“That Is Not What This Place Is to Us”: Adaptive Reuse, Public Ethnography, and the Politics of Knowing in Rural West Texas
Dr. Asma Mehan is Assistant Professor at Texas Tech University and Director of the Architectural Humanities and Urbanism Lab (AHU_Lab). Her research focuses on adaptive reuse, community design, and critical urban futures. She is Editor-in-Chief of PlaNext Journal and works at the intersection of design, ethnography, and public scholarship.
Contact the author: Asma.Mehan@ttu.edu
Keywords
Adaptive reuse; public ethnography; participatory design; community knowledge; rural West Texas; design pedagogy; co-production; situated knowledge.
Methodological Takeaway
Design becomes public ethnography when knowledge co-production, rather than aesthetic output, is the goal. In practice that means embedding ethnographic methods — sensory mapping, walking interviews, oral history, iterative community-led review — into design research; staying transparent with communities about how findings will circulate; and building accountability into every stage rather than adding it at the end. The deeper insight is that the transitions between fieldwork, studio analysis, and public dissemination are not only presentational decisions. They are ethical and political ones. In design projects with communities, every transition is an occasion to ask again who has a say, what becomes visible, and what should remain held in the community. In places that have been subjects of knowledge production with little benefit to them, accountability is not optional. It is the condition under which co-production becomes possible at all.
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Introduction
On a cold morning in early November 2023, a diverse collective gathered on the floor of an abandoned cotton gin in Lubbock, a small farming community on the Llano Estacado of West Texas. Seated in scattered folding chairs were long-time residents — growers, retired schoolteachers, members of the local historical society, several women who had once kept the gin’s office books — alongside students from our community design studio at Texas Tech, members of the Architectural Humanities and Urbanism Lab (AHU_Lab) who had convened the meeting. The gathering was one in a series of county-wide conversations about the future of the region’s underused historic buildings, the gin among them. What mattered that morning was less the building than the fact of the room itself: residents who had lived the gin’s history, students trained to redraw it, and the institutions that had brought them together, all assembled under a single design objective whose terms had not yet been agreed upon. That assembly — and the gap it would expose between knowing a place and knowing about it — is the subject of this essay.
The centering question was this: what forms of knowledge, memory, and community practice emerge when adaptive reuse is approached not as a design intervention but as a collective process of listening, co-production, and situated civic imagination?
For three generations the gin had been the town’s pulse. Built in 1923 along the rail line that carried West Texas cotton to the markets of Houston and Galveston, it ran from August through January. Wagons, and later trucks, queued the length of Main Street to deliver the harvest. Children cut through the gin yard on their walk to school. The women in the office knew every grower’s name, every acreage, every running balance. When the bale press dropped, the schoolhouse a quarter mile away could hear it. Then, in the mid-1990s, when consolidation pulled cotton processing into larger regional facilities, the gin felt idle and closed. By that November morning it had stood silent so long that its corrugated metal had bleached to the pale orange of the Llano Estacado.
The gin’s predicament was not unique. Across West Texas, small communities face a common condition: aging infrastructure, shrinking tax bases, and the steady erosion of the physical fabric — gins, grain elevators, feedlots, courthouses, downtown storefronts — that once held them together. These conditions press an urgent question onto towns with few resources to answer it: what should become of buildings too significant to demolish and too costly to maintain?
That question animated the broader project from which this essay draws. Texas Tech University had launched an initiative to inventory and reimagine the region’s at-risk historic sites, and AHU_Lab was charged with leading it. The initiative’s intended deliverables were oriented toward external audiences and institutional requirements: heritage documentation, condition assessments, and reuse concepts that could anchor grant applications and regional planning decisions. Facilitating the county-wide conversations was one part of this larger effort to move from inventory to action.
