Reflections and Some Suggestions for Change
Since 2021, our collaboration with residents of the Braddock and North Braddock neighborhoods has brought community desires, histories, and agency directly into classroom learning and pedagogy. It has highlighted for students the need to grapple with very real, multiscalar and seemingly intractable concerns and power dynamics, and, most importantly, to recognize a long history of community action to build local power against extractive industries and racial capitalism.
While there is a long history of academic research in and with Mon Valley communities, institutions have tended to dip in and out through sporadic engagements. At other times, they have simply given corporate and industry interests precedence over community needs. Meanwhile, even well-meaning modes of participatory research and design can also create harmful results for local communities. In our conversations with residents in Braddock and North Braddock, it is clear that such engagements have left participation fatigue and resentment in their wake. And that any tangible benefits of institutional research are elusive at best.
As we reflect on the work conducted over the last year through the SOM Foundation Research Prize, and going further back—and as we build on this work in the future—we recognize that repairing these harms, and developing strong and supportive university-community relationships, is critical in our ongoing work. Most importantly, it is crucial to ensure that research and design can translate into meaningful and tangible benefits for research participants and their communities.
Reflecting back on the project, the following sections outline areas for effecting change in institutional, curricular, and research frameworks for community-centered design and learning.
Desire, not damage
Eve Tuck’s description of “damage-centered research and damaging research” rings true in “boom and bust” narratives about post industrial communities, often repeated in academic settings. Systemic racism and abandonment at the hands of racial capitalism certainly create all types of damage—to ecosystems, local economies, built environments and more. Yet misreading damage as a defining function of marginalized communities, rather than structural causes, leads to, as Tuck writes, research framed around “a theory of change that establishes harm or injury in order to achieve reparation.” Indeed terms like “renewal” and “revival” are pervasive in contemporary discourses of planning and design in postindustrial communities. They presume depleted landscapes and communities.
Learning from Tuck, centering desire, not damage, needs to be the starting point of community centered work. A framework of desire brings complexities and contradictions into view. For example, our conversations with residents in Braddock and North Braddock have brought such a range of perspectives, ideas, visions, experiences, and explanations about the past, present, and future of the community: about the role of the steel mill, how businesses come and go, air pollution and its causes, fracking, local power structures, and about the nature of change.
Moving forward, we (re)commit ourselves to:
- Remaining attentive to the damaging and extractive tendencies in our practices and refusing damage-centered theories of change.
- To producing knowledge and plans that start from the different, and sometimes contradictory, perspectives and desires of community members.
- Working with community members to develop and implement robust guidelines (see Tuck) for ethically grounded research and design.
Unlearning design, situating expertise
Belief in individual authorship and design virtuosity is deeply embedded in the Anglo-European cultures of architecture and urban design. Much of our work in this project has been about letting go of—indeed “unlearning”—such individualistic methods, and along with them, rarefied formal conventions.
During the first studio meeting in Spring 2024 Ginger talked about starting General Sisters with Dana as a space that was open to being interpreted, used, and experienced by and “with many neighbors.” Taking in this valuable lesson, we learnt to work and learn collaboratively with members of our expanded ecosystem of experts, teachers, and friends. In the context of the design studio, this often meant making design decisions based on critical, and sometimes uncomfortable, reflection on our long-held assumptions about urban space and the built environment.
Centering residents’ perspectives, expertise, and long-term visions for the built environment needs to be the starting point for design—rather than a box to check in a participatory process.
Building ongoing commitments and relations
Research conducted through the structure of a one or two semester course can create significant practical and ethical constraints in community-centered work. For starters, course requirements and timelines can sometimes overshadow concerns on the ground. This can also create a sporadic in-and-out dynamic of institutional research, with priorities set by curricular rather than community needs, and work stopping or slowing down once the semester ends. What is practical and expedient for a course may ultimately harm the relations and trust that are so important for community-centered work. Since 2021, we have struggled with this dynamic, and how it impedes continuity.
One way to overcome these constraints is by continuing to build on the work done from year to year, and more importantly on what people in the community have been doing and thinking about. If we need to reconnect after an extended period of time, it has to be on their terms, and recognize where they are at with their work and priorities—rather than where we (as the institutional partner) might have left off.
It has been especially encouraging that some students have continued to work in and with members of the community in different ways, after the end of their semester and in some cases after they graduate—sometimes through independent research, thesis projects, internships with local organizations, etc.
Continuing to show up is important.
At the same time, research fatigue is also real. Institutional research in (and with) Mon Valley communities has a long and mixed history, as we have learnt through archival research and in conversation with residents. Many expressed a sense of the community being over-studied, but without always knowing what comes out of the studies and proposals conducted by university actors.
With this in mind, it is deeply important to maintain dialogue, trust, and continuous consent with research participants, to share research and design outputs, and, as detailed below, ensure that they receive remuneration for their time, recognition for their expertise, and concrete benefits of the research in their communities.
Recognition and compensation
In a recent conversation about a multi-authored grant proposal to conduct community-centered environmental justice research, a university colleague from a different department suggested removing the word “expertise” in reference to the role of community members. This was an important reminder of how university research, even when framed through logics of participation, creates and sustains hierarchies of knowledge. These hierarchies have repercussions on who might be recognized and remunerated for their contributions to a research project. It is vitally important for institutions and research-leading units to recognize community contributions to research and pedagogy—and follow this through direct and fair compensation for their work and expertise.
An important starting point is the need to set consistent guidelines for payments and honoraria, and to strengthen procedures to ensure that these are followed through, especially that payments are made smoothly and without delays.
In the last five years members of the Braddock and North Braddock community have played important roles as advisors, teachers, and design and research collaborators for CMU Architecture students and faculty. Spaces in the community, and especially General Sisters over the last year, have become important sites for student learning.
As Dana Bishop-Root underscores: We must properly name and recognize the important contributions of community members to student learning and university research.
Beyond “research”: Achieving tangible results
In our project’s interviews and conversations, residents have continued to stress the urgency of creating neighborhood public spaces, developing shared community resources, or mobilizing towards policy proposals for environmental reparations and justice.
Towards this bigger goal, the collaborative work of this project has produced drawings, plans, presentations, the website, and interactions that “plant seeds,” as Ginger and Edith Abeyta suggested, towards wider conversations and results. They bring community desires into the public sphere. Recounting an incident where a North Braddock Council member used the MUD Studio’s 2023 project report to advocate for ideas already proposed by the community, Edith stressed that physical outputs such as printed reports and zines are important ways to meaningfully “put things out in the world.” Similarly Ginger talked about the making of the kiosk, which plays an important role in helping create General Sisters as a space for safe, collective community engagement for environmental justice. Other improvements in the space, supported by the “Taking Back the Air” project and the SOM Foundation Research Prize will also strengthen that objective.
Working towards tangible results that community members want to see—by planting seeds through drawings and texts that have broad reach and impact, and through realizing material and spatial change, must remain the core objective of community-centered spatial research.
As Edith reminds us, the worsening political climate—an “atmosphere” of fear and constrained resources which continues the racialized legacies of systemic abandonment over the last 100 years—only underscores the importance of continuing to leverage our work towards collective and liberatory change.
