might argue against the wisdom of yet another transaction—another disposal—of the public land. But Treuer’s argument advances a fundamentally different idea of stewardship—one that is much closer in principle to that which animated Jefferson’s spirited defense 200 years ago. Both are vigorously against enclosure in any form, and oppose

5 Kirk Johnson and Jack Healy, “Protesters in Oregon Seek to End Policy That Shaped West,” New York Times, January 5, 2016.

6 Timothy Egan, “The Great Western Public Land Robbery,” New York Times, August 17, 2019.

7 Josh Dawsey and Juliet Eilperin, “Trump Shrinks Two Huge National Monuments in Utah, Drawing Praise and Protests,” Washington Post, December 4, 2017.

8 “The Looting of America’s Public Lands,” New York Times, December 10, 2017.

9 Jimmy Tobias, “Public Lands in Private Hands?,” New York Times, March 3, 2017.

10 Benjamin Spillman, “Bundy Trial Puts Land in Spotlight: Public Land Battles Debated in US,” Las Cruces Sun-News, January 31, 2017.

11 Carl Hulse, “Republicans Push a Bill to Protect Public Lands,” New York Times, June 9, 2020.

12 Kyle Paoletta, “Why We Need More National Parks,” New York Times, August 28, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/28/opinion/national-park-nature.html.

Artifacts

13 Dawsey and Eilperin, “Trump Shrinks Two Huge National Monuments in Utah, Drawing Praise and Protests.”

14 David Treuer, “Return the National Parks to the Tribes,” The Atlantic, May 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ archive/2021/05/return-the-national-parksto-the-tribes/618395/.

43

single, intense, and altering use, no matter how valuable it may be. What made the shrinkage of Bears Ears so egregious was not the sheer acreage, but that it was slated for uranium mining—not known as a practice that creates inviting or easily shared landscapes.13 These virtual enclosures, like strip mining or clear-cutting, prevent the public lands from being true “Lands of Many Uses.” Treuer’s suggestion is compelling because the Indigenous land ethos dictates that the land should be truly open to anyone—from “toddlers to Tony Hawk,” and refuses to countenance a future that narrows the definition of “everyone.”14 We should think more about that vastly diverse future public; a public that includes the most expansive definition of everyone we can imagine will probably be much like the boaters and clay gatherers on the Batture St. Marie—polyglot, multiracial, heterodox—and certainly worthy of spirited defense.

Map of Nebraska showing the Union Pacific Railroad land grant, 1880.

r Ho Walte

L. , Toni SITES s Shafaieh arle on, Ch ryn Sim de, Ta ra Zew od, Sa

a , Tali H Griffin

tuka

HOW CAN WE SHARE SPACE TOGETHER? Walter Hood & Sara Zewde

The idea that we can share space together is one we might take for granted, but—as landscape architect, professor, and MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient Walter Hood reminds us—the public sphere in the United Space was designed to keep us separate. In a conversation with landscape designer, urbanist, and artist Sara Zewde, Hood makes clear that the notion of a cohering, unifying public good is in a productive tension with our plural and heterogeneous society. In the generative space between the public and the plural, stories can be transformational in the shaping of space for us to be in, together.

Sites

47

SARA ZEWDE Walter, what has happened to the notion of “the public”?

WALTER HOOD I’ve been struggling with this concept of public, particularly from an urban design or landscape point of view because we act as if we’re a homogeneous society, and as if everybody sees space in the same way. We also need to understand how space has been constructed in the US. Since the 20th century, there’s been two publics. There’s been one white public and one brown and Black public, and those were actually created through design. So it’s problematic to suggest that everybody sees a park, a plaza, or a square in the same way.

If I had to think of what’s the most public of public spaces that we have today, I would say it’s the street. Since the middle ages, the street has been this place of connectivity, commerce, community.

It still allows people to express themselves freely.

I was driving through the Tenderloin in San Francisco recently, and everyone’s on the street.

People are yelling, people are fighting, people are just acting out in public. It’s non-normative, but that’s the only space where that can happen. If you have 40 people on the street, it’s hard to make them conform to one kind of activity.

SARA I was just reading a quote from Olmsted, where he’s talking about the influences of slavery on society, and as the remedy he’s talking about publics. He says, “There need to be places and times for reunions. […] They would exert an elevating influence upon all people, public parks, gardens, galleries of art, other means of cultivating taste.” In theory, that’s the reason our profession exists. It’s made to form this kind of theater for civic life.

WALTER That’s really important because even in Olmsted’s parks, he talks about the role of the allée—the

Members of the 25th Infantry Bicycle Corps pose with their “state of the art” test bicycles in 1897.

straight street—as a place where we can come together. And he talks about gregariousness in the park through these sinuous lines. That’s where you can be individual, right? When you think about it, the promenade is the first urban element that actually comes into the city. So that idea of the line, of moving, I think it could be a powerful way to think about how we can come together. I always think of the allée in Central Park. You can sit on one side of a bench, and someone can be on the other, but you have enough space, and you don’t feel threatened.

But as a society we’re not purposely thinking about how we can share space anymore.

I’ve been thinking about how to give a voice to different types of spaces. A developer asked me to help with a design in San Francisco. I said, “Let’s think about what would make Black space.” How can we make space that people of any background feel like they want to come in, and they want to be with us? So we came up with these different themes.

One’s called the Royal Road, where we’re talking about royalty, and that Black folk are part of royalty. How can we share space together through landscape design and urban design?

SARA It boggles the mind how we are so diverse as a population and yet our landscapes are not. Why are we restricting ourselves so much?

WALTER

Hood Design Studio, Brickline Greenway, segment that highlights the city heritage which runs on Grand Boulevard from the Fairground Park to Cass Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri, 2021.

I struggle on projects to try to find a conceptual thread that’s powerful enough to be transformative, because if not, you’re just doing the same thing from place to place. I’m working on a project where we’re doing bike trails and I learned an incredible story about Black Union soldiers in Brickline, St. Louis. When the Civil War ended, the military said, “Hey, we want you to help us think about how we can move from horses to bicycles.” Crazy, right? So the military gave these soldiers bicycles, and they rode bicycles from fricking Montana to Missouri. I have pictures of the Black cyclists at Yellowstone. It’s the most beautiful thing, but I’m working on this

48

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

bike trail project and no one mentions it.

But then this woman, Shaughnessy Daniels—the community engagement manager with Great Rivers Greenway—sends me articles. Then I find out two of the brothers had patents for bicycles. So now we’re trying to weave this into this sectional trail.

There was nothing there, because there’d been disinvestment. But designing elements that can inspire people might allow them to see a future that’s very different. I’m doing lenticular fences so when you’re on the trail you’re actually riding with the soldiers. I think that’s the work: digging and trying to find ways to express history, but also a validation that African Americans didn’t just arrive here. We’ve been part of making this public from the beginning.

SARA I’d love to hear more about the role of narrative for you. In my work, sometimes people say, “Well, even if that narrative inspired your design, it’s not legible.” My response is that that’s okay. It’s not about public spaces being didactic or literal, but that there is an entry point. Actually, there are multiple entry points because it has to serve so many. It has to be open-ended by virtue of it being public.

want, and get something different. Because we’re all part of the same cultural landscape. So when I ask people what they want, they always want a park, grass, and trees. It’s a normative way of thinking.

There’s nothing negative about that, but I’m trying to find something that can validate a history that people might not know that they’re a part of.

I feel that African Americans are never in the conversation. We’re never contributing to what something looks like. This is my best way to contribute. I don’t care so much about knowing “Oh, that’s based on this.” I care more about someone saying, “Wow, you made that for us? How’d you come up with that?” People appreciate that you’re going out of your way to find something to give to them that’s really different. I think there is a reciprocal relationship: it’s not just that people will take care of this space, but they will look at it in a completely different way.

SARA Many American public spaces are either privately owned or just the leftover space from private development. I’m sure many of your clients are private entities—but your thinking is always about the public. How do you wrestle with that?

WALTER WALTER I think of telling stories instead, because when people think of “narratives” they assume that it must come from something historic. But the landscape is a place where stories unfold, whether you like it or not.

The story of racial segregation is in the landscape.

The story of colonialism is in the landscape.

I use story to find difference, because I don’t want to keep doing the same thing. I don’t think you can go into a community, and ask people what they

As a society, we don’t want to live together.

Someone was just telling me that during segregation, there was more investment into public works because white communities wanted swimming pools and they would have them to themselves. They had to give us the same thing. When we started to integrate these places, they were like, “We can do without these,” which is kind of mind-blowing.

Map drawn by 2nd Lieutenant James A. Moss of the journey of the 25th Infantry Bicycle Corps from Missoula, Montana to St. Louis, Missouri, 1896.

Sites

When we’re doing public spaces for cities today, it’s really hard because there’s no money, and then they’re always talking about low maintenance, and we know what that means. So the private is the only thing we have left. We try to leverage that, to give something back to the collective. Nonprofits are now working with developers, and the nonprofits have these great missions, but then they’re somehow subverted through the development.

For example, a faith-based nonprofit is doing a housing project at a little triangle park where people used to hang out at the end of our block. It’s been fenced off so no one can go in. Since the city deemed that what they had been doing was nonnormative, all the brothers now are across the street sitting against a fence. The city gave the community $50,000. They said to me, “Walter, we have $50,000. Can you design the space?” I said, “Let’s think about this entire block as a district. Do you know there’s almost 50 artists in this little district?

We need to make a beautiful public realm. Let’s plant some trees, widen the sidewalks so those people have a place.” But a nun said something to me that blew my mind: “If you plant the trees and everything, the space will get gentrified.” This is coming from a nun—someone with compassion—but that’s how people think of public space. It is left to private individuals because no one wants to pay taxes to create those spaces.

If we really want to think about public, we have to think about the collective. Olmsted was writing about how to bring people together. Whether his spaces do that or not, at least he was thinking about it. It really is about putting something out there and hoping that the world will come to you. In a way, that’s the philosophy embedded in America, that I think we’ve forgotten—that we’re an experiment.

We’re still experimenting. We should be more

49

speculative and remember that there is no one solution. Pragmatism suggests that you keep trying, and things are going to work themselves out. Olmsted was a pragmatist, and that’s a powerful way to think about design. Sometimes the world might not meet you, so you keep trying. Too many of us are searching for the right answer.

SARA Public space is about democracy. The small touch points that bring people together are necessary to cultivating the calculation of democracy. . . the calculation that there is a common good, that there is moral advancement, intellectual advancement inherent to the idea of democracy, and that public space has a critical role. These everyday moments of spending time together in the same space, no matter who you are, is central to the project of democracy.

WALTER That’s beautifully said. Catastrophic events are probably the places where we see democracy at its best. You see people collectively working together, and I wish we didn’t have to always be at the extreme before we come together. During COVID, I noticed how people used public space in my neighborhood…

At noontime, everyone was out walking. It’s too bad it takes these kinds of events for us to see, “Wow, we can close streets, and people will come out and be together.” Then all of a sudden it’s like, “Oh, we need the streets back.” But we had that moment, right? We had that moment.

During their 1896 excursion from Fort Missoula, Montana to Yellowstone National Park, riders of the 25th Infantry Bicycle Corps, led by 2nd Lieutenant James A. Moss, at top, pose on Minerva Terrace at Mammoth Hot Springs.

The Object of Applause: Producing a Public Taryn Simon & Charles Shafaieh In A Cold Hole (2018), artist Taryn Simon creates what at first seems like a private experience at its most elemental.

Participants enter a bright white, ice-covered room, alone.

Their purpose there is singular: to drop into a five-by-five-foot void filled with frigid water carved out of the gallery floor. In the piece’s accompanying text, Simon writes that cold plunges like this, considered healing and restorative across cultures, have been practiced for centuries, from Shinto and Eastern Orthodox purification rituals to Geronimo’s training of Apache boys. “The body is thrust into an extreme state,” she says.

“The shock overrides the body’s automatic response. The initial gasp of submersion reflects the sharply drawn breath experienced during sudden death, sleep arrhythmia, and birth.

The physical stress disrupts and alters thought processes, inducing a flight response that individuals must meet with vigorous determination in order to endure.” In the act, a person can be aware only of themselves. This total and uncontrollable involution perhaps elucidates why Simon has described the work as a “self-portrait.”

The plungers are not the work’s sole participants, though, and arguably are not even the performers. In an adjacent room, onlookers gather. When large in number, they press close together as they move toward the space’s only light source: a window, intentionally designed to appear like a camera’s aperture, which looks into the starkly lit chamber where each diver disappears into the hole.

When asked about this group, Simon repeats one adjective: “rabid.” “The idea of consumption becomes such a large part of the piece,” she explains, speaking from her home in New York City. Echoing her characterization of the cold plunge as a potential “quick fix,” she sees these visitors as seeking

their own type of “quick delivery.” Atomized and anonymous to each other in the dark, they watch, expectant, as plungers stand poised at the precipice, sometimes silent and still for 15 minutes or longer. The wait makes the crowd impatient.

Their intense desire for spectacle can manifest as irritation.

But then, Simon says, when the desired action eventually occurs, “there’s an ecstatic response, a sound of cheer and elation.” At that moment in this barely illuminated room, a public body materializes through a shared vocal response.

Yet this public has a doubly perverse foundation. It is unlike the temporary community created in a theater, for example, which arises through an acknowledgment between audience and actors of a shared space and experience. The status of each plunger as a performer is questionable: In submergence, they lack all public awareness; their experience is totally their own, unknowable and unaffected by the onlookers. Furthermore, the audience comes together at the instant the plunger disappears, coalescing around an absence. Their applause rings out at nothing at all. Simon’s sharp delineation of three material spaces (white room, black room, and hole) and the restricted viewpoints therein reveal the ease with which a public can be created and manipulated—one whose members, if asked why they actually cheer, may not be able to explain their actions.

Simon’s Assembled Audience (2018), which was shown contemporaneously with A Cold Hole at MASS MoCA, makes even more explicit the power and strangeness of collective praise. For that work, Simon and her producers recorded individual applause tracks of attendees at events at three major venues in Columbus, Ohio, which was chosen because of the perception of the city as a microcosm of the country.

51

Taryn Simon, ACaption Cold Hole to ,the installation image goes view, here.

Massachusetts Caption to the Museum image of goes Contemporary here. Caption Art, toNorth the image Adams, goes Massachusetts, here.

2018.

52

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

TarynCaption Simon, to A Cold the image Hole, goes installation here. Caption view, Massachusetts to the image goes Museum here.ofCaption Contemporary to the image Art, North goes Adams, here. Massachusetts, 2018.

53

Taryn Simon, A Cold Hole, installation view, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, Massachusetts, 2018.

54

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

The events were myriad in nature and included a rodeo, pop and country music concerts, a religious congregation, and a furniture expo. When Assembled Audience is exhibited, a computer program selects a random combination of these tracks and creates fictional crowds whose adulation, played at fluctuating volumes, fills a darkened room.

“As the algorithm rotates through different individuals, you have the melding of different ideologies and intentions,” says Simon. “Scale morphs also. Your surroundings in the darkness start to shrink in response to weak applause, like that at an office presentation, and expand when it gets to a stadium setting. Then, when the applause gets really loud, even beyond that in a stadium, it sounds like rain.”

The visceral effects of mass applause on a group can help create a public, even against its will, as politicians have long understood and which Simon reveals in A Cold Hole. The spectator of Assembled Audience, however, becomes primed to interrogate rather than to participate in this public praise due to its isolation as pure sound. “You start to consider who is there and who is the object of applause,” says Simon. “All of those celebrated figures we praise and relegate to a higher position are missing and become interchangeable. Sometimes you become the object of applause.”

communities, professional mourners perform rituals, often in the form of song, as a means for the bereaved to externalize grief or to catalyze their emotions. Simon brought 30 of these professionals together for An Occupation of Loss (2016), which was staged first in New York City and, two years later, in London. During the piece, the performers were situated in small rooms at the base of eleven 45-foot-tall concrete wells, designed in collaboration with the architecture firm OMA. They issued their lamentations in concert, which were amplified throughout the venue. Immersed in this soundscape, the audience negotiated the counterpoint of the transient aural performance of loss and the monumental pipelike structures, between and into which they could move, that gave this mourning its physical manifestation.

Many of these performers’ practices are prohibited in their countries as part of a long history of governmental restrictions on who, how, and when people mourn. Consider the US military’s de facto prohibition of public mourning when, from 1991 to 2009, photographs of service members’ caskets on airplanes were banned, as well as the American media’s near-total silence regarding the Iraqis, Afghans, and others killed during that same period. More recently, the eagerness of politicians worldwide to declare the end of the COVID-19

“THE EAGERNESS OF POLITICIANS WORLDWIDE TO DECLARE THE END OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC HAS IMPLICITLY PROHIBITED FURTHER ACTS OF COLLECTIVE MOURNING.”

The transformation of the spectator from subject into object prompts multiple questions: Would all these people, with their diverse backgrounds and opinions, clap for you? And if they did, would you welcome it? That the algorithm forces the praise of every recorded person for each spectator of the piece is not so far from real-world situations. “The contagion of participation,” as Simon puts it, depersonalizes action. “You can’t even process your own response in a crowd because it’s drowned out,” she says. Conversely, one person’s stillness in a cheering mass stands out to those around them just as a sole clapper does to a silent group. In these situations, personal emotion easily becomes subordinated to public agreement, especially when resistance to the norm risks ostracism or even incrimination.

Praise is not the only presumably private action and emotion which exterior pressures shape. Grief, too, has become increasingly controlled by public influence. “We’re guided in moments of loss,” says Simon. “In America, this guidance is often outsourced to a complete stranger, whether through the media or in religious ceremonies. A generating of emotion is often linked to the success of these figures.”

In the United States, this outsourcing goes unacknowledged, whereas in Yezidi, Wayúu, Darghin, and many other

pandemic has implicitly prohibited further acts of collective mourning. It has also compounded the perpetual social rejection of groups—like the elderly and people experiencing homelessness—who have been cast aside as unworthy or less deserving of grief since the beginning of the crisis.

These prohibitions acknowledge the metamorphic potentials which grieving facilitates. As Simon writes in the text for An Occupation of Loss, “Individuals and communities [who] pass through the unspeakable consequences of loss. . . can emerge transformed, redefined, reprogrammed. Results are unpredictable; the void opened up by loss can be filled by religion, nihilism, militancy, benevolence—or anything.” In that metaphysical space, new ideas and identities can find their genesis, providing the potential for emancipation from governments and other power structures that seek to maintain a status quo. With this performance, Simon says, “I was really trying to imagine where this space is and a response to it that is outside those influences. Can it even exist?”

Simon, whose optimism is evident when she speaks, needs to believe it does. This philosophical position connects her entire oeuvre, including her image-centered pieces such as An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar,

Sites

The Picture Collection, and The Innocents. She continually engages in meditations on framing—figuratively or, as in her photography and performance work, literally—and provokes audiences to interrogate how material is presented, the ways in which they are programmed to receive it, and how they navigate the thresholds established by such framing which prohibit or encourage specific thoughts and actions. That process, facilitated by her work, can enable a liberated consciousness, aware of but free from public interference. “No matter how much a piece is bound to a text or an image, these are magical objects that can go off into other spaces,” she says.

All art worthy of the name, in other words, has the ability to function like the void in A Cold Hole in creating, for the spectator, a private space with anarchic potential beyond state or other public control.

55

This requires an active audience who is receptive to shock and transformation—spectators who do not view an encounter with art as a passive experience separate from everyday life. Just as Simon expresses belief about the possibility of private experience, she has confidence that her audience will meet her on these terms. “My work has often been up against the assumption that, somehow, I was going to be asking too much. With the use of text, for example,” she says.

“But I believe in people’s desire to work in those ways and always have. I see it when the work is on the walls. It’s how I think, it’s how I want to engage, and it’s how I hope others will operate. I can’t imagine doing it any other way. It would feel like a waste.”

Taryn Simon, An Occupation of Loss, installation view, Park Avenue Armory, New York, New York, 2016.

South Side Land Narratives: The Lost Histories and Hidden Joys of Black Chicago Toni L. Griffin

Sites

Publicly expressing Black pain can render reactions of solidarity, healing, and empowerment, or exhaustion, guilt, and helplessness.

However, Black voice can be a powerful instrument of change—used as a currency to be saved or spent or as a carrier of demand and solution.

The past year has unearthed untold knowledge that gives additional context to the root of what drives this voice—its trauma, its demands, and its joy. Making this knowledge more public can help to inform how we understand and engage one another; how we reframe harmful Black narratives that shape the public perception; and how the power of Black creativity and resiliency as a political device can produce spaces of Black-centered freedom and liberation.

This essay and the corresponding collages aim to represent and make public the confrontation of pain and quest for joy found in the Black public realm of Chicago’s Mid-South Side. Each collage illustrates the relationship between publicness for Black Americans and the current urban landscape of vacancy including southern migration in response to public denial; the public scars left by urban renewal’s land mutilation; and the relentless pursuit of public freedoms in the public realm. The series offers a reflection on the contests that exist over land, space, and place alongside the aspiration of Black Americans to simply occupy and be carefree in public, unencumbered by fear and liberated from self-consciousness.

The collages include present-day mapping, photography, and historic images, in combination with clippings from, and references to, the imagery and symbols of Chicago’s Black life and prosperity used in the work of notable African American artists. My objective was to create new portrayals of the South Side and its people by making public some of the lesser-known narratives about these neighborhoods over the last century.

The narratives, rooted in the ownership and occupancy of land, reveal the practices of institutional racism, exclusion, and extraction, juxtaposed against images of the undiminished spirit, ambition, productivity, and creativity of Black Chicagoans. Richard Wright describes this as the “extremes of possibility” in his introduction to Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in

57

An Unguaranteed Existence.

We Used to Ball.

a Northern City, the seminal 1945 book by University of Chicago researchers St. Claire Drake and Horace A. Cayton on Negro life in Chicago: “There is an open and raw beauty about the city that seems either to kill or endow one with the spirit of life. I felt those extremes of possibility, death and hope, while I lived half hungry and afraid in a city to which I had fled with the dumb yearning to write, to tell my story.”1

narratives of Black inferiority and Black neighborhood undesirability. The new Black Chicagoans found themselves spatially confined to an area that would become the Chicago Black Belt, unable to avail themselves of all the offerings of urban life.

Today, the Black Belt is simply referred to as the South Side. For a Black Chicagoan, growing up on the South Side is to be nourished in Black space, but often with little knowledge of the forced restriction that once bound people together in place. Nonetheless, the South Side now proudly belongs to Black Chicagoans, and their claim is validated by its history of confinement.

AN UNGUARANTEED EXISTENCE incorporates the three Great Migration routes used by Black Americans to access the greater personal freedoms and fortunes promised by cities outside of the southern states. The routes are intertwined with thorny cotton stalks representing the escape from chattel slavery and journey toward the Chicago Black Belt. Underneath is a 2020 aerial map of the Washington Park and Woodlawn neighborhoods, where over 200 acres of publicly owned vacant land appear as green voids on the map similar to the formal park spaces of the neighborhood. These vacant lands, the byproduct of urban renewal, disinvestment, and Black population exodus from the South Side, are demanding a new form of land care by remaining residents. Today, however, tending the land is not generating wealth for anyone; instead it is a temporary investment of sweat equity to cultivate greater safety, beauty, and mental well-being while residents wait for redevelopment.

BLACK MIGRATION | PUBLIC DENIAL “Why do Negroes leave the sunny South to live like this?”

Black Metropolis: The Study of Negro Life in a Northern City

AVAILABLE WITHOUT FREEDOM | In the introduction to Black Metropolis, Richard Wright describes white Chicagoans questioning why Black migrants willingly uprooted themselves from the South, given the racial animosity and rapidly deteriorating built environment of Chicago’s South Side in the early 1900s.

Between 1916 and 1970, six million African Americans migrated from the rural South to industrial cities in the Midwest and Northeast. In the first five years of the migration, Chicago saw a 50 percent increase in the Black population— from 46,000 to over 83,000 residents; by 1937, more than 237,100 Black Americans called the South Side home.2 Fleeing the Jim Crow South meant the possibility of industrial rather than agricultural work, with the promise of better wages and greater public freedoms to move about the city.

Upon arrival however, migrant Blacks were confronted by a different form of public denial.

Throughout the Jim Crow era, when separate but equal was the law of the South, northern cities maintained a different form of discriminatory practices perpetuated by white homeowners, real estate agents, lenders, and employers. Racial restrictive property covenants, redlining, and blockbusting formed an impenetrable barrier, intentionally constraining the geographic and economic mobility of Blacks in the city. These practices simultaneously and systematically devalued Black land assets and deepened the

PUBLIC CONFINEMENT | BLACK METROPOLIS “But the American Negro, child of the culture that crushes him, wants to be free in a way that white men are free; for him to wish otherwise would be unnatural, unthinkable.”

Richard Wright

AVAILABILITY REALIZED | By the 1940s, despite the racial restrictions enforced on the South

58

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

My Beauty Will Not Be Denied.

. . . House Will Lift Me Up.

Dreamlike in Its Wild Out-of-Placeness.

Side, Chicago’s Black Belt neighborhoods— becoming known at the time as Black Metropolis—were becoming a land of promise, prosperity, and a blueprint for Black urban culture. The concentration of unemployed labor after the Great Depression, persistent racial segregation, and other forms of discrimination created a community that demonstrated the self-reliance and creative production that have long served Black Americans in times of austerity and deprivation. The denial of access to the city at large activated the necessity of Black-created and -controlled commerce, finance, media, and entertainment that would become visible to—and ultimately consumed by—the very citizens who deemed Black people and places unworthy.

Drake and Cayton’s Black Metropolis establishes that at the tail end of the Great Migration, the Black Belt had over 2,600 Black-owned businesses, accounting for nearly 50 percent of all businesses in the area, and with access to a Black purchasing power of nearly $150 million. Their research also elaborates on the existence and role of Black influence and wealth through the church, media, and entrepreneurship: “To the Negro community, a business is more than a mere enterprise to make profit for the owner. From the standpoint of both the customer and the owner it becomes a symbol of racial progress, for better or for worse.”3 But after the Second World War, the physical spaces built by these Black cultural producers would become lost to urban decline and denied access to the federal aid that was afforded to white homebuyers in the new frontier of the American suburbs.

The relatively short-lived prosperity born in Black Metropolis creates a gap in our understanding of the generative ingenuity propelled by Black Chicagoans. In Selling the Race, Adam Green describes this gap in knowledge as an underappreciation of Black-led production “where expansive imagination is often counted as a luxury, or distraction from the harsh realities of proscription. Consequently, urban blacks have generally been seen as history’s victims, rather than its makers. This has exacted a steep cost on our overall knowledge and perspective, for it obscures African Americans’ central role in fashioning the world all of us live in today.”4 The stories of Black imagination and production are

rarely incorporated into our public knowledge of American ingenuity and invention. The knowledge of the existence of Black prosperity, amassed only a few decades after Emancipation, must become a more visible public truth within the canon of American histories.

WE USED TO BALL uses a 1906 map outlining the boundaries of Chicago’s Black Belt against images of Black-owned businesses to remind us that Black Americans have always had the capacity to generate wealth, even just one generation removed from slavery. Black Metropolis, despite its spatial confinement within racially restricted boundaries, was a prosperous economic center, self-sufficiently sustained by the recirculation of its own dollars by its own people. It is unlikely that today’s generation of young Black residents have any knowledge of the economic and cultural power this place once held because the current ruinscape holds no visible memory of wealth, which is symbolized here by the lotus flower.

status, were routinely intimidated: “In 1960, not even a black cop was safe at Rainbow Beach.

Patrolman Harold Carr took his family and friends there on a steamy July afternoon and was summarily mobbed by a gang of rock-throwing white hooligans. ‘Why do you come down here?’ they jeered, according to a story in the Chicago Defender. ‘Can’t you feel that you’re not wanted?’”6 The wade-ins were a peaceful disruption of the fear-driven supremacy by white beachgoers.

Today, Rainbow Beach, situated at the eastern edge of Jackson Park, is a favorite of Black Chicagoans, but its history as a contested space is little known except for the markers installed and dedicated in 2011 to commemorate the wade-ins.

Five years ago, a new contest over the right to occupy public space emerged. By 2025, the Obama Presidential Center will open as a new building in Jackson Park. The siting of the center in the historic Frederick Law Olmsted park has been controversial, again raising questions of acceptance, access, and belonging, but this time for a building, not a people. Since 2016, when the Obamas chose to locate the center in their hometown, a long and vocal public battle has been underway regarding the appropriateness of the building, its scale, and use on public park land, challenging the notion of what is public and for whom.

Critics—mostly people from outside the surrounding neighborhoods—have opposed the new building, public plaza, and associated roadway reconfigurations. They point to Olmsted’s 1894 vision for Jackson Park: “All other buildings and structures to be within the park boundaries are to be placed and planned exclusively with a view to advancing the ruling purpose of the park. They are to be auxiliary to and subordinate to the scenery of the park.”7 Meanwhile, the predominately Black residents of the surrounding communities have generally embraced having a center devoted to the Obamas on the South Side, as they are hopeful it will bring much-needed attention and equitable reinvestment back to the former Black Belt.

However, it is also important to note that this enthusiasm is coupled with fears of displacement if investments are not directed to local Black households, businesses, and institutions.

PUBLIC SPACE | BLACK RIGHTS “Violence was a common reaction to any encroachment.”

John Keilman

DEMANDING AVAILABILITY | Chicago’s public amenities have a long history of being contested spaces of exclusion. Until the 1960s, Lake Michigan’s public beaches were controlled through white intimidation, discouraging Blacks from exercising their rights to public access. To disrupt this practice, Black and white activists organized beach “wade-ins”—protest events where people formed long human chains and marched onto the beaches and into the lake. In a 2011 Chicago Tribune article, John Keilman interviews Nicholas Juravich, a University of Chicago research student studying the wade-ins, who says, “Many whites considered the lakefront their preserve. The presence of blacks offended their sense of social order. . . and the notion of young, half-dressed blacks and whites mingling on the shore raised fears of race mixing.”5 Keilman’s article goes on to describe how Black Chicagoans, despite their community

Sites

These dialogues about the center force the question of who and what has the right to occupy public space, whose interests are prioritized, and who gets to decide. While the arguments over the siting of the Presidential Center have not explicitly been race-based, the optics around who is advocating for the outcomes that directly affect those who will experience the greatest impact (good or bad) is situated in a racial climate common in a racially segregated city. As such, the act of claiming access to public space and who gets to determine the cultural and economic value of Black occupation must always be understood as the pursuit of Black rights.

MY BEAUTY WILL NOT BE DENIED is a reminder of how little we know about the origins of some of our most beloved Black spaces.

During the wade-ins, a human chain of people moving across the city was required to bring about racial justice and access to a public space.

During this same time, John H. Johnson, owner of Johnson Publishing company, was publishing Jet, a weekly news magazine celebrating urban Black modernity. The centerfold beauty was often a local Chicago woman posed somewhere along the very beachfronts white Chicagoans were refusing to share. In this context, the centerfold photo represents both the mundane day at the beach and the fantastic fighting for the right to the beach. The question of who and what belongs in the public realm is nonexistent for those whose rights are an unquestionable birthright, but for others who are still waiting for the equal fulfillment of rights, access is a constant contest. Nonetheless, the blue streams of water/sky, taken from Amy Sherald’s Michelle Obama portrait represent the resistance to denial, the optimism for ultimate equality, and the beauty and strength of the Black woman.

PUBLIC SCARS | BLACK MUTILATION “Urban renewal is Negro removal.”

James Baldwin

AVAILABILITY TAKEN | The public policies that systematically perpetuated urban removal, redevelopment, and planned shrinkage are being redefined as a form of racial capitalism—the extraction of value from the racial identity of others.8 Those policies left a landscape of urban ruin in the former Black Belt neighborhoods of Chicago. Fallow for decades, these lands, both privately and publicly owned, have been waiting for external capital interests to reestablish economic value. Meanwhile, generations of Black Chicagoans have lived in a state of perpetual disinvestment with high percentages of concentrated poverty, poor health, and low employment prospects.

Writer and activist Lucy Lippard is quoted as observing, “Poverty is a great preserver of history,” noting that it is within communities of disinvestment that we confront how economies dictate what does and does not happen to land.9 However, the vacancy we observe in low-income Black neighborhoods does not tell a complete story about the contentious causes of decay.

