Design

There Are No Urban Design Courses on Race and Justice, So We Made Our Own Syllabus

Black students at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design say there are no design courses that consider race and justice. Here’s an outline for one.
Children play with a basketball in front of a vacant home, left, and a restored home in the Reservoir Hill neighborhood of Baltimore on May 10, 2015.AP Photo/Patrick Semansky

On May 12, Al-Jazeera America ran a story about a social justice-focused urban design conference hosted by the African American Student Union (AASU) of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, just days before protests in Baltimore turned ornery. This black student group made waves a couple of years ago when they brought the college-dropout-turned-honorary-Ph.D rapper Kanye West to campus, where he proffered his vision of how design will save the world.

The African-American design students are well-invested in that vision as well. They find it difficult to realize that vision, however, when their instruction has been based in the work of architects whose worldviews don’t give heavy weight to social problems. AASU president Dana McKinney told Al Jazeera that issues of race and justice are not only not discussed among designers, but neither does Harvard’s Design School offer courses that consider these things together.