Urban Technology at University of Michigan week 122
Community Development and Change-Making in Cities with Jermaine Ruffin + Curriculum Notes
This week we share (below) an interview with Jermaine Ruffin, who is teaching the final course in the cities sequence that is required for Urban Technology students. Chatting with Jermaine was great in its own right, and also cause for reflecting on the the cities sequence as a unit of our curriculum. The question we asked ourselves when we designed is it: After completing the cities sequence, can a student be teleported to an unfamiliar city, walk around for half a day, and make some educated guesses about why things in this unknown land work the way they do? More on this after Jermaine’s interview.
💬 Hello! This is the newsletter of the Urban Technology program at University of Michigan, in which we explore the ways that technology can be harnessed to nurture and improve urban life. If you’re new here, try this short video of current students describing urban technology in their own words.
🏘️ Communities, People, Power
Jermaine Ruffin joined us this year as a lecturer in urban technology and is also a graduate of the Taubman College Master’s of Urban and Regional Planning program. In addition to his teaching, Jermaine is host of the The Streets Are Planning podcast and Vice President of Neighborhoods at Invest Detroit, the local community development financial institution or CDFI. Previously Jermaine has plied his trade at the City of Detroit and the Michigan State Housing Development Authority. This is all a perfect background for teaching Change-Making in Cities, a course about how things happen.
CHARLIE: How did you get started working in housing and development?
JERMAINE: Initially my interest in housing and development came from a kind of lived experience. I grew up in affordable housing, so I knew the value of what it meant to have quality housing to call home. So for me, it started in that space of having an interest, but I didn't know that I could make a career out of being involved in that space. Initially I went to school to be in kinesiology, but then I realized no, this is not my passion. My passion is helping people and ensuring that they have quality housing.
After undergrad, I had an opportunity to work for the State of Michigan with the State Housing Development Authority. I was exposed to how affordable housing actually comes to fruition, from idea to actual implementation, and that drove my interest in housing for a number of years. I got to work on the Cities of Promise initiative, where we worked with the eight most impoverished cities across the state of Michigan at that time, helping them with everything from community organizing, to identifying housing needs, to coming up with ideas and strategies for making that housing a reality. That really was the genesis of my interest. But then I kept hearing about this field called “Urban Planning” during that time, and it just brought everything that was my natural skillset and all of my interests together. That brought me to Taubman College, and the rest, as they say, is history.
CHARLIE: Do you have a favorite project you've enjoyed working on?
JERMAINE: What I've enjoyed the most out of my work in Invest Detroit is with the Strategic Neighborhood Fund. I found that working in the equitable developer space has been a major motivator for me. Being able to work with folks who are from the neighborhood, who grew up in the city of Detroit and who simply want to be a part of reviving their city or bringing it to the standing of what they recall growing up, and then looking at the future of what they believe their neighborhood and community can be. Helping to give those folks the space and opportunity to thrive in their neighborhood is something that brings me a lot of joy.
Six Mile and McNichols is one of my favorite project areas, knowing what the potential was because the history was right there. In talking to the residents who lived in the adjacent neighborhoods, they talked about how they would walk from their home and go to the store, or walk from their home and go to these different restaurants and businesses along the corridor, and when that left they had a very emotional impact on them. So to see that area be revived and to see it be led by developers of color, black developers who are from the neighborhood or from the city and are tailoring their businesses according to what the neighborhood input has been is something that has been a joy for me to be a part of.
I hope that that's going to be the legacy of the work we do – that when we look back it's not about personal accolades, it's about the legacy of a neighborhood being brought back to life and becoming part of the future of the city of Detroit.
CHARLIE: The class you're teaching is called “Change-making in Cities,” and it deals with different actors in the urban space and the form(s) of power they wield. How would you characterize Invest Detroit as a player?
JERMAINE: I would consider Invest Detroit to be one of those players that tries to identify the best way they can be helpful to the folks who are already on the ground doing the work, which is something that aligns with my personal mission: to have an organization that will sit down and do some of what I find to be the most important thing about doing community work, which is listening first. Whether you're talking about the venture capital side, or our lending products, or the work I do on the neighborhood side, it all begins with trying to better understand what the community and the business needs are on the ground, and then reacting and responding to that to address the needs the community has identified.
