Abstract
This paper describes an interpretive, exploratory qualitative study that sought to understand practitioner perspectives on challenges to and opportunities for advancing equity through landscape architecture. We defined equity broadly as “fair and just access to opportunities and resources.” A purposeful nonrandom sample of public practice designers aswell as designers in private and nonprofit practice who worked on public projects was followed by a snowball sample.We conducted 25interviews in total. As we planned for our member check in May 2020, George Floyd, an unarmed black man, was murdered by Minneapolis PoliceOfficerDerek Chauvin, prompting racial justice and police reform protests in the Twin Cities and around theworld.We used themember check survey as an opportunity to reviewthemesidentifiedin the interviews and to ask how participants thought their interview responses might have shifted as a result of experiencing these events.
Participants identified the lack of diversity in landscape architectural education and practice as a barrier. They observed that one’s professional power (e.g., status as a firmleader vs. junior staffmember)was significant to one’s ability to advocate for equity through practice. Public engagement and community planning processes were seen as opportunities for landscape architects to address the unequal distribution of positive and negative impacts of environmental design. Respondents suggested that there was a need to educate design decision-makers about what equity is and how equity-driven design projects might be implemented. Respondents noted the role that community organizations played in educating designers about equity issues. Our next steps are to create a survey based on our findings, to use that survey to hear froma broader range of practitioners in the State of Minnesota, and to share this research with ASLA-MN members who are organizing equity-advocacy networks.
INTRODUCTION
Since the murder of George Floyd and subsequent calls for racial justice around the globe in 2020, the landscape architecture field has seen a wave of blog posts, articles, panel presentations, and workshops exploring the links between racial justice and environmental design. However, little research has been conducted on how landscape architecture professionals see the opportunities for and barriers to advancing equity through their work. In this interpretive, exploratory study we sought to contribute to local design-based social justice initiatives by gathering and analyzing practitioner perspectives on challenges and opportunities around advancing equity through landscape architecture practice in the Twin Cities Metropolitan Region of Minnesota. Equity in this study is defined as “just and fair inclusion into a society in which everyone can participate and prosper” (Treuhaft et al., 2011).
Context and Background
Twin Cities landscape architects (hereafter LAs) practice in a context with deep racial equity disparities. Minneapolis and St. Paul have, in the last 15 years, topped the charts for livable neighborhoods and beautiful parks. However, the Twin Cities remain among the worst places in the country to be Black or Native American on important measures such as education, health, and jobs. Furthermore, the landscape architecture profession in the Twin Cities does not reflect the racial diversity of the region. This lack of diversity mirrors that of landscape architectural practice in general in the United States, where only 10% of LAs identify as Latino and only 3% of LAs identify as Black (American Society of Landscape Architects [ASLA], n.d.).
The idea for this study emerged from the research, teaching, and institutional capacities and relationships developed through ReMix, a 15-year-long, award-winning community-university partnership between Juxtaposition Arts in North Minneapolis and the UMN Department of Landscape Architecture. ReMix envisions the Twin Cities’ environmental design professions as diverse and equity-focused. Juxtaposition Arts (JXTA) is a Black-founded, Black-led, nonprofit youth art and design education center, social enterprise, gallery, retail shop, and artists’ studio space located in the heart of the West Broadway Cultural Corridor. JXTA creates a stronger creative and economic ecosystem for Minneapolis by nurturing community legacy and assets for future generations.
Since 2005, over 100 MLA students have been involved in ReMix, and many now practice in the Twin Cities. Informal conversations between alumni practitioners and our faculty author pointed to some of the challenges designers faced when attempting to advocate for equity in their work. These included feelings of being labeled as always pointing to issues of racial justice in their offices and having inadequate budgets for including community engagement in their work. What other obstacles were practitioners facing? What opportunities were they finding, and how easy was it to realize those opportunities? Did a consensus emerge about what barriers were most pressing?
In 2018, one of our authors, who was then an undergraduate Environmental Design student, approached our faculty author about the possibility of doing an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) project. Since the student author had an interest in pursuing an MLA degree and had a strong grounding in racial justice issues, they decided to create an exploratory study to better understand how Twin Cities designers saw the barriers and opportunities for contributing to equity through their work. Another coauthor of this study had been involved in ReMix as an administrator and researcher and joined the faculty and student authors in the study to refine the interview questions and collaborate during the data analysis and member check phases. The goal was to conduct the study and share back our findings to contribute to local-practitioner-led organizing efforts including the recently formed Equity Planning Committee of ASLA-MN.
