Design Consequences: Taking Responsibility for Our Ideas

ISBN 979-8-218-17194-0

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Alexandra Staub

CONFERENCE SPEAKERS

STATE LOOKS, BLACK DESIRE(S), HOUSING SCHEMES

Ife Salema Vanable

BUILDING SPATIAL JUSTICE: IN TWO ACTS

Rayne Laborde ON SISTERED DESIGN

Lily Song + Euneika Rogers-Sipp

ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION 1

THE RACIALIZATION OF SPACE AND THE SPATIALIZATION OF RACE

Antwi Akom

WHO COLLECTS THE DATA? A TALE OF THREE MAPS

Catherine D’Ignazio + Lauren F. Klein

DESIGNING LEGAL FUTURES

Andrea M. Matwyshyn

ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION 2

INTRODUCTION

“We are going to have to have people as committed to doing the right thing, to inclusiveness, as we have in the past to exclusiveness.”

Whitney M. Young Jr., addressing the American Instutute of Architects Annual Convention in Portland, Oregon, June 1968

Architecture and related disciplines rarely take into account racism and social equity, yet the built environment serves as a backdrop to both. Segregation, unequal access to infrastructure and opportunities, and an economic system that allows private interests to be disguised as public interest have fostered systemic inequalities that, even when recognized by the profession, seem removed from the problems architects are trained to address. This symposium will explore how, starting with their formal education, architects and designers in related disciplines can gain a better understanding of how our built environment helps shape society’s inequalities, how our decisions have consequences, and how we, as design professionals, can help bring about better social equity.

Architects and those in related disciplines are trained to seek solutions to problems that are largely defined through client values and demands. Additional stakeholders, such as users or community members, are rarely consulted directly. This has

resulted in architecture’s success being measured internally (through positive reviews by other architects or critics) or through the prestige or economic opportunities projects create for the client.

Increasingly, successful design hinges on technological advances that integrate technology into both the design process and its outcomes. Such advances are seen as a form of progress that allows for novel designs while attaining cost and labor savings and opportunities for new functionality. Yet the singular focus on technological advancement ignores social concerns, including the effects of opaque and biased algorithms used in decision-making, surveillance overreach and privacy breaches, and unintended consequences of the technology itself or its accessibility.

that ignore, and often work against, social equity. This has been especially prevalent in an economic system that encourages zero-sum thinking, where improving social equity is seen as cutting into a company’s potential profits. Consumption, rates-on return, and market advantages drive innovation, often to the detriment of social justice concerns.

In both situations – architectural design used primarily to enhance the designer’s and client’s prestige, and technology in design that focuses on creative novelty or cost savings – criteria for successful design have equated “success” with factors

Social equity extends to how design problems themselves are framed: What biases are inherent in the questions asked, what stakeholders are affected, and what are the extended consequences of proposed solutions? A few examples can illustrate the problem. Increased reliance on technology in the built environment benefits wealthier segments of the population with access to the newest products, smart devices, good internet, and credit that allows for online payments. Communities of color are disproportionately left out of the technology equation, leading to an acceleration of economic inequity.

The COVID pandemic illustrates further problems with how we are framing our

built-environment questions. Before COVID-19, shifts in housing, office work, retail patterns, and recreation were already designed to serve more privileged communities, often driven by a search for comfort in the face of climate change or environmental hazards. Already segregated communities of color, by contrast, systematically experienced cultural de-valuation, exposure to environmental hazards, and a dearth of infrastructure including adequate housing, healthcare, transportation, and food. Current concerns for viral pathogens have accelerated social and spatial trends that have privileged wealthy communities. White-collar workers shape social and spatial networks to meet their needs, discounting the needs faced by communities of color, who are more often employed in low-income, front-line service sectors.

to better understand underrepresented voices is an important first step. Learning to design for social sustainability is a necessary goal. In their work, the contributors to this symposium explore how to reshape our design agendas for more inclusivity and social equity.

The Design Consequences symposium allowed speakers to present their work or thinking on a topic related to social equity. Each panel was followed by a roundtable, where speakers discussed methods to bring social equity thinking into the professional curriculum.

How can architects and other shapers of future systems and spaces design for social equity and social sustainability?

Change must begin through reframing our design problems. Breaking down social and cultural value assumptions

In the first panel, speakers discussed means by which we can design for a more just society. This panel proposed methods to increase awareness of how injustice is generated and perpetuated, and examined both policy and built-environment solutions toward needed social change.

The ensuing roundtable explored how these questions should be addressed in the classroom: How can architectural and design programs innovate to help

students learn to design for inclusivity? How can we best bring ethical practices into the field of architecture and design? How can students transitioning into the workplace continue the quest for more inclusive design? How can we design the built environment to foster social equity?

The talks recorded online and in this catalog will hopefully provide readers in design fields with ideas for their own work. I would like to thank the speakers for the wealth of thoughts they have shared and the openness of the ensuing discussions. Inclusiveness takes commitment, and this is something we can all chose to do.

In the second set of talks, speakers examined how to better understand and predict consequences of technology on equity in the built environment, as well as their approach to integrating ethics in the field of technology and design. How can technology be designed to improve lives, how can such improvement become more equitable, and how can we better measure success in these endeavors?

Alexandra Staub State College, PA, October 2021

The ensuing roundtable explored the questions: How can we ensure that the technology we develop and use benefits all members of society? How can we avoid unintended technology consequences? How can we design technology for more inclusivity and social equity?

CONFERENCE SPEAKERS

Antwi Akom is a data scientist, health technologist, and community informatics research methodologist. He is a professor and founding director of the Social Innovation and Universal Opportunity Lab, a joint research lab between the University of California at San Francisco and San Francisco State Unviersity in the only College of Ethnic Studies in the United States. He is the co-founder of IC, the Institute for Sustainable, Economic, Educational, and Environmental Design. He has an extensive background in building collaborative, community-facing technology projects, and new models of urban innovation that help cities become smarter, more equitable, just, and sustainable. He is also the co-founder of Streetwyze, a mobile, mapping, and SMS platform that was founded to give underrepresented and underserved communities a voice in co-designing the product, places, and spaces that impact their everyday lives .

Key areas of his research include social determinants of health, health information technologies, health literacy, GIS, people sensing, food security, big data, community based participatory action research, and interdisciplinary research; collaboration and mentoring of junior faculty and trainees on race, pace, place, and waste. He has been a White House Opportunity Project Innovation Fellow, and is involved in multiple National Institute of Health grants and is actively engaged in mentoring of doctoral students, post-doctoral scholars and junior faculty.

Tessa Cruz is the director of engagement and design at Streetwyze. She has many years of experience in community engagement facilitation, community-based research, and geospatial data collection.

Catherine D’Ignazio is an assistant professor of urban science and planning at MIT. She is also director of the Data + Feminism Lab, which uses data and computational methods to work towards gender and racial equity, particularly as they relate to space and place. D’Ignazio is a scholar, artist/designer, and hacker mama who focuses on feminist technology, data literacy, and civic engagement. With Rahul Bhargava, she built the platform Databasic.io, a suite of tools and activities to introduce newcomers to data science. Her 2020 book from MIT Press, Data Feminism, co-authored with Lauren F. Klein, charts a course for more ethical and empowering data science practices. Her research at the intersection of technology, design, and social justice has been published in Science & Engineering Ethics, the Journal of Community Informatics, and the proceedings of Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM SIGCHI) and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (ACM CSCW). Her art and design projects have won awards and been exhibited at the Venice Biennial and the ICA Boston.

Lauren Klein is an associate professor in the Departments of English and Quantitative Theory and Methods at Emory University, where she also directs the Digital Humanities Lab. Before moving to Emory, she taught in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. Klein works at the intersection of digital humanities, data science, and early American literature, with a research focus on issues of gender and race. She has designed platforms for exploring the contents of historical newspapers, modeled the invisible labor of women abolitionists, and recreated forgotten visualization schemes with fabric and addressable LEDs. In 2017, she was named one of the “rising stars in digital humanities” by Inside Higher Ed. She is the author of An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and, with Catherine D’Ignazio, Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020). With Matthew K. Gold, she edits Debates in the Digital Humanities, a hybrid print-digital publication stream that explores debates in the field as they emerge. Her current project, Data by Design: An Interactive History of Data Visualization, 1786-1900, was recently funded by an National Endowment for the Humanities-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication.

Rayne Laborde is the associate director of cityLAB at UCLA, a design research center concentrating on urban spatial justice. Laborde is an architect, urban planner, and interdisciplinary researcher whose work combines community collaboration and planning methods with design practice that prioritizes public engagement while raising questions of agency and spatial justice. Her career began in human rights, including judicial advising to the United Nations and partnerships with the Kofi Annan Foundation through the International Center for Transitional Justice. A recipient of numerous grants and awards, she has contributed to, designed, and curated exhibitions across the world, including installations at the 2014 Venice Biennale and installations for the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Melbourne, and the UCLA Perloff Hall gallery.

Andrea M. Matwyshyn is founding director of the Policy Innovation Lab of Tomorrow (PILOT) Lab and a professor of law and engineering at Penn State. She is an academic and author whose work focuses on technology, information policy, and law, particularly information security, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and machine learning, consumer privacy, intellectual property, health technology, and technology workforce pipeline policy. Previously, she was a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University where she served as co-director of the Center for Law Innovation and Creativity. She is a faculty affiliate at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School and a senior fellow of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. Matwyshyn has worked in both the public and private sectors. In 2014, she served as the senior policy advisor academic in residence at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. She has testified in Congress on issues of information security regulation, and she maintains ongoing policy engagements. Prior to becoming an academic, she was a corporate attorney in private practice, focusing on technology transactions.

Euneika Rogers-Sipp is a creative researcher at the Destination Design School of Agricultural Estates in Atlanta. Working at the intersection of conceptual and material practice, she develops projects that deal with the natural environment’s role in culture, examining the significance of mainstream industrial production in developed countries and local production in developing countries. Her current work explores the social and philosophical dimensions of reparation ecology, the curious intersections of the humane and inhumane, and art as a means of engagement, education, critique, and healing. Rogers-Sipp, under the name Ndg Bunting, facilitates, globally, curriculum design, workshops, and ritual spaces that address ecological crises.

Lily Song is an urban planner and activist-scholar. She is an assistant professor of race and social justice in the built environment at Northeastern University, jointly appointed between the School of Architecture and the School of Public Policy and Urban Planning. Her research and scholarship focus on the relations between urban infrastructure and redevelopment initiatives, socio-spatial inequality, and race, class, and gender politics in American cities and other decolonizing contexts. Her work both analyzes and informs infrastructure-based mobilizations and experiments that center the experiences and insights of historically marginalized groups as bases for reparative planning and design. Song was previously a lecturer in urban planning and design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), where she was founding coordinator of Harvard CoDesign, a GSD initiative to strengthen links between design pedagogy, research, practice, and activism. She holds a doctorate in urban and regional planning from MIT, a master’s deree urban and regional planning from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a bachelor’s degree in ethnic studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

Alexandra Staub is a professor of architecture at Penn State and an affiliate faculty member of Penn State’s Rock Ethics Institute. Her research focuses on how our built environment shapes, and is shaped by, our understanding of culture. This interest leads her to examine not just what we build, but also how we get there: design processes and their social implications, the economic, ecological, and social sustainability of architecture and urban systems, interpretations of private and public spaces, architectural ethics understood as questions of power and empowerment, and how social class, race, ethnicity, and gender shape our expectations for the use of space. She has presented and published her work extensively including the books Conflicted Identities: Housing and the Politics of Cultural Representation, published by Routledge in 2015, and The Routledge Companion to Modernity, Space and Gender, published in 2018. She is currently working on a book titled Architecture and the Search for Social Sustainability

Daniel Susser, a philosopher by training, works at the intersection of technology, ethics, and policy. His research aims to highlight normative issues in the design, development, and use of digital technologies, and to clarify conceptual issues that stand in the way of addressing them through law and other forms of governance. Specifically, much of his work has focused on questions about privacy, online influence, and the ethics of automation. Daniel is the Haile Family Early Career Professor and assistant professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology, research associate in the Rock Ethics Institute, and an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Philosophy at Penn State

Ife Salema Vanable directs i/van/able, an architectural workshop and think tank located in the Bronx. She is a practitioner, theorist, and architectural historian and is the inaugural KPF Visiting Scholar at the Yale University School of Architecture. She is also a doctoral candidate in architectural history and theory at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), where she examines high-rise, high-density, residential towers erected in New York under the 1955 “Limited-Profit Housing Companies Law,” known as Mitchell-Lama, in an effort to expand the scope and range of histories and theories of multi-family urban housing and complicate narratives of public private partnership for its development. She has taught at the Yale School of Architecture, Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union, and Columbia GSAPP. She has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a History and Theory Prize from Princeton University, a Columbia University Buell Center Fellowship, and the New York State Council on the Arts Grant.

STATE LOOKS, BLACK DESIRE(S), HOUSING SCHEMES

Ife Salema Vanable

Ph.D. Candidate in Architectural History and Theory

Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation

Not long ago, during the final review presentations of a second-year architecture design studio I was co-teaching, at a time when such amazing and, at times, troubling performative spectacles were occurring as had been the only way, in-person, a particularly prominent member of the faculty stood beside me looking simultaneously uninterested and somewhat tickled. Smiling in a self-amused way, this member of the faculty leaned over and said, “He’s too good looking,” at least the second time this observation had been gleefully uttered to me by this professor. “Stop saying that,” I contended. As if scripted, one of my co-instructors passed by and asserted, “Let’s move on quickly with this one.” An urging directed at me in my role as designated keeper of time. To which I flatly stated, “They all get the same time.”

A Black male student, a year older than most others in his class — having taken a year off to travel, study, and work beyond, outside of, and perhaps against the academy — stirred these sentiments unbeknownst to him. Sitting on a stool as opposed to the customary and ritualized standing done before one’s work when laid bare to such scrutiny, such review, a scene of subjection, if I may extend an analytical frame offered by Saidiya Hartman: this student fielded inquiry with calm, fortitude, and an outward lack of self-consciousness, presenting by way of a voice marked by a smooth depth in a slow taking-his-time cadence; his ongoing performance, the mundane drama of his showing, was likely irksome to those unfamiliar with and made uncomfortable by such displays of firm self-possession from a young person, from a student,

State Looks, Black Desire(s), Housing Schemes

racialized as Black, though not in the way anyone would actually openly admit. “He’s just too good looking.” A Black male reviewer was awed by the display, smiling in what Ralph Ellison might have concurred was “the Negro sense.” “Fear me for I am God,” was what he felt this student emoted in such a most obvious and matter of fact way.

I think about this often: this student, his mode of thinking, making, and doing, thoughtful and full, beautifully considered, imperfect, longing, resistant, although, honestly seeking support and guidance, almost always performative, his command, his audacity, and this set of reactions to his physical corporeal

presence, captively invoking a range of racial tropes, evinced ongoing modes of objectification, the thingified nature of Blackness (a la Bill Brown) and its simultaneous what Sylvia Wynter might call invisiblizing, its denial, and rejection; the flattening, erasure, and eviction from the category of legitimate student that often attends blackness in this context.

Fred Moten describes in his exploration, In the Break: The Aestetics of the Black Radical Tradition, that “Between looking and being looked at, spectacle and spectator-ship, enjoyment and being enjoyed, lies and moves the economy of what Hartman calls hypervisibility.” (Figure 1)

Figure 1: 1970s Harlem. Photo by Jack Garofalo

This hypervisibility is a condition of being seen, the excessive degree to which something, in this case notably Blackness, has attracted general attention, prominence, in this case superficially — literally at surface level — the level of skin, outward appearance, looks, embedded in what Hortense Spillers might suggest is a “bizarre axiological ground,” a strange site valuation and desire or desirability (Figure 2).

This student’s Blackness would typically render him useful, valuable to the marketing efforts of a particular school of architecture wanting to demonstrate, and even quantify, its diversity. What are the ethics, though, of his so-called inclusion to this sphere where he may be so violently, superficially regarded? How might inclusiveness connote not a bringing into, or providing access to rarified spaces of critique and evaluation, but instead, the active production of more capacious sites of study, a more hospitable opening up to a range of subjects, disciplinary and transdisciplinary dispositions, alignments, and subjectivities that instigate more bold and banal confrontation with a range of modes of being and knowing in spaces, sites, forms, uses, not commonly regard-

Figure 2: Harlem River Park Towers. Photo by Davis Brody Bond

State Looks, Black Desire(s), Housing Schemes

ed as legitimate sites or territories of architectural inquiry, analysis, or design, where unauthorized epistemologies are sought after.

In this context, today, I will focus on orality, to sonic gesture (of which my own performance with you here today is part), on tales, tall tales, on their telling, (reconfiguring, or perhaps attending to what could be understood as a more current state in “historical movement [that has passed] from the priority of sonic gesture to the hegemony of visual formulation.” (Figure 3) I will focus on tall buildings, the sky, and the land, on Black folks out in the street, and at home, on my emerging dissertation project “Tall Tales: State Looks, Black Desire(s), Housing Schemes.”

A project that seeks to operate at a critical intersection of historical analysis, theoretical speculation, and a close reading of language and rhetoric as a way to interrogate how modes of architectural production are operative parts of the same project that has historically, and continues to mutate, to produce varying ideas about racial difference. These alignments, not merely material, but arguably also constitute a discursive system, an aesthetic and sociotechnical mode of operation that orders the world in particular ways. Specifically, my interrogation of New York, 1970s, high-rise residential towers developed under the scheme known as Mitchell-Lama, affords a compelling and essential course of study due to the hybridity of scheme for housing (the result of pub-

Figure 3: 1970s Harlem. Photo by Jack Garofalo

lic-private partnering, not public housing, but not market rate), the simultaneous ambiguity and specificity with which the terms of its production have been managed (terms including “middle-income,” “family,” “household”), and the ways that its objects aesthetically deviate from and challenge expectations for how subjects racialized as Black are to be physically and materially housed, but also imagined as living in and dwelling.

I am curious about how housing, as a field of study and practice, praxis, and theoria, is often relegated to acts and discourse related to social justice and not also understood as a legitimate speculative and imaginative domain of action and thought, consciously willing to defy prevailing no-

tions of type, taste, and form. Where, as Ruha Benjamin has noted, “Imagination is a contested field of action…most people are forced to live inside someone else’s imagination.” (Figure 4) I wrestle with this “living inside,” inside someone else’s imagination, someone else’s imaginings of one’s place and the contours of that living, and also with living and learning otherwise; and as such have been studying modes of Black subjectivity and dwelling in tall buildings, the performance of domesticity and respectability, and the politics, aesthetics, and materiality of the making of home; the hope, desire, contentment, and aberration of housing.

As concerned with orality, this work seeks the relation of the oral to the written mark, “the convergence of meaning and visuality—[as sites] of both excess and lack,” to the archival. Work that is in many ways about what Ann Stoler puts forth in her 2009 text, Along the Archival Grain, “the force of writing and the feel of documents..., about commitments

Figure 4: Harlem River Park Towers. Photo by Davis Brody Bond

Figure 5: 1970s Harlem. Photo by Jack Garofalo

State Looks, Black Desire(s), Housing Schemes

to paper, and the political and personal work that such inscriptions perform.” (Figure 5) By confronting archival documents, the aim is to interrogate the ways in which architectural objects may have been culturally, socially, aesthetically, formally, or otherwise received over time, interpreted or evaluated and the biases, assumptions, and inventions that have shaped those operations.

As Saidiya Hartman has articulated, this embrace of documents is not to suggest any fidelity to truth or authority of the document, but is an attempt to consider what may be done with official, archived documents, given the limits, lies, omissions, and fabrications (Figure 6).

Attentive to legal rhetoric put to paper in legislative acts and the ways in which persons are figured in texts as targets and architectural artifacts marketed and rendered desirable though real-estate advertising, among other schemes and devices, this work deals with categories enacted by state and municipal authorities and their

Figure 6: The Jeffersons sitcom (1975-85).

enumeration; particularly attending to the oscillations, uncertainties, assumptions, and fabrications about what constituted “middle-income,” and the work of both gesturing to and eliding reference to racial categorizations. This work pursues architecture in the glut of bureaucratic documents that depict the daily work of city government. In so doing, this work mines those records teasing out predetermined parameters for how architectural developments meant to house were financed, developed, geographically situated across the urban domain, and designed, before any architect was commissioned; recognizing a kind of shadow architect therein. Pushed to outsize heights in the name of public benefit, simultaneously bold and unnerving, with aesthetics championed by the state, this work fundamentally seeks the often invisibilized (and often Black and Brown) residents, and their varied sanctioned, unauthorized, ingenious, pleasurable, sensuous, and, especially, quotidian domesticities and modes of dwelling.

With this, I aim to share questions I have posed simultaneously considering aesthetics, wanting, and the provision of accommodations and the relationships of these to modes of architectural production, practice, and pedagogy. This offering ponders the desirability of proximity to varying conceptions of Blackness (and Black students), alongside ongoing acts of its objectification, othering, and effacement, and asks how architectural thought within the academy, and as a physical,

material praxis, might be endowed with greater depth, nuance, specificity, radical, and even seemingly banal imagination.

I am deeply committed to interrogating how more imaginative, critical, and hospitable modes of shared study may be fostered, particularly in architectural pedagogy and those related fields that seek to reckon with and speculate on the built domain.

I have many more questions than I have any remedies or prescriptions. As an emerging theorist and architectural historian, I am meditating and speculating on the systems, desires, values, etc. that have made it (seemingly) necessary for a symposium on “design consequences” in the first place. In the context of this symposium, I am asking precisely what is meant by “social equity?” How are design consequences measured? Is this an evaluation of the past, present, or future? Who is the “our” being referred to? Who exactly needs to take responsibility for their ideas? Why is the study of “housing” deemed a “valuable framework through which to understand the issues of [so-called] social equity more generally?”

In terms of “designing for a just society,” my questions are less about how to bring discussions of racial justice and social equity into the classroom and more about how racial categorizations have been constructed and have been structurally operative and have transformed over time; how

resources have been both hoarded and rendered inaccessible. Ultimately, perhaps I have some approaches and am truly interested in how to cultivate ways of thinking (and designing) with greater depth and nuance, that avoid flattening and rehearsing particular narratives.

As an emerging scholar being trained as a doctoral degree candidate in the history and theory of architecture, I have no interest in reconstructing the past “as it really was.” (Figure 7) The past “as it really was” is an illusory territory. Instead, my interests are fervently aligned with engaging architecture as a product of culture; a sociopolitical, sociocultural, and sociospatial artifact constructed as a result of historical processes that continue to resonate in the present moment and endure into the future. As such, architectural objects — buildings, spaces, urban territories — operate at both a wholly undeniable material level, as well as at the level of the immaterial — an ethical, behavioral, affective mode of operation.

Both the material and affective modes of operation of architectural artifacts maintain

an ongoing and continually transforming aesthetics and attendant politics. In this way, works of architecture that particularly intervene in urban domains populated by people of color, or more specifically inhabited by Black bodies, are regarded as what philosopher Jacques Rancière would refer to as “aesthetics acts, as configurations of experience that create new modes of sense perception and produce novel forms of political subjectivity.”

(Figure 8)

At the confluence of the law, legal rhetoric, public policy, and the development and construction of high-rise residential towers in New York City from 1955-1975 (perhaps a sort of pre-history or back story to the neoliberal project), space exists for interrogating how these objects and their financial, political, aesthetically-designed framing, sought to instantiate motives for constructing a sort of urban “middle-

State Looks, Black Desire(s), Housing Schemes

Figure 7: 1970s Harlem. Photo by Jack Garofalo

Figure 8: Scene from Mandigo (1975 film).

classness” (or “dress up” a population regarded as undesirable and pathological in an architecture that would make them “respectable”), rooted in conceptions of race, geography, and finance. In my work, these hybrid objects, publicly funded and incentivized, though privately developed and managed architectural artifacts are regarded as “racial formations,” “historically situated projects in which human bodies and social structures are represented and organized.” (Figure 9) According to sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant, from whom I borrow this analytical tool:

A racial project is simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines.

Racial projects connect what race means in a particular discursive practice and the ways in which both social structures and everyday experiences are racially organized, based upon that meaning. (Figure 10) Asking such questions as to how these objects came into being, under what

circumstances, out of what body of legal, cultural, financial and social mores, directly engages what Luisa Passerini described as the “raw material of oral history.” In this manner, “the raw material of oral history consists not just in factual statements, but is pre-eminently an expression and representation of culture, and therefore includes not only literal narrations but also the dimensions of memory, ideology and subconscious desires.” (Figure 11)

Likewise, the raw material of oral history also, importantly, includes the dimensions of projection; that which is intimate and internal, as well as that which is thrown forth, outward, externalized.

Projection can be understood as a technique of self-preservation, a defensive act. Freud asserted that this “defensive projection” was an act of paranoia. The purpose of paranoia is thus to fend off an idea that is incompatible with the ego, by projecting its substance into the external world. The transposition is effected very simply. It

Figure 9: Title image from The Jeffersons (sitcom 1975-85)

Figure 10: Scene from King Kong (1933 film)

is a question of an abuse of a psychical mechanism which is commonly employed in normal life: transposition or projection (Figure 12).

Transposition or projection as paranoid, thus defensive, protective, and preservationist, is also constructive; at once building up the self while simultaneously fashioning an external other. And while this defensive act may be upheld as the unconscious work an individual mind, I would suggest that this defensive act of self-preservation also operates at the level of society, at the level of collective imaginar[ies]. Paranoid projection at the level of society or nations undergirds racial formations, precisely those “historically situated projects in which human bodies and social structures are represented and organized.” (Figure 13) At the level of society, this form of projection operates to determine the ways in which nations work to define belonging, access, rights, and citizenship, while they concurrently construct and disseminate their own image and mythologize their own tenuous and embattled sovereignty (Figure 14); systematically casting

State Looks, Black Desire(s), Housing Schemes

Figure 12: Title image from Good Times (sitcom 1974-79)

Figure 11: Co-op City, Bronx.

off or throwing forth that which is deemed incompatible with its sense of identity.

Identifying architecture as a cultural artifact, this work joins architectural historical and theoretical analysis with analyses of society and ideology. Racial projects engage the inequalities that racial regimes produce. As representational frameworks, the work of culture (through the various forms of media this work confronts), including real-estate brochures that announced the benefits of these works and solicited Black families, involves discursive practices that make sense of racial difference in the everyday, infiltrating and constructing the contours of seemingly

banal modes of black (urban and middle-income/middle-class) domesticity.

As Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva assert, “houses are unsettling hybrid structures.” (Figure 15) The house as a juridical-economic-moral entity has even greater material (as asset), political (as dominion), and symbolic (as shelter) authority when agglomerated as highrise, high-density, multi-family housing for urban Black bodies (Figure 16). Schemes deployed in service of this system condition experience, delimit fields of action, and partition knowledge, becoming things with which to think and act. Mitchell-Lama housing as a State fabricated and

Figure 13: 1970s Harlem.

Photo by Jack Garofalo

Figure 14: 1970s Harlem. Photo by Jack Garofalo

Figure 15: 1970s Harlem. Photo by Jack Garofalo

State Looks, Black Desire(s), Housing Schemes

authorized, and municipally elaborated scheme for housing black bodies in the urban domain embody these processes, making power relations explicit with logics not always merely reducible to that of capital (or profit). “Tall Tales: State Looks, Black Desire(s), Housing Schemes” exits at this critical nexus, where imaginative invention interacts with and complicates literal meaning and where blackness (and to some extent the state and city) is a constantly reworked, redefined, and reconstituted frontier.

The figure of the Black, throughout the diaspora, and especially in what is referred to as the United States of America, and Blackness by extension in this national, state apparatus, can be understood as a projection, an image, a fiction deployed to shore up the nation against reproach; the very “avoidance of self-reproach via the externalization of cause or blame.” (Figure 17) And while the category and notion of whiteness, as embedded in the narrative of the nation, is equally fictionalized and co-constructed, the “incalculably differentiated thing [is] the fetish character of Blackness and its open secret.” (Figure 18) Blackness, as such, is both magical and ordinary, rehearsed, constantly re-presented and practiced, embodied and structural, illusory, and haptic, rendered common at both the level of the individual and the

Figure 16: Waterside Plaza, New York. Photo by Davis Brody Bond

collective social body. As Fred Moten scholar and poet asserts:

Blackness is the name that has been assigned to difference in common, the animaterial inscription of common differentiation, which improvises through the distinction between logical structure and physical embodiment. Physical embodiment is not this or that skin color or bodily shape but haptic graph. Logical structure is not this or that determined or determinate discursive frame but common informality. (Figure 19)

My work exploring this complex body of high-rise residential towers, sponsored

Figure 17: 1970s Harlem.

Photo by Jack Garofalo

Figure 18: Cadman Towers, New York, 1973.

State Looks, Black Desire(s), Housing Schemes

by well-crafted legal andfinancial maneuvers, is invested in the divergent tales of Black life, the “general gathering of dispersal,” (Figure 20) these buildings host. As racial projects, these buildings are simultaneously abstractions and wholly real. These projects are deliberately engaged, “not because of [their] centrality or authenticity but rather, because of [their] specific enactment of the marginality and minority that is the central and authentic feature of Blackness understood as a general, generative principle of differentiation.” (Figure 21) In this way, my work is particularly invested in an exploration of the “relationship between subjectivity and objects,” (Figure 22); in this case the object of the high-rise residential tower, as a large scale agglomeration, consisting of individual objects, apartments, and a mass of overwhelmingly Black bodies.

Figure 20: 1970s Harlem. Photo by Jack Garofalo

Figure 19: 1970s Harlem. Photo by Jack Garofalo

The high-rise residential tower at the macro level and the life lived within the individual unit, the individual apartment, constitute the territory wherein notions of Black domesticity are both projected and performed, as well as conceptions of respectability and where the legislation of dwelling is enacted. These objects act as, “a politically salient meeting ground of public authority and personal intimacy,” (Figure 23) whose tales can be told through the specific form of discourse identified as such by Alessandro Portelli as oral history.

Oral history has the potential to directly engage this territory of projection, where Blackness is the site of that which is thrown forth, cast as divergent from the social mores, behaviors, customs, and

ways of being that have been imagined as constitutive of the core of the national and state identity. This paranoid work of social and/or state projection delimits where and how individuals contained therein are categorized, located, and expected to interact with objects both in the physical, material world and in the social, cultural imaginary. This is a decidedly collective domain — expressly political, highly aesthetic, and particularly intimate

Figure 21: Schomburg Plaza, New York.

