💡 A place to call home
Episode 4: on designing places of beauty and belonging that celebrate history and community.
“How can you, to yourself, verify your humanity, your worth, your self worth and yourself if you don't even have a place to call home?”
Leah Clark posed this question during our interview about her master’s thesis project, Lots of Caring, a radical proposal to reinhabit vacant lots in West Baltimore with pop-up communities for the unhoused. We’re excited to share her project in Episode 4, out today. We also get into Jazmin Inoa’s visionary project on historic Berry Farm in the Anacostia neighborhood in Southeast D.C. (We previewed their conversation, Building Hope by Caring, in a prior post.)
Leah has thought a lot about the housing crisis:
“I feel like the way that we've treated unhoused people has just been awful. I see every day living in DC, the police constantly clearing out housing encampments of people who don't have a place to put belongings. They're trying to make a place—any place—and you're taking that away from them constantly. How, how can you continually deny their humanity, their right to have a place to call their house to call home?”
Indeed. What so impresses me about her project, as an extension of her deep concern for people’s humanity, is the care she took to create places of beauty. Not surprisingly, Leah cares about that, too:
“My parents always used to say, you have to pay for beauty. We have this misconception that if you want something beautiful, it has this monetary connection. Like you have to pay a lot of money for it.”
Jazmin’s project excavated and presented the rich history of Berry Farm, a history that was erased multiple times since the post-Civil War freedman’s village thrived there. Her contemporary agrarian community celebrates the self-sufficiency of the past while empowering an urban community’s future.
Jazmin also critiques the disconnections created by multiple highways that gird the historic landscape. In her presentation, Jazmin noted that the Anacostia Freeway was built the same year as the Berlin Wall, with similar effect. This observation blew me away, and speaks to history’s power to illuminate the present. As she says in the episode:
“It's a testament to how structurally, infrastructure has been weaponized against marginalized communities very intentionally. And it's an act of environmental injustice because of the effects of highways and separation of access.”
The impulse to reconnect Anacostia’s people to their riverfront informed a project we saw in Episode 3 of this podcast by Jemimah Asamoah. Both her project and Jazmin’s intentionally weave the area’s history into active experiences: people walk across a green bridge past interpretive sculptures or encounter plaques along a heritage trail that weaves through abundant community gardens. They seek to rebuild and intensify the lost spirit of a place.
These projects may take different approaches to design for social justice, but both start from the understanding that beauty, belonging, and community are interlinked as essential expressions of the human spirit.
Do you know of architecture firms that design for social justice? Where do they work?
This project is supported by a Faculty-Student Research Award from the Graduate School, University of Maryland, as well as grants from the University’s Sustainability Fund and the School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation.