2021 AIA/ACSA Intersections Research Conference: COMMUNITIES

This research explore ways in which participatory community design processes can catalyze, expand and sustain local power in a historic Texas Freedman settlement.

The racialization of cities in the United States has resulted in inequities that have disproportionately impacted black and brown communities. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has identified two primary root causes of inequity, (1) the intrapersonal, institutional, and systemic mechanisms that organize the distribution of power and (2) the unequal allocation of power and resources.[i]

Recently there has been considerable social science and public health research dedicated to the intersectional relationship between power and community well-being.[ii] In 2008 the World Health Organization introduced a new global agenda introducing “power and the ability to control oneself and one’s environment” as a basic human need. Research and built interventions that center participatory design processes are one way to begin shifting community power from external to internal influences.

Joppa (Joppee) is one of Dallas’ most intact Freedman’s communities founded by emancipated slaves in 1872. Its development over the past 150 years has been largely determined by systemic practices that commonly characterize Black communities – proximity to heavy industry, lack of access to services, transportation and healthy food, and the devaluing of residents’ lives. Despite external influences and perceptions, Joppa has a rich history and long lineage of generational occupancy that contribute to a strong sense of neighborhood pride.

Beginning in 2020, University of Texas at Arlington, community organizations (South Central Civic League, Joppa Momma Farms and Habitat for Humanity) and residents partnered to begin a series of locally led activities including neighborhood art projects and an urban farm, leading toward the redevelopment of a former public school into a multi-purpose community center. Work is ongoing. Research presented will illustrate how design processes deployed within early stages of a larger initiative work toward uniting community interests and build long-term capacity. Materials to be shared include engagement techniques, resident participation and experiences, power mapping and public design art activations through three projects: (1) Dear Melissa Pierce: A youth engagement letter writing campaign to former Joppa resident and former slave who donated land to former Joppa school. story of your house and help create a directory of Joppa’s (Joppee’s) development; (2) House Stories: A public art installation documenting the story of Joppa houses through the creation of a visual neighborhood registry; and, (3) Local Love: Locally engaged art projects facilitated and led by neighborhood artists with the oversight and support of a Joppa resident advisory committee.

Citations:
[i] National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; Health and Medicine Division; Board on Population Health and Public Health Practice; Committee on Community-Based Solutions to Promote Health Equity in the United States; Baciu A, Negussie Y, Geller A, et al., editors. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2017 Jan 11

[ii] Christens, B.; Kegler, M.; Wolff, T.; Strengthening Our Collaborative Approaches for Advancing Equity and Justice; Sage Journals: Health Education & Behavior, Volume: 46 issue: 1. October 1, 2019.

[iii] Fone, D., White, J., Farewell, D., Kelly, M., John, G., Lloyd, K., & Dunstan, F. (2014). Effect of neighborhood deprivation and social cohesion on mental health inequality: A multilevel population-based longitudinal study. Psychological Medicine, 44(11), 2449–2460.

My research uncovers the history of “incrementalism” in architecture, urban planning, and international development as it relates to the design, construction, and maintenance of housing for low-income, urban populations. Incrementalism is understood here as a departure from the traditional theory and practice of design through the invitation (and expectation) that the users of the designed structure will continue to adjust or customize it after the conclusion of the formal design process. This incorporation of the expectation of change into design signals an embrace of the additive (or incremental) quality inherent to all built environments. The affirmation of indeterminacy—in both meaning and in final form—represents a significant shift in the philosophy of design. While incremental strategies are currently gaining ground in contemporary urbanism, its history remains incompletely understood. My research explores the interconnected histories of incrementalism in avant-garde architecture, international development, and local housing advocacy. Based on fieldwork in Pakistan, Colombia, the United States, Senegal, and Germany, I seek to unearth both the promise and pitfalls of community control of land and housing among vulnerable populations.

Existing scholarship on this topic is primarily concerned with international development policies, particularly in terms of informal settlements and slum upgrading strategies in the megacities of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. However, the incremental tradition can be found in all parts of the world and at all times throughout the history of the built environment. Examples are found equally in sites isolated from other traditions as well as in design and activist projects in contemporary urban environments in the Global North learning from and adapting the precedents of people building their own housing in the urban peripheries throughout the Global South.

My project builds on this literature, both spatially and temporally, connecting traditions of self organized housing more explicitly to urban spatial theory and the political philosophy of cities in particular moments and in particular places. The work resists the facile dichotomies of top-down or bottom-up approaches to design-based strategies of addressing the effects of poverty to look at the ways in which incrementalism can be understood as an ideological approach to the concept of housing as an unfixed and dynamic process. To this end, the work relies heavily on the concept of maintenanc —the necessary corollary of a city under heavy use, experiencing mechanical breakdown and decay—as a lens to look differently at the dynamism of the built domestic environment. That which is revealed by and through the processes of upkeep and preservation can be as instructive as is the initial design itself.

Citations:
Abrams, Charles Man’s Struggle for Shelter in an Urbanising World MIT Press, 1964

Aravena, Alejandro, Incremental Housing and Participatory Design Manual. Ostfilden: Hatje Cantz, 2012.

