Building Community

INDEPENDENT RESEARCHER & DESIGNER | SENIOR THESIS | THE NEW SCHOOL | FALL 2020- SPRING 2021

I came back to Williamsburg, Brooklyn after lockdown wanting to feel connected to the place, and instead started noticing how little say any of us had in it. Williamsburg residents already have a formal channel for shaping what gets built around them, and the community board meets in public every month. Almost nobody goes. This thesis is about why, and what design could do about it.

Approach

SEQUENCED ACROSS TWO SEMESTERS

Fall was reading and interviews. Spring was the survey and the boards.

Desk research, to understand the ground

Williamsburg's history, NYC rezoning and gentrification patterns, and models of participatory governance including participatory budgeting and participatory action research. This gave me the vocabulary and showed me what had already been tried elsewhere.

Interviews, to test the reading against practice

Ten conversations across the year. Five with people working inside these systems, at the Danish Design Center, Grand Street BID, Design Trust for Public Space, ANHD, and in academia. The rest with Williamsburg residents and organizers about their own experience of taking part, or of wanting to and not knowing where to start. The reading told me what the models promise. These conversations told me how they behave in practice.

Survey, to see how far the pattern ran

A questionnaire on how people engage with the place they live, and what stops them. Twenty-nine responses, mostly from Brooklyn and Williamsburg, skewing between 18 and 35.

Observation, to see the process run

Seven sessions across three community boards: Williamsburg-Greenpoint in November, February, and March, its outreach committee twice, and boards in Bushwick and Chinatown-Lower East Side for comparison. This phase changed the project, and it needed to come after the other two. Going in first would have meant watching without knowing what I was looking at.

What I found

THE FIRST MEETING TOLD ME MOST OF IT

At the Williamsburg-Greenpoint board meeting in November 2020, I was the only community member there to observe, and the full board was not present either. Finding out the meeting was happening had taken effort. Once inside, the discussion moved through jargon and procedure that assumed you already knew how it worked. It ran two and a half hours with no clear end.

THE SURVEY SAID THE SAME THING AT SCALE

When people described what held them back, the most common answer was not knowing how to start.

Asked what would change that, people pointed to two things: clearer information about what taking part actually involves, and seeing people they already know doing it. This is a small convenience sample and it skews young. I treated it as a signal supporting what I was seeing in the room, not as a measure of the neighborhood.

PARTICIPATION RUNS REACTIVE

Communities here organize when something threatens them, and rarely for the sake of staying connected. When they do organize they are effective, and Harlem's sustained response to development pressure shows what that looks like sustained over years. The pattern leaves residents responding to proposals that are already formed, instead of shaping what gets proposed.

THE SUPPORTING LANDSCAPE IS THIN

Mapping Williamsburg's organizational ecosystem turned up fewer groups than expected, most covering a wide range of issues rather than specializing. Several had disbanded. Several had not updated a website in years. Advocacy groups are what usually carry residents into these processes, and that layer was stretched.

Where the project changed

My original plan was to co-design a new meeting model with the board itself. I built a working relationship with the chair of their ad hoc committee on outreach, who agreed with the pain points I had documented and asked for my involvement in the committee's research and design work.

The board declined the request. In committee, one long-tenured member pushed back on outside input as well.

That ended the co-design path, and it answered my research question more directly than any interview had. I redirected toward something that could work without institutional permission.

The Community Deck

A set of 163 conversation prompts for boards, organizations, and residents to use together. It runs before a proposal exists, when the conversation is still about what a community wants instead of what it opposes.

STRUCTURE

Prompts are grouped into six themes. Six roles let participants speak from a defined position: community member, organization chair, key partner, designer, mediator, and observer. The format borrows from speculative design, drawing on The Thing From The Future and Dunne and Raby's Speculative Everything, and asks players to set aside current constraints long enough to say what they actually want.

TESTING

I built the deck in Mural and tested it asynchronously with four people, who commented on prompts, roles, and rules before I finalized the design.

WHERE IT LANDED

It stayed a prototype. Piloting it needed the board's participation, and that was the door that had already closed.

Reflection

Participation structures can be open and still be hard to enter, and the design of a process decides who ends up in the room. That held for the meetings I observed, and it held for my own attempt to contribute.

The project also taught me the pace of this kind of work. Access came from showing up consistently over months, and it could still be withdrawn by a process I had no standing in. Studying a neighborhood shaped by displacement meant staying careful about what I could claim from a year of observation, and where residents and organizers needed to speak for their own experience.

This is where my interest in participatory methods started. Designing the conditions for a conversation, not only gathering input from one, runs through the co-design work I lead now.