Transforming Community Spaces Project

All over the world we see increasing conflicts over monuments, memorials, building names, and other sites identified with histories of harm such as violence, slavery, colonialism, and environmental disaster. Communities everywhere are struggling over whether to leave such spaces alone, alter, or reclaim them in entirely new ways. IEN’s Transforming Community Spaces (TCS) project, founded in 2016 to address these challenges, has had an active year in no small part thanks to contributions from several representatives from UVA's School of Architecture. IEN convened two meetings of the TCS national advisory committee, in December 2017 and May 2018. Robust, intense, and enlightening dialogue about history, design, cultural landscapes, and conflict, has informed the development of a draft toolkit for communities and institutions. Beth Meyer and Louis Nelson contributed substantially to these conversations as did alum Harriet Jameson Brooks, who drafted part of the Toolkit.  The TCS pilot, “Charlottesville Acts for Racial Equity (CARE)”, got off the ground with a packed forum titled “Confronting Racial Injustice in Housing and Neighborhoods.” This forum provided an opportunity for community members to connect with organizations such as Habitat for Humanity and Charlottesville Low Income Housing Coalition.