Bosma, Koos, Dorine von Hoogstraten and Martijn Vos, Housing for the Millions: John Habraken and the SAR 1960-2000. NAi Publishers, 2001

Buckley, Robert M and Jerry Kalarickal (eds.) Thirty Years of World Bank Shelter Lending: What Have We Learned? World Bank Press, 2006.

Gouvereur, David Planning and Design for Future Informal Settlements: Shaping the Self-Constructed City Routledge, 2014

Habraken, N.J., Supports: an Alternative to Mass Housing. Architectural Press (London), 1972

—, The Structure of the Ordinary: Form and Control in the Built Environment, ed. by Jonathan Teicher. MIT Press, 2000

Hamdi, Nabeel Housing Without Houses: Participation, Flexibility, Enablement (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1991).

Hasan, Arif Scaling Up of the Orangi Pilot Project Programs: successes, failures and potentials City Press (Karachi), 2000

Jencks, Charles & Nathan Silver Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation MIT, 1972

Krivy, Maros & Tahl Kaminer (eds.) “The Participatory Turn in Urbanism”Issue #13 of Footprint, Delft Architecture Theory Journal. Delft, 2013

Mayo, Stephen K. and David J Gross (1987) “Sites and Services – and Subsidies: The Economics of Low-Cost Housing in Developing Countries” in The World Bank Economic Review, Volume 1, no. 2, p. 303.

Turner, John Housing By People: Towards Autonomy in Building Environments Marion Boyars, 1976

Turner, John & Robert Fichtner (eds.) Freedom to Build: Dweller Control of the Housing Process. Macmillan, 1972

UN Habitat The Vancouver Declaration on Human Settlements. United Nations, 1976

This paper will explore a design method for incremental suburban transformation that draws on local cultural practices and social spaces of immigrants and racialized minorities in Brampton, a suburban municipality of Toronto.

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The suburbs aren’t what they used to be. In Brampton, for example, single family homes are occupied by multiple families, industrial parks are home to Sikh gurdwaras or Hindu temples, and strip malls have immigrant vendors catering to their communities. Initially designed for middle-class, white, nuclear families; the suburbs have been transformed by recent immigrants and racialized minorities who appropriate this landscape to produce new kinds of social spaces and forms of public life.

Meanwhile, the urban design department at the City of Brampton is making plans to transform its suburban fabric into a compact, transit oriented, walkable urban space. The city is expecting a dramatic population increase over the next twenty years. Images for this new density portray a downtown-like fabric: light rail, mid-rise street walls, and sidewalks with cafes. It is an image that draws on qualities of the city center, introducing a preferred ideal of urbanity to a place that is presumed to lack it.

The city of Brampton has invited us – urban design and planning faculty from the University of Toronto (UofT) – to develop alternative, incremental design methods that build on existing social spaces and cultural practices. Over this summer, we will work on five sites with two parallel methods. One method begins by analyzing social and physical spaces on the five sites and developing phasing scenarios for adding new built form. A second method will research ‘third places’ across Brampton focusing on how immigrant communities have appropriated and transformed suburban landscapes. We will study places such as a shopping mall food court, a parking lot serving as a venue for temporary events, a street closure for a festival, or an industrial building functioning as a place of worship. This research will inform the urban design proposals by providing the contextual knowledge that will drive the social space and public realm strategies for the various design scenarios.

This paper will present and assess these parallel methods and identify how they diverge from current planning and urban design practices in suburban municipalities. Based on a series of workshops with city planners, developers, and UofT faculty; we will evaluate the potential of these methods to be integrated into Brampton’s form-based code, regulations, and secondary plans. We will situate this work within a theoretical context of third place research, everyday uses of space, and a parallel discourse of time-based scenarios and incremental design. Our goal is to develop ways that localized, third place, appropriation practices – those that tend to operate beyond legal boundaries, by-laws, and rigid temporalities – might inform mainstream planning processes.

In the wake of natural disasters, barriers to equitable housing access are exacerbated in low-wealth, rural communities. This paper will describe a disaster-recovery pilot project that is 1) developed in partnership with local organizations, 2) leverages the hidden value of nonstandard lots, 3) increases the inventory of high-performance homes [i], and 4) cultivates the local workforce necessary to build them.

The US suffers from an acute housing shortage, with aging stock becoming increasingly substandard. Deferred maintenance is often the culprit; and natural disasters further weaken and destroy these structures. The crisis in inventory is amplified in disaster-affected rural communities. When Hurricane Michael decimated the Florida Panhandle in fall 2018, relief poured into the coastal counties, and an out-of-state workforce repaired adequately insured homes. However, recovery in rural areas has lagged compared to coastal Florida due to underinsurance and non-conforming properties, where the hurricane damaged 70-75% of the housing stock. Three years later, blue tarp roofs remain, and communities still struggle to recover.

