In Conversation with Mary Anne Ocampo and Jill Allen Dixon

This transcript is an informal conversation between Dan Lu (MAUD ‘21), Naksha Satish (MAUD ‘22), Mary Anne Ocampo and  Jill Allen Dixon on March 30th, 2021.  

Mary Anne is an urban designer and principal at Sasaki whose multidisciplinary training and experience allow her to work across contexts and scales. Her philosophy centers on achieving design excellence through a critical understanding of the academic vision and community contexts. 

Jill Allen is an associate principal and planner at Sasaki with over a decade of experience collaborating with public sector and non-profit clients. Her expertise in climate adaptation and resilience, public engagement, and park/landscape planning enables municipalities, states, and conservancies.

Dan Lu (DL) :

As urban planners and designers, how do we establish a big vision in a project that is common but not singular, unified but also including diverse interests of multiple stakeholders? 

Mary Anne Ocampo

(MA):

 I think the beauty of urban design is that it is interdisciplinary. It is a collaboration among landscape architecture, architecture, and planning. In my experience, the urban designer is someone who is tasked to understand and integrate strengths of each of those disciplines, and to make sure that there is space to share ideas. I think that's one of the roles that we can play—making sure that we synthesize diverse skills, opinions, and knowledge into meaningful visions that reflect public interests

Stakeholder interactions reveal diverse perspectives, needs, and understandings of the politics and decision-making process. Our stakeholder process typically centers on active listening, hearing feedback through different engagement methods. Knowing there's a range of thoughts, we find common themes and create planning and design principles to guide the project.  We find creative ways to bridge those public opinions with design visions that work across scales of space and time. There's this great symbiotic relationship between urban design and planning that is about designing space and designing inclusive processes that make space for each other.

Jill Allen Dixon (JAD):

I really love that you use the word 'bridging', because I really do think that's the important moment in our projects—where planners and urban designers help bridge between feedback that we're hearing and what's possible. It’s such an important part of each process because it's how we hear and build a consensus. It's also about how we're trying to be really conscious about making sure we're hearing from as broad of a group as possible in order to understand a greater range of perspectives about the issue at hand.

We've observed in public sector projects that open houses, which are supposed to be an opportunity for anyone to come and participate, tend to make it easier to participate for some people more than others and end up capturing a narrower group of perspectives and demographics. What we've been trying to do is to broaden the types of outreach and the ways we're hearing from community members. We want to make sure that we're not just finding what looks like a shared idea across the “community” but in reality, may be a result of only listening to one group of people. We need to be able to understand what the full range of opinions are and then we need to design a different kind of strategy that can incorporate a much greater range of perspectives. I think the future of community engagement is about how it opens up the conversation and brings together many different ideas in a way that's not about getting to the one shared vision, but a vision that's much more nuanced, diverse, and multi-layered.

DL:

How do you resolve different or even conflicting interests among different stakeholders?

JAD:

To me, it is about starting as an open listener so you're not coming in with your own perspective; it is about starting by hearing where everyone is coming from. Be conscious of the questions that you're asking to understand the intentions and goals. Then give more flexibility for what strategy is used to achieve those shared intentions. 

We've been doing a lot of work on how we analyze feedback. We look for groupings of feedback to find common patterns. For example, for a master plan for a park in Baton Rouge (Greenwood Park), we learned that while most people are interested in nature-based approaches to recreation—zip lining, kayaking, paddle boarding to get outside, hike, and watch for birds—there was also a subgroup of people that we called the sports lovers, who were much more interested in active recreation, sports fields, and parking.  Looking only for the most common interests would have missed the sports lovers, along with the subset of the nature adventurers who were more social, wanting to enjoy nature with families and friends.  By taking this approach, which is about understanding the different constituent groups, we started to understand that this park also needs to offer places for active recreation and provide a greater range of activities for introverts and extroverts. It's a way to be more specific and to understand how this greater diversity of activities could then support a greater range of interests and ultimately make the park more welcoming to a greater range of people whether someone wants to watch for birds or watch their kid play soccer.

MA:

I think that stakeholder processes provide space for people to share ideas and to hear each other, which creates moments for dialogue and debate.  We’re actively trying to listen, not to preclude anything. We make sure that we do not just go to the dominant voices in the room, but level out the conversations by how we interact, how we ask questions, and how we replay what we've heard. 

