De-Gentrification, a Transition Design Solution

Willow Hong, Adrian Galvin, Gray Crawford, Lisa Li

PART I: Critique of The Greater Beltzhoover Urban Planning Toolkit

Project Overview

The Greater Beltzhoover Toolkit is a document created through the collaboration of a member of Carnegie Mellon University’s UDream Fellow program, Mary Taylor, and a member of the Urban Redevelopment Authority’s Urban Innovation21 program, Naomi Ritter. The Toolkit was created in order to address some of Beltzhoover neighborhood’s most pressing concerns. It is meant to be an accessible planned reference document for future development in Beltzhoover and its surrounding areas by providing urban design strategies linked to corresponding urban planning and policy initiatives.

The toolkit is divided into four parts and a resource guide. Part A: Process to Product gives an overview of the important role community engagement and participation played in the creation of the toolkit. Part B: Background Information and Neighborhood Context provides an overview of Beltzhoover’s background information, such as history, pertinent data, and statistics. Part C: Toolkit Goal and Intent introduces the design opportunities that were discovered through placing the findings made during community meetings within the physical context of the neighborhood. Part D: Proposed Design Strategies outlines the three design sections of this toolkit: Take the First Step, Connect Community through Open Space Network, and Anchor Existing Assets and Integrate New Opportunities.

Vision & Lifestyle

The Greater Beltzhoover Toolkit is meant to be a reference document for future development in the Beltzhoover neighborhood mainly through urban design. Great emphasis is placed on the fact that this toolkit is only meant to be a catalyst, the first steps in a longer evolution, for future development within the neighborhood. It is to be viewed as a living document that “should be explored and fully developed and modified per the community’s needs” (3). The designers’ vision was to heavily involve the residents within the community to work together to build the future of the area they reside in. The toolkit can be used as a valuable communication tool that can facilitate conversation and guide future action.

The vision of this project is only connected to a mid-term vision of sustainable future because it only outline three objective areas: accessibility, mobility and activity. Back-casting was done for these three areas as the main goals of the toolkit were to allow the Beltzhoover community to make future improvements specifically in those areas. Anything beyond those is outside the scope of the project vision.

Theories of Change

The Beltzhoover Toolkit’s theory of change revolved around developing solutions by gathering the local community into collaborative design workshops and identifying areas of improvement. The final product being the toolkit PDF itself, presumably the theory of change included the belief that a digital document can contain information enough to spur change in others who gain access to it and hold the conviction or are convinced by the information contained.

The community design workshops involved bringing members of the community to envision specific future states of the neighborhood, identifying core values and opening up a forum for communication of meaningful values.

As the project didn’t progress further than the creation of the toolkit PDF, the creators’ scope didn’t include explicit self-assessment and assumption-review. Most ideas considered led to pinpointing of areas of improvement in the general quality of life in the neighborhood, such as a focus on developing vacant lots, revitalizing community spaces with events and supplementary programming, and developing infrastructure in need of maintenance.

Mindset & Posture

The Toolkit makes sustainability an early, explicit goal. It references a strategy guide for holistically revitalizing urban alleyways to mitigate stormwater runoff, incorporating permeable paving, plant erosion control, and environmentally-friendly surfaces. Ideation for rain gardens communicates an awareness of water conservation through rainwater capture.

The Toolkit is embedded in dominant socio-economic paradigms inasmuch as the location it focuses on has been shaped by the dominant socio-economic paradigms, but it appears to step away from explicit, cause-and-effect mindset and towards a more general listing of possible leverage points and areas of improvement.

New Ways of Designing

The Greater Beltzhoover Toolkit is, at its foundation, primarily an urban planning project. It intends to shape the process by which future neighborhoods are made . Attention and priority are placed on the “…arrangement, appearance, and function..” of neighborhood spaces. The designers who worked on this document were primarily urban planners, as such their focus on the physical form of neighborhood spaces is prominent.

