Honestly, I feel a little bad for the folks at the Kounkuey Design Initiative. The international nonprofit says its mission is to “partner with under-resourced communities to advance equity and activate the unrealized potential in their neighborhoods and cities.” Recently, the design collective teamed up with the Los Angeles Department of Transportation to address a very real problem. Most LA bus stops lack any sort of structure offering shade in the daytime or light at night. KDI secured funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and began studying how a better bus-stop design could be part of LADOT’s “Gender Equity Action Plan.” KDI designers “traveled around the world to understand how other cities made their transportation systems more gender inclusive,” the company bragged in a tweet.
All over the globe, foundations and nonprofits are playing a growing role in setting policies and building infrastructure intended to help poor communities. Many of these organizations look a lot like KDI, which was started by six Harvard graduate students. They’re composed of highly educated, well-connected do-gooders who want to put their progressive values to work helping “under-resourced communities,” to use the current approved terminology. If a project goes well, its designer might even be invited to give a TED talk. I don’t mean to be too cynical; these groups often do important work. But all too frequently, it seems, their grand progressive plans wind up colliding with messy reality.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Commentary
______________________
James B. Meigs is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a City Journal contributing editor, cohost of the How Do We Fix It? podcast, and the former editor of Popular Mechanics.
Photo by AnnaStills/iStock