Why City Planning needs Interior Designers

My practice brings new life to US cities by bridging the gap between interior design and city planning! 

 

Growing up, I wanted a dollhouse. However, in those days boys didn’t play with dolls. Instead, I built a scrappy dollhouse out of a shoebox with odds and ends my grandmother had given me. Next I built a mini city with the same materials. Building model cities and interior spaces became my hobby. I was fascinated with the environment around me. I would redecorate my room often and give my mother decorating advice. 

 

After high school, I studied interior design at Woodbury University. Through the Interior Design program I learned how to understand my relationship to the environment. I took classes in color theory, art history, perspective and design. I designed an art-deco, bank lobby, a pink shoe store, and a Spanish room addition. I excelled at interior design. After a graduated however, I could not find a design job. Much to everyone’s surprised I joined the army with the promise to be stationed in Europe. It was a poor man’s European vacation. 

 

Rather than quickly visit Europe like a tourist, I had 4 years and immersed myself there. I was station in Heidelberg, Germany and Vicenza, Italy. During this time I visited many others cities by train and would spend hours exploring them by foot. 

 

Woodbury’s interior design education prepared me to examine the geography and urban design of various European cities. The natural light, weather, and landscape varied from city to city. The building facades to public spaces I was fascinated by these cities. These included Heidelberg’s pink sandstone buildings, Florence’s warm colored buildings. I was also fascinated with the way streets and plazas were laid like out door rooms with focal points and other creature comforts. I felt at home living amongst Italians because it was similar to living in East Los Angeles. 

 

In Europe I realized urban planners could learn from interior designers as I explored the intersection of urban planning through interior design.

 

When I returned to the states, I shifted careers and studied city planning at MIT. Studying urban planning took the joy out of cities because it was all based on numbers and a sudo-science.  My research on how Latinos used space allowed me to apply interior design methodology with my European experiences. Vicenza and East Los Angeles illustrate two different urban forms, one designed for public social interaction and the other one being retrofitted by the residents to allow for and enhance this type of behavior.  The Italian “passeggiata” was similar to car cruising in ELA. 

 

From comparing Vicenza and ELA I realized that humans experienced public/private, indoor/ourdoor space the same way through their body. However it’s the scale and level of design we put into a space that makes them work or not. 

Using interior design as an urban planning tool allows me to understand how cities feel with is just as tangible as it’s infrastructure. Feelings are less-tangible, but no-less-integral, elements of a city that transform mere infrastructure into place. This determines why some one will drive rather than walk, or why a women walks this way by herself and a different way with her male partner. 

Both these professions examine the relationship of the human body with place from different scales: a room to a street. While planners measure numbers they lack the tools to investigate how places feel. 

 

Through feeling we can investigate issues like gender inequity, environment justice, climate change, health, safety, and other non-quantifiable elements of urban planning that you can’t count.

 

I begin all my urban planning meetings by having participants build their favorite childhood memory with objects in 10 minutes. They quickly examined the hundreds of small objects placed in front of them. Once the participants started to see, touch, and explore the materials they begin choosing pieces that they like, or help them build this memory. They place their pieces on a sheet of colored construction paper. The design process begins once they laid out a few objects on the paper. Hands moved furiously as their designs became more developed and elaborate.  For the next few minutes the participants are in a meditative flow state using their hands. Once they are finished everyone has one minute to share their memory. This begins the planning process with a positive emotion or feeling and not one of anger like most community meetings. What I tell the public we are not hear to build more housing, roads, parks but uplift your story and apply to the creation of place in your community.