A Pedagogy of Engagement
Anthony SchumanThere were three specific events that brought these issues home to me in a visceral manner. The first was my presence at the massive anti-war demonstration in front of the Pentagon in October 1967, when, at midnight, the government turned off the lights and soldiers advanced on the demonstrators, arresting many of them. My friends and I left at the onset of this aggression. I was disheartened to read an account in the New York Times the next morning that did not accurately portray the events as I witnessed them with my own eyes. This awakened me to the possibility that the paper of record was not ideologically neutral. It was a loss of innocence for me, and for the first time I saw myself on the left side of the political spectrum.
The second were the student protests at Columbia University in the spring of 1968, as I was pursuing my Master’s of Architecture there, against the proposed construction of a gymnasium in Morningside Park, a public park adjacent to the campus, as well as secret research the university was conducting for the Defense Department to aid the US war effort in Vietnam. These protests led to the student occupation of several buildings on campus, including Avery Hall, home to the School of Architecture. With roughly half of the school population, I participated in a week-long occupation of Avery that ended with a police bust on campus.
Outcomes of this protest included criticism of the violent police response that resulted in a campus-wide student strike and the removal of the university’s President. At the School of Architecture, significant changes included modifications to the curriculum and a focus on recruiting students of color, an effort acknowledged by Dr. Sharon Egretta Sutton in her book When Ivory Towers Were Black.1
The third event was a Fall 1968 studio in East Harlem, where a small group of students worked with the Real Great Society Urban Planning Studio, a local Puerto Rican activist group. Our project was a proposed minimum rehabilitation of Old-Law Tenements while the tenants remained in their apartments. I learned that the greatest need in the neighborhood was for more political and economic power.
All three of these events occurred within a single year. The density and intensity of these experiences had a profound impact on my direction. Because I was in architecture school when this rise in consciousness took place, my first impulse was to want to make the revolution through architecture. Indeed, architecture’s role in constructing what Anatole Kopp calls “a framework of existence” has remained my preoccupation since those early, heady days of student activism.
I found the connection between social values and architecture through housing activism. I was part of a group in the mid-1970s called Homefront (formally, the Citywide Action Group Against Neighborhood Destruction and for Low-rent Housing). Our group was a combination of neighborhood housing activists and people whose perspective was more of an overview, “the larger picture.” I was in that latter cohort, rooting for the revolution that we believed was just around the corner. Homefront’s magnum opus was a study entitled “Housing Abandonment in New York City,” in which we analyzed the causes behind the widespread abandonment taking place in New York in the 1970s.
Our goal was to encourage neighborhood organizations to focus on in rem housing the countless apartment buildings that were taken over by New York City for non-payment of their real estate tax. Our partners in the neighborhoods appreciated our analysis but were less eager to address the big picture. “When it comes to housing, we’re all socialists,” they said, “but we’re too busy getting boiler repairs for this building, and we can’t focus on city-wide policy at the moment.”
We understood their reticence to devote scarce resources to address this underlying policy question. In the absence of adequate city responses to create more affordable housing, neighborhood groups became developers themselves, putting further strain on their budgets. Community organizers were often the first staff to be let go. Homefront thus had a key role to play in advocating for policy reform in the city’s housing agency. Starting in the late 1970s, New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) created a series of programs to assist tenants in taking ownership of their buildings, often rehabilitating them through their own labor (known as “sweat equity”). With progressives inside city government working alongside outside advocacy groups, an “inside/outside” strategy that resulted in significant improvements to municipal housing policy.
It was during this period, in 1978, I began teaching at NJIT, and it was natural for me to base my early teaching and scholarship on housing. In my second semester, I taught a seminar on self-help housing where students were surprised to learn that developers of Section 8 subsidized housing made a killing in the process. This course was the forerunner of “Problems in Modern Housing,” where I analyzed the roots of “the housing question” in the late 19th century Industrial Revolution. The course reviewed not only significant milestones in housing design but also the production, finance and delivery systems that built it.
My early scholarship examined French social housing with articles on participatory design and the relationship between architectural imagery and social structure. This research, including a look at limited-equity cooperatives in New York City, informed my lecture course as well as design studios which addressed forms of collective housing.