It was within this initiative that the design studio was invited support the reconceptualization of the gin and several companion structures. AHU_Lab was brought in for a specific reason: our work joins technical design capacity to a participatory, community-engaged framework, and the initiative needed both — the drawings that institutions recognize and a process that could surface what residents wanted. As Project Lead, faculty member, and Instructor of Record, I directed the studio, designed its research process, and was responsible for what we carried into the room. I was not, in other words, merely observing the methodological reckoning that followed; I had helped set its terms.
Our charge was to produce a baseline for the community conversation: a body of analysis and proposals concrete enough to react to. For six weeks beforehand, the design team — a group of students working under my direction — produced figure-grounds of the downtown, axonometric studies of the gin and three other historic structures, condition assessments, and watercolor renderings of what adaptive reuse might look like. We intended these not as finished plans but as provocations: openings for a conversation we knew we could not script in advance.
The morning of the meeting, the students hung their drawings on the gin’s walls. They were technically accomplished, creative, and expansive. They were also, as it turned out, wrong.
A woman who had grown up directly behind the gin, who had lived her whole life alongside it is standing abandoned, studied a watercolor that showed the building reactivated as a community arts space. She looked at it for a long moment. Then, quietly, she said: “That is not what this place is to us.”
She was right. What the drawings rendered was a building. What she meant was that a building — abstracted from the labor histories, family geographies, and seasonal rhythms that gave it meaning — was not the place she lived in. The drawings showed what we had come to know about the gin: its dimensions, its structural condition, its presence in the streetscape. They had not shown what residents knew of it — the relational, embodied, biographical knowledge that constitutes a place from the inside. We had brought the drawings expecting them to start a conversation; we had not expected them to expose how far our way of knowing the gin stood from the town’s. The distinction between knowing a place and knowing about a place — one we did not arrive with but were obliged to learn — became the methodological core of the work that followed.
Designing With, Not For: The Studio as Field Site
The project asked a deceptively simple question: how should the small towns of the southern Plains imagine the future use of their historic agricultural and civic infrastructure — gins, grain elevators, feedlots, courthouses, downtown storefronts — given declining tax bases, aging populations, and the slow erosion of the fabric that once held communities together? Our studio’s working hypothesis, which we carried into the project before that first meeting, was that the answer could not be designed for these communities from the outside; it had to be designed with them. The woman’s words on the gin floor did not overturn that hypothesis so much as give it teeth: they converted a principle we held in the abstract into a concrete methodological demand, and they dictated the choices that followed.
What followed was a deliberately heterogeneous toolkit. We used conventional spatial analysis — building typologies, condition surveys, contextual mapping. We also asked participants to map their experience of place through dimensions that architecture rarely registers smell, sound, temperature, the seasonality of light, the social geography of who walked which street and when. The premise was that the sensory and biographical data residents carried in their bodies was not an anecdotal supplement to “real” research; it was its own form of evidence about how the place had been lived.
What did this look like in practice? On a hot afternoon in October, we ran a sensory-mapping session in the gin and its yard with eleven residents, ages roughly thirty-five to eighty-two. We gave each a black-and-white plan of the site and asked them to walk it slowly and annotate what they noticed: where the air still smelled of cottonseed oil three decades after closure; where the metal walls amplified the wind into a low industrial hum; where the concrete floor radiated heat hours after sunset; where the shade of the loading shed had been the gathering place for the men waiting on their bales during ginning season. The annotations were uneven — some plans dense with layered notation, others a single circle around which a long story was told. One man in his seventies, who had worked the gin as a teenager, walked the perimeter without writing anything, then stopped at a patch of dust and said, “This is where the dogs always slept.” The wagon teams had drawn flies, he explained, and the flies had drawn the dogs, and after the wagons stopped coming in the early seventies the dogs had gone on lying there for years, as if waiting. None of this was in the plans we had drawn.
