A Message from the President of ADPSR

Dear ADPSR Members and Friends,I am very happy to be writing to you as the new National President of ADPSR in this organization’s twenty-second year. ADPSR is taking exciting new steps towards making a real difference in these troubled times. If you are a member, thanks for being with us and I hope you’ll continue to support our efforts to achieve environmental protection, ecological building, social justice, and the development of healthy communities. If you aren’t yet a member, I hope you’ll join—ADPSR is dedicated to involving the largest possible number of design professionals in the movement for a better world.

ADPSR’s newest project is our national Prison Design Boycott, calling on architects to pledge not to design prisons. If you weren’t aware of the prison crisis, I can understand—by and large, prison problems are ignored by the mainstream media, or when they do show up, are presented out of context and lacking any systematic analysis. But when I and others at ADPSR began to study the prison system, we were truly horrified. From every perspective, huge problems emerged: systematic abuse and neglect of prisoners, racist and unjust sentencing, predatory prison sprawl into small towns and rural areas, resources drained away from publicly beneficial programs, a corrupt “prison-industrial complex” running the show, and more. All this, and on top of it prisons achieve little in terms of their most basic function, reducing crime. The U.S. has over two million people in jail—the highest per capita rate of imprisonment in the world—more than four times the number we had in 1970, yet our crime rate is the same.

When confronted with all this, you might wonder, “what can I do?” Well I’ll tell you, alone, you can’t do much, but by organizing others, we can do a lot! And that’s what ADPSR is doing. Our boycott pledge is open to all design professionals—not just ADPSR members—and is getting new signers all the time. And it’s not just for designers who work on prisons, either. I think it’s unlikely that most of the architects who do design prisons will give up a big piece of their livelihood, but if the rest of us take a stand together, we can make a very large impression. It may not be our boycott that stops prisons from getting off the drawing boards, but it may well be our boycott, in combination with organizing with other groups, that pressures legislators to stop hiring architects to make new prisons in the first place. What a relief that will be for our struggling society!

Sign the prison boycott pledge here: http://www.adpsr.org/prisons/form_individual.htm

I’m proud of ADPSR’s prison boycott—and not just because I’ve invested a great deal of my personal time into getting it going. To me, the campaign is a very exciting demonstration of a new kind of activism specific to architects, designers, and planners. The central design of the project is the work of a few dedicated ADPSR volunteers (including myself), but it draws on the strength of many participants. It makes activism easy and accessible, and combines learning about injustice with taking a concrete step to change it. I’m convinced that enabling participation in social issues is essential to making social change, and I’m very proud that ADPSR is working to help design professionals participate more fully in the areas where our professional skills give us special expertise.

I am also very excited to announce ADPSR’s new partnership with DESIGNER/Builder magazine. DESIGNER/Builder is a beautiful bi-monthly magazine published in Santa Fe, with a special focus on the built environment and social justice. As far as I know, it’s the only magazine that regularly covers those topics, so it’s an ideal fit with ADPSR. Our members will all be receiving DESIGNER/Builder as a member benefit! This is the major reason for the dues increased we’ve asked you for (you’ll note that individual memberships are $10 more than they were last year— this covers the increased cost of providing you with DESIGNER/Builder). DESIGNER/Builder will also start running a regular column from ADPSR—so you can read more of what ADPSR has to say in the magazine! This is a great opportunity for ADPSR to reach a wider audience, and I’m glad that we’ll be communicating with you all more regularly through the magazine as well.

But ADPSR isn’t only subscribing, we are publishing, too. New Village Journal has ceased publication and made a successful transition to becoming New Village Press. With grants from the Education Foundation of America and Nathan Cummings Foundation, New Village will be publishing books that offer in-depth profiles of healthy community development and related guides and resources. We’ve made a partnership with New Society Publishers, giving us great marketing and distribution, and the first books will be coming out in September. We’ll have at least six books published in 2005-06,on topics including arts involvement in community building, community-based alternative forms of justice, green design education, and ecological schoolgrounds.

So what’s next? We have some exciting plans for this year. ADPSR’s annual Mumford Awards presentation ceremony will be held in San Francisco on June 4, coinciding with the World Environment Day celebration there, and the Northern California chapter will be hosting its Green Materials Showcase and monthly lecture around the same time.

Beyond that, I hope more ADPSR members will participate in our events. We’ve been dreaming up a number of design competitions—or maybe cooperative, rather than competitive, design challenges—around important political themes. This is another way that a small group of organizers—ADPSR’s active volunteer members—can enable the participation of a much larger group. We’re thinking of generating design discussion about the voting process (now that we’ve all seen how troubled it is), and about Dennis Kucinich’s visionary proposal for a U.S. Department of Peace. Stay with ADPSR, get your friends to join, and be sure to participate. We’re putting in the work to make changing the world through design easy, fun, and meaningful—thanks for being with us!

Sincerely,
Raphael Sperry
ADPSR National President