Redefining Participation (Part 2): Estefania Barajas in Conversation With Siboney Díaz-Sánchez
Nuestra Comunidad Development Corporation
The following conversation took place over two days and follows Redefining Participation [Part One], which can be found here.
Estefania Barajas (EB): The conversation we are having is about leaving space. What can we do better? And who do we need to collaborate with? After the murder of George Floyd, we as students felt an increased urgency: meetings, groups, conversations, studio—we also began to see a lot of things that felt like performative activism. How do we address this? We think we’re doing something positive when we participate.
Siboney Díaz-Sánchez (SDS): The question is: What is participating? How are we defining it and to what degree? Who are we sharing space with in the participation? Are we forwarding a story? Or advocating to change a policy? Could it be speaking up when studio prompts and those leading them are not in alignment? What does it mean to be held accountable in performative activism? What does it mean to actually do “the work” and not feel the need to publically document for social media likes?
I think it’s ironic that we say we’re practicing architecture because that implies that architecture is an exercise and that we are always evolving and perpetually studying. Working to be anti-racist is practicing—it is continuous. I find it powerful to be in a profession that implies consistent evolution. We, as architects and designers, should be able to understand that we need to be anti-racist in practice. And it’s not as simple as: I donated; I listened to a three-minute podcast; I completed my woke quota for the day.
Going back to participation—I think about the Design as Protest collective (DAP) demands. We’re having discussions within the collective about feeling the need to hold other people accountable and document the accountability. Is it the work of Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian and other QTBIPOC groups to remind people of their responsibilities and to educate individuals? It is exhausting to remind people of morality. It’s not new work. Protests have existed for generations. There is humility in work that is associated with being an anti-racist. You need to pause and say, I am responsible for harm, I messed up, I have to fix it and pay for repair, it is urgent, I apologize, I have to change X so this is not repeated... Ironically, those processes are also in architecture; they are also in community work. I noted in the community meetings we had for Plaza Guadalupe that we never got everything right. There was no meeting we facilitated that I walked away from and considered successful. I always left with a list of urgent improvements and apologies.
EB: [Laughs] That’s right.
SDS: The reflection piece is, I think, the deeper part. We need to consider feedback loops and assess processes. We talk about architecture as a commissioned piece. We produce built work and don’t return to communities. How are we learning from what we build instead of using time to apply for design awards that don’t prioritize justice? When you try to tie community work that’s ever evolving with a very finite scope, it distorts timelines. We have to live in that messiness, in that humanity. A common question throughout my career has been: “So when do we talk to community?” I respond, “Always, and how are we paying them for their time and labor?”
I appreciate some of the questions that I’ve received from coworkers in trying to engage with communities, architecture space, and now in development because they have given me the opportunity to clarify priorities. I’m working for two nonprofit community development corporations (CDCs), where we invest in communities through resident services, community building and affordable housing development—federally and state funded affordable housing. I would argue that affordable housing produced is never affordable enough, especially in the Boston area, and unit production rates are not catching up with affordable housing needs. I work in well-meaning and really problematic systems, as you know, because the affordability relies on highly regulated low income housing tax credits. That’s a whole other conversation. Nuestra Comunidad, one CDC I work for, collaborates with MASS Design and IBI, on a community park called Oasis Bartlett. The future park is a part of a much larger affordable housing development in Roxbury, a neighborhood in Boston. The park is only 15,000 square feet and will have a small gallery within an adjacent affordable housing building. I moved to Boston in October. We had one meeting with the design team in January, and then the pandemic hit. The project construction cost was estimated at $6 million in 2018, and the project was on hold when I arrived. We needed to do value engineering while we continued to apply for funding, and I insisted that we could not value engineer without community voices for a public arts park. I helped put together a community advisory committee, which is made up of about 11 people. I say about 11 because capacities change depending on lives. We’ve been meeting monthly in a virtual space since March of 2020. I’ve facilitated these meetings with people who are volunteering their time to strategize about a park design, who it is for, and what it could generate. Asking people, predominantly Black people, from Roxbury for their time in 2020 to help imagine a safe space is a heavy proposal because there are different priorities at the end of the day.
The lead architects from MASS Design are Jha D Williams and Jonathan Evans; the landscape architect is Steve Woods. We collectively asked ourselves: Does it even make sense to design this park in 2020 if we can’t have in-person community meetings? Should we even try to push forward during multiple simultaneous pandemics? Is it fair, is it ethical to ask for community time when there are other more urgent needs? How can we be design justice advocates if we are asking for community input in this time?
