Design Justice Demands
The protests you see across America are a response to a prolonged dehumanization of a people unwilling to be participants in their own demise. The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery may have sparked the most recent calls to stop killing black people, but it is a story as old as this nation. It is often the soft power of the built environment that provides the preconditions for that dehumanization and the subsequent atrocities.
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, including your organization. The design professions are as complicit as any. In accordance with our values and in defense of black lives, we demand the following:
Reallocate Police Funding.
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.End CPTED Tactics.
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.Emphasis on CPTED tactics centers crime prevention as opposed to community power. Any tactic that seeks to the suspicion that the public on wanted ultimately focuses its sights on black people safety store paramount where our entire profession is Guided by underlined and sometimes our racist Tendencies we have to dismantle the two.End design of prisons and police stations.
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.Redefine metrics for affordable neighborhoods.
Design Justice demands that we cease the use of area mean income to determine “affordability” in our communities and instead root the distribution of state and federal resources in a measure that reflects the extraction of generational wealth and from black communities.Shift public policies.
Design Justice demands we advocate for policies and procedures that support a genuinely accessible public realm free from embedded oppression. In doing so, we must recognize the inherent health, dignity, and necessity afforded to cultural communities able to congregate in public without fear of harassment.Enhance self-determination.
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.Reimagine financial model of neighborhood design.
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 extraction. Freeing ourselves from the fee for service model and building power through black and brown development of the built environment.Preserve and invest in black cultural spaces.
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.Reflect Spatial Injustice in Design Training & Licensing.
Design Justice demands we proactively redesign our design training and licensing efforts to reflect the history of spatial injustice and build new measures to ground our work in the service of liberating spaces.