2021 AIA/ACSA Intersections Research Conference: COMMUNITIES

Substantial scientific evidence gained in the past decade has shown that various aspects of the built environment can have profound and directly measurable effects on both physical and mental health outcomes at the population level.  These effects have been particularly impactful to the already existing burdens of illness experienced among low-income populations and communities of color. However, there are two primary gaps. First, clearly demonstrating the connection between built environment and health disparities has proven to be challenging to the scientific community due to a variety reasons, such as a need for detailed and quality neighborhood data as well as location-based built environment data. Traditional studies have often lumped many important components of the built environment into a blanket socioeconomic status variable. But this approach makes it nearly impossible to tease out discrete housing and community characteristics related to certain diseases. Second, in the past couple decades, the focus on the association between the built environment and public health has been mainly focused on chronic disease rather than infectious disease.  Limited studies have focused on built environment factors linked to indoor air quality and subsequently infections disease, such as the physical and structural condition of buildings and homes.

The goal of this research was to investigate the multifaceted interrelationships between the built and social environments and the impact of this relationship on population-level health in the context of the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). More specific, this study assessed the relationship between several social determinants of health, including housing quality, living condition, travel pattern, race/ethnicity, household income, and COVID-19 outcomes in Washington, D.C (DC).  Using built environment and social environment data extracted from DC energy benchmarking database and the American Community Survey database, more than 130,000 housing units were analyzed against COVID-19 case counts, death counts, mortality rate, age adjusted incidence rate and fatality rate data for DC wards. The results demonstrated that housing quality, living condition, race and occupation were strongly correlated with COVID death count.

1.     Hood, E. (2005). Dwelling disparities: how poor housing leads to poor health.

2.     The DRA Project (Accelerating Disparity Reducing Advances). Using Healthy Eating and Active Living Initiatives to Reduce Health Disparities. Bethesda, MD: Institute for Alternative Futures; 2007. Accessed August 3, 2020. https://cdn.ymaws.com/chronicdisease.site-ym.com/resource/resmgr/healthequity/he_dra_report_08_01_using_he.pdf

3.     Saarloos, D., Kim, J. E., & Timmermans, H. (2009). The built environment and health: Introducing individual space-time behavior. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 6(6), 1724-1743.

4.            Perdue, W. C., Stone, L. A., & Gostin, L. O. (2003). The built environment and its relationship to the public’s health: the legal framework. American journal of public health, 93(9), 1390-1394.

5.     Spengler, J. D., & Sexton, K. (1983). Indoor air pollution: a public health perspective. Science, 221(4605), 9-17.

Successful urban systems-related climate-action-support tools enable urban stakeholders to communicate and collaborate across and beyond their respective disciplines to identify innovative, transformative solutions to increase urban infrastructure resilience and sustainability. The actions of humans within buildings and the relationship of buildings to their near-building environments (aka microclimate) constitute one understudied urban system with significant impact on urban energy use strongly impacted by a warming urban climate.

This interdisciplinary research team lead by an architect at a large research university collaborates with local community partners to identify evidence-based approaches for the integration of human behavior data, building energy use characteristics, future climate scenarios, and near-building microclimate data. The team of engineers, humanists, data scientists and an architect provides an excellent example how design can lead community engagement. The team has built a prototypical model, which integrates urban trees into urban energy models based on a large-scale inventory and probabilistic occupancy data based on a neighborhood wide energy use survey.

The goal was  to build, calibrate and validate an urban energy model for a local neighborhood, to be adopted to other communities. To ensure that these urban energy models are equitable, however, the needs of marginalized populations must be included- especially those most vulnerable to the consequences of a changing climate. The challenge in understanding these needs is that researchers have often struggled to reach and engage underserved populations due to factors such as access, time, language, economic resources, and trust.

The presentation will thus report on two intertwined research strands. First of all, the team’s best practices for gathering data from individuals facing marginalization as well as the application of this residential occupancy data into neighborhood energy models. Human behavior data collection has been conducted at various community events over multiple years to integrate data about neighborhood dynamics and needs: an extensive youth program merged sustainability, technologies (geographic information system (GIS) information and ABM), and action projects.

The second strand addresses trees in urban landscapes and their capacity to modify temperatures in the near-building environment, which is important for reducing summer heat loads on building surfaces. Trees can reduce energy use and improve indoor and outdoor comfort for cooling in summer by casting shade and providing evapotranspirational (ET) cooling. Tree morphology and building data have been integrated in a three-dimensional energy model to estimate cooling due to interception of sunlight.

The team is currently using results with local partners to develop strategies for individual homeowners in resource-vulnerable areas, as well as to inform city-scale policy responses that improve human health and quality of life for example during extreme heat events. The integrative approach will be disseminated broadly as a means to support cities as they make development decisions that integrate the impacts of climate variability and population dynamics in low-resource, vulnerable urban areas.

