Resilience for All

BARBARA BROWN WILSON

R E S I LI E N C E F O R A LL Striving for Equity Through Community-Driven Design

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Resilience for All

Resilience for All STRIVING FOR EQUITY THROUGH COMMUNITY-DRIVEN DESIGN

Barbara Brown Wilson

Washington | Covelo | London

Š 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 xiii Acknowledgments xv Chapter 1: Introduction: Resilience or Resistance? 1 Chapter 2: A Short History of Community-Driven Design 15 Chapter 3: East Biloxi: Bayou Restoration as Environmental Justice 29 Vignette 1: Fargo: Playing in the Sandbox in the Fargo Project 55 Chapter 4: The Lower East Side, Manhattan: Tactical Urbanism Holding Space for the People’s Waterfront 59 Vignette 2: San Francisco: Reconsidering Parklets in Ciencia Pública: Agua 101 Chapter 5: Denby, Detroit: Schools, and Their Students, as Anchors 105 Vignette 3: The Coachella Valley: Reimagining the Banks of the Salton Sea in the North Shore Productive Public Space Project 137 Chapter 6: Cully, Portland: Green Infrastructure as an Antipoverty Strategy 141 Vignette 4: Philadelphia: The “Makerspace” Revisited in the Tiny WPA 165

Chapter 7: Conclusion: Toward Design Justice 169 Notes 177 Bibliography 195 Index 211

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 xiii

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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.Â

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. xv

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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 3

East Biloxi: Bayou Restoration as Environmental Justice Long ago there were two housing projects on either side of Bayou Auguste.

One housed white residents and one housed black residents. There was intentionally no road that connected the two properties, and the footpath that went over the bayou was always very overgrown. Everyone who walked it had to watch out for snakes and wildlife they didn’t want to encounter. The Housing Authority was ultimately found guilty of race discrimination. They tore both old properties down, built new (unsegregated) housing projects, and then Katrina came.

—Carol Burnett, Executive Director of Moore Community House On August 29, 2005, the Category 3 tempest known as Hurricane Katrina came ashore and clung to the Mississippi Gulf Coast for more than 10 hours. The 25-foot storm surge accompanying those winds devastated the Gulf. Biloxi lost around 90 percent of its coastal properties—including several large casino barges that either dislodged from their piers and floated away or rammed into other buildings along the shore. Although Biloxi’s waterfront barges received the most media attention after Katrina, it was the low-lying residential areas along the interior bayou system that suffered the most. In response to this horrific flooding of residential neighborhoods, the Federal Emergency Manage29

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ment Agency (FEMA) redrew the 100-year floodplain to include almost all of East Biloxi.

East Biloxi is a predominantly African American community with an average annual household income of $19,890. Once the third-largest city in the state, Biloxi’s population decreased 13 percent after Katrina. Although the city has seen a steady, but slow, rise in the population since then, a USA Today article in 2015 still described East Biloxi as “mostly empty.”1 Hearing about East Biloxi from its residents and driving its historic streets, one can see it is far from empty, but most of the community was submerged in water for days after Hurricane Katrina, and rebuilding the beloved neighborhood presented numerous social, political, and environmental challenges.

In the days after Hurricane Katrina, David Perkes moved his community-based studio from Jackson to Biloxi to assist with recovery efforts on the Gulf Coast. With limited staff, he founded the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio (GCCDS)—a professional service and outreach extension of the University of Mississippi State College of Architecture, Art and Design.

As discussed in chapter 2, there are many university-based community-design centers across the country aiming to serve lower-income communities.

But Perkes was not aiming to perpetuate what is traditionally a parachute model, in which students and professors fly in to engage briefly with the community as a laboratory for their design research without developing long-term partnerships. Under his leadership, GCCDS was built to work “through close, pragmatic partnerships with local organizations and communities in Mississippi’s coastal counties.”2 Today, GCCDS is a multidisciplinary “public practice”3 deeply rooted into the social, environmental, and cultural fabric of the Gulf Coast. But this didn’t happen overnight. Perkes began slowly, attending community meetings to understand where there might be a use for the services of architecture professionals. He quickly met Bill Stallworth, a former high school teacher turned councilman and businessman, who had deep roots in Biloxi and a vision for how it might begin to heal. Stallworth founded East Biloxi Coordination, Relief, and Redevelopment Agency (later named the Hope Community Development Agency, or Hope), which provided case management to existing residents and coordinated the wave of resource providers that had come to the community offering to help rebuild. Stallworth saw Hope as “a point of entry—a go-between for organizations that wanted

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to do work and people who needed work, to make sure there is not as much of a duplication of effort . . . including delivery of food, water, and other necessities.” By organizing both the residents’ needs and the volunteers’ desire to help, the new nonprofit intended to assist all area residents in achieving self-sufficiency after the storm.

