Black In Design
Designers’ Contributions to the #BlackLivesMatter Movement
This October, Harvard students will host the first ever Black in Design conference and “recognize the contributions of African Descendants to the design fields, and to broaden definitions of what it means to be a designer.”
For Polarr, Emily von Hoffmann spoke with urban planning student and conference co-chair Courtney Sharpe about how design can help solve — or worsen — social justice issues.
Emily: How did you become interested in urban planning & design?
Courtney: There are a few ways — when I was in middle school, I really loved writing stories. Or actually, I should say that’s only half true. I had lots of story ideas in my mind, but I had trouble actually writing because I got so caught up with my perfectionism. I realized I didn’t want to make up something that wasn’t true about a place, so I made a map. This is when palm pilots were a thing, so I had software on my computer that let me make maps with houses and addresses and schools. So I finally had this map on twenty pages of computer paper that I felt gave me something concrete to work with.
Courtney: About 15 years later, after I graduated from college and moved back to Chicago, I had a fellowship concerned with urban food deserts. The goal was to come up with business solutions to offset the negative health effects of living in underserved communities, which I’d never dealt with before. I actually had a similar experience when I was in the Peace Corps — I had a conversation with a volunteer from Baltimore, who said she had never had fresh zucchini and other things that to me were the most basic vegetables, total staples in my family. And there we were, cooking in this rural village in Morocco. Growing up she really only had canned vegetables, so that was a real privilege-check moment for me, because I lived mostly with my grandparents and had lots of home-cooked things I didn’t know were unusual for other people. Now I’m interested in neighborhood economic renewal and real estate; I like thinking about how food access, education, and housing interact.
E: How did the idea for the Black In Design conference come about, and what do you hope it will achieve?
C: It’s been talked about in the GSD for at least a few years, so it’s been on people’s minds for a while. I’m going into my second year in the program now, and last fall there was just enough momentum that we decided it’s time to finally do it. Cara and I were in the room together, both kind of thinking, “I can’t do this by myself,” and so we took it on together! This will be the first one, and we hope to have it become a successive thing.
The goal is to highlight the work being done by black designers, because we feel they do so much work that never gets mainstream academic recognition. Or even discussion, outside of black communities. So we want to be a platform for deeper, larger scale projects, while also introducing the field of design to a younger audience. I’m on the diversity committee for the Urban Planning Department, and one of the things we really talk about is outreach and engagement among minority students.
C: I think it’s really important to reach out to kids to try to get them interested in design fields, because by the time people have a bachelor’s degree, they may feel that it’s too late or too expensive to change course and acquire a technical skill set. So I want the conference to encourage younger people, like high school aged kids, to come and see what design is. A lot of people aren’t aware entire subfields of design exist; I think generally people don’t consider urban planning to be a design discipline. So we want to expand the definition of design, and be more inclusive about the parts of the field that are up for discussion.
To that end it was also very important to us that the audience is composed of people who are not designers. We believe that everyone’s work, whether done by designers or non-designers, is strengthened by cross-discipline collaboration. Design communities can be fairly isolated, we can use a little assistance in reaching outside of our own doors. The work we do is a valuable, but it can be better if we have more conversation with other people.
My part of the programming has been all about food — I was inspired by Seitu Jones, who is an artist and was a former Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Last year he created a half-mile long table in St. Paul and invited the community out for a meal. We’re having a panel on food access and food traditions in the black community which he has been helping to curate in collaboration with Bryant Terry, who is the first chef in residence at the Museum of African Diaspora in LA, and local chef, Didi Emmons. We’re integrating food access and justice into it; I’m very excited for that part, it’s my baby… food is at the heart of everything!
E: Do you think any part of the decision to make this conference finally happen had to do with the relatively sudden visibility of the #BlackLivesMatter movement for mainstream audiences?
C: Definitely. We were watching the national conversation, and the people protesting in the streets, and we wanted to be a part of the movement in a way that could utilize our skill. So we thought, “we’re at a design school, what does that mean for planning, communities, cities, buildings, spaces?” A lot of the problems we’re seeing in terms of inequality and crime begin in the built environment, so how can we use our skills and abilities to address the current climate? For us, creating this conference offers a way of educating ourselves but also creating a space where we could work with other people who know so much more than we do. So hopefully the conference will help create a tangible outcomes for people who want to be involved in using design thinking to improve these problems.
It’s interesting because there are polls showing race relations in this country are worsening, or something to that effect. But I don’t personally that’s true, I just think more people know about these things now. One might actually argue that things are improving, it’s just that we’re hearing more about the negative things, and it’s good to have people involved where they may have been completely unaware before. I honestly think it’s just people coming to terms with what’s happening in other parts of America, or maybe the same parts of America, actually. So it’s really uncomfortable for everyone and I think that’s good, because if some sort of injustice is going on then we should all know about it. So hopefully we’ll use this moment to do our part. It reminds me of that Chris Rock interview from sometime last year, when he was talking about Obama being President, saying like, “That’s not an example of black progress, that’s white progress.”
