For decades, the work my colleagues and I have realized, as architects, designers, and planners, has emphasized equity through design of the built environment. The three workshops summarized on this site were singular in bringing together a diverse group of museum professionals, artists, entrepreneurs, designers, and thought leaders who have spent many years focusing on equity work in their respective fields, uncovering injustices, and asking critical questions. Who better to explore and reimagine museum design toward an equitable, inclusive, and socially sustainable future?

We began with a seminal question: How can equity inform and drive the physical design of a space or place? We considered the nuances of terms that are so resonate within our current social context, establishing ‘inclusion’ as centering those already inside, ‘belonging’ as putting more agency in those seeking access, ‘equity’ as measuring success and impact, and ‘change’ as the coveted objective and outcome.

Beyond clarifying the meaning of these terms, it was important to identify where and how they actuate in the built environment. Two of our case studies, The National Museum of African American History and Culture and The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Museum demonstrate that there is no template for equity. Every place must frame inclusions and belongings in time and over time and this requires a process that balances collective goals and individual learning. Key to this framing is empathy—the precursor to accessibility— which results in accountability to the communities served by a design project.

Empathy is achieved by recognizing that every community has shared memories, experiences, and places of collective identity that reveal the unique story of that community. Uncovering these elements starts the process of allowing history and context to shape the physical design. The imperfect present makes space for a new sustainable future—one that is not just different but allows us to process and heal from an imperfect past.

The design for the National Museum of African American History and Culture was inspired by stories related to African American southern agrarian culture, legacy of enslaved and freed iron craftsmen, and west African notions of sculptural and architectural forms. The built expression and experience dives deep into the earth to discover hidden histories and then rises upward in a crown-like form representing the community and culture that will continue to evolve and be sustained by the community.

The design of the Olympic and Paralympic Museum illustrates stories rooted in community experience through a spiraling form depicting the movement, energy, and drive of the incredible athletes celebrated by the museum. Stories of an often-unrepresented segment of athletes are represented in the design in ways that are both tangible and symbolic prompting Wanda Dalla Costa of the Herberger Institute for Design and Arts, to observe, “[Wheelchairs] show a really profound path to inclusiveness…They are a useful canary bird for the field of architecture… If we can listen and attune to the people who are in a wheelchair and if we can use that same level of empathy toward every person who is underrepresented in architecture and planning, I think we're on a really phenomenal pathway.”

Designers not only have the responsibility to act as discoverers and authentic storytellers who translate past and present stories into experience of place, but as advocates for communities in making museums their own. It’s important to consider whose story is being told and how that story will unfold to sustain people and place well into the future.

As consultants who are called on to assist cultural projects in the earliest stages of development, my colleagues and I are highly attuned to how the planning process can impact the long-term success of an idea. We think deeply about who should be part of the conversation to create a strong foundation of support, how to create buildings that are homes for interesting programs, and what ensures that long-term operating realities are addressed in a project’s spaces and in the organization that will animate them. Equity sits as a critical part of this, both as a moral imperative and as a practical one – building a larger audience, as well as a more just culture. The results of early-stage planning efforts often are encapsulated in a “critical path” for the project; our workshops on equitable design, summarized on this site, suggest that we need to reconsider a critical element of the process: time.

“Time is money,” we hear: our economic systems reward speed, yet this work requires an atypical patience. We must deliberately and knowingly push to disrupt our context, which otherwise grabs hold of a project and pulls forward with an unearned momentum. The things that veer projects away from a tidy timeline are also what acknowledge their humanity: the realities of relationships and the complexity of our contexts – emotional, social, political – that we live with. We need to ask ourselves how we can re-harness time, not in a way that artificially imposes an outside order – likely to be Western and colonial – but as Roberto Bedoya, Cultural Affairs Manager for the City of Oakland, said in one of our sessions, “establishes a civic narrative of collective belonging.”

Equity starts with the time to ask questions: How do you care for your community? Your neighbors? Walking down our own block, we might start this by saying hello, expressing an interest in the people around us and how we connect with them. How can we extend that same hello when creating spaces for cultural institutions? We should expand the planning process to make sure community engagement and genuine connection is a priority, and that project leaders – founders, Boards, funders, and staff – build in the focus and the funding to do it.

Existing focus and funding will also need to be redeployed in new directions: identifying the people who will be impacted, spending on the materials required to engage with non-experts, and honoring their time and input, either by paying them directly or by defraying costs of their participation (transportation, food, and especially childcare.) We also need willingness to spend our time circling back to participants with updates, keeping them looped in as part of a significant communication process.

Disrupting time in these interactions establishes a more equitable power relationship and changes perspective on economic equity, in stewarding assets, and in ownership of spaces. Projects we examined as case studies in our workshops are beginning this shift: NXTHVN is looking to a model of equity ownership that works against the traditional (equity) owner-less (though not control-less) not-for-profit model: working as an agent within the system to funnel funds to artists. Destination Crenshaw is, in part, promoting small-scale economic development opportunities alongside a major state transportation project: a new take on transit-oriented development. Others pushed a new perspective further: Poor Farm was directly oppositional to the dominant forces of the market, with artists serving as resistors in the usual free-flowing circuit of power, money, and space.

Exemplifying these alternative perspectives allows us to consider new paths: changes in how we think about space as a container for past, present, and future needs of people and objects. Considering who these projects are for requires us to ask: what did this space mean for people 50 years ago? 500 years ago? What will the space mean for future generations? These questions require us to switch between perspectives and build in flexibility as a new sort of political device: one that leads to a deeper, more direct and equitable, reinvestment in communities.