New Orleans class update: Community and Leadership

This is what now feels like the belated report back on my class trip to New Orleans. I dropped an architecture class, Architecture and Social Practice, in favor of a class called Urban Interventions: New Orleans. This Parsons class, in collaboration with a class at Milano, the urban policy and management school at The New School, works on a competition entry for Chase’s Community Development Competition. The New School has participated in the competition for I think 8 years, winning awards in 5 of those years.

The competition is usually based in New York, with schools partnering with NGOs to develop urban design projects. This year and next year, the competition is focusing on New Orleans. I was awfully excited about the opportunity to work on a New Orleans based project. I was in New Orleans two years ago, just 6 months after Katrina. I was devastated to see the state of the city and the despondency of the people. At the same time, I was greatly inspired by the resilience and persistence of many people to improve the situation and carve out the space they needed and deserved. I also had the exiting opportunity to work with some skilled, fierce women like Jacque Soohen of Big Noise Films and Jennifer Whitney formerly of The Infernal Noise Brigade and Notes from Nowhere and now an independent writer and medic. Working along side these women and receiving their help and encouragement was uniquely validating. I wanted to revisit aspects of this experience as well as contribute to the just reconstruction of the city. There is so much work to do.

The class is partnered with an NGO to design and create a financing plan for a medium density, mixed income-housing complex. The site is by the river, very close to the planned Riverfront Vision developments. Navigating this class and the project has been complicated. The Parsons class is a mix of architecture, communication design, and design management students. I am the anomaly coming from the design and technology end with a liberal arts mindset. I was motivated to work on documenting the community and getting community feedback. We were informed early on in the class that the NGO partner was not willing to help us do this, even though it is a very important piece of the competition, not to mention any development in general. This was a huge red flag for me. On the one hand, I thought that maybe the NGO was buffering the community from the questioning of outsiders. On the other hand, I doubted that the NGO had the community relations and buy in needed to make the project happen properly.

Here as I write, I feel my hands tied. I worry about what I say and how this might get me in trouble be that with the class, with the NGO partner, or with the competition. We went down to New Orleans two weeks ago with the same feeling. Both the Milano class and the Parsons class felt confused about what we could say to whom. It was evident that the NGO was edgy about who we talked to and what information we shared about the project. This reluctance transferred to the group.  Looking back, I realize that I dragged my feet in preparing for the trip. I have good connections. I can get information about what is happening in the community and what the community’s needs and expectations are. I did not set myself up to do this work. Initially, I beat myself up about this. I told myself I was being disorganized, irresponsible, and unethical. As I survey where we are and how the field work went, it’s evident to me that my subconscious drag on gathering community input had more to do with knowing that there were other concerns about communication within the group about the project before we could effectively handle this kind of community input.

The Site Visit

We did get a lot of important work done in New Orleans. We visited the site. We met with councilmen, planners, community organizers, and clergy. We even met with Ed Blakely.

We came to a better understanding of what the NGO expects and the challenges they are facing. We also strengthened the dynamics of the group, a common result of trips. Just spending more time with people when you aren’t explicitly working makes a huge difference in dynamics.

I spent a considerable amount of time with the Milano students because I went down with them on Thursday while the rest of the Parsons class went down on Friday. I was relieved to hang out with them. Their end of things is being run more like a group project. A very intense group project. On the Parsons side, the class is run like an undergraduate class. This is confusing for project management because the teachers have the dual goals of creating a learning experience and delivering the needed component for the project. In my experience, I have a hard time slowing back down into an academic learning process (as different from experiential learning) when there is a project on the table, especially one with real world ramifications. I am further confused when the two objectives of the class, learning and winning, become intertwined. They aren’t quite conducive in my mind. The professors know this and are doing their best to manage it. I was glad to hang out on the Milano side where that doesn’t need to be managed because the focus is explicitly on the competition. I liked the momentum and focus, even if it was tempered by an anxiety passed down from the NGO.

“The person who can most accurately describe reality without laying blame will emerge the leader, weather designated or not.” – Edwin Friedman