Design as Protest

Design As Protest’s Nine Design Justice Demands:

1. That our cities and towns reallocate funds supporting police departments and reinvest in the critical needs of disinherited neighborhoods and communities.

2. A cease to all efforts to implement defensible space and (CPTED) crime prevention through environmental design tactics.

3. We cease support of the carceral state through the design of prisons, jails, and police stations.

4. We cease the use of area mean income to determine “affordability” in our communities and instead root the distribution of state and federal resources in a measure that reflects the extraction of generational wealth from black communities.

5. We advocate for policies and procedures that support a genuinely accessible public realm free from embedded oppression.

6. We ensure communities’ self-determination through an established procedure that incorporates community voice-in-progress and community benefits agreements in action for all publicly accountable projects.

7. We detangle our contractual relationships with power and capital to better serve neighborhoods and communities from a position of service and not from a place of extraction.

8. We invest and secure the place-keeping of black cultural spaces.

9. We proactively redesign our design training and licensing efforts to reflect the history of spatial injustice and build new measures to ground our work in service of liberating spaces.