Architecture, Design, Action: Preston Scott Cohen on Dismantling Systemic Racism in Pedagogy and Practice

Preston Scott Cohen, Gerald M. McCue Professor in Architecture and Director of the Master in Architecture II Program

June 22, 2020: Do you support the Notes on Credibility ?

Yes, and I signed in support of it. It is a carefully considered series of imperatives and principles. One of its most challenging demands—that at least 50 percent of course source material be BIPOC-authored—will force us to confront the extent to which the design fields have been exclusionary. For the moment, let’s just consider modern architecture in the US beginning in 1865, the year the first American architecture school was founded and the Civil War ended. Since then, few Black American architects or Black-owned American firms have been commissioned to author the kinds of projects that ultimately become didactic exemplars of the classical, modern, and contemporary canons. We will have to reckon with the prevailing tendency to valorize authors, authorship, and stated intentions, as opposed to buildings designed and produced collectively or anonymously.

The overwhelmingly non-Black voices in the academy today are very focused on diversifying the established canons by including the study of global POC cultures. That’s fine and great. But until we significantly change the composition of the faculty, what will we have achieved and who will we have educated?

What sort of structural changes do you think are necessary at the GSD to support more Black architects and designers?

Roughly speaking, there are two means of change. On the one hand, there are the mandates in the Notes on Credibility. On the other hand, there must be a process initiated by the school’s leadership to include many more Black Americans in the field.

Compared to the other arts—literature, music, theater, and the visual arts, for example—the design disciplines have made virtually no progress, even since the civil rights movement.

The GSD could truly change course by building a new teaching infrastructure that will have an impact on our school and on other design schools, both undergraduate and graduate. The ultimate outcome would be a substantially more diverse student applicant pool. The idea is to establish new GSD-based teaching fellowships, one in each department. While here, fellows would teach required core studios, courses, and electives.

These would be similar to the fellowships at the University of Michigan, Ohio State, and Rice that have launched many significant design, teaching, and practice careers for people who have gone on to become professors in design schools all over the country. But whereas none of these fellowships have had the intention to combat the white-centric biases and the privileged social networks engrained in the design professions, the new GSD fellowship would be dedicated to advancing underrepresented minorities in design education in the United States. We would need to work out the protocols to conform to the rules that limit our capacity to be explicit, in this regard.

You have said that the fellowship would be focused on spatial justice. What do you mean by that?

It would be about spatial justice, but in a new way that doesn’t make eligibility contingent upon teaching and research topics that are literally related to equity and justice. The idea is to ground the fellowship in a very specific and powerful statement of principle, something like this: In the American context—given how exclusionary and entrenched the design fields have always been—just changing the people who actually lead, teach, and shape the built environment is an act of spatial justice.

There is a long tradition of hiring excellent but inexperienced recent graduates to teach. Almost all of the people whose careers begin this way were brought up through a supportive social network that perpetuates the exclusion of Black people. If we want to bring about real change, we cannot only draw in faculty from the usual exclusionary networks and then proceed to mitigate systemic racism by theoretical or pedagogical means that the predominantly white faculty and students find comfortable.

What kind of changes need to happen at the top of the academic hierarchy?

There has never been a Black American tenured professor in Architecture or Landscape Architecture at the GSD. And since its founding, there has only been one tenured Black professor in Planning, Jerome Lindsey, in the early 1970s. For nearly two decades, I, along with my senior colleagues, have been responsible for this abominable reality.

Until non-Black faculty share real power with numerous Black people, there can be no spatial justice. The schools can’t just continue to be a bunch of non-Black academics telling each other how to be inclusive and equitable, and trying to be cognizant of Black culture, while at the same time preserving the status quo—an overwhelming majority of non-Black faculty, student applicants, and practitioners.

Conducting faculty searches that aim to poach the best POC from other schools is a selfish act that does nothing to expand the field. My hope is that we will make it a central goal to add many new voices to the faculties of schools around the country and to tenure numerous Black American professors at the GSD itself, in the years to come.

Preston Scott Cohen is the Gerald M. McCue Professor of Architecture and the director of the Master in Architecture II Program. He was chair of the Department of Architecture from 2008 to 2013. He is the founding principal of Preston Scott Cohen, Inc. and has received numerous honors including an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award and induction as an Academician of the National Academy in New York.

Architecture, Design, Action: Charles Waldheim on Dismantling Systemic Racism in Pedagogy and Practice

Charles Waldheim, John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture & Director of the Office for Urbanization

What role have the design disciplines historically played in the systemic violence against Black Americans? Having grown up in the South, I’ve been sensitized to the effects of institutionalized racism my entire life. Of course, now we can see these effects across American culture. A racist society produces racist spaces. Our first step as educators, architects, and designers is to acknowledge that the ways the world has been built around us is a manifestation of structural forms of racism, capitalism, and centuries of treating Black labor as essential, yet expendable. When design migrated to the US in 19th century, it was explicitly progressive, about suffrage, women’s right to vote, and immigrants, and their access to activities that the “academy” of architecture and art precluded. When the GSD was formed in 1937, the University leadership used a socioeconomic crisis to force structural changes to pedagogy in a discipline that was meant to be progressive. I think the big question for us as architects and designers is whether those instruments that we’ve inherited are still sharp enough to address the challenges we face? I think we are finding out the answer to that question in this moment.  From a landscape architecture perspective, how do you make sense of the current racial justice protest movement and power clashes on city streets? In short, it’s the understanding that space (landscape, urbanism) is—and always has been—socially charged and political. Let’s look at a recent example: Trump holds a press conference at the White House Rose Garden. He moves across Lafayette Square, where protestors had been terrorized with tear gas and rubber bullets moments before, and arrives at a small white church to be photographed while holding a bible. All of these spaces have been designed to perform a certain rhetorical function. Landscape has to do with environment as perceived—a collective construct of people’s experiences—but its slipperiness as an agent of power makes it distinct.  What structural changes need to happen in the field of landscape architecture to make the discipline more accessible? How can landscape architects better align their work with principles of design justice? And what changes should be made at the pedagogical level? The role of professional licensing in architecture and the requirement for higher education are classic signaling mechanisms and gates that hold back non-white, non-middle-class communities. The professionalizing, and licensing, of our field is a weak instrument, but its cultural capital can be considerable. Landscape architects ought to be more critical in terms of the work they take on. They must always ask themselves, Whom is this project serving? In terms of education, the urgent work here to is build institutions that are as diverse as the people we represent. The GSD must produce architects and designers who strive for spatial justice. And students should ask how landscape architecture can be used as a tool in working for a more just future.    I believe that the Enlightenment and its goal of individual liberties secured through collective rights, for all its failings, remains an incomplete project. I believe that we are obligated to share the American experience of race with our students. The history of racial violence should be taught to all students as a fundamental part of political literacy and ethical authority for future architects and designers. “Climate by Design” is a new course offered by the Department of Landscape Architecture now open to students across the GSD. How about a similar course—“Race by Design”— to address issues of racism and anti-Black violence in America, both historic and contemporary, as enabled by the design disciplines? I would love to contribute to the construction of just such a course at the GSD today. Charles Waldheim is an American-Canadian architect and urbanist. His research examines the relations between landscape, ecology, and contemporary urbanism. He is author, editor, or co-editor of numerous books on these subjects, and his writing has been published and translated internationally. Waldheim is the John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture at the GSD, and he directs the school’s Office for Urbanization.

