Resilience for All: Striving for Equity Through Community-Driven Design

By Barbara Brown Wilson

In the United States, people of color are disproportionally more likely to live in environments with poor air quality, in close proximity to toxic waste, and in locations more vulnerable to climate change and extreme weather events.
 
In many vulnerable neighborhoods, structural racism and classism prevent residents from having a seat at the table when decisions are made about their community. In an effort to overcome power imbalances and ensure local knowledge informs decision-making, a new approach to community engagement is essential.
 
In Resilience for All, Barbara Brown Wilson looks at less conventional, but often more effective methods to make communities more resilient. She takes an in-depth look at what equitable, positive change through community-driven design looks like in four communities—East Biloxi, Mississippi; the Lower East Side of Manhattan; the Denby neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan; and the Cully neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. These vulnerable communities have prevailed in spite of serious urban stressors such as climate change, gentrification, and disinvestment. Wilson looks at how the lessons in the case studies and other examples might more broadly inform future practice. She shows how community-driven design projects in underserved neighborhoods can not only change the built world, but also provide opportunities for residents to build their own capacities. 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: May 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9781610918930

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Front Cover of Resilience for All

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Half Title of Resilience for AllBook Title of Resilience for All

© 2018 Barbara Brown Wilson

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, Suite 650, 2000 M Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036

ISLAND PRESS is a trademark of the Center for Resource Economics.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018931271

All Island Press books are printed on environmentally responsible materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Keywords: adaptive capacity; community engagement; Cully, Portland, Oregon; Denby, Detroit, Michigan; East Biloxi, Mississippi; equity; inclusion; Lower East Side, Manhattan; participatory planning; placemaking; racial discrimination; social networks; systems thinking; tactical urbanism

For BeBay and Tru, who keep me focused on what matters

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:

so much has been destroyed

I have to cast my lot with those

who age after age, perversely,

with no extraordinary power,

reconstitute the world.

—Natural Resources, by Adrienne Rich

Contents

Preface: On #Charlottesville

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: Introduction: Resilience or Resistance?

Chapter 2: A Short History of Community-Driven Design

Chapter 3: East Biloxi: Bayou Restoration as Environmental Justice

Vignette 1: Fargo: Playing in the Sandbox in the Fargo Project

Chapter 4: The Lower East Side, Manhattan: Tactical Urbanism Holding Space for the People’s Waterfront

Vignette 2: San Francisco: Reconsidering Parklets in Ciencia Pública: Agua

Chapter 5: Denby, Detroit: Schools, and Their Students, as Anchors

Vignette 3: The Coachella Valley: Reimagining the Banks of the Salton Sea in the North Shore Productive Public Space Project

Chapter 6: Cully, Portland: Green Infrastructure as an Antipoverty Strategy

Vignette 4: Philadelphia: The Makerspace Revisited in the Tiny WPA

Chapter 7: Conclusion: Toward Design Justice

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface: On #Charlottesville

I finished this manuscript the week before hundreds of white supremacists came together from across the continent to terrorize my community in the name of protecting the heritage they imbued in the local Confederate monuments our community decided to remove because they did not reflect our collective values or history.

On the night of August 11, hundreds of torch-bearing white supremacists marched down the center of the University of Virginia campus—making an already white space (marked most notably by columns of Greek revival designed by Thomas Jefferson and built by enslaved laborers) feel even more exclusionary. No public space, much less a place of learning, should be coded with exclusion and hate, and yet so many universities have these symbols built into their landscape.

The next day, one of the terrorists made manifest the violent threats many rally organizers had insinuated would be present—using his car to hit 30 antiracist protestors, including several of my students, and killing Heather Heyer. It was a weekend of violence that shook people across the globe. While still incredibly traumatic for them, many friends, neighbors, and colleagues shared that it was unsurprising in some ways because those events simply made visible the prejudice and trauma people living outside the white Christian patriarchy endure each day.

What happened on August 11 and 12, 2017, was horrific, and it must serve as a catalyst for long-term, overdue change if the trauma of so many and Heather Heyer’s death will not be in vain. I have no illusions that this book will right any wrongs of systemic racism built into the very fabric of our urban environment, but I do hope it is a tiny part of a much larger, self-reflective, and ongoing conversation about how we decolonize the planning and design of the built world, how we de-center the voices of white privilege to better learn from the wisdom of people of color in this country, and how we work to ensure that all our public spaces are equitable and inclusive.

