Designing a Green New Deal Fleming Site: Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta

In some ways, this studio picks off where previous efforts left off. Students are back in Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta (but not the Midwest!), and focused on the mine-to-prison and plantation-to-prison pipeline in each region. Their challenge was to make these pernicious forces legible, to situate their work in both the realm of the built environment and the broader public imagination, and to then develop credible, compelling stories from/for the future, informed by the various movements for justice organizing around each industry in each region. The central aim of this studio is to continue forging new alliances with these movement leaders through the tools at designers and planners’ disposal. So, while students were, at times, asked to simply illustrate the often-abstract, non-spatial demands of, say, the climate justice movement, by giving form and aesthetic and spatial dimensions to their work, by landing their ideas in real sites through real projects, and by elucidating the various state instruments (legal, regulatory, financial) imbricated in the fossil fuel, carceral, and agriculture industries of each region, you will be, in some ways, attempting to make their visions for the future seem more pragmatic, more tangible, and more desirable than they might otherwise.