ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION 1

Ife Salema Vanable

Ph.D. Candidate in Architectural History and Theory

Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation

Rayne Laborde

Associate Director of cityLAB

UCLA

Lily Song

Assistant Professor of Race and Social Justice in the Built Environment

Northeastern University

Euneika Rogers-Sipp

CEO and founder of the Destination Design School of Agricultural Estates, Atlanta

Alexandra Staub

Professor of Architecture, Penn State

Alexandra Staub: We had four speakers this afternoon: Ife Vanable, Rayne Laborde, Lily Song, and Euneika Robers-Sipp.

I’d like to start by asking you a small question on a very large topic. All of you examine issues at the urban scale, where problems such as redlining, pollution in low-income communities, and housing inequalities have become baked into our urban DNA. How do we begin to move out of that legacy? How do you decide where to start to make the biggest impact — as researchers, as activists, as pedagogues, and as designers?

Rayne Laborde: For us, it comes down to teaching and learning together with the members of the communities that we work with. Although social equity has been discussed more frequently in the past year, it has not often been discussed within the context of design studios. I think one of the best things that we can do as educators is to initiate these conversations and to listen to what our community partners feel as a result of years of segregation or environmental racism. These topics have profound impacts on all of us.

Euneika Rogers-Sipp: I agree that listening is a lost art. This art encompasses the ability to slow down, observe, listen deeply, and then have the time to be aware, understand what you have seen, and think about how to make meaning for others. It’s important to meet people where they are. There’s all kinds of data and information out here, but we measure it by how meaningful it is for the end user. Does it fulfill the day-to-day needs of their operation? our role to join forces with these struggles and divest from extractive modes of development. We should invest more in regenerative movements and change leaders. We are surrounded by them; they are in every single city and region.

Listening and being able to hear, seeking common goals through accepting your own belief system as well as those of others is a lost art. In the work of our CoDesign Field Lab that we presented today, we realized that we had to make more space to hear each other, something that is highly underrated.

Lily Song: Regarding problems like redlining and housing discrimination being baked into our urban environment, I would say that the oven is still on. A lot of design and planning is complicit, for example in speculative housing commodification. Yet as long as these human-created problems have existed, people have been organizing and fighting them. In his case for reparations, Ta-Nehisi Coates talks about racial dispossession and the violence that African Americans have sustained in this country, but also about the calls for reparations that go back centuries. As designers and planners, it is

Alexandra Staub: One of the things that we discovered this afternoon is that we are battling against mainstream perceptions. When we challenge established opinions, we often find that the real situation can be quite different from the mainstream canon.

Ife Vanable: For me, it is important to understand the experiences of people who live in urban domains. Such domains have their problems, but they are also sites of joy. I grew up in New York, my grandparents were born in New York. I have a large history steeped in urbanity that is pleasurable and joyful, as well as consisting of sites that are characterized by extraction, subjugation, and other forms of dispossession. But within that context, there is always an ongoing mode of survival and fight, as well as joy, pleasure, and desire.

Ife Salema Vanable, Rayne Laborde, Lily Song Euneika Rogers-Sipp, Alexandra Staub

We must make space in the pedagogical realm for students to not merely perpetuate narratives of dispossession by reading narratives of Black folks solely steeped in issues that are deemed problematic. We must provide space for students to imagine sites of joy and elevation within these contexts as well.

Alexandra Staub: Rayne, Lily, and Euneika, your talks brought up Ursula Le Guin’s carrier bag theory of fiction. Le Guin reminds us that the first human tool was not a weapon, but rather something that holds: a bag, a pouch, a vessel, something for gathering and storing and sharing. Before making the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home. With this revelation, the narrative of humanity shifts from that of violence to that of safekeeping. The purpose is neither resolution nor stasis, but continuing process. Can you reflect on how that metaphor of the vessel of gathering and storing flows into the work that you do, especially with students?

what the carrier bag is collecting or holding, the opportunity is to understand how thick and nuanced design and planning practice is and how important it is to have a “bag” of different experiences and perspectives. As humans, we are limited by our embodied experiences and what we know. Co-design and co-creation can happen with people who are situated differently from us in ways that are disruptive and fun and surprising, or even self-transcending.

Lily Song: For students thinking about

Euneika Rogers-Sipp: For me, it boils down to the “containers” that have held me in my journey through the years. Some of those who have joined me have been incredibly challenging, but I have been held by family, people in my community, mentors, and friends. A really important piece of my work is mentoring students. A main point of support is asking, “How are you holding yourself and how are you being held by those around you?” The extended space to explore that is part of the culture of our learning environment. You need to take the time to examine those things and create those things for yourself.

