All of the Above
Janette Komoda Kim
My work addresses climate justice by empowering communities to realize a more equitable distribution of land and resources. To address such complex issues, I often collaborate with community-based organizations and municipal agencies, and I combine tools of urban, architectural, and multimedia design.
Over the years, I’ve been drawn to approaches that I believe get to the roots of systemic change. One—decision-making tools—deals with the process of community empowerment. The other—property reform—shapes the space of community life.
My decision-making tools help community members explore, imagine, and debate potential responses to complex urban issues in a healthy, playful way. For example, I designed three board games, called In It Together, Bartertown, and Mix & Match, which play out more just and equitable responses to wildfires and rising seas. I also wrote a book called The Underdome Guide to Energy Reform, which exposes the politics behind sustainable design, and I co-produced a podcast series called Safari, which gives subway riders a tour of urban animal life just outside their windows. I reflect on such methods by writing about public engagement. I advocate for more direct, collaborative governance by those who are most impacted by design.
I also reimagine the space of property ownership. My goal is to foster regenerative economies and a more reciprocal relationship between people and land. In the Resilient by Design Challenge, for example, our team designed collectively-owned housing to protect communities from displacement due to sea level rise and gentrification. I also designed a hotel in Sichuan, China and a farmhouse in Sonoma, CA, where people can engage with bamboo and chapparal landscapes around them. I also research and write about exceptional community-based initiatives. I am currently writing a book called Property Playbook, which illustrates how activists and architects can co-opt property ownership to foster ecological vitality and repair the dispossession of land from workers and BIPOC people.
Books
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on Climate and Justice
Selected Writing
“Whose Resilient Future,” editorial in Metropolis Magazine, Nov/Dec 2018, in print and online.
This editorial essay was part of a feature called “Year in Review 2018: 9 Lessons from Architecture, Design, and Cities,” which “tapped experts from across the design world to help articulate the year’s biggest takeaways—from resiliency to workplace productivity, diverstity, and beyond.” The piece offers a critical assessment of resilience planning with reflections on multiple projects in the San Francisco Bay Resilient by Design Challenge. Link to Publication,
See also:on Property Ownership and on Engagement pages for work on climate justice.
Urbanism Beyond Corona
#UrbanismBeyondCorona was a series of Instagram posts published by the Urban Works Agency and the Experimental History Project over four Wednesdays in June and July, 2020. We asked architects, urbanists, and scholars of the built environment to offer a prediction, warning, gift, hack, instrument, prompt, or question on the role designers and urban actors can play in shaping cities after COVID-19. we initiated this series in hopes of sparking an open, informal conversation amidst this ever-changing context. Link to full project page and The Agent publication.
The Pandemic Effect
This short essay is one of 60 from architects, designers, engineers, materials scientists, and public health experts that exploring how COVID has changed the built environment. The essay publishes the image and text I created for the #UnderdomeBeyondCorona series, which argues for a a more supportive boundary between public and private infrastructures—one that extends responsibilities of the state for health and care-giving into the home, but expands the rights of collective decision-making and protection against police intrusions out into the city. This text expands on the #UBC contribution with a few specific examples of this new boundary might enable.