Annotated Table of Contents Empathic Design Perspectives on Creating Inclusive Public Spaces Edited by Elgin Cleckley, NOMA
Summary In Empathic Design: Perspectives on Creating Inclusive Spaces (Publication Date: January 16, 2024), award–winning designer and architecture professor Elgin Cleckley brings together ten leaders and visionary practitioners in architecture, urban design, spatial justice, planning, and design activism. The chapter's authors show how to take an empathy-based design approach and ways to translate the generational lived experiences of marginalized communities into built form. As part of an emerging design framework, empathic designers work with and in communities affected by violence, racism, displacement, spatial justice, and sexism. Empathic design acknowledges the complete history of a place, even when that history is painful, and addresses the lived experiences and memories of community members with respect. Through empathic design, people can better connect with the ongoing history of a place and develop deeper relationships with nature and the land. Empathic Design provides essential approaches and methods for designing inclusive public spaces with respect for communities' history and lived experiences. This work ensures that all people, especially those marginalized and harmed by systemic oppression, are represented in their built environment.
Elgin Cleckley, NOMA, is an Assistant Professor of Architecture and Design at the University of Virginia and the Undergraduate Program Director at the School of Architecture. He has appointments at the School of Education and Human Development and the School of Nursing. He has been the Director of Design Justice at UVa's Equity Center (Democracy Initiative Center for the Redress of Inequity Through Community-Engaged Scholarship). He has led the school's NOMA Project Pipeline: Architecture Mentorship Program. He is the principal of _mpathic design, a multi-award-winning pedagogy, initiative, and global professional practice. Introduction The introduction begins by describing an empathic design the author was part of – co–creating with a team of academic, community, and professionals in Charlottesville, Virginia. The author's take on empathy in design, developed over almost three decades, is defined through research emerging into practice, setting the stage for how empathic designers’ work. The contributors' multiple perspectives on this topic are described as a way to meet the needs of our time and hold space for readers to find themselves. Chapter 1: From Empathy to Ethics Christine Gaspar Gaspar raises critical questions on empathy in design practice, accepting its purpose and recognizing its limitations. Gaspar shares how she brings accountability and compassion in her sixteen years of empathic practice, demonstrated through two case studies. First through approaches and methods as the Executive Director of the Center for Urban Pedagogy (NYC), and second, through collaborations with the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Gaspar closes this chapter by detailing elements of accountability and compassion practices that set ethical guidelines for community engagement. Chapter 2: Making Space for Grief Liz Ogbu, Studio O, Oakland, California Internationally recognized spatial justice designer Liz Ogbu details her community engagement processes in the first project on a former power plant site in the Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood of San Francisco, with her innovations for architectures that respect local communities and understand unprocessed grief caused by decades of spatial injustice. Ogbu shares that this project shifted her empathic design processes to make space for grief in her design projects, further detailed in the second project in the chapter, empathically designing potential future uses for the Innerbelt in Akron, Ohio. The Innerbelt, an eight-mile highway running along Akron's downtown, is a familiar story – destroying the fabric of a Black neighborhood, decimating its economic base and social connection. Ogbu shares how her grief
work is helping reconstruct the visual memory of what existed before the Innerbelt, closing with how you can incorporate grief work in your design process. Chapter 3: Unseen Dimensions of Public Space: Disrupting Colonial Narratives Erin Genia Dakota creative practitioner Erin Genia explains how public space is aligned with outmoded values of institutions steeped in cultural supremacy. Western domination over indigenous peoples is evident in centuries of dramatically altered landscapes, ecosystems, cities, roads, buildings, place names, and other infrastructure. Genia describes the arenas she's created to showcase innovators whose work is developing spaces to probe hidden histories in public space, defining what pieces of human and natural history have been glorified or erased. Genia closes her chapter with a site–specific project commissioned by the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, rethinking public space dealing with the legacies of colonization and current realities of injustice. Chapter 4:Renewing Spatial Agency for a Community: The Freedom Center, Oklahoma City Cory Henry Architect Cory Henry views his work as an aesthetic, social, and cultural construct derived from and understanding the contextual conditions in which it is situated. Henry demonstrates this in his chapter's case study, the Freedom Center in Oklahoma City. He shares how his design practice led to the renovation design for a community-rooted nonprofit, the Clara Luper Civil Rights Center. Henry shares with readers the life and legacy of Clara Luper, understood as the mother of Oklahoma City's Civil Rights Movement. Luper’s memory and community responsibilities laid a foundation for his process and practice – with Henry meticulously detailing his design for the Freedom Center through three parts: the figure (Clara Luper), the frame (preservation of the building), and the field (engagements with the site). Chapter 5: The Harriet Tubman Memorial, Newark Nina Cooke John, Studio Nina Cooke John In the late fall of 2020, the City of Newark announced an artist call for a new monument to Harriet Tubman to be erected at the site previously occupied by a statue of Christopher Columbus. John details her journey to designing the new memorial in Harriet Tubman Square, exploring individuals' multiplicity and complex engagements with urban life and public space. John shares how she approached Tubman's legacy as a complex individual with layered experiences, understanding our current-day questions of "what stories belong in public" and "how do we democratize historical narratives?" John takes us through the early development of the monument design, titled Shadow of a Face, expressing how she elevated Tubman while allowing people to connect with her life and legacy generated in extensive public workshops.