We decided as a group: yes, we should continue with prioritizing community in the creation of a safe public space that is focused on local art and artists. We cannot stop creating public space with QTBIPOC peoples for QTBIPOC peoples. I don’t want to romanticize it because there were meetings where I felt ridiculous—I am not from Roxbury, and while the majority of the design team is Black, I am not. I am here on an Enterprise Rose Fellowship. The character of my role is often presented as temporary. Feedback from group members noted that helping design a park in 2020 sometimes served as a source of healing—just in the process itself, an urgent escape to imagine a public space that could contribute to community health. The committee is made up of artists, residents, Roxbury community members, business owners, and I’ll say artists again, because there are several. It is important to acknowledge that we were never going to have a perfect public process virtually, but in doing it virtually recognized that it wasn’t ever perfect in person either. CAC members are listed here, and they will never know the full gratitude I feel for their time. I hate that we have not paid them; I am still trying to make that happen as we are drafting community agreements for how the park will operate and be programmed.
EB: This brings up a good point. I had a question when you talked about the way we were trained as designers. From my experience, none of this process, none of these conversations, were happening. I’ve never had them. And in 2020, when we did have the conversation and we did want to add these questions to our studio space, professors were more critical, explaining that when involving community, it’s a commitment. You can’t just play around, have the experience, involve people and then leave. So then how do we students within academia engage with community? How are we going to change the system?
SDS: That’s a beautiful question because there are components of community work that are very extractive. You need to be sensitive about people’s capacities and your own scope; what are the limits and who dictates them? By scope, I often mean budgets. You want to be able to allow for dreaming, but you also want to be transparent about the realities of a project and its funding. What are the certainties, and what is the timeline? There has been a lot of insensitivity when it comes to approaching communities for projects. There are moments where I have been asked to leave out truths as if community members cannot manage to grasp basic realities of budgets. I teach a class at the Boston Architectural College called Community Practice. It is required (which is amazing). The vast majority of students I teach are freshmen, and they’re learning about the ways in which you can engage, organize, advocate for community and what that means for authorship, dignity, and the humanity of design as it relates to community voices.
Architecture has historically not considered communities as clients. We are taught more about willfulness and less about listening. I am hopeful about the shifts I see. There is always sensitivity that needs to be applied in any kind of community engagement—even engagement is a terrible word because it is a softer action, superficial, performative, and not long lasting. In many instances, engagement is code for notification. It does not imply sustainable relationship building. You could have just sent out a blast email with all the information if you’re not going to incorporate input. It is insulting to have insincere intentions.
I think we need to be honest. Some communities are tired of being asked questions, especially if feedback loops retraumatize. People don’t want to necessarily share their dreams and hopes when they’re so used to them not being invested in. I witnessed pain while working on the Alameda Theater with Allison Hu and Overland Partners. After a community meeting other architects on the project came to me and were like, “Oh my God, that was a rough meeting. People are angry.” It was annoying to see coworkers realize how decades of disinvestment in built spaces could carry such pain. I worry often about showing gratitude and compensating for energy, because when you ask people to share their perspective or lived experiences, it can unearth traumas in QTBIPOC communities. Being present in those moments is a priority; we need to respect people who make time and are honest in communities that have been excluded on systemic levels. We need to be patient and not claim martyrdom.
More importantly, knowing that processing reactions is a part of “the work.” I think it’s important to note that the designers and architects who were expressing community input exhaustion were all white. There was kind of a confusion—and I’m going to say fragility—there was fragility and a feeling of “I was attacked.” My response was: yes, that rendering was upsetting because you had mostly white people in it. I am not going to deny your feelings, but this work is not about focusing on your feelings. We need to be better. Get it together.
EB: This is a good way for me to reframe that question about values and political views. Your approach is very thoughtful and sensitive. My experience while working in a community design charrette was definitely not the same. The group I was working with at the time (not all, but some) had a very pessimistic attitude, treating the work not as a privilege but a duty. I heard comments like: “We are wasting time because at the end we’re just going to do whatever we want, but this is a requirement…”
SDS: [Laughs]
EB: We spoke about this in our first conversation[1] , but I wanted to ask more about these instances where community voices diverge from your own opinions or ethics. There were comments in a community meeting I attended about needs and wants in public space, and some of the attendees asked, “Can we add spikes on the sidewalks? Something to avoid people sleeping on benches?” I was there to take notes, but I felt conflicted.
SDS: That came up about Plaza Guadalupe. There were people urinating, there were situations that involved drugs, and there was otherness in speaking about people who are experiencing homelessness, and that’s what led to our committee summary responses. What can be done from a design perspective? We can’t ignore pieces related to operations and programming. In reality, the instances being highlighted are associated with investment in health and human services. Obviously, there is no gate that is going to fix how much of a population is experiencing homelessness.
