© 2025 Abbetuck

Designing Just Spaces

The 11th Street Bridge Park is a landscape and urban design project that transforms a former freeway bridge into a park that connects historically divided neighborhoods in Washington, DC. With equitable development strategies and community-led planning, the park will feature community-driven programming such as outdoor performance spaces, playgrounds, and urban agriculture.

Architecture. Urban Planning. Landscape and Transportation Design. Building Equity and Creative Resistance.

Designers, architects, planners and engineers shape the physical world. In doing so you also shape how we live together. How will your practice dismantle injustice, reclaim public spaces and build communities rooted in equity and care?

  • Design for Social Equity: Every building, street, and green space tells a story. Whose story gets told and who gets left out? Designers can challenge displacement, segregation, and exclusion by centering community voices, prioritizing affordability, and creating spaces that welcome everyone.
  • Reclaim Public Space: Parks, plazas, sidewalks and transit corridors are more than infrastructure, they’re stages for civic life, protest and collective memory. Reclaiming public space means resisting privatization, defending the right to the city, and designing places where people can gather, speak and belong.
  • Confront Environmental Injustice: Marginalized communities often bear the brunt of pollution, climate risk, and poor planning. Through sustainable, community-led design, practitioners can address environmental racism, restore ecosystems, and create neighborhoods that are resilient, healthy, and safe for all.
  • Preserve Cultural Memory: Too often, development erases the histories of Indigenous, Black, and other marginalized communities. Designers can resist this erasure by honoring local heritage, protecting cultural landmarks, and creating new spaces that tell the truth of what came before.
  • Empower Communities: Design is a tool for shifting power. Participatory processes invite residents to shape their own neighborhoods—strengthening networks, building trust, and mobilizing collective action. When people have agency in shaping their environment, they gain agency in shaping their future.

Design for Social Equity

Via Verde in The Bronx, NY is a mixed-income, sustainably designed housing development that prioritizes affordable living in a historically underserved neighborhood. By integrating green roofs, community gardens, and health-focused design, it models how architecture can promote equity and well-being.

LEARN MORE

Reclaim Public Space

Superkilen Park in Copenhagen, DK transformed a neglected urban stretch into a vibrant public park co-designed with residents representing over sixty nationalities. This bold urban intervention reclaimed space for community gathering and cultural expression, celebrating diversity through design.

LEARN MORE

Confront Environmental Injustice

San Francisco's Hunters Point, a historically Black neighborhood built next to a contaminated Navy shipyard, has been the focus of extensive environmental cleanup and shoreline restoration. Through community-led planning and landscape design, projects like the India Basin Waterfront Park are reconnecting residents to public green space, remediating toxic land and resisting displacement.

LEARN MORE

Preserve Cultural Memory

This site honors the thousands of enslaved and free Africans buried in Lower Manhattan during the 17th and 18th centuries. Through careful memorial design and interpretive spaces, it preserves erased histories and makes hidden narratives visible in the urban landscape.

LEARN MORE

Empower Communities

The Detroit Collaborative Design Center partners directly with neighborhood residents to design parks, streetscapes and community centers. Their participatory approach provide the opportunity for local people to shape projects that respond to their needs and build lasting social capital.

LEARN MORE
The Lucerne Railway Station and Ferry Terminal is a transit hub that welcomes visitors with beauty and purpose. The station integrates rail, bus, ferry and pedestrian access into a single, navigable space. Its elegant design and lakeside setting invite connection — linking people, places and possibilities across modes and communities.

The Lucerne Railway Station and Ferry Terminal is a transit hub that welcomes visitors with beauty and purpose. The station integrates rail, bus, ferry and pedestrian access into a single, navigable space. Its elegant design and lakeside setting invite connection — linking people, places and possibilities across modes and communities.

Jan Gehl
Designed by Elemental under Alejandro Aravena, the Quinta Monroy social housing project in Iquique, CL reimagines affordability with dignity. Built in the urban core, it offers expandable homes that allow residents to customize over time—preserving community ties while advancing equity through adaptable design.

Designed by Elemental under Alejandro Aravena, the Quinta Monroy social housing project in Iquique, CL reimagines affordability with dignity. Built in the urban core, it offers expandable homes that allow residents to customize over time—preserving community ties while advancing equity through adaptable design.

Are you aware of architects, urban designers and planners who are mobilizing meaningful change in the world with their art form?
TELL US ABOUT THEM
Abbetuck

Abbetuck
Dallas, Texas | USA

© 2025 Abbetuck

The arts transform. The arts defy. Will you?