Action Research
Our design for this study was inspired by action research paradigms. The motives of action research are “simultaneously pragmatic and emancipatory” (Deming, 2011, 192) and often “oriented to the enhancement of direct practice” (Deming, 2011, 194). In the spirit of Ernest Boyer, and as stated by Rios and Napawan in their article “Diversity and Inclusion by Design: A Challenge for Us All,” we hoped to “develop knowledge that has relevance beyond the academy… towards actionable outcomes” (Rios & Napawan, 2018, 1).
Researcher Positionality
In action research, positionality refers to whether the researchers are “insiders” or “outsiders” relative to the community they are studying. As Wendy E. Rowe has discussed, the action researcher’s positionality impacts “every phase of the research process” (Rowe, 2014). In this study, the authors consist of an educator, administrator, and student in the fields of landscape architecture and housing studies who seek to address racial equity through their work. We are all white females and consider ourselves to be both insiders and outsiders in the landscape architecture community of the Twin Cities. The work of the student author as the interviewer was essential. Since almost all the respondents were alumni of UMN, and many were already acquainted with the faculty author as a professor or advisor, we didn’t want interviewees to feel as though they needed to give answers that they thought she would want to hear. Prior to the interviews, the interviewer had not met any of the participants.
Related Literature
Related literature can be loosely grouped into four categories: studies that sought to capture practitioner perspectives on the relationships between landscape architecture and equity (in peer-reviewed and grey literature); peer-reviewed and grey literature written by individual landscape architecture practitioners and practitioner/educators about their experiences working toward equity through practice; grey literature published by the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (CELA), and the Council of Landscape Architectural Registration Boards (CLARB) about national efforts to address equity through practice and education; and peer-reviewed studies about equity and landscape architectural practice—its processes and products (from scholars inside and outside of landscape architecture).
There has been a dramatic increase in related literature since we began this study in 2018. A study that sought to understand professional perspectives emerged as we concluded our interviews in 2019: an ASLA-Environmental Justice Professional Practice Network (EJPPN) survey of LAs about their understanding of and interests in environmental justice (Cheng & Martin 2019). Survey responses highlighted a disconnect between great general concern regarding environmental justice (EJ) by practitioners in the United States and limited understanding of the history and current efforts of ASLA to incorporate EJ into the profession, along with limited individual experience in doing so through practice. Opportunities identified in the EJPPN findings to address EJ as a profession included: educating clients and community through the public participation process, actively recruiting cultural and racial minorities, and actively working in locations that are impacted by environmental racism.
Scholarly books and articles written by individual academic practitioners on the barriers to and opportunities for advancing equity through landscape architecture include Kofi Boone’s “Black Landscapes Matter,” which asks what the Movement for Black Lives platform means to LAs who work with Black people and in Black communities. In this comprehensive and expansive article, Boone calls for a reframing of the discipline and profession. Landscape history must include the roles Black people have played as architects of landscapes like Middleton Place and the town of Princeville, NC, and as change agents who transformed private spaces like lunch counters into public realms for democratic action. Contemporary practice must connect to the “ abundance of designing and making going on in black communities… to create new possibilities.” Boone identifies barriers to pursuing accredited degrees in landscape architecture, noting the closure of Historically Black Colleges and Universities and their undergraduate programs in landscape architecture making it even more difficult for Black students to obtain an accredited degree.1 Other publications by individual practitioners/educators that address questions of equity and landscape architecture include the work of Anne Spirn (Spirn, 2005), Walter Hood (Hood & Tada, 2020), and Julie Stevens (Stevens et al., 2018).
Existing studies exploring equity and practice as it relates to community engagement have asked questions including: Who is included or excluded from the LA design process via community engagement? Who has a say in the ongoing management of built landscapes? How might new approaches to engagement bring more voices to the process? These articles are found in landscape architectural journals and in journals of allied fields including planning, architecture, and cultural geography. Community engagement has a varied history in landscape architectural practice reaching back to the 1960s into the present. Alison Hirsch (2012, 2014) presents an analysis of the early engagement work of Lawrence Halprin, M. Paul Friedberg, and Karl Linn. Critiques of and counterproposals for the normative community engagement work of LAs in the 1980–1990s include Lynda Schneekloth and Robert Shibley’s 1995 book, which proposed “placemaking” as a new mode for shared visioning and decision-making (Schneekloth & Shibley, 1995) and their 2008 article on the challenges and opportunities for public engagement at a regional scale that “accepts the indeterminate space of no client and little agency even while organizing a public conversation among a myriad of voices and perspectives” (Schneekloth & Shibley, 2008). Randy Hester answered his own call for a complete overhaul of the “techniques, policies, processes, and legislation” that underlie participatory design (Hester, 1999) in his Design for Ecological Democracy (2006). Cermetrius Lynell Bohannon, in his dissertation, “Design Education Reconsidered: Faculty Perceptions of Community Engagement in Landscape Architecture,” used both survey and indepth interview methods to understand how faculty value community engagement in academic teaching, research, and scholarship (Bohannon, 2014).
