Architect calls for cooperation during AIA address.

Ron Shiffman, FAICP, AIA, former director of the Pratt Center for Community Development, focused on cooperative arrangements between developers and community architects during his November 6 address at the Center for Architects.

"One myth I'd like to dispel is that community-based developers, community organizers, and environmental justice advocates are anti-development. They are not," Shiffman said. "Anyone who looks through the numbers and at the role they have played will see their record of accomplishments.

"Through these efforts community-based organizations working with architectural and planning practitioners have preserved and rehabilitated hundreds of thousands of housing units and preserved the historic character of many of our cities. Most importantly, they have enabled many places to retain their genius loci--their genetic footprint--the form that gave the distinctiveness and unique character to that particular community of city," Shiffman said.

The architect proposed means to examine large scale projects, such as Columbia University's proposed expansion that are in the pipeline, so that they maximize public benefit.

"What we plan and build today will be with us for generations and we should take the time to rethink them and do them right," Shiffman said.

He stressed the importance of integrating affordable housing initiatives at all levels of government.

"The role of the city and the community-based advocacy and development groups working in partnership with the private sector is paramount since it is on the local level that policies translate into reality. The city can't wait for other levels of government to act, albeit that it desperately needs the financial resources, but must itself invest in the building of neighborhoods for those in need of housing today and for future generations of New Yorkers.

"The city must use all the resources and creativity it has to recommit and rebuild its diminished capital investment in housing, accessing all available sources to commit a minimum of 12 billion dollars to preserve and build affordable housing over a 10-year-period," he said.

To this end he advocated adopting inclusionary housing requirements like those in London that a significant portion of all new housing be set aside for affordable housing, the creation of at least 300,000 new units of affordable housing, and zoning policies that promote housing for all New Yorkers.

Finally, he advocated designers adapt an "architecture of inclusion."

"By investigating how our practice of architecture and urban planning can promote social justice and equity, and by exploring the links between city form and sustainability and by understanding the cohesive potential of public space and how and where we build housing and for whom will determine the nature of the city of 2030 and 2050," he said.