Can Urban Planning and Design Find A Solution To Police Violence?

http://www.citylab.com/design/2015/05/what-urban-design-can-actually-do-to-address-police-violence/393845/?utm_source=nl_daily_link3_052215

Police violence protestor
AP Photo/Patrick Semansky
citylab.com

Hello Everyone:

These days, it seems that civic leaders, police officials, and community activists all seem have an idea of what to do about the epidemic of police violence.  The most popular suggestion is putting body cameras on every police officer and sheriff's deputy.  Other much bandied about suggestions include cultural sensitivity training and more community policing.  All good ideas but what about using urban design to address police violence?  This is the very subject that Brentin Mock looks at in his article for CityLab, titled "What Urban Design Can Actually Do to Address Police Violence."  It is an interesting thought, using urban design to combat police violence but one born out of necessity.

Hidden Village Apartments
Lakewood, Ohio
lakewoodcitizen.com

Brentin Mock begins, "Last year, the city of Lakewood, Ohio, just outside of Cleveland, paid $507,500 to settle a lawsuit filed by the owners of an apartment complex that hosted a church-operated re-entry program for formerly incarcerated youth."  The residents of the apartment, young African-Americans, complained that local police routinely harassed them.  Some of the harassment was captured on video by the owners of the complex.  Mr. Mock quotes some of the police's behavior listed in the complaint:

In one incident, two participants "were given tickets for jaywalking and astronomical fines for it."  In another, police stopped a participant for failure to attach a license plate to his bicycle.  In yet another, police falsely accused a program official of helping clients deal drugs...In May 2007, a team of Lakewood officials-police, an officer in SWAT attire, a canine unit, fire department workers, health department workers-visited Hidden Village, unannounced and without a search warrant, for the purpose of conducting what the defendants term a "joint inspection..."

Lakewood, Ohio mid-2012
edgeofspace.net

Not exactly helping formerly incarcerated youth rehabilitate themselves.  Lakewood is 87 percent Caucasian and African-Americans comprise just over seven percent of the population. Coincidently, the Hidden Village apartments are located less than two miles from the Cudden Recreation Center in Cleveland, where Tamir Rice was killed by police this past November.  Lakewood is predominantly a middle-class suburb famous for its quaint houses.  Brentin Mock writes, "Homeowners compete for best design during the city's annual 'Keep Lakewood Beautiful' contest.  Black youth looking to improve their lives after juvenile detention didn't seem to fit into the city's overall aesthetic ambitions."

Baltimore-area row houses
theatlantic.com

This issue is not sui generis to the Cleveland-area, similar policing issues have culminated in riots in African-American communities across Ferguson and Baltimore as well as other cities. This disturbing situation has prompted professionals across the spectrum to consider their role in the "#blacklivesmatter era."  One group that has been asserting themselves into discussions on racial-justice and police reform is urban planners and designers.  Mr. Mock writes, "From their perspective, design has ramifications for policing in vulnerable communities-along with histories of poor planning decisions, racial segregation, environmental injustices, and other disaffecting factors."

Contemporary designers and planners are culling from long neglected scholarship on these legacy problems in order to arrive at a solution, within their field, that can affect policing problems in a positive manner.  New School Urban Studies Professor Joseph Heathcott (http://www.newschool.edu/facultyexperts/faculty.aspx?id=23742) and president of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History (http://www.sacrph.org) recently wrote in The Aggregate:

As we imagine ways to move the #BlackLivesMatter campaign into the realm of policy, and to challenge the legacies of racism, discrimination, and concentrated poverty in cities, it is crucial that we take stock of what we know about the long history of racism in city planning.  It is equally important that we study the multiform efforts of diverse peoples over time to build resilient communities, demand justice, and define alternatives.

The question is how do planners and designers accomplish this task in ways that that are genuinely felt by the public?

Anonymous protesting Baltimore police violence
citypaper.com

When Mr. Mock posed this question to practitioners in the field, the responses he received "...reflected ideas that were fleshed out in the legal scholar Neal Kumar Kaytal's 'Architecture as Crime Control' study.  That is, if you optimize an area's innate surveillance qualities-encourage residents, neighbors, and bystanders to be rigorous watchdogs-plus reduce social isolation and beautify otherwise dull environments, then justice will come within reach." (http://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/architecture-as-crime-control)

These remedies sound all well and fine, but they put the burden of behavioral change on individual communities.  However, these prescriptions do not take into account the fact that many of the bold faced police killings have occurred among young African-Americans accused of petty offenses-real or imagined.

Baltimore police push back demonstrators
citylab.com

Another remedy offered was social-justice minded architects and designers refuse to accept prison commissions ("The Ethics of Prison Design" 3/2/15; historicpca.blogspot.com), given that the majority of incarcerated individuals are people of color.   Brentin Mock quotes Dana McKinney, president of the Harvard Graduate School of Design African American Student Union, "some of her colleagues have also proposed rejecting jobs designing luxury condominium buildings that only serve the wealthy."  This is a potentially limiting proposal because the contracts would simply awarded to less socially conscious architects, developers, and contractors.  Brentin Mock places these issues in what law professor Elise C. Boddie refers to as racial territoriality, more recently labeled as architectural exclusion by professor Sarah Schindler in the Yale Law Journal (http://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/architectural-exclusion). Brentin Mock writes, "Both have written that current legal remedies are mostly inadequate to address these injustices because laws rarely recognize the radicalized discrimination embedded in certain urban spaces and design processes."