The conversation that we’re having about the park in Roxbury is around the idea of security. What does security look like? What does it mean to create a safe space in a public space? Instead of saying how many cops are going to be there—what are we defining as safe? And what are we defining as secure? How much money are we going to have to program the space?
Going back to how you write those comments, I think it’s important to take the notes because that’s what you’re there for, but then you can facilitate the conversation and say, “This is actually part of a greater issue related to access,” then you open it up for a different conversation, depending on the time that you have with this group. You could say: “Thank you for sharing. You brought up that type of bench—that is a form of hostile architecture in design work.”
These are factual terms. It’s an opportunity to talk about the dehumanization of design. I struggle because sometimes it feels self-righteous, but in fact it’s just about acknowledging humans and saying this sounds like more of a health and human services issue. That is actually the greater problem related to the way in which our city is funding X, Y, and Z. The question is who has the resources to clean the place properly? The city needs to invest in other mechanisms from lighting to benches to shade. You remember all of those pieces. The reason why people are urinating is because you close the bathrooms during the open hours. You close the bathrooms because you don’t have the budget to clean the bathroom X number of times. People pick those bathrooms because there aren’t enough public bathrooms in the neighborhood. When you’re having conversations with community and hear, “We don’t really want those people to live here,” I think backing up and saying, “Well, we’re all on stolen lands, if we really want to talk about who has a relationship with this land,” and then confronting and talking about race and not being scared to say, “What do you mean by ‘those people?’”
EB: I think it takes a lot of character. It’s attempting a conversation after hours and saying, “Let me explain to you things that you don’t want to listen to.”
SDS: I know. You go all in. You can’t shy away, but it is important to check your humility. There are tone issues; it requires emotional labor. Your energy depends on your own emotional capacity as a POC in this space too. Part of anti-racist work is talking about racism and addressing it and asking “difficult” questions. But they’re not difficult questions, and none of what I advocate for is radical. They were in a for-profit architecture firm, and sometimes they are in a nonprofit development world, but I think that’s also why groups like DAP, Design as Protest, are so sacred because the baseline is not: does this exist? The attitude is: what are we going to do about it? How are we working towards liberation? At what rate? With whom? When people say “let’s talk about equity,” I say “let’s talk about justice—let’s talk about justice, then let’s talk about liberation.”
These are not revolutionary thoughts. Depending on whatever room you’re in, you’re going to be at a different place in the spectrum of what is defined as radical. I would say that in my Brownness, it is my responsibility and my white passing privilege to not shy away from addressing racist comments, because I have a different layer of safety for my health and my well being than others might have in a particular situation. So how dare I not confront or speak up. We need to work together. I am not well if we are not well.
SDS: We can’t just keep building affordable housing within the financing structure that we currently have. We need to change the ways in which affordable housing is funded. Often even within community groups, the idea of an agenda can be tricky as you don’t know what people’s energies are going to be. If you only stick to the agenda, you might not be as sensitive to the ways in which people’s feelings are evolving in the meeting. One could argue that an agenda, depending on how it’s written, is a community agreement.
As a developer, we buy a piece of property way before conceptual design. It’s just a bizarre space, but it’s also important because it’s about honoring the community, whether it’s a master plan or an initiative or a study related to environmental issues or transportation adjacencies or all of these pieces. How are we thinking about the value of buying property to develop affordable housing as it relates to what the community wants and where it needs it?
Sometimes a meeting is transactional. I give you this, you give me this, I’ll follow up about this… We’ll proceed with the transactions until the contract ends. Community engagement is a consistent relationship. I’m even critical of the fellowship that I’m in to be perfectly honest, because I moved to Boston to do this work, and I am not from these communities. I move within them very humbly and very differently in the sense that I didn’t attend middle school in Roxbury; I didn’t go to middle school in Chelsea.
EB: Community members have a personal investment. They’re involved one way or another in wanting to protect and improve their neighborhoods. That’s what being part of a community is all about. So the strangeness seems to come when architects, developers, and stakeholders from outside the community enter into these conversations with money from elsewhere paying them or using these community members and designers to advance their own work or standing in their field. Is there any way to avoid this dynamic, or is it just a matter of approach, ethos, and how you navigate the situation earnestly?
SDS: I ask that question daily. I think making it a singular is even wrong because there are so many communities within the community. How are you defining community? Is it the artist community? Is it a physical community? Is there a line drawn around it? Is it a political community? What does that mean? And so even in bringing these people together, I was nervous about how naive I was about their dynamic and their histories together. Being open to those moments is important. I apologize. I own those moments. There is a history of females apologizing more often than they need to, but it also comes with gratitude. So, I will say, “I am so sorry, I didn’t know. Thank you for calling me out.” I’m constantly expressing gratitude for energy and time to educate me. I will also do the research. Asking questions about something you can Google is disrespectful. Getting everything from the internet can also be problematic, but you don’t want to come to a conversation with little to no knowledge.