The methodology was also deliberately ambulatory. Walking interviews let the landscape pace the conversation rather than the reverse. The most useful single hour of fieldwork I conducted across two semesters was a memory walk through the gin guided by a former operator, who narrated how mule-drawn wagons gave way to truck delivery, when the second press was installed, the summer a fire burned through the eastern wall, and how the community rebuilt it in two weeks. Almost none of this was in any archive. It existed only in the bodies and memories of the people who had been there (Hayden, 1995; Mehan, 2025).
Back at the Texas Tech studio, we turned over what we had gathered. Drawings and photographs went up on the walls. Students adjusted their analyses against what residents had told them — including what residents had told them about the representations themselves. When we returned for a second round of presentations, the dynamic had shifted. The drawings were no longer finished plans submitted for judgment; they were partial proposals submitted for revision. Residents annotated paper prints with corrections, additions, and alternatives, and argued with one another about which interpretations were right and which were worth pursuing. This interpretive scrum — slow, sometimes tedious, rarely visually compelling — was the methodologically generative core of the project (Forester, 1999; Mehan, 2026).
What We Made
By the end of two semesters, the studio’s work had resolved into deliverables of two kinds, answering to two different audiences. For the initiative and its institutional sponsors, we produced an adaptive reuse proposal for the gin and a set of companion concepts for the other structures — the documentation the broader project had been commissioned to generate. For the community, and at the community’s request, we produced three things they could hold and use: a community asset map; a reuse briefing formatted to the county’s grant application requirements, so residents could pursue funding on their own terms; and an oral history database, housed locally and under their control.
What Gets Made Public, and at What Cost: Accountability as Method
Once these deliverables existed, making the knowledge behind them public — public in the sense that it would be treated as legitimate and allowed to shape outcomes — proved anything but straightforward. The friction had a structure, and it is worth naming the parties to it. The external audiences with authority over the project’s trajectory recognized a particular kind of product: documentation, heritage value, images that could travel. Residents wanted something else. They had little investment in heritage preservation as a category; they cared whether their grandchildren would have a reason to stay. When our results entered regional planning forums, the material that circulated most readily was the visually striking, easy-to-reproduce photography of historic buildings, not the oral histories, the economic analyses, or the community-identified reuse proposals. The buildings traveled. The people did not.
The second tension concerned the ethics of visibility. Several of the communities we worked with had wary relationships with outside institutions such as universities, state agencies, foundations that had come before to study them, produce reports, and leave without tangible return. Documentation, in this context, was not neutral. In one instance a resident asked us not to publish photographs of a particular building, fearing county officials might use the images as evidence of substandard housing and condemn the structure rather than support its repair. We agreed. The exchange forced us to distinguish between making knowledge public and making it responsible (Till, 2005; Mehan, 2025).
The third tension, and the most persistent, was authorship. Many of the design proposals, oral histories, and spatial analyses produced in the studio were genuine collaborations with community partners who shaped both content and direction without university affiliation and without academic credit, while the resulting works carried the names of the researchers and the university (Bishop, 2012). Equitable distribution of credit and authority in collaborative research is a long-standing, unresolved problem, and we did not solve it. We did take concrete steps: community partners were named and credited wherever the work appeared, were given the chance to review materials before publication, and — most importantly — the products that mattered most were the ones they had asked for and could keep: the asset map, the grant-ready reuse briefing, and the locally held oral history database.
These three tensions converge on a single methodological argument. Accountability to the communities whose knowledge makes the work possible cannot be appended at the end of a research process as a layer of dissemination ethics. It must be built in from the beginning. Accountability is a method and a practice, not merely an ethic. In practice this means establishing regular, structured occasions for community critique and revision; being transparent with participants about how and where findings will circulate and what control they retain at each stage; resisting representations that are aesthetically compelling at the cost of analytic depth; and asking, at every transition, who beyond the usual research consumers is shaped by what we publish (Şevçenko, 2010; Mehan, 2025). It also means redefining success. The most consequential outcome of the gin project was not the studio’s adaptive reuse proposal. It was the way community members afterward reframed their own advocacy to county planners, drawing on the shared spatial and historical mapping we had built together. That outcome is not legible as a research deliverable; it will not be published, exhibited, or grant funded. It is, however, exactly what publicly situated knowledge work should be able to produce.
