The Design Justice Summit is a gathering established through Colloqate and in collaboration with the DAP Collective to bring together spatial design architects, planners, urbanists, and designers from across the country with community organizers and advocates. The explicit intention of the summit is to share knowledge and workshop solutions to address the issues of injustice facing communities throughout the world. Our mission is to codify and grow a diverse community of spatial design justice leaders who can shape the profession's future toward justice and liberation.

The summit will take place over four days in New Orleans. A cohort of practicing organizers will convene for the first day of the summit prior to a larger open session for the remaining two days. Advocates will gather over the entirety of the four-day summit and work through a series of presentations, workshops, and activities designed to build fellowship and foster critical, nuanced learning around the details of our most pressing issues. The expectation is that the cohort is well-versed enough in practice and theory to facilitate substantial conversations and open-minded enough to learn critically from each other.

Our values are validated through the spaces and places we design. The Design Justice Summit 2023 will explore the privilege and power structures that have defined injustice in the built environment from America's inception. We will look at the history of the design justice movement and how the theory of practice continually advocates for the dismantling of power ecosystems that use architecture and design to create oppressive conditions throughout the built environment.

Like all institutions, Design imposes its power through policies, procedures, and practice and is subject to its own inherited biases. At the root of climate change is an infrastructure that exhausts 39% of our carbon emissions and demands 40% of our energy production. At the root of housing, transportation, and economic injustice there are remnants of redlining and convents that continue to extract wealth and codify structural or de facto segregation. At the root of unjust policing is a prison industrial complex sustained by spaces that extract human dignity and economic potential from marginalized people in the name of profit. At the root of food and commercial insecurity is the idea that retail (structures) follows rooftops, meaning the viability of a neighborhood is measured by the acceleration of housing values and individual assets. The force of these issues is often invisible but they are not insurmountable.

Design Justice work is a means to establish a set of anti-racist liberation-centered frameworks for designing the radically just world we want to live in. We seek to develop a movement that operates with three explicit goals. First, orient ourselves within the context and history of racist systems, humanize the disinherited, build a field and aggregate our collective resources in supporting movement work across the country, and develop a core set of guiding principles and actions for the betterment of political discourse inherent to the built environment.

The design of our built environment and the injustices that persist within it are the lasting physical result of policies, procedures, and practices. Given the permanence of this work, we must pay particular attention to these relationships and seek Design Justice whenever possible.

These workshops bring organizations, community members, artists, activists, and designers together in pursuit of a design intervention with the explicit intention of addressing the systemic issues of injustice throughout the built environment. These are training, using the language of design, to protest these systems of injustice that show a willingness to actively perpetuate oppression in our world.

A seductively renovated 1845 Creole townhouse, boutique hotel Selina Catahoula makes the most of of a quirky layout, tactile brick walls and original windows in just 35 fresh and airy rooms. A short stroll from the French Quarter, this downtown gem is our New Orleans tip-off to in-the-know bons vivants. The proof is in the pisco here: Peruvian influences breeze from the courtyard café to the sun-kissed rooftop terrace, where guests gather to sample zingy ceviches, hearty sandwiches and all manner of head-turning cocktails.

– mrandmrssmith.com

Guests may reserve their accommodations by calling our Reservations team directly at (+1) 786-485-0498. In order to obtain the special group rate, guests must identify themselves as being with Design Justice Summit.

The Mercantile Hotel New Orleans is located in the historic Warehouse/Arts District of New Orleans.

Enjoy your sweet suite at The Mercantile. Located at the former site of The Henderson Sugar Refinery, a New Orleans landmark and major sugar manufacturer that once produced up to 800 barrels a day. Here, we’re honoring the past and reimagining the future of the boutique hotel experience.

-Mercantile Hotel Site

Guests may reserve their accommodations by calling our Reservations team directly at (+1) (504) 558-1914. In order to obtain the special group rate, guests must identify themselves as being with Design Justice Summit.