Deanna Van Buren

Activist, architect, artist

Deanna Van Buren is an architect who designs spaces for peacemaking, inside and out.

Why you should listen

After practicing as a corporate architect for 12 years, Deanna Van Buren left her job to become an activist architect, and for the past six years she has been designing restorative justice centers instead of prisons in order to end the age of mass incarceration. She's the co-founder and design director of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces, based in Oakland, California. She's also interested in designing virtual spaces for peacemaking and was the lead architect for The Witness.

Deanna Van Buren’s TED Talk

Deanna Van Buren
What a world without prisons could look like
15 minutes 9 seconds
Deanna Van Buren designs restorative justice centers that, instead of taking the punitive approach used by a system focused on mass incarceration, treat crime as a breach of relationships and justice as a process where all stakeholders come together to repair that breach. With help and ideas from incarcerated men and women, Van Buren is creating dynamic spaces that provide safe venues for dialogue and reconciliation; employment and job training; and social services to help keep people from entering the justice system in the first place. "Imagine a world without prisons," Van Buren says. "And join me in creating all the things that we could build instead."
Posted Mar 2018

Deanna Van Buren

Why you should listen

Deanna Van Buren’s TED Talk

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