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 community, trust, and democratic power in the future. Perhaps the most radical comment of the evening was made by Nandini Bagchee, who said that “community engagement has to be led by the community and then you have to figure out if there’s a part for the designer. Sometimes there’s not, and you have to step back.”