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.

Lily Song & Euneika Rogers-Sipp

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.