Chapter 6: Materializing Memory: The Camp Barker Memorial in Washington, DC Katie MacDonald and Kyle Schumann The Camp Barker Memorial, designed by MacDonald and Schumann of After Architecture, shows how nontraditional architecture practice through the commissioning of a public artwork can become a vehicle for engaging emotion and memory in the design process. Located on the historical site of a Civil War–era "contraband camp," the memorial is an empathic approach to surfacing and constructing memory in public space. This chapter begins with how historical markers register the legacy of the Civil War in public space and how Confederate memorials create memories they mythologize, whereas memorials remember. MacDonald and Schumann let us imagine the invisible at the DC site of an once freedman and contraband camps - evolving in a design for the memorial aligning with rising regional, national, and international discourses on the role of Civil War markers in the built environment. Chapter 7: Practicing _mpathic design: The Charlottesville Memorial for Peace and Justice Elgin Cleckley Book editor and designer Elgin Cleckley presents an essential question at the start of this chapter - "How can I have more empathy in my design work?" In response, Cleckley shares an approach and example from almost three years of research and practice in academic, community, and professional design contexts in _mpathic design – the title of his pedagogy, initiative, and design practice. We experience the result of Cleckley's experience in creating the design for the Charlottesville Memorial for Peace and Justice, marking the lynching of John Henry James in 1898, an ice cream salesman falsely accused of assaulting a white woman, Julia Hotopp. One leaves this chapter with an answer to this important question and a foundation to develop one's approach in collaborative spaces. Chapter 8: Incorporating Empathy: To Middle Species, With Love, Columbus, Indiana Joyce Hwang Hwang shares her two decades of experience designing and building structures intended for habitation by non-human species. Hwang's "animal architecture" or "habitecture" amplifies transspecies habitats, grappling with the built environment's crucial role in combating biodiversity loss. In this chapter, we learn how Hwang's empathic process starts with her attempt to imagine the world through the lens of non-human project inhabitants. To illustrate her approach, Hwang extensively details To Middle Species, With Love, an installation in the 2020 -2021 Exhibit Columbus, which lets us experience first-hand amplification of urban habitat conditions and draw awareness to the presence of urban wildlife.
Chapter 9: Teaching Empathic Community Engagement Using Storytelling
C.L. Bohannon Landscape architect and educator C.L. Bohannon prepares students to be fearless in pursuing social and spatial justice by understanding and actualizing the power of empathy, narrative, and community engagement. Bohannon begins by defining community engagement through applicable research models to help students develop a deeper understanding of their role in society and how to address societal needs. He explains how empathy is an essential skill to create responsive design solutions through storytelling, bridging the gaps between people from different backgrounds. Through a Case Study in the Hill, a predominantly Black community in Apalachicola, Florida, Bohannon shares an approach in a three-year initiative to recover and celebrate local Black history, improve community well–being, and mitigate displacement. The case study is a product of student-led institutional changes in the University of Virginia's Master of Landscape Architecture program design studio, redesigned to incorporate community– engaged design pedagogy. Afterward: Planning with Purpose: Repairing Past Harm with Empathy Mitchell J. Silver Silver, a principal with McAdams, a land planning and design company, once served as commissioner for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, closes the book. Silver, a former president of the American Planning Association and American Institute of Certified Planners, shares his empathic practice that planning is about place - and, more importantly – people. According to Silver, to be a great planner is to listen with empathy aligned with professional ethics set with economic, social, and racial equity. Silver puts his process into practice with Juneteenth Grove in Cadman Plaza Park in Brooklyn – the location of protests following the murder of George Floyd. As the afterword closes, you understand that this last case study provides a model for a full integration process of social and organizational inclusive design goals for belonging to operate at a speed required to respond to the realities of our time.
Suggested Complimentary and Cited Reading Rest is Resistance, Tricia Hersey Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture, Nishat Awan, Tatjiana Schneider, and Jeremy Till A New Look at Humanism: In Architecture, Landscapes, and Urban Design, Robert Lamb Hart Empathy: A History, Susan Lanzoni
The Art of Empathy, Karla McLaren Design Justice: Community – Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need, Sasha Costanza – Chock Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir, Rebecca Solnit Seeking Spatial Justice, Edward W. Soja Real Change: Mindfulness to Heal Ourselves and the World, Sharon Salzberg Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, bell hooks Unsettling the Commons: Social Movements Within, Against, and Beyond Settler Colonialism, Craig Fortier Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital, Chris Myers Asch, and George Derek Musgrove. Making the Invisible Visible: A Multicultural Planning History, Leonie Sandercock, ed.