Public Information

ORGANIZATION
The Center for Urban Pedagogy
www.welcometocup.org

Since 1997, the Brooklyn-based Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) has been using the power of art and design to make complex urban planning and policy issues accessible to the public. Collaborating with teachers and students, artists and designers, policy makers and communities, the group plays a lead role in creating clear graphic tools that help aid the democratic process. This past fall, the nonprofit was one of the winners of the Curry Stone Design Prize for social design pioneers. Metropolis editorial director Paul Makovsky and managing editor Shannon Sharpe recently sat down with co-founder Damon Rich (who is currently chief urban designer for the city of Newark, New Jersey) and executive director Christine Gaspar at the CUP offices in Gowanus, Brooklyn, to talk about accountability in social design, the role of participatory democracy, and moving forward with post-Sandy rebuilding.

How do you hold the current generation of social designers accountable?
Damon Rich: That is the issue. All professions of course have a tendency toward “self-congratulations.” Maybe design exceeds others to a certain degree. But it’s not enough to be critical about claims for effectiveness, or claims to speak in the name of the public. It’s also about crafting an alternative. What’s exciting to me, looking at CUP’s trajectory over the past 15 years, is that we’ve gone from questioning the claims of others to a much more confident stance about our own work and what it means to be accountable for it.

How do you look at CUP’s work in terms of accountability?
Christine Gaspar: We think about it a lot and we’re trying to get better at it. We have accountability structures, like having a jury, which helps us pick topics. For each project, we also work with groups on the ground that tell us what we need to understand. So CUP responds to a need instead of just initiating projects in a more speculative way. As we finish our projects, we try to reinforce that structure so we are putting product in the hands of people who can use it. The design process is being done in conversation with the end users, which is an important factor in how we design these tools. Evaluation is a really difficult thing for groups that are trying to achieve social impact, and we spend a lot of time thinking about how can we be better. We have these partnerships, but in the end the community is the designer. We let people bring their skills to the table and sometimes it gets muddy. But by collaborating, we can create something that is better than each of us doing it on our own.

In terms of city planning, do you have a sort of magic wish that would make your life easier?
CG: The real wish is that you wouldn’t need CUP to do the work. In a perfect world, people would create these really accessible ways of explaining the things that they are doing and genuinely seek input on them. We’re trying to break down the rules that have been constructed by giving communities a tool so they can understand what is happening or what is proposed. Sometimes, someone in the planning department calls us for advice on how to do the outreach and that’s really great. Younger planners, who are increasingly in positions of power in city government, are open to using these tools and we encourage them to do workshops to get people to understand complex information.

In the rebuilding efforts post–Hurricane Sandy, what potential is there for moving forward in a constructive way?
CG: I’m always trying to figure out ways that we can be useful. We’re committing this current round of designs in our Public Access Design Program to Sandy-related issues. I’m interested in how communities can be involved in their own recovery—not only in the communities that were hardest hit but as a city—and then how CUP can be involved in those conversations.

DR: When I think of the relationship of CUP’s mission to the post-Sandy recovery conversation, I’ve been aghast to see Sandy used as a reason to assert domineering expertise. Even New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman, who we’re all supposed to like, wrote a piece essentially saying that something big has to happen, and democracy is in the way. What a crazy thing! If everyone has the right and obligation to participate in the decisions that we all have to make together, then how does that add up to public officials telling us they have this big technical “solution”?

CG: And I would argue that there are good best practices to look at from the grassroots side. CUP has been involved in some of the budget work that has been going on in New York City in the last year—some city council members (four last year and eight this year) have this participatory discussion in these communities to understand the city budget and determining what projects would get funded in these districts. There is a tremendous building of capacity within those communities and that should get transferred over into the rebuilding and recovery processes. I hope that model is relevant and not people saying “the money is coming down and I hope the experts know where that money goes.”

You take the messiness of the process as a given, but your end result is always clear and accessible.
CG: The things we produce are certainly meant to be inserted into that process and guide some of the messiness, but we embrace the process—we trust in democracy.