Felicia Jiang: Championing Community-Centered Planning

Felicia’s approach to planning is grounded in the belief that community is at the heart of every successful project. When it comes to connecting with people, Felicia believes that blending information with celebration yields the best results, helping organize events that flip the script on traditional engagement efforts. As an advocate for building more equitable, joyful, and resilient spaces for all, she also lends her expertise in planning and public engagement to her role as a Sasaki Foundation board member.

Let’s start from the top. How did you get into planning?

I grew up loving design and architecture, and I thought maybe I wanted to be an architect, but I was also encouraged to explore engineering from my parents who were very practical. So that’s how I ended up majoring in civil engineering in college. But then, I discovered urban planning through an introductory urban studies course that I took my freshman year. That’s how I realized that I was really drawn to the scale of cities, of looking at problems and challenges through an urban lens and understanding the interconnected systems within cities. 

You work both on campuses with universities and colleges and in the civic realm. Do you prefer one over the other? Are there lessons learned from one that you translate to the other, or are they very different?

I enjoy working on both campus and civic projects. It makes me really appreciate both types of projects that we do at Sasaki. I think the interesting thing about campuses is that they’re miniature ecosystems, where universities and colleges often have more control over their land, which can make it easier to test new ideas or be more innovative in our approach to planning. 

I really love working on civic projects because I feel like they are tackling the important issues within cities today, issues like affordable housing or access to open space or preventing gentrification and displacement. I think where the two overlap for me the most is community engagement. I find that I learn lessons from campus engagement that I can take to civic projects and vice versa.

What is your approach with engaging different populations? Is it on a project to project basis, or do you have a philosophy that you always stick to?

I believe that meaningful community engagement is central to every project that we do as designers, planners, and architects. It’s not just an exercise or something to check off, but it’s critical to the success of a project. My approach revolves around centering the community and empowering them to become partners in the work. This is inspired by a few organizing models of community engagement that I learned about in grad school that place the level of public participation in a community process on a spectrum. Two examples are Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation and the IAP2 Spectrum of Public Participation. 

In my projects, I’m constantly trying to find ways to push our approach towards the highest end of that spectrum where communities have the greatest ownership and control over the project and the outcomes of the project, but also understanding that that approach needs to be nuanced—it might not be the right approach for every project or situation. And in order to reach that level of community empowerment, it needs to be accompanied by things like intensive community capacity building, and compensation for community members for their time and participation.

Are there any recent projects that come to mind that demonstrate these different approaches?

Right now I’m working on two projects that have been really meaningful in terms of engagement, and those are the Pittsburgh Comprehensive Plan and Phillips Square. In both of these projects, we’re really pushing the boundaries of what we’d consider traditional community engagement. 

In Pittsburgh we’re doing a citywide plan for all 90 neighborhoods in the city. Our goal is to reach a 10th of the overall population. That’s 30,000 people, and we’re trying to do this also in a way that centers equity and prioritizes harder-to-reach populations. In order to do this, we are working with an amazing team of on-the-ground community organizers and local engagement experts who are leveraging their networks and local knowledge to reach people about the plan. Our strategy also relies heavily on digital engagement, including a robust project website that Sasaki’s developed. We’re aiming to make the process as accessible and inclusive as possible when reaching this many people.

Philips Square is right in our Boston office’s backyard. How does that compare to a project like the Pittsburgh plan?

Phillips Square is a much smaller project in Boston’s Chinatown. I think the goals are actually really similar between the two projects, even though they differ so much in scale. In this case, Sasaki is bringing a lot of the local knowledge and expertise within our own team. Ponnapa (Gift) Prakkamakul is our project manager, but she’s also an extremely talented and respected artist in the community. Through her art, she’s formed such a strong connection to the neighborhood.

We’re also working with Heang Rubin from CHIC Community Engagement as our community engagement partner. Heang also has years of experience working in Chinatown. She has this strong understanding of the neighborhood and a really robust network where she’s connected to many of the neighborhood organizations and groups. I feel like without the two of them, we could not do this work.