Such things aren’t normally part of a graduate degree or your Ph.D., or even an acknowledged academic skill set. Having that support system is essential to the work that we do.

Alexandra Staub: Are you saying that the legitimacy of your work is sometimes called into question?

Euneika Rogers-Sipp: Absolutely. We spend hours learning how to come across as a professional, to be competent in the field. How about other necessary skills? We hear a lot these days around radical self-care. That is what I think we are trying to transfer to our young people alongside all of the other soft or hard skills they may attain as designers. How will you take care of yourself considering the demands that you are going to confront?

Alexandra Staub: When you go through most professional programs, you hear about something called billable hours. Rayne, you work at a center that considers architecture within its social context; do you have any solutions to the problem private practices face when they want to do socially-oriented work but feel they cannot really afford to do so?

Rayne Laborde: We have a lot of support by merit of being a university center. A large organization is structurally different from a small practice, and we don’t have the financial struggles that small practices often face. We support through mentoring, but also through financially supporting our students directly whenever we can. We have all kinds of research grant programs for the urban humanities that allow us to focus on the work and the end product. We want people to have space to explore their interests. That is not always fostered within architecture programs. All this goes back to the carrier bag theory of fiction and the idea that “carrying” is not only useful, but it is a necessity. It’s a concept that is not always embraced within academia, where a more abstract ideal of design excellence reigns. Often, ideas of “design excellence” are separate from any consideration of people or program or who is making an object.

Ife Vanable: For me the roadblocks are when students hold onto certain ideals and modes of knowledge production, as well as certain assumptions. One of our greatest challenges is finding ways to creatively think beyond our assumptions, to move beyond ideas and narratives that are so persistent that they are no longer interrogated. We need to get away from ideas of “truth” and instead create spaces where students can cultivate curiosity.

Alexandra Staub: All of you have mentioned education as a possibility for advocacy. I am not sure who is advocating more: Is it is the students, since they are driving so much of the thinking about making systemic changes, or is it the teachers, who advocate for change through projects like the ones you presented in your talks today? When you engage in advocacy through the pedagogical system, what do you see as the largest roadblocks and how can we get around them?

Sometimes we experience resistance from the administration to certain forms of pedagogy. I taught a studio last semester called “Guns and Butter” that looked at architecture and capitalism. There was a huge amount of interest in the topic, although there probably wouldn’t have been several years ago. When I taught that studio, there were five or six Black women studio faculty at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, which had also never ever happened before.

We’re currently experiencing a moment of reckoning. We need to recognize it, however, as part of ongoing struggles, and ongoing work. We need to see the current attention to these types of stories, narratives, and approaches to pedagogy, not as something new, but something to tap into, something which already exists and has always existed. What I am finding as kind of a roadblock is that there is a lot attention on what is new and I am deeply interested in what has always been in the minds and the hearts and the hands of people. It is these things that become a territory for imagination and further investigation.

Alexandra Staub: It sounds like you have to look forward in addition to keeping your eyes on the periphery because you need to see what else might be important for your work. Lily, Euneika, Rayne, what do you see as the largest roadblocks towards change and how do we get around them?

Rayne Laborde: I see normative ideas of production and evaluation as problematic. At UCLA during the pandemic, a lot of classes were ungraded, and I thought that was incredible. We should not have grades. They are not helpful for the stu- dents, and they are not really helpful for us either. We become focused on grades instead of the idea or the intent of the effort that is happening before us.

Alexandra Staub: Written commentary on one’s work is a more nuanced means of reflection, certainly. Euneika and Lily, what do you see as the largest roadblocks and how do we get around them?

Lily Song: I was just noticing some resonance between what both Ife and Euneika have said about things that have always been there and also the idea of leadership by Black women. I’d like to hear more about that.

Euneika Rogers-Sipp: I can speak a bit to that. We value the knowledge that comes from community leaders. We seek out different ways of knowing. One roadblock I’ve found is validation of people’s experience when they don’t have a degree. Another is the insider/outsider division.

On the one hand, you sometimes need people from outside a situation to see it with fresh eyes, on the other hand there is a question of control and ownership when outsiders swoop in and come up with a solution to a local problem. The dynamics of such situations impact the efficiency of solutions-based work.

As Black women, we often find ourselves not valued for being makers of space. We build space in all kinds of ways. Women in general have always been doing so, but particularly Black women. In the field of the architecture, landscape architecture, and design it is always a real fight to be heard and to be considered as capable. Those are the roadblocks that I have come across from personal experience. We are trying to move through them with our school.

