“We merged sociology and architecture to create SOCIOARC, a process of aesthetic and substantive reconciliation to arrive at just and beautiful places, as collectively defined. In SOCIOARC the “good” and the “just” is not prescriptive and has no predetermined shape or form. Rather, the “just,” the “good,” and the “beautiful is defined through a dynamic iterative process that invites different positions and voices to come together. SOCIOARC is also an epistemological, methodological, and practical framework for studying and producing the built environment. Epistemology refers to the frames of knowing that we bring to our work: how we evaluate what we see, thereby laying the groundwork for how we act on the world. This attention that we bring to the world is shaped by our social and cultural identities, as well as our disciplinary trainings (in this case in architecture and sociology). SOCIOARC seeks to unsettle siloed ways of seeing and imagining the world, in order to see through a new shared lens. Epistemology shapes the methods we favor and use. Therefore, the first step of the guided SOCIOARC approach is to look again, through new lenses, at an expanded architecture and sociology, in order to be ready for the methods described in the second part of the book.

This requires sociologists and architects to engage in a process and a methodology that draws from the community, and from culture, and from people to design the built environment in a new SOCIOARC way. Bringing the sociologist and architect together gestures towards a specific kind of product. This is not about just making a community healthier, or more efficient, or nicer. It is about thinking of the elements, processes, and methods that could produce a more just, social, creative, and innovative design. ”

— Bakshi & Dinzey-Flores - Collaborations in Architecture & Sociology