AIA has a history with American mayors. What keeps them up at night are not inevitabilities they’re merely anticipating— rather, what keeps them up are real choices that have profound consequences.
Earlier this month, I was to represent AIA in the U.S. Conference of Mayors (USCM) in Austin at a meeting that was canceled due to COVID. It’s been a tough year for mayors, to say the least. When we talk about cities tackling challenges “head-on,” I don’t think we realize that often it comes down to one person acting on the best intelligence and advice of their municipal teams. I also don’t think we fully realize what accountability means until we consider the responsibility of mayors.
Over the last few years, AIA has been cultivating relationships with mayors in every part of the country. Shirley C. Franklin, the former mayor of Atlanta, currently serves on AIA’s Board of Directors. Her rock-solid ethics, zeal for transparency in the public process, and long-term infrastructure investments were boons for the city. A few years ago, I worked with then-Mayor of South Bend Pete Buttigieg, who at the time had been receiving a lot of flack for upgrading the city’s infrastructure, which will pay dividends for generations. If he had just focused on policing and public safety, he might have had more fans. But, he was committed to re-creating a city that had been decimated 60 years ago with Studebaker’s departure. If you talk to Mayor Nan Whaley of Dayton, Ohio, she will tell you about the importance of school safety as an investment and a virtue. When you talk to former Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett, he will tell you that cities with low standards will not attract businesses with high standards—and there is no greater standard than the city’s quality of life.
My message to mayors, which I intend to deliver in alternate ways, is: You need architects to build better projects if you want to remain relevant and prosperous. Equitable design shapes our citizenry. Climate action will save our cities.
My message to them is also supported by evidence. Look at South Bend, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Atlanta for four dramatic examples of transformation half a century after we all thought their stories were set in stone. Each one of those narratives requires an architect’s thinking; each one of those cities was made better and more prosperous because of architects.
The narratives of cities and towns, big or small, are always being written. In those narratives, the architect’s role is unchanging: What architects do is create places where people live their lives, and where people experience the things that make us happy and help us learn and find fulfillment. There’s the physical infrastructure of roads and bridges—all of which define a community’s capacity to make the most of its future. There’s also the vertical infrastructure of affordable housing, museums, schools, and hospitals—all of which define the promise of a civil society, as I’ve said on numerous occasions.
More fundamental and, to my mind, elemental is the opportunity to make cities more equitable, which creates an organizing logic from which everything else may grow. Let’s talk about bridges, but let’s also talk about connectivity and access for disenfranchised neighborhoods. Let’s talk about affordable housing, but let’s also talk about ensuring the things that support residential life like sanitation, well-maintained parks, nearby grocers who sell fresh produce, clinical healthcare, and safe schools.
Where architects and mayors are aligned is on converting talk to action, which makes them ideal partners.
