INTtalk: Roots & Rhythms with Darius Somers and Latoya Nelson Kamdang

Adjunct Associate Professor Darius Somers and Adjunct Professor Latoya Nelson Kamdang present Roots & Rhythms, a talk that reimagines Buffalo, New York’s Michigan Street Corridor as a site of food sovereignty, cultural memory, healing, and economic empowerment. Merging agriculture, spirituality, and the corridor’s musical and cultural legacy, the project proposes a framework for community-driven development rooted in care, agency, and intergenerational exchange.

Framed through a speculative lens, the work asks how architecture can draw from alternative histories of Reconstruction, imagining a United States in which its promises were fully realized as the foundation of civic life. From this premise, the project explores how land, institutions, and cultural systems might have evolved under conditions of sustained Black freedom and self-determination, using that speculative history as a tool to inform present-day spatial, social, and economic futures.

Grounded in archival research, site analysis, and design speculation, the project also responds to the racist mass shooting at a Buffalo grocery store, confronting the vulnerability embedded within spaces of food access. In this context, the proposal repositions such spaces as environments of safety, dignity, and collective resilience—where nourishment, protection, and community are inseparable.

Through this synthesis of research and design, Roots & Rhythms positions architecture as both a cultural framework and an instrument of repair, offering a spatial approach to healing that is at once speculative, grounded, and actionable.