The University of Oregon is currently seeking applicants for its latest cohort of Visiting Faculty Fellowships in Design for Spatial Justice. 

The initiative, according to a listing currently featured on the Archinect Jobs board, “will award up to six faculty fellowships in design/research and teaching for durations of two terms to three years, to start as early as September 2020.” Applications will be reviewed beginning February 15, 2020.

The fellowships are part of the UO School of Architecture & Environment’s year-old Design for Spatial Justice Initiative, a program that spans across the school’s architecture, interior architecture, landscape architecture, and historic preservation professional programs in Eugene and Portland, with the aim of “changing the voices that are at the table in order to change the kinds of questions that can be brought to the table,” Erin Moore, Director of the School of Architecture & Environment and Associate Dean of the College of Design, explains to Archinect. 

According to the UO website, the initiative coincided with the creation of a new College of Design Equity and Justice Faculty Fellow as well as new faculty hires in the School of Planning, Public Policy, and Management that will help create a new Access and Equity Research Group whose aim will be, in part, to collaborate with Design for Spatial Justice scholars to create “an intellectual space to share research and professional practice” approaches in the spatial justice realm. 

According to Moore, the fellowship program is crafted as “a response to the need to address social issues in design for the climate emergency.” Moore added, “We are a school with deep strength in delivering design for the environment. As we lead forward in design in the context of climate change, we are now positioned to combine expertise on the environment with leading-edge thinking on social justice, human health, and community well-being."

Moore describes the program as part of an effort aimed at “building our capacity to take on design for social justice and for broad public impact—ecoregionally and globally." Moore explains that “architecture, interior architecture, and landscape architecture at the University of Oregon have long histories of teaching design and preservation that is rooted in ethical imperatives, in the idea of service to the region, and of architecture for people. In the end, this isn't new for UO. We are just building on our people-first approach.” 

“The thing that's being added,” Moore explains, “is that we are acknowledging that the center of inertia in design education is in European colonial perspectives, and that architecture education does have a history of reinforcing these power structures and barriers. And knowing also, for real design leadership, that we have to have the right people at the table who can ask questions, can address questions, and can help build community partnerships, including from lived experience.” 

The current fellows

Currently, six Spatial Justice Fellows are in residence at the university working across various programs and in differing capacities to help bring these new approaches to the fore. 

The current crop of Design for Spatial Justice Scholars includes:

• Menna Agha: A researcher and architect with a PhD in architecture from the University of Antwerp who is focused on the “right to define, make, and appropriate the ‘spatial’ on an ontological level, especially by those [not in] power.”

• Priyanka Bista: A Nepali-Canadian architect and designer who is the cofounder and design director of KTK_BELT, a studio working in Nepal on a “Vertical University” that doubles as a biodiversity conservation effort designed to span an 8,000-meter elevation change between a local wildlife reserve and Mount Kanchenjunga, the third tallest peak in the world. Bista has a masters degree in International Architecture and Development from Oxford Brookes University and a Bachelors in Architectural Science from Ryerson University.

• Karen Kubey: A designer and urbanist with architecture degrees from Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley who studies “spatial justice by examining how architecture and urban design might address injustices rooted in the built environment” and is developing research on the relationship between design and health equity while working on the publication of Good Neighbors II, a book that revisits a comprehensive guide to affordable housing design in the U.S. that was first published in 1997.

• Zannah Mae Matson: A visiting assistant professor teaching landscape architecture at UO and a current PhD student in human geography at the University of Toronto who is teaching on infrastructure planning and sresearching the spatial justice implications of Colombian counterinsurgency groups in highway design. 

• Craig Wilkins: The Pietro Belluschi Distinguished Visiting Professor currently teaching at the School of Architecture & Environment who is focused on teaching architecture and historic preservation at the intersection of design, Hip Hop, and the “development of an African-American spatial paradigm.” 

• Cory Parker: A Visiting Assistant Professor teaching landscape architecture working at the intersection of poverty, movement, and landscape.

Getting the right people to the table 

As the school has deliberated over how to implement the program, the educators there have pushed to take a both/and approach with regards to how the initiative changes the school’s pedagogical positioning and how those shifting approaches are absorbed by a student body that, administrators hope, will grow more inclusive and broad over time. “It's not an initiative to change just the topics we are teaching and it is not an initiative to just increase demographic diversity — I think approaching either of these goals independently can be very destructive. ” Moore explains, instead, “It’s an initiative that connects us in a real way to real global challenges in design for social and environmental justice and to make sure that we are fully representative of communities impacted by design and preservation at all scales. The language in the application is meant to reflect this: We are looking for people who can work from lived experience, in authentic relationships with broad communities. The idea is to close the gap between thinking about this program as solely a pedagogical shift or a reductive and problematic diversity initiative.”

According to Moore, a goal of the initiative is to “empower people who are working in different kinds of architectural practices with tools from designers’ toolkits to address questions at the intersection of social and environmental justice.” 

One way this empowerment takes shape is through the “reinforcement of the significance and value of design and design practices to impact questions and real issues in the designed environment at all scales, from the human body, to the room, to the building, and to the eco-region,” according to Moore. “Given that the School of Architecture & Environment includes professional programs at all of these scales — interior architecture, architecture, landscape architecture, and preservation — and because this is a school initiative rather than a department initiative, we are making it possible for visiting faculty to be at the leading edge of design practices that exist at the overlap of design disciplines. It’s transcending the scale-driven divisions that are inherent to our professional programs.” 

"What surprised me," Moore explains of the current fellows and the body of applicants as a whole, "was how the application has drawn out new modes of architectural practice and new modes of community engagement and fieldwork approaches. That wasn't expected, but it's become really important as we're thinking about building our capacity to advance design education and practice." 

"I would love to have more applications from people who are practicing design at the scale of the human body--on health in the built environment, in interior architecture, on architecture and the microbiome, and on environmental health, justice, or cultural thought on interior environments and on also adaptive reuse as it relates to ecology, carbon, community, and the human body," Moore adds, "We’re also looking for people who are practicing at the scale of the building, whole community and landscape.”

She adds that "there are really critical questions that need to be addressed — not solved, but at least asked — in environmental and social design. And, I argue, that architectural education and architectural practice, at this moment and as a whole, do not have enough of the right people at the table to be asking those questions in a real, robust way." Changing that structural condition in the field is a fundamental premise of the fellowship: "Who needs to be at the table in order to identify and ask these key questions?", Moore asks rhetorically. 

"The impact — already — in the College of Design and in the School of Architecture & Environment has been that questions that were not being asked before are now being asked by people who haven't been heard enough." Moore explains that as a result of a new format for the school's design for social justice lecture events that combines short talks by the visiting faculty fellows with conversations including aligned professionals, academics, and heavy student involvement, students have become engaged with the dialogues on education and practice "in an unprecedented way. And the questions that are coming up from students in public conversation are unprecedented and the cultural leadership coming from the students that we made space to hear from is amazing."

That goal ultimately underlies the program's mission of "building cultural leadership for design, transcending the narrow understanding of design-as-commodity, and finding the leading edge of education and practice at the intersections of our many disciplines." "What I'm finding," Moore explains, "is that the silos that we have in design education can sometimes be reflected in design practice, but also that some of the most exciting things, in education and practice, are the ones that are happening in the zones in between existing silos."

Moore adds finally that the impetus for the program is actually two-fold and represents both the strong academic and pedagogical approaches discussed above as well as a desire on the part of alumni and practitioners to have help to broaden the "understanding of the cultural value of design practices," and that in fact envisions "in all of our communities that design and architecture at all scales is not just a commodity but is a powerful, culturally-leading force."