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In 2021, Sanaa Shaikh was burned out. As a South Asian woman working in an overwhelmingly white and male profession, she had spent years experiencing her fair share of discrimination and microaggressionswhile at the same time being tasked with designing housing developments for underserved communities where she routinely felt like her ideas and perspective were dismissed. She was ready to move on. A friend asked whether shed consider going into public-sector work, and mentioned Public Practicea social enterprise that works to build the design skills and capacity of the public sector across the U.K. by bringing established professionals from architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, city and town planning, engineering, transportation, and ecology into local government. Sanaa Shaikh [Photo: courtesy Public Practice] After completing Public Practices program last year, Shaikh has remained in the public sector, working as placemaking lead for the London Borough of Bexley. In the role, she shapes urban design and develops planning guidance for the area, initiating efforts to reanimate its disinvested public realm to support local businesses and to ensure overlooked groups including young people and the elderly have free and accessible spaces to spend time. You have way more impact by designing for the everyday in the public sectoryoure actually contending with wider societal issues, Shaikh says. Public Practice was cofounded in 2017 by Pooja Agrawal and Finn Williams, both of whom were working for the Greater London AuthorityLondons city governmentin response to what they saw as a challenge facing local areas within the city. They found that nearly every local authority was struggling to attract qualified architecture and design professionals with the right skills to support their work. We set up Public Practice to see how we can make the public sector a player in driving development with public purpose in mind and raise the ambition and quality of what is being driven and delivered, Agrawal says. Pooja Agrawal [Photo: Benoît Grogan-Avignon/courtesy Public Practice] The rise and fall of public-sector designers Until the 1970s nearly half of U.K.-based architects worked in the public sector, with some of the most admired architects of their time working for local councils. But by 2020 that rate had dropped substantially. Agrawal attributes the decline to stagnant wages in the public sector, the increasingly outsize influence of the private sector in urban development, and a perception of local government as bureaucratic and ineffectual. These problems arent unique to the U.K.they are challenges for the urban planning and design professions in the U.S. and Canada as well. In their work, Agrawal and Finn could feel a marked difference in those local councils that had design skills in-house in their ability to deliver projects. And on the other side we were seeing increasing dissatisfaction with our peers and friends in the built environment sector but who hadnt seen public-sector work as a desirable option. They studied design because they had a social agenda and wanted to make a difference but ended up designing toilets instead, Agrawal says. Public Practice’s spring 2024 cohort [Photo: Benoît Grogan-Avignon/courtesy Public Practice] To address this, Public Practice devised its central associate program to partner up local authorities looking to build their in-house design capacity with yearlong cohorts of mid-career professionals, the majority of whom come from the private sector and are looking to transition into public-sector work. In their placements, these designers address everything from affordable housing and the climate crisis to town center redevelopment in response to changing retail patterns. Since that initial group, Public Practice has delivered more than a dozen cohorts and scaled from a focus on London to cities and towns across England and into Wales, placing more than 370 people with upward of 97 different public-sector organizations; nearly 75% of those people have remained working in the public sector. Alumni stay part of a community of practice, getting ideas and inspiration from other public-sector designers through a dedicated Slack group, learning trips, and public forum. [Photo: Dion Barrett/courtesy Public Practice] Redefining meaningful work Designer Laura Keay felt like she was hitting a wall after spending years as part of a two-person sustainable architecture studio doing low-embodied carbon, adaptive reuse, and retrofit buildings for multifamily homes, community spaces, schools, and cultural hubs in the U.K. and internationally. I felt like I was waving a green flag in a larger system that isnt always set up to support our values, Keay says. Laura Keay [Photo: Benoît Grogan-Avignon/courtesy Public Practice] She decided to do Public Practice to scale her impact beyond the few projects she was able to work on at any given time. Working across a diverse range of projects showed me how much design can do, but also where its influence stops without the right policies and systems behind it. Keay became a community retrofit officer with the London Borough of Merton, shaping planning policy and building retrofit strategies and sustainability frameworks to guide the area toward its transition to net zero by 2050. If we want sustainable and equitable places, change has to happen systemically from planning and policy and not just project to project, she says. In parallel to its placement program, Public Practice has been trying to instigate a wider culture and perception shift in how local government and public-sector work is thought of and talked about, even launching a magazine, Public Notice, that looks at the backstory of public space and public-sector projects. Theyve flipped that narrative and created a space where the public sector is now seen as an opportunity for real leadership and where the most meaningful work happens behind the scenes in policy writing and strategic planningthat it isn’t always about designing buildings, Keay says. I can’t believe Im saying that as an architect. [Photo: Benoît Grogan-Avignon/courtesy Public Practice] In the past seven years Public Practice has already had to weather and respond to ongoing internal and external crises, each of which has had implications for public planning and designfrom the pandemic, implementation of Brexit, changes in the U.K. government, and the Grenfell Tower tragedy. Public Practice is continuing to adapt to an ever-changing economic and political context with local authorities under increasing financial pressure and expectations to do more with less. The group has received inbound interest from cities in North America and Europe curious about the model and is starting to explore what it could look like to adapt its approach within different contexts. For us, international expansion isnt simply about rolling out the associate program globally, Agrawal says. Instead, its about developing new, locally embedded models that respond to different political, spatial, and institutional contexts while holding true to our core mission of building public-sector capability in place-based work.
