Herbert Parsons (New York politician)

Transcription

Thank you all so very much for being here. Please take your seats. This looks like a wonderful event. My name is Mohsen Mosfafavi. I'm the dean of the Graduate School of Design, and I just want to take a couple of minutes, before I pass on the baton to our wonderful organizers, to really take this opportunity to thank you all for being here tonight and also to thank our speakers, they are a wonderful panel, in advance of their presentation. This event, as I said, is important for the school. It's part of a series of events that has been organized. We've had already a few conversations at the level of the school community, within the context of our Dean's Diversity Committee, after the events in Ferguson and really as recently as yesterday in South Carolina that have just shocked the nation to really be together to see what we can do together because these events are issues that really affect the nation, affect the university at large. And of course they affect the Graduate School of Design. I think tonight, of course, the focus is more on the connections and relationship between questions of form and justice. The title of tonight's presentation is Informing Justice, of course. It touches on questions of information, of formation, and of form and their relationship to issues of justice. This is I'm sure something that our panelists will discuss in detail. I think at this school, there has been a long history of the discussion between spatiality and questions of justice. The topic of spatial justice is something that is discussed at many levels. And, indeed, what are the kind of questions and what are the correlations between design form and democracy? What does spatial democracy imply? I don't think we for a moment believe that this is something that can be resolved purely at the level of this school by itself. This is why we have so many people from different fields here. And it's really the collaboration together, the working together, that will hopefully lead to both reflections but also some recommendations, some solutions. And I see, with the tables and with the four colors, some evidence of action that is about to take place, which is always a positive thing, to really see where we go from here. We intend to have more conversations, more gatherings, after this, so your decisions in a way, your conclusions, your recommendations, your thoughts are going to be very, very important for the school in terms of how we follow on. I do want to take this opportunity to thank the African American Student Union, the Loeb Fellowship Program, and the Joint Center for Housing Studies for really coming together, collaborating together, and making this event possible tonight. And without any further delay, I would like to invite Chris Herbert, who's the managing director of the Joint Center, to come and speak to us about the plans for tonight. Thank you. Thank you, Mohsen. And thank you all for coming. It's really a pretty dreary night here in early April after a long winter, but I'm really encouraged by the number of people who've turned out for this really important discussion. As Mohnsen mentioned, this is an event that really is a continuation of conversations that started in the fall and really was precipitated by the community meeting that was held here in this room that the dean hosted in December at the urging of students to address the horrific events that had happened in Ferguson and in Staten Island and that really highlighted the tremendous disparities in justice that exist in this country. And I think that the events of this week have really-- you know, the shooting in South Carolina is just another reminder of really the continuing, horrific levels of injustice that exist. And so certainly the need for having conversations is really significant and important. Obviously, what happened in Ferguson, what happened in Staten Island, what happened in South Carolina are issues that relate to injustices in the criminal justice system. And so I guess one question might be how that relates to issues of design and planning in the built environment. But I think they really do highlight a broader set of injustices and failures that exist in our society, that really define life's opportunities and chances by race and ethnicity and class. There's just, in essence, a really strong spatial component. And I think what these events have really highlighted is that where you live matters a tremendous amount. And in fact, I think if you look at the story of Ferguson as a suburb, it really is a microcosm of issues of racial segregation in this country. In 1970, Ferguson was a community that was essentially lily white. And then over time, blacks moved into the community, and it became integrated. But that integration has not been stable, as whites have fled, and the community has not been an area of opportunity. That path from the city to the suburb that had been a path of opportunity for whites was not a path of opportunity for African Americans. And I think what that tells us, too, is this issue about that the shadow of injustice follows people, and that we can't just assume that people can move to opportunity. We have to really work on having places be places of opportunity. And so I think that this discussion is about how do we deal with spatial issues and making more equitable and inclusive communities. Now, back at that December meeting, many people spoke passionately and eloquently about the important role that design professionals can and must play in building these more inclusive communities. So inspired by that discussion, the Loebs African Americans Student Union, the Joint Center for Housing Studies, and the GSD administration have designed this event to continue that conversation about the importance of the built environment in addressing these issues of inequalities. There's a number of people here you'll hear from. I just want to quickly thank, of the people who helped plan this event, among the Loebs, Jamie Blosser, LaShawn Hoffman, Marc Norman, Thaddeus Pawlowski, and Sally Young have all played an important role. From the African American Student union, Dana McKinney and Hector Tarrido-Picart were also instrumental. And Jenn Molinsky, Kerry Donahue, and Pam Baldwin at the Joint Center also played key roles. So with that, let me just give you a broad overview of how we're structuring this evening. As much as we wanted to stimulate thoughts on this issue, we also want to engage people in conversation. So we've structured the evening to that end. We're going to start off with a panel discussion, in which people who have been devoted to these issues, who are trying to create more equitable communities, will share their perspectives, their experience, their ideas, as a way to stimulate our thinking. But we didn't want to leave it there. So after an hour of that discussion-- and we'll have opportunities for people to comment via Twitter as that goes on-- we're then going to break it down into each of the tables. We've set this room up in tables, so that people can actually engage with each other in the conversation. We'll have people help facilitate how that conversational will go. We'll do that for about a half an hour, and