SIMONE DELANEY

Portrait courtesy of Simone Delaney.

Intern at SCAPE (New Orleans office)

University of Waterloo, School Honors, Bachelor of Architectural Studies '21

Simone Delaney is a fourth-year undergraduate student at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture. She is a member of Treaty Lands, Global Stories, and a Academic Organizer of Design as Protest Collective. As part of the long-settled Afro-Canadian community of Black Loyalists in the Maritimes, she is particularly invested in struggles against systemic anti-Black racial injustices and ecocide in the Canadian built environment. Growing up partially in Montreal, she has also participated in public programming, mentorship, and community-based programming, and pacifist intervention work in Little Burgundy, the center of the anglophone Black community. Throughout her co-op terms, she has had the opportunity to work on community-oriented public space projects in disinherited Black communities in North America and Belgium. She also spent a term exploring non-Western urbanisms and participatory disaster mapping at a research-oriented office in Jakarta, Indonesia. Simone hopes to integrate critical studies of race and ecology with community organizing in her future design work.

My History, My Voice, and the Call for Collective Action

What is your favorite dish?

Mie Aceh, a Sumatran noodle dish my Indonesian coworkers introduced me to.

What is your favorite song by a Black artist?

"Dilemme” by Lous and the Yakuza

Three additional facts about Simone:

1. I can only snap backwards.

2. My favorite tree is the red mangrove.

3. I love hiking volcanoes!

What inspired you to study architecture? 

My original motivations to study architecture in high school weren’t very deep. At the time I was especially passionate about visual arts and my family was heavily invested in the Canadian arts community. However, I was also quite well-rounded, seeing equal value in arts, sciences, and humanities. I didn’t want to limit myself to one subject area, so choosing a design education was partly just a matter of choosing an interdisciplinary field for me.

Exterior view of Isuma School for Northern Communications in Kuujjuaq, Nunavik for a third year design studio in collaboration with Vanessa Sokic. Photo courtesy of Simone Delaney.

That being said, I don’t think my initial motivations align with the values that have led me to continue studying architecture throughout my degree. There have been many moments that I wanted to leave the discipline because of the deeply embedded biases and injustices in architectural practice. I was actually quite despondent after going back to Montreal after first year to work in public programming and community-based intervention for a summer in Little Burgundy, the city’s historic anglophone Black community. I felt that I might end up letting my own people down when I returned to Montreal from design school, because my new spatial perspective made me hyper-aware of how the anglophone Black community undergone several huge waves of gentrification and “urban renewal” schemes set out by the city of Montreal over the past few decades. I also became increasingly aware of how cultural erasure and manipulation of collective memory could take place in public space. Many former community hubs had been torn down within the past thirty years. At that point I had never even met a Black architect, so simply continuing to exist within the profession began to feel like an act of resistance.

Interior view of Isuma School for Northern Communications in Kuujjuaq, Nunavik for a third year design studio in collaboration with Vanessa Sokic. Photo courtesy of Simone Delaney.

Name a Black architect/artist who most influenced you as an emerging professional?

I am rarely exposed to Black artists within my formal education, so most of my greatest influences are people I came across in informal settings. Octavia Butler is probably my greatest inspiration right now. Many of her Afrofuturist writings seem prophetic today. Although her works are fictional, speculative futurities imagined by Black creatives are essential precedents for Black designers. After all, the design process requires collective envisioning of the future.

Walking through Seattle Central Library. Photo courtesy of Simone Delaney.

Name a favorite project completed by a Black Designer. Why is it your favorite?

My favorite project (although not yet constructed) is Sara Zewde’s memorialization of Valongo Wharf, a slaver port constructed in 18th century Rio de Janeiro. She used her background in landscape architecture to explore Black ecologies. The natural world is intricately tied to the ancestral experiences of all colonized peoples, and Sara was among the first landscape architects I came across who truly challenged the legitimacy of European understandings of land and ecology. The landscape architecture profession rarely recognizes the importance of Indigenous worldviews in defining human relationships to land, and it fails to recognize the significance of monocrop cash crop plantations - harvested at the expense of Black humanity - as an oppressive form of imposed colonial relationships to land. At its root, the current climate crisis is the culmination of centuries of colonialism. In the Americas, both Black and Indigenous women have inherited and lived experiences that will help us see through Eurocentric concepts of ecology going forward. Reading about Sara’s work on Valongo Wharf helped me realize that in a very visceral way.

Simone’s grandmother holding her during a visit with her extended Black Loyalist family. Photo courtesy of Simone Delaney.

How does your culture, ethnicity, and/or race affect your studies and the way you design?

Growing up in a multi-racial family in New Brunswick was especially significant in recognizing divides within the built environment. The contrast was stark. The white euro-settler branch of my family inherited property on pristine land around Fredericton for multiple generations, continuing to live privileged lives to this day. In contrast, my Black Loyalist family has lived in housing projects and low-income areas for generations in Saint John, the industrial port town of the province. It is heavily poisoned by airborne emissions and effluent dumpings of Irving Oil’s refinery and paper mill. These injustices are inherited from the colonial era. Despite being promised land when relocating to present-day Atlantic Canada from below the 49th parallel, most Black Loyalists were either denied ownership or provided with uncultivable plots. The Black community has subsequently been subject to centuries of state-sanctioned ecocide and displacement (the most famous of which is Halifax’s Africville).

