Welcome to the First Quarter 2007 Newsletter of the Association for Community Design
This is the first issue in a series of quarterly newsletters which are dedicated to support those engaged and interested in the history, theory and practices of community design.
In every newsletter, you will find a description of ongoing community design work and resources, including interviews, book reviews, profiles of helpful tools for community design, and news highlighting important community design initiatives. In addition, at the end of each issue, we will pose a question and a link to a forum on Archinect.com for you to share your thoughts and engage in a discussion with other people within the ACD network.
This newsletter contains the following:
- Announcing the upcoming 2007 ACD/ADPSR conference in Baton
Rouge and the Planners’ Network conference in New Orleans
- Interview with Clifton James, Urban Design Research Center.
- Overview of New Markets Tax Credits, an important funding
source for community design
- Book review of CASE: Hilberseimer/ Mies van der Rohe,
LafayettePark Detroit
- Information about the inaugural Jane Jacobs Fellow at the
Center for the Living City
- Link to a downloadable lecture and panel discussion from the
Mayors' Institute on City Design
- News on Infill Philadelphia, an initiative of the Community
Design Collaborative of AIA Philadelphia
- Job opening with the Community Design Center of Pittsburgh
- Question for discussion and link to Archinect
We hope you enjoy the newsletter, and welcome any comments and requests for content for future issues. Please e-mail any comments, questions or suggestions to newsletter@communitydesign.org.
Jody Beck, Newsletter Editor
Chair, ACD Communications Committee
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SAVE THE DATES FOR:
THE GREAT GUMBO!
Association for Community Design and
Architects/Designers/Planners for SocialResponsibility
LouisianaStateUniversity, Baton Rouge
LouisianaStateUniversity, Baton Rouge
June 3–5, 2007
The Great Gumbo:
Stirring the Pot of Community Design
We wish to celebrate the rich regional cultures of Southern Louisiana—the food, music, art and conviviality. And, in this place where conversation itself is an art, we are designing a conference environment that will give us time and space to explore multiple issues in community design, appreciate what is working, and discuss ways of building community that are meaningful. This unique conference promises to fill your senses and sensibilities as we harvest best developments from the field. It is a rare opportunity to “stir the pot” of community design by addressing our evolving practice and its response to issues of social, environmental and economic justice. Bring your unique experiences and a big appetite for connecting as you never have before. Watch for conference information from ACD here.
in conjunction with:
PlannersNetwork
University of New Orleans, New Orleans
We wish to celebrate the rich regional cultures of Southern Louisiana—the food, music, art and conviviality. And, in this place where conversation itself is an art, we are designing a conference environment that will give us time and space to explore multiple issues in community design, appreciate what is working, and discuss ways of building community that are meaningful. This unique conference promises to fill your senses and sensibilities as we harvest best developments from the field. It is a rare opportunity to “stir the pot” of community design by addressing our evolving practice and its response to issues of social, environmental and economic justice. Bring your unique experiences and a big appetite for connecting as you never have before. Watch for conference information from ACD here.
in conjunction with:
PlannersNetwork
University of New Orleans, New Orleans
May 30–June 2, 2007
Race, Class and Community Recovery:
From the Neighborhood to the Nation and Beyond
Hurricane Katrina exposed tremendous rifts over class, race and community, not just in New Orleans but throughout the United States and around the world. It also shook the very foundation of planning and governance, whose failures were broadcast in high definition to the global community. Yet the effort to dig out and rebuild has been marked by tremendous innovation and will on the part of local communities, despite continued abandonment at the federal level.
The 2007 Planners Network Conference will confront issues of race, class, injustice and the failures of planning, while seeking to learn from the work of community-based organizations, dedicated planners and local residents. Planners Network is an association of professionals, activists, academics, and students involved in physical, social, economic, and environmental planning in urban and rural areas, who promote fundamental change in our political and economic systems. The planning department at the University of New Orleans is the only accredited planning program in Louisiana, Mississippi or Arkansas, and has been extremely active in community-based planning efforts in the aftermath of the hurricanes.
More information, online registration and the call for proposals can be found at www.plannersnetwork.org
Making Gumbo: Interview with Clifton James
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When asked what the focus of design for communities should be, and what he would recommend are sustainable, resource-efficient strategies that should be standard in community design, Clifton James indicated that his number one recommendation to community designers …is to stop designing! “Making a difference for a community is not a design issue— it is a process issue, which may involve traditional design.” James emphasizes that the process starts with finding the right team of people who can implement change in a community through a business model, rather than a design model. “To make a change that truly supports the quality of life in a community starts with an overall vision crafted by a partnership of visionaries in economics, business, law, science, finance, engineering, social work, building, teaching, learning, etc., and only a minority representation of designers and planners.
