Architects today know they need to reach out to users and the people who live in the communities where they build, but often struggle with doing so effectively. Interviews with architects in both practice and academia reveal some strategies they are employing to bring the voice of the public into their work.
It’s about empowering, not just inclusion,” says Claudia Herasme, a partner at Partners in Public Design (PPD), a Manhattan-based urban-design practice led by people with deep experience in the public sector and law. Herasme, who served as managing deputy commissioner of the Bureau of Planning and Design at Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development and as chief urban designer at New York City’s Department of City Planning before joining PPD, explains that architects and planners must do more than just listen to the public. They must use what they hear to shape their designs. “We need to really understand how people perceive a place, how they feel about it,” says Herasme. “That means talking to all kinds of constituents—from elected officials to regular folks just trying to live their lives, from advocates to dissenters who don’t want any change.” Confrontation is often part of this process, she admits, but it can help architects design a project that “brings everyone’s concerns to the table.” No project can resolve all the competing concerns, she admits, but each should at least address them and find solutions that accommodate most of them.
Herasme’s firm often breaks free of meeting rooms to experience sites with the people who will be using them. For a recent job to develop a concept design for revitalizing a park and main street in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, PPD and SCAPE Landscape Architecture held some meetings outdoors in public spaces, including Gazebo Place; biked parts of the town with residents; and toured downtown in wheelchairs with an accessibility advocate. Such exercises allowed residents to point out aspects of their town that might not have been addressed in a traditional indoor meeting, and let the designers explain how they approach public space. “Lots of architects see engagement as something that needs to be done, but we really enjoy it and feel it’s the richest part of the design process,” says Herasme.
To explain their initial design strategies, the PPD principals use a lot of hand sketches and renderings that evoke the feeling of a place rather than declaring, “This is the design,” says Herasme. The drawings tend to show the project from a pedestrian’s perspective to emphasize the experience of being in and moving through the project. “We start with sketches and then develop design principles based on what the public brings to the table,” she says. “At architecture school, we’re trained to be owners of our design, but we try to open that up and make it a co-created vision.”
Work on the Johnstown project began with an open house at the town’s visitors center on Main Street, which had been advertised in the local newspaper, on social media, and via the city’s existing Main Street Committee, composed of local business and community leaders. PPD and SCAPE engaged the 100 residents who attended the open house in a pair of exercises: one asked what they love and don’t love about Main Street and nearby Central Park, and the other asked what elements they want in the future of downtown. They conducted in-person and online surveys during and after the open house. From this input, the PPD/SCAPE team developed a set of design principles touching on issues such as inclusivity, accessibility, health, ecology, transparency, boldness, fun, pride, maintenance, resilience, and forward-looking initiatives.
Next steps included a design-options meeting held at Gazebo Place, a design options survey, the development of a concept design overview, and the unveiling of that overview at an outdoor meeting. The team collected public responses to the concept design on comment cards and via an interactive mural organized by a public art consultant. They also heard from the public through a series of community conversations at local events, including a polka fest, community days in various neighborhoods, a Juneteenth celebration, and a Pride event.
PPD and SCAPE made sure to engage different groups of residents, such as kids, young adults, bike advocates, artists and makers, entrepreneurs, and veterans. Because their concept design looked at moving some monuments and statues from Central Park to another park a mile away, they held talks with local veterans who initially were not happy about the change. In the end, the designers and planners recommended keeping some monuments in Central Park, while relocating a few to the other park. They also reached out to residents of public housing, who often feel they are not heard or included in public decisions, says Herasme. “We believe every resident is an expert on the city, because they live there,” she explains. “The question is: How do we tap into that knowledge so we can create cities that are more responsive to their needs?”
In the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, Think! Architecture + Design has designed a 230-unit housing project that responds to the needs of the community by including a 20,000-square-foot space for local entrepreneurs and businesses. Currently halfway through construction, the project—Glenmore Manor—acknowledges that housing is just one of the critical issues facing people in the area, says Jack Esterson, a founding principal of the firm. It was developed by a consortium of non-profit community developer African American Planning Commission, affordable housing developer and builder Lemle & Wolff Companies, and construction management and development company Brisa Builders. The project combines apartments for several different groups—families earning less than 80% of the area’s median income, formerly homeless families, and low-income seniors—with the facility for emerging businesses. Called the B’Ville Hub, this two-story element provides space for the Central Brooklyn Economic Development Corp., the Brooklyn Coop Credit Union, an Asian restaurant, a public radio station, and a salon and beauty-training rooms.
