Introduction: What Shakes Loose When We Imagine Otherwise

The planning scholars and practitioners whose work follows, responded to a call to consider the possibility of planning in ways that counter, elide, and/or dismantle white and colonial spatial imaginaries. We asked how – as planning scholars, practitioners, and educators – we could develop a new spatial imaginary, one that is not merely anti-colonial or anti-racist, but a spatial imaginary that is entirely otherwise.

My own thinking and hoping has been sparked by a collaboration of research inquiry, community organizing, and art and planning practice. In Portland, Oregon, America’s ‘whitest city,’ the project This is a Black Spatial Imaginary (TIBSI) insisted on creating a different narrative of Black presence, sometimes contesting and sometimes dodging all together the White gaze on Black bodies, communities, and geographies. Some things ‘shook loose’ in the world of Sharita Towne, my dear friend and co-conspirator in the Black Life Experiential Research Group – as a result of participating in the Portland-based interventions and viewing the works of Black diasporic artists. The following comments from just a few of the TIBSI artists, I think, turn the planner’s interest in the place-making function of art on its head to speak to the art-making function of place (making art making place). Sharita writes,

Notes on Contributors

Lisa K. Bates , PhD is Associate Professor in the Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University. Her scholarship focuses on housing and community development policy and planning, attending to the legacies of discrimination in urban policy-making.  She engages in research and practice with the aim of dismantling institutional racism, and in 2016 she was awarded the Dale Prize for scholarship on urban planning for community self-determination and racial justice from Cal Poly-Pomona. Email: lkbates@pdx.edu

Christopher Paul Jordan integrates virtual and physical public space to form infrastructures for dialogue and self-determination among dislocated people. Jordan’s paintings and sculptures are artefacts from his work in community and time-capsules for expanded inquiry. Jordan co-directs the grassroots youth arts organization Fab-5, which empowers young people as creative leaders to inspire change in their surroundings. Email: jordan.p.chris@gmail.com

Kitso Lynn Lelliott is preoccupied with enunciations from spaces beyond epistemic power and the crisis such epistemically disobedient articulations cause to hegemony. Her work interrogates the ‘real’ as it is shaped through contesting epistemologies, their narratives and the form these took over the Atlantic during the formative episode that shaped the modern age. Email: kitsolynn@gmail.com

Sharita A. Towne ​is an instructor at Pacific Northwest College of Art, and works in the DIY printmaking and audiovisual collective URe:AD Press (United Re:Public of the African Diaspora) and the Black Life Experiential Research Group, which co-curated This is a Black Spatial Imaginary, as well as creating with the post-colonial conceptual karaoke band Weird Allan Kaprow. Email: stowne@pnca.edu

She Made the Vision True: A Journey Toward Recognition and Belonging

Using Her Story to De-codify Home

While this is my story, it is a story of shared experiences between women whose environments leave them marginalized and dehumanized. “Life-stories have a geography…they have immediate locales, provocative emplacements which effect thought and action” (Soja, 1989, p. 14). Spatial frameworks are integral to any analysis of power. However as my experiences reflect, these spaces often served as mirages of safety and comfort. While my story is but one, it reflects the struggle of women situated within low-income urban communities and their desire to control these environments as patriarchal systems of domination dictate rights within and to space. The collection of women’s experiences are unique, but as this auto-ethnography illuminates, a consistent theme is a longing for collective recognition and individual belonging. This longing manifests in myriad ways. It speaks through her desire to bear witness to the struggle of her community and to participate in its transformation. Nevertheless, as she pushes toward recognition and belonging, private and public physical spaces marginalize her. It manifests in the power exerted over women’s movement within spaces and to the architecture that restricts it (Fainstein & Servon, 2005). This essay deconstructs the notion of socio-spatial location by exploring the intersection of critical spatial literacy with the spatial isolation of poor Black women in poor urban geographies. It uses critical spatial theory and auto-ethnographic methodology to explore how Black women create belonging and establish recognition through their interpretation and interaction within physical spaces in the midst of frameworks that oppress and marginalize her (Haymes, 1995).

As a poor Black woman in a poor urban community you begin to question space:

Expanding the Conceptualization of Critical Spatial Literacy Theory

Amoo-Adare’s (2004) framework for critical spatial literacy deconstructs how Black women’s experiences intersect with space. The theory asserts that spatial configurations communicate power, and dictate how space and women of color are constructed within these environments. Power exerted over the physical environment impacts perception of self – specifically how we reconcile who we are and who we will become. Critical spatial literacy deciphers codified language latent in the design of and interaction with the built environment. It crystallizes the dominant belief systems that inform Western conceptualization of urban environments. The isolation of these spaces purposefully confine disorder and disease(Weisman, 1994). Society overlooks them as long as deviance does not affect ordered and rational spatial environments. Therefore, socio-spatial location controls movement and creates a hierarchy in order to accommodate those deserving of protection and recognition.