Architecture, Design, Action: Rahul Mehrotra on Dismantling Systemic Racism in Pedagogy and Practice

Rahul Mehrotra, Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design, John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization, Director of the Master of Architecture in Urban Design Degree Program, Co-Director of the Master of Landscape Architecture in Urban Design Degree Program

As an architect and urban planner working in the US and India, how do you understand the role of architecture and design in contributing to systemic inequity? How can architects and designers use their work as tools to fight for underrepresented communities that have been targeted by structural racism and its spatial manifestations? 

The physical form of cities and architecture are critical instruments with which we bring societies together or with which we separate and polarize them through zoning, redlining, urban renewal, and so on. What I have learned from my work in India is that architecture, urban design, and planning are not always the solution to the problem. Sometimes they are the problem.

Furthermore, I believe that architects and designers must not let design disciplines get co-opted into perpetuating biases and divisions in society. We should have the confidence to go into a project and call out the limitations inherent in the way it has been defined. We need to have the integrity to advocate against a project—especially if it is positioned to merely symbolically try to solve a problem, whether it’s racism or other institutional inequities. Sometimes convincing a client or a constituency to not do the building or project is the more appropriate solution.

I believe our aspiration as professionals should be to recognize our agency as well as our limitations. But unless we understand issues like racism at a structural level, we won’t even get there. That is an education that our faculty, and by extension our students, need. This is something I am deeply concerned with as a teacher—in today’s culture, everyday crises, fears, and concerns are expanding at an exponential rate, but often our sense of agency as designers is diminishing at the same rate. I would not want a generation who will keep nuancing their understanding and expanding their fields of concerns as students, but then graduate and find they do not have the tools to influence the environment and the issues that they are committed to. All architects, planners, and designers must maintain a close correlation between their concerns and their influence; the wider apart those get, the more cynical and jaded you become, the more your work becomes commercially focused, or you try to justify it through other ways that often harm the planet and society. 

How does your experience growing up in India and recently becoming a citizen of the US shape your perspective on the racial justice movement happening across the country? How does it impact your pedagogical approach? 

 I carry a very particular experience as an immigrant, and as someone who has faced discrimination and racism. Having said that, my understanding of American history is limited. But I note that this is a common problem among international students and often with my American colleagues. In applying for American citizenship, which I received just a couple of years ago, I quickly learned that the kind of history you’re expected to know when interviewing for citizen status is one of American exceptionalism. For example, they test your knowledge of which president issued the Emancipation Proclamation, but never ask you to study and familiarize yourself with the brutalities of slavery that led up to it.

I find a parallel here to my student experiences in India, where I became aware of what came to be known as “subaltern studies.” This was a group of Kolkata intellectuals active in the 1970s and 1980s who wanted to reclaim their history in postcolonial studies and critical theory, and did so by gathering alternative histories that hadn’t traditionally been told in India’s elite intellectual circles. They were focused on subalterns (people of inferior rank or station due to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or religion) as agents of political and social change. 

They attempted to propel the rhetoric of emerging political and social movements to go beyond highly visible actions like demonstrations and uprisings to engage with forms of productive action. Their fight for “truth” and its representation resonates with the telling of the history of America, a country built on stolen land by enslaved Black people. We fail to deliver these truths when we teach the history of the built environment in the US and neglect to teach whose land it was, how it was taken, who built it, and who was denied access. 

When we talk about the Black Lives Matter movement and racial justice issues related to Black communities, I ask what it means for the curriculum taught at the GSD, as much as for design at large. Students and faculty are challenging the integrity of the “heroes” in the canons of architecture, landscape, and design more broadly. And they are asking for many more lenses to understand the biases that influence our disciplines through the blind worship of these icons in the profession. They are rightly demanding a far more complex and nuanced pedagogy, to better understand and critique the heroes, typologies, and city forms we’ve come to hold sacred as precedents. If we don’t understand the embedded stories and the subaltern voices that have led to the construction of forms, and their related histories, we will perpetuate these injustices forever.

How can we broaden the spectrum of lenses that expose students to these different biases?

I believe that while individuals and curriculum are important, there is a critical need to look at the underlying issues and structures of society that people unknowingly perpetuate. New Deal programs, redlining, and urban renewal all had underlying biases that displaced Black people for generations and constructed a singular dominant imagination of the nation around a filtered narrative of American exceptionalism. As faculty and students, we must sharply focus our learning and attention on the history and theory of systemic and structural issues so that we are equipped to undo and reimagine the problems our disciplines have perpetuated. 

Teaching has to straddle both ends of the spectrum. It’s not just about making people aware of these issues, it’s also about addressing, reimagining, and remaking the underlying structures of the institution: how departments are organized, how the silos of coursework are organized, what we include and what we knowingly or unknowingly leave out, and how we interact and share resources with the Cambridge and Greater Boston communities. 

Our locality is where we can begin. We need to rethink our structures, how we organize events, public programming, and the platforms we set up for conversations in order to see problems as more ecologically and intrinsically linked. By slicing issues into silos, we don’t get the interconnectedness; when we look through one lens, we are limited in action by what we can see.

How should the pedagogical approach of the GSD change in order to make space for this kind of interconnectedness?

In pedagogy, what’s important is the notion of scale. We have to challenge ourselves as an institution to work across these scales. At the small scale of the individual building, architects are limited to solving the problem by softening the threshold between components of society in order to address inclusiveness and exclusion. They can, however, decide what kinds of projects and what aspects of a project are worthy of their time and attention. At the planning and urban design scale, it’s a bit easier, as planners and urban designers necessarily have to think about multiple systems and populations. At the territorial/regional scale, the landscape architects have the greatest agency as they’re trained to look at these large terrains. 

But how can we educate each beyond their own scale, so they can understand the systemic problems? How do we teach the ability to understand how these issues play at different scales? We have to recognize that we reinforce the divide when we silo these discussions in our pedagogy and public engagements. We perpetuate a problem where architects have the arrogance to work at the urban scale without understanding the inherent structural problems at that scale, and planners work on broader landscapes or territories without adequate training in those issues. 

Additionally, every student brings their lived experiences and unique perspective to any discussion and it’s critical that the faculty creates safe spaces for people to share their perspectives because we have so much to learn from each other. Thus, the interconnectedness you refer to already exists, at least at the interpersonal level, and it’s really a matter of activating this more consciously in our pedagogy and in the more structural organization of the GSD.

Do you believe that a course on spatial justice should be a mandatory part of core programming? If not, what kind of restructuring to the curriculum do you think is necessary? 

It’s not about making spatial justice a core class, but a matter of emphasizing core issues like race and ethnicity, economic justice, climate change, and public health and embedding them in every course—background and foreground, always omnipresent. Our responsibility as teachers is to reflect collectively on what voices we’re including, what we’re not including, and to be self-critical. That’s fundamental to how we provide alternate narratives. All GSD faculty should ask themselves, How does understanding racism inform my curriculum? What is happening in the world and why is my curriculum not responding to this condition? One must make space in the curriculum to let other voices meaningfully enter the discourse, be heard, and have a transformative effect—that is, we must open our minds to be changed by them. 

