Jenn Low featured in Agora 13: Transformations
Jenn Low (MDes ‘20) is featured in volume 13 of Taubman’s graduate urban planning and design journal, Agora. The piece is entitled, “Design is Political: White Supremacy and Landscape Urbanism.”
In celebration of the completion of this year’s journal and its release, the Agora 13 Launch Party is on Wednesday, April 24 from 8:30 — 10:00 pm at 320 Baldwin Ave, Ann Arbor, MI 48104. Tickets can be purchased online ($15) or at the door ($20) and includes, food, drinks, and a copy of the journal.
Landscape architects, planners, and other land-use professionals can play an important role in disconnecting the nation’s racial regimes from their spatial grounding.” Landscape Urbanism theory gained momentum for its potential to drive new urban forms and increase the agency of landscape architecture in the design and planning of the contemporary city. However, this approach still leaves significant gaps in our design discourse surrounding issues of equity that remain since Frederick Law Olmsted and the creation of Central Park. If Landscape Urbanism seeks transformational change, landscape architecture and planning professionals must recognize their role and responsibility in breaking down the physical and spatial manifestations of structural and systemic racism that continue to disproportionately affect people based on race. Environmental justice and environmental racism will be defined to frame the objectives of an environmental justice agenda for Landscape Urbanism. More specifically, Laura Pulido’s broadened definition of environmental racism that speaks to the spatial manifestations of environmental racism frames this critique. Through a review of Landscape Urbanism discourse and practice, examples of non-action, complacency, and erasure of structural and systemic racism embedded in the physical environment must be acknowledged in order to hold critical conversations on what it means to design better cities.
Agora Journal Website: https://agorajournal.squarespace.com/.