Civic Dreams, Human Spaces
What teaching a Stanford d.school course taught us about equity + engagement and the pitfalls of neatly packaged definitions.
The Challenge
Earlier this year, my colleagues and I received an equity and engagement grant from the Stanford d.school to supplement our course. The theme, equity + engagement, emerged from a living infographic experiment involving balloons and helium, in which it quite literally floated to the top of students’ priorities. While our team had previously taught classes in various iterations, all involving some aspect of applying design thinking to cities and urban environments, the theme of the grant was something new to consider. So we put our heads together and approached the challenge from our backgrounds in urban planning, design, business, and civil engineering.
Aside from the parameters that we were given — that we would teach a design thinking course that integrated “equity and engagement” — we had considerable freedom to design the curriculum, content, and learning outcomes. To start, we had to define equity and engagement. Then we had to translate that theme within the specific context of our course. The key idea was to use the equity and engagement funds to create an immersive learning experience by bringing our students to San Francisco so that they could dive right into learning directly from the local context through observations, interviews, and prototyping with the people on location.
After weeks of discussions, we rolled out the Civic Dreams Human Spaces course in which we partnered with The East Cut Community Benefit District (CBD) to envision new opportunities for public space at three different sites in the neighborhood.
Our team chose to focus on public spaces, or the third places of a city, defined by Ray Oldenburg as social meeting points that are distinct from the home as a first place and work as a second place. In everyday terms, this might be a stoop, street corner, square, or park — spaces where people might gather for conversation, sit, rest, throw a block party — or perhaps, just come together with no other purpose than to be alone, together, in public. Oldenburg saw these third places as critical anchors of community life that encouraged social mixing, a sense of belonging, and communal purpose.
Given this, we came up with the following design challenge for our students: how might we design a public space intervention in this neighborhood to infuse possibility in its third spaces to encourage those at the ends of the spectrum to perhaps meet in the middle? What if design thinking could create opportunities for everyone in the neighborhood regardless of their backgrounds to offer and share input about their needs (e.g., equity) and involve them in planning and designing their spaces (e.g., engagement)?
Brief History of Rincon Hill
To understand why this prompt is relevant to the neighborhood today, we’ll have to retrace its history. One of the original seven hills of San Francisco, the site known as Rincon Hill housed wealthy families and their mansions in the mid-1880s. It remained a prominent address in the city until the public works project in 1868, the Second Street Cut, leveled the highest point of Rincon Hill and triggered the rapid transformation of the neighborhood into an industrial corner of the city. More recently, the neighborhood is rising back from the ashes, as construction cranes dot the skyline of the future Salesforce Tower, Salesforce Park, and Salesforce Transit Terminal.
For many, the neighborhood today embodies the growing chasm between the two cities of San Francisco. On one end, we see the professional working class, many of whom work in the technology sector, housed in the gleaming skyscrapers sprouting all over the neighborhood where they live and work. On the other end, there are the unhoused and transient population — some of whom were displaced when the old Transbay Terminal was torn down to make way for the incoming futuristic park and shopping mall. Both spectrums occupy the same spaces of this neighborhood but their spatial paths and positions rarely intersect. In one place, we see the uncomfortable juxtaposition of two cities in which optimism, abundance, and generosity are showered upon one segment of the population, while the needs and desires of another subset of the population are not being adequately addressed.
The San Francisco Planning Department in its 2005 Rincon Hill Plan designated the neighborhood as the future home to tens of thousands of residents, but you might not know this from walking down the street on the weekend. The sidewalks are empty; basic neighborhood amenities such as a grocery store have yet to arrive. Opportunities to start conversations while picking up a container of milk or seeing your neighbor at the nearby park or while walking your dog are rare. John King, architectural and urban design critic from the San Francisco Chronicle wrote extensively about the neighborhood’s modernist architecture but concluded with this verdict: “Ultimately, Rincon probably won’t ever feel like a neighborhood unto itself.”
The Course
For the next two and a half weeks, our students grappled with these questions both inside and outside the classroom. During our first weekend in the field, the students focused on understanding the various perspectives of the neighborhood and the three particular sites chosen by the Community Benefit District. They went on a neighborhood tour led by the CBD and the San Francisco Planning Department to meet business owners and employees, conducted a focus group with residents, and spoke with people on the street (if and when they were able to encounter them). The second weekend, the students returned to the City towing along suitcases holding their prototypes on the Caltrain and Muni. Students were given the following instructions: create a programmatic and physical intervention — and roll them out as quickly as possible to get immediate feedback from neighbors on location.
A wide range of ideas emerged. One group was assigned Essex Hill, a steep drop off at the end of a residential street that is connected by a staircase to a congested street below. The students learned during their interviews that residents who lived at the bottom of the hill at the affordable housing complex have few interactions with the residents who live in the market-rate condominiums on top of the hill. The students began to think of ways to bridge the seemingly vast physical and mental gap and ultimately came up with one concept of a membership-based community garden that would unite people from both ends of the hill.
Another group was tasked with the Spear Street cul-de-sac that essentially served as a parking lot during the weekday for nearby office workers. During the weekend, it became an empty street, overshadowed by the majestic span of the Bay Bridge. The team decided to create an art wall on the chain link fence and light projections in the evening to bring residents who lived on the street a chance to pause, observe, and strike up impromptu conversation.