Alexandra Staub: It sounds like a further instance of gathering and collecting versus a more aggressive projection of one’s ideas. This afternoon, we saw what a rich array of research and design work has arisen from that approach of gathering. Lily, would you like to add to that?

Lily Song: Yes. You referred to students earlier. Students have always been active, and in recent years, students have gotten more organized and have demanded responses and accountability from design schools around social issues such as anti-Black or anti-Asian violence, or closing borders to refugees and immigrants, or climate justice. Those issues present a huge opportunity for change. Part of this is a weird flipside to how neoliberal our universities have become and how they consider students as clients. There is pressure to appease students, which creates an opportunity that students can harness to fight for change.

One challenge is that since students graduate, we need a generational leadership transfer amongst student organizations. In addition, it’s important to work with faculty and staff accomplices to push change over the long term, especially for curricula. I think another issue we need to examine is tuition. Students are saddled with tuition debt. When I talk to first-generation students, I find they feel pressure to, above all, pay off their debts and support their households. I think that sometimes confines the kind of courses that they are able to commit to, and they end up pursuing a more skills-based, practical approach to their education. Could we just lower tuition? Could we have more resources to support students, so they don’t have to make those tough decisions?

Alexandra Staub: Students are in an interesting position because they are between childhood, where they do not have much power, and an early career stage, where they suddenly have more power and more say in our society. Some have their eye on getting a well-paying job in order to pay off their debts. But in the work that all four of you are doing, you are also modeling alternatives to that scenario. That first job does not need to be in a corporate architectural office or even a small firm that is building for an elite. It could be in a firm that does advocacy. I think you are all modeling different visions of that advocacy that could begin to change the architectural profession in smaller or larger ways. Do you also think that you are changing perceptions of where students are seeing themselves in five or ten years?

Euneika Rogers-Sipp: I mentioned ecosystem and support before. We have to assess what it takes for the child to have the most positive experience they can beyond the STEM education or the hard skills that we provide. I was fortunate; I was privileged to receive support from my family and my community. I was not necessarily in what would be considered a high-risk environment. We do need pol- icies for children that come from high-risk neighborhoods. It is a question of what it takes for people to be able to learn and thrive in a particular environment. Some of the challenges that come to mind when we talk about equity is education for all, quality of education, quality of life, experience for all, and cultural enrichment opportunities for all. These are huge issues. We can intervene in the academic growth of a child. Our community design interventions have to do with the family household and the way in which that child is “held” so they receive the design education that they need or want for the future. At the end of the day, we need to ask how well we understand some of the settings and environments that people are coming from that are considered high risk, and what we can do about the problem in order to begin to move the needle on it.

Alexandra Staub: I think you bring up an excellent point and one that is perhaps universal across many design schools. How do you recruit and retain, and really encourage students that have insights that come from their “underprivileged” backgrounds? Often, these students do not consider architecture or related disciplines as something they might be able to do. How do you get people into the profession so that they can begin to use their wisdom? Ife, I think you called some of these “underprivileged” spaces sites of joy. How do you bring that joy into the academic environment, into academia?

Ife Vanable: I am skeptical of “inclusivity.” I do not think the answer is necessarily that folks have to be in the institution. The institution is not always the answer, academia is not always the answer. It’s not always where the most radical and ebullient work is done. I am very interested in the ways that students think. Consider a student from the Bronx, like myself, who as a child went to a Quaker school with no grades, and then went on to architecture school. How do you start to foster those different sets of valuation? How do you, as an academic, think of the work that you do in the space of academia, a place that Fred Moten and Stefano Harney describe as a place where you “steal,” where students like me are able to come in and learn skills in order to take them elsewhere? The institution is not necessarily a site where you must stay to be successful if we can spin other types of narratives around where success and value lie. I was able to work in offices that were fairly corporate, and my aim was always to get the information, the tools, the skills, the knowledge, the know-how, and to go elsewhere with that. I never thought of myself as climbing a ladder.

When we enable people to assign different types of value to the ways in which we move in the world, then we are not looking at being in the institution as the only solution. It is unethical to bring students into a place where they have no support, where they are not “held.” To use students to increase your numbers [for diversity purposes], but to not have systems in place for their support or a curriculum that is capacious and sensitive, experimental and inventive, and imaginative and caring enough – that is deeply unethical.