Mary Taylor, at the time of this document’s publishing, was completing her Masters of Urban Design at CMU through the UDream fellowship, a program whose mission is to increase diversity in the Urban Planning field. A candidate of color in a program which aims to change both the field itself and the way that it is practiced, she seems to bring a different lens to the table. Naomi Ritter worked at Urban Innovation 21, an organization dedicated to increasing sustainability through inclusive innovation. Working together, these two seem to have been rooted in urban planning, but have a positively disruptive and open-minded attitude. This attitude can be seen in their explanation of the toolkit:

“This toolkit pairs proposed projects with similar examples of supporting urban planning and policy-based initiatives.” (2)

So, each proposed idea in this toolkit has supporting case study research, and the authors acknowledge that their own urban planning efforts must be supported by effective policy action, which indicates an openness and awareness on their part. Additionally, later in the document, they recommend that urban planning efforts be preceded by a Community Design Workshop, and includes a case study of a successful workshop. The purpose is to generate, in partnership with the community in question, a “…list of core values…” which the residents of the neighborhood care about (30).

Our gentle critique is that these efforts to reach out to the community and work in partnership with policymakers are an excellent start, but there are many more voices that should be at the table. The perspectives of ecologists, anthropologists, and holistic scientists would expand, extend and deepen this vision.

Connection to Wicked Problems

The project is closely connected to the wicked problem of lack of access to healthy foods in Pittsburgh. One of the approach mentioned in the toolkit book is to introduce food accessibility. The suggested actions include constructing new farmstands, implementing new community supported agriculture (CSA) programs and fostering new channels (e-commerce, community kitchen) for food access.While these actions sound promising in increasing food accessibility, many social and environmental concerns are not addressed in these solution spaces.

One concern relating to the social aspect of the wicked problem is the existent conflict of different stakeholders. Imagine if the CSA programs become successful, it might threaten large companies who were once monocrop national producers. The consequence is that these companies might start laying off employees to adjust the new situation, causing people to lose their jobs.

One concern relating to the environmental aspect of the wicked problem is the climate change. Although creating new CSA programs seem to increase the food accessibility in the neighborhood, the availability of the food might be highly unstable due to changes in the weather. If the growing season is ruined by the climate change, local farms might not even survive, making the CSA program a meaningless practice.

The newly conceived solution might have impacts that will solve for multiple systems levels (niche, regime, landscape) across a relatively long period of time. It is hoped that by doing so, a system-level change will occur instead of a point-level change.

Needs & Satisfiers

The toolkit book clearly stated that the goals and intent for this project is to provide a clearly planned document addressing some of the neighborhood’s most pressing concerns and needs in the state of change. It also provides design strategies that could inform future redevelopment projects within the neighborhood of Beltzhoover. The book has identified three major values that are derived from resident’s needs and desires for the neighborhood:

Community | inclusiveness and civic engagement

Communication | social connections and access to information

Harmony | safety and unity

The strategies offered by this project are essentially the satisfiers of the above needs, and the target user for these strategies are the local residents. The project stated that when people in the neighborhood presents ideas for future development to architects, urban planners, and developers, they can use this toolkit book as references and communication tools. Since each strategy is dealing with multiple values of the community, they are considered as integrated satisfiers. And since it is the members of the neighborhood that are taking initiatives and controlling the satisfiers, such control is internal and therefore speaks to the genuinity of the satisfiers. However, one thing needs to mention is that although the new redevelopment plan can be informed by the strategies provided in the book, its actual implementation is still carried out by external parties (architecture firms, urban planning office, etc). Thus, there is a possibility that the final outcome of the plan will not fully fuel community needs and desires.

Understanding the Scope of the Project

The Winterhouse Pathways in Social Design matrix maps the scope and potential reach of a project. The vertical axis maps the scale of engagement from the level of a single project to a systems level and all the way to a level of impact that affects culture. The horizontal axis maps the range of expertise from the level of a single individual through interdisciplinary teams up to type of cross-sector collaboration that is necessary to address complex problems.

The Beltzhoover toolkit was primarily conceived of, researched and written by two individual urban designers. They are both excellent thinkers and clearly look outside themselves and their field frequently. However, because they do not explicitly work on a multidisciplinary team, their toolkit must be placed in the left column of the matrix. Indeed this references one of our primary critiques of this project: it would be augmented by meaningful partnership with other Pittsburgh organizations and individuals who could bring different perspectives and expertise to the project. Fundamentally, this toolkit is not designed to be a solution, but a series of guidelines, recommendations and research which can inform the execution of better urban planning outcomes in the Pittsburgh area in the future. Therefore we have placed it at the System innovation level.

