urbanCORE Faculty Spotlight: Kyle Spence

We’re shining our faculty spotlight on Assistant Professor of Architecture Kyle Spence, who is completing his first year at UNC Charlotte. Despite being new to the city, Professor Spence has been awarded a Gambrell Faculty Fellowship, a W+GRA Seed Grant, a SoTL grant for a community-engaged learning project, and a position on the Community Innovation Incubator Albemarle Rd./Central Ave. team. Kyle took time out from his busy schedule to answer our questions. 

Q: How did you get started in community-engaged research?

A: I went to Howard University and a lot of the work going on in the classroom there is about giving back, and students would be involved with community stakeholders in Washington, DC. And in grad school, we were coming out of the recession and as a result, a lot of that was focused on getting us involved in global communities. I went to Lagos, Nigeria, to see the streets and roads in that city. But we were embedded in Harlem, at Columbia University, and there was a lot of interacting with the community to understand Columbia’s impact. So after graduating, I tried to tackle these problems head-on and I did a lot of community initiatives independently and in architecture firms. My first client sold vegan foods at a farmers market and I helped transform their kiosk and local eatery into a full-service restaurant. We had to be super-creative and I found a load of other community-focused initiatives working with families in Harlem who needed renovations, things like that. 

When I moved to North Florida, I discovered that one of the ways I could give back was by being a public artist. I built a sundial for the African-American Festival, then I wrote about repair as a design tool that has larger implications, because it gives community stakeholders the opportunity to interact. I’m now in the process of recreating it for Charlotte SHOUT! 

Q: Getting started in community-engaged research requires first establishing trusting relationships with community partners. How did you make Charlotte connections so quickly?

A: I’m finding the Charlotte network of art and community initiatives was similar to what I saw in Harlem and North Florida. So I started the same type of conversations and saw the same kind of synergies. 

At the urbanCORE Community Engagement Orientation, we took the bus tour with Tom Hanchett and saw Brooklyn and how the farmers market carries on the legacy of what once stood there. So when I went to the farmers market and saw Deep Roots, it was like the vegan restaurant in Harlem–it had the same mission. Ever since Nigeria, I had this idea of a larger story about markets and placemaking and how entrepreneurship can thrive in this place. The Deep Roots couple has a daughter at Howard and a son who attended North Carolina A&T.  And their larger mission is to help stabilize food systems in Charlotte. 

And I can teach this in my Community Planning class, so I applied for the Gambrell. And She Built This City was present and I explained to them that one of my passions is building furniture. One of the frustrations of the building field is I’ve worked on massive structures like airports and museums that can take a really long time, ten years. The more immediate way of seeing your work play out is in something like furniture. It started as a hobby during the pandemic, then at my last institution I built 40 or so pieces of furniture. When I met with SBTC, I shared my pictures with them. One of their projects involved a program that focuses on building furniture with a vulnerable group of girls aged 8 to 12 in Charlotte. Through the W-GRA initiative, we aim to build three of my chairs and a table design as part of their week-long activities.

Nadia [Associate Professor Anderson, in Architecture] has been a big influence on my work. She took me under her wing and showed me how things were working. And in the incubator, Nadia told me a lot about the incubator and as a team, our focus is critical design futures and computation. That was intentionally ambiguous as a title, but critical design futures implies a level of engagement with the community. 

I appreciate having gone to the urbanCORE orientation because it showed me there was some alignment, challenges, and existing Charlotte infrastructure to move the goal posts so that communities aren’t staying in place, they’re socially mobile. 

Q: What are your long-term community-engagement goals?

A: Building is very important to me. In addition to my interest in time, timekeeping, and solar time, my long-term goal is to use AI to help architecture students visualize themselves in spaces. I aim to express this connection through jazz music, design, and drawings. Last summer at a conference in Mexico, I was talking about helping students convert their drawings into models and visual representations that represented students and their backgrounds. I realized then that I could continue that line of work forever, but a lot can be achieved through this connection between AI and work. My SOTL grant is continuing that line of thinking. 

I recently came across “people-centered AI” or “AI for civic engagement” so it goes beyond AI for visual representation. In a design meeting, we typically bring a pencil and sketch ideas in real-time, but using AI you can create visualizations that are really helpful. In a recent incubator meeting, I pulled out one of my AI tools to say, look, we’re talking about this kind of space and we could create an AI-influenced vision that could say, this is what we’re looking for. 

We can use that vision to reimagine how to achieve it. This vision can help us convene around a shared visual goal—collective expression. Outside of that, we’re at this crossroads where we’re learning that there are three big companies controlling AI, and we’re helping the algorithms but they’re not always helping us. But a community could make their own local language model, and that would be their tool to enhance their cultural sovereignty. For example, if they’re concerned about local codes, they could make their own tool and get their own text translated into different languages. 

I’m very invested in making community-owned AI systems a reality for communities in Charlotte. I’m not a computer scientist and it would require interdisciplinarity, but collective AI envisioning a space and a concept of aiding community sovereignty is a larger goal. I use AI now in my public art, but community engagement is this dynamic, innovative pursuit in the AI realm that I want to tap into through my research.