Perkes began attending Stallworth’s volunteer meetings and offered his services. “I asked him what he could do,” Stallworth recalled, and “David looked at the map I had drawn with little squiggly lines on a Post-it note, and said, ‘I can do that better.’ He brought with him the ability to look at several things at once.”4 Directing eager volunteers from out of town to specific areas of Biloxi was an incredible challenge in a postdisaster environment with low resident capacity and no functioning street signs to help guide eager visitors. The GCCDS created a grid map (fig. 3.1) that allowed Hope to better coordinate their volunteers. It was the first of many tangible contributions Perkes gave to Biloxi’s long disaster recovery process.

As residents’ needs changed, GCCDS stayed responsive by bringing in new skills and partners to their network whenever appropriate. In the five years immediately following Katrina, GCCDS helped coordinate volunteers first to clear debris and restore salvageable homes, and then to build new homes for residents wanting or needing to rebuild in place. GCCDS mapped out postdisaster realities to educate the public on the implications of changing floodplains and to serve as a resource to local decision makers on issues of social and environmental justice.

GCCDS was also charged with conducting planning research for the Biloxi Housing Authority (BHA) on the revitalization of the East Biloxi Main Street area. The need to clean up Bayou Auguste emerged in their asset-focused research effort as a demonstration project with the potential for systems change.

A bayou is an intertidal marsh zone, and Biloxi is blessed with many such environmental amenities. GCCDS describes the Bayou in their report to BHA, Bayou Auguste comprises two legs extending south into the Biloxi peninsula from the Back Bay. The western arm is largely channelized and forms the northern border to the Hope VI development; the eastern arm is less confined, though it is channeled under the bridges of Back Bay Boulevard, and extends due South to Division Street, at which point it is forced underground through culverts. The bayous exist at the lowest points of the

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Figure 3.1. Biloxi post-Katrina grid map. (Gulf Coast Community Design Studio) peninsula, where water accumulates and water levels rise during seasonal storms. Historically, the bayous are a critical part of the coastal ecology.

Over time, however, they have been filled in, channelized, dumped in, built upon, and otherwise neglected to the point where they are considered eyesores and detriments to surrounding neighborhoods.5 Bayou Auguste runs between several publicly owned parcels—an elementary school, public housing, and municipal property. Littered with shopping carts and other debris, this forgotten bayou was long past delivering meaningful ecological benefits. Local residents referred to Bayou Auguste as “the ditch.”

Johnny Gonzales, an East Biloxi resident and educator with Women in Construction (WIC), the job-training partner on the Bayou Auguste restoration project, describes the slow process of getting other residents excited about this work: I was gung-ho because being out in the woods and in the water sounded cool. But other residents did not like the idea of working in a ditch with trash in it. It was after GCCDS held educational sessions for our trainees on the value this project would provide Biloxi that they started getting

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excited about it. We learned that it would be a nursery for shrimp, and other fish people make their livelihoods catching here. They quickly felt a sense of ownership and pride over the project. So many trainees live in the housing complex right there, and they started watchdogging the area; being stewards of the place.6 WIC trainee Simone Agee did not hear about the project until she went to enroll in the training program: “We are required to do a trial workday as a part of the enrollment process, where both the program and women interested can get an idea if it is a good fit. During our workday, a number of other women and I removed invasive species and trash, and performed erosion control.” Agee corroborated the importance of the environmental education to her experience: It felt like a worthwhile endeavor because Women in Construction and the Gulf Coast Community Design studio took the time to teach everyone about the importance of bayous as a place where some of our seafood is spawned. This project was vital to our economic industry because Biloxi is known for its seafood and birding, and this project brought both back to this community. I began to take ownership of the bayou. To see what I planted grow was an awesome and amazing feeling, especially when the bayou began to take shape. And to be armed with the knowledge of why this is important has allowed me to really advocate and teach others.7 Transforming the perception of the bayou—from an eyesore to a community asset with economic, ecological, and social value—defined the Bayou Auguste restoration effort. GCCDS understood that if the City of Biloxi could better maintain and value its bayou infrastructure, this paradigm shift could dramatically increase local resilience to future storms. The Studio rallied its network partners around a holistic approach to restoration of Bayou Auguste that built civic capacity in the local schoolchildren and residents of this community, and also illustrated for the City of Biloxi how bayou restoration could be seen as a driver for economic development and placemaking, in addition to ecological resiliency.

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Mapping East Biloxi Biloxi’s urban fabric developed in response to successive environmental shocks. Perched on a peninsula between Biloxi Bay and the Mississippi sound, East Biloxi’s low-lying topography and tidal marshlands make it extremely vulnerable to hurricane winds from the Gulf of Mexico (fig.

3.2). Hurricanes hit the area 52 times in the past 145 years, and Biloxi continues to be brushed or hit by increasingly intense storms every 2.79 years.8 Recent oil spills provide an additional, ongoing challenge to the health of the bayou-rich inlet. As is common for US urban development patterns, the ecologically vulnerable areas were also subject to the effects of Jim Crow–era segregation that still compound to limit resource provision in East Biloxi today.

