Written by:
Sophia de Sousa
This is the first in our series of Sharing Place Think Pieces, part of The Glass-House 2024/25 WEdesign event series Sharing Place. Every week through the end of March, we will share pieces written by guest contributors representing a range of experiences and sectors, which will capture their reflections, ideas and provocations on the theme of Sharing Place. This year, we are kicking off the series with a personal think piece from me on place equity.
Sharing Places for Place Equity
Dr Martin Luther King Jr is a hero of mine and his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, at the March on Washington on 28 August 1963, has been on my mind a lot over the past few weeks. It inspires and moves me as much today as it did when I first studied it at primary school.
I spent a good chunk of my early years in the US, having arrived there in 1976 and enrolled in a primary school in the state of Maryland. My father was taking on a new job in Washington DC and we had been advised to find a home just across the border in neighbouring Montgomery County Maryland, which had state schools with a good reputation.
In my early childhood, legislative victories of the civil rights movement in the US were still recently won, evolving and still hard fought on the ground. Despite Montgomery County Public Schools (what we call state schools in the UK) having been declared fully racially integrated in 1961, my primary school was integrated the same year I arrived. They applied an experimental and controversial plan to bus children from kindergarten to Second Grade (equivalent to UK Reception, Years 1 and 2) from the predominantly white affluent neighbourhood of Chevy Chase in which my school sat to the less affluent area of Rosemary Hills, which had a predominantly “minority” population. For Grades (Years) 3 to 6, the reverse would be applied and children from Rosemary HIlls would be bussed to Chevy Chase.
As I was placed in Third Grade, I went to school in Chevy Chase, an almost exclusively white middle class neighbourhood, and every morning, children were bussed in from Rosemary Hills. With the exception of one boy, all of the children who were bussed in every morning were African American. Though we children played together during the day, the racial divide was tangible and visible every morning as children arrived at school and at the end of the day when they left.
I was 8 years old when I arrived in the US and remember finding it hard to understand the very notion of schools divided by race or of bussing children from one neighbourhood to another rather than just making better schools in every neighbourhood.
I was also aware that there were country clubs in the area which boasted generous social and sporting facilities, but that were far beyond my family’s economic means. At that time, they were not only economically exclusive, but did not offer membership to Black or Jewish people. While this made them places that were neither accessible nor attractive to us, it also meant that we had to travel some distance to find a swimming pool we could, and wanted to use.
Having been born into a multicultural family in London within a diverse social network, I did have an awareness of prejudice and discrimination. However, this was the first time I had encountered, or perhaps when I first became really conscious of, such explicit barriers and differences in access to places and services.
I think that this moment of transition from one place and set of laws and cultural norms to another, at this young and impressionable age, helped inform the professional path I have taken and my passion for place equity.
I spent my early years in the Maryland state education system studying US civil rights activists such as Rosa Parks, whose refusal to move to the seats allocated to people of colour at the back of the bus instigated the hugely influential Montgomery bus boycott. At our freshly integrated school, we also learned about what civil rights activists had endured to make this possible. I was particularly inspired by the strength of the “Little Rock Nine”, the first Black students to attend Little Rock Central High School in the state of Arkansas in 1957.
The school was one of the first to integrate following the 1954 US Supreme Court “Brown v. Board of Education” ruling that segregated schools were unconstitutional. The new African American students of Little Rock Central High, aged only 14 to 17 years old at the time, took up their newfound right to attend the school despite unimaginable challenges. They repeatedly endured threats and intimidation at the hands of an angry mob and were even denied entry by the National Guard at the request of the state Governor. Eventually the students had to be escorted into school by federal troops.
The old news footage we were shown of what those enormously brave young people endured in order to access a shared place of education will always stay with me.
Now, nearly 50 years later, a lot has changed both in the US and the UK, but we still have a very long way to go in achieving place equity. In the UK, class, social mobility and economic prowess, undeniably linked to gender, race and ethnicity, still play a huge role in determining who has access to high quality places, amenities and services.
This disparity across different socio-economic, gender and racial groups is present not only in our physical places and spaces, but also in the professions that shape them.
My generation of placemakers is rightly challenged by young emerging professionals and by communities to help drive systemic change to improve place equity, and to share power and agency, just as we challenged the generations before us. This is simply a part of the cycles of life and essential to progress.
However, this can sometimes feel uncomfortable to all involved, despite our shared values and ambitions around place equity.
Young emergent place professionals and community activists, particularly those from underrepresented groups, feel rightly frustrated by the still complex disparities within practice-based and political power structures.
Older generations of placemakers sometimes feel that the young people challenging them don’t appreciate the significant changes that they and the generations before them helped bring about through their personal and/or professional activism and over their careers.
Indeed, many placemakers and place equity champions approaching retirement or stepping back from community activism, feel frustrated by the lack of opportunity to share their useful experiences, learning and reflections to help others drive change in the future. At the same time, those starting out in this space are thirsty for knowledge and experiences and sometimes struggle to connect either with history or with others in this space.
We are so many of us driven by the same values and working towards shared objectives yet somehow, feel at odds with each other. We use different language and practices, and each of us has our own unique background, trajectory and set of influences and experiences. We also operate with different levels of influence, reach and power within our professional and personal networks.
So my provocation is this:
We need to create more safe, accessible and inclusive places (both physical and digital) to share what we know and to work together around a shared value of place equity.
I firmly believe that such places can help us focus on the values we share and find opportunity and complementarity in our differences, rather than obstacles.
If these places are created, can they help us step into these spaces with generosity, empathy and appreciation of what each brings?
Join the Sharing Place Conversation
In February, March and early April, The Glass-House will be running a series of WEdesign online and in-person events on the theme of Sharing Place, as well as sharing a series of Think Pieces on the same theme from a range of contributors. In the series, we’ll be exploring the many facets of sharing our places and spaces more equitably, as well as how we can create places to share experiences, skills and other things we value, through thoughtful placemaking. We hope you will see these as safe spaces to connect, learn, inspire and collaborate, whatever your age, gender, background or profession.
We urge you to get involved and to make your contribution to our shared movement championing and enabling place equity and collaborative action.
About the Author
Sophia de Sousa is Chief Executive at The Glass-House Community Led Design. Sophia has lived and worked in the UK, US and Italy. Her background is in architecture and urbanism, education, community and voluntary sector work and in multiculturalism.
About the WEdesign 2024/25 Series: Sharing Place
WEdesign is The Glass-House’s annual series of free interactive public events, held online and in-person in cities across the UK, where we explore collaborative design in placemaking through discussion, debate and playful co-design activities.
Sharing Place brings people together to propose more equitable ways of sharing our places and spaces, as well as creating places to share experiences, skills and other things we value, through thoughtful placemaking.
Our online events create provocative spaces for conversation and are open to participants across the UK and further afield. Our Think Pieces bring together a series of blogs from a range of voices to explore the WEdesign series theme.
WEdesign in-person events are safe spaces for diverse audiences to come together to explore challenging issues and to work collaboratively to generate ideas and solutions, co-designing propositions for changes to culture, policy and practice through hands-on making activities, discussion and debate. These events are co-facilitated by students from our WEdesign Student Programme, in collaboration with our partner universities in cities across the UK.
WEdesign is supported by the Ove Arup Foundation.
Find out more and book a place at one of our WEdesign Sharing Place events here.
Visit our WEdesign page to find out more about the WEdesign Programme and how we work with partner universities, students and external contributors here.
