A BLUEPRINT FROM BRAZIL

Of all the elements required to sustain a city, affordable housing is a linchpin that has come loose. Inflation in American real estate has become so pronounced that approximately 40 percent of Los Angeles, Miami, and New York residents spend more than 30 percent of their pretax income on housing; in Asia, those costs can exceed half of a person’s income. As an affordable housing crisis looms over cities worldwide, governments around the globe are trying to rein in the threat with measures ranging from revolving funds to 3D-printed residences.

São Paulo, Brazil, is one urban center where the housing emergency has deepened in the absence of such solutions. Because the construction of public housing proceeds at a snail’s pace and private investors have largely ignored inclusionary zoning incentives, as many as 1.2 million people face extreme housing insecurity in a metropolitan area of almost 23 million. Favelas are a common sight, as are abandoned high-rises occupied by squatter populations. To remain close to their jobs—which are vital to the local economy—Paulistas must often choose between informal communities and tenements operated by predatory landlords, known as cortiços. Alternatively, they can settle on the city’s fringe, where the commute to work averages two and a half hours each way.

In 2015, a group of São Paulo professionals stepped into the leadership gap separating the public and private sectors. They founded the nonprofit FICA (Fundo Imobiliário Comunitário para Aluguel, or “Community Real Estate Rent Fund”) to house low-income locals in single-family rental apartments that the organization had rehabilitated. In 2020, with the support of the Wealth Inequality Initiative, FICA began acquiring tenantoccupied cortiços in order to introduce to Brazil an ethical business model founded on fair rents and a management culture that welcomes residents’ participation.

The launch of this initiative, known as Compartilha (“Sharing”), followed FICA’s invitation to Parsons professors Lara De Sousa Penin and Eduardo Staszowski to join its new international advisory board. Soon after, the two professors—who founded Parsons’ Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability (DESIS) Lab in 2009 and currently lead The New School’s graduate minor in Civic Service Design—recognized that FICA could foster more collaborative management of its cortiços through service design. As Penin explains, “Designing for services means trying to understand people’s needs, their existing relationships, the ways to best serve them, the artifacts created in the process, and how outcomes are co-created by all involved in a service.” In particular, she and Staszowski felt that a tool called a service blueprint would help FICA not only visualize the tenant-landlord evolving relationships but also help them refine what they already do. As Penin points out, “the service blueprint offers a bird’s eye view of a service very much like a floorplan of a building.”

Last December, the Henry Luce Foundation held a symposium with DESIS Lab to explore topics including ethical landlord practices. The foundation followed a 2022 grant to support DESIS Lab’s affordable housing work with a 2023 research grant to fund the creation of narratives and photo documentation of alternative housing models.

Working with São Paulo residents, the FICA–DESIS Lab team designed plans for affordable housing units that involved minimal redesign and adaptive reuse of discarded materials.

Yet the educators also note that the use of a service blueprint, like any service design effort, can succeed only by avoiding top-down consulting. “Effective service design is about opening doors in a multidirectional way,” Staszowski says about approaching FICA and its stakeholders as equals. In fall 2022, Parsons received a $275,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation for DESIS Lab, enabling him and Penin to share with students the opportunity to engage in this best practice.

Leticia Takeuti—who recently earned a master’s in anthropology from The New School for Social Research after completing the Strategic Design and Management undergraduate program at Parsons—was among the students who answered DESIS Lab’s call. She and her classmates diagrammed the process through which a Compartilha resident secured housing, from lease application through occupancy. The team identified vital artifacts involved in the process, including the tenant application and lease and messages sent through the WhatsApp platform, through which most Brazilians communicate. By thinking deeply about interactions and the artifacts they produced, DESIS Lab members discovered forms of exchange that could be developed further. “When applicants are signing contracts, for example, it is important to create space for them to familiarize themselves with the documents and process, which might be new or different,” Takeuti says of one possible revision. “Another example involves what happens after move-in. We need an intermediary between FICA and the tenants, and a social worker would feel less intrusive to the community.”

