(de)othering: empathic design thinking for race + culture in urban landscapes

Designing for spatial justice, with goals of incorporating the diversity of underrepresented voices, requires new methodologies when creating for the other to integrate complex topics of race and culture. (de)othering is such a method – an architectural empathic thinking approach – incorporating untold socio-cultural historical narratives implementing archival research of public and community historians. This paper details the foundational principles of the method and influences from a field-defining precedent, with guidelines on urban-scaled axial/spatial practices to produce, as noted by Mabel O. Wilson, “black scenography” in classical, colonial, and ideologically held cultural landscapes. This paper demonstrates an implementation of the approach in the Southern American town of REDACTED to memorialize the life and legacy of John Henry James, an African American man lynched just west of town on July 12, 1898. Originating in multidisciplinary empathy-based research, (de)othering adds an African American narrative in the civic and political REDACTED of this now infamous city, beginning on July 12, 2019, becoming a transferrable model for re-stitching urban fabric. (de)othering positions that inclusionary architectures must respond to the ever-growing public call for rethinking urban spaces demonstrated in the United States through the discussions on Confederate statues. The approach produces the necessary rethinking of culturally dominant landscapes, introducing one to one human-scaled representations, resulting in much-needed, empathic architectural spatial justice models.

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ISBN
978-1-944214-31-9