Naming language has power and evokes meaning. My neighborhood was called ‘The Hole’ because it sat within the lowest topographic area of the city. It was adjacent to a creek, making it more prone to flooding and a less desirable habitat. My neighborhoods’ placement was associated with darkness, distance and degradation. The street grids led to a series of dead ends, which symbolically represented the experiences of the residents. When I compared my community to the neighborhoods of my middle-income classmates, I began to translate those differences using the language of value and self-worth. ‘Why was my physical environment allowed to decay and become obsolete?’ Playgrounds with out-dated equipment and public space with inadequate lighting and services directly signalled our lack of worth. ‘Why did mature tree canopies line the landscape of their environments, infusing life and vibrancy into their physical surroundings while my canopies were power lines?’ I unconsciously internalized these differences as legitimate sources of shame.

Using Critical Spatial Literacy to Establish Belonging and to Create Recognition

That sense of solidarity among Black women was my primary lifeline. These women served as my refuge and safe harbor. I could not articulate it at the time, but in some supernatural way, the Black women who shared my space, understood what I could not verbalize. They understood because we mirrored one another’s experiences. As Collins (1997) pointed out, oppression is real and tangible to the oppressed. It threatens to destroy the essence of self and quell individual and collective power. Solidarity creates space for overcoming. It stimulates an inner knowing that recognizes the strength and power in the collective story to not only change external circumstance, but to evolve an entire community’s sense of self.

Synthesizing Black Women’s Positionality with Space

We begin our search for self, outside of self. We desperately look for comfort, peace and validation when we are betrayed by a system that loudly whispers we are inadequate and unworthy to occupy space. Once I recognized that I was not confined, but liberated by my physical location, transformation began. This is how Black women have created belonging – by serving as the critics, creators, conscious, connectors and consumers of space. Black women transcend imposed constructs to create a story of collective overcoming. These are stories where she nurtures the ‘souls of Black folk’, acting as the spiritual-consciousness of a people (Dubois, 1903). These are stories where she assumes the mantle of social justice to critique the dominant social structure. These are stories where she serves as the economic consciousness of a community – remaining conscious of the breached 40 Acres and a Mule contract. These are stories where she rises to intellectual heights, assuming the blessings and the burdens shouldered by the talented tenth. She has courageously confronted the challenges of her community, acting as her sister’s keeper where her spiritual connection keeps her planted in the seen world, recognizing that forces unseen influence these manifestations. Her Sankofa wisdom keeps her connected to the past with eyes forward looking toward the future. ¹

This auto-ethnographic study synthesizes the experiences, power and sister wit of Black women that use the built environment to frame their collective struggle. My intent was to capture the longing for spatial recognition and individual belonging among women of color through my story of transformation. It serves to illuminate the ingenuity of Black women who struggle for position and power within physical spaces constructed to marginalize their bodies and their souls. My aim is to encourage practitioners to understand the living history and traditions that effect the way Black women interface with the built environment. That understanding is achieved by making space for Black women’s diverse voices – without pre-conception or judgement. Those involved in community transformation may then empathize with these experiences of overcoming and courage, so that Black women’s stories intentionally inform how physical space is equitably planned and developed.

Notes on Contributor

Monique S. Johnson is Chief Operating Officer with the Better Housing Coalition. Monique is an adjunct professor at Virginia Commonwealth University where she earned a PhD in Public Policy and Administration. She received an MBA from the University of Richmond and a BS in civil engineering from the University of Virginia. Email: m.johnson@betterhousingcoalition.org

Isha Black or Isha White? Racial Identity and Spatial Development in Warren County, NC

Scholars have written extensively on the interaction of race and space (Neely & Samura, 2011), but the “significance of the qualities and particularities of different specific places in the unfolding of race” cannot be ignored (Delaney, 2002, p. 10). I do not claim to fully understand how race works, but I do know how it worked for me. I am also beginning to understand how it worked on me. This essay uses Warren County, North Carolina – where I grew up – as a point of departure for exploring aspects of race, racial identity, and spatial development in a rural environment with complex racial geographies. I argue that the “racialization of space and the spatialization of race” (Lipsitz, 2007) has influenced Warren County’s development and, by extension, formal and informal planning efforts there.