Figure 22: 1970s Harlem. Photo by Jack Garofalo

Figure 23: Demolition of the Trans-Manhattan Expressway, 1960.

State Looks, Black Desire(s), Housing Schemes

— involving the relationship of parts to a perceived or imagined whole. It involves what philosopher Jacques Rancière refers to as a “distribution of the sensible:”

A distribution of the sensible establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts. This apportionment of parts and positions is based on a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that determines the very manner in which something in common lends itself to participation and in

Figure 24: 1970s Harlem. Photo by Jack Garofalo

Figure 25: Still image from Good Times (sitcom 1975-79).

what way various individuals have a part in this distribution. (Figure 24)

This distribution of the sensible, as a “system of self-evident facts of sense perception,” (Figure 25) invokes those faculties by which the body perceives and understands its relation to the external world and ultimately stores and remembers that information, namely memory. By establishing what is common, as well as exclusive parts, the distribution of the sensible operates at the level of society and at the level of lived individual, affective, material experience and betrays modes of consensus at work and the proliferation of commo sense. And while the seminal work in the field of oral history of Luisa Passerini and that of Allessandro Portelli are different on many levels, I recognize a particular correspondence at work between the two in their respective references to “consensus” and “common sense,” as well as in Anna Green’s interrogation of “collective memory.” As I work to unearth the historical processes at play surrounding the conceptualization and physical intervention of the body of architectural objects I have chosen to study, I have sought out the methods and theories of oral history alongside Black

studies and architectural historical and theoretical analysis to afford a means by which to directly engage those who dwell within these objects.

Oral history is defined by Anna Green as “the collection and analysis of autobiographical memory.” (Figure 26) While Green suggests that research into autobiographical memory often found itself “relegated to the sidelines by the scholarly community’s burgeoning interest in the social or cultural memory of the group,” (Figure 27) my approach is less interested in establishing a binary opposition between social or cultural memory and autobiographical memory and is instead interested in the ways in which the individual, autobiographical tale is mediated by collective remembrance. Citing historical sociologist Jeffry Olick, Green presents two facets of collective memory theory. Accordingly, collective memory may be either:

“...the lowest common denominator or normal distribution of what individuals in a collectivity remember, or…’the collective memory’ as a ‘social fact sui generis,’ a

Figure 27: 1970s Harlem. Photo by Jack Garofalo

Figure 26: Lionel Hampton Houses, New York.

State Looks, Black Desire(s), Housing Schemes

The work of oral history gets at how one comes into knowing how to be. There is a performative quality that foremost interests me, in both how — through what types of language, references, associations, etc. — tales are told and how personal, intimate life has been lived in a particular historical time and space, as constructed in

Figure 28: Tilden Towers Senior Center, undated pamphlet. matter of collective representations that are the properties of the ‘collective unconscious’ which is itself ontologically distinct from any aggregate of individual consciousness.” (Figure 28)

or by those tales — through what types of behaviors, rituals, corporeal, bodily events are described, distorted, or omitted. My interest is in both form and content. (Figure 29)

Anna Green concludes her interrogation of the use of the conceptual term “collective memory,” with the assertion that some would argue there is “much leeway in what one can claim to be,”(Figure 30) that “there is surely an element of conscious personal selection among the potential relationships and networks available in modern, multicultural cities.” (Figure 31) By contrast, this work seeks to complicate and undermine the supposition that the machinations of the wider society have fundamentally changed. The “creative autonomy” that Green — by way of her analysis and exaltation of the work of anthropologist Daniel Miller — argues is permitted individuals to a much greater degree in the “modern state,” ignores impositions and boundaries delineated by racial formations and their attendant politics. And while I disagree with Green’s analysis of the availability of choice, this work whole-heartedly agrees that “we must keep space for the resistant, curious, rebellious, thoughtful, purposeful human subject,” (Figure 32) the subject racialized as Black, especially the dissenting Black scholar has always and already made space, bent space, reworked space. (Figure 33)

A very distinct order and authority attends securing and maintaining housing, particu-

Figure 29: Still image from Empire (1965 film).

Figure 30: View of the Washington Bridge Apartments and Extension Complex, New York (undated photo).

Figure 31: Nagle House advertisement, undated pamphlet.

State Looks, Black Desire(s), Housing Schemes

larly under impoverished circumstances. Residents who interact with the well-established order and authority of this system, enact a certain dwelling ideology, reluctantly accepting the imposed order and authority, but with little protest. It is a form of “consensus, in the form of acquiescence to the established order and authority,” (Figure 34) as Luisa Passerini asserts that is part of what I seek to tease out through oral history interviews. My work directly engages the “material component of consensus” (Figure 35) in that the towers I pursue as my objects of study are actually providing housing, they afford residence. How individual subjects confront, accept, dwell in, resist, and enjoy, are pleased by the tensions, imposed restrictions, and forms of surveillance and regulation that come with these residences is what I seek to deploy oral history to confront.

I am fascinated, and have been for some time, with the fantastic modes of operation of the seemingly banal and contradictory. I fully accept and relish the “tension between individual reality and general [historical] process…” (Figure 36) And while the high-rise residential towers I pursue are objects that have emerged from particular sociopolitical, sociocultural and socioeconomic contexts — equally constructed under the law,

Figure 32: 1970s Harlem. Photo by Jack Garofalo

through certain development and financing schemes and are aesthetically determined in very specific ways — these highrise towers are also products of a specific cultural imaginary. I refer to this domain in a manner that Alessandro Portelli might agree with, as “Tall Tales;” sits enmeshed in fabrication, lies, tales, attended by deceit and fakery, always already operating on multiple registers. The specific dialogic nature of oral history is an essential tool for my work, particularly because it is equally fraught with its own contradictions and tensions. “The expression oral history therefore contains an ambivalence…: it refers to both to what the historians hear (the oral sources) and to what the

historians say or write.” (Figure 37) What I hear is significant, however what I write is supremely important to me.

Architectural histories of housing perpetuate narratives that align Blackness with dispossession or totally ignore it and unconsciously universalize whiteness, while simultaneously working diligently to ignore architecture’s role in the development and implementation of racial projects. Revolving around categoriza-

Figure 33: Tilden Towers, Bronx, New York (undated photo.

Figure 34: Confucius Plaza Apartments, New York (undated photo).

State Looks, Black Desire(s), Housing Schemes

tions of form and type, architectural histories of housing have in many instances neglected how deeply connected seemingly mundane configurations of domesticity have been tied to and been generated as a result of the constitution of racial categories and the perpetuation of a moralizing mission. As such, modernist “towers in a park,” when not narrated in terms of universal access to light and air, have alternatively been and remain a continuously vilified trope when taking into account any discussion of race. These narratives often render Black residents victims of architecture, for whom the high-rise residential tower as type is deemed inappropriate, damaging, and damning. As the story goes, Black bodies, particularly Black families with children, and the housing they have been relegated to are deemed pathological. Black poverty is overwhelmingly used to explain the overrepresentation of black folks in sub-standard housing and their presence aligned with the perpetual decay of urban domains.

For all its seemingly progressive intent, the Mitchell-Lama housing program (and the accompanying body of large-scale, urban architectural artifacts) could be read as a bellwether for the fate of Black Americans within an increasingly privatized and global-

Figure 35: 1970s Harlem. Photo by Jack Garofalo

Salema Vanable

ized economy; one version of a back story to the neoliberal moment (Figure 38). What some scholars may refer to as the rise and fall of a failed experiment in postwar largescale, middle-income housing, my dissertation finds striking the endurance and mutability of the program across time and media — as legislative rhetoric, financial scheme, marketed object, aesthetic entity, architecture, cultural artifact, and host of physically lived, domestic realities; infiltrating and working on the social, cultural imagination. While the last project enacted under the legislation was certified for occupancy in the late 1970s (as the city of New York was facing serious financial decline), this work recognizes its ongoing productivity in the realm of myth-making, spinning tales, promoting an image of benevolent government intervention, that in fact mask a particularly mundane maintenance of racial hierarchy and subjugation; where Blackness is constantly veiled and simultaneously centered.

Jack Halberstam, in this opening essay to Fred Moten’s and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, writes in “The Wild Beyond: With and for the Undercommons” that: “In the essay that many people already know best from this volume, ‘The University and the Undercommons,’ Moten and Harney come closest to explaining their mission. [A stance with which I feel methodologically aligned]. Refusing to be for or against the university and in fact marking the critical academic as the player who holds the ‘for

Ife

Figure 36: Independence Plaza, New York.

Figure 38: Knickerbocker Plaza, New York.

Figure 37: Still image from Independence Day (1994 Film).

and against’ logic in place, Moten and Harney lead us to the ‘Undercommons of the Enlightenment’ where subversive intellectuals engage both the university and fugitivity: ‘where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still Black, still strong.’ The subversive intellectual, we learn, is unprofessional, uncollegial, passionate, and disloyal. The subversive intellectual is neither trying to extend the university nor change the university, the subversive intellectual is not toiling in misery and from this place of misery articulating a ‘general antagonism.’ In fact, the subversive intellectual enjoys the ride and wants it to be faster and wilder; she does not want a room of his or her own, she wants to be in the world, in the world with others and making the world anew.” (Figure 39)

State Looks, Black Desire(s), Housing Schemes

Figure 40: 1970s Harlem. Photo by Jack Garofalo

Figure 39: University Village Towers, New York (undated photo).

DISCUSSION

Alexandra Staub: Thank you very much, Ife. That was a remarkable essay. You’ve interwoven so many themes into a mosaic of cultural phenomena. I’d like to circle around to some of your topics. You talked about racial categorization and oral history as a means of accessing individual subjectivities. At the same time, society at large objectifies the people you interview. You tie that in with the idea of architecture as an artifact and as a product of culture. The people and the architecture are both a construct of culture, and you’re delving into the ways in which the two intersect.

Many of your stunning images are from pop culture of the 1970s. Considering the U.S. housing history after World War II and through the 1970s, this was a time during which white families increasingly moved into suburbs and Black families were relegated to high-rise housing in the cities. I was wondering if you could comment as to your choice of using the 1970s as a point of analysis?

Ife Vanable: The 1970s are an important periodization for my work as an architectural historian. New York State’s 1955 Limited Profit Housing Companies Law, known as Mitchell-La-

State Looks, Black Desire(s), Housing Schemes

ma, did not initially produce the number of housing units hoped for in the 1950s and 1960s. And, in many ways, the Mitchell-Lama housing program was conceptualized and enacted as a deviation from New York City public housing authority projects — architecturally, socially, and financially. With the private, though publicly subsidized, development of low-moderate and middle-income housing, the housing program produced architectural objects and simultaneously defined the contours of a desirable middle- income Black resident. Without access to wealth or income to sustainably enter into market-rate housing, as the law was written, this desired and envisioned resident would nonetheless be recognized as different in terms of finances, status, family composition, and values from an imagined more low-income public housing tenant. Many of the images I shared reflect how this imaginary was also constructed in popular culture. [The Jeffersons, Good Times]

a notion that is often attributed to the “tower in the park” ideal, touted as seeking that sought universal access to light and air. This led to urban policy schemes that benefitted developers of middle-income housing.

With these architectural and financial ideals and incentives, in the late 1960s, developers in New York began to produce ever-taller housing. In other parts of the country, high-rise residential towers were being demolished, yet New York was going ahead with production. The largest number of high-rise residential towers came into being in New York between about 1968 and 1975. This was the time when New York was on the brink of financial and material decline, and the Bronx was assumed to be burning. At this time, in 1970s New York, something else is happening that often is untold [Paris Match]. For me, that becomes the very fertile ground from which the tales I unearth emerge.

In 1961, a set of revised zoning resolutions in New York City provided benefits and bonuses to developers for open space, following

Alexandra Staub: What you’re describing — the idea of putting families into a certain type of housing and encouraging them to become middle-class or to remain

Ife Salema Vanable

middle-class and not take on perceived characteristics of poor families — sounds like social engineering. Was that what was taking place in New York City?

Ife Vanable: In New York, the Mitchell-Lama housing scheme contributed to the making of the city itself. Designed in very robust ways, by architects like Paul Rudolph and I.M. Pei, or well-known mid-sized firms, such as Davis Brody and Associates, as well as firms like Bond Ryder before Max Bond joined Davis Brody, Mitchell-Lama housing is still quite desirable. The apartments are large and were affordable. Though affordibiity was not a term used at the time, there was much more emphasis on tenant income. I would say the city was not necessarily interested in transforming families as much as it was in maintaining its own status by keeping families who supported the city. People deemed “essential” during the COVID pandemic, for example, those who work for municipal agencies and authorities – post office workers, bus and train drivers, nurses, or home care aids – would have been classified as Mitchell-Lama tenants.

In many ways, Mitchell-Lama housing can be understood as a form of catchment, a way to keep bodies in the city. These were folks who could have potentially moved elsewhere, those who once had a home and decided to do away with having to shovel snow, or the responsibilities of maintaining a home, or folks who loved the view from the 28th floor high-rise apartment unit. While recognizing these developments as a form of catchment, simultaneously my work recognizes desires to live in ways not always aligned with prevailing narratives of a single-family home as the most desirable object. I’m so interested in how these objects and the program operates on both these levels.

Alexandra Staub: New York during the late 1960s and early 1970s was experiencing many difficulties and social disruptions. How do the towers figure in?

Ife Vanable: Some of the projects in Mitchell-Lama took fifteen years to build. An example is Waterside Plaza, which was the only development east of the FDR Drive and is constructed on invented land

State Looks, Black Desire(s), Housing Scheme: Discussion consisting of pilings. Developers were very committed to moving forward with these projects. In the course that I’m currently teaching, we talked about the sense of distance from the ground and the notion of danger associated with being in a high-residential tower. Some students told me that their families moved out of high-rise buildings due to fear of being unable to escape during a fire or not wanting their children to run up and down the stairs and play in the elevators — all things that I actually did growing up because I lived on the 28th floor in one of these buildings. Distance from the ground is simultaneously desirable and also a means to capture bodies. The street has been seen as a site of disturbance and chaos. The tower begins to create a very palpable and real, physical, material distance from the street. There is an idea that housing, containment in towers, provides a sort of stable distance from the street. A notion of the stable family persists after

Daniel Moynihan’s 1965 report [titled The Negro Family, the Case for National Action], in which the Negro family is analyzed as unstable and pathological. These towers do emerge in this moment as part of a narrative toward stabilizing a seemingly “unresting” urban population at the level of the street. This construct between the street and the sky is something that I’m constantly thinking about and looking at.

Alexandra Staub: A fascinating thought. From an architectural viewpoint, the tower has to be very stable because there’s the structure to consider. The engineer is involved from day one. Metaphorical and physical stability overlap here.

I was wondering if you could speak a bit more about racial categorization. You mentioned that Black people and Black families were seen as pathological, but on the other hand, everything that you’ve said about the tower sounds very positive. Where is the overlap for you?

Ife Vanable: I obviously do not align my-

self with Moynihan’s thinking of the Black family as pathological — a framing based on the perceived lack of a male figure, and the ensuing critique of a matriarchal structure. Hortense Spillers writes that if you look at the Black family, you can find a father, that there is not merely instability, but otherwise familial compositions that might not be registered or valued in the same way. Value questions are prominent. I resist the narratives that urban housing in the form of high-rise residential towers is inherently problematic, or that a spatial concentration or even segregation of Black bodies is inherently bad.

space, the idea of the terminal bedroom, the separation of uses, and the categorizations of domestic space. It’s one of the first things you learn to do when you draw floor plans of domestic spaces — you call out where the living room is, where the bedroom is, where the bathroom is — ongoing processes of demarcating. These ideas of social structures inherent in dwelling are also implicated in racial categorization.

In many ways, Mitchell-Lama was an integrationist project. The initial idea was that if you take families of moderate income and put them next to people who are more middle income, there would be a growth in values and behaviors. But I really resist perceiving the towers as a problem. I even question where and how the problem is described, and the tendency of architecture to operate in terms of problems and solutions. Robin Evans writes about the production of domestic

Alexandra Staub: It sounds as if you are emphasizing the value of particular and specific cultures that you find in the housing you’re studying. In your oral history project, I assume you’re interviewing residents of the towers?

Ife Vanable: Yes, current and former resident activists, tenants, and organizers.

Alexandra Staub: As a final question: you mentioned COVID at one point. I’m just wondering if what you are unearthing in your own research has some implications for what you see happening today?

Ife Vanable: I get this question a lot

State Looks, Black Desire(s), Housing Schemes

when I talk about this work. I do historical analysis and research, but am also engaged in a theoretical project framing questions around media and documents. As I’m analyzing oral histories, talking to people, I’m also looking at how these projects are represented in media, and how they’ve been understood and received across time. My aim has been to see how we pose questions, how we assert certain schemes of value, how we talk about things as being good or bad, and how we ask questions about where those designations come from. I’m aiming for a methodological transformation that I hope to integrate pedagogically. We need to examine the way that we can move through the work pedagogically and in practice with greater attention to nuance. We need to ask questions about things that are seemingly cemented, and we need to take those things apart with greater depth and specificity.

Alexandra Staub: One of the underlying premises of this symposium is that we do need to explore alternative ways of generating knowledge, asking questions, and finding answers. I would like to thank you very much for your fascinating talk and for this discussion.

State Looks, Black Desire(s), Housing Schemes

BIBLIOGRAPHY BOOKS [INCLUDING BOOK CHAPTERS]

Ernest, John, ed. The Oxford Handbook of The African American Slave Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Evans, Robin. Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays. London: Architectural Association, 2003.

Adams, Timothy Dow. Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

Bloom, Nicholas Dagen and Mathen Gordon Lasner, eds. Affordable Housing in New York: The People, Places, and Policies That Transformed a City. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2016.

Brilliant, Eleanor L. Urban Development Corporation: Private Interests and Public Authority. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1975.

Brooks, Daphne A. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

Browder, Laura. Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities. Chapel Hill and Lodon: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Brown, Carolyn S. The Tall Tale in American Folklore and Literature. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1987.

Brown, Wendy. Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books 2010.

Brown, William Wells. The Escape; or, a Leap for Freedom: A Drama in Five Acts. Boston: R. F. Wallcut, 1858.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York & London: Routledge, 1993.

da Silva, Denise Ferreira. Toward a Global Idea of Race. Borderlines. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

Ellison, Ralph, and Albert Murray, Johan Callahan, ed. Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray. New York: The Modern Library, 2000.

Fields, Karen E. and Barbara J. Fields. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. London and New York: Verso, 2014.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.

Frazier, E. Franklin. The Negro Family in the United States. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1939.

Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Gikandi, Simon. Slavery and the Culture of Taste. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Green, Anna. “Can Memory Be Collective?” In The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, edited by Donald Ritchie, 96-111. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Hackworth, Jason. The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2007.

Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and representation. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992.

Hurston, Zora Neal. Mules and Men. London: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1935.

Jenkins, Candice M. Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy. Minneapolis and London: University of Minneapolis Press, 2007.

Marable, Manning. Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945-1982 (The Contemporary United States). Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1984.

McKittrick, Katherine, ed. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Durham, NC & London: Duke University Press, 2005.

Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010.

Moynihan, Daniel Patrick. The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Labor, Office of Policy, Planning and Research, March 1965.

Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. New York and London: Routledge, 1994.

Passerini, Luisa. Autobiography of a Generation. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Wesleyan University Press, 1996.

Portelli, Alessandro. “Oral History as Genre,” in The Battle of Valle Guila: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.

Rainwater, Lee and William L. Yancey. The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy: A Trans-action Social Science and Public Policy Report. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967.

Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988, 271-313.

Stern, Robert A.M., David Fishman, and Thomas Mellins. New York 1960: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Second World War and the Bicentennial. New York: The Monacelli Press, 1997.

Willmann, John B. The Department of Housing and Urban Development. New York, Washington and London: Frederick A. Praeger, Publishers, 1968.

Young, Kevin. The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2012. Articles and Reports.

Kaplan, Samuel. “Bridging the Gap from Rhetoric to Reality: The New York State Urban Development Corporation.” Architectural Forum (November 1969): 70-73.

Marriott, David. “Inventions of Existence: Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, Sociogeny, and ‘the Damned.’” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 11, no. 3 (2011): 45-89.

Passerini, Luisa. ‘Work Ideology and Consensus Under Italian Fascism,’ History Workshop Journal, no.8 (1979): 84.

Saldahna, Arun. “Reontologizing Race: The Machinic Geography of the Phenotype.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 24 (2006): 9-24.

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Thompson, Jr. William C., Comptroller. “Affordable No More: New York City’s Looming Crisis in Mitchell-Lama and Limited Dividend Housing.” City of New York: Office of the Comptroller, Office of Policy Management, February 2014.

Vale, Lawrence J. and Yonah Freemark. “From Public Housing to Public-Private Housing.” Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol. 78, No. 4 (2012): 379-402.

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Ife Salema Vanable

BUILDING SPATIAL JUSTICE: IN TWO ACTS

Rayne Laborde Associate Director of cityLAB UCLA

ABSTRACT

Building Spatial Justice: In Two Acts highlights a small portion of the recent work of cityLAB as related to Design Consequences. cityLAB is a design research center housed within UCLA Architecture and Urban Design. As a group of architects, designers, urban planners, researchers, and theorists, we explore the challenges facing our contemporary cities, and particularly our home, Los Angeles. As part of a public education institution, our mission involves community partnerships, mentorships, and developing new methodologies for embedded research. For us, this happens in three parts:

1. through cityLAB as a whole;

2. through our partner the Urban Humanities Initiative, which is an interdisciplinary, year-long graduate certificate program for students in architecture, urban planning, and the humanities;

3. through our field office dedicated to long-term partnerships in the Westlake/MacArthur Park neighborhood of LA.

PREFACE: DESIGN AS LEVER

When it comes to studying and acting within our city, “Design is our Lever.” In thorny issues at the intersection of policy, capitalist market forces, and racism (which are intrinsically linked), of land use and accessibility and connectivity, we see design research as an opportunity both to highlight the complexity of the issues at play and to showcase alternative possibilities. Solutions, and good design, require interdisciplinary work at all scales but for us, the project of design research is a catalyst for larger-scale change. Ways of seeing, then, are incredibly important. Design research has the capacity to get everything and everyone on the page, to explore connections less easily seen, to tease out hidden narratives, and to piece it all back together anew. It is true that design and architecture have very real limits. Seeing design as a lever recognizes the ways in which architecture, aesthetics, and urbanism are abused as tools of power, oppression, intimidation, and displacement. We see the consequences across our cities. This leveraging also maximizes our ability to use design as a tool of communication, or even an act of translation, between different disciplines, groups, and interests. Our actions foreground the ability of design to suggest, excite, delight, and provoke radical possibility in the everyday.

ACT 1: DESIGN EVOLVING POLICY

as endless suburbia may be lacking in complexity, but it is not entirely incorrect: half a million lots in our city are zoned for single-family use, the most restrictive zoning type. This suburban ideal is, in many ways, an economic dilemma cloaked in the wrapper of a design consequence. It’s the marketing of and subsequent desire for the single-family home as the American dream, that perfect image of the standalone house bordered back and front with perfectly maintained lawns. It’s the attached garage and white picket fence — a contained and private world filled with all the appliances, trinkets, and finishings that attract home as a vessel of consumer culture demanded. Even in a city short on land and water, the image of this as “home” remains powerful. As an economic investment bolstered by a housing crisis driven by anti-development sentiment, the symbolic and fiscal power of the single-family home has only grown. And yet, it forms an antithesis to the sustainable and humanistic density we need.

Until five years ago, local planning departments exercised full control over the density (or lack thereof) on these lots, almost always limiting construction to the traditional home. Secondary houses on the same lot — what we refer to as backyard homes or accessory dwelling units (ADUs) — were costly, allowed only in select areas, and only through a long and drawn out discretionary process. Restrictions were so profound that between 2003 and 2010, only eleven ADUs were permitted in Los

The familiar imaginary of Los Angeles

Angeles. This is not to say that ADUs did not exist in the city; in fact, design, land use, and socioeconomic consequences in the neighborhood of Pacoima converged to normalize this typology. Pacoima is in the northeast San Fernando Valley. Of its 100,000 residents, 85% are Latino, one-third are under 18, and nearly 20% live below the poverty level, with a median

household income of $49,000.1 As in the rest of the region, high real estate prices and population pressures have led to a shortage of affordable housing.

Though Pacoima is zoned R1 (single-family residential) and 80% of its housing units are detached homes, the lived reality of neighborhood residents tells a different story of density and alternative models. One in five residents live in shadow

Rayne Laborde

Figure 1: CityLAB, Large Lot Design Concept, 2008.

housing: garages, rented rooms, and illegal units. These illegal units are especially prevalent in the peculiar lot type unique to Pacoima. The neighborhood has over 1,000 extra-long single-family lots that yield 10,000 square feet of surface area, nearly twice the size of the average LA residential lot. As of 2016, 95% of these extra-long lots had illegal units constructed in the backyard. Born out of necessity yet popularized through effectiveness, Pacoima residents were modelling a different future for suburbia:

a more sustainable yet equally communal way of life that was particularly impactful for intergenerational households.

Pacoima’s accessory dwelling units were unpermitted; they could lead to steep fines or demolition, and they decreased property value rather than building equity. Together with the neighborhood group Pacoima Beautiful, cityLAB sought to imagine a future in which these illegal second units could instead be an equity-building asset as well as a safe, dignified way to provide

Building Spatial Justice: In Two Acts

Figure 2: cityLAB, Neighborhood Analysis, 2010.

denser housing without fundamentally altering neighborhood character or straining the existing infrastructure of a fragile neighborhood. Resisting gentrification was a priority, as was affordability. This meant validating, legalizing, and proliferating the ADU across multiple typologies and regions through a streamlined approval and construction process. As either an attached or detached structure, ADUs can support intergenerational families, provide affordable rentals for students or older adults, and reorganize underutilized yard space – or even provide new surfaces for thickened occupation.

Such interventions are replicable in underutilized backyards or alleys throughout Los Angeles, with its half-million single family lots. To make ADUs appealing to a broader audience, and in particular to politicians and planners who are predominantly single-family home owners themselves, design was a powerful tool not only of demonstration and dignity, but of persuasion.

We partnered with Kevin Daly Architects and a team of twelve students to imagine and construct what became the Backyard Bi(h)ome: a prototypical, ultra-modern, lightweight accessory dwelling unit that provides a home for Angelenos and habitat opportunities for our local fauna. The Bi(h)ome is flexibly designed to meet the needs of almost any household, such as an elderly parent, a returning college graduate, or renters, while maintaining

the benefits of easy maintenance and affordability. The environmental impact of the structure over its entire life cycle is between ten and one hundred times less than a conventional auxiliary dwelling.

We constructed the Bi(h)ome in public view within a UCLA courtyard. The effects were better than we could have imagined. The Bi(h)ome’s provocative form, paired with its simple and sustainable message, captured the attention and interest of media outlets, planners, and neighbors who had previously seen ADUs as little more than illegal blight, impossible in a small

Rayne Laborde

Figure 3: cityLAB and Kevin Daly Architects, Backyard BI(h)ome. Photographs by Nico Marques, 2015.

backyard space, or a woefully small approach to achieve greater urban density.

The Bi(h)ome, paired with diagrams situating its prolific possibility and calls for legalization of existing ADUs in neighborhoods like Pacoima, made real the potential of a different future. Over the course of that year, cityLAB Director Dana Cuff and former Deputy Planner of Los Angeles Jane Blumenfeld worked with State Assemblyman Richard Bloom to turn design possibility into a legality.

In January 2016, then-Governor Jerry Brown doubled the allowable density of California’s single-family home neighborhoods by signing AB 2299, which mandated that planning departments allow ADU construction by-right. This was paired with pushes for legalization programs, allowing the Pacoima ADU owners and others to re-legalize their lots while keeping existing structures. Simultaneously, we produced a step-by-step ADU guidebook, informing interested parties on the benefits, restrictions, and opportunities for three types of ADU construction on a standard lot, and with which agencies to proceed. Five years later, this guidebook is still frequently cited on the city and state level.

Figure 4.: cityLAB and Kevin Daly Architects, Backyard BI(h)ome. Photographs by Nico Marques, 2015.

The result has had a profound impact on Los Angeles architecture:

• From 2017 to early 2021, nearly 20,000 applications for new ADUs were submitted, accounting for 22% of newly permitted housing units in Los Angeles.

• Of our architecture faculty, nearly half are working on or have recently completed an ADU. ADUs have provided a gateway to practice for young architects.

• The Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety (LADBS) Approved Standard Plans Program for ADUs was launched earlier this year by Los Angeles Chief Design Officer Christopher Hawthorne. Under this new Standard

Plan Program, an ADU application following any of the dozen or so plan sets pre-approved by LADBS may receive all plan check authorizations in as little as one day. Architecture offices retain the rights to their plans, while individuals seeking to build an ADU benefit from huge savings on permitting and feasibility costs.

• In September 2021, SB 9 was signed into law. A response to AB 2299’s success and only possible because the step to double density across single-family zones had proven both effective and popular, SB 9 quadruples allowable density. Lots once zoned for single-family homes may now be divided into two, each with two by-right structures.

Figure 5: Public record images from Four LADBS Approved Standard Plans Program (clockwise): Taalman Architecture, IT House; SO-IL, Pebble House; Amunátegui Valdés Architects, ADU; LA Más, ADU25..

Single family zoning, the root and expression of so many of our state’s inequities, is legally dead. And while it will take a great deal of advocacy, financial subsidies, tenant protection, and labor reform to equitably develop these newly available lots, the possibilities have not only been opened but multiplied.

ACT 2: COMMONING, BY DESIGN

“The first human tool was not a weapon, but rather something that holds: a bag, a pouch, a vessel; something for gathering and storing and sharing...Before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.” [With this revelation, the narrative of humanity shifts from that of violence to that of safekeeping.] “Its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process.”

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, annotations my own.2

For our second act, we leave suburbia behind for some of the densest neighborhoods in the city. This initiative, which we call Place2Be, reflects our ongoing commitment to and interest in acts of “commoning” as an urban intervention, and as an assertion the right to public space as a right to the city. Our interest in and thinking around this public sphere work was sparked by a partnership with the Camino Nuevo School group, a collection of charter schools in the Westlake/ MacArthur Park neighborhood. Adjacent to Los Angeles’s Koreatown, Westlake/MacArthur Park is the second densest neighborhood in the city. It has been known as an immigrant landing pad since the 1980s, especially for new arrivals from Mexico and Central America.

