Toni L. Griffin
What’s been cool about living in Harlem—I’ve been here now 12 years—is that it’s dotted with so many creatives working in the built environment space, including many of my former students. In general, I think Black architects, planners, and designers are becoming more visible. I did a NYCxDESIGN poster this past year where I wove designers’ names through the streets of Manhattan, including yours. I have to get you a copy.

Sara Zwede
Yes! I need one.

TLG
There really is a little creative Renaissance happening here.

SZ
I’m curious how you ended up in Harlem. I ended up in Harlem sort of randomly. I read this book by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts called Harlem Is Nowhere (2011). Have you read it?

TLG
I haven’t, but I’ve heard of it.

SZ
I grew up in Louisiana and there’s this coffee shop in New Orleans that I love and used to work at all the time. There was another woman who was also always there, working on a laptop. One day I was like, “What are you doing?” and she said, “I’m writing a book about Harlem.”

TLG
Oh, wow.

SZ
The book is about whether Harlem is a real place, or whether it’s an idea. I was so fascinated with this question that I was inspired to open my design practice here. As Black designers of the built environment, this very question that the book proposes is often at the crux of our thinking. We have this sense of what places can be, despite what they are, and the huge chasm in between.

TLG
I think for places that are very culturally rooted, either by their inhabitants or by their identity, which sometimes are one and the same, it’s both. They’re physical locations and ideas, even ideals. I think designers working on physical space are wrestling with all three of those things simultaneously. We’re asked to talk about context and history, we’re asked to consider, understand, and address current conditions, and we also have to figure out how to push all those things forward into a proposition that changes a space into a place, or that extends the meaning of that place, or both.

What drove me here was not so much professional as personal. I was coming from working for Cory Booker as planning director during his first term as mayor of Newark. That was after living in DC, New York and, before that, my hometown of Chicago. I’m from a gritty, racially segregated place. It’s black and it’s white—there’s no in between.

The first time I lived in New York, which was after the Loeb Fellowship at Harvard GSD, I loved being in a city where I could see people who looked like me, but also spoke different languages and represented so many different cultures. In the Midwest, you don’t get the same sense of the richness of Black Americans or the many variations on the Black experience in America.

Coming back here a second time, after living in Newark—which is a very Black and Brown city, but also a very economically depressed city—I was just like, you know what? I don’t want to live in the hood and I don’t want to live in an all-white neighborhood. I don’t want to live somewhere where I can’t walk out of my house and go buy a gallon of milk. I want amenities and I want to live among people who look like me and share similar experiences to me. I want accessibility, identity, community, and coexistence. I want balance. I’m going back to Harlem.

SZ
You moved here for personal reasons, but I’m curious as to what Harlem has given you professionally. What inputs has it provided to your practice?

TLG
Super interesting question. It’s complex because, shortly after I moved, I wrote an article for The Huffington Post questioning, “Am I a gentrifier?” I was two years into living here. This block in particular—120th Street and Lennox—was, at the time, predominantly Black, but still mixed race. I was grappling with the decisions I made about leaving Newark and recognizing that I, in fact, was a gentrifier, what that meant to me, and how we unpack what gentrification truly is. It’s a term that people tend to use in a very binary way, and in a way that’s most often negative. Gentrification is white folks moving into Black neighborhoods, displacing poor people, and especially displacing poor Black people. I was teaching a course on gentrification at the time, so I was thinking, “Okay, I’m living this, but what do I actually want to say about it?”

As I’ve watched this neighborhood transform for over a decade, I’ve thought more about the complexity of what neighborhood change means alongside aspects of displacement or dislocation. Economic displacement, when rents go up, means that a broader span of people are subject to being priced out. You and I were just talking about rents going up on commercial space nearby, so perhaps you have been gentrified out of an office. Cultural displacement, however, is the loss of an identity, of tradition, of community.

