BY JENNIFER REUT
An emerging platform for design activism braces for the future.
FROM THE OCTOBER 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.
It can be difficult, even in the face of powerful evidence, for designers to accept responsibility for the role the profession has played in reinforcing the boundaries of race and class that shape urban lives, not just the spaces in which they?re lived. ?As designers and planners, we have neglected these communities,? says Lindsay Woodson, a recent graduate of Harvard University?s Graduate School of Design (GSD) in urban planning.
Woodson is talking about neighborhoods like Sandtown in Baltimore, or Ferguson, Missouri?historically segregated communities that are disproportionately affected by police violence. In 2014, Woodson and fellow Harvard graduate student Marcus Mello began a project that would illuminate the systemic crosshairs in which black urban residents literally and figuratively find themselves. Titled Map the Gap, the project and report, which was recently published online, is an example of mapping as activism. Woodson and Mello, with contributions from other GSD students, mapped every fatal encounter in Baltimore, Boston, and Saint Louis from 2000 to 2015 and overlaid it with census data to analyze historical patterns of urban renewal, transportation access, and educational attainment. They found that disadvantaged communities unequally bear the brunt of police brutality. ?The goal,? Mello says, is ?to get people to...