Equity in the built environment
Creating equitable communities is central to the profession and it goes beyond projects, it demands for design remove barriers and burdens, physical or abstract, empowering and enabling people to gather and connect, live, and function to their highest potential.
These resources are designed to demonstrate how architects can play an important role in fostering equitable communities:
Architect's Role in Creating Equitable Communities: Within Projects
This resource shares how architects can, in their practices, bring about racially just and equitable outcomes for all members of the communities they serve. Explore the pages for actionable tools, tactics, and strategies offer a means to understand their extent of agency.
Equitable Development Frameworks: An introduction and comparison for architects
In this resource, AIA analyzes five systems to identify the agency architects and designers have in driving valuable change. This report equips architects and designers with tools to develop a deeper understanding of equitable development; equips architects' and designers' role in shaping equity in their work through equitable development frameworks; presents a wide range of equitable development approaches differing in intersectionality, depth, structure, and provides project examples to demonstrate the potential impacts each equitable development framework can establish
Justice in the Built Environment
This supplementary edition to the Guides for Equitable Practice is intended to help designers convey the opportunities, benefits, and challenges of making justice a deliberate aim of the building process. It includes more hands-on interactive exercises, with worksheets and contextual timelines that can be used within project teams and with clients or partners.
Return on investment (ROI) of investing in equitable communities
This resource collects examples of the return of investment on the work necessary to invest in more equitable communities. Explore the pages for information tailored to communities and firms, as well as extensive funding ideas from grant opportunities, to community land trusts, financial instruments and micro-investing case stories.
Communities by Design (CxD) program
The Communities by Design (CxD) program was designed to provide a ready, applicable model to overcome the challenges in the built environment and provide communities with a path to success. Through decades of work in hundreds of communities with tens of thousands of volunteers and citizens, CxD Design Assistance Teams have proven that communities are at the heart of solutions to the world’s most pressing issues.
Explore the Design Assistance Team projects (Interactive map) >
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