Acknowledgments

I’m grateful to many people for their part in this book’s creation. First, to my family, and most importantly my husband, Marshall, who kept our children, dogs, and myself feeling loved and fed throughout this process. Thank you for your patience and your grace. Thank you, also, to the family and friends who gave me support and feedback throughout this process, including full reviews of the manuscript by Deborah Morris, Katherine Ryan, Ann and Layton Wilson, Elise Dixon, Mary Kathyrn Fisher, Christine Gaspar, Jess Garz, Margaret Haltom, Janie Day Whitworth, and others. Thanks to the colleagues near and far that teach me every day, including Garnette Cadogan, Dan Etheridge, Theresa Hwang, Nicole Joslin, Bryan Lee Jr., Liz Ogbu, Sarah Wu, Jess Zimbabwe, and others. My deepest gratitude goes to Kevan Klosterwill, who created most of the beautiful illustrations included herein and served as an internal critic along the way. Thanks to the University of Virginia, for supporting the research, and to the Surdna Foundation for supporting several research investigations that inspired and fueled this book. I’m grateful to the external reviewers for their thoughtful feedback. And, my gratitude to my editor, Heather Boyer, and her colleagues at Island Press cannot be overstated. Her commitment to this project, and to me, transformed the writing of this book into more of a meditation than a stressor during the political turmoil of this past year.

Finally, in the spirit of this book, instead of thanking the four networks highlighted herein with superfluous language for opening up their projects to my external critique, I commit to donating any proceeds from this project back to those four brave collectives.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Resilience or Resistance?

Inclusion doesn’t undo existing injustices. In particular, viewing place as common denominator runs the risk of erasing major differences in the ways people experience place and public spaces. In the United States, these major differences cleave along racial and class lines…. Persistent inequalities and decades of discrimination mean a code of ethics isn’t going to cut it. We need an actual politics of placemaking.¹

—Annette Koh, Urban Planning Researcher

Many traditional methods of community engagement are useless to vulnerable communities. They attract outspoken residents who rarely represent greater neighborhood interests, and they reduce decision-making power to a series of sticky-dot votes instead of privileging the substantive power of collective conversation. Residents in lower-income neighborhoods often do not trust they will be heard by municipalities or speculative developers in a town hall setting because the meeting experience often includes imbalanced power dynamics, inconvenient locations, unclear marketing, and culturally inappropriate agendas; thus many residents do not see these meetings as the best use of their time. Low levels of participation and low-quality feedback absolve designers and planners of seriously considering any community input. The result is irrelevant public infrastructure at best, and resident displacement at worst. And yet, these presentation-heavy meetings remain one of the most common methods used to involve residents in the process of improving their neighborhoods.

Resilience planning and urban design all strive to transform urban form in the name of social values like human thriving and walkability. But in places with low socioeconomic status, structural racism and classism prevent many residents from exercising their full rights in the collective work of citymaking. What does that mean in practice? This book contributes to the discourse around the politics of placemaking, holding up less conventional, but often more effective, methods to make communities more resilient. Through a collective case study of eight of the most successful community-driven design projects in the country, each prevailing in spite of serious urban stressors (e.g., climate change, gentrification, disinvestment), this book seeks to clarify what equitable, positive change looks like in vulnerable urban communities. This case study suggests that consultation in a design process does not necessarily help create more equitable communities. Indeed, consensus is not the goal; designing for equitable, systemic change in vulnerable communities involves fusing the local knowledge of residents with the technical knowledge of professionals in small, nimble, public projects.

