DISCUSSION

Alexandra Staub: Thank you so very much for a fascinating talk and an introduction to the Streetwyze project. I have several questions for you already, but I would like to start with a question from the chat.

One of our viewers wonders if you have done any work on intergenerational living. I think this question is coming from a few angles: One is that affordable housing is a huge problem, especially in California, where you are based. Intergenerational living is something that architects are currently looking at, both from a social and from a housing density point of view.

Antwi Akom: Thank you for the question. Folks have used our platform and process to help create spaces and places for intergenerational housing and living, particularly with Indigenous and Asian American populations. There’s real potential for further work there.

Alexandra Staub: Thank you. If I understand it correctly, Streetwyze is a data collection tool that crosses over into be-

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ing something like social media. Regular people can input data about their environment, but also gain information about it. Is that correct?

that person.

Alexandra Staub: Could you give an example of how a regular person be able to use data collected by Streetwyze?

Antwi Akom: Absolutely. The inspiration behind Streetwyze grew out of understanding the limitations of ethnography and of big data. Big data often misses what is really happening on the ground, and secondary data is not always accurate at the street level. Ethnography is limited because someone else is telling your story. Streetwyze grew out of a desire to help everyday people share and tell their own stories and share their own vision of transforming the social material conditions in their neighborhoods and communities. It is a data visualization as well as a digital storytelling tool. It can also be used as social media and can create a local knowledge ecosystem. It can play a number of different roles when we want to design for equity and consider how we want to design with but not for our community. We can continually interact with the person we are building with a way that maximizes opportunities and access to resources for

Antwi Akom: There are a number of ways to use Streetwyze. We are able to create a local knowledge ecosystem with the people who have access to the app. The type of knowledge depends on who we are partnering and collaborating with.

Streetwyze can be used by everyday people to share and find goods and services, to rank the quality of goods and services, and to connect and share at the same time. For example, if you saw that the eggs in that liquor store were not refrigerated, you could share that information on Streetwyze. The app can also be used by the city or designers and architects to improve the built environment, by tapping into the knowledge of the people who are living there.

Alexandra Staub: We have another question from the chat. Could you talk about what institutions of higher learning

The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race

can do to address some of the issues that you highlighted? Questions such as the [school to prison] pipeline issues, more attention to vulnerable populations, the 98% versus the 2%, or a change in substantive issues stressed with the curriculum and so forth.

purposes of the university. When that research project is done, the university leaves. It is a very extractive relationship with the community, which is why low-income communities of color do not trust us as a university.

Antwi Akom: I think institutions of higher learning have an imperative to hire, recruit, retain, and promote more women and People of Color, and that will help transform the industry. Higher education can and should be playing an intentional role in building these pathways and partnerships. I also think that higher education needs to rethink and reimagine the ways that we work with community groups. I do not think community-based participatory action research (CBPR) goes far enough, hence, the invention of this new methodology and technology, to go deeper and to put the power in the hands of the community.

We have to reimagine the work that we are doing in communities, we have to let communities really lead. We have to be more purposeful and more intentional about building pathways to prosperity and pathways out of poverty, with Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, People of Color, women, all of these groups who have been locked out of these conversations.

When we do CBPR and think that we are centering community voice, whose research is it? Who owns it? What purpose does it serve? Often it is serving the

Alexandra Staub: We have another question from the chat. Is there a digital divide, effect, or impact? At Streetwyze, you do a lot of work with very vulnerable populations, for example, homeless populations, and those populations, I would assume, cannot afford cell phones and phone plans. What happens if you are dealing with very poor people who do not have the access to the technology that Streetwyze relies on?

Antwi Akom

Antwi Akom: We thought a lot about this. We designed for equity with those populations in mind. For example, my father’s father and his side of the family lives in Ghana, West Africa, in a place called Kumasi. it is very rural. We wanted to make sure that those kinds of populations could have access to our platform and our process. In those situations, there are ways where we are able to create paper maps with QR codes that upload the data into our system. There are a number of other design interventions with homeless populations or other vulnerable populations, we are able to pair researchers with them and input information, if necessary. This focus has enabled us to connect and build trust with vulnerable populations.

ods you’ve developed to tackle the problems that are specific to the United States translate well into these other cultural contexts?

Antwi Akom: The method of centering community voices is very translatable.

Experiential data is very translatable. Our platform and processes are multilingual. We have had a lot of success in international contexts because we value racial and social justice methodology and an approach that lets the community lead. I think when you do that, you are able to create culturally and community responsive methodologies that are more equitable, diverse, inclusive, and that allow for better design.

Alexandra Staub: Could you speak a bit about your international work?

Antwi Akom: We are working internationally. Most recently, we launched in New Zealand with the Maori population. We are also in the process of launching in South America and in Africa.

Alexandra Staub: How do you work with architects and related designers, for example, urban designers?

Alexandra Staub: Do you find the meth-

Antwi Akom: Generally, they have reached out to us to partner and collaborate on different projects. We’ve had conversations about redesigning the new stadium for the Oakland A’s, where the architects need to do community engagement. We’ve had conversations about a $5 billion project for the San Francisco waterfront. Here we want to make sure that the population is not vulnerable to climate change, and the impacts of climate change. is responsive to community needs. We have been invited into conversations and projects where we are able to move the discussion about responsiveness from the margins to the epicenter of the planning process.

Community voices, the vision, and the storytelling for those projects – architects know that needs to be at the center. When

COVID hit, and our social and physical infrastructure shut down and our digital infrastructures increased, people began to see the need and the power of platforms and processes like Streetwyze even more. So those conversations have just grown in size and scale and in scope.

Alexandra Staub: How about the post-occupancy process? Do you have processes in place where you are able to re-examine those structures after they’ve been built?

I also mentioned that we lead the racial equity impact assessments for the downtown plan for the city of Oakland. We worked with Opticos Design on the community engagement portion of the Memphis comprehensive plan. Designers, architects, planners, and engineers know about us, but our passion is people and planning for and with people, especially vulnerable populations. We want to make sure that we plan and design in a way that

Antwi Akom: It depends on the project, but ideally every step of the way we want to ensure that community voice is being heard and listened to and responded to, and we are holding people accountable. That can become really challenging, because there are so many competing priorities and different groups.

Alexandra Staub: I am going to ask a question on a slightly different topic. In Ibram X. Kendi’s book, How to be an Anti-Racist, he argues that one of the problems with trying to integrate communities is that many cultures, especially Black cultures, tend to be devalued in

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the process because it is assumed that they get absorbed into the mainstream. There is such a richness in Black cultures that gets lost through that process. In your work with vulnerable communities and with communities of color, have you found a way to enhance or highlight the community cultures that you are gathering data on?

spoke of today. And culture does have a strong spatial component. Thank you very much for your talk today. It has been very thought-provoking and we look forward to hearing more about your work in the future.

Antwi Akom: Absolutely. Our whole platform and process is built on lifting up those cultures that are normally locked out and left out of these conversations. I have been talking about creating a multilingual platform, creating a culturally and community responsive platform, centering community voice, and linking the design process to art and other forms of design. I spoke about the Walter Hood design project at the end. We were able to lift up the power of culture to really inspire us and help us design for equity and justice. That is something that we take very seriously.

Alexandra Staub: The landscape architect Walter Hood is a preeminent designer who spatializes some of the issues you