The continued growth and relevance of landscape architecture and urbanism is contingent on the plurality and diversity of identities, geographies, and schools of thought represented within the field. Currently, there is a glaring under-representation of host-Indigenous peoples and of Black and racialized people within landscape architecture and its adjacent disciplines.
The Black + Indigenous Design Collective formed in response to the murder of George Floyd, as the BIDC founding members felt individual responsibility to respond to the groundswell of public support for change to the status quo within the field. However, three people are insufficient to shoulder the burden of guidance and education for entire companies and institutions, and don’t want to remain token representatives within them in practice.
So, our mission is a decades-long goal of increasing awareness of the landscape and spatial design fields to BIPOC youth, so as to increase their representation in these fields. The funding provided by the LACF will form the basis of this outreach as BIDC researches and develops a program/curriculum for (a) a 4-part introductory summer design training intensive: the Design Cypher, and (b) a 60-min short format version to be presented in high-schools and recorded as video content for mass distribution.
Anchored in Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurism, the curriculum will encourage participants in a series of explorations of their cultural identities, values, and interests, and how they can apply these to create change in the world through design.