then we'll have you report back. And the goal there is to identify, what do we do? What are the steps we do as a profession? What are the steps we take as a community to try to address these issues? And so I really hope that what we're doing here is going to inspire. We're going to have [? ideas ?] and then help lead to implement, how do we make the world a better place? So with that, I just want to remind you that this event is being webcast as well. And we do have a Twitter handle, Informing Justice. And so as you have comments or questions, you can tweet those, and they will appear on the screen. So we can have an ongoing dialogue as we go. Let me introduce Michael Hays. He's the Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs here at the GSD. He'll be moderating the panel discussion. Michael was one of those eloquent voices at the event in December who really spoke passionately about the imperative of incorporating a social-justice perspective into both education and practice. And so we're really pleased to have Michael here today to help facilitate this conversation. So please join me and welcome Michael, and Michael will introduce our fabulous panel. Black lives matter. I want to insist that this is where we must begin this conversation tonight. I want to suggest that to foreground race and racism in our discussions of space and design, and specifically racism against black people rather than the generic discussions of justice and inequity that we also must have, I want to insist that it's time to foreground race. This is not to say that the other discussions aren't important. We need to also talk about gender. And of course there are other races as well as genders and sexualities that have to enter into the discussion as well. But again, I think my point is that we've been shy about talking about race. I almost said gun-shy. And I think we have to sort of stop our continued covering our discomfort about these issues, and we have to foreground it. So that's my first point. I want to ask that we foreground race. My second point is that we try to talk about form. And I wasn't in on making the title, but I love the title, Informing Justice, because of the emphasis on the form. It's difficult to talk about how design and race are going to intersect, I think. However they intersect, it's going to be highly mediated. It's not going to be direct. It's not going to be simple. It's going to be oblique. But since design is never merely a practice of sort of technical organization or construction of a building or an urban space or a landscape, since design-- like law, like politics, like religion, and other disciplines-- is a very self conscious, formal organization of material and spatial relations, for that reason form can be and must be discussed and approached as ideology. And I want to try to bring those two desiderata, that we foreground race and that we try to talk about race and this interaction of form to begin the discussion tonight. And we have the panel to do it. As we've been talking to each other, sort of planning this, the panel, it's constantly talking about how we can use what we know as designers, how we can target that which we know about and bring our kind of cultural competency to bear. So let me introduce the panel. Liz Ogbu, an alum of the Master of Architecture Program here at the GSD, designer, urbanist, social innovator. She runs her own multi-disciplinary design and consulting practice, called Studio O and is on the faculty at UC Berkeley as well as teaches courses at Stanford's D School, but we don't talk about Stanford's D School so much. It's really good to see Liz again, as it is Theresa Hwang, who is also an alum of our Architecture Program for the GSD. Soon after leaving, Theresa set up and became director of the community design and planning at Skid Row Housing Trust in Los Angeles. And she'll be talking about that experience tonight. Kimberly Dowdell, trained as an architect at Cornell, is now the Sheila Johnson Leadership Fellow at the Center of Public Leadership at the Kennedy School, here. She'll graduate from that program in May. She's also a licensed architect and has done real-estate projects in New York. But she's co-founder of SEED, which is Social Economic Environmental Design. SEED's mission is to, and I'm quoting, "advance the right of every person to live in a socially, economically, and environmentally healthy community. And then finally at the far end is Seitu Jones. Seitu was a Loeb Fellow here recently. He's an artist who has created over 30 large-scale public art works, including work for three stations along the green LRT line in Saint Paul, Minnesota, which is where he's based. He also teaches at the University of Minnesota. In addition to the Loeb Fellowship, Seitu has received numerous awards. I'll just mention the latest, the 2013 award for the Chicago Joyce Foundation, where he created a project called Create. It's a community meal service, a project that focuses on access to healthy food for over 2,000 people in a single, half-mile-long table, which I hope he'll also talk about. So welcome to all these people. I'd like to begin, if I could, with Liz. Liz was a student here. As I said, she set up her own studio, which I hope she can talk about. But I'm also interested in hearing sort of-- maybe what we'll do this is briefly make a pass, a brief description, and then use that information on the table to start going around with a longer conversation. So, Liz. Thank you, Michael, for that introduction. It's really great to be here, to be able to participate in this conversation, especially thinking back to my time here and issues that were of importance when I was here. I actually wanted to start with just telling a personal story. About seven or eight months ago, I was participating in an event in San Francisco, where I live. And it was an event attended by a lot of well-connected, many of them very wealthy, folks in the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley. And as part of the event, we were doing different breakout exercises. And one of the breakout exercises was to pair up with someone and tell them your life story in a minute, which if you've never done, is actually really hard to do. And so I was paired up with a woman who was a wife of a very influential figure, who I won't name. And I got to go first. And I told her all about growing up in Oakland, about the fact that I went to Wellesley and then came here to Harvard, did my master's in architecture, worked for IDO.org, have my own practice now where I'm doing projects for Unilever and the World Bank, and also teach at Berkeley. And I also mentioned at the beginning of my story that my parents are immigrants. Both of them were born and raised in Nigeria. My dad came here, ended up becoming a professor at Berkeley, and I actually hadn't gone back to Nigeria until I was 16. That was the first time. After I finished speaking, she said, you know, your story is so impressive and so inspiring. And she went on to say a couple other things. And then she paused, and she said, and you speak English so well. And I think gobsmacked is an appropriate term to describe how I felt at that moment. And I said, yeah, I grew up in Oakland. And then, fortunately, we