As the Black Lives Matter movement led protests against racial injustice and violence in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in the summer of 2020, “design justice” emerged as an ambition for many students of architecture and their faculty and professional allies. In the form of statements, manifestos, open letters, and calls to action, design justice eventually came to name a variety of institutional critiques and reforms of architectural education and practice. While these critiques and reforms centered on the ways in which educational and professional institutions were enmeshed within and reproduced larger dynamics around racism, they also referenced capitalism, colonialism, the carceral state, environmental injustice, and other systems and forms of oppression. This seminar will explore design justice within a longer history of struggles around racism and colonialism in U.S. schools of architecture. In so doing, we will also study intersections and contradictions between design justice and institutional initiatives around diversity, equity, and inclusion; the relationship between design justice and spatial justice; design justice and identity politics; and case studies of design justice initiatives.
This class does fulfill the architectural history requirement for the three-year Master of Architecture.