I often say, “I appreciate it if you have time, if you have the capacity.” Every time a community member is sharing a thought or feeling or a piece of history, it’s a gift. There’s a tone piece that I think is also a problem. I was taught architecture within school where you are always defending your ideas.
For example, my purpose in creating this specific committee (Roxbury) is to inform the value engineering for the design of a park, but that might mean that maybe out of an hour and a half meeting, twenty minutes of that meeting is about the members talking about their own initiatives and sharing information about what they’re working on so that they can attend each other’s events or support each other’s initiatives. They’re coming to this meeting to get to know and support each other outside of the park. The best community meetings are where I speak the least.
EB: How can we introduce community practice classes? How do we make this part of our education?
It’s a bit irrational that we’re not having these conversations or that it is not common practice. Everything you shared points to a process that is imperfect but very human. In that case, how do we duplicate this process?
SDS: You can’t just copy and paste, and I think that’s why it seems so complex. You don’t know how much time it’s going to take. You don’t know what the community is already addressing. You don’t know what else is being asked of a community. I have a complicated identity right now because I’m a licensed architect who is working as a developer, but within that work it’s not just asking people to come to you—it’s also going to communities. I think that one of the things that we did most incorrectly within Plaza Guadalupe is that we didn’t go to enough other events. We went to Tafoya Middle School for a lunch. It was good. It was important but, again, imperfect. We didn’t go to hang out with any elders, and we didn’t speak to an accessibility consultant to talk about access. We didn’t have a larger conversation about security or safety. We kept asking people to come to us. It would have been beneficial to go to a community patrolling meeting, not to lead, not to speak, but just to listen. That is a bigger issue—I think architects are very quick to prescribe.
Anti-racism work and environmental sustainability work don’t need to be separate. They should be integrated. Community practice should be a part of every studio, no matter what. It can begin as an elective, but ideally it would then become a part of a studio program. Before you start designing you have to speak to X number of people, or you have to read X number of master plans, or you have to go to X number of community meetings beforehand. Right. That is a part of community practice.
EB: You can either focus on community work or you can focus on construction documents, or you can focus on design. You can’t have the perfect architect. I wonder then if this is something that every designer has to think of. Should this be a separate service? Consultant but required? Something we should incorporate within the profession and that should be part of the fee/scope? Can community work be a specialization? Does it not have to be?
SDS: That’s a strong question because architects are generalists. If you think about the extent of knowledge that we need to reference on a regular basis or at least have access to, it is a wild profession in that way. I have always been more of a generalist in a generalist profession, but I am never the strongest detailer. I think there are different roles. What my advocacy gets at is the fact that all architects should see the value of this work. If you are primarily a CA person in an office, you should understand that part of the work that you are able to realize is still in relationship to community.
I am thankful for Jose, Marilyn, Monica, Sharon, Nathaly, and Raquel at OppCo who remind me to ask these questions. Their wisdom motivates me.
-Siboney Díaz Sánchez
Siboney Díaz Sánchez is community advocate, and former zoning commissioner. She is a NOMA Empowerment Committee Co-Chair, Enterprise Rose Fellow at Opportunities Communities in Boston, and a lecturer at the Boston Architectural College. Siboney is a licensed architect in the state of Texas.
Estefania Barajas is a first-generation Mexican-American architectural designer and a master’s of architecture candidate at Rice University. Barajas graduated in 2018 from the University of Texas at San Antonio with a bachelor's of science in architecture. Barajas served as an active member and director of Freedom by Design, helping with the planning and construction of pollinators and community gardens in San Antonio.
She has worked at AbleCity (formerly Frank Architects Inc) and Lake|Flato architects under the eco-conservation studio and research and development program. While at AbleCity, she had the opportunity to work on an award-winning comprehensive plan (Plan Viva Laredo), community-driven projects (such as John Valls Skate Park) and urban agriculture ordinance. During her time at Lake|Flato, and as a committee member of AIA San Antonio Latinos in Architecture, she helped facilitate community meetings for the revitalization of San Antonio’s Historic Plaza Guadalupe.
She is a recipient of the ACSA COTE Top Ten for students award and SARAs National Design Award. Most recently, she was awarded the 2021 RDA Houston Design Research Grant for her project titled Tables in Deserts and Swamps: How Food Education Can Help Solve the Root of Food Security.
In 2020, Barajas was an editor and contributor for PLAT 8.5 tl;dr. She currently serves as a member of Rice Architecture’s Anti-Racism Collective (ARC).