June Jordan’s Political Theory of Redesign

This essay examines June Jordan’s design writings to elaborate a political theory of redesign in her work. I show that Jordan’s redesign offers political principles for reimagining space at multiple scales and speaks to the question of how more livable, beautiful worlds may be wrought from the material contexts in which we presently live. Against the grain of the dismantling of public goods in the late twentieth century, Jordan re-envisioned public city spaces and housing with dignity and room for human flourishing. Her primary barometer for design was the fullest expression of human aliveness—she insisted that the built environment should “[cherish] as it amplifies the experience of being alive.” Jordan’s visionary pragmatism anticipates what Deva Woodly calls the “radical Black feminist pragmatism” of the twenty-first century’s Movement for Black Lives and speaks to contemporary abolitionist thought and struggles over the future of public goods.