Approach

Neighborhood Architects
As neighborhood architects, we commit to supporting local businesses and residents by designing experiences that promote liberation, joy, and agency. Headquartered in Southwest Detroit, we believe everyone deserves good design through inclusive community development.

Our design process centers client goals, generating value by creating a variety of scenarios that envision the imaginations and aspirations of their constituents. Our projects are informed by building relationships with neighboring block clubs and partnering with community leaders. We design and develop equitable systems that increase access to social, cultural, and material needs.

Playfully Critical
Joyful, fun, and optimistic while keeping a critical eye on enabling and empowering 


Reclaiming Value
Celebrating the value of the margins — everything from objects, spaces, and material ecologies


Responsive Design 
Designing tools to enable moments and events


Ground-up Urbanism
How might a table, a house, a neighborhood, connect to one another to vitalize and repair the city. How does it provide a much needed third space?


Design, Build, Curate
We like to live and grow alongside the work


Based on a True Story
What stories and counternarratives do we want to tell about Detroit? How does the world of the project affect how we see this place?


Co-Production
Cooperative Agency through community engagement, networks, and scale

Community Engagement

Research
Context, History and Culture matter.

Radical Inclusivity and Empathy
We work to define a range of engaged and affected stakeholders that form a community. We consult outside expertise when relevant to align and meaningfully contribute to the design process.

Participatory Design
Our design approach is centered around feedback. Our work is fluid and continuously evolving with how communities shape and interact with our designs.

Facilitation / Consent / Conflict Resolution
Oftentimes there are diverse opinions, perspectives, and voices within a community, and our approach seeks to navigate these various perspectives in order to reach consent from community members.

Output / Key Findings / Impact
The stakeholders that have dedicated their time, energy, and expertise deserve to understand the ways they have contributed to the design process and the design outcomes. We report back the Key Findings in a visually compelling way through diagrams, graphs, and maps.

Our Methods
Meeting you where you are 
Workshop It
New Media and Technology
Alliance Building
Play
Open Source

Services