Something that has sparked us as a team of collaborative designers is this quote by urban geographer Neil Smith, “There is no such thing as a natural disaster.” We see this as an important point to situate ourselves and establish the context within which we see openings for design thinking and resistance. The fallouts of crisis heavily and dramatically impact cities, places that are already burdened by the fractured nature of urban ecosystems and uneven development. These ruptures become exposed and further exacerbated by crises, such as Hurricane Katrina or Sandy, but we know they are always present, looming under the surface of the everyday. We need to work in this space; our aim is broadening capacity in order to actively challenge these patterns. In a system that is constantly in crisis, collaboration is critical. People have the tools and can be a part of the resistance. Through our practice, focused on particularly vulnerable populations, we work to harness this energy and direct it in a way to be used most effectively. We believe that the just city is the ultimate form of resistance.

We understand design as a process that can be mobilized to begin to tackle the complexity of a problem. We look at a given urban ecosystem and examine existing patterns, explore the ways in which people operate within it, and map how we can begin to navigate a system to achieve a paradigm shift. Transformation is happening at a strategic scale, both large and small, simultaneously. When we map these cross-sectoral actions together, we can see how complex this system of change can be. The system itself is in crisis and we are perpetually reactive. We believe the design process has a potential to move us out of this reactionary state through engagement and capacity building. Put very simply, this means working with people.

Working at the intersection of civic engagement and design, we can address systems of injustice and include more voices in the process of urban transformation. In.site operates in this realm in order to build resiliency as a permanent state of being! In.site collaborative was born out of our team’s collective belief that civic engagement is necessary for more just urban transformation. There are many problems in how cities are developing today. Top-down processes of urban transformation often prioritize and benefit only a small section of those who use the city. This creates extreme disparity, something that we have all witnessed in our own daily and professional experiences. There are systems in place that perpetuate this disparity. Having a real effect on individual lives, these problems increase the lack of opportunity for growth and development. At the same time, vulnerable pockets of society, where voices go unheard, continue to grow, further excluding groups of people unable to experience the benefits of development in their cities. This is the space in which in.site intervenes to break the cycle of uneven development.

Filling in gaps through this approach promotes the idea that urban citizens can be agents of policy and/or design within their capacity beyond the limiting “expert” silo. We work to make these fields accessible, through a collaborative and multidisciplinary design process, so that all urban citizens can be agents of change, agents of the resistance. To ground these theories, we present three projects that begin to carve out the intimate connections between climate justice and social justice, through on the ground design work.

The first is a Youth-Centered Urban Design Curriculum in Reading, PA that was designed to include students in top-down revitalization proposals. Education and urban revitalization are often not discussed together, but public schools are one of the most accessible social institutions that provide a link between people of multiple communities and the urban realm. This proposal shifts purpose of schooling in order to activate education itself as a vehicle of community building and revitalization. City Revitalization proposals can be made more inclusive by acknowledging the indispensable knowledge of local residents. Thus, the curriculum is based on the idea that through activating situated learning, schools can foster creativity and provoke critical thinking towards collective and civic participation. This project identifies a critical point in which civic participation, capacity, and resistance from the ground up can respond to crisis. Rather than a consecutive approach, these can be read more as a circuit in which the various actions creates sparks and feedback loops that inform next steps and deliverables. Critical to the way we practice, social justice or advocacy always underlines our research questions and design tools. By participating in the process of urban transformation, students gained awareness and developed tools and skills necessary for navigating the ever-changing urban setting, while also acting as ambassadors of their communities. As this diagram shows, institutionalizing such a curriculum can reposition public schools as anchor institutions, advancing students’ sense of responsibility as active participants with and for the betterment of their communities. This strategy decentralizes decision-making power to create a community of learning outside of the institutional walls, building resiliency -- as a perpetual state of practice.