For those with competing interests, we can talk about ideas in a way that drill down to why they feel a particular way. We always try to make space in the conversation and show that there is a range of ideas. When we propose planning and design ideas, we tend to show different ways to translate those needs into multiple concepts. We show two or three different alternatives based on what we've heard. We evaluate design concepts on their physical strategies and potential impacts. I think it is important to make sure the process clearly communicates the logic for the design vision and how stakeholder feedback was integrated.

Naksha Satish (NS):

How important do you see a designer's role in shaping the implementation process? At what moments should the designers grasp and fine tune the feedback and when does it turn to the designers' agency to recommend? 

JAD:

We worked on a 71-mile greenway in Denver—the High Line Canal—that runs from the foothills all the way out to the Denver Airport, weaving its way across the landscape. It's a beloved green corridor that people come to walk and bike and enjoy escaping the city. One of the interesting things about it is that it runs through many different communities and each community really favors the character within its own section. Rather than having one singular vision for the whole project, one of the guiding principles was that it should provide varied experiences with these different “character rooms.” Each one of them reflects the unique ecology and community setting of different segments along its length. That's one example of how feedback can be translated directly into a recommendation celebrating diverse perspectives. The Community Vision Plan was the first time in the canal’s 150-year history that all 11 jurisdictions along the 71-mile greenway have come together to endorse a common vision. Because the final results reflected how our team centered community feedback in the recommendations, elected officials could see how the perspectives of their communities were heard and mattered in the plan. Being able to translate community feedback into implementation recommendations, I think, is central to the role of planners and designers.

MA:

I think one has to understand implementation as it pertains to ways in which you would prioritize and phase the vision over time. For instance, at Syracuse University, we worked on the Campus Framework plan. We centered on a vision and ideas that had to work within our unique context—bridging the campus community feedback into physical projects. It's strategic in that we understood the financial resources, what leadership wanted to prioritize, and when these projects could happen over time. How do you create enough flexibility for future unknowns? Who is the decision maker? What are the external forces that can prevent or promote this project? At Syracuse, there was intention in implementing different types of projects that improve learning environments, enhance the student life experience, and support campus culture.  Having worked with the University since 2014, we have been implementing projects from the framework plan.  Even during this past year with the pandemic, the Campus Framework has been a guiding vision that has provided enough flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances.  

Time is such a valuable component in what we do in planning and urban design. We look at history to understand the past and present conditions of how we’ve arrived to where we are—and, we create a physical framework that projects out with 5-, 10-, and 30-year timelines.  Things will inevitably change in the future, so we have to be open enough to adapt and revisit ideas.

DL:

When working on urban projects led by private developers, as planners and designers, how do we increase our agency to actively push for public good instead of merely meeting project requirements?

JAD:

MA:

DL:

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NS:

JAD:

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NS:

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JAD:

We've been seeing private-public partnership a lot when it comes to local resilience. The city of Boston is starting to plan ahead when it comes to rising sea levels and increasing levels of heat due to climate change. There's a very interesting balance of how implementation happens when it comes to building a more resilient city. I appreciate that you said that it's not a dichotomy, because it's about how we find a way that all these different forces can come together. There are a lot of questions around how you balance new development with the local neighborhood. How do you plan for flood protection without accelerating forces of displacement, or creating other negative impacts on a neighborhood? How do you balance these different forces? How do you mitigate against negative unintended consequences that may result from something that also has a positive effect? These are the questions that we're trying to take a close look at and be mindful about as  we're working through the process. It's definitely a balancing act.

I think that designers and planners can actively contribute to asking questions, having productive dialogues, and creating strategies that promote public interests through clever ways we can design the physical environment. Whether you're working on a project for a developer or for a city, I think there has to be an awareness of the proposed project’s impacts and finding ways that different interests can align and work together. For instance, in our Ananas project outside of Metro Manila, we focused on building a new sustainable community for Filipino residents. We worked with the developer to discuss who we were designing the community for and how to contribute to a balanced approach between agricultural land and urban development.  In a country that has long been colonized, we had meaningful conversations with the developer to rethink and reimagine an urban design vision that centered on Filipino culture. This culminated in a physical framework that was organized by agricultural land (pollinator paths and community gardens), mixed use zones, a variety of housing typologies, and a public realm that supported Filipino cultural events and rituals.

At that same time Sasaki was working on the Ananas project, the developer also sponsored a studio that I taught at MIT, which focused on informal settler family communities located on a lakeshore vulnerable to flooding. It was wonderful to have a developer sponsoring this work, blending academia and planning with the World Bank and focusing on social justice issues. As designers and planners, you have a tremendous role and responsibility to think about bridging the environmental, cultural, social, and economic aspects of all people.  I do find that there are these windows into unique partnerships that could happen between academia and practice. In practice, as Jill said, there are ways that designers and planners can ask the right questions to start thinking about the project in new ways, showing examples and bringing those to light in the conversations with developers.