I inherited the ancestral place-based traumas of my Black family. However, I also developed a deep awareness of my privilege growing up due to my proximity to whiteness. The multiplicities of my identity provided me with two perspectives from a young age. I see plural perspectives as an essential component of communal co-creation throughout in design processes. I am interested in helping to foster a design process that centers the collective voices of the many over the singular voices of the few.

Visiting Iqaluit, Nunavut on a studio research trip with Waterloo classmates. Photo courtesy of Simone Delaney.

Are there any organizations that helped you grow in architecture? How did they help you grow?

“Treaty Lands, Global Stories” at the UW School of Architecture has also been an important group for me. Founded in 2016 by three graduate students (Amina Lalor, Paniz Moayeri, and Samuel Ganton), they were among the first to release a formalized call to action against the Eurocentric curricula of architecture schools at the national scale in Canada. This began during the first year of my undergraduate degree, and it set an amazing precedent for ways to engage against a huge network of ivory towers. Later in my undergraduate degree, I have become more heavily involved with the group, and we were able to host “Breaking Foundations” in the fall term of 2020. This was a cross-institutional roundtable about ongoing movements for justice in design education, and it featured representatives from ten architecture schools across present-day Canada.

More recently, Design as Protest has become an especially important group of people for me. I recently joined the academic organizing group. A lot of racialized designers engaged in activism feel quite isolated, and the wider profession feels quite hostile when engaging in activist labor. Being able to grow collectively with a caring community of BIPOC designers has been important both maintain my sanity and to develop values deeply rooted in collective power.

Neither of these groups is really formal “organizations”, but non-hierarchical and informal networks have proven to be the most valuable to me.

Presenting site and ecology research with Sarah Mason. Photo courtesy of Simone Delaney.

Tell us about the publication, here & now. What inspired you to participate as a team member? What do you hope the publication achieves?

“here & now” was a zine developed in conjunction with the third volume of “Galt.”, a design publication run by Waterloo Architecture students. Following widespread student calls to anti-racism action within the school, the team realized the importance of having a separate publication specific to current calls for justice happening within the school. Although the majority of students at Waterloo Architecture are not white, the vast majority of the faculty and staff remains straight-identifying cis white men. The Eurocentric and often outright harmful course materials reflects this, as do the day-to-day experiences of BIPOC students within the institution. Annika Babra, a member of the “Galt.” team, reached out to a small group of motivated students from outside the publication. I joined in the hopes of helping the team make a powerful collective statement against the current eurocentric culture of our design school. More importantly, it was a platform created exclusively to elevate the voices of underrepresented emerging designers, and we hoped to create a safe space for these students to share their experiences within our own institution. Students were given the option of submitting anonymously to protect their identities, and submissions included single sentence anecdotes, visual art pieces, personal reflections, and academic essays.

My biggest hope is for the publication to help maintain the momentum of calls for anti-racism at Waterloo Architecture. This was first established by students in 2016 with the founding of “Treaty Lands, Global Stories”, and saw a resurgence in the spring of 2020 due to the police lynchings of Black and Indigenous community members such as Regis Korchinski-Paquet, an Afro-Indigenous woman thrown off a 24th floor balcony in Toronto. This zine not only serves as public record of the experiences of racialized students within our school, but also acts as a collective call for institutional accountability from the student body.

In October 2020, Simone co-hosted “Breaking Foundations”, a cross-institutional roundtable about ongoing movements for justice in design education, with Niara van Gaalen. Photo courtesy of Simone Delaney.

If you were able to talk to your younger self, what would you say? 

I used to be reserved to the point that I never felt I could openly express my true thoughts. Going through middle school and high school in a rural province was quite alienating. Although my Black Loyalist family had been in the Maritimes since 1783, I was almost always the only Black student in my classes. I would want to reassure my younger self to go through life without shame and to dismantle my fears of being outspoken. I never truly began to develop this openness until university, but I can now reflect on how deeply liberating this can be.

While on a term in Jakarta, Simone visited Mount Bromo in Central Java.

Hiking Mount Ijen in East Java, Indonesia.

Photo courtesy of Simone Delaney.

What would you want to say to the next generation of aspiring Black women architects?

Although discomforting, it is quite common to feel friction within the design profession. That response might never leave you. For many Black women, imposter syndrome is a response to existing in a profession that actively negates your humanity. It is through this friction that students and emerging professionals develop critical consciousness deeply lacking in this unjustly designed world. While it is important to engage in design justice initiatives, it is equally important to protect your mental and physical health. Your voice is important and no one wants you to burn out!

Longitudinal section of “Taddle Creek Transformative Justice Center” for a fourth-year design studio. Photo courtesy of Simone Delaney.