UT Architecture Fellowship Explores Race in Spaces: Environmental psychologist Todd Brown to teach workshops on designing for inclusion – News
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Todd Brown (Photo by Jana Birchum)
Sometime last fall, the meme of the day circulating on Twitter was “gentrification font,” the universally recognizable sans serif house number in a changing neighborhood. This immediate association that emerges from such a simple visual cue – wealthy white newcomers in immaculate Range Rovers – is known as the “socio-spatial imagination” and is the focus of environmental psychologist Todd Brown, the sixth winner of the UT-Austin School of Race Architecture and Gender in the Built Environment Fellowship.
As part of the scholarship, Brown, who has studied both architecture and public health, will teach a series of workshops for landscape architects, interior designers, urban planners and more called “Designing for Inclusion and Socioracial Sustainability” this semester, in which He will be existing Consider projects in terms of social and environmental justice. The grant was launched in Fall 2016 with the aim of “helping the development of future scientists whose work focuses on the relationships and intersections between race, gender and the built environment” – intersections that are at the heart of Brown’s interdisciplinary approach .
Environmental psychology, he explains, explores the psychosocial relationship between humans and the environment, where the environment is a tangible space – a building, a neighborhood, or a park – or even something as amorphous as social media. He hopes to teach budding architects new approaches to development that encourage a sense of inclusion. “Instead of gentrification, it is the improvement of the community that gives residents a kind of ownership in the redevelopment process.”
Brown’s dissertation at the City University of New York Graduate Center, interviewing Harlem residents about their relationship with the neighborhood, found that small environmental features – the size of the windows in a brownstone, or whether the trash is tidy or scattered – make strong assumptions evoke about the race, gender, health and politics of a community. In some of his interviews, elderly residents recalled that access to public parks was different 20-30 years ago. “They told me, ‘That gate used to be open 24 hours a day, but then they welded it shut.’ For them it was a sign of gentrification, for now, as access to [the park] being restricted, yes it is still a public park but it has been partially privatized. … For the safety of the newer residents, they try to remove these ‘unwanted elements’. “
Architects can help to reinforce or alleviate this feeling of exclusion. For example, when designing affordable housing, balconies in the off-the-shelf units rather than affordable units can make residents feel like they “have no sense of ownership or accessibility with the place they live,” Brown said. Simply through access to, or lack of, individual green spaces. “Conversely, in gentrification areas,” luxury buildings become walled fortresses with security, and the building clearly screams: ‘This is not for the people in this area’. ” Such things can send a negative signal to people in the community. “
Brown’s goal is a design for inclusion, because “historically we have always been trained to view the architectural user as the white, healthy, privileged man of space and perceive it in a completely different way.” He admits that architects do not control rents and other exclusionary systems are at play. “But I think the architect’s job is to be an advocate for the community he is designing in. … It is a good step in the right direction in starting a variety of Users and different experiences to consider what I will hopefully bring with me. “
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