I am critical of the idea of a required core class on race because it lets everyone else off the hook. Maybe it will be a good beginning, but if we can’t meaningfully embed the questions of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and ability in all our curriculum, then we might as well accept that we lack the ability to go beyond gestures and symbols to really have the courage or capacity to effect real change. 

Rahul Mehrotra is professor of Urban Design and Planning and the chair of the Department of Urban Design and Planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Mehrotra is a practicing architect, urban designer, and educator. His Mumbai + Boston-based firm, RMA Architects, was founded in 1990.

Architecture, Design, Action: Toshiko Mori on Dismantling Systemic Racism in Pedagogy and Practice

Toshiko Mori, Robert P. Hubbard Professor in the Practice of Architecture

What are your thoughts on the Notes on Credibility  document? 

It’s a strong statement as much as it is a thoughtful one. The demands are very well-reasoned. We must make headway on them, and I expect that some changes can be immediate. The students’ anger is absolutely justified and it breaks my heart. This injustice and inequity—not only at the GSD, but in society at large—has finally reached a revolutionary tipping point. We must seize this moment to jump in and make a change. We owe it to ourselves, to our students, and to the future of this institution.

Whose job is it to ensure that the demands in the NOC are turned into actions?    

This is fundamentally the school’s responsibility. The students are presenting the issues, but the burden of the work shouldn’t be on them—it should be on the dean, the administration, and the faculty.

Of course, this must go beyond a curriculum change. Our task is to rethink our cities and our civilization, and the time for this is right now. The historical injustice and maltreatment toward Black Americans has continued without meaningful rectification for far too long.

The GSD’s entire institutional history rests on a dogmatic, elitist, and white supremacist version of architecture. It’s a tradition that many architectural institutions have forcibly imposed upon other civilizations to “improve” their culture. In order to change anything, the GSD must first acknowledge its place in this history of systemic oppression and come to terms with its part in perpetuating the colonial legacy.

This is truly a revolutionary moment. A broadening societal understanding of climate change, civil rights, criminal justice reform, societal inequity, cultural diversity, and architectural pedagogy has been enabled by a digital culture that accelerates the transmission of information. It’s all coming together to effect a huge shift in architecture and design understanding; it’s a new era, as radical as the arrival of modernism. This is the time to overhaul architecture and design education for good.

Beyond curriculum revisions, what does this change look like to you? 

We need to amplify voices that have been systemically marginalized and oppressed. We have inherited a mindset and a way of thinking about society and culture through an implicitly racist lens, and we’ve accepted that for far too long. Of course, being a person of color, I am very sensitive to it. I’ve experienced it and perceived it. That being said, my experience as a Japanese person is fundamentally different than that of Black Americans. Non-BIPOC must make space for these voices in order to deepen our understanding of systemic racism while using the power at our disposal to fight for a more just future for Black Americans.

What role must senior faculty play in helping to bring about the longer term changes necessary at the GSD?  

There’s an immense privilege and security in tenure. That privilege should be used to protect those who speak up and risk their reputations to fight for justice. But we must speak up as well. Tenured faculty have the power and responsibility to take the risks—we must be the driving force. This is the time we have to show up and do the work.

Thinking about both immediate and long-term changes, where should the GSD begin?   

First, the GSD has to acknowledge its past mistakes. The dean’s note sincerely does that, and it needs to be followed up with a big move. We must divest from the school’s questionable assets—such as luxury pied-à-terres—that promote white privilege and luxury, and use the proceeds to invest in the diversity of the faculty and student body. Big gestures are needed to make clear that the GSD is committed to fighting racism.

I think there are also actions the GSD can take right away. These actions can bolster the GSD’s relationship with the local community, particularly Boston’s Black community. The Design Discovery programs should be regarded as the baseline for student outreach. There need to be more scholarships to help increase diversity in our community. From there, we can offer students positions and engage them with admissions people. And we can provide training during the summer. We already have this platform—let’s put it to good use. There also needs to be an active and earnest dedication to hiring more Black faculty. Scott Cohen and I recently proposed to the full faculty the establishment of a fellowship program for young professionals and scholars to promote social and spatial justice at the GSD.

We must work in a dynamic way on all these levels at once—rethinking curriculum, hiring, and outreach. Only after that will we gain credibility to be a platform to help the profession at large. We can’t just sit on our Harvard laurels—it’s not going to work like that.

Truth-telling must come before reconciliation. But it’s not enough to solely educate oneself about the history of slavery and oppression in this country. We must realize that these aren’t just issues of the past—they affect Black Americans every day. From there, the GSD must recognize its position in this history and make reparations.

What changes must be made in the architecture discipline and culture? 

Every aspect of the profession must change. There is a limit to how much one can understand about the racial inequities of the profession when looking at it solely through academia. We must also try to understand how structural inequity toward Black Americans plays out in office settings, from the perspective of the working professional. Only through such a multifocal approach can we begin to change the discipline. As human beings, we have to transform and change and keep learning, not only in the academy and in our offices, but also in our hearts and minds. It will be a collaborative learning process; it will be messy, it will be uncomfortable for many of us, but we have no choice.

Toshiko Mori, FAIA, is the founding principal of Toshiko Mori Architect PLLC. She is also the Robert P. Hubbard Professor in the Practice of Architecture at the Graduate School of Design, and served as chair of the Department of Architecture from 2002 to 2008. She was inducted into the Academy of Arts and Letters in 2020 and has been a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2016.

Architecture, Design, Action: Erika Naginski and Sean Canty on Dismantling Systemic Racism in Pedagogy and Practice

Erika Naginski, Director of Doctoral Programs & Robert P. Hubbard Professor of Architectural History, and Sean Canty, Assistant Professor of Architecture 

 

Several weeks ago, the African American Student Union and Africa GSD published the Notes on Credibility statement, which included 13 actionable demands to the GSD. What’s your response to the statement?

Sean Canty (SC): A week before the Notes on Credibility document was published, Erika and I were having a candid conversation about recent events, which is why we wanted to respond together. We discussed the ways that our core education can rethink some of the issues surrounding spatial injustice, but for us, this question is fundamentally a question of time.

Erika Naginski (EN): As we watch these events unfold, educators and the design practices need some time to think, analyze, and explore. Sean and I wanted a chance to do that rather than respond immediately. One of the reasons we started talking was that everyone wanted to put out statements of solidarity, but they weren’t talking about change or actionable items. In order to have actionable items, one needs to sit down and reimagine pedagogy anew. 

Do you believe it’s possible to retool existing design pedagogy, or should design institutions abandon the current curriculum and start fresh?

SC: Retooling from within might be a more responsible approach to address things now. We all recognize that architecture has been an exclusionary practice. We can do more to change that, and to get our students to not only care about optical aspects of the profession, but also to fold in the ethical aspects.

EN: I think that’s beautifully put and I really agree with it. In order to understand systemic racism and typology, we must examine the long history of architecture before it became a discipline. How do you talk about race, exclusion, and gender when there isn’t simply the heroic figure of the architect? You have to talk about race, slavery, and the Civil War. That’s a long history that has an impact and mode of intersection with architecture, urban planning, and urban design. This goes to the heart of how we move beyond the presentism of this conversation. It’s so much more than just recognizing practitioners of color or women.

