Value Statement
The Department of Architecture (DAR) at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (UWM) acknowledges Milwaukee as a vibrant, resource-laden, and historically significant metropolis that sits within traditional Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk, and Menominee homeland along the southwest shores of Michigami.
Milwaukee’s intractable and racially rooted problems of segregation, poverty, disinvestment, and environmental inequity overshadow local efforts1 to create sustainable development, economic resurgence, and social stability—especially for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). These problems are widespread in our country. DAR, as part of a Milwaukee institution of higher education, has a unique and specific responsibility to tend the wounds that our discipline has helped inflict2 on those among and around us, including aspiring architects.
As a first step towards taking responsibility, we are working to understand and acknowledge the role architecture and its allied fields play in undermining persistently marginalized people’s access to well-being, power, and full participation in the civic, social, and economic life of Milwaukee. This includes the displacement of Indigenous people, segregation and impoverishment of Black communities, marginalization of immigrant communities, devaluing and disregarding the work of LGBTQIA+ people, inadequate accommodations of space and access to the profession for disabled people, ageism, economic disparity in rural and urban communities, redlining, infrastructural displacement, climate justice, and more which we have yet to fully discuss and discover. We must also take the time to acknowledge the much larger system under which DAR has been functioning for more than 50 years. We acknowledge the ways in which our nation is built on colonization, racial wars, and sexist hierarchies3, the ways in which these harms persist in our local communities, and their urgent need for repair. This history is engrained in the dominant architectural education values and methodologies that persist in our institution today.
We acknowledge that all members of our community have different lived experiences of injustice and come to this conversation with various levels of expertise. We uplift this moment as an opportunity for collaboration between beginners and experts in allyship, anti-racism, and compassion in the academic environment and workplace. This work requires ongoing engagement from the faculty, staff, and students, so it is important that we hold each other with patience and kindness as we reach understanding and build new habits and practices. We will work together with humility and a growth mindset to move in the direction of being a highly trustworthy, caring, and collegial team of connected people. We know that there will not be a universal solution to these issues and commit ourselves to meeting each person’s experience where they stand.
We acknowledge that this is a first step to initiate a process of drafting accountable improvement for all our actions.
We commit to:
- Building a more welcoming academic environment that prioritizes mutual respect for each other’s cultures, values, backgrounds, and world views in which no student, faculty, staff, or guest shall be prejudiced based on their race, sex, color, religion, gender, national origin, disability, family status, age, LGBTQIA+ status, and financial or educational status.
- Rejecting the erasure of any member of our community by ableist, heteronormative, racist, ageist, classist and/or sexist norms;
- De-centering whiteness as the default or “norm” in our school’s culture and curriculum;
- Questioning and reevaluating the education of architects and our role in perpetuating the systems of oppression we have inherited;
- Training future architects who have the skills to lead the practice and profession of architecture to a more equitable future;
Commitment to Action
We understand as a community that value statements such as these mean very little without actions. To this end, an executive summary of actions taken by DAR students, faculty, and staff in alignment with its principles will be reviewed annually.
