Design Justice: The Language of Anti-Racist Architectural Vernacular
“For every injustice in the world there is an architecture, a plan, a design that sustains it.“
Bryan C. Lee Jr ‘08
Architecture, as a field of design, is coming to terms with the ways that architects are educated within a canon that places modern western culture and the object, a building, at the center of its practice. It has been a culturally narrow approach that has disregarded the localized vernacular designs that reflect the history and culture of communities of color and their relationship to and experience of place.
Definition: Injustice is the imbalance of power and resources.
Lee presented the soon to be published comprehensive design justice index at the Hillier College Design Showcase 2020. His work on design justice started in earnest in 2010, and through this index of definitions, concepts and frameworks, we began to learn how injustice and racism is expressed through architecture, and also understand how to transform every aspect of it, from how it is taught to how it is practiced, and how specific processes and design outcomes can lead to reparations of past harms, fairness in the present, and just futures. Questions Lee poses to come to this foundation include: “What are the power structures and injustices directly impacting the community? Who does this directly and disproportionately impact? How does the built environment manifest, facilitate, and perpetuate this injustice?”
Lee states that the movement for Design Justice seeks to challenge the privilege and power structures that use architecture and design as a tool of oppression, and has as its foremost demand a cessation of the harm that is being caused to communities of color. Acknowledging this dynamic within the field of architecture is the first step towards Design Justice. Lee points out, “If we recognize the structures of power we can challenge them. Power is the distributing mechanism in oppression, so what does power look like in place?”
In his talk, Lee described what power looks like in place and the design decisions that destroyed black communities, citing the highway built through a thriving black community as one example of many ‘urban renewal’ projects across the US in the sixties. “In New Orleans this highway infrastructure development resulted in the loss of 400 black owned businesses and just as many live oak trees, cutting through the park spaces that tied the community together.”
Another example he offers is a case study of New Orleans properties after Hurricane Katrina and the history of black land ownership rights and laws in Louisiana and how segregation tactics were put in place to control the physical environment. “If we want to look at housing, transportation and economic injustice, it is a direct result of remnants of redlining, covenants, deed restrictions, other segregation tactics like urban renewal put in place through the physical environment,” said Lee. These constraints imposed on land ownership disproportionately impacted the accumulation of generational wealth and potential economic growth for black people individually and communities as a whole.
The process of reaching Design Justice is multifaceted. “We have to reflect on what anti-racism looks like through design pedagogy.” Lee noted. “Design Justice forwards the radical anti-racist vision of racial, social and cultural reparation through the process and outcomes of design.
Design Justice recognizes your job as a student, if you choose, is to move away from a nonracist (neutral) position and move towards an anti-racist capacity. Acknowledging both responsibility and our obligation to each other to actively recognize racialized and socialized bias in the system and seek to dismantle the privilege and power systems that perpetuate injustice.”
Lee recognizes, “We are afraid to deal with these subjects.” He lays out a clear set of principles that can guide students and practitioners in their work: honor the voices of an existing community that have the deepest knowledge of community needs, work to build collective power and develop roles and opportunities for community members to actively engage in the design process, understand the stories and history of a place that make it meaningful and valuable, seek to repair harms of the past, and always stay committed to getting to the root of the issues as expressed in the social spaces and places of the built environment.
Definition: Cultures are the consequence of persistent circumstance and immediate conditions.
Lee goes on to ask, “What are the opportunities to imagine new systems, spaces and models that address, mitigate, eliminate and repair injustice by design?” He cites many: commitment to being radical in design and getting to the root of the issues we are trying to solve, Design as Protest, understanding the importance of language, and recognizing the ‘signals’ that arise in design pedagogy, that influence everything from policies, to procedures, to practice and projects.
He also reminds us that architectural form is a language that reflects and speaks about our history, values and culture. Colloquial language is like vernacular architectural design that is place, function and culturally specific. Pointing to the name of the firm Lee started, Colloqate, it is a combination of the words colloquial and location, and in the new canon of Design Justice, represents a shift in language to meet the needs of the people.
Building on a quote by Dr. Cornel West, Lee adds that "Design Justice is what love looks like in public spaces. Design should be a deep expression of care of a beloved community expressed in physical form. There is power in the spaces and places where our culture is recognized, our stories are told, our language is valued, that is not just good design, that is justice.”