Reverberations | The Roots and Relevance of Community Design

In commemoration of the founding in the 1960s of the Neighborhood Design Center and other such organizations, this illustrated keynote lecture recalls the race riots of that tumultuous era and their causes.  It recollects for the audience the responses to the riots by the planning and design professions, including unprecedented activism at the American Institute of Architects, the American Institute of Planners, and Planners for Equal Opportunity.  It enumerates what the Neighborhood Design Center and other organizations were able to achieve amidst white backlash in the 1970s and a shift from social idealism to the politics of law and order.  It implores the audience to recognize what lessons the nation’s most virulent struggle for justice holds for today’s activists.  It points to the similarity between the 1960s struggle and those that are occurring now, and predicts that the same courageous defiance of authority could happen now as happened then.  The lecture ends by contemplating new strategies to dismantle current conditions of racial and economic inequality.