Design
The Future of 'Hip-Hop Architecture'
Michael Ford explains how he’s building a movement to reclaim urban design from the failures of the 1970s.
The opening bars of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s seminal 1982 track “The Message” pretty much summarizes an entire suite of policies set up to address urban African-American criminalization and poverty over the past few decades:
In barely half a verse, rapper Melle Mel covers the broken windows theory, the environmental injustice of discriminatory waste facility siting, choice neighborhoods (or, rather, the lack thereof), the War on Drugs, the collusion of cities and banks to keep the poor indebted, and the lack of a strong public transit.