How do you convince people that environmental and social resilience can be tackled with common solutions?
What started in 1987 as a three-year landscape planning effort for West Philadelphia ultimately grew into an expansive, consciousness-shifting “action research” project to restore urban nature and rebuild inner-city neighborhoods in West Philly’s Mill Creek Watershed through advocacy, education, and design.
In 2020, Anne Whiston Spirn, the project’s director, recruited me to spruce up some unfinished videos that were meant to communicate some of the key lessons from the project. Concerned that the structure of the existing edits wouldn’t be able to inspire her target audiences, I proposed a strategy that would allow us to communicate a powerful story and overarching lesson about design.
Taking inspiration from Anne’s writings and great essay-style documentaries such as Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, I proposed that we dive back into the series of interviews of Anne between 2015 and 2017 to find a clearer sense of story and transformation. Together, we developed a new series of videos, sampling from the earlier edits but connecting each of her revelations to specific anecdotes.
Our process inspired Anne to write a new article based on one of our scripts and to reach a deeper understanding of how she’s evolved as a designer. We are almost finished with the final chapter, which examines unintended consequences of her work leading to “green gentrification” and the current phase of the project of helping African American homeowners to keep their homes prior to environmental improvements.
Role: Co-Writer, Co-Editor
For: MIT DUSP
Date: 2020 -
Type: narrative strategy, research, media campaign
Project Director: Anne Whiston Spirn
Editors: John Moody, Libbie Cohn
Cinematography: Libbie Cohn, Michael Waldrep