Racialization of Space

In 1860, 31.3 percent of Warren County’s 15,726 residents were white, 2.6 percent were free persons of color, and 66.1 percent were slaves (U.S. Census Bureau, 2017a). If “the white spatial imaginary views space primarily as a locus for the generation of exchange value” (Lipsitz, 2007, p. 15), the decline of places like Warren County following the end of slavery and loss of the plantation economy is not surprising. Since then, its economic story has been one of short-lived attempts at reinvention that have resulted in a poverty rate of 24.1 percent, with just 15.5 percent of adults having a Bachelor’s degree (U.S. Census Bureau, 2017b). The isolation, disinvestment, and marginalization that characterizes rural communities like this can be understood as a form of place annihilation that scholars have typically discussed in the urban context (McKittrick, 2011).

Warren remains among a small number of majority black counties outside the Deep South. Of those who identify as one race only, whites comprise 39.3 percent, blacks 50.9 percent, and Native Americans 4.6 percent of the population (U.S. Census Bureau, 2017b). The Haliwa-Saponi are an Indian Tribe recognized by the State of North Carolina in 1965, but unrecognized by the federal government. Most of its 4,300 enrolled members live in Warren and Halifax counties (Haliwa-Saponi Tribe, 2017) and the tribe has fought to maintain its culture and identity, amid shifting attitudes towards race (Richardson, 2016), including operating a tribal school and holding an annual pow-wow. Race is often understood as binary in the United States, but has always been more complex in Warren County. The fact that I have ancestors who were listed by name and counted as Black in one Decennial Census, then Indian or mulatto in another Decennial Census offers further evidence of its fluidity.

In 1806, the Virginia legislature passed a law expelling free blacks by threatening the revocation of their free status (Higginbotham, Jr. & Kopytoff, 1988). This intensification of the prevailing ‘racialization of space’ fuelled migration to northeastern counties of North Carolina and contributed to the emergence of what has been termed ‘a tri-racial isolate’ (Beale, 1972) in the region that includes Warren County. Colonial laws regulating relations between whites and non-whites as well as controlling the growing ranks of free persons of color, added new factors into the racial identity calculus:

Spatialization of Race

Warren County, North Carolina is most widely known for the grassroots protests in 1982 (Bullard & Wright, 1986) against a landfill for cancer-causing polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) that were illegally dumped along the roadside in over a dozen NC counties – the beginning of the environmental justice movement in the U.S. (McGurty, 2009). These protests in a poor county made up predominantly of people of color quite literally involved claiming space and asserting identity (Figure 1).

Race and Spatial Imaginary: Planning Otherwise/Introduction: What Shakes Loose When We Imagine Otherwise/She Made the Vision True: A Journey Toward Recognition and Belonging/Isha Black or Isha White? Racial Identity and Spatial Development in Warren County, NC/Colonial City Design Lives Here: Questioning Planning Education’s Dominant Imaginaries/Say Its Name – Planning Is the White Spatial Imaginary, or Reading McKittrick and Woods as Planning Text/Wakanda! Take the Wheel! Visions of a Black Green City/If I Built the World, Imagine That: Reflecting on World Building Practices in Black Los Angeles/Is Honolulu a Hawaiian Place? Decolonizing Cities and the Redefinition of Spatial Legitimacy/Interpretations & Imaginaries: Toward an Instrumental Black Planning History

All authors

Edited by Lisa K. Bates with http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3887-8754, Sharita A. Towne, Christopher Paul Jordan, Kitso Lynn Lelliott, Lisa K. Bates, Sharita A. Towne, Christopher Paul Jordan, Kitso Lynn Lelliott, Monique S. Johnson, Bev Wilson http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3892-456X, Tanja Winkler, Anna Livia Brand, C. N. E. Corbin, Matthew Jordan Miller http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3140-4756, Annette Koh, Konia Freitas & Andrea R. Roberts http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9979-6026

https://doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2018.1456816

Published online:

25 April 2018

Figure 1. Source: PCB Landfill Protest, 15 September 1982, in the Jerome Friar Photographic Collection (P0090), North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Prior to those protests, ‘Soul City,’ a master-planned community led by civil rights leader and attorney Floyd McKissick and funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), sought to reverse out-migration and stimulate economic development in the county, while empowering local residents. Although water and sewer infrastructure and facilities were built, the project faced criticism and HUD withdrew funding in 1979, citing a lack of progress (Mock, 2015). Rather than a catalyst for economic development and empowerment, Soul City languished for years. The business incubator envisioned by McKissick and the planners of Soul City was sold off and since 1997 has been home to the 809 bed Warren Correctional Institution (North Carolina Department of Public Safety [NCPDS], 2017). Over the past decade, the Triangle North network of business parks has expanded into Warren County, taking advantage of the infrastructure developed decades earlier as part of the Soul City experiment (Figure 2).