Long before, it was still considered a melting pot. When the Home Owners Loan Corporation chose to redline this neighborhood in the 1940s, they pointed to the mixed density and mixed racial housing of what was once a luxury retreat for downtown workers. This same adjacency to job centers,

and landlords’ ability to endlessly subdivide former mansions and apartments into overcrowded and under resourced room rentals, characterize Westlake today. Median household income is impossibly low at $27,000, and public assets are both underfunded and undermaintained. The neighborhood is simultaneously a welcoming landing place rich in advice, community, and resources for immigrants, yet also a deeply exploitative rental economy with limited long-term assistance programs and a long history of gang activity.

Westlake’s multicultural hybridity and constant contestation are a microcosm of broader Los Angeles. Our field office, entering its third year, was formed out of decades-long relationships that members of our team have cultivated with artists, organizers, educators, and activists in the neighborhood.

In Spring 2020, when COVID distancing and daily death tolls were still new, the Camino Nuevo school group reached out with a question: how should they rethink student pedestrian safety outside the walls of their campus? Of their student body, nearly half used public transit or walked to school. Almost all students who stayed for after-school programs walked or took transit home.

to the north. Cars speed through the area to get on the freeway, and the freeway provides one of the few permanent and deep sources of public shade and shelter in Los Angeles. Combined with Los Angeles’ housing crisis, this has resulted in extensive unhoused encampments along the same underpass areas where students commute. The school reported that students would walk in busy streets to avoid the tents, and that two girls were caught bringing weapons to school because they felt so vulnerable in these spaces. At the same time, the school recognized and was receptive to one of our project’s early goals: focusing on investment and opportunity, not displacement. They understood that moving or policing these encampments would not produce the kinds of equitable community change the school was seeking beyond its own campus. It quickly became clear to us that what was needed wasn’t simply a student pedestrian safety plan, but a Community Engagement Plan for the school to better connect with neighbors who were housed, unhoused, or business owners, and those who had the power to impact public spaces.

The school initially approached us with concerns centered on a 10-lane freeway

It is important to consider under or disinvestment as a mixture of intentional and unintentional consequences of decisions made by those in power. Aesthetics play a crucial role in the expression of such decisions. Much of these design choices take place under the auspices of what is often

Rayne Laborde

referred to as CPTED: Crime Prevention through Environmental Design. However, as scholars Paul Cozens and Terence Love have pointed out, what we actually see is Crime Prevention through Exclusionary Design.3

Born in the 1970s as an evolution of Jane Jacobs’ call for eyes on the street, CPTED proponents claimed that “the proper design and effective use of the built environment can lead to a reduction in the fear and incidence of crime, and an improvement in the quality of life.”4 This “proper” design involves three overlapping strategies: “territorial reinforcement, natural surveillance, and natural access control”.5 In other words, desired users are encouraged to have a sense of territoriality around their space, thus sparking a protective urge. This is often attained through privatization of public space. Second, clear surveillance strategies and view corridors are planned; and third, access is controlled as a means to dissuade and deny those deemed undesirable. Such control takes the form of doors, gates, disruptive landscaping, and bright lighting. Some of these are familiar forms of hostile or defensible architecture, most often against unhoused urban dwellers. Among other Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) and activist designers, Colloquate Design in New Orleans have called for the abolition of CPTED tactics, which “criminalize Blackness un-

der the guise of safety,”6 while at the same time utterly failing to address underlying causes of crime. CPTED design comes at a cost, and the streets around Westlake and especially around this particular school are a clear example. CPTED does not add anything to the urban environment apart from tools of the surveillance state: fences, cameras, and methods of identification. Instead, CPTED practices strip back public spaces. I would take Cozens’ and Love’s renaming of the acronym one step further: CPTED is not only Crime Prevention, but Community Prevention through Exclusionary Design.

Under CPTED practices, bathrooms are perceived to be “dirty,” or associated with “illicit activities,” and so they are closed. Human-scale and conversation-enabling groupings of furniture may block sightlines, so they are rejected. Comfortable street furnishings may invite the “wrong sort” (usually unhoused people) to rest, and so they are made awkward and rigid. Whole parks are swept, fenced, and removed from the public sphere for months or years at a time under the guise of public safety.

What is left is a scorched-earth approach to public space that fails to benefit a wide range of constituents: elders, youth, people who are pregnant, people with certain disabilities, and unhoused people alike are left without spaces in which to rest,

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relieve themselves, linger, or play. Even street trees — the precious providers of shade that profoundly impacts health outcomes in a hot, sunny, and carbon-fueled city like Los Angeles — are rejected by CPTED. Paired with disinvestment in maintenance, CPTED design practices are a leading cause of mature canopy reduction in LA. Sam Bloch writes in his outstanding article for Places Journal:

Requests to deforest are common in heavily policed areas, where shade is perceived as a magnet for drug dealing and prostitution. In the early 2000s, the L.A. Police Department began installing security cameras in high-crime areas of the city, and it asked city crews to cut back trees that obscured sightlines. Eventually, street cops submitted so many requests that the overwhelmed forestry department started recommending tree removal in places where “regular maintenance” was not feasible. Officially, the city has no policy about removing shade for surveillance purposes, but it happens: public housing courtyards, including Jordan Downs’s, are bare of trees, and when a new pole camera goes up in a public park, the mature canopy around it vanishes. On private property, the approach is more informal. ‘It’s not that the police have the authority to say, you can’t plant trees here,’ explained Michael Pinto, a principal at NAC Architecture who specializes in community design-build projects. ‘It’s that they have convinced community leaders that, if you want to save your community, you can’t have too many trees, because it restricts [the police’s] ability to do their jobs.’ 7

In considering the Camino Nuevo school’s request, part of being able to reimagine how students — and by extension, the whole community — could feel safe, empowered, and

welcome necessitated being able to collectively identify sites where fences, boulders, and expanses of empty paving replaced what may have otherwise been benches, restrooms, or shade structures, armatures for lingering and socializing. These are the spots where design for spatial justice might confront, head on, consequences of an insidious set of design guidelines, selectively applied and enforced in low-income communities of color.

Our work began through combinations of Zoom and distanced interviews, learning about what residents of all walks of life currently saw and wanted to see in the area. The interviews addressed a combination of state, city, county, private, and no-mans-land jurisdictions and again revealed mismatched priorities, broken systems of communication, and a lack of awareness of what neighbors were doing. The interviews which most changed the way that I see the city and our work, however, didn’t come from planning experts or even students on the ground; they came from residents of the encampment by the freeway.

In conducting interviews with unhoused residents, we met Richard, who at the time had lived at this encampment for four years. Four years in a tent under a freeway. But somehow even more shocking: four years of living in the same place – the same number of years these students spend walking to their school, in fear – and no one at the school knew Richard. So, we started asking others how long they had lived there. The answers: three years, six years, eight years in the area. Many people had lived in this encampment for longer than students spend in high school; and yet, no one at the school knew their names. Social ties were so broken, and the othering of unhoused neighbors was so strong, that no one thought to have a conversation with the people on the street whom they knew by sight.

CPTED is part of much broader neoliberal effort to privatize and police cities in service of attracting ever-greater capital investment. The system is meant to promote this exact kind of “othering,” these breakdowns in communications between neighbors. As Don Mitchell writes in his landmark essay, “The Annihilation of Space by Law,” “we are creating a world in which a whole class of people simply cannot be, entirely because they have no place to be.”8 In other words, we have so criminalized innocent behaviors – rest, bathing, relieving oneself, having and transporting belongings – that people forced to live their lives in public find themselves lacking a true public in which to survive. Instead, this criminalization forces unhoused city dwellers into cycles of carcerality for fulfilling their most basic needs. In Los Angeles County, 84% of the over 70,000 unhoused residents are people of color, meaning this is not only the criminalization of poverty and innocent behavior, but also a process of what Ananya Roy terms “racial banishment,” a term that spans the cyclical actions of disenfranchisement, disinvestment, gentrification, displacement, and criminalization we so often see play out in our capitalist cities.9 In Mitchell’s words, under this constant and discretionary banishment and criminalization, public space is transformed into landscape, an aestheticized space that is no longer truly public.

How do you fight this transformation, this slow creep towards privatization and profound inequity? One way is through commoning. It is by reinstating the right to the city, not to simply be in the city, as David Harvey emphasizes, but the right and ability to change the city. Acts of commoning radically reclaim space, share resources, and re-knit social connections.

You may be familiar with the oft-cited “Tragedy of the Commons,” a favorite parable of market economists. First named and described in a science publication in 1968, the initial example of the Tragedy of the Commons remains the best known: a cluster of cattle herders begin to graze their herds on a public pasture. Each herder realizes that the cost of grazing — soil depletion; reduced grass for food — is divided among everyone, but the individual herder alone gets the benefit of selling their cattle, and thus benefits from having more. So, independently, each herder adds more cattle, and soon the overpopulated and overgrazed field is useless to all. Despite being widely cited, taught, and used as a base public policy assumption, the Tragedy of the Commons was published with no supporting evidence, written by a neo-Malthusian, eugenicist scholar at the University of California whose primary research concern was human “indiscriminate reproduction” and “control of breeding” of “genetically defective” people. In 1990, Elinor Ostrom began work on a counter-the-

ory: the triumph of the commons. Her research highlighted the ways in which, “in reality, we see the triumph of the commons every day.” There is evidence that “communities establish their own systems without the need for regulation or privatisation. These communities can be found all over the world and are demonstrably capable of managing common resources and assets in a more sustainable and productive way than comparable state or market systems.”10 Her work was awarded a Nobel Prize, and yet the narrative of tragedy persists.

This act begins with a quote from Ursula K. Le Guin’s framework of the Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. To extrapolate the carrier bag from fiction to architecture, we may consider that the role of design is not to produce the commons, which happens through a commoning process in which the role and expertise of the designer is absorbed into the flattened hierarchy of the collective. Rather, the role of design is to hold or to frame the commons: to assist in carving out and protecting spaces of commoning — to soften or harden borders as needed, to know when and where not to design. And if that sounds antithetical to what I have presented of our work and the way we situate design research, I ask you to think back to the way in which our approach to ADUs was not to go into mass production ourselves, or even to

build a single inhabited structure; rather, we designed a portable framework for legalization and showcased a demonstration project. We leave the construction up to the architects rather than competing for bids. In other words, we create frameworks to hold, to support, to enable. De-stigmatization, joy, visibility, and a sense of agency and belonging are our priorities.

For this particular project, our engagement plan leverages the school’s established presence on Hoover Street, including a home support office, sports fields, and the campus, while considering the persistent challenges faced along this short but heavily trafficked stretch. The combination made it an ideal catalyst site for community change. “Hoover Juntos,” meaning “Hoover Together,” is a network of urban interventions stretching from the freeway underpass to the school. It serves as a demonstration project to address student safety, instill equity, and foster community. Interventions range from temporary events to permanent installations, providing provocations for community engaged projects to be further molded with public partners. With new opportunities for communication and connection made between the school and the encampment, we prioritized areas of perceived safety concern and developed a theory of change that begins with staffing and sidewalk improvement interventions under the freeway to create a new campus gateway. In this way, Hoover Jun-

tos uses an “inbound approach” to build community and a sense of joy and arrival flowing from neighborhood to school. This strategy focuses on the areas with the greatest complexities and moves toward campus where the dynamics in public spaces present fewer variables to manage.

Under the freeway, we asked how a barrier may become a gateway. Staffing, communication, and tactical urbanism set the stage for long term change under the freeway. By keeping pedestrian-oriented changes to the west sidewalk, where the encampment occupies less space, we proposed a condition where

the east sidewalk is reserved for dwelling. To the west, a new member of the school team – the sidewalk steward – becomes a familiar presence for both encampment residents and students. Modelled after programs that hire formerly incarcerated or unhoused individuals who are often able to pair negotiation skills, empathy, and problem solving to engage in a wide variety of interactions while managing relationships and expectations, the sidewalk steward marks a “safe” presence for student pedestrians and negotiates a clear path during pickup and drop off hours. This process does not penalize or displace encampment residents but instead establishes shared expectations with clear

Figure 6: cityLAB / coLAB, Hoover Juntos Community Engagement Plan - Geography. 2020.

limitations. Public art and temporary installations set the stage for longer term sidewalk widening and mural programs. At the school’s soccer field, a hyper-securitized space that both housed and unhoused neighbors resented not being able to access, community nights with shared food and casual activities become an opportunity to mingle without stigma. Along the fringes, parklets reintroduce places to rest, plant, and socialize. The parklets are desirable for vendors, who are frequently penalized for blocking the sidewalk during soccer matches yet also considered a vital part of the community. They are also desirable for neighbors of all housing statuses, as by jutting into the street these parklets serve to reduce traffic speeds. Other elements, such as shaded and spacious bus stops, outdoor classrooms, and more, took a longer-term approach to reinstating value and amenity in space, and we look forward to continuing to develop these projects. The theories behind what we learned from Hoover Juntos have had much larger ramifications for our work. Also in 2020, we began work with the Los Angeles County Department of Regional Planning, which tasked us with imagining new forms of anti-racist planning. This time working in the unincorporated neighborhood of Florence-Firestone, a historically Black neighborhood south of South LA which is now majority Latinx, we again found new ways to connect with constituents during COVID. This report, “Building Justice,”

Figure 7: cityLAB / coLAB Hoover Juntos Vignettes. 2020.

was largely analytical, but highlighted the ways in which unresolved community tensions further fray social safety nets.

In Florence-Firestone, the hot button issue is parking, or rather, overcrowding due to housing costs, with parking having become the scapegoat. Every single person we spoke to had deep concerns

around parking. Community leaders who had taken county classes on mediation found themselves almost solely mediating parking disputes. Fights over parking escalated to the point of hospitalization. As residents thought there could not possibly be more cars on the street, suddenly the number of RVs began to skyrocket. As the incorporated City of Los Angeles repeat-

Rayne Laborde

Figures 8 and 9: cityLAB / coLAB Hoover Juntos Vignettes, 2020.

edly pushed RVs out of adjacent neighborhoods through fines and legal pressure, RV dwellers found themselves in the middle of an already boiling tension while they were relegated to industrial-adjacent major roads.

While there was a clear need to build more affordable or otherwise subsidized housing to alleviate overcrowding, and to incentivize public transit use appropriate to the neighborhood’s density and three light rail stops, these answers lacked short-term impacts and went directly against many constituents’ stated desires. We needed a way to build trust, while also opening opportunities for RV dwellers forced into toxic situations. As people began to feel

heard on their parking concerns, they also opened up about other issues: environmental concerns flowing from the area’s industrial presence, which faltered under deindustrialization in the 1960s-1980s yet still lingered, causing water and air pollution; the fact that many kids in the neighborhood were not even attending school during the pandemic because they had neither wifi nor an adult at home to assist or supervise them; and a sense that they had little to no communication with their government.

Each of the three rail stops in Florence-Firestone is adjacent to meaningful public space. Two are near parks, and one is near an elementary school, which is still

Building Spatial Justice: In Two Acts

Figure 10: cityLAB; Thick Mapping Community Context. In Building Justice: Racial Equity in Planning for Unincorporated Los Angeles County. 2020.

remembered in the community for its role in desegregation. With community members, we teased out areas of underutilized public land and non-residential parking, like a park-and-ride lot next to the station, which opens to a vacant lot adjacent to park space. Rather than feeling like a station next to a park, the station feels isolated. With minimal shade and uncomfortable lean-to benches, it’s also an uncomfortable space for even short waits. We proposed a spine of services that would activate and reconnect disparate places near the station to serve three essential purposes:

• Creating a spatial armature to address short term needs ranging from sanitation stations, a safe place to park and rest, Wifi, water filtration, and information about county short- and long-range plans;

• By virtue of convenience and desirability, bringing people in close proximity to the rail stations as part of their weekly or daily routine and passively encouraging use of the light rail without shaming or pressuring residents to be “sustainable;”

• Providing a site of missing community connection and resources to build resiliency, both for everyday crises like being unhoused, and for point-in-time crises, such as earthquakes, blackouts, and heat waves.

Figure 11: cityLAB; Place2Be diagram. In Building Justice: Racial Equity in Planning for Unincorporated Los Angeles County. 2020.

Building Spatial Justice: In Two Acts

These geographies are imagined as “places to be” (Places2B): stigma-free zones of service access, connection, and lingering. They stand to proliferate across the rail system and into nearby public spaces. As our work Places2Be continues to evolve, we think of them as community-based support sites intended to build social as well as physical infrastructures needed to overcome both everyday and climate-induced disasters.

Though Places2Be forms a unique typology in their proposed sites, we draw from dozens of precedents worldwide. These include access points for people experi-

encing homelessness, community magnet programs run by cities and towns, radical commoning projects, community health clinics, and resilience hubs. Between these categories of precedent and case study, it seems that at this crucial moment, socially, sustainably, spatially, just about everyone is working on something akin to a Place2Be. From architects exploring climate shelters that function as community meeting points, to communities that are rejecting social norms to instead build community fridges, informal showers, and enact other acts of mutual aid and mutual care to benefit unhoused neighbors, there is a world of projects focused on how we

Figure 10: cityLAB; Thick Mapping Community Context. In Building Justice: Racial Equity in Planning for Unincorporated Los Angeles County. 2020.

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survive and thrive, and crucially, how we reclaim our public space together.

When thinking of commoning, of community-led resilience rather than top-down plans, and of designing for reclamation and celebration, I leave you with this question, my constant one: How can design help elevate, dignify, and proliferate work on the ground? If design consequences have furthered inequity and embedded systems of racialized othering into our urban fabric, it is our duty to confront these outcomes. Yet it is also within our power as designers, and particularly for community-based designers, to contribute to equitable outcomes and re-situate the power and agency of our work. I hope this presentation has in some way inspired you to think differently about your work, your potential, and the importance of connection with those around you.

Rayne

DISCUSSION

Alexandra Staub: Thank you so much, Rayne. This has been a wonderful introduction to some of the projects cityLAB is doing. A lot of what you discussed seems to center around public spaces and amenities and their privatization. With our hyper capitalist society, privatization has only increased in the past decades. Instead of public parks or pools, we have focused on large backyards and private pools for play and entertainment, for example. Added to that, people seem unwilling to pay taxes for public amenities. How do you deal with that in your work?

Rayne Laborde: That’s a great and complicated question. I am proud to live in a city where we did choose to voluntarily tax ourselves to fund measure HHH [a $1.2-billion bond measure to fund homeless housing]. This allowed us to build several thousand units of new affordable housing. Of course, we need to do much more.

As a Marxist scholar, I have a profound interest in modern monetary theory. I believe that as a nation we should not be so concerned about racking up debt to further our social opportunities. We have the capacity to fund what we need, through a controlled system of taxation to create equitable balance. The very wealthy might not agree with this. But I do believe in a strong government that chooses to create a better world for its citizens.

Alexandra Staub: The work at cityLAB often shows that something can happen in ways that are counterintuitive. It gives people pause to reexamine common and widespread beliefs. With the ADUs, you showed an alternative to what people thought such units would look like and demonstrated how their aesthetic value would enhance the community. Can you comment on this aspect of design research as social research?

make our schools run. A huge part of that problem is housing affordability. By showing that we can successfully co-locate housing on school sites, we can create better facilities for the schools themselves and more stability for students through a stable teaching environment.

Rayne Laborde: Design research is our bread and butter. It’s what cityLAB has been doing for many years now, with Dana Cuff at the helm. Grant funders are sometimes skeptical about design research. We like to reorient perspectives and show the possibilities that are hidden in plain sight.

Our school housing project, like so much of our work, was initially met with resistance. People thought we should preserve school land, as if every inch is used as a play yard. In reality, much of it is parking lots. So, it’s all about the reorientation of possibility and for finding those opportunities that are in plain sight.

We’re currently developing prototypes for housing on school lands across California. It’s a project similar to our ADU project. We have about seven Manhattans’ worth of underutilized school lands in California. At the same time, we have a statewide problem where we don’t have retention for the education staff or the facilities staff that

Alexandra Staub: When you do take on a new project, how do you begin to work with the community? Community buy-in is very important to your work.

Rayne Laborde: Embedded research has been a very explicit goal of ours for the past three years. In the Westlake MacArthur Park neighborhood, for example, we have three core partners: the school group, an aftercare program that does youth program-

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ming, and a senior services organization. At cityLAB we have had extremely long relationships with those groups. We are also constantly looking to form new partnerships. In addition, we’re an organization that attracts people that are already working in the community. We organize and take part in advocacy boards because we’re passionate about the partnership aspect to begin with. Another question is how to introduce students to community work, especially when you might only have an academic quarter to structure the project. That can be a challenge. We focus on maintaining long relationships, and not leaving a place until something is done.

Rayne Laborde: It depends on the project and is neighborhood specific — the people that we’re working with, specifically. In addition to our project structure, we’re involved in larger initiatives. Our work on ADUs is part of our housing initiative. Our initiatives never quite end, and we’re always staying in touch with various groups that we’ve worked with. We also partner with our university’s planning school and are on their juries. That provides another way to see how research is evolving in other parts of the university. Communication is important. We do quantitative research as well, but it tends not to be our focus. We have many incredible partners for quantitative research, for example the Turner Center at Berkeley, and the Lewis Center here at UCLA.

Alexandra Staub: That can be difficult when you’re working within an academic calendar. You constantly have new people that have to be brought up to speed and there’s a rotating cast of characters. Could you speak a bit about how you follow up on projects? How do you evaluate them months or even years after their completion?

Alexandra Staub: The issues you’ve addressed go far beyond Los Angeles or even the United States. Thank you very much, for this fascinating talk about cityLAB’s work. We look forward to seeing more of your work in the near future.

ENDNOTES

1 Cuff, D. T. Higgins & P.J. Dahl. Backyard Homes LA SP: 2010.

2 Le Guin, U.K.” The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” Women of Vision: Essays by Women Writing Science Fiction. Ed Denise Dupont. St. Martins Press, 1988.

3 Cozens, P. & T. Love. “A Review and Current Status of Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED).” Journal of Planning Literature. 2015.

4 Crowe, T. Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design. Woburn, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2000.

5 Ibid.; Crowe, T. & D. Zahm. “Crime Prevention through Environmental Design.” NAHB Land Development Magazine, 1994.

6 COLLOQATE, Design Justice for Black Lives. SP.

7 Bloch, Sam. “Shade.” Places Journal, Writing the City. 2019.

8 Mitchell, D. “The Annihilation of Space by Law: The Roots and Implications of Anti-Homeless Laws in the United States.” Antipode 29(3). 2002.

9 Roy, A. “Racial Banishment.” Antipode at 50. 2019.

10 Ostrom, E. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

ON SISTERED DESIGN

Assistant Professor, Departments of Design and Race and Social Justice

Northeastern University

Lily Song

Euneika Rogers-Sipp

Destination Design School of Agricultural Estates

ABSTRACT

This presentation explores the theme of Design Consequences with a focus on design education and pedagogy.

Lily Song and Euneika Rogers-Sipp present their sistered approach of teaching and learning to bring about just transitions and reparative design in the Georgia Black Belt. They speak about opportunities presented by anti-racist reckonings within the design professions and the global pandemic, along with challenges and strategies of harnessing specific moments to open up new practices and methodologies that retool design in more relevant, accountable, and impactful ways.

Lily: I’m joining this afternoon by Zoom from Northeastern University in Boston, which is situated on the occupied lands of the Wampanoag and Massachusett People. I want to begin by honoring the Native and Indigenous community leaders who work to preserve the history and culture of the tribes in this region. I also want to acknowledge the migrant, racialized, and working-class people who have joined them — despite four centuries of systematic division and cooptation — in seeking more healthy and humane ways of living together on the land. Boston remains among the most segregated metro areas in the country but is also home to fierce anti-displacement struggles and initiatives for equitable development.

Euneika: I would first like to acknowledge the living land, Our Mother Earth, as well as those first non-human and Indigenous human land keepers for the close relationship they had with the land. I would then like to acknowledge my ancestors who toiled without reward on this sacred soil and their allies who understood fellowship beyond blood.

Lily: We will be speaking about the responsibility of the designer with a focus on design education and pedagogy. We believe it’s important to design with an understanding of thick histories of place along with peoples’ movements and their struggles. No matter what, design has consequences; it’s our responsibility as

designers to learn from the past to take mindful actions in the present that move with intention into the future.

Euneika: We are at a moment of climate crisis and vast inequality where we cannot afford to design without thinking about the severity of consequences, both intended and unintended. It’s also critical to act strategically to scale up transformative design that builds connections and movements between design practitioners, planners, activists, and change leaders. These would be transitions that shift society from the current extractive economy to regenerative systems. We are both very interested in what the cultures and methodologies of this sort of contextualized, solidarity design education and pedagogy looks like.

Lily: The project we are presenting today is the CoDesign Field Lab: Black Belt Study for the Green New Deal, a design-action research seminar that we co-created. It was offered at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) this past spring (2021) as a virtual course. I launched the CoDesign Field Lab in 2020 in my capacity as a lecturer in urban planning and design and founding coordinator of CoDesign, a school-wide initiative to link design teaching, research, activism, and practice. The previous year’s iteration of CoDesign Field Lab (CDFL) worked with the Place Leadership Network and the Boston Foundation. I was

Lily Song & Euneika Rogers-Sipp

thrilled to meet Euneika and learn about her long-standing practice of collaborative design and fieldwork. Euneika’s work inspired the next iteration of CDFL.

Euneika: Destination Design School of Agricultural Estates (DDSAE) builds on years of research and practice centering the Black Belt region of the southern United States. We have been investigating the practices and possibilities of integrating a reparative design residency into an intergenerational setting, anchored on youth-led inquiry. We are a collective of educators from different backgrounds and design disciplines and are all connected to the school through the Black Belt Reparations Design Residency and CDFL research project. Using a care and healing-based approach to collaborative design rooted in Indigenous and African American agricultural communities, this work led to my year-long Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard GSD in 2016 and eventually my connection with Lily in 2019.

Lily: Sistering is an anti-supremacist, reparative design epistemology and methodology in which designers accomplice place-based activists and frontline organizers who are leading the change to heal and repair communities, commons, and the planet. By reparative, we mean acts of repair, healing, and making whole that move us beyond the prevailing development regime, which has enclosed land and commodified much of life under settler colonialism and racial capitalism. To counter this, we seek ecologically and socially regenerative systems. One of the hallmarks of sistered design epistemology and methodology is working on relationship and community while attending to diversity and difference. This allows us to better recognize and address our respective biases and limitations as well as exercise our creative strengths and collective capacities more fully and impactfully.

On Sistered Design

THE CODESIGN FIELD LAB: BLACK BELT STUDY FOR THE GREEN NEW DEAL

Euneika: We designed the spring 2021 class to engage in the national conversation about how the framework of the Green New Deal can be translated into actual projects that will live in and help repair the Black Belt region. We examine how these projects should take place, what they look like, who they serve, and how, with a repair mindset, they will roll out. Our inquiry included several questions:

• How are we defining Just Transitions?

• What tools from DDSAE’s framework and the CDFL could be used or adapted to support the development of reparative design?

• How can we make a case for catalytic federal and state policies and infrastructure investments that compensate for centuries of profound injustices?

• How can we amplify the incredible community-driven, movement-based work already happening in the Black Belt region that has brought forth DDSAE and other African American women-led practitioners?

Our collaborative coursework resulted in the creation of story maps, stakeholder-power maps, and future histories focused on reparative infrastructural possibilities in the Black Belt. We also created and developed infrastructures of sistering in order to to codesign the future histories between CDFL students and DDSAE “youth elders.”

Lily Song & Euneika Rogers-Sipp

THE LEAD-UP

Lily: The series of anti-racist conversations in summer 2020 across design schools and institutions were sparked by the convergence of several major events. Many designers were working from home under shelter-in-place mandates. COVID was especially affecting women, essential workers, and communities of color. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing by police, mass protests in defense of Black lives took place. We also experienced intense weather events: floods, storms, heat waves, and fires. Under the Trump presidency, a voter organizing initiative led by Black women in Georgia was working toward turning the tideq of the next election.

Euneika: The social justice flashpoints that mobilized the current push for reform and change are simply the latest motivators in the effort to eradicate atrocities against marginalized community members. In our grandparents’ lifetime, African Americans have been denied full American citizenship as well as access to protections against environmental catastrophes. Our collective was asking why it takes a video [of George Floyd’s killing] for many to finally believe injustices were happening and be motivated to action? Social and environmental activists have been making the case for years that a social justice

and environmental reckoning was long overdue. It is not enough to say a Black life matters without also acknowledging that that life comes with thoughts and agency beyond just breathing and that our educational experience and voices matter. Unpacking the ongoing impact of the legacy of oppression, and working toward an active vision that could change negative narratives into positive outcomes, is critical to the transformation we seek.

Lily: It became clear that so much of what was happening in the world – the pandemic, accelerating climate vulnerabilities, antiracist reckonings, defeating Trumpism – was tied to the Black Belt. Events of today link back to the founding of plantation capitalism, which economically integrated the globe while ravaging the environment and sowing the racial divisions that continue today. The Black Belt was a place of hope and a cradle of American social movements for abolition, human rights, environmental justice, and voter mobilization. Many of these movements were based on a tradition of Black women leadership.

Among designers and planners, 2020 saw a lot of discussion and excitement about the Green New Deal (also known as the American Jobs Plan), and as the election results came in November and January 2021, it was becoming a legislative possibility. The Black Belt has some of the high-

est levels of climate vulnerability. That isn’t just about being situated in coastal regions. It relates to socioeconomic metrics and the government’s capacity to prepare and respond to crisis events. Climate vulnerability offers cautionary lessons about how landmark policies like the historic Homestead Acts and New Deal reinforced white supremacy and ecological decimation through sprawling spatial development. Vibrant social movements and southern innovations like community land trusts and economic collectives are so instructive for designing and planning for just transitions. The HR 40-Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act and the HR 1102-Thrive Agenda were also garnering public attention. They presented opportunities to deepen and extend Green New Deal planning and design in more reparative, just, and sustainable ways.

