How can Design Help Communities Shape Their own Futures?
At the 2025 Deem Symposium, a panel titled On Our Terms: Imagination and Urban Life asked: how design can help communities shape futures that are genuinely theirs? Architect Katherine Darnstadt, founder of Latent Design, moderated a conversation with developer Ghian Foreman and artist-educator Andres L. Hernandez. These three Chicagoans understand what it means to build within constraints and against the odds.
The discussion, held in the Museum of Contemporary Art’s main theater, unfolded less like a formal panel and more like a working session. It centered on the systems that dictate how cities grow—policy, philanthropy, bureaucracy—and what happens when those systems begin to shift. Darnstadt’s questions moved between the conceptual and the pragmatic: What are your non-negotiables? What terms have you accepted without realizing it? How do you take risks without losing the trust of a neighborhood?
At a time when Chicago continues to confront cycles of disinvestment, stalled reinvestment, and deep structural inequity, this conversation felt urgent. It didn’t produce a single “solution;” instead, it offered language to help people name the patterns that hold back change and imagine the conditions that might finally move it forward.
Katherine Darnstadt, Ghian Foreman, and Andres L. Hernandez on stage at the 2025 Deem Symposium. Photo: Leah Ray
“What’s missing from your bio?”
Darnstadt opened with a small but revealing prompt. Titles are fine, she suggested, but what do you actually do for people? Ghian Foreman answered simply: “I’m a community developer.” His work, he explained, stretches across real estate, nonprofit boards, and partnerships aimed at creating wealth that stays local. Andres L. Hernandez described his own practice as grounded in curiosity—an instinct to keep asking why, from the color of a brick to the decision of 300,000 Black Chicagoans to leave the city since 2000. This introduction made it clear that this panel would not be about ego; it was to be a conversation about civic responsibility.
“What was non-negotiable then, and what is non-negotiable now?”
Darnstadt pressed further, asking each speaker to define their lines in the sand. Foreman replied without hesitation: “No crumbs without cake.” In his world, crumbs are the small, symbolic gestures of progress—temporary funding, photo-op programs, one-time grants—that never change the conditions they claim to address. Cake, by contrast, represents sustained investment, ownership, and a timeline long enough to make a difference. Hernandez’s non-negotiable was curiosity itself. If a project stops asking questions, he said, it stops serving the people it’s meant to reach.
“Which terms and conditions have you accepted without realizing it?”
With this question, Darnstadt turned attention to the invisible regulations and contracts that shape civic work. Hernandez named rigidity, closure, and slowness as the unspoken terms of Chicago’s bureaucratic systems. Disinvestment, he said, happens fast; reinvestment moves at a crawl. Foreman followed with an example: he planted a one-acre field of sunflowers on a city-owned lot to turn neglect into beauty. The following year, the city mowed them down because he hadn’t filed for permission. The story was half absurd and half parable—proof that small acts of self-determination still threaten the system they try to improve.
“How do you hold risk and failure?”
Darnstadt, who works at the intersection of architecture and public policy, drew a parallel between building codes and civic design. Engineers talk about structures that can “fail safely,” she noted—buildings that might crack but not collapse. What does that look like in communities?
Foreman’s example was immediate: during the COVID-19 pandemic, he and his partners kept a gym open for neighborhood teens. Closing it might have been safer on paper, but it would have left those kids on the street. Hernandez told a story from Tucson, where his effort to reopen a public park for unhoused residents faltered under political pressure. The park stayed closed, but the debate it sparked widened public understanding. Doing nothing, they agreed, is the greatest risk of all.
“What do we really mean by placemaking?”
Darnstadt’s next question took aim at a word often used—and overused—in design circles. For many planners, placemaking refers to community-based improvements to public space. For Foreman and Hernandez, the term felt too branded, too controlled from above. On our terms, they argued, means something else: it means neighbors set the brief, determine the pace, and share the gains.
Hernandez offered his own metaphor: aerate the soil. His role, he said, is to loosen what’s compacted—rigid systems, narrow assumptions—so other growth can take root. “The goal isn’t to brand a place,” he said. “It’s to unlock the conditions where people already make culture.”
“How do you respond to criticism without losing momentum?”
Darnstadt turned next to endurance. How do you keep moving when your ideas meet resistance?
Foreman described how he raised millions to install split-rail fences around vacant Chicago lots, inspired by a Philadelphia study showing a correlation between visible stewardship and a reduction in violent crime. Some residents hated the look; others saw early improvements. Six months later, even his harshest critics admitted the change felt good. Hernandez added that critique is built into architectural training—it’s the discipline’s superpower and also its burden. Still, he said, Chicago’s culture of toughness can work against progress. “We’re so good at being critical,” he noted, “that we sometimes forget to collaborate.”
“What are your future non-negotiables?”
As the discussion turned toward the future, Darnstadt asked what conditions they refuse to compromise on in the years ahead.
Foreman began with three words: peace, health, and prosperity. He questioned long-held assumptions about how wealth is built, arguing that traditional tools like homeownership do not serve everyone equally. He urged designers and policymakers to focus on where the ball is going, not where it sits now.
Hernandez reframed AI not as artificial intelligence but ancestral intelligence—knowledge carried through generations and activated in the present. His commitment is to critical questioning: asking why systems work the way they do, who benefits, and who bears the cost. “We should all be the pebble in someone’s shoe,” he said, reminding the audience that agitation is often the start of change.
Why this conversation matters now
In Chicago, questions of agency, authorship, and access play out daily on blocks where the built environment mirrors social history. Disinvestment is visible in vacant lots and shuttered schools; reinvestment often arrives with strings attached.
The value of this panel was not in consensus but in the conversation itself. Darnstadt’s questions gave form to what many practitioners already feel: that design and development must move beyond optics and into shared ownership, that small acts of repair are not small, and that language—defining your own terms—is a tool of power.
This reflection is part of The Raygency’s series on dialogue in design, inspired by the 2025 Deem Symposium at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Each story examines how conversation and culture shape the spaces we share.