Season 2 Episode 01 Podcast Transcript

Interview with Craig Wilkins

Episode Title: Design Activism: The Desire and the Necessity

Host: Grace Aaraj
Audio Engineer and Editor: Mary Anne Funk

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Grace Aaraj: Welcome to Design For Spatial Justice Podcast Series launched by the University of Oregon’s School of Architecture and Environment. 2020 changed the way we live and how we connect with one another. This season, we recorded episodes from our offices, home offices and living rooms, sometimes surrounded by a baby born mid August 2020. She is mine and her name is Joy.

Through our remote discussions among colleagues and friends, we are bringing you insights from design for spatial justice fellows who taught on campus or remotely from other parts of the world, and from sponsors who made the design for spatial Justice initiative possible.

We are talking to you from and about Beirut, Oregon, California, Michigan, Namibia and Sudan. Our spatial justice realities and concerns could be your own as well. With each episode of the podcast, you are brought a little closer to understanding spatial justice and how it is practiced and taught.

Episodes were prepared with hope, pride, but also frustration by the injustices we are surrounded with. This is Grace Aaraj Design For Spatial Justice Fellow 2020 and 2021 and for the upcoming episodes, I am excited to be your host.

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Grace Aaraj: Today for the episode of design for spatial justice, we have with us Craig Wilkins who’s a 2017 Smithsonian Cooper, Hayward Design Museum National Design Award winner, and hip hop architectural theorist, architect, artist, academic and activist. Dr. Craig Wilkins’ creative practice specializes in engaging communities in collaborative and participatory design processes. The former director of the Detroit Community Design Center, he is currently creative director of the Wilkins project, a social justice strategic design alliance that provides architectural urban design and planning services, solutions and expertise in engaged public discourse. Welcome with us Craig.

Craig Wilkins: Hi, thank you for having me today.

Grace Aaraj: Definitely. We’re very excited.

Grace Aaraj: What is spatial justice for Craig Wilkins?

Craig Wilkins: For me, spatial justice is about identifying and eliminating those things that keep people from accessing space to keep them from living their best life. All my students, at both institutions where I’ve taught, have heard this statement, ad infinitum and the statement is that: space is life. What I mean by that is access to the public realm is essential. It is where all the benefits of life spring forth. The ability to earn a living, the ability to find joy, the ability to participate in leisure activities, the ability to move around freely. It is the place where health, wealth, and prosperity lies in the public realm. That can be anything from something as small but as important as curb cuts for people in wheelchairs, it could be something as large as addressing the inequitable conditions of gentrification. It could be something as huge as attempting to redress the adverse effects of redlining, all these things, from the little to the large, limit people’s access to public space and they need to be dismantled so that folks can live their best life. So that, for me, is what spatial justice is about.

Grace Aaraj: So speaking of students, I was teaching a seminar about refugees and the role of architects and architecture in solving displacement problems in the 21st century. In the final sessions, we had two different sessions that were the final. I always allow students to chat on the sides. They can do it publicly or privately. So I had two particular students debating whether they should go and become building envelope experts, because that makes money or whether they should be more engaged with the communities. And your name popped up, because one of the students was recommending the other students to take your course, basically, design as activism. So, you’re famous, but you don’t know it. Can you tell us a little bit about design as activism?

Craig Wilkins: I’ll start with the course that I teach at Oregon. The Design Activism and Social Justice course looks at the role of the profession and the discipline of architecture in society, what authorizes us to practice, are we fulfilling that role, if we aren’t, what are the obstacles to actually being more engaged in the world around us?

Craig Wilkins: I try to encourage students to try to think broadly about the practice of architecture. What is the ultimate goal of practicing?

Craig Wilkins: My desire is for students to really interrogate what authorizes us to practice in the world. Are we actually fulfilling that role? And if we’re not: change it. You can do that through practice, you can do that through writing, you can do that through teaching, you can do that through talking with the public. The goal is to make it the best it can be. Sometimes that takes asking hard questions. That takes realizing that, some things that we have done, that maybe we shouldn’t have done, and owning that and trying to do better.

Grace Aaraj: Who are the three people or three events (that can be a mix of both) that you think were most influential in the career choices you’ve made?

