On a summer evening in 1946, the sound of jazz spilled out from the doors of a modest community centre in Little Burgundy, Montréal. Inside, a young Oscar Peterson sat at the piano, his fingers gliding over the keys as the room filled with the rhythm of a community. Around him, neighbours gathered—some tapping their feet, others lost in conversation—united by the music that had become the heartbeat of their neighbourhood.

In the early twentieth century, Little Burgundy was home to a vibrant Black anglophone community. Spaces like the Negro Community Centre (NCC) and the Union United Church became sanctuaries of cultural memory and creativity, where the community resisted the systemic exclusion they faced elsewhere in the city. Black space is not just physical—it is cultural, emotional, and symbolic. It is where overlooked histories reside, where music thrives, and where futures are imagined. From jazz in Little Burgundy to hip-hop in the Bronx, Black communities have used architecture and music as tools of reclamation, empowerment, and storytelling. These spaces are far more than the buildings, parks, and streets that contain them—they are living testaments to survival, resilience, and cultural innovation.

Music has the potential to act as a bridge between memory and place, preserving histories and experiences that might otherwise be erased. In Little Burgundy, jazz was an expression of cultural identity shaped by and shaping the environments it emerged from. The NCC and Union United Church provided spaces where people performed, gathered, and built community. Jazz became the rhythm of the neighbourhood and reflected the vibrancy of the community, ensuring that its history was carried forward, echoing through generations and across borders. These spaces hold the histories of their communities while being reshaped and reclaimed by music as a tool and symbol of resistance.

While traditional archives have historically privileged written documents, the idea of archiving is evolving to include oral histories, lived experiences, and other alternative forms of cultural production. Black spaces have long embodied these practices, preserving memory in ways that challenge conventional archival norms. Through storytelling, music, and communal practices, these spaces—churches, schools, homes, and public areas—are repositories of stories and legacies.

In Little Burgundy, the shared spaces of the neighbourhood itself are an archive of Black cultural memory. Many in the community were descendants of African American railway porters who migrated northward from the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in search of economic opportunities and freedom from the entrenched racial segregation of the South. Afro-Caribbean migrants also settled there, creating a unique cultural fabric. Their migration brought cultural traditions and musical influences that laid the foundation for the jazz scene in Montréal.¹

Founded in 1907, the Union United Church provided spiritual guidance and served as a critical gathering space, fostering solidarity among Black residents. Established twenty years later in 1927, the NCC became a hub for education, social events, and artistic expression. More than just a building, the NCC’s rooms echoed with the sounds of jazz, community debates, and the laughter of children. It was a cultural sanctuary where Black residents could cultivate identity, share knowledge, and create art.

Oscar Peterson, who grew up in Little Burgundy, often credited the neighbourhood and its vibrant community for shaping his musical identity. His sister, Daisy Sweeney, was not only a trailblazing musician but also a music teacher who mentored Peterson and countless other budding talents in the area. The music of Peterson, Sweeney, and others carried the rhythm of the neighbourhood’s lived experiences, turning the NCC, homes, and local venues into cultural landmarks. For instance, Rockhead’s Paradise, a nightclub opened by Rufus Rockhead in 1928, was one of the first Black-owned jazz clubs in Montréal, hosting performances by international icons like Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, as well as local talents.¹ The rhythms and melodies born in Little Burgundy preserved the collective memory of a community navigating the challenges of racial inequality. The NCC, with its concerts and community events, was central to these stories, offering a space where music became a vehicle for connection.

Little Burgundy’s significance extends beyond its local history—it speaks to the broader legacy of Black communities in North America using space as a means of preserving cultural identity and creating new futures. In the 1970s, hip-hop emerged as a form of cultural expression, deeply tied to the urban spaces of the South Bronx, New York. A borough scarred by decades of systemic neglect, redlining, and urban renewal policies, the Bronx’s Black and Latinx communities reimagined burned-out buildings, empty lots, and neglected parks as sites of creativity, resistance, and joy.

