Even in times of uncertainty where funding and policy constraints remain a large question mark, there is still an abundance of opportunity to create impactful and innovative public projects. That’s if designers can understand how to approach the politics of navigating limited budgets, ample bureaucracy and complexity, and diverse project stakeholders.

This shift requires planners and designers – whether landscape architects, urban planners and designers, architects and engineers – to expand our mindsets beyond simply shaping the aesthetics of projects to seeing their role as a bridge between communities, stakeholders and policy and decision-makers.

Central to our work designing landscapes, public and open spaces, and urban planning processes for public sector agencies like the New York City Housing Authority, School Construction Authority and Brooklyn Public Library system is approaching public facing work with a community organizing mindset – like we’re adeptly running a political campaign.

The best and most effective political campaigns focus on listening, understanding community priorities, communicating in a way that people can actually understand and relate to, and pointing them to a galvanizing vision of what’s possible.

So what does that look like in the context of designing transformative public sector projects?

Listening deeply to communities

The way that scope of works are put together for many public sector design projects, community engagement, discovery and immersion is included as a short phase at the beginning. Design concepting and implementation comes on the back end. As part of that, designers often come in with pre-existing and conceived ideas about the direction a project could or should go.

We suggest inverting this process, ensuring there is ample time at the outset to build meaningful relationships and talk to a wide cross-section of community stakeholders. This can include connecting with churches, tenant associations, youth groups and elderly groups and small local businesses. In practice, this looks like listening without an agenda: spending time in communities informally outside of structured sessions, having casual conversations, and asking better and more nuanced questions to understand both historic barriers and resentments as well their vision and aspirations.

While it may seem counterintuitive, this approach ends up saving time and money in the long run. When projects attempt to advance with design concepts that aren’t reflective of – and thereby rejected by – communities, the project team has to go back to the drawing board and repeat parts of the process.

In putting together a new open space plan for the multigenerational residents of Jefferson Houses in East Harlem, we needed to address the competing interests and priorities of two groups within a large NYCHA development. We made it a priority to actually spend time with local leaders – giving them space to express themselves, meeting in locations where they were comfortable and working through the process at a pace that felt good to them. By doing so, we could figure out solutions that would meet the age-specific open space needs of different residents in a way that felt egalitarian, that ensured their priorities were acknowledged and integrated into the design, and that gave them a sense of ownership as we moved forward.

We were able to show them that we understood and embraced their skepticism as a healthy part of the process, ultimately landing on a solution that introduces new central gathering spaces across the campus, including playgrounds for young people, spaces for teens and garden areas for seniors, while also achieving the client goal of addressing flooding and improving climate resiliency for the larger East Harlem community.

Getting creative with funding

Cities and local agencies are being forced to do more and more with less and less. While that can be a source of pessimism and frustration, it can be an opportunity to get more creative with available resources and maximize existing pots of funding.

Doing so requires close ongoing collaboration with public agency partners and bureaucrats who have invaluable insider knowledge of how funding units operate. Together, we find ways to stretch the boundaries of what’s possible and navigate red tape without disrupting stipulations and regulations attached to funding. By collaborating, we’re able to benefit all parties involved, leveraging capital investments to create tangible and immediate outcomes that residents can get excited about.

For South Jamaica Houses in Queens, we took advantage of construction that was already required for stormwater infrastructure repairs, using it as an opportunity to embed much-needed public amenities into the project design. Instead of needing to invest an added $10 million to introduce a separate design, we were able to value engineer $1 million of existing funding by developing an innovative design solution for the project that created a sunken basketball course that could double as gallery space, a farmers market and space for other forms of community programming. Having a component of the project that creates immediate, visible value helps alleviate some of the inconvenience that the community has to go through during lengthy construction processes.

Projects like this show that the Cloudburst formula commonly used in Copenhagen – a design and planning approach that integrates climate adaptation infrastructure with publicly accessible spaces – is entirely possible in the United States. And it doesn’t need to break the bank, either.

Helping people visualize what change can look like

To build consensus and coalitions, all communities impacted need to be able to visualize what change can look like — and be able to imagine themselves within it.

The ability to understand and talk about design concepts shouldn’t be reserved for designers. If we’re doing our jobs well, all kinds of stakeholders should feel comfortable using imagery and visual assets to support their own storytelling.

For the New York City Department of Education Learning Farm, which recently opened as the first and largest educational urban farm in the city, we were able to put together a full package of visual assets for council members and city officials. Using this toolkit, we presented our idea around the city to everybody from the Brooklyn borough president’s office, city departments and state assembly offices — building widespread support and expanding committed funding for the project from $250,000 to $15 million.

And assets don’t just mean standard renderings. We’ve been using virtual reality headsets to help community members better visualize and imagine themselves within proposed ideas.We should also be developing the kind of materials people can interact with in their day-to-day lives: postcards, puzzles and games, refrigerator magnets, expressive art activities and anything that can get people excited.

Talking like a human and normalizing the work

It can be easy to fall into the trap of using excitable buzzwords and jargon to try to build buy-in for projects. In practice, these phrases can quickly become meaningless to many communities. (See the landscape urbanism bullshit generator).

Just like the most impactful politicians are those who can speak in plain and relatable ways, so should we be talking to communities in accessible language that directly addresses their questions and concerns — another benefit of listening!

This also means resisting the urge to overpromise because it sounds good in the moment. It also means resisting the urge to veer away from thorny and complicated topics because they’re seen by partners as too complicated or controversial to engage with, leaving the elephant in the room unaddressed. Many communities are used to seeing consultants parachute in and – often due to opaque communication between city agencies and consultants – make promises that their clients aren’t able to actually deliver on or are hesitant to engage in dialogue around, further embedding distrust and disdain.

We can work to rebuild this trust by believing in the intelligence of communities, by informing them of the factors that will influence each project’s trajectory, by being realistic with them about what’s possible within schedule and budget – and letting them decide how they would proceed within those constraints.

In every project, we try to be transparent with community members upfront. We take the time to walk them through a framework of the considerations that will impact the design and delivery of that project: site conditions and design, community preferences, project timeline, constructability, cost and budget and maintenance. Giving that perspective helps create a frame of reference and reduces frustration around why project decisions are being made.

Getting social with policy- and decision-makers

Like with a campaign, it’s important to do the work of getting social. You’ve seen this in election campaigns when prospective leaders show up in popular social and cultural environments, rather than just a political sphere. People want to work with and are more likely to trust people they see showing up places – including outside of the places you’d expect to see them.

In the era of Zoom and most of our connections being mediated by screens, we can’t overstate the importance of building real in-person connections. That means showing up at street fairs, community festivals, holiday parties, dinners, sporting games, knitting classes, public talks and forums, community service events and food pantries.

It’s these repeated contacts and informal relationship-building that builds the casual rapport and trust that can yield the information and decisions necessary to move projects forward. It also allows designers to understand and be sympathetic to the conditions that stakeholders and decisionmakers and policymakers operate within. Showing up and building relationships applies to contractors as well. Being able to build relationships grounded in mutual respect allows us to get insights and options that can save time, energy and money once project construction is underway.

This post was originally published on Next City.