Euneika: Our project allowed us to connect the dots and offer an interdisciplinary design action research seminar in which emerging designers could gain exposure to designing with intergenerational and societal consequences and responsibilities in mind. At the same time, the seminar fostered co-building research inquiries at the intersections of five key infrastructural sectors: mobility + access, food + fiber, housing + buildings, energy + waste, and water + climate.

CONNECTIVITY

Lily: The design action research seminar initially focused on case-making to amplify work of the DDSAE and its network of community and movement-based organizations in the Black Belt region. CoDesign Field Lab enrolled fourteen graduate students, most of whom were in their final semester in urban planning, landscape architecture, architecture, and design studies. The advanced graduate levels of the students not only translated into technical competencies in spatial mapping, visual representation, and historical and document analysis but also familiarity with planning and design. The class also drew students with aligned identities and values — of the fourteen enrolled students, five identified as Black, and eight as Black, Indigenous, or Person of Color (BIPOC).

Spring 2021 was an entirely virtual semester, with students logging into Zoom class from different locations across the United States. Course lectures were pre-recorded and posted for asynchronous viewing, while Zoom class meetings were used for discussions, desk crits, workshops, and other interpersonal activities. Students completed their coursework using online platforms such as Miro, Google Doc ArcGIS, Adobe InDesign, and even WhatsApp.

Euneika: A month into the semester, Destination Design School began to integrate

its students into the collaborative learning partnership. Destination Design School students were between 6 and 15 years old and were designated as “youth elders.” The term is adopted from partner group Be Present, Inc., to denote the wisdom, foresight, and leadership of young people within multigenerational families and communities. We assembled a core teaching team that included Scarlett Rendleman, the Destination Design School project manager; Mina Kim, special advisor to the Destination Design School; and two course teaching assistants, Cynthia Deng and Thandi Nyambose. The team began weaving together a network of course mentors, who would share their expertise and gifts with the class through panel presentations, instructional videos, and workshops, as well as desk crits with the

student teams. Over a series of weekly coordination meetings among our learning team, we decided that for the final future history exercise, each of the five teams would be joined by the youth elders and selected Black Belt community mentors. Lily: Once we decided that the future histories were going to be co-created in teams of GSD students and Destination Design School youth elders, the teaching team gathered individual biographies from the students, youth elders, teaching team members, and course mentors. We then built infrastructures of sistering to support the codesign process. It was essential to practice care and fellowship at every step.

From the beginning we worked through our differences in curriculum implementation. Together, we planned and adapted the course through weekly coordination

Lily Song & Euneika Rogers-Sipp

meetings. Naisha Bradley, Harvard GSD’s assistant dean for diversity, inclusion, and belonging, greatly supported us through the Racial Equity and Anti-Racism Fund, which allowed us to gain technical assistance and offer our course speakers, mentors, and DDSAE youth elders honoraria.

Euneika: To ensure all participants felt supported throughout the experience, Destination Design School youth created a “Guide to Nourish,” to which CDFL students responded with “Youth Elder Engagement Guidelines.” For example, the youth elders requested movement breaks and learning quality over quantity, which we all appreciated and benefited from.

Lily: Our core team structured an agenda and a schedule for joint learning and teamwork between the CDFL students and DDSAE youth elders. DDSAE developed a parallel curriculum for the youth elders, who would meet separately on Saturdays. The youths, along with a few family elders, were assigned to the five teams based on personal interests and alignment. As the blended teams heard from course speakers and mentors, and jointly participated in an Afro-Futuring workshop, they collectively learned about asset-based arts and cultural programming, community wealth building, and shifting power in the Black Belt along with speculative futuring tools.

and based on what DDSAE considers culturally relevant design methodologies that we conduct as part of our core curriculum. The Afro-futurist scholar and activist Lonny Avi Brooks works as an advisor to DDSAE. Lonny was brought in to stress the importance of the research and data, and that it be anchored in an engagement process that allowed for African American youth to see themselves outside narratives of projected gloom and doom. As an outcome of their future visioning process, our youth elders used storytelling to narrate their concepts. The result was an exhibition that focuses on a future where they see themselves thriving with their families and surrounding community.

Euneika: The future visioning process was rooted in the concepts of Afro-futurism

As a next step, CDFL students generated prompts for DDSAE teammates to begin futuring artifacts and scenarios for their respective topic areas. Within a week, the DDSAE youth elders came back with written and drawn responses. These were relayed by the teaching team to the CDFL teammates who incorporated the ideas and inputs into the future histories of mobility + access, food + fiber, housing + buildings, energy + waste, and water + climate for the Black Belt region. CDFL students were instructed to weave in historical sources and multi-faceted data to ensure that future histories were recompensing for historical and systemic injustices and that they were healing forward in creative, joyful, and care-centered ways. Following two more joint teamwork sessions, the CDFL team members

Lily Song & Euneika Rogers-Sipp

presented their future history projects to Euneika and me. We offered feedback and the students made improvements as requested.

CHALLENGES AND OUTCOMES

Lily: It took a lot of coordination for us to all work together across different time zones, busy schedules, and “Zoom fatigue.” Some of the graduate students expressed a desire for deeper collaboration and more time with the youth elders, which was a tough balance given the youth were also in school throughout the day. Another challenge was managing work expectations, as the CDFL was offered as a three-credit seminar and not a six-credit studio. Some students expected a lighter load. While we would have liked to offer it as a studio, the department had decided otherwise.

It was truly impressive how much care the students took to listen, ask questions, and work together in team settings — valuing teammates’ input by thoughtfully integrating and expanding on them. The DDSAE youth elders were wonderfully open, creative, and engaging while exploring topical issues with their teammates through the future history exercise.

On the final day of class, the five teams presented and received feedback on their future histories, with course mentors and DDSAE associates and supporters in attendance. Each presentation opened with an introduction by a DDSAE youth elder. A CDFL student then presented the team’s future history. CDFL and DDSAE teammates were listed as co-authors, and the CDFL students highlighted specific inputs and inspirations from DDSAE youth elders during the future history presentations. The formats for the future history outputs included a zine, graphic novel, poster, design guidelines, and a video.

On Sistered Design

Euneika: The mood was celebratory, and the event ended with participants’ reflections on their codesign experience. it was incredible to see the fruition of complementary creative inputs and how disparate ideas could create a unified whole.

Lily: As an example, we’d like to show the infrastructural vision from the mobility and access team. It’s a poster designed to be easy and fun to read for people of different ages and from different walks of life. Here, leisure and recreation is a right. Twelve-year-old Isis, who was a member of this team, came up with the idea that all people should be able to travel and

visit their families and home regions. Her teammates, including Kevin Sipp, DDSL co-founder who is from the Black Belt region, and two graduate students from Harvard, helped her flesh out the idea. The concept includes government travel vouchers and a high-speed rail network. If you read closely, you can see that regional mobility services are provided through electrical vehicle sharing and driver cooperatives. Neighborhood ambassadors and bike repair scouts help people get around actively and safely, while libraries loan everything from books to building and farming tools, digital tablets, and musical instruments.

Other teams produced further future histories: water, housing, energy, and food.

Euneika: For the final farewell, CDFL students created greeting cards and video messages. The DDSL youth elders responded with collaged images and words of appreciation, again relayed by the teaching team via email.

CONCLUSION

Lily: Beyond course outputs, the most notable accomplishments were the creative connections and codesign processes that

we nurtured through this sistered design initiative. These gave a taste of design cultures and methodologies that are grounded, inclusive, mutual, and care-based. During a time of pandemic, anti-racism protests, electoral mobilizations, and severe climate events, the course allowed us to pause and rethink. Euneika’s invitation and our ensuing response allowed me to overcome a great sense of isolation during the pandemic year which also saw anti-Asian scapegoating and violence. Together, we reformulated design pedagogy and education as an expansive reclaiming and celebration of design ingenuity and futurity. The experience affected my

Lily Song & Euneika Rogers-Sipp

On Sistered Design

approach to other courses, research projects, and applied work. Ultimately, the experience saw me through a career transition as well.

Euneika: The class developed partnerships between people who are committed to equity. It showed how we can bring that focus to all of our design work. It validated a learning approach that affirms grassroots and youth-led inquiry. The collaboration between the CDL and DDSL helped the youth elders understand that they have transformational voices and leadership capabilities in the fields of planning and design. They were in a space where they were able to sit in a classroom with college students and have their thoughts, experiences, and ideas carry the same weight and vision. It was a truly remarkable experience.

Lily Song & Euneika Rogers-Sipp

DISCUSSION

Alexandra Staub: Thank you very much, Euneika and Lily. The project that you’ve just presented has been fascinating. In the course of this symposium, we’ve heard a number of different approaches to break through the barriers that prevent us from developing alternatives to current practices, both in the classroom and in the field. You have focused on a pedagogical approach, which is fascinating on many levels. You are training the next generation of designers and architects. It’s very important to encourage younger people, and especially People of Color who may not think they have a voice, to share their knowledge. Architecture still tends to be dominated by white, middle and upper-middle class designers. So, I also see your work as a form of advertising to get a new cohort of people involved in planning our future

My immediate question is, how will you continue? You’ve come up with an extremely creative partnering, “sistering”, between the CoLab students in a graduate-level architecture program and the youth elders in Atlanta. It sounds like this might be a prototype of some sort. If so, what’s next on the horizon?

Euneuka Rogers-Sipp: Yes, the research has to continue.

On Sistered Design

There’s lots of data, and there’s lots of information to be processed. We also need to take the research and apply it. We want to continue to build out our Reparations Design Residency.

tecture as well as the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, I’ve been leading an anti-displacement studio and continuing to apply what I created with and learned from Euneika.

The next phase of our action research project is to build on what we were able to accomplish with the CDFL by taking this research into the communities, our sister sites. There are ten DDSL sister sites that we continue to do active research with. We want to continue those partnerships and strengthen those relationships. Those communities are at the forefront, with leaders who are colleagues that I’ve been working with for years. We’re very excited about continuing to unpack what we’re learning and to come up with product and practice prototypes, such as the ones our youth have shown and expressed. We want to build those prototypes and demonstrate those practices.

The anti-displacement course is sistering with the Sweetwater Foundation in Chicago. We are concept-mapping drivers of displacement, forms of displacement effects, and mediating conditions. We are also concept-mapping what anti-displacement looks like and we are creating design impact maps of consequences — intended and unintended — of placemaking projects. We’re learning a lot through this mutuality and co-creation.

The thing about my work with Euneika is that it evolves as our relationship does.

It’s possible that we might do a different iteration. I’m here for that. Working with the youth elders was so energizing.

Lily Song: I’ll speak to how things have continued within the university. Since moving to Northeastern this semester, where I’m teaching in the School of Archi-

One of the things you said is that our design spaces are not always representative of population majorities, especially when the population is changing. One of

Lily Song & Euneika Rogers-Sipp

our CDFL grad students once said of the youth elders, “Honestly, before you came and joined our team, our ideas were kind of boring.” I see that as representative of design spaces and how they might be stale in ways that we don’t even notice.

Alexandra Staub: It brings up the question of what role architects and designers will play moving forward. We’ve been at a crossroads for quite some time regarding the traditional role of the architect. We used to be generalists, and there was a clear trajectory of how to design and build. But when I see your work and the work of Rayne Laborde and UCLA’s cityLAB, you see novel and incredibly creative approaches. Architecture has become very interdisciplinary. It’s become an opportunity to engage voices that we formerly would not engage. I think you’ve tapped into a very positive, creative impetus in your work by listening to people whose voices traditionally haven’t been regarded.

as an afterthought, or because government policies require it. But the way that Euneika and I proceeded, along with Mina Kim, who was part of our team, was to put care and nourishment at the center. That’s something I learned from this process: to make sure that co-creation isn’t extractive, or transactional, and that it doesn’t cause harm.

Euneika Rogers-Sipp: And that it doesn’t damage any of our underground work. In the circles that I am in, especially in grassroots leadership, if you act in a way that is dismissive of other people’s emotions, their feelings, their contributions, you don’t get anything done.

In the beginning of this CoDesign partnership, we spoke a lot about our orientation.

Lily Song: Thank you. Sometimes we engage groups without much thought, or

What is the reality of the students – the underground work of the students that are in the institution compared to the day-to-day realities of the folks that are in the communities? That intersection, and bringing those realities together, is really what it’s all about. You have to be able to sustain that. That is what keeps the design

alive, whether it be an architectural design or built infrastructure project. It’s the relationships. It’s the care. It’s all the things that keep people coming back, the trust. You have to build that. Sometimes it’s not as valued as some of the other outputs, but it remains critical, nevertheless.

I’m wondering whether it’s specifically some of the theory behind CoDesign that’s informing some of these concepts. And then I’m also wondering how this extension from agriculture to design and architecture informs the way that you engage in and talk about activism.

Alexandra Staub: We have a comment and a question in the chat. One of our viewers says, “Thank you for sharing this incredible project. I wish I had an opportunity like this in grad school and would love to facilitate an experience like this for our students at Penn State.” We also have a question from Lisa Iulo, the director of Penn State’s Hamer Center for Community Design.

Lisa Iulo: I have a comment and a question. I love the way that you talk about connectivity and how connectivity brings together land and people and place and partnerships. I can’t help but notice that many of the terms you’re using, such as reparative and regenerative, are terms that come from agriculture, and that you’re applying them to design and architecture.

Lily Song: Those are really keen observations. Thank you for sharing them. One of the things that came forward in the conversations with Euneika is the leadership of the Black Belt region and its social movements. Many of the movement leaders come from agricultural communities. With the Green New Deal and the kind of planning and design around the Just Transition Framework coming as it does out of the Climate Justice Alliance, they’re an outgrowth of the environmental justice movements and especially the labor environmental organization nexus. Here, too, we see agricultural roots. We can say that so much innovation in society comes from social movements of people who are doing the hard work of changing society on the ground.

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Euneuka Rogers-Sipp: This is a place of language and the use of language. You say certain terms come from the agricultural movement, but if you talk to the average farmer, how often do they use the term “reparative design?” How often do they say “carbon sequestration” when they refer to an age-old practice of regenerating or pulling carbon out of the air through a soil-based practice? I think language is critical, especially when we’re unifying people and bringing them together. Repair, nurturing, and healing, I would say that’s more of a feminine approach. And many people argue that agriculture leans toward the feminine.

to continue to discover what a Blackled feminist approach to making spaces means. The social movements we referred to before, we have to look at the role of women in those movements. That will be our place of inquiry.

I agree that reparative, nourishment, regenerative, are all principles that have long been overlooked in the way we design environments and build today. It’s not unusual for us to use these words in our work and we feel very at home creating spaces that reflect those ideas. This is about how women, and especially Black women, make spaces. You asked about where we go next. I want

Alexandra Staub: That’s a powerful observation. I’ll throw in anecdotally that when I was putting together this symposium, I found that a lot of this kind of work is being done either by women or in centers that are being led by women. It certainly shows the shifting roles of the architect in our society. We are becoming more socially engaged as architects and designers in related fields. I think it’s important that we explore design in terms of social justice and social equity and that this becomes part of our DNA.

Lily Song: I really appreciate these remarks about gender. Some of the students in the class were really inspired by Ursula Le Guin’s carrier bag of fiction theory, which proposes that instead of hunters, it was gatherers who advanced society. It’s important to gather and have bags and

containers for things and ideas. One of the ideas that Euneika talked about earlier was the notion of a container for the kind of interdisciplinary work that we do. We try to bring in a critical gender lens, to bring together design and community development, and sociology. Ultimately, the infrastructure of sistering acted as a container to hold all these things.

emotional.” These things are associated with women’s leadership as being weak, or not as good, or that it’s risky somehow.

Euneika Rogers-Sipp: I agree that our work is akin to a container. But we talk a lot about the way in which that container holds things. For some people, having a container and keeping things held together is a measurement of success. For others, having a container and understanding what holds it together and valuing all that holds it together and speaking to things that could possibly tear the container is important. It’s one thing to have emotions and find that the container breaks as a result of those emotions or that people’s feelings are hurt. But in most design spaces, at least in my personal experience, there’s no room for your feelings to be hurt. People are worried it’s going to affect the bottom line. They’ll say, “You’re too

On the contrary, our containers are built to be strong. When we recognize that emotions are important, it’s feeling. And we want to be able to feel. That’s where our sensitivity and our empathy come from. And so, if the container gets broken, we can come together and figure out how to solve that. It’s not the end of the day. Containers are good to hold things, but what are we holding? And how are we holding these things?

Alexandra Staub: A great parting thought. The project is stunning, and it shows what we can do when we start breaking through design conventions in transformative ways. Thank you so much to both of you for the thought-provoking work you shared with us today.

Lily Song & Euneika Rogers-Sipp

ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION 1

Ife Salema Vanable

Ph.D. Candidate in Architectural History and Theory

Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation

Rayne Laborde

Associate Director of cityLAB

UCLA

Lily Song

Assistant Professor of Race and Social Justice in the Built Environment

Northeastern University

Euneika Rogers-Sipp

CEO and founder of the Destination Design School of Agricultural Estates, Atlanta

Alexandra Staub

Professor of Architecture, Penn State

Alexandra Staub: We had four speakers this afternoon: Ife Vanable, Rayne Laborde, Lily Song, and Euneika Robers-Sipp.

I’d like to start by asking you a small question on a very large topic. All of you examine issues at the urban scale, where problems such as redlining, pollution in low-income communities, and housing inequalities have become baked into our urban DNA. How do we begin to move out of that legacy? How do you decide where to start to make the biggest impact — as researchers, as activists, as pedagogues, and as designers?

Rayne Laborde: For us, it comes down to teaching and learning together with the members of the communities that we work with. Although social equity has been discussed more frequently in the past year, it has not often been discussed within the context of design studios. I think one of the best things that we can do as educators is to initiate these conversations and to listen to what our community partners feel as a result of years of segregation or environmental racism. These topics have profound impacts on all of us.

Euneika Rogers-Sipp: I agree that listening is a lost art. This art encompasses the ability to slow down, observe, listen deeply, and then have the time to be aware, understand what you have seen, and think about how to make meaning for others. It’s important to meet people where they are. There’s all kinds of data and information out here, but we measure it

by how meaningful it is for the end user. Does it fulfill the day-to-day needs of their operation?

Listening and being able to hear, seeking common goals through accepting your own belief system as well as those of others is a lost art. In the work of our CoDesign Field Lab that we presented today, we realized that we had to make more space to hear each other, something that is highly underrated.

our role to join forces with these struggles and divest from extractive modes of development. We should invest more in regenerative movements and change leaders. We are surrounded by them; they are in every single city and region.

Lily Song: Regarding problems like redlining and housing discrimination being baked into our urban environment, I would say that the oven is still on. A lot of design and planning is complicit, for example in speculative housing commodification. Yet as long as these human-created problems have existed, people have been organizing and fighting them. In his case for reparations, Ta-Nehisi Coates talks about racial dispossession and the violence that African Americans have sustained in this country, but also about the calls for reparations that go back centuries. As designers and planners, it is

Alexandra Staub: One of the things that we discovered this afternoon is that we are battling against mainstream perceptions. When we challenge established opinions, we often find that the real situation can be quite different from the mainstream canon.

Ife Vanable: For me, it is important to understand the experiences of people who live in urban domains. Such domains have their problems, but they are also sites of joy. I grew up in New York, my grandparents were born in New York. I have a large history steeped in urbanity that is pleasurable and joyful, as well as consisting of sites that are characterized by extraction, subjugation, and other forms of dispossession. But within that context, there is always an ongoing mode of survival and fight, as well as joy, pleasure, and desire.

Ife Salema Vanable, Rayne Laborde, Lily Song Euneika Rogers-Sipp, Alexandra Staub

We must make space in the pedagogical realm for students to not merely perpetuate narratives of dispossession by reading narratives of Black folks solely steeped in issues that are deemed problematic. We must provide space for students to imagine sites of joy and elevation within these contexts as well.

Alexandra Staub: Rayne, Lily, and Euneika, your talks brought up Ursula Le Guin’s carrier bag theory of fiction. Le Guin reminds us that the first human tool was not a weapon, but rather something that holds: a bag, a pouch, a vessel, something for gathering and storing and sharing. Before making the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home. With this revelation, the narrative of humanity shifts from that of violence to that of safekeeping. The purpose is neither resolution nor stasis, but continuing process. Can you reflect on how that metaphor of the vessel of gathering and storing flows into the work that you do, especially with students?

what the carrier bag is collecting or holding, the opportunity is to understand how thick and nuanced design and planning practice is and how important it is to have a “bag” of different experiences and perspectives. As humans, we are limited by our embodied experiences and what we know. Co-design and co-creation can happen with people who are situated differently from us in ways that are disruptive and fun and surprising, or even self-transcending.

Lily Song: For students thinking about

Euneika Rogers-Sipp: For me, it boils down to the “containers” that have held me in my journey through the years. Some of those who have joined me have been incredibly challenging, but I have been held by family, people in my community, mentors, and friends. A really important piece of my work is mentoring students. A main point of support is asking, “How are you holding yourself and how are you being held by those around you?” The extended space to explore that is part of the culture of our learning environment. You need to take the time to examine those things and create those things for yourself.

Such things aren’t normally part of a graduate degree or your Ph.D., or even an acknowledged academic skill set. Having that support system is essential to the work that we do.

Alexandra Staub: Are you saying that the legitimacy of your work is sometimes called into question?

Euneika Rogers-Sipp: Absolutely. We spend hours learning how to come across as a professional, to be competent in the field. How about other necessary skills? We hear a lot these days around radical self-care. That is what I think we are trying to transfer to our young people alongside all of the other soft or hard skills they may attain as designers. How will you take care of yourself considering the demands that you are going to confront?

Alexandra Staub: When you go through most professional programs, you hear about something called billable hours. Rayne, you work at a center that considers architecture within its social context; do you have any solutions to the problem private practices face when they want to do socially-oriented work but feel they cannot really afford to do so?

Rayne Laborde: We have a lot of support by merit of being a university center. A large organization is structurally different from a small practice, and we don’t have the financial struggles that small practices often face. We support through mentoring, but also through financially supporting our students directly

whenever we can. We have all kinds of research grant programs for the urban humanities that allow us to focus on the work and the end product. We want people to have space to explore their interests. That is not always fostered within architecture programs. All this goes back to the carrier bag theory of fiction and the idea that “carrying” is not only useful, but it is a necessity. It’s a concept that is not always embraced within academia, where a more abstract ideal of design excellence reigns. Often, ideas of “design excellence” are separate from any consideration of people or program or who is making an object.

Ife Vanable: For me the roadblocks are when students hold onto certain ideals and modes of knowledge production, as well as certain assumptions. One of our greatest challenges is finding ways to creatively think beyond our assumptions, to move beyond ideas and narratives that are so persistent that they are no longer interrogated. We need to get away from ideas of “truth” and instead create spaces where students can cultivate curiosity.

Alexandra Staub: All of you have mentioned education as a possibility for advocacy. I am not sure who is advocating more: Is it is the students, since they are driving so much of the thinking about making systemic changes, or is it the teachers, who advocate for change through projects like the ones you presented in your talks today? When you engage in advocacy through the pedagogical system, what do you see as the largest roadblocks and how can we get around them?

Sometimes we experience resistance from the administration to certain forms of pedagogy. I taught a studio last semester called “Guns and Butter” that looked at architecture and capitalism. There was a huge amount of interest in the topic, although there probably wouldn’t have been several years ago. When I taught that studio, there were five or six Black women studio faculty at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, which had also never ever happened before.

We’re currently experiencing a moment of reckoning. We need to recognize it, however, as part of ongoing struggles,

Ife Salema Vanable, Rayne Laborde, Lily Song, Euneika Rogers-Sipp, Alexandra Staub

and ongoing work. We need to see the current attention to these types of stories, narratives, and approaches to pedagogy, not as something new, but something to tap into, something which already exists and has always existed. What I am finding as kind of a roadblock is that there is a lot attention on what is new and I am deeply interested in what has always been in the minds and the hearts and the hands of people. It is these things that become a territory for imagination and further investigation.

Alexandra Staub: It sounds like you have to look forward in addition to keeping your eyes on the periphery because you need to see what else might be important for your work. Lily, Euneika, Rayne, what do you see as the largest roadblocks towards change and how do we get around them?

Rayne Laborde: I see normative ideas of production and evaluation as problematic. At UCLA during the pandemic, a lot of classes were ungraded, and I thought that was incredible. We should not have grades. They are not helpful for the stu-

dents, and they are not really helpful for us either. We become focused on grades instead of the idea or the intent of the effort that is happening before us.

Alexandra Staub: Written commentary on one’s work is a more nuanced means of reflection, certainly. Euneika and Lily, what do you see as the largest roadblocks and how do we get around them?

Lily Song: I was just noticing some resonance between what both Ife and Euneika have said about things that have always been there and also the idea of leadership by Black women. I’d like to hear more about that.

Euneika Rogers-Sipp: I can speak a bit to that. We value the knowledge that comes from community leaders. We seek out different ways of knowing. One roadblock I’ve found is validation of people’s experience when they don’t have a degree. Another is the insider/outsider division.

On the one hand, you sometimes need people from outside a situation to see it with fresh eyes, on the other hand there is

a question of control and ownership when outsiders swoop in and come up with a solution to a local problem. The dynamics of such situations impact the efficiency of solutions-based work.

As Black women, we often find ourselves not valued for being makers of space. We build space in all kinds of ways. Women in general have always been doing so, but particularly Black women. In the field of the architecture, landscape architecture, and design it is always a real fight to be heard and to be considered as capable. Those are the roadblocks that I have come across from personal experience. We are trying to move through them with our school.

Alexandra Staub: It sounds like a further instance of gathering and collecting versus a more aggressive projection of one’s ideas. This afternoon, we saw what a rich array of research and design work has arisen from that approach of gathering. Lily, would you like to add to that?

Lily Song: Yes. You referred to students earlier. Students have always been active, and in recent years, students have gotten more organized and have demanded responses and accountability from design schools around social issues such as anti-Black or anti-Asian violence, or closing borders to refugees and immigrants, or climate justice. Those issues present a huge opportunity for change. Part of this is a weird flipside to how neoliberal our universities have become

Ife Salema Vanable, Rayne Laborde, Lily Song, Euneika Rogers-Sipp, Alexandra Staub

and how they consider students as clients. There is pressure to appease students, which creates an opportunity that students can harness to fight for change.

One challenge is that since students graduate, we need a generational leadership transfer amongst student organizations. In addition, it’s important to work with faculty and staff accomplices to push change over the long term, especially for curricula. I think another issue we need to examine is tuition. Students are saddled with tuition debt. When I talk to first-generation students, I find they feel pressure to, above all, pay off their debts and support their households. I think that sometimes confines the kind of courses that they are able to commit to, and they end up pursuing a more skills-based, practical approach to their education. Could we just lower tuition? Could we have more resources to support students, so they don’t have to make those tough decisions?

Alexandra Staub: Students are in an interesting position because they are between childhood, where they do not have much

power, and an early career stage, where they suddenly have more power and more say in our society. Some have their eye on getting a well-paying job in order to pay off their debts. But in the work that all four of you are doing, you are also modeling alternatives to that scenario. That first job does not need to be in a corporate architectural office or even a small firm that is building for an elite. It could be in a firm that does advocacy. I think you are all modeling different visions of that advocacy that could begin to change the architectural profession in smaller or larger ways. Do you also think that you are changing perceptions of where students are seeing themselves in five or ten years?

Euneika Rogers-Sipp: I mentioned ecosystem and support before. We have to assess what it takes for the child to have the most positive experience they can beyond the STEM education or the hard skills that we provide. I was fortunate; I was privileged to receive support from my family and my community. I was not necessarily in what would be considered a high-risk environment. We do need pol-

icies for children that come from high-risk neighborhoods. It is a question of what it takes for people to be able to learn and thrive in a particular environment. Some of the challenges that come to mind when we talk about equity is education for all, quality of education, quality of life, experience for all, and cultural enrichment opportunities for all. These are huge issues. We can intervene in the academic growth of a child. Our community design interventions have to do with the family household and the way in which that child is “held” so they receive the design education that they need or want for the future. At the end of the day, we need to ask how well we understand some of the settings and environments that people are coming from that are considered high risk, and what we can do about the problem in order to begin to move the needle on it.

Alexandra Staub: I think you bring up an excellent point and one that is perhaps universal across many design schools. How do you recruit and retain, and really encourage students that have insights that come from their “underprivileged”

backgrounds? Often, these students do not consider architecture or related disciplines as something they might be able to do. How do you get people into the profession so that they can begin to use their wisdom? Ife, I think you called some of these “underprivileged” spaces sites of joy. How do you bring that joy into the academic environment, into academia?

Ife Vanable: I am skeptical of “inclusivity.” I do not think the answer is necessarily that folks have to be in the institution. The institution is not always the answer, academia is not always the answer. It’s not always where the most radical and ebullient work is done. I am very interested in the ways that students think. Consider a student from the Bronx, like myself, who as a child went to a Quaker school with no grades, and then went on to architecture school. How do you start to foster those different sets of valuation? How do you, as an academic, think of the work that you do in the space of academia, a place that Fred Moten and Stefano Harney describe as a place where you “steal,” where students like me are able to come in and

Ife Salema Vanable, Rayne Laborde, Lily Song, Euneika Rogers-Sipp, Alexandra Staub

learn skills in order to take them elsewhere? The institution is not necessarily a site where you must stay to be successful if we can spin other types of narratives around where success and value lie. I was able to work in offices that were fairly corporate, and my aim was always to get the information, the tools, the skills, the knowledge, the know-how, and to go elsewhere with that. I never thought of myself as climbing a ladder.

When we enable people to assign different types of value to the ways in which we move in the world, then we are not looking at being in the institution as the only solution. It is unethical to bring students into a place where they have no support, where they are not “held.” To use students to increase your numbers [for diversity purposes], but to not have systems in place for their support or a curriculum that is capacious and sensitive, experimental and inventive, and imaginative and caring enough – that is deeply unethical.

I work a lot with graduate students at Columbia University in the Black Student Alliance. We wrote one of these letters

that was circulated, and our aim was not necessarily to transform the institution, but to transform ourselves, to think about the ways that we work and develop and present our own projects, the ways that we bring people into the fold that we want to talk to. Inclusion into the institution takes a back seat to thinking about ways to operate otherwise, to come in, to gain skills, to move those elsewhere. We need to change how we think about value and where success lies, and where and how the numbers of architects are counted. Katherine McKittrick talks about a sort of cruel mathematics around Blackness. It involves a desire to always be counting everyone and when we say there is only a certain percentage of Black architects, it just means there is a certain percentage of licensed professionals and practitioners. They have bought into the regime of licensure, but there are many, many people working in a range of ways to shape the built environment. Those people are not counted, so we do not hear their narratives. How we rehearse and repeat their narratives is really, really important.