were saved by the bell. And I explain that story not so much to say, you know, woe is me. This is the burden I have to carry as a woman of color. I mean, that was not the first time that something like that has happened to me. Unfortunately, will not be the last. But I want to explain it, just to sort of posit against the work that I do. So a lot of my work is in what I describe as under-resourced communities, communities in need. And they are often communities of color. They are often communities where there's a lot of poverty. And on the surface of it, when I go into many of those committees, if you look up at the skin color, it's exactly the same. And I can relate to some of the situations that they've probably had, as evidenced by the story I just told you. But there's a difference. Whereas with that woman, I was sort of at the low end of the privilege totem pole, in these communities that I'm dealing with, I'm actually on the high end. I can go into those communities, but at night I get to go home to my gentrifying neighborhood. Somebody has given me money to do something in that community, which already gives me some power. And so I set that up to sort of say that race and privilege and class, these are not simple concepts. They're not, excuse the euphemism, black and white. They're actually really complicated. And part of the reason why they're complicated is that they're really embedded in human emotions, and that is not an easy thing. And so, for me, one of the things when you start to talk about how do we put this into practice and what I try and wrestle with my work is how do we engage that humanity? One of the things that was most hurtful about that situation with that woman wasn't so much that it happened, but that in wanting to tell my life story, I had come with an air of vulnerability. I had wanted to share myself. And when I'm dealing with a lot of these communities, the folks that I'm dealing with are doing exactly the same thing. They're coming vulnerable. And if I can't hold space for them, like she didn't hold for me, then actually that's going to be at a detriment to the project. And so one of the biggest things that I bring in the work is actually trying to figure out ways to make sure that I'm being vulnerable, that I am fully aware of all the baggage and assumptions that I'm bringing into a situation. And I'm willing to also embrace them being vulnerable because it's not a one-way street. The other thing that I've found that has been really helpful is this idea of intentional listening, so going in and actually showing that I want to hear what they're saying. I said many things in my story over the course of that minute with that woman, but clearly she didn't hear everything that I had to say. And so it's really important that when you're engaged with these communities and figuring out ways that you're making sure that you're actually listening and then being able to reflect back. And then the final thing, I think I had slides, which may not be coming up. Oh, do I have to come up there and do it? OK. This is a very mobile speaking engagement. So I just wanted to kind of-- because Michael and suggested that we use examples as much as possible to show how this might play out. So this is a project that I'm working on right now in San Francisco, in the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood, which, for those of you who are not familiar with San Francisco, is pretty much the poorest district in the city, by a lot. A lot of the public housing is there. It's an historical African American community, and there's been a lot of injustice and inequity over time. And this is a big, 40-acre redevelopment project that I'm working on with a couple other firms. And one of the things that we found is to actually show that we-- this community had participated in a lot of different planning workshops long before we came to the table. And to show that we were intentionally listening, it was a point where we actually had to put design in place. So we actually created a listening booth on our site, invited people to come and tell their stories there. We partnered with StoryCorps. So every story that's told in that booth gets archived in the Library of Congress. And it was a very intentional act of showing we're listening and we're remembering your stories. And from that, we've also found that there are other ways to listen. So with kids, they weren't going to sit for an hour in the booth. And so we've actually employed arts workshops with them to try and get what their stories are and what their vision is in the community. And then the last bit that I wanted to say is also this idea of authentic engagement. Once you listen, how are you sharing back to them that this is a dialogue and you've heard what they've said? And so what we've done as part of that is in the things that we were hearing, there are real needs around health equity, around housing equity. But there's also some serious issues in terms of they felt that nothing ever happens in that place, nothing that they can feel proud of, nothing that is actually fun. And so one of the biggest things that we did in this past year, and all of this is from hijacking our community engagement budget, was to host a circus. And in that circus, we actually had 650 people show up. Nobody had ever seen that many people come for anything in this community, nor had they seen a crowd that diverse. And so for a lot of people that we've talked to, they came, and they said, you heard us. And you listened to us, and now you're doing this. So I'm going to leave it there, but I think those three things-- being vulnerable, intentional listening, and authentic engagement-- for me, are sort of the important thing of just even starting the conversation, before we get into what we normally recognize as true design projects. So Theresa is going to speak now. I just want to echo a lot of the thanks for all the organizers for putting together this event. I think it's important and timely, and it's actually very nice to see the GSD try to take these issues on head on. I thought I would also, similar to Liz, talk about really the way that I found myself to doing this work and really how I am also grappling with the integration of this equity piece into my own design practice. So I wanted to start with this image because I think it really frames what we're talking about. It was at a planning workshop last year, where we had this really kind of light-touch activity where we wanted community residents to really define what are the components of a neighborhood that they want to have. And I think this comment is really timely. You know, all neighborhoods, including Skid Row, should have police that don't arrest, harass, or kill you just because you look black, poor, or homeless. All neighborhood should have neighbors that watch out for each other. And I think we all realize that this is a huge kind of larger social issue. And is there a role that design can play in this? Is there a role that the designer can play in addressing this social issue? And I think we're all in this room because we want it to. And I think, as a way of starting, we need to really think about how we're defining design and really begin to broaden it