You were named a 2017 MacArthur Fellow, what are you hoping to do with the $625,000 award money?
As we look for ways to connect our design and planning work to the longterm sustenance of a place’s many lives, we often find great potential in unconventional partners and design phases. The fellowship will be invaluable as Hector develops these ways to work with complex coalitions of community organizations, government agencies, businesses, advocates, and schools.
You work in what you call democratic and accountable spaces. How do you define them?
We use the WPTT test, which stands for ‘Who put that there?’ What are the stories that will be told about the powers that put it there and why? It leads you to think about how the design and planning process might create shared understandings. Our favorite projects end with authorship and credit in a fog but a clear and certain feeling of successful self-determination in the face of long odds.
Why are urban planning and design important?
They’re engaged with figuring out how people can successfully live together. Both are quite young: Today’s institutions of urban planning date back only 100 years, and urban design became a topic of conversation 50 years later. I see our current moment as still quite early in the arc of figuring out how to make decisions together about how to build the places we live.
Can you tell us about your work on Mifflin Square Park in South Philadelphia?
The park is just over 100 years old, one of what they call the ‘old square parks.’ Since it was created, the neighborhood has changed. The park’s original passive design has been retrofitted officially, and by do-it-yourselfers, which is amazing to study. Our task is to learn from this evolving work to design a park that makes more room for all the good things people want to do.
What else are you working on?
My Hector partner Jae Shin and I just put up an exhibition at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts called Space Brainz—Yerba Buena 3000. Created with Lucía Sanromán and Martin Strickland, the show surveys some of our projects from the last 10 years that involve spatial conflicts.
