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Michael Ford teaches the importance of equitable design to participants at the 2017 Hip Hop Architecture Camp in Los Angeles.

Architect Michael Ford uses hip hop to explain how designers and planners have marginalized communities. Samra Habib reports on how the Interior Design Show speaker is trying to change the way we all think about diverse viewpoints in design

It might not be obvious to many fans of hip hop, but its lyrics have a lot to say about ill-conceived architecture. Many hip-hop songs touch on what it's like to navigate life while being black or brown and living in spaces that shape individuals' lives and experiences. Ideally, these places are meant to provide respite from the harsh realities of life, but when planned recklessly, they can obstruct access to basic needs such as transportation and food, and isolate communities. What's often not considered in the construction of high-density neighbourhoods is the psychological and sociological impact of design and planning on those who live there.

Dubbed the 'hip-hop architect,' Michael Ford wants to show people how the built environment influences behaviour. Bradlee Bertram

"Sometimes these individuals are the non-paying end users of our work, but their needs must be heard, understood and respectfully considered during the design process," says Michael Ford, a designer who has been branded "the hip-hop architect" because of his research into the popular music genre's evaluation of the urban projects where it was created. Born and raised in Highland Park, a city in Metro Detroit, he calls hip hop modernism's "postoccupancy report," the voice of the unconsulted end users of the sort of public-housing developments that started to appear in New York's Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village in 1947. On Jan. 19, he'll explain the relationship between built environments and hip hop to a Toronto audience for the first time when he speaks at the Interior Design Show.

To connect his research to hip hop during such talks, Ford often shares the lyrics to the song We're All in the Same Gang by the West Coast All-Stars:

I'm in a rage

Oh yeah? Yo, why is that G?

Other races, they say we act like rats in a cage

I tried to argue, but check it, every night in the news

We prove them suckers right and I got the blues

"[Rapper Shock G.] is referring to the research of John B. Calhoun, who predicted the negative impact of high-density living with controlled resources on city dwellers based on his research with rats," Ford says. "When I show this research, it stuns people." Calhoun, a behavioural researcher who studied the impact of population density on behaviour by placing rats in rodent-sized condos, discovered that they spiralled out of control through overcrowding, experienced population collapse and displayed problematic behaviour patterns.

Ford is the founder of Hip Hop Architecture Camp, which aims to increase the visibility of underrepresented communities in the profession.

Central to Ford's argument about the interplay between design and hip hop is the role architect Le Corbusier and builder Robert Moses played in the making of the hood in the United States. Le Corbusier, the Swiss-born French architect who Ford facetiously calls "the forefather of hip-hop culture," developed a planning style known as "towers in the park," first presented in 1924, which Ford believes disproportionately and negatively affected people of colour. Meant to transform polluted industrial areas by offering affordable housing high above the streets, the concept was adapted by Moses for New York in a plan Ford calls "the worst remix in history." While working on the city's Cross Bronx Expressway between 1948 and 1972, Moses ignored Le Corbusier's suggestions to consider amenities that would make his proposed architecture welcoming to people and instead built concrete jungles and monotonous brick towers that came to define low-income housing across the continent.

One of Moses's buildings, 1520 Sedgwick Ave., is recognized as the birthplace of hip hop. In 1973, Clive Campbell (known as DJ Kool Herc) and his sister, Cindy, threw what Campbell has called the first hip-hop party in the building's recreation room. Meanwhile, in his book Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, writer Jeff Chang links the birth of hip hop to the social policies advocated by Moses that displaced marginalized black and Hispanic communities to east Brooklyn and South Bronx.

Architecture and design continue to struggle with diversity, says Karen Kang, the national director of the Interior Design Show who invited Ford to speak at the event.

"Architecture and design is anything but diverse. Recent studies such as Equity by Design show…that the field is overwhelmingly lacking in racial diversity," Kang says. "We all know that this is not reflective of the communities and the actual people who live in these communities, especially in large urban centres such as a city like Toronto."

Kang believes Ford's perspective is especially valuable because, through hip hop, he's able to explore broader issues around race, architecture and urban planning.

Michael Ford talks with a participant during The Hip Hop Parkitecture Event in Madison, Wis.

"Hip hop as a musical genre evolved as a reaction to predominantly black and immigrant youth living in marginalized spaces, protesting against social injustices in their communities by the powers that be," she says. "Ford is not just talking about how we need to find solutions, but through his Hip Hop Architecture Camps, he's also trying to engage youth to be part of the solution."

Ford, who developed his hip-hop thesis while studying for his Master of Architecture degree at University of Detroit Mercy, now teaches "design justice" at Madison College in Wisconsin. He is also the founder of Hip Hop Architecture Camp, which aims to increase the visibility of underrepresented communities in the profession. In the camps (held in Los Angeles, Detroit, Houston, the Bronx and one planned for Toronto in July at North York Central Library), Ford encourages students to translate the rhythm, rhyme and repetition of hip-hop lyrics into design concepts and details, or to look to the flexibility of break dancers when creating adjustable furniture.

"If we listen to the music, we can understand just how unsuccessful this architecture was and we can understand the injustices faced by people of colour who live in communities based on modernism," Ford says. He wants people to stop using the behaviour of people of colour to explain why the hood exists and, instead, understand how the built environment influences behaviour. For Ford, hip-hop architecture isn't a stylistic approach like modernism or art deco; it's about design accountability. It's a critique of modernism and the architecture that gave rise to the culture. "Often times, access to the nonpaying end users may require architects and designers to create non-traditional engagement sessions to hear and learn from those communities," Ford says. To build for change, Ford emphasizes the importance of creating for people, not magazine covers.