beyond kind of what are the aesthetic or technological outcomes associated with our work. You know, it becomes sometimes hard when I think you define design in more of a social justice context. So actually, once I graduated from the GSD, I took a left turn and did community organizing work. So this is a photo from when I worked at the Design Studio for Social Intervention, and this is really more of what design looked to me. You know, it's about how do you overlap multiple publics in public space? How do you engage and activate and really break down boundaries so that people who may not ordinarily interact, interact with each other? Very different from the studio projects that we're used to working on for four years-- I think absolutely that implications and application of design thinking was really important. But also I started to realize, after working a few years in community organizing, the permanence of the built environment was something that I really missed as a person trained as an architect. And so I was fortunate enough in 2009 to receive the Enterprise Rose Architectural Fellowship, which really started to synthesize my community organizing work, but also my training as an architect and a designer. So I moved from Boston, and went cross country, and landed in Skid Row, Los Angeles, which I think is probably one of the most obvious forms of inequity or injustice in the built environment. So almost for the past six years, I've been working within the community and really trying to understand what this social outcomes piece in our work really is. And so for the first few years I worked on-- so I work for a nonprofit organization. It's called the Skid Row Housing Trust. I was placed there as a Rose Fellow, and we develop affordable housing for kind of the most vulnerable, lowest income, homeless community in Los Angeles. But we also provide services, and we work with wonderful architects to really build generous, active, high-performing spaces for recovery. And this is the Star Apartments that we worked on with Michael Maltzan. And as a housing project, it has high impact. But when you're dealing with a community that you have over 3,000 people living on the streets without a permanent place to call home, the merits of the project-- it is aesthetically beautiful, it's prefab modular construction, kind of the programmatic elements-- are really what begins to have transformation. So this was the first project that the trust, we implemented a participatory design input process, but also started to really challenge the typology of affordable housing to include more community-building activities. But within the context of Skid Row housing isn't the sole solution. And so as a way to kind of scale up some of the work, we launched a community planning process last year, called Our Skid Row, in hopes to really re-frame a place that tends to be thought of as transitional or transitory, to really re-frame it as a place of equitable, permanent living. And so this has really been a project where we're trying to really demonstrate what it means to try to use design as a way of reallocating power and distribute decision making possibilities. So I wanted to kind of give concrete examples because I think that becomes helpful in the discussion. So even little things like research or mapping or existing conditions, which this is-- we made sure that it was engaged with the community. So oftentimes in Skid Row, our residents are the subjects of research. We wanted to really subvert that relationship and have, now, the residents be the actual researchers-- so going around, mapping all the assets in the community, but really interpreting and analyzing where they live with their embodied experience. We also try to increase the decision-making opportunities by having participatory design workshops, but beyond really trying to engage on a deeper level. So we're not just asking people to choose between colors or finishes. We're having the community residents really generate the actual solutions. So they're projecting the outcomes that they want, the programs that they want to see, so that really the solutions are based off of their embodied experience. And also trying to really leverage as many resources in the places of privilege that we have as designers so that we can really create a more robust process-- so this is from a series of design-resource resource workshops that we've had, where we invite designers from the surrounding community. And then we bring the community experts to the same table and collaborate. So I think in many arenas, you know, the designers work behind the curtain here, but also community organizers work behind a curtain here. So the goal was to come and collaborate and work together, framing the issues but also generating solutions together, collectively, at one place. And I think another goal with a lot of the work that we do is about how do we change the narrative? I think a lot of times, some of this work, we have embodied implicit biases, and it's not always really addressed. And so by being able to change the narrative, is there a way that design as a process or a project can build more empathy so that we're not creating this other category but really understanding it's more of a week? And then just wanting to ask, while we're in this room, how are we personally engaged, whether it means on me, Theresa, as a person? I ask the audience members, how are you civically engaged? Do you vote? Are you out in rallies? Are you in marches? And kind of what is your political presence in all of this, in addition to, professionally, how can we begin to control what we have access to in order to create more equitable outcomes? Thanks, Teresa, and now, Kimberly. So this is me, Kimberly Dowdell, with a lot of letters behind my name, which means that I'm a licensed architect. I care about sustainability. I also was a founder of SEED, which Michael mentioned, which again is Social Economic Environmental Design, which I founded based on my personal story, which I'll get into now. So beyond all of these fancy titles and letters and things, I'm actually just a girl from Detroit. And I'm the granddaughter of the two people who are on either side of the bride. The bride is my aunt Irene. So this is actually the house that my grandparents bought in 1947 when they moved to Detroit from Georgia, to escape the segregated South. So they moved to Detroit in 1946 when my mother was six months old, and then they bought this house the following year for $6,500. And they were one of the first black families to integrate this particular neighborhood. So this was a working class neighborhood. My grandfather worked for Ford Motor Company, and my grandmother, she cleaned houses. And so my aunt was married in 1963, so this is a photo of the house. The actual wedding was at our church, but this is just a photo showing just a little bit of the house, which my grandparents essentially bought, you know, bought into the American dream. And I actually spent the first nine years of my life living in this house on the east side of Detroit. So, unfortunately, this is what the house looked like in 2011. This is not an uncommon story. It's sort of something that's happened all around Detroit, all around