Deanna Van Buren — Designing for Abolition

We are in a time of rapid, intense change, amid failing systems that must be dismantled and simultaneously reimagined. This lecture will explore our responsibility as world builders in addressing one of these failing systems: mass incarceration. It will showcase the work of past and current efforts by architecture and real estate development firm Designing Justice Designing Spaces, as well as others, to support the dismantling of mass incarceration and the creation of an ecosystem of care that can replace it. It will elevate the roles of artists, designers, architects, and creatives in addressing whole-systems change and explore new initiatives for discussion and exploration in partnership with the Pratt community.

BIO: Deanna Van Buren is the co-founder and executive director of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces. An architecture and real estate nonprofit working to end mass incarceration through place-based solutions, DJDS builds infrastructure that addresses its root causes: poverty, racism, unequal access to resources, and the criminal justice system itself. Van Buren has been profiled by The New York Times. He has written op-eds on the intersection of design and mass incarceration in outlets such as Politico, Architectural Record, and Stanford Social Innovation Review. Her TEDWomen talk on what a world without prisons could look like has been viewed more than one million times. She is the only architect to have been awarded the Rauschenberg Artist as Activist fellowship, and she is also the recipient of UC Berkeley’s Berkeley-Rupp Architecture Prize and Professorship. Van Buren received her BS in architecture from the University of Virginia and her M.Arch from Columbia University. She is also an alumna of the Loeb Fellowship at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.