Ahead of our upcoming event, The Intentional City, on September 12, we decided to sit down with one of our panelists to learn more about them. Spencer Williams has a background in architecture, advocacy, and policy; we wanted to know how these disciplines inform his approach to his work as Director of Land Use and Topography in the Office of Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso.

Below is a transcript of our conversation with Williams. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Are you from Brooklyn originally?

I am not from Brooklyn originally — I’m originally from the southeast. I moved around a lot as a kid, so I’ve lived in Tennessee and Alabama and Georgia and Florida and New Jersey, and then I went to college at Savannah College of Art Design in Georgia. Then I moved to Portland, Oregon, where I went to Portland State University, and then moved to Seattle. And now I have been in Brooklyn for the last six years. I’m currently in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and it’s a great neighborhood. It’s super close to Borough Hall, so I can walk or bike or take the subway. It’s been a good home for me, and continues to be. 

It’s really interesting that you have moved around so much, because it seems like now much of your job is about how we build connections and maintain communities in place, right?

Yeah, that’s a fair bit of the job. And I think having the experience of other places has given me insight into other approaches to some of those challenges, and also a good sensibility of sort of who’s not in the room in terms of engagement issues, or what connections are maybe possible to bring to that work, informed by work that I’ve done in other cities.

So one way that Brooklyn and Providence differ is public transit, right? Brooklyn has a very robust public transit system, while Providence does not. What role does public transportation play in bringing communities together?

When we look at Brooklyn historically, the places where we have frequent buses are the places where we used to have streetcars. And these transportation systems reflect the legacy of our built environment and how this city grew up: how it grew from neighborhood to neighborhood, and how those neighborhoods were connected to thriving downtown areas. Big strategic investments in things like the subway and rapid bus transit are an acknowledgement that people are traveling across the region in New York to get access to job centers, to schools, to cultural institutions, things like that. 

Though we do have a really robust level of transportation, we still have our transportation challenges, particularly for folks with disabilities. Not all of our subway stations are accessible, and there are parts of our transportation system — particularly our bus network — that get really snarled by some of the traffic that we experience as a city. In Brooklyn that means that along some of our key corridors, there are folks who only have access to the bus, and they end up spending a lot more time in traffic, even though they have access to this really great transportation system. 

Part of having a comprehensive plan — or thinking about transportation and housing and culture together — is about how to cultivate a city of short trips. How do we make it so people have ready access to the things that they need and options on how to get there?

And so those challenges are born out of land use: How far do people need to travel in order to access the things they need and connect with the communities that matter to them? Part of having a comprehensive plan — or thinking about transportation and housing and culture together — is about how to cultivate a city of short trips. How do we make it so people have ready access to the things that they need and options on how to get there? 

I’m fortunate enough to have a lifestyle that allows me those options. And I just want everyone in the borough and the city to have the same level of access, whether that’s because of the affordability of the housing or the comfort of the bike network. 

Before you worked for Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, you were Director of Advocacy at Municipal Art Society New York City. I’m curious — how can art elevate advocacy work?

The Municipal Art Society started over 120 years ago in New York City and they do phenomenal work and advocacy for planning-related issues. It also came out of the municipal arts movement and thinking about how we beautify cities. How do we think about sculpture and statues and landscaping to really cultivate civic pride? That’s one way that history can inform what is beautiful — the things that people have made, the quality of the housing stock, the function of different places. 

The other way that art can really help is that it celebrates culture and reflects the lived experience of a city. We see that culture come out in advocacy efforts. When people are organizing to make housing more affordable, art is really critical in how you communicate with your neighbors. When we see people thinking about understanding climate change, art can be really helpful to cut through what might be otherwise really dense data. It might be overwhelming to say, “Here is a marker of what the high water mark was during Hurricane Sandy.” If you have an art project that’s really trying to wrestle with the memory of that event, it’s going to have a different impact on people than showing them a map of coastal flooding risk. An artistic approach is going to really get to the heart and soul of a matter and make a personal connection with place, with people, with culture. 

And I would say, particularly in Brooklyn, we are fortunate to have forms of art that speak to every part of what it means to live in the city, from people making art and plays around the struggle to find housing to people celebrating the mixture of cultures in a place with some of the most diverse zip codes in the country.

You are currently pursuing a master’s of divinity, correct? Do you feel like your religious studies and your practice as a city planner are at all related to each other?

Yes, I am a student at Union Theological Seminary. And I feel that they are very related. If you look at my background, I started as an architect, then went into city and community planning with a focus on community development. I’ve spent a lot of time focusing on housing, homelessness, transportation, and urban design issues, and a lot of that is related to the question of what makes a place sacred. How do we, as a community of people, be better neighbors to one another? 

An artistic approach is going to really get to the heart and soul of a matter and make a personal connection with place, with people, with culture. 

For me, that is not a way to say I’m going to bring a sort of religiosity into my work as a planner, in terms of, like bringing that sacred text into planning. I don’t need to do that because we have sacred text in the city — that’s our city charter. When I look at the city charter of Brooklyn or of New York City, it has really high aspirations about how we should be and how the government should function. And so when people come to City Hall or Borough Hall to get their needs met and let their elected officials know what they’re struggling with, we need to be able to listen and to take action. I think there’s a set of skills that is available in religion that hopefully makes me a better public servant. And I would also say that our deputy borough president is also an ordained minister and a reverend as well. And so that example of public leadership and service, even within our office, is a really good touch point for me on how to bring that part of myself — my whole self — to work.

Lastly, communication between city leaders and the people who live in the actual communities affected by policy is so important. I think everybody acknowledges that, but it’s not always easy to engage people on policy issues, right? How can city planners better work directly with the community to ensure that the people who actually live there have a seat at the table?

I would say that thinking about community engagement really begins with how you think about community. One of the ways that we do that at Borough Hall with the borough president is we really utilize a lot of data to make sure that we are operating with as much existing information as we can. The quality of the questions that you ask will reveal the quality of the engagement that is possible. When we look for underlying trends and patterns across the borough based on race or class or age, we can begin to see and understand some of the challenges that we’re facing as a community, and also highlight who is really most impacted by those challenges. Using data to understand some of the issues on the ground can really help to build trust and accountability across different communities. 

The other way that we engage people is by investing in community leadership. We do that at Borough Hall in a number of ways. One of those ways is that we have a nonprofit development and acquisition fund to help nonprofits basically get stable places in the community — meaning the ability to buy and renovate places for offices and work. That helps to stabilize community leadership so they’re not subject to ever-increasing rents, for example, and enables them to more readily do the work they’re there to do. 

Using data to understand some of the issues on the ground can really help to build trust and accountability across different communities.

The other way that we do that in our role at Borough Hall is by convening folks. We hold public hearings. We are out in the community at block associations and tenant associations and community boards. At all these places we are listening and responding and being accountable to the issues that we hear on the ground, as well as the data that we see, and then giving voice to those things through our recommendations and through the power that we have as an office to advocate on behalf of the nearly 3 million people in the borough. That’s a lot to hold up, and we are often doing that through amplifying advocacy that is on the ground and reflecting what we’re hearing in our public processes.