This lecture by architect and academic Kholisile Dhliwayo will describe the tenets and methodology of making Black Diasporas Naarm-Melbourne and the forthcoming Black Diasporas Tkaronto-Toronto—projects celebrating cultural practices and knowledge systems that support the creation of places where Black communities can thrive. In particular, the talk will outline how oral narrative, filmmaking and exhibition are both archival and aspirational—archival in their celebration of the spaces and places created by Black communities in Toronto and aspirational in the articulation of hopes and dreams and how these manifest in the built environment. It will be moderated by the Daniels Faculty’s Kaari Kitawi.

Architect Kholisile Dhliwayo is an Adrian Cheng Fellow at the Social Innovation Change Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School and a 2023 resident at the Center for Architecture Lab in New York City. A founding member of afrOURban Inc., a 501c3 dedicated to documenting and celebrating the spaces that have meaning to Black communities worldwide, Dhliwayo leads the afrOURban project Black Diasporas, a community-led geolocated oral narrative mapping project that examines the experiences, spaces and places having meaning to Black people.

Moderator Kaari Kitawi is a landscape architect and an urban designer with the City of Toronto. She is an alumna of and a sessional lecturer at the Daniels Faculty. Prior to moving to Canada, she ran a landscape company in Kenya.

Image 1 by Bonn Creative from the exhibition Black Diasporas Naarm Melbourne. Image 2 by Bonn Creative. Image 3 from the Black Diasporas film TRAMS TRAINS TKZEE + ME, directed by Scottnes Smith, co-produced by Phillipa J. Smith, with cinematography by Abdul Yusuf and starring Kgomotso Sekhu. Image 4 from afrOURban Black Diasporas.