“Introduction to Race, Identity and Ideology”

Date: 2022
Source: The Routledge Handbook of Architecture, Urban Space and Politics, Volume I
Authors: Stephen F. Gray and Anne Lin

The murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020 prompted a massive global reckoning – including within design disciplines – to understand, grapple with and acknowledge the need to subvert systems and practices of oppression. This ideological turn has nudged spatially oriented disciplines away from good intentions and toward intentionality in identifying ways to dismantle the politically constructed, geographically inscribed practices and cultures of design that reproduce the control and uneven deployment of physical space in service of colonialism, imperialism, racism, capitalism and a suite of interconnected forms of political ordering.