C: What happened in Ferguson was awful; New York, awful; Baltimore, Texas, so many other places, awful. Everyone hopefully understands that if it’s happening in those places, it can happen in your place too unless you do something to prevent it. We’re all tired of all the marching, it’s tiring and dreadful but it’s been centuries in the making.
E: You’re in a formal design program, and whenever anyone sets a curriculum, there is a certain risk (and likelihood) that events or people will be weighed unevenly. Do you think the official curriculum contains enough of this kind of literature?
C: From my perspective as someone in the urban planning program, it seems social justice issues are not emphasized in the architecture program, for instance. I think it’s much better in urban planning; in our studio program and fall design class there was actually an explicit effort to cover these topics. Some of our projects had to do with mapping various inequalities in cities, for example. And we’d look at data to find demographic differences, and try to map or visualize those in some way to see what was happening.
Really interesting things came out of that because everyone did something different. I remember one classmate looked at lending rates in Boston relative to which houses had been foreclosed the most. The foreclosures were overwhelmingly in the black neighborhoods, it was a heartbreaking map. Mapping is powerful because as planners, many of us are already socially inclined towards those issues, but it would be wonderful if that could be applied to other design programs too.
E: Can you tell me a little about how urban planning can lessen inequality? I think a lot of people consider the former a very concrete thing, while they think the latter is more mysterious, so maybe you can help explain.
C: Urban planning and design are tools that can be used to improve places and experiences, and hopefully that’s the designers’ goal at the outset. Maybe it’s a bit idealistic, but my hope is that when designers work they always aspire to make things better. Realizing we are the products of our times in different moments when certain ideas are in vogue, different policies are coming down from the government or coming up from different communities, and the work that people do is varied. In some instances it hasn’t been so great. Urban renewal in Boston is an example of a really interesting hot topic, where there were communities that were basically torn down, displacing lots of people and removing a lot of functional space. So that’s one problem that hasn’t been fully resolved yet, so you can still see its legacy, along with community lines where people lived.
Throughout the country there are certain cities where people recognize that once upon a time there was a highway that came through, and then this community or that community got cut off, and now they don’t have resources. So even going back to how people talk about the different groups living on the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ side of the tracks was actually using barriers in the street and transportation to keep communities of different types separate. And it doesn’t even have to be a wall, it doesn’t even have to be anything that was done to seem so imposing, to really have major impacts on the community spaces.
Another side of the issue relates to my experience in Chicago, where I was a PresenTense fellow working to create a business solution to offset negative health effects for residents of food deserts. I spoke frequently to people who lived in parts of the city with convenient access to grocery stores and when I explained my work to them I realized that people just didn’t understand that there were parts of the same city of Chicago that lacked many of the things they relied on to live.
C: I think part of education for all of us is understanding that not everyone’s community looks like yours, it’s something that most people probably understand but perhaps aren’t able to conceptualize. A lot of people haven’t visited other communities, even in their city. That is not an accusation; we all get wrapped up in our own stuff, we all live in one place and so necessarily we’re not someplace else most of the time. In our program, I do think there’s an awareness that it’s important to be strategic about going into different communities, and thinking about how one comes across to residents. The work that we do really depends on the opinions of people who live in the affected areas, so it’s necessary to see what people actually want in addition to whatever data has been collected.
E: Are there any designers or scholars in particular that you’re excited to hear speak at the conference?
C: Everyone, there are honestly so many people we’re talking to but one of the people I already heard speak, I was so moved I really wanted him to come and speak at our conference, José Camilo Vergara, he is a photographer who I believe was the first to get a national Humanities Medal from the White House. He did multiple series where he revisited the same spot over time. One in California, some in NY and I think in Detroit. They are poignant because you see how the neighbourhood changes over time. And it went from being like like a small barbershop or something, to boarded up, the space opened again, the closed. Eventually it was torn down and became new housing. It was the same corner, and you can tell because like there was a phone booth there , there as not a phone booth, the phone booth moved, it was just like a really interesting to see what happened in the community.
C: It was just really interesting to see Harlem over the years and so he goes into these neighborhoods and what he captures is a really great. The fact that he returned to these sites, you could see that like over years and years it’s really incredible because I feel like so few people have the dedication to keep returning to a spot. He’s created an incredible archive of history for all of us about these communities. A lot of people are also very excited about hearing from Maurice Cox, the incoming City Planner of Detroit. Brent Leggs is also speaking, he does preservation work with national historical sites like black sites so I’m really interested to hear about that. And then we have Phil Freelon who is actually one of the designers of the African American History Museum being built in D.C. on the National Mall so I’m super stoked about that.
The construction team has a connection to my undergraduate school, Northwestern University, so through our DC alumni group I actually had an opportunity to tour the construction site. I went when most of the completed construction was underground, but it was still very impressive. The way the building was designed, it actually takes into account the city itself. Certain parts of the exhibits are specifically designed so that what you see out of the window is related to what’s in the room and its position in the city, so I can’t wait to see how it comes together.
Interview by Emily von Hoffmann and Polarr — Pro Photo Editor Made for Everyone. Follow Polarr on Twitter and try our products.