But the relationship between humans and their environment was not always so stressed in Biloxi. The first known inhabitants were a Sioux tribe that lived on the Pascagoula River, and the residents for which Biloxi is named. The Biloxi Sioux lived in relationship with the dynamic tidal landscape and were likely less affected by storm shock than our built world is today. After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the US government sent out Dr. William Flood to plant a US flag. Dr. Flood found a peaceful place with a mix of French and Creole influence. He observed that the community was marked by kindness and a wealth of natural resources ripe for exploitation: A more innocent and inoffensive people may not be found. They seem to desire only the simple necessities of life, and to be let alone in their tranquility. I am greatly impressed with the beauty and value of this coast. The high sandy lands, heavily timbered with pine, and the lovely bays and rivers, from Pearl River to Mobile will furnish New Orleans with a rich commerce, and with a delightful summer resort.9 After Dr. Flood’s visit, new residents began to join the community and a robust physical infrastructure was built. When the Hurricane of 1855 hit Biloxi, it decimated much of the area’s burgeoning economy, including its four hotels, the piers and other fishing infrastructure recently set in place.

Of all the environmental challenges Biloxi faced in its history, Hurricane Katrina arguably made the biggest mark on the town. In the days just after the storm, funding was not available for any new construction. Early recov-

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Figure 3.2. Bayou Auguste location map. ery efforts focused on clearing debris and identifying homes to rehabilitate or demolish. GCCDS spent considerable effort illustrating the postdisaster regulations the government proposed for Biloxi so that residents could understand their implications.

With insurance litigation, FEMA recovery coordination challenges, and other onerous issues, the rebuilding of the Katrina-decimated waterfront at Biloxi proceeded very slowly.10 Many lower-income residents found themselves stuck in place—without enough home equity, insurance support, or government assistance to buy housing elsewhere. Their only option was to rebuild their homes in place, but the new floodplains (fig. 3.3) meant that new houses would need to be built above storm surge levels, as high as 10 feet off the ground.

During the housing recovery process, GCCDS built more than 300 homes and rehabilitated more than 100 others. Many green-building tech-

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Figure 3.3. Post-Katrina floodplain map. (Gulf Coast Community Design Studio)

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niques and structural details that GCCDS used were consistent, but GCCDS felt strongly that unique floor plans and streetscapes would provide residents with a deeper emotional connection to this new home. Perkes and his colleagues suggest that the extra few weeks of collaborative planning and design required to co-create unique elements gave residents an opportunity to reflect as they decided how to plan their community and rebuild their home. This process helped build the trust and knowledge required for GCCDS to facilitate meaningful recovery, and ultimately engendered a more sustainable, healthy community filled with proud homeowners (fig. 3.4).

Perkes refers to the housing rebuilding efforts that marked his first five years in Biloxi as “buying time” until the community could craft a more sustainable long-term community plan. Many East Biloxi residents desperately needed to move out of toxic FEMA trailers,11 and, although the new floodplains did not create ideal environments in which to rebuild resident homes, financial constraints often left them with no other viable options.

GCCDS helped residents move into safe, high-quality housing so they could regain the emotional energy needed to think about bigger ecological issues facing the region collectively.

Being locally rooted, GCCDS could fully appreciate the dynamic web of challenges facing East Biloxi and sought to connect disparate issues and organizations to increase the community’s adaptive capacity in a holistic fashion through the Bayou By You restoration project at Bayou Auguste.

GCCDS sees their work as helping to connect seemingly disparate environmental and social assets, so that East Biloxi can become more resilient on their own terms.

Injustice along Biloxi’s Waterways Urban decision makers in Biloxi historically understood the waterways as a resource to exploit and a force to control. The Biloxi Sioux who first inhabited the area used only what they needed to live and built thatched houses with reeds, rivercane, and other natural materials. But by the time the United States planted its flag after the Louisiana Purchase, the new residents were already exploiting the natural amenities. Dune ridges became a major thoroughfare, and locals employed oysters as a paving material to create what become known as Shell Road along the coastline. After the 1909 and 1915 hurricanes, Biloxi successfully petitioned the state for ero-

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Figure 3.4. Residents in front of their new home. (© Alan Karchmer) sion control. As a part of that effort they built a 26-mile seawall and transformed the Shell Road into a graded and partially paved “highway.” After the 1947 hurricane decimated many of the coastline areas, the government responded by building “the longest manmade beach in the world”—700 acres of beach, spanning 300 feet wide and 26 miles long.12 Each intervention fundamentally compromised the functions of the Gulf Coast bayou and wetland natural infrastructure.13 This manmade beach became a major attraction for visitors and residents alike.

The prized beachfront was not accessible to all residents, however.

