Empowering Mayors as Chief Urban Designers

In preparation for hosting for mayors and design leaders, Marcinkoski and Nick Jabs, an associate principal at PORT who earned his Master of Landscape Architecture from Penn, traveled to each of the seven cities represented and visited a series of sites selected by the mayors. The sites represented particular design opportunities or challenges the mayors wanted insight on. Together the mayor and the design team selected a single site in each city to focus their attention on during the session.

In Lenexa, Kansas, a western suburb of Kansas City, the site was a neglected area near 95th Street and Interstate 35. Lenexa Mayor Julie Sayers, an interior designer by training, says mayors all over the country are under pressure to build housing everywhere it’s feasible to mitigate the housing affordability crisis. Sayers arrived at the MICD session with a sense that the area in question, already surrounded by relatively dense housing, would function better as a neighborhood node with retail and entertainment uses. And working through the possibilities with professional designers and planners validated her assessment, she says.

“Seeking outside feedback, whether it’s through a program like this or some other type of technical engagement, is good for us. A lot of times we are too close to the problem and we don’t always see options clearly,” Sayers says. In addition, participants find value just spending time with other people who hold elected office. “There are certain things about being a mayor that no one in your life understands other than a fellow mayor,” she says.

The rules of the MICD special session — no press and no mayoral staff are allowed to attend — make it a unique chance for mayors to candidly discuss ideas and problems. Several student research assistants for the McHarg Center were invited to sit in and listen to the sessions. Rebecca Popowsky, the Wilks Family Director for the McHarg Center, says she impressed upon the students how rare it is to be invited into a room where elected officials are talking in detail about the design of their cities. It is also rare for consulting designers like those invited by MICD to contribute input early in the process of developing a project.

“[MICD] has broken the usual chain of events around how decision-making happens, in a really productive way,” says Popowsky, who spent 15 years as a landscape architect at OLIN before assuming her current role at Weitzman. “We’re used to, as designers, being called in at a particular point but having a limited and curated relationship with policymakers, especially at the level of mayors. You’re doing your best to provide suggestions or proposals or advice in bite-sized pieces, in situations where you assume you have 30 seconds. The way that you approach problem-solving when you’re on a platform of cooperation is so very different than when you’re on a platform of pitching or providing services.”