Notes from the Anti-Displacement Studio

This article addresses the question of how design pedagogy and methods can be reformulated and retooled to support community-led anti-displacement planning and design initiatives. It critically examines and reflects on a series of architecture courses taught by the author in which students have worked with Boston-based community leaders on anti-displacement planning and design strategies over two academic years. The analysis particularly focuses on the anti-displacement studio, which takes a grounded, relational, and reparative approach to addressing current gaps in design studio education by aligning university-based teaching and learning with community-led decolonizing agendas. Leaning into the university’s location in Lower Roxbury and harnessing the instructor’s existing relationship with community leaders as an anchor for ongoing collaboration, the studio remains a work-in-progress that is replete with tensions and challenges, which carry implications for radical planning and design pedagogy.