Race and Spatial Imaginary: Planning Otherwise/Introduction: What Shakes Loose When We Imagine Otherwise/She Made the Vision True: A Journey Toward Recognition and Belonging/Isha Black or Isha White? Racial Identity and Spatial Development in Warren County, NC/Colonial City Design Lives Here: Questioning Planning Education’s Dominant Imaginaries/Say Its Name – Planning Is the White Spatial Imaginary, or Reading McKittrick and Woods as Planning Text/Wakanda! Take the Wheel! Visions of a Black Green City/If I Built the World, Imagine That: Reflecting on World Building Practices in Black Los Angeles/Is Honolulu a Hawaiian Place? Decolonizing Cities and the Redefinition of Spatial Legitimacy/Interpretations & Imaginaries: Toward an Instrumental Black Planning History

All authors

Edited by Lisa K. Bates with http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3887-8754, Sharita A. Towne, Christopher Paul Jordan, Kitso Lynn Lelliott, Lisa K. Bates, Sharita A. Towne, Christopher Paul Jordan, Kitso Lynn Lelliott, Monique S. Johnson, Bev Wilson http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3892-456X, Tanja Winkler, Anna Livia Brand, C. N. E. Corbin, Matthew Jordan Miller http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3140-4756, Annette Koh, Konia Freitas & Andrea R. Roberts http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9979-6026

https://doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2018.1456816

Published online:

25 April 2018

Figure 2. Source: Author.

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Two large reservoirs were constructed between 1947 and 1963, creating water-front real estate on land that had previously been used for farming. Today, the lake communities are enclaves of mostly white residents and many vacation properties. In Warren County, whites live in towns like Warrenton (the county seat) with buildings on the National Register of Historic Places, or on the water; Native Americans live in the hamlets surrounding Hollister and Essex in adjacent Halifax County; and blacks are concentrated in areas near one of at least thirteen plantations established in the county before the Civil War. This pattern of residential segregation evokes the “defensive localism” described by Lipsitz (2007) where communities or racial groups delineate and continually guard their space.

Racialization and Racial Identity

How we see ourselves and who we choose to identify with is an important expression of human agency. The question of racial identity was answered differently by different members of my family. My father’s kin are more stereotypically black in their physical characteristics, while my mother and her family are fair-skinned, with straighter hair. On my mother’s side, there were six children and three of them identified as Indian while the other three (including my mother) ‘went for’ black. It was very important to my father that my brothers and I did not identify as Indian. Both he and his father held that the Haliwa-Saponi tribe was really comprised of people with both white and black ancestry who, for a variety of reasons, could not countenance blackness. In their view, claiming a Native American identity was a not-so-subtle attempt to secure additional privileges within the color hierarchy described by Milteer Jr. (2014). On one hand this could be interpreted as reifying the black-white racial dichotomy or as an attempt to assert and maintain and pass down racial identity. However, one of the direct impacts of this mandate to identify as black and only black was to create an obvious and enduring disconnect between my physical appearance – which is closer to that of Warren County residents who identify as Indian – and how I identify. Someone who looks Indian but insists he is black invites derision and rejection by both constituencies. Wright, Houston, Ellis, Holloway, and Hudson (2003) researched multiracial geographies in the U.S. and found:

While growing up in a racial identity limbo was socially problematic, it did afford a useful perspective. Because I was not allowed to follow the path of least resistance and ‘go for’ Indian, I adopted an observer status of sorts that allowed me to focus on school and avoid the kind of entanglements that prevented many of my peers from leaving Warren County. Outside Warren County, I have benefitted from passing privilege (Ginsberg, 1996) where strangers project what they like onto my racially ambiguous physical appearance. As Delaney notes, “to be white is to be unmarked in the cultural economy of race” (2002, p. 11) which not only affords privileges, but also confers the option of engaging with race or not. This means I can only remember being called n – r three times and have only experienced police harassment twice, but it also means always feeling unmoored and like an outsider who lacks a genuine perspective. In the same way that “non-white identities are subject to public scrutiny, monitoring, and disciplining” (Wright et al., 2003, p. 459), persons whose appearance does not align with their racial identity or individuals who transgress racial boundaries may find it difficult to engage with race as a result of not being black or Indian, or Asian enough.