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Every weekday morning, across the country, parents fall into the same routine. A line of SUVs and minivans snakes around the school. Engines idle as mothers and fathers inch forward, phones in one hand, coffee in the other. Kids sit in the back seat scrolling on their own phones, waiting for their turn to be unloaded by a staff member in a reflective vest. One by one, the doors open, backpacks are lifted, and the vehicle pulls away. The factory-like process is orderly, efficient, and utterly dehumanizing. The school drop-off ritual is a powerful curriculum, teaching kids that they are packages to be delivered and picked up, and that they require constant adult supervision. In 1969, about 48% of children walked or biked to school. By 2009, that number had dropped to just 13%, according to Walk, Bike & Roll to School statistics. Today, the figure hovers around 11%, largely unchanged for a decade, per Rutgers University. Even among children who live within a mile of school, walking or biking has fallen from nearly 90% in 1969 to just 35% in 2009. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"","headline":"Urbanism Speakeasy","description":"Join Andy Boenau as he explores ideas that the infrastructure status quo would rather keep quiet. To learn more, visit urbanismspeakeasy.com.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.urbanismspeakeasy.com\/","colorTheme":"green","redirectUrl":""}} Whats going on? The shift didnt happen because children stopped being born with legs or because they stopped wanting independence. Schools were moved to the edges of town, often on cheap land surrounded by parking lots and wide arterial roads. Roads were engineered to maximize long-distance automobile throughput and minimize short-distance walking and cycling. Parents were persuaded that it was unsafe to let kids walk or bike, even though most child fatalities happen while they are passengers in vehicles. Logistics management Line up, inch forward, unload. It looks like logistics management because it is logistics management. We have turned the beginning of a school day into a miniature supply-chain operation. This logistical worldview carries profound consequences. Physical health: Walking and biking to school once provided children with reliable daily exercise. Today, U.S. teenagers walk about 5 miles less per week than teens did in the 1990s, The Wall Street Journal reports, and rates of childhood obesity have tripled since the 1970s, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Mental health: Independent mobility builds confidence. A child who can walk to school learns to navigate space, manage risk, and take pride in independence. A child chauffeured twice a day learns dependence, passivity, and helplessness. Safety paradox: Parents believe driving is a safe way to get around, but an average of three children are killed and another 445 injured every day in traffic crashes, National Highway Transportation Administration’s traffic safety data shows. Packages dont talk back, dont take detours, dont linger to climb a tree, don’t stop to pet a dog, and don’t notice the smell of honeysuckle on the way to class. Car dependency trains kids to be passive and dependent cogs in a machine. The irony is that the very efficiency parents cravefaster lines and predictable behaviorincreases congestion, frustration, and risk to everyone on the roads. The alternatives We dont need a time machine in order to reintroduce childhood independence to our culture: Walking school buses are groups of kids who walk together, accompanied by one or two adults. This approach offers safety in numbers while teaching kids independence. Bike buses or bike trains do the same with cycling, helping to normalize two-wheeled commutes for kids. School siting reform could reanchor school construction back in neighborhoods, instead of exiling buildings to distant parcels accessible only by car. The morning line is more than a nuisance; its a ritual of indoctrination. Every inch forward in that queue trains children to see themselves as cargo, delivered by others, rather than as capable individuals navigating their world. But if we flip the script, if we give kids back some autonomy, the benefits ripple outward. Parents reclaim sanity. Communities reclaim healthier, calmer streets. And children reclaim one important thing the car line strips away: freedom. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"","headline":"Urbanism Speakeasy","description":"Join Andy Boenau as he explores ideas that the infrastructure status quo would rather keep quiet. To learn more, visit urbanismspeakeasy.com.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.urbanismspeakeasy.com\/","colorTheme":"green","redirectUrl":""}}
