Architectures of Spatial Justice Reads Like a Challenge to Do More

The volume by Dana Cuff, founder of UCLA’s cityLAB, scrutinizes justice through the lens of architecture’s privilege.

By: Jaxson Stone

How are architects and designers breaking conventions to create more equitable buildings and cities? This is the question that Dana Cuff, professor of architecture and urban design and founder of cityLAB at the University of California, Los Angeles, poses in her new book Architectures of Spatial Justice. In it, Cuff establishes an ethos of spatial justice, rethinking the discipline through frameworks of privilege, power, aesthetics, and sociality. Organized into eight chapters, the book draws on project-based research from around the world, including analyses of a community rebuilding after the Great East Japan Earthquake, half-houses in Chile, and backyard homes in California. “Architecture’s potential for transformation is heightened by a growing awareness of structural racism and other forms of systemic injustice that take shape in the built environment and in the city in particular,” Cuff writes in the introduction. “By challenging conventional roles through history, theory, and contemporary practice, underacknowledged dimensions of architectural agency come to light.”