New York Afropolitan: CPL x CUBE The Centre for Urban and Built Ecologies

Summary

New York Afropolitan is a collaborative research and knowledge exchange initiative developed by CUBE: the Centre for Urban and Built Ecologies at London Metropolitan University and CPL: the Benjamin Menschel Civic Projects Lab at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York.

The project extends an evolving programme of enquiry into Afropolitanism and its implications for contemporary architecture, art, design and urban culture. It grows from Afropolitan Architecture: Imagining the African Urban Future by Design, initiated by Mokena Makeka and Matthew Barac at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2023 – an event that successfully recentred the global cultural event of the biennale on Africa for the first time – and in parallel with the subsequent London Afropolitan: Worlding Blackness and Diasporic Urban Imaginaries project. Together, these activities explore how Afropolitanism might offer a critical and creative framework for addressing questions of place, identity, mobility and belonging across interconnected urban settings.

Where earlier research moved between Venice and London, New York Afropolitan turns to a city profoundly shaped by African American history and culture, global migration and diasporic exchange. New York becomes both a location for this enquiry and a point within a wider network, connecting African and diasporic cultural production with transatlantic conversations about cities, citizenship, race, representation and the making of shared urban futures.

New York Afropolitan

The initiative was first anticipated as the fifth and final dialogue in the Afropolitan Architecture series, following three conversations at the British Pavilion during the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023 and a fourth at the Africa Centre in London. As the research developed, New York emerged as the basis of a broader place-based investigation, related to but distinct from London Afropolitan.

The proposition recognises New York as a significant hub within the global African diaspora and a formative setting for African American cultural and intellectual life. It also locates the city within the wider geographies, histories and imaginaries of the Black Atlantic. Against this background, New York Afropolitan asks how ideas associated with Afropolitanism might be encountered differently in an American setting, and how they might enter into dialogue with other histories and practices of Black urban life.

Rather than attempting to define the "Afropolitan" as a fixed identity or category, the project approaches it as an open research question: a lens through which relationships between people, places, practices and ideas can be investigated. In this sense, New York is understood not in isolation but relationally, through its connections with other cities and cultural geographies. The project therefore develops the wider Afropolitan research agenda as a networked phenomenon, formed through encounters between different disciplinary, institutional and urban contexts.

CPL Civic Scholar residency

The first concentrated phase of the project took place from 19 to 26 May 2025, when Matthew Barac was hosted as Visiting Civic Scholar at the Benjamin Menschel Civic Projects Lab (CPL) at Cooper Union. Working with project co-investigator Mokena Makeka, who was CPL Director at the time, the residency provided an opportunity to bring CUBE's developing Afropolitan research into dialogue with academics, curators, designers and cultural practitioners in New York.  

A temporary installation at the CPL provided an audiovisual backdrop to the week, drawing together material from the preceding Afropolitan Architecture and London Afropolitan projects in an exhibit that presented the work’s content at street level in the CPL’s highly visible downtown location. Around this display, a deliberately open programme of conversations, seminars and encounters allowed the New York proposition to be explored collaboratively rather than presented as a predetermined research framework.

Central to the residency was an invited seminar and open forum hosting distinguished participants including Ernestine White-Mifetu, Curator of African Art at the Brooklyn Museum; V. Mitch McEwan, Assistant Professor at Princeton University and co-founder of the Black Reconstruction Collective; Victor Peterson II of Cooper Union, with colleagues from the CPL network and an online audience. The discussion brought perspectives from cultural and creative practice into dialogue with scholarship and community engagement, exploring points of connection between Afropolitanism, African American experience, Black cultural production and contemporary urban life.

A CUBE x CPL research and knowledge exchange seminar on 22 May extended this collaborative approach through presentations and discussion with Cooper Union faculty Jonah Rowen and Guido Zuliani. A public forum later that day brought the week's emerging ideas to a wider audience. Following welcome remarks from Prof. Demetrius Eudell, Mokena Makeka offered a scene-setting reflection on the New York Afropolitan proposition and Matthew Barac presented a keynote, ‘New York Afropolitan: Collaboration and Enquiry as a Networked Phenomenon’.

The residency also coincided with the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, which provided the focus for a study visit and a further context in which to consider Black cultural expression, style and representation alongside the questions emerging from the week's discussions.

Collaboration and knowledge exchange

New York Afropolitan has therefore been conceived not simply as a sequence of events but as an evolving framework for collaboration and enquiry. The 2025 residency provided a setting in which different forms of expertise could encounter one another, testing how architectural and urban research might connect with curatorial practice, cultural production and wider conversations about identity, history and belonging.

The project also marked an important step in developing an institutional relationship between the Cooper Union and London Metropolitan University. Through CPL and CUBE, the two institutions used the residency to explore shared interests in research, education, civic engagement and knowledge exchange, alongside the development of future collaborative activity.

In this respect, New York Afropolitan continues a research trajectory that began in Venice and expanded through London, always engaging its African constituency through speakers across the diaspora, with homes in Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, and Lesotho, hereby opening another geography of enquiry. Across these interconnected settings, the evolving Afropolitan programme asks how architecture, art and design can participate in imagining urban futures shaped by movement, cultural exchange and multiple forms of belonging.