The Sparking Cycle: From Contemplative Leadership to Meaningful Change and Community Self-Determination
“Planners can also be artists in the sense that they have to contemplate the people that they work with in order to understand how they can be more helpful and contribute better… the idea of empathy and sensitivity and care and treating people with love is embedded in this idea of contemplation.” — Antonio Moya-Latorre
In Season 2, Episode 9 of The Move Podcast, co-hosts Ceasar McDowell and Ayushi Roy interview Antonio Moya-Latorre, also known as Toni, an artist, architect and planner. Moya-Latorre also coordinates student engagement at MIT’s Community Innovators Lab (CoLab). In a unique twist to Podcast interviews, Ceasar and Ayushi join Toni in an MIT piano practice studio, where he improvises (live!) using some of the emotional themes he felt while facilitating community-centered development in Brazil. The podcast explores one guiding question through art and discussion: what does it mean to spark meaningful, sustainable and self-actualizing work in local communities?
Toni grounds his narrative on a belief informing his personal theory of practice: that planners — who he sees as facilitators — can spark meaningful change in communities dealing with some sort of trauma or vulnerability. As a planner, he uses a contemplative mindset and art as powerful means to spark this change. For Toni, a contemplative mindset is critical to a planner’s ability to understand and support the communities they are stepping into. Contemplation connotes empathy, sensitivity, and care, and it must continuously inform the planner’s engagement with the community that welcomes them in.
To shed light on how a contemplative mindset and art can interplay in planning to encourage behavioral change, Toni shares his experience working in a Brazilian community with an immense dumping site in the middle of the community. Notably, Toni describes this dumping site as an urban trauma, a prolonged experience that residents had endured for years. In the past, community members had undertaken a huge collective clean up of the site, but “the traumas still remained.” Neighbors continued disposing of trash there.
For this community, the trauma was so chronic that action became necessary. To address this chronic trauma, art was leveraged in the form of a festival with workshops, street performances, and music for the community to begin to address the issue of the dumping site and for them to reinforce their desire to co-transform the area into a park.
At the same time, Toni and local leaders acknowledged that art and festivals were not enough to co-envision and lead community transformation. He says, “there need[ed] to be some sort of cultural or behavioral change in the community, so that they stop throwing trash.” That desire to create a mind shift lead to the art festival, “to showcase that this space could be used for something else, something different. And that way start changing little by little the behavior of the community.”
One of the most important outcomes of the spark that led to the festival was building and enhancing leadership and capacity in the community. Toni shares, “we were building capacity to make the festival happen keeping in mind the complexity of the community so that the project could move forward once the festival was over. And one of the most important capacities that emerged out of this festival was the leadership team built there.”
In this community and planner co-ideation process, Toni highly emphasizes the importance of humility. He says, “you have to be just a normal human being, not come in with the idea of the expert that you are going to offer solutions. You have to empathize with people. And then once you have been submerged into the culture…then you’ll start together with the team there to offer proposals and solutions to test them.” This gets to the heart of the discussion of Season 2, which focused on people coming from different traditions and who are supporting new processes in a community to connect people, and potentially even help them heal.
Toni hopes planners embrace the idea of contemplative mindsets and leadership when they enter communities. The opposite — a lack of contemplative leadership — can actually lead to a re-traumatizing of those planners intended to help. Toni offers a pointed example of this by sharing the experience of a woman whose home was destroyed by the 2017 earthquake in southern Mexico. Though a house was rebuilt, it was not built for her needs. She expressed to Toni, “this house has nothing to do with my lifestyle…no one asked me how my house looked like. I just received this project that was built and I have to live here.” Here, Toni distinguished between meaningful change and impactful change. While impactful change may have lead to a home for this earthquake survivor, the push for impact did not care to understand the survivor’s needs and it therefore was not meaningful to her way of life. On the contrary, it could further traumatize her further and prolong a violent lifestyle change.
One organization focused on the contemplative centering of community needs, self-expression and self-determination is Oakland’s Betti Ono Gallery. Founder Anyka Barber established the Gallery with a vision to be, “a space for art, culture, and community,” and believes artists are paving the way to a more just world, one exhibit at a time. As a Black women-led and run organization, Betti Ono is dedicated to amplifying the work and lives of Black, Brown, Immigrant, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ artists and communities. Its presence and efforts to highlight the work and lives of the marginalized is especially critical in Oakland, a city impacted by skyrocketing rents and gentrification, leading to a loss of 25% of its Black population between 2001 and 2011. In its work to display art of and by people of color, Betti Ono leads with its principles: art-making as a form and function of activism, self-determination, community transformation, and cultural resilience. Moreover, as a cultural center, it cultivates a network of what it calls a, “ community of artists, community builders, residents, and all-around arts lovers.”
Abroad in Brazil, domestically in Oakland, and in diverse communities worldwide, the arts have served as a transformative tool for planners and communities in their potential to access the emotional, human side of the urgent challenges we face. Merged with a contemplative mindset, planners have the capacity to support the organic spark in local communities for meaningful, sustainable and self-actualizing work.
