Letter on Architecture & Rebellion
This moment is heartbreaking. Again. It is emotionally exhausting. Again. It is enraging to watch yet another black body plead not to be executed in public. Again.
The architecture profession should know that your colleagues are hurting. You should know because you were told by Whitney M. Young Jr, many years ago about the harm inherent in your inaction, and you've failed to respond. Again, you were warned of the impact of your thunderous silence long before we made it to this moment, and now we are here. Alas, the response then, as it will likely be now is one woefully short of a material change demanded from those most impacted by our work.
Rage and sadness are a natural response to the moment because this moment is a reminder that our lives and the lives of our kin have been and continue to be at risk while any system of oppression is allowed to exist. And so we fight to put pressure on the system to recognize our humanity, not in words but deeds and actions. This moment, like so many others, rose out of the state-sanctioned murder of black people. It emerged from the killing of George Floyd, before that, Breona Taylor, before that Ahmaud Arbery, and so many others. It grew out of the specter of impending violence that follows black and brown people daily. It grew out of the apathy of this nation towards a black community so profoundly affected by our built environment that a global pandemic exponentially impacts us.
Our obligation to each other, to the built environment, and in solidarity with black lives is to hold all complicit actors in these systems accountable. The profession of architecture is as complicit as any. This is a profession swarming with "white moderates more devoted to order than to justice" to quote everyone's favorite civil rights leader, Dr. King. The profession is faced with another critical moment to act in accordance with justice over order. Will we ever make the right choice?
We believe that it is essential to name the manner in which the profession's silence is assent. In its purest form, we have an obligation to protect the people's health, safety, and welfare in and through the spaces we design. This commitment extends beyond the boundary of our buildings and landscapes and into the public realm. We narrow and neglect these commitments often on the backs of the perpetually marginalized and to the detriment of the field. Architecture has been the backdrop and so often the instigator of violence on black bodies throughout this nation's history. This is the case, In large part, because white America has found it all too easy to transpose both its capital and beliefs into physical space, allowing the architecture to covertly project power in the name of white supremacy without the burden of having to sustain the unpleasant acts of overt racism themselves. With this simple deed, we've restricted the freedom of movement to those deemed unworthy by the declaration of the built environment. It subsequently authorized countless acts of violence in the name of protecting land, property, and the public realm.
America has never fully recognized racism as a complex cooperative system dependent upon its institutions (academic, political, commercial, or otherwise) to resign themselves to complicity willingly. As a result, this profession, like many others, has been unable to find a reason to acknowledge the compounding effects of each act of violence on the psyche of Black America. The rebellion you see across our country is fundamentally rooted in this conflict, rooted in the notion that black lives are deemed disposable in white society, justified, solely for the act of being - in place.
For some, there will be an impulse to equate property loss to the loss of life. Don't. For others, there will be an instinct that swells from the pits of whiteness to declare the fury and rage of the protesters as invalid because of the escalation we see on a nightly basis. To those challenging the credibility of this mass movement, I urge you to remember that nearly every riot you've ever heard of, starting with the American Revolution, was preceded by the murder of black people and escalated by an oppressive militarized force. We have seen throughout our history that to label an uprising as a riot is in itself a declaration of authorization that serves to assuage the white moderate, to justify the expansion of state-sanctioned violence on its people, and to mask the valid manifest rage of black and brown people pleading for justice in the face of a dispassionate system.
One day it will inevitably be one of us—the ones you deem palatable for your committees, boardrooms, and ivy league schools. You will never know the prevailing grief of a people destined to mourn our loved ones before they are gone because we refuse to seek justice before trauma. I wonder where you will stand when it's one of your "diversity hires" left bloodied and breathless in the street.
History tells us that the design profession has a role to play in the short term and long term outcomes of justice, and we would be wise to revisit our past to find direction. We must act swiftly and sustain our efforts to reconstitute our profession as a co-conspirator to justice. Justice requires us to repair for a past of injustice, to make whole those subjected to oppression in the present, and to remove barriers to progress in the future.
The first step towards dismantling unjust systems is to clearly articulate a direction out of our malaise and into action. Here is the start of a path forward through the efforts of design justice and in alignment with the demands of the movement for Black Lives.
Design Justice demands that our cities and towns reallocate funds supporting police departments and reinvest in the critical needs of disinherited neighborhoods and communities. Anyone who has worked with marginalized communities knows of multiple projects unable to find footing due to the lack of investment and resources. The design profession must be an actor in the visioning of these spaces.
Design Justice demands a cease to all efforts to implement defensible space and (CPTED) crime prevention through environmental design tactics. These efforts often criminalize blackness under the guise of safety, and the breaching of these efforts promotes unwarranted interaction with the police.
Design Justice demands we cease our support of the carceral state through the design of prisons, jails and police stations. All of these spaces inflict harm and extraction on black bodies far beyond that of other communities.
Design Justice demands we advocate for planning, policies, and procedures that support a genuinely accessible public realm free from embedded oppression. In doing so, we must recognize the inherent dignity and necessity afforded to cultural communities able to congregate in public without fear of harassment.
Design Justice demands that we ensure communities' self-determination through an established procedure that incorporates community voice-in-process and community benefits agreements in action for all publicly accountable projects.
Design Justice demands we detangle our contractual relationships with power and capital to better serve neighborhoods and communities from a position of service and not from a place of extraction and labor exploitation.
Design Justice demands we invest in and secure the place-keeping of black cultural spaces. In doing so, we must acknowledge the history of spatial removal and cultural erasure that grounds spaces that have been adversely impacted by unjust policies and practices within urban design and planning.
Design Justice demands we proactively redesign our architectural training and licensing efforts to reflect the history of spatial injustice and build new measures to ground our work in service of liberating spaces.
This is as much a call to action as it is an act of healing. Join the Design Justice movement. Join any movement for justice, just don’t allow another moment to be one of inaction when our nation so clearly needs us to stand for, fight for, and design a just future.