PART II: Neighborhood Revitalization Transition Design Solution

Project Overview

We propose that gentrification, to the extent that it is being addressed at all, is being address in a disconnected way with solutions that operate at only a single level of scale. This wicked problem is both complex and complicated as previous mapping work has shown, therefore we have come up with a simple maxim which defines the direction future work needs to take:

“Holistically cultivate urban revitalization without gentrifying.”

One of the primary complications of this wicked problem is that revitalization, or neighborhood improvement, is intertwined with, sometimes indistinguishable from, and occasionally the exact same thing as, gentrification. Any solution for neighborhood improvement which is imagined and implemented cannot fully succeed long term unless the issue of gentrification is being addressed throughout the city. Positive urban revitalization often gradually morphs into negative gentrification

We advocate for interconnected efforts between policy, physical construction, planning, education, grassroots community, food systems and transportation systems. We also advocate for coordinated action in many neighborhoods simultaneously. To this end, we propose a vision around which highly localized and specific actions can be take at all levels of scale and all locations throughout the city of Pittsburgh to achieve a state of balanced, diverse, vital and self-sufficient neighborhoods.

We propose the following visualization and conceptualization. Neighborhoods can be imagined on a spectrum from blighted to gentrified. Healthy neighborhoods fall in the middle of this spectrum and have the following positive attributes:

• Balanced
• Diverse
• Vital
• Prosperous
• Functional Infrastructure

Work in the sector of urban planning has up until now has primarily focused on supporting and improving neighborhoods in need. The Greater Beltzhoover Toolkit previously discussed is an excellent example of this, within our conceptualization, it represents a roadmap for moving a blighted neighborhood toward the idealized state. However, as transition designers, we have identified the need for three additional directions of action:

• Moving a gentrified neighborhood toward the idealized state.
• Preventing an ideal neighborhood from moving toward gentrification.
• Preventing an ideal neighborhood from moving toward blight.

This necessitates the creation of a total of three toolkits, which are frameworks for helping any given neighborhood move toward a state of de-gentrification. Each community will then co-design with a panel of dedicated transition experts their most desirable future, which must include a framework for de-gentrification.

Vision and Lifestyle

Futurist Stuart Candy, in his TED Talk “Whose future is this?”, notes “…because the future is un-risen, it is therefore plural.” This is the taking off point that we chose for our own future visioning and back casting process. Candy also notes that the unfolding well being of many will be dependent upon our current ability to grapple with and envision a desirable future. He asserts that “…our collective ability to manifest a future, is dependent on our ability to imagine it.

We imagine a future, 50 years from now, in which wealth, human diversity, healthy infrastructure, green spaces, and prosperity are distributed equitably throughout each neighborhood the city of Pittsburgh. However this equitability does not imply a sameness. Following the tenants of cosmopolitan localism, we envision each neighborhood having a unique, place-based local flavor which emerges over time as its sense of collective self deepens. The city itself will become a lovely mosaic, a patchwork quilt of unique places which are individually identifiable, yet form a coherent and inseparable whole which is greater than the sum of each of its parts.

Our desire is provide a framework which will bring each unique place to its own holistic understanding of the wicked problem of gentrification. From this concrete, placed based understanding, each neighborhood will envision its own most desirable future, carefully including a gradual process of de-gentrification.

Imagining how to get to this future, we realized that the communities of Pittsburgh will need the following components:

A diverse team of Neighborhood Transition Supervisors which must include a wide array of expertise and power, as well as local representatives from the neighborhood itself. For example, a hypothetical team might include a city councilperson, a legislative expert, two community leaders from the targeted neighborhood, an ecologist, a social scientist, an urban planner and a transition designer.

De-gentrifying toolkit seeds, which explain the most pertinent facts, strategies and approaches for moving forward.

Theories of Change

Inigo Eguren describes a theory of change as:

“A thinking‐action approach that helps us to identify milestones and conditions that have to occur on the path towards the change that we want to contribute to happen.”

The first milestone that we will look for is the formation of the Neighborhood Transition Supervisors. These individuals are key leaders, and their selection must be a carefully vetted process. Once selected, they will need to be trained and informed about the wicked problem of gentrification.

The next milestone will be the gathering of community members to hold co-design and visioning workshops. In this moment, the community is visualizing what it would like to be in the future, assisted by the guidance of the diverse experts and lawmakers who make up the Transition Supervisors.