Studies exploring the positive and negative distribution of impacts of the products of landscape architectural practice from within and outside of the field have asked questions tied to environmental justice: What is the spatial distribution of new landscape amenities like parks, trails, and public plazas, and how are they funded (Wolch et al., 2005; C. G. Boone et al., 2009; Hughey et al., 2016; Rigolon & Németh, 2018)? Who has ongoing access to these spaces and who does not (Mitchell, 2003; Rigolon & Németh, 2020)? Are these spaces programmed to support diverse publics (Bruton & Floyd, 2014)? How do built landscapes relate to the social construction of race (Harris, 2007)? Whose histories are interpreted in the landscape, and how (Low et al., 2009)? What are the negative impacts of new landscapes on the surrounding neighborhoods (Anguelovski, 2016; Curran & Hamilton, 2012)?
Peer-reviewed articles exploring the lack of diversity in academia and the profession, as well as in its organizational leadership, include Rios and Napawan (2018), which poses the question, “What can be done to move closer to … supporting diversity and inclusion?” As Rios and Napawan noted: “Whether in our student body, faculty, administration, editorial boards, or institutional committees, it is clear that a more inclusive culture is needed to address current diversity concerns in the landscape architecture academy. By extension, greater inclusivity is needed in our definitions of scholarship. There is a growing body of research that speaks to the value of engaged scholarship and the intersections with diversity and inclusion” (Rios & Napawan, 2018, 3).
While there are few peer-reviewed studies describing professional perspectives on landscape architectural practice and equity, equity has received heightened attention in the profession over the last ten years. New professional networks have emerged, including the Black Landscape Architects Network (BlackLAN) and the ASLA-EJPPN. BlackLAN was established in 2010 “to increase the visibility, support the interests, and foster the impact of Black practitioners in landscape architecture” (BlackLAN, n.d.).
A growing body of grey literature from the perspective of landscape architecture professionals and academics includes trade articles, theses, blog posts, scholarly articles, and reports published by ASLA, CELA, and the Landscape Architecture Accreditation Board (LAAB). In 2014, ASLA issued a policy statement on environmental justice that emphasized access, distribution of negative impacts, and public participation. In 2016, the ASLA-EJ-PPN was formed. The EJ-PPN defines environmental justice as addressing issues of:
(1) unequal distribution of resources such as clean air and water, healthy food, homes, parks, places to walk and sit in public, etc.; (2) inaccessibility of public goods and resources because of transportation, cost or discrimination; and (3) exclusion from facilities and full participation in decisions about one’s community largely because of poverty, prejudice, race, income, recent immigration, or other marginal status. (ASLA, n.d.-b)
One of the PPN’s goals is to share knowledge because very little work has been done to understand how LAs contribute to environmental justice through different professional roles. The PPN collaborated with student representatives from the ASLA-PPN to develop a guide to environmental justice for students.2 The PPN is currently gathering examples of EJ projects to “build a robust database of precedents … of how to integrate environmental justice into our field of practice” (Noto et al., 2018). In 2018, CELA, CLARB, and ASLA issued a joint statement titled “Mirroring the Nation: Landscape Architecture and the Future of the Profession,’’ in which the organizations acknowledged the lack of diversity in the profession and pledged to “ work toward a diverse profession fully reflective of our nation” (CELA, n.d.).
A 2021 article further confirmed what we were noticing as we developed our study in 2018—that equity issues were receiving increased attention in peer-reviewed and grey literature in landscape architecture. That article reviewed CELA conference abstracts from 2013 to 2019 and identified research trends in community-based approaches to climate change, hydrology, land reuse, and social equity issues. The authors also stated that “the 2021 track created on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion fills responds to the critical need for research related to social issues” (Newman et al., 2021).
Throughout our review of existing literature, we found that while there was an increase in peer-reviewed research on the relationships between equity/environmental justice and landscape architectural practice in the United States, along with increased attention to EJ issues via professional networks, little was known about how professional designers themselves perceived opportunities for or barriers to advancing equity through their work.
FRAMEWORKS AND METHODOLOGY
For this interpretive study, we conducted individual interviews with practicing LAs/designers from the Twin Cities Metropolitan Region of Minnesota to understand what they saw as the challenges and opportunities regarding advancing equity in landscape architectural practice.3 As Deming (2011, 152) has noted, interpretive researchers accept that meaning is “actively constructed through mediation between researcher and the data.” In order to “make sense” of our data, we worked reflexively, moving between the specific comments in the interview transcripts and broader themes that emerged as we read and reread each transcript. We identified nine themes, which we grouped into three categories. We “member checked” these themes via an online survey. This survey also asked respondents to reflect on how their thinking may have changed because of the murder of George Floyd and subsequent uprisings in the Twin Cities.