SC: I am thinking about one of the ways that we can “retool” how we teach. At the GSD, our major disciplines are landscape, architecture, and urban planning—and urban design, which falls at the intersection of all three of those disciplines. How can we foster more of a connection across those four departments? It’s been happening more over the past few years, but we need to capitalize on that history without squandering the specificities of the disciplines.

EN: Each department has its own core. How do we stitch together the interstices and enable a serious intellectual understanding of the necessary points of collision and coalescence?

Is this an opportunity to introduce a kind of cross-departmental curriculum on the history of spatial injustice in the United States, as well as an anti-racism 101 design course?

SC: It’s a beautiful idea that’s worth exploring. And I think that going beyond a core curriculum, the studio program can be indispensable because it’s at the intersection of all those disciplines. I recently taught “Multiple Miamis” with Lily Song and Chris Reed (the second edition was with Eric Höweler and Corey Zehngebot), and it was such an enriching experience. The studio enabled specificity while creating a collaborative conversation between urban designers and architects and planners. For students to understand a site, and learn how they can operate social and political apparatuses around that site, to discover those linkages—particularly in the context of a real American city, for all of the international students—is hugely helpful. 

EN: I’m wondering how can we fold back those ideas into the core. When we were talking about the architecture core, the first semester tends to be small-scale, formal. It’s not even at the level of the building—much less program or type. Then in Core 2, there begins to be an elaboration, or the hint of program. The minute we start inserting program or type, we can’t think of these as purely abstract or ideational modalities. We have to start thinking about history, context, power structure, race, gender, institutional structures, urban, and rural. 

SC: Core 1 introduces students to the discourse and discipline, the intrinsic thing. Core 2 implements the external factors—ethics and social elements, for example. Core 3 is the integrative studio, where complex systems and robust institutional programs are introduced. Core 4 addresses issues of collective housing, medium skill, and medium density. 

EN: All disciplines have their different intellectual traditions. One thing that strikes me is that maybe we are at a junction where form and function are too separate. Has a formalist discourse attached itself to design? Is it in the context or the content? 

What’s the relationship of formalism to context? Maybe in our core, we’re so used to a kind of abstraction and ideational approach. We need to suture together form and content. 

SC: It’s true. You can’t really have content without form, or form without content. We’ve been foregrounding that in our pedagogy.

How was the “Multiple Miamis” studio useful for thinking about the link between pedagogy and practice, and the kinds of conversations surrounding design justice across disciplines at the GSD?  

SC: These are all stakeholders—activists and developers—for the same place. Fostering those kinds of connections was quite meaningful. It wasn’t easy all the time; there were a lot of difficult conversations between students, developers, and activists about more responsible spatial practices in our cities. One stakeholder alone can’t do that. It requires everyone to come together to hash these things out.

We find ourselves in disciplinary silos at the GSD. We need to find ways to have these meaningful connections and teach our students how to use them. 

EN: With architecture specifically, it’s a question of how to get people in the door at all. Alongside systemic racism, there’s an economic reality: it’s the lowest paid of all the design professions. If you’re coming from a disadvantaged place, medicine or law is a safer bet than architecture. To make design accessible, there has to be a better access point to get young Black students and faculty through the door.

We need to get people of color to want this profession. It’s really important, and it’s not just going to happen through people saying “We have a scholarship.” It’s a broader educational commitment and we have to start much earlier.

Beyond changes to pedagogy, how can the GSD leverage its influence and financial resources to make design education a more equitable and accessible field?

SC: The GSD needs to amplify existing voices within the discipline and add more voices, so that the representation is there. If you scroll through any institution’s website, you can certainly see that there’s not a lot of people who look like me. For prospective students, it’s important to have people there who look like them, so they see it’s something that they can do.

The GSD also needs to give renewed attention and resources to platforms like Project Link and Design Discovery . They should be centralized in the GSD’s operations, and be way more robust in terms of outreach. Project Link is a high school program in the GSD with relationships with Boston high schools and elementary schools. Design Discovery is for people in college or older. 

Undergraduate programs can start doing this work as well. The GSD should redraw the ways in which one can enter. We have the facilities and resources to bring in more Black students and staff, but it’s a question of the GSD opening the doors. 

Sean Canty is assistant professor of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and founder of Studio SC, a design practice that activates environments by conjoining discrete geometries, materials, and architectural types.

Erika Naginski is Professor of Architectural History. Her research interests include Baroque and Enlightenment architecture, early modern aesthetic philosophy, theories of public space, and the critical traditions of architectural history.

Architecture, Design, Action: Anita Berrizbeitia on Dismantling Systemic Racism in Pedagogy and Practice

Anita Berrizbeitia, professor of Landscape Architecture and chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture

As a landscape architecture theorist, how do you understand the crisis of systemic inequity and spatial injustice in American cities?

I’m interested in examining how landscape architecture can rework and redirect pressures of capitalism toward more just ends. How does the landscape architect understand his or her project beyond design direction? How do they understand governance, politics, and power in relation to their design proposals and built projects? How can landscape shape urbanization (at every scale), to check its inherent tendency to expand and maximize capitalistic growth?

Landscape architecture, landscape, land itself—this is where, simply put, life and all of its conflicts takes place. This means that, as long as the capitalist spatial mode prevails, landscape is always a contested ground. Landscape architecture constantly negotiates between disciplinary values of environmental protection, the necessity of high-quality public-realm landscapes, and social equity and the pressures imposed by the market forces of development. Who/what pays for landscape, and what does this have to do with its spatial distribution in urban areas, with accessibility, upkeep, and design quality?

This conundrum of funding—for all public realm projects such as streets and infrastructure, in addition to recreational landscapes—has resulted in a new set of questions. Who gets to design the space and why? All you need is a quick glance at a Google Earth image of any city in the world to see the inequities in the distribution of “green.” The pattern always reveals the same story: leafy green spaces indicate where the rich (typically white) people live, and arid areas signify where the poor (typically communities of color) live. How can we redistribute public and private funding more equitably, toward projects that have broader public benefit? 

How can landscape architects align their work with principles of spatial justice? 

The first obvious answer is that they must commit to expanding their practice to include work with underserved communities. Because these communities cannot afford the services of a landscape architect, firms will need to procure other sources of funding. This is difficult and time-consuming, a commitment on many levels that will necessarily restructure practice itself. We are increasingly seeing firms that have a non-profit arm, funded largely by the profits earned from high-paying clients such as private developers. 

Second, landscape architects have to formulate an agenda for each and every project that exceeds the client’s brief (typically framed as a bounded site, a program, a budget, and time frame) to focus on broader issues of spatial justice, including designing and incorporating mechanisms for preventing well-known consequences of building landscape, such as gentrification. This will be essential as landscape inequality will only become more intensified with climate change. The landscape architect will have to be a politician, an activist, and an advocate for the interests of those who are not on the typical client list, incessantly arguing that there be greater public utility in all their work, regardless of the scale of the project. Ultimately they have to deliver this new vision with greater intentionality and clarity of position, implemented through the invention of new methods and languages of design.

How does design justice filter into your pedagogy, and how do you think landscape architecture education still needs to change?

Course syllabi are essential, as they are the primary venue through which we express a value system. To demonstrate the relevance of the field, we often boast of the multivalence of landscape architecture, how it touches on all aspects of the natural and the social spheres. Yet as often as we explain the many ways that landscape relates to everything, we neglect to explain what landscape hides behind its physical manifestation, its appearance.  We do not as often discuss the histories, processes, and practices that have led to the present state of landscape, to the climate crisis in all its manifestations, to pandemics, and to social injustice and exclusionary public realms.  