There will then be a second round of workshops, in which the community will come together to harness their vision in a toolkit creation session. In this moment, the provided de-gentrifying toolkit seeds will be combined with the community’s vision in order to make a locally specific toolkit for the neighborhood.

Over time, we will look for the creation and implementation of these neighborhood specific toolkits, which will slowly move neighborhoods toward a more idealized state. We aim for the neighborhoods of Pittsburgh to each create their own specific version of a place which is: balanced, diverse, vital, prosperous and well supported with infrastructure.

Place-based, Integrated Satisfiers

One section in our proposed solution is about fostering self-generated community projects in response to changes in the neighborhood.

While the toolkit book provides strategies for residents in communicating their ideas with external organizations, our proposed solution encourage residents to take their own initiatives to alter the neighborhood dynamics. Workshops that ask residents to create concepts about community projects can become integrated satisfiers that respond to several needs of the residents including creation, freedom, protection and participation. Through freely participating in the workshop to create future community social environments that are protected from gentrification, residents are then able to think from local points of view, and to concretize the concepts within local contexts.

In the process of conducting the workshop, the residents are not thinking solely from a local perspective; they are also free to research on existing community practices in other parts of the world, and evaluate on their pros and cons in relation to their own places. In this way, the concepts generated from the workshops will be both place-based and global in its awareness, which can be easily scaled or replicated for other places.

Leveraging Under-Utilized Resources

In our proposed toolkits, one of the strategies is to incorporate efforts that are already underway based on the spatiotemporal characteristics each effort is targeting at. For example, “Community Land Trust” is an existing organization that buys land together and reserve it for original residents at an affordable rate. This initiative seems provide short-term solutions for residents who are living in neighborhoods that are already being gentrified. Therefore, it will be provided in the Neighborhood Diversification Toolkit and coupled with other strategies that work at different time scales of the adjustment.

In addition, efforts that bring residents’ opinions together are also embraced in our toolkits as a way to leverage community force to help with the execution of the toolkits. “The Art of Democracy” is a design agency that design facilitation plans for community meetings to help synthesize residents’ voice and accomplish common goals. They could help neighborhoods effectively take community-favored actions in response to the gentrification process.

What’s more, efforts that revitalize vacant lots are recognized in our toolkits as well. “Vacant Property Working Group” is a group that helps neighborhoods leverage legislation and opportunities in order to redevelop vacant properties. This effort could be coupled with self-generated community projects in order to develop mixed-used housing developments to encourage community diversity and dynamics. These efforts are strategies provided in the Neighborhood Vitalization Toolkit to ensure its healthy development instead of going through the traditional gentrification process.

Emergent Products, Services, and Outcomes

Since our solution has a component that helps the community utilize vacant lots to foster community diversity and dynamics, many products and services could emerge as a result of the revitalization. For example, one of the architectural strategies for the vacant lots could be designing and selling modular housings at a reasonable price. The design will not only provide a pre-specified framework to ensure the healthy growth of the community, but also present flexible options for local families to participate in the planning and construction process, and to configure the modules according to their needs and visions. As a result, the updated community will foster new small businesses that utilize full potentials of each family. For example, businesses that celebrate local craftsmanship or other knowledges will grow and thrive, and help with both families’ and the community’s economic strength.

The implementation of the toolkits will also generate emergent job positions and services. For example, new job titles such as transition supervisors might identify people who are good at finding local experts in various areas that need help to support their lives. Once identified, these experts will be given a vacant lot to construct their studio space so that they can keep practicing their expertise. Other emergency services might be new facilitation agencies that are good at helping the community conduct workshops and gather ideas.

Restoring & Strengthening Relationships

Our proposed solution aims to reach to a balance between two extremes of relationships that closely relate to various ecosystems in a local scale. We realize that when improvement strategies are designed and only applied to the run down neighborhood, it might work on that specific site for a short time period. However, since the needs are different in the gentrified neighborhood, their activities would prevent the improvement progress through the connected social, economical and infrastructural ecosystems. Moreover, if the run down neighborhood happens to be unaffected by the gentrified neighborhoods,and follows the design strategies to improve its condition without limit, it will pass the ideal balanced condition of the neighborhood, and transition to a gentrified condition that lacks diversity and vitality. Therefore, we propose to conduct site-based strategies depending on the neighborhood situation. Those toolkits will be implemented simultaneously across various urban scales to ensure successful restoration. As the toolkits are taking effects in various neighborhoods, they have the ability to change and adapt based on the performance of the system transformation process, especially of the social system. This way the solution will prevent abrupt collapses in the social networks, and further strengthen system relationships.

