In Conversation with Shaney Peña-Gómez
This transcript is an excerpt of an informal conversation between Natasha Harkison (MLAUD ‘22), Elyjana Roach (MAUD ‘22) and Shaney Peña-Gómez.
Shaney is the director for planning and project development at the Ministry of Tourism in the Dominican Republic. She is interested in projects where she partners with the public and private sectors and academic institutions. And within this framework, she developed the green Santo Domingo plan, sustainability ordinances for the capital city and the national network of ecological parks, promoting land use conservation and parks creation. As part of this network, she designed the Bi-National Park between Haiti and the Dominican Republic and co-edited a book tackling the issue of green infrastructure development. She lives and works in Santo Domingo, which is the largest city of the Caribbean archipelago. She conducts professional practice as well as regional collaborations and academic appointments.
Elyjana Roach (ER):
Can you speak to what the priorities were for you in transitioning from architecture to landscape architecture and later to urban planning?
Shaney Pena-Gomez (SPG):
A lot of what I am now doing happened while I was developing my application for the GSD Loeb fellowship. Constructing the application was a kind of reflective practice. In the moment you do things you feel strongly about and it’s only when you look back, you can see a line of thought or work that is coherent. You can see the worlds that were open or even the paths that you didn't take.
I was trained as a designer, with the mark of what architecture was in the 20th century - modernist approaches and a high consciousness for form-making as the main goal of architecture. When you practice in a developing country like the Dominican Republic, you are exposed to the lack of urban and regional planning, and exposure to inequalities. At the same time, you're blessed enough to live on a Caribbean island where nature is so precious and rich. You start to ask questions like, ‘How relevant is the training that I have as an architect? Can you form this reality of nature that is around me and vice versa?’ It was very clear for me that jumping scales was necessary for my practice. It's funny because I started to bury all my buildings in architecture school. I just remember that I wanted my building to be more like a landscape or a poetic space, like a landform or topography.
As a student, I went to Europe to study geographic urbanism. I started to link different interests that I had in cartography and geography with my own field. I didn't even know that this transition was possible. Then I studied landscape architecture, which is how I discovered that landscape architecture, urban design, and urban planning are so intertwined. For me, right now it’s the best body of knowledge that I could have to tackle the issues that I'm more interested in, such as territorial and environmental issues concerning the built environment.
ER:
This is something I struggled with in architecture school. I wanted to give back to my community in some way, but I didn't know how to do that through one single building. I like that this urban scale of thinking allows us to include our communities in a much broader conversation.
SPG:
Yeah, especially when you're living on an island, that starts to be very clear, because an island in itself, in terms of productive activities can be very unsustainable. You need to import a lot of things. It is highly urbanized because activities in institutions tend to be centralized. The issue of urbanization for us has been pretty much the norm. It’s seen as the conduit that started to develop the scale of the country. You need to have the large-scale approach.
ER:
I think it speaks to the ability for architects to use their training in identifying what problem it is that we're really trying to solve. There's a struggle involving more urban issues in architecture schools and the architectural discipline itself.
SPG:
And that translates into practice. For the last 10 years we have been really pushing the planning agenda here. And now people understand that a lot of their problems that they claim to the government, or want to correct in their communities, are related to the lack of planning. Though we still don't have a strong education in urban planning or landscape architecture. There are some programs that are sometimes available for urban planning, but with a very institutional logic. Then you have architecture offices that exchange in doing the work of an urban planning or an urban designer. And that brings a problem in itself. So it's definitely something that’s a reality here and we still don't have a corrective measure in terms of academic programs, or in understanding the role of each discipline or the role of the interdisciplinary to tackle very complex situations.
Natasha Harkison (NH):
Many of the projects you work on cut across the singular intervention in landscape or architecture – rather they involve more regional strategies, and propose policies that allow citizens into the process. So how would you define the role of urban design?
SPG:
I think that the body of knowledge we represent is the one better equipped to respond to the challenges that globally we are concerned with. In the 21st century, we still have a role to take in our location and in our practice, because of data. Data is complex, and we need to analyze and filter it to have better informed decision making and outcomes for our work. I strongly believe that planners and urban designers should be sitting at the table whenever a decision is made. The leader that usually makes these decisions understands that they need someone that has this passion. Because any decision that you make, for a strategy for economic growth, for social impact, for creating jobs, are going to be translated into physical space - and into social and environmental fabric.
As urban designers, we can play that double role of being optimistic and critical. That's really good because we know what can lead us is not positive. And to be honest, that's why a lot of professions, even in the business schools I see, like this way of design thinking. We're educated in a way that really brings an outcome, quickly and many times successfully.
NH:
How would you describe your process of applying a critical lens while having to mediate between differing actors and agendas?
SPG:
I do a lot of mediating. You cannot only present yourself as an architect or a landscape architect - but more like a strategist, or a translator. You have to very quickly translate what is being discussed as a problem, into a methodology and process.
When I sit as an urban planner, I still need to fight and educate people to understand that what I bring to the table does not only translate into paper. I won’t draw whatever I’m being told to. I'm bringing a strategic idea to the table, and I’m saying that as a team, I need you guys from interdisciplinary worlds - from policymaking, finance, to politicians and social activists - to work together. What we do is not necessarily going to be a master plan, or an urban design or a site design. Sometimes it’s writing, educating people, or using whatever tool is needed so people can understand.
NH:
How and why do we need to be acknowledging the border region? And what does that mean for urban inclusivity?
SPG:
The border region, here in the Dominican Republic, has been a school for me. It has tested me as a citizen, on a personal level, and as a professional. I started to understand that I needed other tools to understand what I was looking for at the border, as I was looking at it through the lens of architecture alone.
The border itself functions as a third space that I wish was the relationship between the whole country on the Dominican side and the whole country on the Haitian side. The interdependency and exchange ability sometimes is not the best, but people at the border understand that they need each other. There is an interdependency. So why I think globally, that's also something that we should look at beyond the specific border, in my own island. If we're looking at an increasing, urbanized world, we need to look at places we often overlook. We have a strong emphasis on big cities and how they will grow. And now, we’re slowly seeing areas of Asia and South Africa rethinking a new urban context. In our case, the most impoverished regions in the Dominican Republic are overlooked by the government and public sector. At the same time, there is good infrastructure because you need the commercial exchange, which happens at a broader scale.
That is not only the exchange that happens locally. So in that sense, if we're talking about an increase in the urbanized world, we should look at these places that can tell us something.