Activations: NOW Hunters Point

Architect Douglas Burnham is the founder and principal of Envelope, a Berkeley-based architecture and activations studio. Envelope’s work includes Proxy, the temporary activation of two vacant lots in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley neighborhood. Proxy, which Envelope designed, developed and curates, is “a flexible environment of food, art, culture, and retail within renovated shipping containers.”

In 2013, Envelope teamed up with designer, urbanist, and spatial justice activist Liz Ogbu of Studio O to develop NOW Hunters Point, an ongoing program of events that activate the vacant site of a former PG&E power plant, with the goal of engaging neighborhood residents in envisioning the future of the site.

Such urban activations are not building types in the traditional sense, yet this project type is a growing area of practice for architects. In the following conversation, Ogbu and Burnham discuss how, when centered on human needs, activations can foster a more inclusive and nuanced, community-driven conversation about a neighborhood’s future.

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Douglas: Maybe we should start with a working definition of an activation, according to our approach.

Liz: Our work at NOW Hunters Point is the antithesis of the how traditional development works. The idea is to create a development process that is more nimble and responsive to the needs people have through relationship-centered engagements, often based on activations held in the community. These activations aren’t simply activity for activity’s sake: they are events, workshops, and resources that together form an open, ongoing dialogue with a community about their needs and dreams, and their connection with a place. This conversation, in turn, shapes how the neighborhood develops and transforms.

From the beginning, we’ve worked with the idea that the traditional community meeting process is broken, because it rewards people who are time-rich. Instead of centering the process around those who need the most support and then working outward, the traditional process centers on those who show up and have the loudest voice. Those who have suffered the greatest harm in the past – and are most in need of support in the present – often get left out, because they’re precisely the ones who are unable to show up time and time again, to argue for their cause.

Douglas: What we’re advocating, instead, is a process that takes the time to gather input from a broader swath of the community, by connecting with people in a multitude of ways – bringing the conversation to them rather than asking them to come to us.

Liz: We use activation events as a form of community meeting where there is some other benefit of showing up. If you’re a shift worker, you’re not going to show up at a community hall to talk about a project that might see the light of day – if you’re lucky – in five or ten years. But you might bring your kid to a circus! And, while you’re there, we’ll ask you some questions about what you want to see happen in this place in the near and far term. We aren’t just putting on a circus; we’re setting up the possibility for conversations with the community.

Liz: Another value of dialogue rooted in activations is the regular, ongoing flow of information. The way traditional development works, people are engaged in the beginning. Once plans are approved, a lot of time passes in which the details are sorted out behind the scenes. There’s no bringing people along in those conversations, and little recourse when what comes out at the end is different from what you spoke to people about at the beginning. Which is why people don’t trust planning, why they don’t trust a developer or the city.

The cornerstone of our work is ongoing relationship development. It’s activation as a form of building a relationship in space.

Douglas: We frame our process as an ongoing conversation with the community. For NOW Hunters Point, when we first met with the elders in the Bayview Hunters Point community, we asked them: What do you want? What are your visions for this place? At first, they didn’t have an answer. It’s a huge site, and they were all traumatized by the process of fighting to pull the power plant down.

We bring people to the place for events. We might have a drawing, or a rendering, or a survey as a prompt, but we’re also having a human conversation, asking questions and listening. And this continues month after month, so we get to hear more, provide updates, and see how perspectives change as the place (and our team) become more familiar.

There’s also just trying things out, with live prototyping. By activating the place with a mock-up of, say, a job training center, roller skating rink, community heath clinic, we allow people to experience a possible future life of the place, in a nimble and inexpensive way. When people come to these events, they’re like, “Wait: this is my neighborhood? This feels totally different.” We’re working to change the mental map that people have of a place, by giving them joyful, enriching experiences on that very ground.

Liz: The example I often share is the movie nights at NOW Hunters Point. A lot of our early activations were informed by suggestions people made at the listening party launch or that we gathered through conversations, but nobody ever asked for a movie night. What we did hear is that people wanted a space where they could gather safely. We also knew that nighttime activities were not a thing people did in the neighborhood; if they were going to do something at night, they left the neighborhood, going downtown to see a movie, for example. So we decided to try a movie night as an event that hits at the fun that we were trying to cultivate, the iconic experience, and that allows us to test whether it’s possible to create safe spaces at night. Because, if we’re imagining the future of this site, we’re going to want to have people there at night, but you have to build an experience of that for people to believe it’s possible. And it worked. We started seeing movie theaters among the uses people would like to see in the long-term future of the site.

