Designing Distance: Resilience, Design, and the Critical Social Sciences after the Design Turn

Over the past decade, the rapid growth of interest in resilience has generated new avenues for interdisciplinary initiatives. Resilience programs, such as the Rockefeller Foundation's influential 100 Resilient Cities, increasingly draw on the holistic and future-oriented approach of social design to transform how decision-makers within and beyond the state might know and manage social and environmental complexity. In the process, the critical social sciences risk becoming sidelined, relegated to backwards-looking critical analyses after the fact, rather than driving forward social change. In contrast, this article explores alternative ways to integrate design and the critical social sciences that avoid a myopic focus on the temporal. Emphasizing the capacity of critical social sciences to spatialize thought, or orient attention and concern to multiple, contemporaneously juxtaposed temporal trajectories, we examine how design and the critical social science might be integrated around a common concern with place-making. Drawing on an example of collaborative community resilience-building in Allapattah, a majority-Dominican neighborhood in Miami, Florida, we explore how spatializing thought on resilience can further advance critical design's efforts to create problem-finding approaches that radically expand the kinds of issues and resources resilience-driven design can address.