"Moving beyond problems and toward the graphic description of proposed solutions at this scale, the expectations and opportunities were many. One expects to find a visual analysis of the relationship between geographically networked institutions of various sizes—considered in terms of their constituencies and jurisdictions, their resources and reach—and of the realpolitik of intracity spatial bargaining that determines outcomes within this complexity. At minimum, one expects to find assessment and depiction of the movement of materiel and individuals within and around potentially affected neighborhoods or defensible infrastructural conclusions regarding citywide pressures relieved by untying that knot. One hopes to find the promise of the Commission’s rigor kept with a cartography that clarifies costs and benefits for communities and outlines the terrain of interests and stakeholders. Justice in Design, however, offers a second illustration in which the knot of confusion, chaos, and constrained collection is rendered effortlessly resolved, a drawing that vaguely points to neighborhoods where new jail facilities are suggested within a flat, undifferentiated, neutral city. But for those communities and stakeholders, #WhereWeAre is not a city of abstracted ease. It is a complex political space in which they are now negotiating without a shared reference of options and effects, through which they are navigating without a map.

[…]

“This form of public engagement has not happened, and the Justice in Design team may not have known it would not. Still, we might learn from the role their work has served in its absence. Their illustrations have circulated as #VisualHashtags, as shorthand stand-ins for promises, as New York’s primary collective image of itself #AfterRikers—distracting, while real plans were made outside of public view. We might learn that none of us can afford to forgo that crucial, first-and-only chance to fulfill #AsEarlyAsPossible by beginning a public conversation in concrete terms, however contentious we know it will be. We might learn that our drawings could effectively facilitate inclusive debate but won’t without empowering communities with the “full scope of issues.” We might learn that shying away from guaranteed opposition provides cover for others, whether we intend it or not. Forfeiting any opportunity to problematize the urbanistic, sociospatial implications of a proposal means also forfeiting the chance to create platforms for advocacy by testing and presenting alternatives or to carry and maintain professional influence over a process so easily hijacked by power.

[…]

“The broader, hazier ethical questions are those anticipated by the Lippman Commission, those not delimited in building-related professional Codes, those concerned with whether outcomes are reached by just processes, and those in which #DrawingInPublic is implicated. Unsurprisingly, these are also questions of scale: the scales of specificity, of information, of intervention, of anticipatory action and practices of civic involvement. The drawings did not illustrate an implementable project; they were an implemented project. As such, they carry a set of ethical questions regarding their effects, use, and location within the city—including, for example, the completeness and clarity of the information shared, the impacts of their dissemination, their influence on decision-making, and their relationship to present and future participatory practices.”