Sharon Sutton: Social Inclusion and Participation in Urban Planning

Sharon Sutton is the American architect and planner, professor emerita at the University of Washington and one of the first African American women licensed as architects in the United States, who has devoted her career to arguing that cities are designed equitably only when marginalised communities, and especially their young people, take part in decisions about their surroundings. Her thesis, developed in books such as Weaving a Tapestry of Resistance (1996) and The Paradox of Urban Space (2011), co-edited with Susan Kemp, is that urban space reproduces racial and class inequality but can become, through participatory design, the place where that inequality is transformed; and that participation is not a formality but a form of civic education that strengthens the social fabric.

Columbia 1965-1976: when the ivory towers were Black

Sutton came to architecture from music and painting, and as a student lived through the transformation of Columbia's School of Architecture after the protests of 1968, which she reconstructed in When Ivory Towers Were Black (2017): between 1965 and 1976 the school recruited Black and Puerto Rican students, oriented its curriculum toward the neighbourhoods of Harlem and produced a generation of community-committed architects, before a conservative backlash closed the experiment. That episode, which she calls a forgotten success story, shapes her conviction that the training of professionals decides which cities they are able to imagine.

Designing with children and youth: the environment teaches who counts

Her first contribution is design with children and young people. In Weaving a Tapestry of Resistance she studied how school and neighbourhood environments teach children of poor communities their place in society, with decayed schools, unused playgrounds and dangerous streets that transmit a lack of worth, and showed that involving young people in redesigning those spaces changes both the place and their sense of capability. Her community design workshops in Detroit, New York and Seattle have followed that method: young people research their neighbourhood, propose and negotiate, and learn that the environment can be changed.

The paradox of urban space: it segregates and it sustains

The second is the paradox of urban space. With Kemp, Sutton argues that the same space that segregates, excludes and stigmatises poor and racialised communities is the resource with which those communities build identity, networks and power, and that planning must start from that double condition: recognising the capacities the place already sustains before intervening, and ensuring the intervention does not destroy them. Her critique targets urban policies that favour groups with more economic and political power and treat marginalised neighbourhoods as problems, and participation processes that consult without ceding decisions.

Influence, criticism and what real inclusion means

Her work converses with Paul Davidoff's advocacy planning, Sherry Arnstein's ladder of participation and the community design centres of the 1960s, and has influenced the training of architects and planners through her teaching and her role in professional associations, where she has pushed for racial and gender diversity in a profession that remains mostly white and male. Critics note that small-scale participatory design does not alter the structures that produce inequality; Sutton replies that participation builds the collective capacity without which no structure is changed.

Sharon Sutton's lesson is that social inclusion in planning does not mean designing for the excluded but with them, and that young people in marginalised neighbourhoods are the best experts on what their places need. A city that gives them a voice produces better spaces and capable citizens; one that treats them as passive beneficiaries reproduces, with every project, the lesson that their environment does not belong to them. Changing that lesson, she argues, is planning's most urgent task.