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

Wilson, Barbara Brown

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1610918924 ISBN 13: 9781610918923

Verlag: Island Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

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. 
 

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Barbara Brown Wilson

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Resilience for All

Striving for Equity Through Community-Driven Design

By Barbara Brown Wilson

ISLAND PRESS

Copyright © 2018 Barbara Brown Wilson
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-61091-892-3

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, 

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. — 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. 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. 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." 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.

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. 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. 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, blockbusting, racial zoning, and nefarious land-use planning all have historical roots and have been rendered illegal, yet they continue in new forms today.

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.,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Island Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1610918924
• ISBN 13: 9781610918923
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 2
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland