Of Value and Values: Highlights from the 2006 Association for Community Design Annual Conference

ACD convened in Los Angeles from June 5-7 for its annual conference, Telling Stories, held in conjunction with the ACSA's Affordable Housing Design Forum.  Major sponsors of the events include Citibank, Woodbury University, Enterprise Community Partners Los Angeles, and the Fannie Mae Foundation.

Back in early June, Los Angeles seemed to be the epicenter for a flurry of summer conferences and symposia on local and national design issues. The American Institute of Architects (AIA) alone, attracted tens of thousands of participants for their annual gathering at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Shortly before the AIA's convention, a smaller group of designers and planners from around the country, and including some international participants, convened just a few miles away in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles, to explore and further articulate what has come to be known as the "community design movement." The conference, which was entitled, Telling Stories: Reflections on Community Design, encouraged community design practitioners to share and reflect upon their experiences in community-based participatory practice, in order to collectively understand the legacy of work done under the mantra of "community design" over the past three decades.

What is community design? The organizers of the conference believe that community design encompasses a diversity of people -- including planners, designers, funders, academics and community advocates -- and a diversity of practices -- including non-profit organizations that provide low-cost or pro bono professional design services on behalf of communities, academically-based community design centers that integrate student service-learning opportunities, and individual planning and design professionals who integrate principles of community design into their work. Furthermore, community design places an emphasis on meeting community needs through participatory decision-making at all levels.

The ACD conference was held in conjunction with the Association for Collegiate Schools of Architecture's (ACSA) Fannie Mae-sponsored affordable housing design forum, which took place from June 7-8. The following summarizes the major events of the ACD conference:

Day 1: Conference participants convened on the steps fronting the Japanese American National Museum, where they were given three tour options: A tour of transit-oriented affordable housing developments in Hollywood, joined by representatives from the Hollywood Community Housing Corporation and M2A Architects; a walking tour of affordable housing developments, community projects, public art and public spaces in downtown Los Angeles, led in part by representatives from the Little Tokyo Service Center CDC and the Skid Row Housing Trust; or a van tour of murals, affordable housing developments, community design projects and community spaces in South Los Angeles and East Los Angeles, led by James Rojas of the Latino Urban Forum, which included the South Central Farm shortly before its unfortunate demise. Afterward, many of the conference participants jokingly fretted over not having had the opportunity to tour all three neighborhoods. However, all was forgiven when the group reconvened at Woodbury University's Center for Community and Design Research, in Hollywood, for an evening of reunions, networking and exchanging accounts of what they had seen on their respective tours.

Day 2: ACD officially kicked off its conference at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy with welcoming remarks, and a poignant keynote address from NewsHour Senior Correspondent and author Ray Suarez. Suarez, who had been recovering from a near-fatal bicycle accident, could not remain for the duration of the conference. However, with the themes that he had raised in his address -- from understanding the complexities of narratives and counter-narratives in community revitalization, and understanding the difference between value and values -- resonating throughout the rest of the conference, his presence was certainly felt. In his address, Suarez gave a vivid account of the transformations of places that he had witnessed throughout his career as a journalist, including the seemingly irreversible state of post-hurricane Katrina New Orleans, even against the backdrop of present rebuilding efforts.

Suarez asserted through his presence that journalists are community designers in their own right, and while he praised and acknowledged the work of community design practitioners, he also made the point that successful community building requires collaboration that extends beyond the usual suspects, such as planners, architects and developers, and others who focus solely on the built environment.

The keynote address was followed by a marathon of panel presentations and discussions that focused on telling the story of the community design movement through the projects, lessons-learned and reflections of community design practitioners. The first panel, Context and Relevance, explored the community design movement and its relevance, using examples from locally-based projects and initiatives in Los Angeles. In particular, Context and Relevance explored the difficulty and complexity, but perhaps, necessity of consciously driving community design efforts in planning and design, and tying those primarily local efforts into a larger movement.

The next panel, Diversity in Practice, not only highlighted the diversity of community design practice -- from emergency home repair to addressing homelessness -- but also the similarities that unite it, including an emphasis on end-user participation, consensus-building and good design. Finally, the panel sessions closed with Disaster in Design, which gave an honest and unpretentious "from the trenches" perspective on the role of community design in Gulf Coast rebuilding efforts in New Orleans and Biloxi, MS.