Participants, Recruitment, and Data Collection Methods
We used an interview-guided, semi-structured approach for this study. Interview questions were developed from the review of literature and the researchers’ epistemological framework. Questions were pilot-tested prior to the interviews, and the final two questions read as follows:
In this study we are defining equity as “fair and just access to opportunities and resources.” Could you tell me a little bit about your work at (fill in the blank) and how you think it relates to equity issues?
We talked about the work you do and how it relates to equity. Now I would like to ask what you see as the challenges and opportunities for advocating for equity in the work that you do in the (public, private, nonprofit) sector
We began recruiting participants by contacting an initial list of 15 practitioners from private (5), public (9), and nonprofit practices (1) in the Twin Cities area. Interview questions were provided in the recruitment email.4 Interviews were conducted in three rounds.5 From the initial participants, additional practitioners were identified through snowball sampling. A total of 25 interviews were completed. The first five interviews were conducted in person and the rest by phone to facilitate scheduling.
Data Analysis Process
A generic qualitative approach was used to collect and analyze the interview data. This approach is defined by flexibility and iteration rather than an explicit or established set of philosophical assumptions from a single qualitative orientation (Caelli et al., 2003). Recorded interviews were transcribed shortly after they were completed using the online service TranscribeMe. Transcripts were “hand-coded” using an open coding approach. Coding occurred after the first ten interviews were finished and again after the next 15 interviews. Once all interviews were coded, all three researchers reviewed the coding and began to organize them under a set of themes. Next, interview transcripts were analyzed using NVivo to see if additional codes emerged. All three investigators reviewed the NVivo codes, and as a result of the additional analysis, one new theme emerged. All investigators discussed the final set of nine themes and grouped them into three categories prior to the member check (see Table 1).
FINDINGS
Interview Findings
This section describes the themes that emerged through our analysis of the interview data.
1. Professional Diversity
Respondents discussed barriers to advancing equity in the form of both the lack of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) designers in the Twin Cities landscape architecture professions and the challenges faced by BIPOC designers who are part of the profession.
(1a) Professional Diversity: There is a lack of BIPOC designers
Several respondents noted that the overall lack of racial diversity in the Twin Cities design professions was a barrier to advancing equity. One respondent highlighted the importance of diversity in a profession that works directly with communities: “I think people should look like the communities that they are planning for … I really want that for the world.” While many noted that their agencies or firms were actively recruiting BIPOC designers, some noted that there are few young designers entering the field: “They’re just not represented in the graduate classes. So we try, and I think we’ve made steps in that direction as a firm… . But I’m not seeing it in the greater community of architecture and landscape architecture in the Twin Cities just yet.” The time and money required to enter the profession was seen as a barrier to increasing diversity in the profession. Some discussed in more detail the kind of infrastructure required to help young BIPOC people enter the profession:
For a lot of young people, they may be the first person in their family to go to college or they are trying to weigh different paths or different majors… . I think figuring out how to make that bridge a little shorter and more feasible … that is an opportunity …
… how are young people and students… getting access to the education that they need or the jobs that they need to potentially put money in their pocket right now and make sure that they’re thriving right now, and that also we’re setting them up for (future) opportunities to have a relatively high paying job.
One interviewee noted additional barriers faced by BIPOC designers seeking positions and contracts in a field where networking is key:
If you’re not in the room when those conversations are happening, you’re not getting that opportunity… . If you’re a newly minted landscape architect,… you don’t get to break that (barrier)…. If you’re a person of color, … you’re also trying to break another barrier that’s there and I think it’s important to always be aware of that.
One interviewee pointed out that the field lacks gender diversity in its leadership and that landscape architecture is “still very much a male-dominated profession” in a work environment in which women across professions earn 80% of what men earn in the same positions.
(1b) BIPOC designers who are part of the profession face challenges in the workplace including microaggressions, disrespect, and burnout
Participants noted that BIPOC designers who do enter the profession can also face significant obstacles. Because there is a lack of diversity in the profession, and in the Twin Cities environmental design decision-making professions in general, BIPOC designers frequently describe the feeling of being the “only ones” from underrepresented groups in meetings, in the office, and when working outside of their offices: “In many meetings I would be the only person of color and the youngest person…That’s always a challenge.” BIPOC designers noted that in those situations it was a challenge to advocate for equity because “people don’t believe you because you are the only person that looks different, or comes from a different back-ground”Being the only BIPOC person in their firm/ department overall or at an individual meeting could raise unreasonable expectations from colleagues or collaborators that the BIPOC designer should serve as the “voice of their community” in addition to being a member of the design team: “It’s been hard because as a designer of color—we are so insignificant to the larger design community here in Minnesota. And our access to certain projects, access to design, or just being heard is often hard.” The “double-duty” of being a design professional and constantly advocating for change within the profession can lead to burnout: “If I’m the only person of color in this room here, I will be fighting and advocating for my brothers and sisters. And it definitely takes a toll on you… having to always be that voice.”
