Episode 12.6: Our spaces tell the stories of who we are

Rula: Our stuff is extensions of who we are. They are part of our identity, otherwise we wouldn't be carrying stuff. When I worked with migrant farm workers, among my first questions, my interviews, "What did you bring with you?" That's very important. So of course, when you are moving and you are coming across borders and you are moving, you know, in certain areas and perhaps your stuff is very limited and many people talked about bringing pictures, bringing perhaps this Afghan that grandma made, bringing some recipes, bringing certain icons, bringing whether it's the, I have the evil eye sitting here or maybe the cross or maybe the Quran verse or some, something for protection.

So our stuff is this idea of it makes the interiors and exteriors of our homes and our places what it is. It gives it that texture and that flavor.

Danae: Hi everyone. Welcome to The Vandal Theory, a podcast about science and research at University of Idaho. I'm your host for the day. I'm Danae Lenz, external communications coordinator at U of I. And I am joined by Leigh. Hi, Leigh.

Leigh: Hi, Danae. My name is Leigh Cooper and I am an editor and science writer here at University of Idaho.

Danae: So today we're going to talk about the built environment, the human made things around us. What is one of your favorite human built environments past or present that you felt a very strong connection to?

Leigh: Well, this is interesting because I have lived many places, had the fortunate opportunities to travel many places, so I have many favorite environments. But maybe I'll use one that I didn't think I'd form a connection to. I lived in D.C. for two and a half years and my walk to work became something very special to me. You know, first it's intimidating. I was actually walking by the White House, so like through all of the columns and Grecian-Roman buildings that are there.

And I wasn't connecting to it, but over time you see it in the different seasons and through different emotions and different weather and everything and you start to build a connection and you have memories on it. I got pooped on by a bird while walking to work one day on that. I rescued a bird with a friendly stranger. A little bird got tangled up and we cut it free. And it even moved a bit protective because at one point I, on the way home, noticed that someone had drawn graffiti on one of the statues that I walked past and the next day I packed my scrub brushes and walked to work and stopped and cleaned up the statue.

And it was something that was very personal to me that they would take my walk away from me.

Danae: Not to give it away, but I do talk about my actual favorite place in this episode. But a place I've been thinking about a lot recently, which is interesting because actually as far as like aesthetics go, it was not a good looking place. But I've been thinking a lot about my college newspaper office, which obviously was in the basement. Where else are you going to put a bunch of kids? And I was always there after dark and we're never getting natural sunlight, but I just had so many good moments there and that's where I learned how to do the skills of my trade. And yeah, it's kind of funny the things that you can, you wouldn't expect to feel such a strong connection to because on the surface they're kind of bland or whatever.

Leigh: I would agree. I have very fond memories of my high school journalism room. I can picture it very well.

Danae: So today we're going to talk to Rula Awwad-Rafferty. She's the chair of University of Idaho's Department of Design and Environments and a professor of interior architecture and design. We're going to explore what makes a place feel like home and how we can make our spaces work better for us. Are you ready to get into it?

Leigh: I'm ready to make space for some new knowledge.

Danae: Hi, Rula. Welcome to The Vandal Theory.

Rula: Hello. How are you?

Danae: I'm so good and I'm super excited to talk to you today.

Rula: Good.

Danae: To get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? How did you get interested in studying the connection between people and their spaces?

Rula: My name is Rula Awwad-Rafferty. I'm an Idahoan, but Idahoan through many other roads. I was born in Palestine, grew up between Jordan and Saudi, and the place where I lived most my life is in Idaho. I studied architecture in Jordan, my undergraduate, and I was always fascinated visiting people in their home places, looking at different architecture. But in my actual studies, it seemed that we were focusing more on Western culture and Western architecture, which made me question, "Why is that? Where's my history? Where is my place?"

Studying rural and vernacular architecture later in Jordan, I discovered more about how people used local resources, local building material to build in the ways that are responsive to their needs, to using their own traditional construction methods, region specific, climate specific, and they passed those traditions and they passed those buildings from one generation to the next. I did my dissertation working with migrant farm worker community in the state of Washington and observed and analyzed the housing that they were living in provided by the people who owned that orchard where those individuals worked.

And on the outside it looked attractive and beautiful and irresponsive, mimicking traditional dwellings where individuals came from. But once you enter in the inside, it seemed like all of it was exactly like my apartment here in Moscow. So that's my fascination of how people live in the built environments, how people interact in the built environment. How does the built environment represent who we are and what we might be? How does it support our health and wellbeing? How does it elevate our quality of life? So that fascination led me to many more areas of explorations through my research as a scholar, as an educator, and enabled me to do more work with communities in Idaho and abroad as well.