Koupaei, Diba Malekpour, Manon Geraudin, and Ulrike Passe. 2020. “Lifetime Energy Performance of Residential Buildings: A Sensitivity Analysis of Energy Modeling Parameters.” SimAUD2020, May, 585–91. http://simaud.org/2020/proceedings/93.pdf

When the pandemic hit, the shelves of the Dotte Mobile Grocer – a community-owned mobile market grocery store that was designed and built by architecture students – sat empty. The residents who had formed a community council to make decisions for it were unsure how to best proceed: should the mobile market launch into a national public health crisis or wait for a safer moment? To answer the question, a collaborative model of governance was used that gave residents decision-making power through consensus and consent, and was facilitated by participatory methods of design. The community council grew their capacity to feed thousands of food insecure people in their community; raised enough money around their food justice mission to be sustainable throughout the pandemic; and they continue to use methods of design to make decisions together.

The pandemic also brought to light the need for restorative public spaces, where green space and fresh air can improve mental health indicators. In redlined communities, however, the quality of neighborhood parks has been eroded by generations of disinvestment that has left residents on their own to navigate the labyrinths of broken infrastructure and government bureaucracy. Meanwhile, community policing has championed the use of CPTED – or Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design – as a method for improving parks. It is also based upon the Broken Windows Theory, which can lead to over-policing in communities of color. Groundwork NRG – a northeast Kansas City, Kansas environmental justice organization – took that as a challenge to build their own alternative tool that was created by their Green Team, a green infrastructure and youth training program. The Green Team Toolkit has been co-designed by youth living in the neighborhoods that are being designed with, and it has invited neighbors to collaboratively redesign a vacant lot and two parks, leading directly into implementation phases to build trust with participating neighbors.

Both community health design case studies include evidence and context for how designers can reframe their methods of participation and collaboration and put them in service to community experts. Building upon historical methods of participatory design, socially conscious designers can adopt principles of community engagement from public health practitioners and apply innovative research methods throughout the design process. By bringing together the theories, processes, and outcomes of community health design into a cohesive framework, designers can find common ground with communities in need of spatial agency. Though the pandemic did not introduce these conditions – food and park apartheids are the results of a multi-generational epidemic of racism – this moment has highlighted the need for new ways of collaboration, creation, and building. A framework of Community Health Design is possible through the translation of community voices into a shared vision; designing governance structures to build community power; and turning design tools over to communities to define and achieve their own desired community health outcomes.

Anderson, Nadia M. “Public Interest Design as Praxis.” Journal of Architectural Education 68, no. 1 (January 2, 2014): 16–27.

Architecture and Participation. Edited by Peter Blundell-Jones et al., London [U.A.], Taylor & Francis, 2009.

Arnstein, Sherry R. “A Ladder Of Citizen Participation.” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35, no. 4 (1969): 216–24.

Criss, Shannon, and Matt Kleinmann. “Dotte Agency: A Participatory Design Model for Community Health.” The Plan Journal 1, no. 2 (2017): 213–37.

De Carlo, Giancarlo. “An Architecture of Participation.” Perspecta, vol. 17, 1980, p. 74.

Design as Democracy: Techniques for Collective Creativity. edited by David de la Pena et al., Washington, Dc, Island Press, 2017.

Fulton, William K. “Community Learning: Broadening the Base for Collaborative Action.” National Civic Review 101, no. 3 (September 1, 2012): 12–22.

Hester, Randolph T. “Scoring Collective Creativity and Legitimizing Participatory Design.” Landscape Journal 31, no. 1–2 (2012): 135–43.

Luck, Rachael. “Participatory Design in Architectural Practice: Changing Practices in Future Making in Uncertain Times.” Design Studies, 2018.

Sands, Catherine, Carol Stewart, Sarah Bankert, Alexandra Hillman, and Laura Fries. “Building an Airplane While Flying It: One Community’s Experience with Community Food Transformation.” Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development 7, no. 1 (2016): 1–23.

Sanoff, Henry. Community Participation Methods in Design and Planning. New York, Wiley, 2000.

Till, Jeremy, and Tatjana Schneider. “Invisible Agency.” Architectural Design 82, no. 4 (2012): 38–43.

Smith, Rachel Charlotte, and Ole Sejer Iversen. “Participatory Design for Sustainable Social Change.” Design Studies 59 (2018): 9–36.