many others American cities. And there are lots of reasons why this particular neighborhood turned it into this, which I'll get into a little bit later. But I just wanted to sort of show the contrast, you know, where there would be a neighborhood where people would want to have a photo of their daughter's wedding, to an abandoned shell. And then unfortunately, the following year, the American dream that my grandparents envisioned was gone. And so just to back up a little bit, so I spent the first nine years of my life in this house with my mom, and then the neighborhood just got so bad we actually had to move to another area in town. And I think my mom intended to rent out the house for additional income, but unfortunately as soon as we left, looters came and took literally everything. I remember going back in with my mom, shortly thereafter, and they took, literally, the kitchen sink. Like, everything was gone, like, the toilets, everything. So you really can't recover from that. So essentially, that's why when we left the home, we weren't able to really do anything with it. And that's something that just happened all over the city. So that's actually another neighborhood in Detroit. The top picture is form 1949, and the lower picture is from 2003. And I mean, it just goes to show that this is a pervasive issue, which is sort of what caused Detroit to become what it is today. So a lot of these things are sort of what inspired me to go into architecture. I think around age 11, I remember being in downtown Detroit and noticing that a lot of the buildings were, like, boarded up. And you know, it's just not a very vibrant place. And I said, oh, I have an idea. I'll become an architect, and I'll fix it. I later realized it was a little more complicated than that, but that was sort of the original dream. So in pursuit of this dream, I went to Cornell to study architecture. And to get a bachelor of architecture, you need to do a thesis. So my thesis, actually, was focused on what happened to Detroit. I really wanted to understand some of the issues that led to that. And then, of course, I had to actually design a project to kind of address it. But essentially I looked at just some of the historical issues, which I'll talk about probably later in the question and answer portion. But essentially, when the Great Migration of blacks from the South to the North happened, a lot of racial tension started to emerge. There were riots, not only in the '40s, but also more drastically in the late '60s. I mean a lot of policy issues, a lot of racial strife. Also, if you take a look at the changing population, it just goes to show how African American were 42% in 1970, but then by 2000, they're at 81%. And then sort of the inverse happened with whites, and Hispanics are slowly growing. But some of the issues that I uncovered in my thesis, or that I kind of tried to address, were blight, where do vacant lots come from, which I had mentioned in my story, poverty, crime, racial tension, segregation, disinvestment, abandonment. So those were pretty heavy issues for an architectural thesis, but I tried my best to kind of stitch it all together. But part of the reason why I'm at the Kennedy School is to try to understand how do you build coalitions? How do you create sort of interdisciplinary teams to solve these really, really complex problems? Because design is not going to fix what's wrong with Detroit. There are a lot of different issues. So one of the issues that I uncovered during my thesis, but even more deeply within the last year at the Kennedy School, it's just like redlining, which I think a lot of you are familiar with, which if you aren't, essentially, it's a policy that was pretty popular in the '50s and '60s, where essentially if you literally take a red line and mark a piece of a map, you'd say, this area is really only for black people. So they wouldn't be allowed to, like, issue mortgages or mortgage insurance. So basically that's the only place where blacks could buy something. And then another issue is restrictive covenants. So let's say you are a black family who could afford it. You didn't a mortgage. They're like, oh, sorry, you know, the previous owner said, specifically, no black people can buy this house. So regardless, there were just policies in place that sort of prevented diversity in a lot of communities. So then after the riots of the 1960s and then the infiltration of drugs in the '70s and then crime, so it's like layer upon layer of issues. So that's kind of what I tried to look at in my thesis and then what I'm sort of working towards now. So to bring a little more hope back to the picture, actually, as a practitioner, I've worked on several projects in New York and New Jersey. And this is a project where I was the project manager. And many people know, just like Newark-- Newark has very similar issues to Detroit. And this park, Military Park, was actually a pretty bad place to be, probably even two or three years ago. But a public-private partnership was established actually about 10 years ago, but we just opened the park last year. But essentially, this was a place where you didn't want to walk. You didn't want to be in this park after dark, especially. You'd find, like, drug paraphernalia on the ground, you know, just a really sort of bad place. Actually, I should show a before and after. You can't really tell the drug thing from here, but that's what it looked like before. So I actually took those pictures from the office where we had our meetings. So I show this project, one, because I actually worked on it and, two, because it just goes to show that when you do build partnerships between public and private actors, you can actually begin to do things that improve communities. So this particular area, again, I mentioned it has some crime issues. But I'm sure many people are familiar with Bryant Park in Manhattan. Well, the redeveloper who led this project also did Bryant Park. So essentially the model is, hey, there's this great, high-potential urban space that we just need to kind of provide a little TLC to. And so they used the same kind of model to do here at Military Park in Newark. And so they worked closely with Prudential, which is building a brand-new tower right across the street, as well as the city of Newark itself and several other foundations that were in the area. So they pulled the money for all these different sources and just created a partnership to-- there were several key things that were done beyond design. I mean, yes, we retained a great design firm to build these two little buildings that are, in the after shot, sort of nestled in the trees. It's basically a comfort station, so people can use the restroom in the park, as well as a small burger pavilion. But we've added programming, like yoga in the park, and you can watch movies. We've created a better landscape plan. And then also, more importantly, we actually raised funds to staff the park full-time security. So you know, there's better lighting. There's security staff. There's maintenance staff. It's actually a park that's maintained. And so that really sort of made the difference. And so this is the park today. It just opened before I started school in June. So we had the ribbon