2022 Research Prize
Taking Back the Air: Collective Learning, Advocacy, and Design for a Healthy Environment

Extractive industries and segregative planning have long contoured the uneven effects of air pollution and other forms of socioenvironmental toxicity in Pittsburgh’s industrialized river corridors. This is especially so in the Monongahela Valley, where three legacy US Steel facilities continue to create intersecting and multigenerational harms, particularly for Black and low-income communities. Yet, these toxic systems have not gone unchallenged, and there is a long history of community action against environmental and social injustices. Anchored in a collaboration with North Braddock Residents For Our Future, a grassroots environmental justice organization, and General Sisters, a neighborhood initiative focused on food, healing, and repair, this project asks how spatial design pedagogy and research can engage in interpretive, collaborative, and community-centered approaches to weave together the complex histories, political ecologies, material effects, modes of resistance, and everyday experiences of toxic systems to help shape better worlds. Taking inspiration from Eve Tuck’s (2009) call for “desire” rather than “damage” centered research, the project aims to channel institutional resources and design skills to aid community actions for environmental and community health, while reframing what counts as spatial expertise by centering knowledge production grounded in local experiences, expertise, and visions. Working through the framework of a seminar and studio, in close collaboration with residents in Braddock and North Braddock PA, the project will engage methods of participatory qualitative research, field work, and spatial design to develop an Archive of Air testifying to the historically situated sociomaterial entanglements of air in the Mon Valley, a Clean Air Learning and Gathering Space in North Braddock, and an Atmospheric Justice Curriculum to reflect on our process and outline ethical principles for collaborative research and design.

Collaborators

The project team will comprise CMU students working closely with community partners—organizers, artists, and educators who have been building spaces of community to resist environmental injustice.

Morgan Newman is a first-year PhD student in Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research works at the intersection of spatial and quantitative analysis, architectural history, and Black geographies to examine issues of racial and environmental injustice in the United States.

North Braddock Residents For Our Future is a grassroots, volunteer-run organization founded in 2014. It successfully led the opposition to unconventional gas drilling in Braddock, North Braddock, and surrounding communities from 2014 to 2021 and continues to fight for environmental injustice in the region.

• Edith Abeyta is an artist and cofounding member of North Braddock Residents For Our Future and maintains a civically engaged art practice with residents in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Hazelwood. She was awarded the 2020 Community Sentinel Award for Environmental Stewardship by FracTracker Alliance.
• Tony Buba is a community activist and filmmaker. Buba has been documenting Braddock for fifty years. His films have won numerous awards including the Alfred I. DuPont–Columbia University Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism. In 1985 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and was named Pennsylvania’s Media Artist of the Year.
• Jan McMannis is a retired educator with forty years of experience working with first generation “at-risk” college students. Since 1985 she has been an active community volunteer in Braddock and North Braddock and is a former board member of the Braddock Carnegie Library Association.

General Sisters was founded in 2009 in North Braddock, PA and focuses on modes of spatial and ecological repair, community gathering, and collective learning to advance environmental justice and food security in the neighborhood.

• Ginger Brooks Takahashi is a transdisciplinary artist and educator. Her performance, installation, and site-responsive works examine our relationships to the mediums that connect us.
• Dana Bishop-Root worked and lived in North Braddock for eleven years and is a member of Transformazium and is the associate director at the Braddock Carnegie Library. Her work grows alongside local systems of communication, exchange, and resource distribution.