The practice of active listening has its roots in psychotherapy but has since been applied across a range of helping professions. Within the design professions, active listening is most usefully applied both at the outset of a project, when the designer is seeking to understand their client’s needs, and when soliciting feedback to inform subsequent iterations of a design. Arguably, active listening is an essential skill, if not the most essential skill, for any service-oriented project that aims to deliver a quality product that successfully addresses the client’s needs, be they an individual, small organization, or an entire community. 

Active listening can be practiced in innumerable ways. Some examples include: 

• Making a point to listen more than you speak 

• Resisting the urge to make assumptions about what the other person means 

• Responding directly to what is personal rather than to abstractions.  

• Asking for clarification with open-ended questions 

• Restating what the speaker has said to clarify and open yourself to correction when needed 

• Checking your tone for sincerity 

• Empathizing without attempt to speak from someone else’s frame of reference 

• Showing genuine interest in the speaker  

• Holding off on giving advice unless you’ve been asked to  

Active listening of this sort requires three fundamental skills: (1) attentive body language, (2) following skills and (3) reflective skills.  

Our project builds on work completed by two prior Community Engagement studio classes. In 2012, a class of MLAs completed a master plan for Brooklyn Cemetery offering guidance for its restoration and preservation. In 2020, another class of MLAs contributed design concepts centering on Section G. Elyna and my task these semester has been to take those design concepts – namely David Evans's (MLA 2020) “figure and coin” concept” - and advance it toward an implementable set of design guidelines, specifications, and construction details as well as provide finalized renderings that the Friends of Brooklyn Cemetery could use for fundraising.   

Active listening was particularly important at the outset of our project, when we first met with Linda Davis, and toward the end of our first phase of community engagement, which concluded with presenting our proposed design alternatives to the group in person. Prior to meeting Linda, Elyna and I had done extensive background research on Black cemetery preservation and had carefully read the questionnaire that Linda had submitted to Professor Melcher prior to the semester. Even so, we remained hyper-aware of the position we occupied as two white graduate students with limited familiarity with the site, and wanted to be sure that we honored Linda’s local expertise, hard-won through 15 years of dedicated stewardship. When it came time to meet, Elyna and I made the effort to listen actively, ask follow-up questions where needed, and reflect what we had heard back to Linda to ensure that we had understood her correctly.  

At the end of our in-person presentation, when we had moved into more of an open discussion of the proposed alternatives, these active listening skills were doubly extensive. It was a humbling experience to be privy to the conversation as the trustees, most of whom were Black Athenians born and raised in or near the Brooklyn neighborhood, frankly and passionately discussed the legacy of slavery and racial prejudice they had inherited, the limitations that this legacy had placed upon them in terms of capital resources, and the degree to which our designs had remained attentive to these challenges. We were humbled all the more when the trustees assured us that we had, indeed, listened well, and that, in our own small way, we had aided their efforts to move this project from far-off vision to implementable reality.   

If there was one lesson I would urge other students to consider, it is that our skills as designers in no way position us as experts when working with groups like the Friends of Brooklyn Cemetery. If we are to take the service-oriented nature of this class seriously, we must consider our stakeholders as local experts and allow their experience and needs to supersede personal design visions.   

I would also strongly urge landscape designers, in particular, to consider what stewardship means to them. If there is anything that this project has taught me, it is that our profession by and large has co-opted the term. By and large, we employ the term as a buzzword and catchy raison d’etre. But stewards do not proclaim their status as such, nor do they opportunistically jump from project to project. They show up, day in and day out, week after month after year, and put in the hard work of tending to the places that matter to them the most. To my mind, the Friends of Brooklyn Cemetery and their kindred organizations across the United States are exemplars of what genuine stewardship looks like in action. Their experience, as such, is worth learning from.   

Our role is not to swoop in and proclaim ourselves as stewards of a place. It is to listen, with care and humility, to local expertise, and seek out ways to align our skills to stakeholders’ genuine needs in order to serve their highest aims and values. We may not presume their same level of expertise, but we can act as accomplices to it. 

Sources:

Gragson, Ted L. “Active Listening – a brief introduction.” Class handout, ICON 8001, Fall 2016