Although the school in its early years had a notable core faculty with experience in community engagement (Troy West, Leslie Weisman, Richard Hatch, and Karl Linn), the school had no coordinated approach to it, partially because there was already a community design center operating in Newark whose director did not want “competition” from parallel efforts at NJIT (or so I was told). This situation prompted me to address community engagement through scholarship and advocacy, a stance I pursued in particular during my service on the board of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA). Here I promoted the creation of an annual award for Collaborative Practice, meant to recognize and encourage engagement by schools of architecture in the communities where they stood. During a term as President of ACSA in 2000, I sponsored a study of “Community Engagement in Schools of Architecture in North America.” My own scholarship on this topic culminated in the essay on “Community Engagement” that I was invited to contribute to ACSA’s 100th anniversary publication Architecture School: Three Centuries of Educating Architects in North America.2
It was a logical step for me to become personally engaged in neighborhood development in Newark. In 1999, at the invitation of one of my students, I participated in a design charrette to explore the creation of an arts district in Newark’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. The impetus was community advocacy led by Amiri Baraka, the late activist, poet, playwright, and provocateur. I remain, to this day, heavily involved in the neighborhood as President of the Board of Directors of Lincoln Park Coast Cultural District, Inc., the community development corporation we founded. We have been responsible for developing over a hundred units of mixed-income housing and are breaking ground next year on seventy units of mixed-use, mixed-income housing behind a historic church façade across from Symphony Hall.
In conjunction with my elective course “Architecture and Social Change,” I recently reconnected with Carl Anthony, a noted environmental activist in Oakland, California, whom I had known casually at Columbia in the late 1960s. After catching up on Carl’s current concerns, he asked me what I had been doing. When I mentioned that I had taught at NJIT for forty years, he posed a question, ”You’ve been teaching for forty years; what did you learn?”
I thought about this for a while and answered, “Patience.” By this, I meant I had learned that social progress comes slowly, and you have to work at it every day. My activism had come full circle, from my student protest days to an immersion in one neighborhood for the long haul, From the “larger picture” to the understanding that detailed local work and incremental change were critical parts of that picture. Without relinquishing my desire for radical change in how we construct our shared social consensus, I discovered the intense satisfaction of being grounded in one community.
There is another question Carl might have asked: “Why did you stay so long in the same job?” After all, in the context of today’s gig economy, forty-four years is a pretty long gig! The answer is simple: I really liked my job, for at least five reasons. The first is that NJIT is a public university and I deeply appreciate the opportunities it brings to families of modest means, including most of our student body. The second reason follows from the first: our students recognize this opportunity and work hard to take advantage of it. Third, teaching gives you a lot of latitude to determine the direction of your scholarship and community engagement work. In other words, the work that informs your teaching is very much within your control. Fourth, I have had a wonderful group of colleagues, both faculty and staff, to work with all these years. And finally, simply put, my neighborhood development work in Newark has enriched my life. I have retired from teaching at NJIT, but not from Newark.
With this in mind, it was logical for me, at the end of my teaching career, to play a significant role in establishing the Newark Design Collaborative, an effort to coalesce the disparate community engagement activities at the College into a coordinated approach. As I write, in August 2023, the NDC is editing a study of “Community Engagement in Schools of Architecture in The United States,” a first cut at an ambitious goal of updating that 2000 ACSA study with a new template and profiles on each community engagement program in the US and Canada as well as an analysis of summary data. To date twenty-nine programs have been profiled thanks to the efforts of a student research team.
One final thought: At the end of the day, the greatest satisfaction for a teacher is to see their former students succeed, the more so when their career trajectory bears traces of the social commitment you sought to encourage. Last spring, I had a conversation with a graduate from the mid-1990’s who has spun a whirlwind of initiatives harnessing the power of design for community activism in my hometown of Montclair. In the course of our conversation, she said I had been a mentor to her. “But I never had you as a student,” I interjected. “That’s right,” she said, “but we knew what you stood for.” This, beyond all considerations of scholarly and professional contributions, of neighborhood struggle and development, is a source of deep personal satisfaction: to be understood.
Anthony (Tony) Schuman is Professor of Architecture Emeritus at Hillier College of Architecture and Design, where over a forty year career he taught design studios and courses on housing, the City of Newark, and architecture's social vocation. He remains active in Newark community development and preservation efforts.
This essay was published as part of Transect Volume 5: Pedagogy (2024), Jacob Swanson, Daniel Girgis, Dhruvi Rajpopat, Fatima Fardos, Jimenna Alcantar, Elizabeth Kowalchuk, eds.
Footnotes:
1: New York: Empire State Editions, 2017.
2: Edited by Joan Ockman and Rebecca Williamson, 252-9. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012.