A Place for Us: Reclaiming Identity and Agency in Transitional Spaces, my thesis project, brings together interior design, community engagement, and participatory design.

My project demonstrates how architecture can create frameworks for agency and belonging in the two- to five-year-long process of migration in which displaced communities face unmet needs: During this time, emergency aid has ended but full integration remains distant and unsupported. Engaging with this reality, my thesis positions migrants as knowledge producers and community builders rather than passive recipients of aid.

To develop a broadly applicable solution, I worked with migrants in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, in a participatory design project to transform the Sunset Park Recreation Center into a replicable threshold network—a space that exists between defined states: neither fully public nor private, neither temporary nor permanent.

In my design scheme, four interconnected environments work as a system: The Kitchen facilitates not only domestic cooking but--owing to its industrial kitchen--also blanket license vending, thereby legitimizing street vendors and creating new economic pathways. The Sanctuary incorporates jali bricks, a material associated with spiritual refuge and cultural connection. The Forum space can be adapted to accommodate needs ranging from intimate gatherings to larger community meetings. Memorial elements—including a cultural wall, herb and spice archive, and documentation station—make it possible to record and celebrate histories that might otherwise be lost.

Programming at the site guides participants in activites designed to create narratives that support cultural preservation and economic opportunity. Skill-building workshops on topics ranging from cooking to making cyanotypes, along with initiatives like a community A Place at the Table cookbook and a Through the Lens photography project can be part of this effort. The result is an innovative community-driven model that can be adapted to help displaced persons in other neighborhoods find belonging through creation instead of consumption, through agency instead of dependency.