A recent project in Seattle—Africatown Plaza—demonstrates the alchemy of community collaboration and a development team’s commitment to creating a neighborhood that can thrive. Much can be learned from how the team prioritized people in the process to make a people-centered place.
Seattle’s Central District was founded in the late 1800s as the city’s first Black settlement, which evolved into a vibrant community of thriving residences and businesses. In recent decades, as outside development expanded into the area, the Black community experienced displacement and gentrification coupled with persistent exclusion from the development process.
Seeing no place at the table for the Black community in the official Seattle 2035 Comprehensive Plan, a local nonprofit stepped in. Africatown Community Land Trust is an organization that moved into development as a way of enabling the community to have a stronger voice in the neighborhood. The organization brought together community members and designers to propose an alternative path to engage in a deeply inclusive development process that shaped Africatown Plaza.
David Baker Architects and GGLO were part of the collaborative team that cocreated Seattle’s Africatown Plaza. The developers and the design teams facilitated a participatory and generative level of community engagement that influenced the design.
Whitney Lewis, then an architect with GGLO, says, “We were building upon the legacy that was there already. Our role was to elevate the voice of the people, and our task was to make something iconic, on par with the Gum Wall and the Fremont Troll, when people think of Seattle.”
Through a series of “design cyphers” (a name borrowed from a hip-hop cultural event where everyone shares their voice), and in partnership with design team members David Baker Architects, GGLO, and landscape architecture firm Site Workshop, the Africatown Community Land Trust engaged the community around questions of identity, current needs, and future stability. An important aspect of this process was meeting the community in spaces where its members felt most comfortable.
(Africatown Plaza/David Baker Architects/GGLO)
Two development groups with Seattle Roots
Africatown Community Land Trust was founded with the mission to “acquire, develop, and steward land in Greater Seattle to empower and preserve the Black Diaspora community.” Community Roots Housing was the co-developer. Newly retired CEO Chris Persons describes the group’s process: “We collaborate on the priorities of the communities we serve and partner with people and organizations rooted in place to build on existing strengths.”
Through a series of “design cyphers” (a name borrowed from a hip-hop cultural event where everyone shares their voice), and in partnership with design team members David Baker Architects, GGLO, and landscape architecture firm Site Workshop, the Africatown Community Land Trust engaged the community around questions of identity, current needs, and future stability. An important aspect of this process was meeting the community in spaces where its members felt most comfortable.
“This gave us a deep sense of where people were coming from and how to elevate the story that they wanted to tell,” says Biruk Belay, then with Site Workshop (now at Seattle’s Department of Transportation). “The most important thing for the community was having a place of expression—a place where [residents] had access and agency.” When David Baker Architects joined the team, there was already a rich tapestry of language, ideas, and symbols from which we launched the design conversations.
At Africatown Plaza, the developers supported us to facilitate a deeply participatory and generative level of community engagement that influenced the design.
Seattle’s Africatown Plaza
Africatown Plaza includes 126 affordable apartments, office and community space, and local retail in the heart of Seattle’s Central District neighborhood. The developers had previously partnered on the nearby Liberty Bank Building, but this time around, Africatown Community Land Trust was leading the development process and locating its offices in Africatown Plaza to provide services and programming. The Central District was the place that the Black community had historically been redlined into—and was now finding itself being priced out of, as market rate housing developments began to rise near the intersection of 23rd and Union.
Africatown Plaza not only provides affordable housing for families and individuals earning up to 60 percent of the area median income, but the building also is a symbol of community empowerment and anti-displacement. “This project reflects a deep commitment to revitalizing the Central District,” says Wyking Garrett, president and CEO of Africatown Community Land Trust. “This includes honoring the rich heritage of the Black community, and creating a space where everyone, especially those who have endured harmful discriminatory policies followed by aggressive gentrification and displacement, can be empowered, feel rooted, be seen, and truly feel at home.”