Instead, mainstream media conditions us to read this landscape as a reflection of the neglect and disregard of Black people to care for and invest in the places where they live, thereby placing blame on the poor for their inability to pull themselves up by their bootstraps—

a quintessential American narrative. But in Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics, Rebecca Solnit reminds us that “the great ruins have been situated on what is first of all, real estate, not sacred ground or historical site; and real estate is constantly turned over for profit, whereas a ruin is a site that has fallen out of the financial dealings of a city…”10 On Chicago’s South Side, falling out of financial dealing meant the demolition of physically deteriorating buildings and the consolidation of poverty within mile-long superblocks of public housing. By the late 1940s, the housing stock of Black Belt neighborhoods was crumbling due to resident overcrowding, landlord neglect, and white flight. What was once the center of Black economic prosperity was swiftly becoming the South Side slum. The Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954, in combination with the Federal Highway Act of 1956, created a suite of federal programs that helped support state and city governments in their efforts for “urban renewal” in predominantly Black neighborhoods, leading James Baldwin to coin the phrase “urban renewal is Negro removal.” These programs were focused on slum clearance in order to make way for new economic development, affordable housing, and urban infrastructure projects. Instead, these public actions led to the concentration of poverty for generations of families, in part because private capital—in the form of commercial and residential amenities— did not follow these public investments. It followed the white Chicagoans fleeing to the surrounding suburbs, who were supported by other federal home loan subsidies provided by the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, or Freddie Mac. Between 1955 and 1966, urban renewal projects displaced more than 300,000 people of color nationwide, according to the Renewing Inequality Project developed by the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab. While Black Americans were just 13 percent of the total population in 1960, they comprised at least 55 percent of those displaced. Many Black communities were also fragmented or razed to make way for new infrastructure projects.11 Today, the highways of the South Side, constructed in the 1960s, together with the lands left undeveloped after urban renewal erasure, remain as visible scars of the land mutilation and the social and economic harm imposed on the former Black Belt communities. . . .HOUSE WILL LIFT ME UP celebrates the origins of house music in Chicago and the legendary Chosen Few Old Skool Picnic. Started 40 years ago by a few house DJs in the tradition of the Black family barbecue in a public park, this casual communal gathering has exploded into the appropriation of Jackson Park by 40,000 souls every July. The sounds and beats of house music can be transporting—if you let it take over—freeing your body and soul from the mutilated lands surrounding the park, and into a space of joyful escape. Amada Williams’s Color(ed) Theory houses, cloaked in the palette of Black commercial products, are used to represent the artifacts and trauma of real estate violence. But the collage situates the painful image of these houses against the joys of house music and its consumers, known as “house heads.” Black joy can always be found in Black spaces, where urban sanctuaries are often created within the context of urban ruin. By

59

acknowledging the trauma endured by disinvestment, the picnic and its music create a haven within marginalized space for marginalized people. House, as sanctuary, can and should counteract the protracted harm inflicted by insufficient resources, amenities, and investments and lift one to a place of safety, care, and freedom of movement. Thus, the Color(ed) Theory houses are lifted up, rising above their current context, and hopefully making way for new sanctuaries of dwelling.

PUBLIC SPACE | BLACK SPACE I’m hoping to see the day When my people Can all relate We must stop fighting To achieve the peace That was torn in our country We shall all be free Follow me Why don’t you follow me To a place Where we can be free

“Follow Me – Club Mix” Aly-Us, 1992 12 AVAILABLE CREATIVITY | Chicago’s Washington Park holds a prominent history of creativity, exhibition, and amusement. Twenty-three years before the first wave of the Great Migration, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition used the South Side—specifically Jackson Park, Washington Park, and the Midway Plaisance—to showcase the technological advances of the time. In 1902, following the success of the exposition, Chicago’s civic-minded business community constructed another space of amusement on South Side park land. The White City Amusement Park was imagined by one of its benefactors, hotel developer Joseph Beifeld, as a space of escapism. He described his ambition to colleagues by saying, “I’m glad of one thing, boys… we will give the people of Chicago an opportunity of enjoying themselves such as they have never yet dreamed of. When I think of the hot stufl’y (sic) theatres in Chicago on summer evenings; when I think of the absolute barrenness of the lives of so many thousands of men, women and children there, who have no place to go for clean, unobjectionable entertainment and pleasure, I’m glad that we are going to build White City, from humanitarian principles if for no other reason.”13 When White City opened, offering arcades, the White City Roller Rink, a beer garden, and a boardwalk, it was surrounded by neighborhoods growing in African American population. In fact, the local Black population grew by more than 250 percent between 1889 and 1905.14 But their admission into the park was barred despite the 1885 Illinois Civil Rights Act which made business discrimination illegal. When the park closed in 1933, the roller rink was the only feature to remain in operation, but it continued to be off-limits to Blacks Chicagoans. In 1946, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), founded four years prior, used the racially restricted rink as an opportunity to focus their desegregation efforts. The group staged public protests and filed a lawsuit with the aim of ending racial discrimination in public and privately controlled

60

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

They Didn’t See Us, but We’re Here.

spaces. Within a few months, CORE was victorious; the rink was desegregated and renamed Park City Roller Rink until it closed in 1958.15 Today, Washington Park is surrounded by majority African American neighborhoods except for Hyde Park to the east, home to the University of Chicago and its hospital. Current Black or white residents would find it hard to imagine the park was conceived of and operated as exclusively white space. In fact, college students and white residents of Hyde Park are rarely seen east of Cottage Grove Avenue, the park’s eastern border. Black residents, on the other hand, have claimed the park for their own recreation, amusement, and marking territorial rights.

Public open spaces that exist in Black neighborhoods—such as Washington Park— hold the possibility of simply being spaces unencumbered by the kinds of unspoken permissions or questioning of acceptance that Black bodies experience when moving through spaces dominated by whiteness. But there are also times when the claiming of public spaces— whether by gangs, children playing, or Black creatives and place-makers—could be viewed as political and defiant acts against the history of denial. As a result, public open spaces in Black neighborhoods must become the platform for a Black imaginary to produce an adapted landscape, in opposition to historic contexts situated in racist practices, that make visible an aesthetic of equity, inclusion, and future possibility—an aesthetic of Blackness.

DREAMLIKE IN ITS WILD OUT-OF-PLACENESS centers the joy of a young Black boy in the 1970s at Adventure Playland, a mid-century modernist playground located on Washington Park’s Bynum Island. The playground was designed by Chicago Park District architects and named after Marshall F. Bynum, the first African American member of the Chicago Park District Board, a civic-minded businessman who lived nearby. The park included a spaceship-like sculpture, a zip line, and stackable Lincoln logs.

Equipped with supplies, a dedicated art director curated programs that enabled young people to construct alternative futures in contrast to the realities of the adjacent neighborhood’s accelerating physical decline.16 Crossing onto the island was like stepping into an urban utopia. And using

healing imagination—akin to what novelist Toni Morrison describes as “dreaming loud,” a power used by one of her characters in Paradise to share, confront, and acknowledge past traumas as a form of healing—was encouraged.17 Vacant neighborhood spaces have the potential to be owned and configured by Black creative imagination—both temporal and permanent—and in doing so, the South Side can be transformed (back) into an economic and cultural Black Metropolis. The dream of what is possible for these lands and the South Side is in the hands and imaginations of future generations of young Chicagoans, but they must be lifted up and supported in their dream-making capabilities. Hence, the young Black boy is placed on the pedestal of chrysanthemums and grape leaves to represent Chicago, achievement, freedom, and a new future for Black Space.

PUBLIC SPACE | BLACK OCCUPATION “We were unarmed, but we knew that Blackness armed us even though we had no guns.”

Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

AVAILABLE FOR THE TAKING | Public space can be occupied for protest, celebration, or the mundane. The ability of Black Americans to be carefree and at ease within the public realm often requires the appropriation of space through cultural ephemera like performances, festivals, and parades, where Black joy can be claimed without apology, apprehension, or acquiescence.

The aspiration is to be at peace in space, unencumbered by unspoken and unseen oppression—a feeling of true liberation. But depending on the identity of the observer, the occupation of Black Americans in public space, outside of those ephemeral events, is often perceived as threatening.

Black bodies in the public realm are not all observed or experienced in the same way. Black girls and women are often rendered invisible in public, overlooked from the checkout line to the sidewalk. Black boys and men, on the other hand, are keenly visible and often confronted, questioned, or challenged about their public occupation. But unlike gender differences, class

differences for the Black body are rarely distinguished. In his article “The White Space,” Yale University professor Elijah Anderson notes that “members of the black middle class can be rendered almost invisible by the iconic ghetto.

Police officers, taxi drivers, small business owners, and other members of the general public often treat blackness in a person as a ‘master status’ that supersedes their identities as ordinary law-abiding citizens. Depending on the immediate situation, this treatment may be temporary or persistent while powerfully indicating the inherent ambiguity in the anonymous black person’s public status.”18 Anderson’s reference to the “iconic ghetto” represents the stereotype and presumption that the ghetto is where all Black people live, and therefore the burden of disproving this position is placed upon Black people, regardless of income class, before meaningful trust and interactions are possible.

Therefore, being armed in Blackness, as Kendi points out, is to have a dogged awareness of one’s position in space, because you never know who’s watching.

THEY DIDN’T SEE US, BUT WE’RE HERE uses a historic photograph of a white couple rowing peacefully in the mere of Washington Park, with white observers standing on a distant rustic bridge. The scene is enveloped by images of feminine power and color. The silhouette of Michelle Obama’s portrait by Amy Sherald forms both sky and forest, while the quilt patterns from the portrait float through the scene as water and terrain. Marching out from the trees are confident young women, arms locked and striding toward the rowers. They are participants in the annual Bud Billiken Parade, founded in 1929 to help fuel the Great Migration, according to the Chicago Defender, the nation’s first Black newspaper. The mission of the parade, named after a fabled guardian of young people, is to celebrate youth, progress, and pride, providing “one of the only spaces where we can openly and emphatically praise the historic roots that plant us into the South Side of Chicago.”19 The female figures throughout the collage are a reminder of the prominence of women in the Black community as heads of households and the fastest growing demographic of entrepreneurs.20 They are emerging from the shadows and excelling to great heights.

Sites

Make Art Not Owners.

PUBLIC LAND | TEMPORARY APPEASEMENT “…development breeds development, and development breeds stability. Each new owner is an anchor that holds our neighborhood in a safe harbor ahead of the next economic crisis.”

“These Black developers are buying back the block,” Crain’s Chicago Business AVAILABILITY ON LOAN | The temporary use of publicly owned land as a means of equitable investment—until it’s deemed worthy of value recapture—keeps these lands in a holding pattern of appeasement. The former Black Belt neighborhoods that surround Washington Park, Jackson Park, and the forthcoming Obama Presidential Center, hold nearly five million square feet of vacant city-owned land. Most of the lands are residentially zoned lots where upper-, middle-, and lower-class Black Metropolis residents once lived.

In 2020, the University of Illinois Chicago Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy published “Between the Great Migration and Growing Exodus: The Future of Black Chicago?,” a study on the city’s Black population shift. It reported that Chicago’s population peaked in 1950, while the percentage of Black residents continued to grow until 1980. But the aftershocks of urban renewal and civic unrest, coupled with the demise of the steel economy in the early 1980s and sustained public and private disinvestment, has triggered a steady exodus of Black people out of these neighborhoods and Chicago over the last four decades. More than 46,000 residents left the Black Metropolis neighborhoods between 1990 and 2016 alone.21 This exodus has opened up new possibilities for land use, ownership, and development. In recent years, temporary murals, community gardens, parklets, art installations, and pop-ups have become the predominate means by which productive community and non-community members have claimed space for cultural expression, identity-making, placekeeping, and commerce. However, access to these lands seldom comes with the right to own or produce generational wealth. Instead, temporary

61

. . . South Side Gold Rush.

permissions are granted to occupy, beautify, and convene as a practice equity, which means that the engaged may be dispersed, the installed may be deconstructed, and the land may be returned to stasis months—or even days—later.

If true equity—understood as economic and wealth parity rather than community engagement—is the goal, greater attention must be given to the transference of underutilized vacant land into community-controlled ownership as a strategy for Black repopulation and closing the Black wealth gap. According to the Brookings Institution, the net worth of a typical white family in 2016 ($171,000) was nearly 10 times greater than that of a typical Black family ($17,150).22 Harnessing Black creativity to produce wealth is not new to the neighborhoods of Black Metropolis and can be used again to drive demand for development while reanchoring the community in a manner that lessens the vulnerability of displacement. The current creative efforts that prioritize beauty and community participation as a place-saving tactic must now evolve to also become an investment in creative wealth-building that centers on ownership, attracting capital, and monetizing Black cultural production.

MAKE ART NOT OWNERS speaks to the readiness of public agencies and philanthropic organizations to invest in creative initiatives that promote art-making practices and community engagement as a means of equitable investing in underrepresented communities. These locally produced installations aim to build civic trust, engagement, and social cohesion. They also purport to elevate neighborhood identity, spur economic development, and counteract the threat of cultural displacement often associated with gentrification. Missing from these benefits, however, is the deepening of control and ownership of local economic assets, such as the land upon which these creative endeavors are built. Without land ownership, community residents and businesses remain vulnerable to dislocation. The makers featured in this collage, photographed by Sandra Steinbrecher, work to uplift community and represent a commitment to place, cultural identity, healing, and the value of the aesthetic. Their commitment must now be monetized through an equity stake in the places they work to improve.

PUBLIC WHITEWASHING | BLACK SPACE “The 1619 Project is a racially divisive and revisionist account of history that threatens the integrity of the Union by denying the true principles on which it was founded.”

Saving American History Act of 2020

AVAILABILITY AT RISK | There is a growing fear of American narrative truth telling. In 2021, Congressional Republicans introduced the Saving American History Act of 2020, prohibiting the country’s public schools from using federal funds in the teaching of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s “1619 Project.” The project is a series of essays— published by the New York Times in 2019—that elaborate on the consequences of slavery today, as well as on the impact of African Americans on American life at large. The proposed bill states that “an activist movement is now gaining momentum to deny or obfuscate this history by claiming that America was not founded on the ideals of the Declaration [of Independence] but rather on slavery and oppression.” The proposed legislation goes on to say that “the 1619 Project is a racially divisive and revisionist account of history that threatens the integrity of the Union by denying the true principles on which it was founded.”23 Lawmakers in Texas and Alabama are also debating which version of American history should be publicly offered. These contests over American storytelling expose our current reckoning with who gets to tell our history and who legitimizes its truth.

The whitewashing of the Black experience through narrative is extensive and its practice not only eliminates the contributions of Black Americans, but also minimizes their legitimacy and worth by pathologizing their pain and resistance. In 2020, Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain published Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 16192019, a collection of histories told by African American authors, curated to fill in the gaps of the Black experience in America. In the built environment, whitewashing is most visible when underinvested Black spaces begin to see reinvestment and improvement by people or institutions who are not Black or Black-led. This form of gentrification is experienced by longtime

62

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

residents as the modern-day version of land taking, “negro removal,” and cultural erasure.

Gentrification is feared, whether it forces residents and businesses to involuntarily relocate or not, and it is almost always objected to by those who are most vulnerable to urban change and most traumatized by previous urban interventions that caused dislocation. As poverty is erased, so too is their history, culture, and a community of shared values and endurance. The long trajectory of land occupation on Chicago’s South Side and its racial narratives are at risk of being obliterated when the opportunity to recapture land value is again available. This reclamation benefits directly from the devaluation of Black real estate assets, and dismissal of the power of the Black cultural aesthetic and prosaic activities of Black life. What is at stake is the loss of control of a neighborhood’s land and landscape—its “Black gold.”

In order to protect these assets from those who wish to acquire and appropriate them without regard for their significance, there must first be a financial and cultural reconciliation of value. Artist and urban planner Theaster Gates understands this mission. His practice of acquisition, archiving, and placekeeping is

. . .SOUTH SIDE GOLD RUSH represents the threat of gentrification and displacement in the disinvested neighborhoods of Chicago’s South Side. Publicly owned vacant land in neighborhoods on the threshold of change is commonly offered for sale or ground lease through public request for proposals (RFPs), a competitive bidding process for public land dispositions.

Referencing imagery from the 1940 American Negro Exhibition, the Black god and goddess lift up the neighborhood’s abandoned land assets as a symbol of public offering. The exhibition, also known as the Black World’s Fair, was curated in response to racial discrimination during Chicago’s 1933 Century of Progress Exposition and was designed to showcase Black excellence in business, arts, and production. Again, Amanda Williams’s Color(ed) Theory houses are used to represent the area’s devalued vacant properties as South Side’s Black gold. The Black police officers represent the community’s desire to fend off and protect these assets from the rush of white investors and instead, seek capital that intentionally puts South Side public land assets in the hands of the Black families who have endured generations of urban neglect.

Black residents from their communities. This is only partially true. Black depopulation has many triggers, both voluntary and involuntary. The demolition of public housing projects during the height of the HOPE VI program, a federal initiative to disrupt the concentration of poverty by replacing public housing “projects” with mixed-income, low-density housing, contributed to South Side population dispersal. There is another group of Black Chicagoans who felt compelled to leave the city because of the disinvestment that left Black neighborhoods with inferior public schools, infrastructure, and commercial services, as well as surges in neighborhood crime. Black families with financial means made the choice to leave the city because public investment had not been equitably distributed on the South Side, as it had been on the North Side. And finally, there are those Black families who simply wanted what many other Americans want—a large home on a spacious lot in the suburbs.

In Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in Black Cities, Brookings Institution senior fellow Andre Perry reminds us that central to the idea of the American Dream is the belief in a land of opportunity in which any person,

“THESE CONTESTS OVER AMERICAN STORYTELLING EXPOSE OUR CURRENT RECKONING WITH WHO GETS TO TELL OUR HISTORY AND WHO LEGITIMIZES ITS TRUTH.”

“deeply invested in the material preservation of neglected social and cultural histories,”24 according to a description of his work from a recent gallery show in Chicago. His practice, and that of Chicago artist Amanda Williams, aims to elevate the inherent value of the everyday urbanism of Black Chicago, in much the same way that musical artists Common and Chance the Rapper have done in their lyrical homages to the South Side. Their art and music are now consumed by art curators and suburban teens, because to consume Black culture is, after all, to be cool, to be progressive, to be woke.

Since the 2016 announcement of the Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park, land speculation has accelerated on the South Side, increasing the price of land and sparking fears of displacement by current residents. The preservation of cultural heritage through the placement of ethno-representations into new development cannot be the only strategy for withstanding the threats of whitewashing. Black participation in the ownership and development of the future of the South Side must become a primary strategy to ensure that a Black cultural aesthetic remains visible and enduring.

PUBLIC LAND | BLACK REPARATIONS O, let America be America again— The land that never has been yet— And yet must be—the land where every man is free.

The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME— Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again”25

AVAILABILITY OWED | In 1980, with Black residents making up more than 40 percent of the city’s total population, Chicago felt like a Black city (at least to a Black Chicagoan). But this was the peak of Black residency in the city and marks the start of a consistent trend of an exodus, with 33 percent of the Black population leaving the city between 1980 and 2017.26 What happened to the land of promise proposition that attracted Black Americans to Chicago nearly a century ago? How had the city failed to fulfill the promise of freedom and equality?

Popular displacement narratives suggest that the reverse migration was driven by a push—an economic force that involuntarily dislocated

regardless of background, can—with hard work—climb economic and social ladders to attain a home, start a business, or retire with a security of income. Wealth, as measured by a person’s material possessions, like land or home, minus their debts, is the most common measure of one’s fulfillment of the American Dream. As such, wealth provides economic security and thus enables freedom.27 In 2018, Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program’s research on Black housing assets found—after controlling for factors such as housing quality, neighborhood quality, education, and crime—that owner-occupied homes in Black neighborhoods are undervalued by $48,000 per home on average, amounting to $156 billion in annual cumulative losses nationwide.28 The devaluation of Black-owned real estate means less property tax revenue to support funding for schools, infrastructure, policing, and other public services. The ripple effect of this underinvestment translates to the potential for lower educational outcomes, and less homeowner equity for families to support sending their children to college or starting and maintaining a business.

Sites

63

A March for Our Land.

NOTES The racial unrest in 2020 brought about a new commitment to reparative approaches to redress the harm done to Black Americans in the urban spaces of the city. New waves of public debate have forced public officials to put promise into action through publicly funded interventions.

Evanston, Illinois, a northern suburb of Chicago, became the first US municipality to pay reparations to Black residents who were victims (or descendants of victims) of housing discrimination between 1919 and 1969. Funded by a new tax on legalized marijuana, this program offers homeownership assistance grants as investments in neighborhoods. City officials outlined as part of the proposal that the “strongest case for reparations by the City of Evanston is in the area of housing, where there is sufficient evidence showing the City’s part in housing discrimination as a result of early City zoning ordinances in place between 1919 and 1969, when the City banned housing discrimination.”29 If equity for Black Americans is really the promise and the desired outcome, financial redress must be part of the act of change and the vision for a just Chicago—and a just America.

A MARCH FOR OUR LAND recalls the work of organizations like CORE in the early 1960s and the tactic of protest marches as a means to desegregate the public beaches. Imagine a contemporary effort to stage local marches for land reparations. People would take to the streets in neighborhoods of chronic vacancy to demand equitable land appraisals and value, access to capital for reinvestment, and Black land ownership, as promised in the Special Field Order No. 15, issued by Union General Sherman in 1865 to allot plots of land up to 40 acres to some freed slaves.30 Steinbrecher’s photographs of South Side land vacancy are overlaid with images of Black men—both real (CORE protesters) and fictional (as represented in artist Hebru Brantley’s depiction of Chicago-native Chance the Rapper as a superhero of generational pride, power, and hope)—exercising the superpower of Blackness: descending upon the vacant land to reclaim the assets and monetary value of what was taken, devalued, and denied. The case for reparations is undeniable as there is already a precedent in Native American reparations. The South Side belongs to Black Chicagoans—it’s time that they own it as well.

1 St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1945).

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Adam Green, Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940–1955 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

5 John Keilman, “Rainbow Beach ‘wade-ins’ broke down racial barriers,” Chicago Tribune, July 10, 2011.

6 Ibid.

7 Charles A. Birnbaum, “Is Chicago About to Ruin Jackson Park?” HuffPost, January 3, 2018.

8 Nancy Leong, “Racial Capitalism,” Harvard Law Review 126, no. 8 (June, 2013): 2151; U Denver Legal Studies Research Paper No. 13-30.

9 Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics (Oakland: University of California Press, 2007).

10 Ibid.

11 Digital Scholarship Lab, “Renewing Inequality,” American Panorama, ed. Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers, accessed August 26, 2021.

12 Aly-Us, “Follow Me — Club Mix,” produced and mixed by Kyle Smith, recorded 1992, Strictly Rhythms Records, SR1288 A, 1992, track A on Follow Me, 12-inch vinyl.

13 WTTW, “White City Amusement Park.”

14 Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City.

15 Alison Martin, “This week in history: White City Roller Rink desegregated,” Chicago SunTimes, February 4, 2021.

16 Julia Bachrach, “Remembering the Adventureland Playland on Washington Park’s Bynum Island,” Julia Bachrach Consulting, May 3, 2021.

17 Zeng Na, “The Healing Power in Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” International Journal of Arts and Commerce 4, no. 6 (August 2015): 6-10.

18 Elijah Anderson, “The White Space,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1, no. 1 (January 2015): 10-21.

19 Bud Billiken Parade, http://www.budbillikenparade.org/about.

20 Shelley Zalis, “Black Women Entrepreneurs are Launching More Businesses Than Ever: Here’s What They Need to Help Them Mature,” Forbes, May 25, 2021.

21 William Scarborough, Iván Arenas, and Amanda E. Lewis, “Between the Great Migration and Growing Exodus: The Future of Black Chicago?” University of Illinois at Chicago Institute for Research on Race and Policy, 2020.

22 Kriston McIntosh, Emily Moss, Ryan Nunn, and Jay Shambaugh, “Examining the Blackwhite wealth gap,” The Brookings Institution, February 27, 2020.

23 Seth Cohen, “Defund Teaching About Slavery? Sen. Tom Cotton Proposes Legislation Attacking The 1619 Project,” Forbes, July 23, 2020.

24 Gray Warehouse Press Release, Documentary Premier: “How to Sell Hardware.”

25 Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again” in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994).

26 William Scarborough, Iván Arenas, and Amanda E. Lewis, “Between the Great Migration and Growing Exodus: The Future of Black Chicago?”

27 Andre M. Perry, Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution Press, 2020).

28 Andre M. Perry, Jonathan Rothwell, David Harshbarger, “The devaluation of assets in Black neighborhoods: The case for residential property,” The Brookings Institution, November 27, 2018.

29 Rachel Treisman, “In Likely First, Chicago Suburb Of Evanston Approves Reparations For Black Residents,” NPR, March 23, 2021.

30 William Darity, “Forty Acres and a Mule in the 21st Century,” Social Science Quarterly 89, issue 3 (September 2008): 656-664.

Protesting in Times of Social Distance

Tali Hatuka with photographs by Mel D. Cole

65 Social distances are everywhere: between family and friends, in the way we communicate, how we share our thoughts and ideas, move in the city, inhabit our living spaces, and perceive our past, present, and future. And we simultaneously embrace and reject those social distances.1 We embrace them because they help us feel safe and define a place where we can hide secrets. But they also enhance discontent, separateness, and loneliness, weaken social bonds and, in severe cases, cause isolation. Our conflicted and multilayered feelings reflect both the social distances (segregation, polarization) and the social interactions (protests) that characterize contemporary life.

Social distances can be based on race, ethnicity, age, sex, social class, religion, and nationality. The greater the social distance between individuals or groups, the less they influence each other. Maintaining social distances is a daily practice driven by cultural norms and political institutions that advance regulations. These regulations also serve to establish hierarchies among people, and between citizens and the government. When necessary, the government guarantees distance by modifying or tightening regulations, and by ensuring that boundaries are understood and maintained. Through this ongoing process of maintaining and defining distances, social order is achieved, aggression is suppressed, and an illusion of stability is attained. In extreme conditions of social distance, individuals are easy to manage and control.

SOCIAL DISTANCES AND MOMENTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Brooklyn, New York, June 14, 2020.

Since social distances are embedded in our life, and social power structures have been built to maintain them, people do not think about them or engage with them on a daily basis. But powerful moments and unforeseen events can shed light on the obvious and push societies to reflect on and assess social distances. George Floyd’s killing is one of those moments. On May 25, 2020, Floyd, a Black man, was arrested after allegedly passing a counterfeit $20 bill at a grocery store in the Powderhorn Park neighborhood of Minneapolis. He died after a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, pressed his knee to Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds during the arrest. Floyd was handcuffed, face down in the street, while two other officers further restrained him and a fourth prevented onlookers from intervening.

Floyd’s restraint and death were captured on a cellphone camera and sparked global protests opposing police officers’ use of excessive force against Black suspects and the lack of police accountability.

Protests themselves are moments that challenge our defined social distances. In the case of Floyd, his death was a reminder of the social distances defined by race. Moments, as defined by Henri Lefebvre, are those times when one recognizes or has a sudden insight into a situation or experience, beyond the empirical routine of some activity. Moments are within everyday life, and are the means and mediations offered to the individual for change.2 They facilitate a shift from individual consciousness to questions of social reality and reflection on social distances. In that sense, social revolution is not a political form but rather a praxis of everyday life. As Alain Badiou suggests, the political is a site open for occupation by those who call it into being, and stage “equality” irrespective of the place they occupy within the

66

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

New York, New York, March 13, 2021.

Sites

67

Washington, DC, January 6, 2021.

social hierarchy.3 And protests, as eventual time-spaces, are the moments from whence a new democratizing political sequence may unfold.4

Challenging social distances requires imagination, the power to act, and public spaces. Imagination is the key tool by which people consider themselves part of a larger whole and refuse to retreat to the isolation of the private sphere. To counteract discrepancies, imagination may be the only tool at people’s disposal. Action is a flexible strategy that tolerates conflicted positioning and that allows activists to make changes based on actual events on the ground. And space is a social platform that allows for creating new possibilities.

This triumvirate is essential for redesigning social distances and altering the political sphere.

THE NECESSITY OF PUBLIC SPACES FOR CHALLENGING SOCIAL DISTANCES A significant step in communicating protesters’ ideas is their physical presence in space; they need to be visible. In everyday life, the relationships between citizens and the state are distant and abstract, but they are concretized in physical

spaces during protests. According to Hannah Arendt, protest actions are prerequisites for the creation of public spaces.5

To be sure, protests do not need special spaces. We tend to differentiate between social spaces, where a full range of social interchanges and recreation activities take place; infrastructure spaces, which support transportation and movement; and third or hybrid spaces, which are between public and private. Protest events do not follow this categorization but rather challenge it by offering new temporal interpretations for the programmed action associated with space. This interpretation and the negotiation over messages and symbols associated with space is what transforms a space into a public, political space.6 The meanings and manifestations of the political in places emerge from the significance that people assign or read into them rather than from their actual physicality. Furthermore, protests are vital in rearranging social distances through material and temporal use. Three key strategies are associated with challenging existing social distance: Procession: The actions of a group of people going or marching along in orderly succession in a formal or ceremonial way at a festive occasion or at a demonstration. Even when carefully planned, however, processions are loosely organized in nature. The site of the procession is a mundane space, an

68

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

69

Brooklyn, New York, June 5, 2021.

70

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

economic space; if used, symbols during these protests are held by the participants themselves. Processions sometimes pass by institutional buildings or spaces, referring more to their secondary identities as representations of power and locations of other remembered events or spaces rather than to their primary identities, which are derived from public use.

Processions essentially make use of the most primal forms of human locomotion on land—walking or using wheelchairs, for example. The simple act of protesters moving together, with one body next to another, produces magnified rhythms of sound, creating a dynamic performance that enhances social bonding. Each body is constantly responding to the movement of other bodies that surround it. The body is the core of the procession’s composition, dictating its rhythm and density, which then influences the distance among participants. As such, the physical distance among participants is not defined a priori; it is ever-changing and often unpredictable, dictated by the pace of this dense movement. Overall, spatial choreographies associated with processions share three key attributes: (1) they focus on the body and its movement, (2) the people carry the symbols of the protest, which are closed and concrete, and (3) they are informal and dynamic events. Processions entail significant uncertainties for both organizers and regimes, since they have minimal control over the participating body(ies).

Spectacle/ritual: Although often associated with grand events, a spectacle can be a massive event with many participants or a small event with very few participants. In the context of protests, “spectacle” refers to a well-planned event, which takes advantage of the physical order and/or the architectural attributes of a particular space. It often has a focal point, perhaps a stage or a performance, that captures the crowd’s attention. In some cases, the spectacle is located in a space that is associated with symbolic attributes or with sacred sentiment; in other cases, it appears in an informal space, among the mundane.

Whether used in mass gatherings or in small group assemblies, the tactics in this category share three key attributes: (1) defined roles for participants, (2) spatial distance between the key actors and the participants or general audience, and (3) a set of agreed-upon symbols that are associated with the event. In a spectacle, the body tends to respond to predetermined choreography, and thus is respectful and obedient.

Placemaking: This involves changing a place’s physicality and meaning through the use of objects or other means over a period of time. The object is often the heart of the event— its form, spatial location, or spread has symbolic meaning. In this type of action, the body is secondary to the object, but the two are closely related. The object’s creation and survival rely on the body; pitching tents, building sheds, and erecting statues are all placemaking acts. Clearly, the spatial choreography of placemaking requires preparation and adequate infrastructure. Its rhythm is mediated by the object, with the body relating and responding to the object.

The power of this type of action lies in its ability to suggest an alternative symbolic setting in place of an existing social order. The question of control and certainty in the occupation of spaces varies, but it relates to the ways in which an action is framed in advance by its political leadership. Being so central, the object has a major influence on how the distance among participants is defined and enacted. In other words, placemaking actions focus on the erection of an object and its resilience as a means of defining a new place.

Black Trans Lives Matter, Brooklyn, New York, June 14, 2020.

Sites

71

All of these strategies have been used in protests following the killing of George Floyd, but the major task is to respond to the call of protesters to reconfigure social distances. A political idea cannot find ground and grounding without localization. Without a site, a place, or a location, a political idea is impotent. Ultimately, however, protests can only ever be an event; they are pre-political.7 Indeed, as Elias Canetti has argued, during a protest, the people “who suddenly feel equal have not really become equal; nor will they feel equal forever”; instead, they “return to their separates houses, they lie down on their own beds, they keep their own possessions and their names.”8 They maintain their distance. Although activists are aware of this gloomy prospect, physical protests remain a method of political partnership and a tactic for maintaining or changing places.

