Can Design Make Cities More Equitable?

"Residents are rightfully sceptical, as there are too many examples of them being disenfranchised due to their race and/or class"

Stacey Matlen

Similarly, François Mancebo, director of the International Research Center on Sustainability, has written that when he was growing up in the 1970s in a deprived quarter of Paris, government attempts to regenerate the area by constructing parks, gardens and libraries were resented by the locals, in the absence of any wider effort to improve housing or reduce crime. “The population stuck to its usual way of living,” Mancebo says, “as if these amenities were not for them. They were perceived as vague threats, put there only by the will of planners and local moguls, rather than opportunities for a richer life. […] The people decided not to use them because they considered that they didn’t belong to their world.”

Consultation that works

How can we avoid repeating the mistakes of the past? Jacobs and many subsequent researchers and practitioners have pointed out that we need to learn from communities themselves — and especially the disenfranchised — before devising plans that will affect them. Genuine dialogue and co-creation should be the ambition, rather than simply rolling out a consultation exercise after a whole load of assumptions and design decisions have already been made. 

This may be far from straightforward to marry with the commercial interests of landowners (and their shareholders), or the political priorities of public authorities. WSP’s work with Aboriginal Australian communities provides one template for how it could all fit together. Michael Hromek, technical executive for indigenous design, says that the country’s built environment has left Indigenous Australians — whose culture is rooted in a deep connection to the land — utterly “invisible in space”, and often cut off from access to traditional practices and culturally important sites. “There’s been a pretty strong message that their culture, their heritage, doesn’t matter. The built environment doesn’t reflect them,” he says.

In an attempt to address this, his team works to identify traditional knowledge-holders, then involves them in in-depth co-design sessions that identify important sites and routes that should be preserved, drawing out stories and cultural heritage to inspire the design response. The community is also paid as a consultant, with opportunities for indigenous artists to win commissions, so gains a direct benefit from the process. On a rail project in Melbourne, a site was set aside as a traditional Yarning Circle, a space from which local elders have been able to conduct cultural tours. Another project — yet to be implemented — has seen Aboriginal Australian family groups in Perth come together to co-design a pedestrian bridge inspired by a spear thrower, the woomera.

Far from being uncommercial, this process usually results in places that work better for everybody, says Hromek. “It is a bit trickier to do, it does involve a few more steps, and there’s a lot of politics and emotion in it. But what we do is follow a set of principles — that are Aboriginal-led and community-involved — to navigate that, to ultimately get the right design and hopefully address that inequality. That’s something that both communities and clients want.”

Another example is the pro-bono community-led design process in West Baltimore for the Penn North, Druid Heights and Upton districts, which were severely disadvantaged by historic redlining designations. Here, WSP’s role has been to help the three communities come together to form a united vision for the area — distinct from the municipality’s plans for it — of “investment without displacement.” 

"We used the documents and the plans and the priorities that the neighbourhood groups had already identified for themselves, and spent years and years creating"

Heather Martin, WSP

“We specifically chose to use a community-first approach,” says Heather Martin, a former City of Baltimore planner who is now a transportation planner with WSP. “We used the documents and the plans and the priorities that the neighbourhood groups had already identified for themselves, and spent years and years creating. We talked with these groups and explained how they would be so much stronger working collectively around a unified vision that we could co-create together. That’s what private funders and the government are looking for — a collaborative effort that really makes a difference.” A local politician involved in the process has recently introduced a bill to set up a redevelopment authority for West Baltimore, and has invited WSP to support the revitalization planning, building on its efforts in the area.

Inviting participation in planning is only the first step. As with the right to vote, people still need to be persuaded to exercise it. Traditional consultation efforts tend to result in the over-representation of a certain subset of the population — usually retired, often well-educated, with time on their hands — because others are too busy or too beaten down to engage.

The best practice is to consciously look for a range of perspectives, as White Arkitekter in Sweden has done: “We go and talk to people, seeking them out instead of expecting them to come to us,” says Viktoria Walldin, a partner and anthropologist at the firm. “When you expect people to come to a regular consultation, it’s usually old white men showing up, it’s not a diverse group.”