By not interrogating these histories, processes, and practices, landscape architects can blind themselves to the ways that capitalism and empire have artificially limited the bounds of the possible. In addition, by focusing on the constructed work, we neglect to discuss those conditions of mutuality that necessarily exist in the creation of every landscape: the labor that actually shapes and constructs landscape, the live matter that is often displaced from other geographical locations, the extractive practices that cause environmental and social damage elsewhere. 

Our department has a long-standing commitment to pedagogy that focuses on public-realm landscapes and, building on this commitment, over the last four years we have made changes across all areas of our curriculum.  After the last presidential election, we reinvented the fourth semester theory class “The Nature of Difference: Theories and Practices of Landscape Architecture.” In this class we explore how notions of social and political difference are embedded in the design of landscapes. More recently, the changes to first semester’s “Textuality and the Practice of Landscape Architecture” embrace a less filtered view of landscape architectural history. Core studios have also seen significant changes that address issues of climate change and social and environmental inequities at every scale. 

Admittedly, these changes are slow to implement—and uneven. Some courses, and some topics, are more open to evolution than others. Some require tweaking while others require radical transformation. Implementation of curricular changes requires faculty support, funding, and time. But more importantly, it will require adding the historical and cultural perspectives, the design expertise, and scholarship of those who have been traditionally excluded from prestige landscape architecture.

What role should senior faculty have in bringing about this change? 

The senior faculty are a hinge between the present and the future of the school, between the present and the future of the discipline, and between the school as a community in its totality and those in charge of its administration. They have a fundamental role in bringing about change.

One key issue we need to address is the importance of both continuity and change in academia, especially in terms of hiring and promotion protocols. Hiring more faculty of color is imperative, but so is the long-term mentoring of our Black graduates toward academia. This is clearly an area where senior faculty would have a major impact. Evaluation for promotion needs to include greater recognition of faculty working in research or in practice that addresses inequality. Similarly, senior faculty have a profound influence on the research interests of their students, and continuities often get reinforced unnecessarily. We also need to broaden the criteria for funding student research beyond ecology to include research that explores BIPOC cultural and vernacular landscapes, and that addresses systemic racism, environmental justice, and the relationship between the two. 

In terms of addressing institutionalized racism at the GSD, senior faculty need to accept that it exists, understand and accept our roles in it, and seek advice on how to implement change both in the short and the long term. Faculty and administration must have focused conversations on the gap that exists between an evolving vision for the school and the administrative mandates that shape, sometimes in invisible but very tangible ways, the school from the outside. This will be fundamental to bringing about change.  

Anita Berrizbeitia is professor of Landscape Architecture and chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture. Her research focuses on design theories of modern and contemporary landscape architecture, especially those that represent paradigm shifts in the conceptualization of landscape, the productive aspects of landscapes, and Latin American cities and landscapes.

Architecture, Design, Action: Chris Reed on Dismantling Systemic Racism in Pedagogy and Practice

Chris Reed, Co-Director of the Master of Landscape Architecture in Urban Design Degree Program & Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture

How has the discipline of landscape architecture enabled a history of spatial injustice and violence against Black Americans? 

Open space and landscape/planning practices have been used to segregate and oppress Black populations in cities across America for decades. Urban renewal and public realm projects and new open space projects intentionally removed thriving Black communities in order to separate them from one another and to disempower them, and subsequently, to disinvest purposefully in those communities. We can also see, in the last couple of decades, the imbalance of investment in open spaces in white communities and Black communities—and the ways Black and minority communities near signature projects have not been included in their design and planning nor in reaping their benefits. We must acknowledge this disciplinary history as a start, and we can then begin to have an open and more honest conversation pedagogically and professionally. 

How can landscape architects be better allies to, and advocates for, communities of color, particularly Black communities?

This is a very important question. I can really only speak from my own experience as a practitioner. My firm, Stoss, works typically in the public realm, and we confront these issues of race and social equity on a daily basis. When you’re working on public projects you engage many communities of color, and you can and should give those communities a real voice and influence in the work. Our practice has been involved in many projects that put issues of equity, race, and social justice at the center of their agendas, and make racial and social equity an essential outcome of that work. 

In our recent work in St. Louis on the Chouteau Greenway , for instance, we put together an incredibly diverse team of nationally recognized and local consultants, including Toni Griffin and recent Loeb Fellow De Nichols. The Greenway project was intended to address St. Louis’s racial issues square on and to find ways forward that would change the way the city works, change the way design projects and practices are developed, and change the nature of civic conversation in the city. That’s a big challenge for any design discipline—but it’s one that landscape architecture is well suited to, given the impact that landscape projects have physically, geographically, socially, and economically across many different neighborhoods and cultures. In such instances, we work deeply with African American communities and many other communities of color to draw on their experiences and their own social and cultural histories and traditions as ways to begin to inform the work that we do—and that then are manifest in the programming and design.

When we do this, the projects become richer. They have broader appeal when people can begin to see in the work their own cultural histories and references. It takes a certain humbleness on our part, knowing that we don’t have all the answers. If we do it right, this kind of open process results in a set of designs that are powerful and empowering, and advance design ambitions and agendas as much as they advance social-cultural agendas. But it’s important to listen in the right ways, to assemble the right teams, to build trust in those communities, and to start with questions, not answers. Even in projects where we’re not being asked to take on these issues directly, it’s up to us as designers to advocate for the voices who aren’t in the room and who don’t yet have a seat at the table. We can expand the possibilities and the audiences for a project and counter built-in, structural, anti-Black racism that continues to pervade many forms of city-making and design.

Practitioners can model practices that help to address racial issues, even when our projects do not. We can develop partnerships with local organizations that deal with issues of race, equity, social and environmental justice, youth, art, etc., and provide pro bono design and planning services to them and the communities they serve. We can donate to the organizations we work with in our own communities, and in the communities we work in across the US, as we are doing at Stoss. We can host Black thinkers and designers for forums and discussions with our staff. We can advocate for many causes, including making Juneteenth a state and national holiday, and for Black rights in general. We can showcase the work of Black creatives, as Sean Canty has done so powerfully . And we can implement new opportunities for firm-supported community service; at Stoss, Juneteenth will be a paid day off for staff who want to take on a community service initiative that day. 

How else can landscape architecture education help dismantle white supremacist narratives? 

It’s important that we first acknowledge that the experience of Black Americans is singular—beginning with slavery, and then with the lingering effects of slavery, racism, and racial violence that persist today. No other people have endured a history of violence as Black people in the US have. Our work—and diversity initiatives generally—need to be broad, but they need to acknowledge that African Americans have a singular experience in the US that no other race has shared; we need to respond to this clearly and directly.

In the department, we’re looking at a number of initiatives, including revising the curriculum; recruiting more Black faculty, students, and administrative staff; and continuing to build upon our recent efforts in the history and theory courses to include topics and resources beyond white, Eurocentric sources. We will see clear results starting in the fall, especially if we expand this work to studios and seminars. 