Craig Wilkins: I tend to think of my trajectory, as atypical, but also fluid. I don’t think there was a one moment where I decided to say, oh, this is what I need to do, or that’s what I need to do, or I need to stop doing this or stop doing that. I see my career as a process of revelation. I think where I am today is where I’ve always been, at least personally. My career has been about allowing my personal desires, principles, ethics and pursuits to become visible in the way in which I approach architectural education and practice. I want to bring all of myself when I come to work , so I practice and teach what I believe. I’m increasingly thinking, or believing that is what I’m trying to do in my work. I am trying to profess position or profess a life choice, profess something bigger than me, that I think is important enough to state to the public. So…

Grace Aaraj: My question this time is a long one; I’ll read it. “Dear architecture, I’ve been wondering why you don’t speak to me. Is it because you don’t see me? Are you ignoring me? Maybe it’s because you really don’t care for me. But whatever it is, you sure don’t speak, that is, at least not to me.”

Grace Aaraj: For context, what I just read is the Dear Architecture and winning entry from the 2015 competition. Do you still feel the same, six years later?

Craig Wilkins: That is the reality of a lot of people in this world. Certainly a lot of people in this country. It isn’t a homage to powerlessness. It was written really from the perspective of 10, or 11 year old kid. If I were to write that now, through the perspective of a 10, or 11 year old kid, it would probably be not so differential. It would be angrier, it would be more aggressive, more defiant. I don’t know that I would ask those questions at the beginning, you know, do you not speak to me? Or why don’t you speak to me? I think I would start those with answers. You don’t speak because you don’t care. I wouldn’t offer the opportunity for a response. I would offer a critique.

Grace Aaraj: Is that because in the last six years you changed or did the word change?

Craig Wilkins: I think the last six years we have seen people, especially people in distressed communities and neighborhoods who have moved from being accommodating. who have moved from soliciting conversation and slipped into making demands. They’re less willing to provide the benefit of the doubt. And more willing to say, enough is enough is enough. We demand to be treated humanely, we demand to be treated fairly and we demand that you listen. I’m entreating you, I’m inviting you, I’m waiting for you to address these concerns: you’re going to do this now. You’re going to do it one way or the other. You’re going to do it while we’re sitting at the table. Or you’re going to have to do it in the streets? One of the two. We’re tired of waiting.

Grace Aaraj: So I have actually one long question and one game. Let’s play the game first.

Craig Wilkins: All right.

Grace Aaraj: So this is a quick game of quick words. I’m going to give you words and you’re going to tell me for each word, what do you think it is and what it isn’t?

Craig Wilkins: Okay.

Grace Aaraj: Okay. Hip Hop architecture.

Craig Wilkins: Hip Hop architecture is hip hop culture in built form. What it isn’t, is applique

Grace Aaraj: What is your favorite music?

Craig Wilkins: I like almost all kinds of music. I like to listen to live stream radio stations in languages that I don’t know, from countries that I’ve never been, or from countries I’ve been, just to listen to who gets played.

Craig Wilkins: I’m really a sort of a fan of the kinds of music that tends to try to blend a lot of different influences. I am currently finding the kind of music in places like Nigeria, and Ghana, and Cameroon, and Senegal, to be really interesting, to me, at least, simply because they take a lot of different influences.

Grace Aaraj: What’s your favorite food?

Craig Wilkins: I can tell you that, I will never ever in my entire life turn down any kind of seafood or pasta. I enjoy those immensely.

Craig Wilkins: Before the pandemic I would travel often. One of the enjoyable things about that was you get a chance to actually try something or eat things that are prepared differently, things that you’ve never seen before, things that are staples and in other cultural settings. I find it part of broadening your perspective about what your possibilities are, so food is a good way to do that.

Grace Aaraj: Craig, you mentioned your career being atypical, projectory, but fluid. And you also mentioned that it’s continuously unveiling. I know a lot of students, aspiring professionals or emerging scholars, for example, might be reading your bio, watching your TEDx, reading your publications and wondering what this career path holds. What kind of advice can you give them if they want to pursue a career similar to yours?

Craig Wilkins: I will encourage the desire and the necessity of bringing your whole self to whatever project that you’re working on. And what I mean by that is architecture is not devoid of society. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It is part of society. All the wonderful and ugly things that happen in our society, they affect the profession and the discipline as well. It’s okay to identify those things that perhaps trouble the study and practice of architecture: it is not in a sense for you to always be a cheerleader. It is, in a sense, for you to always be a truth teller because what we do is not perfect. It affects so many people. It is our responsibility to continually perfect what we do, and to continually question what we do, so that we can do it better.

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Grace Aaraj: Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Design For Spatial Justice Podcast Series. This is Grace Aaraj, your host, signing off from Beirut, Lebanon, and Mary Anne Funk, our editor from Portland, Oregon. The music you hear in every episode is by Chicoco Radio—all the way from the waterfront settlements of Port Harcourt Nigeria.

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