The threat of that loss comes when a different population moves in, who are not of the identity of people already in place; people who don’t understand that identity, and perhaps also actively don’t want to understand it. Then there’s also civic displacement, a change in whose voices are shaping decisions within that community, both at the elected level and within the day-to-day negotiations that neighbors have with one another. Certain bodies bring with them power and resources to affect decision-making and change; Black residents in gentrifying neighborhoods must fight for the value of their Blackness, and their needs, against the inherent value of whiteness and white people’s ability to mobilize their structural advantages to prompt services and changes in the neighborhoods they’re moving into. There are so many Black creatives who are an active part of this neighborhood change, living with and around us—gentrifiers and legacy residents. I feel so inspired, not just by the history of this place, but by the future possibilities of what this cohort of designers might inspire for one another.

SZ
That’s the very value of place that is coming under threat given how digital our social lives have become during the pandemic. I think we’ve become more uncoupled from our value of place. What you’re describing, on the other hand, suggests that there is an inherent and non-quantifiable value to being in a place, in union with one another, on an everyday basis. To your point about gentrification, I try not to use the word because it’s—

TLG
So loaded?

SZ
Well, yes, and it combines all the different dynamics of change that you described into one idea. In my office’s projects across the country, in places that are experiencing rapid change, those dynamics are not always the same. Sometimes rents are going up but racial demographics aren’t changing. Sometimes an area is simply densifying or, sometimes, people associate a particular aesthetic with gentrification. Sometimes it’s the displacement of people that have many generations of connection to a place by newcomers with no legacy there. Combining all those different forms of change into one word prevents us from being able to identify the specifics of the type of change, and what its causes and implications might be.

TLG
Absolutely.

SZ
Toni, I would argue—and I’m curious what you think about this—that you’re not a gentrifier, and here’s why. I think gentrification, or very rapid change within a neighborhood, is possible because certain neighborhoods are artificially undervalued. Harlem has great building stock. It’s in Manhattan, it’s close to Central Park. Why is it artificially lower in value, relative to the rest of Manhattan? Because of the color of the skin of the people who live here. And, historically, it was always a mixed-income neighborhood. In fact, what makes a neighborhood stable is being mixed income. I think that having mixed income Black neighborhoods, like Harlem, is key.

TLG
It is essential.

SZ
So, in my opinion, your presence here is quite the opposite of what people would associate with gentrification.

TLG
That’s interesting, and yet if you took race off the table and looked at my profile through the lens of how gentrification has historically been defined—which is around income—you and I are both part of a population that has a higher income than the historic baseline, and our income profiles are driving up the value of property and goods. In a way, I think we are feeling this erosion of place because we’ve started treating place, and home, as a commodity tethered to a market. We buy real estate as an investment for generating wealth rather than for the establishment of rootedness or a multi-generational sense of home. This commodification of place is what leaves us vulnerable to the erosion of place that you’re talking about.

Now, when you put race back on that table, what’s interesting is that Black folks with means have been buying assets in Harlem for decades. What’s troubling is that this did not bring with it the escalation of value such that those who owned here saw their wealth increase decades ago. But it’s notable that only when other bodies, different bodies, started to acquire assets here did the market then respond with a validation of Harlem as a commodity. That’s the rub.

I’ve found that a lot of my students are very much interested in understanding involuntary displacement versus voluntary displacement, and how cultural displacement occurs within the involuntary category. The fight against the erosion of identity and ideals makes clear why a deeper understanding of what place means is so important. How do you come into a place and understand the fullness of what you’re dealing with?

I think the public realm is where all these contests ultimately play out. As a landscape architect, how do you grapple, take on, or reject the term placemaking? Because I haven’t found the term useful in my practice.

SZ
I’ll put it this way. I think the aesthetics that are now associated with placemaking are more about making legible the value of a place to outsiders. Some of the most important Black cultural landscapes are parking lots. You know what I mean?

TLG
Yes.