DEMOCRACY AND THE RECONFIGURATION OF SOCIAL DISTANCES Both in representative democracies and in other types of regimes, protesting is all about disobeying the accepted ideas or practices of those in power. Chantal Mouffe explains that this dialogue is important to democracy: “We need a conflictual consensus for democracy to exist. There needs to be some form of consensus but the consensus is on what I call ‘the ethical-political principles,’ the values that we are going to accept in order to organize our coexistence: liberty and equality for all. But those values are going to be interpreted differently according to different perspectives.” According to these ideas, democracy should attempt to create practices and institutions that allow conflict to emerge and take an agonistic form, “a form of adversarial confrontation instead of antagonism between enemies.”9

Indeed, the threat of violence can never be eliminated from protests. We need to study when and why violence erupts, but also how the potential for violence is policed, encapsulated in law, and sublimated by design. According to Don Mitchell, the key dilemma is how order can be maintained when public spaces are used for acts of dissent and how speech rights—which are deemed necessary for the production of truth—can be protected through the imposition of order.10 The solution in democratic regimes is establishing agreed-upon spatial distances while allowing the freedom of speech. This approach shifts the control over speech itself to the space in which the speech occurs.

In all democracies, planners and architects demarcate distances by defining the geometry of space. Conservative democratic regimes tend to frame the built environment by limiting the use of space, enhancing social distances. Progressive democratic regimes will allow events that offer open interpretation of spaces and negotiation over social distances. In the words of Doreen Massey, “Any politics which acknowledge the openness of the future (otherwise, there could be no realm of political) entails a radically open time-space, a space which is always being made.”11 This openness is made possible by and through the imagination of space.

The wave of protests in the 21st century, an age of active civic participation, is far from over. Protests are a message to policymakers, whose power is given to them by citizens. We are at the beginning of civil-sovereign negotiations over social distances everywhere.

NOTES 1 Many of the ideas in this essay are explored in The Design of Protest, which maps the multiple choreographies of protest and its role in projecting messages and enhancing social change. Tali Hatuka, The Design of Protest: Choreographing Political Demonstrations in Public Space (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018).

2 Henri Lefebvre, Henri Lefebvre: Key Writings, ed. Stuart Elden, Elizabeth Lebas, and Eleonore Kofman (New York: Continuum, 2003), 176.

3 Alan Badiou and Aude Lancelin, In Praise of Politics, trans. Susan Spitzer (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019).

4 Erik Swyngedouw, Promises of the Political (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018), 135.

5 Hannah Arendt defines action as a human being’s exercise of freedom, which is a combination of “I will” and “I can”: the will and the ability “to take an initiative, to begin, to set something into motion.” In the Arendtian scheme of the private/public dichotomy, action occurs when someone for whom the necessities of life have been satisfied in the private realm enters the public realm. For Arendt, public space results only from people’s action and is not a given. John McGowan, Hannah Arendt: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 177; Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 160.

6 Yvon Grenier, From Art to Politics: Octavio Paz and the Pursuit of Freedom (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 76.

7 Swyngedouw, Promises of the Political, 140.

8 Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (New York: Viking Press, 1962), 18.

9 Chantal Mouffe and Elke Wagner, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London: Verso, 2013); Chantal Mouffe, “A Vibrant Democracy Needs Agonistic Confrontation - An Interview with Chantal Mouffe.”

Interview by Biljana Đorđević and Julija Sardelić. Citizenship in Southeast Europe, May 2013. https://www.citsee.eu/interview/ vibrant-democracy-needs-agonistic-confrontation-interview-chantal-mouffe, 2013.

10 According to Don Mitchell, early federal intervention in speech and assembly cases “was not concerned either with protecting the right to dissent or with creating the boundaries in which dissent was possible, but rather with controlling the public behavior of the working class.” Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: Guilford Press, 2003), 54.

11 Doreen Massey, For Space (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005), 189.

SPACES Ali Madanipour, Frida Escobedo, Sala Elise Patterson, A.K. Sandoval-Strausz

Beyond Placing and Distancing: Public Spaces for Inclusive Cities

Ali Madanipour

Spaces As public spaces were emptied and abandoned by the force of the pandemic, their significance for social life became increasingly apparent to everyone. And everyday sociability, which is always taken for granted, became an object of desire beyond reach. The centrality of public space in urban life can be traced back to the archaeological remains of the very earliest cities. Today, in the context of cities that are more complex and fragmented than ever before, public spaces are facing challenges and threats, but there is potential for change and improvement for the spaces themselves and for the city as a whole. Therefore we ask, How are public spaces defined? How can public spaces contribute to a more inclusive city? What challenges does this need to overcome?

DEFINING PUBLIC SPACE: A DOUBLE NEGATION There is an old ontological controversy about space, on whether it is an entity in itself or just a set of relationships between things. Descartes, Newton, and an entire tradition of mechanical science and philosophy that started in the 17th century and continued for centuries, believed that space and time are stable and measurable entities.1 From early on, however, Leibniz objected that space is relational, no more than “an order of coexistences,” as time is an order of successions; and by the early 20th century, Einstein argued for the relativity of space and time and their interdependence.2 If space is an order of coexistences, the epistemological question is: How do we get to know it? Kant’s answer was that space and time “cannot exist in themselves, but only in us,” as they are aspects of our perception of the world.3 As Hegel argued, however, no perception of the world is purely personal, but is influenced by larger contextual conditions.4 Furthermore, as critics of idealism have argued, our experience of the world is embodied, rejecting the Cartesian duality of body and mind.5 Understanding space means that we, as embodied and embedded beings, try to understand, from the inside, the material and social order of coexistences within which we live.

So what makes such a space public?

The word “public” has a wide range of meanings, which may be grouped into three broad definitions: the totality of a population who share common interests, territories, or laws; the contradistinction of this totality from the private and partial; and exposure to non-intimate others. These definitions are not unproblematic: people as a whole is difficult if not impossible to delineate, boundaries between public and private are not easy to draw and they are more blurred than ever before, and appearance before others occurs in all sort of places, now even in the depths of what is considered private space. Nevertheless, these definitions may offer a platform toward a broad concept of public space: an inclusive order of coexistences, an inclusive space that is open and accessible to all in contrast to the exclusivity and enclosure of the private space. This order is embodied in material conditions of people and their environment and takes shape in physical co-presence and direct face-to-face encounters as well as in institutionally and technologically mediated relations.

The inclusivity of public space indicates a double negation: a space that is not private, while in turn the private space is that which excludes others. Private space specifies an individual’s legally recognized claim for control and use of space; it is the socially sanctioned negation of common

75

access to a territory, enabling some to exclude others. Public space negates this negation, defining an area in which no one can exclude others from accessing it. In other words, it defines an area of common accessibility, where a private individual’s claim to limit or negate access by others is not recognized. This creates a normative demand, an affirmation, that an area be safeguarded from the encroachment of individual, partial interests, so that everyone in society can have equal access to it. Areas are needed in which everyone can enter, but no one should dominate permanently. Public space becomes an empty space, necessarily underdefined so as to allow different entrants to make it as they wish, but to leave it not long afterward, so that the others can have the same chance. It is inscribed with the possibility of exerting double negation at all times and in doing so finding an affirmative character.

Inclusivity becomes a principle that could lead urban transformation. Public space is not the space of “Society” as a monolithic totality; it is the entire range of different places and activities that make up the social life. It incorporates presuppositions of unity, equality, and openness, which are not found in the realities of highly stratified and diversified societies, but describe the ideals of democratic society. The public is not a mere aggregation of people, but as Rousseau argued, it implies association, and it is in this sense that it becomes a normative principle rather than a descriptive statement.6 If seen as the place of possible association, public space finds a transformative force. Rather than a passive container for some activities, it becomes an active force, a stimulant for change; not by assigning independent agency to the material environment, but by seeing how materiality is an integral part of social relations.

This concept of public space generates demands on society and its institutions. Spaces can be evaluated on the basis of their inclusivity and accessibility, with all the subsequent implications for spatial form, composition, and context.

The meaning of space is not fixed; it finds meaning through a continually changing process of designation. It is in this fluidity that public space’s normative potential may be actualized.

What the many different forms of public space share is that they are materialized actions, rather than thoughts and feelings; they are all exposures rather than concealments; and they all potentially involve unknown, rather than intimate, others. From this perspective, public space is a social space, the place of impersonal co-presence.

Public space is always contextualized: it combines a general principle, which demands equal access for all, with widely different contextual conditions of spatiality, where different and unequal forces are at play.7 The result is ambiguous, multilayered, and conflictual. Activities, events, and spaces may not be entirely private or public, and the complex urban circumstances generate a wide spectrum of publicness and privacy, each subject to challenges, conflicts, and vulnerabilities. This is evident in the gap between ownership and use of space: some “public” spaces are not accessible to the public or are highly controlled, while some privately owned spaces are open to them. Some spaces mediate between different realms, generating peaceful ambiguity, while others create harsh boundaries, reflecting a warring condition. The encroachment of private interests into the public domain is always present, pushing to expand more and more. Vice versa, the intrusion of the public eye into private domains should be curtailed, so as to protect intimacy and peace.

76

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics PLACING AND DISTANCING

Under what conditions can public spaces and their expansion contribute to the development of a more inclusive society?

Like public space, social inclusion is a double negation, a continuous struggle against social exclusion, which can broadly be analyzed in overlapping economic, political, and cultural spheres.8 In economic terms, social exclusion is the lack of access to resources that are necessary for decent living. The political form of social exclusion is the lack of political voice through explicit suppression or through alienation from the political process. In cultural terms, social exclusion is the loss of status, stigmatization, denial of identity, and disconnection from common symbols and shared narratives. Social exclusion is the acute and sustained combination of these limitations, which are exacerbated at their intersection with the patterns of social difference, such as age, gender, ethnicity, and physical ability. It is a condition of powerlessness that characterizes those at the lowest ranks of stratified and diversified societies.9

Social exclusion is not a fixed condition, but it is a continuous and multidimensional process of negation. It works through “placing,” which, through political, economic, and cultural processes, allocates inferior positions to some individuals and groups within a social hierarchy. It also works through the process of “distancing,” which keeps these inferior positions away from those who are placed at higher levels of the hierarchy. The extreme forms of social exclusion find spatial expression in deprived neighborhoods, which in turn consolidate the conditions for the reproduction of disadvantage and marginality. These neighborhoods are the most visible manifestations of placing and distancing, but different forms of these processes can be found at all levels of society. Placing and distancing are among the instruments that shape the order of coexistences.

Social inclusion is the fight against the processes of exclusion in all its dimensions; it is the process of negating the negative. In economic terms, social inclusion is a struggle against poverty, which is normally made possible through social support and though access to well-paid employment, facilitated by knowledge and skills provided through education and training. Social inclusion in political terms means having a stake in power and being able to participate in the decisions that affect our lives. And social inclusion in cultural terms means the ability to share symbols and meanings, perform free expression and communication, and enjoy social recognition and a secure status.

The role of public space is significant in all three dimensions. In economic terms, it involves investment in public infrastructure, such as public transportation and housing, and a fair distribution of public services in urban areas, ensuring access for all groups. Political inclusion entails a democratic public space that is open to equal political participation. Cultural inclusion requires a free space of cultural presence and expression that allows as many voices as there are forms of life.10

Exclusion as the practice of distancing is an essential part of social life, enabling individuals and households to manage their lifeworld; but it needs to be offset by processes of inclusion. Social exclusion and inclusion largely revolve around access: to resources, power, and shared symbols. This access is regulated through social barriers that constitute the social hierarchical order, with which individuals and groups are placed into particular positions and kept at a certain distance from each other. These visible and

invisible social barriers range from subtle nuances in signs and gestures, to institutionalized customs and laws, and to the physicality of high walls and the violence of barbed wires.

Access is enabled or denied with these socio-spatial barriers, through which individuals and groups are sorted and placed.

Public space as the inclusive order of coexistences offers an open gate to cross at least some of these barriers; it offers the possibility of negating the negative. More public spaces, in all their immediate and mediated forms, from faceto-face to digital and institutional spaces, would mean more choice for more people to have open access to places and possibilities, which would include better access to resources, political voice, and cultural exchange. Public space can help overcome the limitations that are generated by placing and distancing, not on its own and in a deterministic way, but as part of a broader process of making society more inclusive.

THE BARRIERS TO CROSS Low density dispersion of urban areas, which is one of the causes of the climate crisis, has also decimated the places of sociability. The expansion of public spaces, therefore, can be seen as a bridge for the reconstitution of fragmented society.

The obstacles and challenges to an inclusive public space have come from an economic approach to public space, which sees it as a commodity serving partial interests; a political approach that metamorphoses the role of public authorities into private corporations; and a cultural fragmentation that is reproduced even by the instruments that claim to overcome it.11

Some forms of public spaces, such as market squares, have long been associated with economic activities, as the public space, and the city itself, functioned as a marketplace for the exchange of goods and services. The link between public space and retail trade is still present in casual street vendors and regular open-air markets. In the structural transformation of urban economies from manufacturing to services in globalized economies, this historical link is utilized to serve urban regeneration, which draws on consumerism, leisure, tourism, and real estate development. However, what appears to be public and open, and used to claim inclusivity, could become merely an image, a shell for partial interests and a catalyst for gentrification; more exclusive places with glitz and excitement, but with additional legal, physical, and symbolic limits on accessibility. Public space becomes a catalyst for animating an experience economy and boosting property value, a medium of attraction that can lubricate the operations of the retail and real estate markets.

The link between trade and public space—now transferred to online spaces, and accelerated through the global health crisis—is threatening the survival of the model of urban space that is based on consumerist retail. By being attached to partial economic interests, the inclusivity of public space in all its forms is undermined or curtailed. As social inequality has grown, some public spaces have dwindled, been neglected, or become associated with homelessness.

Deregulated urban development has been driven by maximizing interest on private investment, which was secured through a privatized environment, rather than through an inclusive public space. Tensions between public and private interests, which are manifested in approaches to public space, have long been identified as a challenge to democracy, one that needs to be continually addressed.

77

Alex Chinneck, From the Knees of My Nose to the Belly of My Toes, Cliftonville, Margate, United Kingdom, 2013–2014.

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

The duty of balancing different demands that put pressure on common resources falls on public authorities. Public spaces, as one of these common resources, are not supposed to belong to any one person or group, and therefore they are managed and owned by public authorities. Global economic restructuring of recent decades, however, has dramatically changed the nature of public authorities and their relationship with private interests. Public authorities are encouraged to think and act like private corporations.

Under the pressures of reduced budgets and guided by a change of mentality and culture, some public authorities look to public space as a source of revenue, rather than as a nonprofit common resource. This metamorphosis has profound implications for the processes of urban development and the quality of public spaces. Rather than performing a balancing act, public authorities join private corporations in a search for maximizing revenue. Although some have taken positive steps toward reducing car-dependency in urban spaces, similar steps have not been taken toward a reduction of dependence on partial interests. Partiality of public authorities undermines the possibility of democratic governance, which is expected to safeguard an open and inclusive public sphere. Meanwhile, authoritarian political tendencies insist on surveillance and violent control of public spaces, keeping people out of what could become a theater of democracy.

In addition to these political and economic challenges, cultural challenges are also significant. Public space reflects the idea of public interest, which in turn draws on a presupposition of unity and homogeneity. But even as the diversity of the population increases, the “public interest” is often seen as supporting the interests of a privileged minority—while being wrapped in the language of the public. This is reflected in a wide range of struggles: from a critique of top-down urban planning practices, to women’s and minorities’ struggle for equality of presence and opportunity in the public realm, to the fight for removing the symbols of racism and colonialism from the public domain.

Faced with social diversity and fragmentation, in which traditional social bonds would no longer be recognized, some have argued that the revival of democracy depends on the formation of a single public out of these many publics.12 However, while different publics may be formed at smaller scales, a single public may be difficult to find. Information and communication technologies were at first praised for offering the possibility of linking people from across their spatial and social divides, constituting healthy new public spaces. In practice, however, they amplify this fragmentation through the creation of echo chambers, and in monetizing any success in the creation of new publics. They have also threatened the possibility of safeguarding a realm of intimacy and privacy, by further blurring the boundaries between public and private spheres. Meanwhile, long-term alienation from common narratives, as well as fears of violence, crime, terrorism, and health hazards, have led those who feel vulnerable to withdraw from the public realm.

STRUGGLE FOR PUBLIC SPACE Public space is both a mirror and an engine of the urban society.

It is both a functional necessity and a normative principle. It is not a stable and fixed condition, nor a particular architectural form that can be repeated in different times and places, but

“SOCIAL EXCLUSION IS NOT A FIXED CONDITION, BUT IT IS A CONTINUOUS AND MULTIDIMENSIONAL PROCESS OF NEGATION.”

78

Spaces

79

a continual struggle to maintain an inclusive common realm, a negation of negations. The threat of partial interests and exclusionary forces is always present, finding different forms: authoritarian or commercialized public authorities that do not recognize the inclusivity of public space, economic pressures of turning or attaching public spaces to commodities, and cultural pressures of stratification and diversification that break or weaken social linkages. These exclusionary pressures find spatial expression in placing and distancing, to which public space as inclusive space is a partial response. Despite these pressures, there is no life without interdependence, no city without public space, and no democracy without the public sphere. As such, there is no alternative but to struggle for creating and safeguarding inclusive public spaces.

NOTES 1 René Descartes, Discourse on Method and The Meditations (London: Penguin, 1968), 58.

2 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “The Relational Theory of Space and Time,” in Problems of Space and Time, ed. J.J.C. Smart (New York: Macmillan, 1979), 89; Albert Einstein, foreword to Concepts of Space: The History of Theories of Space in Physics, by Max Jammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), xi–xvi.

3 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (London: J.M.Dent, 1993), 61.

4 Ludwig Siep, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

5 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2000), 134–35.

6 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract & Discourses (London: J.M. Dent, 1923 [1761]).

7 Ali Madanipour, ed., Whose Public Space? International Case Studies in Urban Design and Development (New York: Routledge, 2010).

8 Ali Madanipour, “Social Exclusion, Space and Time,” in The City Reader, 7th edition, eds. Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout (New York: Routledge, 2020).

9 Ali Madanipour, “Can the Public Space Be a Counterweight to Social Segregation?,” in Handbook of Urban Segregation, ed. Sako Musterd (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2020), 170–184.

10 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London: Continuum, 2004).

11 Ali Madanipour, “A Critique of Public Space: Between Interaction and Attraction,” in Companion to Public Space, eds. Vikas Mehta and Danilo Palazzo (New York: Routledge, 2020), 7–15; Ali Madanipour, “Rethinking public space: between rhetoric and reality,” Urban Design International 24 (2019): 38–46.

12 John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry (Chicago: Gateway Books, 1946); Charles Taylor, “Liberal Politics and the Public Sphere,” in New Communitarian Thinking, ed. Amitai Etzioni (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 183–217.

WHOSE SPACE IS IT? Frida Escobedo & Sala Elise Patterson

Frida Escobedo’s approach to designing for public spaces begins with a consideration of the most vulnerable people in them. Do they feel safe, accounted for, supported? It is an extrapolation of the power dynamics she confronts when designing for the microcosm of the single-family home. Escobedo has developed an eye for the way traditional architecture conceals and oppresses domestic workers in her native Mexico. She responds with projects that encourage an acknowledgment of this largely female class of workers, their needs, and their productive labor.

Her public work, most often temporary installations, scales this concept as “highly activated incubators.” The projects not only reveal and celebrate the individual, but at times they work to further a body politic. Her prizewinning pavilion at the Museo Experimental El Eco in Mexico City was an experiment in programming a space whose purpose was meant to be deconstructed and transformed by visitors through a shared experience. It is quintessential Escobedo: using the built environment to stimulate an improvised dance between rigid material, human agency, and collective consciousness.

Spaces SALA ELISE PATTERSON Why did you decide to address social and political issues with your work?

81 SALA

Can you provide an example?

FRIDA

FRIDA ESCOBEDO It wasn’t really a decision but rather realizing that if you look at architecture through a lens of inquiry, that’s what naturally comes out. There is not a built environment that doesn’t make a comment on social, economic, and political forces, whether intended or not. Because it’s materializing human life, it will necessarily be a commentary on human life.

SALA When anticipating the different audiences for a public commission, do you find that there are competing needs, with one public taking precedence over the others?

There was a project for making a public transportation line on Paseo de la Reforma, one of the main avenues in Mexico City that goes from downtown all the way to Lomas de Chapultepec, a very wealthy neighborhood. The initiative was stopped right where Lomas started because residents thought public transportation would damage the image of their neighborhood.

Clearly the most vulnerable person in this case would be an Indigenous woman domestic worker who has to take public transportation either very early in the morning or late at night. She becomes vulnerable. She is dependent on having a specific time frame when she needs to move around the city. So the city does not belong to her.

SALA

FRIDA We’re always trying to start with a gender perspective because it reveals how public spaces are created for the group in power—usually men—and therefore align to that way of thinking and behaving. And there is a spectrum of experience that goes from being uncomfortable in a space to the most important condition, which is being at risk or endangered.

When you’re uncomfortable in a space, the message is, “You don’t belong,” because that space was not made for you. This creates a condition of displacement, of being inadequate, both in the public and private spheres And that only reinforces the other intangible experiences that are heightened by not belonging in a space. It’s important to understand how small changes affect both the risk and the sense of belonging and to consider all needs rather than just the patriarchal, binary ones.

SALA Your book, Domestic Orbits, looks at how, through design, certain groups are excluded and rendered invisible in spaces of domestic labor. Does the built environment similarly conceal certain genders, races, or classes?

You talk about how domestic architecture can create spatial inefficiencies when it’s trying to hide unpalatable realities like the labor that keeps a house tidy (e.g., large pantries for concealing appliances). Are there ways to make public spaces more efficient, even if that means exposing tensions we don’t want to see?

FRIDA Absolutely. Mexico City is a great example, because everything happens in the public space—life and death. An example is the food cart or food truck. If you analyze the time people spend just setting up and breaking down a food truck, it’s half the workday. This idea of them being informal is problematic because by casting them as such we avoid recognizing their needs; but they are actually highly organized and quite fixed, culturally, and physically.

In Guadalajara, a brilliant architect renovated a small plaza and included water taps every few feet and a proper grease trap on the drainage for the street, like the ones in kitchens. It was basic, but it

FRIDA Yes. I think that’s why we shifted the scale for Domestic Orbits. We started by analyzing the main residential unit, in this case, Luis Barragán’s home studio, a house embedded within a house. But then we moved to a multifamily building and then slowly into larger compounds. You start seeing that the dynamics that happen within the private house are replicated in collective housing, and then in the public sphere.

Frida Escobedo, Bajo el mismo sol, Museo Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico, 2015.

82

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

made it much easier to set up a stall and take it down. He was facilitating the use of time and also protecting the infrastructure, if you think about the grease that goes into the sewage system.

SALA To what extent have architecture and design enabled or constrained how we define public space?

But this time it was “re-signified” through a very intelligent and powerful strategy: a collective of women organized to have the names of the victims of violence and femicide written on the fence. So these thresholds became a board to endorse or communicate something else. And the people supported it, leaving flowers and candles. It became a huge altar, which the government didn’t expect.

SALA

FRIDA It’s interesting to see what’s happening in the public sphere during the pandemic, because it always seems to be controlled by some form of power or domination. For example, during the Ides of March protests last year [which called for the end of gender-based violence in Mexico], some monuments were heavily graffitied. The government’s strategy was to put a fence around these public monuments.

It signifies that the streets don’t belong to you.

These monuments do not represent you because you are not a citizen, or at least not in the same way that other groups are.

Then this year, the government put a fence around the National Palace, a government building.

How can we create public spaces where people can actually reveal these kinds of discomforts and resolve them without it turning to violence?

FRIDA The more we’re able to negotiate those differences in public, the less of a snowball effect we will have. But we don’t have any options right now. Either it’s a public space that’s controlled by the government, or spaces that are controlled privately. There’s no way of having a space that is not politicized or controlled. I wonder, how can we open them up?

Frida Escobedo, Civic Stage, Lisbon Architecture Triennial, 2013.

83

Frida Escobedo, Pabellón Eco, Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City, Mexico, 2010.

Latinidad and the Construction of a New Public in Pennsylvania

A. K. Sandoval-Strausz with photographs by Michael T. Davis

Spaces

In rural Pennsylvania, on a small grassy area opposite a gas station-convenience store that serves travelers and truckers pulling off Interstate 80, stands an eight-foot-tall statue of a Mexican man sporting a magnificent revolutionary-era moustache, wearing a holstered pistol, and crowned with an expansive red sombrero.

If you’ve taken the long-haul bus east or west across the state, it’s a good bet you’ve stopped here and seen this eye-catching advertisement for the J. Zapata Mexican Food taco truck, which began serving customers in 2014. A few years later, the proprietor—Ricardo Santos, an immigrant from Mexico—added a sign that archly beckoned potential customers with the slogan “Mexican food so good, Trump wants to build a wall around it!”

It is essential to note where this eatery is located: just a short drive up Route 93 from Hazleton, Pennsylvania, the town often called the true birthplace of a now-familiar strain of anti-immigrant politics. It was in Hazleton that in 2006 Mayor Lou Barletta spearheaded local ordinances criminalizing undocumented people and outlawing official documents in any language but English. And it was here that in 2016 Donald Trump turned a reliably Democratic county red and ran up massive vote margins in virtually every Pennsylvania county further west along the interstate. So it may be something of an indicator to see the J. Zapata taquería on the landscape of northern Appalachia—especially given that one of Trump’s supporters famously warned, “If you don’t do something about it, you’re going to have taco trucks on every corner.”1 This is more than just a colorful anecdote or local idiosyncrasy: it is a bellwether of immigration and migration in an old industrial state with a fast-growing Latino population. It hints at the intertwined relationships among places, publics, and power in a changing America—and it speaks especially to the challenge of “trying to find your culture in a place where you can’t see your culture,” as a recent Tejana transplant from South Texas to Central Pennsylvania elegantly phrased it.2 Hazleton grew up as an anthracite coal town, prosperous but scarred by violence: in 1898, sheriff’s deputies opened fire upon striking immigrant workers at a nearby mine, killing 19 and wounding dozens more in what became known as the Lattimer massacre. As the coal seams were gradually exhausted, the town made a difficult economic transition to manufacturing and then to meatpacking, warehousing, and distributing. Its population peaked in 1940 at 38,000 people, but over the six decades that followed, nearly 40 percent of them moved out.

Hazleton only began to grow again when a new group of migrants arrived seeking jobs and affordable housing. The largest group were originally from the Dominican Republic, many of whom had previously lived in the New York City area; they were joined by fellow Spanish speakers from Mexico and other parts of Latin America. They stabilized the population, reinhabited vacant homes, and opened businesses in long-shuttered storefronts. Whereas in 1990 Hazleton was 95 percent non-Hispanic white, by 2010 it was 28 percent Latino.3 In larger cities that had been revitalized by immigrants, local people mostly welcomed them. But in Hazleton, Mayor Barletta led an anti-immigrant reaction, using the pretext of the murder of a local man to enact an ordinance that

85

did not address crime at all but did impose harsh penalties upon anybody who hired or rented space to an undocumented person. The so-called Illegal Immigrant Relief Act (IIRA) of 2006 made nationwide news, becoming the first of a wave of local laws that criminalized unauthorized migrants: within months, 49 similar laws were introduced nationwide—26 of those in Pennsylvania alone. The IIRA never went into effect as it was ruled unconstitutional by a series of federal courts and ultimately by the Supreme Court. But the real effect was political. Barletta parlayed his newfound notoriety into a seat in the US House of Representatives and then into the Republican nomination for Senate. And both before and after the election of 2016, a series of feature articles and political analyses declared that Hazleton explained blue-collar white voters’ affinity for Donald Trump.4 Scholarly analyses of Hazleton have focused on the politics of place and identity. Urban planner Justin Steil and geographer Jennifer Ridgley have argued that the rhetorical construction of the community created, rather than described, social and political divides.

Proponents of anti-immigration ordinances repeatedly positioned Hazleton as an exemplar of “small-town America” in a way that implied whiteness but avoided explicit appeals to race by contrasting it with large cities that were racially heterogeneous and heavily populated by immigrants. The emphasis on Hazleton’s small size and the connection to a past before recent immigration were consistent strategies of the town’s immigration restrictionists.5 The definition of the public is also central to sociologist Jamie Longazel’s analysis of how “misconceptions about Latina/o immigrants coupled with nostalgic collective imaginings of ‘Small-Town America’ contribute[d] to the construction of a racialized community identity that embrace[d] exclusionary immigration policy.” Longazel, himself a Hazletonian, explains how Barletta and his supporters emphasized undocumentedness (as opposed to race or ethnicity) as the objectionable characteristic of the newcomers. This made all Spanish speakers and Latinos into presumptive “illegals,” thereby defining the legitimate public as implicitly non-Hispanic. These moves, he observes, were both instantiations of the “Latino threat narrative” described by anthropologist Leo Chávez and the “dog-whistle politics” described by legal scholar Ian Haney López. This positioning rendered the white, non-Hispanic part of the community as traditional and normative while casting Latino features of that landscape— Spanish language signage, Latin music, and brown people in public space—as essentially alien to the “real” Hazleton.6 The broader context of small postindustrial Pennsylvania municipalities also reveals the arbitrariness involved in presenting Hazleton as a representative community in which politics simply grew out of its geography or economy.

The urbanist Domenic Vitiello has pointed out that some communities that were demographically or economically much like Hazleton actually pursued pro-immigrant policies as part of bids to improve their municipal fortunes. He notes that “some of this divergence of local responses can be explained by the particularities of local histories of migration and revitalization” and that “immigration debates are revitalization debates, particularly in first suburbs and older industrial

86

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

Spaces

Opposite and above: Betsy Casañas, Cruzando el Charco, 2007. Mural in two parts, divided by North 5th Street, near the intersection of West Dauphin Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

87

communities.” He argues that when elected officials tell stories about their communities, they make pivotal choices about how to incorporate newcomers into their notions of the local public and of the history (and future) of that public. And as we know from We’re Still Here, ethnographer Jennifer Silva’s fascinating account of white, Black, and Latino working-class people in eastern Pennsylvania, such narratives critically shape grassroots political responses.7 Hazleton’s place on the landscape thus became a terrain of struggle over who was and who was not a legitimate member of the public; it was also presented as a meaningful indicator of the status of that struggle. The “small-town” rhetoric positioned the everyday street life of the community as an index of true Americanness and a warning of the threat to an implicitly white national identity: as Barletta said of the small-town character of communities like Hazleton, “if you take that away you are taking away a part of America.”

This was also an unmistakable precursor to the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump, who repeatedly insisted that cities were dangerous and made that way by Latino immigrants (even though crime had been dropping for three decades nationwide and native-born Americans committed crimes at a far higher rate than immigrants) and who used a landscape feature (“Build the wall!”) to symbolize his hostility to immigration. Lest there was any doubt how that might be understood in rural Pennsylvania, one small town’s “Trump House”—a two-story dwelling painted in the colors of the American flag, surrounded by dozens of Trump campaign signs, and featuring a 14-foot-high metal cutout of the candidate—drew national media attention during that campaign.8 Pennsylvania’s built environment features many signs of a quarter-millennium-long history of political struggles over belonging. German design elements—houses with two front doors, forebay barns with painted barn stars, and union churches surrounded by decorative grave markers—can still be seen throughout the commonwealth, and the German cultural landscape is by far the most represented non-Anglo subject in the conference tours and scholarly publications of the Vernacular Architecture Forum. This did not come without a struggle, though. The first chapter of America for Americans, Erika Lee’s history of US xenophobia, begins with Benjamin Franklin’s 1751 denunciation of German immigrants. Why, he asked, should these newcomers “be suffered to swarm into our settlements, and by herding together establish their languages and manners to the exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them[?]”

The colony enacted laws attempting to limit immigration, but these were rarely enforced, and Germans became by far the most numerous settlers on Native lands.

Pennsylvania’s history of immigration took a strange turn for most of the 20th century. For the better part of two centuries, it had attracted millions of immigrants: after the Revolution, in every census since the first in 1790, it registered more foreign-born residents than the United States as a whole. Pennsylvania’s immigrant population topped out at just under 19 percent in

88

1910, when about 15 percent of all Americans were foreign-born. But with the coming of immigration restriction in the late 1910s and early 1920s, this proportion plunged. By 1960, Pennsylvania was at parity with the United States as a whole at 5.3 percent foreign-born; and by 1990 it had fallen to an all-time low of just over 3 percent at a time when the nation had risen to nearly 8 percent immigrants. That trend only gradually reversed itself, with immigrants in Pennsylvania rising to just over 4 percent in 2000 and more than 7 percent in the most recent counts—slightly over half the national average of 13 percent. About one-third of immigrants in Pennsylvania are now from Latin America, and together with their children and the state’s almost half a million US citizens of Puerto Rican ancestry, nearly one out of every twelve Pennsylvanians is Latinx. The commonwealth is returning to its traditional place as a destination for migrants.9 Part of this process has been the way Latina and Latino migrants and immigrants have refashioned the landscape. In part this has involved simply reoccupying homes and shops that were being abandoned by the people who had arrived decades earlier. But it has also entailed deliberate efforts to represent themselves, their culture, and their historical struggles on the cityscape, especially through murals. Muralism has been an artistic tradition among US Hispanics ever since migrants brought it from Mexico in the 1920s; it was subsequently adopted by politicized Chicanos and then by Puerto Rican activists.

