In the 20th century, the American Dream manifested itself in many elements of the public realm, including through the public swimming pool. Spurred on by the Works Progress Administration and the post-World War II boom, more than 2,000 pools glittered across the American landscape by midcentury, including destinations like Audubon Park pool in New Orleans, Oak Park pool in Montgomery, Ala., and the Fairgrounds Park pool in St. Louis, which in its time, was the largest in the country, featuring a sandy beach and diving structures and serving thousands of swimmers.
As economic and social policy expert Heather McGhee writes, “Officials envisioned the distinctly American phenomenon of the grand public resort pools as ‘social melting pots.’”
The reign of the ubiquitous public pool was short-lived; many were drained, filled with concrete, sodded over, or sold to private entities.
In her book The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World, 2021)—released in paperback last week—McGhee outlines how desegregation efforts to welcome people of color to use these publicly funded pools, which were either explicitly or tacitly built for white people, created an avalanche of closures or privatizations. In short, white folks would rather shutter this public good than share it with people of color.
This is one example of many that McGhee uses to illustrate how racism is universally destructive. The Sum of Us examines this zero-sum paradigm that racism spurs in American society across many realms, from voting rights to the subprime mortgage crisis and mass incarceration.
Of special interest to the design community, McGhee investigates discriminatory housing practices (i.e., redlining, zoning for single-family homes) and the collapse of American investment in infrastructure and shared public goods, such as these historic public pools. “Our roads, bridges, and water systems get a D+ from the American Society of Civil Engineers,” McGhee writes in Chapter 2: Racism Drained the Pool.
ARCHITECT spoke to McGhee to learn more about how architects and designers can correct historic and ongoing discriminatory practices and strengthen public goods and spaces for all.
ARCHITECT: One of the most striking parts of the book is the history of public pools and segregation and desegregation. Do you ever see this kind of social melting pot, like the public pool, returning to this national scope that it was before? Is there anything that's primed to replace it?
That's a really good question. There's an opportunity with the infrastructure bill to spend on social infrastructure to create the kinds of public goods that are about space for people to meet and about socioeconomic and racial diversity and integration, whether that's libraries or pools or other public spaces of recreation and citizenship.
As our climate heats up, public pools are actually going to be more and more important from a public health standpoint. We know that there's inequality around tree cover and shade and, in urban places that are heat traps or rural areas where air conditioning is prohibitively expensive, it's actually going to be more and more important to rebuild the public pool.
Are there any contemporary examples or parallels in the built environment that are repeating the mistakes of the public pool?
Because we let our public infrastructure degrade so much over the past 50 years, it has led to crises in sanitation and water quality, collapsing bridges, lead-poisoned and poorly ventilated schools. And, as with the parable of the drained pool in my book, the brunt of that burden goes to communities of color: 11% of Black children are lead poisoned in the United States; 4% of Mexican American children, and 2% of white children. So, the disparities are very real. At the same time, the entire country suffers from a standard that has fallen so low. The parallel I see today is that it's up to multiracial coalitions to fight together to rebuild the pool of public good for everyone, and the infrastructure bill, for example, is the product of a multiracial coalition.
With the infrastructure bill, do you see any opportunities for architects, designers, planners, developers, and other professionals of the built environment, to right past wrongs?
There's so much in the infrastructure plan that has to do with residential housing. There is absolutely a way to ensure that building new and refurbishing old, climate-ready housing is done in a way that is not just for wealthy people in white neighborhoods but is also for the families that have the highest energy costs and the highest rates of asthma and lead poisoning, are really at the front of the line to benefit from infrastructure spending. Whether that means that architects and designers and contractors get together and make a pledge to have equity in terms of the households and neighborhoods that benefit from their work, or it means organizations and guilds lobbying for that; whether it's sort of voluntary or whether it's designers and builders using their voice and clout to at the municipal or county level, there are a lot of opportunities.
Some design programs around the country have listed your book as recommended reading, and you were the commencement speaker at the Berkeley College of Environmental Design in Berkeley, Calif. What are you hoping emerging and future architects and designers take away from your book?
I'm impressed by things like Design as Protest and Dark Matter University that are trying to interrupt the pedagogy and center racial equity and Black and people of color designers. As my friend Walter Hood [founder and creative director of Oakland, Calif.–based social and design practice Hood Design Studio] is constantly reminding us Black Landscapes Matter. But it's not just about preserving historically significant Black neighborhoods, it's about designing the systems that can build political power and opportunity among the people who live in these places. Designers who care about issues of justice and equity have an opportunity to create the conditions where they're the clients and the initiators of projects that aim to design environments that can empower communities of color. So, for an architect, sometimes that will mean becoming the enlightened developer you wish you had as a client or a developer. This might mean getting involved in the kind of advocacy that leads to policy moves that increase the supply of housing, like undoing single-family zoning, and simultaneously helping protect against eviction and predatory lending and other instruments of housing insecurity.
What advice do you have for architects and designers speaking to elected officials?
Elected officials don't often get highly educated, upwardly mobile white—I say that knowing how white the architecture field is—people in their offices advocating for policies to improve the quality of life for brown and Black people. There is a man-bites-dog quality to effective advocacy and lobbying where politicians are very used to the same type of people coming to their door for the same reasons. There is for many, a hierarchy of value that has to do with income, that has to do with their presumptions about proclivity to vote, their presumptions about whether they have somewhere else to go politically, whether they are potential swing voter, that shapes how much attention they pay to people who live in different communities.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
