Design Symposium Undercommoning The Urban Campus
The Undercommoning the Urban Campus Symposium brings together scholars from art, architecture, public history, and urbanism to examine the histories, reckonings, and futures of the modern urban university. Exploring themes such as campus as “UniverCity,” monumentality, and town–gown relations, the symposium creates a forum for dialogue across disciplines. Open to all, it will be of special interest to students and faculty in design, social sciences, and cultural studies.
Since the sixteenth century, the typology of the university campus has served as a nation-building instrument of modernity—from a settler colonial architecture that literally and figuratively concealed enslaved labor in the conception of the colonial college, to fictions of terra nullius that predicated on indigenous dispossession in the making of the land-grant university, to the unmaking of Black, Latino, and immigrant neighborhoods in the postwar and ongoing expansion of the modern urban university. Since the decolonial turn, the typologies of the colonial college and the land-grant university have been increasingly scrutinized to reveal institutional spatial practices that appeared removed from racial thinking, all the while reinforcing the absence of Black and Indigenous bodies and material culture. In contrast, the more recent emergence of the modern urban university in the twentieth century—and its ongoing hand in displacing communities in service of institutional expansion—continues to be either overlooked or justified under the guise of progress.
In the case of the modern urban university, scholars in the humanities and social sciences have been centering the experiences of displaced communities as they excavate the racial underside of urban campus expansions and advocate for reparative futures; in contrast, scholars and practitioners of the built environment have yet to critically re-examine their role historically and to productively re-imagine their agency moving forward, as more architects and University Architects continue engaging with extractive campus expansion projects. To that end, the symposium invites a much-needed discussion: as beneficiaries of higher education—scholars, faculty, students, staff, admin—how do we confront past and ongoing urban institutional expansions when they come at the expense of displaced communities whose suppressed histories have often been justified under the rhetoric of public good? What theoretical underpinnings can shape how we unravel this attern in higher education’s built environment?
Symposium Schedule
2:00 - 2:15: Introduction
2:15 - 2:35: Davarian Baldwin | Distinguished Professor of American Studies & Founding Director of the Smart Cities Research Lab at Trinity College
2:35 – 2:55: Rachel Gross | Associate Professor, Co-Director of Public History Program at University of Colorado Denver
2:55 – 3:20: Panel Discussion
3:20 – 3:30: Break
3:30 – 3:50: Faheem Majeed | Co-Director of Floating Museum, Assistant Professor of Art, Director of Undergraduate Studies at University of Illinois Chicago
3:50 – 4:10: Leen Katrib | Assistant Professor of Architecture, University of Kentucky
4:10 – 4:35: Roundtable Panel Discussion, Audience Q&A
4:35 – 4:45: Closing Remarks
This symposium is generously supported by a UK Conference & Workshop Grant, UK UNITE small-scale grant, Gaines Center for the Humanities Mini-Grant Program, and UK CURATE Research Support Program. Research presented at the symposium is supported by a 2025 Graham Foundation Grant.