your mind, our design

Developing socially aware and inclusive engagement practices

 We often reach out to understand others before we look to understand ourselves – this course is designed to help you reflect and start a conversation about how we know the world and the power and privilege we hold. If you are interested in engagement, inclusive and just built environments and built environment practice/s, this course will help you critically reflect on your ways of knowing and working, the power you hold and consider how you can work in the future.

 Over six two-hour interactive sessions, you will critically engage with concepts such as power, privilege, race, and colonisation. Using theories/concepts, examples, activities, and individual and group reflections, you will build and extend your understanding of individual and systemic privilege and the built environment; you will develop an understanding of your positionality and reflect on how social constructs, such as race are entwined with the built environment, built environment professions and our ways of working. We will explore how we can reimagine inclusive built environments that respond to our current social and environmental challenges.

 At the end of the course, you will be better placed to engage with diverse ways of knowing and doing,  communities that have different lived and living experiences and to work collaboratively in partnerships to create more inclusive built environments.

 In this introductory course, we will cover:

• The historical and contemporary intersection of race, colonisation, and the Built Environment.

• Power, Privilege, and Responsibility 

• Positionality and the implications for Built Environment practice. 

• Individual, institutional, systemic, and structural power and the Built Environment

• Reimagining how we practice - systems, knowledge, and process. Creating change - envision a community of practice that actively struggles against injustice.