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

Pennsylvania’s largest and best-known Hispanic settlement is the Puerto Rican community of Philadelphia. As the historian Carmen Teresa Whalen has written, it largely originated in the late 1940s as agricultural modernization forced people off the land in Puerto Rico and the US government facilitated their labor recruitment to southeastern Pennsylvania. After they were pushed out of their initial area of settlement, the Spring Garden neighborhood, many moved to North Philadelphia, where older white ethnic Philadelphians had been moving out, leaving more affordable housing. The distinctively Puerto Rican presence on the landscape was immediately apparent. Si Izes, a longtime restaurant owner whose father had immigrated from Russia’s Jewish borderlands in 1912, remembered that in the 1970s, in addition to the signs on Spanish-language businesses, his new neighbors ran colorful fabrics along building fronts in preparation for celebrations and parades. In 1992, he sold his premises to a Puerto Rican restaurateur who became a part of the economically vital North 5th Street corridor that became known as “El Centro de Oro.”10 These areas were home to the most influential early Puerto Rican murals. This was closely linked to the founding in 1974 of Taller Puertorriqueño, a North Philadelphia arts and culture organization that has served for nearly 50 years to support public art projects in the barrio.

In 1979, Taller organized a community mural project; the response was so enthusiastic that it

Dietrich Adonis, Carlos Vasquez, Glenn Hill, and Jane Golden, Puerto Rican Statue of Liberty, 1984. Located at 1701 Mount Vernon Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

became an annual event. That first Feria del Barrio saw the dedication of Domingo Negrón’s mural Nuestra Sangre, which he called a “legacy” to the neighborhood; it illustrated Puerto Rican mestizaje—its mixed Taíno, African, and Spanish heritage. In 1984, local artists founded the Mural Arts Project, which coordinated a number of early murals. The most notable was that year’s Puerto Rican Statue of Liberty, which commemorated a 1976 protest by independentistas who scaled the Statue of Liberty and unfurled a Puerto Rican flag in opposition to US domination of the island.11 Phillyricans have continued to define and elevate their barrios through public art. “Murals were really about claiming space,” explains Philadelphia artist Michelle Angela Ortiz, recalling one from the late 1970s titled Aquí Me Quedo (Here I Stay) that showed Puerto Rican families “fighting for the rights and presence and visibility of the Latino community.” Muralism, she says, is “representative of history and representative of the continued struggle of our presence in the city and our contribution.” This approach is exemplified by the work of Betsy Casañas, whose 2007 mural Cruzando el Charco features historic leaders like Pedro Albizu Campos and the Young Lords alongside everyday working people. It shows the continuity of Puerto Ricans’ struggles as they migrated from the island and fought to improve their communities. Indeed, this kind of placemaking has been credited with helping transform the barrio. The ethnographer Frederick Wherry, for example, assigns public art

“IT IS IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER THAT DEMOGRAPHY IS NOT DESTINY, AND THAT THE MOMENT WHEN SALSA BEGAN TO OUTSELL KETCHUP WAS NOT SOME KIND OF MAGICAL TIPPING POINT.”

Spaces

a central role in his account of how local artists, activists, and entrepreneurs remade Puerto Rican North Philadelphia, once considered a blighted area, into a place of community pride and economic opportunity while preserving its cultural character. Efforts like these have also broadened to include the city’s newer immigrant communities: Ortiz has painted collaboratively with Mexican and Central American migrants who strive for acceptance despite severely limited opportunities to gain legal status.12 Latinx public art is of more recent vintage elsewhere on the Pennsylvania landscape. The fastest-growing Hispanic communities of the past 30 years have blossomed in a line of deindustrializing cities extending 90 miles southwest from the Lehigh Valley: Bethlehem, Allentown, Reading, Lancaster, and York. These include five of the 10 largest cities in the state after Philadelphia, though most reached their population peaks around midcentury; they then lost residents for decades, only achieving real population gains since about 2000. Most of this growth has been achieved by attracting Latino migrants, who account for between one-third and two-thirds of the population of each city. People of Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Mexican heritage predominate, joined by significant Colombian and Central American colonias. Many lived elsewhere in the region before coming to Pennsylvania, propelled by the high cost of living in the New York City area; others have come more recently from the hurricane-devastated Caribbean.13 Latinos in these cities marked their presence through street performance and public art.

Norberto Domínguez, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, moved from Brooklyn to Allentown as a child in the 1970s, a time when its population was about 95 percent non-Hispanic white. As he remembers it, living “with residents that only knew who Dominicans were if they themselves were baseball fans left me feeling like one red kidney bean in arroz.” As he grew up and began looking for cultural programs relevant to his community, he found none in the Lehigh Valley that were based on Latino or Black culture.

“Yet as I walked down the street to my father’s bodega, I’d pass groups of kids dancing on porches, choreographing dance moves with others in back alleys. Graffiti artists, poets/ rappers, dancers, and singers made the barrio their stage at block parties, kept sticking out like cinnamon sticks in arroz con dulce.”14 Recognizing community members as the key to much-needed public representation, Domínguez established Hispanic American League of Artists in Allentown in 1994. The organization’s public projects initially involved the performing arts: community-based theater performances, salsa and merengue and bachata dances and classes, and the like. Later on they expanded into the visual arts, most notably through the Lehigh Valley Community Mural Project that began in 2002. Domínguez helped organize local people to create public artworks that expressed the hopes and values of their communities. He called public meetings to ask residents how they wanted to see themselves represented in murals. In multiracial neighborhoods, people spoke out about poverty and violence but preferred to emphasize more hopeful themes of community empowerment and harmony. Predominantly Latino barrios spoke more specifically about the preservation of culture and language.15

89

The result was a series of murals that, over the course of several years, expanded into a citywide project in Allentown and smaller efforts in Bethlehem and other cities. One prominent example was led by Michelle Angela Ortiz.

Bridging Communities: Embracing Change (2004) evinced the increasingly multicultural character of Allentown, using diverse figures and bright colors to convey the centrality of the city’s more recent inhabitants to its urban fabric.

Another of the project’s murals, We Can, led by painter Matt Helm and completed in 2008, adorned the business of a Puerto Rican restaurateur who specialized in comida criolla and particularly appreciated the Caribbean and Mesoamerican motifs.16 Latinidad has been much less visible on the landscape of western Pennsylvania. The state’s gradual population growth has been driven by migration to its eastern counties, with Hispanics accounting for more than half these gains since 2000. Farther west, however, Pennsylvanians have become fewer and older, and cities like Pittsburgh and Erie have attracted less immigration and thus continued to lose population even in an era of national urban revitalization. Despite municipal leaders’ efforts—governments and community groups in both cities are members of the Welcoming America network, a national organization dedicated to helping municipalities “become more inclusive toward immigrants and all residents”—the western part of the state has often been seen as less welcoming to newcomers. This impression was only reinforced by an October 2020 incident in which Gisele Barreto Fetterman, the wife of Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, was shopping in a Pittsburgh-area market when she was accosted by a white woman who told the formerly undocumented Latina community organizer that she didn’t belong there. And, even though she knew she was on video, she called Barreto Fetterman the worst racial epithet in the American language.17 Western Pennsylvania civic groups had already mobilized to challenge exclusionary attitudes in their part of the state. Among them was the Westmoreland Diversity Coalition, which partnered with the Westmoreland Museum of American Art to create the Billboard Art Project.

The coalition commissioned 10 artists to create images that advanced its goals of promoting diversity, encouraging acceptance, and helping create “an atmosphere in Westmoreland County where all people feel welcome.” The resultant artworks were featured in an exhibit that toured nearby towns, and were reproduced on billboards throughout the county. The effort was headed by Sheila Cuellar-Shaffer, a painter and designer who immigrated from Colombia to Westmoreland. The impetus for the initiative, she explains, was that “after 2016, the county had been increasingly divided. . . we saw an increase in racially charged incidents that targeted minorities. Homemade signs went beyond supporting individual candidates to attacking other political viewpoints, ethnicities, and cultures.” Local observers also linked these efforts to prominent features on the county’s landscape: Pittsburghbased journalist Brentin Mock juxtaposed them with the nearby Trump House.18 These acts of signification in the built environment echoed earlier conflicts in Pennsylvania, clearly demonstrating the connections between cultural landscapes and political power. In October 2012, state officials placed

90

Spanish-language advertisements on billboards in Philadelphia Latino neighborhoods implying that people should show identification when they went to vote. Since Pennsylvania election law did not require identification, Latino leaders immediately saw this as attempted voter suppression.

“Take those signs down,” demanded former city councilman Juan Ramos, “take them down!”

A very different kind of visual campaign was launched in 2017 in which Cuellar-Shaffer also participated. She joined Power to the Polls, an effort to encourage people of diverse backgrounds to vote in the 2018 midterm elections, creating an image that drew upon her cultural roots in Colombia. “The series was influenced by pre-Columbian art, textiles, pottery, and goldwork that informed my childhood. These Indigenous artifacts used by the caciques were so powerful and I wanted to translate that into power for modern-day female and femaleidentifying people.”19 Contests over public power and public space in Pennsylvania are certain to continue, not least because recent census counts indicate that the Hispanic population of the Keystone State will soon cross the 1,000,000 mark. Western Pennsylvania is still a site of political action.

Westmoreland county resident Leslie Baum Rossi, the creator of the Trump House, has leveraged the notoriety she gained there into a winning bid for an open seat in the state legislature. In the next county over, from a home in the

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

old industrial town of Braddock, Gisele Barreto Fetterman’s husband, John (whose approach to immigration policy, it should be noted, is the exact opposite of the one Lou Barletta adopted in the 2018 Senate run that he lost by over 13 percent), has launched a campaign for Pennsylvania’s open seat in the US Senate.

Meanwhile, taco-truck owner Ricardo Santos has claimed a more permanent place on the Pennsylvania landscape. In the fall of 2020, he expanded his operations by opening a fullservice restaurant located in a 19th-century brick rowhouse on the main street of Bloomsburg, a university town 30 miles west of Hazleton. It’s too early to say how long it will be before the popular imagination catches up to the reality of a multicultural and postindustrial Pennsylvania; too many people, especially outside the state, still think in terms of Rust Belt clichés. And it is important to remember that demography is not destiny, and that the moment when salsa began to outsell ketchup was not some kind of magical tipping point—in retrospect these were romantic notions even before November 2016. But it is certainly worth noting the process by which the underlying rejuvenation of Pennsylvania was more actively joined by deliberate efforts to represent Latinidad in order to expand the public image of Pennsylvanians.

Michelle Angela Ortiz with David Flores, Oscar Gallegos, Juan Carlos Reyes, and Antonio Leal, Aqui y Alla, 2012. Located on South 6th Street at Greenwich Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Spaces

91

NOTES 1 The vote totals can be seen at the county level at the New York Times’s “An Extremely Detailed Map of the 2016 Election,” at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/ upshot/election-2016-voting-precinctmaps.html#5.04/41.69/-75.75); Latinos for Trump founder Marco Gutierrez on All In with Joy Reid, September 1, 2016, at https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/ taco-trucks-on-every-corner-756382787934.

2 The phrase was spoken by Penn State graduate student Kay Piña in March 2021 in my Latina/o Studies graduate seminar, and is used with her permission.

3 Thomas Dublin and Walter Licht, “Creating the Anthracite Region,” chap. 1 in The Face of Decline: The Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Paul A. Shackel, Remembering Lattimer: Labor, Migration, and Race in Pennsylvania Anthracite Country (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2018); U.S. Census, 1940-2019.

4 Jamie Longazel, Undocumented Fears: Immigration and the Politics of Divide and Conquer in Hazleton, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2016); Binyamin Appelbaum, “In a City Built

by Immigrants, Immigration Is the Defining Political Issue,” New York Times, October 12, 2016; Charles F. McElwee III, “Haunted in Hazleton,” The Atlantic, November 5, 2016; BBC News, “The Pennsylvania Voters Who Took Donald Trump to the White House,” November 13, 2016, at https://www.bbc.com/ news/world-us-canada-37942545.

5 Justin Steil and Jennifer Ridgely, “‘Small-town defenders’: the production of citizenship and belonging in Hazleton, Pennsylvania,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30 (2012), 1028-1045.

6 Longazel, Undocumented Fears; Leo R. Chávez, The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation, 2nd

ed. (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013); Ian Haney López, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

7 Domenic Vitiello, “The Politics of Immigration and Suburban Revitalization: Divergent Responses in Adjacent Pennsylvania Towns,” Journal of Urban Affairs 36 (2014), 519-533.

8 Steil and Ridgely, “’Small-Town Defenders,” 1028.

9 https://www.census.gov/content/dam/ Census/library/working-papers/2006/demo/ POP-twps0081.pdf; By 2018, Pennsylvania’s foreign-born population proportion was just over half of the national one: 7.2 percent versus the US at 13.7 percent.

10 Carmen Teresa Whalen, “From the Country to the Cities,” chap. 2 in From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001); email from Laurie Izes, received March 29, 2021, in author’s possession.

11 Frederick F. Wherry, The Philadelphia Barrio: The Arts, Branding, and Neighborhood Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 44-45; Stacey Van Dahm, “Barrio Art: Telling the Story of Latino Philadelphia Through Murals,” Latino Studies 13 (2015), 421-33; Kathryn E. Wilson, “Building El Barrio: Latinos Transform Postwar Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Legacies 3, no. 2 (November 2003): 17-21.

12 Telephone interview with Michelle Angela Ortiz, April 2, 2021; Van Dahm, “Barrio Art,” 425-26, 431; Wherry, The Philadelphia Barrio.

13 Edgar Sandoval, The New Face of SmallTown America: Snapshots of Latino Life in Allentown, Pennsylvania (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010); Hispanics/Latinos in Reading and Berks: A Portrait of a Community (Reading, PA: Penn State Berks, 2010); Chloe Taft, From Steel to

Slots: Casino Capitalism in the Postindustrial City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); Our City Inside Out: Changing Perceptions of Reading (Reading, PA: Penn State Berks, 2019).

14 United States Census counts for Allentown; email from Norberto Domínguez received on March 28, 2021, in author’s possession.

15 Email from Norberto Domínguez.

16 Email from Michelle Angela Ortiz, received March 28, 2021, in author’s possession.

17 Ryan Briggs, “Eastern Pennsylvania’s Population Growth Bypasses Western Pa.,” PBS/WHYY, April 19, 2019, https://whyy. org/articles/eastern-pennsylvanias-modestgrowth-streak-continues-to-bypass-westernpa-new-census-data-reveal/; https://www. welcomingamerica.org/programs/our-network; Anna Orso, “Pa. Second Lady Gisele Barreto Fetterman Films Woman Calling Her the N-Word at a Grocery Store,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 12, 2020, https://www. inquirer.com/news/pennsylvania/gisele-fetterman-racist-attack-grocery-store-braddockn-word-20201012.html 18 Westmoreland Diversity Coalition Billboard Art Project website, https://www.wdcoalition.org/dbap/; email from Sheila CuellarShaffer received on March 30, 2021, in author’s possession; Brentin Mock, “How to Diversify Trump Country,” Bloomberg.com CityLab, December 11, 2020, at https://www. bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-12-11/ billboards-advertise-diversity-in-pennsylvania-county.

19 Mike Dunn, “Philadelphia Latino Leader Irate Over Pa. Billboards He Says are Misleading,” 3CBSPhilly, October 22, 2012, https:// philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2012/10/22/ philadelphia-latino-leader-irate-over-pa-billboards-he-says-are-misleading/; email from Cuellar-Shaffer.

SCALES Daniel D’Oca, Khelsilem, Toby Baker, Gil Kelley, Andrea Reimer, Sharon Zukin, Abraar Karan, Diane E. Davis, Anita Berrizbeitia, Isabelle Anguelovski

AS OF RIGHT: FIRST NATIONS RECLAIM THE CITY Daniel D’Oca, Khelsilem, Toby Baker, Gil Kelley & Andrea Reimer

Scales

In what is arguably the first legal recognition by the British Crown of Indigenous rights, the Royal Proclamation of 1763 decreed that Indigenous land could only be acquired through treaty-making. In British Columbia, where very few treaties were made, 95 percent of the land remains “unceded,” or not surrendered by First Nations in treaties. In theory, this means that 95 percent of British Columbia is sovereign, Indigenous land that First Nations maintain title and rights to.

In reality, throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, Indigenous people in Canada were dispossessed of their land and placed on Indian reserves. Since the Indian Act made it illegal for Indigenous people to bring about land claims against the government without the government’s consent, efforts to reclaim land were rare.

This situation changed somewhat in 1967, when a group of Nisga’a elders brought a lawsuit against British Columbia claiming that, because no treaty was ever made with the Nisga’a First Nation, the title to their lands had never been lawfully extinguished. The case made it to the Supreme Court, which, in 1973, ruled in their favor, thereby paving the way for First Nations to reclaim territory. While 20 years would pass until an official treaty process started in British Columbia, First Nations had some success in reclaiming land. In 2003, for example, the Musqueam First Nation, following the example of the early land claims advocate Chief Israel Sgat’iin, filed a legal claim to its traditional territory, which includes much of Vancouver. In the ensuing years,

the Musqueam First Nation asserted ownership rights in several landmark sites in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland, acquiring a golf course at the University of British Columbia, and a large parcel of green space and farmland in Richmond known as Garden City.

It is estimated that by 2017, 140 separate Indigenous communities were engaged in land reclamation negotiations with the Canadian government.

Against this backdrop, a reconciliation process was taking place. In 2014, Vancouver’s city council formally acknowledged that “the modern city of Vancouver was founded on the traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations… these territories were never ceded through treaty, war or surrender.” And in 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada released its final report, with 94 calls to action.

Seeing an opportunity to improve living conditions and generate income for their members—some of the reclaimed land is in valuable, opportunity- and transit-rich urban centers—many First Nations have been proceeding with ambitious development plans. First Nation or Native American development sometimes conjures up images of casinos, bingo halls, and smoke shops, but these images are increasingly stale. Perhaps the most ambitious new development is the Squamish Nation’s proposed Senakw development in Vancouver. Planned on the site of a former Squamish fishing village that was (partially) reclaimed by the

95

Squamish Nation in 2002 after 25 years of litigation, Senakw calls for 6,000 units of housing in 12 mixed-use towers up to 56 stories in height—a combination of market rental units, condominiums, and below-market units for members of the Squamish Nation.

Typically described using words like “staggering” and “unprecedented,” the 10.48-acre, four million-square-foot Senakw project, which is scheduled to break ground later this year, is the single largest development on First Nation lands in Canada (and one of the largest in Vancouver). Importantly, because land reclaimed by First Nations is sovereign, the Squamish can develop this reclaimed land as they see fit, with little interference from non-Indigenous government.

Squamish Nation Councillor Khelsilem explains: “This whole city was built up around [our people] with very little benefit. . . . This development is going to tell the world that this is a Squamish place. That’s really powerful from a First Nations’ rights perspective; it’s also really inspiring, because we’re seeing the Squamish Nation visibly assert their sovereignty on these lands that they’ve lived on for thousands of years.”

I sat down with Khelsilem; Toby Baker, the Squamish Nation’s senior operating officer; Gil Kelley, Vancouver’s former chief planner; and Andrea Reimer, founder and director of Tawâw Strategies and former Vancouver city councilperson, to discuss Senakw, the context that is making it possible, and the future that it potentially represents.

96

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

DANIEL D’OCA: In order to understand why Senakw is such a game-changer, it’s important to have context. For starters, can you explain what “unceded” land is?

KHELSILEM: “Unceded” is a framing that came from the Canadian Supreme Courts.

There’s a lot wrapped up in it. It actually goes back to the Royal Proclamation, which American history nuts might be familiar with because it’s what kickstarted the American Revolution.

Because Canada was still a colony and then a commonwealth country, the Royal Proclamation (and then the British North American Act) guaranteed that the Crown—meaning the state—owed an obligation to obtain permission from Indigenous tribes or nations in order to occupy their lands.

That legal basis is still a precedent in Canadian jurisprudence. It is also recognized within the Canadian Constitution.

So, there’s different levels of jurisdiction in Canada, one of which is the underlying Aboriginal title. But how those jurisdictions interact and conflict with each other is part of the mystery that’s still unraveling: the history is still being written. The three First Nations here—the Squamish, the Musqueam, and the Tsleil-Waututh— don’t have any form of treaty or agreement with the state that settles the issue of our First Nations. We own all this land, they’ve asserted control over our lands, but there’s competing law in Canada that makes it gray and confusing.

DANIEL: What avenues exist for reclaiming unceded land?

View across False Creek taken from the Kitsilano (False Creek) Indian Reserve, ca. 1890.

Scales

KHELSILEM: I would put it into three categories.

First, there’s regaining land (and complete control of that land) by adding to the reserve. New legislation enables this to be much more efficient than before. For example, we just added 20 acres of land to the Stawamus Reserve in Squamish, BC. And we have another 1,400 acres in Squamish that are in the queue to be added to the reserve in the next decade.

The second category is gaining tenure over the land through a long-term lease.

We’ve negotiated long-term leases with the provincial government, for example, and have acquired lands that we, for all intents and purposes, control. A lot of that land has been utilized or set aside for cultural use. The province still owns the land, but we control it. So it’s a form of ownership.

The last category is getting control of fee-simple lands that are then held in trust through a corporate entity that is a subsidiary owned by either a nation or a group of nations. We’ve done this in collaboration with our neighbors. [Musqueam is to the south; Tsleil-Waututh to the east and north.] They are fee-simple lands. They are privately owned lands, so to speak, in the private system, as opposed to federal or state-owned lands (the Indian Reserves).

97

Map of a portion of New Westminster District, future sites of Vancouver, Burnaby, and the North Shore, 1877 (traced 1954).

DANIEL: How was Senakw acquired?

KHELSILEM: Senakw was acquired through a court settlement with the federal government regarding legal challenges around both the Senakw lands and a number of other lands that were confiscated by the federal government.

TOBY BAKER: We’ve gotten to a place where there’s a certainty around the reserve. These lands were expropriated and returned. Now, with the support of the community, we have a mandate to develop it for economic development purposes. But we couldn’t do a designation with membership, pursue economic activity, or work with the city of Vancouver without the efforts of the Squamish Nation to advocate for its own stewardship, and to get its land back. So, from my position on the chessboard, I’m just very excited that we can now actually turn our attention to development.

DANIEL: How would you describe Senakw?

TOBY: It’s effectively 12 towers in metropolitan Vancouver adjacent to the Burrard Street Bridge and other mature development in the area. It’s 6,000 units, 4 million square feet, environmentally friendly, and what we believe to be the largest Indigenous economic development undertaking in North America from a residential and development perspective.

It’s designed to generate approximately $17 to $20 billion in distributions for the Squamish membership over the life of the 120-year lease. It’s a partnership with Westbank’s Project Corp, which is an international developer headquartered

98

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

in Vancouver. We’ll be offering affordable rental housing to the market in general as well as to Squamish Nation membership.

It’s a huge opportunity. By contrast, the last project the Squamish Nation built on its own was a gas station. The learning, the education that’s going to come out of this is something that can’t be forgotten.

Looking ahead, there’s several hundred acres—if not thousands—that the Nation has available for community use, but also for economic development.

DANIEL: I’d like to hear about the density.

How did you arrive at 4 million square feet?

KHELSILEM: The Squamish Nation looked at this land through an economic development lens and a “highest and best-use” lens that asked what the site could sustain from a livability and feasibility standpoint. We believe that we have a responsibility to improve the quality of life for our 4,000 members and that this is a vehicle toward being able to accomplish that.

DANIEL: Tell us about the program. Why rental housing, for example?

TOBY: It was explained to membership that you have two options: you can either receive all of your income from development at once by doing a prepaid lease— effectively a stratified interest where you would receive a blank check for the next 100 years up front and nothing more, or you would put it into a rental model where you don’t receive a check up front, but you wait to receive your return over time. The feedback was that the rental was more palatable for this generation and future generations: they would have a slice of the pie in their lifetime, rather than just one generation at the beginning of construction who would enjoy that. The idea is that it creates a legacy of cash flow.

The other thing that dovetails off of what Khelsilem had to say is the way that the city of Vancouver has digested the project through the lens of reconciliation.

When they were looking at density, Khelsilem got what he asked for—three times what it would have been otherwise.

The city was very open to the concept because of the history of the Nation suffering as it had. So they were somewhat silent on running the project through the planning department, instead allowing them to present the technical limitations and then develop accordingly.

We’re very close to signing off on a service agreement. It would be unique as an agreement that is outside of British Columbia jurisdiction and outside of city planning guidelines and that allows a nation to maximize the value of the interest in land.

DANIEL: As I understand it, even if the city had wanted to impose limits, they couldn’t, since it’s sovereign territory. Can you explain a bit about this unique situation—about not having to get permits or adhere to Vancouver’s zoning guidelines?

Scales

99

KHELSILEM: I have a snappy answer to that that I actually got from Twitter.

Somebody asked: “Why isn’t the city of Vancouver the zoning authority for these lands?” Somebody responded, “The same reason that the city of Coquitlam doesn’t dictate zoning in the city of Vancouver.”

It’s two different jurisdictions. We’re a council. We have government. We have land. The city of Vancouver has a council, has government, has lands. We have voters, they have voters.

GIL KELLEY: The basic premise for us in our discussions with the Squamish and with Westbank was that this site belongs to a sovereign jurisdiction, not subject to city regulations. And Toby is correct: as a City of Reconciliation, we were not going to fight this. Obviously, we have some planning and design thoughts, but we focus most of our energy on the service agreement because the development still requires connections to city services, whether that’s water and sewer or the use of parks and schools and libraries and so forth. These are topics that we negotiated in the service agreement, which at least understands that the city has a favorable reading of the proposal in terms of the social justice aspect of it and the fact that there’s a lot of rental housing. These negotiations recognized that this development will ultimately be part of the city at large, regardless of whose jurisdiction it’s technically in. So, for us, there was great potential for a long-term learning about what reconciliation actually means on the ground as the First Nations empower themselves with more economic development. This isn’t the one and only: this is the first of several cooperative ventures we have to figure out. So there’s the legal reality and then there’s the long-term reconciliation. We have to figure out ways of giving full recognition of value to First Nation interests and the historic lands and what that means for building a healthy and diverse community.

DANIEL: How has the project been received in the media, in the city, by the public? Has there been resistance? NIMBYism?

ANDREA REIMER: The first proposal for this was for billboards! The public went nuts about it: it generated more resistance than what is proposed now. The first time I saw a proposal for the site was in 2011.

I think it was three towers. There was some pushback in the Nation, and it stalled a bit at the Nation level, so it never really went much further at that time. But by the time this current proposal came, I would say the tolerance has kept growing and the opposition has been shrinking, which is an interesting equation that you don’t normally see. It speaks to some really adept work by Khelsilem and others, to be able to move it into a conversation about urbanism, instead of a conversation about land-use battles.

Clearing the former Kitsilano Indian Reserve, 1942.

100

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

GIL: If you were just a regular developer coming in—were this not reserve land— you’d be a big target. I think the fact that this is part of reconciliation changes that.

And people who might otherwise resist it were astute enough to understand that the city doesn’t really have any legal control.

TOBY: The Nation has been doing some amazing relationship-building: with the Parks Board, with local governments, with others. And it has branded the Nation. It’s more than just “We’re open for business”; it’s “We are a government, and we have a say, and we’re on equal footing, and we need to work together on how these projects come out of the ground or what development happens generally.” The branding experience is extremely valuable: we used it heavily during the service agreement negotiations. Different properties are going to be coming online over the next several decades. There are a lot of people that want to heal through making good, healthy decisions around Indigenous development and activities.

ANDREA: There’s a Musqueam reserve on the southern edge of Vancouver, in the mouth of the estuary. When we first started doing the work on reconciliation, the Musqueam chief and council met with the mayor. The meeting was very polite.

They listened to us, and we had a nice dinner and a reasonably good chat. Nolan Charles, one of the Musqueam councillors said, “This is all nice, but we’ve been trying to negotiate a service agreement with you guys for over 20 years; until I see that agreement signed, I don’t want to meet with you again.” And that service agreement was signed within six months, after 20 years of it being a battle of nano inches. The city just did not want to give up anything. How much difference it made to put this different lens on it—this lens that looks at the arc of history and justice and what that meant. I think this speaks to what we’ve all been alluding to: how much difference it makes to change the lens you’re looking at this through.

Plan of portions of the False Creek (Kitsilano) Indian Reserve required for the Burrard Street Bridge right-of-way, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 1930.

GIL: Khelsilem and I used to talk about using the development—whatever its ultimate shape and size—as a premise for a larger urban design and development framework that looks at surrounding non-reserve lands as well. What does the larger area want to be in 10, 20, 30 years?

Cooperating with the First Nations, land owners, and community to define that large vision for this part of Vancouver could be a really big deal in terms of city and community building. The scale of development could motivate things like extending the streetcar system, looking at the shoreline for pedestrian access and boating facilities, or looking at design at a broader scale to identify synergies (for example, the potential co-location of school and childcare). All kinds of wonderful things could come out of this that could be co-sponsored by the First Nation and the city.

101

Scales

KHELSILEM: Senakw has also sort of revitalized and highlighted the need for transit connections to the development, and reinvigorated the opportunity to activate the streetcar line that is available in South Falls Creek, and that we are tentatively naming “The First Line.”

DANIEL: Might I venture that another reason the project has been received favorably has to do with how it is designed?

Khelsilem, you said that the design of the site was inspired by traditional oral storytelling and values of the Squamish Nation. Can you talk more about the design? Why does it look the way it does?

KHELSILEM: The design is influenced by a desire to have a very prominent expression of Squamish identity within and throughout the development. It’s been influenced by the values of the Squamish Nation in our connection to water, land, and sky and it’s connected to the geography that the Squamish people are from, as evidenced by the references to our mountains, and to the iconography of our art and the design motifs from our history. It also picks up on motifs from some of our architectural forms, like our traditional longhouses.

DANIEL: I’d love to hear more about the design process of the forms that you came up with. How did you communicate to the architect and the designer what your intentions were?

KHELSILEM: A lot of that was driven by our development partner, using their expertise in this field to steer the design process. And then we worked through an iterative process of sharing versions of the design and seeking input from the Squamish Nation as a partner. We found ways to correct elements that needed to be refined, to ensure more accuracy or authenticity, but also to provide knowledge and information to inspire the designers.

Some of that work is still ongoing. While a lot of the physical design of the buildings is coming to a set place, there is still more work happening on the landscape, which is being designed by a different firm, Public Work.

Squamish Indian Reserve seen across the Burrard Inlet from Dunsmuir Street, Vancouver, ca. 1903.

View of Kitsilano Indian Reserve looking east, 1907.

GIL: Early on, Chief Ian Campbell brought a sketch that Arthur Erickson, a wellknown Vancouver architect, had done, which actually showed parallel heights on both sides of the Burrard Street Bridge, which connects Senakw to Downtown.

My response was: this is a revolution in thinking in a way, because the bridge functioned less like the drawbridge between the castle and the farm and more like a bridge between two very urban plants of equal heights. Now it could be a bridge between two cultures. And so the bridge itself becomes a very powerful piece of design, as opposed to looking only at the design of the site.

DANIEL: I know that membership has been involved from the beginning. Were they involved in the design discussions?

102

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

TOBY: They are very involved. We’re creating a committee that will gather the input of artists and cultural stewards and oversee a lot of the design elements and cultural pieces. The only thing that’s taken shape from the feedback we’ve gotten so far from artisans is the exterior work that Khelsilem talked about, but there’s still a ton of design work to be done.

DANIEL: Khelsilem, I remember reading that you said that Vancouver was built up around your people with very little benefit to them. In terms of what we’ve talked about, do you think things are starting to change? Do you feel now that Squamish do belong more in Vancouver?

