Making space for equitable urban development
We’ve seen an uptick in equity-driven RFPs over the past two years. More often than not, these requests for proposals describe the scope for community engagement as one-off town halls, charettes, or polls and surveys: demands on people’s time without a plan to connect their input to the design process, and turn their inclusion into tangible benefits. As a result, these activities become performances of community engagement, leaving skeptical and burnt-out communities in their wake.
In our own work, we find time and space to be the biggest obstacles to more just outcomes for communities most impacted by urban development projects. So in the spirit of redesigning existing processes that have been complicit in driving inequity in our cities, we decided to design our own timeline for equitable urban development.
We’re eager to show you what we’ve built — but first, three principles that drove the design of this timeline:
1. Lead with equity and the design plans will follow
“Reach out to the diverse residents that you expect to serve, because they must be involved in the genesis of your solutions for the solutions to be meaningful. Don’t pretend that you know what’s best.” — Community leader, Washington
In our experience, equity-centered processes can create more just, inclusive, and equitable design decisions, but only if processes are put in place before decisions happen. Urban development timelines need to incorporate sufficient preparatory community work that ensures more equitable outcomes.
What if we listened to lived experience before making design decisions, understood what’s needed for local capacity building before making community benefits decisions, and piloted community programs before making operations and maintenance decisions? Without doing so, we risk repeating patterns of exclusion in our processes and outcomes.
2. Prove to communities that they are being heard
“So often folks give their time to participate only to have none of it implemented and they find out they’re just being used as a token. Don’t waste people’s time!” — Community organizer, Washington
Community members give their time and share their stories in order to improve the lives of their neighbors. When there is no reciprocal action or outcome resulting from their contributions, engagement fatigue deepens as communities continue to feel (and be) ignored.
What if communities could clearly see and hear the material impact of their participation in planning and design processes, in what was designed, in who was hired to build it, in the materials used, and in everyday operations? Clarity on what is decided at each stage allows an urban development project to earn its trust as a new neighbor. The accumulation of equity-centered decisions, impacts, and outcomes, creates opportunities for credible community spaces to emerge.
3. Center community power building as a design outcome
“We see the vigor, and it’s all good and fine, but will you be in it for the long haul?” — Community organizer, New York
We’ve found that existing development processes and deliverables are focused on getting to the final certificate of occupancy, and less so on the ongoing life and care of the built project and its connected communities post-occupancy. However, communities experience the impact of development cumulatively over the long term: in seeing who uses the space, who accesses it, what it brings and takes away from communities.
What if we established local partnerships with communities for decision-making that considers long-term community impact? By building community power through proactive partnerships, urban developments can be a source of strength for the generations who live, work, and support the area.
Introducing The Equitable Urban Development Timeline
An urban development project that simultaneously builds equity within its community and for the project itself is our vision for a more equitable urban development process. It is a proactive process that finds ways to invest in community and create more inclusive spaces. And it is pragmatic; by mapping itself to the standard timelines of urban development, an equitable process also meets the time and project management needs of development, architecture, and construction teams.
The below graphic illustrates the following four stages of equity-centered process that map onto the typical phases of a project from early planning stages, to design, construction, and post-occupancy:
1: Equitable project vision
When a new development project begins, what is its North Star?
A vision grounds the entire process. A concrete commitment to an equity-centered vision means including marginalized communities in decision-making, making their needs and experiences part of the brief for design teams. It means creating project timelines that create adequate space for meaningful community conversation, and bringing on community advisors and partners to help inform the design concept.
To develop an equitable project vision, we build a deep understanding of local socio-economic and environmental context to identify opportunities for community partnership. We also plan for capacity-building within both the project team and the community, beginning to build the “muscle” of community collaboration, proactively listening to community needs, making project recommendations responsive to lived experiences, and validating those decisions with community members.
2: Community design directives
What data is being used by architecture teams to create design concepts? As designs are being developed and project teams make technical and conceptual design decisions, local lived experience needs to weigh in.
Community design directives ensure that local insights inform design decisions. It starts with generating insights from place-based community research, which are then translated into low-fidelity design concepts, garnering community input before plans advance to design development. In the early stages of design, community feedback is integrated early and often to build community authorship through meaningful input into design decisions and enable exploration of longer term partnerships with community organizations and leaders post-construction.
3: Community investment strategy
Community investment refers to how a project supports community-centered capacity building, resource distribution, and access. These include equitable workforce development programs, just supply chain practices, and local industry development. Investment research begins well before these contracting decisions are made; community investment strategies involve identifying barriers and building capacity for equitable local investment to happen. This ensures that construction documents and bid packages clearly make space for power and wealth building in the communities we serve. Again, continuing to build the project’s equity building “muscle,” investment strategies are surfaced, tested, and validated with communities while adjustments to project plans can still be made.
4: Community stewardship plan
By the time projects begin to think about the maintenance, care, and community stewardship of places post-construction, typically amid construction, through this process it has already strengthened its capacity to collaborate with communities. As early planning and design partnerships are formalized into long term community ownership opportunities, development projects continue investing in and partnering with organizations that have been involved from very early on, demonstrating that equity was intentionally included, and not an afterthought.
At this point, equity commitments and goals that were identified early on should continue to align once the construction site transitions to an operating site and decision-making power shifts from the construction manager to the property manager. Caring for and sustaining community collaborations is an essential part of management’s role in cultivating place-based spaces that are increasingly community-led.
Equity-centered processes are not an afterthought to “check a box”; they are an intentional investment in time and resources that start before an architect is hired and span to a generation after a project has been built. At Openbox, we are energized by the opportunity to design a process that makes time and space to engage in deeper people-centered design work across the entire urban development process. This timeline is a contribution for how we can begin building more equitable futures for our cities.
How will you make space for more equity-centered processes in your projects? What are the challenges you’re facing to get there? We welcome your comments and feedback at hello@opnbx.com