The rest of our team is also really central to the success of the project. Almost everyone on the team is bilingual and speaks either Cantonese or Mandarin in addition to English. Working with a community like Chinatown, having this language ability and cultural competence is absolutely essential. I think it’s making a huge difference. The turn out at all of our events has been higher than expected, with residents showing up and engaging with the material, but also having a good time. I hope that when we release the final design later in the summer, the community feels like their input has been actually taken into account and they see the ways that their feedback has helped shape our design.

In both of these projects, but especially with Phillips Square, the team has put on some incredible events that go beyond a typical survey or suggestion board. Has there been a moment that’s stuck with you after one of these events?

For both projects, we feel like our events have gone really well largely because attendance has been so high, and that’s not always the case. Sometimes the hardest part of community engagement is getting people to participate, but we’ve been really intentional about how we are reaching out, and also making the community want to be there, providing food and childcare, making it easy for people to show up. 

Our public kick-off for the Pittsburgh project was organized like a big party for the community, with food, drinks, and a DJ. For me, that sets the tone for future community events, proving that they don’t need to be so formal and focused only on the technical content. They should really be about bringing people together and creating a sense of joy and celebration. 

Is there a project that you’ve worked on so far that’s had a lasting impact on you?

One of my first projects at Sasaki was the UC Berkeley Accessible Paths and Places Plan. That’s been a project that has been impactful to myself and to our practice at Sasaki, but it’s also had lasting impacts outside of our firm. For that project, we were tasked with redesigning the entire campus landscape and collection of pathways to be ADA compliant, which was not an easy feat given the amount of grade change and topography across the campus. 

We also aimed to make the plan about more than just accessibility compliance by incorporating human-centered design practices as well as a new system for simple and intuitive wayfinding. When UC Berkeley asked us to do this project, it was the first time that any institution had undertaken a plan for accessibility on this scale. Now we’re already starting to see other institutions being inspired to do the same. 

UC Berkeley is one of the birthplaces of the disability justice movement and advocacy for disability rights. I think that the school was trying to honor that in doing this work as well. It was really interesting to learn more about that history through this project.

Can you tell us about your involvement with the Sasaki Foundation and the relationship between this work and your project work?

When I first joined Sasaki, I was immediately drawn to the Foundation and their mission of working together with communities to advance equity and design. Now I sit on the board of trustees, and that’s been a great opportunity to go beyond volunteering with the Foundation to help shape the strategic direction of its work. 

The work that the Foundation does represents many of my own interests and motivations for choosing this field, such as bringing the power of design to all communities and working directly with community members and leaders to empower them to shape their own environments. I definitely see the work with the Foundation as a compliment to the project work that we do at Sasaki. The project work is focused on serving our clients and helping them achieve their goals, whereas at the Foundation, it’s really about serving the community and making sure that our design and planning expertise is shared with everybody. 

Is there a favorite initiative of yours or are you involved across the board?

Design education is a really important part of the Foundation’s mission. We’re always thinking about how to bring more people into this field and make it a more accessible field for anyone that might be interested in learning more about design and planning. Our SEED and DESI internship programs have made such a big impact in the Boston area with helping more students get exposed to careers in design. 

On that note, do you have any advice that you’d give to people just starting out in planning or design?

This is an amazing field where we have the opportunity to positively impact the built environment and make it more equitable, resilient, livable, and beautiful. I truly believe that urban planning and design has the power to transform and improve people’s everyday lives. I would encourage anyone who’s starting out to not be afraid of pushing the boundaries or advocating for something they believe in. I think that planning is an inherently idealistic and optimistic practice, and one that also needs to be values-driven. If there’s something that you’re passionate about or really care about, don’t be afraid to speak up or be bold. It’s really important that we have new voices at the table to question or challenge the way that things have been done in the past, in order to imagine a future that best reflects what our communities need and what our world needs.