2. Professional Power
Some respondents noted that depending on their professional power, they might have greater or fewer opportunities for advancing equity through their work. These respondents referred to the professional power (or lack thereof) that comes with occupying a particular rank in an individual firm, agency, or organization and/or the professional power that comes with having (or not having) an established career and network.
(2a) Professional Power: Those with less professional power have fewer opportunities to work for equity
Some private-sector respondents noted that junior designers are not typically part of the process of selecting projects or setting broader firm agendas and so do not have the power to decide what projects are taken on or how they are approached. One privatesector respondent stated that their firm had a more open design process: “We have an open dialogue and … the way our collaboration works … is—for anyone to share their thoughts.” But even in more “open” firms, firm leaders chose the projects and set the design approach.
(2b) Professional Power: Firm leaders can pursue clients and projects that value equity—but this takes time and energy
Private-sector practitioners saw opportunities for firm leaders to cultivate relationships that could lead to projects that were equity-focused.
Depending on the leadership and how hard you are willing to work you can try to match values with clients and cultivate relationships with people who could be potential clients or connect you to projects that match your values.
Public-sector respondents noted the value of leadership in making racial equity an explicit goal within their agency, especially since it can be difficult to shift culture in a large public institution:
Once something has been instituted as a procedure it is hard to unravel. You need people at the top willing to put the time, energy and resources towards it. So all our opportunities have started with good people here.
Where firms have made a commitment to work with under-resourced communities, they have found that writing grants to fund projects has been valuable.
(2c) Professional Power: Equity-driven designers may risk being negatively perceived as “activists”
It was noted by private-sector respondents that younger/ newer LAs faced risks in pushing for equity and justice that might impact their careers.
If you are perceived as an activist or someone with an advocacy view around something, you have diminished the marketplace that might be interested in hiring you… and once someone launches into those other things, my observation is it is pretty hard to move back to the other side of the profession.
Junior designers shared that upon raising questions about design and equity at work, they had felt “dismissed”:
There are consequences if you, as a junior designer, try to push too hard for something. I think that there can be consequences within your career in a company.
(2d) Professional Power, Design Decisions: Planning processes provide opportunities to address equity. Ongoing planning cycles without implementation cause community fatigue/frustration
Planning processes emerged as both opportunities for and barriers to addressing equity through LA practice. Some respondents saw an opportunity within public planning processes for LAs to help communities to define equity:
All of the communities … have to complete a comprehensive plan… . Our job is often to help them define equity and help them understand what that might mean for their city.
Because comprehensive planning requires an assessment of multiple factors that impact equity, it is an opportunity for designers to look across silos and help set broad goals for future action:
In the comp(rehensive) plan we deal with things like housing, transportation, parks, things like that. When you look at all of those things through an equity lens it really helps to understand where we might have shortcomings, figure out how we are actually analyzing the condition now and helps us set some goals about where we might want to be.
The broad reach of policy documents that are developed in planning processes were seen as a key component of working toward equity:
I feel like because this policy document is guiding policy throughout the city it is really important so my colleagues and myself are in a unique position to create real change. That has a lot of meaning for me personally.
However, a nonprofit practitioner noted that ongoing cycles of planning processes that do not lead to positive outcomes for communities can be damaging: “Many of these communities here, especially communities of color have gone through all of this bullshit. They don’t need another small area plan… I would say an opportunity is to act on those plans.”
(2e) Engagement Processes: Project-specific public engagement processes are barriers to and opportunities for achieving equity through design practice
Many respondents pointed to the public engagement process as a key connection between LA practice and equity. Some described engagement processes as a barrier when a designer’s only contact with a community is through a specific engagement process tied to a specific project. This was seen as extractive and an impediment to building the relationships needed to achieve equitable outcomes:
We go and say, “We want you to show up to our meeting and participate in our way to get what we need on our timeframe.” And then, there is no understanding… . There’s no trust there… . So it goes back to starting with building a relationship, not with what I need out of you.
The need for long-term relationship building with communities as opposed to one-off engagement events was emphasized by a respondent who said, “If we don’t build long-term connections it (engagement) is just a joke.”Others noted that engagement processes can be dominated by a homogenous set of voices—of white, middle-aged homeowners:
I think one of the things that keeps underrepresented communities from having a voice (in engagement processes) has been that often some groups are overrepresented … Equitable engagement doesn’t always mean pleasing everybody, sometimes it means telling people that they need to sit down and let other people speak.
