Austin's Solutions-Driven Community Center Pilot
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Austin’s Solutions-Driven Community Center AUSTIN’S SOLUTIONS-DRIVEN COMMUNITY CENTER PILOT DECEMBER 2018 REPORT Austin Community Design and Development Center Nicole Joslin AIA | LEED AP, Executive Director Marla Torrado PhD, Program Coordinator 1023 Springdale Road Building 13, Suite F Austin, TX 78721 www.acddc.org Introduction neighborhood in Austin, TX to develop a SDCC that can support anti-displacement strategies, and b) producing Solutions-driven community centers (SDCCs) are scholarly literature on the topic, bringing different views neighborhood-based, physical spaces where residents and expertise to the conversation. The work taking can share their most pressing community needs, plan place in Montopolis has grown to include institutional and organize specific actions and activities with other partnerships with UT Austin and the City of Austin Office residents, and work alongside public and private of Innovation to better connect residents with existing institutions, researchers and other organizations that institutional resources and provide a platform for co- could potentially assist and collaborate with services, creation of new policies, programs and initiatives that programs or initiatives to address those issues. A SDCC value and respect community leadership and locally focus is place-specific, given that different communities produced knowledge. More specifically, for the last 6 face different challenges that vary across time and scale. months ACDDC has been working closely with a resident Some of the challenges addressed can include, but are group in Montopolis, recently named Mi/My Montopolis, not limited to housing, neighborhood beautification to move forward the activities and programs that would and the built environment, economic development, be accomplished through a SDCC and to develop a solid traffic, job trainings, youth and adult programming, etc. community foundation that can steward the future These spaces become anchors for community leadership SDCC storefront. and support, collective storytelling, engagement and This report traces the engagement process, resilience. capacity building, and organizing work that has been The Austin Community Design and completed thus far in Montopolis, as well as the role of Development Center (ACDDC), a 501(c)3 non-profit ACDDC in supporting the initiative. We will also discuss design and planning professional organization whose the opportunities to partner with other institutions and mission is to improve the quality of life for all through organizations, including UT and local city government, community engaged design, has been working to to ensure that these centers become true connectors develop different aspects of the SDCC model by: a) that make communities more resilient, organized, and working closely with residents in the Montopolis active in the face of challenges. AUSTIN COMMUNITY DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT CENTER 1 Austin’s Solutions-Driven Community Center Background the yearlong collapse of electrical power in Puerto Rico following hurricanes Irma and María in 2017. Current times merit careful attention, for These are not simple technological failures. They they bring challenges that affect societies with an are failures of interconnected ecological, economic, unprecedented intensity and scale. Socio-economic social and technological systems. The disparity between disparities across cities and neighborhoods bring about knowledge and need is something that needs to be uneven development and planning-related strategies given priority if we are to successfully move towards rooted in institutional injustices that disproportionately communities that are more resilient. Nonetheless, the protect or make vulnerable specific populations. nature of relationships between vulnerable communities For example, environmental stressors likely to keep and the agencies (public or private) charged with increasing and intensifying due to global warming providing essential services has significant gaps. will continue to threaten vulnerable communities We know that patterns of infrastructure in the near future if measures to mitigate these distribution reflect municipal income generated impacts are not taken promptly. In the face of these through taxation and sociopolitical power: rich challenges it is important that the research, technology neighborhoods get more parks, better schools and and infrastructural advances created to assist and smoother streets while poor ones get more garbage, mitigate the needs of communities are properly used bad schools and a lot of police scrutiny. These patterns to strengthen community resiliency. Unfortunately, of uneven development are defined through racial lines, implementation of these technologies has not been as with people of color generally experiencing greater successful as expected. vulnerability and lower quality of life. Systems that The 2005 failure of levees in New Orleans produce fair and life-enhancing relationships between following Hurricane Katrina has been traced back, not communities and stakeholders in charge of deploying only to the weakness of levee design per se, but to critical technologies are more likely to be reproduced the inability of subsystem managers to communicate. by communities themselves. In other words, resilient Climatologists, engineers, public works managers, infrastructure and the organizations that support police and politicians, all had abstract fragments of the such services are typically constructed from the top- knowledge required to avoid the failure of this critical down by technocrats, rather than co-constructed infrastructure, but none had understanding of the from the bottom-up by communities themselves. We whole, or the consequences of inaction. The distinction at the Austin Community Design and Development made here is that while knowledge is an abstract Center believe in a hybrid process, which recognizes comprehension of a subject like physics, understanding the unique perspective and knowledge provided by is comprehension of that topic in its social context. the varying sectors of society. The assumption here Even more critical, residents who lived in the lowest- is that no single sector has the knowledge required lying areas knew what they would need when waters to manage and sustain the infrastructure and tools started to rise, and nobody thought to ask them. The needed to be more resilient, and that communities have same claims apply in the context of the 2012 failure of important information that can inform the research and mass transit in New York following Superstorm Sandy; or AUSTIN COMMUNITY DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT CENTER 2 Austin’s Solutions-Driven Community Center development process of new technologies. A SDCC would provide a space where We believe that civil society groups (including community members, infrastructure managers, non-profit organizations, neighborhood groups, and researchers, and public and private institutions can work other community representatives) should be the together and create targeted action plans that directly primary source catalyzing local knowledge, agency, assist the community needs. The solutions-driven system redundancy and the resilience required to community center will be commissioned to promote manage sustainably local-scale challenges related continuous collaborative projects with innovative to climate change and the built environment. It is relationships and technologies that catalyze context- important to emphasize that legitimate civil society rich knowledge and resilience. It is not necessarily groups never speak for vulnerable populations, but geographically bound to a particular place. In fact, we include them in defining problems and taking actions believe that every city and neighborhood would benefit to improve conditions. However, civil society groups are from an organization like this. frequently unseen, or even resisted, because; (1) public and private agencies imagine they are communicating A SDCC should: successfully with vulnerable communities, when they • Capture the neighborhood’s main concerns are not. Although individual municipal representatives through workshops and other participatory may be well-intentioned, vulnerable residents are activities from a community-led platform rationally reluctant to communicate about the issues • Regularly communicate with public and private which make them vulnerable to authority of any kind. stakeholders from a researcher-led platform to (2) Public and private agencies also imagine that they ensure community needs are reflected in research have higher level, and thus more relevant knowledge. and resource management efforts In fact, civil society groups frequently have personnel • Serve as a connecting space between residents with advanced degrees and highly sophisticated analytic and other public and private institutions that can and organizational skills. (3) Situated knowledge of provide the services or data needed local conditions cannot be economically gathered and • Conduct regular workshops crosswalking documented (in conventional quantitative formats) by community-led and researcher-led efforts that municipal employees. Civil society groups, particularly strengthen our community’s collective resilience when linked to universities, can more economically and build capacity within the neighborhood gather robust data. Finally, (4) public and private Development of the Montopolis SDCC institutions tend to (paternalistically) resist the agency and self-determination of vulnerable