New Orleans-based architect Bryan C. Lee, Jr. calls the Lafitte Greenway “a civic green boulevard” and describes it as “a space that has continuous motion.”

This motion has certainly been present since the bike path was built in 2015, but the land beneath it has seen movement for more than 200 years. Before it was a park, it was a railroad, and before that, a shipping canal. Residents have always lived alongside this stretch of land. Lee sees a deeper story that needs to be told here. He envisions creating a new space — a bridge that will span the bioswales — that he hopes will encourage the park’s users to slow down, pause, and reflect on the city’s destructive, unjust, and buried history.

Lee is the founder and design principal for a nonprofit design and architecture firm called Colloqate (pronounced co-locate.) He approaches all of his work with a set of core beliefs he calls “design justice.”

“For every injustice in this world, there’s an architecture, a plan, a design that has been built to sustain that injustice,” Lee says. “We’ve got to acknowledge how, whether we play a minor role or a major role in some of these things, how best to not be complicit.”

Lee and Colloqate first gained national recognition for a project they called Paper Monuments. In 2017, when Confederate monuments were being torn down across New Orleans, Lee and his colleagues collected a series of lesser-known stories about the city’s historical injustices. They created posters to tell those stories and pasted them on brick walls and public spaces across the city. The posters were also distributed at book stores and libraries.

Now Lee wants to use architecture and design justice to tell a story about the displacement of people, cultures, communities, and environments across New Orleans. This time, his approach will be a series of outdoor pavilions he’s calling the Storia Program.

Read the full article about design justice at Grist.