Angela Davis (1944–) (2024)

The work of the abolitionist and civil rights activist is a cornerstone for architects advocating spatial justice

Angela Davis is the recipient of the Ada Louise Huxtable Prize for Contribution to Architecture 2024, part of the 2024 W Awards. Read the full announcement

Calls to ‘defund the police’, abolish the penal system and demolish prisons most recently entered mainstream consciousness during the 2020 racial justice protests in the United States. Such slogans may at first seem provocative and radical. Some might even dismiss them as disruptive, irrational and unrealistic. Nevertheless, for almost six decades Angela Davis (1944–) has demanded we challenge the carceral logics that lay the blueprint for modern societies. She stands firm in her belief that reimagining justice through the abolition of prisons also means transforming into a society that no longer relies on the repressive effects of violence.

Born in 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama, Davis grew up in a society where segregation was racial, spatial, and upheld and protected by civic society and law enforcement; Jim Crow racial segregation laws were still enforced. Every aspect of life was ‘separate but equal’, and transgressions were routinely policed or met with violence, many times deadly. This early life experience of segregation and racial terror encouraged her to demonstrate how space and the built environment are integral to combating all forms of oppression, and how all struggles for justice are also spatial struggles.

In 1969, at the age of 25, Davis was hired as an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her first lecture attracted more than 2,000 students, but she was fired after only a brief period for being a member of the Communist Party. Later that same year, firearms registered in her name surfaced in an investigation connected to a courtroom kidnapping that resulted in four deaths. Already under tremendous political scrutiny and harassment, she went underground. Overnight, she became an outlaw, and a national manhunt followed before she was detained two months later in New York City. After her arrest, ‘Free Angela’ became a global movement, and by February 1971 more than 200 local committees in the US, and 67 organisations elsewhere, worked to free her from jail, led by, among others, her sister Fania. In 1972, after 16 months of incarceration, the state allowed her release on bail.

Her own experience of incarceration was the pivot for Davis’s own scholarship on prison abolition, which has become the central focus of her political activism over the past decades. Davis firmly believes that the prison system cannot simply be reformed; instead, she insists it must be abolished. Abolition is more about rebuilding than about dismantling. Instead of asking how, in a future without prisons, the punishment of crimes should be dealt with, abolitionists such as Davis ask how to resolve inequalities and fight for appropriate resources. Abolition means not just the removal of prisons, but the presence instead of vital systems of support that have been eroded, calling for government investment in jobs, education, housing and healthcare.

‘The abolitionist models for justice that Angela Davis has advocated throughout her career can inform how spaces are designed’

In early work and interviews, Davis developed the concept of the ‘prison industrial complex’ and traces the prison system’s racist roots to the southern plantations; although slavery was abolished in 1865, it is still thriving in US jails thanks to the 13th Amendment making a special allowance for penal labour. The documentary 13th, directed by Ava DuVernay in 2016, opens with a speech in which Barack Obama states: ‘The United States is home to five per cent of the world’s population, but 25 per cent of the world’s prisoners. Think about that.’ DuVernay’s film is much influenced by the work of Davis and other abolitionists, and maps out the creation of the current system of mass incarceration and, effectively, the re‑enslavement of predominantly racialised bodies.

Architect and scholar Mabel O Wilson argues in her essay ‘Carceral Architectures’ from 2016 that the ‘gap in understanding the implications of incarceration’s impact on black and Hispanic Americans may have to do in part with who designs prisons’, but critically it is also ‘influenced by architecture’s own genealogy in racialised modern discourses of history and science’. Disproportionally affecting the black community, who are imprisoned roughly five times the rate of white Americans, the prison is the most obvious architectural expression of a structurally racist system. For architects who are concerned about reproducing carceral architectures, dismantling racism depends on transforming the built environment; it is with the prison that such dismantling must begin.

In the lineage of black feminist thinkers, Davis is one of the most prominent. Black feminism is abolitionist and therefore reveals the connections between state violence and violence in the intimate sphere, between prisons and domestic abuse and control, and between local and global structures for support, care and organising. In Abolition. Feminism. Now., published in 2022, Davis, her life partner Gina Dent, Beth Richie and Erica Meiners write: ‘Justice, in the form that we know it, is always designed to deal with one individual case, leaving all the structures intact that are responsible for the reproduction of that violence.’ Instead, they see ‘justice as transformative: transforming not only individuals but transforming our societies … That in the same way we have to learn how to think in structural terms about racism, we also have to think in structural terms about gender violence’.

