The Space of Social Equity

Political polarization, the unequal distribution of rights and massive economic inequality, continues to dramatically divide today’s societies. As such, there is a pressing need for those who design the physical fabric in which we co-exist to challenge these divisive trends by imagining more than just frameworks for living. The question is how. While aesthetic discourse has long been part of art, design and architecture’s intellectual histories, it has, for nearly a century, been largely dismissed as the mere superficial pursuit of only visual pleasure.

In this book, Mark Foster Gage proposes a dramatic realignment between aesthetic thought, politics, social equality and the design of our physical world. By reconsidering historic concepts from the deep history of aesthetic philosophy and deftly weaving them with emerging intellectual positions from a variety of disciplines, including those of Xenofeminism, Object Oriented Ontology, Dark Ecology, Neo-Afrofuturism, Accelerationism and others, the book introduces a groundbreaking intellectual framework. Through what used to be known as the practice, teaching and discourse of architecture and design, this framework sets out to reconfigure a more encompassing social theory of how humanity perceives its very reality and how it might begin to more justly define that reality through new ways of reconsidering the built environment.

Mark Foster Gage is an internationally recognized architect and theorist. He has written extensively on the relationship between aesthetic philosophy and design in both academic and popular publications and edited defining books on the subject including: Essential Texts: Aesthetic Theory for Architecture and Design (2008), and Aesthetics Equals Politics: New Discourses between Art, Architecture and Philosophy (2018). Gage is the Principal of Mark Foster Gage Architects in New York City and Assistant Dean of the Yale School of Architecture.