NOMA Detroit Design Exhibition: Design Justice

The 2026 NOMA Detroit (NOMA-D) Design Justice Exhibition is intended to serve as a strategic conduit for knowledge and professional experience, intentionally designed to empower our local chapters and membership.

Our mission - to foster justice and equity in communities of color through outreach, community advocacy, professional development, and design excellence - finds its highest expression in the pursuit of Design Justice. By positioning this exhibition at the intersection of practice and advocacy, we seek to showcase architecture not as a passive backdrop, but as an active facilitator of social liberation, ensuring Detroit’s architecture and creative community is at the vanguard of an equitable urban future. This transition is vital because Detroit’s survival may depend on non-extractive, community-led outcomes that move beyond performance toward tangible resilience and the dismantling of structures that dehumanize and oppress marginalized populations.

The 2026 Exhibition seeks to prioritize Process and Historical Analysis as heavily as Final Outcomes. We believe the inclusive design process is primary to path of justice; by highlighting the journey, we hold the designer accountable to the community. We hope to explore a shift in the practitioner’s role from expert to facilitator, acknowledging that everyone is an expert in their own lived experience.

This mission demands a rigorous evaluation of our built environment, categorized into these five focus areas that represent the systemic layers that must be addressed to move the needle:

I. Economy: This pillar interrogates the role of design in an inclusive economic future, exploring models that provide the most opportunity for all inhabitants.

II. City Systems: City Systems pillar focuses on forward-thinking infrastructure and environmental policies that provide safe, inclusive, and efficient services across the city.

III. Housing: The Housing pillar examines innovative, accessible, and affordable residential models that prioritize sustainable lifestyle changes and inclusionary growth.

IV. Public Space: This pillar emphasizes public space as an inclusionary network that functions as the heart of civic life, regardless of scale.

V. Neighborhoods: The neighborhoods pillar focuses on community-driven urban design and the preservation of cultural assets to ensure residents can live, work, and relax within their own communities.

UN SUSTAINABILITY GOALS

We use Detroit's UNESCO City of Design designation as a call to action for Detroiters to embrace the Sustainable Development Goals in their own communities, contributing to the active effort of solving global interconnected issues.