Collaborations in Architecture and Sociology

This book, by an architect and a sociologist, addresses the disconnect between the design of the built environment and social life and lays out a pathway for interdisciplinary engagement.

Through this scholarly collaboration, the authors create a new interdisciplinary orientation and methodology, termed SOCIOARC, that recognizes the relationship of the built form and aesthetics to social experience. Shifting between the architectural and sociological imaginations, it provides a strategy for rethinking the nature of the “objectives” of the research enterprise and the “objects” that designers create. This approach opens up possibilities for design and sociology to together inform new and more just ways of making and occupying space. The first part of the book examines the methodologies and conceptual lenses of architecture and sociology in parallel. The authors then tether together complementary approaches to offer a new transdisciplinary practice for researching and designing the built environment. A collection of tried-and-tested exercises is provided to enable students and practitioners to employ this approach in their work.

Accessibly written and illustrated, this book will be an essential resource for undergraduate- and graduate-level students of sociology, architecture, urban design, landscape architecture, and planning, and all those interested in shaping a more just, equitable society through our built environment.

Author Biography

Anita Bakshi teaches in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Rutgers University. She has a PhD in Architecture from Cambridge University with the Conflict in Cities research program. At parties as a child, she would ask her aunties for paper plates on which she would draw buildings and people. In high school she drew many versions of city plans of her dream community in spiral bound notebooks. This fascination with buildings and social life has stayed with her and informed her scholarly work on place and memory, contested cities, and environmental justice.

Zaire Z. Dinzey-Flores is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Latino & Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University. She has a PhD in Public Policy and Sociology and a Masters in Urban Planning from the University of Michigan. Her interest in the built environment and its interaction with social inequality came from observing and experiencing the many ways in which race and class are codified in the spaces of her native Caribbean. Her research examines how the social becomes spatialized, particularly in housing and neighborhood policy and design, and the consequences of such spatializations for the prospects of equity across the Americas.