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By Joe Wilensky

Emma Osore ’09 was in high school when she attended a town hall meeting that sparked a passion for urban planning and community design. It was an unlikely circumstance, she admits, as most teens don’t attend town halls—or even know that urban planning is a profession.

Osore’s mother had brought her along to the meeting, a design session led by local planners aiming to redevelop her neighborhood in Prince George’s County, MD, into an arts district.

“We were seeing these visuals, these designs, of how our neighborhood could look in the future,” Osore recalls.

The planners shared various renderings and asked residents which they liked—and what they wanted for their community. For Osore, the exercise was transformative.

“I found it very empowering, even as a young person,” she says, “that I could participate and see this vision of the future.”

Today, Osore is the co-founder and executive director of a collective of planners, architects, artists, and designers who work to protect, elevate, and create Black spaces.

“A lot of times in Black neighborhood planning processes, there’s a focus on community centers and basketball courts, which are important,” Osore says, “but our group has always wanted to then say ‘Yes, and …’ What are the other cultural assets that sustain place?”

A lot of times in Black neighborhood planning processes, there’s a focus on community centers and basketball courts, which are important. But our group has always wanted to then say ‘Yes, and …?'

That mindset can be seen in one of BlackSpace’s earliest projects, which is ongoing: Brooklyn’s Brownsville Heritage House, a half-century-old mainstay of Black cultural life.

Founded as a library—one of 26 gifted to the city by Andrew Carnegie—it boasted the first children’s reading room in the U.S. That space now houses a neighborhood cultural center that includes an expansive book collection and a wealth of historic Black magazines.

Other ongoing projects include redesigning a community farm in Red Hook, Brooklyn; growing the neighborhood around the Imani Baptist Church in East Orange, NJ; documenting 62 Black historical sites throughout Brownsville via a storytelling tour; and co-designing a Boston-based program for women and nonbinary people of color in tech.

BlackSpace also recently launched Studio KIN (Kinfolx Imagining Neighborhoods), a business accelerator aimed at nurturing Black-founded ventures while improving public spaces.

“We want to ask the right questions, to launch stories that help us understand a community’s themes and values, and to make sure that at every point along the way you’re listening to people, and reflecting that information back to them,” Osore says.

“You’re building things together—and you’re building trust. That’s how we make sure that the community’s voice is respected.”

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As a child, Osore says, she was keenly aware of her environment and how people navigated both race and space: Prince George’s is the most populous African American-majority county in the nation.

“I was a Black, biracial, queer child trying to find my way and how I fit into this American context,” she says, “where race is very spatialized and embedded in systems.”

I was a Black, biracial, queer child trying to find my way and how I fit into this American context, where race is very spatialized and embedded in systems.

But after attending that town hall meeting with her mom, her trajectory was set. “I was like, this is it,” she recalls, “because it combines place, people, and making change.”

In an urban planning intro course on the Hill, she learned how zoning determines the shape of cities by dictating the locations of industry and residential areas.

“And that opened my whole brain,” she says. “There’s a system that’s behind the way I’m experiencing my city that people have decided to carve out, in a puzzle-piece way.”

As an undergrad, Osore spent a semester in the Cornell in Washington program and another in AAP’s Rome program.

She extended a winter break program in Nairobi by traveling to visit relatives in Kenya with her father, who was born there—and began to envision a career combining urban planning with the preservation and celebration of Black environments.

After working at AmeriCorps and in the D.C. school system, she earned a master of public administration degree from Baruch College.

BlackSpace grew out of a 2015 conference, held at Harvard, for Black urban planners, architects, artists, activists, and designers; inspired, they wanted to keep developing their ideas.

BlackSpace grew out of a 2015 conference, held at Harvard, for Black urban planners, architects, artists, activists, and designers; inspired, they wanted to keep developing their ideas.

(Its inaugural board includes two other AAP alums: Peter Robinson, BArch ’98, and Ifeoma Ebo ’01, BArch ’02.)

The collective has since sparked affiliate groups in municipalities beyond NYC—from Chicago and Indianapolis to Atlanta and Oklahoma City.

BlackSpace’s founding manifesto outlines 14 guiding principles for co-designing projects by working in and with Black communities, protecting Black culture and experiences, listening deeply, accepting criticism, and catalyzing Black joy.

Among its key principles: “Move at the speed of trust.”

Top: Osore at the Brownsville Heritage House. (Joe Wilensky / Cornell University; all other images provided, unless otherwise indicated)

Published February 16, 2026

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