Designing Social Equality: Architecture, Aesthetics, and the Perception of Democracy

Political polarization and the unequal distribution of rights and massive economic inequality continue to dramatically divide today’s societies. As such, there is a pressing need for those who design the physical fabric in which we co-exist to challenge these divisive trends by imagining more than just frameworks for living. The question is how. While aesthetic discourse has long been part of art, design, and architecture’s intellectual histories, it has, for nearly a century, been largely dismissed as the mere superficial pursuit of only visual pleasure.

In Designing Social Equality, Mark Foster Gage proposes a dramatic realignment between aesthetic thought, politics, social equality, and the design of our physical world. By reconsidering historic concepts from the deep history of aesthetic philosophy and deftly weaving them with emerging intellectual positions from a variety of disciplines, including those of Xenofeminism, Object-Oriented Ontology, Dark Ecology, and others, the book introduces a ground-breaking intellectual framework. Through what used to be known as the practice, teaching, and discourse of architecture and design, this framework sets out to reconfigure a more encompassing social theory of how humanity perceives its very reality and how it might begin to more justly define that reality through new ways of reconsidering the built environment.