Danae: You mentioned this term, but just to make 100% sure that we're on the same page, what do you mean by built environment?

Rula: The built environment refers to all human made surroundings, how people create physical environments in this natural setting and create settings for human activities for interactions. It can be as small as a bench on a sidewalk. It could be as large as a city. So it's all of those human intervention to create places, utilities, parks, urban landscapes, that shape how we live, work and interact.

Danae: This is kind of fascinating to me because it does get into psychology a bit. So can you just touch on how the built environment can shape people's behavior and wellbeing?

Rula: So think about places that you may have encountered. There might be, have been some environments where you felt welcomed. Can you think of some place like that?

Danae: Oh yes, absolutely.

Rula: There might be some environments where you felt you really want to get out of there. You might have arrived at the town and you really were very able to navigate, knew almost intuitively which paths to take. Where is the downtown? Where is the marketplace? And you may have also encountered some other environments where you live for a long period of time and you still get lost, right? So the idea of place totally is different from the idea of a space or a building.

So I might design a square in downtown and it's just a square, but it becomes our Friendship Square when there are things happen there, when people find reason to frequent it, they steward that and start associating certain kind of activities connected with that setting. So there ought to be for those places, it has an identity. It has functional reliance on the location meeting some of our needs. It has certain rootedness that we develop. When I came back to Moscow, I just felt at home being at Friendship Square downtown. I felt at home because there used to be street dances and there is a farmer's market.

After you had a meal in one of the restaurants, that's perhaps where you linger and still continue the conversation. That's where people stand this moderity with one another and celebrate occasions. So that's the idea of place and place attachment.

Danae: So that sense of connection comes partly from what people experience in a place. How can designers help make a space somewhere people want to spend time and connect with one another?

Rula: As designers, as planners, as place stewards and citizens, we engage in what we call placemaking. On placemaking, perhaps we start looking at what are those attributes that we think are important to have in those areas, whether they are cultural or community or, you know, aesthetic, and how do we enable them in this particular geographic location?

Danae: How do you preserve what makes a place meaningful to a community over time?

Rula: Another concept is placekeeping and placekeeping is more than placemaking. It's placekeeping is when we really invest in, have that long-term investment, it's community centered, it's community governed, it's stewarded, it's culturally stewarded kind of environments that ensure that history, identity and continuity of the social fabric that ensures multiple stories to be told. There is always, when we are designers built environments, we always say there is danger in the single story. And so how can our designs enable the sharing and the, and the coexistence of those multiple narratives over time and their continuity? Do you have favorite places?

Danae: Do I have favorite places? My number one favorite place is my own backyard. I have spent time and money and energy making it very, very cozy and I've got a nice couch out there and some sun sails and I've planted a couple trees and I don't know, like more than anything, it's mine, you know.

Rula: Yeah.

Danae: Yeah.

Rula: I have many favorite places. I have memory from when I was a child sitting on the threshold of my grandparents' home in Tulkarm Place where I was born and looking at the orchard, the orange trees just in the same land. And that threshold was so important. When I went back and revisited this place, that's what I looked for. I looked for that threshold because I knew I sat there. Places are both heritage and lived experience for and by the people that call those places home. Home is not necessarily the house where I live, but it's that sense of home.

Of being home. It's, they are those, in their collective integrity, they are geography and history and culture and flora and fauna and story and many decisions that you have made just like your backyard, right?

Danae: Yeah.

Rula: And so they have both tangible and intangible expressions. They are sensorial, they are remembered, they imprinted on a group consciousness as well as in our identity and wellbeing.

Danae: So we've talked a lot about places and we will circle back to that, but can we talk about stuff? Like what are our spaces, if not full of our own belongings?

Rula: Our stuff is extensions of who we are. They're part of our identity, otherwise we wouldn't be carrying stuff. When I worked with migrant farm workers, among my first questions, my interviews, were, "What did you bring with you?" That's very important. So of course, when you are moving and you are coming across borders and you are moving in certain areas and perhaps your stuff is very limited and many people talked about bringing pictures, bringing perhaps this Afghan that grandma made, bringing some recipes, bringing certain icons, bringing whether it's the, I have the evil eye sitting here, or maybe the cross or maybe the Quran verse or something for protection.

So our stuff is this idea of it makes the interiors and exteriors of our homes and our places what it is. It gives it that texture and that flavor.