Tactical urbanism, also known as urban acupuncture, DIY, pop-up or guerilla urbanism, is touted as a vehicle for propelling change in the built world, and for generating new platforms for civic discourse, and it does.² This strategy for placemaking is typically conceived of and implemented by residents, often outside the bounds of government-approved processes, as a means of creating prototypes of particular public spaces and how they might look and function differently. But leaders of this movement acknowledge that this method of civic engagement with the built world works better for affluent, white communities, and can result in penalization, and even unwarranted criminalization, when poor people of color attempt guerilla urban design tactics in their own neighborhoods.³ It is well documented that people of color often experience disproportionate impacts of overpolicing. The Washington Post received a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on police shootings, which found that in 2016 34 percent of the unarmed people killed were black males, although they are 6 percent of the population.⁴ This statistic alone could hinder the enthusiasm of a person of color to participate in guerilla urbanism. Further, parklets and yarnbombs almost never address the more acute needs of residents with low socioeconomic status.⁵

Socioeconomically vulnerable communities around the country are developing their own, increasingly sophisticated, methods for influencing local decision making, often with designers serving as resource allies. These strategies tend to be beautiful, provocative, and extragovernmental, like their more affluent tactical urbanist counterparts, and socially impactful. As is discussed in chapter 2, efforts to make design relevant to complex social challenges and to the lives of vulnerable communities operate under many names.⁶ This book uses the language of community-driven design because the projects described herein take pains to move away from an approach where designs are crafted exclusively by professionals with the public interest in mind; instead, these projects are crafted with or by vulnerable community residents with social equity as a central tenet.

Why Equity?

In contrast to equality, which connotes justice through fair access to resources, equity, in this context, measures justice through equal impacts. The language of disproportionate impacts frames the environmental justice movement and the policies inspired by it. For centuries, common land-use practices and policies have perpetuated systemic inequities in the built environment. In the United States, people of color are disproportionately more likely to live in environments with poor air quality, in close proximity to toxic waste, and in locations more vulnerable to climate change.⁷ This is not the result of poor choices, but of widespread racially unjust practices that continue to be codified into the built world through land-use policies. Practices such as red-lining,⁸ blockbusting,⁹ racial zoning,¹⁰ and nefarious land-use planning¹¹ all have historical roots and have been rendered illegal, yet they continue in new forms today.¹²

These practices lower property values and therefore reduce social mobility for families of color, which is significant enough to inspire dramatic change in our current system. They also have horrific health impacts that should move all of us to action. Although all poor, nonwhite communities are subject to discriminatory practices, African Americans suffer the most widespread discrimination in the United States. For instance, a 2002 study of exposure to environmentally hazardous sites (e.g., power plants, landfills, incinerators, and industrial facilities) in Massachusetts found that high-minority communities face a cumulative exposure rate to environmentally hazardous facilities and sites that is nearly nine times greater than that for low-minority communities.¹³ A study of Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, found that poor and African American residents are 36 percent and 20 percent more likely to be exposed to harmful air pollution.¹⁴ In comparison with their white counterparts, African Americans are three times more likely to die from asthma; for African American children this ratio rises to eight times more likely.¹⁵ An analysis of lead exposure in children under the age of five between 1988 and 2002 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that, although exposure rates for all races have gone down dramatically, African American children are still roughly 60 percent more likely than white children to be exposed—from 11.2 percent and 2.3 percent of one- to five-year-old black and white children, respectively, in the early 1990s to 2.8 percent and 1.8 percent in the early 2000s.¹⁶ Heat waves are becoming more common with climate change, and heat-related deaths disproportionately impact African Americans.¹⁷

To change this pattern of systemic inequity, society must alter its modes of decision making to incorporate a wider range of voices. It must also recalibrate its collective value system so that safety, health, and equity are just as important decision-making factors as financial return on investment. For urban development processes and products to contribute to community resilience, the residents who have consistently borne the burden of these unjust land-use patterns must be given space to process collective trauma and availed their full rights of self-determination, regardless of what stressors affect their neighborhood. The lived experiences of any place are important, but the situated experience of living in communities marked by structural classism and racism provides its residents with unique knowledge that cannot be understood from outside observation. Every community has assets, and building on the existing assets of a place and its people increases social capital and leads to greater community resilience.

Cities are complex; correcting these systemic injustices is also complex and requires time and effort. Many urban leaders are eager to help support resilience in lower-income communities. But the varying meanings of the word resilience in the context of vulnerable communities, even within a singular conversation between city leaders, renders the term problematic when neither fully defined nor explicitly connected to equitable impacts.

Resilience or Resistance in the Urban Context?

Modern theories of resilience originated in the field of ecology. C. S. Holling’s 1973 paper Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems established modern resilience theory, noting that ecosystems are not stable environments; they are strongest when they are dynamic and can persist despite change.¹⁸ As urbanists adopt these ecological notions of resilience, the term most commonly refers to responses to extreme climate events. Many practitioners employ the term through an ecological frame—the ability to absorb shock—while others see it through an engineering lens—the ability for a material to bounce back—after a storm, earthquake, or other stressor. But critics point out the problems with asking vulnerable communities to bounce back or absorb shock in order to be resilient.¹⁹ It seems outrageous to ask communities of residents with low socioeconomic status, who have been subject to generations of systemic inequities, to rebound after they suffer yet another injustice perpetuated by unfair land-use policies. Some advocates even put forth the notion of resistance, instead of resilience, as a way to express their displeasure with what they see as rhetoric without context.²⁰ For vulnerable residents, the notions of resilience are often just another way to limit their rights to the city.²¹ But these communities are also the ones most at risk for future extreme climate events, so the relationship requires further consideration for resilience planners. I’m using the term here to engage with the current discourse on resilience planning to help make the practice of resilience-as-adaptive-capacity more robust, and more socially just.

Planning theorist Peter Marcuse suggests that employing terms without fully considering their implications is dangerous business. He points out that one-dimensional conceptions of terms typically serve to maintain the status quo.²² Further, American studies scholar George Lipsitz asserts that there is a white spatial imaginary²³ that often guides land-use decisions and policing practices toward exchange value over use value, selfishness over sociality, and exclusion over inclusion.²⁴ Lipsitz challenges practitioners to more reflectively consider the myriad of assumptions built into the language and design decisions they make. Planning historian Leonie Sandercock argues for insurgent histories of urban planning that hold up the marginalized voices, telling the stories of urban interventions without privileging a white, male, professionalized approach to every project.²⁵ This book attempts to follow the charges laid out by Marcuse, Lipsitz, and Sandercock: to reconsider the role that certain terms play in our urban discourse by learning from micro design projects that challenge the status quo, and by asserting the voices of community leaders from a variety of perspectives. The projects highlighted shed light on what resilience planning and design might include for vulnerable communities when conceptualized by local residents for their own neighborhoods.

What can systems thinking contribute to a redefinition of resiliency with equity in mind? Ecologists and planners are actively engaged in debates about what social resilience might entail if we are to go beyond simply bouncing back after a crisis (e.g., a flood-resistant material) or absorbing an ecological shock (e.g., barrier wetlands along a coastline). Urban resilience literature frames social and ecological systems as inseparably coupled, and understands adaptive capacity and inclusivity as critical aspects of resilience planning.²⁶ A resilient city would be one that plans collectively for and responds well to disaster,²⁷ but is also powered by renewable energy,²⁸ including nature,²⁹ food production,³⁰ and cooperative economies.³¹ Many scholars are interested in how socioeconomically vulnerable communities, in the face of outside stressors, might enhance their adaptive capacity through increased political agency and improved quality of life.³²

Urban cityscapes are complex adaptive systems, consisting of many diverse and autonomous but interrelated and interdependent parts. They include countless social, ecological, technological, and economic flows, which all function within an interconnected system. In Resilience Thinking, Brian Walker and David Salt describe the typical dynamics of complex adaptive systems in which human and nonhuman actors continuously remake the world in four phases. Drawing again from environmental ecology, the four phases of adaptive cycles are rapid growth (a time of innovation), conservation (a time of increasing standardization), release (creative destruction), and reorganization (regeneration) (fig. 1.1).³³,³⁴

FIGURE 1.1. The adaptive cycle, based on Gunderson and Holling’s Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002).

No two systems are completely alike, but they do follow particular patterns. This model espouses that adaptive cycles often begin with a period of rapid growth. The growth phase is marked by the exploitation of resources—in ecological systems the protagonist in this phase might be a rapidly growing weed; in economic systems, opportunistic entrepreneurs. Then incremental change shifts the system into a conservation phase that is more judicious with its resources. These phases are marked by efficiency over flexibility, and the system becomes less resilient to outside stressors. As Walker and Salt describe it, Increasing dependence on existing structures and processes renders the system increasingly vulnerable to disturbance. Such a system is increasingly stable, but over a decreasing range of conditions.³⁵ In other words, in the conservation phase powerful interests become entrenched in a certain way of doing things, and reliability is valued over creative problem solving. This phase is marked by inequities, often in