In cases where a diverse group of community members took part in planning meetings, a challenge was being able to facilitate discussions about equity and social justice:
In a lot of cases it’s a hard conversation for people to have… . How do you get people in a room and have hard conversations like that? … (It’s) one of the biggest challenges I’ve faced.
(2d) Professional Power, Design Decisions: Landscape architects make design decisions about public spaces—including how people physically access public spaces and how those spaces are programmed
Design around parks was seen as an opportunity to innovate in community engagement—especially since reaching children and young people was part of the process. This led to innovations around engagement that could be brought to other kinds of projects:
It changes the dynamic. Instead of having a professional standing at the front of the room doing all the talking, you start to form a deeper relationship with the community members and start to understand more what they are saying and why they are saying things. You start to internalize the needs more.
3. Education
Respondents noted an opportunity for designers to learn from community activists about social justice initiatives and noted the need for professionals and members of the public to learn about the value of equity-driven design work.
(3a) Education: Community activists educate designers and decision-makers and push for equitable changes in policies/processes/designs
A subtheme related to the engagement process is that community activists educate designers and decision-makers and/ or push for equitable changes in policies/processes/ designs. One respondent pointed to the fact that communities have developed initiatives and visions outside of “official” city or county planning, but few designers “understand how you carry that from vision to implementation.” A key example of community activists successfully advocating for major shifts in design/planning policies and processes that emerged was tied to park spending and management in Minneapolis, where
…the community call(ed) the [public agency] out (saying)… “Your elected body doesn’t represent the diversity of the community. You make decisions about funding behind closed doors, your leadership and hiring practices are flawed.” … Really looking at it from a systems wide perspective.
As a result of community pressure from the outside of the organization and actions by staff and leadership within the organization, the Minneapolis Park Board adopted a new (and now nationally recognized) approach to park funding based on equity measures.
(3b) Education: Practitioners, government officials, clients, and the public need education about what equity is and why it matters in general and in different contexts, and how to implement equity-driven design projects
The need to educate practitioners, government officials, clients, and the public about what equity is and why it matters in general and in different specific contexts came up in several interviews. Within LA practice, in-firm education was seen as useful, but in some firms, optional sessions amounted to little more than “preaching to the choir”:
The same people (who) already know about topics in equity are the same people who like to talk about them and hear about them. The people who don’t know about them tend to not show up.
A few interviewees said that ASLA and CLAARB had major roles to play in educating practitioners about equity:
We’re required to do an ethics course for our renewal of licensing and that’s fairly new. Why shouldn’t we have an equity and inclusion requirement for licensing?
Some pointed to specific areas where LAs needed to build their equity knowledge base. These included a need for
… quality information or quality tools. We struggle a lot with this because there is LEED and SITES and these different national standards for planning and design that are quantitative measures of excellence… . We just don’t really see so much that is related to equity.
Respondents also expressed a need among practitioners and their clients to learn about definitions of equity and approaches to advocating for equity in situations where it is not an explicit or clear part of the project.
A lot of times our clients might equate the word equity with diversity. Or equity means affordable housing. We tried to get a little deeper with it… . In some cities equity is a bad word, in another it is a good word and they might be right next to each other.
Interviewees noted that LAs need to gain a better understanding of community engagement:
A lot of LAs don’t really understand community engagement that well. Or don’t care about it compared to the design. The design is the most important to them.
Some cited the need for public knowledge building among people who live in highly resourced neighborhoods:
A lot of it has to do with educating the general public about why we are proposing these things…. It is sometimes difficult for them to see issues that impact wider communities outside of their own.
Member Check Findings
Member checking is a process to help ensure that participants’ experiences are adequately represented in the data interpretation. The member check in this study allowed us to explore the credibility of our themes with participants and to gather new data about how participants’ thinking may have shifted since the time of their interview. We completed the interviews and interview data analysis in January 2020. We began planning for our member check in May 2020. On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, an unarmed black man, was murdered by Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin. Floyd’s death prompted ongoing racial justice and police reform protests in the Twin Cities and around the world. Almost all the interview participants (and the researchers) live in either St. Paul or Minneapolis (two had lived in the Twin Cities previously but were now living out of state). We wondered whether, as a result of experiencing these events, interview participants may have changed their thinking about challenges and opportunities for advancing equity through landscape architecture practice in the Twin Cities. Out of the 23 interviewees, 17 responded to the member check survey.