cutting. People are actually sitting in the park, using the park, and this is, I mean, a night-and-day difference from where it was before. I think this is my last image. So I just wanted to show a nice picture of the park and [inaudible]. Seitu, do you have slides? I have no slides, so I'm not moving, at least not right now. And tonight, first, I want to thank the organizers of this event. This is a grand and great opportunity for us to continue to come together around issues of race, class, and gender in design. And I want to talk about-- actually, I don't want to talk about the role of design. What I really want to do is to talk about the role of designers, of each one of us, and our responsibility. On April 4, 1968-- and I'm going to be going from my little mole skin sketchbook here, too, with my notes-- but on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated, and 130 cities exploded across the country. And after four days, on April 8, on this date here, on this very date, 47 years ago, that urban unrest began to wane, although the sparks that were lit in the '60s were ignited from time to time throughout that summer and summers after and a few summers before. And it really wasn't the death of Martin Luther King that ignited those fires, but it was this pent-up anger at the collective condition of African American communities and the poor. It was the redlining, the disenfranchisement, the poverty, the disinvestment, and our relationship to power. All of that affected design infrastructure in many neighborhoods across the country. And John Loeb and a few others felt that the design professionals had not done justice to American cities, and working with [? bill doble ?] and John Loeb's gift, created the Loeb Fellowship. So here we are, 50 years later, and black men are still being killed by the police. And we're still having this discussion about design and communities of color and poor white communities. So how do we stop repeating the same historical mistakes over and over and over. Now, this is a big task. All we have to do is eliminate structural racism, get off the hyper-capitalist train, and embrace a new world-- easy. But we really have to take it in small chunks. We really need to think about what it is our role as designers and planners in changing the world? And I want to remind all of you all, in particular the students that are here, that at some point in time, you're going to join a professional organization. And each one of you will belong to the AIA, APA, the ASLA. And remember that you're going to sign a code of conduct. That code of conduct will cover and address all of the professional and the legal relationships that you have with your client and will set out those business practices that you should follow. But each one of those codes of conduct also asks members not to discriminate based on race and sex. It also asks members to uphold human rights in all of our endeavors. Everything that we do, we really need to keep that in mind. And as I said, your real job is to change the world, and designed for a fair and just world is the right thing to do. I mean, that's why we're here. We're doing this not because of metrics, not because of analytical data, but we are here because this is the right thing to do. And I'm going to close here, and I can go on and on. But I'm going to close here with words of Martin Luther King, kind of where we started, that are paraphrased. And at one point he said, on some positions, caution asks the question, is it safe? Expedience asks the question, is it quick? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes a time when we all must take a position that is neither safe, quick, or popular. We must do this because conscience tells us it is right. And so we're here, not to become millionaires, although maybe some of you will. And it's going to be hard with the [? student ?] [? debt ?] [? law ?] to get there, but we're here because we love what we do. We're here, really-- and all too often, in forums like this, we don't spend enough time talking about love. And we're here because of this love and this passion that drives us. And along with that, comes this responsibility that gets back to what Martin Luther King described as the beloved community. And that's what each one of the panelists have begun to describe and to build. And I ask that all of you all participate in building that beloved community. We're doing this because it's the right thing to do. Thank you. Thanks to all of you. I was struck, without any planning to this effect, that all of you spoke from a very personal position. You spoke about personal experiences, even back to childhood or experiences since graduation. There's something in there that I can't quite pull out, but there's a reason for that. I think partially, to me, it's something that Liz said about privilege, that when you were talking about privilege as a black person, or thinking about privilege as a black person, you think about education. You think about certain income, certain place. White people don't think about privilege, and I think it's because it has something to do with choice. I was thinking about when Kimberly was talking about growing up in Detroit. I didn't grow up in Atlanta, but I was a student in Atlanta. And right after graduation, of course, you have all the debt and no money. And I lived in some pretty little, high-crime concentrated poverty near areas south of Atlanta, but I always felt like I had made that choice. Whereas I think there are conditions where, because of race and racism and the designed sort of real estate that Kimberly was talking about of sort of designing to keep white people out of certain communities and to keep black people in, because of that black people sometimes don't have the choice that every white person has, no matter their income, no matter their other situations. I think it's a very asymmetrical starting point, to come from that. It makes me think, too, that part of the work we're doing, and I think the reason that things like this are so important, just like the event that sort of initiated this, that Mohsen and Chris were referring to earlier, part of it is just talking to each other. I mean, it's not like in academia we don't constantly have discussions. But we don't have discussions like this. We're not upfront with each other. We don't make ourselves vulnerable, as Liz was saying, and I think that's a very important thing, as academics, to remember from where do we speak. From what position are we speaking? It's a good thing to remember. I wanted to ask, first Liz and Theresa, because you're both teaching. Theresa mentioned just before we started that when you went to GSD, because it's such a high concentration on issues of form in the Master of Architecture Program, that you actually felt some tension, even. And could you talk a little bit about how some of these concerns that you voiced enter into your teaching? And I guess I'm asking also for recommendations and personal stories. But how do they enter into your teaching, as supposed to your practice? You know, I think now that I've been able to teach a few design studios in the past few years, definitely the way that I've set up-- kind of the way that the course unfolds-- we