Barriers and Challenges

As mentioned in Part 1, one of the biggest challenges of our solution is its intricate connections with all other wicked problems. Unforeseen forces might come into play in the implementation process such as environmental and economical changes that happen in a larger urban scale. Climate change or economic downturn might prevent the solution from taking place.

In addition, the interest of different stakeholders might also add friction to the process. Government might develop contract relationships with real estate companies, and carry out zoning plans that will wipe out low-income housings.

Another obstacle that can be encountered in the implementation process is the uncooperative attitudes from local residents. It is essential to design plans that would teach the local committee on how to facilitate community conversations and foster their motivations in participating in the improvement.

The selection and training of Neighborhood Transition Supervisors would also be a complex process requiring great care and attention.

Spatiotemporal Scaling

This Temporal Scope timeline depicts multiple points on a long-term (thirty year) application of the Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative. Note how initiative reassessment is essentially continuous. We expect that due to how many people and resources the creation and implementation of each toolkit will require, that the neighborhoods will be starting at different times. It is unrealistic to think that this initiative can be executed in all neighborhoods in Pittsburgh at the same time

The Spatial Scope grid above depicts multiple points in the long-term application of the Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative across multiple scales. Since the Initiative seeks to impact only up to the scale of a city, the Region and World scales remain unfilled. Although we speculate that this initiative, if successful, could be analyzed and scaled up to affect different cities in the US. Perhaps this initiative could be studied and used as a model for future efforts once complete.

Visualizing a Transition Design Solution

Our visualization has three components: connection between our proposed solution and the original critiqued project, the content and dynamics of the proposed solution, and the solution implementation process toward the projected future along with emergent products and services.

Component 1: As analyzed in the project overview, any solution for neighborhood improvement which is imagined and implemented cannot fully succeed long term unless the issue of gentrification is being addressed throughout the city. Positive urban revitalization often gradually morphs into negative gentrification. Therefore, our visualization indicates that the Greater Beltzhoover Toolkit lands itself into being part of the Neighborhood Vitalization Toolkit.

Component 2: our solution comprises of three toolkits that help any given neighborhood (on a spectrum from blighted to gentrified) move toward a state of de-gentrification : the Neighborhood Vitalization Toolkit, the Ideal Neighborhood Homeostasis Toolkit, and the Neighborhood Diversification Toolkit. Within each toolkit, interconnected efforts between policy, physical construction, planning, education, grassroots community, food systems and transportation systems are proposed as part of the toolkit strategies. To be more specifically, the strategies proposed in the Neighborhood Vitalization Toolkit can move a blighted neighborhood toward the idealized state. For instance, planning future committee to maintain local food supply will help the neighborhood be resilient toward potential future food desert which could drive the neighborhood toward a more blighted state. The strategies proposed in the Ideal Neighborhood Homeostasis Toolkit can help preventing an ideal neighborhood from moving toward negative gentrified or a blight condition. For instance, educate community in danger could help the neighborhood residents keep being informed of the ideal situation and the useful strategies across generations, thus ensuring the neighborhood to be in the idealized homeostasis state over a long period of time. The strategies proposed in the Neighborhood Diversification Toolkit can move a gentrified neighborhood toward the idealized state. For instance, proposing radical liberalization of zoning laws in wealthy areas forces new real estate development to happen in those areas, thus promoting a mixed use of the neighborhood lands that is socially inclusive and economically diverse.

Component 3: in our visualization we envisioned the coordinated, simultaneous toolkit implementation at all levels of scale and all neighborhoods throughout the city of Pittsburgh. Each community will first co-design with a panel of dedicated transition experts their most desirable future, and select/devise strategies that are highly localized and action-specific. The time length needed for each community to reach to the idealized state might be different, but eventually all neighborhoods will achieve a balanced, diverse, vital and self-sufficient state in the future. In the process of implementation, many new and unexpected products and services might be generated in response to the new conditions each neighborhood is going through, and serve as ‘integrated satisfiers’ to accompany the implementation process.