Deanna Van Buren was drawn to architecture before she even heard the term. As the only Black family living in a white Virginia neighborhood, she often found herself playing alone — spending many hours in her basement building cities out of refrigerator boxes and Tinkertoys.
The young Van Buren would go on to become an architect who designed luxury shopping malls, upscale office buildings and even an acclaimed video game. But throughout her career and life, she increasingly felt called to use her talents to create true change in the world around her.
Today Van Buren, 49, is an architect-artist-activist who creates spaces in the spirit of restorative justice. She works to end mass incarceration by designing physical environments that support programs to address the underlying causes, whether it be poverty, racism, a lack of access to education, a dearth of role models or the criminal justice system itself.
Where the U.S. criminal justice system is developed around jail time and other punishments as deterrents, restorative justice seeks to repair the tear in the relationships between the people impacted by crime by understanding victims’ needs and holding the accused accountable in a way that addresses those needs.
The goal of Van Buren’s restorative justice spaces are twofold: Create a space for community members to come together, to learn, and to support one another so people don’t enter the criminal justice in the first place. And if a crime is committed, everyone involved can be encouraged to come together at the center in the spirit of reconciliation.
“From an architect’s point of view, the built environment really impacts us,” Van Buren told Know Your Value in an interview. “We’ve manifested our values, which includes structural racism, into the architecture around us. It matters for us to create spaces that promote wellness and that are built in an equitable way.”
Van Buren is one of the leading activists seeking to unbuild the punitive system and develop a new one around restorative justice — around people coming together, having dialogue and trying to work toward a reconciliation — through her firm Designing Justice + Designing Spaces, which she co-founded with developer Kyle Rawlins. The community spaces DJDS has designed include Restore Oakland, which in 2019 became the first American center dedicated to restorative justice and restorative economics.
Restore Oakland has become a community hub, welcoming people in with its brightly colored exterior. Inside, the center provides community members with all kinds of resources in intentionally designed spaces: Sun-drenched rooms where community groups and clubs can scribble plans on chalkboard-paint walls. Cozy chairs lining the hallway where friends might bump into one another. Conference tables where an executive can offer business skills training or interview tips to local jobseekers. Intimate, comfortable, private spaces where victims of a crime and the accused might come together to talk, and to heal.
The current American criminal justice system has led to mass incarceration — particularly of Black and Latino people, Van Buren said. According to a 2021 report from The Sentencing Project, Black Americans are incarcerated in state prisons at nearly five times the rate of white Americans, while for Latinos it’s 1.3 times. Nationwide, one in 81 Black adults in the U.S. is currently in state prison. In 12 states, more than half the prison population is Black.
“The messaging I got as a young person was that the criminal justice system is not for you. My dad would say driving past the courthouse, ‘You never want to be there. It’s not fair to Black people,’” Van Buren said. “So when I heard about restorative justice, it was like, wait a damn minute. This is justice: this repair and healing.”
Beyond Restore Oakland, Van Buren helped lead the design of the Near Westside Peacemaking Center in Syracuse, New York, including Native American peacemaking processes and inmate feedback into the framework. Other projects include spaces designed for community programs through the nonprofits Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth and Writer’sCorps, as well as workshops in prisons nationwide and a toolkit for reimagining institutional spaces like prisons.
Van Buren had detailed her vision two years before founding DJDS in a 2017 TED talk that went viral, inviting people to imagine a world without prisons. It wasn’t a path she could have foreseen as a child, when restorative justice wasn’t a term, much less a concept. But as she looks back over her career, she can connect the dots.
There was no “lightbulb moment” when Van Buren decided she would use her architecture skills to be an activist, she explained. Rather, it was the slow burn of being a Black person moving through the U.S. and later the world at large. As a child, when she wasn’t working with her Tinkertoys in that white Virginia neighborhood, she was visiting family who lived in Black communities in Queens and in Raleigh.