For a number of years, in my courses, I’ve been trying to include project references from many different cultures around the world, to ask “who are we (or should we be) designing for,” and to very directly take on hard questions of race in the city. Recently, for instance, Sean Canty, Lily Song, and I taught “Multiple Miamis,” an option studio in the Overtown neighborhood of Miami, an African American community. We began with questions of how design could best serve the community members that are already there, before it begins to imagine amenities that could attract new populations. 

Much of the departmental conversation focuses on how we can expand these practices and efforts and initiatives in both the short and long term. How do we expand resources that help support this work? And how do we create a culture that brings more Black and brown people into the school in meaningful ways—in positions of authority, on the faculty—who can contribute their intellects, their cultural and social traditions, and their own life experiences in order to have more open and more diverse conversations about the agency of design. 

Creating a community of people who look like each other and who can share life experiences will also help with student recruitment. The more that we can have diverse Black faculty, the more we can begin to develop a culture that’s going to naturally attract more Black students and provide a community that they can respond to. 

What kind of conversations have the Notes on Credibility and subsequent responses from the dean and faculty generated in your department? 

The Notes caused a lot of people to reflect deeply on the broader cultural moment we are in and the issues specific to the GSD—it’s a very helpful and necessary critique of our institution. The students behind the Notes were able to articulate something very clear—it was a tough message for many people, but one that rang true—and you could sense the students’ passion and frustration. They weren’t just raising issues, they also outlined very tangible actions for moving ahead, which is incredible. 

The responses we’ve seen so far from the dean and different departments are a good first step. The dean’s response, in particular, was heartfelt. You could read the humanity behind it, but also the intellectual project at hand. Across the faculty, it’s been a deeply reflective conversation, and what we’ve uncovered through it is the need to take quick steps forward, in a thoughtful way, in combination with more long-term actions. We all feel the urgency and opportunity of the moment to rethink how we teach, and how our academic lives are structured, how we recruit, all of that. I think the Notes have generated more focused conversation on a single topic or set of topics than anything else in the recent past at the GSD—and the students are to be lauded for this. 

How can the GSD begin to diversify its faculty, particularly in terms of younger Black architects and designers showing excellence in their profession but without a pre-existing teaching record? 

We need to do multiple things simultaneously. We need to recognize the world-class Black researchers and designers who are already out there—and not just because they focus on Black issues, but because they are outstanding academics and designers who just happen to be Black. We also need to find ways to cultivate more relationships with these scholars and practitioners and double down on our efforts to bring them into the GSD. 

In Landscape Architecture, we were fortunate this year to bring in a new faculty member, Sara Zwede, who’s African American. She is well recognized already as a young designer, urbanist, and artist and has an excellent body of emerging research about the South called Cotton Kingdom (also the name of the seminar she’ll be teaching in the fall). Finding folks like Sara at all levels of our faculty is important. It will take a commitment of energy and resources to develop such recruitment initiatives and teaching programs, but it will be time well spent.  

How can the GSD reshape its pedagogical approach? 

Again, to go back to the “Multiple Miamis” studio, the school raised money through the Knight Foundation to do a series of studios in Miami that dealt with issues of race, social equity, and climate displacement. Those sorts of GSD-sponsored initiatives are absolutely critical. It’s all too easy to say that we’ll take on a problem in Cambridge, St. Louis, Miami, or Los Angeles: We’ll do an event in an impoverished area, meet the folks struggling with these issues, and then we go away and develop our own academic projects. We must also find a way to give something back to these communities so we’re not just drawing on their experience and knowledge to develop our own work. It could be using the GSD’s convening power to put community advocates and power brokers into the same room, so we can contribute to and advance the issues on the ground, or it could be offering scholarships to programs like Design Discovery for kids in these communities. The goal is to find or make opportunities for reciprocal learning and benefit so that we are good stewards as well as good students.

Chris Reed is founding director of Stoss Landscape Urbanism, and Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture and co-director of the Master of Landscape Architecture in Urban Design Program at the GSD. He is interested in the relationships between landscape and ecology, infrastructure, social spaces, and cities—and in foregrounding issues of race and equity in the firm’s projects.

Architecture, Design, Action: Diane Davis on Dismantling Systemic Racism in Pedagogy and Practice

Diane Davis, Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism

Why is it important to understand the history and origins of systemic racism perpetuated through urban planning? 

Planners, by their very nature, focus on the future, and are concerned with how to make things better. Sometimes these commitments make them overly technocratic. Insights from the humanities and social sciences can help push back against these tendencies. They also can reveal the ways that planning actions in the past have actually produced the problems we try to correct today, including systemic racism.

I say this as a sociologist working mostly on similar questions in the developing world. I’m originally from St. Louis, though, a city that’s very divided by race and space. Its endemic racial injustices reflect institutional legacies of the Civil War and historical struggles over sovereignty. So what looks like community-level, routine police abuse of power is actually rooted in the systemic racism that was a product of that time. To properly dismantle racist structures in American cities and elsewhere, we need to know exactly how we built them.

Planners also generally have some degree of social awareness because part of the job is to think about class, inequality, race, and power. You can’t solve problems with just spatial interventions; you need to understand the actors and institutions that keep people apart in space.

As a professor of urban planning, how do you respond to the increasingly popular call for abolishing the police? 

It is not enough to defund the police; we must address why police officers feel empowered or entitled to abuse citizens. We also need to understand the systematic ways police have inherited their power, with what social or political mandates, and with what oversight (or lack thereof). Most societies want institutions that guarantee social order and protect citizens. If that is not happening, and certain populations are suffering disproportionately, then there is something wrong with the police institutions and the social contract upon which they are founded.

I see people pushing for police reform in the United States, but from my studies in Mexico, and also looking at conflicts in Israel and Palestine, where police violence is used to spatially separate people, officials constantly call for reform. But more often than not, reform cannot solve endemic structural problems. It is likely that police are incapable of reforming themselves, because institutionalized norms that govern their behavior are often part of the problem.

This means that others must be involved. Communities on the front lines need to lead security efforts—with an understanding of safety and justice that comes from their own experiences and not from outside interpretations. We must continue to ask how much of any community’s security should really lie in the hands of the police, as opposed to with the communities themselves. What co-policing institutions and practices would guarantee citizen security without sacrificing equity and justice?

What should all students, regardless of department, leave the GSD knowing about?

Our programs should place more emphasis on the history of American cities, and on why they look the way they do. Even though we are an international university, we are located in the US and such knowledge would be a good way to ground a conversation across our varied disciplines. More generally, all planning, urban design, and architecture students should be taught to think about the institutions that create the spatial conditions in which we are designing. When I say “institutions,” I refer to social, political, and economic institutions, ranging from states to markets, and how or why they may impose certain regulations, incentivize certain actions, or normalize certain values.

In the US, most of the institutions we live with—many of which emerged out of the struggle over race—embody some form of political arrangement or compromise. This includes certain zoning or land-use regulations. To understand some of the contemporary problems we are facing with respect to race-based inequality and oppression at the hands of police, students—including architecture students—must understand the history of zoning and when it is used to isolate people of color. All disciplines at the GSD should be asked to study the history of governing and legal institutions relevant to the design world.

What can planners do better? What role do they have in fighting for more just cities?

To create equitable and just cities, we need to think about them both socially and spatially. Planners should be well prepared to keep both these dimensions in mind. While urban designers often think about what constitutes a vibrant or equitable community in spatial terms, planners are inclined to think about the social relationships that create strong and equitable communities. At the GSD, we are in a particularly privileged position to move beyond these dichotomies and work on both fronts simultaneously. If we want to transform cities, we need to improve our pedagogy to generate horizontal conversations and strengthen connections among the various design disciplines, including architecture.

