Journal of History and Culture Journal of History and Culture

j o u r n a l o f h i s t o r y a n d c u l t u r e
urban populations since the 1970s, Atlanta is rich site for engaging Jack-the-Bear’s effort to “illuminate the blackness
of [his] invisibility and vice-versa.” Students in the course split their time between two major and related tasks: 1.
engaging an ambitious multi-disciplinary reading list with texts from architecture, history, literature, sociology, and
geography addressing race and space, and 2. designing, building, and installing an “intervention” into a site of their
choosing. 2 Briefly, the intervention is expected to develop out of a set of questions regarding the built environment:
How do spaces empower and disempower us and those around us in our daily lives? How do institutions depend
on a spatial articulation of power to maintain authority? How is neighborhood identity (an almost always “raced”
condition) revealed, controlled, manipulated or even elided across space and through the control of space? After
analyzing the work of architects and other figures ranging from Dread Scott, the Critical Art Ensemble, Otabenga
Jones & Associates, Mark Jenkins, Urban Curators, Nadine Robinson, the Wooster Collective, Banksy, and Hank
Willis Thomas, students are asked to develop an intervention of their own creation. 3
These interventions range from the tectonically simple (signage crafted to appear official and attached
to built surfaces or a two-by-four inserted into a doorway or across a staircase) to complex (scale models of
considerable detail inserted into unexpected sites or elaborate chalking of public spaces). In the past students also
developed projects with both three-dimensional and virtual components (for instance using websites to bridge
imposed physical boundaries separating communities or posting on-line videos documenting the construction and
reception of their intervention). Regardless of format, each intervention is tasked with achieving one or more of
the following: exposing the relationship between the built environment and power in the chosen site; challenging
the hierarchy (or hierarchies) of power at that site and re-ordering the hierarchy of power or relationship between
power and the built environment in that site.
The pedagogical purposes motivating this choice of assignment are (at least) two-fold: one is to de-mystify
the relationship between race and space, moving the examination of that relationship from the realm of theory and
discourse into the world of everyday life. In the process, students develop a trained eye. Rather than seeing the built
environment around them as merely the physical embodiment of the status quo and therefore, largely neutral, they
instead are encouraged to understand the built environment as one of many sites where contests over opportunity,
resources, access, equity, and power play out. The second is to encourage students to understand first-hand (rather
than textually) the multiple ways architects are implicated in the process of transforming ideologies into the material
world. From this position—one informed by the various strands of history, discourse and aesthetics continuously
at play in the built landscape—students can consider how and in what fashion both the discipline and practice of
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