(Image: Smash the Box)

Smash the Box, a multidisciplinary Seattle-based planning startup, recently won contracts with the Seattle Department of Transportation and King County Metro to join efforts to improve the quality of local transit. Founder Yes Segura, a professional cartographer, has been selling engraved wooden art of maps in order to raise funds to kick start the business.

The firm is diverse in both their leadership and the work they do — Yes Segura, a transgender man and first generation El Salvadoran, founded the firm to provide services ranging from art, to communications, to urban planning and design.

“We’re smashing the box in the way that we’re actually having representation at the table, but also the way that we’re going about it,” Segura said.

According to Segura, the Seattle Department of Transportation has been working with organizations like Smash the Box in order to field policy recommendations from the local community surrounding the planning of public transportation in the area. Smash the Box will work to provide these policy recommendations, as well as spark conversation by using Oculus technology to inspire questions about transportation, constructing a chalk wall near Beacon Hill Station for people to share what they want to see in their streets, and launch a guerilla marketing campaign to communicate statistics about transportation.

Smash the Box will also be working for King County Metro alongside the larger Alta Planning + Design firm to provide KCM with communications, map, and transportation planning services for routes across the city including areas of Capitol Hill.

During the pandemic, Segura decided to start his own firm in order to bring more diverse voices to urban planning, a field that he says is mostly homogeneously white. Segura said this is important as urban planners have laid out highways in the past that have destroyed BIPOC neighborhoods, and he emphasized the importance of uplifting diverse voices to avoid this damage.

“We’re working with community, uplifting, centering and giving voices to those who haven’t been at the table making the decisions,” Segura said.

Segura said Smash the Box seeks to subvert the more traditional top-down approach of urban planning in which cities hire homogeneously white planners who are not from the communities they are doing planning for, in favor of a bottom-to-top dynamic that centers voices from within BIPOC communities in making planning decisions.

The firm is also hiring the talents of design studio Wahooville, which has recently done graphic design work for Capitol Hill drag queen Bosco.

Segura said they hope to emphasize the importance of people over cars through their work, citing the figure of over 40,000 annual deaths from car crashes in the U.S. as well as the shortcomings of “cleaner” or more technologically advanced cars.

“Electric vehicles aren’t going to solve traffic, self-driving cars are not going to solve traffic. Really investing in public transit and multimodal transportation options for all people helps reduce traffic [and] helps prevent deaths.

Segura said they are phasing out their wooden map art in favor of canvas screen prints, which they are currently selling at the Capitol Thrill shop in Pike/Pine.

“No matter what, I will always somehow try to incorporate art into the services that we’re providing, because it’s multidisciplinary. We need to start using 21st century tools within our urban planning, our transportation planning, communication planning– any type of planning work,” Segura said.

Learn more at smashthebox.org.

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