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Idea by

Jeffrey Kruth, Bin Sayeed Bhakti

SPEC Collaborative

Cincinnati, United States of America
SPEC is a research and design collaborative interested in the myriad potentialities of an unknown future city, an alternative landscape not yet visible on the horizon. SPEC seeks to exploit established methods for producing the city, angling their arguments, constellating their desires, exploring their affordances and dismantling their mechanized prohibitions. SPEC explores the intersection of cultural landscapes, design policy, and the mechanisms for creating alternative future cities.

Call for ideas 2021

What Boundaries Maintain


What Boundaries Maintain


This project imagines the historic and contemporary sites of segregation in the US as spaces for alternative publics.
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Type of project
  • Site-specific cases

The racist legacy of land use planning in the United States persists today. Contemporary data-driven planning methods, development practices, and police surveillance further exacerbate boundaries of separation. These shaped boundaries are often also the frontlines of gentrification and development speculation. In spite of this, the many lived identities within these spaces resist these markings over time, fostering a complex reciprocity between the spaces in which we live and who we are.

“What Boundaries Maintain” emerges from engaged work with a social movement in Cincinnati, OH. This place-based network of organizations and their legacy of care, repair, and maintenance are speculatively deployed as a form of reparations. These boundaries of segregation are re-imagined as sites for historical exchange as an open archive and library, comfort offered through sites of public space, and the expansion and repair of de-commodified housing.

What Boundaries Maintain


What Boundaries Maintain


This project imagines the historic and contemporary sites of segregation in the US as spaces for alternative publics.
File under
Type of project
  • Site-specific cases

The racist legacy of land use planning in the United States persists today. Contemporary data-driven planning methods, development practices, and police surveillance further exacerbate boundaries of separation. These shaped boundaries are often also the frontlines of gentrification and development speculation. In spite of this, the many lived identities within these spaces resist these markings over time, fostering a complex reciprocity between the spaces in which we live and who we are.

“What Boundaries Maintain” emerges from engaged work with a social movement in Cincinnati, OH. This place-based network of organizations and their legacy of care, repair, and maintenance are speculatively deployed as a form of reparations. These boundaries of segregation are re-imagined as sites for historical exchange as an open archive and library, comfort offered through sites of public space, and the expansion and repair of de-commodified housing.

Idea by

Jeffrey Kruth, Bin Sayeed Bhakti
SPEC Collaborative
Cincinnati
United States of America
SPEC is a research and design collaborative interested in the myriad potentialities of an unknown future city, an alternative landscape not yet visible on the horizon. SPEC seeks to exploit established methods for producing the city, angling their arguments, constellating their desires, exploring their affordances and dismantling their mechanized prohibitions. SPEC explores the intersection of cultural landscapes, design policy, and the mechanisms for creating alternative future cities.
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