The Nexus: Season Two
African American Design Nexus
The Nexus is a podcast that explores the intersection of design, identity, and practice through conversations with Black designers, writers, and educators. As hosts, students Tara Oluwafemi and Darien Carr push the understanding of the boundaries of design in the most expansive ways possible. This StoryMap provides a geospatial preview for our season two listeners, featuring Amir Hall and Marisa Parham , Justin Garrett Moore , Rob Problak Gibbs , Tiara Hughes , Dmitri Julius , Sekou Cooke , Dana Mckinney & Lesley Lokko . Read to uncover the projects that galvanize our podcast guests and embody their prolific work.
Esri technology used: ArcGIS Pro, Online, and StoryMaps.
Amir Hall and Marisa Parham
In our first episode this season:
We talked to Amir Hall - an Interdisciplinary Artist and Writer, and Dr. Marisa Parham - a professor, Director for the African American Digital Humanities Initiative, and Associate Director for the Maryland Institute for Technology and the Humanities. Parham’s current teaching and research projects focus on texts and technologies that problematize time, space, and bodily materiality assumptions.
Dr. Parham is particularly interested in how such terms share a history of increasing complexity in literary and cultural texts produced by African Americans and how they also offer ways of thinking about intersectional approaches to digital humanities and technology studies.
Tara, Amir, and Marisa discuss their earliest interactions that brought a sense of identity from technology. Each speaker shared their personal and professional connections to technology and how technology, surveillance, and privacy can be a barrier and or an enabler to expressing identity.
The internet is a vital tool that connects technology and people to information, work, and other resources. As an essential part of the economy, personal computer ownership could indicate a level of opportunity and access, as shown in the map on the right.
Map information from the American Community Survey (ACS, 2022).
Justin Garrett Moore
In this episode :
We connected with Justin Garrett Moore, a Design Justice lecturer at Yale University, Commissioner - of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, and Inaugural Program Officer - Humanities in Place at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. At the Mellon Foundation, his work focuses on advancing equity, inclusion, and social justice through place-based initiatives, built environments, cultural heritage projects, digital and ephemeral programs, and commemorative spaces and landscapes.
Justin's story started from his early days growing up on the Northside of Indianapolis. His work on Urban Patch - a family-run social enterprise, is motivated by work people like his grandfather, Albert Allen Moore, an Urbanist, had done many years ago to improve food, place, the environment, housing, and development in Black communities. Similarly, Justin carries that work forward through Urban Patch. He shares the importance of history - unlearning whiteness and recovering knowledge lost to erasure, process, and adapting to change from a local perspective.
America's inner cities have suffered years of disinvestment and neglect, resulting in high property vacancies, depressed property values, and foreclosures. This is the scope and scale of the challenges that Urban Patch was established to address.
The map here reveals the high property vacancies around where Justin grew up in Indianapolis.
Map data from IndyGIS.
Rob Problak Gibbs
In this episode :
We talked to Rob Problak Gibbs, a visual artist and organizer who has transformed the cultural landscape in Boston through Graffiti art since the early '90s. Gibbs grew up in Roxbury, Massachusetts, during the hip-hop golden age and was in his teens when he found that the power of graffiti was a powerful form of self-expression. In 1991, Gibbs co-founded Artists For Humanity, an arts nonprofit that hires and teaches youth creative skills ranging from painting to screen printing to 3D model making.
Beyond his personal art practice, Gibbs details the origins of his work as a community activist, organizer, and mentor through his non-profit organization Artists for Humanity , which hires and teaches local youth creative skills.
More importantly, in this episode, he shares his passion for storytelling and how his inner griot comes alive through his work. He also speaks to the sense of belonging graffiti writing provides. His portraits, characters, letters, and background show how communities exist. The new landmarks he makes help reclaim space, celebrate Black culture, and create a place for communities to enjoy and find representation.
The overlaying maps showing graffiti locations and reported graffiti incidences in NYC police precincts indicate varying levels of reporting or even trust in law enforcement.
Graffiti data from Mary Preston_EGTC
Tiara Hughes
In this episode :
We talked with Tiara Hughes, a Senior Urban Designer at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), an adjunct professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, a Commissioner with the City of Chicago Landmarks Commission, and a real estate professional. She is a devoted activist, educator, and advocate for underrepresented communities and voices, and currently serves on the Board of the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA) and the Charnley-Persky House Board of Directors for the Society of Architectural Historians.
As the founder and executive director of FIRST 500, a growing community of black female architects, Tiara travels the country to raise awareness of the importance of Black women architects throughout history and their contribution to the built environment. Tiara also shares the need for equity over equality to "meet people where they are and address their needs and issues accordingly".
As an instructor, she shares her passion for the political fabric, preservation, and community engagement with her students. Teaching young architects the value of preservation and remembrance in light of development pressures.
We are going to have to have people as committed to doing the right thing, to inclusiveness, as we have in the past to exclusiveness- Whitney M. Young Jr.
This data was gathered from project HAL and OSF databases. HAL's project stated purpose is to collect and disseminate data on American lynchings from verified sources to enhance the Tuskegee/Tolnay and Beck Southern lynching database.
These sites of remembrance hopefully serve as a reminder of what was lost and underscore the urgency to preserve, change that narrative, and be a voice and advocate for underrepresented communities.
Dmitri Julius
In this episode :
We talk with Dmitri Julius, the Chief People Officer of ICON , the construction technologies company leading the way into the future of human shelter and homebuilding using 3D printing and other scientific and technological breakthroughs. In his role, Julius is building and cultivating an elite, adaptive and diverse team to support ICON’s mission and strategic vision.
