But form can follow community. And form can follow diversity. When community and diversity lead the way, the individual and the singular can also be manifold. Every neighborhood park can capture stormwater to prevent flooding, recharge aquifers, and improve air quality. Every new light rail streetcar line is an economic mobility connector, a cultural corridor, and an affordable housing catalyst. Every housing development anchors a cultural and ethnic community, is an incubator for entrepreneurs, and provides access to healthy food and fitness. Of course, the manifold can have a negative valence too: a school can be a place where children learn but also get separated from their inherited culture. Either way, this complexity—seeking it out, designing and creating with it, and fostering it—is the overarching design parameter of our times.

In one example of cultural strategists making affordable housing policy more effective, they also helped make it more meaningful to the entire neighborhood. San Francisco has grappled with an astronomical rise in housing costs for decades. This has fueled a powerful wave of gentrification, forcing residents, businesses, cultural institutions, artists, and whole communities from their homes. The Mission Economic Development Agency (MEDA), a long-standing economic development organization focusing on the needs of the Mission’s residents, and Galería de la Raza, a major cultural and arts anchor in the Mission, worked together to identify small multifamily apartment buildings that offered affordable rents and were also occupied by at least one local artist or culture bearer. They then utilized the City of San Francisco’s Small Sites Acquisition Fund to acquire these properties, simultaneously preserving existing affordable housing and ensuring that individuals and families who contribute to the cultural vibrancy of the Mission neighborhood help anchor other families and institutions there as well.

As strategic partners, the artists of Galería helped turn a single-purpose program, the Small Sites Acquisition Fund, into a tool for a more comprehensive and effective approach to resisting cultural and physical displacement. According to Ani Rivera, executive director of Galería, “Saving the buildings was more than just saving the units or creating below-market-rate opportunities; it was saving the cultural legacy of the Mission.” Ani and Galería helped demonstrate a new way for MEDA to fulfill its mission and for San Francisco to make its affordable housing funding policy doubly impactful.

Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color have suffered centuries of varied and lasting impacts caused by designers complicit in the mundane evil of bureaucratic racism that has at best been negligent, and at worst predatory. Bureaucratic racism can be described as a flattening of complex human, social, and neighborhood conditions into a monocultural pragmatism that believes all circumstances can be handled through the dominant white, middle-class, Protestant, northern European norms that form the basis of nearly all US public policy. Designers working with this context may have had benevolent intentions around infrastructure—housing, schools, supermarkets, highways—but bureaucracies’ narrow focus and dependence on singular-purpose policies have forced decisions resulting in multiple unintended and often negative consequences. The standards in the federal Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices prescribed the design of roads, optimizing for maximum safe throughput of vehicles, and became a de facto threshold to accessing federal funding. To this day, automobile turning radii, driver sight lines, ubiquitous parking and the like override considerations of shared use of the roads, the community’s characteristic mobility patterns, and local priorities, except in the most progressive of cities and towns.

The ways that designers understand and pursue projects are often prescribed by the roles they play within, or in service to, bureaucracy. Collaborating with artists, who are typically accustomed to creative, boundaryless play and process-based approaches, could benefit designers and help them overcome many of the limitations associated with the bureaucratic mindset.

While some designers have worked with artists, more often than not the interactions between them are transactional and, unfortunately, more about creating a veneer of creativity and community engagement than making real change.

Instead, artists, who are especially skilled at uncovering hidden connections, creating unexpected relationships, and crafting new beginnings and endings, can help designers better engage communities to take part in the planning of infrastructure projects, not just react to them. This is the decolonizing of infrastructure projects, and through it, design decisions can have extraordinarily long-lasting effects. Communities need both designers and artists to help repair the manifold impacts of design decisions of the past that did not, and were never intended to, account for the full scope of humanity and society. Beginning at the earliest stage of projects—the design phase—reparative design can create projects that “inoculate” communities (particularly BIPOC communities) and society at large against many of the overlapping evils that conventional planning has spawned.