Difference and Design - The Bartlett International Lectures

About

Streamed live on The Bartlett School of Architecture's YouTube channel, this event will be a discussion between hosts Edward Denison, Maxwell Mutanda and Lakshmi Priya Rajendran and speaker Justin Garrett Moore. They will be joined by students Daniel Davis, Jude Jabali and Claire Robey. 

This event forms part of The Bartlett International Lectures Spring 2022.

This spring, each of the International Lectures will be curated by one of the school's programmes to inspire, invent, imagine, and provoke. This event is curated by Architecture & Historic Urban Environments MA.

Abstract

Four hundred and odd years after colonialism and racial capitalism brought “twenty and odd” enslaved people from Africa to the dispossessed indigenous land that would later become the United States, the structures and systems that generate inequality and white supremacy persist. Our cities and their socioeconomic and built environments continue to exemplify difference. From housing and health to mobility and monuments, cities small and large, urban and rural, north and south demonstrate intractable disparities. The disparate impacts made apparent by the COVID-19 pandemic and the reinvigorated and global Black Lives Matter movement demanding change are remarkable. Change is another essential indicator of difference in urban environments, such as disinvestment, disaster, or gentrification. Cities must navigate how considerations like climate change and growing income inequality intersect with politics, culture, gender equality and identity, immigration, migration, and technology, among other conditions and forms of disruption. 

Speaker biography

Justin Garrett Moore is a programme officer for the Humanities in Place programme at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. His work focuses on advancing equity, inclusion, and social justice through place-based initiatives and programmes, built environments, cultural heritage projects, and commemorative spaces and landscapes. He has extensive experience in architecture, planning, and design - from urban systems, policies, and building projects to grassroots and community-focused planning, design, preservation, public realm and arts initiatives. With over fifteen years of public service with the City of New York, Mr. Moore has led several urban design and planning projects, including the Greenpoint-Williamsburg Waterfront, Hunter's Point South, and the Brooklyn Cultural District. From 2016 to 2020, he was the executive director of the New York City Public Design Commission, where he spearheaded initiatives to address social equity and sustainability through improved built environment design and public processes. In 2021, Moore received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Architecture and was named to the United States Commission of Fine Arts by President Joseph Biden.

Image: Description of a slave ship: Plan and cross-section of the slave ship "Brookes" of Liverpool, 1789. The Trustees of the British Museum