In the member check, participants were asked to review the themes identified in the study. Participants were also asked to add, in a text box, any important themes we may have missed. Three participants added themes/ideas. One of the added themes/ideas related to a specific aspect of professional power: “Those with less professional power have fewer openings to influence a workplace to pursue foci of equity and community benefit.” And one added theme related to how the term equity can be used in different ways in different contexts to argue for different outcomes. All of the added themes/ideas resonated with our analysis and were already part of the subtheme discussions.
Participants were then asked what additional themes they would identify if they were interviewed “today,” after George Floyd’s killing and the subsequent racial justice protests in the Twin Cities, and to provide any themes they might add to the list that they think would have emerged in that “new” interview. Eight participants shared ideas in the text box. One participant noted that a positive outcome was that “ communities (came) together to support BIPOC businesses/communities.” Another participant talked about the need for individual practitioners to balance “listening and acting” to advance equity through their work:
It means seeking out the voices, often in places we haven’t thought of before… and holding ourselves accountable to follow-through or better define concrete actions to take.
Many of these responses noted the increased attention to equity and social justice. One respondent pointed to a racial equity initiative in their agency that began prior to George Floyd’s murder that “gained more traction.” While respondents had positive views of the increased attention paid to social justice in their workplaces, within the profession, and among the public at large, some worried that the “talk” might not be followed by the long and hard work of dismantling structural racism.
One respondent anticipated a “parallel negative enthusiasm from some discounting its importance based on our increasingly polarized climate,” which would require increased “forethought and planning for future engagement efforts.” Another said that practitioners needed to consider the specific equity issues that surrounded each unique project and that this kind of analysis was another educational opportunity.
One statement read as a call to action:
It requires us as individuals, as community members and as designers, to do the hard work of unpacking racism in all its colors and end this now!… All ideas should be on the table.
Challenges and opportunities identified, priorities set, implementation strategies and metrics developed and steps for accomplishment.
Differences in Pre- and Post-Thinking about Equity
Table 2 summarizes the member check responses. The column titled “ Theme” lists the themes that emerged in our analysis that were shared with participants for their review. The column titled “Pre” shows the percentage of member check participants who said that a particular theme was relevant to their interview (most interviews occurred in 2018 or 2019). The column titled “Post” shows the percentage of member check participants who felt that theme was relevant to them after George Floyd’s killing and subsequent racial justice protests in the Twin Cities. All percentages were rounded to the nearest 10th.
All themes saw an increase in responses from Pre to Post, except for theme 3b (Education), which received one response fewer. Notable increases (more than 20%) were seen in two themes: 2d (Design Decisions) and 3a (Community activism), which received an additional four and six responses, respectively. These increases in quantitative results are consistent with the ideas participants described in the “text boxes” highlighting the need for long-term, community-led action and professional accountability.
Discussion
The main goal of this inductive study was to capture a rich set of qualitative data to shed light on the barriers to and opportunities for addressing equity through design practice from the perspectives of professional designers. The study sample was not drawn to represent the broader population of LAs and designers in the Twin Cities, so generalizing would not have been appropriate. However, the sample group does represent a range of experience levels from private, public, and nonprofit practice; it also features participants speaking quite candidly about their experiences.
As we worked through the data and thought about its implications, we saw that much of what individuals brought up was already being considered by ASLA, CELA, and CLARB or was explored in peer-reviewed and grey literature. The emerging discussion included calls for the following: increased diversity and improvements to community engagement strategies; long-term commitments to communities as opposed to one-off projects; and increased educational opportunities around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues (ASLA, n.d.-a).
Significantly, LAAB published new standards for accreditation in January 2021 that included expanded language around DEI. LAAB is currently amending its standards further to reflect “recent and continuing developments around Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), and racial and social equity” (LAND, 2021). LAAB formed a Diversity subcommittee to work on continued standards revisions pertaining to DEI and expects to have completed these revisions by the end of 2021.
Respondents provided insights grounded in their specific experiences and contexts. Our final themes—professional diversity, professional power, and education—and subthemes can be thought of as a set of opportunities for knowledge sharing and action that links back to the experiences of professionals who seek to address equity through practice. Interviewees were clearly grappling with what they as individuals could do to advance equity through their work. They noted that the hierarchies inherent in professional practices—level of experience, position within a firm, how they are perceived by their superiors—and their levels of advantage or disadvantage based on factors including age, race, and gender—all framed what was possible or not possible for individual designers to achieve.6 As we reflected further on our findings, the multidisciplinary and linked concepts of positionality, agency, and social capital proved helpful in understanding how respondents were thinking about individual action and pointed to opportunities for collective action based on their ideas and experiences.
Agency, Positionality, and Social Capital
The concepts of positionality, agency, and social capital may be familiar to LAs who work in areas related to public health or environmental justice or with backgrounds in social theory. In public health contexts, positionality is quite simply “the extent to which one is privileged or oppressed along different axes of identity” (Staton et al., 2016, 10). Agency in these contexts refers to whether or not individuals are able to live the lives they envision for themselves, and social capital refers to the benefit people derive from having relationships with others.