Despite boasting 700 acres of beach, the recreational amenity did not allow people of color to enjoy most areas. Dr. Gilbert Mason, an accomplished African American physician, became a local civil rights leader in the effort to make the beaches fully accessible to all people. He reflects on his impetus for that work, having come back to Mississippi after living many years in the less segregated North:

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From the time that I arrived in Biloxi in July of 1955, the thought that the twenty-six-mile-long Mississippi Gulf Coast beach was closed to me and my family because of skin color did not sit well with me at all. According to Harrison County and the City of Biloxi, my little son could not legally swim in the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico that lapped the shore just a few blocks from our home.

Local practice reserved God’s sunrises and sunsets over the glistening waters and white sands of Biloxi beach for the exclusive enjoyment of white folks. For a man who loved swimming and who had gloried in the free use of the parks in Chicago and Washington, D.C., the idea that a marvelous oak-lined public beach was forbidden territory was just too much to abide.14 In the early 1960s, Dr. Mason and other East Biloxi advocates organized a series of wade-in protests around the segregated beachfront to protest inequitable access. In a 1960 wade-in, now known as Bloody Sunday, as well as similar protests in 1963, the horrifically violent backlash from racist community leaders and inappropriate arrests of the nonviolent protestors formed the basis for legal action contributing to national civil rights legislation related to public beach access (fig. 3.5). Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination because of race, color, religion, or national origin in places of public accommodation, which includes public beaches. Fifty years later, equitable access to high-quality coastal waterways is still seen as a major environmental justice issue, as is made manifest in the local bayou restoration discourse.

Valuing Community Assets Bayous provide numerous ecosystem services, among them storm surge attenuation, which provides flood protection; habitat creation and maintenance, which support commercial fisheries and broader ecosystem health; and, in an urban setting, the recreational and health-related values of having a functioning natural system accessible to many people.

But valuing ecosystem services is a new concept, and the human tendency to control nature instead of value it is hard to reverse. In times of crises, humans tend to become nostalgic for an idealized past. Returning to old ways of living might simply re-create old vulnerabilities, so, ideally,

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Figure 3.5. Biloxi 1963 wade-in protestors being escorted off the beach.

(Associated Press) postdisaster recovery can be a time of creativity that leads to greater adaptive capacity. But when the trauma of the crisis is significant, healing is essential before residents can creatively reimagine their community. For residents of East Biloxi, the coastal landscape holds memories of shared social and environmental traumas. GCCDS saw a community-engaged restoration of the bayou system as a way to address both traumas simultaneously.

Bayou Auguste is both a vulnerable waterway in East Biloxi and the environmental feature that divided two historically segregated public housing projects (fig. 3.6). The neighboring elementary school engaged in the Bayou By You effort educated the black children prior to the desegregation.

And although both the public school and public housing are now racially integrated, the neighborhood remains the most socially and environmentally vulnerable part of Biloxi. The shopping carts that remained in Bayou Auguste—long after other waterways were cleaned up by the City—were seen as an environmental justice issue to the local residents.

GCCDS’s research identified three primary postdisaster needs in Biloxi: (1) to actively process the trauma of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath; (2) to help increase the ecological resilience of the area so that it better absorbs storm shock, supports biodiversity, and contributes to the fishing industry; and (3) to create stronger ties between different public, social ser-

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Figure 3.6. Bayou Auguste project map. vice, and community groups. Because they have a public mandate (much of their funding comes from public sources), yet often have autonomy from following the direction of any one particular client in their work, GCCDS was able to use their vision toward connecting seemingly disparate issues under one collective strategy.15 Taking an asset-based approach to recovery planning allowed GCCDS to propose a resource-appropriate and locally replicable strategy for East Biloxi. Through this asset-based approach, GCCDS identified the bayou system as an important contributor to increasing both environmental and economic resilience. In addition to supporting a critical part of fish habitat, they recognized the economic value of ecological restoration as an expanding job sector and sought partnerships that would specifically connect East Biloxi mothers with those jobs. This is especially important here—Mississippi women are employed in three-fourths of low-wage jobs, and the

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higher-paying jobs available in the skilled trades are more challenging for women to acquire. This approach also appreciates the critical role that social connections play in strengthening resilience in vulnerable communities—strong ties that residents might form with like-minded collaborators, and weaker (but still incredibly useful) ties with groups a resident may know only through a shared experience as a volunteer.

What Disaster Recovery Means in Vulnerable Communities Recovering from a disaster is incredibly difficult for any coastal resident, but creating platforms for vulnerable community members to increase their own adaptive capacity is essential to increasing the resilience of the places themselves. It is possible to couple economic, ecological, and equitable goals within a holistic, community-driven strategy, but this requires a deep, shared understanding of the acute experiences vulnerable residents endure after a storm. Armed with such understanding, communities can prepare collectively before a storm and heal collectively afterward.