SZ
Or a sidewalk. The placemaking lens is about saying, “This parking lot has value.”

TLG
It’s something.

SZ
As a landscape architect, we have interesting conversations about bolstering place in a way that’s beyond placemaking. It’s about rooting people’s rituals of everyday life in space, and I think that ties into the kind of neighborhood change that we’re talking about—anchoring it, mitigating it, evolving it.

Speaking of asset generation, this block is one of the most highly valued in Harlem. Why? Because of the park. Not coincidentally, my block, which faces Central Park, is also one of the most expensive blocks in the neighborhood. There’s a value that landscapes in the public realm create, a value that can be wielded. You and I, Toni, have always wanted to work together, yet we haven’t. But we have this opportunity, because when design and policy come together, we can craft the kind of mechanisms that would allow for a neighborhood to be invested in by the residents it has historically been tied to. That takes both design and policy working together really, really intimately, and I feel the potential for that has yet to be explored.

TLG
We will find something to work on together. I have no doubt about it. I find it interesting that when I read RFPs for the public space projects that are defined as components of the civic infrastructure of a neighborhood, they inevitably have to take on more than just the boundary of the public space. There are also the conditions of the neighborhood, such as the understanding of populations around that public space and who is its intended user, that require a broader interrogation of the context in which the park sits.

Finding a way to help the people we work with, and for, understand that their neighborhood environs shape their landscape is where I hope we can create an opportunity to collaborate. The success of these types of projects requires additional investments and strategies that help lessen vulnerabilities, such as involuntary displacement, and ensure that those who we’re designing for can actually be a part of that place once it’s finished. When I worked in the public sector, I could shape policy, direct the way governments hire people like us, and help create the type of multidisciplinary teams that I knew were needed to design projects for our communities.

SZ
I’ve been doing research on the formation and early history of the discipline of landscape architecture. Our profession was founded by people who were engaged in politics. They were engaged in city building. We are, currently, 11 blocks from America’s first public park, and it’s 840 acres large. That’s a city building project. Over the last two years, we saw Central Park become a mental health facility and a field hospital. Our parks and our public spaces are not just nice amenities—they’re essential to city function and infrastructure. I had to go back to the history of the profession to be energized by that legacy, and it has emboldened my belief in the role landscape architecture can play in city building and neighborhood shaping.

TLG
It’s something I’ve really been inspired by, too. We both wrote an essay in this issue of Harvard Design Magazine. Mine was rooted in the narratives of neighborhoods surrounding historic parks, which brings me to this topic of place and stories, which I find you always bring into your projects. Narrative is so important. History is your entry point to narrative, data is mine. You and I could look at the same data, but you may tell a very different narrative with the data than I would. I’m trying to teach my students how to learn to shape their own narratives, and for those of us who are working in Black neighborhoods, I’m encouraging the unearthing of hidden narratives—not the pervasive narrative of what a place looks like and projection of what you think is happening in it. For example, a new narrative we incorporate into our work in Black neighborhoods is that vacant land is actually an asset, not just the representation of disinvestment, devaluation, and extraction. Land is inherently valuable because it holds the potential for future valuation, and Black people should be a part of that.

Do you find that your use of narrative and storytelling is ever oversimplified as an engagement tactic versus as a legitimate aspect of the design process?

SZ
In a word, yes.

TLG
It becomes tactical rather than a substantive component of the design ideation.

SZ
Unfortunately, it’s because there are not so many examples in which the narrative-centered aspects of the process have really borne out into a design that’s resonant to those things. Again, I’m hoping to raise the expectations for design and our ability to do that. That’s why I teach—because understanding people in place must be translated not only into design and detail, but also into construction.

The place you live in tells you something about yourself, your story, and whether that story is valued by your society. I don’t take it lightly when we build a curb. Why is it six inches high? Is there a story there? Can we rewrite it and design this street to be reflective of another story? The idea of narrative is relevant to every phase of what we do, and at every scale.

