Eliminating the "other" is a strategic design for Achieving Full Integration of Diverse Communities in an Urban Environment by Serrino Shizun Liu and Jehane Akiki.
The projection later had been presented in United Nation and UNESCO by Jehane Akiki.
Research on design practices that minimize the hostile perception of the other so that they are more successfully integrated into their urban settings
A system guideline for the integration of diverse communities to produce more inclusive urban environments by adopting a holistic and multilevel approach that addresses all stakeholders involved (from policymakers and government officials to community leaders)
This project is part of a comparative analysis of different urban scenarios in which diverse communities find themselves co-inhabiting the same urban space. In our work, we focus on different situations as the starting point of our inquiry into how socially distinct and heterogeneous communities can be integrated to coexist in an urban environment. We approach this endeavor through the lens of governance to understand how the areas of interaction and collective decision-making can be influenced to produce such a diverse community.
In our research, we ultimately seek to find out how different, marginalized communities can be better included: How can they be successfully integrated into a society so that they are no longer the "other"?
We looked at 4 different cases of urban exclusion, Beijing, Lebanon, New York and Hartford, in order to inform us how to better design governance strategies to minimize this hostile perception of the other and produce more inclusive urban environments.
Four Cases:
Hartford, CT - impact gentrification - inspired by urban development - is having on Hartford’s communities.
New York - Gentrification have made changes in racial demographics and the social economic status of residents.
Beijing - The urbanization, which caused Beijing’s population grew rapidly. Rat tribe - people who are allowed legally possess resident right in Beijing are forced living in basement.
Syria - A lot of money is being put into ‘solving the crisis’ but the needs on the ground are not being met; refugees gave aid agencies a rating of 3/10 when asked if they met their priority needs; 2.5 if their opinions are considered.
While researching these four cases Hartford, NYC, Beijing, and Syria, we attempted to understand how individuals in the communities are dealing with exclusion.
What we recognized is that there is not one solution, but we would have to employ a holistic approach that targets different areas at once. (Education, Finance, Real Estate, Climate Change, Health, etc)
We started designing our concept by putting the community at the heart of the process.
We employed the design thinking tools that we used in this class as the basis for community engagement and imagined this as an ongoing process of community engagement, ideation, and prototyping for the needs of the different categories that we had identified in our opportunity map.
What this points to is that integration is not a "project". To truly produce inclusive society, you need a holistic system/network of collective life and decision making.
Its values would be community-centered, open-based; highly localized( with a commitment to the place but linked to the broader urban context); collaborative (between different stakeholders), inclusive (makes use of every skill available in the community) and Institutionalized (supported by institutions and ecosystems that embody new community-centered norms of political-economic activity)
Various structures and networks are needed to create such a system and there would need to be a managing platform, which we referred to as a “community-building cooperative” :
This ongoing project started by looking at different cases of urban exclusion,
from the Rat Tribe in Beijing to the current Syrian refugee migration crisis,
through the lens of design thinking in order to inform us how to better design governance practices and conditions for more inclusive urban environments.
Through the application of design thinking tools, we conducted multiple observations with the different populations in question to get first hand insights on how they experience marginalization.
We then engaged with different stakeholders, from the affected communities, refugees, government officials, and professionals working on the ground in different fields, and organized brainstorming sessions to ideate on how to overcome this 'otherness'.
From an economic perspective, marginalization costs governments.
If the population that is marginalized can be turned into
fully productive members of society, they will have positive social, economic,
and political repercussions on their environment.
Human behavior cannot be controlled,
yet it can be influenced by incentives and macro-scale changes
that create the conditions for a more participatory urban space.