Reframing What it Means to be a Leader

As a Principal of Urban Design at Sasaki, Chair of the board for the Hideo Sasaki Foundation, and a teacher at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Mary Anne Ocampo is a force to be reckoned with. Through her work as an urban designer, she has led master plans and institutional planning projects for many colleges and universities. As Chair of the Board of Trustees for the Sasaki Foundation, she advocates for social justice and global community design while developing the strategic direction of the Foundation. We sat down with Mary Anne on zoom to talk about her past, her mentors, and what being a leader means to her.

How did you get to where you are?

My journey into urban design started with my love for architecture and cities. With architecture, I loved the process of creative thinking and spatializing ideas. My love of urban design grew from traveling and discovering cities when I was studying abroad in Italy as an undergraduate student in the University of Kentucky’s College of Architecture program. I was fortunate to have a cohort of talented friends and amazing faculty. The program was experimental in its approaches to architectural design and covered a range of thinking about space, art, film, and urbanism. I felt like I had found my calling.

I decided that I wanted to continue my studies and went to Cornell for a MArch II. Ithaca was magical. The campus on the hill overlooking the gorges was the perfect setting. It was a time when I was deeply devoted to research and taught with faculty in the undergraduate architecture program. It is also here that I started thinking about the dynamic systems that impact the way we design cities, and my focus broadened to infrastructure, landscape, and how cultural and environmental forces were impacting cities.

When I graduated from Cornell, I got an opportunity to teach at Syracuse University. I taught there for three years and loved teaching, but my interests continued to gravitate toward urban design and planning, which eventually led me to return to school for an urban design degree at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard.

Harvard was great because I learned more about planning. It gave me a deeper understanding of how political and economic systems influence design. In one of my reviews, I had an amazing critic, Janne Corneil. She is a great thinker, a talented designer, and at the time a Principal at Sasaki. I decided that I wanted to work with her. So for the last 12 years, I have worked at Sasaki where I continue to grow as a professional, working with interdisciplinary teams on interesting projects.

Today, I balance three major roles: a Principal practicing urban design at Sasaki, Chair of the board for the Hideo Sasaki Foundation, a non-profit organization centered on building equitable and resilient communities in Boston, and a teacher at MIT.

Has the pandemic reshaped your thinking?

Absolutely. It has made me rethink my role as an urban designer. Whom I’m designing for has become more significant to me. The pandemic has shown us the areas where we are resilient and adaptable and where we are systematically in need of reform. We are finding disparities and disproportionate impacts to certain populations defined by gender, race, and socio-economic backgrounds and we have experienced how fragile particular populations actually are in this pandemic. I’m constantly considering, how is your work contributing to communities where there is the greatest need?

Mary Anne teaching MIT students for a studio studying urban design and flooding in Venice, Italy. Photo credit: Rebecca Ocampo.

On a more personal note, the pandemic redefined my work/life balance. I went from traveling to two or three cities a week and living out of a small suitcase to working in my home and I have to say, a lot of that travel wasn’t necessary. I feel much healthier in a lot of ways now, and I no longer assume that certain business-as-usual practices are just the way things are. There are options that we can position to fit our own needs for our health and well-being. From a teaching perspective during the pandemic, I have found it more challenging to engage students online at times and have been thinking about what obstacles they may be experiencing.

What challenges have you faced and how did you overcome them?

One of the challenges I have often faced is how to navigate bias. There is a wide variety of biases that are based on race, gender, age, and so on. I have had clients say, “I was just thinking you were not old enough to know what that was.” There have been times I have been surprised by some of these statements, but the way to succeed in those situations is to take the long view and educate those who are not trying to intentionally harm you.

Because I am in a leadership role and have experienced biases that impact me, I feel a responsibility to others who don’t have the same position, who may not feel like they have that platform, or who are at the beginning of their career. Simply soliciting another person’s opinion who I know to be shy in larger group conversations or who often gets drowned out by louder personalities is one way to promote others’ voices and let them know, “I see you, I hear you, and I value you.” These simple tactics can hopefully be transferred to the next generation of leadership until eventually, it becomes standard industry practice.

One way that I am trying to work through the challenges is working with the Hideo Sasaki Foundation to host public conversations that discuss these issues and amplify the work of wonderful activists. The Foundation hosted an amazing panel called, Feminist Practices in Design + Data, and we had a group of women coming from MIT and Syracuse University that focused on how our society has essentially erased Black women in history, drawing from a playbook of misogyny that uses disbelief, gaslighting, erasure, and revisionist history. Danielle Wood, Katlyn Turner, Catherine D’Ignazio, Lori Brown, and Elaine Minjy Limmer shared ideas that celebrated women and also exposed the challenges and need to advocate for gender and racial equity with an intersectional feminist approach. It was inspiring.

What can leaders do to alleviate some of these challenges?

I really think the first thing we need to do is reframe what constitutes good leadership. There is a type of leadership style that emerges in design culture that casts the leader as the heroic architect/designer — traditionally an alpha-oriented personality that knows best. I believe that design culture should be centered on collaboration, which is very hard to do if success is only understood through that traditional lens.

Using community engagement tactics such as listening sessions and tabling sessions allowed for a variety of voices to be heard on a project at the University of Kentucky. photo credit: Sasaki

I believe that active listening is also extremely important. It is not about only listening to what you want to hear and accepting what you already find agreeable, it is about listening to why someone thought those things. Ultimately, it comes down to respect for all human beings, empathy for their experiences, and accountability in how you are participating in those experiences. It’s what I hope to achieve in my work as a designer who chose this career to build a better world, so I think it should be within my work environment as well.

What policy would you change in the profession?