In my own writings, I have been thinking about the need to champion urban sovereignty, or reciprocal governance at the scale of the city, in ways that might enable every resident to feel included or recognized as a member of an urban “imagined’ community of allegiance. With such a commitment, all residents would be asked to become collectively responsible for defending, shaping, and transforming the city they share, but in a more just and equitable way.

Cities are hotbeds of diversity and, precisely because of that, I am hopeful that what might unite people at the scale of the city is going to be more inclusive and humane than what people share at the scale of the nation. We cannot leave identity-formation or repertoires of reciprocity only to state and federal authorities, particularly when they are incapable of understanding the complexities of urbanism and seek to divide urban residents rather than unite them.

We need planning and design strategies that move us beyond the worst excesses of nationalism and militarized exclusion that manifest at the scale of the city. Whether these excesses involve the use of the National Guard to police street protesters, or whether they come in the form of federal policies that distribute funds to states without accounting for differences in their urban populations, we must ask whether these responses show sufficient knowledge of cities, the challenges they face, and how people actually live in them. By focusing attention on urban sovereignty, we may be able to push back against such practices.

I would also hope that any such endeavor might help transcend binaries of difference that are frequently exposed in cities, whether based on race, ethnicity, class, gender, or neighborhood. With socio-spatial practices and sensibilities that foster shared allegiances—both in physical and spatial terms, as well as through resources and recognition—it will be clear that we are all in this together, and that moving forward collectively is the best way to build more just and equitable cities.

Diane E. Davis is the Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism and chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design. She is Area Head of the Risk and Resilience MDes area group. Trained as a sociologist, Davis researches the relationship between urbanization and national development, comparative urban governance, socio-spatial practice in conflict cities, urban violence, and new territorial manifestations of sovereignty.

Architecture, Design, Action: Abby Spinak on Dismantling Systemic Racism in Pedagogy and Practice

Abby Spinak, Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design

From an urban planning perspective, how has the coronavirus pandemic challenged and reshaped cities as democratic spaces? 

One of the prominent public narratives early on was that the protests would cause superspreading events. But by and large the same people protesting are also the ones advocating for social distancing and for more government accountability on suppressing the spread of COVID. This movement should be taken even more seriously because the people out there know the risks and are protecting each other to mobilize during a pandemic that is disproportionately affecting Black people. This, and of course the curfews and escalating police violence, show how both highly politicized and absolutely necessary urban public space continues to be, even in a pandemic.

How can planners leverage their skills to better serve the communities of color they’re supposed to represent?

The field of planning can learn a lot from Black activists and scholars about how to expand our basic conception of what’s possible, what growth means, and who gets to determine the path of evolution of the built environment and of our institutions. There are a lot of alternative future visions that activists and theorists have developed—planning as a discipline needs that diversity of futures. We can achieve it by listening to the conversations and work of these activists and including them in our teaching. It will also require an intense, no doubt painful, period of self-reflection, of understanding the true breadth of exclusion in planning education alongside other architecture and design disciplines. There’s a point where you have to ask, Beyond getting a seat at the table, who gets to design the table?

What about educational reform at the GSD? 

We can learn so much from our students. Toni Griffin and I recently co-advised a student, Natasha Hicks, whose thesis questioned what it would look like to rebuild design education from a position of Black radical feminism. She started from the perspective that people come to learning with different expectations, and you need to meet them where they are. How do you develop a pedagogy for these different groups? Where do you start the conversation? What narrative tools do you need? What should they be reading?

In the short term, we must make sure that our syllabi reflect diverse voices and perspectives. I remove more white male authors from my syllabus every year. We need to continually check in with ourselves and each other about the tacit language of our disciplines: what colonialist, white-centric narratives are embedded in the canon we’re teaching? We need to reevaluate what we teach so that knowledge itself is not acting in a violent, hegemonic way.

In the hallowed halls of old institutions like the GSD, we are good at showing solidarity without necessarily turning that gaze on ourselves. It’s one thing to amplify voices, but maybe amplification in this context means that we, the white faculty, should shut up and listen.

Abby Spinak is lecturer in Urban Planning and Design and area head in the Risk and Resilience MDes area group. Spinak studies the history of “energy democracy.”

Architecture, Design, Action: Malkit Shoshan on Dismantling Systemic Racism in Pedagogy and Practice

Malkit Shoshan, Lecturer in Architecture

As an architect in a multidisciplinary, research-based practice that works to uncover systemic inequity in the built environment and its regulatory bodies, can you begin by discussing your relationship with architecture and how architects can fight against oppression?

First and foremost, we need to ask questions rather than propose solutions. Architecture wants to provide answers to every problem, but it could be more productive to cut off this impulse. As architects, we’re trained to draw lines, build walls, and extract—whether it’s information or material resources. Instead of drawing lines, let’s think about what’s underneath them and what they are crossing.

Israel, where I was born and studied, operates on explicit politics of exclusion. Every architecture project can be considered an act of segregation, every masterplan brief I opened was a tool kit of implementing racism in the built environment. Every structure has a role in the historical and present dispossession of Palestinian communities, taking away land and cutting off access to resources. I can only really speak from my own experience of growing up amid this systemic segregation, but perpetuating it through my work was never something I would agree to, so starting when I was a student, I decided to change the way I engaged with architecture.

My architecture designs turned into research and experimentation with mapping, representation, and activism, which I later edited and published in Atlas of the Conflict: Israel-Palestine and Village: One Land Two Systems and Platform Paradise . These books critically examined Israel’s architectural and spatial strategy. It’s a country that has two doctrines: design for Israelis and design for Palestinians. The easiest way to describe it is that the former works on construction and the latter works on deconstruction. But both are intertwined—the destruction of Palestinian cities fortifies and enables the construction of additional Israeli settlements, and so on.

Both with my practice and with FAST , we aim to make visible how complicit architecture and design is in perpetuating segregation by uncovering these processes of colonization and dispossession. We look for opportunities to challenge institutions and empower the marginalized and the public imagination. We all have a duty to confront, criticize, and scrutinize the ways architecture is weaponized as a tool of inequality and exclusion and used to maintain hegemonic powers.

In your work with FAST you often talk about dismantling systems of power and segregation as a multi-scalar issue. Can you elaborate on that process?

One of FAST’s ongoing projects focuses on the impact United Nations peace missions have on cities, communities, and the environment. My interest in the architecture of the UN is institutional and topological. The UN is an important institution of global international cooperation, but it’s incredibly segregated and perpetuates the exclusive power of nation-states. Its peace operations generate the largest material and environmental footprint among all UN agencies, and they occur in areas with long legacies of violence, colonization, extraction, and systemic marginalization. All decisions regarding peace operations are led by the UN Security Council and are subject to the veto power of five nation-states: China, France, Russia, the UK, and the US.

