All the goldfish are better than one when it comes to community design.
In his book, The Air We Breathe, Glen Scrivener uses goldfish to analogize the way we navigate and participate in society without fully grasping the nature of our environment. “Goldfish don’t see water. Goldfish see what’s in the water, they see what’s refracted through the water, but I assume… that goldfish don’t see the water itself. And yet there it is. It’s their environment… It shapes everything they do and everything they see. But they don’t see it.”1
Navigating and participating in our communities is kind of like that. We all do it, whether it’s a suburb, a major metropolis, a rural area, a workplace or even a digital community. But what goes into the mechanics – the design – of these communities in the first place and how do these structural choices influence who we are and how we see the world?
A 2020 Forbes article approaches this question from a community design perspective. Neighbourhood or city planning deals predominantly in regulations and conventions, according to Community Building Strategist and Systems Designer, Sloan Leo. Community design instead looks at questions of interpersonal connection and equity. It is a collaborative, community-based approach to design that aims to create an ecosystem based on everyone’s needs.
Try to imagine, for example, what our spaces could look like if disabled members of the community were thoroughly consulted on matters of accessibility and then made part of the entire design process. Not everyone, especially able-bodied folks will automatically see the value in this. Understandably, it can be difficult to reimagine systems if they already appear to be functioning well for us.
But we challenge everyone to keep in mind that “access to people, goods, services, and information is the basis of economic development in cities. The better and more efficient this access, the greater the economic benefits through economies of scale, agglomeration effects, and networking advantages.”2 Put another way, a product might be good enough if it works for most who buy it. But is it great? Not so much.
A community design approach would not only prioritize enabling disabled folks to participate in community more fully and easily, but it would result in the same for everyone else. Think of the single parent with three kids and a stroller who has to get to an appointment on the third floor but there isn’t an elevator. Or the marathoner who recently had knee replacement surgery, but the entryway stairs are icy and there’s no ramp in sight.
Community design is about fostering inclusion in our already diverse environments and as far as approaches go, it is highly versatile. Sloan Leo sees “anything that causes frustration [as] a (re)design opportunity.” For the workplace struggling to incorporate DEI initiatives to the Chamber of Commerce trying to understand how to best serve it’s shifting demographic, community design applies. The secret ingredient though is equity of voice. “Traditional design puts the designer as expert, whereas community design situates the designer as facilitator, and sees that facilitation as an act of service, not an act of leadership.” To be truly successful the designer – the business owner or the city planner – must not only hear diverse voices, but actually listen to them.
Let’s return to our goldfish analogy. For the purposes of this article, it needs a bit of qualification. We may all be goldfish, but it is inaccurate to suggest we are all unaware of the water dictating our environmental experience. Sure, the majority of us goldfish are swimming happily, but there is a very real number of us who are struggling because of the water.
Architects and city planners know very well that good planning translates into easy, maybe even beautiful, navigability. But in our communities – cities, towns, workplaces, corners of the internet – people don’t always have what they need to navigate well. Structural inequality occurs when the fabric of organizations, institutions, governments or social networks contain an embedded bias which provides advantages for some members and marginalizes or produces disadvantages for other members.3
Things like racial, gender, or spiritual discrimination, disparities in wealth and resources, lack of access to healthcare, transportation, education and the internet, are all examples of structural barriers to full community participation and self-actualization.
Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) experts like Felicia Johnson of the Gatson Group, seek to make all of us goldfish aware of structural and individual inequities so we can design ways of being and belonging in our communities that are better for everyone. For more information about DEI and how to begin prioritizing it within your community, we suggest starting with actionable education. Check out Felicia’s course offerings on the RFN Academy.
1 Glen Scrivener, The Air We Breathe (11)