Three pieces on urban planning, public spaces, and architecture; as they relate to the moment and the movement of Black Lives Matter. Deirdre Mask for The Atlantic proffers that street renaming is not merely performative in an empty sense; Matt Hickman for The Architect’s Newspaper profiles the Foley Square street mural in New York City (via Civic Signals); and Craig Wilkins for Curbed proposes that architecture as a profession needs an analogue to the Hippocratic oath (via Civic Signals).
Mask:
I’ve spent the past four years researching street names and what they reflect about communities. I understand that merely changing a street’s name might be seen as “performative,” another show without substance. But performative can also refer to words that, as the philosopher J. L. Austin theorized, don’t just speak but act. (Try arguing that the words I do, said before your beloved and a judge, don’t actually do anything.) Here, the naming is the doing. And although changing street names alone cannot alter societal norms, it captures the momentum of the BLM movement in a concrete way.
Hickman:
“For a long time, in both urban planning and in architecture, there has been a refusal to acknowledge how political our work really is,” said Hassen. “For me, personally, it feels very important at this point in time to acknowledge that as creators who are in positions to help shape the public realm that we come to it with our values and our political standings—because the places that we are involved in creating are not neutral spaces.”
Wilkins:
As a profession, we don’t all talk about our role in redlining. We don’t talk about equitable resource allocation, or argue for or against it. We don’t talk enough about the increased privatization of public space. We have been complicit in the design of public housing, which was nothing but warehousing people, when we knew better. And if we didn’t know better, we should have. And what’s the result of that? Whole generations of people have been lost because they were confined to spaces that we designed, and we keep refusing to acknowledge and own up to that.