It’s interesting to go into the belly of the beast to figure out how power works. When we started working with the individuals at the helm of such organizations, we realized that many of them have come from the field of activism and are motivated by good values. But we quickly discovered that these huge institutions and their personnel are so immersed in bureaucratic and administrative processes that they suffer from a systemic lack of imagination; they fundamentally cannot envision a different world. So how do you work with these UN staff members and empower them with tools to advocate for change in a superstructure so resistant to it? By using conceptual design—and never specific design, because ultimately you want them to think, and consequently change work culture, rather than follow yet another procedure—you can open up all kinds of nodes in the system and dissolve them.

Although it feels almost impossible to change the UN, we trying to penetrate this bureaucratic and overpowering monolith. For instance, peace missions are gigantic—a UN camp is often bigger than the city or village situated alongside it. We kept asking UN agencies, What happens with all of this material footprint throughout and at the end of each mission? What is the material legacy? These questions led to a conversation about the policy of “liquidation of assets” at the end of every mission. We wondered what kind of behavior or institutional habits the word “liquidation” enables? What accountability does it lack?

During field research, I began by visiting sites where the UN liquidates materials and documenting what I found there. I brought this documentation to UN representatives and constituents at the Secretariat in New York; the photos—which normally aren’t permitted to be taken—gave them an immediate understanding of the need to enact policy changes. The change was in the micro: modifying the wording from “liquidation” to “repurposing” changes the doctrine. Liquidation erases and abandons; repurposing requires accountability, takes responsibility for actions, and develops and nurtures future relationships.

Designers must become fluent in a language of multiple strategies if they want to change built-in institutional oversights. They must create space by penetrating walls and liberate resources by identifying opportunities for change. They must be attuned to very small things and understand how the micro affects the macro.

Why is mapping (and data visualization in general) a particularly important tool in the realm of design as activism? What distinguishes it from critical writing?

I started mapping to understand the systems and mechanisms behind the production and construction of space in Israel. Often when you write an essay about an event, you get a response like: “This is an isolated incident; it was an accident; shootings happen; walls and settlements get built.” It seems incidental when spoken by politicians or public representatives, but once you give data a scale, and lay it out upon territory and along various periods, then you can begin to understand and reveal the systems that operate behind its production. These maps expose the relationship between ethnicity and land ownership, access to resources, typology of settlements, demography, archaeology, and memorial at various scales—from the household to the nation.

When it comes to challenging inequity, exclusion, and human rights abuse in the architecture and design disciplines, why is a cross-disciplinary, multi-scalar approach so important?

What I like about the relationship between architecture and urban design is the capacity to move through scale—you can very fluidly link different levels of abstraction through an object and synthesize complexity and relations in space. A building can suddenly become a site of inquiry across multiple networks: from sourcing materials to construction regulations, to labor conditions and supply-chain flows on a global level, to a building’s specific situation in a community—it can all serve as a testimony of power relationships. No other profession is able to offer so much evidence and so many tools to understand structural inequality. But it’s also difficult because architecture is fundamentally embedded in power; it created these regimes that it perpetuates and continues to fetishize. Can we ever undo it? It’s a big question.

How can art, architecture, and design complement each other in the realm of activism?

They can be incredibly complementary. To give an example, close to Haifa (where I’m from), there are two small localities situated one mile apart. One is a thriving art commune, and the other is an unrecognized Palestinian village. The origins of these communities and the relation between them taught me a lot about art and architecture. The Palestinian community was forcibly displaced in 1948. Their village was confiscated and fenced off by the Israeli army and they were forced to build new homes at the edge of their former village. Their new homes have been routinely scrubbed off any official data records—according to Israel, it doesn’t exist. As such, the village was never granted a formal address or access to infrastructure such as water, electricity, sewage, or education.

Their original homes were appropriated by a group of avant-garde Dada artists and recent immigrants. They converted the old Palestinian village into an art commune. The artists treated the Palestinian homes as found objects, and turned them into galleries and experimental spaces to produce new cultural narratives. They overlaid the Palestinian history with their own fantasy. They appropriated the place and its memory through artistic production.

I worked for many years with the displaced Palestinian community. My involvement with this context taught me about the power of art. It’s not obligated to tell the truth, it’s not a scientific process, yet it can resonate deeply with the public perception and imagination of place, people, culture, etc.

With art, you can quickly create broad, overarching visions and bring them into the public domain. It can offer powerful tools for experimenting with activism and challenging hegemonic narratives. With art, we can imagine and create all sorts of alternative agencies that do not exist now and it can have a real presence on the ground within communities.

The projects “One Land Two Systems” and “Platform Paradise”—which resulted from my engagement with this context—devised methods similar to those used by the state of Israel and the avant-garde Dada artists to challenge false historical narratives and empower the Palestinian community.

We used art together with architecture and urban design tools. We visualized the historical spatial transformation of the region and developed an alternative masterplan with, and for, the Palestinian community. The villagers used this plan to negotiate their rights with the local planning authorities. At the same time, we launched an international art exhibition to produce temporary spaces and help the Palestinian villagers tell their stories, history, and future plans.

I think that art can nourish community-based approaches, and it can complement other processes. There is something about the freedom, ephemerality, and illusiveness of art that make it very powerful, especially in the realm of activism.

How does your pedagogy address issues of systemic inequality? What kinds of conversations happen in your classroom?

What I like about the ADPD (Art, Design, and the Public Domain) MDes area group is that it’s interdisciplinary; we have people coming from different backgrounds. Many have practiced architecture and returned to school frustrated by working in a discipline that’s fundamentally misaligned with their personal values.

In the classroom, we use open-ended experimentation. We ask ourselves, How can we use our privilege to include more perspectives, to better engage with communities, to create inclusive and just platforms that challenge the status quo and dominant powers? Instead of sticking to a strict academic process, we encourage everyone to use all the experience and knowledge we’ve gathered and apply it to our projects. It’s a process of expanding and learning together. 

Several weeks on from the publication of the Notes on Credibility document, how are you thinking about this growing conversation on structural racism at the GSD?

I’m really happy this conversation is happening at the GSD; it’s giving us a chance to look inward. Architecture is typically taught as a mentality of extraction: the power of the genius, the starchitect—these are stereotypes that have long reigned at the architecture academy everywhere. Instead of being critical, students learn how to mimic and develop a couple of tricks that will allow them to go into the industry and be plugged into a big office, or develop into a one-dimensional starchitect deluded by the idea of their own autonomy. 

But I think it’s changing now and that is really exciting. The discourse in practice should be expanded to develop this consciousness when architects are dealing with marginalized communities, or in any other context. Architects should care about and use their work to stand up against racism and fight for social, environmental, and economic justice. All these issues are embodied in the structures that we have created and the clients we work for, even down to how we specify our windows and doorknobs. It’s a complex matrix, but once we have this consciousness, we will be able to examine this world critically and make our collective stake in it. Architects are both powerless and powerful. The role which they once played in society made them powerless; they were working in the service of power. But with these tools we can reclaim power and work toward the creation of more egalitarian spaces, cities, and communities.

Specific to the GSD’s pedagogical structure, having one foot in practice and one foot in academia is a tough challenge but also an incredible advantage. It’s a constant act of translation and communication with different stakeholders simultaneously. Working with academics and bringing that work into practice and vice versa makes us much more agile and ready to deal with complexities in any environment, especially around issues of race and social justice, where there is a need to hear and engage with a multitude of voices in our approach, our practice, and our design work.

Malkit Shoshan is area head of the Art, Design, and the Public Domain MDes area group and the founder and director of the architectural think tank FAST: Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory.