Designing for Dignity: Viewing Design as a Social Tool

Speaking at ULI’s Housing Opportunity Conference in Minneapolis on July 14, designer and architect Liz Ogbu sounded more like an anthropologist or oral historian, intent on understanding and listening to people rather than offering them a pre-cooked solution to their problems.

Ogbu spoke about a recent experience serving on a ULI Advisory Services panel in Durban, South Africa, where the city is trying to redevelop a transit node. The existing space had been overtaken by nearly 8,000 street vendors, selling everything from vegetables to jewelry at small stalls.

The local government had tried in vain to convince the vendors that they would be better off relocating to a far-off trading center or establishing higher-wage, traditional retail shops. The traders had their own ideas: to stay put, but make their space clean and attractive; to be more successful in selling their products through training in sales and marketing; and to have a community kitchen where they could continue their tradition of preparing meals for a local HIV clinic.

“It was quite different than what the city had imagined,” Ogbu said. “The traders had a complete understanding that the bad condition of their space was directly connected to how people perceived them. They deserved to have their dignity recognized and have a quality space.”

Designing more human-centered communities requires “moving beyond intentions of what we hope to create to finding ways to actually engage with people [in order] to get there,” she said. Her call to action has far-reaching implications for cities, housing professionals, and anyone else concerned about putting the needs of people first on the path toward growth.

One strategy Ogbu proposed is for designers, architects, and developers to embrace a new role as “expert citizens”—professionals who don’t leave their humanity behind when interacting with people affected by a project. For their part, residents become “citizen experts”—people with deep-seated knowledge of a community but who have never valued their lived experience as a form of expertise.

This new paradigm redefines the relationship and makes the citizen engagement piece of community planning less perfunctory and more real, said Ogbu; it has its origins in the 2011 book Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture by Nishat Awan, Tatjana Schneider, and Jeremy Till. “Part of our role is to actually create a space where they feel comfortable coming to the table and working with us to deliver something,” she said.

One of Ogbu’s recent projects that put these ideas to the test was NOW: Hunters Point, an interim event space project on a former industrial site in the impoverished Bayview/Hunters Point neighborhood in San Francisco. PG&E, a California energy company and one of the state’s largest landowners, asked Ogbu and other partners how the site of a now-shuttered power plant located near public housing complexes could be disposed of. The site had been remediated and paved over, but still proved foreboding to local residents, many of whom who had agitated for the plant’s closure in 2006. PG&E needed assistance soliciting their feedback in a way that did not provoke suspicion or apathy.

What Ogbu and others realized was that local residents had an “impending sense of loss” about the changes to their neighborhood. Like other underserved areas in San Francisco, Bayview/Hunters Point is now capturing the attention of market-rate developers who want to cash in on the area’s postindustrial land and deliver much-needed housing to the region.

Ogbu and her partners, envelope Architecture + Design and landscape architecture firm Royston Hanamoto Alley & Abey (RHAA), enlisted the help of StoryCorps, the national storytelling and radio production nonprofit, to capture residents’ stories of growing up in the neighborhood. They transformed a shipping container into a recording studio and captured oral histories through audio and video.

“We never said, ‘Tell us what you want here.’ We just said, ‘Tell us your story,’” Ogbu explained. Instead of having the requisite community meetings, the partners held “listening parties” where residents gathered to hear their neighbors’ stories. “We got all the data we needed.” Ogbu and her team also put on a circus attended by 650 people from across the city.

These events helped break down walls and establish trust with the residents. Going forward, the space will be turned into an interim-use hub where classrooms, health screenings, and food vendors will be offered, with selections based on requests from Bayview/Hunters Point residents. The shoreline near the site also will be upgraded and restored using remediation funds.

A community benefit organization will act as a steward for the site and be in charge of future programming for the hub, which will focus on job training for residents. “We can’t stop gentrification, . . . but how do we give people greater capacity to stay?”