Doing good deeds with design?

Last night I attended a lecture at OCAD in Toronto. Speaker Debera Johnson from Pratt spoke about the future of design education. She is grounded in her values to use her skills to help others, and to help others find skills to help others.
There is a Centre for Sustainable Design Studies at Pratt that is interdisciplinary, allowing students from arts and science backgrounds to cooperate in projects. Some are fantastic, good design, offering great options for people in the environment and health care.
It all looked good to me until one project came up. Pratt works with a local neighbourhood and has come up with some urban planning options that will allow for a safe environment, street furniture the people can make themselves (but designed by Pratt students) inexpensively etc. It is aimed at reducing truck traffic through the area, and the proliferation of prostitutes who hang out to service the truckers.
Although it seems like a good idea, and the renderings make it look like everybody's happy afterwards, it smacked of a kind of colonialism to me. The values are positive that are brought to the community - creating sustainable products, good planning (which does not appear to have been done to begin with) and potential employment.
Bu who are they - or we - to foist this on a community?
Much like early Christian missionaries, who had clear values and felt that if they brought all these good things to people in other countries, that they would have better lives, the design school seems to believe that bringing what they think is important into this community is what's best for the community. No question that most of us would agree. But most of us aren't living in that community.
I was compelled to ask what efforts Pratt makes to bring in thought and people from the ground up - in other words, have projects instigated by a community, and co-created by them.
On Pratt's site, the costs listed are about $US50,000 per year to attend school.
This appears to be a fairly select group of people who can afford to enter this program. Deb did say that they are creating some scholarships, but there was no clarity about how many or how people are recruited into the program from the 'user group' for the projects.
I fully recognize that they are doing something that's Very Good. But it seems that doing these projects may not get to the core problems. It seems a bit like more of the same, not deep diving Design Thinking, just creating new solutions for a fraction of what the problems are, and doing it top down.