DESIGN FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE This studio was a studio taught by William Bates that focused on the connection because social and racial issues and the built environment. We started off by spending time to understand the underlying issues that historically Black communities, such as Wilkinsburg, were facing and talked to members of the community such as the Mayor of Wilkinsburg, non-profit leaders, and residents. We read “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America” by Richard Rothstein and “Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities” by Andre M. Perry to get a better sense of how redlining and segregation were systemic efforts by the U.S. government and how communities are still affected by these policies. Based off of this research we created a website with a series of proposals for the community that could serve as a conversation starter for imagining new futures. We hope that through these proposals we could start a dialogue with the Wilkinsburg community - these are not as much a final product as they are ideas to build off of based on input from the community. We hope that this dialogue between Carnegie Mellon’s School of Architecture and the Wilkinsburg community is one that will continue on for a long time and that this studio is only the beginning of these discussions.
The section that I worked on was the Partnership with Carnegie Mellon section. To take a deeper look into the research check out the website at https://dsj-cmu.com/Partnership-with-CMU.
This diagram is a web and timeline depicting our proposals for projects that Wilkinsburg could implement within their community and how these ideas have ties with Wilkinsburg’s past, present, and future. The web reads from left to right with the grey boxes on the left showing some of the issues Wilkinsburg is currently struggling with and the green boxes on the right imagining a new future for the community. In the middle of the web are different categories for our proposals, each with a different color. The main categories for our proposals, as seen in the middle of the diagram, are Energizing Streetscapes, Adaptive Reuse, Commoning, Urban Farming, Community Land Trust, Internet Access, Policing, and Partnership with CMU. To the left of these category titles in matching colors are some projects already being implemented in Wilkinsburg (i.e. computer access to the library for the Internet Access Section). To the right of these category titles are some of our more specific proposals within each category. The proposals that are further to the left are projects that could possibly be achieved sooner because they don’t require as much resources and time, while the proposals that are further to the right are more ambitious and more difficult to implement. For instance, for the Urban Farming section, an internet resource or a community garden would be achievable sooner than a vertical garden.