Glenmore Manor is part of an effort by the City of New York to spur development in Brownsville by modifying zoning and density allowances and creating 2,500 units of affordable housing. The city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), along with the Department of Transportation and the Housing Development Corporation, launched the project by conducting outreach to area residents and listening to their concerns. The departments “learned that housing is not the only crisis in New York,” says Esterson. “There are serious problems with education, job training, and economic opportunity.” As a result, HPD has been “piggybacking other components into housing projects,” he explains. “For Glenmore Manor, that meant job training and economic development in addition to housing.”
In preparing its request for proposals (RFP) for the project, HPD held meetings with Brownsville residents, conducted surveys, and reached out to residents in many ways. In doing so, the city learned that people in the area wanted a credit union, a sitdown restaurant, and a radio station, so these elements were included in the RFP as part of the commercial component. Think! also relied heavily on the expertise of Ericka Keller, the CEO of Brisa Builders, who grew up in Brownsville, goes to church there, and is on a first-name basis with many of the people living there. “Ericka can’t walk down the street without people stopping her and saying hi,” states Esterson. “She set up a series of visioning sessions at night at local schools, and invited the public to tell us what they wanted.”
After listening to local residents, Think! gave the B’Ville Hub a prominent location at one corner of the building and wrapped it in glass to make it visible from the street. “We wanted it to be a landmark, a beacon,” says Esterson. “You can’t just listen; you need to respond in some meaningful way. It has to be more than just gloss.” At public meetings, especially early in the process, he continues, “there’s often a lot of fear and skepticism. You need to treat the residents with respect and be transparent about what you’re doing.”
While design practices are engaging more extensively with local communities, academic institutions are realizing they need to teach future architects and planners how to contribute to such efforts when they graduate. The Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York, for example, established an ambitious program in 2022 that uses Harlem, its home, as a focus for pedagogy. Called the Place, Memory, and Culture Incubator (PMCI) and funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, the initiative leverages connections with Harlem’s diverse communities to shape the way students understand the role of preservation in the face of ongoing urban transformations, and how they might engage with the rich histories in the neighborhood.
“One goal of PMCI is to change how we teach design by foregrounding the humanities and culture with an interdisciplinary approach,” explains Jerome Haferd, who is the program’s co-director, along with the school’s dean, Marta Gutman. “To do that, we aim to deepen and strengthen existing relationships with community partners in Harlem, and forge new ones,” says Gutman. “The idea is to walk down the hill to meet our partners, rather than asking them to come up to meet us.” These partners include the Harlem Arts Alliance, the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, Uptown Grand Central, and Save Harlem Now! “We want to integrate new ideas of preservation and the teaching of history, architectural history, and preservation practice in our studios,” she says.
One studio supported by PMCI focuses on the 125th Street Corridor and asks students to study and document the culture, community, and living history of Harlem’s iconic thoroughfare, and then design a culturally resilient future for the area. The studio examines not only the physical fabric of the neighborhood, but ephemeral aspects—such as street art, bodegas, bars, and flea markets—that change over time. Students work with the program’s partner organizations to tap into local knowledge and cultural production and establish a “sustained dialogue with the artists and stewards of Harlem’s living heritage,” states the PMCI website. One element of this effort is to create a “Living Digital Archive” that will grow over time and be accessible to the public. This ensures that the work done each semester builds on what came before and won’t be lost or confined to the school.
This past spring, students in the 125th Street Corridor Studio met with a 93-year-old local artist, Franco Gaskin, who for many years has painted murals on the roll-down gates protecting storefronts in the neighborhood. First installed in the 1960s and ’70s in response to concerns about vandalism, the mostly opaque gates are woven into the social history of the city and reveal changing attitudes about crime, art, commerce, and representation. As the area gentrifies and businesses renovate their shop fronts, these vibrant artifacts and the stories they tell are threatened with being erased.
Thanks to the Mellon Foundation grant, PMCI also distributes micro-grants of a few thousand dollars to community groups, enabling partner organizations to continue work on particular projects begun during the semester. “We hope our students learn to listen—and understand that they have a responsibility to the public that’s independent of their responsibility to the client,” says Haferd. “They need to be stewards of the community’s interest.”
Whether working in the public or the private sector, on large or small projects, designers are growing increasingly aware that responding to the needs of users and the public doesn’t interfere with creativity, but makes it richer. The model of the Howard Roark-like genius, dreaming up architectural visions independent of the people who will use them, may never disappear entirely, but it is being questioned and discredited today as never before.
CLIFFORD A. PEARSON (“Let’s Talk”) is the co-author, with A. Eugene Kohn, of The World by Design, and writes about architecture and urbanism. He is the director of the University of Southern California’s American Academy in China and a contributing editor at Architectural Record.
