HOW IT STARTED

In 1991 I was 9 years old. We moved into a split-level house with five bedrooms. It was perfect for our family of 6, and enormous when compared to the southern California bungalow we came from. The following year, we welcomed Joshua into this home. He was two. He was round with red hair. We have an old home movie capturing his first toddling steps around our living room on that winter night. He was the first of four foster children my parents would care for long term and eventually adopt in the years to come. These four were not the only additions to the household over the 7 years I continued to live there. There was my dad’s cousin and her son, a wheelchair-bound aunt, longtime friends of my parents and their children, other (short term) foster children, a brother-in-law, a new nephew. At one point I think there were 14–15 people living in what became a very tiny house.

By necessity things needed to change, constantly. Bunk mates were shuffled, the family room morphed into a master suite. I think it was my idea to drywall the garage. We separated it into two rooms using a few room dividers and I moved in with my older sister. Painting was complete in hours and when we got home from the water park the next day my mother already had carpet installed. I even dreamed of converting an old detached workshop in the backyard into a loft apartment a la Monica and Rachel’s place where I could go to have private time. By the time I graduated high school I was upstairs in the original master bedroom. I had helped my mother reupholster an old love seat in Martha Stewart fabrics and co-opted an old coffee table from my grandfather. Having my own living room at 17, I felt sophistication beyond my years. In 2000, as I backed out of the driveway with everything with said love seat, coffee table, and everything else I could pack into my dorm room now in the back of my Buick Century station wagon, I could hear sobs from my younger siblings inside the house. I like to think the tears were a sign of how much they were going to miss me, but more likely they were fighting over who got my bedroom.

Here is the BIG lesson I learned from a childhood of constant flux: Our surroundings are malleable, and that if you had the ideas, you could change (nearly) anything about your environment.

It’s so important I’m going to say it again: Everyone has the power to change their environment.

It’s been 16 years since I moved out of that house and this lesson has stayed with me. In fact, looking back, this one idea was the reason I decided to study architecture. I just didn’t know it yet, it would take years for the power of those words to really click.

Through my day job working with clients & users, and my volunteer experience developing design education programs for the public, I’ve come to see that if there is no exposure to this idea, most people don’t think twice about why things are the way they are. Opportunities to create stronger communities and healthier cities are left on the table because people don’t know how to ask for them, or can’t put words to what is missing. But here’s the thing — you can totally learn this stuff. You just need to know where to look.

So I am going to reach out, in a very direct way, and pass on the message that anything is possible through design. But I’m going to do more than that. I’m going to share tools for you to take action, so you can advocate for better public space in your own city. So stay with me…