KHELSILEM: I don’t know if I can speak on behalf of my people. We’re not homogenous, and we’re going to have different experiences. I’ve lived in Vancouver for eight years, and I have other friends and relatives from the Squamish Nation that live in the city. Meanwhile, I have a friend who is always trying to get me to move back to the reserve, but I don’t know if I ever will.

So, it varies, but I would say that our people are proud of our territory and how stunningly beautiful it is. It’s exciting to have the opportunity to influence the future of the city in a way that we can be proud of.

We also have a huge need for housing for our people. Homelessness is a big issue in Vancouver, as it is in many cities. But we also have many Squamish people who are unhoused within their own homelands.

It is a particular policy failure that in Canada we have Indigenous people that don’t have a home in their own homelands.

We have a lot of community members who have had to leave the territory because there are no affordable housing options for them, and they would love to come back.

Rendering of the Senakw development, area outlined in white.

GIL: You can flip your question around and ask how aware of the Squamish heritage are people who live in Vancouver but are not Squamish? Vancouver is a multicultural city, and proud of it. But the base layer in all of that is the First Nations who occupied the lands for more than 10,000 years before any of the European or Asian immigrant waves arrived.

I have some hope that through inspired collaboration and design there becomes more of an awareness of that. What would reconciliation look like in terms of longterm city building, cultural enhancement, and so forth?

DANIEL: As you know, last year I led a studio called “As of Right: First Nations Reclaim the City.” We looked at other reserve lands, and offered some high-level ideas and design guidelines for what they might become. Students were keen to identify ways to make people aware of the richness of Squamish history and culture, in part because they had in some ways become aware of it.

Scales

Kitsilano Indian Reserve Beach, 1932.

KHELSILEM: This isn’t a one-off. It’s the beginning of an era for our nation. As we build our capacity, we realize that the more people we have with the experience, the more influence we’ll have. We’re going to be training so many people in all of the roles that are needed in city building, whether it’s architecture or planning, real estate, business development, marketing. I see a future where we’re going to train hundreds of planners, and one of them might become the head of the planning department for the city of Vancouver. I think it will happen one day—just like we’ll have an Indigenous mayor at some point.

103

ANDREA: One day, I was at Council when someone came to present the results of the Urban Aboriginal Peoples Study [a 2011 survey by the Environics Institute for Survey Research on “the values, experiences and aspirations of Aboriginal peoples” in 11 Canadian cities]. There was this moment where it was disclosed that First Nations’ parents felt like their children would experience far greater levels of discrimination and therefore have way lower opportunities than other children.

It just hit everyone in Council in the gut.

It was one of those rare moments where everything changes. You could just see people’s minds open up and shift and turn.

And that really opened the door to understanding Indigenous people as people who have been heavily negatively impacted by colonization, but who have complex culture and architecture and planning and economies and society and government. And I think Senakw just underlines a lot of that: it evidences the complexity of what was here before we were. It really brings those threads together that have been knit through this period of time and woven through the reconciliation work.

One interesting thing that stuck with me in my time doing reconciliation work is about a public intellectual, John Ralston Saul. He’s the husband of the former governor general, and he used that platform to create more visibility for action. One day, he was on stage talking about how because the route to rights and title has come through the courts, it has created thousands of Indigenous lawyers in Canada. And he said, “If the route to rights and title was through your spleen, we’d have thousands of Indigenous surgeons. And if it was through beautiful buildings, we’d have thousands of architects.” It breaks my heart how few Indigenous planners and architects and engineers there are, because I think these aspirations would just be so much better supported if we could get those worldviews at the ground level.

Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, and the Polarized City

Sharon Zukin

Scales Social media platforms and other digital technology colonized our mental space long before COVID-19 emerged, but, during a year of lockdowns, social distancing, and working from home, our shared physical space morphed into unexpected forms.

Small shops and big stores closed, restaurants moved outdoors, meetings were held entirely online. Zoom became the “third space” for all kinds of encounters. The sudden collective plunge into this virtual reality changed the daily paths and rhythms of our lives. It also accelerated the growth of digital platforms and led to windfall profits for many tech companies.

Among the tech titans, Amazon did exceptionally well.

The company’s logo—either a smile or a smirk, depending on your view of trillion-dollar corporations—became the ubiquitous sign of its ability to move goods across the planet.

Amazon dominates the commodities chain from the sheds and garages of third-party sellers and the company’s own gigantic warehouses to almost everyone’s front door, and drives consumers’ one-click convenience with its control of a large portion of the cloud. To look at the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic is to see, as the journalist Alec MacGillis writes, “the America that fell in the company’s lengthening shadow.”1

But if the shadow of Jeff Bezos stretches over the land, big cities are a more complex matrix. Tech companies compete with other claimants for land, public subsidies, and seats at the policy makers’ table. Their strong suit is the promise of jobs, especially well-paid tech jobs; since the 2008 financial crisis, cities have pursued these “jobs of the future” with barely concealed desperation. Everywhere you look, you see an “innovation complex” built discursively by tech evangelists, financially by venture capitalists, and physically by real estate developers—and their ongoing efforts are fueled by elected officials’ anxiety that their city will either be left behind in the “new geography of jobs” or fail to keep the Big Tech genie in the box.2

Amazon played to this scenario when it conducted a year-long competition for a location to build its second North American headquarters, “HQ2,” in 2018. More than 200 cities and towns submitted briefs for why they should be chosen, offering access to land for development and promising to prepare the local workforce for tens of thousands of tech jobs.

They were also required to submit a range of demographic and infrastructure data that Amazon could use for any purpose in the future—locating warehouses, say, or marketing web services, but the company insisted that details of the selection process remain secret.

New York, which had become, by this point, the second-largest tech city in North America after San Francisco, with an estimated 9,000 tech start-ups and 250,000 to 350,000 jobs using or producing digital technology, was one of those cities whose elected leaders bowed to Amazon’s conditions. The governor, Andrew Cuomo, and mayor, Bill de Blasio, pursued HQ2 with state and city subsidies worth $3 billion and a site on the East River waterfront in the borough of Queens. In the hyperlocal geography of New York’s innovation complex, this site promised synergies with Cornell Tech, the entrepreneurial postgraduate engineering school that the previous mayoral administration of Michael Bloomberg had established on Roosevelt Island. It also dangled a vision of jobs for residents of the nearby Queensbridge Houses, the largest public housing project in the nation. The mayor and governor described this as a win-win situation: a once-in-alifetime opportunity for economic development and jobs for “all New Yorkers,” as Mayor de Blasio liked to say.3

105

But they forgot to tell “all New Yorkers” about their plans before Amazon announced the company’s Solomonic decision, dividing HQ2—and its projected 50,000 jobs—between Queens and Arlington, Virginia. Local elected officials, who had signed an open invitation to the company when the competition began, were irate because the governor and mayor had not involved them in the secret negotiations. Progressive Democrats who had been elected in November 2018, most prominently, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who represents a nearby district in Congress, condemned the overly generous public subsidies that were offered to an overly rich corporation led by the richest man in the world. The die was cast when State Senator Michael Gianaris, who resented the governor for entering an earlier race against him, was named to head a committee that would review the deal.

Public opinion was divided, but Amazon opponents spoke loudly, and their complaints resonated with those of other groups. Because condo prices spiked with rumors that Amazon was even considering the site in Queens, residents in nearby areas feared the spread of gentrification. The site Amazon selected had been slated for more than a thousand affordable apartments. Although many residents of the Queensbridge Houses—and many people of color throughout the city—supported the offer to Amazon, even after it was revealed that half the jobs would not be “tech” jobs and very few of them would be reserved for tenants in the public housing project, immigrant communities in Queens were mobilized for protest, partly because of Amazon’s willingness to develop products for ICE, the federal immigration policing agency. On Valentine’s Day in 2019, after public hearings demanded by the New York City Council forced Amazon to admit they would not support the unionization of warehouse workers in the city and the mayor withdrew his support, the company canceled the deal.

This outcome could have been avoided if the city had followed the required procedures for public consultation on land-use changes, a gauntlet of public hearings that was put in place in the 1960s and early 1970s as reforms associated with the revered urbanist and activist Jane Jacobs.

But elected officials, economic development managers, and urban planners all saw “the public” as an obstacle to the kind of growth they desired. Although some writers still view landuse conflicts in New York as a battle between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, the autocratic public-sector builder of the mid-20th century, the real battle now was between Jane Jacobs and Jeff Bezos. And, like all the other Big Tech CEOs, he didn’t even live in the city.4

But big building projects in New York always betray the public interest. A real estate developer chooses a location off the beaten track and claims their new project will transform the area from a dead zone into a glowing city centerpiece (or tech hub). For structural or environmental reasons, the building process will be both difficult and costly. To make a sizable profit, the scale of the project soars. Zoning changes are sought and contested; public hearings are held; activists protest. The towers are too tall; residents, manufacturers, and local shops will be displaced; development will bring gentrification. In the grand compromise between profit-seeking developers and progressive politicians that led the de Blasio administration to introduce Mandatory Inclusionary Housing, a small number of “affordable” rental apartments is promised to sweeten the deal, but the project will add three or four times as many luxury units to the city’s strained housing market.5

106

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

“NO MATTER HOW THE DEALS WITH COMPANIES AND DEVELOPERS ARE CONFIGURED, THE PUBLIC SECTOR WINDS UP PAYING THE BILL.”

Fanning the conflict, the New York Times publishes a nasty article or two about the architectural design; then the editorial board, waving the flag of economic growth, endorses the project. Swaying in the crosswinds, the local city council member demands concessions. A community benefits agreement is hammered out and never enforced.

This process always betrays the public interest. No matter that local, appointed community boards are required to hold public meetings on land-use decisions, call real estate developers and officials to account, and take the first vote on changes and exceptions to zoning laws; their vote is only advisory. No matter that communities are empowered by the city charter to devise their own local plans for development; almost all such plans have been ignored. No matter how the deals with companies and developers are configured, the public sector winds up paying the bill.6

Disregard of the public will is not limited to big development projects. Since the early 2000s, the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations have rewritten zoning laws in nearly 150 neighborhoods, both changing zones from manufacturing to residential use and “upzoning” for taller buildings, usually on wide streets. The city government promotes these changes as a necessary response to a pressing dual need: for many more apartments at modest rents and for growth of the city’s population—although, in fact, the number of residents has declined since 2016 and continued to decline during the COVID-19 pandemic. Low-income neighborhoods and areas where people of color live are the usual targets of these zoning changes. On the one hand, low-income households and people of color are severely rent-burdened; on the other hand, communities of color often lack historic district designations that would prevent new construction of taller buildings and, in many cases, lack strong community boards.

Yet, in the current climate of political urgency that has been shaped by demands for social equity and racial justice, upzoning efforts have targeted an unlikely neighborhood, the lower Manhattan area of SoHo formerly known as an artists’ district. This is the very district where, in the 1960s, Jane Jacobs fought Robert Moses’s plan to build a Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have demolished a long swath of 19th-century loft buildings across the area, and where the community board continues to fight battles in Jacobs’s spirit.7

Artists in SoHo fought for legalization of joint live-work quarters, the prototype of loft living, in the 1960s and 1970s.

They carved out a niche in Manhattan’s expensive housing market and, with historic preservationists, managed to get most of the area’s 19th-century factory buildings legally

protected from demolition and themselves protected from eviction for living in a manufacturing zone. Over time, loft living developed into a desirable residential style. Housing prices and commercial rents in SoHo rose dramatically.8

By the 1990s, the storefront art galleries that had enlivened the streets and attracted worldwide attention were priced out; they were replaced by both big-box, fast-fashion stores and expensive boutiques. Some artists cashed out, selling their lofts to richer buyers. But other artists were able to cling to several thousand lofts and are still there today, aging in place as either owners of lofts in co-op buildings or tenants whose rents are regulated by a 1982 Loft Law.

Yet for new renters or buyers, SoHo lofts are prohibitively expensive. According to the city planning department, the average monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the area is $8,000; current real estate listings show sale prices ascending from $3 million for an unrenovated 4,000-square-foot loft to $32 million for an extravagantly equipped four-bedroom penthouse nearly twice as large.9

The zoning changes that the Department of City Planning (DCP) proposed in 2020, and which generated fierce discussions on Zoom and Twitter through 2021, aim to produce more affordable apartments. But they are complicated by the temporality of demands for racial justice during the pandemic and the specific spatiality of SoHo. When DCP began a series of public “envisioning” meetings in 2019, their stated goal was to regularize the hodgepodge of special restrictions that had been put in place in the 1970s and were now considered obsolete: a preference, at least on paper, for artist-residents; priority for manufacturing tenants in ground-floor spaces that required building owners to seek a zoning variance (exception) every time they wanted to rent the storefront to an actual store; and historic landmark designations that prohibited taller buildings with a higher FAR (floor-area ratio). But, during the groundswell of protests that followed George Floyd’s murder by police in Minneapolis and addressed the racial inequities exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the goal of rezoning changed. Upzoning would enable real estate developers to build to an as yet undetermined height; Mandatory Inclusionary Housing would require them to include an as yet undetermined percentage of “permanently affordable” apartments. These apartments would presumably be won, lottery-style, by people of color.10

SoHo today is predominantly “rich and white”—an epithet often used in public meetings and on social media by affordable housing activists who support upzoning (selfidentified YIMBYs [Yes In My Backyard]). But opponents of upzoning, mainly older artists, both owners and renters, joined

Scales by the community board, respond with three arguments: You don’t live here. This neighborhood has a special character.

We made SoHo what it is, and now we’re disposable.11

SoHo stands on a fault line where advocacy meets privilege. It represents a disastrous housing crisis in which many New Yorkers cannot hope to afford an apartment, but it also represents a crisis for the progressive hopes of Jane Jacobs’s generation: community self-determination, historic preservation, and the city’s ability to sustain the mix of residents, small shops, and building density that determines not only its “character” but its social resilience. This conflict thrusts baby boomers, who inherited the gains of Jane Jacobs’s generation, into the crosshairs of young upzoning activists—at least, it does so for those baby boomers who are affluent or lucky enough to occupy a comfortable niche in the housing market.

In post-pandemic New York, where the city council and state legislature—and candidates for elected office—are trying to put together platforms for both economic growth and social justice, preserving SoHo’s character is a losing cause.

Work and living space for artists is considered a luxury, and even if “grandfathering” joint living and work quarters for artists in SoHo is acceptable, requiring developers to include this kind of space in new buildings, which would enable young

107

artists to live in lower Manhattan, is not. The goal of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” demands that every locality take its share of affordable housing, but in practice, New York City’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing policy requires neighborhoods to accept more luxury apartments. The DCP rejects SoHo artists’ proposal to rezone empty office buildings to residential use; the city government wants more “tech and creative” workspaces.

In a city polarized between rich and poor, both Jane Jacobs and Jeff Bezos represent targets of opportunity.

Economic growth brings jobs, but where do you put Big Tech businesses if neighborhoods object? Highly paid tech jobs bring people who can pay higher rents, but what if they compete with a low-income, local population? Community planning embodies the public’s right to speak up against bureaucrats and developers, but how does that build a better collective future for all?

Interpreting the public will may never be fully reconciled with satisfying the public interest. But betrayal of both brings rebellion.

NOTES 1 Alec MacGillis, Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021).

2 Sharon Zukin, The Innovation Complex: Cities, Tech, and the New Economy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012).

The same kind of innovation complex is being built globally, including in cities across China, within a framework set by the national government’s priorities and with much more management by local appointed officials.

3 Media coverage was extensive; for a few illustrative quotes, see the governor’s press release: “Governor Cuomo and Mayor De Blasio Announce Amazon Selects Long Island City for New Corporate Headquarters,” November 13, 2018, https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-cuomo-and-mayor-de-blasio-announce-amazon-selects-long-island-citynew-corporate.

4 Bezos owns a triplex apartment in Manhattan, but this is only one of his residences. After the plan for HQ2 fell apart, Bezos was criticized for not even visiting the city during negotiations—although future public subsidies would have included building a helicopter landing pad for his use on the waterfront site despite officials’ awareness that the noise, if not the largesse, would disturb nearby residents. Chris Sommerfeldt and Michael Gartland, “NY Officials Went to Great Lengths to Get Amazon a Helicopter Pad in Queens Despite Fear of Local Pushback: Emails,” Daily News, April 16, 2020, https://www.nydailynews.com/ news/politics/ny-amazon-queens-helipad-emails-20200416-3oi2fwjzpzhmncfzalhqre5aru-story.html.

5 “Mandatory Inclusionary Housing,” New York City Department of City Planning, March 22, 2016, https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/plans/ mih/mandatory-inclusionary-housing.page.

6 For examples, see Tom Angotti, New York for Sale (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). New York City is divided into 59 community districts, each of which has a board of up to 50 members appointed by the borough president; they serve without pay to discuss, adjudicate, and make recommendations on local issues. Community boards represent both the first step and last mile of citywide policies, interpreting the local public interest and expressing the local public will.

7 James Nevius, “Jane Jacobs, Robert Moses, and the Battle

Over LOMEX,” Curbed, March 4, 2016, https://archive.curbed. com/2016/5/4/11505214/jane-jacobs-robert-moses-lomex. Jacobs lived in the West Village, not in SoHo, but both areas are included in the same community district. When I did research on SoHo in the late 1970s and early 1980s, committee chairs of Manhattan Community Board 2 were still Jacobs’s former neighbors and fellow activists.

8 Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change, 3rd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014 [1982]); Aaron Shkuda, The Lofts of SoHo: Gentrification, Art, and Industry in New York, 1950–1980 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

9 Rent reported in Jazmine Hughes, “Does SoHo, Haven for Art and Wealth, Have Room for Affordable Housing?,” New York Times, April 4, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/04/nyregion/soho-gentrification-racism-wealth.html?searchResultPosition=1; sale prices on Street Easy, April 7, 2021, https://streeteasy.com.

10 New apartments built under Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning are distributed in a lottery run by the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). In many cases, tens of thousands of applicants have competed for barely 100 apartments. For various reasons, however, applications often turn out to be ineligible. An analysis of HPD data shows that, of more than 18 million applications submitted between January 2014 and March 2019, 341 eligible applications competed, on average, for each apartment. The lower the subsidized rent, and the lower the applicant’s income, the more severe the competition. Rachel Holliday Smith, Ann Choi, and Will Welch, “Affordable Housing Lottery Odds Worst for Those Who Can Afford the Least,” The City, June 28, 2020, https://www.thecity.nyc/2020/6/28/21306383/ affordable-housing-lottery-chances-worst-low-income.

11 Although I don’t live in either SoHo or NoHo, the adjacent neighborhood north of Houston Street that is also the subject of contested zoning changes proposed by the city planning department, I am following the conflict closely. Since fall 2020, I have watched public informational meetings organized by DCP on Zoom, as well as meetings of the community board where the zoning changes and related issues were discussed, and, with Micki McGee, interviewed participants in these discussions.

THE CRISIS OF AMERICAN PUBLIC HEALTH Abraar Karan, Diane E. Davis & Anita Berrizbeitia

“Resources before restrictions” is an essential axiom in the world of public health, according to Dr. Abraar Karan, an infectious disease physician at Stanford University. A regular presence on NPR and other media outlets since the COVID-19 pandemic began, Dr. Karan most recently advised the Massachusetts state government on public health policies. Diane E. Davis and Anita Berrizbeitia sat down with him over Zoom to discuss topics ranging from the fundamental importance of equity in public health, to how public health priorities are defined and by whom, to the spatial and built environmental correlates of disease transmission and the implications for the planning and design professions.

Scales

DIANE E. DAVIS Anita and I are really interested in a variety of scales of experience, ranging from the household and neighborhood level to the city and even the larger ecological context in which a sense of the public realm can materialize. How are the concepts of scale and context operative in public health?

ABRAAR KARAN The public comprises so many different groups who have very different views on health and health care and public health. And we see that with COVID— especially with the way that people interact with their environment around masks, around vaccines, and even around CDC communications. The initial recommendations last year, for instance, were telling people to stay home. They were really centered on a middle-class to upper-middle-class public that could work from home. People whose livelihood depended upon them physically going into work— cooks, factory workers, caretakers, health-care workers—were getting sick the most.

In public health, one of the things to remember is that if we don’t approach health problems from an equity lens or from a lens of those who are the most vulnerable, then we inevitably will forget the most vulnerable. Recommending staying home to people whose livelihood depends upon not staying home is not useful. It can be harmful because then those same people will get penalized and may be seen as not taking responsibility for their own health. One of the biggest points of contention within health care is the role of personal responsibility and how that plays into things like getting infected with COVID or getting vaccinated or wearing masks or not wearing masks.

ANITA BERRIZBEITIA Given how heterogeneous the public is, how does the US government account for heterogeneity in public health policies?

109

ABRAAR The CDC is supposed to take information and give guidelines and recommendations. Those recommendations are then executed by states and cities. When the CDC recommended that vaccinated people would not have to wear masks anymore, some places took that guidance and got rid of mask mandates and other states kept them in place for longer. But even before the CDC came out with revised guidance saying that fully vaccinated people need to go back to wearing masks in certain circumstances, some localities, like LA County, had already reinstituted mask mandates.

The CDC will say that they make national guidelines, but that all public health is local first. It’s communities. It’s in people’s homes. It’s the decisions that you make. Doctors give patients recommendations and guidelines that may be very different from what the CDC recommends for the general public. Very early on, Cambridge had penalties if you were not going to be wearing a mask, whereas Boston did not. So there are always going to be differences.

DIANE Are people more likely to respond to guidance if it’s locally decided, as opposed to imposed by state or national authorities? Could you say more about the local conditions that help generate public trust?

ABRAAR I’m often asked questions by patients who say they don’t trust the CDC and other entities that are so removed from them, and that they perceive to be highly politicized. There’s a lot of confusion as to who to trust and how to make sure that whatever advice there is around public health and medicine and COVID is not a political tactic for some ulterior motive. It gets very challenging because on the one hand, as people that work in research on epidemiology and other areas, we can understand why the CDC is saying what they’re saying. And yet we can understand the nuances as to why it can be perceived as being untrustworthy.

110

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

Istanbul municipality workers produce face masks in a small workshop, May 2020.

Scales For example, when the CDC went back and forth on masks, people perceived this to mean that the CDC doesn’t have expertise, or they’re not sure what’s going on. In fact, though, adaptability is a key part of an epidemic response because we have to adapt to what the virus does. We’re dealing with an RNA virus that mutates very rapidly. So we must be prepared to respond to how the virus is spreading.

These are complicated decisions, and yet the change can be perceived by the public as uncertainty or untrustworthiness. And that’s something that we’ve had to navigate as local public health folks, as doctors who have to talk to patients about getting vaccinated or wearing a mask. People do tend to trust their doctor or a local public health leader more than they would a big group like the CDC, I’d say.

DIANE It may be worth noting that the discipline of urban planning emerged in the context of pandemics and emergent health issues among immigrant populations in the early 20th century. In that period, authorities behaved as if they had a public mandate to address what was happening inside homes—to control immigrant populations inside crowded tenements, for example.

I’m wondering whether there are parallels between this history and the initial prioritization of health mandates for private homes? A hundred years ago authorities imposed urban planning and design policies geared toward changing conditions inside homes, because poverty and overcrowding reinforced contagion, all in the name of public health. Do you have any thoughts on what the public health profession got right and what it may have gotten wrong with respect to health mandates focused on poor or disadvantaged people?

ABRAAR A lot of the historical work in global health involved people from wealthy countries going into poorer countries and setting up medical infrastructure as part of colonization—which created a sense of “otherness” in people from Sub-Saharan Africa or Central and South America, or India and Asia. And in that otherness, there was introduction of tropical disease as a specialty. So tropical diseases were primarily seen as diseases of other places and other people. When you had immigrants coming in, there was always worry of people bringing in disease. And that helped us solidify this otherness between the West and the East, or the Global North and Global South. Those divides continue today in what we call neocolonialism in global health.

DIANE When immigrants came to the United States in the early 20th century, they were considered the source of the problem. How do you disentangle what’s a

111

public health problem and what’s a social problem for existing Americans, particularly those who worry about foreigners coming into the country— whether it’s in the domain of public health or other arenas?

ABRAAR I think that the takeaway is that we shouldn’t continue American isolationism. COVID has shown that our health is only as good as the health of people in other countries that are connected to us. And, locally, our health is only as good as the health of our neighbors, or the health of the most vulnerable people in our societies. The chance of getting an infection as contagious as COVID is quite high— unless you stay cooped up in your house and you never leave—or you make sure that everyone’s protected, that everyone has access to masks or vaccines or paid time off, or well-ventilated workplaces.

It shows us our vulnerability if we continue to view it as us versus the other, because without having a collaboration where we’re all working together—if it is a zero-sum game—it means that some other countries are doing less well. And that means the virus can spread and mutate there, and eventually just come back here anyway. And we see that happening with the Brazil variant, with the India variant, the South Africa variant. With variants that came out of the US, the UK.

This played a lot into COVID because when COVID started in China, there was this perception that it got out of control because it was in China. We didn’t take it seriously until it hit Italy, and Italy was starting to really struggle. China actually is much more experienced in terms of respiratory pathogens and outbreaks because they had SARS1.

Italy, on the other hand—and many European countries in recent years—have not had to deal with large outbreaks of infectious diseases. Africa dealt with Ebola outbreaks; they deal with several types of outbreaks regularly. So while there are fewer resources, there’s a lot more institutional memory and experience in dealing with epidemics. And yet, the world thought that the US and other wealthy countries would be the best at dealing with COVID, which proved to be exactly the opposite.

From the start, we saw a lot of anti-Asian rhetoric and a lot of hate crimes against Asians, and then that has carried on and continued as new variants spread from other places. It’s another reminder that there’s this perception of otherness in public health, even though the US was one of the worst countries in terms of our COVID response. In terms of a ratio of resources to response, we were probably the worst. But to me, as a public health professional, it reflects the widespread belief that infectious diseases are spread in other places and that the wealthy world doesn’t deal with this, but if it did, it would be better than other countries at solving this.

And now, the wealthy countries are hoarding vaccines. We’ve talked about global solidarity, but it hasn’t happened in terms of resources

112

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics ANITA

Would you ascribe the poor response and performance in this country to a weak and fragmented public realm, in addition to the widespread lack of trust in the legitimacy of the CDC? ABRAAR I would, because as many of us have said, we had the scientific information to know what we needed to do to stop the epidemic. We had the resources and money, if only the government utilized it. And we were unable to operationalize it because there was such a disconnect between our leadership—at the federal and state levels—and what people were willing to do and what resources people were given from these government entities. There was a disconnect because resources were not allocated in the way that they needed to be for the most vulnerable, and there was a disconnect because of that lack of trust between public officials and the general public.

But the bigger point is that the inequities in society are so deep-rooted that all it takes is something like COVID to expose them, because a lot of our patients have nothing to fall back on. They have no social capital to tap into when they’re struggling.

So the public is fragmented, but it’s fragmented along the lines of social inequity that doesn’t have to exist. I think it continues to exist because the systems are designed that way, whether that’s because of capitalism, whether that’s because of a lack of a social safety net, or a lack of universal health care. Health is one part of it, but not the whole story.

ANITA Yet isn’t the idea of the public realm that basic human concerns—such as health—are addressed equally for all, regardless of socioeconomic status?

ABRAAR Definitely. And I don’t think that that is always in the sphere of doctors to solve because we’re really bandaging problems in the hospital. Most of health happens when you leave the hospital and you have to figure out how to afford your medications or who’s going to transport you places, or if you have health literacy, or if you live in a place with access to affordable, healthy food or safe spaces for mental health. Many patients don’t have that, so we can’t solve a lot of those issues. We know that they exist, but we have our hands tied as clinicians by virtue of our own workloads dealing with acute issues.

As public health organizations, we try to work on that. Public health departments give recommendations to governors and mayors. They then take those recommendations and weigh them against economic questions and the pressure they’re receiving from small business owners or other entities. And then, eventually they make

recommendations—some of which are based in public health, but not all of them are.

For instance, Massachusetts reopened back in the spring before we thought it was the best idea to do so by public health standards. The small businesses reopened because there were these other pressures, like economic ones. Public health is extremely important, but it’s one small part of what state leaders have to decide upon. Even during an epidemic, it’s just one consideration.

DIANE To pick up on that: who really is responsible for the public health? Is public health ever possible only from the top down—or might it be conceived from the bottom up? Because you are saying, Abraar, that your profession responds to the reality. You are not elected officials; you are professional experts. So where does your mandate come from? I know that you stand on the front lines of the profession and are an activist for making connections between academic knowledge and the bottom-up realities of the public sphere. Can you say more about the limits—as well as the possibilities—of the profession of public health?

ABRAAR Top-down public health has never really worked, even in global health settings. Part of the reason I liked working at the state level was that we were able to touch base with local departments of public health who know their communities really well.

They understand what the local realities are, so they can adequately address them. Now, if you look at it from the top down, you have people at the CDC saying, “You need to get vaccinated; you have access to vaccines. If you don’t get it, it’s your own responsibility.” Or Biden saying that there are two pandemics—one of the vaccinated, one of the unvaccinated—and that it’s personal responsibility now. To me, that’s showing they don’t understand what’s happening at the local level.

One of the best examples that’s often cited in global health is for malaria control. They would give out bed nets for mosquitoes. But local villagers would use them for fishing nets because they felt that was actually much more needed. They didn’t see malaria as a big problem and they didn’t feel comfortable sleeping under these nets. That’s a prime example of a top-down program failing by not understanding the local contextualization.

And that’s true again in this pandemic. We’ve seen vaccination rates really decline and slow down.

People who are not sure about the vaccines have real hesitations that need to be addressed at a local level, by leaders that are trusted, that are integrated into those communities. That’s where the local, bottom-up public health comes into play. In Massachusetts, for example, people are going door to door, talking to communities, educating them.

Scales

113 DIANE

You have focused a lot on the importance of examining how people live in their everyday spaces— both at home and at work. Would you suggest that to achieve public health goals we should be thinking more about redesign, either at the building or city scale?

ABRAAR

Streetcar during the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

We’ve entered an era where pandemic-prone diseases seem to be occurring more than prior. So, for instance, we’ve had multiple Ebola outbreaks that have actually crossed borders. We have COVID now, and who knows how many more respiratory illnesses we’re going to have? COVID really changed how we think about respiratory virus transmission.

This is important when it comes to spaces and crowding in homes. How do you create safer spaces, particularly around respiratory infections? If you think about it, every home is equipped with smoke detectors and fire extinguishers, right? With COVID—because it’s transmitted primarily by small aerosols which float around in the air—it means you need to have better ventilation in homes.

You also need better ventilation in workspaces.

That could mean having more open windows. That could mean having larger spaces that are not as crowded. That could mean having better systems, like the HEPA filtration used in hospitals. They provide really good air exchange—much better than what you have in most workplaces. Airplanes have even better air exchanges, in terms of frequency per hour. The CDC—the main public health agency in this country—did not bring up ventilation as an intervention until later in the epidemic when aerosol scientists came out and said, “We think that ventilation is important because this virus seems to be transmitted through small particles, not through droplets that fall to the ground, but through aerosols that stay hanging around the air.”

And the interventions for that kind of transmission are very different. Even the type of mask that you have to use is different. This really played into spaces where people got infected. We saw very, very large outbreaks in jails, factories, kitchens, and other workspaces. There were huge outbreaks that we didn’t even see in hospitals. And it really brought out the question, How do you have buildings with cleaner indoor air? What does that look like?

That was totally new—I did a master’s in public health at Harvard and we barely ever talked about that in terms of control of respiratory outbreaks.

ANITA During the pandemic, everyone discovered the importance of public open spaces, precisely because they are well ventilated. There is such a great overlap between public health and natural capital—fresh air, clean water and soils, and the forests and wetlands that sustain them. But there’s increasing

114

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

resistance from people to having parks in their neighborhoods because they fear an increase in taxes and gentrification. How do you see the interface between publicly available resources and how public health operates?

ABRAAR The link between those has never been clearer. The indoor/outdoor part of the equation is perhaps the defining characteristic of COVID transmission. The rate of outdoor transmission is exponentially lower than indoor transmission. If you had people that engaged with public spaces, who saw value in having public parks and areas that the government maintained, and understood those to be safe spaces, you wouldn’t have to shut things down. You could actually move a lot of things into public spaces. If people saw those as collective spaces, which have value, and which they’ve contributed to, that itself could be a sign of trust in the government.

With COVID, we could have used outdoor public spaces to reduce transmission so much. And yet the response was the opposite. It was all about individualism—hoarding toilet paper, hoarding masks. Ordering food and worrying only about your own home, staying home, not really considering the equity considerations, like who was getting sick? How were they getting sick? Should we be advocating to get better protection to workers who couldn’t stay home?