When we did those first movie nights, we had string lights and popcorn and all that stuff, and it was a big hit! And it inspired other outdoor movies around the neighborhood, because people saw that it was successful. It redefined what was possible, which opened up a whole new conversation about what the community would like to see at night.

Douglas: A lot of people look at me sideways when I say, “We just, like, put on a circus!” Or, “We just curated and produced a film festival at PROXY.” People ask: What are architects doing with this “activation” work? Isn’t it a distraction from the core work of being an architect? You and I know that this work is incredibly poignant and is a part of a deeper investigation into knowing a place. What do you tell people?

Liz: Whenever I say I’m an architect, people often are like, well, what kinds of buildings do you do? Or, maybe what kind of parks do you do, because they can only grab on to specific built forms. And I think that’s what the profession has pretty much set itself up to be.

Douglas: Also our education. I didn’t learn very much about how people figure into the creation of architecture. The history of architecture I learned was focused primarily on the built work – the so-called “master” works – almost all by white men.

Liz: Totally. I’ve been saying lately how my education taught me to be a white supremacist, which leads to a fascinating conversation, but it’s true. Like you, I wasn’t taught about how regular people can be co-creators of the program or values for a building or a public space. I think I found my way to it, in part, because my dad was an anthropologist and my mom was in public health. I was also the weird kid who drew! So I grew up trying to stitch those things together. Yet, when I got to architecture school, I was really confused when they weren’t. And so I was lucky that went to an undergrad program that didn’t have a set program in architecture – you could design your own major. So I took courses in urban economics and sociology, not knowing that’s not what architects do.

What I tell people is that I don’t look at what I do in terms of shaping built form. I say that my purpose is to help shape the places that enable people to live their best story. And I’m going to do whatever I can that’s involved in shaping those places. I very specifically use the word “place,” because “space” is very much about built form and “place” is what happens when you add the emotional energy and make it meaningful to a person. A circus fits right along with that. When you see the cute pictures we have of kids and how their faces light up at being able to see somebody flying through the air in the Bayview. Or when you look at the sea of faces and it’s a sea of cultures that you are not used to seeing in the Bayview, who have happily come together to experience the circus.

Douglas: They are seriously joyous together!

Liz: Yes, there’s a shared experience of joy! I still remember from the first summer at NOW Hunters Point, when we partnered with some summer school programs. We invited the kids to come to the site for an architect-for-a-day/kite-making workshop. And I still remember this one child – sweetest thing you’ve ever seen – who was holding her kite so proudly; it was the first time she’d ever flown a kite. And she said she couldn’t wait to go home and tell her Gran what she did that day! Her grandmother probably only knows this place as the old power plant site and maybe has some negative memories associated with it. But this child just had this magical experience. She doesn’t see the power plant, she sees the place where she got to fly a kite for the first time. That’s a story she’ll take with her from then on, and maybe it will change how her grandmother thinks about the site, too. It becomes the place where her granddaughter had this magical experience, did something that she’s not been able to do anywhere else, and came home with a smile on her face. To me, that was a success story.

That’s what we get from doing a circus or kite-making workshop or petting zoo or any of the other crazy things we’ve attempted. We change people’s relationship with place, and we give them an opportunity to have stories that they’ve not been able to tap into elsewhere. That, then, has a direct correlation to bringing elements of joy that can improve the quality of their life.

Douglas: That young girl was also invited to imagine what this place could be, to dream, to make suggestions for the future of the place. That is an invitation that young girls from Bayview Hunters Point don’t typically get, but in addition to that, we were paying attention, listening, and honoring her dream. Taken together, these simple things can be incredibly transformational for people and their relationship to a place. The scores of people having joyful experiences on the site of a former power plant – a site that people were forbidden to enter for more than 70 years – can transform the mental map of the place for the people who come to these events. With neighbors attending event after event on-site, eventually people build the sense that this place is now a part of their neighborhood.

