LEGACY LANDS | PROTOPIAN FUTURES
A Design Studio at Harvard Graduate School of Design, supported by ULLI with funding provided by the Herbert Simon Family Foundation
Legacy Lands | Protopian Futures’ professor, students, and guests
Legacy Lands | Protopian Futures
Reconciliation, Reclamation, and Reconstruction in Indianapolis is a multidisciplinary design studio at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) that imagines the future possibilities for Indianapolis’ Historic Indiana Avenue neighborhoods if racial segregation, eminent domain, and slum clearance policies had not disrupted their existence.
The studio, created by Professor in Practice Toni L. Griffin, developed design concepts by experimenting with a protopian approach rather than a utopian approach to unlock the unrealized potential of centering Black cultural production, innovation, and entrepreneurship as the influence for the design of the built environment.
Graduate students in the Legacy Lands studio visited Indianapolis for on-the-ground research and first-hand engagement with communities in the fall of 2022. Only four weeks into the course, students arrived with compiled research on waterways, mobility, industry, culture, and shelter, focused on Historic Indiana Avenue neighborhoods. While in Indianapolis, students were given tours of neighborhoods, talked with elders of the community, and had conversations with city officials and community leaders.
The sponsored studio represents the first of ULLI’s Legacy Lands program, an initiative created to bring design thinking to the work of the community groups are doing on the ground every day in our communities. The GSD studio generated grand and imaginative aspirations to see the futures that could have been radically reversing the gut-wrenching harms much of Black Indianapolis was stripped of, preventing its right to growth.
Community leaders were invited to attend the mid-semester and final presentation of Legacy Lands | Protopian Futures in Cambridge, MA, in December.
The takeaways from the studio are endless. The level of impact the students’ work is having on leaders is evident with immediate action at work to collaborate with surrounding communities, residents, and leaders to begin implementation for the improvement of Black heritage neighborhoods.