Inclusive strategies

A lack of diversity in design teams themselves compounds the problem, adds Courtenay Northcott, team leader in landscape architecture and urban design at WSP in New Zealand: “When you’ve got cisgender men designing the world, they design what they know and what they feel is important. So you get one part of society designing society, and it’s not fit for all. That’s what’s happened in the past.” Her projects have a major focus on gender inclusivity in play space and the public realm, and she says that it is necessary to actively target certain parts of the community, such as women’s shelters and refugee groups, to ensure their voices are heard. 

"Quite often we’ll only realize afterwards that we didn’t engage the right people. With tactical urbanism, the people who use the space every day are the ones experimenting with it"

Courtenay Northcott, WSP

Something that is increasingly used almost as a proxy for consultation is “tactical urbanism”: temporary and small-scale changes such as pop-up bike lanes or parklets. “The point is to force the local community to use these new streetscapes without making permanent changes and then to monitor the reaction,” explains Northcott. “Quite often we’ll design something and put it in and only realize afterwards that we didn’t engage the right people or build it in the right way. With tactical urbanism, the people who use the space every day are the ones experimenting with it.”

The answer is sometimes less strategic and more prosaic. Inclusive design is often simply about incorporating the practical facilities that older people, pregnant women or people with health conditions cannot do without, such as sufficient and sufficiently comfortable seating, shade from the sun, public conveniences and drinking fountains, to name just a few. In Vienna, strategic urban planner Eva Kail has been involved in more than 60 projects related to gender-sensitive planning in cities, including the creation of a 240ha suburb, Aspern. The principles she helped to develop are now the basis for every public space design or redesign in Vienna. At the heart of it, she says, it’s about meeting these basic needs: “You need decent lighting. You need clear routes that give eyes on the street, increasing the feeling of public safety. You need public toilets, drinking water. It’s very banal but it really makes a difference. For some it is just nice to have, but for others it’s a necessity.”

Nadia De Santi, senior project manager in WSP’s planning and urban design unit in Canada, has come to a similar conclusion through the specific lens of age-friendly design, aimed at ensuring people of all ages and abilities are catered for. Interventions can be as simple as those supported by the StopGap Foundation, a charity that installs temporary ramps in shop doorways or street crossings to allow those using wheelchairs or pushing small children to use them.

A constant concern is about the provision of public conveniences. “It’s the fear of not having access to a washroom, or not knowing how far away they are,” she says. “Those who have that anxiety or certain medical conditions will not use those spaces. So you can build the best, most beautiful park, but if there is no consideration for public washrooms, those spaces won’t be fully used.” This isn’t just a moral imperative, it’s an economic one too: “If you can’t get people to come to a place or an event, then people are not participating in their community, or supporting city or community events, or using civic spaces.”

Tough choices

If the solutions to many of these problems appear to boil down to good placemaking, that doesn’t mean that any of this is easy. There will inevitably be a tension between the demands of different city users — and even the provision of public washrooms poses questions around maintenance and safety. Inclusive design specialist Ross Atkin (in The Possible 06) points out that decluttered, car-free spaces — while ticking a lot of placemaking boxes — can have a negative impact on visually impaired people. “In recent years, one of the first things that places have done to improve their public realm is to get rid of guardrails. But guardrails can be really important for helping people with sight loss to find crossing points. The designers have often had very good reasons but they haven’t necessarily understood all of the consequences. And they’ve ended up making life more difficult for a certain set of people.”

A key issue is how facilities tailored to appeal to a particular group of people can co-exist with the demands of the majority, and the assumption that public spaces should be universally usable. It is a dichotomy that White Arkitekter grappled with when designing an outdoor recreation space aimed at girls in Upplands Vasby, Sweden. This could be justified by considering the extent to which cities already unconsciously exclude teenage girls from many parks and public spaces. “Some people say, ‘why a park for girls, what about the boys?’” says Walldin. “But the goal is not to make a park for girls, the goal is to make a park for girls and boys. The goal is equality, but to achieve equality we might have to focus on the group that is excluded, and be comfortable with that.”