[Linking image: Composite collage of maps, images from Seattle and the Lake City neighborhood ]

Lake City Collaboratory (2013-15)

In 2013, I began a collaboration with a colleague at the University of Washington Bothell (UWB)—then-UWB Digital Futures Lab (DFL) Program Manager, Aina Braxton—in the Lake City Neighborhood of North Seattle. We were drawn to Lake City for a number of reasons. The neighborhood is on the furthest northeast edge of Seattle, close to our suburban UWB campus and familiar to many students, staff, and faculty (indeed, Aina lived and raised a child there). Lake City is socio-economically, demographically, and culturally diverse in ways that are unique within the city and the region. At the same time, the economic, technological, institutional, and ecological future of neighborhood seemed like it was about to be transformed before our eyes in ways closely linked to the rapid development and displacement that was then well underway in parts of the city closer to the Downtown core. We could see that some residents in the neighborhood—many of whom found themselves in this part of northeast Seattle because they had already experienced displacement from elsewhere—were being made vulnerable and not being connected to vital resources and local decision-making processes, even as they faced prospects of future displacements in the wake of re-zoning and density-increasing development initiatives as part of the Seattle’s regional growth plan moving forward. We could see that the unfolding planning process for the future of this place was largely peopled and supported by homeowners outside the neighborhood’s central core—those likely to benefit from but unlikely to be displaced by development. Meanwhile, it seemed that many communities in the core of the neighborhood—those in publicly subsidized housing or in aging market-rate rental housing on lands near the commercial center and slated for up-zoning and redevelopment; many from immigrant communities and communities of color—had not been incorporated into the planning process to a degree that would allow them to substantially contribute to the future vision for this place. What would it take, we wondered, to try and leverage the university, an anchor institution relatively close to the area, as a public infrastructure through which a multiplicity of students, staff, faculty, residents, and communities might come together to bend that future in a different, more equitable and all-inclusive direction? This goal in mind, we set out to develop and pursue a model for participatory action research (see visualization below) to both increase public access to and robust participation within important state, civic, economic, ecological, and institutional processes both locally and beyond. We conceived of this as a “collaboratory” which might channel institutional resources into a delimited local space, in effect creating a community-embedded hub.

In the summer of 2014, we formed a partnership between the Seattle Public Housing Authority, the YMCA of Lake City, and the Children’s Home Society of Seattle, coordinating activities for a small group of children and youth out of a public housing facility located at the heart of the neighborhood. Utilizing a computer lab there and drawing on pedagogy from popular education, we—aided by a couple committed students from the DFL—used digital-mapping and place-based storytelling techniques to surface issues of interest for future participatory activities. We held a community event to showcase the photo-stories created by participants. Subsequently, through 2015, we further sought to recruit other colleagues and made plans to organize a series of additional community-controlled participatory research initiatives in the neighborhood. Another colleague—Dr. Lauren Berliner—and myself taught graduate-level studio classes that began to make detailed studies and further recommendations for these purposes.

Though, amid the competing pull of other demands and commitments for participants, this initiative concluded after a short run and short of our original ambitions, many valuable lessons were learned—especially in relation to collaborative process, community organizing, resource consolidation, and institutional navigation. These lessons have been carried forward into new and ongoing initiatives.