According to James, within the business model, community infrastructure is built to allow farsighted businesses to flourish. “Everything else can happen within the business model. For example, since vocational education was taken out of our schools, we have ended up with unskilled construction workers building from our community plans. We designed machines to build, and waste a lot of energy answering RFIs.” Within his business model, a different, economic solution—an implementation plan can emerge when visionary partners finance a business that, “for example, makes stair steps out of wood scrap left from homes damaged by Hurricane Katrina.” In this example, the implementation plan could include training programs for local community members to become skilled in the manufacturing of these steps. Without having “designed” a new community, the people could acquire useful and marketable skills; and the community has a new business base and a new product that can be used to build their homes and communities. James further went on to explain that the next level for the business model in this example would be to “develop a distribution industry to distribute the steps globally.”
In practice, through his work at the the Urban Design Research Center, Inc. (UDRC) and through his academic teaching, James emphasizes “returning to the fundamentals of teaching, the pre-Industrial Revolution model that trains people to not just build, but to read and write and to develop character.” James indicated that young design students these days come into the classroom believing they have all the answers. “They have no questions.” James’ students may come with a vision, but “they leave with a different one, a different understanding of what they should be doing” and many more questions. “I have not completed any projects,” says Mr. James to describe how community design is a continuous and neverending process, not just something that is put into place and then left behind. “Someone needs to maintain the economic process to support the changing dynamics of that community. “I teach my students all of the components, the ingredients they need to do everything,” including design.
When asked if New Orleans was recovering, James used the question to further illustrate his development philosophy. “New Orleans has put on a face to attract its tourists back, but no, New Orleans is not recovering.” He described the experience of the “national guys” who came to New Orleans and “started to design immediately.” According to James, the impression the designers left on local communities was that they had pretended to listen to what the people needed and wanted, then left a design solution for their own glory and no plan for its implementation. James further indicates that economic development studies have simply been shelved and master plan drawings have been stored in flat files because “they began from a design model rather than a business model.” This also illustrates to Mr. James the reason we have lost respect as an industry. “We need to stop believing we have the answers that will be best for our customers and listen to the people, respect and trust them, have faith that they do understand their community needs.” James points out that the solution does not lie in a design or economic development plan but in an implementation plan, based on an economic model designed by partners with the vision and the desire to build communities that enhance the quality of life. As he aptly put it, “It is not about design. It’s about making gumbo.”
Mr. James issued a challenge at the end of the interview: “How can we use the debris and trash still left from Hurricane Katrina in a community building way?”
Please forward any ingredients you may have for this gumbo to katrina.rosa@HDRInc.com.
Katrina Rosa is a registered architect, LEED AP, active member of the AIA Committee on the Environment and the US Green Building Council. She is currently a Sustainable Design Project Manager for HDR, Inc. in the Pasadena office working primarily on the sustainable design of university and healthcare building types.
New Markets Tax Credits Support Community Development Projects
Traditional architecture firms are usually brought into a project after the basic financing has already been established, but community design centers are often involved in projects earlier than corporate firms. Additionally, community design centers are in a unique position to help bring together otherwise disparate parties that are targeted by public-private financing vehicles. Although the focus of individual design centers remains primarily local, it is important to understand and advocate for those federal and state programs that support community-based work.
The New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) program was initiated in 2002 to encourage investment in low income communities that have historically had poor access to capital. This program is coordinated by the U.S. Department of Treasury though the Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) Fund. The CDFI Fund makes competitive allocations of credits to community development entities (CDE’s), which then make qualifying investments in eligible local projects.
For a community group working to realize a particular project, application for financing would be made by the owner entity to an individual CDE. A searchable list of CDE’s that have received awards in the past few years is posted on the CDFI Fund website at the end of this article. For a particular owner entity to be eligible to receive funds through this process, the entity must either be located in a low-income community or its activities must be targeted to benefit low-income populations, either through a specified percentage of sales, employment or ownership. Although CDE’s often have a variety of funds to provide to a given project, a project that meets the requirements of the NMTC program may have a greater chance of receiving funds.
According to a 2005 analysis of the program by the New Markets Tax Credit Coalition, 58% of the $4 billion awarded in 2004 went to finance real estate development projects. The program has been used to bring a full-service grocery store to a distressed neighborhood in Cleveland, for example, and a technology center and small commercial storefronts to anchor a transit center in Chicago. NMTC’s may also be used in connection with other financing, such as Historic Tax Credits. Under the NMTC rules, 40% of all U.S. census tracts, including most central business district census tracts, qualify for activities eligible for NMTC’s.