After a full day of panel sessions, the conference participants walked over to the nearby campus of the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) for Fuzzy Activism: Social Practice in Los Angeles, a discussion among a panel of distinguished Los Angeles designers, organized by Cityworks Los Angeles, on the "fuzzy" line between socially-conscious design practice and good design practice in general. Many in the audience seemed to agree that the discussion, which at times, provided uncomfortable perspectives on design practice that straddle somewhere between reality and pessimism, was a necessary contrast to the earlier panel discussions, which focused on the victories and accomplishments of community design. In many ways, the discussion indirectly posed a healthy challenge to community design practitioners to be more self-critical of community design practice in the interest of moving it forward.

After Fuzzy Activism, the "traveling conference" made its way to the Mountain Bar in Chinatown for an evening of documentary screenings on community design. Katie Swenson, of the Charlottesville Community Design Center, screened footage of her organization's efforts to transform a trailer park in Charlottesville, VA into a livable and affordable community, followed by Sheri Blake, of the University of Manitoba, who showed the final cut of her documentary on the work of the Detroit Collaborative Design Center. With one more documentary to go, the crowd went strong, knitting away with their chopsticks at the incessant piles of fried rice packed into their styrofoam take-out boxes. Chuck Turner, a longtime community designer from San Francisco, screened We Have To Be Able To Do It Ourselves (1971), an activist-charged film produced for the AIA in support of the establishment of community design centers. The film, which is probably one of the earliest documents of the community design movement, features a young Chuck Turner, a young Allan Jacobs as a planner for the City of San Francisco, and other contemporary planning and design pioneers from across the country calling for the need to institutionalize the practice of community design -- all against the grim backdrop of urban renewal. Seeing the face of the community design movement at its freshest seemed to remind everyone in the room of its profound origins, and, as the title suggests, confirmed that an emphasis on participatory practice is one of the defining characteristics of the community design movement.

Day 3: marked the final day of the ACD Conference and kicked off the ACSA affordable housing design forum. Both conferences convened in the morning at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy for a joint keynote address by longtime community designer Michael Pyatok. Pyatok was also joined by a panel of guests, including Katie Schwennsen, president of the AIA, who managed to momentarily slip away from pre-AIA convention activities. Pyatok showcased his work at the new Stardust Center for Affordable Housing and Family, based at Arizona State University, of which he is the recently appointed executive director. During the question and answer period, Pyatok described the relative ease at which he has been able to achieve his recent accomplishments in affordable housing, by working with non-traditional partners, such as the wealthy business community in Phoenix. He also noted the irony of his recent accomplishments in comparison to some of the uphill battles and challenges that he has faced in his 30+ years as a designer, builder and advocate for affordable housing. While he was not suggesting a particular approach to affordable housing, the audience seemed to embrace his point about bringing non-traditional partners to the table as one of many strategies for implementing affordable housing.

For the mid-day sessions, the ACSA kicked-off its affordable housing design forum across the plaza at the Japanese American National Museum. The ACSA presentations focused on the role of designers and the academy in promoting, understanding and articulating affordable housing design, but also emphasized the importance of interdisciplinary approaches by balancing the panels out with non-designer respondents, including representatives from HUD and the EPA, affordable housing finance professionals and planners. The forum also included small group discussions, as well as poster presentations on best practices on affordable housing design.

Meanwhile, across the plaza at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy, the ACD conference continued, first with Community Design Centers, which featured panelists who represented various community design centers from across the country, including long-time Seattle-based EnvironmentalWorks and the Community Design Center of Pittsburgh, and two relatively new design centers, Community Design Solutions at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the Office of Community Design and Development at Louisiana State University. The next panel, Art in Space, explored the stories of ambitious and unique community design projects with a focus on public space and urban design. Finally, Expanding the Role of the Architect focused on the role of architects in community design practice, and the implications of consciously striving to exert meaningful social change through architecture, including expanding traditional roles, and in some cases, not designing at all.

The ACD Conference and first day of the ACSA forum on affordable housing design came to a close with a light social event at the Japanese American National Museum, which included an encore screening of We Have To Be Able To Do It Ourselves. The ACSA forum continued on to the next day to wrap up the discussions on affordable housing design and to begin mapping out next steps for developing a research agenda for affordable housing design that could be useful to academics and practitioners, alike.

Connie Chung is a planner with the Los Angeles County Department of Regional Planning. She is currently serving as Board President of the Association for Community Design.

The Association for Community Design is a network of community designers that has been dedicated to advancing the practice of community design for over three decades. Additional details on the conference, including post-conference proceedings, are available on the ACD website. The next Association for Community Design conference, which will be hosted by Louisiana State University, is scheduled to take place in June 2007 in Baton Rouge, LA.