Just as important, DESIS Lab sought the input of all stakeholders without weighting or judgment. To prepare themselves to represent the Compartilha experience from the perspective of tenants, whose voices have historically been ignored, the students immersed themselves in interviews recently conducted by FICA. (The project team decided that holding a new round of interviews could be seen by residents as intrusive.) Speaking about the process of documenting FICA’s point of view, Takeuti says, “I could reach out to board members anytime, and they were so openminded about new ideas.” Fabiana Endo, an institutional coordinator and project manager at FICA, says that DESIS Lab members on the project made equity a priority throughout their efforts. “Working with DESIS Lab and the students was inspiring,” says Endo, a civil engineer and architect. “I don’t have the words for it—they created this very respectful environment in which everyone was superempathetic, and they saw things that we would not have seen in our daily routines.”

Staszowski agrees that DESIS Lab’s approach to the Compartilha blueprint was unique in its evenhandedness, noting that “we cannot stay within our realm of privilege and expect people to share with us what they’re doing.”

Staszowski, a co-director of Parsons’ MFA Transdisciplinary Design program, points to DESIS Lab’s dedication to social justice and attention to multiple perspectives in the FICA project, two features essential to the practice of transdisciplinary design.

To heighten awareness and expand application of transdisciplinary design throughout The New School, Staszowski, John Bruce, and Hala Abdel Malak—all co-directors of the MFA Transdisciplinary Design program— are now also serving as founding co-directors of the Consortium for Trans/disciplinarity (CT/d) with anthropology professor Hugh Raffles . A partnership between the MFA Transdisciplinary Design program, DESIS Lab, and GIDEST (the

Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography, and Social Thought, housed at The New School for Social Research), CT/d has a twofold mission. “One of CT/d’s aims is more frictionless movement for students, faculty, and learning partners,” says Bruce. Malak adds, “What’s really great about The New School and Parsons is having the social sciences, humanities, and design in one place, and through CT/d, we’re offering a structure for all that transdisciplinary work to be tightly interwoven.”

The consortium’s second goal is to encourage academics to treat a project’s stakeholders as co-authors rather than passive constituents, employing empathetic methods like those used by DESIS Lab members for the Compartilha blueprint. “We can only move forward through other ways of knowing, of learning from communities that have been marginalized and whose voices are rising,” explains Malak, whose work in urban resilience includes a highly regarded rethinking of refugee housing.

CT/d has already begun broadcasting its presence across the university. Launch activities this past academic year included the consortium’s spring dialogue series, which introduced its guiding principles to a wide audience. One member of that audience was MFA Transdisciplinary Design student

Fatou Kiné Diouf, who says, “The CT/d dialogue speakers helped me better grasp the intersection of social justice and thinking about organizational dynamics.” She also believes that CT/d’s embrace of the views of underrepresented people has the potential to turn traditional academic hierarchies upside down. “I know from back home—Senegal—that lived experience is an important kind of learning, yet thinking about ancestries and spiritualities as scholarship is radical.” For this coming fall semester, CT/d plans to develop its practice further with what it calls a “Superstudio” course, in which students will investigate the planning process for building in the Brazilian Amazon and efforts to advance Indigenous knowledge systems and improve infrastructure throughout the traditional lands of Indigenous peoples in Canada and beyond. Erin Dixon, who oversees knowledge and Indigenous leadership with Reconciliation Canada, an advocacy group facilitating dialogue and economic justice action, will serve as one interlocutor for the students. Dixon hopes the dialogue emerging from the CT/d course will serve as “preparatory ground to find that new way forward together—all peoples, all places.”