Congress recently extended the NMTC program through 2008, and in the fall of 2007, CDE’s will be authorized to issue up to $3.9 billion in qualified equity investments. For more information on the New Markets Tax Credit Program, including a list of CDE’s, visit the following links below:
Casius Pealer is a real estate attorney at Reno & Cavanaugh, PLLC, focusing on affordable housing and community development. He holds a B.Arch from Tulane University in New Orleans and was co-editor of ArchVoices from 1999-2006.
Review of Lafayette Park Detroit
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Design of this planned community paired architect Mies van der Rohe with planner Ludwig Hilberseimer and landscape architect Alfred Caldwell. They introduced Detroit to several of the concepts of burgeoning urban design theory - such as a linear park connected to spacious paths that allow residents to walk to school or shop without crossing a street. The development, which was conceived as a response to changes in living patterns induced by increased automobile ownership, includes rental units located in towers and low-rise cooperative units. LafayettePark includes the largest collection of Mies van der Rohe’s buildings in the world, and is now recognized as a historic district.
One of the most interesting strategies employed to describe the development is the inclusion of three contemporary photo essays that are interspersed with the original black and white images. The large, high quality color photographs effectively draw the reader into Lafayette Park; they are particularly successful in describing the skin of the buildings, the mature landscape adjacent to the units and the strategies employed to minimize the visual impacts of parking. Unfortunately, only one of the portfolios includes people in any meaningful way. Even more disappointing is the lack of interior views of the units. In contrast, the narratives that portray anecdotal reactions of those residing at Lafayette Park focus in large part on the interior spaces and framed views.
Unlike most architectural writing, which often focuses only on plan and structures, the essays in the book describe the complexities of achieving and maintaining projects in the real world. Readers learn about the politics of the designers’ offices, housing policy, regional economics, the evolution of construction technologies, the way in which the design evolved, design theory, property management and compromise. Cumulatively, the essays make a strong but not definitive argument for the success of the project, and by doing so, present a credible challenge to several of the assumptions that underlie the principles of the Congress for the New Urbanism.
The project analysis would have been more compelling if theorists representing Modernism, New Urbanism and Community Design were provided an opportunity to comment. Lafayette Park Detroit is worth reading, contemplating and discussing. The monograph would make a good addition to any housing theory seminar reading list.
review by Kathleen Dorgan, who is the Vice President of the Association for Community Design and practices community design in Storrs, CT
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Mayors' Institute on City Design Celebrates
Twenty Years of Shaping Civic Design
Twenty years ago, Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley, Jr. awoke one morning and realized that he was the chief urban designer of his city, or so the story goes. He promptly wrote a letter to Jaquelin Robertson, then Dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia, proposing the Mayors' Institute on City Design - a program that would bring mayors together with design and development experts to discuss the most challenging urban design projects facing their cities. Robertson brought the idea to Adele Chatfield-Taylor, then Director of Design at the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Mayors' Institute was born.
Twenty years later, in essentially the same format proposed by Mayor Riley, the Mayors' Institute on City Design (MICD) is going strong - hosting seven to eight sessions and reaching at least 50 cities each year. In fact, the MICD has graduated over 700 mayors and over 500 design and development professionals in its 20 year history.
To celebrate this momentous occasion, the MICD hosted a public lecture and panel discussion at the National Building Museum on December 13, 2006. The discussion, which was moderated by Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for The New Yorker magazine, the centered around the impact of politics on city design and the future of urban development within U.S. cities. The Mayors present were: United States Conference of Mayors President Douglas Palmer of Trenton, New Jersey; Mayor Joseph P. Riley, Jr., of Charleston, South Carolina; Mayor David Cicilline of Providence, Rhode Island; and Mayor T.M. Franklin Cownie of Des Moines, Iowa.
For more information on this event and a link to download the lecture and panel discussion, please click here.
submitted by Jess Wendover, director of the Mayors' Institute on City Design
The Jacobs Fellowship Program:
Inaugural Fellow to work in New Orleans
Before her unexpected death, Center for the Living City founders met with Jane Jacobs to discuss what issues would be logical focuses for the further exploration, and application, of ideas Jacobs had uncovered as critical to the success of cities. They agreed that creating a number of fellowships for individuals to pursue applications of a variety of city-building processes would be an effective way of communicating issues of critical importance in maintaining or regaining the strength of a city.
Jacobs attached one stipulation: that the fellowships focus on what can work in a city and how, rather than what we already know does not work. The ever-practical Jacobs was always loath to recite a tale of urban woes, always seeing any urban circumstance as an opportunity to create ‘new work’ to address it. For Jacobs, understanding cities meant understanding the economies around which they were initially organized. With any urban issue, Jacobs applied similar thinking: the way to turn a negative into a positive was to proactively add new positives, not impose negative restrictions.
