Africville - Spatial Justice and Commemoration for Landscape Interactive Monument: Design Research Project
This project proposes a memorial landscape for Africville that commemorates the Underground Railroad and the erased Afro-Canadian community through light, absence, and spatial memory rather than object-based monumentality. The design translates oral history and lived recollection into a series of illuminated forms embedded within the altered terrain, allowing memory to re-emerge where physical structures were systematically removed.
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Location: Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
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Project type: Memorial landscape / design research
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Role: Architectural designer; research-by-design
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Scope: Historical research, community engagement, conceptual design, spatial and material studies
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Status: Unbuilt (Part 2 of academic thesis project)
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Why it mattered: The project explores how architecture can act as an instrument of spatial justice, using light and landscape to reconstruct cultural presence in a site defined by displacement, erasure, and infrastructural violence.