Danae: So I'm a big fan of stuff. My office here is full of my favorite things. There's a bookshelf right behind me full of my favorite books. Most of my favorite artwork is in this room. I've got a bunch of gnomes and I have them because they make me happy and they make working just a little bit more joyful.

Rula: Yep, exactly. So our stuff could be functional. You know, how do I press the garlic? My garlic, you could do the garlic squeezy press thing or a mortar and a pestle that you create. So traditional in many other areas. So certain stuff we use because it's functional, but sometimes I have to do it the way my mom did it because there is meaning in that. And there are some, it's aesthetic. So creating some sense of beauty and beauty is very personal, but also it's part of that identity, adding layers of comfort, changing things.

So perhaps I no longer, when I'm growing older, I no longer am able to use a can opener the same way I used to before. So now maybe my stuff is transformed into being more adaptable and more accessible and flexible to be used. So we start looking at stuff that is universally designed so I can use any kind of grip on it and open the can, open the door, transition from one place to the other and with ease and comfort.

Danae: So that connects to something else I wanted to ask you about. How should our homes and other spaces adapt as our lives and our bodies change?

Rula: I want everybody, especially if you are a developer, if you are building your own home now, or even if you are looking for one, look for something that can grow with you, that can age with you, that perhaps you don't have to move out of if you are starting to have babies or if you are growing older or if grandparents or parents came to visit or live or a friend who may have become disabled needed to come with you. I urge us all because this is an area that although we study and we teach our students, we have codes that require our places to be more accessible, sometimes those just meet the letter of the law.

They are not as, as humane or equitable or flexible or they don't give us choices. As human beings, we want choices. We want to choose.

Danae: What are some design features that give people more choices in how they use their homes?

Rula: Thinking about transition between inside and outside, in Australia, there is a beautiful initiative called the House with No Steps. If a person is using a wheelchair, they can independently come in and out of that place. Be a little bit more generous in spaces that you might have. So I'm talking with a new design so that perhaps when we are navigating, if I'm going to move this baby in the stroller or have this wheelchair, I can actually do a turning radius and not damage the wall or other furniture and not have people feel so self-conscious about moving. Allow for indoor and outdoor kind of spaces. People don't want to be stuck in one room with no window.

Danae: So those are helpful things to consider if you're building a new home, but what if you're working with a home that's already there?

Rula: So there are concepts about aging in place and aging in place literally asks how can we modify an existing dwellings, an existing place so it accommodates our needs. Perhaps ensure that there are the walls that are available. So if I need to have grab bars so individuals can actually move safely into whether it's a bathtub or a shower or up the stairs using those grab bars with minimum reconstruction.

Danae: Let's talk about your work with and in communities. What should designers keep in mind when they're coming into someone else's community?

Rula: I value, I greatly value, community engaged design, community engaged work. It's really critical. It's really important, but it has ethical implications and ethical requirements as well as certain protocols for engagement. Communities are tired of people going there and acting as if they are broken. Actually, I remember something my good friend Laura Laumatia talked about. She said in tribal communities, "Don't come as if we are broken and try to fix us." We are not. Communities have the inside information about their culture, the way they do things, their perspectives, their worldview, their lived experience, and it's really important to engage the community.

The community invites you there. The community has to be part of this articulation of what is the problem, what are the issues? And the community are co-designers, community members, the participants, of course. We need to identify who is participating, ask clarifying questions and have them be co-designers and co-authors in any kind of design solution that we are generating. We should never treat the community as only the source of information, and that's it. They are also the source of the solutions.

Danae: So what does that partnership with a community look like in practice? Can you give me an example?

Rula: At one point of time, two years ago, one of my colleagues, or a team of my colleagues, received a major grant from Northwest Area Foundation to work with Idaho communities who are below poverty level. And some of those communities, they did a vision rally and they identified that they needed community centers. They saw that community center as the vehicle to address certain issues that were persisting within those communities, and they differed. For instance, in Troy, it was totally different than Kamiah, than Cottonwood, than up river. So each one of these had identified a certain type of a community center.

If we were not to engage them, then perhaps my students would, at that point of time, were envisioning community center almost equal a gym, and it's not. And so what was fascinating is that with deep connection, we have to build, first of all, we have to build deeper relationship, deeper connection with the communities that we are serving and that we are working with so we can understand better and they can also, we can co-understand and then understand what we are creating and why. The relationship does not stop at, "Here's the project, goodbye." No, we can't.