Number one there have to be more women at the table and in meaningful positions of power and leadership in all professions. There are plenty of smart women who have different lived experiences; the question is why haven’t they been included at the decision-making table? Studies have shown that student populations in university design programs are almost equally women and men, but when looking at professional practice there are fewer and fewer women. That's a real problem. I think there has to be a level of recognition in promoting women into leadership positions to change the conversations, with their voice at the table essentially. With those new perspectives will be new ways of thinking. And I would add, one woman doesn’t represent all women. It isn’t a monolith. In the spirit of bell hooks, we need intersectional thinking that really understands that different social identities contribute to a person’s experience. As hooks and Kimberlé Crenshaw have written, women of color have different experiences that aren’t captured through just a gender lens.

My hope is that there are many diverse lived experiences that are reflected in multiple leadership roles and that there is change. If we are adding a couple of new voices to leadership, but simply perpetuating the same system—a business as usual culture—this is a futile endeavor. I also believe that it is really important to have allies that support women leaders at all stages of their leadership, but especially when they first advance to that position.

Second, we need to assess the inherent gender and race biases within our systems, reform them, and then create a system to track improvements. To really change a culture of bias, we must first acknowledge the bias and reexamine the decision-making process and policies.

There needs to be better gender and racial equity within the design profession. Women, especially women of color, have been disproportionately at a disadvantage compared to men for too long. There needs to be policies in place that provide flexibility for a balanced work and life approach within design. Studies have found people are constantly overworked and so that's one of the reasons that women might leave the profession. We need to ensure pay equity for women and opportunities for growth. Having women in leadership allows us to provide mentorship, sponsorship, and role models that women can relate to from leaders who have overcome challenges specific to their experience. It is extremely encouraging and validating to know that if someone like you has done it, you can do it too.

Mary Anne teaching MIT students in Venice Italy. photo credit: Rebecca Ocampo

You have mentioned that your role models and mentors have had a huge effect on your career. Can you talk a little more about that?

I am so grateful for all of the mentors and role models that have guided me throughout my career and from whom I have borrowed certain traits. I've had women and men who have really been inspirational and fantastic mentors for me in learning architectural design and urban design, and I often look back to them for ways to approach planning and design—even to this day. The list is too long to go over all of my mentors who’ve made a difference in my career and in my life, but here are a few:

Mentorship came from my home environment first in the form of a great father who got me super excited about learning. Learning was what we did for fun and having that curiosity about the world was always kind of built into our home. That philosophy extended into the classroom with an amazing teacher, Sonya Fowler, who again always took the time to get me excited and understand what my interests were. She then helped reinforce and connect me to those different fields of knowledge, whether it was science or math or the creative arts, and helped build up my confidence in my abilities. We were in a small, intimate classroom and our teachers taught us for multiple years across multiple subjects, so that was very special because you don't always get that type of long-term support and coaching.

One of my first role models was Andrea Simitch. She was my thesis advisor and teacher at Cornell, and I really loved her direct and honest approach. She suffers no fools and her presence within a studio atmosphere was amazing.

I had another professor, Lily Chi, at Cornell who just was so intellectually rigorous and demanded so much of everyone that she pushed you to achieve more than you ever thought you were capable of. Her willingness to always ask more of you and how she talked about ideas was so inspiring.

Janne Corneil, at Sasaki, as I mentioned before, changed the way I interact with people. She showed me, by example, how deep humility and modesty can be a powerful asset as an urban designer. She really connected with different people through her ideas and values — what she stood for and what she believed in — and used design as a tool for positive change in communities.

What are some positives and negatives in emerging professionals (EPs)?

From my experience, emerging professionals have a palpable excitement towards advancing social equity, making a difference, and contributing to the world in a positive way, which is truly inspiring. Their drive towards helping the collective constantly injects new purpose into our industry and keeps a mirror in front of us, providing unapologetic responses to outdated belief systems. Emerging professionals help us remember what’s possible rather than what’s probable. That’s a clear positive.

I think there is a potential trap that is easy for emerging professionals to fall into, and that is a great urgency to advance. It takes time to build up the skills that you need and sometimes it can be so exciting and there's so much responsibility that wants to be gained, but you have to earn that over time. Advocate for the things you can’t live without in your career and plan for how you want to achieve your goals over time.

What final tips do you have for emerging professionals and leaders?

I would say follow your passions, but also know what avenues, skill sets, and foundations you need to grow and remain competitive. For emerging professionals, I encourage you to build skill sets, get experience, be optimistic, remain open-minded, and be ready and willing to experiment and dive deep into the work that you're doing. Practicing design encompasses so much more than just passion, that's what may fuel you, but it's learning the mundane and the pragmatic stuff that can also make you a really great designer. Ultimately, it is how you balance all of those things. Don't lose sight of the big design ideas and the passion that you had that brought you into the field, but also realize there's a lot of other aspects to design that include the business side, the pragmatics of technical details, and working with communities and clients that really create a stronger more comprehensive way to approach and think about projects. Be critical of approaches, but learn and be open at the same time. Learn how to work with more people in a way to understand how to collaborate. Stay true to your values and understand how your design process and projects are impacting others.

As for leaders, I would encourage you to continue to question how you can advance our discipline and our world — the way we educate, the way we mentor, and the way we practice and then hold ourselves accountable to reaching those new parameters. As a leader, you are in a more privileged position and that privilege comes with lots of amazing aspects of how you can shape the narrative, the profession, and what you can do to contribute to it. At the same time, be mindful that you can impact other people or other ways of thinking, so remain responsible to those people. Stay true to yourself in regard to what your values are and reflect on the relevancy of your design work to the larger social and environmental challenges we as a society are confronting.