I used to think design was just about making things look pretty.
Then I spent three years interviewing architects, urban planners, and community organizers in seven different cities, and I realized how profoundly wrong I’d been. Emancipatory design isn’t about aesthetics at all—it’s about power, and who gets to wield it. The philosophy emerged from liberation movements in the 1960s and 70s, particularly among Black and Indigenous designers who were tired of seeing their communities shaped by people who’d never lived there, never walked those streets at 2am, never had to navigate a wheelchair through a subway system designed by someone who apparently thought disabled people just didn’t exist. It’s messy and confrontational and deeply uncomfortable for a lot of practitioners trained in traditional design schools, where the architect or designer is positioned as the expert, the visionary, the one who knows best.
Here’s the thing: emancipatory design flips that entire model. It says communities are the experts on their own lives. The designer becomes a facilitator, not a dictator.
When Power Dynamics Shape Every Door Handle and Staircase We Encounter Daily
Every built environment encodes assumptions about who belongs and who doesn’t. I’ve seen this in Boston, where new luxury developments in historically Black neighborhoods include design features—high-end coffee shops, minimalist lobbies with door attendants, even the materials used for facades—that send a clear message about who the space is for. Emancipatory design practitioners argue that traditional design perpetuates oppression by excluding marginalized voices from decision-making processes. The philosophy draws heavily from Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed, which emphasizes consciousness-raising and collective action. Designers like Bryan Lee Jr., founder of the Design Justice Network, talk about design as a site of struggle, not a neutral technical practice.
Wait—maybe that sounds too abstract.
Let me tell you about a project in Detroit I visited in 2019. A group of residents in a predominantly Black neighborhood were facing displacement due to gentrification. Instead of hiring an outside firm to design new affordable housing, they partnered with designers who used emancipatory principles: the residents led every decision, from building layouts to material selection to governance structures. The designers taught technical skills—how to read blueprints, how zoning laws work, how to navigate bureaucratic systems—but the residents determined what their community would look like. It was slow, sometimes contentious, often exhausting for everyone involved. One designer told me, with this tired laugh, that she’d had to unlearn basically everything from architecture school.
Anyway, the philosophy isn’t without critics.
Why Some Designers Think Liberation-Focused Approaches Actually Create More Problems Than They Solve
Some practitioners argue that emancipatory design romanticizes community input and can lead to impractical outcomes or stalled projects. There’s also the question of who speaks for a community—neighborhoods aren’t monoliths, and internal power dynamics exist everywhere. I guess it makes sense that a philosophy about liberation would generate debate about what liberation actually means and for whom. Critics also point out that funding structures and regulatory frameworks often punish participatory approaches, which take more time and don’t produce the kind of glossy renderings that win awards or attract investment. The designer from Detroit told me their project took four years longer than a conventional development would have, and they definately lost potential funders along the way who wanted faster results.
But here’s what stuck with me: the residents still live there, in housing they shaped, in a community they defined.
How Liberation Design Confronts Capitalism’s Deep Entanglement With Built Environments
Emancipatory design necessarily critiques capitalist modes of production because, turns out, you can’t meaningfully liberate communities while maintaining systems that extract value from them. This is probably the most contentious aspect of the philosophy. It positions design as inherently political—not neutral, not objective, but entangled with economic and social systems that create and maintain inequality. Some theorists, like Design Justice Network members, argue for abolishing traditional client-designer relationships entirely, replacing them with cooperative models where communities own and control projects. Others take a reformist approach, working within existing structures while trying to shift power dynamics incrementally. I’ve seen both approaches recieve criticism from opposing sides: reformists get called sellouts, abolitionists get called impractical idealists. The tension probably won’t resolve anytime soon, honestly. Maybe that’s the point—liberation isn’t a fixed destination but an ongoing practice of questioning who benefits from our decisions and who gets left out.
