It came out of the manuscript review process. My first working title was Talent Unveiled: A Pipeline into the Margins of Society. I proposed to tell a balanced story about youth development and community development that would challenge prevailing beliefs that communities undergo a “natural process” of decline, decay, and reinvestment, and that youth are “problems who need fixing.” Instead I positioned young people at the center of community development to show their creativity in resisting negative change. I’d show that designers don’t need to invent a pipeline so underrepresented youth can enter the professions; that it already exists in the talent that youth use to address community problems. The Fordham University Press executive editor saw how this story aligned with the press’s series POLIS: Fordham Series on Urban Studies, which examines what makes a good community and how people learn to live together effectively. He wisely gave my proposal to the POLIS editor, and that helped shape the book’s story about how youth can work to improve their communities and in the process learn to live together.

The commons is a public domain where people simultaneously experience collective life and participate in determining its quality. I began with the pre-industrial concept of the commons as the land where peasants shared the resources of the baron’s manor, an arrangement that wasn’t just in Europe. For example, in Hawaii—before the U.S. convinced indigenous people that private property was superior to shared ownership—if you worked the land you could subsist on it; its goods were yours to share with other community members. The commons was also a political community for deciding what was in the common good. I applied these early concepts to today’s public domain, which the geographer David Harvey noted only becomes a commons when people appropriate it for their mutual benefit. Current trends to privatize public space, for example, by enclosing and policing it, assert property rights over community rights and eliminate the idea of mutual benefit. When youth participate proactively in their neighborhoods, they assert their rights and responsibilities to share the commons.

The beloved community is the place, as Dr. King described it, where people somehow learn to live together despite their differences. It’s akin to Bucky Fuller’s idea of “Spaceship Earth”: people living on a planet with finite resources that they somehow learn to share. For Dr. King, the barrier to co-existence was racism. I also fault the dominant ethos of American exceptionalism and rugged individualism, neither of which consider how the nation’s legacy of genocide and slavery made possible the world’s greatest economic power. As an alternative, the communal practices of indigenous cultures are central to achieving a beloved community.

I can tell you why I think about public space this way. I grew up during Jim Crow in Cincinnati, the so-called “gateway” to the South. I was a teenager during the 1950s when young people risked their lives to integrate lunch counters, schools, buses, and other public spaces. I grew up knowing that “place” was important—that who could be where and with whom was a life-and-death matter. By the time I got to architecture school, I already knew there was a connection between place and social justice, so Kevin Lynch’s claim about society being mapped out on the ground made perfect sense to me. It makes perfect sense that children, who are keenly observant of spatial details, learn a great deal about their position in society from the places around them. So I set out to help them use public space to explore alternative futures.

These activities are simply community service unless they’re undertaken to address the roots of a problem. Place-based activism is the ability to deliberate and take collective action to achieve a just world, which requires a critical posture. You need to be reflective about the underlying causes of problems and how you might address them systemically. Place-based activism also requires the ability to perceive a common purpose and work with others to take action to address it. Given the nation’s current divisiveness, I wanted to offer an alternative to the prevailing notion of activism as demanding your rights, to show how young people can contribute to their schools and neighborhoods. Collective action and critical consciousness are the antecedents of place-based activism, and those abilities develop within the safety of community programs.

Citizenship involves rights and responsibilities. American education primarily emphasizes the individual’s rights and responsibilities. Teachers measure success as individual accomplishment but there are other ways to live together successfully. What I loved about growing up in my segregated Cincinnati neighborhood was that everyone, poor and well-off, lived together and shared whatever they had. For example, two women in the neighborhood had grand pianos in their homes, and they “required” me to go there to practice while they were out at work because they felt responsible to contribute whatever they had to my musical development. What early African American teachers referred to as “communitarian selflessness” was part of my childhood. It’s counter to the individualistic culture I’ve experienced as an academic. In this book, I focus on youth development that improves not just the individual but the community as a whole. Individual citizens can better themselves and their communities by participating as change agents in the beloved commons, exercising their collective rights and responsibilities.

An activist is anyone who advocates a strong position. So an activist scholar is someone who takes a strong position, and generally that’s discouraged in academia, which is why my credentials as a scholar are suspect. The truth is supposed to be neutral, objective, not subject to individual biases. I have a drawer full of teaching evaluations that say I’m biased or have an agenda. You betcha I do! If you work within the dominant value system, you don’t have to admit your biases, because they are essentially masked within the system. It’s only if you work at the margins of that system that you appear “biased,” otherwise your values are invisible. I also refer to myself as a “tempered radical”—someone who works within the system while trying to change it. The feminist scholar bell hooks believed that choosing to be simultaneously at the center and the margins, as I have done throughout my career, broadens your perspective and allows you to imagine radical new alternatives. Toward that end, I’ve become somewhat of an elder to a group of young academics affiliated with Dark Matter University who seek to invent alternatives to architecture’s individualistic, Eurocentric values.

You don’t. The grading and accreditation system forces educators to reward individual achievement. One alternative is to make community engagement part of individual assessment. But such a requirement is an anomaly within the typical architecture curriculum so students resist it. Then, too, how do you evaluate teamwork? How do you identify what individuals have contributed to a particular outcome? Realizing communitarian selflessness in a program focused upon individual accomplishment is difficult. It requires an entirely different worldview.

Things are definitely worse because of the escalating cost of college, which is negating the calculus of investing time and money to accrue the rewards of earning a college degree. Maybe my goal of staying inside the institution as a tempered radical has run its course. It may no longer be possible to change institutions from the inside. I recently learned that architecture’s professional organizations are considering a really sinister proposal to address the cost and time to earn a college degree. They propose to eliminate it entirely and substitute office training. I hope for a better alternative to credential future professionals than indoctrinating them with market-driven job training, which would surely magnify the nation’s already insidious concentration of power. That’s why youth programs and what they contribute to community betterment interest me. They’re not part of an unjust education and employment system—they seek radical transformative change from the ground up.

All images courtesy of Sharon Egretta Sutton.