dear chinatown, dc

Washington, DC | August 2019 to August 2020

the challenge + opportunity

In a review of strategic planning documents by DC’s Office of Planning, Chinatown’s cultural identity is defined through entertainment and tourism-centered objectives. Absent are recommendations that recognize the neighborhood’s value and significance to its past and present residents, and as a result, private interests and capital have transformed the once predominantly residential neighborhood into the entertainment and tourism-centered hub it is today. (DC Office of Planning 2009 and 2011) And the processes that inform strategic planning documents like these are important contributing factors, because City planners don’t design for engagement, they hold meetings. And these meetings don’t work.

The driving research question that guided my design inquiry on how we can design for better and more meaningful participatory planning models was: How can we connect existing neighborhood assets and the 1882 Foundation’s cultural activities to inform place-keeping in D.C.’s Chinatown?

THE OUTCOME

Dear Chinatown, DC is a multimodal making and sharing station for Chinatown’s past and present to declare what they love about the neighborhood and why through the production of poster-sized love letters. Through words, sketches, calligraphy, poetry, or sharing a story, the project will capture the hearts and minds of the community and what they treasure most about Washington, DC’s Chinatown. The act of generating this type of activity in public places aims to evaluate how we can facilitate inclusive forms of public engagement that make a first step toward new ideas and initiatives for place-keeping. Insights generated from the content from the love letters and from the entire process of engagement associated with the project is to be integral to that story and its dissemination.

THE PROCESS

Methods

The early stages of the project were devoted to relationship building and ecosystem understanding. Participant observation, semi-structured interviews and open-ended surveys were also used to surface existing strengths and assets of the neighborhood. From these explorations, I developed a prototype that considered the following:

• Generate a proactive versus reactive process model

• Form new networks and collaborations to test new outcomes and build capacity

• Generate a process that is adaptable and flexible

• And meet where people are already at and leverage existing assets and resources.

Prototyping 

I conducted a total of 3 prototype iterations that were tested to evaluate how participants engaged with the prototype itself and to analyze the types of insights participants generated through engaging with the prototype. The third and last prototype completed in this study was the full build-out to test the Dear Chinatown project concept at the 2020 Lunar New Year parade.

LESSONS LEARNED + NEXT STEPS

This project hopes to illustrate that we can do more than hold meetings, but design for engagement. Social groups within DC Chinatown’s longtime community are diverse, dynamic, overlapping, and sometimes conflicting. As such, a one-size-fits-all approach to engagement does not work. Dear Chinatown reveals an opportunity to look closer at the mechanics of engagement; both the opportunities to foster more meaningful forms of exchange and learning and how to fill the gaps where we are deficient.

Within the context of DC’s Chinatown, let’s do this by...

Minimizing barriers to communication not only through language but also by diversifying the scale, venue, and methods facilitating interaction and learning amongst participants.

Participatory processes should be seen as a longitudinal process because trust and relationship building takes time. Let’s move away from processes that are extractive and seek out how we can leverage existing strengths and assets of the neighborhood to facilitate participation, engagement, and learning that also brings value to your stakeholders and your constituents.

Let’s build upon and not start from scratch. Chinatown, and more broadly, Washington, D.C. is rich with collaborators and resources that can be leveraged as allies toward making a transformational shift in participatory planning. Design, making, public history, cultural preservation, and physical place were integrated in complementary ways to bring this project to live.