In our conversation with Dmitri Julius, we explore how ICON’s projects with NASA and their projects in vulnerable communities intersect through their designs for an idyllic future that addresses current environmental concerns. The conversation weaves through topics of education and representation as ways to promote diverse futures in space. We engage the following questions: Is identity tied to land? How do we address issues of colonialism or decolonization in space? How do we create new infrastructures for novel communities and cultures in space?
Dmitri grew up with nothing in South Central LA. Using technology, he explores his passion to provide affordable housing and explore a more sustainable future.
Map showing housing costs as a percent of income for Median Income Family Households below $65,000.
Date from Diana Clavery.
Sekou Cooke
In this episode :
We talked to Sekou Cooke, an architect, researcher, educator, and curator born in Jamaica and based in Charlotte, NC. He is the Director of the Master of Urban Design program at UNC Charlotte and a recipient of the 2021/2022 Nasir Jones HipHop Fellowship at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University.
We journey with Sekou Cooke from the first Black in Design Conference at Harvard on Sunday, November 17, 2013, to his design practice in sekou cooke STUDIO . In discussing his latest book, Hip-Hop Architecture , Sekou draws parallels between Hip-Hop and the built environment. Through conversation ranging from sampling and notions of property to grids and scaffolding, we discuss how vocabulary can be transferred across the two fields to share a common mode of production.
Architecture is an industry informed by scholarship and research. Hip-hop culture in built form is the design field becoming more inclusive. As Sekou put it,
“…architecture needs to more thoroughly investigate the dominant ways of thinking, doing, and being in the world today and rethink its place within this current reality".
Please read all about our StoryMap on Sekou here .
Dana McKinney White
In this episode :
We connected with Dana McKinney White , Architect, Urban Planner, and Developer. Dana is an outspoken advocate for social justice and equity through design. During Dana’s time as a student at the Harvard GSD, she helped to establish the inaugural Black in Design Conference , Map the Gap , and the African American Design Nexus . She subsequently worked at Gehry Partners, where she focused on the LA River Master Plan , Southeast Los Angeles Cultural Center , and other river-related projects.
Before returning to Harvard as an Assistant Professor of Urban Design, Dana served as Development Manager at Adre , an equity-centered development company in Portland, Oregon, that seeks to develop buildings that create social and economic benefits for Black, Indigenous, and people of color through the creation of affordable homes, mixed-use developments, and facilities for mission-driven organizations. Dana also established Studio KINN, where she consults on social justice and equity design problems.
In 2021, Dana co-founded enFOLD Collective with Megan Echols, a fellow GSD alumna.
She described her time at the GSD as a balancing act of being a student and an activist. She shared the journey that started the African American Design Nexus, the Black in Design conference, and other initiatives she was essential to founding at the GSD. We also learned how she has since continued her work as an activist in her architectural practice.
Dana's efforts through Studio KINN advocate social justice and equity for vulnerable groups.
"In addition to its ongoing interest in alternatives to incarceration, Studio KINN has extensive subject matter expertise on formerly incarcerated individuals, system impacted persons, persons experiencing homelessness, and the elderly". - Dana.
This map reveals a stark contrast between the percentage of Black people in U.S. state prisons and the overall percentage of Black residents in each state.
No state has a higher percentage of Black residents than Black prisoners.
The percentage of Mississippi's black prisoners, for instance, is 1.7 times the percentage of Black residents, while Maine's disparity in incarceration rate is even more pronounced, exceeding 11 times the state's percentage of Black residents.
Data from Maps.com, Esri, 2021.
Lesley Lokko
In this episode :
We connected with Lesley Lokko, an architect, academic, and novelist. Lesley graduated from the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, with a BSc(Arch) in 1992 and an MArch in 1995 and went on to earn a Ph.D. in Architecture from the University of London in 2007. In 2004, she published her first novel, Sundowners, a Guardian Top 40 Bestseller, following up with eleven more novels. Lokko has taught architecture all over the globe. In partnership with the University of Johannesburg, she established the Graduate School of Architecture (GSA) in 2014/2015 and became the director of the school. She is currently the founder and director of the African Futures Institute in Accra, Ghana. In 2021, she was appointed as the curator of the 18th Venice Biennale of Architecture , set to open in 2023.
Lesley Lokko shares the dynamic between Architecture, Blackness, and Otherness. She discusses the urge for Architecture - rooted in Western systems, to seek to simplify and render legible rather than engage in the complexity of language, tribe, culture, conflict, and values..." there is a form of intrinsic lack in those conditions that render it useless to Architecture..."
In Chapter 2 (Cities, People, and Language) of his book Seeing Like a State. James C. Scott discussed the role of (il)legibility as a form of power “streets, lanes, and passages that intersect at varying angles…privileges local knowledge over outside knowledge”. He also adds that historically, illegibility has provided some protection from external intrusion (policing and control). Richard de Satgé and Vanessa Watson also draw on this concept when discussing Conflicting Rationalities. Today, many parts of Africa are planned by foreigners, miles away, who never set foot on the land but drew lines on paper that would divide entire tribes and families.
On the right is a map of Joe Slovo, an informal settlement on the outskirts of Cape Town established through colonial visions of the Garden City next to the suspended N2 housing project detailed in Richard and Vanessa's book Urban Planning in the Global South. Notice the shacks made from the people's will to "survive and thrive" nestled between the grids and straight roads from the government's will to "develop. "
"what if a new school of architecture suddenly emerged from a new and unexpected place? / what if Africa and the African Diaspora held the key to overcoming so many contemporary challenges of race, environmental justice, new forms of urbanism?" - African Futures Institute.