Lack of workforce complicates disaster recovery. Nationwide, 81% of contractors have difficulty hiring skilled labor, and 72% cite the workforce shortage as their most pressing concern [ii]. The diminishing workforce is more pronounced in rural areas. COVID-19 has exacerbated this labor shortage. Although not a natural disaster, the pandemic has severely restricted the number of volunteers for not-for-profit housing providers reliant on community resources.

The challenges of recovery and workforce are disproportionate in communities of color, which are under resourced relative to their white neighbors. In historically Black areas of town, parcels are smaller, and minimum lot size and setback requirements devalue individual lots and stifle new construction. Homeownership has long been a tool for wealth building, but landowners with smaller properties are forced either to relocate or aggregate multiple lots for development. The structural inequity of the zoning code discriminates against landowners with smaller-sized property.

In response to these challenges, this organization has partnered with a not-for-profit housing provider and a local college to increase housing stock. The pilot project consists of four homes utilizing small, non-conforming lots. Designed to EnergyStar and FORTIFIED standards, the houses anticipate an increase in severe weather along with an uncertain energy future. This partnership supplies a skilled workforce for the housing provider while offering students service learning and credit toward construction certifications. The authors’ technical assistance to the workforce program emphasizes home performance, with the aim of teaching the students both the method for, and benefits of building high-performance, beyond code homes.

This partnership, borne of necessity and limited shared resources, embodies a particularly rural response; cooperative innovation generates greater success than can be achieved individually. The wider community benefits from skilled local workforce, resilient, energy efficient, and healthy housing, and economic stability generated by homeownership. The presentation will demonstrate how increasing access to high-performance homes which preserve affordability and reduce displacement of low- to moderate-income households is critical to closing the economic and social opportunity gap.

Citations:
[i] “Performance” in this case is considered as a multidimensional set of issues, and includes concerns such as unaffordability, energy inefficiency, lack of durability and resilience, substandard conditions that impact occupant health and wellness, an increase in the fragility of vital community networks, and systemic structural and social inequities, particularly among populations protected by the Fair Housing Act.

[ii] AGC and SAGE, “Strong Demand for Work Amid Stronger Demand for Workers: the 2020 Construction Hiring and Business Outlook. https://www.agc.org/sites/default/files/Files/Communications/2020%20Construction%20Hiring%20and%20Business%20Outlook%20Report.pdf Accessed May 19, 2021.

Transportation infrastructure projects are infamously complex and illegible. Freeway expansions in particular have a legacy of disregarding and displacing communities of color without substantial engagement. This legacy continues with the North Houston Highway Improvement Project (NHHIP), which the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) unapologetically states “would cause disproportionately high and adverse impacts to minority and low-income populations.”[1]

In response to disparities in participation, agency, and impact, a public engagement process parallel to TxDOT’s was collaboratively developed by academic and professional design researchers and practitioners. This research outlines the tools and processes used to make legible an intentionally opaque freeway megaproject and equip Houston’s residents to substantively critique it. Through participatory mapping, public dialogue, active listening, and the translation of thousands of comments received by TxDOT and thousands of pages of reports, the work has informed decision making and re-balanced power. In this effort, design became the tool to transform an institutionally mandated process too often designed to exclude into one that was inclusive and activating.

In the midst of a renewed call to confront white supremacy, citizen coalitions are emerging across the county to fight freeway expansion projects that reproduce racist legacies. The NHHIP has become a key narrative within this resurgence of anti-freeway activism. There are no two communities in Houston or elsewhere that have ever been created equal. The neighborhoods that have been most marginalized historically are often the least called upon or prepared to engage substantively with a one-size-fits-all community outreach process like TxDOT’s.[2]

Designers need to put politics back into practice as a means of amplifying the many and diverse voices of the public, as they were called to do in 1968.  In the case of the work, this imperative was upheld through the design team’s radical alignment with residents rather than with the project. The work posed questions about architecture’s capability to visualize realities to inform decision-making and create clarity around impact. The process strengthened grassroots activism such as by citizen coalition “Stop TxDOT I-45” while demonstrating how designers, academics, researchers, government officials, and communities can work together to create more equitable and inclusive cities. Further, in recent months the process has led to a lawsuit from Harris County and multiple Title VI complaints from Houston residents which have resulted in a Federal Highway Administration (FHWA)-mandated pause on the project.

Freeway projects, perhaps more than any other public infrastructure investment, raise the question of agency. Who decides where public dollars are spent, for what purpose, and for whose benefit? Architects and designers are capable of translating history, material reality, and imagined futures back and forth between diverse stakeholders. Our responsibility to make the future inclusive, accessible, and legible is integral to whether or not the future will be equitable.

[1] See TxDOT NHHIP Draft Environmental Impact Statement
[2] TxDOT has met with interests in Downtown Houston more than 30 times for the NHHIP. Fifth Ward, a highly impacted historic Black community already divided by two freeway projects in the twentieth century, has received one visit.

Citations:
TxDOT NHHIP Draft Environmental Impact Statement, 2017 https://ftp.txdot.gov/pub/txdot/pfd/strategic-contracts/alt-delivery/nhhip-seg3/admin/deis.pdf