Alexandra Staub: In other words, we’re under-valuing a lot of contributions to the construction and shaping of society. It’s a great point. Even within the architectural profession there are ingrained sets of criteria that seem difficult to break through. Since all of us are involved in pedagogy in some way, what specific ideals might you have for a curriculum to make it more inclusive?

Rayne Laborde: I look at everyone who spoke today and how interdisciplinary all of our scholarship is. Architecture school is not just an education about building systems or construction or how to make a building. I think that fact should give us more freedom to be ever more radical and more exploratory, to set new guidelines and boundaries and systems of evaluation, and to really be more open across disciplines in a way that allows students to craft intellectual homes for themselves in ways that are not limited by the rigid confines of what constitutes a degree.

Lily Song: Academic institutions are all different and have their own cultures. Even within academia, there are different people that have different logics and are there for different reasons. One of the things I love about architecture school is that there are a lot of practitioners who are not just there to get tenure. They love teaching, they want to mentor a new generation. I am really excited about power shifts and leadership shifts and cultural shifts and the dominant logic shifting. I want there to be more leadership from people who reflect the global population majority.

Ife Salema Vanable, Rayne Laborde, Lily Song, Euneika Rogers-Sipp, Alexandra Staub

It’s important to train students to build movements and collaborations instead of working in individualistic ways. I work with a lot of first-generation students, and nowadays personal “brands” seem so important, and everybody wants to be a thought leader and design leader. But then how do you work together with people who have been leading the work for generations beyond the trends? If there were ways to incorporate a more collaborative style of thinking into the culture of architecture or planning curricula, it would make a real long-term difference.

Alexandra Staub: For my final question, I’d like to ask all of you what you will be doing next. You are certainly all doing work that I will want to follow. So, what is on the horizon for you? Would anyone like to share that?

Alexandra Staub: Getting those voices out there is so important. In the past years, a body of literature by People of Color has come more to the forefront and this literature has highlighted the topics that you have been talking about today. Much remains to be examined – recent work has become a treasure trove of new areas of exploration for many of us. Lily and Euneika, what are your plans? The CoDesign Field Lab work you introduced us to today sounds like it might have been a prototype.

Ife Vanable: I am going be working to finish my dissertation – to finish this project and bring it to fruition. It’s important to have Black women that students can read from, Black women who can be cited.

Euneika Rogers-Sipp: The CoDesign Field Lab laid the foundation for a year-long journey by foot that I’ll be embarking on throughout the Black Belt region. That journey will bring a narrative to light with different voices to capture the day-to-day realities, the day-to-day language of our residents, folks who have been here for generations, and even those who are newer. I want to portray what they are doing and what they feel about our current moment. And then I’d like to pursue collaborative work to get more of my own

writing published. We’ve been talking for a long time about how to get more things published, and I plan to do so with the written word, but also through film and through photography and music. So that’s what I’ll be working on for the next year: lifting up the Black Belt and its people.

Lily Song: I’ll continue to develop the sistered approach to design education and pedagogy, incorporating it into studios and research seminars as deeply as I can. Now that I have some time and space at Northeastern [University], I’ll be consolidating my research on anti-displacement.

I hope to be pulling together a manuscript on that in the next year or two.

Alexandra Staub: Rayne, you are part of a network, and I know you probably have many projects that are in the works. What are your future plans?

also working on a project called “Place2Be” that I spoke a lot about today. Since March, I’ve been working with a new union here in Los Angeles on house tenants and against carceral housing. The union came out of the Echo Park Lake displacement, which was a huge topic in L.A. It has been an entirely new way of working with folks who I have known for quite a while that have this new-found power.

Alexandra Staub: Wonderful. Will the exhibit on demolition and demonstration be online or in person?

Rayne Laborde: It’s only in person, we are going old school.

Rayne Laborde: A couple of fun ones coming up. We have an exhibition that will be in October [2021] over the dual theme of demolition and demonstration. I’m

Alexandra Staub: We’re getting to the close of the hour. I’d like to thank you all for a series of very invigorating talks and for the ideas that you have presented in the round table. We look forward to hearing much more about your work!

Ife Salema Vanable, Rayne Laborde, Lily Song, Euneika Rogers-Sipp, Alexandra Staub

THE RACIALIZATION OF SPACE AND THE SPATIALIZATION OF RACE

Antwi Akom Professor, Department of Ethnic Studies

University of California at San Francisco and San Francisco State University

My talk today is about the racialization of space and the spatialization of race, and how architecture, technology and community informatics can help us dismantle racism, design for equity, and build more just, equitable, diverse, and inclusive, age-friendly and livable communities for all.

I am a sociologist, a technologist. Currently, I am doing a lot of work with social and spatial epidemiologists. I do a lot of work around community-driven data. I have been inspired by folks like Jane Jacobs and Eli Anderson and Jan Gehl, and others who think a lot about public space and the public realm. I’ve been described as a teacher, a unifier, a poet, an activist, and a catalyst, and yes, that does spell TUPAC when you are reading vertically. Some have called me an eco-visionary because my work is rooted in building real-time data, place-based data, location-based data, data visualization tools, and technologies that meet community needs in the center and uplift community voices. I incorporate Afro/Asian/ Indigenous/Latinx/disabled/poor/rural and other principles of participatory co-design into my work. I have had the pleasure of working with some of the leading designers, architects, starchitects, landscape architects, and engineers in the world.

HOW ARCHITECTURE, TECH-EQUITY, AND COMMUNITY INFORMATICS CAN DISMANTLE RACISM, IMPROVE DESIGNING FOR EQUITY, AND INCREASE SOCIAL JUSTICE.

The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race

I would like to start this conversation by wearing my sociology hat. You can think of me, today, as playing the role of Alexis De Tocqueville for architecture. Because I am not an architect by training, I am hoping that my invisibility, my two-ness, will be seen as helping you see and feel things that you otherwise may not be able to see and feel.

With my social scientist hat on, there are two paradoxes that I would like to put forward today. First, I think architects, as well as designers, planners, and engineers, are suffering from a form of schizophrenia. Everywhere I go, there are a number of designers, architects, planners, and engineers that are frustrated by their inability to make a real difference in the lives of vulnerable populations, to really affect change in BIPOC communities, rural communities, and other low-income communities. George Lipsitz refers to this as the racialization of space and the spatialization of race. Lots of folks like you say it is remarkable that we do not talk more about the impact of race and space in practices of architecture, urban planning, and beyond.

The second paradox that I want to mention is that it is no secret that the field of architecture gets whiter and more male as you go higher and higher toward the top of the profession. We know that women have 42% of architectural degrees, but only make up 17% of principals and partners. We know that only 15% of registered

architects are women, and even less than that are People of Color. Some of the key questions that this makes me think about are: how are these issues playing themselves out in the built environment, these pipeline issues, these pathway issues? How do these issues play out in the places and spaces where we live, learn, work, play and pray? What can designing for equity look like if we begin to pay more attention to the racialization of space and the spatialization of race, if we do not ban these conversations from our colleges and universities, in our classrooms and our communities? Can we have those courageous conversations?

That is what I am hoping to do with you all today. Some of the key questions I would like to address are:

1. How can real-time data, location-based data, and experiential data revolutionize the way that designers, architects, planners, and engineers vision and plan with vulnerable populations?

2. How might the power of technology help you all improve your existing and future conditions, analysis, and land-use planning?

3. Can architecture really help dismantle racism? I obviously believe that it can.

4. Can we design for not just equity, but design for a justice that leads to greater gender equity, so that people do not have to leave their communities in order to live, learn, work, and thrive?

Antwi Akom

The two paradoxes are connected. As individuals and as a society, I do not believe we have gotten much better from a Tocquevillian perspective at designing for equity because we have not gotten much better at addressing, identifying, and transforming issues of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusivity in our own lives, let alone in the built environment. Architecture, much like race, is personal. It’s local and immediate. But racial profiling and systemic racism are still disproportionately impacting many of the communities that I work with, people that we love and care about.

HERE ARE 25 WAYS YOU COULD BE KILLED IF YOU ARE BLACK IN AMERICA:

1. Failing to signal a lane change

2. Riding in your girlfriend’s car with a child in the back

3. Running into the bathroom in your own apartment

4. Selling cigarettes outside of a corner store

5. Riding a commuter train

6. Walking home with a friend

7. Making eye contact

8. Selling CDs at the side of a supermarket

9. Wearing a hoodie

10. Walking away from police

11. Walking toward police

12. Missing a front license plate

13. Holding a fake gun in the park in Ohio

14. Driving with a broken brake light

15. Sitting in your car before your bachelor party

16. Walking up the stairwell of your apartment building

17. Calling for help after an accident

18. Holding a fake gun in Virginia

19. On the way to Bible study

20. Holding a fake gun in Walmart

21. Laughing

22. Holding a wallet

23. Attending a birthday party

24. Doing absolutely nothing

25. Not being servile enough

The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race

Unfortunately, the more things change, the more they stay the same. The different ways that we treat immigrants in this country are based on their skin color. European immigrants are treated very differently from non-Europeans. Cuban immigrants are treated very differently from Haitian immigrants. These things impact access to institutional resources and the way that we think about public and private space. I want to start with this point of departure, which is that you cannot talk about placemaking without talking about race making, and its impact on places and spaces.

Placemaking with low-income communities and communities of color has become a lost art. We have gotten good at placemaking for the 1%, but not with the 100%. We have gotten good at building places, but not those that poor people can afford. Our librarians, our teachers, our firefighters, our designers, our architects, our planners, and our engineers, they cannot afford them either. Right?

What we have seen is an explosion in homelessness, and people who really have no place to live. Our excuse, for those of us who have not gotten swept up in this wave is, “Well, I got in early.” But what about the next generation of librarians or teachers or firefighters, designers, architects, and planners? Where are they going to live? How are they going to survive? If we want to design for equity, if we want to engage in more equitable development, architecture, and land-use practices, consider not only the 1% but design with the 100%.

It is not enough to ask how we can build healthier communities, happier communities, greener communities, more livable communities, or more age-friendly communities. Those are all important questions. But we first have to address these real structural inequalities in terms of race, class, gender, immigration, poverty, sexual orientation, and other forms of social inequality that are impacting the shape of our communities, past, present, and future. To us, the real challenge of designing for equity in the 21st century is to reimagine and redesign the built environment in neighborhoods, public spaces, and places with communities

Antwi Akom

that have been locked out of sustainability, shareable city, smart city, and social justice conversations.

Will we design our neighborhoods and our communities for rich folks or for poor folks? For people of color, or for white folks? For eco-haves or eco-have nots? Who will have a say in how we redesign our communities: powerful elites, or everyday people? How do we redesign our communities not for but with those folks who are disproportionately being impacted by two of the greatest challenges of our lifetime – climate change and income inequality? How do we redesign with those populations who have limited access to food and who are facing unprecedented environmental threats? My term for this situation is called “eco-apartheid.”

Eco-apartheid is a systems theory that examines the ecological impacts of structural racialization. An article I published in Teachers College Record in 2011 highlights the ways that structures and institutions cumulatively cause unequal built environment health benefits and burdens based on race, class, gender, language, and immigration status, as well as their interconnections.

What do I mean by all that theory? Let’s try to bring this into the real world and into practice. I want to talk about what I mean by this idea of cumulative causation and eco-apartheid. Close your eyes for a minute and imagine that all of you are Black,

living and growing up in West Oakland. How many grocery stores do you think that there are in our neighborhood in West Oakland? Ten? Five? No. There are two grocery stores in our neighborhood for Black kids and Brown kids growing up in West Oakland.

How many liquor stores do you think there are in our neighborhood? Remember, we are talking about eco-apartheid, the racialization of space and the concept of cumulative causation. Five liquor stores? Twenty? Forty? More! Depending on how you draw the boundaries of our neighborhood, there are between fifty and sixty liquor stores in our neighborhood. So, if you are a young Black child, and you are on your way to school and you want to get some food, it is easier to find a liquor store or a corner store. What kind of food is available at corner stores? Chips and all these unhealthy foods.

As you eat those foods, and you are on your way to school, what is the race and the gender of most of the teachers that comprise urban schools? The answer is white women. That is all good. But the folks who are teaching in our schools, they do not look like us and they share a very different lived experience than we have. When we sit down in that classroom and cannot sit still in our seat, we are all sugared up from the food that is available to us in our neighborhood. What is the general diagnosis for us Black and Brown children? The answer is attention

The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race

deficit disorder. The point being that the outcomes matter more than the intent. You could be a well-meaning teacher, but because of structural issues, we have too many people being misdiagnosed in terms of access to institutional resources and privileges in our neighborhoods and our communities.

Eco-apartheid suggests that “environmental bads,” like toxic waste, are located more in low-income communities and communities of color while “environmental goods,” like grocery stores, open space, and parks, are in wealthier neighborhoods. Is that true? Absolutely. Eco-apartheid is also a more powerful definition than environmental racism because it begins to capture inequalities beyond race, including space, place, and waste. Eco-apartheid explains the urban grocery gap, the fresh produce gap, the transportation gap, while simultaneously centering race and racism in their political implications.

Eco-apartheid also suggests that policy is not neutral. So, it captures the racial and the spatial reproduction of inequality. This builds off of the work of Tim Wise, who asserts that the history of the United States is systematic, institutionalized, racial privilege – for white folks and white-looking folks. An early example is the naturalization law of 1790 – the first law passed by Congress after the Constitution was ratified, which said that whites and whites only could be free citizens of the United

States. Another example is the Homestead Act of 1862, which guaranteed white folks 162 acres of land if they just agreed to live on the land, improve the land, and pay a small registration fee. Black people could not even get 40 acres and a mule. Let’s look at federally subsidized, underwritten and guaranteed Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Assistance loans, which led to the creation of the white middle class. When you do that for Black people and other people of color, you call it welfare, but when we do that for white folks, we call it good sound economic policy.

Because of these systematic institutionalized racial privileges that are passed from one generation to the next, the average white family has twenty times the net worth of the average Black family, eighteen times that of the average Latinx family, and ten times that of the average Asian American family, depending on how you disaggregate Asian American. We cannot even calculate Indigenous people, which shows how far Indigenous communities have fallen behind in terms of the wealth gap. This racial privilege is not just because of white people’s hard work, better value,s or better morals. It is because of systematic, institutionalized racial privilege passed from one generation to the next.

I will give you an example: I have a grandfather-in-law who fought in World War II. His best friend, his brother-in-arms, was a white male. They saved each other’s lives,

they saw their people die on the battlefield, they stood up and they fought for their country. When they came back to the United States from fighting in the war, they wanted to live near each other and they settled on a place in the Monterey Peninsula. My grandfather’s white friend found property that he thought they could both buy, in a place called Pebble Beach, California. He got the land. When my Black grandfather went there to buy the lot next door, he was prevented from buying that land because of redlining, blockbusting, and restrictive covenants. Some forty or fifty years later, the white grandfather’s home is worth $32 million dollars – talking about the racialization of space, the spatialization of race. My Black grandfather was able to get a place in a town called Seaside or Marina and worth a couple $100,000 in today’s dollars.

Just that example alone should crystallize for us that this is not only happening in terms of wealth, but also in terms of health. This is how we create healthy communities and sick communities. Whiteness, as a skin color, becomes a key ingredient to accessing healthy property in the United States. Property rights have been equated because money talks with human rights. Have things changed? No, they haven’t.

Mortgage algorithms also perpetuate racial disparities. In an analysis of two million documents, racial biases still present when we control for debt to income or loan to neighborhood value. Lenders were 40% more likely to reject Latinx people, 50% more likely to reject Asian Pacific Islanders, 70% more likely to reject Indigenous people, and 80% more likely to reject Black people. The racialization of space is real, and it is deeply connected to both the past and the present. What Critical Race Theory is trying to do is to highlight the role that the past is played in our present land use conditions. Together we have to address what our future can really be like.

I will put out a challenge to those of us listening today: What if we create the next generation of designers, architects,

Antwi Akom

The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race

planners, and engineers at the intersection of social justice, technology, ecology, human rights, and activism? What if our next generation designing for the equity movement places access to opportunity at the center and commits to protecting our most vulnerable populations? What if the goal is to correct centuries of disinvestment and inequalities in our neighborhoods and communities? What if we do not just build hybrid cars? What if we build a hybrid design for equity?

I like the way Deanna Van Buren talks about the Designing for Justice movement. Can our designing for equity and designing for justice movement help make our communities more just, more equitable, more diverse, and more inclusive (JEDI)? Can this movement help make them immune from gentrification and displacement? Do you all believe that this is possible? And if so, what might such a movement look like?

A few examples that I have seen in the field, and this is probably the most obvious one, is to imagine what would happen if more female architects designed buildings such as sports venues and theaters. If we eliminated paradox one, as I outlined above, then we would eliminate the line of women waiting outside the ladies’ room for lack of space, while the men’s room remains accessible. This might seem obvious, but it’s an example of how underlying issues that we need to address are holding us back from reaching our full potential.

In Vienna, Austria, you see designers planning the city to work specifically for women and children by widening sidewalks, increasing access to public transport, building ramps to accommodate people with strollers and wheelchairs, making sure that there is the kind of lighting that we need, so all people, particularly vulnerable populations, can feel safe.

What about housing equity? I think Dudley Square in Boston is a classic example of resistance, agency, and political contestation leading to designing for equity. The city had planned on gentrifying a neighborhood and turning it into an area of luxury condos

and hotels. Instead, folks were able to take over the land from the private developer using eminent domain and convince the city to sell it cheaply. Then, they were able to put up 225 units of affordable housing as well as urban farms.

I mentioned Deanna Van Buren. One of her projects involves restoring Oakland through running the country’s first design studios with incarcerated men and women, incorporating restorative justice and design. Instead of building prisons, they build spaces to amplify restorative justice. She started with schools, and the early data shows that it has reduced violence up to 75%. It is reducing the impact of post-traumatic stress disorder on survivors of violence as well as young people in school. Then there is our own work where we have recognized that zoning is the real DNA of the built environment. We had the opportunity to work with the Memphis 3.0 Comprehensive Plan. We became a part of community-led, reinvestment-forum-based coding that focuses on equity and creating degree change maps that prioritize public investment. We helped bring in $200 million and public infrastructure, affordable housing, parks, greenways, and we renewed public assets. This was the winner of the Congress for New Urbanism 2021 Design Award. This plan included the missing middle strategies that are a key ingredient of designing for justice and designing for equity.

developers. David Adelaide, in Detroit, raised $5 million, largely from family and friends, and created an investment fund that is accessible to neighborhood residents. So, when developers come in, instead of you losing your home, you actually get to own your home and build equity in your neighborhood.

How do you pay for all this? We think it is really important that you invest in infrastructure. The miracle of Minneapolis is a great example where they took one half commercial tax revenue, and they redistributed that tax revenue to the poorest areas in the city. So, everyone has access to quality civic and green infrastructure, such as schools, parks, and playgrounds.

What about walkability? We know how important that is to designing for equity and justice. If sitting is the new smoking, then walkability is the secret sauce to help us have more complete communities. But –walkability for whom? We always like to lift up the work of Morgan Dixon and GirlTrek, who draw on women’s liberation in the civil rights movement to get one million women walking out for the health of their neighborhoods.

I also want to lift up the role of community

GirlTrek has rallied to mobilize Black women and girls to walk for their health, together, across the country. They walk five days a week, thirty minutes a day, for eight weeks straight to reach, restart, jumpstart, kickstart healthier lives and to combat these statistics that say, “Black

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The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race

women are going to die earlier, younger, and at higher rates than any other group in the country.” Four out of five Black women are over a healthy weight. All of this is preventable. We know that walking changes things when Black women walk together. Four years ago, when Morgan first started, she mobilized 10,000 women; now it is one million. I invite you to check out her TED talk.

Our organization Streetwyze is in conversation about partnering with Morgan, and the great work that they are doing so that we can design our neighborhoods for justice and equity. Organizations such as GirlTrek, Gehl, Opticos, and Designing for Justice are transforming through the Designing for Equity movement, changing things from top down technical approaches to bottom up community-driven approaches that can create the next generation of JEDI designers, architects, planners and engineers. But, the real question remains: how do we scale this up? How do we move from local work to making this national and international, yet still remain relevant locally at all scales?

Our answer to this has been Streetwyze, a next generation participatory planning

3.0. We begin to answer these questions about how you integrate community voice with participatory planning processes. We think the missing link is something that we refer to as “tech-equity.” Our methodology is to create more tech-equity with everyday people

and vulnerable populations. We call this “people powered placemaking,” which is a real-time, two-way communication with everyday people, who can participate in the design solutions that meet their everyday needs. Streetwyze is a mobile, mapping, and SMS platform that collects real-time data about how people are experiencing spaces in places. We turn this data into actionable analytics.

For example, we might have decent information that the communities you are working with live near a park; but what we really want to know about is community members’ experience in that park. Is that the park where the drugs are sold? Is it safe enough to bring your children here? Do the swing sets even work at the park? Streetwyze gives you both that experiential and proximal data. In doing so, we are able to address two key questions: 1) How do you democratize data? and 2) How do you democratize decision-making?

Imagine us giving architects, designers, engineers, and planners this 360-degree view of what is happening on the ground beneath the regulatory datasets that you generally use, and beyond the one-anddone town hall meetings where the same people speak, driving the decision-making of development processes during a time that I have to take my child to school, or work two jobs, so that I could not be at that meeting. Streetwyze brings a level of inclusivity. We address key questions around social and structural determinants.

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With Streetwyze, you can determine the real condition of community resources. For example, the public data set from the Alameda County Department of Public Health suggests that East Oakland is a food oasis. The public data is what the mayor, the designers, and the architects see. When you compare this with the data from Streetwyze, you realize is that what look like grocery stores are not, in fact, grocery stores. Most of them are in fact, liquor stores or corner stores, with only a handful of them being grocery stores. In Streetwyze you can upload picture, audio, and video, which is so important with vulnerable populations, Gen Z, millennials, and people whose first language may not be English.

When you are thinking about designing for equity and justice, it’s important to have the lived experience of people on the ground. Streetwyze can provide that view. For example in East Oakland, we have had major policy and social impacts. Prior to our work, there was no farmer’s market at the local high school; in part due to this work, a farmer’s market is now in place there.

We were also able to connect with the CalFresh fund, to go to each of those corner and liquor stores and, in collaboration with the store owners, make sure that they were restocked and reshelved with more culturally and community responsive, healthy, affordable food. Then this data was also used to help pass a multi-million-dollar food commissary in Oakland for the Oakland Unified School District.

Streetwyze caught the eye of then-President Obama, who invited me and the other co-founders to the Frontiers Conference where we presented our work along with other top innovators in the world, after which we were invited to participate in the Opportunity Project, launched in 2014. The Atlantic’s CityLab has named Streetwyze one of the top twelve data tools to help vulnerable populations. GreenBiz has an article that talks about Streetwyze as being one of the few processes and platforms to measure different forms of

resiliency: social resiliency, cultural resiliency, climate resiliency, and built environment resiliency.

We have also partnered with grassroot organizations as well as big organizations like Google. On Google Streetview cars, we put air quality sensors – we partnered with Google and Aclima. As those Streetview sensors were driving through neighborhoods in West Oakland, we would collect data on black carbon, nitric oxide (NOx) and oxident (Ox). We have been collecting one of the most valid and reliable datasets on the relationship between asthma and air quality that we could possibly have.

We have been invited to do anti-gentrification mapping in the city of San Francisco, making and designing parks that are more diverse and inclusive. We’re trying to understand who is and isn’t using the parks and where parks are located. This helps us understand the relationship between vulnerable populations, parks as cooling centers, and climate change. We have worked with the Oakland Department of Transportation to create safe and accessible walking and biking lanes. We have created and led the racial equity impact assessment for the downtown Oakland plan.

Streetwyze has been used in terms of new-market tax credits. Right now, we are just seeding your imagination with different ways that our platform has

really impacted designing for equity and designing for justice. The old way of doing new-market tax credits involved a blanket approach to what community needs and wants are. At Streetwyze, we are able to get a much more hyperlocal and local approach to community wants and needs.

We have been able to partner with folks like Enterprise Community Partners, who launched an opportunity index on housing, powered, in part, by Streetwyze. We were able to provide real-time data on housing, help them build out an evidence-based assessment framework, help them make it open source, and help them build a community engagement partnership toolkit. With some of my colleagues at UCSF, we have mapped the geography of homelessness. Finally, we have worked with Walter Hood Design on community art revitalization and reimagining the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) headquarters and BART, so that it could be more culture and community responsive and more accessible with and for diverse cultures.

Streetwyze been able to create safer water fountains in San Diego, better bus stops in Fresno, healthier food in the Bay Area. We have expanded nationally and internationally. What we have learned –and this is coming from Brian Stevens’s book, Just Mercy – is that ultimately, we will not be judged by our technology, our design, our intellect, or our reason, and not by how we treat the rich, the powerful and the privileged, but how we embody

The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race

Antwi Akom

empathy and compassion, and how we treat the poor, the condemned, the most vulnerable amongst us. That is the nexus where we begin to understand our collective humanity and who we are as a people, as well as our purpose on the planet.

We came here today because we believe, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, that the moral arc of the universe is long and bends towards justice, but only if we embody justice in our minds, our hearts, our bodies, and our daily actions. We cannot reach our full potential and as designers, architects, planners and engineers, we will not do so until we start seeing and designing for equity in a way that restores the dignity, humanity, and access to institutional resources and privileges. This would center community voices with the world’s most vulnerable populations.

We hope you join us in building a new design for equity and justice revolution. We hope you begin to integrate the power of local and official knowledge and technology in a way that shows how the field of architecture can dismantle racism, and help neighborhoods and communities become more transparent, open, connected, smart, shareable, sustainable, and equitable for all.

The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race

DISCUSSION

Alexandra Staub: Thank you so very much for a fascinating talk and an introduction to the Streetwyze project. I have several questions for you already, but I would like to start with a question from the chat.

One of our viewers wonders if you have done any work on intergenerational living. I think this question is coming from a few angles: One is that affordable housing is a huge problem, especially in California, where you are based. Intergenerational living is something that architects are currently looking at, both from a social and from a housing density point of view.

Antwi Akom: Thank you for the question. Folks have used our platform and process to help create spaces and places for intergenerational housing and living, particularly with Indigenous and Asian American populations. There’s real potential for further work there.

Alexandra Staub: Thank you. If I understand it correctly, Streetwyze is a data collection tool that crosses over into be-

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ing something like social media. Regular people can input data about their environment, but also gain information about it. Is that correct?

that person.

Alexandra Staub: Could you give an example of how a regular person be able to use data collected by Streetwyze?

Antwi Akom: Absolutely. The inspiration behind Streetwyze grew out of understanding the limitations of ethnography and of big data. Big data often misses what is really happening on the ground, and secondary data is not always accurate at the street level. Ethnography is limited because someone else is telling your story. Streetwyze grew out of a desire to help everyday people share and tell their own stories and share their own vision of transforming the social material conditions in their neighborhoods and communities. It is a data visualization as well as a digital storytelling tool. It can also be used as social media and can create a local knowledge ecosystem. It can play a number of different roles when we want to design for equity and consider how we want to design with but not for our community. We can continually interact with the person we are building with a way that maximizes opportunities and access to resources for

Antwi Akom: There are a number of ways to use Streetwyze. We are able to create a local knowledge ecosystem with the people who have access to the app. The type of knowledge depends on who we are partnering and collaborating with.

Streetwyze can be used by everyday people to share and find goods and services, to rank the quality of goods and services, and to connect and share at the same time. For example, if you saw that the eggs in that liquor store were not refrigerated, you could share that information on Streetwyze. The app can also be used by the city or designers and architects to improve the built environment, by tapping into the knowledge of the people who are living there.

Alexandra Staub: We have another question from the chat. Could you talk about what institutions of higher learning

The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race

can do to address some of the issues that you highlighted? Questions such as the [school to prison] pipeline issues, more attention to vulnerable populations, the 98% versus the 2%, or a change in substantive issues stressed with the curriculum and so forth.

purposes of the university. When that research project is done, the university leaves. It is a very extractive relationship with the community, which is why low-income communities of color do not trust us as a university.

Antwi Akom: I think institutions of higher learning have an imperative to hire, recruit, retain, and promote more women and People of Color, and that will help transform the industry. Higher education can and should be playing an intentional role in building these pathways and partnerships. I also think that higher education needs to rethink and reimagine the ways that we work with community groups. I do not think community-based participatory action research (CBPR) goes far enough, hence, the invention of this new methodology and technology, to go deeper and to put the power in the hands of the community.

We have to reimagine the work that we are doing in communities, we have to let communities really lead. We have to be more purposeful and more intentional about building pathways to prosperity and pathways out of poverty, with Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, People of Color, women, all of these groups who have been locked out of these conversations.

When we do CBPR and think that we are centering community voice, whose research is it? Who owns it? What purpose does it serve? Often it is serving the

Alexandra Staub: We have another question from the chat. Is there a digital divide, effect, or impact? At Streetwyze, you do a lot of work with very vulnerable populations, for example, homeless populations, and those populations, I would assume, cannot afford cell phones and phone plans. What happens if you are dealing with very poor people who do not have the access to the technology that Streetwyze relies on?

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Antwi Akom: We thought a lot about this. We designed for equity with those populations in mind. For example, my father’s father and his side of the family lives in Ghana, West Africa, in a place called Kumasi. it is very rural. We wanted to make sure that those kinds of populations could have access to our platform and our process. In those situations, there are ways where we are able to create paper maps with QR codes that upload the data into our system. There are a number of other design interventions with homeless populations or other vulnerable populations, we are able to pair researchers with them and input information, if necessary. This focus has enabled us to connect and build trust with vulnerable populations.

ods you’ve developed to tackle the problems that are specific to the United States translate well into these other cultural contexts?

Antwi Akom: The method of centering community voices is very translatable.

Experiential data is very translatable. Our platform and processes are multilingual. We have had a lot of success in international contexts because we value racial and social justice methodology and an approach that lets the community lead. I think when you do that, you are able to create culturally and community responsive methodologies that are more equitable, diverse, inclusive, and that allow for better design.

