52 Distillation Guidebook Co-Lab • 9.18–9.19 2025 Landscape Architecture Department and Senior Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs and Community Engagement at the University of Virginia) wrote in his Meds and Eds booklet feature that: “Universities are uniquely positioned to slow things down, create space for learning, and support relationships that aren’t driven solely by immediate outcomes or market pressures.” I could not write more succinctly how these qualities, among others, lend the university toward fostering relationships between designers and communities and supporting the kinds of cross-pollination I have described above. As a student working within communityengaged methods, I see the ways in which it clearly acts toward good: redefining expertise, producing empathetic and justice-focused designers, or protecting the socialspatial realities that are meaningful for community life. But there were less expected ways in which the project’s combination of method and content induced new ways of seeing. My experience of either community engagement, or of disability studies, would be completely different if they had not taken place together. For me, the combination has redefined what it means to create the space of a “project” in the first place, taking seriously what is afforded between the tools, structures of thought, and relationships that we carve as a practice, as we attempt to create a more equitable world.
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