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Staged Encounters | Embodiment, Architecture, and Urbanism
Spring 2020 Mellon Forum on the Urban Environment
April 20 / Home
Zoom Link: https://princeton.zoom.us/j/558631990
With Rashad Shabazz, Arizona State University, and Ashlie Sandoval, Princeton Mellon Fellow
As an ideological figure in American media and political rhetoric, home is often represented as a space of leisure and rest, as a place separated and distinct from work, and as a detached realm of community and private family morals. These ideological representations often mask the ways that property, housing, and the figure of the home were and continue to be impacted by racial covenants, housing discrimination, predatory lending, policing, and gentrification. This final session of the Spring 2020 Mellon Forum on the Urban Environment will explore how we might bring different disciplines together (e.g. design intelligence, geography, Black Studies, and urban planning) to rethink how we access problems in the city and seek solutions, the ways housing policies, urban planning, and architectural design have made and unmade racial communities, and what effects new approaches to urban policy or the urban environment could have in undoing racially or economically inequitable urban landscapes and carceral geographies.
The Spring 2020 Mellon Forum asks how does the built environment influence how we perceive and feel race? How might design work for and against the disabled body? What are architectural design and urban planning’s political capacity in the twenty-first century? This forum series privileges the site of the body (in its raced, gendered, and abled aspects) to think through what the role of architecture and urbanism is in the twenty-first century. Rather than offering design-based solutions to social issues, it thinks of how architecture stages the body and, thus, impacts how we frame and interpret social inequality. It attends to how design influences the way we understand diversity, discrimination, and inclusion. It explores the embodied ways marginalized communities perform with and against the built environment. It looks at the social, economic, and political contexts that allow the built environment to manifest its own order, logic, and effects.
The Spring 2020 Mellon Forum is organized by Kinohi Nishikawa, Department of English, and Ashlie Sandoval, Princeton Mellon Fellow. The Mellon Forum is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Humanities Council, Center for Collaborative History, Department of Art + Archaeology, Program in American Studies, and the School of Architecture.