As an abolitionist, Davis is also one of the most insistent critics of settler colonialism as an ongoing system of power that perpetuates the genocide and repression of indigenous peoples and cultures, and normalises continuous settler occupation, displacement through settlement, and exploitation of indigenous peoples and lands. Throughout the years, she has shown how settler colonial systems perpetuate inequalities and injustices spatially, embedded in the social fabric and the institutions that underpin our societies. In Freedom is a Constant Struggle, written in 2016, Davis offers radical black struggles as a model for other struggles for liberation around the globe, connecting the protests which erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, after the death of Michael Brown at the hands of a police officer in 2014, as well as other historical black radical struggles, primarily to settler colonialism in Palestine.

‘Black solidarity with Palestine allows us to understand the nature of contemporary racism more deeply,’ Davis argued in an online event hosted by Black Women Radicals in October 2023. For Davis, our relationship to Palestine says a great deal about our capacity to respond to complex contemporary issues, whether concerning imperialism, settler colonialism, global racism, transphobia, hom*ophobia or the climate. If we are not prepared to think critically about what is happening in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Davis argues, ‘we will not only be unprepared to understand and address the issues emanating from the current crisis, but we will also not be able to understand the world around us, in relation to the many struggles for justice and freedom all over the globe’. Today, Davis uses the phrase ‘abolitionist imagination’ to describe the mentality needed to see beyond current forms of law enforcement. In an interview with the New York Times, Davis explained the importance of imagination to her politics: ‘The abolitionist imagination delinks us from that which is. It allows us to imagine other ways of addressing issues of safety and security.’

For decades, Davis has promoted feminist thinking that pushes back against hypermasculine forms of political leadership and resistance. She sees this taking hold in recent radical organising among younger generations, such as the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements, which have moved beyond recognisable leadership and broken new ground in forming leaderless movements. For Davis, notions of what counts as radical have also changed over time. In recent years, her attitude to activism has been transformed by the influence of her sister Fania Davis. Fania Davis has advocated for decades that justice not only be transformative but also restorative, and describes restorative justice as ‘a justice that seeks not to punish, but to heal’. Fania’s move from a hyper‑aggressive stance towards spirituality and healing initially caused a rift between the two sisters, but today Davis considers restorative justice integral to her activism.

The work of both Angela and Fania Davis has informed many architects’ spatial practice. Oakland‑based architect Deanna Van Buren, with her team at the non‑profit Designing Justice + Designing Spaces (DJDS), designs alternatives to prisons that promote healing instead of punishment, such as Restore Oakland, one of the first centres for restorative justice, and the LOVE Building in Detroit, which brings social justice non‑profits under one roof. For Van Buren, new building types need to be imagined in order to bring change.

In 2014, Architects / Designers / Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR), based in San Francisco, filed a petition with the American Institute of Architects (AIA), calling on the organisation to censure member architects who design solitary‑confinement cells and death chambers. It was not until September 2020 that the AIA in New York (AIANY) finally responded to the demand and called on architects to stop designing prisons, detention centres and police stations. ‘We instead urge our members to shift their efforts towards supporting the creation of new systems, processes and typologies based on prison reform, alternatives to imprisonment, and restorative justice,’ reads the statement. It urges architects to no longer design ‘unjust, cruel or harmful spaces of incarceration within the current United States justice system’. New York is the first chapter in the AIA to take this position. The decision came after a wave of demands, not only from ADPSR, but also from organisations across the nation such as DJDS and the Design as Protest collective, who argued architects have an obligation to protect health, safety and welfare through the spaces they design.

Davis’s invaluable contribution to architecture is her assertion that, while abolitionist imagination might begin with the role of punishment in our societies, it is not simply about dismantling prisons. She shows how abolitionism is feminist: it is a transformative and a creative project that asks architects to imagine and design alternative forms for justice. As architects, we must therefore ask ourselves, if we don’t wish to perpetuate the white supremacist values that underpin carceral logics and architectures, what kind of values do we wish to organise around? The abolitionist models for justice that Angela Davis has advocated throughout her career can inform how spaces are designed, in a way that not only rethinks punishment, but also envisions alternatives for justice that focus on values of care, healing and repair.

Lead illustration: Diana Ejaita