Eric Garner memorial
bet.com

These components are acknowledged by most urban designers and practitioners in discipline that combines urban planning, architecture, and engineering.  Yet, the overarching question is "How exactly can they use design to help mitigate Ferguson- and Lakewood-type situations?"

The Lakewood case is our example.  One way to approach the issue of police harassing children walking on the railroad tracks near the Hidden Village complex is simply a matter of someone designing the tracks too close to the apartments.  Another approach is the opposite, the apartments are too close to the tracks.  Regardless, the solution is obvious, at least to Mr. Mock, the tracks could be removed or rerouted.  Less obvious, is whether or not African-American young people would still be able to live without fear of harassment from the police?

Protestors in Baltimore
baltimoremagazine.net

Designers can't really make people's environments safer, according to Sharon E. Sutton, Architecture, Urban Planning and Design professor at the University of Washington and author of the book The Paradox of Urban Space and Transformation in Marginalized Communities.  Prof. Sutton's statement is clarified by the fact that designers cannot make people's environments safer without their help.  She continues,

You don't do for people...you get them involved in doing things for themselves.  I think that's where we can make a contribution.  We have to think of ourselves as facilitators of people living in the built environment.

As chair of design review boards in Seattle, Prof. Sutton has used her position to educate community members on how they can be agents of change using the design process.  Prof Sutton says,

I spend a lot of time with people, many of who do't speak English, asking them questions like, "When you exit the hotel where you work after your nigh shift, how do you get to your bus?"  "Do you have spaces where you can rest during work breaks?..."  We have these discussions so they can go to a design review board meeting and testify to these things because the architect is not thinking about that.

Image from an anti-police brutality protest
San Francisco, California
abc7news.com

Despite all of Prof. Sutton's community engagement efforts, she reports only some of what residents testify to will make it into designers' plans.  The city-design review guidelines dictate what community stakeholders can speak about at public meetings.  Mr. Mocks writes that Prof. Sutton's role is to help community members structure their testimony within those guidelines. However, Mr. Mock speculates, "And if residents identify a design need that doesn't fall within those guidelines?"

Prof. Sutton respondes, You can't do that...Many times when I was chair I would say 'That's a very interesting comment and thank you for that, but the board doesn't have prerogative in deciding what your asking for.'  You're stuck with those guidelines.

This gets at one of the fundamental problems encountered by city designers and planners, according to Julian Agyeman, professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University. Prof. Agyeman, the co-author of a forthcoming book Sharing Cities: A Case for Truly Smart and Sustainable Cities continue, If the profession is non-representative of the communities they are designing in, then you will get codes and guidelines that do not serve the best interests of that community.

Face of fatal police encounters
nytimes.com

Prof. Agyeman agrees that one of the best ways that city-making professionals (his catch-all term for designers and planners) can affect change for the better is acting as "community engagement agents."  He cautions about environmental determinism, the concept that we can design our way out of violence.

Nevertheless, police understand city spaces well enough to, in some cases, take advantage of urban design (or lack of) to impose violence.  For examples, some of the police officers in Philadelphia and Baltimore know which bumpy streets to take people they have arrested on "rough rides" or "nickel rides"- a practices allegedly used in the injuries and death of Freddie Gray.  In Chicago, police know which buildings are the most hidden from public view and can be used as "black sites"-unofficial holding cells for violent interrogations.  Mr. Mock asks, "These would seem to be clear examples of what designers can do to reduces these kinds of abusive police practices, no?"

Demonstrator sitting in front of police
newrepublic.com

 Prof. Agyeman responds, I don't think we can see the police as a separate entity outside of society and say there is some appropriate form of design that con modify their behavior...I think what we can do is see to it that police are fully integrate back into society through policies like having cops walk and bike through neighborhoods and proactively getting to know the neighbors they protect and serve.

Columbia architecture professor and senior urban designer for the New York City Department of City Planning Justin Garrett Moore had this to say, What you'll find underlying these discussions are notions of power...The perception of whether people belong in a space or not is one very much embedded in urban design, planning, and architecture.  It is not a matter of coincidence or of whether you have good cops or bad cops.  It is design that has conditioned these interactions.

Justin Garrett Moore comes from a family of African-American designers, planners, and real-estate professionals with whom he works with through the Urban Patch project in Indianapolis, Indiana (http://www.urbanpatch.org).  "Urban Patch is a local family-owned business social enterprise...committed to and believe in Indianapolis' and inner cities everywhere's success and long-term sustainability.  We promote interdisciplinary collaboration and commitment to community." (Ibid)  Mr. Moore says, ...city designers deal with problems like policing all the time in their work, but communities can't always tell because there's no grand installation in the public square they can point to as illustrative evidence.

It's difficult to get people to pay attention to that, Mr. Moore says resignedly.  He continues, but it is that kind of everyday-life experience that we're most concerned about.  We're not just focused on figuring out things like how to build a police athletic league after-school program for better interaction with the community,  It's your entire experience as a human being that our work is trying to deal with.