never jump to diagrams or form within the first, I would say, six weeks of the course. I realize, I think, something that we don't discuss in design pedagogy is really what is the role of the designer in terms of a leadership capacity? And really what are the tools that we're given in order to be an effective leader? So whether we're engaging in a conversation about form or larger social issues, I think we still need the facilitation tools. And so when I've been teaching studios, kind of the first two, three weeks have been about how do you speak to a community? So all my studios are contextualized within a community context, whether it's Skid Row or somewhere else in Los Angeles, and it's all participatory. So the goal is first, I already know how to do Rhino and render and Illustrator, all that stuff. The goal is how do we now equip you to be more effective when you have kind of basically your client meetings-- and so trying to expand what we're learning in order to include cultural-competency facilitation and really leadership development. Yeah, I think I take a very similar approach to Theresa, that a lot of the courses I teach, we also do very contextual projects. And the whole idea is, before you even start to get to analyze any place, I actually want to take away-- I think this vulnerability thing is connected to eliminating the distance. I think if you're looking at people as subjects that you're trying to observe, it's very easy to separate yourself from the realities of what they're doing or take it in such a hypothetical, rational way that you actually don't get into the real meat of stuff. And so one of the first couple of exercise that I do with my students is a lot about themselves, about their history, about the places in which they grew up, really getting to think of that in a really personal way and bridge the gap between that personal history and space. And then there's a whole series of coaching, of, like, how do you go out and start talking to people in the community? And so before they can even start to think about the design project, part of analyzing the neighborhood is just having conversations and interviewing people, but interviewing them in a conversational way. And we do coaching around the best ways to do interviews, places that they can do interviews, questions that they can ask. And so what I've found is that, naturally, this starts to seep in. So in the beginning, I'm scaffolding a lot. But by the time we get to the end of the course, they're doing it on their own. And they're excited, and they want to go back out and integrate more interviews and more community engagement as part of their process of design. So I think it's really about giving that lift initially, and really setting the tone that this is a fundamental part of the course. And then over time-- and I think one of the reasons why we don't do it is that we're afraid of it. It's really scary, and so it's about bridging that fear and that it's OK to fail. It's OK to screw up in a conversation with a community member, but if you approach that as something that you're going to learn from, then you can get past it and move on to that next level of engagement. Mm-hmm, and Seitu and Kimberly, I'm interested to hear a little bit more. I mean, Kimberly talked about it, about your practice. But I'm interested to hear a little bit more about how opportunities are initiated or discovered, or how do you make opportunities for the kind of community involvement that you were showing in places like Detroit? You've also done real estate work in New York, and it seems like a lot of your practice is making opportunities for things, rather than responding to offers of opportunity. And could you talk a little bit about how that works? And also, Seitu, a similar thing as an artist-- commissions come along, and projects are offered. But a lot of what you do is sort of ex nihilo. I mean, it's out of nothing, sometimes. Sure, so my approach is to try to be as proactive as possible, and so that's sort of why I've been transitioning more so from traditional architecture to real estate development, just to kind of be a part of the decision-making process as early as possible. And so that's part of the reason why I'm at the Kennedy School, to really start to understand how all of these different pieces come together. Design is a really important piece of the puzzle, but you also have to, like, finance these things. So I took finance last semester. I was like, this is really difficult. But I passed, so it was fine. I mean, I took real-estate finance. I took all these other classes at the Kennedy School. Actually, here at the design school, I'm at the law school now. I'm taking one class at the law school. So really my approach has been, how do you create an environment for interdisciplinary problem solving? That's really been the focus of my work since I've been here at the Kennedy School. I'm also a fellow at the Center for Public Leadership, which is focused on training the next generation of leaders to solve really complex problems. And I've had the honor of being in the first cohort of Sheila C. Johnson Leadership Fellows. And essentially, the 10 of us this year were the first group, and we're charged with addressing disparities in underserved communities. So I'm the only architect, but there are people in public health, in politics, in law, in just a really wide range of things. And we're just trying to figure out how do we fix Detroit? How do we fix Newark? How do we fix, you know, these really complex, super-hairy issues? And so in terms of creating opportunity, I think it's really about asking good questions, creating the right networks, really sort of building a team of people, a diverse team of people, in every sense of diversity you can think of. So that's really been my approach. You know, I've really used several different approaches. And I'm really fortunate and really blessed to be able to earn a living from commissions. You know, that's really what's kept me going. I mean, you describe integrating artwork into three of these stations for light rail. That was this large contract, the biggest thing I had ever signed, and it was multi-year. And I was working on other things. I also do theaters set design. But I've used all of that, personally, as a way to support my real work. And I encourage all of you all to, if you have a vision-- and you can hear that in the panelists who started these organizations and started these organizations from scratch. You know, I've been able to use my commissioned work to subsidize my real work. And many times, that real work starts with an idea. And I encourage you to follow that vision. This larger work that I do was able to help subsidize. Also, Michael described this meal. I have been working with food-related issues. And in fact, at the University of Minnesota, I teach a class on urban food systems that I alternate with a class on storm water management. Integrating art into storm water infrastructure is really what I've been focusing on. And so being varied and being willing to take on tasks that sometimes you might not know where to go-- you know, many times I will go into an interview. And I'll say to folks, sure, sure, I can do it in, and then have to