About
Educated as an architect, planner, and urban researcher, Lyndsey Deaton is principally an urbanist, whose specialty is the study of policies, the urban design of public space, and community health. As a peer-reviewed measure of significance, Lyndsey’s research with adolescents received the Environmental Design Research Association’s Great Places Award for Research and the Architecture Research Center’s Consortium King Medal for Research Excellence. Pedagogically, Dr. Deaton teaches a range of courses spanning lectures, studios, and seminars. At Clemson University, she is an Assistant Professor of Architecture within the Architecture + Health NAAB-accredited graduate program. She also teaches professionals at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Learning Center, an accredited higher education institution. Dr. Deaton firmly believes in the benefits to her students of practicing as a Senior Architect and Planner at The Urban Collaborative LLC, an international planning and architecture firm. Over her career, she has worked on 70+ master plans, 20+ architectural designs, 50+ policies and codes all with diverse communities across six continents receiving 21 awards. She started her career in healthcare design with Gresham, Smith, and Partners and then transitioned into project engineering, most notably for the USACE Martin Army Medical Center ($389M). She has continued in healthcare and laboratory design with notable customers such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Visit Dr. Deaton's Department Profile.
How their research is transforming health care
Deaton brings a unique combination of theoretical scholarship (community health), professional experience (healthcare design), and technical expertise (sustainability and construction). Her research connects policies to urban designs revealing the impacts to underprivileged groups such as children and women. This broad framework in social sustainability and community health is a backdrop for her professional experience, which includes significant work in the community design, laboratories, and healthcare facilities. Her research focuses on the intersection of age, gender, and economic inequality in the built environments—a discourse attributed to ‘spatial justice.’ Originating with Soja (2010) and Harvey (1973), she views spatial justice through a community health lens, looking at the consequences of the organization of space on social sustainability (e.g., dispossession, privatization of public lands, accessibility, etc.). Within the spatial justice discourse, she explores the dialectic relationship between economic disenfranchisement and the architectural settings that affect community health in the face of rapid urbanization. She generally takes a historical perspective underscoring vectors of power and political influences to describe contemporary built environments and rely on inductive and participatory methodologies to develop conclusions. Considering all her past research projects together, her contribution to transforming health research are participatory studies with low-income communities that highlight experiences of underprivileged groups such as children and women. To date, this work has resulted in peer-reviewed publications including Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, Ethno-Architecture and the Politics of Migration, and Whose Tradition?, in addition to over 20 papers published in conference proceedings.
Health research keywords
Faculty Scholar, Community health, urban design, gender, dispossession, healthy community planning, evidence-based design, healing environments, healthcare facilities design, sustainable environments, spatial justice, children’s environments, nature
