Constructing Health

Friday, October 8 | 3:30PM - 4:30 PM

Diamond, Wilson and Ripple discuss work related to scholarship published in the article “Constructing Health: Representations of Health and Housing in Charlottesville’s Urban Renewals,” in the Journal of Architectural Education.  This article examines the co-construction of urban health and blight through architectural representation during urban renewal, exploring how building imagery was used to convey social and epidemiological diagnoses, producing racial othering through depictions of space. We argue that racialized image-making practices used by designers and planners perpetuated inequities that urban renewal policy purported to reconcile while masking the true generating dynamics of white neglect and wealth extraction. Each of the authors will use the content of the article as a way to introduce their broader research agendas, and implications of this work for current building and planning practices.

Panelists

Jeana Ripple, Associate Professor, UVA School of Architecture

Jeana Ripple is an associate professor of architecture at the University of Virginia, founding principal of the architecture practice MIR Collective, and a founding editor of TAD: Journal of Technology | Architecture + Design. Her research focuses on the impact of building codes on socioeconomic vulnerabilities.

Barbara Brown Wilson, Associate Professor, UVA School of Architecture

Barbara Brown Wilson is an associate professor of urban and environmental planning in the

School of Architecture, University of Virginia, and is faculty director of the Equity Center there. Her research focuses on the intersections between social and ecological issues, and on the role of lived expertise in land use decision making. She is the author of Resilience for All: Striving for Equity Through Community-Driven Design and of Questioning Architectural Judgement: The Problem of Codes in the United States.

Alissa Ujie Diamond, Landscape Architect

Alissa Ujie Diamond is a landscape architect and a candidate in the Ph.D. program in the constructed environment at the University of Virginia. Her current research examines the intersections of design, everyday life, and racial history in the US, with a focus on the ways spatial histories can become levers for social change.

Moderator

Tarin Jones, Education Manager, The Branch Museum of Architecture and Design

This webinar is “pay-what-you-can” to register.

Registration closes October 8 @ 2:30 PM.

Pay as little or as much as you wish and as you see fit for this experience. Per our mission, The Branch Museum of Architecture and Design endeavors to create opportunities for everyone to begin (or continue) exploring design for the public good. Your contribution toward this webinar will be used to develop even more amazing programming in the future. A video of this webinar will be made available to those who register.