MDes Open Project: Land Narratives + Formations for A Just City

Stories We Tell, Spaces We Make

“…modernism in architecture and the visual arts had strong inclinations to do away with the past, even attack it, especially the legacy of classical antiquity and its varied revivals.  These erasures were to make place not necessarily for certain urgent needs of the present, but for what was often described as a utopian future.”
     -Sabine Eckmann, Director and Chief Curator, Kemper Art Museum

Land erasures are often compelled by intentions of betterment, but always involve some form of violence and dislocation. Even before the modernist destruction projects, spaces of colonial land takings, conflicts over land rights, and sites of sanctioned racial segregation and eminent domain produced land erasures across the global, with spaces of climate devastation rapidly expanding in territorial scale and scope. Today, many of these everlasting land erasures of people, languages, cultures, traditions and places are situated in a perpetual state of flux, destabilization and/or tenuous cultural identity and habitation.  

Whether man-made or natural, it is commonly our most vulnerable populations that are disrupted, displaced, or left to survive while attempting to maintain dignity and wellbeing. Contemporary narratives about these spatial erasures are grossly reductive and disregard any acknowledgement of the cultural origins or the harmful public policies that instigated the devaluation of lands we refer to as slums, settlements, or disadvantaged communities. But all land has a rich and more complex story to tell about people and place. It is time we stop to consider whether once upon a time, these lands were once advantaged, productive and prosperous and who controlled them. What cultural heritages were lost or taken and what might have happened on these lands if harm and exclusion had not been mandated, or if democracy and freedoms had not been denied.

This Open Project is a call to action for the pursuit and preservation of democracy, freedom, and inclusion in response to the current conditions and impending threats of erasure and is designed for students whose research interests involve exploring a reparative agenda for more just cities. This Project seeks cross-disciplinary and multi-media dreamers, activists and makers, from all four MDes domains, to engage in collective, small group and individual work to reconstruct lost narratives, stage public democratic discourse, and reimagine protopian land formations (temporal or permanent) through reparative rhetorical, spatial, cultural and political prototypes. Collaborative work of the course will organize around 4-6 groups to produce a framework of manifestos addressing selected land injustices and articulating the students’ collective visions and demands for a just city. This will inform the development of a single web-based platform that will hold the manifestos and student-generated curriculum for each of manifestos, including syllabi with proposed lecture and corresponding literature review and readers. The curriculum will be tested at mid semester during a two-day Just City Teach-in led by students and invited scholars, practitioners and fellow students, together with a series of environmental narrative installations mounted throughout the GSD. Finally, students will work in groups or individually to achieve the demands of their manifestos overlaid onto selected geographies of erasure and produce a multi-media final installation that may include graphic theories, critiques and spatial interventions in the form of essays, films, performances, installations and/or design renderings, plans, models.