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Building Equity into the
Design Process
Project Planning
During the project planning stage, the engineer should initiate:
(1) Bringing the Stakeholders Together
"It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences."
ELIZABETH
PERATROVICH
"Speak your intent to help us overcome discrimination."
AUDRE
LORDE
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This step is crucial in order to begin building a shared vision for the purpose and impact of project.
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Promoting transparency and open communication channels between stakeholders to build trust and strengthen relationship. This includes being honest in communicating the motives and rationale for engagement
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Planning actionable steps and aligning resources toward the pursuit of a high level of community engagement including continually identifying stakeholders who may be missing or hard to reach (e.g. young people, older people, minority groups or socially excluded groups).
Equity in Engagement Framework developed by Cancer Care Ontario (n.d.). Follow the link to learn more about how to promote equitable engagement and for tools to assist your organization in its efforts to engage and connect with diverse marginalized populations.
(2) Project Conceptualization of the Shared Vision
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Building a shared vision will entail the following:
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Problem analysis
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Project/Product lifecycle
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Environmental Factors
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Limitations
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Finances and resource availability
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Time constraints
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Material and labor availability
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Opportunities
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Reflecting on past and current unequitable practices and systems in order to repair and revamp practices and systems for the restoration and healing of marginalized communities
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Representation of community in project leadership team
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Identifying gaps in information which could be filled by local knowledge
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Building resiliency in the community
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Universal design principles for all-inclusive accessibility
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(3) Formal Needs Evaluation which will entail
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This may entail the following tasks/documentation:
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Community Survey and Community Mapping
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Community Needs Evaluation
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Problem Analysis
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Asset Inventory
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Proposed Interventions
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Choosing Appropriate Metrics for Evaluation
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Preliminary Cost/Benefit Analysis
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Environmental Impacts Analysis
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Exploratory Feasibility Study/Risk Analysis
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Stakeholder Analysis
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Iterative review process, appraisal and approval of concept
A representation of the Social Change Cycle by Community Empowerment Research (2015).
“Whenever you conceptualize social justice struggles, you will always defeat your own purposes if you cannot imagine the people around whom you are struggling as equal partners.”
ANGELA
DAVIS
"I've never been interested in being invisible and erased."
LAVERNE
COX
"An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity."
MARTIN LUTHER
KING JR
"Where do you begin telling someone their world is not the only one?"
LEE MARACLE
“How many years has it taken people to realize that we are all brothers and sisters and human beings in the human race? I mean how many years does it take people to see that?
MARSHA P.
JOHNSON
Back to Hoo City
To address the growing traffic congestion, the State expects a Formal Needs Assessment (with an emphasis placed on a cost benefit analysis) to be completed by your team.
Your team of planners, engineers, designers, environmentalists, landscape architects, soil scientists, social scientists, and community members are ready to hit the ground running.
Here are some goals that you outline for your team to accomplish during the project planning:
First and foremost, you ask them to identify the various stakeholders for the project
The Stereotypical Working List: State Department of Transportation, Planners, Engineers, Architects, regional planning organizations such as the Metropolitan Planning Organization and Planning District Commission, Contractors and Subcontractors, Consultants, and the Community
You ask them to take this one step further. You ask them a seemingly simple question:
Who is "the community"?
The ensuing brainstorm session resulted in the following list:
The team has created a shared definition of who makes up a community. The next challenge you give the team is to dive a little deeper into (1) who might fit in the excluded groups category and (2) what types of discrimination do people in the community face?
This what the team came up with:
Now with this in mind, we need to strategize how to promote transparency throughout the design process and map out entry points to amplify community/stakeholder voice and involvement. This will be the key to building a shared vision for the purpose and impact of the major infrastructure project at hand.
Your team already has some ideas:
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Who wants to join me at the Town Hall on Friday? Let's put our heads together and identify some other community gathering places where we can disseminate information on the upcoming infrastructure planning meeting.
I have some colleagues from Hoo University who specialize in building community partnerships and already have strong ties within the different communities surrounding Hoo City. I will ask them about how we can employ best practices for community engagement.
Let's do it!
Really great idea! We want to make sure that whatever plan moves forward, it is rooted in improving the quality of service to the communities with the most need.
That sounds great! Let me know I can help.
This initiative ties everything together! Expresses our intent as an organization
on building inclusive spaces.
We need to be really honest about why these gaps in service are more common in specific communities. I want to create a task force of our engineers and community members that will focus on identifying these gaps in service and strategizing how this project and our future work will support local communities that have been previously disinvested.
Identifying Service Gaps to Improve Communities
A gap is the difference between a current level of knowledge, competency, performance or outcome and the ideal or desired level.
What is happening? What should be happening?
Community needs are gaps between what services currently exist in a community and what should exist. In a community, these may include pressing gaps in service availability, important barriers to accessing services, and other systems-level issues related to housing, transportation, health, employment supports and the cultural responsiveness of services (Amherst H. Wilder Foundation, n.d.).
The goal is to identify how services are (or are not) meeting needs of the community and finding solutions that increase positive outcomes for the community. This may not be as straightforward as you might initially think because gaps in service are based not only on access or performance of a service, but also expectation, perception, and normativity by the user or community experiencing the service or lack there of.
Expectation
Expectations are the strong belief that something will happen or be the case. These are “prior beliefs” we hold based on past experiences that help us make sense of what we are perceiving in the present
Perception
Perception, in terms of providing services, it is often described as a process by which a consumer identifies, organizes, and interprets information to create meaning. A consumer will selectively perceive what they will ultimately classify as their needs and wants.
Normativity
Normativity is the phenomenon in human societies of designating some actions or outcomes as good or desirable or permissible and others as bad or undesirable or impermissible.
GAP
Gap analysis is a tool we can use to identify and address where these gaps exist. It involves the comparison of actual performance with potential or desired performance. An organization or service provider can use this tool to support decision making that best make use of current resources to serve their community at its greatest potential.
Exploring Motivation
In the pursuit of happiness, many people find fulfillment in participating in civil society in some way.
"Giving to people in need, fixing problems that hurt or inhibit others, and seeking the good of the communities in which we live all have more to do with taking something from a lesser to a better, or fuller, state.
In our quest to find fulfillment, we typically do so not only by trying to fulfill our own potential, but also by helping others and their communities fulfill theirs."
As engineers, we derive more motivation and fulfillment by focusing on the impacts that connect most directly to our individual sense of purpose. When building a shared vision for a project, the meaning for our work (and by relation, the purpose), will expand beyond our individual perceptions and expectations.
Without meaning, impact is a neutral term and purpose is a lofty aspirational statement (Debevoise, 2019). Building a deeper meaning occurs when more voices are included in designing our future.
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The team has been busy working with various community
partners and businesses to initiate project planning.
A major part of project conceptualization is determining
design parameters such as:
Back to Hoo City
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the purpose and impact
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Typical key factors: type and quality of service being provided, meeting "success" metrics (making a profit or return, increased access to a service), expected beneficiaries
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Other crucial factors to consider: Promotion of equitable outcomes. Local community seen as important beneficiaries of project (e.g. creates jobs; provides community, cultural, and inclusive spaces). Consideration if project puts a group of people at a disadvantage (e.g. creates pollution, displaces current inhabitants). Recognition of ways in which local communities can be supported (e.g. support small businesses as well as minority-/women-owned businesses)
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the project timeline and resources available
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Typical key questions: What are the limitations (e.g. funding/budget, time)? When do the stakeholders need the service by? Is it urgent? What are the funding avenues for the project? What is the timeline on the funding?
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Other crucial questions to be considered: What opportunities can be created to bring the community directly into the design process? Are there OTHER services that may need to be addressed first that would serve the community better at this time? How sustainable is this project? What does the community buy-in look like? What local expertise and businesses will be beneficial to the project?
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OPPORTUNITY TO BUILD A SHARED VISION
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the site location
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Typical key factors: zoning, terrain, geological factors (site/geological survey), current land use, the ability to acquire the land, cost of land, daily operation, environmental importance/habitants of the land, utilities affected by the project
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Other crucial factors to consider: history of the land, context of the community and relation of community to that space, where this infrastructure/service is needed most, access in terms of both location and mobility (example: public transportation points
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After many meetings between team members and stakeholders, the creation of a shared vision from the project planning phase allowed the diverse stakeholders to reach a compromise for what the project will be:
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The siting of the highway was modified to avoid neighborhoods and old growth forests.
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The highway will be designed to transition to a boulevard in community settings.
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Increased on-ramp access points designed into plan for communities that had been ignored or disrupted in previous transportation/mobility projects.
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Agreements were reached on the improvements to the infrastructure plan including public transportation and pedestrian infrastructure.
Different iterations of the design included:
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some alterations to the highway's pathway,
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types and levels of stormwater protections,
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materials to be used for earthwork and roadway construction,
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the size of roadway (number of lanes) with the possible addition of HOV/bus lane,
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the location and style of noise protection walls,
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speed limit of the highway and boulevard sections,
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seamless mobility options connecting and interacting with new and old infrastructure systems
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the time frame and number of phases in which project will be completed.
All of these design decisions have different implications when it comes to benefitting or impacting the community and environment, cost, and feasibility. With your expanding team of engineers and community now deep into the project planning stage, it is time to analyze iterations of this plan by means of an Environmental Impacts Assessment, a Feasibility Analysis, as well as a Cost Benefit Analysis.
The team will have to carefully consider metrics that value investment in the community and environment. These types of metrics focus on (1) long term impacts versus short term payoffs of a project, (2) the entire lifecycle of the infrastructure, (3) and the ability of the project to build community resilience.
To ensure the sustainability of these improvements, the team worked directly with Hoo City and State officials, leading to a reprioritized budget. The changes in the budget reflected newfound priorities of increased attention to revitalizing historically Black and Brown communities.
Community Resilience
Community resilience is a measure of the sustained ability of a community to utilize available resources to respond to, withstand, adapt to, and/or recover from adversity. Improving the community’s physical, behavioral, and social health are important aspects of building a community's resilience.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, community resilience is important because:
"Communities are increasingly complex, and so are the challenges they face. Human-caused and natural disasters are more frequent and costly. Factors like climate change, globalization, and increased urbanization can bring disaster related risks to greater numbers of people.
Addressing these threats calls for an approach that combines what we know about preparing for disasters with what we know about actions that strengthen communities every day. Community resilience focuses on enhancing the day-to-day health and wellbeing of communities to reduce the negative impacts of disasters."
Different approaches help breakdown the key components of community resilience.
Three models used to analyze community resilience are given below.
The Sustainable Livelihoods Approach
Analyzes how the lives of people with low socioeconomic status and other disadvantages change over time. This approach recognizes that all people have abilities and assets that can be developed to help them improve their lives.
The Community Capitals Framework
A model that views assets of a community as well as deficits that keep communities from full health. There are seven community capitals: natural, cultural, human, social, political, financial, and built capital.
Natural capital—including resources and natural beauty
The Community Resilience Framework
This framework by Cafer et al. (2019) combines the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach and Community Capitals Framework.
Cultural Capital—including comfort and collaboration with racial, ethnic, and age-related diversity
Human Capital—including citizens’ skills and abilities and access outside resources and knowledge
Social Capital—including the extent to which citizens within communities are connected
Political Capital—including influence over standards, rules, regulations and their enforcement
Financial Capital—including the financial ability to invest in capacity building within the community
7 types of Community Capital
Built Capital—including infrastructure like parks, roads, and telecommunications systems
What is the Difference Between Sustainability and Building Resilience?
Resilience and sustainability are linked together. Sustainability is the measure of system performance, whereas resilience is the means to achieve sustainability during or after a disturbance (Tendall et al. 2015).They are the key components to maintaining healthy relationships between the built, the natural and the social environments.
Both components require adopting a systems approach in order to (1) understand the complexity, (2) highlight the importance of long-term effects and (3) take a holistic view of highly interconnected variables.
Resilience
(1) The capacity to adapt to changing conditions and to maintain or regain functionality and vitality in the face of stress or disturbance. It is the capacity to bounce back after a disturbance or interruption (Resilient Design Institute).
(2) The intentional design of buildings, landscapes, communities, and regions in response to vulnerabilities to disaster and disruption of normal life (Resilient Design Institute).
Figure retrieved from Bocchini et al., 2014.
Sustainability
(1) The capacity to endure in a relatively ongoing way across various domains of life.
(2) Development that meets the needs of the present, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (United Nations World Commissions on Environment and Development, 1987).
Figure retrieved from Bocchini et al., 2014.
Figure retrieved from Tendall et al., 2015
Although the concepts are closely linked, each individually emphasize different priorities and relationships. When decision-making and implementing policy occur, both of these concepts should be considered in tandem so that they may interact in mutually supportive ways (Lizarralde et al., 2015).
The figure below explores how resilience and sustainability are incorporated into the design of the built environment.
