Grassroots Urbanism for our Communities
Air, brakes, chain: check. A group of excited kids led by then-U of A student and Living Streets Alliance intern America Blackketter gathers after school to bike to parks throughout Tucson’s Southside. Riding through quiet streets, the students reach their destination, where they play water games in the heat after learning about safe and responsible biking.
Such a ride may seem like simply a fun activity, but it is a part of a wider effort across Tucson that is centering community involvement in the ideation of sustainable urban projects.
Such collaboration, which blends expertise from local organizations, researchers, community members, and local government, is helping lay the foundation for a socially and environmentally resilient urban landscape in Tucson that will support communities and ecosystems going into the future.
Urban Planning in the Sonoran Desert
Urban planning is the design and regulation of urban infrastructure and land use, organizing roads, parks, public spaces, zoning regulations, and more.
Despite its public image as a small frontier town in the Southwest, Tucson has grown to a city of nearly 550,000 people at the center of a metropolitan region of over a million. That kind of growth requires intentional planning and retrofitting of a sprawling built environment, one which encroaches on the area’s beloved deserts and mountains, said Kenny Wong, a lecturer in the U of A’s College of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape Architecture.
Tucson and the U of A have emerged as a hub for sustainability in planning, fostering education and action that empowers communities to participate in the development process for projects that support a sustainable urban landscape in the city.
“In urban planning, getting community input and seeing the needs of the community is the core of what I’m going to be doing,” Blackketter, who recently graduated from the U of A with a bachelor’s in sustainable built environments, said.
Community Engagement: A Two-Way Street
Blackketter is learning what community-engaged planning looks like in a real-life setting through her internship with Living Streets Alliance, a local nonprofit that advocates for safe, accessible, and attractive transportation options in Tucson.
At the forefront of this work is LSA’s community engagement manager, Kate Saunders, who, through LSA, has honed this process of community integration in their work, gathering community leaders to ask about key issues, leading workshops, conducting surveys, and coordinating between planners and community members.
In its essence, this work is collaborative, forming a link between planners and community members to help combat socio-environmental issues like American car-dependency that both pollute and isolate.
“The education needed for effective planning is kind of a two-way street,” Saunders said. ”It's half education for community groups and residents, half receiving feedback that experts learn through that process that helps them understand how to better meet the needs of the community.”
Wong emphasized the importance of developing solutions that are tailored to those they are intended to serve by making sure the development process is in conversation with those who are going to be the most impacted.
“Engagement will probably look like negotiating and bringing folks along, shaping ideas together,” Wong said. “It needs to be an open-ended process.”
A key component of this collaboration is the establishment of a shared basis in understanding.
For example, when Saunders served as the community engagement lead for the Tucson Climate Action Plan, they organized focused conversations to provide an introduction to urban planning and communicate the intentions of the process.
“Round one was, let's all get on the same page about what climate change is, what climate adaptation is, and why a city would make a plan for that,” Saunders said.
Focus groups are one of many ways to “bring folks along” and form ideas together, Wong said, but the basis for these to work requires attracting attention and generating participation.
Creating a relationship with the community one works with is an integral part of a successful project in the quest for sustainability and establishing long-term community relationships. Kate Saunders said LSA’s ability to leverage the trust they’ve established with locals over the last 10 to 15 years has allowed them to solicit more honest feedback and aid in campaigning for sustainable streets.
Non-profits like LSA are unique in the level of on-the-ground community engagement and lack of political association in the success of specific plans and policies beyond their engagement with the community.
“Our ability to be quite frank I think is a strength. It's not a (city) plan that we're responsible for carrying forward, but we are the ones who convened everybody,” Saunders said.
Wong has integrated students in his Introduction to Design Thinking class into the community engagement process through his work with the El Pueblo Center in the Southside of Tucson.
Across multiple offerings of the studio and in partnership with the Sunnyside Foundation, over 150 students have visited and learned about this Southside neighborhood center that has offered public-facing spaces and services for over 50 years.
Students apply their learning about design processes to imagine what adapting the center to promote greater sustainability might look like. In the bigger picture, the university-community engagement has raised awareness about the importance of the center’s role in meeting the community and area’s goals for the future.
He spoke on the value of hearing stories on their relation to the space from individuals in the community at the center’s anniversary.
“When a team or an individual speaks, and we are listening, there are always clues in those stories of how to honor that history, how to acknowledge our individual experiences while still trying to make decisions for a broader community as a broader group," Wong said.
Small Steps for Big Goals
Organizations like LSA carry a strength in their variety of ways to engage with the community, spearheading smaller and more personal actions that help residents contribute to the broader effort for sustainability in everyday life.
America Blackketter, LSA’s safe routes and advocacy intern, supports this pipeline through the youth bike clubs she organizes around Tucson.
“It’s harder to get investment in the big policy moves without people doing those smaller actions,” Blackketter said. “For me, it seems really worthwhile to go out and do community outreach with the kids at bike club because that’s a small step to get them exposed to and excited about being more sustainable, so when they grow up, and they can vote, they’re more likely to think about climate action.”
The importance of these smaller moves with strong community involvement, particularly regarding education on more sustainable daily practices like biking instead of driving, is a growing method of community outreach and action.
Familias Unidas Ganando Accesibilidad (FUGA) is another organization that hosts community bike rides, advocates for safe streets, and, in turn, Wong says, encourages people to incorporate active transportation into their habits. FUGA’s “Bicicleteadas del Sur,” or Southside rides, begin and end at an underutilized parking lot at the El Pueblo Center.
“It's a great example of social and environmental sustainability coming together,” Wong said. “When you see other people practicing bicycling, it's not so strange. You feel like you've got people in it with you, you've got a sense of community. It's a lot of fun to bike with others, and when it can be lively and engaging, I think that helps change our minds about things.”
Meaningful action isn’t restricted to education and community organization, as is the case with America Blackketter’s or FUGA’s bike rides, but as Kenny Wong points out, it can apply to regular individual actions that connect individuals to the community’s efforts for sustainability, which, in its own way, can serve as a kind of education.
For this, Wong used the example of simple actions like composting, stating that the commitment of an action as an individual still establishes a connection.
“When I take out my compost to my neighborhood bin, it makes me feel that much more connected to my part in the bigger picture,” he said. “I get kind of excited when the compost bin is full. That means other people are also dropping off their food waste. Even if I never see folks doing it at the same time I am, it builds a sense of community and good habits.”
Establishing the tangibility of progress in everyday life through doing things for others to contribute to efforts of sustainability, whether that be as simple as composing or stepping up to educate others, contributes to the democratization of people’s efforts to sustainability, forging community connections.
Kate Saunders encourages interested students to organize with each other, an important step for fostering community action towards sustainability.
“The more students can self-organize and share power amongst each other, and kind of build that collective voice, is really important,” Saunders said. “Reaching out to nonprofits as a collective is always really strong and helpful to building partnerships.”
These stories ultimately amount to the importance of community trust and democracy in decision-making.
As climate change and other social and environmental crises continue, a desire for fast-paced and forced change is tempting, but small actions and the long-term values they engender are what lay the foundation for collective action in the face of these challenges.
“It adds up,” Blackketter said. “There’s this common view of ‘Oh, what is one little thing going to do?’ But it’s never one little thing. The things that we do have a huge impact on the people around us, influencing the way a community works, so I think the small actions are a big step in trying to create more systematic change.”