The Center for Communities by Design is proud to be a partner this year to an Urban Thinkers Campus as part of the World Urban Campaign led by UNHABITAT. The theme of this event series is 'Language in the City: Re-imagining cities through the lens of Language'. This initiative is led by the Association for Collaborative Design (UK), in partnership with the Community Design Agency (India), The Bio-leadership Project (UK/Spain), the Landscape Institute (UK) and AIA's Center for Communities by Design.
On March 30th at 9:00 am EST we will be launching this Urban Thinkers Campus with a virtual event featuring some inspiring thinkers, including Rosanna Vitiello and Marcus Willcocks (UK), and Taryn Sabia from the Florida Center for Community Design and Research (US). Taryn is a former chair of the AIA's Regional and Urban Design Committee as well.
This event is free, and will attract a global audience of participants – follow this link to register.
This launch event will represent the beginning of a global conversation that we hope will build shared understanding among a diverse array of urban experiences. This Urban Thinkers Campus will explore ideas around both the physical language of cities and the public conversations we have about them. As the US partner to this effort, one of the topics we hope to pursue is focused on the role of language and public participation in building trust and popular support for the critical decisions facing our communities. Distrust has become a pervasive destabilizing current through many of our public conversations, including urban design and planning. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer – an annual survey covering 28 countries and over 36,000 respondents - "distrust is now society's default emotion." The study's findings included that "Nearly 6 in 10 say their default tendency is to distrust something until they see evidence it is trustworthy. Another 64% say it's now to a point where people are incapable of having constructive and civil debates about issues they disagree on. When distrust is the default – we lack the ability to debate or collaborate." This is the underlying context within which much of our work is set today. In order to build healthy, sustainable and just cities, we must first build trust with the publics who give them life. An entire lexicon of professional language to describe community opposition has developed in the past two decades, including terms like NIMBY (Not-In-My-Backyard), YIMBY (Yes-In-My-Backyard), NOPE (Not-On-Planet-Earth), BANANA (Build-Absolutely-Nothing-Anywhere-Near-Anyone), and TEDAO (Tear-Everything-Down-At-Once), reflecting increasing pain points with public processes gone awry. There is growing research around the topic, with some studies estimating that community opposition is costing the nation as much as $1 trillion annually. This Urban Thinkers Campus will create a forum to explore how we speak to cities, and how cities speak to us.
We invite your thoughts on the topic – both here in the discussion and at our upcoming launch event and future convenings as we roll out this initiative. We'd love to hear ideas around how your work is impacted by language and trust as well as how you design to build public trust and create an urban 'vocabulary of inclusion'.
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Joel Mills
The American Institute of Architects
Washington DC
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