Design as a Form of Ethnographic Practice
What the gin project offers, finally, is one example of how public ethnography can take shape — not the only form, but an instructive one. Public ethnography has long been organized around a question of audience: how can knowledge produced inside the academy be made accessible and useful to publics outside it? (Low & Merry, 2010; Mehan & Stuckemeyer, 2023). That question matters, but it is not the whole of the problem. Making knowledge public is not only a matter of translation, of converting specialized insight into lay terms. It is also a question of the architecture of knowledge production itself: who is present in the fieldwork, whose observations register, who analyzes, who decides what circulates, and what happens when knowledge moves from the conditions of its making into the conditions of its use.
Participatory design — processes in which non-designers actively shape research questions, methods, representations, and outcomes rather than being consulted after the fact — offers a way to actualize public ethnography (Petrescu, 2007; Hamdi, 2004). Within such processes, knowledge is not produced first and made public second. It is co-produced, iteratively and often messily, across many sites at once: the design studio, a gin-floor meeting, a county planner’s office, a newspaper clipping, a Facebook post, a kitchen table. The studio becomes a site of continuous translation, where fieldwork, representation, and public discourse are negotiated in concrete material terms — through choices about how to draw, what to model, what to display, and what to withhold. The claim is narrow but firm: when participatory design is practiced reflexively, attentive to the relations it produces among designers, communities, and audiences, it functions as public ethnography.
The woman on the gin floor that November was not being difficult. She was articulating, with precision, what communities long studied by others have learned to say: that knowing a place is not the same as knowing about a place, and that the difference matters — methodologically, ethically, and politically. Public ethnography must take that distinction seriously. It must ask, at every moment of fieldwork, representation, and publication, whose knowledge is being made visible, whose is being translated, and whose remains the property of those who hold it.
References and Further Readings
Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso, 2012.
Forester, John. The Deliberative Practitioner: Encouraging Participatory Planning Processes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
Hamdi, Nabeel. Small Change: About the Art of Practice and the Limits of Planning in Cities. London: Earthscan, 2004.
Hayden, Dolores. The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.
Low, Setha M., and Sally Engle Merry. “Engaged Anthropology: Diversity and Dilemmas.” Current Anthropology 51, no. S2 (2010): S203–S226.
Mehan, Asma. “Adaptive Reuse as a Catalyst for Post-2030 Urban Sustainability: Rethinking Industrial Heritage Beyond the SDGs.” Discover Sustainability 6 (2025): 598. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-025-01462-9.
Mehan, Asma. Decolonizing Industrial Heritage: Adaptive Reuse, Community Engagement, and Climate Resilience. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2026. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781035370993
Mehan, Asma. “Reimagining Post-Industrial Landscapes through the Lens of Sustainable Development.” AGATHÓN: International Journal of Architecture, Art and Design 17 (2025): 120–129. https://doi.org/10.69143/2464-9309/1772025.
Mehan, Asma, ed. After Oil: A Comparative Analysis of Oil Heritage, Urban Transformations, and Resilience Paradigms. Cham: Springer, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-92188-9.
Mehan, Asma, and Jessica Stuckemeyer. “Adaptive Reuse of Industrial Heritage in the Era of Radical Climate Change–Related Urban Transitions.” Geographies of the Anthropocene 6, no. 2 (2023): 169–192.
Petrescu, Doina, ed. Altering Practices: Feminist Politics and Poetics of Space. London: Routledge, 2007.
Sandercock, Leonie. Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities of the 21st Century. London: Continuum, 2003.
Şevçenko, Liz. “Sites of Conscience: New Approaches to Conflicted Memory.” Museum International 62, no. 1–2 (2010): 20–25.
Till, Karen E. The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.