These actions represent a culmination of student and alumni voices from the History of Art + Architectural Studies, Urban Studies, Studio Arts, and Civil Engineering departments. We aim to actively institute anti-racism, justice, inclusion, representation, and equity into the foundation of our design programs at our university. They are as follows:
1. Restructure our core curriculum courses to include BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) voices, design, and theory outside the current colonized lens. Concurrently, existing global courses should be strengthened and offered more regularly.
2. Implement a required seminar course for architecture + urban studies students that teaches how systemic racism is directly integrated into the built environment.
3. Design a new studio course that focuses on design justice.
4. Restructure early studio courses to teach more meaningful research methods for design and include community-voice in the process.
5. Establish strong connections across HAA + ARC, Urban Studies, and Civil Engineering departments by cross-listing courses.
6. Decrease hidden costs that can be barriers to BIPOC and financially-strained students and create more scholarship opportunities for students within the department.
7. Establish an ongoing list of design-related professional development opportunities with firms + organizations that forefront social justice in design, are BIPOC + women/non-binary owned, and pay their interns and workers ethical wages.
8. Promote learning environments that include BIPOC, women, and queer speakers, jurors, presenters, and professors. This mandates hiring more BIPOC tenured faculty, adjunct faculty, staff, and administrators and ensuring that all event + guest critique panels are fully representative of racial, socio-economic, gender, cultural, geopolitical, professional, and educational backgrounds.
9. Encourage studio environments to be more critical of their traditional language used and promotion of unhealthy lifestyles.
10. Train leadership and faculty annually in anti-racism and implicit bias work through an educational lens.
11. Proactively collaborate with local BIPOC organizations as well as support and promote events hosted by these organizations and the creation of Pitt NOMAS.
2. Implement a required seminar course for architecture + urban studies students that teaches how systemic racism is directly integrated into the built environment.
3. Design a new studio course that focuses on design justice.
4. Restructure early studio courses to teach more meaningful research methods for design and include community-voice in the process.
5. Establish strong connections across HAA + ARC, Urban Studies, and Civil Engineering departments by cross-listing courses.
6. Decrease hidden costs that can be barriers to BIPOC and financially-strained students and create more scholarship opportunities for students within the department.
7. Establish an ongoing list of design-related professional development opportunities with firms + organizations that forefront social justice in design, are BIPOC + women/non-binary owned, and pay their interns and workers ethical wages.
8. Promote learning environments that include BIPOC, women, and queer speakers, jurors, presenters, and professors. This mandates hiring more BIPOC tenured faculty, adjunct faculty, staff, and administrators and ensuring that all event + guest critique panels are fully representative of racial, socio-economic, gender, cultural, geopolitical, professional, and educational backgrounds.
9. Encourage studio environments to be more critical of their traditional language used and promotion of unhealthy lifestyles.
10. Train leadership and faculty annually in anti-racism and implicit bias work through an educational lens.
11. Proactively collaborate with local BIPOC organizations as well as support and promote events hosted by these organizations and the creation of Pitt NOMAS.
