About This Case Study

In 2015, a group of Black planners, architects, artists, designers, and organizers founded the BlackSpace Urbanist Collective in New York, and in 2019 they published the BlackSpace Manifesto: fourteen working principles for shaping the built environment, rooted in Black liberation. Among them are "move at the speed of trust," "create circles, not lines," "plan with, design with," "protect and strengthen culture," and "reckon with the past to build the future." The collective describes the manifesto as a "gut check" for anyone making decisions about place, and the principles have been taken up in city agencies and neighborhood projects across the country. Most of the documents that actually decide what happens to a neighborhood, by contrast, do not read like a manifesto at all. A rezoning application, a community-benefits presentation, an environmental review, or a neighborhood plan reads as technical, procedural, and ostensibly race-neutral — which is exactly why holding a values framework up against one is revealing.

This case study uses the manifesto as an instrument, in two directions. First it treats a real planning document as an instrument in its own right: a plan does racial work — securing some people's presence in a place and easing others out — whether or not it ever names race, and the fourteen principles give you a way to make that work visible. The concept the manifesto puts into practice is placemaking: not the passive fact of a neighborhood existing, but the deliberate creation and protection of community space, especially Black space, against the market forces that devalue and displace it. The analytical move is to read the plan as an instrument — to ask what it does, whose neighborhood it governs, and how race operates through it — and then to turn the manifesto from a measuring tool into a design tool. You will audit a real plan against the fourteen principles, and then choose three of them to reimagine the same site for an outcome that serves the community already there.

Before You Begin

Have ready:

• The BlackSpace Manifesto (BlackSpace Urbanist Collective) — the framework you will apply.
• One real public planning document of your choosing — a rezoning application, a neighborhood plan, or a developer's community-benefits presentation. New York City's public review (ULURP) materials are one place to find them.
• A note-taking surface — paper, a document, or a shared doc if you are working in a group.

A note on access: planning documents are often long, technical, and hosted on agency portals that get reorganized. If you cannot locate a full document, a summary, a public-hearing presentation, or a community board's materials will work just as well; what matters is that the plan is real and public. Choose a project at neighborhood scale, large enough to have a stated vision but small enough to read closely.

Before you begin, write down, in a sentence or two each:

• Have you ever attended a community meeting, read a notice about a rezoning or new development, or watched a building go up near you? Whose voices seemed to count in deciding what happened?
• Can a set of values — "move at the speed of trust," "plan with, design with" — be used to judge a technical planning document that never mentions them? What would honoring, or violating, such a principle even look like on paper?

The Exercise

Phase 1: Choose and Summarize the Plan (8–10 minutes)

Select your planning document and write a short, neutral summary before you evaluate anything. State what the plan proposes, where, and at what scale; who is behind it (a city agency, a private developer, a coalition, a partnership); and what it claims it will do for the area — the jobs, housing, amenities, or "revitalization" it promises. Quote or note the plan's own description of its benefits. Resist, for now, the urge to judge it; the analysis comes next.

For groups: choose one plan together so everyone audits the same document, or distribute different plans for breadth. Either way, each member writes their own summary first.

Phase 2: Audit Against the Fourteen Principles (15–18 minutes)

Read the manifesto's fourteen principles, then work through your plan with them in hand. The point is not to score the plan but to read it closely against a standard. Work through these three passes:

1. Honored. Which principles does the plan, in its own terms, appear to honor — and on what specific evidence in the document? Cite the passage. Be skeptical of language that merely echoes a principle without enacting it.
2. Violated or absent. Which principles does the plan violate, or simply ignore? Pay particular attention to the principles about process — "plan with, design with," "move at the speed of trust," "build trust to build community" — since a plan can promise good outcomes while excluding the people it affects from the decisions.
3. The gap between letter and spirit. Where does the plan use the vocabulary of community, equity, or culture without the substance a principle demands — "engagement" that is a single notice, "affordable" units priced beyond current residents, "celebrating heritage" while displacing the people who made it? Note where the document is vague or where information is missing; the gaps are part of what you are reading.

For groups: divide the fourteen principles among members so each person audits a few in depth, then reconvene and assemble the full picture.

Phase 3: Reading the Manifesto as Instrument (8–10 minutes)

Step back from the line-by-line audit and ask what it has revealed. Bring the unit's framing to bear:

• Read the plan as an instrument. Setting aside its stated intentions, what does it actually do — whose presence in the neighborhood does it secure, and whose does it make harder to sustain? Where, if anywhere, does race operate through a document that never mentions it?
• The manifesto was written as a practitioners' "gut check," not a regulation. What can it catch that a legal or technical review of the same plan cannot? And what can it not do — what does it have no power to require?
• The strain test. Where does the manifesto work well as an instrument for auditing this plan, and where does it strain? Consider that the principles are values open to interpretation, that some may pull against one another in a real project, and that a plan can "comply" with a manifesto on paper without a community actually being served.

For groups: move quickly through the first two questions and spend the most time on where the frame strains.

Phase 4: Reimagining the Site (12–15 minutes)

Now turn the manifesto from a measuring tool into a design tool. Choose three of the fourteen principles and use them to sketch how the same site, or the same process, could be remade to serve the community already there. Make it concrete rather than a slogan. Depending on the three principles you choose, your proposal might specify who would be at the table and at what stage; what the plan would protect and how — affordability secured through a community land trust, existing residents and small businesses kept in place, cultural anchors safeguarded; how "the past" of the neighborhood would be reckoned with rather than erased; and what "moving at the speed of trust" would change about the timeline and who controls it. Produce a short proposal that names the three principles and what each one requires the plan to do differently. This is the counter-narrative the unit sets against displacement: not only diagnosing how a neighborhood is unmade, but imagining how it could be made well.

For groups: small groups each take a different set of three principles and present competing reimaginings of the same site; the differences show how much the chosen principles shape the result.

Closing Reflection

In two or three sentences, complete this thought:

Audited against the BlackSpace Manifesto, the plan I chose mainly __________. Using three principles to reimagine the site, the hardest thing to actually change would be __________. The part of this exercise I find hardest to hold steady is __________.

Write the most specific version you can; the value is in naming exactly which principle the plan fails and exactly what a different process would demand.

A Note on Modes

Solo mode. Work through the four phases in order. The audit from Phase 2 and the three-principle proposal from Phase 4 are the central artifacts; keep them for use with the unit's questions on placemaking and the BlackSpace Manifesto.

Group mode (3–6 people). Designate a timekeeper. Phase 1 is collective (choosing and summarizing one plan) or distributed; in Phase 2 the fourteen principles are divided among members and reassembled; Phase 3 is full-group discussion; Phase 4 works well as competing small-group reimaginings. If time is short, the closing reflection can be assigned as individual writing after the session.

After the Case Study

• BlackSpace publishes more than the manifesto — project case studies, toolkits, and the collective's own accounts of putting the principles to work; reading how practitioners apply them raises the question of what a values framework can and cannot do inside a planning bureaucracy.
• For the affirmative geography the manifesto puts into practice — placemaking as achievement, not only defense — see Marcus Anthony Hunter and Zandria F. Robinson, Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life (University of California Press, 2018), in the unit's Key Scholarship.
• To see principles like "plan with, design with" realized in institutional form, look into community land trusts and participatory or community-led planning, which try to give residents lasting control over the future of their neighborhoods.