Alexandra Staub: Could you speak a bit about your international work?

Antwi Akom: We are working internationally. Most recently, we launched in New Zealand with the Maori population. We are also in the process of launching in South America and in Africa.

Alexandra Staub: How do you work with architects and related designers, for example, urban designers?

Alexandra Staub: Do you find the meth-

Antwi Akom: Generally, they have reached out to us to partner and collaborate on different projects. We’ve had conversations about redesigning the new stadium for the Oakland A’s, where the architects need to do community engagement. We’ve had

conversations about a $5 billion project for the San Francisco waterfront. Here we want to make sure that the population is not vulnerable to climate change, and the impacts of climate change.

is responsive to community needs. We have been invited into conversations and projects where we are able to move the discussion about responsiveness from the margins to the epicenter of the planning process.

Community voices, the vision, and the storytelling for those projects – architects know that needs to be at the center. When

COVID hit, and our social and physical infrastructure shut down and our digital infrastructures increased, people began to see the need and the power of platforms and processes like Streetwyze even more. So those conversations have just grown in size and scale and in scope.

Alexandra Staub: How about the post-occupancy process? Do you have processes in place where you are able to re-examine those structures after they’ve been built?

I also mentioned that we lead the racial equity impact assessments for the downtown plan for the city of Oakland. We worked with Opticos Design on the community engagement portion of the Memphis comprehensive plan. Designers, architects, planners, and engineers know about us, but our passion is people and planning for and with people, especially vulnerable populations. We want to make sure that we plan and design in a way that

Antwi Akom: It depends on the project, but ideally every step of the way we want to ensure that community voice is being heard and listened to and responded to, and we are holding people accountable. That can become really challenging, because there are so many competing priorities and different groups.

Alexandra Staub: I am going to ask a question on a slightly different topic. In Ibram X. Kendi’s book, How to be an Anti-Racist, he argues that one of the problems with trying to integrate communities is that many cultures, especially Black cultures, tend to be devalued in

The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race

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the process because it is assumed that they get absorbed into the mainstream. There is such a richness in Black cultures that gets lost through that process. In your work with vulnerable communities and with communities of color, have you found a way to enhance or highlight the community cultures that you are gathering data on?

spoke of today. And culture does have a strong spatial component. Thank you very much for your talk today. It has been very thought-provoking and we look forward to hearing more about your work in the future.

Antwi Akom: Absolutely. Our whole platform and process is built on lifting up those cultures that are normally locked out and left out of these conversations. I have been talking about creating a multilingual platform, creating a culturally and community responsive platform, centering community voice, and linking the design process to art and other forms of design. I spoke about the Walter Hood design project at the end. We were able to lift up the power of culture to really inspire us and help us design for equity and justice. That is something that we take very seriously.

Alexandra Staub: The landscape architect Walter Hood is a preeminent designer who spatializes some of the issues you

WHO COLLECTS THE DATA? A TALE OF

THREE MAPS

Catherine D’Ignazio

Department of Urban Studies and Planning

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Lauren F. Klein

Departments of English and Quantitative Theory and Methods

Emory University

ABSTRACT

Who makes maps and who gets mapped? Using a comparative reading of three maps, this case study introduces the idea that data may be useful, but they are not neutral. Rather, they represent the interests and goals of the groups and institutions that are doing the data collection. These interests and goals may be liberatory, discriminatory, or something in between. In all cases, we argue that an analysis of social inequality is essential to understanding the ethical impacts of data collection and use. To aid such analysis, we introduce a model of power out of sociology called the matrix of domination. This model helps us understand why collecting data is political, why not collecting data is also political, and what actions we can take to address unequal social relations using data science.

This essay was originally developed for the MIT Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) and portions are excerpted from chapters 1 and 2 of Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, Data Feminism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020).

Who Collects the Data? A Tale of Three Maps

Figure 1: “Where Commuters Run Over Black Children on the Pointes-Downtown Track” (1971) is one image from a report, “Field Notes No. 3: The Geography of Children,” which documented the racial inequities of Detroit children. The map was created by Gwendolyn Warren, the administrative director of the Detroit Geographic Expedition and Institute (DGEI), in a collaboration between Black young adults in Detroit and white academic geographers that lasted from 1968–1971. The group worked together to map aspects of the urban environment related to children and education. Warren also worked to set up a free school at which young adults could take college classes in geography for credit. Courtesy of Gwendolyn Warren and the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute.

In 1971, the Detroit Geographic Expedition and Institute (DGEI) released a provocative map, “Where Commuters Run Over Black Children on the Pointes-Downtown Track.” The map (Figure 1) uses sharp black dots to illustrate the places in the community where the children were killed. On one single street corner, there were six Black children killed by white drivers over the course of six months. On the map, the dots blot out that entire block.

The people who lived along the deadly route had long recognized the magnitude of the problem, as well as its profound impact on the lives of their friends and neighbors. But gath-

ering data in support of this truth turned out to be a major challenge. No one was keeping detailed records of these deaths, nor was anyone making even more basic information about what had happened publicly available. “We couldn’t get that information,” explains Gwendolyn Warren, the Detroit-based organizer who headed the unlikely collaboration: an alliance between Black young adults from the surrounding neighborhoods and a group led by white male academic geographers from nearby universities. Through the collaboration, the youth learned cutting-edge mapping techniques and, guided by Warren, leveraged their local knowledge in order to produce a series of comprehensive reports, covering topics such as the social and economic inequities among neighborhood children and proposals for new, more racially equitable school district boundaries.

Compare the DGEI map with another map of Detroit made thirty years earlier, the “Residential Security Map” (Figure 2). Both maps use straightforward cartographic techniques: an aerial view, legends and keys, and shading. But the similarities end there. The maps differ in terms of visual style, of course. But more profound is how they diverge in terms of the worldviews of their makers and the communities they seek to support. The latter map was made by the Detroit Board of Commerce, which consisted of only white men, in collaboration with the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, which

consisted mostly of white men. Far from emancipatory, this map was one of the earliest instances of the practice of redlining, a term used to describe how banks rated the risk of granting loans to potential homeowners on the basis of neighborhood demographics (specifically race and ethnicity), rather than individual creditworthiness.

Redlining gets its name because the practice first involved drawing literal red lines on a map. (Sometimes the areas were shaded red instead, as in the map in Figure 2.) All of Detroit’s Black neighborhoods fall into red areas on this map because housing discrimination and other forms of structural oppression predated the practice. But denying home loans to the people who lived in these neighborhoods reinforced those existing inequalities and, as decades of research have shown, were directly responsible for making them worse.

Early 20th century redlining maps had an aura very similar to the “big data” approaches of today. These high-tech, scalable “solutions” were deployed across the nation, and became one method among many that worked to ensure that wealth remained attached to the racial category of whiteness. At the same time that these maps were being made, the insurance industry, for example, was implementing similar data-driven methods for granting (or denying) policies to customers based on their demographic

Catherine D’ignazio & Lauren F. Klein

Who Collects the Data? A Tale of Three Maps

Figure 2: Residential Security Map, a redlining map of Detroit published in 1939. Created as a collaboration between the (all white men) Detroit Chamber of Commerce and the (majority white men) Federal Home Loan Bank Board, the red colors signify neighborhoods that these institutions deemed at “high risk” for bank loans. Courtesy of Robert K. Nelson, LaDale Winling, Richard Marciano, Nathan Connolly, et al., Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America, University of Richmond: Digital Scholarship Lab.

Catherine D’ignazio & Lauren F. Klein

characteristics. Zoning laws that were explicitly based on race had already been declared unconstitutional; but within neighborhoods, so-called covenants were nearly as exclusionary and completely legal. The effect of these policies, bolstered by maps like the example in Figure 2, exacerbated racial inequality and have led to long-lasting, intergenerational impacts.

Who makes maps and who gets mapped?

The redlining map is one that secures the power of its makers: the elite white Christian heterosexual men on the Detroit Board of Commerce, their families, and their communities. This particular redlining map is even called “Residential Security Map.” But the title reflects more than a desire to secure property values. Rather, it reveals a broader desire to protect and preserve home ownership as a method of accumulating wealth, and therefore status and power, that was available — preferentially and unfairly — to white people. In far too many cases, data-driven “solutions” are still deployed in similar ways: in support of the interests of the people and institutions in positions of power, whose worldviews and value systems differ vastly from those of the communities whose data the systems rely upon.

The DGEI map, by contrast, challenges this unequal distribution of data and power. It does so in three key ways. First, in the face of missing data, DGEI compiled its own counter-data. Warren describes how she developed relationships with

“political people in order to use them as a means of getting information from the police department in order to find out exactly what time, where, how, and who killed [each] child.” Second, the DGEI map plotted the data they collected with the deliberate aim of quantifying structural oppression. They intentionally and explicitly focused on the problems of “death, hunger, pain, sorrow, and frustration in children,” as they explain in the report. Finally, the DGEI map was made by young Black people who lived in the community, under the leadership of a Black woman who was an organizer in the community, with support provided by the academic geographers. The identities of these makers matter, their proximity to the subject matter matters, the terms of their collaboration matter, and the leadership of the project matters.

For these reasons, the DGEI exemplifies one of the core principles of what we have termed “data feminism:” challenge power. Challenging power requires mobilizing data science to push back against existing and unequal power structures and to work toward more just and equitable futures. To challenge power means we must take action against an unjust status quo. In this case study, we discuss one starting point for challenging power: Collecting counterdata — in the face of missing data or institutional neglect — offers a powerful starting point.

Who Collects the Data? A Tale of Three Maps

POWER AND THE MATRIX OF DOMINATION

What do we mean by power? We use the term power to describe the current configuration of structural privilege and structural oppression, in which some groups experience unearned advantages — because various systems have been designed by people like them and work for people like them — and other groups experience systematic disadvantages — because those same systems were not designed by them or with people like them in mind. These mechanisms are complicated, and there are “few pure victims and oppressors,” notes influential sociologist Patricia Hill Collins.

In her landmark text, Black Feminist Thought, first published in 1990, Collins proposes the concept of the matrix of

domination to explain how systems of power are configured and experienced. It consists of four domains: the structural, the disciplinary, the hegemonic, and the interpersonal (Figure 3). Her emphasis is on the intersection of gender and race, but she makes clear that other dimensions of identity (sexuality, geography, ability, etc.) also result in unjust oppression, or unearned privilege, that become apparent across the same four domains.

The structural domain is the arena of laws and policies, along with organizations and institutions that implement them. This domain organizes and codifies oppression. Take, for example, the history of voting rights in the United States. The U.S. Constitution did not originally specify who was authorized to vote, so various states had different policies that reflected their local politics. Most had to do with owning prop-

Figure 3: The four domains of the matrix of domination from Collins, 2000.

Catherine D’ignazio & Lauren F. Klein

erty, which, conveniently, most women could not do. But with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, which granted the rights of U.S. citizenship to those who had been enslaved, the nature of those rights — including voting — were required to be spelled out at the national level for the first time. More specifically, voting was defined as a right reserved for “male citizens.” This is a clear instance of codified oppression in the structural domain.

It would take until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 for many (but not all) women in the United States to be granted the right to vote. Even still, many state voting laws continued to include literacy tests, residency requirements, and other ways to indirectly exclude people who were not property-owning white men. These restrictions persist today, in the form of practices like dropping names from voter rolls, requiring photo IDs, and limits to early voting — the burdens of which are felt disproportionately by low-income people, People of Color, and others who lack the time or resources to jump through these additional bureaucratic hoops. This is the disciplinary domain that Collins names: the domain that administers and manages oppression through bureaucracy and hierarchy, rather than through laws that explicitly encode inequality on the basis of someone’s identity.

deals with the realm of culture, media, and ideas. Discriminatory policies and practices in voting can only be enacted in a world that already circulates oppressive ideas about, for example, who counts as a citizen in the first place. Consider an antisuffragist pamphlet from the 1910s that proclaims, “You do not need a ballot to clean out your sink spout.” Pamphlets like these, designed to be literally passed from hand to hand, reinforced pre-existing societal views about the place of women in society. Today, we have animated GIFs instead of paper pamphlets, but the hegemonic function is the same: to consolidate and reinforce ideas about who is entitled to exercise power and who is not.

Neither of these domains would be possible without the hegemonic domain, which

The final part of the matrix of domination is the interpersonal domain, which influences the everyday experience of individuals in the world. How would you feel if you were a woman who read that pamphlet, for example? Would it have more or less of an impact if a male family member gave it to you? Or, for a more recent example, how would you feel if you took time off from your hourly job to go cast your vote, only to discover when you got there that your name had been purged from the official voting roll or that there was a line so long that it would require that you miss half a day’s pay, or stand for hours in the cold, or ... the list could go on. These are examples of how it feels to know that systems of power are not on your side and, at times, are actively seeking to take away the small amount of

Who Collects the Data?

A Tale of Three Maps

power that you do possess. The matrix of domination works to uphold the undue privilege of dominant groups while unfairly oppressing other groups. This remains true even as women constitute a majority of the world’s population. What does this mean? With respect to gender, for example, men constitute the dominant group, while all other genders experience structural oppression, which is evident in any research that studies wage gaps, wealth gaps, political representation gaps, and more. Sexism is the term that names this form of oppression. In relation to race, white people constitute the dominant group (racism); in relation to class, wealthy and educated people constitute the dominant group (classism); and so on.

Using the concept of the matrix of domination and the distinction between dominant and oppressed groups, we can begin to examine how power unfolds in and around data. This often means asking uncomfortable questions: who is doing the work of data science (and who is not)? Whose goals are prioritized in data science (and whose are not)? And who benefits from data science (and who is either overlooked or actively harmed)? These questions are uncomfortable because they unmask the inconvenient truth that there are groups of people who are disproportionately benefitting from data science, and there are groups of people who are disproportionately harmed. Asking these questions allows us, as data scientists ourselves, to start

to see how privilege is baked into our data practices and our data products.

USING COUNTERDATA TO CHALLENGE THE MATRIX OF DOMINATION

As we saw with the DGEI example, collecting counterdata can be a powerful strategy for exposing the differential harms of an unequal world, particularly when institutions run by dominant groups neglect to quantify or investigate such harms. Lacking comprehensive data about women who die in childbirth in the United States, for example, ProPublica decided to resort to crowdsourcing to learn the names of the estimated 700 to 900 U.S. women who died in 2016. As of 2019, they’ve identified only 140. Or, for another example: in 1998, youth living in Roxbury — a neighborhood known as “the heart of Black culture in Boston” — were sick and tired of inhaling polluted air. They led a march demanding clean air and better data collection, which led to the creation of the AirBeat community monitoring project.

Scholars have proposed various names for these instances of ground-up data collection, including counterdata or agonistic data collection, data activism, statactivism, and citizen science (when in the service of environmental justice). Whatever it’s called, it’s been going on for a long time. In 1895, civil rights activist and pioneering data journalist Ida B. Wells assembled a set of statistics on the epidemic of lynching that was sweeping the United States. She accompanied her data with a meticulous exposé of the fraudulent

Catherine D’ignazio & Lauren F. Klein

claims made by white people — typically, that a rape, theft, or assault of some kind had occurred (which it hadn’t in most cases) and that lynching was a justified response. Today, an organization named after Wells — the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting — continues her mission by training up a new generation of journalists of color in the skills of data collection and analysis.

A counterdata initiative in the spirit of Wells is taking place just south of the U.S. border, in Mexico, where a single woman is compiling a comprehensive data set on feminicide: gender-related killings of women and girls. María Salguero, who also goes by the name Princesa, has logged more than 5,000 cases of feminicide since 2016. Her work provides the most accessible information on the subject for journalists, activists, and victims’ families seeking justice.

The issue of feminicide in Mexico rose to global visibility in the mid-2000s with widespread media coverage about the deaths of poor and working-class women in Ciudad Juárez. A border town, Juárez is the site of more than 300 maquiladoras — factories that employ women to assemble goods and electronics, often for low wages and in substandard working conditions. Between 1993 and 2005, nearly 400 of these women were murdered, with around one-third of those murders exhibiting signs of exceptional brutality or sexual violence. Convictions were made in only three of those deaths. In response, a number of activist groups like Ni Una Más (Not One More) and Nuestras

Hijas de Regreso a Casa (Our Daughters Back Home)

were formed, largely motivated by mothers demanding justice for their daughters, often at great personal risk to themselves.

These groups succeeded in gaining the attention of the Mexican government, which established a Special Commission on Feminicide. But despite the commission and the fourteen volumes of information about feminicide that it produced, and despite a 2009 ruling against the Mexican state by the Inter-American Human Rights Court, and despite a United Nations Symposium on Feminicide in 2012, and despite the fact that almost all Latin American and Caribbean countries have now passed laws defining femicide or feminicide — despite all of this, deaths in Juárez have continued to rise. In 2009 a report pointed out that one of the reasons that the issue had yet to be sufficiently addressed was the lack of data. Needless to say, the problem remains. How might we explain the missing data around feminicide in relation to the four domains of power that constitute Collins’s matrix of domination? As is true in so many cases of data collected (or not) about women and other oppressed groups, the collection environment is compromised by imbalances of power.

The most grave and urgent manifestation of the matrix of domination is within the interpersonal domain, in which cis and trans women become the victims of violence and murder at the hands of men. Although law

Who Collects the Data? A Tale of Three Maps

and policy (the structural domain) have recognized the crime of feminicide, no specific policies have been implemented to ensure adequate information collection, either by federal agencies or local authorities. Thus, the disciplinary domain, in which law and policy are enacted, is characterized by a deferral of responsibility, a failure to investigate, and victim blaming. This persists in a somewhat recursive fashion because there are no consequences imposed within the structural domain. For example, the Special Commission’s definition of feminicide as a “crime of the state” speaks volumes to how the government of Mexico is deeply complicit through inattention and indifference.

Of course, this inaction would not have been tolerated without the assistance of the hegemonic domain — the realm of media and culture — which presents men as strong and women as subservient, men as public and women as private, trans people as deviating from “essential” norms, and nonbinary people as nonexistent altogether. Indeed, government agencies have used their public platforms to blame victims. Following the feminicide of 22-year-old Mexican student Lesvy Osorio in 2017, researcher Maria Rodriguez-Dominguez documented how the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Mexico City shared on social media that the victim was an alcoholic and drug user who had been living out of wedlock with her boyfriend. This led to justified public backlash, and to the hashtag #SiMeMatan (If they kill me), which prompted sarcastic tweets such as “#SiMeMatan it’s because I liked to go out at night

and drink a lot of beer.”

It is into this data collection environment, characterized by extremely asymmetrical power relations, that María Salguero has inserted her feminicides map. Salguero manually plots a pin on the map for every feminicide that she collects through media reports or through crowd-sourced contributions (Figure 4, top). One of her goals is to “show that these victims [each] had a name and that they had a life,” and so Salguero logs as many details as she can about each death. These include name, age, relationship with the perpetrator, mode and place of death, and whether the victim was transgender, as well as the full content of the news report that served as the source. Figure 4 (bottom) shows a detailed view for a single report from an unidentified transfeminicide, including the date, time, location, and media article about the killing. It can take Salguero three to four hours a day to do this unpaid work. She takes occasional breaks to preserve her mental health, and she typically has a backlog of a month’s worth of feminicides to add to the map.

Although media reportage and crowd-sourcing are imperfect ways of collecting data, this particular map, created and maintained by a single person, fills a vacuum created by her national government.

The map has been used to help find missing women, and Salguero herself has testified before Mexico’s Congress about the scope of the problem.

Salguero is not affiliated with an activist group, but she makes her data available to activist groups for their efforts. Parents of victims have called her to give their thanks for making their daughters visible, and Salguero affirms this function as well:

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Figure 4: María Salguero’s map of femicides in Mexico (2016–present) can be found at https://feminicidiosmx.crowdmap.com/. (Top) Map extent showing the whole country. (Bottom) A detailed view of Ciudad Juárez with a focus on a single report of an anonymous transfemicide. Salguero crowdsources points on the map based on reports in the press and reports from citizens to her. Courtesy of María Salguero

Who Collects the Data?

A Tale of Three Maps

“This map seeks to make visible the sites where they are killing us, to find patterns, to bolster arguments about the problem, to georeference aid, to promote prevention, and try to avoid feminicides.”

It is important to make clear that the example of missing data about feminicide in Mexico is not an isolated case, either in terms of subject matter or geographic location. Feminicide is a widespread problem that occurs globally in all countries that normalize violence against women, including the United States. And the phenomenon of missing data is a regular and expected outcome in all societies characterized by these unequal power relations, in which inequality and oppression are maintained through willful disregard, deferral of responsibility, and organized neglect for data and statistics about those members of oppressed groups who do not hold power. So, too, are examples of individuals and communities using strategies like Salguero’s to fill in the gaps left by these missing data sets — in the United States as around the world. If “quantification is representation,” as data journalist Jonathan Stray asserts, then collecting counterdata offers one way to hold those in power accountable. Collecting counterdata demonstrates how data science can be enlisted on behalf of individuals and communities that need more power on their side.

DISCUSSION

Alexandra Staub: Thank you very much, Catherine. That was such a thought-provoking talk! I’d like to start the discussion with an idea by Ursula Le Guin that was brought up in an earlier talk: the concept of gathering something and putting it into a vessel as opposed to a more forceful idea of hunting. The big picture was a type of research that “listens” to its sources in a way different from what is typically done.

With your work on data feminism, you’re showing how data and our attention to it is a manifestation of power: who has the power to decide what data is important and what data should be considered. We tend to think that the built environment is very neutral. Anyone who has worked with a feminist lens knows it’s not the case, but I’d be super interested to hear where you see the data gaps in built environment research.

Catherine D’Ignazio: That’s a great question. I was speaking about data feminism to a mobilities group earlier today, and we were talking about some of these things. For example, what are the data, what information sources inform what gets built, and what flaws does that data have?

As an example, I’d like to refer to the work of Inés Sánchez de Madariaga, who has developed the concept of mobilities of care. She examines the gendered uses of the city and the ways in which women’s needs around mobility have been neglected. In particular, she studies how women as a group use the city. Often, it’s in the context of care work, either for younger people or for elders. In the context of mobility these folks are making more trips. They do more “trip-chaining” – they go to work, then stop at a store to get some food to make dinner, or they stop at the daycare center to pick up the child, etc. Sánchez shows how when we apply a gendered lens, it reveals data patterns that were previously neglected. I think we need to consider gender, race, ability, not just individually, but also in combination, to see what kinds of insights they reveal. A lot of design methods don’t use large datasets. It’s important, however, to have data concepts at the forefront of one’s mind. It’s important to ask, “Who you are designing for?” In any given space, it’s important to consider who might be margin-

alized by the space, and how to bring them into the conversation. To ask questions like, “How do I understand what their needs are and how do I work in partnership with them?” We can partner with community and advocacy groups, where people already have really great ideas, but don’t always have the ability to realize them.

We live in a society that pretends to be raceblind, gender-blind, and so on, as if this were a way toward gender and race equality. In fact, this prevents us from being able to adequately recognize these forces of oppression when they show up, and thereby we end up perpetuating those forces, whether that’s in datasets or in our designs. We need to build our skills to better be able to use race, gender, etc. as analytic categories. This will allow us to form new collaborations and work in of new sorts of ways.

Alexandra Staub: That’s something we’ve been hearing over and over throughout the course of this symposium. We’ve also been hearing that there are a lot of so-called non-experts who are, in reality, very expert

Who Collects the Data? A Tale of Three Maps

when it comes to issues of equity. These people can give us so much more insight than we’re trained to take from the academy. The academy trains us to conduct research a certain way, and we need to think of alternatives. I would like to ask one final question that’s come in through the chat. Could you comment on your own background as a software developer, a designer, and an artist? It’s a wonderful combination of backgrounds – how has this helped you in your work?

HTML, they’d say, “Okay, you’re a Java developer”. That’s how I fell into programming, but it always intersected with my interests in art and design. As I’ve come more and more into the academy, I’ve realized I love theory, I love scholarly ideas and academic research, yet I also feel very propelled by action in the real world.

Catherine D’Ignazio: My background experiences came together a bit serendipitously.

I did my undergraduate degree in a liberal arts tradition, but at the same time I worked for my dad, who was in educational technology. During summers, I helped him run educational technology workshops to teach teachers how to build web pages, etc. I graduated with my undergraduate degree during the first dotcom boom. I was excited by technology, and decided I wanted to be a programmer. It was very easy to get a programming job in those days because there were just not enough people. If you knew

This is another reason I appreciate feminism and intersectionality, because I think there’s a unique commitment to action. You have to be very precise about your ideas. When you’re trying to realize ideas through a design or in code or something like that, you often have to compromise. You can’t just sit back in your academic chair and claim that everything is bad. You have to navigate some of the complexity, and I appreciate the impetus to do that. I also appreciate the vibrancy of design artifacts and I think there’s something unique about that.

Alexandra Staub: Thank you so much, Catherine, for your compelling talk and for this discussion!

Catherine D’ignazio & Lauren F. Klein

Who Collects the Data? A Tale of Three Maps

ENDNOTES

1 Gwendolyn Warren, “About the Work in Detroit,” in Field Notes No. 3: The Geography of Children, Part II (East Lansing, MI: Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute, 1971), 12. The report also included data that Warren and her team collected — and quantified — on factors as specific as amount of broken glass found on playgrounds in white versus Black neighborhoods, as well as essays from other members of the DGEI.

2 Paul Szewczyk, a historian of Detroit, has created a map that overlays demographic information on top of the redlining map to show how all of Detroit’s majority Black neighborhoods were colored red. See the blog post authored by Alex B. Hill, “Detroit Redlining Map 1939,” Detroitography, December 10, 2014, https://detroitogra phy.com/2014/12/10/detroit-redlining-map-1939/.

3 And that’s not the end of the cycle: those who could not buy in those neighborhoods but still wanted to own their homes were required to look elsewhere, depriving those neighborhoods of higher-income individuals, as well as those committed to the neighborhood’s long-term growth. Fewer higher-income individuals and prospects for long-term growth made those neighborhoods less desirable as locations for business or other developments, and so the cycle continued on, as it does into the present. For a summary of these and other pernicious effects, including their impact into the present on homeownership rates, home values, and credit scores, see Daniel Aaronson, Daniel Hartley, and Bhash Mazumder, “The Effects of the 1930s HOLC ‘Redlining’ Maps,” Working Paper No. 2017-12 (2017), Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago; and Emily Badger, “How Redlining’s Racist Effects Lasted for Decades,” New York Times, August 24, 2017.

4 We use the term whiteness here and throughout the book to refer to the social category of whiteness and to distinguish it from any biological or otherwise essentialist conception of race. The concept of whiteness has a long history, just as the concept of Blackness does. Indeed, many have argued that the two are co-constructed. In the early 20th century, James Weldon Johnson, James Baldwin, and W. E. B. Du Bois devoted significant attention to the relationship between Blackness and whiteness, emphasizing how Black people needed to understand whiteness for their very survival. In more recent years, scholars from across the humanities have taken up this category, offering additional historical context and theoretical importance. See, for example, David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso,

1991) and Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993) for two early works in this tradition; or, more recently, Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: Norton, 2010).

5 Buchanan v. Warley, a 1917 legal case heard before the U.S. Supreme Court, declared that a race-based zoning ordinance in Kentucky was unconstitutional. But many states and cities, as well as private communities, continued to implement other laws and covenants that would effectively exclude certain inhabitants on the basis of race. See Christopher Silver, “The Racial Origins of Zoning in American Cities,” in Urban Planning and the African American Community: In the Shadows, ed. June Manning Thomas and Marsha Ritzdorf (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1993), 23-42.

6 This is a phenomenon that political philosopher Cedric Robinson famously termed racial capitalism, and it continues into the present in the form of algorithmically generated credit scores that are consistently biased and in the consolidation of the “1 percent” through the tax code, to give only two examples of many. What’s more, the benefits of whiteness accrue: “Whiteness retains its value as a ‘consolation prize,’” civil rights scholar Cheryl Harris explains. “It does not mean that all whites will win, but simply that they will not lose.” Along similar lines, transgender activist and writer Dean Spade and computational biologist Rori Rohlfs, following Michel Foucault, theorize these effects in terms of “life chances.”

Sorting techniques like redlining distribute life changes differently for different populations, they explain. This “distribution of life chances” is key. Under the matrix of domination, life chances for majoritized bodies are enhanced, multiplied, and secured by new technologies, whereas life chances for minoritized bodies are diminished, divided, and imperiled by new technologies. Spade and Rohlfs, “Legal Equality, Gay Numbers and the (After?)Math of Eugenics.” On racial capitalism, see Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and Jodi Melamed, “Racial Capitalism,” Critical Ethnic Studies 1, no. 1 (2015): 76-85. On the links between whiteness and property see Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, No. 8 (1993): 1758. On credit scores, see Mikella Hurley and Julius Adebayo, “Credit Scoring in the Era of Big Data,” Yale Journal of Law and Technology 18, no. 1 (2017), 148-216. On the tax code, see Michael Leachman, Michael Mitchell, Nicholas Johnson, and Erica Williams, “Advancing Racial Equity with State Tax Policy,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, November 15, 2018.

7 Redlining is still present with us in numerous ways. In

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late 2018, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development charged Facebook with discrimination for, among other things, enabling housing advertisers to draw a red line around geographic areas where they did not want their housing ads to appear. See Russell Brandom, “Facebook Has Been Charged with Housing Discrimination by the US Government,” Verge, March 28, 2019, https://www.theverge .com/2019/3/28/18285178/ facebook-hud-lawsuit-fair-housing-discrimination. Scholars have also proposed the concepts of technological redlining, to describe the ways that technology reinforces oppression and engages in racial profiling (see Safiya Umoja Noble in Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism [New York: New York University Press, 2018]); digital redlining, to refer to the unequal distribution of digital services across different geographies, such as the lack of Pokémon Go stops in neighborhoods of color (see Allana Akhtar, “Is Pokémon Go Racist? How the App May Be Redlining Communities of Color,” USA Today, August 9, 2016); and discursive redlining, in which online characterizations of physical places, such as Yelp reviews, directly contribute to gentrification processes (see S. Zukin, S. Lindeman, and L. Hurson, “The Omnivore’s Neighborhood? Online Restaurant Reviews, Race, and Gentrification,” Journal of Consumer Culture 17, No. 3 [2017]: 459-79).