Liz: Yeah, this point about the ability to claim land and claim a place is also embedded in what we’ve been doing. It’s a transfer of ownership – one that may not be manifest in legal documents, but that does exist emotionally and psychically. And that is super important, because when we talk about the long-term future of the site – regardless of whether it’s a city or a developer who ultimately has the right to develop it – we’ve tried to create an opportunity where the community is claiming their ownership of it as well, and will assert their voice as part of whatever process lies ahead. I think if it had just gone straight from utility ownership to developer ownership, the developer probably would have done a process very akin to the broken process I was complaining about in the beginning.

The fight to bring down the power plant was itself an act of community claiming, but the community still had never set foot on the site. Now that they have, and have had meaningful experiences there, that’s a whole other level of ownership that cannot be erased.

Liz: The other point that came to mind when we were talking about joy, is we have not done joy at the exclusion of grief. We’re not just in the business of rainbows and unicorns. There was a bit of a gap between when we did the StoryCorps recordings in the first year, and the partnership with Question Bridge and artist Chris Johnson in fall of 2019. But it’s meaningful that those two storytelling pieces not only covered the things that make us happy, that we love about this place, but also the things that have been hard. And, particularly as we think about the African-American population, what has been hard about that story in this neighborhood? From when we started until now, the gentrification pressures have been intense. A lot of people have left, and some of the people with whom we engaged early on have passed. So, what does it mean to hold that grief?

Douglas: The palpable presence of that grief also changed how we approached the conversations. We came into the neighborhood with some understanding of the grief – maybe not a bodily understanding, but an understanding of the struggle. Our first experiences with the neighborhood were the long interviews with unsung people who had been doing incredible things for decades in the neighborhood. They were powerful, everyday people, but people filled with grief and sorrow. I remember Marie Harrison: she put her life into removing the power plant for the health of the children in the neighborhood. And then she ended up dying of cancer. It’s as if she gave her life for this community. I believe there was an honor and a respect that we brought with us, because we were seeing and hearing the grief.

Liz: I have a project in East Palo Alto where we began with listening sessions, and I learned there that we really underestimate the need to voice the grief and how few people have anyone who is listening to them so they can do it. It brings us back to our conversation of community meetings as a broken system, in that there’s no space for grief to be shared. There’s a poet, nayyirah waheed, who does these beautiful poems that are either really long or really short, like a sentence. One of hers I love is: “Anger is grief that has been silent for too long.” That is a community meeting in a nutshell.

Douglas: Exactly! It’s like: “We’re about to wrap this up. You in the back, one last question.”

Liz: Sometimes when I’m giving talks to architects, I’ll ask: Who has been to a good community meeting? Or, who thinks community meetings are good? Or, who has a track record of good experiences? Raise your hand! Sometimes people will shyly raise their hands, but it is a tiny, tiny percentage of the people who are in the audience. And it’s often because the process sucks for architects, too. Community meetings are these super transactional things, and people are angry because they have this well of grief and they’re used to not being heard. And they yell, because they don’t know if you’re going to come back to them.

Douglas: Sure, but when your kid is happily petting the pony, and you’re close by having a conversation with us – with a cup of coffee in hand – then there’s no pressure, especially when they’ve seen us or spoken to us at previous events. They recognize us, they’re happy coming to this place, and you’re just talking.

Liz: We talk to the kids, too! I think that’s the other thing that’s unique about what we do. We don’t just talk to the adults; we talk to kids, because they’re the ones who are going to inherit all of this at the end of the day. We consider them as people with opinions who should also be engaged. The parents are absolutely delighted that we want to talk to their kids, that there’s a way for their kids to give input, and it in turn makes the parents even more excited to contribute information. Because it’s like: “Oh! You got my kid excited about this place! Now I’m excited about this place!”

It’s an experience of wholeness – with the grief and the joy – and it goes beyond just the site. Because, over the years, we’ve shown up at events elsewhere in the neighborhood.

If I go back to my white supremacist education, it’s only for the project: I show up for the community meetings related to the project, I show up for the meetings that are with the clients. And we have a really messed up idea of client: it is a capitalist model of client being just the people who pay you and not the people who have to live with what you’ve created. We’re taught to engage the communities that we’re building from a super transactional place. Why would you go to any event that’s not your project?

Transactional thinking would limit our engagement to what happens on our site, but we saw ourselves as building a relationship with the community and the people in it. We work with partners in the neighborhood on events at NOW Hunters Point, but we also join in and support events at their sites. And that’s important, because people see us not just at our site but in the community; they see that we are investing personally in the neighborhood. By continuing to show up, we build a trust that gives our conversations additional depth.

