Studio+: Public Schools as Equity Infrastructure

Studio+: Public Schools as Equity Infrastructure was an advanced-level interdisciplinary design studio that included students and faculty from all departments of the school of design.

Studio+: Public Schools as Equity Infrastructure of the spring of 2022 was only the first of a series of annual advanced level design studios that belong to the larger Studio+ initiative of the Weitzman School focused on community-engaged design, planning, art, and preservation. Conceived as a vehicle for collaborative and interdisciplinary work by Penn faculty and students in partnership with civic organizations, Studio+ aims to address systemic racism and spatial injustice embedded in processes, uneven distributions of public resources and erasures in the city.

In its first iteration, and using the People’s Assembly as a central studio method, Studio+ opened a space to speculate, design and rehearse a self-organized interdisciplinary agency or cooperative practice for design justice in real-world design-build projects and in partnership with civic organizations. Studio+ is at once a space to define a critical form of spatial practice, a vehicle to imagine more equitable worlds, and a means of operating concretely and immediately on this one. Studio+ makes strategic alliances with diverse players including youth to advance projects for social justice spatially from large system/institutional/structural scale to the neighborhood to the built furniture/artifact within and beyond a school building. Material implementation of Studio+ design projects take place during the late spring and summer, led by interested students hired and supported as PennPraxis Design Fellows.