In fact, when Boston and Massachusetts decided to reopen, they did so despite knowing that the general public had very little protection from COVID. We didn’t have vaccines, we didn’t have access to high-grade masks. And yet things opened anyway, because there was so much focus on the private sector and very little regard for the most vulnerable parts of the public.

But none of this is surprising to me because even before COVID, it was the same. In the healthcare system, we see the same thing. It’s completely privatized to the extent that if you rely on the public health-care system, you have much worse health outcomes. You don’t have access to high-quality care; you get treated in an emergency room. But what happens after that emergency level of care is really unclear.

DIANE I keep thinking about the misalignment of the planning professions, the design professions, and public health in the US. Earlier, you mentioned ventilation within buildings. Can you imagine a public health program that breaks down the barriers between the inside and outside, the public and the private, to advance the entire public health domain?

ABRAAR The way that I approach this issue and the way I approach most public health issues is with a focus

Sign to enco​urage the use of mosquito nets, Coto​nou, Benin, 2002.

Two men use a mosquito net in shallows of Lake Victoria to catch baby catfish to sell as bait, Kenya, August 25, 2014.

Scales

115

on equity. What is the highest risk space or place— and where is it going to affect the most vulnerable people? If we agree that protecting the health of the public is a public good that the government should be responsible for to an extent, then we may say that indoor spaces that are high risk for transmission of respiratory viral pathogens must be protected to a basic level. And if we say that, then we may say that that could mean access to cleaner air indoors. And so, what does that look like? That looks like access to resources, which often is the endgame.

And that could mean HEPA filtration. Or having accessible, affordable, high-grade masks that you can use inside. It could be in the way that buildings are redesigned as it relates to airflow and windows. Outdoor aspects could be incorporated into workplaces that traditionally have poor ventilation.

So kitchens or factories, for example, could have open-air areas that would be much safer to work in, especially during times of high viral transmission.

There are a lot of ways in which the public health enterprise and the government can intervene to protect the most vulnerable people by making indoor air safer and by utilizing the outdoors in creative ways.

There’s nothing you can do if you cannot work from home and have no mask and have no time off work.

Or if you have no way to get a vaccine. But the resources are what you need to avoid getting sick in the first place.

DIANE

ANITA

ABRAAR

So again, who pays for this? Should there be government subsidies to replace HVAC units, windows, ventilation systems?

It’s hard. This past year just working at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, I got to see firsthand that you may know exactly what you need to do, but getting it done is a whole other ball game. Thanks for including me in the conversation. Interdisciplinary work like this is really interesting. We’re so used to grappling with the clinical stuff, but thinking about the architecture part, or even public spaces, is very new.

ABRAAR I think that it does have to come from both the federal and state governments. I mean, we get taxed.

At a very basic level, our health should be protected, and if not, it’s going to cost us a lot more. People will end up sick. They’ll end up in the hospital.

That’s lost work days. That’s lost productivity.

That’s more cost in the health-care system. So in my opinion, it should fall upon governments and states to provide those subsidies, based on need, to make houses and spaces safer in order to prevent viral transmission.

DIANE There is clearly a tension here. Can authorities give advice to the public or impose mandates, but also expect individuals to take responsibility for carrying them out? Can you have it both ways—individual responsibility and a public mandate?

ABRAAR One of the phrases that took hold in public health was “resources before restrictions.” Because restrictions are ways for the government to say, “Don’t do something,” and if you do it, and you get sick, then it’s your fault. It allows the government to deflect responsibility back onto the public without the public realizing that they’re in a lose-lose situation.

I just love that phrase, “resources before restrictions,” because we could think about that in the urban planning profession as well. We have a lot of regulation, but how do we make it possible for people to actually afford to live the life that regulation is supposed to produce?

ANITA Abraar, thank you for helping us understand the challenges—and opportunities—for public health at this moment. We have many writers contributing to this issue who are, in a way, explaining how difficult it is in their own field to do what they do, which is to create a public project, something that has public utility. How does one move around institutions, blockages, restrictions to actually make something happen at the scale of the public?

Rethinking Urban Environmental Justice: Who Benefits from Green Cities?

Isabelle Anguelovski

Scales

Renaturing and greening urban public spaces to benefit all residents may seem like a contemporary challenge, but it isn’t new. In fact, more than a century ago, Ebenezer Howard laid out plans and designs for the “garden city of tomorrow.”1 In his view, “human society and the beauty of nature [were] meant to be enjoyed together.” And back in the 1860s, Catalan planner Ildefons Cerdà designed a thousand-block expansion of Barcelona that would improve urban living and housing conditions while offering new gardens and green spaces between each block as well as new public spaces and squares at street corners cut at 45-degree angles.2

Those early planners created an urban green imaginary around neighborhood revitalization and healthy living that has—through projects such as parks, gardens, greenways, and ecological corridors—permeated planning practice ever since. Yet many of the spaces they envisioned quickly became enclaves of environmental privilege, turning into strolling and playing grounds for the wealthy. In Barcelona, for example, just a few years after the construction of Cerdà’s Eixample, the notion of “public” spaces had to be revisited; and today it must be examined through the lens of environmental (in)justice.

Fast forward to 2021 and the green city utopia3 has become a widespread global planning orthodoxy through which private profit and green privilege intersect.4 In North America and Europe, green urban plans include the GreenPlan Philadelphia, the Vancouver Greenest City Action Plan, and Copenhagen Urban Nature; and recent projects include the Chicago 606, the Washington DC 11th Street Bridge Park, the Montreal Lachine Canal regeneration, and Barcelona’s Jardins de la Rambla de Sants. Generally speaking, these landmark projects start with the clean-up and/or restoration of abandoned and underutilized urban landscapes and/or gray infrastructure (e.g., vacant lands, highways, bridges, and railways). They are transformed into nature-centered projects (sometimes paired with gray, high-tech environmental strategies) that redefine their use and purpose and help create a redevelopment vision for the broader neighborhood.

More broadly speaking, green planning contributes to the construction of a renewed urban brand and helps to position global (and globalizing) metropolises in the race for the

117

most livable or greenest city. But by creating environmental injustices, these cities also confront social tensions and critiques. In fact, greening is increasingly unequal when embedded in urban growth and redevelopment logics. It’s deeply political and grounded in technocratic principles and the naive assumption that greening alone will create more prosperous and just cities. This growing orthodoxy builds on a significant shift in green urban planning. The community-oriented greening of the 1970s and 1980s that aimed at reclaiming neighborhoods has morphed into a 21st-century development-oriented model. Today’s growth-centered greening focuses on building high-end amenities that target service industries, technology and design districts, privileged and creative-class residents, and visitors and tourists.5

Working at the intersection of research and praxis, the Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability (BCNUEJ) examines how urban renaturing programs, together with transit and housing infrastructure, create new urban landscapes, discursive and branding tools, and contested practices while often sustaining unequal green development, exclusive governance, and growing civic tensions.6 Our research is grounded in the growing critique of the green city as a “sustainability fix” rather than as a genuine alternative to unsustainable development and to enduring land and housing losses and underinvestment in marginalized, often racialized communities. In particular, much of our work shows that green infrastructure projects are increasingly linked to a paradox: Socially vulnerable residents (including racialized and working-class residents)—who most need green neighborhoods and whose well-being would most benefit from greener environments—are often negatively affected by such projects due to gentrification processes.

Today, public and private investors, along with elected officials and planners, sell the diverse and ample benefits of greening for the environment, health, economy, and society.

But as the redevelopment of Bayview–Hunters Point in San Francisco and the associated environmental justice mobilization by Greenaction well illustrate, those transformations overlook both enduring environmental toxins in greened neighborhoods and the highly inequitable impacts of gentrification

118

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

Children at Barry Farms Housing Development, Anacostia, Washington, DC, April 1944.

Scales

Barry Farms Development, after demolition of public housing, Anacostia, Washington, DC, April 2019.

119

120

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

“IN THE SANT MARTÍ DISTRICT, FOR INSTANCE, THE PERCENTAGE OF RESIDENTS HOLDING A BACHELOR’S DEGREE OR HIGHER INCREASED BY NEARLY 28 PERCENT ON AVERAGE AROUND A NEW LOCAL PARK.”

and displacement linked to these green developments.7 This last aspect is what Sarah Dooling called ecological (or green) gentrification back in 2009.8

In a 2017 article referring to New York City’s Highline as the most egregious manifestation of the relationship between greening and gentrification, Scott Kratz, project director of Washington’s 11th Street Bridge Park in the predominantly African American Anacostia neighborhood, voiced concerns about the (in)ability of gray-to-green infrastructure to deliver ample social benefits for all and to benefit the public as a whole. “Who is this really for?” were his words.9 Who are the real targets and beneficiaries of new or restored green infrastructure projects? Despite one of Bridge Park’s emblematic equity tools—the 2018 Equitable Development Plan10— Anacostia today risks becoming a white and upper class greenscape. Home prices multiplied by 2.5 between 2014 and 2018;11 large-scale, mostly market-priced developments such as Poplar Point are sprouting; and the historic public housing development Barry Farms was demolished in 2019.

Through Green Locally Unwanted Land Uses (Green LULUS), our research project over the last five years, BCNUEJ has moved beyond single-case studies and analyzed the scope and magnitude of such green gentrification in 40 cities in North America and Europe. Building on the widely used concept of LULUs in urban planning, GreenLULUs are about the exclusion over time of historically marginalized groups from the long-term benefits of new or restored green amenities by processes of land speculation and real estate development.

Our research finds evidence of green inequalities and in green gentrification in cities across the globe.12

In Medellín, Colombia, for example, greening in the name of growth control, beautification, and resilience is transforming low-income areas into landscapes of pleasure and privilege. The construction of the greenbelt—Cinturón Verde—is leading to the dispossession of community assets including land, social capital, and traditional farming practices for many residents of low-income neighborhoods. And in New Orleans, new green infrastructure linked to climate adaptation and its Living with Water plan13 mostly aims to attract a creative, white middle class that can afford to purchase new waterfront property, while overlooking long-term racial inequities in land-use development and promoting the creation of ecological enclaves. The Lafitte Greenway—a 2.6-mile bicycle and pedestrian green infrastructure created in 2015 and connecting neighborhoods from Armstrong Park to City Park within flood-sensitive neighborhoods—is already contributing to increased prices in the predominantly Black neighborhoods of Treme and Mid-City.

In Barcelona, one of our recent studies finds clear green gentrification trends in several historically underserved areas, especially old industrial neighborhoods.14 In the Sant Martí district, for instance, the percentage of residents holding a bachelor’s degree or higher increased by nearly 28 percent on average around a new local park, versus only a 7.5 percent increase for the district as a whole over a period of 10 years.15 The data clearly demonstrates how new green space attracts residents with high levels of education.

Our documentary, To Green or Not to Green,16 and our online interactive documentary, The Green Divide,17 both examine tensions in the postindustrial waterfront neighborhood of Poblenou, in northern Barcelona. Poblenou has undergone major land-use transformation since 2000, with the advent of the 22@ plan. The 22@ prompted the arrival of new tech and start-up firms, design companies, and office buildings and hotels. In 2016, the municipality inaugurated its pilot Superblock project in the neighborhood, which creates new grids made of 3 × 3 blocks of traffic-minimized streets to reroute car traffic and pockets of urban green inside “pacified” streets.18 This project was followed by the “green axis” of Cristóbal de Moura, built in 2019, which adds linear green space, integrates Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SUDS), and remediates climate-driven flooding risks in the areas.19

As local Barcelona architect and neighborhood activist Albert València argues, these transformations have simultaneously triggered speculation—with new skyscraper hotels built around those projects—and displacement—with the closure of traditional stores and locals being priced out of the area. Promises of high-paying jobs have been replaced by the reality of low-wage call center or service jobs. Concerned by displacement, residents have created two groups—Ens Plantem and El Observatori dels Barris de Poblenou—to advocate for protected housing and offer alternatives to tourism and an office-centered economy, which are both now under threat due to the relative absence of tourists and the growth of telecommuting during the pandemic.

Of course, BCNUEJ’s position is not to advocate against greening in working-class neighborhoods or marginalized communities. Urban greening and green spaces are vital to climate, ecological, and human health. Nor do we claim that urban planners and developers intentionally target historically marginalized communities in order to concentrate profit in the hands of developers and exclude vulnerable residents. What our research highlights is how planning decisions are embedded in the dynamics of exclusive competitive urbanism and green boosterism, even if they attempt to consider equity in green projects.20

Scales A justice-centered policy and planning path lies in associating plans with equitable and inclusive green development to respond to the specific issues of displacement, gentrification, and exclusion. As part of our most recent work, we have produced a report—“Policy and Planning Tools for Urban Green Justice”—with 50 possible equity tools from Western European, Canadian, and US cities which shows how green equity and the preservation of public green spaces can be better secured.21

Helpful green justice interventions include land-use tools; requirements and incentives for equity-driven real estate development; housing-focused financial plans for community groups, homeowners, and renters; and other regulations such as public workforce housing and increased funding for the improved maintenance of public green spaces. Successful tools incorporate inclusionary zoning—such as in Nantes, France, where 56 percent of new housing has to be public or affordable; land banks for vacant or underused lots in Philadelphia; a development tax for affordable housing funds in Boston and Sacramento; community land trusts such as in Washington, DC; rent control in Catalonia, Spain, and in Washington State; and right to return—reparation-driven policies to respond to the needs and demands of urban renewaland gentrification-displaced residents in Portland, OR,22 and Evanston, IL.23

In Vienna—considered to be the world’s most livable and green city24—half of the housing stock was either affordable or social housing, as of 2018. In addition to state-owned and

121

-managed social housing, limited-profit associations receive government funding to cap rents and are obligated to invest their profits in new housing projects. As a result, gentrification has been largely contained. Vienna also has equitable and participatory greening strategies, and when developers bid on housing construction on publicly owned land, proposals are evaluated on the basis of architectural quality, environmental performance, social sustainability, and economic parameters. Such practices and regulations explain why public green spaces have mostly been preserved as a public good throughout the city and why new green spaces are generally exempt from real estate speculation pressures.

Beyond such mechanisms, the historical context of enduring environmental violence in marginalized communities, especially in the US, calls for deeper reparative principles and practices. In many cases, urban justice would best be served by planners and designers questioning experiences of domination, racial stratification, and oppression—and the institutions around them—in racialized spaces. For a more radical practice, green cities would also need to build emancipatory spaces and policies at the intersection of land, resources, and nature that would address the trauma, loss, and erasure that marginalized groups have historically endured in the American city. Policies such as the right to return in Portland and the land reparation provisions in Evanston are positive signs that change is possible.

NOTES 1 Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow (London: Faber, 1946).

2 Ildefonso Cerdá, Teoría general de la urbanización, y aplicación de sus principios y doctrinas a la reforma y ensanche de Barcelona. Vol. 1 (Madrid: Imprenta Española, 1867).

3 Isabelle Anguelovski, James Connolly, and Anna Livia Brand, “From landscapes of utopia to the margins of the green urban life: For whom is the new green city?,” City 22, no. 3 (2018): 417–36.

4 James Connolly, “From Jacobs to the Just City: A foundation for challenging the green planning orthodoxy,” Cities 91 (May 2018): 64–70.

5 Isabelle Anguelovski, James JT Connolly, Melissa Garcia-Lamarca, Helen Cole, and Hamil Pearsall, “New scholarly pathways on green gentrification: What does the urban “green turn” mean and where is it going?” Progress in Human Geography 43, no. 6 (2019): 1064-86.

6 For more information about recent research: http://www.bcnuej.org/.

7 For an overview of environmental justice issues in Bayview–Hunters Point: http://greenaction.org/bayview-hunters-point/.

8 Sarah Dooling, “Ecological Gentrification: A Research Agenda Exploring Justice in the City,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33, no. 3 (September 2009): 621–39.

9 Laura Bliss, “The High Line’s Next Balancing Act,” Bloomberg City Lab, February 7, 2017, https://www.citylab.com/solutions/2017/02/the-highlines-next-balancing-act-fair-and-affordable-development/515391/.

10 For more information about the equitable development plan: https:// bbardc.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Equitable-DevelopmentPlan_09.04.18.pdf.

11 For more data on real estate changes: https://www.trulia.com/ for_sale/1850_nh/.

12 Anguelovski, Connolly, and Brand, “From landscapes of utopia to the margins of the green urban life: For whom is the new green city?,” 417–36.

13 For direct access to the New Orleans water plan: http://livingwithwater. com/.

14 For direct access to the study and published paper: http://www.bcnuej. org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/06.2017-Open-Access-file-BCN-PIlotStudy.pdf.

15 An earlier version of these studies was published in our internal lab blog: http://www.bcnuej.org/2017/07/06/benefits-green-cities/.

16 Watch To Green or Not To Green, available for free: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8dUMucYN0w.

17 See the online platform and interactive documentary at: http://www. bcnuej.org/greendivide/#Home.

18 For an official description of the Superblock (Superilla in Catalan), see https://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/superilles/es/?utm_content=bufferd8070&utm_medium=social&utm_source=plus.google. com&utm_campaign=buffer.

19 For an official overview of the new green axis and associated green initiatives, see https://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/instituturbanisme/ ca/noticia/cristobal-de-moura-mes-a-prop-de-ser-un-eix-verd-ipacificat-2_658031 20 Melissa Garcia-Lamarca, Isabelle Anguelovski, Helen Cole, James JT Connolly, Lucia Argüelles, Francesc Baró, Carmen Pérez del Pulgar Frowein, and Galia Shokry, “Urban green boosterism and city affordability: for whom is the ‘branded’ green city?” Urban Studies 58, no. 1 (2021).

21 For direct access to the report: http://www.bcnuej.org/2021/04/08/ policy-and-planning-toolkit-for-urban-green-justice/.

22 Melanie Sevcenko, “Ungentrifying Portland: scheme helps displaced residents come home,” The Guardian, March 1, 2018, https://www. theguardian.com/cities/2018/mar/01/portland-anti-gentrificationhousing-scheme-right-return.

23 The Associated Press, “Evanston, Illinois, becomes first U.S. city to pay reparations to Black residents,” NBC News, March 23, 2021, https:// www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/evanston-illinois-becomes-first-u-scity-pay-reparations-blacks-n1261791.

24 “Vienna remains the world’s most liveable city,” The Economist, September 4, 2019, https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail /2019/09/04/vienna-remains-the-worlds-most-liveable-city.

SUBJECTS Jia Lok Pratt, Emmanuel Pratt, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Malkit Shoshan, Alex Anderson, Thaïsa Way

Designing for Public Trust: From Bounded Rationality to Unbounded Possibilities Jia Lok Pratt & Emmanuel Pratt

Subjects

Sweet Water Foundation, facade installation at the Civic Arts Church, a formerly abandoned building being transformed into a community design center, 2021.

125

We are living amid an international crisis of public trust, a pervasive unraveling of faith in leadership, a void of common truths, and an absence of a shared humanity at a time when collective action is a precondition for our continued survival.

The erosion of public trust is a natural consequence of societies driven by the obsessive pathology of profit and growth. Just as Earth’s topsoil has been decimated by conventional mono crop farming, so too has public trust—the foundation of democracy—been decimated by widespread misinformation and disinformation. The purveyors of soulless algorithms that curate content with the sole purpose of monetizing the human psyche have destroyed public trust without accountability. Public trust is “the fabric of trust and civic virtues that make it possible for human and economic development to begin and sustain over time.”1 Any hope of tackling the complex and interconnected layering of crises we face requires [re]establishment of public trust. In this time of stratifying economic divides, collapsing infrastructure and urban decay, environmental degradation, perpetual cycles of violent crimes, and food insecurity, hope lies within the paradigm shift happening at the interstice of grounded design, real work, and the values of what we call an “essential economy”—which means one that operates with a triple bottom line that recognizes people, planet, and profit.2

Since 2014, Sweet Water Foundation has brought the power and possibilities of an essential economy to life on Chicago’s South Side via The Commonwealth, a dynamic site that is a direct response to the hollowing out of urban communities that have been subjected to the reductive logic of bounded economic rationality. Every aspect of The Commonwealth—each program, project, and space—is designed to cultivate trust through new forms of publics created with the specific intent to reexamine labor, the value of work, education, and material life cycles. The Commonwealth shows us the solutions that lie outside the bounds of economic rationality.

[RE]CONSTRUCTING PUBLIC MEMORY | THE EROSION, ELUSION, AND ILLUSION OF PUBLIC TRUST

In America, public memory of how we got here has been erased and replaced with an illusion of public trust and American exceptionalism that no longer bears scrutiny. So [re]building public trust requires us to first reconstruct public memory.

Many look to the Trump era as peak erosion of public trust. Four years of an incompetent and revolving-door administration corroded the trust of even those for whom the great American system has so reliably worked. But the rise of Trump was made possible by decades of steady contraction of the so-called American dream to the point at which it became out of reach even for those with white privilege—for whom it was once guaranteed. This disintegration intensified America’s culture wars and diminished white Americans’ public trust in ways never before seen. By the time we had reached 2020, public trust was undeniably compromised on all sides.

The void of public trust, however, is not a new phenomenon for those Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. referred to as “the Other America”3—the millions of Black, brown, and Indigenous Americans for whom the notion of public trust has always been elusive. For those whose heritage and histories have been situated outside the margins of the American mainstream, public

126

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

trust has never existed. Instead, the individuals and institutions that comprise the publics—public officials, public police, public schools, and public transportation, for example—have repeatedly created, administered, and enforced laws, policies, and practices that exclude, restrict, and oppress. Equal access occurred only after more than a century of persistent struggle. And equitable access remains elusive today. History clearly shows us whom the American public was built to serve.

THE BOUNDS OF OUR RATIONALITY | THE CHOICE TO TURN A BLIND EYE TO EXTERNALITIES The term “bounded rationality” refers to the natural limitations faced when presented with complex decision-making scenarios. It is the process of choosing the filters, or bounds, within which an acceptable decision can be reached when a thorough accounting for all variables is impossible. Bounded rationality is a natural, human response to complexity, but when applied by a global economic system hardwired for economic growth and deeply rooted in the exploitation of people and natural resources, the result is acceptance and normalization of negative externalities which directly accelerates an unfathomable concentration of wealth for a select few.

can improve quality of life, strengthen families, restore and protect the environment, and cultivate public trust.

This is why the American publics exist within a perpetual cycle of underfunding and neglect. We close public schools and health facilities, demolish public housing, and cut public services that support basic human needs of the many, while simultaneously increasing public policing and public subsidies to protect and expand the private wealth of the few. The power of the paradigm has convinced Americans that it is both possible and acceptable, within a free and democratic nation, for billionaires to thrive and, simultaneously, for society to lack enough public resources to support basic human needs and necessary infrastructure.

RECLAIMING THE PUBLICS | FROM “PUBLIC” TO “PUBLICS” To begin, the definition of the word “public” must be reexamined, re-storied, and reclaimed. “Public” has largely been reduced to “of or relating to a government,” becoming synonymous with flailing institutions controlled by the state. Today, “public” generally denotes something less than, inferior, mired in bureaucracy, or ineffective. Public schools, public health

“PARADIGMS ARE FOUNDATIONS UPON WHICH SYSTEMS ARE BUILT.”

For these few, it matters not whether “earning” wealth destroys natural capital (air, soil, water), exploits human capital, and/or ravages the social capital that makes up the fabric of society.

Within the logic of this system, decision-making and accountability are determined by the mere calculation of return on investment, and externalities—the human and environmental costs—remain invisible and go uncounted. According to philosopher André Gorz, “The one-dimensional reductionism of economic rationality characteristic of capitalism. . . swept away all values and purposes that were irrational from an economic point of view, leaving nothing but money relations between individuals, nothing but power relations between classes, nothing but an instrumental relation between Man and Nature.”4

The bounds of economic growth also serve as the parameters within which the American publics tackle the myriad of social and economic challenges faced today. Stimulating economic development is the holy grail for elected officials, leading them to ignore their duties to develop initiatives that

centers, and public housing are perceived as things to be avoided at all costs. Those who must rely on those institutions have a stigma attached to them. There is a desperate need to shift the meaning of public from the adjective “of or relating to a government” to the noun publics, referring to “the people.”

John Dewey offered an alternative, more expansive definition of “public” that is rooted in accountability and acknowledges a shared vulnerability to events and actions which impact us, but are out of our control. He said, “The line between private and public is to be drawn on the basis of the extent and scope of the consequences of acts which are so important as to need control, whether by inhibition or by promotion. . . . The public consists of all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for. . .[so] that their interests are conserved and protected. The buildings, property, funds, and other physical resources involved in the performance of this office are res publica, the common-wealth.”5

Subjects

127

Sweet Water Foundation, too, has reexamined and reclaimed the term “public.” In the nascent weeks of 2017, after years of contending with repeated violations of various forms of publics and witnessing the inauguration of the 45th president of the United States, we drafted “We the Publics: A Manifesto to Restore Democracy and Truth in the Republic”6 as a way to rethink and reframe theoretical and actual forms of publics.

Five years later, the manifesto remains more vital than ever.

We must establish new forms of publics that are accountable to—and work toward—the commonwealth.

A PARADIGM SHIFT | UNBINDING POSSIBILITIES VIA RES PUBLICA, THE COMMONWEALTH Paradigms are foundations upon which systems are built, the shared ideas in the minds of society that reflect the deepest set beliefs about how the world works.7 Facilitating a paradigm shift requires a leverage point capable of releasing the publics from the bounded rationality in which we are entrenched. In a so-called blighted community on Chicago’s South Side, Sweet Water Foundation has built such a leverage point, a model that demonstrates how we can create new forms of publics and cultivate public trust on a neighborhood scale. The Commonwealth emerged through a series of interconnected, urban acupuncture–inspired installations that were collectively imagined, grounded, designed, and constructed by local people, whom we refer to as the Humans of Sweet Water.

Each installation, whether a design-build project, program, or event, concentrates on a site that has experienced some sense of loss, trauma, or scarring of history (an abandoned property, demolished structure, or unfinished development, for example).

With a footprint of over eight acres, The Commonwealth spans four contiguous city blocks. It includes more than three acres of urban farmland, open community gardens, a carpentry workshop, a formerly foreclosed home turned into a community school, an abandoned home transformed into an art gallery and live-work space, and a hand-raised, timber frame barn that serves as a dynamic and flexible space for visual and performing arts, reflection, and gathering. An abandoned church in the neighborhood will soon become a community design center known as Civic Arts Church.

We design and build furniture, craft home goods, and construct public structures from salvaged wood deflected from landfills. We reclaim vacant spaces by transforming them into productive public spaces that grow healthy food and engage intergenerational audiences in programming that reconnects people to one another and their shared environment. By defying the bounded rationality of traditional economic development and reconstructing a community, The Commonwealth fills the void of food deserts, closed schools, and economic marginalization through an approach that is ecological, inclusive, and accessible with localized labor and limited financial resources.

THE HOLLOWING OUT OF A NEIGHBORHOOD The Commonwealth lies spatially and temporally within the epicenter of Chicago’s histories of the Great Migration, urban renewal, redlining, white flight, and disinvestment. Historical Sanborn maps show that the neighborhood was once densely

Local resident and Sweet Water Foundation Urban Ecology Fellow harvesting in the Sweet Water Foundation Community Garden, 2021.

Sweet Water Foundation Urban Ecology apprentices and mentors building furniture from reclaimed wood in a public alleyway, 2021.

128

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

Aerial view of conditions before The Commonwealth.

Aerial site map of The Commonwealth footprint today.

packed with family homes. Postwar reconversion housing for “coloreds” in the 1940s was followed by the Moseley School, built in 1958. Moseley became the second Chicago public school designated as a school of “social adjustment,” serving predominantly young African American men deemed “truants, delinquents, and incorrigibles.” The school became renowned as a pipeline for prison and was closed in the 1990s. The building was briefly repurposed as a homeless shelter before it was demolished after sitting vacant for nearly a decade. The fate of the Moseley School is similar to that of the neighborhood itself. After generations of municipal neglect, predatory lending practices, and increased waves of foreclosure, the neighborhood was hollowed out and its structures demolished.

By 2014, the neighborhood had been reduced to a hole— almost completely devoid of buildings and with a rural population density that is all too familiar across Chicago’s South and West sides and in urban communities nationwide. Today, of the 174 parcels within the “boundaries” of The Commonwealth, about 80 percent are vacant, 58 percent are owned by the City of Chicago, 24 percent are owned by absentee owners, and only 9 percent are owner-occupied homes. Alleyways and vacant lots were reduced to dumping grounds, where the by-products of bounded rationality, such as construction waste and furniture from evictions, were disposed of in plain sight. The area had been hollowed out to a point where there was no hope or no care.

The mid-2000s housing boom introduced a scattering of homes built by developers seeking to take advantage of soaring prices fueled by predatory mortgages. Its subsequent bust, however, simply added a modern, cookie-cutter aesthetic to the collection of homes sitting vacant, foreclosed, and boarded up across the neighborhood. The house that now serves as Sweet Water Foundation’s headquarters was one of those model homes. It was first listed for $460,000 in 2007, and then sold for $31,000 in May 2013. It was deemed to be of no value because selling or renting to a family in need of housing did not make economic sense.

FROM HOLE TO WHOLE | EMERGENCE OF THE COMMONWEALTH It is amidst this multigenerational hollowing out of a neighborhood that Sweet Water Foundation has been working to cultivate a whole from a hole. Redlining, urban renewal, and decades of disinvestment diminished the tax base, rendering the neighborhood illegible to the city and state and economically unattractive to developers. The confluence of illegibility and municipal neglect gave rise to the opportunity to practice a new method of neighborhood development applied through a usufructuary lens—the right to the use and profits of the property of another without damaging it.

In 2014, Sweet Water Foundation was granted right of access to a full city block of public land zoned for urban farming and an adjacent foreclosed home. With zero public funding, the foundation began canvassing the streets to meet those in the community who remained—the elders and families still standing as anchors of stability and hope. This was the first act of a new method of neighborhood development that has come to be known as Regenerative Neighborhood Development. Deeply rooted in theory and grounded in the values of the essential economy, Regenerative Neighborhood Development requires, as preconditions, lived experience

Subjects within the community, consistent and daily presence over time, and hands-on labor. It is only through proximity to the ecology of place—its land, people, and flows and movements across seasons—that one can truly acquire the tacit knowledge necessary for designing interventions that will regenerate for sustained impact and real transformation.

After all, masterplans and policy documents do not pick up trash, shovel snow for elders, mow lawns, or provide safe passage for children en route to school. The constant cycling of plans, policies, and initiatives are degenerative distractions that siphon millions of dollars in resources to external “thinkers” that exploit the free consulting services of community members to produce glossy visions and band-aid solutions rather than supporting those doing real work. And thus, the cycle of public distrust continues.

In contrast, Regenerative Neighborhood Development reinforces and regenerates community by allowing space for feedback, interaction, and evolution. Growing food and sharing it with a neighbor, who then cooks a meal for their family, is a regenerative act. This seemingly small act connects people outside the bounds of an economic rationality, offering a different foundation from which public trust can begin to be established. New forms of publics are created—not as customers of the same businesses—but as neighbors with shared accountability for the land and one another.

The practice of Regenerative Neighborhood Development requires thorough and deliberate consideration for the urban ecology in its entirety. It is accessible, inclusive, and ecological. The Commonwealth was built with readily available tools and equipment, the labor of local residents of all skill levels, and a focus on transforming “wastes to resources.” The vast waste streams of the city were utilized: crates and pallets from traditional developments, wood chips from trees, tools and equipment reclaimed from closed schools, and the steady stream of materials used in installations at art galleries, museums, and architecture schools otherwise destined for landfills.

DESIGNING FOR PUBLIC TRUST The reality is that the focus of traditional neighborhood development through the lens of bounded rationality dictates that commercial development takes precedence over the needs of the publics. Most neighborhood development schemes begin with commerce as the core solution and are based on an underlying premise that expansion of commercial transactions and bolstering the local consumer economy will improve the quality of life of residents. These approaches, even if paired with extensive community engagement, fail to allow room for “development” outside of the bounded rationality of profit and growth.

The tried, true, and tired approach of typical neighborhood development neglects to account for the countless previous projects of the same flavor that have failed to fundamentally change the quality of life for neighborhood residents.

And, thus, the cycle of broken promises and the crumbling of public trust continues. On the other hand, for a fraction of the cost of any of the so-called equitable development initiatives underway nationwide, Regenerative Neighborhood Development results in the production of locality that defies any generic formulaic approach to neighborhood and economic development. It moves beyond the bounds of economic rationality and allows for unbounded possibilities for We the Publics.

129

NOTES 1 Luigino Bruno and Stefano Zamagni, Civil Economy: Another Idea of the Market (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 24.