I work a lot with graduate students at Columbia University in the Black Student Alliance. We wrote one of these letters that was circulated, and our aim was not necessarily to transform the institution, but to transform ourselves, to think about the ways that we work and develop and present our own projects, the ways that we bring people into the fold that we want to talk to. Inclusion into the institution takes a back seat to thinking about ways to operate otherwise, to come in, to gain skills, to move those elsewhere. We need to change how we think about value and where success lies, and where and how the numbers of architects are counted. Katherine McKittrick talks about a sort of cruel mathematics around Blackness. It involves a desire to always be counting everyone and when we say there is only a certain percentage of Black architects, it just means there is a certain percentage of licensed professionals and practitioners. They have bought into the regime of licensure, but there are many, many people working in a range of ways to shape the built environment. Those people are not counted, so we do not hear their narratives. How we rehearse and repeat their narratives is really, really important.

Alexandra Staub: In other words, we’re under-valuing a lot of contributions to the construction and shaping of society. It’s a great point. Even within the architectural profession there are ingrained sets of criteria that seem difficult to break through. Since all of us are involved in pedagogy in some way, what specific ideals might you have for a curriculum to make it more inclusive?

Rayne Laborde: I look at everyone who spoke today and how interdisciplinary all of our scholarship is. Architecture school is not just an education about building systems or construction or how to make a building. I think that fact should give us more freedom to be ever more radical and more exploratory, to set new guidelines and boundaries and systems of evaluation, and to really be more open across disciplines in a way that allows students to craft intellectual homes for themselves in ways that are not limited by the rigid confines of what constitutes a degree.

Lily Song: Academic institutions are all different and have their own cultures. Even within academia, there are different people that have different logics and are there for different reasons. One of the things I love about architecture school is that there are a lot of practitioners who are not just there to get tenure. They love teaching, they want to mentor a new generation. I am really excited about power shifts and leadership shifts and cultural shifts and the dominant logic shifting. I want there to be more leadership from people who reflect the global population majority.

It’s important to train students to build movements and collaborations instead of working in individualistic ways. I work with a lot of first-generation students, and nowadays personal “brands” seem so important, and everybody wants to be a thought leader and design leader. But then how do you work together with people who have been leading the work for generations beyond the trends? If there were ways to incorporate a more collaborative style of thinking into the culture of architecture or planning curricula, it would make a real long-term difference.

Alexandra Staub: For my final question, I’d like to ask all of you what you will be doing next. You are certainly all doing work that I will want to follow. So, what is on the horizon for you? Would anyone like to share that?

Alexandra Staub: Getting those voices out there is so important. In the past years, a body of literature by People of Color has come more to the forefront and this literature has highlighted the topics that you have been talking about today. Much remains to be examined – recent work has become a treasure trove of new areas of exploration for many of us. Lily and Euneika, what are your plans? The CoDesign Field Lab work you introduced us to today sounds like it might have been a prototype.

Ife Vanable: I am going be working to finish my dissertation – to finish this project and bring it to fruition. It’s important to have Black women that students can read from, Black women who can be cited.

Euneika Rogers-Sipp: The CoDesign Field Lab laid the foundation for a year-long journey by foot that I’ll be embarking on throughout the Black Belt region. That journey will bring a narrative to light with different voices to capture the day-to-day realities, the day-to-day language of our residents, folks who have been here for generations, and even those who are newer. I want to portray what they are doing and what they feel about our current moment. And then I’d like to pursue collaborative work to get more of my own writing published. We’ve been talking for a long time about how to get more things published, and I plan to do so with the written word, but also through film and through photography and music. So that’s what I’ll be working on for the next year: lifting up the Black Belt and its people. also working on a project called “Place2Be” that I spoke a lot about today. Since March, I’ve been working with a new union here in Los Angeles on house tenants and against carceral housing. The union came out of the Echo Park Lake displacement, which was a huge topic in L.A. It has been an entirely new way of working with folks who I have known for quite a while that have this new-found power.

Lily Song: I’ll continue to develop the sistered approach to design education and pedagogy, incorporating it into studios and research seminars as deeply as I can. Now that I have some time and space at Northeastern [University], I’ll be consolidating my research on anti-displacement.

I hope to be pulling together a manuscript on that in the next year or two.

Alexandra Staub: Rayne, you are part of a network, and I know you probably have many projects that are in the works. What are your future plans?

Alexandra Staub: Wonderful. Will the exhibit on demolition and demonstration be online or in person?

Rayne Laborde: It’s only in person, we are going old school.

Rayne Laborde: A couple of fun ones coming up. We have an exhibition that will be in October [2021] over the dual theme of demolition and demonstration. I’m

Alexandra Staub: We’re getting to the close of the hour. I’d like to thank you all for a series of very invigorating talks and for the ideas that you have presented in the round table. We look forward to hearing much more about your work!