Building Community

“In New York,” said moderator Mariana Mogilevich in her introduction to Tuesday’s event, “implicit in the discourse of community [is] a certain kind of disinvestment and disenfranchisement.” She continued: “When we are talking about an urban community, very often cultural and social solidarity are being summoned to compensate for other material resources.”

How can architecture and design play a part in the process of building communities? That was the question that the assembled panelists attempted to answer through the ten-minute-long Pecha Kucha and the conversation that followed.

The projects presented offered different ways of engaging communities. In some cases, community feedback was incorporated into a more traditional RFP, while in others, architecture’s role was to translate community principles into designs for communal stewardship. During the Q&A, architecture’s purview was discussed in temporal terms as well: while architects should first and foremost listen to what the community’s needs are in the moment, they can also help visualize new ways of building…