Now that the class is over, The East Cut CBD is working with the City of San Francisco to move forward with a design and activation plan, in which improving public space is one of the priority areas. We were glad to hear that our course provided concepts that the CBD plans to refine, with the possibility of developing into a more permanent project. Our course aimed to inspire possibility, ultimately guiding our students to use design thinking to reimagine possibilities for public space and explore a range of concepts made tangible and real through rapid prototyping and iteration.
The Learnings
To revisit our original goal, were we able to meet the “equity and engagement” theme as much as we wanted? In retrospect, I think we could have pushed harder and asked more challenging questions of ourselves.
I recently searched for the definition of equity and engagement in the dictionary. Some were obvious, but others were not at the forefront of my mind. Oxford Dictionary offers several definitions of equity [noun]:
The quality of being fair and impartial.
The value of the shares issued by a company.
The value of a mortgaged property after deduction of charges against it.
When we set out to design the course, we saw equity as the recognition that one group of people had clear advantages, privileges, and resources to assert their voice on the future of the neighborhood. Naturally, our approach was to restore that balance. We assumed equity was a good thing to achieve, and once set forth in that direction, we marched towards achieving it.
Equity — often used by social justice advocates to suggest fairness and impartial treatment of all people regardless of background — is also a term commonly used in property and real estate. The great paradox is such that the ability to gain more equity through property ownership in the neighborhood and increasing one’s share of a company has become precisely why the neighborhood represents two fragmented cities of San Francisco, separating those who have equity from those do not. In this sense, greater equity in terms of property and real estate ownership is in direct conflict with lower and diminishing equity as defined by social justice advocates.
Our interpretation of “engagement” was even further removed from the Oxford Dictionary. We saw engagement as a way to bring people normally left out of the conversation together towards a collaborative and ideally peaceful agreement of shared space and values. Perhaps if people from disparate ends of the spectrum had a chance to come together, they might realize their shared commonalities and find ways to work together. And yet, Oxford defines engagement as both an agreement in preparation for marriage and “a fight or battle between armed forces” — neither definition, of course, was what we had in mind when we designed the course.
Our blind adherence to equity and engagement as universal values and goals, reminds me of the article “Sustainability is not enough” written by Peter Marcuse, Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning at Columbia University in which he argues that sustainability — often assumed to be a universal goal — might work for environmental and ecological concerns, but fails miserably for a housing or urban development program. To planners who are presumably concerned with issues of social justice, he asks: “So, if justice is the standard by which sustainability is measured, why add the criterion of sustainability in judging the measure at all? Why not simply ask if it is just?”
Marcuse goes on to argue that it might actually be detrimental to assume that sustainability can serve as a universal goal that works for cities as much as it does for ecological conditions. After all, most of us can agree that we want to avoid the extinction of the human species, but ask anyone to define a sustainable city or social policy, and you are likely to get multiple answers.
In part, Marcuse argues that housing and urban development programs are inherently based in conflict. If we cloak our intentions behind a veil of universality, or we assume that we simply want to sustain what is existing regardless of how unjust it is, then we lose sight of the real work ahead of us: the redistribution of capital, political power, and human capacity.
If we were to replace the word sustainability with equity in his article, Marcuse might as well have said, “Equity is not enough.”
Tomorrow’s Work
When we first set out to create this course, we were seduced by neatly packaged definitions of equity and engagement and all the yearnings that it comes with.
To do this work well, we need to be thinking a lot more about whom this work serves and what questions we aren’t asking when we default to the universal definitions. This is how we can understand whether we are being effective. One can make a similar argument for sustainability and other deceptively simple words that are used so often that they lose their efficacy.
Ultimately, we are grateful to the d.school for the funds and opportunity to offer this course. It’s clear that the students enjoyed this experience and gained a lot in their exposure to the CBD and from talking to the residents who kindly offered their insights and time. We ended up creating a course where students were able to apply design thinking to reimagine possibilities for public space and contributed to a process that might actualize these ideas and improve the quality of third places in the neighborhood.
But for those looking to push the boundaries of equity and engagement, we have to take on a deeper questioning about our assumptions and definitions.
To address equity in this community, we would have to question how it came to be that certain people and groups of people disproportionately hold more equity in the buildings, institutions, and organizations than other people in the neighborhood. We would have to ask why those who hold more equity are given more importance and weight through their CBD membership, homeowner association meetings, and channels to elected representatives.
Perhaps we might have asked if engagement therefore meant that we abandon polite conversation in a conference room, over bagels and coffee, in which we assumed that we could and should reach common and shared interests. Perhaps engagement in the true sense of the word meant that we should have allowed difficult conversations to take place. We would have to acknowledge the tensions and conflict between competing uses of limited space, and how one group’s assertion of use has the real possibility of diminishing the ability of another group to enjoy and use the same space.
The greater danger here is that we completed the course and checked off the boxes saying that yes, we explored equity and engagement as a theme in the course, and yes, this is how you do the work of equity and engagement, done and done. This gives the impression that both are achievable. In actuality, the landscapes of equity and engagement remain unfinished, as well as they should be.
All along, we’ve been asking ourselves the wrong question: equity and achievement, are we done yet? Instead, a more useful question might be: equity and engagement, for whom? Once we ask that question and seek answers, we can begin the hard work of writing and re-writing those narratives, which are likely to be continuous, ongoing, and forever fluid.
