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

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 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 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 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.

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.

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. 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.

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.

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 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,

Rayne Laborde

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 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,” 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- 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 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.

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

Laborde

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.