The second project we would like to share with you moves us from curriculum design to policy proposal. Through this project, our ultimate aim was to include representational justice in local politics by creating a new participatory model in the form of a legislated local body, which we are calling Public Action Review Collaborative (PARC).This proposal addresses the lack of democratic process in urban development in New York City. It focusses on the contested public-private spaces along the Brooklyn waterfront. The social ecology of public space is inherently tied to the maintenance and representation of difference. The policy proposal seeks to enable multiple groups to continue to be represented in the new public spaces that are created. Here we address the ways in which the current structure of urban development falls short and affects the majority of communities who become disenfranchised within their own neighborhoods. The process of designing this policy recommendation included prototyping a dialogue around these spaces through hosting a series of community workshops. These workshops were run along the Williamsburg waterfront crossing social and physical boundaries that exist in space, initiating a dialogue between diverse stakeholders. Here, theoretical research provides us a lens through which to understand current conditions, while ethnography enables a site-specific analysis of a complex situation and entry point into designing a process that includes local constituents. The Walking Workshops were the first phase of building the capacity necessary for introducing a new policy. Within the second and current phase storytelling serves as a tool for dialogue and exchange between constituents geared toward a larger socio-political transformation. This set of workshops will highlight: local cultural heritage; lived experiences and broader significance of maintaining such diversity in a rapidly changing landscape; and the accumulation of intimate narratives that emerge from the collective experience. Ultimately this policy proposal expands upon current placemaking practices in order to be more inclusive of multiple voices. One dominant view defining place can flatten the rich history and diversity of complex neighborhoods. Through the collaborative design process , we are able to move placemaking into a more diverse and participatory process, representative of the existing communities. Just representation is critical for building resistance that moves from one overarching position to a dialogue amongst many.

As we have seen, we understand cities as sites of engagement and negotiation: the voiceless and the powerful, wealthy and poor, privileged and marginal, all work together continually defining how we live together within our collective environment. With this in mind, our third project starts with urban policy and aims to generate more inclusive and collaborative practices through on-the-ground partnerships. We collaborated with a local non-profit organization in Philadelphia to design an interactive, multi-lingual exhibition, sited in City Hall, as a method for increasing diverse civic participation. Fundamentally, this platform creates opportunities for unexpected encounters and exchange across barriers of language, education, profession, class, race, and ethnicity. Stakeholder mapping and policy analysis inform the content of interactive workshops and, ultimately, the design of the exhibition, all meant to build engagement strategies within the socio-political realm of Philadelphia. An important moment is when strategic alliances begin to manifest that prioritize inclusivity and social justice as fundamentally critical to building a just city. As a design tool, the exhibition [1] makes physical the voices of the people and [2] offers a space of civic participation amongst populations often unable to access spaces of urban governance. It continues to travel around the city, engaging new communities in the growing archive, broadening representation and folding into the resistance formerly excluded populations. When thinking of cities in this way, we are able to have conversations involving multiple voices from multiple actors, building confidence and strengthening civil society to proactively engage in shaping their local environment. In each of these three examples, we illustrate the role design can have in developing patterns of action and harnessing capacity necessary to engage in the resistance, at multiple scales. We prioritize collaboration with vulnerable communities, often excluded from participation: students and youth, neighborhoods facing displacement, immigrants and non-native English speakers. The design process offers an important space for capacity building and dialogue within these populations.

The spatial efforts of resiliency, while very important, are not enough. Existing social and political movements uncover critical fissures that must be addressed hand-in-hand with planning strategies. Resiliency is a form of social infrastructure and needs to be built from the ground up. Establishing a stable and sustainable resistance requires the breadth of diversity that any urban space entails, because every resiliency plan will be incomplete and derailed without grounding in social justice. Abdoumaliq Simone indicates here that working towards social infrastructure is not only a form of resiliency but also an important way of constructing urban livelihood. Climate issues, economic crises, social inequities can not be separated. Any design proposal for a more resilient city must include a just city. In combating such systemic fractures, we begin to move away from a reactive state. In order to make the Resistance Irresistible, we work to build capacity at multiple scales, making resiliency an inclusive state of being.