This Black design collective is incubating the next generation of community builders
Across the United States, there is a long history of communities of color being underserved—if not outright oppressed—by the dominant modes of urban planning and development. But for the past 10 years, a collective of architects, designers, artists, and urban planners called BlackSpace has been rethinking how communities of color get designed and built. Now, the group is trying to build up the ranks of practitioners working alongside communities of color in the built environment to make sure their needs are no longer overlooked or ignored.
To spread this work through young and emerging firms, BlackSpace has launched Studio KIN (Kinfolx Imagining Neighborhoods), a business accelerator focused on bringing resources, funding, and community to Black-founded ventures that produce services and products focused on the built environment. The incubator’s first cohort has just been announced.
“When we think about spatial justice, we think a lot about how it’s realized through having the folks that are planning, designing, and building neighborhoods that reflect the places that they’re serving,” says Kenyatta McLean, co-managing director of BlackSpace. “We developed Studio KIN to be a home for those urbanists that are working to meet communities where they’re at.”
Members of BlackSpace’s Studio KIN cohort include an urban planning studio in Indianapolis, a community design firm in Oklahoma City, and a bookstore and community space in Brooklyn.
The focus of the accelerator is “interdisciplinary urbanist solutions that strengthen majority Black and majority multiracial neighborhoods,” says Emma Osore, co-managing director of BlackSpace.
The hole to fill is wide. There are roughly 1,000 zip codes across the U.S. that have majority Black populations, but fewer than 2% of them are considered prosperous. Osore says the goal of the accelerator is to help support the growth of locally based organizations that use place-based practices to increase prosperity for Black communities, particularly within Oklahoma City, Chicago, Indianapolis, and New York City.
“There’s rapid change in Black places in all of these cities, and there are very few people locally who understand urbanism from this people-centered, culturally rooted, and ethical point of view,” Osore says.
Having locally based design firms, for example, can help ensure projects are developed in ways that serve their communities over the long term. McLean notes that it’s not uncommon for a big national firm to come in to work on a well-meaning project in a Black neighborhood, only to leave once the contract is over. “What does that mean for the sustainability of that project? What does it mean for the communities that surround that neighborhood?” she says. “That’s another reason why we’re so interested and continue to be interested in folks that are locally rooted, because they will stay through the storms and also be there for the moments of sunshine that are happening.”
BlackSpace’s Studio KIN will operate like a typical business incubator, offering support and resources to organizations as they grow and mature. The first cohort is made up of small firms that are between three and five years old, and the accelerator will help them do things like build capacity for new work or help raise capital, as well as more mundane things like assisting with bookkeeping.
Members of Studio KIN’s cohort reflect the need for this kind of hyper-specific business incubator. For example, Open Design Collective is the first and only Black woman-led nonprofit design firm in Oklahoma, with a focus on architecture, planning, and cultural preservation. In Indianapolis, Rokh Research & Design Studio focuses on cultural equity by partnering with researchers, practitioners, and community members to understand lived experiences and introduce new policies and strategies for urban design.
The accelerator will run for 12 months, and BlackSpace’s program director Gabriella Malavé says the collective plans to have at least three cohorts over the next few years. The shape of the accelerator may shift as the organization gets to understand what members of its first cohort really need to grow and thrive. But the overall goal of the program is to help Black communities by establishing a wider network of urbanist practitioners focused specifically on their unique needs.
“Our mission has always been to have opportunities for urbanists to co-create spatial change in partnership with Black communities and to strengthen Black communities,” Osore says. “So this is really a sort of a renaissance for BlackSpace.”