In the shadow of the Cross Bronx Expressway, a Robert Moses project completed in 1972 that cut through and devastated working-class communities, hip-hop pioneers transformed spaces of neglect into sites of cultural vitality. At the heart of hip-hop’s origins was the block party, and one of the most pivotal locations in hip-hop history was 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, where DJ Kool Herc hosted his legendary back-to-school party in August 1973—an event widely regarded as the birthplace of hip-hop. This unassuming apartment complex became a cultural epicentre. Kool Herc used turntables and a powerful sound system to pioneer the “breakbeat” technique, isolating and looping the instrumental breaks in records like James Brown’s “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose.”¹ This innovation created a continuous groove that energized the dancers, laying the foundation for breakdancing and the genre’s rhythmic DNA.

Graffiti artists also contributed to redefining the urban landscape, with pioneers like TAKI 183 and Phase 2 transforming subway cars, walls, and abandoned buildings into vibrant canvases of self-expression. Public infrastructure was turned into a moving gallery that challenged the invisibility imposed on marginalized communities and asserted their presence in a city that often sought to erase them. Similarly, breakdancers, or b-boys and b-girls, claimed sidewalks and public parks like Crotona Park, vacant lots like the one at 63 Park, and a schoolyard at the intersection of Boston Road and 169th Street, as stages for their athletic and artistic storytelling.¹

The Bronx’s architecture—its public housing, streets, and vacant lots—was not just the backdrop for this cultural movement; it was the foundation of its creativity. Hip-hop demonstrated how Black and Latinx communities could reclaim spaces of abandonment and neglect as an act of resistance—a refusal to be displaced.

This reclamation was deeply political. It declared that these spaces, and the people who occupied them, mattered. The Bronx’s built environment, damaged by years of systemic neglect and redlining, became a canvas for innovation and community pride.

At this time, a broader pattern of urban renewal sweeping across North America disproportionately targeted Black and working-class neighbourhoods. Back in Montréal, the construction of the Ville-Marie Expressway cut through the heart of the Little Burgundy neighbourhood, displacing many Black families and dismantling the social and cultural fabric of the community. Despite this, Little Burgundy’s legacy as the birthplace of Montréal’s jazz scene continued to thrive.

Until its closure in 1993, the NCC was a sanctuary for education, music, and social life. More recently, as gentrification has reshaped Little Burgundy, its jazz legacy remains embedded in its spaces, keeping the cultural memory alive, ensuring that the neighbourhood’s contributions to Montréal’s cultural fabric are not forgotten. Projects like Diverse Pasts and Near Futures aim to carry this legacy forward. By engaging youth in community-driven design and conversations about gentrification and spatial justice, these initiatives reclaim space through collective imagination, ensuring that Little Burgundy remains a site of resistance, connecting past struggles to future possibilities.

Black spaces demonstrate that design is dynamic, adaptive, and deeply intertwined with the lived experiences of those who inhabit it. Shaped by music, art, and storytelling, these spaces transform physical environments into vibrant expressions of identity. Hip-hop embodies this principle, repurposing and remixing its surroundings. From sampling beats to reclaiming sidewalks for breakdancing or tagging walls with graffiti, hip-hop’s ethos of adaptation and transformation aligns with an emerging paradigm in architecture: one that prioritizes community, creativity, and resilience over static, top-down design.¹

The Diverse Pasts and Near Futures long-term program explores the intersection of architecture, design, landscape, and urbanization with BIPOC narratives and histories. Through workshops, public programming, and collaborations with organizations like Nigra Iuventa and McGill University, it amplifies underrepresented voices and empowers youth to reimagine their environments. By fostering creativity, oral history, and cultural traditions, the program equips participants with tools to critique and reshape the spaces they inhabit. This program is rooted in the belief that Black and BIPOC communities must not only be represented in architectural spaces but must also lead in designing them.

Little Burgundy’s ongoing battle with gentrification and erasure highlights the urgency of addressing structural challenges head-on. Displacement, systemic inequality, and the commodification of cultural legacies continue to threaten the survival of Black spaces such as the NCC. The future of Black space is one where communities are not just represented in the design of their built environments but lead in their creation and thrive in the spaces they reclaim.

Black spaces are more than physical sites—they are blueprints for liberation. They teach us that architecture can transform neglect into creativity, silence into sound, and exclusion into empowerment. As we look to the future, we must ensure that Black communities remain central to the conversation about how space is designed and inhabited. These spaces offer a model for architecture that prioritizes justice, equity, and inclusion.