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Getting dressed for work takes some effort. You have to buy the right clothes, choose what you want to wear each day, and think about how the way you dress affects the way people see you. Some people like to use their clothes as a way to call attention to themselves, while others are not interested in having their clothes make a statement. While there are always some special occasions at work when you want to think carefully about what you wear that day, there are probably many days when you would like to be able to get up and choose an outfit quickly, because there are more important things you have to do in the morning before you head out the door for another day. For that reason, it is helpful to develop a uniform for yourself. That is, a simple look that allows you to make at most a small number of choices that allow you to get dressed and ready. Of course, your uniform need not be an identical set of outfits the way Steve Jobs adopted a black turtleneck and jeans (famously copied by Elizabeth Holmes). Here are a few considerations as you develop that uniform. Stand out or blend in In any environment, there is a certain amount of similarity in the way people around you dress. Those patterns of style set expectations about what people with different roles within your organization typically wear and how that is affected by other factors like gender. Your choice of uniform affects whether other people are likely to notice your clothes. The more that you dress similarly to others, the less that your appearance is going to be a factor that makes you leap out of the environment to others. To the extent that you select clothes that display a more individual style, you are inviting others to notice you because of what youre wearing. You should decide whether youre comfortable with the impact of the decision you make. When you wear something that you feel will call attention to itself, that can influence how you feel when walking the hallways, going to a meeting, or even sitting in a public area having lunch. If you dont like that sort of attention, then a unique outfit is likely to make you uncomfortable. If you dont mind the occasional smile from coworkers or comments about your clothes, then a more individual style can be a welcome point of conversation. Of course, you do want to be aware of the difference between friendly conversations about how youre dressed and comments that veer toward harassment. Talk to a supervisor or your HR rep if you get comments that make you uncomfortable. Everyone should have the chance to display their individual style without fear of unwanted advances. Dress up or dress down One of the dimensions of difference across people in a particular role is whether they tend to dress more formally or more casually relative to their peers. Casual dress tends to lean toward outfits that are more strongly associated with leisure rather than work. More formal dress is often associated with people higher up in the work hierarchy. Casual dress evokes a less serious attitude about work. That doesnt mean that people who dress casually work less hard. But, they are dressing in a way that creates the impression that work is not a strong driving force in their lives. As a result, casual dress is often easier for people to get away with when they have more power within the organization. That power enables them to overcome the initial impression conveyed by their outfit. When you have relatively less power (or are trying to make a positive impression about your workplace attitude), then dressing more formally than is required is an easy way to leave an initial impression of your dedication to the work you do. When in doubt, find a guide Choosing a work uniform (particularly if youre new to an organization or a role) can create some stress. Before investing in your clothes, take a look at other people around you. In particular, notice the ones whose sense of style you admire. What is it about the way that they are dressing that leads them to look comfortable in their surroundings? You need not copy the people whose uniforms you admire. Instead, you want to learn from them. Think about how those people are conveying something about themselves through their work attire. Then, think about what you would like to say about yourself. If youre like most people, you may be able to answer the question of what you want your clothes to say about you, but you may have more trouble figuring out how to get your clothing to say it. Thats where you should seek help. If youre very lucky, you have a friend who knows a lot about clothing who can take you shopping to help you develop your uniform. If not, find a clothing store with a well-trained sales staff. Talk to the staff about how you want your clothes to make you feel and what you want to communicate to others by your look. Let them help you pick out a couple of combinations that will convey that message. Of course, the stores that have great staff are often (somewhat) pricy. If youre shopping on a limited wallet, then pick one or two outfits from that store as a baseline for the rest of your work uniform. Use what you learned to pick similar things at a store that fits your budget. Also, remember that your ideas about the ideal uniform will change over the years. That is going to reflect a variety of factors including your growing confidence in yourself over the course of your career, changes in your role within an organization, and changes in the amount of money you feel like spending on clothes at different points in your life. As a result, you may go through this exercise periodically to reset your look.
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