The City and What It Is Not

Four hundred and odd years after colonialism and racial capitalism brought “twenty and odd” enslaved people from Africa to the dispossessed indigenous land that would later become the United States, the structures and systems that generate inequality and white supremacy persist.3 Our cities and their socioeconomic and built environments continue to exemplify difference. From housing and health to mobility and monuments, cities small and large, urban and rural, north and south demonstrate intractable disparities. The disparate impacts made apparent by the COVID-19 pandemic and the reinvigorated global Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 through to more recent protests regarding humanitarian and spatial conditions in Gaza demanding change are remarkable. Change is another essential indicator of difference in urban environments, such as disinvestment, disaster, or gentrification. Cities must navigate how considerations like climate change and growing income inequality intersect with politics, culture, gender equality and identity, immigration, migration, and technology, among other conditions and forms of disruption.

Of course, there have been people from diverse backgrounds taking a different approach for how we design our built environments. Here, designing for difference is rooted in identifying broader and shared values, needs, and objectives. Rather than monumentally reinforcing difference, design can be a process and a tool to positively and systematically address difference. A growing field of designers, organizations, and offices have shown that this work can be central or at least integral to architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design practice. This emerging field has been called social design, impact design, design for good, design justice, and other monikers. Some leaders in socially- or environmentally-focused design include Theaster Gates, MASS Design, Latent Design, Hector, ASA Studio, Walter Hood, Francis Kere, Assemble, Department of Places, Sharon Davis, Colloqate, Interboro, Sweetwater Foundation, IDEO, Lesley Lokko, Ekene Ijeoma, Mitch McEwen, Paola Aguirre, Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello, Teddy Cruz, Germane Barnes, Toni L. Griffin, Chris Cornelius, June Grant, the Black Reconstruction Collective, and many others.

In Difference and Design + Culturally Responsive Practice, we will explore together some key questions:

● How has the built environment been shaped by difference?

● How do we make a difference in the design of our spaces, places, and cities?

● How do you want to make a difference through your practice as a designer?

The format of the course will include readings, presentations, conversations, and counter-stories in the first half of the semester. The second half of the semester will focus on the development of students’ research and design for place-based or issue-based design projects or on developing independent research papers focused on difference and design in the built environment.