Eliza Principe Garcia | CIIP 2023 Blog Portfolio

Posted: July 7, 2023

Orientation

A topic that was brought up several times throughout orientation in different panels and lectures was positionality and how our identities can impact us in different ways depending on the situation. I think in many conversations about identity, our identities can get reduced to the ones that give us privilege and the ones that don’t. But identity is more complicated than that. Intersectionality plays a huge part in how identities are perceived, and the cross between different identities with different levels of privilege make for unique experiences with privilege and oppression. The environment that you are in also plays a huge role in how your identities are perceived. The identity that most easily comes to mind as one of both privilege and oppression is white womanhood. White woman often experience oppression at the hands of the patriarchy, but because of how the white patriarchy is structured, this can also be a position of privilege. The patriarchal view of white woman as weak and something to be protected has many times aided and encouraged the oppression of black and brown communities. This is something that I had thought about before, but this week really brought it into focus and articulated it in a way I hadn’t yet been able to.

Week 1

Instead of focusing on an issue, I want to reflect on an experience that highlights what I love about Baltimore. On my walk to my placement earlier this week, an older gentleman and his friend stopped me to ask if I was an artist. I told him I wasn’t and he responded that I looked like I played music. I left soon after but the experience was so nice that I was in a better mood for the rest of the day. This is always something I enjoy about Baltimore, no matter where I go, someone will always try and connect with you. That could be through smiling at you on the street, saying hello, or fully stopping you to have a conversation. It was never something I had experienced before coming to Baltimore, at least not from strangers, but it was a welcome change. It also reminded me of how much I love the arts and how vibrant that community is in the city. My placement is in Station North, so even though I am not an artist, I was headed to a space rented by plenty of artists. Graffiti ally is right behind my office and you can find murals across the city. Plenty of my co-workers have artist friends and I was given several of their social medias to support them. A lively arts scene is something I’m much more familiar with, and is something I love both in general and about Baltimore.

Week 2

Something that I have begun to enjoy about NDC is how varied the work is from day to day. Because the program I work in, Community Design Works, is community led and volunteer orientated a lot of our work varies depending on when community partners are available. It also leads to meeting a variety of different people—one of the main projects we are working on this summer is meeting with parents that are heading a project to build a playground in Greenmount. We also met with medical students from the University of Maryland to discuss potential partnership. In between that, there is stability is some recurring meetings I have with the center’s executive director and my personal projects. My biggest one is compiling resource guides for community members so they can make improvements to their neighborhoods without the explicit help of the center. It has been a good blend of expected and unexpected. Getting to work with volunteers and community members makes me feel in a more tangible way like I am a part of the project process. I’ve also enjoyed learning more about my coworkers. Many of them have travelled and lived in places across the world which shapes how they approach design here in Baltimore. Harkening back to the playground project, my supervisor lived in Germany for several years and showed me German playgrounds that could influence the design of the playground.

Week 3

This week was especially interesting at my placement because I not only got to help coworkers outside of my normal program but I also helped with a presentation at a community meeting in South Baltimore. With other coworkers, I was able to help with grant applications that my organization was applying for, which was good insight into nonprofit administration, which is something I’m quite interested in even though it isn’t the express purpose of my internship. It was also an enlightening experience because it is a reminder that despite being just an intern, my input and perspective can be helpful.

But the community meeting I attended this week was much more interesting. Our purpose there was to present on a project that NDC is implementing in the neighborhood, give the neighborhood updates on the project and get their feedback. The community members gave valuable insight into the project design and were very receptive and welcoming. During the meeting a lawyer and a resident of Mount Vernon also came to speak about the recent BGE gas retainer controversy. The lawyer spoke about how BGE was getting away with building these retainers without homeowner consent because of a lack of communication between neighborhoods in Baltimore. Apparently, before this lawyer and resident started reaching out to others in the city, there were eight community organizations speaking out about this issue with no knowledge of each other. Baltimore is such a unique and vibrant city because of its neighborhoods, but community across the whole city is so important. Residents in multiple neighborhoods in Baltimore are speaking out against what BGE is doing, but without community organizing and support its hard to fight back against large corporate powers.

Week 4

A lot of my goals before I started CIIP were broad, mostly because I didn’t know much about my placement of what kind of work I’d really be doing there. I knew I wanted to feel like I was doing something with tangible effects, and I knew I wanted to get to know the city of Baltimore better. But beyond that I was very open to how the summer would shape me and how I would grow. Because of this, I don’t think my goals have changed, per say, but I do think that they have become more defined as the summer has progressed. With regard to wanting to do something with tangible effects, one of my projects this summer is creating resource guides that will provide communities with the information they need to improve their neighborhoods. Creating something from start to finish largely by myself like this has been incredibly rewarding so far so I just want to make sure I’m working to complete this by summer’s end. As for getting to know the city, I do feel like I’ve done so at least to some degree already. I’ve become a lot more comfortable in neighborhoods across Baltimore, and I’ve been able to meet a lot more people who live and work in the city not connected to JHU. At my placement, I’ve been able to go to community meetings and events that NDC’s partners host and learn more about the communities I live in and near. July will be a lot more program-based at NDC, so for the rest of my time, I want to try and get to more of these meetings and events.

Week 5

I’ve spent a lot of time this summer thinking about how my internship experiences will help shape my eventual law school application. I’ve always known I wanted community to be the central theme of my application and was the reason I started seriously considering law in the first place, but tailoring your specific experience is always a difficult process. In the end, I think the most valuable thing I’ve learned at NDC this summer is the importance of trust and building relationships. In these architecture and design projects, there are so many moving pieces that require completely different skill sets, from the community members, to the project managers, to the designers, contractors, etc., so it is so important have strong relationships with everyone you are working with. Because of the relationships my supervisor has built running her program at NDC, everyone involved in a project trusts each other and their expertise to follow the project through to completion and for everyone to feel listened to and involved.

Week 7

Because the Neighborhood Design Center works with community partners across Baltimore, intersectionality always plays a role in its work. The Community Design Works Program (CDW) that I help out with serves only low to moderate income neighborhoods, but each community holds so many different identities and experiences beyond that. Even though they are coming to NDC for services, they each have unique perspectives that allow them to best serve their community. Some are teachers, community leaders, neighbors, parents, women, men, people of color. Each of these identities impact the community partner’s experiences and help shape their skill sets. In a new project that will kicking off this fall, a teacher is trying to build a community garden at her school. CDW can help with some of the technical aspects of design and planning, but my supervisor made sure to listen to everything the teacher had to say and schedule a follow-up meeting because she does not have the knowledge and relationships to best serve the school that the teacher does. The teacher knew the students, the faculty, and what was most important to them, which all need to be kept in mind when designing a community space. Without that, people feel spoken over, and projects don’t end up serving them at all.

Intersectionality also occurs across organizations. CDW employs volunteers from a variety of different backgrounds, like architects and graphic designers, as well as with other organizations partnered with CIIP. NDC has already done projects before with the Franciscan Center and Center Baltimore Partnership, where two of my cohort members have been placed this summer. CDW is a community building resource, so it has a great capacity to collaborate with organizations, with CIIP or not, to help improve the built environments of their community.