Because vulnerable populations often experience greater emotional hardship in the aftermath of an extreme climate event,16 many have argued for a deeper focus on sociological analysis in disaster studies.17 For instance, older adults, especially those who are relocated, face increased rates of injury and illness after disasters18 due to substandard housing19 or lack of access to health and social services.20 Women are specifically vulnerable to mental illness21 and to a lack of support when they are the head of a household.22 Persons with disabilities are historically disproportionately affected and overlooked by recovery agencies.23 Three factors make low-income residents more vulnerable in the face of disasters24: (1) a historical institutional marginalization,25 (2) substandard housing quality,26 and (3) lack of predisaster preparedness (financial and otherwise).27 Preexisting disadvantages make the immediate recovery effort more difficult due to a comparatively lower capacity for securing assistance,28 needs that are more dire, and a lack of visibility to service providers.29 Affected populations deem social capital, crime/safety, housing, education, employment, health, and social services30 important components to their successful recovery. Particularly, the presence of social network support is strongly associated with the prevention of mental health concerns

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and is often disrupted by relocation.31 Likewise, both longer-term postdisaster displacement and complete home destruction have been shown to correlate with psychological distress, including posttraumatic stress disorder.32 To protect the health of lower-income and more vulnerable communities, recovery-focused efforts should ensure that these populations have a place at the table, and that their emotional, economic, and physical needs receive the attention they require through the redevelopment process in order to increase community resilience.33 For the greatest chance of successful recovery, residents of affected communities should be involved in the entire recovery process.34 Though FEMA and other governmental organizations provide financial assistance, they are ill equipped to properly allocate such funds to residents themselves or to assist with processing mental and physical trauma. Community-based organizations (CBOs) can bridge the gap between top-down resources and vulnerable populations.35 CBOs are better equipped to encourage this participation and form trusting relationships given their superior knowledge of preexisting contextual dynamics and greater accountability to the community.

CBOs like GCCDS develop a deep knowledge of the needs in their community, and they form critical relationships with other social service providers and community leaders. This local knowledge allows them to more effectively extend design services to those who cannot pay for them, while also addressing systemic problems through their efforts. Perkes often quotes pragmatist educator John Dewey when describing the importance of focusing on vulnerable communities in public interest design: “The public consists of all those who are affected by the consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for.�36 In the hierarchy of needs, it is often hard for residents grappling with oppression or poverty to concern themselves with local ecological challenges. It is difficult for parents to concern themselves with the environmental health of the nearby tidal basin while they are struggling to feed their young children. The Bayou By You community-engaged restoration project sought to illustrate to East Biloxi residents that these challenges are deeply intertwined, and to propose an intervention through which social and environmental issues can be addressed simultaneously.

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The Bayou By You Project As is the case with many formerly segregated communities, Biloxi has its own historic African American cultural center. During the Jim Crow era and beyond, the intersection of Main Street and Division Street in East Biloxi marked a hub for civic, cultural, economic, and religious spaces for Biloxi’s African American residents. This area is also built on a bayou watershed, often channelized or otherwise hidden by development, but always asserting its ecological dynamism during extreme weather events.

In 2008, a group of housing assistance and recovery service providers formed the Gulf Coast Housing Resource Network “to share information, to avoid competition in procuring properties for affordable housing development, and to partner on redevelopment efforts.” By 2009, the network secured funding in partnership with the Local Initiatives Support Corporation and the Biloxi Housing Authority from the Knight Foundation to identify “catalyst projects to spur redevelopment in the East Biloxi area.” To begin this effort, GCCDS conducted an East-Biloxi-wide existing conditions analysis of the post-Katrina urban landscape, a commercial real estate market analysis that documented “the opportunities and challenges surrounding issues of built form,” and an analysis of the changing regulatory landscape in which Biloxi would need to be rebuilt.37 In the report chronicling their work, GCCDS noted that it was common “to hear families speak of coming back to assess the damage to their homes, only to realize that they must first find their homes, some having ended up as far as a block away.”38 The coast is mostly inhabited by commercial enterprises in the fishing and casino industries, but the interior of East Biloxi is predominantly single-family housing with neighborhood-focused commercial corridors interspersed throughout. Many of the areas hardest hit by Katrina, which are also more likely to experience damage in the weaker storm surges Biloxi regularly experiences, are built on former bayou waterways. During their existing conditions assessment, GCCDS found that “over 65% of buildings located less than 10 feet above sea level were destroyed, in contrast to the 25% of buildings above 10 feet.”39 Although the community-engaged bayou restoration project concept did not emerge from local knowledge, as is the case in other projects featured in this book, the asset-based, data-rich research assessment resonated with community leaders. When resident leaders were asked about

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the bayous, most stated that, although they now only see them as a place for trash, they could recall playing in them as children. In response to the analysis emerging from the Knight-funded study, GCCDS constructed a team of five community entities and began applying for grants to actualize a restoration project in Bayou Auguste. The National Fish and Wildlife Five Star Grant required the partnership of five core agencies: GCCDS, the BHA, the Biloxi Public School District, the Land Trust of the Mississippi Coastal Plain, and the City of Biloxi all joined forces (plate 1). For technical expertise in environmental monitoring and restoration, the team brought in Cypress Environmental Science and Management to increase their collective professional capacity in those areas. At this time Cypress Environmental staff lived very close to GCCDS staff, so their professional relationship was truly neighborly. Cypress conveyed their technical knowledge and eagerly made their monitoring data available for collective learning; citizen scientists were engaged through a local high school science class.