8 Warren, “About the Work in Detroit,” 12.

9 Warren, “About the Work in Detroit,” 10.

10 In fact, Warren had previously led numerous community actions, including school walkouts and protests, before beginning her collaboration with the DGEI.

11 The work of the DGEI inspired a generation of critical cartographers — geographers who would go on to interrogate the role of power in maps and the potential of counterdata and countermapping to challenge that power. But progressive, “critical” people have their own sexism and racism to negotiate. In academic geography, the DGEI’s work is almost exclusively portrayed as the work of the progressive academics who worked on the project. Gwendolyn Warren is rarely credited with leading the work; or, if credited, she is used as an example of how the elite academics were successfully able to collaborate with and transfer knowledge to “the disadvantaged Blacks,” to quote geographer Ronald Horvath’s account of DGEI (“The ‘Detroit Geographic Expedition and Institute’ Experience,” Antipode 3, No. 1 [November 1971]: 74). Warren herself challenged this misattribution of the project and mischaracterization of the community in Field Notes No. 3. But the white male savior narrative persists to this day: the DGEI map included in this chapter was referred to as “Bill Bunge’s map” (which

it definitively is not!) as recently as 2018 in a scholarly paper. Feminist geographers like Cindi Katz have worked to restore credit to Gwendolyn Warren. See, for example, Gwendolyn Warren, Cindi Katz, and Nik Heynen, “Myths, Cults, Memories, and Revisions in Radical Geographic History: Revisiting the Detroit Geographic Expedition and Institute,” in Spatial Histories of Radical Geography: North America and Beyond, ed. Trevor Barnes and Eric Sheppard (New York: Wiley, 2019), 59-85. In addition, a video of Katz and Warren in conversation at the City University of New York is available here: https://vimeo. com/111159306.

12 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2008), 21.

13 Even then, Native Americans of all genders were still legally excluded from voting since they had yet to be granted U.S. citizenship. The Fourteenth Amendment explicitly excluded Native Americans from US citizenship — another instance of oppression being codified in the structural domain of the matrix of domination. In 1924, the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act granted joint U.S. citizenship to all Native Americans (without their consent — many did not desire to be U.S. citizens), clearing the path for enfranchisement. But it would take until 1962 for the last U.S. state (New Mexico) to change its laws so that all Native Americans could vote. Even then, obstacles abounded, and many Black women were prevented from exercising their right to vote through voter suppression measures. The 1965 Voting Rights Act offered additional legal language to contest disenfranchisement, but that act is in the process of being dismantled by the Supreme Court (as of 2013, with Shelby County v. Holder), which threatens many of its protections. On the subject of voting rights in the United States, it’s also worth pointing out that Puerto Rico did not have universal suffrage until 1935, and like other U.S. territories, still does not have voting power in the U.S. Congress or representation in the electoral college.

14 Other disenfranchisement methods devised over the years have included undue wait times for registering to vote, having to pay a tax to vote, or having to take a test about the Constitution. Well through the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Black and Brown people seeking to vote faced threats of bodily harm. Note that the history of voter suppression perpetrated by white people on people of color is not over. One need only consider the 2018 gubernatorial election in Georgia, in which Brian Kemp, secretary of state and a white man, presided over his own gubernatorial race against Stacey Abrams, a Black woman. In his capacity as secretary of state, his actions included purging voter rolls and putting

Catherine

Who Collects the Data? A Tale of Three Maps

53,000 voter registrations on hold, 70% of which were for voters of color. Long lines and technical problems plagued the election day efforts, and the NAACP and ACLU sued the state of Georgia for voting irregularities. In short, voter suppression — enacted in the disciplinary domain of the matrix of domination — is alive and well. See German Lopez, “Voter Suppression Really May Have Made the Difference for Republicans in Georgia,” Vox, November 7, 2018, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-poli tics/2018/11/7/18071438/midterm-election-results-votingrights-georgia-florida.

15 Note that the disciplinary domain does not just have to do with government power and policy, but also with corporate, private, and institutional policies. A particular company prohibiting its workers from leaving early to vote or penalizing those who distribute information about voting on the factory floor is an example of the disciplinary domain.

16 Eleanor Barkhorn, “‘Vote No on Women’s Suffrage’: Bizarre Reasons for Not Letting Women Vote,” Atlantic, November 6, 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/ archive/2012/11/vote-no-on-womens-suffrage-bizarrereasons-for-not-letting-women-vote/264639/.

17 This is a point that Collins underscores: “Oppression is not simply understood in the mind—it is felt in the body in myriad ways,” she writes (Black Feminist Thought, 293).

18 We use the term minoritized to describe groups of people who are positioned in opposition to a more powerful social group. While the term minority describes a social group that is comprised of fewer people, minoritized indicates that a social group is actively devalued and oppressed by a dominant group, one that holds more economic, social, and political power. For further explanation of why minoritized makes more sense to use than minority, see I. E. Smith, “Minority vs. Minoritized: Why the Noun Just Doesn’t Cut It,” Odyssey, September 2, 2016, https://www.theodysseyonline.com/minority-vs-mi noritize; and Yasmin Gunaratnam, Researching Race and Ethnicity: Methods, Knowledge and Power (London: Sage, 2003).

19 This role often entails what Sara Ahmed has described as being a “feminist killjoy.” As she writes in the first post on her blog, you might be a feminist killjoy if you “have ruined the atmosphere by turning up or speaking up” or “have a body that reminds people of histories they find disturbing” or “are angry because that’s a sensible response to what is wrong.” The feminist killjoy exposes racism and sexism, but “for those who do not have a sense of the racism or sexism you are talking about, to bring them up is to bring them into existence.” In the

process of exposing the problem, the feminist killjoy herself becomes a problem. She is “causing trouble” or getting in the way of the happiness of others by bringing up the issue. For example, a personal killjoy moment from the book-writing process happened when Catherine shared the topic of the book with a former professor, who responded that she should stay focused on data literacy and not become one of those “grumpy feminists” who were uncomfortable with their sexuality and sought to make problems for people. For the record, Catherine is not grumpy, feels confident in her sexuality, and is working on the killjoy skills of making more feminist problems for people. Read more about how to navigate being or becoming a feminist killjoy at feministkilljoys.com, or see Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

20 Feminist methods involve continually asking who questions, as AI researcher Michael Muller has observed: By whom, for whom, who benefits, who is harmed, who speaks, who is silenced. Muller articulated what some of the who questions are for human–computer interaction in his article “Feminism Asks the ‘Who’ Questions in HCI,” Interacting with Computers 23, No. 5 (2011):447-49, and in this book we articulate what some of the who questions are for data science.

21 See Adriana Gallardo, “How We Collected Nearly 5,000 Stories of Maternal Harm,” ProPublica, March 20, 2018, https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-collect ed-nearly-5- 000-stories-of-maternal-harm.

22 Penn Loh, Jodi Sugerman-Brozan, Standrick Wiggins, David Noiles, and Cecelia Archibald, “From Asthma to AirBeat: Community-Driven Monitoring of Fine Particles and Black Carbon in Roxbury, Massachusetts,” Environmental Health Perspectives 110 (April 2002): 297-301.

23 On counter-data, see Morgan Currie, Britt S. Paris, Irene Pasquetto, and Jennifer Pierre, “The Conundrum of Police Officer-Involved Homicides: Counter-Data in Los Angeles County,” Big Data & Society 3, No. 2 (2016): 1-14. On data activism, see Stefania Milan and Lonneke Van Der Velden, “The Alternative Epistemologies of Data Activism,” Digital Culture & Society 2, No. 2 (2016): 57-74. On statactivism, see the introduction to the special issue of Partecipazione e conflitto: The Open Journal of Sociopolitical Studies on the topic, edited by Isabelle Bruno, Emmanuel Didier, and Tommaso Vitale: “Statactivism: Forms of Action between Disclosure and Affirmation,” Partecipazione e conflitto: The Open Journal of Sociopolitical Studies 7, No. 2 (2014): 198-220. There is a large body of literature on citizen science; a good starting point is Sara Ann Wylie, Kirk Jalbert, Shannon Dosemagen, and Matt Ratto, “Institutions for Civic Technoscience: How

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Critical Making Is Transforming Environmental Research,” Information Society 30, no. 2 (2014): 116-126.

24 See Ida B. Wells, “A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892-1893-1894: Respectfully Submitted to the Nineteenth Century Civilization in ‘the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave,’” New York Public Library Digital Collections, accessed July 24, 2019, http://digital collections.nypl.org/items/510d47df-8dbd-a3d9-e040e00a18064a99. Femicide is a term first used publicly by feminist writer and activist Diana Russell in 1976 while testifying before the first International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women. Her goal was to situate the murders of women in a context of unequal gender relations. In patriarchal societies, men use violence to systematically dominate and exert power over women. And the research bears this out. While male victims of homicide are more likely to have been killed by strangers, a 2009 report published by the World Health Organization and partners notes a “universal finding in all regions” that women are far more likely to have been murdered by someone they know. Femicide includes a range of gender-related crimes, including intimate and interpersonal violence, political violence, gang activity, and female infanticide. Such deaths are often depicted as isolated incidents and treated as such by authorities, but those who study femicides characterize them as a pattern of underrecognized and underaddressed systemic violence. Latin American feminists have shifted the term to feminicide, which augments the definition by directly accusing the state of indifference, negligence, and complicity in the deaths of women. See World Health Organization, Strengthening Understanding of Femicide: Using Research to Galvanize Action and Accountability (Washington, DC: Program for Appropriate Technology in Health [PATH], InterCambios, Medical Research Council of South Africa [MRC], and World Health Organization [WHO], 2009), 110.

25 “Femicide is a term first used publicly by feminist writer and activist Diana Russell in 1976 while testifying before the first International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women. Her goal was to situate the murders of women in a context of unequal gender relations. In patriarchal societies, men use violence to systematically dominate and exert power over women. And the research bears this out. While male victims of homicide are more likely to have been killed by strangers, a 2009 report published by the World Health Organization and partners notes a “universal finding in all regions” that women are far more likely to have been murdered by someone they know. Femicide includes a range of gender-related crimes, including intimate and interpersonal violence, political violence, gang activity, and female infanticide. Such deaths are often depicted as isolated incidents and

treated as such by authorities, but those who study femicides characterize them as a pattern of underrecognized and underaddressed systemic violence. Latin American feminists have shifted the term to feminicide, which augments the definition by directly accusing the state of indifference, negligence, and complicity in the deaths of women. See World Health Organization, Strengthening Understanding of Femicide: Using Research to Galvanize Action and Accountability (Washington, DC: Program for Appropriate Technology in Health [PATH], InterCambios, Medical Research Council of South Africa [MRC], and World Health Organization [WHO], 2009), 110.”

26 See María Salguero’s map at https://feminicidiosmx. crowdmap.com/ and https://www.google.com/maps/ d/u/0/viewer?mid=174IjBzP- fl_6wpRHg5pkGSj2egE&ll=2 3.942983359872816%2C-101.9008685&z=5.

27 Indeed, Marisela Escobedo Ortiz, the mother of one such victim, was herself shot at point-blank range and killed while demonstrating in front of the Governor’s Palace in Chihuahua in 2010.

28 The toll now stands at more than 1,500. Three hundred women were killed in Juárez in 2011 alone, and only a tiny fraction of those cases have been investigated. The problem extends beyond Ciudad Juárez and the state of Chihuahua to other states, including Chiapas and Veracruz.

29 Strengthening Understanding of Femicide states that “instances of missing, incorrect, or incomplete data mean that femicide is significantly underreported in every region.” See World Health Organization, Strengthening Understanding of Femicide, 4.

30 After three years of investigating, the commission, chaired by politician Marcela Lagarde, found that feminicide was indeed occurring and that the Mexican government was systematically failing to protect women and girls from being killed. Lagarde suggested that feminicide be considered, “a crime of the state which tolerates the murders of women and neither vigorously investigates the crimes nor holds the killers accountable.” See World Health Organization, Strengthening Understanding of Femicide, 11.

31 See Maria Rodriguez-Dominguez, “Femicide and Victim Blaming in Mexico, Council on Hemispheric Affairs, October 2, 2017, http://www.coha.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Maria-Rodriguez-Femicidio-Mexico-.pdf.

32 Mara Miranda (@MaraMiranda25), “#SiMeMatan es porque me gustaba salir de noche y tomar mucha cerveza ... ,” Twitter, May 5, 2017, 11:17 a.m., https://twitter.

Who Collects the Data? A Tale of Three Maps

com/MaraMiranda25/status/860559096285720581. For an in-depth study of hashtags and their use in social and political organizing, see Elizabeth Losh, Hashtag (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019).

33 Missing data is not a new problem; the fields of critical cartography and critical GIS have long considered the phenomenon of missing data. Contemporary examples of missing data and counterdata collection include “The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Database,” created by doctoral student Annita Lucchesi, which tracks Indigenous women who are killed or disappear under suspicious circumstances in the United States and Canada (https://www.sovereign-bodies.org/mmiw-da tabase). Jonathan Gray, Danny Lämmerhirt, and Liliana Bounegru also wrote a report that includes case studies of citizen involvement in collecting data on drones, police killings, water supplies, and pollution. See “Changing What Counts: How Can Citizen-Generated and Civil Society Data Be Used as an Advocacy Tool to Change Official Data Collection?,” 2016, https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ ssrn.2742871. Environmental health and justice is an area in which communities are out front collecting data when agencies refuse or neglect to do so. The MappingBack Network (http://mappingback.org/home_en/aboutus/) provides mapping capacity and support to Indigenous communities fighting extractive industries, and Sara Wylie, cofounder of Public Lab, works with communities impacted by fracking to measure hydrogen sulfide using low-cost DIY sensors. See Sara Wylie, Elisabeth Wilder, Lourdes Vera, Deborah Thomas, and Megan McLaughlin, “Materializing Exposure: Developing an Indexical Method to Visualize Health Hazards Related to Fossil Fuel Extraction,” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 3 (2017): 426-63. Indigenous cartographers Margaret Wickens Pearce and Renee Pualani Louis describe cartographic techniques for recuperating Indigenous perspectives and epistemologies (often absent or misrepresented) into GIS maps. See Margaret Pearce and Renee Louis, “Mapping Indigenous Depth of Place,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 32, No. 3 (2008): 107-26. All that said, participatory data collection efforts have their own silences, as Heather Ford and Judy Wajcman show in their study of the “missing women” of Wikipedia: “‘Anyone Can Edit,’ Not Everyone Does: Wikipedia’s Infrastructure and the Gender Gap,” Social Studies of Science 47, No. 4 (2017): 511-27.

34 Jonathan Stray, The Curious Journalist’s Guide to Data (New York: Columbia Journalism School, 2016).

DESIGNING LEGAL FUTURES

Andrea M. Matwyshyn

Founding Director of the Policy Innovation Lab of Tomorrow (PILOT Lab)

Professor of Law and Engineering Penn State

The first decades of the internet have brought with them an explosion of dancing cat memes and a new set of economic titans. But, the “wins” and “losses” of that new economy have not always instilled confidence in its fairness. In particular, questions of user manipulation through design and uneven access to capital for technology creators nudge us to question the stories we tell ourselves about our transformed digital economy. As we move into the next generation of the internet, a moment of self-reflection is warranted about the technology-reliant world we are building: what would it mean to build a more equitable future driven by technology “progress” and “innovation?”

A key aspect of this technology equity or fairness inquiry involves public policy and law. In other words, what does a technological future that is more in line with our legal and ethical understandings of fairness look like? In the philosophy literature, we see that fairness has often meant things like the combination of mutual restraint, mutual benefit, and a consensual agreement to some sort of shared enterprise, whether it is building a society together or entering into a contract.1 But, when we talk about fairness constructs in law, we also frequently talk about the opposite of fairness: we frequently speak about unfairness. For example, we consider unfair trade practices.2 What does it mean when a company is competing in a deceptive manner that disadvantages others and throws the default assumptions upon which

our economy relies regarding supply and demand out of whack?3 We similarly talk about unfair surprise and oppression in individual contracts. In some circumstances, courts may find that under a doctrine called unconscionability, the terms of an agreement are so egregiously unfair and undisclosed in full that they eviscerate the ability of people to understand the deal into which they entered.4 We also discuss concepts of unfair labor practices in employment and labor law.5 We speak of procedural unfairness and selective prosecutions in applications of criminal law.6 Indeed, the ideas of fairness, and its corollary unfairness, exist across many contexts in law. So, what do we mean in technology policy and law contexts when we speak of unfairness? What is an unfair machine learning system that calls for regulatory supervision? What is unfair web design warranting legal enforcement? While agency enforcement has begun to answer these questions at a granular level, in order to answer these questions at the level of our society as a whole, we also need to unpack at least three con-

stituent questions related to public policy and definitions of “technological progress.” The first question involves the word “progress” itself: what exactly do we mean when we use the word progress? Implicitly or explicitly, the goal of some — but not all — definitions of progress is the betterment of the human condition, nudging humans toward flourishing or thriving. The second question digs into a corollary inquiry: even assuming that we can define progress in a shared manner, what is it that a next generation human body will need in this “intelligent society?” Depending on specifics of implementation and oversight, the “winners” and “losers” of various policy and legal approaches can be unpredictable; repurposed technologies might end up hurting the very people we most aim to help. Then, finally, the third piece of our discussion deals with sustainability. Sustainability involves both the physical environment and the way that we engage in social governance and with each other: how do we incorporate both physical and human resources in building constructive infrastructures of technology and law that advance our definition of “progress?”

Designing Legal Futures

Andrea M. Matwyshyn

WHAT IS PROGRESS?

What do we mean when we invoke the idea of “progress?” Looking at meta analyses of progress discourse, you see that theories of progress tend to incorporate at least three types of elements – definitional, operational, and confirmational. The first definitional element involves some sort of normative claim. Sometimes progress is defined as nothing more than a presumption of linear/forward movement of time, implying that current economic and social realities are the baselines that should be maintained. Other definitions of progress explicitly incorporate non-linear ideas, focusing on improvements to the well-being of humans – what might be termed “flourishing” in the language of philosophy7 or “thriving” in the language of developmental psychology.8 In other words, progress definitions start from a set of implicit or explicit assumptions about both time and mechanisms of development that cabin the entirety of the conversation that follows.9 In most of our conversations around technology progress and its shinier cousin, the buzz word of “innovation,” we rarely stop

to ask this critical definitional question; yet, it is a worthy pause. Exactly what normative goals are we pursuing? Exactly which ethical principles are we seeking to operationalize in particular policy or economic objectives in connection with various technologies? It is only after the crafting of this shared benchmark that we can confidently move on to the second element of discussion – the operational specifics.

Theories of progress that involve claims about seeking the betterment of the human condition and “the good life” tend to contain a set of operational elements –claims about how we achieve “progress.”

In other words, these operational elements tend to articulate some mechanism for improvement aimed at furthering the normative goal. Yet, as with all technology deployment into particular environments, the specifics of technology operationalization and the nature of the particular claims matter significantly.

Finally, theories of progress tend to include confirmational elements – methodological and epistemological claims that articulate how we will know that we have achieved

our goal of “progress.” What proof is needed in order to support the particular operational form of the normative ideal? How will we know that technology “progress” is happening?

(someone else’s version of) progress and innovation. The presence of conflicting visions creates vulnerabilities in the security sense of the word – opportunities for strategic exploitation of social resources and humans.

This definitional discussion is often avoided in our technology policy and legal conversations. Rarely is there an explicit articulation and agreement on what “progress” and the technological “good life” precisely entail. Yet, it is foundational to preserving and enhancing fairness in our “intelligent” society’s public policy and law.

BUILDING THE “INTELLIGENT” SOCIETY

What does this progress inquiry mean for the future of policy and law as we build a technology-reliant “intelligent” society? It means that there are competing visions for our future. In other words, the technology creep around us may embody versions of progress that are at odds with our traditional baselines of fairness and equality under law: beware of the incremental slide into unfairness disguised as

Let us briefly look at the trajectory of the way the technology has been changing our built environments and relationships to each other. The 1990s were characterized by technology-mediated communications that allowed us to connect more efficiently with other humans through computers. The 2000s enabled community interactions as social media and other technologies connected us more seamlessly with affinity groups through mobile phones. The 2010s were characterized by the arrival of mass deployment of sensors on physical objects. The arrival of the Internet of Things (IoT) began to permeate everyday peoples’ lives. In other words, for better or worse, this was the start of the era when our toasters started sending us text messages about the status of our toast, and our refrigerators started to remind us that we needed more milk.

Designing Legal Futures

Andrea M. Matwyshyn

In the 2020s, we are starting to put those sensors not only in physical objects, but also on the inside of human bodies, expanding their capabilities with external machine learning processes and live feeds with links to pre-existing external databases. In other words, the human body itself is starting to be used as a technology platform. Thus, we have entered the era of the “Internet of Bodies” or IoB.11 As bodies become some of the “things” on the internet, they will become vulnerable to safety threats from the built environment and other technology systems.

built environments. Various categories of interaction effects between IoB devices and the built environment are usually not yet considered in our design and policy analysis. However, the first deaths from software happened over 30 years ago: a machine called the Therac-25 emitted doses of radiation because of a default software setting and its interaction with inadequately trained staff. A number of patients died, and lawsuits ensued.11

The arrival of the IoB era means that we increasingly need to consider the design and safety ramifications of interweaving technology-reliant bodies with technology-reliant built environments. As we saw with early examples such as COVID tracing technologies,10 the way that humans are monitored as they move in the world is not contained within the unit of an individual body itself. Instead, measurement and sensing occur at the intersection of the body with other groups of sensors working within (and limited by)

Let me offer one slightly comical example of these sensor interaction effects, and two serious examples of some of the early types of sensor challenges. Many of us now have automatic lights in our offices that turn off after a certain period of time if no movement is detected. In order to reactivate those lights, you might find yourself violently waving your arms over your head periodically. Although this flailing is probably an excellent form of exercise for increasing blood flow to the capillaries in your fingers, nevertheless, it is a behavior that is being caused by the default patterns of the technology, not by the preferences of the humans unexpect-

edly sitting in the dark. So, the technology design is interrupting the default patterns of the humans using the space. Additionally, the design might cause unintended interaction effects and unintended harms. For example, a coworker with bad (or maybe good?) aim may biff her neighbor at the table in the dark as she flails her arms trying to trigger the light sensor.

In a less comical example, implanted pacemakers now commonly rely on software and the internet for some aspects of their functionality. If a person with a pacemaker experiences a software malfunction, she may go to an emergency room for assistance. However, the physician may not recognize the problem as a technology issue. Similarly, because the code and the implementation methods inside these devices are sometimes proprietary, not every emergency room necessarily has the correct equipment and expertise to reset every pacemaker. In other words, even assuming a physician correctly diagnoses a software issue, incompatibilities across pacemaker companies and across regional norms driven by

physical geography, design choices, and legal posture can directly impact health outcomes and bodily safety for these IoB bodies. So, if you are, say, one of the patients with a pacemaker whose code is universally resettable and happen to be treated by technology savvy doctor, you are in a different medical situation than a patient who has an insurance provider that pushed her toward a pacemaker with a more locked down code base and design. In other words, “winners” and “losers” are not necessarily obvious in technology interaction scenarios, nor are their outcomes necessarily equitable.12 Additionally, even as devices are going inside the human body, key components or elements of their functionality will remain outside the human body. This shift means that new design and safety challenges will arise at the intersection of IoB bodies and the built environment. For example, the functionality of IoB bodies increasingly relies on always-on internet access. But, a person with an IoB body might work in an office with thick walls that cause weak internet access,13 thereby potentially im-

Designing Legal Futures

Andrea M. Matwyshyn

pacting the device’s functionality and the employee’s safety. Further, as with all prior generations of software and devices, all IoT and IoB devices potentially raise technical security concerns. For example, consider any device that uses Bluetooth. Bluetooth has been demonstrated to be exploitable; in other words, the devices that rely on it can potentially be compromised by an attacker.14 Or consider the challenges of botnets of devices or ransomware on hospital machines that have interrupted care or other malware that might lock up your machine, permitting remote attackers to take control of these kinds of devices. These types of security risks potentially accompany any device reliant on software, and each line of additional code may add additional security risk. To date, despite efforts of various agencies, we have failed to successfully address the categories of security concerns visible in earlier generations of technology. The extent to which we increasingly rely on software in all aspects of our society renders the need to robustly address security vulnerabilities in

real time even more critical – whether they are in the office smart thermostat, in your car, or in your body-embedded device. As sensors are built into environments and bodies exist within these environments, self defense from digital harms becomes increasingly difficult.

So, this again brings us back to the normative question: are we building technologies that make things “better” for humans? Or, conversely, are we merely incrementally iterating various technologies in ways that add complexity, security, and safety risk to humans’ lives without much additional utility?15 Are we primarily considering the fitness for purpose of technologies and their role as tools to aid the thriving of their users? Or, conversely, are we primarily technologies as engines of return on investment for shareholders?

SUSTAINABILITY AND TWO POSSIBLE FUTURES

Finally, as technology builders and policymakers construct the future of our “in-

telligent society,” they must also grapple with questions of sustainability – not only in terms of environmental resources but also in terms of democratic governance and quality of life. Allow me to offer two historical models as think pieces. Approximately fifty years ago, the environmental situation in the United States seemed bleak: the Cuyahoga River had repeatedly caught on fire from pollution in its waters, and severe smog plagued New York. In response, Congress passed an aggressive package of laws, creating the Environmental Protection Agency and imposing treble damages on polluters.16

In other words, we made a choice as a society to address a problem caused by particular polluting technologies with a shared vision of progress toward a more sustainable future of cleaner water and air. In contrast, consider the story of Centralia, Pennsylvania.

dren and adults were physically injured as pieces of the ground opened up beneath them. Centralia was ultimately evacuated, and the zip code was eliminated. The reason that the fire continues to burn arises partially from a design conflict: although mines can be built to extinguish fire through reducing air flow, garbage dumps are designed to expressly encourage air flow to aid in garbage decomposition. Thus, an interaction effect was created in Centralia with devastating impact when the garbage dumps were placed too close to the mines.17 Thus, even when technologies are designed correctly in isolation, emergent effects can create public policy and legal impact.

Centralia was a town with a set of underground coal mines and a set of underground garbage dumps. Around 1962, a fire started in the coal seams of the mine that continues to burn to this day. Chil-

One of these scenarios offers a hopeful tale of public policy and legal intervention that saved a shared resource, the other describes an avoidable dystopian hellscape with no exit. As we ponder the interaction of new technologies and built environments, these two case studies offer lessons on how new technologies impact both the built environment and the people who reside within it. Again, we

Andrea M. Matwyshyn

return to the basic questions with which we started: how do we define progress? What kind of a world do we want to build in the long term? It is only through answering these fundamental questions with a shared baseline of ethics and policy that our future can become as shiny as our technology gadgets.

pedestrians, et cetera. So, commenters in feeds discussing this occurrence have pointed out that we’re using the roads of the country as essentially a test bed instead of having more robust quality assurance analysis and software testing before deployment. It’s a fair critique. This also gets to the point that you’re making about proactive versus reactive response.

The point about reactive versus proactive discussion is really spot on, and that’s the dichotomy that drove this whole conversation for me. It’s why I started digging into questions of what these notions of progress are, what these notions of innovation are. I think we have to start to agree on the society that we’re trying to build in order to be able to have shared baselines for more quickly identifying when things are going off the rails.

So just an example to buttress that excellent point of yours: in the last few weeks there has been internet commentary about “autonomous” car autopilot software updates that have been malfunctioning and allegedly swerving toward

Congress is not the only game in town for regulation. We’ve had instances of successful regulatory efforts in, for example, data breach regulation on the state level, even though we still don’t have a national data breach notification statute. You can argue that there are some pockets of obligation data breach notification under securities laws or under certain financial or child privacy laws, but there isn’t an overarching federal data breach notification statute. However, every state has a data breach notification statute at this point. Now, those statutes have ended up looking a little different in each state, but they do exist. And so one of the viable paths forward – and it’s one that everyday

citizens can push as voters – is to lobby their local state legislatures and say, “Here’s what we care about, here’s the kind of state we want to live in and these are the kinds of technology practices that we find problematic.” That local action can have a big effect, especially in a state like Pennsylvania, California, New York, Massachusetts, or Illinois – states with large populations. If you get a handful of these larger states to agree on an approach, suddenly you create functionally a new national norm – a higher legal floor than the one that existed. Any company that’s doing business in the United States is not going to refuse to do business with the citizens of all of those states, and it’s not going to make a separate product for the other states. So, through local concerted action, that new floor gets created, the products evolve and efficiencies at a higher level of care, functionality, safety emerge. Looking at the car safety historical examples specifically, this isn’t the first time we’ve tried to have autonomous cars.

There have been series of attempts in prior decades that ended because they could not get past certain technological and safety hurdles. And if you watch interviews with those computer scientists involved in earlier rounds of attempts at car autonomy, they tend to think that we’re not there yet. They are not sure that autonomy is even possible with our current technologies. So, when you see a disconnect between what the true experts who have learned on their own skin are saying is possible, based on the state-ofthe-art, and you hear conflicting information from other places, you start to need to reconcile the trustworthiness of those statements. Luckily, that’s one thing the law knows how to do, provided that there are enforcers that are interested in those things and have the budget and personnel to be able to bring action. That can happen in the state level, or it can happen on the federal level. As I was saying, it’s is not a linear process.

Andrea M. Matwyshyn

So that’s the magic question. I don’t know whether the genie is fully out of the bottle. I hope it’s not. The farming example is really interesting; I might argue that part of the reason why the big, industrialized farm approach has been deemed not as successful as we initially thought stems from our losing a sense of the physical environment we were working within. We didn’t adequately consider the benefits of things like indigenous crops – the original crops that had succeeded in particular environments. My perspective on this, granted this is not my field (no pun intended), is that perhaps you can have all of the above in terms of growing different kinds of crops, more experimentation, and seeing what works. There can be multiple different models in play at the same time; you can’t anticipate everything that will go wrong. Unexpected negative interactions may render your original plan not as effective as you thought it would be.

show, a fun techno fantastical world of flying cars and gadgets. But, I recently rewatched “The Jetsons.” Today, I view it equally as a cautionary tale of a dystopian hellscape where the machines frequently are untrustworthy. George gets sucked into the treadmill of the moving carpet. Cars are ejecting people; people are flying through the air unexpectedly. You have to exist within this world of constantly malfunctioning machines.

