Rooted Planning: Amplifying Existing Community Networks

“I take a lot of my learning and inspiration around networks from the field of permaculture — the notion in sustainable agriculture that you’re not just being called to intervene in a system in a mechanical way, but to honor what’s already in place, the root system that’s already there. You can think of the social equivalence of that.” — Curtis Ogden

In this week’s episode of The Move podcast, Curtis Ogden of the Interaction Institute for Social Change likened best practices for planners and civic designers to intervening in agriculture in a way that honors the root systems already in place. Working within the complex social processes and networks between people in cities is not so different. The goal of the planner, according to Curtis, is thus to amplify the networks that already exist in communities, and to allow these local social forms to guide sustainable and ethical interventions.

This call to preserve and build upon root networks is a necessary response to the historic uprooting of low-income communities and communities of color as a result of urban renewal in the mid-twentieth century. In clearing neighborhoods to build infrastructure like highways and public housing, urban renewal both displaced these communities and destroyed their social and supportive networks.

Sociologist Herbert Gans provides a detailed account of the disruption of Boston’s West End community under urban renewal in his book The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian Americans. The West End was once a bustling working class Italian-American enclave, and a place where new and old immigrants provided each other with a strong system of mutual support. In 1958, both the physical structures and the personal, local support structures of the West End were leveled.

The twin traumas of displacement and disruption did not end when urban renewal did, however, but live on in the present day. Mindy Fullilove, a psychiatrist and professor of urban policy and health at The New School, has made these lasting traumas the subject of much of her research. In her book Root Shock: How Tearing up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It, she investigates the mental health effects of urban renewal on African American communities.

Root Shock focuses on the “traumatic stress reaction to the destruction of all or part of one’s emotional ecosystem” that came as a result of these destructive policies of the twentieth century. Fullilove’s book frames a necessary conversation on urban renewal around trauma in the black community, and elevates the voices of its survivors through interviews. Much like Ogden, Fullilove reminds us that we must heal these traumas and build upon the value of root networks in order to create a more equitable society.

In amplifying and building upon existing community networks, planners, designers, activists, and ordinary citizens may look to the work of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York City. The Nuyorican Poets Cafe began as a gathering of artists in the living room of Puerto Rican poet Miguel Algarin in 1973 as a space of expression for Latinx artists, whose work was marginalized within mainstream creative industries.

Algarin’s apartment was the “germ” for bringing together a great network of Puerto Rican and Latinx artists, activists, and community members in the Nuyorican Poets Cafe we see today in the Lower East Side. By staging events like poetry slams, open mics, concerts, and more, the Cafe has been incredibly successful in amplifying the creative work, culture, and identity of the Nuyorican community, and in strengthening this rich network throughout New York City and beyond.

Planners ought to carefully tend to the roots and connections that already exist in communities. Given the traumas enacted by policies like urban renewal, planners must also focus on healing and building trust with the communities they serve. Relationships can grow as this trust is built — and as these roots grow organically, then we can begin to further cultivate community thinking into a thriving system.