There is a responsibility, a sense of responsibility, and sense of long-term relationship. So community engagement is key to everything we do. And of course, I work at the land-grant institution, which this is one of the stories we tell about the mission of this university, but it's also for me personally, I feel more at home at those community engaged kinds of activities. It reminds me of my own home, where those social relationships are key.

Danae: Bringing it back to our own homes. If someone's space isn't working for them, but they don't have much money to spend, where should they start?

Rula: So why isn't that space working for you? Don't just say, "I just hate it," and go. I think really sit with this space. Clare Marcus Cooper used actually, for people who were encountering difficult relationships, she told them to go and interview the house and talk to the house. So interview your place. So you might actually start thinking about, "Is it too small? Does it feel too small?" Well, can I enhance that sense of spaciousness by adding perhaps some lighting on the walls themselves, almost pushing them away, further away from me so they may look like it's a little wider.

Perhaps it feels cluttered. So how might I organize certain areas for certain types of activities? So there is the area where I might complete my paperwork, and perhaps if I put all of that paperwork behind closed doors, it will look almost a little bit less cluttered. Create backdrops and foregrounds for the activities. We all have areas that have multiple usages, so how can that space transform between one use day and night, right? Or how could it be for my workspace and then transition into one edge into dining room, a dining space?

Danae: Beyond rearranging things, what else can we do to make a space feel more comfortable or inviting?

Rula: Color and light are incredible, but so are texture. Perhaps you cannot paint. So can you bring a certain backdrop, throw, pictures, natural elements? Nature is so amazing in any kind of space, but make sure that you are watering things and removing all of the dead leaves and things. Perhaps it's cold, it feels cold. So how can I enhance the sense of its warmth and the sense of belonging? Maybe it's organizing my furniture so it actually creates some form of a circle of conversation, an area where I might be watching my TV, but also I might be doing my work or listening to music. So use all of your senses when you are trying to enhance your built environment.

Danae: I just want to give you the opportunity. What do you most want people to take away from your work?

Rula: I love what I do. I love the design and planning and management or stewardship built environments or the interrelation. It's an ecosystem. The ecosystem is our natural world, it's our built environment and it's the people within. So we can always be active about creating and enabling environments that make us feel better, that make us feel well. Actually, indicators about health and wellbeing, equitable housing is one, transportation, the air we breathe, the water we drink. So if we are, first of all, to be better stewards of our environments, that would be awesome, all of us to be better stewards of those environments, investing in our own sense of ownership and quality, whether it is immediate space or even if it's a public space.

Remember places and document for yourself and maybe for people around you, the places where you grew up, your own geography, how did those places contribute to who you are? And then maybe that can enable you to do more with that. Honor our cultural heritage and our places that we see. They are not just out there. They are our continuity, our history, the time and energy and wisdom of many generations and how it might continue and be built upon whether it's adaptive use or whether it's simply preservation. I think it's really our responsibility, our collective responsibility.

Danae: Awesome. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Rula: Thank you.

Danae: Okay, Leigh, what did you think of that conversation?

Leigh: Gosh, I, she used so many phrases that I really, really like, such as placemaking and placekeeping and the danger in telling single stories. But I think I'll talk about what she was talking about at the end where someone like her or anybody with expertise walks into a place, a neighborhood, a community that is not their own with the good intentions of hoping to help, but not assuming that the community's broken. I, that is such an important thing to remember, and I think it's so easy to fall accidentally, and again, with the best of intentions, into I'm bringing solutions, when in fact it's more about, as she said, listening to them for their needs, the information they have, and then together, you know, they're part of the solution.

They bring a lot of the solution to the table as well. And it's just helping that conversation happen perhaps as opposed to dictating a solution, which is a very beautiful idea.

Danae: It's a good reminder that, you know, even... Well, for instance, when I was a journalist, oftentimes I would go into a story thinking it would be one thing, but having an open mind, right? So you have an educated guess about how something will go based on your own expertise, and then, but you walk in there and you've got an open mind, and sometimes it ends up being like the most incredible conversation or collaboration or whatever, just because you didn't go in with an agenda. And I think this is a good reminder. Thank you for listening to The Vandal Theory.

Be sure to rate, review and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform to help others discover conversations about science, research and innovation at University of Idaho. Email us with research topics, questions or issues you'd like explored in a future episode of vandaltheory@uidaho.edu. And to learn more about our research at the university and listen to past episodes of the Vandal Theory, visit go.uidaho.edu/vandaltheory. I'm Danae Lenz.

Leigh: And I'm Leigh Cooper.

Danae: Thanks for listening.