Profile: Sara Garrett, motiveSpace Coalition
Neighbors building neighborhoods, or Portland as a wiki city
As Executive Director of motiveSpace Coalition, whose board* I recently joined, Sara Garrett has a vision: Neighbors help improve their city. “We all should be able to feel proud about helping to build our neighborhoods.”
Growing up in North Portland, Sara saw a huge discrepancy between her neighborhood, which had a dearth of “safe places to hang out” and her downtown Lincoln High School, with its flower pots and trimmed lawns. It was that experience that started her on the career path of urban renewal and development.
“I’ve always known I wanted to be a builder, but one who does good. I started in architecture the way I start with everything – by going all out.”
At 15 she sent out letters of interest to more than 30 architecture firms in town and ended up with three job offers. Since then, she’s worked tirelessly to know everyone in the city’s building industry, and understand the different perspectives that need to come together to build good spaces.
As a PSU undergrad majoring in environmental physics, she researched the influence of systems thinking on structures. Sara’s focus at that time was on structures as “complex adaptive organisms”, that is, structures which are responsive to their environment and the people in it.
At the same time, Sara saw that building science lagged behind the innovations happening in other industries. According to Sara, “As the dollar amounts gets higher funders get more conservative, and advancements in building science rarely have the opportunity to be tested in real-world scenarios.
“For building science innovations to be tested and to pay off, they have to be built for groups looking at longer-term returns. Until builders are working for communities rather than banks, building science will always lag behind, and buildings will never be built with people in mind.”
The Masters program in architecture and landscape design at the University of Toronto helped Sara define herself as an architect and builder. Her thinking about buildings as systems got her more interested in a buildings’ social bottom line, and participatory processes and designs. In the end she began thinking about micro-financing and participatory development as an alternative to the challenges of participatory design.
Back in Portland, Sara reconnected with old colleagues and reached out to new ones, pulling people together for small-group discussions about participatory development. “Architects needed to be more engaged with the community beyond just saying they are,” Sara said.
She soon realized that a lot more people needed to be talking to each other. With help from the City of Portland, she organized in September 2008 a two-day symposium titled “Collaborative Development and the Creative Catalyst”. Almost 200 people came to discuss how to collaborate in each stage of the development process.
MotiveSpace grew out of the event. “We discussed a lot at the symposium but none of us had even started testing the ideas. Afterward, I realized I’d helped catalyze so much excitement that everybody wanted more – I received hundreds of emails from people wanting to help and participate.”
MotiveSpace Coalition is a membership organization that helps neighbors build neighborhoods. The nonprofit facilitates greater communication within the development community and greater interaction and engagement between building professionals and actual neighbors.
“We create engagement via buildings,” Sara said. “We make participation in neighborhood development and improvements tangible for people. We help people feel they’re part of something bigger than themselves.”
(March 2010)
*The motiveSpace Coalition is currently seeking board member with expertise as a CPA. Interested? Email Sara at sara[at]motivespace.org.
