Practicing Spatial Justice: Design Organizing for Abolition

Atlanta, Georgia / Fall 2023-Spring 2024 / Thesis / Advisor Danielle Choi / Abolition, Community Power, Policy Design, Environmental Justice

+ thesis book can be found here

This project presents a critique of the profession of landscape architecture, extending the liability of a licensed professional to include accountability for slow, systemic violence, in addition to individual health, safety, and public welfare. The project is developed on the site of “Cop City,” a “public training facility” designed to uphold the police state in greater Atlanta, Georgia. The project documents racial and environmental harm on the site through a critique of the legal tools of the profession. It proposes a new kind of abolitionist practitioner, the designer-organizer, who works to build local power and repair relationships between plant and human communities. This requires new practices of codesign, featuring fuzzy future models that embed skills of organizing and designing into decision-making processes. Mutual liability is held between the community and designer-organizers to promote true public welfare in this abolitionist landscape.

Cop City was designed by HGOR (Landscape Architect of Record) and LS3P (Architect of Record) for their client, the Atlanta Police Foundation. This GIF (1993-2023) details the forest removal required to prepare the site for Cop City. Over 3,450 trees have been removed for construction.

The site is highly charged. Through the redlines below, you will see an added layer of cultural history that details the ongoing social and ecological violence. The site was originally inhabited by the Muscogee people, who were forcibly removed from this land during the Land Lottery of 1821. Records indicate that after the Muscogee people were dispossessed, the site was then an active plantation with up to 19 enslaved workers. In 1911, the city of Atlanta purchased the site and used it as a prison farm to work and feed its incarcerated people. Decommissioned in the 90s, the 85-acre site was left fallow and is now a stand of mostly Loblolly Pines.

This thesis asks: How can we move away from landscape architects as disempowered service providers to empowered and skilled community members? How do we center health, safety, and public welfare that licensure was supposed to uphold but falls short of? Abolition consists of the actions we, as design experts, take to build safety and tear down harmful institutions. For this to be a transformational project that puts liberation at the center, designers must develop coalitions of clients that hold projects accountable to all who will use it, and build relationships through the work, not just the checkbook. This project needs to be led by designer-organizers: practitioners who build community power through social and physical infrastructure.

Through a set of counter-construction documents, the designer-organizers propose a new abolitionist landscape. What can we do if we had the time and space to design liberation? After the Stop Cop City petition is successful, the city of Atlanta earmarks the money from the project to designer-organizers to develop the site. Site repair begins by collecting petition signers in an all call. This assembly begins work on a new type of contract, that holds mutual liabilities and distributes the 90 million dollars into different phases. As they see the clear cut land begin to regrow they develop a general plan for the site–focusing on specific types of repair based on the demands of the public comments at the city council meeting. Designer-organizers, all of whom were petition signers interested in stewarding the project or were invited by them, hold meetings to establish community relationships and responsibilities. This organization chart creates a flexible framework for many skills to contribute to the project. This builds space and capacity to repair community relationships and affirm their dreams for the site.

One forest is an experimental climate forest, an attempt to bring back the long-leaf pines that used to cover the area, which require regular fires for reproduction and maintenance. The species is suitable for current and hotter climates, this forest will support innovation in urban controlled burns to regrow Longleaf Pines, an important forest typology to support in the face of rising temperatures. These test forests provide space for greater Atlanta to see what will thrive in the future, preparing the majority-minority city to protect Black and brown neighborhoods. The other forest is a timber production forest. Part of the work the designer-organizer does is to catalyze self-determination. This is a core value of abolition: public safety means folks' needs are being met. When lumber can be harvested on site, it is materially meeting people’s needs. This pine forest regrows the woodlands that once existed on the site. In 2075 the site could provide 60,000 board ft of lumber for neighborhood improvement projects. Trees are surgically removed as timber, allowing the forest to retain high tree canopy and health, to the Annual Allowable Cut.

This project addresses the mandate to unbuild the police state and the apparatuses that enable it, including the professional tools. This project is a direct critique of the profession of landscape architecture, extending the project-scale liability of a licensed professional to include accountability for slow, systemic violence, as opposed to individual health, safety, and public welfare. In a complicit construction model, strict liability holds licensed professionals accountable for individual harm–damage or injury such as tripping- an example of tort law where the harm is accidental and random. These liabilities miss out on larger, more pervasive types of harm that landscape architects perpetuate: systemic harm that compounds thick injustice. This violence is not random (as tort law would litigate) but is often seen as incidental to the design process.

Atlanta is similar in size, geography, and demography to my hometown in Charlotte, NC. They are often compared and understood as very similar cities with similar trajectories. This is why when I learned about cop city in Atlanta, I could immediately imagine a similar complicit construction project being built in my hometown. Since 2020, there are 69 built or planned police training facilities projects across the country. This is a call to stop building cop cities and other complicit constructions. We must embody our values in the spaces we build, leaving behind structures that serve thick injustices to design new forms of empowered practice. As we rethink our commitments to ourselves, our communities and our profession, how can we approach practice to expand agency for everyone, with an eye toward pragmatism and liberation? How do we be brave together?