Aseem Inam: The design fields such as architecture, landscape architecture, and the more transdisciplinary field of urbanism are rife with lofty claims--especially on social media like LinkedIn--that mask hard-core realities of green-washing, art-washing, and increasingly, community-washing.
As my research project, journal article, and forthcoming book explain, one has to carefully unpack popular--and often misunderstood--ideas about what "co-designing" and "public" [or rather, "publics"--plural] actually mean both conceptually and in practice. In terms of the latter, there are three quotes that should give us not only pause, but inspire us to do the necessary and hard work of community mobilizing and organizing.
The first quote is from the black feminist scholar and activist, Loretta J. Ross, who talked about working with people that were extremely different and even diametrically opposite than her as "having difficult conversations with a whole lot of people I wouldn't bring home for coffee. I don't want them to be my friends, but I needed to have conversations with them as a community organizer."
The second quote is from Chris Smalls, the president and founder of the new Amazon Labor Union, describing the historic drive to organize one of Amazon's New York City warehouses: "We created our own culture. Amazon has its own culture that is run completely on metrics, numbers -- no human interaction. While we interacted, we brought a human aspect to it, we cared for one another, we showed the workers every day that we cared for them. Even if they disliked us, we didn't argue, we didn't sit there and you know, get into fights. We just continued to pretty much . . . kill them with kindness . . . I think workers respected that . . . We just stuck to the issues and built off that commonality."
The third and final quote is from the political theorist Alyssa Battistoni: “The point of organizing is to reach beyond the people who are already on your side and win over as many others as you can. So you can't assume the people you organize share your values; in fact, you should usually assume they don't."
I will leave these quotes here for readers to think about, interpret, and come up with their own understandings about they imply for practice and action, especially in the design fields because there is often a lot of lip service in those fields for what is in fact extremely hard and complicated work of truly collaborating and partnering with different kinds of communities.
Note: These three quotes come from an excellent essay by Amia Srinivasan in the London Review of Books. If you are interested in an effective [though not necessarily perfect, because there is no such thing] example of "co-designing publics" in urbanism, please read my open-access journal article on the amazing work of the legendary Culinary Union in Las Vegas. AI
Puerta del Sol square in Madrid: Hundreds of young Spaniards camped out on the streets of Madrid and other cities protesting against mass unemployment, corruption and a political class they say is ruled by the financial markets, not the needs of the people. The demonstration in Madrid gradually developed from a small sit in, to a full blown tent city with a market, a garden and even a library.