The path toward social justice must be designed

In class we discussed the question of whether it is possible to achieve social justice by architectural design or urban planning. I don’t think it is realistically possible to achieve social justice through design and planning alone, but I think it is possible, and morally imperative that we use those means to increase social justice. I also know it is possible to decrease social justice through design and planning as we have seen time and time again. I won’t go into another tirade on the racist tyrant that was Robert Moses and all the harm he has done that continues on, I think we have seen enough examples through studying architectural history and history more broadly to see the negative possibilities. Rather, I want to return once more to David Harvey’s Right to the City and a quote I think embodies this idea of working toward social justice in the city.

"The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights."

Harvey emphasises our human right to shape and reshape our cities and, in so doing, we claim our own and our collective power and agency. Our city will only be just when we force it to be so we need to use our power as designers and as citizens to make it ever more just. Samuel Mockbee more directly calls out our role as architects in the Rural Studio. He touts the special gift of architects to see what others don’t and argues that we must use it to act, without waiting for decisions to be made by others. “In order to challenge the power of the status quo,” he argues, architects must be proactive and involved in their communities and in decision making so as “not [to] be consigned to only problem-solving after the fact.” I believe he best expresses the optimism and moral necessity of design for social good, as well as the complicated path it takes as:

“All architects expect and hope their work will act in some sense as a servant for humanity — to make a better world. That is the search we should always be undertaking and, again, there are no clear-cut definitions or assumed pathways.”