GCCDS partnered with Nichols Elementary School, a neighbor to the bayou and an important community asset with significance in the African American community, to work with its afterschool programs and engage in the school’s extracurricular activities early in the planning process. GCCDS added Britton Jones, a landscape architect, to its staff. Jones worked closely with afterschool staff to develop a series of educational experiences that would increase the civic capacity of the local children, while also enriching the public dialogue about the ecosystem services bayous contribute to Biloxi. A GCCDS-curated field guide took children to Bayou Auguste on a field trip, where they collectively identified local species. During local science fairs, and later in the classroom, children engaged with an interactive stormwater management demonstration Jones built to illustrate the power of natural assets (fig. 3.7).

This relationship quickly grew beyond a one-dimensional educational exchange. Experiencing the importance of protecting native plant and animal species firsthand during their field trip, as well as witnessing the damage of invasive species to local environments, made a lasting impact on the participants. Back in the classroom, the students positioned themselves to form a sustainable food web, driving home the relationship between fish spawning in the bayou system and the thriving fishing industries that employed many of their parents. Afterschool program participants became

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Figure 3.7. Stormwater demonstration with local children. (Gulf Coast Community Design Studio) environmental advocates—designing and stenciling slogans they then spray-painted as guerrilla artwork along the Bayou overpass (fig. 3.8). This group also collaboratively designed and installed a mural at a prominent school location, capturing all the wildlife living in the bayou.

The City of Biloxi did not express active enthusiasm for bayou restoration early on, but agreed to contribute a match of labor and equipment from the Public Works Department to the Five Star grant for the necessary earthwork. When this project received news attention, it gave them a renewed sense of pride in their efforts. Slowly, and with the introduction of a new mayoral administration, the City has become one of the most committed partners to broader systems change.

The first partner to fully understand the potential of a public paradigm shift toward seeing the watershed as an asset was the Land Trust of the Mississippi Coastal Plain (LTMCP). LTMCP “is a member supported, notfor-profit organization whose purpose is to protect the six coastal counties’ natural lands, scenic areas, fresh water resources, and wildlife habitat.”40 With a large member base and a keen vision for community-driven coast-

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Figure 3.8. Art as activism: Biloxi youth display stencil slogans they later spray-painted on a bridge over Bayou Auguste. (Gulf Coast Community Design Studio) land restoration, LTMCP helped GCCDS conceive of the Bayou By You volunteer-engaged restoration plan.

After the plan was vetted by residents at the public housing site surrounding the center of the restoration effort, by the BHA board, and by the larger community of stakeholders, the team turned their attention to implementing the bayou restoration project as affordably as possible, considering limited available resources. GCCDS prides itself on sourcing free or low-cost materials and labor as part of a slower, but more locally grown, ethic for their work. Gabion walls designed to provide stormwater filtration and streambank stability were also a volunteer-friendly design-build technique. Biloxi is known for its oyster reefs, so the design called for filling the wire bin skeletal structure of the walls with locally sourced oyster shells and recycled concrete from the bayou’s previous retaining wall.

For the hard work of installing the more than 5,000 native plants needed to fully restore the bayou, the Bayou Auguste network expanded further to include an important new partner. The Moore Community House’s WIC

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program focuses on economic security for women through the simultaneous provision of training in high-paying job sectors and of child care.

WIC and GCCDS had previously collaborated on housing reconstruction efforts, so it was a natural fit to expand WIC’s training curriculum to include ecological restoration skills, opening a new set of job opportunities to East Biloxi mothers. WIC is a space for women to receive training in the skilled trades and the necessary supportive services (e.g., free child care) to achieve new credentials. Many of WIC’s 400 graduates have subsequently tripled their annual earnings, and this model is now influencing the state policy landscape as well.

In the case of Bayou Auguste, WIC needed a project on which to conduct hands-on training and instruction assistance, while GCCDS needed enthusiastic workers and was willing to provide instruction. WIC trainer Johnny Gonzales noted that the education provided by GCCDS to the trainees was critical in getting them to take ownership of the project.

“GCCDS spoke about the function of erosion control, of gabion walls, and the purposes of these to clean water. They told us how quickly it makes a huge difference for ecology of the area. And it was amazing, we could actually see it happening while we were still working there— the very next day after we planted those plugs you could see small fish swimming up and taking shelter in the plants, the clarity of water was immediately significantly different, beautiful birds started coming up.”

Johnny noted that WIC was also aware of the expansion of this job market because money from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill cleanup was coming into the region: The trainees noticed that yes, they were digging a trench, but it was dug for the purpose of filtering all this stuff. And they understood that they were now the only people in Mississippi that knew how to do it. We are not going to run out of wetlands anytime soon . . . well, unless we do not do anything about erosion control. Now we also teach trainees how to make offshore oyster colonnades that filter water and allow for oyster farming, so they can make their own money too.

Systems change is ambitious in small projects like these, but Bayou Auguste is a great example of little systems substantially influencing bigger ones.

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What Does Success Look Like?

Relying on simple math alone to calculate impact, the Bayou Auguste project does not disappoint. The team restored 2.5 acres of wetlands. The project raised over $189,530 in grant funding for related efforts (from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the Fish America Foundation, and the Gulf of Mexico Foundation). Volunteers contributed more than 2,800 hours of service, and WIC trained 45 program participants to become ecological restoration professionals. This volunteer effort contributed to the construction of gabion wall elements, the installation of erosion control materials, the removal of more than 100 cubic yards of debris and approximately 4,000 cubic yards of fill, and the installation of more than 5,000 native plants. Environmental education lessons directly involved more than 200 students and teachers. The boardwalk and pathway aspects of the Bayou Auguste plan have become part of the City’s broader ecological restoration vision (fig. 3.9).41 Monitoring data one year after restoration showed a “substantial presence of bay anchovy (Anchoa mitchilli) and killifish (Fundulus grandis) over the 2011 baseline,” as well as a marked increase in marsh habitat and the amount of marsh edge along the bayou channel.42 Perkes asserts, “bayou transformation has significantly increased the flood handling capacity of the bayou. The re-shaping of the stream has added more flood way and the landscape—both marsh and upland are flood friendly. We have had several tidal storms since the restoration and the bayou has done great—it all went under water and when the water left all the plants were still there, and there was no need for the sort of clean up that was needed when the bayou was a channel and a flood would over-top the bank and flood out over the grass.”

Measurement of student learning was not in the scope of this project, but research indicates that when students of low socioeconomic status participate in arts education, they are more likely to participate in other extracurricular activities, to graduate from college, to seek a professional career, and to show civic-minded behavior, among other benefits.43 The children involved in this afterschool program likely benefited from the prolonged, thoughtful art programming they received.

What is truly impressive, however, and most illustrative of building adaptive capacity locally, is the Bayou Auguste team’s success in leveraging this experience into other projects that continue to push for larger sys-

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Figure 3.9. Rendering of the Bayou Auguste restoration vision. (Gulf Coast Community Design Studio) tems change across Biloxi. Since Bayou Auguste, the GCCDS and LTMCP partnership has taken on nine more environmental restoration projects together. WIC is now so proficient at providing bayou restoration trainings that they have incorporated boardwalk construction into their skill set. The City of Biloxi now claims Bayou Auguste as its own pilot effort and boasts more than 11 current or recently completed bayou restoration projects.

The environmental education conducted with Nichols Elementary led to four other funded school education projects, including GCCDS becoming a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Bay-Watershed Education and Training (B-WET) program host for the area. In 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency awarded the GCCDS a First Place Gulf Guardian Award in the Civic/Non-Profit Category.

Perkes is careful to make sure the GCCDS does not compete with forprofit design firms, so for him “a real measure of success is when (their) community design expertise is sought after by private professional firms.”

Although this was the first bayou restoration project for GCCDS, the project’s positive national reception has led to more opportunities to partner locally and regionally with like-minded private firms that lack the capacity or skill set to manage such volunteer-intensive endeavors. These more conventional projects, where GCCDS serves as a subject matter expert instead of leading the entire effort, often subsidize the office’s administrative costs

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so they can continue giving more of their time and energy to the other, less fundable projects as well.

Nonetheless, challenges remain in this effort-intensive but resource-deficient environment. Design centers like GCCDS must be opportunistic to some degree, subject to the political whims of public officials and changing foundation interests, whose funding they often rely on to pay their staff. In the case of GCCDS, this does not dilute the quality of their work or the ethics that drive it, but it can mean that projects must be implemented in phases over very long periods of time. For instance, in the Bayou Auguste project, a defining feature of the community plan was a pathway and footbridge around the restored wetland park, to be executed in a final phase (plate 5). Residents remain excited about gaining better access to the waterway, and staff know the path would also function as a helpful “boundary object” to indicate where the maintenance crew should stop mowing. In fact, the lack of a path seems to be hindering some younger children’s environmental awareness. The once vibrant student artwork on the overpass is wearing away and those students have moved on to other schools. During an “up-potting” event GCCDS held at the nearby public housing last summer to teach interested residents about gardening, youth commented that they were not aware of the bayou a few hundred yards away. Though the pathway, which is now associated with a municipal vision for the entire waterway, is still awaiting implementation, programming like this continues to keep residents feeling tied to their environmental assets. Further, the B-WET educational program allowed for GCCDS to embed itself more consistently in the public school curricula, and continue expanding the environmental awareness of all the students they encounter across the school district.

Perhaps the most important outcome of the Bayou By You project is the community’s increased capacity to advocate for the watershed and the civil rights that have long been associated with high-quality access to it. WIC trainees living in the public housing that borders both sides of the waterway have become advocates for local stewardship, and their fervor has spread to others. Gonzales noted that “lots of WIC people live in the housing complex right there; several pull trash out whenever they see it, and they educate their neighbors on why they are doing it. I live two blocks away, and now when you are at the park you can hear adults getting on the little kids not to litter or mess up the bayou. That just fits with the entire vibe

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in the area. It used to be a housing complex where one side was poor, and one side was better off. Now it is all Hope XI (mixed income) housing, and everyone is getting better together. It just goes along with the community they are trying to build.”

The environmental advocacy in East Biloxi is now firmly connected with its social justice roots. The Sierra Club is currently filing a lawsuit on behalf of the community after a contractor hired by the City of Biloxi to replace flood-torn water, sewer, and roadway infrastructure has kept the streets unpaved for four years. Streets remain dusty and uneven, with failing infrastructure and murky water. This negligence in Biloxi is affecting the air quality, the drinking water, the economic vitality of East Biloxi commerce, and the health of the watershed. As Perkes explains, “East Biloxi community members complain—and probably correctly—that the city leadership would not have planned a project that would keep the roads torn up for four years in an upper-income part of the city.” The advocacy of the Sierra Club is a development that project partners directly associate with the network built around Bayou Auguste.

GCCDS is also directly assisting the NAACP’s initiative to memorialize the civil rights protests that happened along the waterfront. Perkes described this Knight Foundation–funded project: The organized 1960’s wade-in protests challenged the segregation of Biloxi’s beaches. Programming the beach in the same places the wade-in demonstrations were organized will create a highly visible place for community engagement. . . . Cities are the product of their place and culture. Biloxi’s beach and its African American population are primary components of the city’s history and present condition. The wade-in protesters are now seniors, and their witnesses of work to overcome racial discrimination in 1960 are especially needed today.44

Lessons for Practice Communities without bayous can still learn a tremendous amount from the approach taken at Bayou Auguste. All urban and environmental landscapes are intrinsically linked and fundamentally interdependent. But the lessons stretch beyond that too. First, addressing linked systems is more

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impactful than any effort in isolation. Practitioners often operate in silos and thus avoid the messy work of transdisciplinary partnerships. But this project would not have changed public perception of the watershed without illustrating the connections between ecological, economic, and social concerns. Perkes thinks that partnerships are critical to implementing holistically impactful projects: “There is no way you can gain broad skills in all the necessary areas, so you must seek out partners that fill in your knowledge gaps and prove yourself useful to them.” Making this project manifest allowed people to learn about these connections through the act of contributing to them. Healthy bayous produce fish and job opportunities, as well as more flood tolerant communities.

Second, adaptive capacity increases when the needs of residents drive the formation of the network. In this case, WIC became a critical partner because job training was so crucial to the women of East Biloxi. The training sessions began just after the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, at a time when the job market for bayou restoration was growing fast. This project created a platform for the network to illustrate the importance and dynamism of community-engaged watershed restoration projects, and it also brought attention to ecological needs of urban locations as funding from the Oil Spill Restoration and Recovery was allotted.

Third, resilience planning induces less anxiety when communities contribute through hands-on, material experiences. Hearing about sea-level rise and more frequent, stronger storm patterns can be terrifying for most community members. Learning the facts about these possibilities is critical to progress, but fear is not helpful. Offering up venues to contribute to something hopeful—from building a gabion wall with local oysters, to assisting a high school student with her water quality samples or helping a child spray paint their environmental slogan on the overpass—allows people to engage in the conversation about climate change without backing down or becoming paralyzed with fear. As will be illustrated in subsequent cases, the possibilities are endless, and they must be framed by local knowledge.

And finally, in order to make systemic change, context matters. If organizations want to change the system within which their direct service operates, they must first fully understand the larger policy environment, and then create networks and partnerships that allow for social ties and healthy redundancies to build. Carol Burnett, from Moore Community

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House, suggests that advocate-practitioners must “learn about the needs and frameworks influencing decision-making entities so that when you go to make a policy appeal, you target the right group and angle at the right strategic moment to be effective.� Often, similar, direct service organizations spend time differentiating themselves from like-minded groups in order to thrive. But once the broader context is understood, alliances can produce well-organized advocacy in communities, which can allow for real change. A variety of perspectives, even when they are seemingly in conflict, can clarify the bigger picture, and overarching clarity is required for grappling with any of these daunting problems.

The Bayou By You project illustrated to the City of Biloxi how waterway restoration might concurrently serve social, economic, and environmental resilience goals. This small project modeled an approach that is now in use across the city. Art and other tactile experiences are often disregarded in the search for solutions to serious problems, but as the Bayou By You project illustrates, such an approach can be both a unifying strategy and a manifestation of hope in action. Creating artwork was one of several useful tools in this case, while in other parts of the country it is the primary tool for designing and implementing resilient communityengaged projects.