Challenging Patterns of Supremacy

This book is a transcript, a conversation, a guide, an example, a reference, an archive, and hopefully many more things to many people. It takes, as a point of departure, the transcript of a lecture by the five of us (Bz Zhang, Lisa C. Henry, Shalini Agrawal, Shawhin Roudbari, and Tonia Sing Chi), members of the collective Dark Matter U , given in September 2022 at the University of California, Berkeley, College of Environmental Design, at the invitation of Berkeley architecture students. Following the lecture, we hosted a workshop where we applied frameworks that addressed power structures and issues identified by students from both Berkeley and the California College of the Arts. After these events, we held two virtual panels with DMU organizers from across the country in dialogue with Master of Architecture students.

The original lecture represents both our individual perspectives as five members of DMU as well as the collective work and insights of hundreds of built environment practitioners, scholars, students, and organizers. The text incorporates perspectives from additional DMU collective members who were not present in the lecture hall. Here we expand on the lecture with additional references, build on it through a series of exercises to support activism and reflection, and experiment with the book as a medium—in both form and content—for challenging patterns of supremacy. We invite you to join us in the margins and take space across entire pages (and beyond them) in shaping these conversations, and we look forward to imagining and building the futures and worlds we have been dreaming of together.