Often there are actors who come into spaces, and it's like, “Hey, you're welcome, here's your solution! And when you get done implementing what we told you to do, you'll be better for it.” That's the wrong approach, in my opinion. Working for an organization that at its core thinks about community from the standpoint of, “How can we be helpful to those who are in a space, based on what they tell us? Not based on our own observations.” Combining that experience and that knowledge typically turns out into a better solution. Invest Detroit, in my experience, has shown and proven that they do that.
“How can we be helpful to those who are in a space, based on what they tell us? Not based on our own observations.”
CHARLIE: So what is “change-making in cities?” How does change happen?
JERMAINE: The foundation of this class that I tried to establish early on was, first, understanding power dynamics — understanding where power resides, where it doesn't reside, how it's utilized, and how it can be effective in certain ways and ineffective in others. In all of the communities or neighborhood strategies and plans we’ve discussed, we have to recognize who has the ability to actually make things happen and who is being positively or negatively impacted by some of these decisions. At the core of what we do, we're dealing with people, we are engaging people.
The second piece was trying to relay the importance of listening first before developing a solution. Change-making, in my opinion, happens the best when you are engaging folks in the process. We come in as experts and we recommend solutions, but we often forget that we might not be impacted by these decisions a year down the line, two years down the line, because we may live elsewhere. It’s really important to lean on the community expertise of residents and the folks who live there, and to always keep at the forefront of our minds that the decisions we make will impact people on a real level.
The third and final thing is recognizing that solutions can come from anywhere, including the students, which has been one of the joys of my life. To be with a such a talented group of students who are committed to learning more about how they themselves can be involved in changing cities and impacting cities from a policy perspective and a technology perspective, in the real world and on the ground level—they are going to be the champions of these spaces, and they will be making sure that folks have a voice.
CHARLIE: How is the class structured? What are the students actually studying week to week?
JERMAINE: We've looked at different case studies of cities throughout the semester, and in the case studies it always comes back to power: who are the actors, and how do they wield their power and move through decision-making processes?
Most recently we looked at Detroit’s Strategic Neighborhood Fund. We're discussing Vancouver and issues around house populations and homelessness right now. And we’ve looked at Toronto and smart cities, and what they wanted to do on the waterfront there. In those conversations about Toronto we were able to ask: How did the government act in this space? What were some of the key nonprofit organizations or foundations that were involved in the process and helped with decision-making? And also, who were those regular citizens who stepped up and pushed back or championed certain portions of the plan?
We've carried those themes through all of the case studies in a way where it's not me assigning blame or championing anyone, but providing the context and information to students for them to say, okay, we agree with this approach, we didn't quite agree with that approach. They are able to reflect and identify where they agree with a process, or where they would critique it, or where they see an opportunity for a solution. That, hopefully, translates to their future work in cities.
I think a majority of the students walked away from the Toronto case study with a healthy understanding that everything that glitters isn't gold. You can have these amazing projects that, from the outside, look to be life-changing and world-changing. But with the implementation of certain technologies are tradeoffs with privacy and other rights.
The majority of students sided with the residents of Toronto to say that their pushback was valid, that they didn't want to sacrifice their privacy just for technology to make their life more convenient. I think now the students have this perspective where, we understand that technology is going to have an increasing role in our lives, but at the same time we need to have a healthy skepticism when certain types of solutions are brought to the table. Hopefully we get to a space where we can have technology and all the benefits of it, but also make sure that people’s concerns are addressed in a meaningful way, not at the level of the corporation or at the level of government, but at the level of people.
CHARLIE: What's been the biggest surprise teaching the course so far?
JERMAINE: Coming into this semester I wondered: are students really going to enjoy this information? Are you really going to enjoy this stuff as much as I do? I love cities. I love talking about them and how they work, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and then trying to identify solutions to make them better. So for the students to embrace this information showed me that they have a really good foundation from their first couple of courses.
They also have a healthy curiosity about cities and how they themselves, even now while they're still students, can be involved in impacting that positively. They're really into this information, and you can't fake that. That's been the most meaningful thing for me, and it keeps me coming back every week.
CHARLIE: What advice would you give the students for after they graduate?