Connecting 150 million households almost every day, the postal network has been America’s central nervous system binding the nation together for over two centuries — ever since Benjamin Franklin was appointed the first postmaster general in 1775. Historian Winifred Gallagher argues that the postal services created America as “the incubator of our uniquely lively, disputatious culture of innovative ideas and uncensored opinions.”^[1]

Despite today’s ubiquitous connectivity, the postal mailbox remains the most reliable and trustworthy portal to the world: here there are no hidden privacy policies or personal data breaches. But the postal domain is rapidly changing and under tremendous pressure to reinvent itself. The Internet reduced first-class mail volume significantly, but also increased that of packages by 50 percent between 2010 and 2015, making the postal service a cornerstone of America’s e-commerce marketplace. Unlike other federal services and infrastructures, the post assumes financial self-sufficiency and does not benefit from tax subsidies, yet is constrained by a universal service obligation and congressional oversight. Accordingly, any debate about future postal services takes place in the context of much broader questions about the role of government itself. And while some voices advocate for its privatization, the postal question does not divide along traditional party lines. Particularly in rural (and often red) areas, the social benefits of the postal service seem to outweigh prioritizing cost-efficiency. Thus, beyond its logistic operation, the post assumes an important civic role at the gain of local neighborhood communities. But despite the post’s ubiquitous physical presence and distribution capability, there is no meaningful process to engage with local place-based revitalization, economic development or smart city initiatives. In the context of recent postal reform legislation which stipulates priority for more state and local partners—as well as the ability to consider non-traditional partnerships which augment core-postal services, the time is right to bridge a place and postal divide.

How can the core service of the Postal Service better align with the needs of the places where they are located?  How can postal networks and underutilized postal facilities be envisioned as civic community hubs?  How and where can facilities and distribution infrastructure adapt and even be repurposed in order to contribute to community wellbeing and resilience?

These questions were at the heart of an interdisciplinary course in which students from architecture, urbanism, design, human-computer-interaction and public policy explored possible synergies between the postal domain and community resilience. Drawing on the authors’ experience of co-teaching the course, this paper reflects on the designers’ agency and capacity to combine systemic thinking, social innovation and place-making in order to reimagine the future of infrastructure beyond the binaries of the smart and the social, top-down planning and citizen-led transformation of cities. Especially against the backdrop of the Covid19 pandemic and the 2021 infrastructure bill, the students’ radical imaginations developed pre-pandemic gain new relevance.

How can social and racial justice be centered within the deliberative process of public decision-making, especially amidst the twin crises of climate change and extractive economies?

The concept of resilience has risen in design circles with competitions like Rebuild by Design and the Resilient by Design Bay Area Challenge (RBD), which venture strategies for absorbing and surviving the shocks of climate change. As a member of an RBD design team, I partnered with planners, economists, biologists, community-based organizations, and government agencies to explore resilience in Deep East Oakland and the San Leandro Bay. Our Oakland partners have had far too much experience with resilience—they are well-versed in bouncing back from the exodus of manufacturing jobs, redlining, public housing demolition, and rapid gentrification. It is no surprise, then, that RBD was met with deep skepticism as a smokescreen for gentrification. Discussions among such a heterogeneous team highlighted not only the need to build a regenerative economy and adaptive landscapes, but also the intransigence of real estate speculation, neighborhood self-interest, and even the analytic language of bureaucracy.

To prompt this expanded team to embrace these debates, I designed a board game called “In It Together” alongside our collaborative process, in real time. This paper reflects on this board game as a empowered decision-making tool for building empathy among stakeholders and modelling risk within urban spaces.

In It Together stages role-play among community stakeholders to reveal how sea level rise will amplify alliances and conflicts among them. The game made it safe, and even fun, for us to expose conflicts typically smoothed over by a goal-oriented design process. It builds empathy by inviting partners to perform each other’s perspectives. It also models the impact of urban adaptation strategies—defined with our partners to range from a community land trust to a raccoon den—in the urban space of the board. The game scores points for ecology and equity as well as economy, and issues currency in votes as well as dollars. Thus, soft judgements have equal weight as hard evidence—from ethics, strategy, and lived experience to the economic or hydrological performance. Values of justice and resilience contend with development and self-protection.

I propose to unpack play scenarios and lessons from over 30 events with activists, agencies and others, both during RBD and since. I will then recontextualize these findings among other decision-making tools, in part to demonstrate how our agonistic stance helped us evade the pitfalls of deterministic choice raised by Jennifer Light in her critique of board games used in the 1966-7 Model Cities and the condescension between expert and “childlike” representational styles raised by Shannon Mattern’s excoriation of Sidewalk Toronto’s participatory workshops. What has proven most elusive, however, is In It Together’s ability to facilitate consensus among different styles of communication—skills I hope to learn from the Brazilian Workers’ Party’s invention of “participatory budgeting” in the 80s. It is with these critical skills that deliberative processes can forge a more nuanced vision of resilience—one that resists precarity while adapting to uncertainty.

Author (2021). “Modelling a Critical Resilience: Board Games and the Agonism of Engagement.” Games and Play in the Creative, Smart and Ecological City, Eds. Dale Leorke and Marcus Owens. UK: Taylor & Francis.

Author (2020). “Daylighting Conflict: Board Games as Decision-Making Tools,” in Scenario Journal, Issue 07, “Power” Ed. Nicholas Pevzner & Stephanie Carlisle. Winter.

Author (2018). Year in Review 2018: Whose Resilient Future? Metropolis Magazine.

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