Ideas from educational research offer models for understanding professional agency and the ways that individual professional agency relates to collective professional agency:
Professional agency can … involve participation and collaboration within the work community … or within the entire work organization (Eteläpelto et al., 2013).
While we did not have enough individual interviews to make comparisons across private, public, and nonprofit sectors, we found some similarities and differences among how practitioners viewed the possibilities of advocating for equity from their specific professional positions. For instance, public-sector designers saw opportunities to help remove obstacles faced by community members who wanted to participate in decision-making. However, the time they spent removing barriers to participation through more innovative and sustained engagement strategies counted directly against a project’s overall construction budget. Private-sector practitioners expressed that designers who are perceived by employers or potential employers as “activists” can face diminished job prospects. Private-sector designers also felt that design training for students interested in equity needed to be a “ both/and,” where students gain a strong base in traditional technical skills and knowledge about how to use their professional design skills to advance equitable outcomes. How might landscape architecture practitioners uncover their power to advance equity from their unique positions, given their levels of agency? How might the broad map of concerns uncovered in this survey ground conversations directed to action?
Next Steps
This study points to many different opportunities for further research. The interview methods could be applied in other U.S. regions, or the survey could be administered nationally through ASLA. Relevant and related studies might also explore the experiences of allied professionals in fields like planning and architecture. What do they see as significant barriers to and opportunities for advancing equity through their practices? What opportunities exist for collaborative action?
We have expanded our study to hear from more Twin Cities designers via a digital survey to all members of ASLA-MN. The digital survey presented the study themes and asked participants to identify and rank those themes they saw as significant barriers to and opportunities for advancing equity through design practice and to suggest additional themes. Fifty-five ASLA-MN members completed the survey, bringing our total participants to about 25% of ASLA-MN’s membership. After analysing the online survey data and comparing it with the data from the interviews, we plan to share our findings with ASLA-MN members in collaboration with the ASLA-MN Equity Planning Committee this Fall.
AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
Kristine F. Miller codeveloped the study, coanalyzed the findings, and served as lead author of the article. Rachel McNamara codeveloped the study, conducted all interviews, coanalyzed the findings, and helped write and edit the article. Amanda Smoot codeveloped the study, coanalyzed the findings, and helped write and edit the article.
PEER REVIEW STATEMENT
All research articles, systematic reviews, essays, and policy briefs published in Landscape Journal are double-blind peer reviewed.
Appendix 1: Recruitment Letter
Invitation to Participate in Research Study on Barriers and Opportunities Relating to Equitable Outcomes in Environmental Design
Dear (Professional Landscape Architect), I am a student at the University of Minnesota conducting interviews as part of a study to increase our understanding of the barriers to and opportunities for creating fair and just access to opportunities and resources (equity) through design practice. As a professional landscape architect, you are in an ideal position to share valuable information about policies, procedures, and practices that facilitate or create barriers to equitable outcomes.
The interview will be informal and take around 30 minutes. Your responses to the questions will be kept confidential. Each interview will be assigned a numeric code to ensure that personal identifiers are not revealed during the analysis and to assist in writing up our findings. You will not receive compensation for participating in this study. However, your participation will be a very valuable addition to our research, and findings could lead to greater understanding of how environmental design can help create fair and just access to opportunities and resources.
If you are willing to participate, please suggest a day and time that works well for you. If you have any questions, please let me know.
Thanks!
In this study we are defining equity as “fair and just access to opportunities and resources.” Could you tell me a little bit about your work at (fill in the blank) and how you think it relates to equity issues?
We talked about the work you do and how it relates to equity. Now I would like to talk about what you see as the barriers to and opportunities for advocating for equity in the work that you do in the (public, private, nonprofit) sector?
Footnotes
↵1. In the article “Notes Towards a History of Black Landscape Architecture,” the author delves further into the possibilities for transforming landscape architectural history, noting, “For many years Black landscapes have been studied mainly within the contexts of historic preservation, cultural anthropology, and archeology. It’s time, then, to widen our disciplinary and pedagogical frames” (K. Boone, 2020).
↵2. A student’s guide to environmental justice, n.d.
↵3. The study was approved by the University of Minnesota Institutional Review Board in fall 2018.
↵4. See Appendix 1 for a copy of the recruitment letter.
↵5. By scheduling interviews in rounds, we were able to better manage the workload.
↵6. “Identity is a combination of who one elects to be known as and what society views as that individual’s group memberships.” (Tajfel, 1974; Tajfel & Turner, 1979)
