In a world where economic quantifiability seems to be paramount, urbanist Karen Kubey, a Faculty Fellow in Design for Spatial Justice at the University of Oregon, specialising in health and housing, examines how some US organisations are enhancing the case for participatory design, social impact and equitable urban design.
See Full PDF See Full PDFBy incorporating values of inclusivity, social justice, and equity, public interest design inserts a critical lens into contemporary architectural thinking, practice, and pedagogy. Its emphasis on inclusive process and action over product creates a praxis that draws on trans-disciplinary knowledge to create change. Theories that underlie this praxis are the social production of space, the everyday, and the relational; key practices are activism, participation, and material agency. In combination, these approaches critically reframe the roles of architects and architecture in engaging current issues and provide relevant scaffolding for contemporary practice and pedagogy.
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Informed by urban political economy and critical social analysis, this book provides a critical comparative analysis of macro- and micro-level spatial design processes in architecture and urban planning. It interrogates the extent to which past and existing approaches to design have catered to social justice issues. With a special focus on the Right to the City approach and recent efforts to democratize urban spaces in the post-COVID 19 pandemic era, the book draws on examples of spatial design from the USA, Northern European countries and elsewhere to shed light on the presence (or lack) of social justice concerns in liberal capitalist and social democratic societies. This book is an important academic addition and resource for undergraduate and graduate curricula in architecture and urban planning/design programs, as well as a complementary resource for practitioners and policy planners who engage in urban development and transformation.
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Community participation in urban design and planning is slowly emerging in Hong Kong as the Government increasingly adopts and recognizes the importance of bottom-up community values in the practice of informing, consulting and involving the community. This paper provides a framework that emphasizes the importance of collaboration and community-based initiatives to reconcile different interests and achieve a balanced vision for the design of the city. The fundamental objective is to ensure foster an increased sense of community, responsibility and civic pride in order to improve the overall quality of life. The Lam Tin Estate case study not only demonstrates how the Government is becoming more responsive to the need to consult with the public and relevant stakeholders to build consensus prior to implementation, but also illustrates how community participation empowers key stakeholders to take ownership in designing and planning their built environment.
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Emerging theories of Design Justice ask architects and planners to center the voices of long-oppressed groups. But which kinds of spatial transformations can concretely inform a just praxis of urban design? To answer this question, we compare-in-difference how disadvantaged people counter exclusion by designing spaces in Baitu (China), Los Angeles (USA), and Rome (Italy). We find that diverse groups activate similar spatial logics in order to resist erasure and displacement: they carve out possibilities, take ownership of space, and break dominant aesthetics. These logics help us identify three design pathways that can detach technical knowledge from the interests of oppressive forces. Supporting ground-up claims, but at the same time using their trained skills to facilitate decisive, long-term transformations of space, we propose that professional designers Situate Possibilities, Exclude-to-Include, and Reject Aesthetic Canons.
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Just Urban Design: The Struggle for a Public City
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As community activists resist racial injustice, food insecurity, and infrastructural delinquency, many groups are attempting to articulate the voice of the citizen. It is within this landscape that architects have historically struggled to find common ground in order to afford democratic access for citizens to engage in discussions about the future of their city. In seeking a balanced relationship between practice, academia, and the public interest, the field of architecture has become increasingly aware of its own fuzzy ethical boundaries. Based upon surrogate models of other professions, there has emerged a proactive movement towards Social Impact Design, a design philosophy that seeks to make a positive difference in the world. Within practice, architectural firms have been responsive to these aspirations, broadening notions of environmental sustainability to include terms of social resiliency. As a result, methods of community-based design have been coopted as a vehicle for speculative development, largely made possible through corporate philanthropy. This 'social-washing' of the design process has become increasingly fluent in its new vocabulary, where terms such as 'empowerment', 'community engagement', and 'the public realm' proliferate. The net result is the loss of ethical authenticity and the perception that architectural design cannot serve as a tool for real social change. Similar to many urban core areas, our community faces a health epidemic compounded by poverty, where there are more safety net clinics than grocery stores. In response to requests for collaboration, and through cross-disciplinary academic partnerships in both public health and social welfare, we've begun to leverage design advocacy in order to improve health outcomes. This has evolved into an alternative model of practice that advances public design through interdisciplinary, adaptive and incremental spatial agency. It is a sustainable practice that fosters conversations and supports events originating from within the community. Our service goes beyond the constraints of a building, and instead seeks to scaffold an infrastructure of public health through methods of participatory design and advocacy. In seeking to address issues such as poverty, mobility, and racial inequalities through design, we have faced our own challenges validating this methodology to our peers and colleagues in academia and in practice. By championing the ‘small bets’, however, we have begun to produce disruptive prototypes that challenge the status quo on how cities should shape the built environment. By meeting residents where they are, our design tools include active citizen participation, grassroots policymaking, and rapid prototyping. We are finding that this process of incremental and collective action provides a great number of innovative design solutions. Through that process, the community sees itself as a partner in the design outcome, and lifts up the work as a reflective representation of its will towards a healthier community. Through new forms of design intelligence and collaborative design tools, our critical spatial practice demonstrates new ways for how architectural design can be relevant to society. This paper will identify a set of particular principles and exemplary models from the field of Social Impact Design expanding upon those experiences.
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International Journal of Architectural Research: ArchNet-IJAR
