We’ve been lucky enough to have our work recognized by some pretty amazing folks—The Franklin D. Roosevelt Foundation, UN Habitat, Open Architecture Collaborative, Clean Water for Ghana, American Express (yes, that one), HIVE Academy, NEA, IMLS—you get the idea. But awards aren’t buildings. And buildings aren’t communities. Communities are the point. Every MIIM project starts with a conversation and maybe a strong cup of tea. We believe the future is local, so we begin by listening (not drawing, yet), learning what people already know, what stories they carry, what dreams they keep folded in their back pockets. Then we get to work connecting that wisdom to the materials, policies, plumbing, and plants that make places real.
Somewhere along the way, we realized that building pretty things won’t fix everything. (Who knew?) Inequity isn’t aesthetic, it’s systemic. It’s tangled. So we made our own model. We call it “Productive Public Space” because we like alliteration and because, honestly, spaces need to do more than sit there looking nice. They need to work. So we design them to host cultural programming, make jobs, grow food, manage water, throw shade, and sometimes, if we’re lucky, spark joy.
We don’t just do architecture. We do architecture-adjacent things: research, policy wrangling, storytelling, systems thinking, and elaborate diagrams with arrows. Most of our projects live at the weird intersections of disciplines that don’t always talk to each other. And we like it that way. It’s messy. It’s multidisciplinary. It’s MIIM.
Top-down policies? Too far removed. Bottom-up efforts? Sometimes stuck spinning their wheels. We operate somewhere in the middle, awkwardly, productively, wonderfully. Think micro-interventions with macro-ambitions. At MIIM, we connect dots. Not the cute kind with colors and numbers, but the messy kind, between communities and city departments, between informal ingenuity and formal systems, between lived experience and development jargon. We help communities build not just things (though yes, also things), but relationships, across power lines and policy walls. We don’t stop at buildings. Our work shows up in meetings, maps, reports, pilot programs, maybe even a few spreadsheets. We take what we learn on the ground and feed it into frameworks that get published, policies that get debated, and practices that might, if we’re lucky, get just a little better.
It’s part design, part diplomacy, part diagram. All in the service of building cities that actually work for the people who live in them. Neighborhood by neighborhood. System by system. With snacks, whenever possible.
That’s our jam: building spaces that care for people, because people care for places.