Community voices
After the engagement from the design cyphers, we facilitated an interactive workshop series with key stakeholders, plus neighborhood participants to arrive at a design resonant with local voices—including fruitful conversations about the experience of being Black in Seattle, how to appropriately honor African American heritage, and creative ways to represent community identity in architecture. At our first meeting, the area stakeholders rearranged the chairs into a circle. They told us, “We are here together in community” and explained how the circular arrangement allowed us to share stories and ideas as equals.
This interaction led to further discussions about Afrocentric design and where we could introduce curvilinear rather than rectilinear arrangements—from graphics and visual aids to the design. Even in our programming exercises, we redrew the boxes as ovals, for example. This sensibility extended and translated into conversations about massing and shape of the building on the block—how curves could break up the rectilinear and represent aspects of inclusion and community.
Importantly, discussions generated metaphors—rather than literal motifs—and gave us the direction needed to design the building with a distinct sense of place and intention. To dig into the expression of identity, we spent time talking about such things as fabric, jazz music, and off-beat phrasing, and how they could be translated into patterning of the exterior skin.
Voices driving form
Engaging core local stakeholders early empowered them to become advocates for the project to the broader community. We asked them to lead a workshop on program and spatial relationships, allowing the design and development team to listen. We asked participants to directly share their ideas and worked with the client to report project updates to make sure the community felt heard.
As architects working in this historically marginalized area, we had to balance how much of a role we were playing with design and how much we were facilitating and realizing the vision of the community. Input from the workshops shifted the initial concept from a U-shaped, inward-facing building—a remnant of the Master Use Permit for the adjacent market-rate building—to an outward orientation framing a public plaza, which is now the heart of the development.
“The Central District needed a space that displaced people felt they could come back to,” says Whitney Lewis, who is now with the city’s Office of Planning and Community Development. “The new plaza creates a mechanism for connecting to people and organizations in the neighborhood. It’s a building that doesn’t look like anything else in the city. It’s a testament to what can happen when you listen to your community and come together as a group to see an idea through.”
The developer’s ‘Why?’
There remains the question for developers: Why invest deeply in community engagement? Especially when a community has been negatively affected by gentrification and may be anti-development? The motivation for clients to engage with the community can vary widely. As housing becomes increasingly streamlined for approvals, we at David Baker Architects find ourselves in the position of helping clients navigate ways to engage communities and to do so in meaningful, authentic, and equitable ways.
“This process made me a better developer,” says Muammar Hermanstyne, director of Real Estate at Africatown Community Land Trust. “It challenged my assumptions, gave me insights we wouldn’t have had otherwise, and kept us accountable to the values we said we were bringing to the table. The result was a building that reflects the culture and history of the neighborhood, provides 126 affordable homes, and creates space for a local Black-owned business—all in a way that feels authentic to the people who call this place home.”
At David Baker Architects, we consider community input to be an essential part of our design process. Current residents not only provide insight on community needs, identity, and neighborhood context but are also potential allies for the life of the building. Community resilience relies on social connections and relationships between neighbors. Africatown Plaza provides an example of a strong intention to create a building that offers a counterpoint to outside gentrification forces, but any development can thoughtfully consider integrating affordability to support a neighborhood in transition and ensure a net positive local impact.
“This process made me a better developer,” says Muammar Hermanstyne, director of Real Estate at Africatown Community Land Trust.
Addressing the legacy of Africatown Plaza, Rico Quirindongo, director of the Seattle Office of Planning and Community Development, says, “Africatown Community Land Trust made a stand by saying, ‘We are not leaving. We will not be pushed out.’ The project exemplifies Africatown’s efforts to ensure that Black families can still afford to live, thrive, and celebrate Black culture in their community.” As a result of Africatown Community Land Trust and Community Roots Housing’s deep commitment to this area, we were able to design a building that delivers on social aspirations and adds to the neighborhood’s legacy.
To anyone who passed by during the opening celebration for Africatown Plaza, which spilled from the cover of the distinctive canopy onto Spring Street, it became clear that this community is here to stay.
