Constructing Care: Design as Cultural Practice

3 units

How can the built environment act as a form of cultural care, historical repair, and community empowerment? This course positions design not simply as a technical or aesthetic endeavor, but as a cultural practice—capable of confronting erasure, fostering belonging, and sustaining collective memory. Focused on communities shaped by legacies of displacement, extraction, or resistance, students will explore how design can operate within complex social systems to imagine just and joyful futures.The seminar begins by sites of community-led cultural spaces, to urban conditions, to memorial landscapes and adaptive reuse projects led by residents. Drawing from design justice, Black geographies, Indigenous land practices, and critical conservation, students will interrogate how the built environment engages with the politics of place. Through a series of research-driven exercises and a culminating speculative project, students will design interventions that propose new spatial narratives for a site of cultural significance. These proposals may take the form of spatial strategies, mappings, performative installations, or spatial prototypes—designed in dialogue with place, people, and history.