When working on international projects, planners and designers inevitably need to make wishful decisions. How have you been tackling the challenges of working with unfamiliar foreign context? 

It is really important, from the perspective of working internationally, to acknowledge that we all have potential biases in regards to how we were educated and the ways that we think about design approaches. When you work internationally, there has to be no predetermined ideas for design. There can be approaches to facilitate consensus building, learning from the community, and understanding the politics, culture, economics of particular cities and location. How do you design a process to absorb that knowledge and facilitate discussions before you ever draw a single line? How do you design a process so that your bias and your ideas are not superseding? How do you listen to what the community's needs are beyond what the client is saying? How do you take the technical know-how of working within different climatic and environmental conditions, with the understanding of the vernacular practices and integrating these together with the community's needs? I think that you have to acknowledge where you're coming from, and be open to the fact that you don't have all the answers. It's got to come from the place and the people that you're working with.

How do you incorporate data in different phases in your projects since it could be a contentious determinant during the planning and design process? 

Data plays different roles in different stages of a project. We leverage different types of data to better understand the questions at each phase. We have a group in-house called Sasaki Strategies, that's composed of all sorts of technology gurus—computer programmers, data analysts, UI/UX experts, etc. They help us take new kinds of data, visualize, understand, and analyze it in new ways that give us new insights on the existing context and conditions. 

          We collect both qualitative and quantitative data from engaging communities and understanding diverse perspectives. We try our best to read through and understand all the different nuances that community members are sharing, to then leverage that as equally important as GIS or other data sources to understand existing context in many different ways. I have been working with a group in Sasaki on a research project about parks and equity. We have been trying to look nationally at how well our nation's parks are meeting community needs and understanding who's being served by them, who's being left out, and what are some of the factors that come into play. With our Strategies team, we've been exploring new ways to understand the quality of open spaces. We have been taking a look at social media data to see what we can learn from there and recognize the limitations that may have. Our team has been testing out machine learning to try to understand if we can use aerial photographs to understand where different types of recreation amenities are. There's open source data through OpenStreetMap, but we have found that it is spotty in most places and it's not a very comprehensive data set. There's always a need for better data. By having better data, we can better understand disparities that might be occurring in communities, and then harness data to better measure and define what some of those differences are and why they are occurring.

I just want to echo the fact that data can have its own bias. Where is the bias coming from? How are you reading it? I do think it's both qualitative and quantitative. We typically look at it as a numeric system of scientific rigor, which is one end of the spectrum. But we know that empirical storytelling and anecdotal information are as important. How do you bridge or integrate those together in a way that you're getting a more holistic understanding of a particular setting or community? 

Have you encountered any situations when data demonstrates something different from the designers’ intuition and how do you navigate and negotiate in such scenarios?

I’m thinking about Catherine D'Ignazio who leads the MIT Data + Feminism Lab, which is dedicated to using data to work towards gender and racial equity. She just did a wonderful talk with Danielle Wood, Katlyn Turner, and Lori Brown for the Sasaki Foundation on feminist practices in design and data and raised so many great points on this topic. I think that there is always a curiosity of who is responsible for the data collection. How was it organized? How is it being read and analyzed? How do you ask the right questions to unpack it? How do you cross reference different aspects of what that data is revealing or not revealing? Some people might think that data is an exact science and it is very objective. But I think you need to be aware of the bias that data can have and the fact that it's not neutral. Be careful and sensitive about where you get your data from, what it is showing, and what might be missing.

At Sasaki, we typically talk about data-influenced or data-informed design processes. We're utilizing a rigorous methodology towards both quantitative and qualitative means to understand how those forces reveal particulars about a site and the communities that we're working in-- climatically, mobility and infrastructure wise, patterns of use, and so forth. Technology can provide more ways to capture and understand metrics, so that the quantifiable information can be overlaid into the qualitative aspects of a place.

To add to that, I think it’s critical to understanding that the phrase "data-informed" does not mean data takes total control or runs the whole process. There have been many reports and research on the biases that even things like machine learning can have because the data and the system are only as good as the person that's creating it. There are biases and the process is going to reflect those biases as well. I think it's important to think about data more holistically as it is one part of the process. We need to recognize the role for real people in the design process, being mindful of the extent to which data can support, but not dominate, decision-making.