Meanwhile, the partnership between DESIS Lab and FICA continues to model both process and results for CT/d’s path forward through the Compartilha blueprint, which has achieved broad impact. “Because the service blueprint helps FICA think about the kind of organization they want to work in,” Penin says, “I have since brought this project to my whole Civic Service Design minor core class, Public and Collaborative Services, with students building service blueprints for the shared and single-family apartments and for a new FICA initiative, called Housing First, that addresses homelessness.” Endo explains that Housing First is funded by São Miguel Arcanjo Parish to help Paulistas reintegrate into society, offering them permanent addresses, social services, and job training. She adds, “The differences between the two blueprints have to do with the intensity of work that is required of us, rather than the types of services. Housing First basically has more frequent social worker visits to make sure everything is OK.” Endo says that in-house staff at FICA are now creating blueprints for a range of services. The diagrams have become a shared language for its members.

That language could very well spread throughout Brazil. Endo explains that FICA has discovered social housing nonprofits that have recently been organized elsewhere in Brazil. Although the housing situations in these locations demand site-specific responses, the groups spearheading them have expressed a desire to follow in FICA’s footsteps. “The blueprints are a clearer vision of our processes, our way of working; they’re also useful for others,” says Endo. “So we are incubating a group of advocates in the state of São Paulo and in the city of Curitiba. By giving other groups access to our blueprints, that process can happen more quickly. I see FICA as a national reference in social non-speculative property in Brazil.” That influence could even extend beyond Brazil, thanks to a new Henry Luce Foundation grant funding the documentation of CT/d’s work in Brazil, a project to be conducted in partnership with the Magnum Foundation, an offshoot of the celebrated photojournalism agency.

The project's impact may be as deep as it is broad, says Takeuti. “I’m definitely bringing my experience at Compartilha with me into my career and academic endeavors. I intend to continue working in the social sector with nonprofits, and I think the blueprint tool just equipped me to be more agile in understanding the internal environment of an organization. I hope that wherever I go, I have the opportunity to share this blueprint or even start new mappings.”

As CT/d gains stature and followers and projects like Compartilha multiply, the effects will be felt far beyond the world of academia. An ever larger number of urban resilience advocates could soon see their work transformed by transdisciplinary design.

Through a creative course focused on impact and community engagement, Juanli Carrión is guiding students from Parsons and our university’s performing arts college as they partner with local and global nonprofits to help communities thrive

by Carissa Chesanek

As an artist-activist whose work focuses on social and environmental justice, Carrión has for years been developing an approach to art that incorporates creative strategies for sustainable social change into his work. Today Carrión is an assistant professor of creative community development at Parsons and a faculty member in the MA Arts Management and Entrepreneurship program at The New School’s performing arts college. Students from both schools are learning together in his Sustainable Creative Placemaking course, for which he recently forged partnerships with Bronx nonprofits needing support to carry out their mission of keeping communities strong and resilient.

Collaboration is familiar terrain for Carrión, who founded OSS Project Inc., a nonprofit that connects communities with artists to create local gardens that serve as platforms for knowledge sharing and community development. The Spanish-born artist is also adept at working across cultural contexts—a skill he cultivates in his students—having presented projects around the world in venues including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Spain’s CentroCentro, and the National Gallery of Modern Art in India.

“Looking at my work today, you might not see my performing arts background,” says Carrión. “I finished my intermediate degree in piano at the Conservatorio Profesional de Villena when I was young, and you can see that training in my earlier work. I did an opera performance on the border of Mexico, directing it and creating the musical arrangements.” His teaching involves leading lively discussions on storytelling in community development and requiring students to present their research, features that connect with the capacities Carrión himself has gained in his interdisciplinary creative career.

Carrión’s creative place-making course welcomes students of all disciplines who see opportunity in combining art and community outreach and working alongside top leaders in creative community development here and abroad. Bringing his former connections and previous collaborators into the classroom and giving students the tools with which to engage with nonprofits, governments, and local stakeholders on their own, Carrión offers students a large array of potential collaborators.

Juanli Carrión, faculty, School of Design Strategies

His students have recently been working on initiatives with Bronx organizations and businesses abroad that draw on creativity to integrate communities and help them thrive.

