A first-of-its-kind community center, Restore Oakland is 20,000-square-foot building in Oakland, California, filled with tenants that offer legal services, shared workspaces, and job training facilities, all aimed at offering local residents access to resources and creating a safe, secure neighborhood. Designed by nonprofit architecture and real estate development firm Designing Justice + Designing Spaces, Restore Oakland also does something greater: By creating a typology and infrastructure that facilitate restorative justice and advance economic opportunity, it's providing an innovative model for a baseline approach to ending mass incarceration. Such empathic spaces offer a paradigm shift in how we address crime and offer access to resources.

Designing Justice + Designing Spaces set out to emphasize a welcoming, nurturing vibe through design. Photo: Emily Hagopian

DSDJ's work at-large—which includes peacemaking centers, mobile resource centers, and housing for people coming out of incarceration—counters the traditional adversarial and punitive architecture of justice (think: courthouses, prisons, and jails). Instead, its designs focus on fostering restorative justice (which emphasizes repairing harm, rather than punishment), rehabilitation, and community building. By addressing the root causes of mass incarceration—poverty, racism, unequal access to resources, and the criminal justice system itself—a building such as Restore Oakland becomes a forward-thinking iteration of what justice can look like from the ground up, by starting, literally, with a foundation for safe, secure communities.

“We build what we believe,” says Deanna Van Buren, cofounder of DJDS. “If we believe in punishment and retribution, we literally build it in concrete and steel. If we believe that some members of society are less valuable than others, we build that hatred into the design of our cities.” A negative approach to design, she says, amplifies those beliefs and foments them, “making it hard to ever create a just, equitable society for all.”