Student Work

Labor of Love: Feminist Tactics for 
Spatial  Justice
Summer 2024-Spring 2025
Advisors: Eduardo Rega, M.C. Overholt, Fernando Lara   
Risograph printing was chosen for its deep roots in grassroots and community organizing. The process has long been a tool of self-publication, used by activists, zinesters, and collectives to produce and distribute materials outside of institutional channels. Its lo-fi aesthetic carries that history with it, connecting the project to a broader tradition of resistance printing and community-made media.
              

The goal of this thesis research is to expand beyond binary, gendered and capitalist ideas of urbanization and care, which have left us in crisis. Instead, this research will prioritize the voices of contemporary feminist thinkers who reject privatized ideas of care, as well as the manifestation of such ideas in the urban environment. Enabling feminist ideologies of care, labor, and development as its core political investment, this project turns to the work of the Philadelphia-based Women’s Community Revitalization Project, learning from its social and spatial tactics in order to project new feminist tools for architecture. Ultimately, the project seeks to develop a set of specific feminist architectural tactics that can inform a spatialized network of care for women and their communities across Philadelphia.


1.Diagram explaining Philadelphia’s Crisis of Care
2. Activating vacant lots with fruit orchards in partnership with the Philadelphia Orchard Project   



3.Collage exercises of ideations for community ownership of vacant lots



defining  a feminist architecture


Feminist scholars have long critiqued the crises of care, revealing how society devalues the very social reproductive labor that sustains it. The suburban ideal of the mid-20th century reinforced binary gender roles, where white women were confined to the single-family home while Black and Latina women served as invisible, and underpaid caregivers. Early feminist proposals in the domestic sphere, like the Frankfurt Kitchen, optimized labor without addressing the gendered division of labor roles. Feminists like Dolores Hayden and feminist architectural collectives like Matrix pushed back in the 1980s and 90s, imagining architecture as a tool for community and justice, not just efficiency or aesthetics. Black feminist theorist bell hooks reminds us that design is an act of care, one that can heal, empower, and make space for marginalized voices. Architects, then, must shift from serving capitalist systems to becoming stewards of radical care, shaping spaces that honor human and ecological interdependence.

learning from the WCRP


The WCRP emerged in the 1980s as a collective refusal by women in North Philadelphia resisting redlining and displacement. Since then, it has built homes, nonprofit spaces, and partnered with local groups like the Phroject to return land to community control. As founder Nora Lichtash explained, the organization formed in response to low income women, especially women of color, being pushed out of the city.

In 2024, I began attending WCRP housing design committee meetings, where tenants and designers treated participation as a form of resistance, shaping projects through surveys and “worst case, best case” demands. While initiatives like Take Back Vacant Land helped create the Philadelphia Land Bank, its slow processes, lack of transparency, and prioritization of market rate development have limited its impact, leaving true community control more aspirational than realized.

Their newest site, 315 West Cumberland Street, will hold 37 three-bedroom units, 4 four-bedrooms, and 2 two-bedrooms, housing for families in Fairhill in northeast Philadelphia. Their site wraps around the just finished construction of a four-story, market rate project with 22 units, on a site that measures a little over 8,000 sqft. 

4. Site Analysis Map of Fairhill

5.Policy, spatial, and development strategies were projected into a future in which local autonomy of land is valued and supported by the City of Philadelphia. Futures were projected from the History of the WCRP 



This project is both a network of urban care infrastructure and a speculative future for the WCRP. While the organization must focus on daily survival, this work builds on its knowledge to imagine a feminist future for Fairhill. The goals may seem ambitious but they are tangible, requiring change at federal, state, city, and community levels. Rather than privatized space, it proposes communal and sustained systems of care. The thesis is grounded in six feminist design tactics, including co producing infrastructure, reflecting embodied experiences in space, and cultivating solidarities between bodies, buildings, and land, drawing from the WCRP and feminist urbanists.


phase 1 

Phase 1 is about today’s realities: the land is mostly paved, with limited walkability. The 47 bus runs along Sixth Street, and food mainly comes from local corner stores, though crossing major roads to get to a grocery store is difficult. Most housing is rental rowhomes, and care infrastructure is limited to a few 9-to-5 programs. Green space is informal and often neglected.




phase 2 

Phase 2 begins planting seeds for change: pedestrian paths emerge through blocks, community members and the Philadelphia Orchard Project start planting food forests, and WCRP acquires land for secure, affordable housing. Care work grows with more commons-based initiatives, and neglected lots are transformed into pocket parks, plazas, and playgrounds.




phase 3 


Phase 3 is about reclaiming and thriving: streets prioritize pedestrians, a food pantry and kitchen support nourishment and learning, St. Edward's is reclaimed as a shelter, and new care infrastructure—including a clinic, classroom, mutual aid house, and makerspace—supports community autonomy and resilience.






We co-produce infrastructure


We reject the myth of the lone architect. Instead, we build coalitions rooted in mutual aid, time banks, and shared childcare. These aren’t just social programs—they’re spatial tactics. Vacant lots become commons. Laundromats become sites of exchange. Feminist spatial practice centers participation—at every phase. We make space with, not for.
We must:
  • Establish city-wide collective infrastructure projects
  • Allow community members and citizens self-determination of what gets built, when it gets built, and how it gets built
  • Invest in public transit and pedestrian-focused design
  • Create public-commons partnerships for democratic control of resources


6. All new structures across the site will not only be programmed by community, but built by the community using a modular construction system.

 
7. A Makerspace in Fairhill will be the epicenter of community creativity and construction of new programs 


We reflect embodied experiences in space


Care is not linear or efficient—it’s lived and ongoing. Maintenance, rest, and ritual shape space just as much as construction. A room becomes a refuge through intention and use. Cities are not blank slates, but layered with memory and struggle.
We must:

  • Guarantee universal childcare and caregiver support
  • Design public spaces that reject carcerality and foster everyday safety and belonging

8. St. Edward the Confessor has long stood as a site of community protection, with the neighborhood rallying around its unhoused residents for decades. Repurposing the abandoned church as supportive housing and services doesn't erase that history, but solidifies it.


We cultivate solidarities between bodies, buildings, and the land


Land holds memory. It is not neutral or empty—it’s active, living, and shaped by struggle. Our materials, like our labor, are part of a mutual web of care. Design must prioritize slowness, interdependence, and reciprocity.
We must:

    • Expand community land trusts
    • Support collective models of care, building, and ownership
    • Treat land as kin, not commodity





    We care for land as a shared inheritance



    Architecture must be oppositional—against speculation, against displacement, against extraction. We resist the failures of systems like the Land Bank by fighting for land justice.
    We must:
      • Reform the Philadelphia Land Bank to prioritize community groups
      • Eliminate councilmember prerogative to ensure land is allocated for self-determination
      • Legalize and protect community stewardship of vacant lands




      We root ourselves in the local, and let our vision grow




      Our work is grounded in collaboration with local organizations and activists, ensuring responsiveness to lived experiences while imagining transformation that grows across time.
      We must:

      • Prioritize CLTs in the Land Bank over developers
      • Establish a citywide office to coordinate and support community-led land efforts
      • Encourage cooperatively managed housing and care systems rooted in local knowledge







      We take on the labor of care as a shared act of sustaining life



      Care is not extra—it is infrastructure. Design must ask: who is cared for here, and who is forgotten? Feminist architecture is accountable, reciprocal, and sustaining.
      We must:

      • Recognize caregiving as essential labor
      • Guarantee universal childcare and caregiver leave
      • Support cooperative economies and mutual aid systems










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