2 Sweet Water Foundation, Our Values, 2020, https://www.sweetwaterfoundation.com/our-values.

3 Martin Luther King, “The Other America.” Speech presented at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA. April 14, 1967. https://www.crmvet.org/docs/ otheram.htm.

4 André Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason (London: Verso, 1989), 19.

5 John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 2016), 69.

6 Emmanuel Pratt, et al, “We the Publics: A Manifesto to Restore Democracy and Truth in the Republic.” Harvard Graduate School of Design, July 20, July 2017, www.gsd.harvard.edu/exhibition/we-the-publics-a-manifesto-to-restore-democracy-and-truth-in-the-republic/.

7 Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer (London: Earthscan, 2009), 162–63.

FOR THE PEOPLE, WITH THE PEOPLE,

BY THE PEOPLE Krzysztof Wodiczko, Malkit Shoshan & Alex Anderson

Subjects

131

Krzysztof Wodiczko and Malkit Shoshan contend unflinchingly with fear, distress, and suffering, but their work is fundamentally hopeful.

It emphasizes the persistence of people’s rights, dreams, and aspirations, and it opens paths to healing in the face of trauma.

In their individual practices as artist and architect, and as codirectors of the cross-disciplinary Art, Design, and the Public Domain program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, they work to visualize conflicts that shape social relationships and public space—“to contribute to a new perception, imagination, and experience of public space and its discursive vitality as, above all, a people’s domain.”

Wodiczko’s haunting projections of images onto buildings and monuments give voice to millions of people who have been unheard or silenced. Quiet constructions of granite and bronze, sentinels of memory, come alive to the present, to its persistent tragedy and suffering. He “paints them with new narrative,” Wodiczko explains. Having produced nearly 100 of these large-scale public projections since the 1980s, he has confronted and reanimated prominent public places throughout the world. At a smaller scale, he has devised a series of instruments—vehicles, drones, and prosthetic devices—to support marginalized people in urban environments and to reinforce their presence and value in the public realm. Wodiczko’s work has been the subject of many major retrospectives, publications, and awards, including the Hiroshima Art Prize for contributions to world peace.

Shoshan cofounded the Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory (FAST) in urgent response to the displacement and persistent marginalization of Palestinians in Israel. Her 2010 book, Atlas of the Conflict: Israel-Palestine, vividly illustrates “the emergence of Israel and disappearance of Palestine over the past century” using hundreds of lucid maps and diagrams. Her more recent work with FAST continues to highlight how aspects of the built environment amplify and perpetuate conflict. It shows, for example, that surveillance and drone technology contribute to the collapsing distinctions between the spaces of war and civic engagement, and that the architecture of global UN peacekeeping missions reflects the military power structures that support them. Working closely with communities, institutions, and governments, Shoshan uses architectural and urban design strategies to promote human rights and equality in public space.

Alex Anderson spoke with Wodiczko and Shoshan about their understanding of the public and how their work intersects with it.

ALEX ANDERSON The theme for this issue of Harvard Design Magazine is the public. So, I want to start with a general question, but a difficult one: How do we understand the public? How do you understand the public? Is it everybody? Is it the general populace, or some group defined by a common cause or a common interest?

KRZYSZTOF WODICZKO For years I have explained to people who respond to my public projects—to the way I work—that perhaps they are missing something, because they always ask, “What is the response of the public to your work?” They assume that those who come to see my work take it as a kind of spectacle—and that they are the public of the event. But they never ask another question: “What’s the value of the work for those who brought their lives to the project and made sense of it for themselves and others?” They, the so-called “participants,” in various stages of work, through storytelling and discussions determine which of their “private” experiences and matters ought to be made public. I call them the “inner public” of the project. “Publicness” is born from within the project’s discursive development.

Now, there is, of course, another public that I call the “outer public,” which comes from without the project’s social making—invited or uninvited. Then there is also an “intermediate public,” which is those who are socially connected with the members of the inner public, who know of the project best and will come to protect and elaborate it with the outer public.

For public space to come to life, the notorious public silence about the lived experience of less privileged people must be disrupted by their own frank and evocative public voice. Without the foundational role of the inner public this cannot happen: their voice cannot be developed and truly participatory, and proactive cultural work and public art cannot be possible.

132

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

Krzysztof Wodiczko, The El Centro Cultural Tijuana Projection, 2001. The headset, equipped with a video camera, LED lights, and a microphone, allows the wearer to project her face and voice in real time onto the facade of EL Centro Cultural.

Subjects I don’t think that in all this I’m responding exactly to the question, “What is public?” I’m basically questioning a simple answer to it.

ALEX Malkit, do you want to respond to that?

MALKIT SHOSHAN I can try, because I do think it’s both a simple and complex question. It’s simple because it’s extremely abstract—the public is us, all of us, with all our difference and similarity. We are united in our plurality. It is complex because the “public” is not a static state of being or belonging. It constantly expands, and becomes increasingly fragmented and diversified. Everything beyond oneself, the individual, constructs a public. The public is a reflection of an entire world that is outside of oneself. As an individual you are always part of a public.

Another issue that comes to mind when I think about “the public” is the question of power and the question of relationships—relationships with power, relationships with others. What is our agency to construct and modify these relationships? They can have to do with rights, with justice, with access, or—in reference to the work of Judith Butler—how we perform as a public, the performativity of our bodies in relationship to other bodies. She says, “When bodies congregate, move, and speak together, they lay claim to a certain space as public space.”

So, ideally, speaking about “public,” for me, is being able to understand and live comfortably, safely, equally, with the world outside our bodies. It is also being able to transcend the notion of similarity, belonging, and identity politics that construct a very narrow form of public that is based on values of exclusion and violence, like for instance the nation-state.

To go back to what Judith Butler has said, we cannot disassociate the public from politics, and from space. Public space is a place that enables difference, plurality of being, bodies, ideas, entities.

In our Art, Design, and the Public Domain classes, we keep asking, “Who are the publics that inhabit the space we design?” And we ask our students to explore the agency of art and design practices in claiming and activating public spaces, programs, infrastructure, and discourses, and in making visible and forming all sorts of assemblies.

Lastly, nowadays, we are speaking about expanding even further the notion of the public, to include more species and ecological entities. We speak about animal rights and the rights of rivers.

KRZYSZTOF A public speech act is a performance par excellence.

It is a bodily utterance. The right to the city means the right to public space which means the right to performance—performative communication and expression. I feel we are in accord in this, Malkit.

133

What do we expect from public space? And once we discuss this more in-depth, we’ll figure out what kind of contribution of artists and designers is possible. Chantal Mouffe speaks about “agonistic public space, agonistic democracy” in which the multiplicity of different positions is exchanged, confronted—in a civilized way, of course, without violence—but without seeking solution or compromise, rather, bringing up what has been rejected normally in liberal discourse. That’s the way Malkit and I are engaging people. They gain some consciousness; they speak on behalf of their own often traumatic experience, make it public, but also speak for others in hope of change. They become healthier psychologically and also more articulate politically.

So, the question is, How can we actually be civilized in uncivilized situations, or what are the limits of our engagement?

That brings up another issue: of intervention.

For years many critical public artists were focused on their role as interventionists. I’m definitely part of that tradition, but I am now questioning this.

Intervention of course doesn’t have to be a scandalous act of provocation—an interventionist could come between warring parties and shift malignant conflict into something creative and healthier. If that’s the case, then I’m not against intervention.

But then the issue is how to create cultural and design conditions for today’s politically divided people to listen to each other—what I call “fearless listening.” There’s so much work that can be done to create a space for such listening. I’m saying that lots of new cultural social projects could make public space more inclusive and artists and designers can help, even if just a little bit.

ALEX Malkit, you talked about the fragmentation of the public. It sounds like both of you in your work try to address the fragments in some way through reconciliation or conversation. Is that how you understand your work? As somehow reducing the frictions between different publics, let’s call them?

KRZYSZTOF These tensions are important. . . . I think we are talking about agency, creating agency. We might have different methods of doing this, but we want people to be engaged and inspire them to be more effectively, emotionally, intellectually articulate, and to create new situations for communities or social groups so they can emancipate themselves.

Am I right, Malkit?

MALKIT Well, I think fragments and frictions are not the same. Diversity exists in the world. We are not the same. There is a lot of similarity amongst all of us, but there are differences. There is no one single public, and there is no idea of unifying things. With my

134

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

work, what I try to do is to find any kind of agency to intervene, and these interventions are about making things visible. It isn’t about making change for the sake of change, but showing all these different realities that coexist and trying to bring them into a public conversation, making them part of a public discourse and conscience. Any systemic attempt to force us to perform in unity produces traumas.

Since I’m coming from architecture, there is a level of abstraction in my practice that is different from artistic practice. In architecture and spatial design, ideas and ideologies about the public are being materialized systemically through form. Too often architects and planners design spaces that are aligned with power, politics, and ideology and really serve only a small fraction of the public. Fearless listening should become a pedagogic requirement for architects and planners who design the cities that we inhabit and the material legacy we leave behind. In my practice, fearless listening also has to do with trying to understand how systems and power work, make them visible, and develop various tactics for interventions.

An artistic practice can do one thing, architecture and urban planning can do something else. You can understand the complexity of public space through engagement; you can understand systemic thinking through architecture and urban planning; and you can learn how words can form space if you intervene at a policy level. Being able to navigate through all these levels to generate both specific and systemic conversations about issues like rights and justice is empowering and exciting. And I use my artistic agency and my teaching to explore these issues, make them visible and tangible for more people to get involved in an activist practice.

ALEX That issue of visibility, or invisibility, is something that really strikes me in both of your work. You both are focused on what is invisible—whether it’s people who have been marginalized or the question of rights, which are often suppressed. What is your perspective on the invisible and what artists and designers can do to bring those things forward?

KRZYSZTOF Malkit, you were saying that we work differently…

So, I tried to think, What is that difference between your approach and mine? Actually, the difference is focused on public space. Because I consider public space as something that already is meaningful, for better or worse; it’s saturated with this meaning.

It’s too late to create public space afresh. We are surrounded by monuments. So, when we come up with something new to say, we’re arguing with what’s already there. Public space is populated by monuments and residents, and they both should be treated with equal seriousness. We have to understand the monuments themselves and help them to be useful for the living. Monuments cannot do

anything. They have no voice; they have no gesture.

They’re just silent.

Many city residents become similar to those silent monuments; they cannot speak to their own trauma; they are speechless. In my work, to recover from silence, the residents and monuments animate each other in joining a sort of “monument therapy.”

To speak out through the monuments, the residents must animate themselves. Conversely, to be of a communicative use for the living, the historic monuments need to be animated by the speech and gesture of the city residents. Monuments stand for the past, something that cannot change, but one must live with this past in some proactive and hopeful way. So, in that sense, the projections—a specific technique of animating monuments that I developed over many years—are an attempt to move this way.

MALKIT Talking about monuments and all these legacies of hegemonic power structures that define our world, our institutions, and in general grappling with the legacy of modernity is overwhelmingly painful. I come from a modern state—very abstract, but very bureaucratic and very structured in the way that it has organized itself and engineered its publics. So, with my work—and with our work, Krzysztof—we try first to make visible everything that has been erased and all the things that are not recognized by these systems. We try to open up all these hermetic structures around us and expose them. Change here is not about erasure or making something new, it’s about seeing one another for what we are. Artists and designers can play an important role in visualizing and spatializing, for instance, the history of systemic violence, linking monuments to policies and to the way our cities, public spaces, and identities have been shaped over time.

I have spent years working and advocating against the administrative erasure of the

Subjects

135

Opposite and above: Malkit Shoshan with the Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory (FAST), Border Ecologies and the Gaza Strip: Watermelons, Sardines, Crabs, Sand, and Sediment, Venice Biennale, 2021.

136

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

Krzysztof Wodiczko, The El Centro Cultural Tijuana Projection, project participant with wearable projection equipment.

Subjects unrecognized Palestinian villages in Israel, for example. These villages, even though physically existing before the establishment of Israel in 1948, have not been recognized as legal entities; they are not marked on the official map of the country and therefore have no address. This subjects their inhabitants to live in a strange administrative threshold.

They cannot have access to municipal services, from water to sewage collection, or roads leading to their homes. Our first intervention there was to draw, with local human rights organizations, a map at various scales. This map became a prerequisite for any kind of conversation about the rights of the unrecognized villages.

It’s interesting to bring an artistic perspective into these hermetic systems, because we think creatively, and channeling this creativity to challenge the boundaries of our systems, cities, spaces, disciplines, is critical. In both our cases, we really emphasize the importance of engagement. You cannot do public art without a public, and you cannot just parachute an object into a public space and call it public art. So, a public artwork starts and ends with engagement, with the public, and in the public’s interest. Those are the kinds of conversations that we are trying to encourage our students to have: to practice fearless listening and embrace public service.

KRZYSZTOF I’m working right now with LGBTQ individuals and communities in Poland. Speaking of hegemony: the ruling populist party in Poland is winning various elections by creating an image of LGBTQ as an enemy that is endangering the identity and even the national security of Poland. This is also orchestrated by the church. So, the church and the state in Poland are working together with a very powerful mixture of slogans that reverberate with the souls of a misguided population.

I’ve been working on this for two years. People from LGBTQ communities across Poland record their voice and their eyes. Their eyes appear on screens attached to drones, and there’s a speaker attached to each drone. So, basically, they become angels speaking from the sky. There’s an artistic issue here—finding a form and means of transmission that is uncanny, partially real and partially fictitious. Listening to details of somebody’s experience from the sky—of a gay person, or someone who has changed gender—when they talk about all the processes they went through, all the hostility, and still express some joy in trying to really be who they are in gender or sexuality, may create doubts about some preconceptions and prejudice. This will be in the center of Kraków, a stronghold of the Polish church. Lots of people, even tourists from other countries, will come and take pictures and post video. The voices will be magnified; they will inscribe themselves in the history of Kraków, in the collective memory. I’m saying this is very similar in principle to what Malkit is doing.

137 ALEX

What you both described reminds me of something you have said, Krzysztof: that it’s important to work with people rather than on behalf of people. It seems like that’s precisely what you’re trying to do—to work with people to generate a more positive idea of the public.

KRZYSZTOF That’s a really good point. You work on behalf of or for people and with people. It’s also important that we come up with a surprise. It is not simply creating conditions for something expected to happen, but conditions in which people will be surprised by themselves, by their own hidden capacity and talents to create or cocreate an original work of communication, expression, or testimonial—visionary or critical. Not unlike the “good enough mothers,” pediatrician Donald Winnicot describes, we can create and secure a “potential space” for people to become authors and coauthors, not just participants. Sometimes, it’s much more of their own invention; other times it’s a result of collective work or exchange.

MALKIT There is a limit to what one person can perceive, understand, or imagine. Architecture has an entire culture built around the “starchitect”—this omnipotent persona who can solve all the problems of the world. There is a huge resistance against that in my practice. I think it’s incredibly important to work with, to listen and open up new spaces for other people to fill. In order to understand the complexities of the world, we cannot do it alone. Art can help by activating and making visible publics, generating a creative collective process that actively and collectively explores how we create a practice that is just. How do we create a practice that is inclusive?

Who is the public that inhabits the public spaces?

And just being able to continuously ask these questions with everything we do is how we engage.

Who Is the Public for Whom We Design?

And Who Are We to Design For Such a Public?

Thaïsa Way

Subjects

139

Gordon Parks, Outside Looking In, Mobile, Alabama, 1956.

In 2022, we celebrate the 200th birthday of Frederick Law Olmsted, the oft credited father of landscape architecture as a professional practice. What is frequently missed is the full breadth and depth of Olmsted’s work—as a designer and as an advocate for a healthier democracy. Charles Eliot Norton, a contemporary, observed that, among American artists, Olmsted ranked “first in the production of great works which answer the needs and give expression to the life of our immense and miscellaneous democracy.”1 As Danielle Allen and Eric Liu have suggested in their 2020 report, Our Common Purpose: Reinventing Democracy for the 21st Century, we are likely in the midst of a fourth founding of our democracy, thus it is essential that landscape architects consider what constitutes our role and contribution to this moment.

We have the opportunity to build on the legacy of Olmsted’s advocacy for the public park as a place that fosters democracy in ways that might engender a more inclusive public realm that stewards a more diverse public.

Over the course of his career, Olmsted pursued a variety of avenues as scientific farmer, author and publisher, social critic, reformer, administrator, and only later as landscape

architect of public parks and urban landscapes throughout the United States. He was an intellectual who spent much of his life seeking to understand how to nurture the capacity for democracy to succeed. America was experiencing unprecedented growth in the mid-19th century, making the transition from a rural society to a complex urban society. Olmsted, alongside others including Andrew Jackson Downing, identified the need for creating and preserving landscapes where people could escape city pressures and nourish the body and spirit. However, his interest went beyond the restorative powers of natural beauty as an urban respite. Drawing from his deep respect for the natural world, he viewed landscapes and public parks as sites to further the democratic ideals of community and equality.2 Olmsted’s beliefs emerged from decades of observations and thinking. In 1850, he visited Birkenhead Park outside Liverpool. The first public park in England to be built with taxpayer money, it was designed by Joseph Paxton, the English gardener, architect, engineer, and member of parliament, best known for designing the Crystal Palace. Olmsted saw in Birkenhead Park a radical civic experiment, a place where the

common people and the elite shared space. As he wrote, “Five minutes of admiration, and a few more spent in studying the manner in which art had been employed to obtain from nature so much beauty, and I was ready to admit that in democratic America there was nothing to be thought of as comparable with this People’s Garden.” He was inspired by the park’s ability to foster a common humanity, later writing that “the poorest British peasant is as free to enjoy it in all its parts as the British queen.” Olmsted’s visit to Birkenhead Park served to develop in him the conviction that “such public grounds were a necessity to civilized urban living.”3 A second series of trips took Olmsted through the American South to learn about the culture, the place, and the land with an eye to the slave economy and the possibility of abolition.4 He concluded not only that slavery was wrong morally, economically, and even ecologically, but that it challenged the very ideal of democracy and our humanity. And as Sara Zewde has argued, he would come to believe that the public realm—and public parks in particular—might counter the evils of enslavement by offering places where people from different backgrounds could come together to share a common good.5

140

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

Dorothea Lange, Wanto Co. Grocery Store at 401-403 Eighth and Franklin Streets, Oakland, California, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 8, 1941. The store was closed and the Matsuda family, who owned it, were relocated and incarcerated under the US government’s policy of internment of Japanese Americans. The sign was installed by Tatsuro Matsuda, a University of California graduate.

Subjects

Lewis Mountain Negro Area, Shenandoah National Park, Virginia, 1930s.

“OLMSTED SAW IN BIRKENHEAD PARK A RADICAL CIVIC EXPERIMENT.”

141

142

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

Tremé Sidewalk Steppers Social Aid & Pleasure Club, under the Claiborne Bridge, Claiborne Corridor, New Orleans, Louisiana, February 2020.

In his view, democracy might be learned, practiced, and expanded in the public realm if it was appropriately designed for that purpose.

While Olmsted’s view of the public was far more limited than how we define it today, his emphasis on the public realm as a physical place for the nurturing of civilization and democracy remains a core principle in urban design and landscape architecture. For Olmsted, the public realm as place was also critical to public health.

This was evident when, in 1861, Olmsted was appointed general secretary of the United States Sanitary Commission, a position that allowed him to develop one of the earliest public health systems, an effort that would, under the leadership of Clara Barton, spawn the Red Cross two decades later. He believed that an enduring democracy required a robust public infrastructure that included not only services, such as public health and education, but also places, where the public became community through a shared presence.

Understanding this history of Olmsted’s intellectual development and his approach to design as a civic practice has been lost in the legacy of Olmsted as designer par excellence.

So we have a thin story, rather than the thickness of Olmsted as civic advocate, activist, and intellectual critic. In ignoring the legacy of a thicker Olmsted, we have allowed our practice to become increasingly thin. While there have always been compelling calls for engagement, these remain in the margins of our practice and profession as well as our pedagogy.

We are again at a moment where the health, or perhaps the very survival, of our democracy is in jeopardy, in no small part due to our fragile ideas about who the public is and what rights this public has, as individuals and as communities.

Pervasive wealth inequality is undermining core values of equity and justice within our communities and nation. Social mobility has become nonexistent for too many. There is a terrifying rise

in white nationalism and anti-immigrant beliefs that continue to dominate the public sphere of social media. As noted by Allen and Liu, trust in our democratic institutions is at an all-time low: “Fewer than one-third of Millennials consider it essential to live in a democracy. . . When Americans are asked what unites us across our differences, the increasingly common answer is nothing.”6 So how do landscape architects respond? If we return to Olmsted’s deep belief in land and place, we might understand our role as designers of the public realm as one of the most critical contributions that we make as civic leaders building a healthier public and a stronger democracy.

Olmsted’s parks were never merely pretty places to gather—they have endured as social arguments for the power of community. They are some of the most important testing grounds for American democracy in the making, places that suggest a confidence in the common good. In a report to San Francisco’s city government in 1868, Olmsted wrote that public parks imbued the public “with a common purpose, not at all intellectual, competitive with none, disposing to jealousy and spiritual or intellectual pride toward none, each individual adding by his mere presence to the pleasure of all others, all helping to the greater happiness of each.”7 He went on to explain that it was the responsibility of democratic governments to preserve regions of extraordinary natural beauty for the benefit of the whole people. Today we might argue that it takes more to build democracy than merely being in a park and seeing different people. This suggests the question of what would landscape architecture look like if the primary metrics of success were how the profession and the discipline contributed to strengthening democracy through the design of the public realm?

This would surely begin with a privileging of spatial justice in the public realm to challenge the common belief that design is neutral or innocent

of broader cultural inscriptions. And it would demand an acknowledgment of the complicity of designers in the history of white supremacy. We would come to understand how the “public” has always been carefully delineated to include and exclude certain people to the benefit of the ruling class of white men and their families. In other words, we would acknowledge that those in power have held authority by defining who comprises the public.

The genocide of Indigenous communities underscored that these first caretakers of the land were denied rights as human and members of the public. The application of the three-fifths compromise prior to the Civil War that implied that enslaved Black people were not fully human precedes the denial of Black communities’ access to the public realm—from public pools and public parks, for example—in the next century. Chinese immigrants were legally excluded from citizenship from 1882 to 1943, overlapping with the period during which Japanese Americans were confined to internment camps. And neither group was allowed equitable access to public amenities in the so-called public realm. Until 1965, voting was not a right of all members of the public and even today this right is being contested. These histories reveal how the idea of the public good and the public realm have changed over the almost two centuries of design in the US. Landscape architects cannot claim ignorance of these definitions of the public as they built educational programs on stolen lands, designed suburban communities with racial covenants, engaged in urban renewal plans, and planned state parks with separate areas for whites and nonwhites, and today engage in the design of prisons. These stories have been increasingly made more evident in books such as Race and Modern Architecture and Black Landscapes Matter as well as in emerging scholarship on the racism evident in the work of the Olmsted

Subjects

Brothers and Warren Manning, among others.

Such research into the legacies of our public sphere might expand how landscape architects identify alternative design tools for the interrogation of public lands.

This is not a new challenge but one that reappears with each generation of designers that struggle to position their practice in the wider world. In 2004, George Lipsitz contended in his essay “The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race” that “A primary goal of landscape architects and other citizens concerned with the built environment should be to disassemble the fatal links that connect race, place, and power.”8 Richard H. Schein wrote more recently in an essay titled “After Charlottesville” that despite all that has been done, we still need to “call out those moments in those landscapes; and engage and challenge the racial formations built on racist practice that the landscape is everywhere and always mediating.”9 And while there are individuals leading such work, as design professions writ large and as design schools, we remain woefully silent beyond concerns about limited pipelines and excuses for a lack of diversity in our students, faculty, and leadership.

One way we might reimagine what publics we design for would be by more deeply engaging with the humanities in our education and thinking. The humanities, after all, are about humans, culture, and place. And questions of justice, equity, and democracy are, at their core, humanist questions. A design education that engaged deeply with the humanities would expand the foundations for grappling with the complex—and often conflicting—narratives about who the public is and who it will be in the future. Such an inquiry might include studying philosophy and literature to consider how cultures think and form belief systems about equity and community and studying languages to better understand how ideas of society and place are imagined by different publics. The disciplines

of African American, Indigenous, Latinx, and gender studies would offer insights into socio-ecological relationships and frameworks.

Designers might learn from important ideas and frameworks that have emerged from humanists seeking to better understand the human experience. Drawing from scholars and practitioners in Indigenous ways of knowing and reading land, community, and narrative, landscape architects might engage in discourse on the role of design as a practice of settler colonialism. We might engage with Ecuador’s adoption of the rights of nature in its constitution, which is intended to shift the relationships between the public and the natural world.10 Concepts of intersectionality as described by law professor Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw could be critical to a more complex understanding of the overlapping dynamics of who is considered a part of the public and the role of the public realm in fostering a diverse world grounded in equity and justice.11 With this framework, designers might explore how an accumulation and overlapping of identities leads to unique manifestations of discrimination and privilege in the built environment.

The writing of bell hooks about marginality as well as the power of land and ground in the capacity to survive would challenge and inspire thinking differently.12 Such reasoning is at the heart of movements—including Black Lives Matter and Land Back13 —that seek to shape public space and take place in public places, often grounded in the commitment to a democracy that stewards human and non-human health and well-being. The measure of success of design could be spatial justice and a stronger democracy that serves everyone in the public as well as the very planet on which we live and depend.

This then leads to a refinement of my second question: Who are we to design for a more inclusive public? The challenge is to consider who we are as a professional community but also who we include in our community, in our public. If we truly believe in an inclusive public, then we

143

must believe that our community must be equally inclusive. While Olmsted offers many lessons, one that we can reject is his assumption that an English-style landscape of pastoral composition was the best form for public parks. We know, or should know, that a truly inclusive public realm supports a broad range of differences in use, look, feel, and engagement of land and place.

This attention to real and enduring difference cannot be merely generated from the same people through the same discussions. We need difference in our community—difference that comes from engaging a more inclusive public in the practice of landscape architecture.

Yes, some of us now practicing will come to learn new ways if we give space to difference.

But more importantly, by moving aside to make new spaces we can nurture others to create what we can barely imagine. We need to allow the profession that Olmsted launched to be founded again along with our democracy and its multiple and diverse public.

We must interrogate the built environment in its capacity to foster the growth of citizens’ engagement with—and trust in—government, institutions, and community, and more to the point, power. This is what democracy is about: people’s power as a public. As noted in Our Common Purpose, “A healthy constitutional democracy depends on a virtuous cycle in which responsive political institutions foster a healthy civic culture of participation and responsibility, while a healthy civic culture—a combination of values, norms, and narratives—keeps our political institutions responsive and inclusive.”14 This takes place in place. Landscape architects stand at the precipice of a new vision of the built environment as foundational to democracy. But they must pay close attention to who the public is and might be and in turn, who should design the places that will steward that broad vision of the public.

NOTES 1 Frederick Law Olmsted and Theodora Kimball Hubbard, Frederick Law Olmsted, Landscape Architect, 1822–1903 (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1922), 37.

2 See for example: Scott Roulier, Shaping American Democracy: Landscapes and Urban Design (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

3 Frederick Law Olmsted, Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England (London: D. Bogue, 1852), 89.

4 Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States. Based upon Three Former Volumes of Journeys and Investigations (New York: Mason Brothers, 1861).

5 Sara Zewde, work in process on The Cotton Kingdom, shared in public lectures in 2021.

6 American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century (Cambridge, MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2020), 2.

7 Frederick Law Olmsted, Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns (Cambridge, MA: Printed for the American Social Science Association, 1871), 18.

8 George Lipsitz, “The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race: Theorizing the Hidden Architecture of Landscape,” Landscape Journal 26, no. 1 (2007): 10.

9 Richard H. Schein, “After Charlottesville: Reflections on Landscape, White Supremacy and White Hegemony,” Southeastern Geographer 58, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 12.

10 Esperanza Martínez, “The Rights of Nature: A balance, 10 years after its constitutional recognition in Ecuador,” World Rainforest Movement, https://wrm.org.uy/ articles-from-the-wrm-bulletin/the-rights-ofnature-a-balance-10-years-after-its-constitutional-recognition-in-ecuador/.

11 Kimberlé Crenshaw, “The Marginalization of Harriet’s Daughters,” Kalfou 6, no. 1 (2019): 7-23.

12 bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” Framework: The

Journal of Cinema and Media, no. 36 (1989): 15–23; bell hooks, “Earthbound: On Solid Ground” in Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World, eds. Alison H. Deming and Lauret E. Savoy (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2011), 67–71.

13 Black Lives Matter, https://blacklivesmatter. com/; LandBack, https://landback.org/; Craig Howe and Kim TallBear, eds., This Stretch of the River (Sioux Falls, SD: Oak Lake Writers Society and Pine Hill Press, 2006).

14 American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century, 4.

CALL AND RESPONSE Margaret Crawford, John R. Stilgoe, Christopher Hawthorne, Alejandro Echeverri, Ethan Carr, Sara Jensen Carr, George E. Thomas, Susan N. Snyder, Alex Krieger, Silvia Benedito, Nicole Lambrou, Lizabeth Cohen

“What is the most important public space worth preserving now?”

Call and Response

Margaret Crawford:

John R. Stilgoe:

147

It’s hard to identify a single public space as fundamental or necessarily worth preserving. Public spaces come and go, depending on their value to different publics. What concerns me more is the continuous elimination of events in public space that have been vitally important to specific groups at particular moments. I am currently mourning two recent losses: the yearly Tiananmen Square vigil in Victoria Park in Hong Kong and the weekend COVID parties at Lake Merritt in Oakland, California. Totally different, both represented important ways of making public spaces meaningful, both shut down by the authorities.

I’d like to find and preserve the Mississippi River Gathering Grounds. On the National Register and graced by an active preservation society, Place Congo— sometimes Circus Square, now Congo Square—in Louis Armstrong Park in New Orleans, shapes my search for similar spaces where African Americans congregated for dance and music. COVID ruined my academic-leave travels along the Mississippi in search of similar ground (only French and Spanish governance permitted such spaces and the playing of drums forbidden in Atlantic colonies). Railroad areas running along rivers may have hosted them (since they could accommodate circus trains and the adjacent big tops), but post-1920s flood-control projects and the end of steamboat traffic probably eradicated most. In his 1904 Nostromo, Joseph Conrad caught the fused Spanish, Native American, and African American activity south of the border, describing “booths made of green boughs, of rushes, of odd pieces of plank” sheltering food vendors, fires heating kettles of maté gourds, the “huge temporary erection, like a circus tent of wood with a conical grass roof,” and the dance music he called gombo. But a character in the book remarks, “All this piece of land belongs now to the Railway Company. There will be no more popular feasts held here.” The recent demise of rail-transported circuses complicates my search for the edgy urban open spaces once stretching from Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and the Main north through New Spain and New Orleans to St. Louis. If any endure they might be preserved. Any one of them deserves a sign. But first I need to find them.

148

Christopher Hawthorne:

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

I have been thinking lately of architecture criticism as a kind of public space, if a shifting and embattled one. In recent years, the perimeter of this space has been not so much closing in on itself as fracturing, creating new territories for debate that are largely digital, democratic, and ephemeral. This hasn’t been all bad. We now have more and easier access to writing about architecture than at any point in the field’s history; there is a related openness to new writers and redefinition of architecture and architectural criticism as political and even polemical that I find encouraging.

But there are at least two ways in which these shifts threaten the public nature of architecture criticism. One is the algorithmic logic that siphons content with increasingly ruthless precision into personalized, which is to say largely private, reading and viewing channels. The other is that it is tougher than ever for younger critics to shape their work into anything resembling a career. We’re losing the spaces where writers can produce criticism in an open, regular, and productive way, with rigorous and attentive editing, and where they can build a relationship with a reading public that includes, but stretches beyond, the discipline itself. In the first decade of my career, between my early 20s and early 30s, I filed—and went through useful and occasionally painful edits on—somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 words every year. This is how I learned to do the thing I wanted so desperately to do.

I don’t want to romanticize the way it used to be. For a long time, regular spaces for criticism were appendages to larger, slow-moving enterprises, eddies alongside the wide rivers of what we now call “legacy media,” and they tended to make room only for critics who were white and male and had degrees from a small group of pricey schools. Meanwhile, for all our apparent and real advantages, architecture critics were often made to feel peripheral, exalted and exotic, at our own publications, where advertising support was understood to be tied to other beats and other coverage, especially Hollywood.

