MDes Open Project: Land Narratives + Formations for A Just City

This interdisciplinary studio explores how narratives of land—its erasure, transformation, and reclamation—inform spatial justice in contemporary cities. Through collaborative research, public discourse, and multi-media installations, students engage with questions of power, memory, and displacement to envision protopian futures grounded in equity, repair, and inclusion.

The course culminates in the creation of LANDCanons, a living manifesto and movement that:

  • Reframes land as a palimpsest and living archive

  • Unveils buried histories and interrogates power structures

  • Uses storytelling, counter-mapping, and speculative design to foster community agency and challenge dominant narratives.

LANDCanons invites practitioners across disciplines to reclaim erased geographies, amplify untold stories, and shape more just futures through radical imagination and design.

1. Land as a Palimpsest –

The land is not fixed; it is written, erased, and rewritten by generations, carrying histories both remembered and forgotten.

2. Land as a Living Archive –

Rather than a static record, land is a dynamic text, shaped by memory, conflict, and speculative reimagination.

3. Unveiling Erased Histories –

LAND Canons is a movement dedicated to uncovering and amplifying buried land narratives through radical research, collective inquiry and open conversations.

4. Multidisciplinary Methods –

LAND Canons integrates archival research, counter-mapping, digital storytelling, and public engagement to recover lost landscapes.

5. The Limits of Positivism–

History cannot be distilled into objective, singular facts. Truths are illusions we have forgotten to be illusions. 

6. The Role of Storytelling –

In the face of erasure, storytelling is critical.

7. Interrogating Power Structures -

The initiative challenges systems of land dispossession, from colonial histories to contemporary real estate developments

8. Empowering Communities –

By reclaiming agency over history, ongoing events, place, LAND Canons fosters new ways to engage with land as memory, identity, and sovereignty.

9.  Embrace narratives outside Institutions -

Engaging with the so-called unreliable narrator as a force of resistance, disruption, and deeper meaning.

10. A Call to Action –

Scholars, designers, artists, practitioners, and activists are invited to challenge dominant land canons and reclaim the narratives that shape our future landscapes.