I’ll use “The Jetsons” as an example here. So, “The Jetsons” are, to those of us who grew up avidly watching reruns of the

So, where is the happy medium between technology wonderland and dystopian machine hellscape, and how do we put in the policy and legal guardrails to get the benefits without the downsides? I think we are living through a critical period in the evolution of tech, and the trustworthiness of tech has, in some sectors, been declining. You’re seeing a replacement of traditional models that still work well in some cases with more technologically-reliant models that have different threat profiles. So, we’re sometimes trading one threat profile for another, worse threat profile, just because a technology is newer. What

that means in the long term, in some cases, we’re not sure, but being overly trusting is the recipe for disaster. Anyone who has owned a computer knows that things never work perfectly – bugs, malfunctions, and unanticipated problems happen regularly. By way of basic example, let’s say you are counting on something as simple as two-factor authentication, which on the whole, is a big win for security. But, let’s say you’re traveling abroad, and you have changed from the phone provider that you’re usually on to a different travel provider or your provider doesn’t give you service internationally. If you can’t receive a text message successfully, and if all of your accounts are keyed to the first phone, the fact that it is a technologically-reliant authentication process rather than a process that is reliant only on information that’s in your head, suddenly converts the security enhancement into a functionality obstacle. So, context really matters, and one size will not fit all for most things.

I think the short answer is that there’s a lot we can do. Much of it will be sector-specific in terms of the particular fixes. But, I

think the first step is a recalibration around the principle of “doing no harm” – do not knowingly hurt people. It is a really good starting point. It makes sense to start from a good faith effort toward anticipating how things could hurt people, and how you can take steps in the design and building process to avoid hurting people. But, just to end on a more positive note, there are some technologies that inspire tremendous hope in me. Three-dimensional-printed houses are one of the technologies that I am super excited about. They allow for a future that is sort of the happy side, the good side, of “The Jetsons.” There may be a future that offers us 3D-printed houses that are low cost and highly customized to the needs of the particular person who inhabits it – whether it be that person can’t walk upstairs or they maybe just want a really high ceiling or a custom built-in bookcase or they have a particular child with particular needs. My hope is that this is a technology we will be able to use in furtherance of making people’s lives better and mitigating homelessness. Those are the kinds of technologies that I get excited about every time I see them.

Andrea M. Matwyshyn

I would like to see them catch on and acquire, for example, governmental sponsorship, because of their tremendous potential to change human lives for the better.

ENDNOTES

1 See, e.g., Markovits, Daniel and Emad Atiq, “Philosophy of Contract Law”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/win2021/entries/contract-law/.

2 See, e.g. Federal Trade Commission, FTC Policy Statement on Unfairness (1980), https://www.ftc. gov/legal-library/browse/ftc-policy-statement-unfairness.

3 See, e.g. Federal Trade Commission, Statement of Enforcement Principles Regarding “Unfair Methods of Competition” Under Section 5 of the FTC Act https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_ statements/735201/150813section5enforcement.pdf.

4 See, e.g., Legal Information Institute, Unconscionability, https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/unconscio nability.

5 See, e.g., U.S. Federal Labor Relations Authority, Unfair Labor Practice, https://www.flra.gov/cases/ unfair-labor-practice.

6 See, e.g., What About Selective Prosecution? Considerations and Analysis, October 7, 2016, https://news.law.fordham.edu/blog/2016/10/07/ what-about-selective-prosecutionconsiderations-and-analysis/.

7 See, e.g., Superson, Anita, “Feminist Moral Psychology”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/ entries/femi nism-moralpsych/.

8 See, e.g., Pamela Cantor et. Al, Whole-Child Development, Learning, and Thriving (2022).

9 See, e.g., Meek Lange, Margaret, “Progress”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford. edu/archives/sum2022/entries/progress/.

12 See, e.g., Lindsay Muscato, Digital contact tracing brought tech rivals together while the pandemic kept us apart, February 24, 2021, MIT Technology Review, https://www.technologyreview. com/2021/02/24/1017803/digital-contact-tracingapp-covid/.

12 Nancy G. Leveson, The Therac-25: 30 Years Later, IEEE Computer Society, November 2017, available at https://legacy.cs.indiana.edu/classes/c211/ leveson-therac-25.pdf .

14 For a discussion of these dynamics, see, e.g., Andrea M. Matwyshyn, The Internet of Bodies, 60 William & Mary Law Review 61 (2019).

15 See, e.g., Mark Stringer, Best Wi-Fi solutions for houses with thick walls, July 27, 2020, LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/best-wi-fi-solutionshouses-thick-walls-mark-stringer/.

16 See, e.g., Chris Merriman, BlueBorne: Bluetooth Hack Doesn’t Require Pairing with Victims Devices, Inquirer (Sept. 13, 2017), https://www.theinquirer.net/ inquirer/news/3017247/new-bluetooth-hack-doesntrequire-pairing-with-victims-device.

17 The United Nations employs a term called “stagnovation” to refer to this second conditionthe situation where products are iterated without transformational betterment of the human condition, yet masquerade as “innovation.” In other, words, although technologies appear to be new, in reality they are sometimes simply old technologies with shiny new exteriors of incrementalism. For a discussion of stagnovation, see, e.g, Andrea M. Matwyshyn, Unavailable, 81 University of Pittsburgh Law Review 2 (2019).

18 See, e.g., Environmental Protection Agency, History of the Clean Water Act, https://cfpub.epa.gov/ watertrain/moduleFrame.cfm?parent_object_id= 2571.

19 About Centralia, PA and the Mine Fire, https:// www.centraliapa.org/about-centralia-pa-mine-fire/.

ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION 2

Antwi Akom

Department of Ethnic Studies

University of California at San Francisco and San Francisco State Unviersity

Tessa Cruz

Director of Engagement and Design at Streetwyze

Catherine D’Ignazio

Department of Urban Studies and Planning

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Andrea Matwyshyn

Professor of Law and Engineering

Penn State

Daniel Susser

Assistant Professor

College of Information Sciences and Technology

Penn State

Daniel Susser: The theme of this symposium has been “Design Consequences” and one implication of that formulation is that the choices designers, architects, engineers, and others make have ramifications that need to be interrogated and, in some cases, contested. Something that came through in all your talks is that design does not operate in a vacuum. It is both a cause and an effect of the broader social, political, economic, and other background conditions in which we live. As a result, not thinking through the choices we make when we design our physical and digital environments can be just as problematic as intentionally designing to harm. Without awareness, we are likely to perpetuate existing systems of power, hierarchy, and oppression.

Each of you are working in fields that are becoming more sensitive to this reality. To help the audience understand what is at stake in the projects that you have articulated, I’d like to ask what might happen if we fail to engage in the kind of critical work that you are prescribing? We are living through a moment of intense social, economic, political, and technological rupture and there is reason to believe things won’t simply be the same in ten or twenty years. How do things look down the road if we fail to adopt the critical perspectives that you all have articulated in your talks?

Antwi Akom: If we do not begin to design for equity and design for justice, I think we will experience an exacerbation of the inequalities that are we see today: from a racial perspective, from a gender perspective, from a sexual orientation perspective, and, disproportionately, from a health perspective. Some of our world’s most vulnerable populations bear the brunt when we don’t design for equity and justice, so I think it is critical that we chart a new, different course.

Catherine D’Ignazio: I agree with everything Antwi just said. The stakes are really high, and I feel that we are in an apocalyptic moment right now, with pandemics, murders, wildfires, and droughts. There are so many intertwined crises, and we can’t continue to ignore them. We need to think about how we design for justice and equity. For those of us who are educators, we must ask how we can transform education about justice and equity so that our fields are no longer blind to some of the consequences of our choices.

The other speakers today are well positioned to articulate what that new course looks like. Climate change and income inequality are growing problems and two of the most pressing issues of this generation. I don’t want to sound overly dramatic, but if we don’t take these things seriously, we won’t exist as a people, as human beings moving into the future. When you see the impacts of our decisions – the heat waves, the droughts, and the fires – it becomes clear that we need massive behavioral changes. We need to design for equity and justice. We need to mitigate and adapt to climate impacts.

Our spaces and places, our datasets, and everything else is impacted by systemic oppressions. How do we stop ignoring such oppressions and pretending they don’t exist? How do we focus on them and make that the focus for training the next generation of designers, data scientists, and urban planners? Because this is going to be an intergenerational thing. I hope that we can use this moment to make a big shift in education, as well as civic and political engagement.

Andrea Matwyshyn: I am going take this question in a very practical direction. One of the methods I use to engage students is to give them corollary movie watching assignments in addition to their regular readings. In technology spaces, the plethora of movies that show how things can go horribly wrong are useful as teaching tools. Such movies can show the way that physical spaces can be networked to erode personal freedom, autonomy, and privacy, and how that connects with, say, the Internet of Things.

Minority Report is mandatory viewing. Brazil and The Conversation are also good picks. Connecting the current problems of technology surveillance to older problems, such as the erosion of a democratic process, is valuable. So are portrayals of social cohesion in regimes where distrust and surveillance were the default. We can convey to our students and people working in various aspects of policy issues some of the feeling of dread that can happen in, for example, totalitarian surveillance structures such as those that existed in parts of the former Soviet Union. Films convey this well.

Gattaca is another movie that I find useful as a cautionary tale because it shows the intersection of genetic privacy and surveillance through technology devices. It also portrays how technology intersects with the physical spaces of the buildings, letting people go in and out based on databases that are externally processed. Those are some concrete ways to connect some of the policy issues we have been talking

Antwi Akom. Tessa Cruz, Catherine D’Ignazio, Andrea Matwyshyn, Daniel Susser

about today with design and the built environment and, more broadly, with questions of equality.

Daniel Susser: A theme in all your responses is that we are living through a particularly spectacular crisis moment right now. People respond to crisis in different ways. Some might argue this is not a moment to worry about things like equity, because we have issues of life and death to worry about. Others might see crisis as opportunity. Everything is being called into question: how we are navigating physical and digital spaces, how we are interacting with people, how we are dealing with travel. Many things we took for granted are being rethought. Do you think the current moment is presenting an obstacle to pursuits like design equity, design justice, and data feminism, or is it an opportunity? Are people more open to the changes that you are prescribing than they have been in the past?

Catherine D’Ignazio: For me, claims that “we cannot think about equity right now” are moot because this is a moment of life and death and the stakes are very high. Zero sum thinking is out of place. What gives me hope right now is the great number of mutual aid and grassroots organizations that emerged throughout the pandemic. People recognized that others were in need and that we must organize to help. Problems such as COVID and the murder of George Floyd laid bare that things are not all good. At the same time, I fear that we might not be able to channel the urgency created by

these problems into structural change, or that we might become complacent and not push our governments to reorganize in a way that supports the flourishing of human life. When we reach out and do small things, we must also think collectively, for example, about policy.

Andrea Matwyshyn: I agree with Catherine that we are at a policy inflection moment. I think now is the time where there can be effective nudging of elected officials and to recalibrate the baselines of what was previously “impossible” to a new baseline of what needs to happen to build the world that we want live in. This is partially why I find myself increasingly talking about the grand ideas of what is progress, what is innovation, why we do not want to live in Ready Player One, to make another movie reference? So, this moment opens that opportunity. A concrete example that things have shifted is the increasing bipartisan support for some sort of recalibration of internet responsibility around content. There is consensus around the recognition that the

current way things work is not sustainable going forward, and that a reconfiguration is required, where different players in the system take various responsibilities and duties upon themselves to ensure the longevity of the system. The internet is not a trustworthy place, and there are things we can do about it. Changing internet policy is wrapped up in other shifts around a fairer competition policy, around response to challenges, fairer medical access, and many other social issues we are grappling with now.

Antwi Akom: For the communities we work with, the issues we’ve touched on are life and death situations. As COVID shut down social and physical infrastructure, digital infrastructure, digital organizing, and activism became that much more important. People were really suffering and needed to find ways to get access to institutional resources and privileges. In our organization we started digital organizing, power building, and engagement labs. A lot of that centered around social and structural determinants of health, and another huge part was around elections,

Antwi Akom. Tessa Cruz, Catherine D’Ignazio, Andrea Matwyshyn, Daniel Susser

and how to get people mobilized on the ground, not just in a presidential election year, but for midterm and local elections. We have spent a lot of time trying to bring together these worlds that do not always speak to each other about design and policy determinants. We’ve worked to democratize data and democratize decision-making with populations that are normally locked out of these conversations.

other institutional resources and privileges. That is the work that we have been doing on the ground, as part of the urgency of the situation.

The communities that we have been working with were suffering long before George Floyd. In my own presentation today, I started with the long history of those of us who have been racially profiled, killed, abused in many different ways, because I think we forget about them. We have this fifteen-minute memory after which we forget Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland. These problems have been going on for a long, long time. We need to figure out how to bring the resources of the university into communities so that they can build power and self-determination through policy changes and access to

Daniel Susser: To build off of that last point, and to put these sorts of dystopian questions aside for a moment, if we want to avoid the kinds of possible futures that you all were just describing, what kinds of changes are you recommending in your various fields? I am not trying to suggest that there are magic potions and that we could fix all these systems by virtue of one or two changes, but what would help push us toward people taking more responsibility for the design choices that they are making?

Andrea Matwyshyn: One thing that I would like to see in my own community is more folks rolling up their sleeves and trying to work with policymakers. Without being in the trenches, you do not really understand how complex some of these issues can be and how they connect to other issues. We academics tend to have deep knowledge in a narrow way, while a Senate staffer

might have knowledge in a broad way, because they are fielding ten different policy issues at once.

I think that there is a beneficial learning exchange that happens between policy makers and regulators, and those of us in the academy who bring the different paradigms, or bring the theoretical conversation, and then the policy makers push us with the hard, practical cases. And out of those kinds of exchanges where both sides are willing to learn from each other – and that is key, because that is not always the case – magic can happen. In my experience, it really only takes two or three correctly positioned people with the correct knowledge base and the correct networks to cause magical things to happen in policy circles. But the trick is for those people to meet each other, for them to like each other, work with each other, engage in an honest way. That is hard and it is rare, but it can happen, and you have to give it a try for it to even be a possibility.

is what scares me senseless in terms of politics. Imagine: it only takes a few people to make these decisions and you need the connections and the resources to be connected to those people that make those decisions. That is both the opportunity, as she described it, and the reason why so many communities and people are locked out of policies that actually work for them. I would like to flip it and say, I would love to see not people going to policymakers, but policymakers coming to the people! I mean the old-fashioned way, like really coming into the community, and being responsive to your constituency and community needs rather than the dollars that are funding your campaign. If I had that magic potion that you are talking about, Daniel, those are some of the changes that I would like to see.

Antwi Akom: Everything that Andrea said

I would like to see us really push ourselves on how we are even using terminology; for example, community. Who is the community? What do we mean by that? Do we mean the community-based organization that sucks up all the dollars, is that really the community? Or are there 500 other

Antwi Akom. Tessa Cruz, Catherine D’Ignazio, Andrea Matwyshyn, Daniel Susser

mom and pop community-based organizations that do not get to be represented in those ways? I would like to see an expansion of our notion of democratization, of decision-making. I would like to see a more critical lens about how we think about community. I would like to see much more, I would like to see democracy in action and more participatory democracy and participatory budgeting and decision-making. I would love to center community voices and have a politic that is much more responsive than we currently have. That is what I would do with my magic potion.

Catherine D’Ignazio:. I think from my end, I would do all of those! I am going to bring it back to the educational environment, and to what we center in on our learning environments and what is relegated to the outside. One of the things that I would love in academia, but also in K-12 education, is more of a centering of theories and ideas of power and inequality. There are enormously visionary bodies of knowledge that are available to us.

People before us have analyzed power, race, and gender, ability, and interlocking systems of oppression. Those are the seeds of making a difference in structural issues because they give us the keys to unlock an understanding about this current moment. In my talk I mentioned how the popular press, when they cover things like algorithmic discrimination, often seem to throw up their hands and say, “Oh my, goodness gracious, the algorithm is racist!” If you have any kind of schooling in feminism, critical race theory, queer theory, or Indigenous studies, then you have tools to figure out

how to change these things. But these bodies of knowledge do not get centered in our institutions and they certainly do not get centered in our design disciplines. We do not necessarily think about how we integrate visionary ideas into concrete designs, information systems, and so on. We do not need new theories, we have theory, it is called intersectional feminism. We have a bunch of other theories of that world that we could be drawing from. So, rather than new theories, we need some bridging work, and we need to center that work and bring it in and relate it to things. That is I would do as well; wave the magic wand and recenter all this stuff about data ethics back on the people who really have the ideas for how we can address the structural issues.

known to us but are not known to people in the halls of power. Being that bridge to the voices that are not being heard is the thing that I try to help with. And sometimes when you are making those connections, your endorsement as an academic, who is trusted by these people, gives an entree to new groups of people to have voice in the halls of power.

Andrea Matwyshyn: I would like to add that I think one of the roles that I was trying to get at, and maybe I did not say clearly enough, is that academics can be connectors to communities that cannot get heard otherwise, and they can be translators of the theories that are well

Daniel Susser: Thanks, I was just thinking about that and about Catherine’s comments a moment ago about how to structure pedagogy. I teach in the College of Information Science and Technology and I am a philosopher by training and I work on issues around technology, ethics, and policy, and I teach these kinds of things to students. Just a few years ago, it was very difficult for me to even get students, undergraduates or graduates, to the starting point of the work that you are doing: the ethical and political ramifications that you need to consider. I would spend all semester just trying to destabilize their assumption that technologies are these value neutral things and that they do not

Antwi Akom. Tessa Cruz, Catherine D’Ignazio, Andrea Matwyshyn, Daniel Susser

need to worry about their implications. I have noticed a marked change, at least in my own students, over the last few years. It is now much easier to convince them of that starting point, which enables us to get into the work much more quickly. So, obviously, there have been changes in the zeitgeist that I think are really promising. I am curious about the kinds of conversations you are having with your students about these issues, about how to develop strategies for tackling them meaningfully, about how to navigate something that, especially graduate students, find very difficult, which is how to speak to different audiences. How to be someone who does academic work that needs to be legible to academics, but if they want their work to have an impact outside of academia, how to do that translation work and position themselves in that way. I am curious about how the conversations you are having with your students are going and if they have changed recently.

research activity) in a medical school at UCSF, and a not-R1 at a MSI (Minority Serving Institution), at the San Francisco State University – it’s the only college of ethnic studies in the United States. Those students that are coming from the MSIs and the HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), these are life and death issues for a lot of those students. Sometimes it is for my other graduate students at UCSF, but not always.

Antwi Akom: I have a joint research lab with an R1 (a research university with high

The students coming from the MSIs have usually had to go down a much harder road, and their lived experience shapes the way that they want to make social impact. So, they want to start with social impact for their auntie, for their grandma in their neighborhood that helps overcome the historical trauma, drama, and disparities that have been impacting them for generations. I have been blessed to be in a position to help these students, and my students walk that fine line between having social impact, and working in academia and being respected.

Depending on the kind of work you do, whether you do quantitative work, or qualitative work, policy work, theoretical work, it depends on your work, the respect level that you have in the academy is shifting terrain. I think the more you step outside of it, we could do a much better job of embracing this idea of making social and political impact. Making economic impact is very important to our work.

There is the possibility of impacting and changing lives, and I do not want to create a false binary. It can be a both; but, I think it is our job to help create the space for that, and those spaces are not always there. We are trying to mentor, create a safe space to be yourself, and allow students to make mistakes, grow, and learn. This will allow them to become the person that could make that social impact and have that academic impact.

Andrea Matwyshyn: I’ve noticed two shifts I’d like to talk about and then I will get to the student engagement piece. The first shift that I noticed is that when I first started teaching many years ago, there was a hearty debate over whether technology was its own thing, whether the internet was a separate space, or whether it was an extension of reality. Most of my students were originally in “the internet is its own thing” camp. I would have aggressive, well-thought-out arguments among students debating this regularly.

Antwi Akom. Tessa Cruz, Catherine D’Ignazio, Andrea Matwyshyn, Daniel Susser

Now, the number of students who would argue that the internet is its own space has dwindled significantly because of how internet conduct impacts the physical world. The new trend that I have noticed is that of a contradiction in technology. On the one hand, technology can engage in high levels of curated, precise tracking of us. The contradiction is our inability to customize technology in ways that we, as users, would desire. That inherent contradiction is starting to be a little galling to my students.

The reason for the lack of customization is, of course, that it is in the interest of the company to be able to extract the maximum amount of data in ways that are maximally exploitable in terms of their licensing of data streams. But the promise of the internet, to use the happier version of that flying cars reference, was that it would give us the ability to find an obscure thing that would point us to this other obscure thing that we would also like, but that we could have some modicum of control.

I will give a physical object example. It is mystifying to me why the features in cars are so limited at this point when any internet-facing company – a car company with a website – could potentially create an interface where you check the box and create, essentially, a custom car. That level of customization, which could exist, might be more expensive and may be annoying to execute from a logistical standpoint on the company side. That degree of personalization to meet unique needs of different people, however, does not really exist robustly in the ways that I would like to see. With respect to technology, finding cars that do not phone home and inform the company where you physically are, is next to impossible at this point. The default in new cars is internet connectivity and maximum data collection, to the point where many cars now have the capability to have microphones that are turned on in the cabin to listen to your conversations.

Because we know that, for example, the remote controls that come with some cable providers have that capability and have secondary licensing streams going

to relevant companies based on your comments in your living room, that is a predictable business model for what will be a next-generation car market data stream. So, where do we see the customization option that lets you turn off the internet connectivity or turn off that data collection to the point of physically disabling that microphone? We are not seeing that kind of customization opportunity, but we are seeing increasingly granular monitoring and surveillance, for lack of a better term. I think students are noticing that.

The short version of the one thing that I have been communicating to my students is that life is long, and you can have multiple different iterations of self, and multiple different careers. Some of the law students that I teach are leaving law school with significant debt, and they need to handle that. But there is always the opportunity to reinvent yourself. Just because you have a particular job at this moment, it does not mean that in four years, you cannot schedule a career change toward a job that you find more

fulfilling. Giving that permission to iterate cycles of keeping yourself stable and in a good place as a human and giving back to society to recognize the needs of others is important. I think that permission to do that kind of a cycle is not something that necessarily occurs to my students, so hearing someone like me say it to them can lighten the load. There’s a tension between needing to do the responsible thing and make a lot of money. For example, some people might want to work in a less lucrative but more personally fulfilling role. And the answer is, they can do both, but sometimes that is not necessarily what occurs to them.

Daniel Susser: I want to follow up on that in a moment, but Catherine, would you like to say anything else about the pedagogical side of these issues?

Catherine D’Ignazio: Maybe because of the pandemic, I have been prioritizing creating spaces for community where people can decompress a little bit, especially in the context of the academic institution. We have a policy in the Data +

Antwi Akom. Tessa Cruz, Catherine D’Ignazio, Andrea Matwyshyn, Daniel Susser

Feminism Lab that we take care of ourselves, and we take care of each other. The idea is that family and health for all of us comes before everything else. I try to model that, not always successfully, to be honest.

I also try to communicate to the students that no deadline, no paper, no research project is worth sacrificing your health and well-being. Those kinds of things can always be postponed. This summer, we had all these ambitious goals. We were going to finish drafts of two papers, and we ended up postponing one for an entire year and the other one is just there, it will happen when it happens. In the kind of high stress environment of a pandemic, I saw and heard all sorts of things through the students last year. People are living real crisis situations.

I also wanted to talk about how I am navigating these spaces. I have a luxurious situation, to a certain extent, because I am in a department that is very interdisciplinary, which makes it easier to mentor students who want to be in the tradition of the activist scholar. We do not necessarily have to “norm” students into these different models.

I do have a larger question: down the road, will that impact their job prospects? For those of us who are committed to an activist tradition, we have to figure out where we can realize those potentials within the academy. I do think it’s easier in the interdisciplinary spaces, because they are spaces that do not discipline us, and do not discipline knowledge as much. I appreciate the

deep rigor of being disciplinarily focused sometimes, but then when it comes on the flip side, you are limited by very specific boundaries and never speak to other audiences. I have a problem norming students into that model, because I actually do not think it is an effective model. It’s important to find and carve out spaces academically where the scholar activist model is possible or will at least be tolerated by the department or the institution.

like you mentioned, preparing people to do this work deeply within communities, as it pertains to technology and technology tools. That involves the questions that you are asking people, and how you are meeting people where they are, how you are making it easy for them to have their voice heard. To feel their own strength within the process and tap into that is critical.

Daniel Susser: We could have a whole panel about navigating interdisciplinary and disciplinary norms. I really appreciate that. Tessa, would you would like to jump in? I am sure, in the course of your work with Streetwyze, that you are engaging in pedagogy, that you are teaching people how to go out into communities and do this work, and equipping them with certain kinds of theoretical models, and so on. How does that work for you?

Tessa Cruz: Thank you – we could probably have a whole panel just on that specific question! There are a couple of different intersections with our work. One,

On the flip side, it is important to explore ways to make space for that voice to be utilized. We are helping people use community data to make better, and more community-informed, decisions. Sometimes people are passionate about that and interested, but the structure that they work within does not allow for them to do that effectively. That is a whole process in and of its own. Often we can speak to these systems that have been ingrained – as researchers, as teachers, as people in academia and beyond – when thinking about data and thinking about how much data is valid data or useful. And we try to flip that on its head, for example if we don’t have a ton of data saying one specif-

Antwi Akom. Tessa Cruz, Catherine D’Ignazio, Andrea Matwyshyn, Daniel Susser

ic thing, but we have one data point that is impactful and powerful that you should consider.

It’s hard for big companies to understand why they should listen to that one piece of data when they have other pieces of data saying other things. I think there are two ways of seeing it, and we specialize in helping people on the ground and within community organizations or institutions meet in the middle and understand each other a little bit better.

Doing this work takes time, it takes patience, it takes care, it takes love, it takes resources. And often we hear clients talk negatively about that. Yes, if you are working with elders and teaching them how to use technology and be at the conversation, it is going to take time. That is okay. It is really important to remind people about that and recenter their values around what that looks like in practice.

Daniel Susser: That’s such a great point.

I’d like to circle back to the issue that I raised at the beginning, which is that

these questions about design – of the physical environment or the digital environment – these questions are not being posed in a vacuum. In those conversations about the ethics of design and teaching students how to become more thoughtful designers, the broader political and economic conditions that they are operating in sometimes falls away a bit. The whole burden of solving these problems can end up on the shoulders of the designers or the people who are intervening in any particular case. As a final question, I am curious as to how you all think about navigating that kind of tension. How do you prepare students, or Tessa, in your case, folks going out and working with the organization? How you help them think about and navigate both the responsibilities that they have, but also the constraints or set of options that they are operating in? A lot of the technologies that we are worried about, as Andrea was describing, are technologies that are developed and deployed by private firms and built in the context of private industry. The space that these folks are going to operate in is not one of complete freedom. How do you help

people think through that tension and their own possibilities for creating change?

Andrea Matwyshyn: One of the things I try to do with my students is to use a lot of historical examples. Sometimes it is easier to see how things go wrong if you look at someone else’s time, place, and context. If you analyze a different time, place, and context with nuance, it builds the skillset to be able to analyze your own in the same way.

An example is Buckminster Fuller’s horrible, scary car. He was a genius of design in terms of geodesic domes, but his car was a nightmare. If we look at it with today’s eyes, it would be unsafe and unroadworthy in every sense of the term. We can ask how this thing was even allowed on the road. What happened to render it non-popular? What would we do if we had that kind of a situation today with, say, an autonomous vehicle? Setting up the conversation with historical examples sometimes helps to connect.

Tessa Cruz: One thing we have considered and learned, and also shared with others, is that you do not have to. When you are seeking partnerships, you do not have to partner with everyone. It is okay to find people that are mission-aligned, vision-aligned, and are on the same theoretical team. Sometimes it is tempting to work with people who you think are well-intentioned and want to improve their methods and standards regarding equity and design. They might seem like

Antwi Akom. Tessa Cruz, Catherine D’Ignazio, Andrea Matwyshyn, Daniel Susser

great partners in that sense, and often times those companies are really big. Still, they might not offer you the resources you want, and they might not be validating you and showing you the equity that you deserve.

navigating those societal forces and trying to figure out how to do your best amidst a very fraught environment that is not perfect and will never be perfect.

A lot of what we have experienced, and try to teach students and partners, is that you do not have to partner when you are a smaller company or a smaller team. If you are a small firm or BIPOC-led, you can prioritize your values and your missions, and find people that are going to be great partners, rather than trying to partner with everyone.

I will give an example from my own work. We ran a hackathon called the “Make the Breast Pump Not Suck Hackathon.” Actually, we’ve run it twice now, once in 2014 and again in 2018. The first time around, it started with a focus on the breast pump, the object and the environment. There were no lactation spaces where I was working, at least not at the time I was a grad student. So, we focused on the object (the breast pump) and the experience of using the object.

Catherine D’Ignazio: I appreciate your question, Daniel, because I think about this a lot. There’s a difference between designing and making things, versus explaining things. We can wrap up a nice explanation of societal forces, and how power and oppression and privilege all work, and then we are done. But then, if you are working on making things, there is a different set of parameters. You are both

It ended up becoming a larger research project. We gathered stories from many people, and it got me to thinking about the structural issues involved in the simple act of feeding one’s child. It got me thinking a lot about things; for example, do we need better breast pumps and better lactation spaces, or do we rather need paid family leave policies because that would just solve this whole thing immediately?

I wrote a paper about that question. Ultimately, though, we need both, and we should ask for both of those things because, to a certain extent, design and making and building things can be a harm reduction strategy. As we build and organize towards long-term change, such as realizing a policy of paid family leave, we run against political headwinds. These are longer-term things that we need to work toward, but at the same time we can make shorter-term changes, reduce harm, and make more incremental improvements to people’s lives.

Maybe we train designers to think in a multi-scaled way so that we don’t think that a better breast pump is the solution to all these problems. The problems are deeply structural, and we think we can situate them and think about our own work within that larger field. In parallel, we can work on designs that can support that larger structural issue.

Daniel Susser: That is a fantastic note to end on. I want to thank all the panelists for their time today, both in the talks that you gave earlier and in this round table discussion. Thank you so much for joining us.

Antwi Akom. Tessa Cruz, Catherine D’Ignazio, Andrea Matwyshyn, Daniel Susser

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