Urban Spatial Justice: Perspectives from Humanities + Design

Urban Spatial Justice: Perspectives from Humanities + Design

February 27 and 28, 2025

How might we rethink capitalist urban development?

How might the way we design, invent, study, and occupy urban space determine how we live and how we thrive? Can cities—increasingly monetized, crowded, ecologically vulnerable, and contested—be sites of racial and economic justice and of climate resilience? Can cities operate as incubators of solidarity, liberation, and sustainability? Geographers, anthropologists, historians, writers, architects, and artists have asked these questions when mapping their inequalities, memorializing their traumas, and narrating their future fictions.

The Penn School of Arts and Science and the Weitzman School of Design convenes ‘Urban Spatial Justice: Perspectives from Humanities and Design’, an interdisciplinary symposium at the intersection of urban scholarship, policy interventions, and design.

The session on “Environmental Justice and Decolonizing Urban Space” addresses the ways colonialism, political economies, and climate change are registered on the physical fabric of the city, increasingly privatizing public space and entrenching environmental injustices. ‘‘Spatialized Capitalism and Digital Shadowing” reminds us that the 21st century city is as much digital as it is physical. Code, camera, signal, sensor, data, and surveillance permeate all aspects of public space with technologies of spatialization, empowering some while disenfranchising others. “Race, Urban Land and Occupation in Public Memory” examines the politics of ownership, marginalized land occupation, and conflicts over urban space, focusing on the United States, with panelists exploring how racialized narratives of lawlessness and violence have distorted our public memory and urban landscapes. “Imagined Futures – Fictions and Techno Otherings” considers how works of art and fiction contribute spaces of imaginative and intellectual reprieve. Inspired critical visions of alternate realties—be they re-imagined traumas, happenings, and celebrations in the form of speculative fictions—help us name and confront the human, more-than-human, ecological, and technological.

The keynote speaker is Dana Cuff from UCLA, and panelists include Jonathan Anjaria from Brandeis University, Patricia Elaine Green from Patricia E. Green Architects, Kingston, Jamaica, Malini Ranganathan from American University, Erin McElroy from The University of Washington, Kate Wagner from The Nation, Betsy Huang from Clark University, Orkan Telhan from Ecovative, Krzysztof Wodiczko from Harvard University, Jha D Amazi from MASS Design, and Marques Vestal from UCLA.

This Penn Symposium is organized by associate professors Franca Trubiano (WSOD) and David Barnes (SAS). HUD Colloquium members include Andrea Goulet (SAS), Ken Lum (WSOD), Fernando Lara (WSOD), Keisha-Khan Perry (SAS), Lisa Mitchell (SAS), Donovan Schaefar (SAS). Thematic research and conference preparation by Eda Begum Birol.

Humanities+ Urbanism+ Design website https://www.humanitiesurbanismdesign.org

Host or Publisher Weitzman School of Design