“I focus on ways we can build solid engagements early in the process of working with communities,” says Carrión. He adds that the rest of the semester’s coursework entails collaborating directly with partners, creating sustainable strategic plans, and taking steps toward putting plans into action—which includes devoting classroom time to addressing new insights and challenges that arise along the way.

The freedom to work outside of the classroom attracted Carolina Trinker, a second-year MFA Textiles student, to Carrión’s course. “It’s exciting to think about how to create opportunities to use what we’ve learned in the studio to help sustain communities—and sustain those benefits outside of academic environments.”

Trinker notes that the course brings together creatives working hands-on in various media and gives them a way to get out of their studios and into communities. The opportunity has encouraged her to reimagine her creativity and even consider new career paths.

“In school, we’re creating these inner worlds in a safe studio environment where we're free to explore,” says Trinker. “I saw Juanli’s course description and thought, ‘This is interesting for after I leave college.’”

In fieldwork at a local nonprofit, Trinker was introduced to Youth Ministries for Peace & Justice (YMPJ) and their work with the Westchester Avenue Station, a Cass Gilbert–designed South Bronx rail station that has fallen into disrepair, and the Southview Economic Hub, a large underused space beneath the Bruckner Expressway at Bronx River Avenue. YMPJ has been engaging the local communities in transforming the two spaces to offer employment opportunities and house community workshops and educational resources. YMPJ’s needs for these spaces inspired Trinker to rethink her textiles practice and imagine ways to apply her fabric-based art in the Bronx development projects.

“I'd never before thought about place or my work so expansively,” says Trinker. “The more formal research I undertook, the more I understood that textiles are a thing of place and a thing of community.”

Trinker is interested in helping lead workshops in the Westchester station after its restoration is complete. She is also looking to take part in other community projects to foster lasting connections among Bronx locals. She points to a nearby garden that supplies neighborhood residents with food. “It turns out that the people who run the garden are looking for a fiber workshop or basketry. People in my MFA Textiles program do basketry, so maybe workshops can lead to a long-term collaboration between my program and some organizations. I think my program would benefit from the exchange students would have with Bronx textile makers.” abandoned factory site between Westchester Avenue and Bruckner Boulevard. “We’re pleased to be organizing a weaving program this summer at Concrete Plant Park, which Carolina has been hard at work on,” says Hunter.

Trinker is now organizing a team of students in the textiles industry to plan a six-week series on weaving that will facilitate community storytelling. “The prospect of having support for arts programming in our parks and an opportunity to document community stories and weave them into textile art pieces is an important new initiative here. Acknowledging the importance of storytelling and how our lives are interconnected is essential to our placekeeping efforts and support to communities,” Hunter says.

Bronx community advocate Nathan Hunter has been collaborating with Trinker in her efforts to build community by design. Hunter serves as the foodway coordinator with the Bronx River Alliance, a community-based nonprofit focused on restoring the Bronx River corridor. His organization partnered with YMPJ on the creation of Concrete Plant Park, situated on an

As an MFA Contemporary Theatre and Performance graduate student at The New School’s performing arts college, Irisdelia García admits she felt like a “fish out of water” when she began Carrión’s course along with design students from Parsons. But her passion for community engagement through theater—along with her existing creative practice, which connects her regularly to Bronx communities—quickly demonstrated how her skills complemented those of her Parsons peers.

Working with a local nonprofit was important to García, a Bronx native. For Carrión’s course, she partnered with the Kingsbridge Armory, one of the last extant armories in New York City. García conceived a creative engagement project to reimagine the armory and its role in the area. Now in the exploratory phase of their redevelopment plan, the armory’s leaders are reviewing a proposal to transform the armory into a cultural center, she says. The proposal inspired García’s project—a documentary-based arts education program for youth in Kingsbridge, the surrounding neighborhood. The program would involve interviewing young people in local public schools to spark their interest in theater and turning their stories into scripts and performances, all interwoven with archival research on Kingsbridge’s history.

“My hope is to make my program a sustainable part of the armory’s cultural engagement,” says García. “The point is to develop programming that meets communitybuilding needs, so that when you leave, the benefit exists without you.”

While developing her armory proposal, García worked with Andrew Harris, a project manager at Hester Street, an NYC justicefocused community development nonprofit that facilitated the local partnerships for the course. Hester Street helps communities build resilience through inclusive planning and design support— the latter provided by Parsons students in Carrión’s course, who bring fresh thinking and energy to creative community development.

“Involving students is important: They're leading the thought and work of the next decade,” says Harris. “Parsons as a whole and the students in this particular class are significant because questions that fall outside the traditional box get asked.”

Harris goes on to explain that Carrión’s students are ideal partners for local nonprofits because they are both creatives and passionate New Yorkers—even if for only a few years while in school. Those paired identities enable students to provide the “necessary input for sensitive community engagement,” he says.

He also notes that the practical applicability and resilience-bolstering capacity of the projects emerging from Carrión’s course set these students apart from peers of other design schools. Harris notes that “the students’ proposals can help shape and enhance our communities, enabling them to thrive in the future. These projects are 100 percent applicable in real spaces. That's unique.”

Also working on the project management side of Hester Street is Ryan Westphal ’20, an MFA Transdisciplinary Design alum. Westphal agrees that the students offer something special in terms of creativity that benefits communities.

“Parsons does transdisciplinary work really well,” says Westphal. “Juanli’s class has classically trained musicians, artists working with fabrics, and people coming with a business perspective. It truly is a multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary course. When you bring all of these different perspectives into the community, what comes out is unique.”

While studying in Parsons’ MFA program, Westphal looked at many local organizations working on social benefit projects, wondering what he as a young graduate might offer. Now that he is a professional at an organization he once researched with interest, Westphal realizes that nonprofits like his are enriched by collaborations with students with innovative ideas. “Students in Juanli’s class and others across Parsons bring a critically needed and particular blend of design, strategic planning, and thinking,” he says. “They are also uniquely prepared to put in the necessary work.” business development proposal with the aim of educating her community about food and nutrition while making craft industry work more accessible.

“It's a country of arts and crafts, but there is a division between rural and urban areas,” says Vaidya. “The level of craft among nonurban artisans is very high—that’s something most people living in cities are unaware of—which means there’s economic opportunity there.”

Vaidya hopes her community-fostering ambitions will find support at Sudarshan Chemicals Industries, a high-end pigment and specialty chemical supplies firm and potential partner on her project. Vaidya has already connected with Madhuri Sanas, deputy general manager of CSR & Administration Media Communication for the company, to discuss plans.

“At Sudarshan, we’re working with very underresourced communities to promote gardening and farming to reduce malnourishment and create green zones in nearby villages,” says Sanas. “Students like Iti are supporting and promoting us. Whenever she's in India, she’s a part of our community."

Vaidya is grateful to Parsons for giving her a space in which to create art and a chance to uniquely contribute to the world. Creating a new network for herself and investigating critical global issues during her studies have revealed the potential of helping others with her craft. “Even if you’re spreading your message to just one person, your work is successful,” says Vaidya.

Parsons MFA Textiles student Iti Vaidya is focusing on a project that develops green spaces in Roha, India, an industrial town where her parents live. Vaidya—who has a background in print design, apparel, and textile embellishments—saw an opportunity to apply her art practice to community building. In her studies, she has been deepening her handcrafting skills in natural dyeing, weaving, printing, and felting and exploring polyculture farming. She has drawn on her home country’s agricultural traditions, incorporating farming programs into a traditional textiles–based

Carrión and his course have clearly transformed the ways students in the creative arts consider their practice and its potential impact. Through partner engagements, students develop a better understanding of creativity as a fundamental capacity enabling organizations to advance their missions. The process has given students a blueprint for making a lasting difference in communities, helping people build healthier, happier, and more resilient futures.

"When students see the creativity involved in community development,” says Carrión, “it changes them completely. We're putting creativity to work for something really useful.”