Sometimes I tell the story of a woman I interviewed in the StoryCorps booth. I had talked to her husband to get them to come and do the interview, but he clearly had not explained the whole setup to her. So, when she came to the booth, she was not about to talk about their entire life with me. Yet, by the end of the interview, I was asking her about her grandbabies, because it was such an intimate setting. She went on to help out on a lot of our events, and she would often do it from a place of joy, showing up with hugs and a “How are things?” Once, though, I ran into her at an event in the community, and she was really sad; she told me it was the anniversary of her son’s murder. And we had this amazing heart-to-heart, with mostly me just listening. She just wanted to talk to somebody. I remember feeling very humbled by the trust that let her feel it was a story she could share with me. And I was grateful that I understood that my role was to be that support for her. That was definitely not what I was taught in architecture school!

Douglas: No, people didn’t figure in very highly, or whether their opinions mattered. It was more like: if you build it, they’ll come! There was a sense of bravado about the agency of the architect to decide what’s best, and everyday people were essentially absent from the discussion. There was, of course, focus on the discourse of architecture and the role that architecture played in the history of civilization, and how that was a compelling role. Usually, we focused on architecture that was designed for very, very wealthy people, the ruling class – the Medicis or the Bonapartes. Or Le Corbusier proposing to wipe away the poorer residential sectors of Paris for the “Radiant City” project, as if that’s just what you do as an architect in the name of “progress.” And so, yes, I think it really was a white supremacist education. Unfortunately, in many places, it probably still is.

Liz: Yeah. We’re having this conversation the day before the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder and, you know, as a Black woman, I can say it’s not just this past year, but for some people the clock did start at May 25th 2020. It feels like there are some cracks forming in this system of white supremacy and growing bigger. I hope it crumbles in my lifetime, but, you know, we’ll see.

Unfortunately, our training makes us complicit in harm. It’s one thing to march in the streets or do your hashtags and all that stuff, but how much change does that actually make? For a lot of the communities that we’re dealing with on a day-to-day basis, it does not help their lives. And so, in every decision that architects make, it’s critical that we ask: are you being complicit in the harm, or, are you supporting the capacity to heal? I think, for the most part, regardless of how well-intentioned people are, they’re actually complicit in the harm. The next question is: how are we taking accountability for our role in these situations? For us, there’s an interrogation of how we are holding ourselves accountable to this community, to their ability to grow their capacity, to tap into joy, to tap into grief – and making sure our actions are not contributing to further harm. At a minimum, that is what we should be doing.

Douglas: Yes. Our project has been to empower the community to dream of this place as theirs, which should be theirs. It’s an invitation to rewrite the narrative every time we do an event, to prototype a future where this is the community’s place. And that’s why we’re still doing it, because it’s super powerful.

You know what? Abigail Munn (Director of Circus Bella) just reached out and said: “We’re back! Could we do the circus in the fall?”

Liz: Yeah! We were already thinking about that!

Douglas: We need that! The community needs that. The joy of a community convening! A healing moment. To come together and be normal again. To bring collective experience back to the community after this really hard year is so important.

Liz: Particularly a neighborhood like the Bayview, which would have had a disproportionate number of essential workers and a significant enough minority and low-wage population that they would have been at higher risk for COVID. This past year for us was hard, but the year for them was even harder. And so it’s great to think about what we can support.

We have access to resources. We have power through our positions in the field, with clients and so on. How do we leverage that to support an improved quality of life for others? Also, how can we create models? … because everybody should be doing this! The other success of the work that we’ve done is that we’ve seen other activation projects happen in Bayview and in other communities that we can trace back to people seeing and being inspired or talking to us to figure out how to do this in other places?

Architects often shy away from the riskier proposition, but it’s important that we are modeling how to change the entire way in which this work is commissioned. When communities themselves start to demand by showing that it can be done, …and the more of us that do it, that’s what makes the cracks break open to holes, holes that then allow the system to crumble.

Douglas: It’s a new normal of inclusion, which is a really different normal.

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The above video, produced by Ryan Petty, describes the storytelling process that launched the on-site work of NOW: Hunters Point, including the making of the Listening Booth, the StoryCorps recording sessions, and the community listening parties.

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