put that together, have to figure out how to put that together. But anyway, I, just this past fall, helped put on a meal for 2,000 people at this table, one half mile long. It was in my neighborhood, with my neighbors, and I had to work on generating interest, support, and stakeholders for folks in my neighborhood. Its focus was on healthy eating because all too often I would see people walking past my studio windows in one direction and coming back, a few minutes later, with bags of groceries, knowing they had just shopped at the local convenience store, a block away. And probing a little bit further, looking at the food in those bags, it was primarily processed food or food in boxes. And there again, I thought, well, you know, what's a brother to do? What can I do? And I thought, well, I'll put on a meal. I'll invite all these folks to dinner, and it was a way of demonstrating what a healthy meal was. That was just part of it. It had a lot of different layers to it. But I'm saying that to say that a lot of that work was subsidized by my professional work. And you're going to have to figure out all kind of ways, angles, schemes, and scams to get to your vision and to begin to change the world. Thank you. So I want to take a little turn here. We're going to come back to the panel, but we had hoped that part of what an event like this would do would be to begin to produce topics, and topics that we would continue to discuss in subsequent events. And two of our Loeb Fellows, Jamie Blosser and Marc Norman, have been monitoring the discussion. Marc is looking at Twitter. I don't how many Twitters came in, but I'm going to ask them to see if they can start to isolate maybe some topics or themes, that then we'll use to turn to this kind of more active part. Thank you. And thank you, Michael, and to the panel and the joint center. Yeah, this is the beginning of the interactive piece and why we have tables and paper. We all worked very deeply in community, as you just heard. And so we very much felt like this needed to be a dialogue. And so your voices tonight are very important, and I just kind of want to summarize some of the things that I heard from the panelists and then turn it over to Marc and see what he's seen on the internet. But I heard a lot about how personal this is, as Michael also said, but that we all have a sense of responsibility toward this, and that there's some ethical considerations in moving forward with this kind of work. And I think that's a big question. What is our responsibility as planners and designers in addressing issues of inequity? What can we do in the process of design and even in our own practices to break down those barriers, to engage, to interact, as some of our panelists discussed, and to take a position? And so much about this is based on these sort of implicit biases, the fact that we all come with a different lens. And it is very personal for some of us. And by the way, I want to make sure we all take that to heart as we talk at our tables. And keep that here, so that we are keeping that respect at the table, as well, for that different perspective. But changing that narrative is really critical. And it's OK to be vulnerable. It's hard when you're doing a pinup, perhaps. You don't want to be vulnerable at that moment. But working with community and working with the teams that are needed to pull this work off is essential to have that kind of openness and humility and vulnerability. I also want to thank the panel, and the tweets have been coming fast and furious. And I think there were a number of things. I think one of the things that I'm most impressed with is, even from the pictures people are tweeting, they're saying that a good start is actually this panel and the diversity of the panel, not just racially and from a gender perspective, but also just from the perspective you're bringing to the discussion, in addition to the audience. And I think there are just a lot of sort of themes coming through-- I think Liz's statement about being vulnerable, but also about telling personal stories, which I think is a way of addressing that vulnerability and putting it out there to everybody else. I mean, I would also say, maybe, we put some of that vulnerability back on some of the people that tell us these stories. We could have a whole conference on awkward statements we've heard people tell us. But I think there are also a number of issues around how we practice and how we participate, how we listen, and especially the phrase that Seitu gave us. We don't spend enough time talking about love, which is very poetic, I have to say, and Kimberly's statement about public and private actors, that it's not necessarily one side of the table or the other, that we're not going to solve all problems by ourselves, but that they're going to be in coalition, and very different coalitions, I think. But the tweets are still coming through. And I think that some of the issues we'll talk about at our tables and then report out on will be important, too. But I probably have, like, two and a half pages of notes just from-- They're coming faster now that they know that you're reading it. Yeah, so please do tweet, and that is the hashtag. But we'll also, as we talk at the tables, be taking pictures of what you write and draw and also what you say. Thank you. So I'm going to introduce the breakout session. It'll be super easy, no anxiety here. And you don't even have to move, so stay at your table. If you have extra seats and those of you up in the risers would like to come down and join us-- one of the things tonight is that we're all participants, and all our voices are important. So please join us. And then if there's any tables-- it doesn't seem like there are any tables of less than four. So feel free to come on down and join us. And can I ask the facilitators to raise their hand? Do we have a facilitator at every table? If not, if we have any extra facilitators, please keep your hands up so we can populate tables without. So it's really wonderful, also, that we have Faculty Loebs and especially the African American Student Union facilitating tonight, so really thrilled with the presence here. So the way this is going to work is that we'll all just do a quick sort of 20-minute session at your table with the smaller group. So you'll have 15 minutes of that for discussion amongst the group and five minutes to sort of wrap it all up. Your facilitators are then going to come back and present your ideas to the group. And so what we'd love for you to do is use the paper in front of you in order to draw and write your ideas down. And so I'd like everyone to get your pen out or grab a marker on the table and just hold it up in the air for me. No, really, everyone-- you in the risers, I don't know why you're still up there. OK, so take the top off. And put it down on that white blank piece of paper, and write your initials on that blank piece of paper. Do it. So now you own that paper. It's no longer blank. It's no longer sacred. And we really hope to see whatever comes out of your discussions to be shown on that piece of paper because your facilitator is going to use that to summarize your conversation. So I hope you have fun, and now you're 20 minutes is starting.