JERMAINE: I think the biggest thing for them will be, when entering into a community space, to build really genuine relationships with people and with partners, because when it comes to this type of work because you can't do it alone. It's more about the “we” and “us” when it comes to approaching community economic development work, because the more you work together with the community and the more you work with partners, the better the solutions. That's something that I would encourage them to continue doing: build those relationships right now with your classmates, and when you are out there operating professionally, you can look around and see familiar faces. That's a great feeling, because it means you're on the right track to making cities thrive and be all they can be for the residents who live there.
CHARLIE: Last question, as we ask everyone we interview: what's your favorite city and why?
JERMAINE: Oh, wow! If I had to pick one city, I really like the layout and feel of Toronto. It happens to be one of my favorite cities because of the cultural diversity there. The architecture, the waterfront, the beauty of the city. The year-round vibe that you can have in Toronto to me, is second to none. I've been there in the winter, I've been there in summer, I've been there in the spring – I haven't been there in the fall yet, but I’ll make sure that happens soon enough – every season they have activities, folks are outside, and folks are enjoying their city. I just love that experience in Toronto.
🏙 Curriculum Notes
Bryan here. 👋 Designing a curriculum of a transdisciplinary nature such as ours sometimes feels like an exercise in finding minimum viability. It’s easy to make a long list of all the things that a student should learn to become a “Effective Agent of Change” or an “Conscientious Citizen of the World” as our degree learning outcomes specify (think of this like the requirements doc for the degree), but it gets a little trickier when those aspirations get blocked out as credit hours, courses, faculty teaching assignments. Overall, I would describe this as an exercise in slowly draining out bathwater while trying to protect the baby, to abuse the dictum.
From almost the very beginning we have slated a sequence of courses dedicated to learning about cities and urban systems, and we also knew that this sequence would be where students begin their studies. Cities first. Civic values and a messy plurality of perspectives are the foundation of urban technology, precisely because they are the things that the smart cities movement ignored. Here’s what the sequence looks like, as captured in the internal curriculum overview documents:
Three of the four courses above are organized around cases and the other one, Incomplete City, is about really making an imagined case study of their own. As such, one of the salient design questions has been how we select and coordinate the cases that each course will teach. The sequence starts out broad in time and space and then narrows in on contemporary issues in North America. This has also been an exercise in taxonomy. We had to find a way to divvy up the nearly infinite expanse of knowledge related to cities in a way that lets the professors of these courses teach alone and but coordinated. The most distilled we could make it was a table—and wow does it it looks impossibly compressed in that format! Then again, have you ever listened to an Air Traffic Control tower? If the table below is terse, that’s because its primary job is to be ATC for our Cities Sequence.
Why Cities is a reading of cities through history and across geographies, and Malcolm sometimes also likes to call it “Cities, wow!” because the intention is to get students thinking about the many ways that cities can be, and exploring the reasons that they are so. Anatomy of a City teaches students to see and read urban systems as “hardware,” which are also decisions that communities have made. Then Change-making in Cities adds to this the dimensions of decision-making and stakeholders. How do decisions get made, who is involved and how, who is not and why? In the middle of the sequence, alongside Anatomy of a City, is Incomplete City, which is a workshop designed to get students exercising the analytical muscles they’re building in the rest of this sequence.
As we near completion of the first run of our Cities Sequence, we’re reflecting on how the first run went. Lots to mull in the next month or so. Here are some of the thoughts that will occupy me over the holidays: How do we integrate the Incomplete City workshop even more tightly with the other course? What exactly is a case study for urban technology and can we get more precise in its format? Can you ever really separate decisions and decision-making? Is it still a good idea to (mostly) push the question of smart cities to later in the curriculum, beyond this sequence?
These weeks: We had our first ever UT operations meeting with stakeholders from across the college and that was awesome. DevOps for Education is now our official side hustle. Also some executive education musing, syllabus perusing. Charlie is working through Protogrant stuff. Nicky is working on prep for our first studio. Working with career services and also on the horn with a number of employers to start building connections there. Thanksgiving too, somewhere in the middle of that. Thanks to you for reading. 🏃
Wow - very impressive and inspiring. Congrats on the impressive addition to the team! I cover Detroit in my Clusters class at Haas. Would love to discuss some time.