The City College of New York has been awarded a three-year $1.5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation. The funding will be used to support the new multidisciplinary Place, Memory and Culture Incubator (PMCI) to be housed within the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture.

The new center will focus on community-based partnerships and projects in Harlem that engage with the design of the built environment alongside attention to the humanities through a social justice lens. CCNY also sees the center as providing a space for the college community to “engage with one another in the production of more representative and authentic histories.”

“This latest project recognizes the historic positioning of the Spitzer School of Architecture in the Harlem community as well as our commitment, in the architectural field and elsewhere in the college, to acknowledging, preserving, and democratizing access to the important physical and cultural legacies of this place,” said CCNY President Vincent G. Boudreau in a statement.

The Spitzer School further expects that the center will transform the ways in which architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design students engage with communities, urban sites, and history. According to the school, participating design studios in the center may focus on “recording, visualizing, and preserving heritage and projecting innovative, resilient cultural and spatial futures.”

News of the funding comes weeks after the Frankenthaler Climate Initiative announced $2.7 million worth of clean energy funding to 48 arts institutions. August has also seen $20 billion in grant funding released by the EPA for adaptive reuse and decarbonization projects. Last month, meanwhile, Syracuse School of Architecture researchers received a $100,000 grant to study the racial wealth gap in the United States.