By the way, Toni, I thought it was so interesting that you described your entry point into design as being from data, and mine from history. I don’t know if you know this, but I have a background in statistics.

TLG
I did not. Another reason we need to work together.

SZ
In my view, statistics are a creative practice. Statistics are not so much a science but an art—the art of identifying a pattern and crafting a story about it.

TLG
That’s such a powerful tool when you are working with community sectors. Sometimes I bristle at using the word “community,” because people tend to think I’m only talking about resident folk, but I’m actually talking about all the different sectors that make a community, such as government, business, nonprofits, faith-based institutions, philanthropy, and residents—each of these are part of shaping place, the responsibility to use data accurately and thoughtfully, and the stories we tell about both people and place. Historical narratives, cultural narratives, data narratives—they’re all intermingled. Most of the cities I work in have contested legacies and deep histories of racial segregation, extraction, and discrimination. Even today, the undercurrent of that tension makes its way into community decision-making processes. The different stakeholders in these conversations experience place quite differently. The use of data and narrative can help to balance power dynamics, because if everyone is armed with the same information and has the ability to share their stories, it helps legitimize varied life experiences and perspectives and ground people in common facts, which I find can be very powerful.

SZ
When we talk about Black places specifically, there’s a tradition of storytelling that far predates Black people’s presence in the Americas. Stories have long been a primary vessel for understanding who we are in the world. Walter Hood and I were having a conversation about the difference between a narrative and a story.

TLG
What’d you come up with?

SZ
He likes to use the word “story” because of the understanding that a story is fabricated. There’s a usefulness to a liberated relationship with what we tell ourselves about who we are and where we live. Whatever you call it, I think it’s about having an idea, a framework, a concept that people feel is flexible enough to put into and take out of. It’s not about a didactic way of telling, like something written on a plaque, but more about forming a relationship to the built environment that is about dissonance.

TLG
Yes. Narratives can be the projections that we associate with place. Those projections can perpetuate actions based on false information, while stories can help to enrich, dismantle, or create alternatives to harmful narratives. I have one last question for you. What are you hopeful or excited about in terms of your creative process and the places you’re working in?

SZ
I want to raise our expectations about what design can offer people. I believe that landscape design has the ability to elevate people’s sense of belonging in the world. I want to fully express that in the built environment, raise expectations, and hopefully prompt us all to engage more in the places we live.

TLG
Similarly, I feel that these last 10 years—in my practice, urbanAC [Urban American City], and at the Just City Lab at Harvard—have been a space for reflecting on the impact of what I’ve done across my career and how I want to find opportunities to push further, because I’m not satisfied that I’ve adequately expressed these aspirations in the built world yet.

I’m eager to figure out, as you explained, how that can manifest beyond a plaque or a marker or an object in public space, or even just the fact that I engage Black and Brown people in the process. To me, that is an insufficient representation of the belonging of Black and Brown bodies in the public realm. I think there’s a deep culture of Americanism rooted in white supremacy that makes this difficult to unpack, and maybe it’s naive of me to think that the built environment alone can satisfy what it truly means to belong in a place. But I continue to be super excited about projects that afford me the chance to poke at that possibility.

SZ
Let’s do that.●

Sara Zewde is Founding Principal of Studio Zewde, a landscape architecture firm based in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. Parallel to practice, she also serves as Assistant Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Toni L. Griffin is founder of urbanAC LLC, a planning and design management practice based in New York that works with public, private, and nonprofit partnerships to reimage, reshape, and rebuild just cities and communities. The practice designs and leads complex and transformative social and spatial urban revitalization projects rooted in addressing historic and current disparities involving race, class, and generation. She is also a Professor in Practice of Urban Planning at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and founder and director of the Just City Lab, an applied research platform that investigates the ways design can have a positive impact on addressing the conditions of injustice in cities.