Session #120

– Workshop –

Designing Justice + Designing Spaces (DJDS) is a non-profit architectural firm working to end mass incarceration in the United States through building infrastructure with communities nationally, that support healing and care-based solutions as powerful alternatives to the carceral state — a complex system steeped in racism and ableism. At the intersection of people, program, place, and policy we build prototypes using an ‘Ecosystem of Care’ approach. By imagining what new spaces we need to support the proliferation of care instead of prisons, we have developed a new model of community care infrastructure centered on youth and behavioral health called The FLOW Center (For the Love Of Wellbeing).

Our organization was called in by community activists in Los Angeles County California, who, in 2019 successfully stopped the $3.5 billion expansion plan of one of the largest jails in the world, to provide new models of architecture following their values and model of care over cages, a mental health approach to prison abolition. We initiated a collaborative process, and with subject matter experts, produced the FLOW Center Concept Paper which robustly outlines the steps to build a culturally relevant youth and behavioral health center. Our approach is aligned with the recommendations of those with lived experience, service providers, advocates, and government officials, put forth in the first of its kind: Alternative To Incarceration Report.

This proposed interactive workshop will open the components of this groundbreaking work for discussion with the participants. We’ll explore the nexus of the built environment and health through sharing case studies of other projects at DJDS, including research around specific spaces for survivors of violence and peacemaking environments. We will collaboratively imagine the approach to developing new architectural concepts within policy and public health frameworks like the Vital Conditions for Health and Wellbeing and other cross-disciplinary approaches which are necessary for improvement on the community level. Finally we will discuss how these frameworks can guide large scale systems change in the built environment informing developers and designers alike around what we choose (and emphatically refuse) to build for a more just, equitable and sustainable world.