But now the rivers are mostly dry and the eddies gone altogether. The challenge is to carve out and defend new spaces for the work of criticism to be sustained—in public view—over time. And when I say “carve out” and “defend,” what I’m really talking about is building a realistic and sustainable business model for a new platform for architecture criticism and raising money to pay for it. Or at least set it in motion. Otherwise criticism will remain at the mercy of, rather than taking advantage of, the ways that the consumption of media and the broader culture are changing. Whether this constitutes preservation or something closer to a wholesale reimagination is up for debate, but the idea that criticism relies entirely on a public for its effectiveness strikes me as underappreciated at the moment. As we rethink notions of the public, it makes sense to be rethinking criticism too.

Call and Response

149

Alejandro Echeverri:

The strength with which young people appropriated the streets in Colombia in the spring of 2021 was poignant and tremendous. It is a paradox that precisely when contact in open spaces was forbidden—when people were forced to keep their distance—there were massive marches of protest, encounter, dialogue, and violent expressions in the open public spaces in our cities. We need to touch each other, feel each other, listen to each other closely. Cultural construction, political construction is a collective action, and it expresses itself in the streets and in the plazas.

During this profound crisis, the spaces in our cities where these exchanges, transactions, and dialogues occurred were made more visible than ever. Each urban tribe found a place to redefine its identity. In Medellín, the Parque de los Deseos (Desire Park) has become a very potent symbol. With shouting and singing, the young protesters have renamed it the Parque de la Resistencia (Resistance Park). That is its new identity.

Ethan Carr:

New York City’s partnership with the Central Park Conservancy transformed the management of large “public” parks over the last 40 years. Brooklyn soon followed the public-private model, as did many other cities, in a pattern that echoed the 19th-century creation of urban park systems. Boston was always a little different. Here Olmsted had his greatest opportunity to develop a connected series of parks that structured urbanization around landscape systems. But Franklin Park, the “large park” of the system, was surrounded by early streetcar suburbs, not the dense grids of rowhouses around Central and Prospect parks.

That difference, still very apparent today, puts the park at a vital point of inflection for our expectations of just how “public” parks are. Plans for the future of Franklin Park will need to assure the people of surrounding communities that investment will not result in displacement. The model of the Central Park Conservancy—so powerful and effective for so long—in this case must be succeeded by new methods of community organization and park rehabilitation, methods that will require substantial and sustained municipal funding, not just private fundraising. At the center of Olmsted’s most innovative park system, Franklin Park will again require innovation: a commitment to community participation and government funding that will be a new precedent for what makes parks “public.”

150

Sara Jensen Carr:

George E. Thomas & Susan N. Snyder:

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics Landscape infrastructure can be public health infrastructure if planned and designed equitably. I would suggest that COVID-19 has made clear that not only are there public spaces that need to be preserved, they also need to be extended to more people and more places. The environmental disparities suffered by communities of color greatly contributed to health disparities during the pandemic, and if the equitable distribution of well-maintained, accessible parks and safe, open streets is made a priority in the coming years, perhaps we can work toward a future that is both climate- and pandemic-resilient.

The danger of the question is the assumption that preservation is an appropriate strategy. Preservation has been typically created by elites to maintain their identity and power. It is inherently exclusionary and contrary to the broad idea of a public that encompasses the entire community. Worse, it implies accepting the idea that public spaces should be kept as they are and have been rather than being open to the continuous transformation that is the essence of modern life. Whenever preservation is given control, life is drained and the user group is reduced.

So what should the question be? Elijah Anderson, in his book The Cosmopolitan Canopy, suggests that some places are of special value in being open to a broad community where people can see that others are engaged in life and not a threat. Those places that he has found are inherently dynamic.

Perhaps the question should be what are the dynamics of human interaction that should be supported and encouraged—not preserved—to make good spaces for the future?

Call and Response

Alex Krieger:

Silvia Benedito:

151

A place accommodating conversation, perhaps around a common table, might be the public space worthy of preserving. In less partisan times, the proverbial “soapbox” would do, understood as a platform from which to express a point of view in front of others who might disagree, indeed often did, but who would listen before retorting. We seem to have lost the capacity to listen. Our national (political) life appears instead to be about ignoring or silencing, even demonizing those with whom we disagree. We would benefit from more places facilitating conversation—talkers and listeners in civil exchange seeking common bond.

I suggest that the national parks are the most important places to preserve in the US. The parks embody the seminal impetus for environmental protection, but they also carry problematic (and mostly unexplored) legacies rooted in colonial dispossession. Yosemite National Park, preserved since 1864 and designated a national park in 1890, exemplifies this contradiction. Yosemite is a memorable landscape even under the ever-growing assaults of climatic disintegration— droughts, pests, and wildfires. It symbolizes the United States’ historical drive to conquer the land and safeguard it. It epitomizes the preservation movement’s foundations—based on John Muir’s affection for nature. Paradoxically, it also materializes the idea of nature preservation that is rooted in excluding Native American communities from their land. While predicated on the concept of nature stewardship, the preservation movement is based on a myth—one that wilderness is found and is to be preserved.

During the 19th century, painter Albert Bierstadt captured Yosemite Valley as a striking landscape of grasslands dotted with mosaic-like tree clusters, herbivores feeding and wandering on open meadows, and a magnificent sunset irrupting through the valley. Rather than showing untouched wilderness, Bierstadt revealed a landscape subject to long-standing maintenance by the tribal communities living in the region. The designation of Yosemite Valley as a national park—under the incorrect assumption that it was “untouched”— excluded these communities, their traditional ecological knowledge, and their place-based practices, such as cultural burnings. Today’s global wildfire crisis is not only a symptom of the climate crisis; it also reflects the marginalization of humans tending the land. As wildfires continue ravaging Yosemite, it is imperative that we use its history as a stepping-stone to restorative and integrative futures.

152

Nicole Lambrou:

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

To confront climate change, much attention has been directed to public land: coastlines that can absorb storm surges and sea level rise, and green urban spaces that can mitigate extreme heat, for example. Public spaces such as these, driven by climate concerns, are worth preserving. But one question, among many, is what their management entails. Who’s taking care of these public spaces? Who’s managing them? And who’s making decisions on behalf of the public who traverses through them?

Stewardship may present itself as a mode of public engagement, but it often disguises the labor involved in public space. Centralizing the question of labor means recognizing that public space that claims to be restorative and inclusive is the end result of a long and laborious process. In that process, the burden of labor can, and often does, shift to communities already facing social, environmental, and climate risks. The point is not to abandon public space, but to reflect on and recognize the work it asks of people.

Call and Response

153

Lizabeth Cohen:

My response may surprise the many Americans who have relished new opportunities for outdoor dining during the COVID epidemic—even in the depths of winter, if heaters were available. In general, the resourcefulness of restaurateurs, the ingenuity required to create useable exterior space, and the many innovations in design have been widely lauded. More recently, attention has turned to how an experiment born in a health emergency might be made a permanent fixture in many restaurant quarters. But even as we embrace what some have hailed as a Europeanization of American dining, it is imperative that we scrutinize the losses as well as the gains involved when a restaurant expands into the sidewalk, the bike lane, and even the street.

My research into the negative consequences of the privatization of public spaces that occurred when shopping malls replaced downtown retail districts or when business improvement districts (BIDs) took over from local government the maintenance and daily upkeep of commercial areas has alerted me to the social risks that can accompany the pleasures of expanding the footprint of privately owned restaurants and other businesses into the public realm.1

The “Open Restaurants” program in New York City and many initiatives like it throughout the country have undoubtedly been a lifesaver for many restaurant owners and a valued way for patrons to be in public at minimum risk to their health. This strategy for remaining open for business has particularly benefited small entrepreneurs with shallow pockets, though the financial investment required to adapt has proved an impediment to some.2 While these business owners have received the credit they deserve, much less attention has been paid to the costs incurred when the once-public pedestrian sidewalk, the hardfought-for bike lane, and the roadways shared between public transit and private cars are made less accessible to non-restaurant customers. Even when narrow corridors are kept open for passersby, they are rarely wide enough for a wheelchair or for pedestrians who are walking more than one abreast.3

Experience with past encroachments into the public realm show that makeshift provisions are often not enough to ward off social dangers. What happens, for example, when individuals deemed unwanted—whether because they are homeless or a racial minority or perceived as undesirable in some other way—are subject to removal because they are considered bad for business?

Moreover, in many cities, when disabled persons find themselves unable to navigate a narrow sidewalk passage, the burden usually falls to them to protest to authorities. Equally disturbing is the takeover of bike lanes by extensions of restaurants, forcing bikers back onto the roadways they lobbied so hard to escape. And while street parking is often a mixed bag, tables and chairs have replaced more than 8,000 parking spaces in New York City, to the detriment of drivers whose only alternative might be astronomically priced parking garages.4 In short, what on the surface may seem like harmless extensions beyond formerly accepted property lines can in fact foster new kinds of inequality and exclusion.

As the pandemic recedes and Americans seek to incorporate some of the positive changes that COVID has brought into daily life, vigilance about preserving the purity of the public sphere must remain a paramount concern. An equitable, democratic city requires freedom of movement, where no restaurant or retail business can set a price for admission to the public sidewalk or the public street.

NOTES 1 Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003), especially Chapter 6: “Reconfiguring Community Marketplaces,” 257–289.

2 “New York Loves Outdoor Dining. Here’s How to Keep the Romance Alive,” New York Times, June 29, 2021.

3 “Alfresco. NYC: Nominate Your Favorite Outdoor Restaurant or Open Street by June 21!” Regional Plan Association’s email newsletter, May 27, 2021; “Sidewalk Seating Is Good for Restaurants. It’s a Challenge for Disabled People,” Washington Post, June 24, 2021.

4 “New York Loves Outdoor Dining.”

154

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

GENERAL PUBLIC

Griffin, Karan-Davis-Berrizbeitia 60, 112, 114

IN PUBLIC

PUBLIC ART PROJECTS

Sandoval-Strausz 88

Pérez de Arce Antoncic, Anderson, Griffin, Hawthorne 31, 33–34, 57, 59–60, 76, 148

ARTWORKS

INNER PUBLIC

AUTHORITIES

Wodiczko-Shoshan-Anderson 131

INTERMEDIATE PUBLIC Wodiczko-Shoshan-Anderson 131

OUTER PUBLIC

Wodiczko-Shoshan-Anderson 131

PUBLIC

Shafaieh-Simon, Griffin, Madanipour, Zukin, Way 50–54, 57–63, 74–79, 105, 138–143

ACCESS

Pérez de Arce Antoncic, Griffin 27, 58

ACTIONS Griffin 59

AGENCIES Griffin 61

AGREEMENT Shafaieh-Simon 54

AMENITIES Griffin, Way 58, 142

ARCHITECTS

Allen-Edgerley-Schulz 20

ARENA

Pérez de Arce Antoncic 26–27

ART

Allen-Edgerley-Schulz, Sandoval-Strausz, Wodiczko-Shoshan-Anderson 23, 88–89, 131, 133, 137

Sandoval-Strausz 89 Madanipour 76, 78

AWARENESS Shafaieh-Simon 50

BATTLE Griffin 58

BEACHES Griffin 58, 63

BEHAVIOR Hatuka 71

BODY

Shafaieh-Simon 50

COMMISSION

Escobedo-Patterson 81

COMMONS Davis 42

CONFINEMENT Griffin 57

CONSTITUTION Zukin 105

CONVERSATION

Wodiczko-Shoshan-Anderson 134

DEBATE Griffin 63

DENIAL Griffin 57

Index

PUBLIC

155

PUBLIC

DICHOTOMY

HEALTH-CARE SYSTEM

Hatuka 71

Karan-Davis-Berrizbeitia 114

DISCOURSE AND CONSCIENCE

HEALTH CENTERS

DISSENT

HEALTH POLICIES

DOMAIN

HEALTH PROGRAM

Wodiczko-Shoshan-Anderson 134 Pérez de Arce Antoncic 27

Pratt 126

Karan-Davis-Berrizbeitia 108–109

Davis, Madanipour, Wodiczko-Shoshan-Anderson 39, 75, 78, 131, 133

Karan-Davis-Berrizbeitia 114

EDUCATION

HEARINGS

ENGAGEMENT

HOUSING

Honig 15

Zukin 105

Lambrou 152

ENTERTAINMENT Pérez de Arce Antoncic 30

Griffin, Zukin, Anguelovski, Pratt 59, 62, 76, 105, 120, 126

IMAGE

Sandoval-Strausz 90

FREEDOMS

INFLUENCE

FUNDING

INFRASTRUCTURE

Griffin 57 Pratt 128

GARDEN

Pérez de Arce Antoncic 30

GOOD

Shafaieh-Simon 54

Madanipour, Way 76, 142

INTELLECTUAL

Berrizbeitia-Davis, D’Oca-Khelsilem-Baker-Kelley-Reimer 10, 103

Berrizbeitia-Davis, Karan-DavisBerrizbeitia, Way 11, 115, 121, 142

INTEREST

GREEN SPACES

INVESTMENT(S)

Anguelovski 121

GROUNDS Way 139

HEALTH

Karan-Davis-Berrizbeitia, Way, Carr 10, 108–115, 142, 150

Madanipour, Zukin 78, 105–107 Griffin 59, 62

KNOWLEDGE Griffin 58

LAND(S)

Honig, Davis, Griffin, Pratt, Way 15, 38–42, 61–62, 128, 143

LIBRARIES

Berrizbeitia-Davis 10

156

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

PUBLIC

PUBLIC

MANDATE

PLACES

Karan-Davis-Berrizbeitia 111, 115

Anderson, Wodiczko-Shoshan-Anderson, Way 36, 131, 143

MEETINGS

PLAZA

MEMORY

POLICE

MOURNING

POLICY(IES)

Sandoval-Strausz, Zukin 89, 106 Pratt 125

Pérez de Arce Antoncic, Griffin 31, 58 Pratt 126

Shafaieh-Simon 54

Griffin 59, 61

NATURE

POLITICAL SPACE

NEED

POOLS

Hawthorne 148

Hatuka 67

Berrizbeitia-Davis 11

Way 142

OCCUPATION

POWER

OFFICE

PRAISE

OFFICIALS

AND PRIVATE INTERESTS

OPEN SPACES

PROJECT(S)

Griffin 60 Honig 19

Griffin, Karan-Davis-Berrizbeitia, Pratt 63, 112, 126 Griffin, Karan-Davis-Berrizbeitia 60, 113

OPINION Zukin 105

PARK(S)

Sandoval-Strausz 90 Shafaieh-Simon 54 Madanipour 76

Sandoval-Strausz, Karan-Davis-Berrizbeitia, Wodiczko-Shoshan-Anderson 89, 115, 131

PROJECTIONS

Wodiczko-Shoshan-Anderson 131

Berrizbeitia-Davis, Hood-Zewde, Griffin, Karan-Davis-Berrizbeitia, Way, Carr 10, 47, 58–59, 114, 139, 142, 149

RACISM

PARK LAND

Berrizbeitia-Davis, Hood-Zewde, Griffin, Hatuka, Madanipour, Karan-Davis-Berrizbeitia, Wodiczko-Shoshan-Anderson, Way, Cohen 10–11, 49, 57, 59, 71, 78, 109, 112, 131, 139, 142–143, 153

Griffin 58

PERCEPTION Griffin 57

Anderson 34

REALM

REPRESENTATION Sandoval-Strausz 89

157

Index

PUBLIC

PUBLIC

REQUEST

SQUARES

Griffin 62

Pérez de Arce Antoncic 27

RESOURCES

STATUS

Pratt 126

Griffin 60

SALON

STREET(S)

SCARS

STRUCTURES

Pérez de Arce Antoncic 27 Griffin 57–59

Berrizbeitia-Davis, Honig, Cohen 10, 19, 153 Pratt 127

SCHOOLS

THINGS

SECTOR

TRANSPORT

SERVANT

TRANSPORTATION

Berrizbeitia-Davis, Griffin, Pratt 10, 61–62, 126 Griffin, Zukin 105–106 Honig 19

SERVICES

Griffin, Madanipour, Pratt 62, 76, 126

SIGNAGE Honig 15

SILENCE

Wodiczko-Shoshan-Anderson 131

SPACE(S)

Berrizbeitia-Davis, Pérez de Arce Antoncic, Anderson, Hood-Zewde, Griffin, Hatuka, Madanipour, Escobedo-Patterson, SandovalStrausz, Karan-Davis-Berrizbeitia, Anguelovski, Pratt, Wodiczko-Shoshan-Anderson, Way, Crawford, Hawthorne, Carr, Thomas-Snyder, Krieger, Lambrou, Cohen 11, 27, 34, 47–49, 58–60, 67, 71, 74–79, 80–82, 85, 90, 114–115, 117, 127, 131, 133–134, 137, 143, 147–153

SPEECH

Wodiczko-Shoshan-Anderson 133

SPHERE

Allen-Edgerley-Schulz, Pérez de Arce Antoncic, Hood-Zewde, Madanipour, Wodiczko-ShoshanAnderson, Karan-Davis-Berrizbeitia, Way 25, 27, 46, 30, 78–79, 81–82, 112, 142–143

Honig 19

Allen-Edgerley-Schulz 21 Berrizbeitia-Davis, Madanipour, EscobedoPatterson, Pratt 10, 76, 81, 126

TRUST

Karan-Davis-Berrizbeitia, Pratt 109, 124–129

TRUTH Griffin 58

USE

Hatuka 70

UTILITY

Karan-Davis-Berrizbeitia 115

VOICE

Wodiczko-Shoshan-Anderson 131

WALK

Pérez de Arce Antoncic 27

WEALTH Davis 39

WHITEWASHING Griffin 61

158

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

PUBLIC WILL

Zukin 106–107

WORK(S)

Escobedo-Patterson, D’Oca-Khelsilem-Baker-Kelley-Reimer 80, 101

WORKFORCE HOUSING Anguelovski 121

PUBLICLY

AVAILABLE

Karan-Davis-Berrizbeitia 114

OFFERED Griffin 61–62

OWNED

Griffin, Anguelovski 57, 58, 61–62, 121

RES PUBLICA Pratt 126

THE PUBLICS

Honig, Pratt, Wodiczko-Shoshan-Anderson 15, 126–127, 129, 133

159

CONTRIBUTORS MATTHEW ALLEN is a visiting assistant professor at Pratt Institute who researches the history and theory of design technics and aesthetic subcultures. He is the author of the forthcoming book Architecture becomes Programming: Modernism and the Computer, 1960–1990 as well as essays in venues such as Log, e-flux, Domus, and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Allen holds a PhD and a Master of Architecture degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

ALEX ANDERSON is director of the PhD program in the built environment and associate professor of architecture at the University of Washington, where he teaches courses in architectural design, representation, history, and theory. His research focuses on the relationships between modernism and domestic architecture—specifically early 20th-century interior design and decorative arts in Europe, and mid-century factory-based house production in the United States. Anderson also writes widely on topics in art, architecture, and culture.

ELIJAH ANDERSON is the Sterling Professor of Sociology and of African American Studies at Yale University. He is the author of the classic sociological work A Place on the Corner; the award-winning books Streetwise and Code of the Street; and The Cosmopolitan Canopy.

Anderson is the recipient of the 2013 Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award, the 2018 W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award, and the 2021 Robert and Helen Lynd Award for Lifetime Achievement, all from the American Sociological Association. He also received the 2017 Merit Award from the Eastern Sociological Society.

ISABELLE ANGUELOVSKI is the director of Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability (BCNUEJ), an ICREA research professor, and a senior researcher and principal investigator at Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She coordinates GreenLULUs, a five-year ERC-funded project which examines green inequalities in 40 cities. After obtaining a PhD in urban studies and planning from MIT, Anguelovski returned to Europe in 2011 with a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship. Her research examines how urban plans and policy decisions contribute to more just, resilient, healthy, and sustainable cities, and how community groups contest the existence, creation, or exacerbation of environmental inequities as a result of urban (re)development processes and policies.

ASSEMBLE is a multidisciplinary collective working across architecture, research, design, and public art. Cofounded by Fran Edgerly and Louis Schulz in 2010, London-based Assemble has delivered a diverse and award-winning body of work, while retaining a democratic and cooperative working method that enables built, social, and research-based projects at a variety of scales.. By positioning the architect as part of an ongoing local conversation, the collective contributes to the efforts of communities pushing forward change.

TOBY BAKER is the Squamish Nation’s senior operating officer for project negotiation and development in North Vancouver, British Columbia.

ANITA BERRIZBEITIA is professor of landscape architecture and chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her research focuses on design theories of modern and contemporary landscape architecture, the productive aspects of landscapes, and Latin American cities and landscapes.

MEL D. COLE is an award-winning photographer, best known for his hip-hop and press/editorial photography. He is also the founder of Charcoal Pitch FC—a Black-owned photography agency dedicated to exploring soccer through a multiracial lens. Starting in April 2021, he focused his lens on the pandemic and then in May 2021 on the Black Lives Matter movement. His second book, American Protest: Photographs 2020–2021, was released in November 2021.

DIANE E. DAVIS is the Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and former chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design. Trained as a sociologist, Davis teaches courses on the social composition, spatial structure, and governance of cities. Recent books include Transforming Urban Transport and Cities and Sovereignty: Identity Conflicts in the Urban Realm.

JOHN DEAN DAVIS is an environmental and architectural historian and assistant professor at Ohio State University. He is currently writing a book on engineering and landscape in the American South during Reconstruction.

MICHAEL T. DAVIS, photographer and owner of Michael T. Davis Photography, College Station, Pennsylvania.

DANIEL D’OCA is associate professor in practice in urban planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and principal and cofounder of Interboro Partners, a New York–based architecture, urban design, and planning firm that has won many awards for their participatory, place-based projects. A second, paperback edition of Interboro’s book, The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion, was released in 2021.

FRIDA ESCOBEDO is an architect and designer based in Mexico City.

Her work focuses largely on the reactivation of urban spaces that are considered to be residual or forgotten, through projects that range from housing and community centers, to hotels, galleries, and public art installations. Escobedo has taught at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and Rice University. She is the recipient of the 2016 Architectural Review Emerging Architecture Award and the 2017 Architectural League Emerging Voices Award.

TONI L. GRIFFIN is founder of urbanAC, a planning and design management practice based in New York that designs and leads complex and transformative social and spatial urban revitalization projects rooted in addressing historic and current disparities involving race, class, and generation. She is a professor in practice of urban planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the founder and director of the Just City Lab, an applied research platform that investigates how design can address the conditions of injustice in cities. She has written and lectured extensively, and served as an Obama appointee to the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts.

TALI HATUKA is a professor of urban planning and the head of the Laboratory of Contemporary Urban Design at Tel Aviv University. As a city planner and urban designer, she serves as a consultant to municipalities in Israel. Her work is focused on urban society and city design and development. She is the author or co-author of The Design of Protest, Violent Acts and Urban Space in Contemporary Tel Aviv, The Factory, Neighborhood-State, The Planners, City-Industry, and Land-Gardens. Hatuka was a Fulbright Scholar and a Marie Curie Scholar at MIT. BONNIE HONIG, Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Political Science at Brown University, works in feminist, legal, and democratic theory. She is currently an affiliate of the Digital Democracies Institute at Simon Fraser University and the American Bar Foundation. Her two newest books are A Feminist Theory of Refusal and Shell Shocked: Feminist Criticism After Trump. She is now working on a book about politics and film.

WALTER HOOD is the creative director and founder of Hood Design Studio, a cultural practice working across art, fabrication, design, landscape, research, and urbanism in Oakland, California. He is also the David K. Woo Chair in Environmental Design and professor of landscape architecture and environmental planning at the University of California, Berkeley. Hood was the Senior Loeb Scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in spring 2021. He is a recipient of the 2017 American Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award, 2019 Knight Foundation Public Spaces Fellowship, 2019 MacArthur Fellowship, 2019 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, and 2021 United States Artists Fellowship.

ABRAAR KARAN is an infectious disease physician at Stanford University.

He completed his medical training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and received a Master’s in Public Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He worked on the Massachusetts COVID-19 response, and on the World Health Organization’s Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response. Karan has spent the last 13 years working in global public health and is interested in the epidemiology of emerging infections, and how the spread of disease affects communities and societies.

160

Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics

GIL KELLEY is principal and owner of Gil Kelley & Associates, Urban and Strategic Planning and the general manager of planning, urban design and sustainability for the city of Vancouver, British Columbia.

Architecture of UN Missions. In 2016, Shoshan curated the Dutch pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. FAST was awarded the Silver Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021.

KHELSILEM has worked as an elected leader for nearly four years in Vancouver, British Columbia. He’s a member of numerous government advisory committees, served on many boards for local nonprofits, and currently leads the Squamish Nation Council as its chairperson.

TARYN SIMON is a New York–based multidisciplinary artist who directs our attention to familiar systems of organization—bloodlines, circulating picture collections, mourning rituals, ceremonial flower arrangements—making visible the contours of power and authority hidden within them. Incorporating mediums ranging from photography and sculpture to text, sound, and performance, her works are informed by research on and with institutions such as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the International Commission on Missing Persons, and the Fine Arts Commission of the CIA.

ALI MADANIPOUR is professor of urban design at Newcastle University’s School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape in the UK. His books on public space include Public and Private Spaces of the City; Whose Public Space? International Case Studies in Urban Design and Development; and Public Space and the Challenges of Urban Transformation in Europe. His recent books include Cities in Time: Temporary Urbanism and the Future of the City and The Routledge Handbook of Planning Theory.

SALA ELISE PATTERSON is a writer interested in stories that reveal untold truths, highlight unsung heroes, and celebrate hidden beauty. A serial expatriate (eight countries on five continents) and linguist (five languages), she often writes about art, design, and culture that reflect or dictate social and political phenomena. She is the founding director of the Songhai Group, a communication advisory firm, and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Phillips Collection, America’s first modern art museum.

RODRIGO PÉREZ DE ARCE ANTONCICH is an architect and professor who lives and teaches in his hometown of Santiago, Chile. His projects include the renovation of Plaza de Armas, the Mapocho Cultural Center, and a new crypt in the Metropolitan Cathedral, all in Santiago. He has taught at various universities in the US and the UK and is the author of books and essays on the architectures of play, landscape, and urban matters.

EMMANUEL PRATT is an artist and urban designer. He is the cofounder and executive director of Sweet Water Foundation. Pratt’s praxis involves more than a decade of explorations, investigations, and transdisciplinary work that intersects architecture, urban planning, agriculture, and public health.

His work has built upon and moved beyond the theory of Communicative Action toward the creation of a new paradigm of Regenerative Neighborhood Development. Pratt was a Harvard Graduate School of Design Loeb Fellow in 2017, a 2019 Joyce Award recipient, and a 2019 MacArthur Fellow.

JIA LOK PRATT is a mother, writer, educator, designer, and the chief operating officer of Sweet Water Foundation. After a decade in corporate consulting and 6 years of working with traditional nonprofits, she joined Sweet Water Foundation where she works to build a more radical and imaginative future.

ANDREA REIMER is founder and director of Tawâw Strategies and former Vancouver city councilor and Metro Vancouver director. In 2018, Reimer was awarded a Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in recognition of leadership on green cities and urban policy. She teaches at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University and consults with municipal governments, nonprofits, and mission-driven local businesses on climate and social policy. Reimer writes a column for Canada’s National Observer.

A. K. SANDOVAL-STRAUSZ is director of the Latina/o Studies Program and associate professor of history at Penn State University. His books include Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City, which won the Caroline Bancroft History Prize and was a finalist for the Victor Villaseñor Book Award; Hotel: An American History; and Making Cities Global: The Transnational Turn in Urban History.

CHARLES SHAFAIEH is an arts journalist and critic based in New York City. His writing on visual art, music, theater, literature, and architecture has appeared in numerous international publications including The New Yorker, The Irish Times, The Weekend Australian Review, and Artforum.

MALKIT SHOSHAN is the founding director of the Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory (FAST), an Amsterdam- and New York–based think tank that develops projects at the intersection of architecture, urban planning, design, and human rights. She is a researcher, author, designer, and the area head of Art, Design, and the Public Domain with the Master in Design Studies program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her books include Atlas of the Conflict: Israel–Palestine and Village and BLUE:

THAÏSA WAY, FASLA is director of studies for garden and landscape studies at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection at Harvard University. She also teaches at the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington. The author of numerous books and articles on the histories of landscapes and design, Way seeks to challenge the canon of landscape architecture to engage with the inscriptions of race, gender, and class in history and today.

KRZYSZTOF WODICZKO is professor in residence of art, design and the public domain at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is internationally renowned for his projection-animations of architectural facades and civic monuments as well as for nomadic cultural equipment developed with marginalized city residents. He received the Hiroshima Art Prize in 1998 for his contribution to world peace. Wodiczko’s books include The Abolition of War and Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings.

SARA ZEWDE is assistant professor of practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in the Department of Landscape Architecture. She is also founding principal of Studio Zewde, a design firm in New York City practicing landscape architecture, urbanism, and public art. Named a 2021 Emerging Voice by the Architectural League of New York, the studio is devoted to creating enduring places where people belong.

SHARON ZUKIN is professor emerita of sociology and of earth and environmental sciences at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has written several books about New York, including Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places, Landscapes of Power, and, most recently, The Innovation Complex: Cities, Tech, and the New Economy. She has received the Lynd Award for career achievement in urban sociology.

IMAGE CREDITS VISUAL TOC 1: © Taryn Simon. Courtesy Gagosian. 2: © Peter van Agtmael/ Magnum Photos. 3: Dorothea Lange/Getty Images. 4, 7: © Mel D. Cole. 5: © Krzysztof Wodiczko. HONIG 14: © Jim Shaw/Courtesy Simon Lee Gallery.

16: Jewel Samad/AFP via Getty Images. 17: Photo by Lucas Jackson/Pool/ Getty Images. ALLEN/EDGERLEY/SCHULZ 23 (left): © Ben Quinton. 23 (right): Assemble. 24: © Zander Olsen. 25: © Max von Sternberg. PÉREZ DE ARCE ANTONCICH 28–29: SpY (SpY-urbanart.com). ANDERSON 35: Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, and Chantal Crousel, Paris.

DAVIS: State Library of Louisiana, Louisiana Collection. HOOD/ZEWDE 47 (bottom): Hood Design Studio. 49: Haynes Foundation Photograph Collection, Montana Historical Society. SIMON/SHAFAIEH all photographs © Taryn Simon. Courtesy Gagosian. GRIFFIN: All collages courtesy of the author. HATUKA all photographs © Mel D. Cole. MADANIPOUR 77: © Alex Chenneck. Photo by Stephen O'Flaherty. ESCOBEDO/PATTERSON all photographs © Frida Escobedo. SANDOVAL-STRAUSZ all photographs © Michael T. Davis Photography. D’OCA/KHELSILEM/BAKER/KELLEY/ REIMER 96–101; 103: Courtesy City of Vancouver Archives. KARAN/DAVIS/ BERRIZBEITIA 110: © Emin Ozmen/Magnum Photos. 113: Shawshots/Alamy Stock Photo. 114 (top): © Jean Claude Moschetti/REA/Redux. 114 (bottom): © URIEL SINAI/The New York Times/Redux. ANGUELOVSKI 118: GottschoSchleisner Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

119: Courtesy of the author. PRATT all photographs courtesy of the Sweet Water Foundation. WODICZKO/SHOSHAN/ANDERSON all photographs © the authors. WAY 139: Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation. 140: Dorothea Lange/Getty Images. 141: National Park Service.

142: © James Cullen (theaccidentalcajun.com).

New York, NY, July 1, 2020.

New York, NY, July 1, 2020.

WITH CONTRIBUTIONS BY: Bonnie Honig, Matthew Allen, Fran Edgerley, Louis Schulz, Rodrigo Pérez de Arce Antoncich, Elijah Anderson, John Dean Davis, Walter Hood, Sara Zewde, Taryn Simon, Charles Shafaieh, Toni L. Griffin, Tali Hatuka, Mel D. Cole, Ali Madanipour, Frida Escobedo, Sala Elise Patterson, A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, Michael T. Davis, Daniel D’Oca, Khelsilem, Toby Baker, Gil Kelley, Andrea Reimer, Sharon Zukin, Abraar Karan, Isabelle Anguelovski, Jia Lok Pratt, Emmanuel Pratt, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Malkit Shoshan, Alex Anderson, Thaïsa Way, Margaret Crawford, John R. Stilgoe, Christopher Hawthorne, Alejandro Echeverri, Ethan Carr, Sara Jensen Carr, George E. Thomas, Susan N. Snyder, Alex Krieger, Silvia Benedito, Nicole Lambrou, and Lizabeth Cohen GUEST EDITED BY: Anita Berrizbeitia & Diane E. Davis