“What to Build and Rebuild, Whom to Protect?”: Digital Technology, Climate Justice, and Housing Affordability

The intersection of housing affordability, climate change, and social inequity in the mature years of the digital age raises a series of critical questions concerning the design professions. How can building designers adapt the urban environment to improve access to affordable housing? What opportunities exist for the integration of digital technologies throughout the design and construction process? How can these adaptations be applied in historic urban centers to reduce material consumption and preserve existing morphology? Most importantly, who benefits from these processes and how? In this paper, we address these questions by outlining a multiyear, interdisciplinary research and design project that uses Baltimore as a case study. While the specific nature of the built environment in Baltimore dictates much of the research and design process, the purpose of working with digital tools is to promote a wider application of our findings in broader and more diverse contexts. The project builds on a growing catalog of research regarding the integration of digital technology in the design professions, and while we aspire to contribute to this catalog with novel methods and new insights, our motivations remain guided by philosopherOlúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s critically important question, clearly articulated: “what to build and rebuild, whom to protect?”

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.112.94

Volume Editors
Germane Barnes & Blair Satterfield

ISBN
978-1-944214-45-6