To that end, and with the driving influence of pioneering community development guru Ron Shiffman, the first Jacobs Fellow has been selected by the Center for the Living City at Purchase College. Benjamin Gauslin, a graduate of Virginia Tech’s College of Architecture and Urban Studies, will work in New Orleans on building and site inspections, developing preliminary designs and budgets for housing and commercial revitalization projects and the development of a pattern book for housing rehabilitation in the New Orleans East neighborhoods. This Fellowship will allow Mr. Gauslin to devote one full year working with ACORN Housing Corporation on affordable housing and neighborhood development efforts in low-income neighborhoods.
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Established by the Center for the Living City at Purchase College, this inaugural Jacobs Fellowship is a collaboration of ACORN Housing Corporation, Deutsche Bank, Pratt Center for Community Development, Pratt Institute School of Architecture, and The Center for Architecture Foundation in New York City. The fellowship is the first in an ongoing Jacobs Fellowship Program of the Center. Fellowships will be created for individuals to engage in city-building processes of critical import in maintaining or regaining the strength of cities. Fellowships will occur across disciplines and will address the complex, interconnected problems facing cities throughout the world. This inaugural fellowship is funded through a generous grant from Deutsche Bank.
Established in 2005 in collaboration with Jane Jacobs, the Center for the Living City at Purchase College develops symposia, exhibitions, training programs, fellowships, internships, workshops and publications that approach city building issues using thoughtful, collaborative, participatory and transdisciplinary processes. The Center most recently created an exhibition with students from Purchase College entitled, “Learning from Disaster: New Orleans after Katrina,” which was held at the Museum of the City of New York.
submitted by Stephen Goldsmith, Interim Director of the Center for the Living City at Purchase College
COMMUNITY DESIGN COLLABORATIVE LAUNCHES
INFILL PHILADELPHIA
Infill Philadelphia is a new initiative that will add the design community’s voice to the public conversation about how Philadelphia can re-envision its neighborhoods.
Infill development—the reuse and repositioning of underutilized buildings and sites—is an essential part of renewing neighborhoods and knitting them back together. Funded through the William Penn Foundation, Infill Philadelphia will generate workable design solutions for under-utilized physical assets in Philadelphia neighborhoods; promote systems change by developing exciting ideas that will help Philadelphia leaders re-think the future of our neighborhoods and city; and foster an understanding of the value of good design and how to involve design professionals in the revitalization process among community leaders and developers.
Each phase of the initiative will consider a different aspect of infill development and feature site-specific design projects; opportunities for public dialogue; and collaborations between community development corporations, design firms, and local and national experts.
Infill Philadelphia kicks off in January 2007, with a focus on neighborhood commercial corridors. The Community Design Collaborative will partner with the Philadelphia Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) to work with community development corporations engaged in the revitalization of three neighborhood commercial corridors.
To learn more about Infill Philadelphia’s projects and participants, please visit the Community Design Collaborative.
Job Opening with CDCP:
Director of Development & Operations
The CommunityDesignCenter of Pittsburgh (CDCP) is seeking a versatile, multi-talented individual to play a key role in our growing organization by increasing, diversifying, and managing revenue to support and sustain our evolution and expansion. The CDCP improves the quality of life in the Pittsburgh region by encouraging good design of the built environment. We invite you to visit www.cdcp.org to learn more.
The Director of Development & Operations – in collaboration with the Executive Director, board of directors and staff of CDCP – will ensure the continued growth and sustainability of CDCP through the management of all development and operational activities and systems. This position is a key part of the organization’s leadership team, reporting directly to the Executive Director, working with program staff, and supervising administrative staff. The position will manage all fundraising activities, building partnerships with public agencies, communities and other nonprofits, and representing the organization in a variety of settings. Contact info@cdcp.org for more information, the deadline for submissions is 02/02/2007
Highlights from the next newsletter:
- Twenty three members have already responded to the ACD Gulf Coast Survey which will serve as the data base for ACD's participation in the region. Please add your expertise and projects. Expect a full report in the next newsletter about the 61% of the respondents who are already working in the area and the resources they need as well as those that are available to share.
- Many community design projects are supported by federal funding or tax credits and are thus dependent in part on the annual federal appropriations process. The next issue of the ACD Review will discuss the likely 2008 appropriations for a number of important federal departments and programs, including Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Agriculture, and will highlight key steps remaining in the timeline to final approval.
Food for Thought:
Both Clifton James’ suggestion to “stop designing,” and the success of Lafayette Park, which – according the current ideology of land use and design – ought to fail, challenge many of the popularly held beliefs about the relationship between community and design.
What do you think about the relationship between the concept of community and methodologies of design in your daily practices? What is the ideal role of community expertise? What is the ideal role of professional design expertise? What is the difference between designing for a community and designing for any other client? If you see a problem with the way communities are currently designed, what steps could we take to bridge the gap between community and design?
Share your answers to these questions in an open forum here.
