BY ZACH MORTICE

Damon Rich talks about the planning approaches that recently earned him a MacArthur Fellowship.

FROM THE JANUARY 2018 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

Damon Rich describes himself as a designer who uses the tool set of a community organizer. Rich says his goal at his design firm, Hector, with partner Jae Shin, and at his previous post as a founder of the Center for Urban Pedagogy, is to “[assemble] constituencies, trying to connect people so they can better exert political influence.” As a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship grant recipient, Rich will get a chance to see how an infusion of money ($625,000), translated through broad-based grassroots urban planning, can pull policy levers to make urbanism more equitable, healthy, and vital.

With Hector, his goal is to go into a neighborhood and uncover design elements that can offer multilayered meanings and associations to meet a wide range of needs. “I’m really excited to keep on finding ways to design things that really become social objects and social symbols,” Rich says. At the Newark Riverfront Park project, designed by Lee Weintraub, FASLA, during Rich’s tenure as the planning department director for the city of Newark, New Jersey, the color orange is used prominently in a boardwalk. The color references local schools’ heraldry and Newark’s municipal neighbors, East Orange and West Orange. It also works because it’s a neutral hue across local gang turfs. After it was built, a yoga instructor who teaches classes there complimented Rich for selecting this color because (unbeknownst to him) orange represents the water chakra.

Rich practices largely in the urban planning tradition, but he’s not careful about disciplinary lines. At the Center for Urban Pedagogy, he created users’ manuals for the city, working with marginalized communities that most need civic jargon translated into plain language. “I Got Arrested! Now What?” explains in graphic novel format how the justice system works, while “Vendor Power!” uses nearly wordless IKEA-like diagrams to show street vendors (who may be recent immigrants who don’t read English) how to comply with vending rules. Clear explanations of the city’s form, use, and regulations are part of his responsibility to “make physical things that carry the will toward self determination of a community,” Rich says.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

You work from the urban planning discipline, but there’s significant overlap with landscape design. What is the current state of the intersection of these two fields for you?

A rendering of what a new Mifflin Square Park in Philadelphia might look like. Photo courtesy of Hector Urban Design, Planning & Civic Arts.

Like most people who studied architecture, I came out with a lot of misconceptions about landscape and planning. Luckily, my first job after studying architecture was in the New York City parks department, where there were about 15 of us in the architecture office and more than 100 in the landscape architecture office. I feel very blessed as someone who, from that early age, learned to practice architecture among landscape architects. I definitely learned the value of collaboration and bringing different disciplinary lenses to the table.

There are a lot of problems that can’t be solved with a new building, especially in terms of public open and green space.

When we’re designing public spaces, art installations, or neighborhood plans, some of the thinking that’s been most valuable to me is about how landscape is a social object in its origins and in its effects. Those early years working at the parks department really put me in a position to see how all kinds of social harmony and conflict are organized and embodied through the landscape.

Hector and the Center for Urban Pedagogy’s projects tend to focus on community process as much as on design results, if not more. Do you feel like civic designers are way behind on how their processes engage communities, and pretty OK when it comes to how their processes wind up turning into designs for public space? 

Rich worked on the first comprehensive zoning overhaul for Newark in 50 years. Photo courtesy of Hector Urban Design, Planning & Civic Arts.

At Hector, one of our highest values is to have the process of detailed design intimately connected to the other types of discussions you’re talking about. One thing that we really want to stand against is the segmentation of our disciplines into people who do output and engagement versus people who do design. The value that we bring is being able to work in a continuous path through those different types of activities. As designers, we think that our best ideas for the design of the spaces that we make come from the rich and complicated human relationships we are able to develop with our clients.

Where does your firm’s name come from?

Like the orange boardwalk, it’s become something that has many layers. “Hector” is a verb, meaning to bully or to affirm aggressively. We really feel that design and architecture and planning are these kinds of activities whether we want them to be or not. Our environments really do a lot to impact and shape our behavior as people. We really think there’s an importance to recognizing that forceful aspect of design so we can use that power to achieve the goals of our clients and partners.

Zach Mortice is a Chicago-based architecture and landscape architecture journalist. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram @zachmortice.