On a recent trip to visit relatives, I drove through Soul City for perhaps the third time in my life. I had been there once as part of class field trip to the public swimming pool and with my grandfather to one of his appointments at the now shuttered HealthCo medical facility. Soul City was not a place I frequented, partly due to the distance and difficulties of physical mobility in rural areas, but also because it continues to be seen as a planned community by blacks for blacks. One could argue that the three largest racial groups in Warren County have pursued separate and often parallel development strategies with the net effect of diluting already scarce resources and talent. Should the Haliwa-Saponi be faulted for operating a charter school in a county of roughly 20,000 residents with the tagline “The Better Choice!”? Is there a fundamental tension between the affirmation of distinct racial identities and effective development planning in a place like Warren County?

Because I have not lived there in over two decades I cannot speak to the political climate or the way that formal planning is occurring now, but reckoning with the complexities of racial identity and the legacy of the past must play a central role in order to move forward. Iris Marion Young notes that “formally neutral rules and policies that ignore group differences often perpetuate the disadvantage of those whose difference is defined as deviant; but focusing on difference risks recreating the stigma that difference has carried in the past” (Young, 1990, p. 169). While it would be unreasonable and unethical to expect groups to stop claiming, making, and remaking spaces to fit their needs and identities, institutional actors and planners can and should do a better job of recognizing and bridging these differences. There is not a single, unified Warren County. However, the complexities of racialization create points of interconnection - and future planning efforts that acknowledge and engage its multiple constituencies as well as the deep history that its residents share, are more likely to succeed. While I do not project a strong singular racial identity, I understand that the impact and place-specific nuances of racialization cannot be ignored in the work I do as a planning practitioner, educator, and scholar.

Notes on Contributor

Bev Wilson , PhD, AICP, is an associate professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His work focuses on the spatial and temporal aspects of development, as well as its implications for the environment and society. He also advocates for more transparent and democratic use of data and technology in urban planning and governance through his teaching and practice. Email: bevwilso@illinois.edu

Colonial City Design Lives Here: Questioning Planning Education’s Dominant Imaginaries

These images of the University of Cape Town’s public spaces – which were taken during pivotal moments of the Rhodes and Fees Must Fall student protests – speak not only of students’ disgust at the slow rate of transformation in institutions of higher learning two decades into a purportedly non-racist democracy, they also speak of

Race and Spatial Imaginary: Planning Otherwise/Introduction: What Shakes Loose When We Imagine Otherwise/She Made the Vision True: A Journey Toward Recognition and Belonging/Isha Black or Isha White? Racial Identity and Spatial Development in Warren County, NC/Colonial City Design Lives Here: Questioning Planning Education’s Dominant Imaginaries/Say Its Name – Planning Is the White Spatial Imaginary, or Reading McKittrick and Woods as Planning Text/Wakanda! Take the Wheel! Visions of a Black Green City/If I Built the World, Imagine That: Reflecting on World Building Practices in Black Los Angeles/Is Honolulu a Hawaiian Place? Decolonizing Cities and the Redefinition of Spatial Legitimacy/Interpretations & Imaginaries: Toward an Instrumental Black Planning History

All authors

Edited by Lisa K. Bates with http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3887-8754, Sharita A. Towne, Christopher Paul Jordan, Kitso Lynn Lelliott, Lisa K. Bates, Sharita A. Towne, Christopher Paul Jordan, Kitso Lynn Lelliott, Monique S. Johnson, Bev Wilson http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3892-456X, Tanja Winkler, Anna Livia Brand, C. N. E. Corbin, Matthew Jordan Miller http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3140-4756, Annette Koh, Konia Freitas & Andrea R. Roberts http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9979-6026

https://doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2018.1456816

Published online:

25 April 2018

Figure 1 (Source: The author, 2015 and 2016).

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Furthermore, and from the purview of planning education in particular, these images speak of a dominant spatial imaginary that persists in various contexts across different world regions despite our embrace of located thinking and situated knowledge production. Hence, students’ use of the southern facade of Centlivres Building – which houses the Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Planning, and Urban Design Programs at the University of Cape Town (UCT) – to voice their ongoing struggle against “colonial city designs [that] live here”. We therefore need to ask: why are students making such worrying claims when our planning curriculum is explicitly shaped by postcolonial and Southern theories?

To begin to answer this question we need to recognize that planning, in liberal democracies, “is inextricably linked to the rise of Western modernity [ever] since the end of the eighteenth century” (Escobar, 2010, p. 145). We also need to recognize that the idea of planning that was exported to African cities and regions post-independence from colonial rule was not based on “a neutral framework” (ibid.). Rather, this idea bears the marks of Western epistemological frameworks, since Western approaches to planning were deemed, and continue to be deemed, more efficient and effective in addressing local needs. Above all else, the rise of Western modernity has spearheaded the expansion of Western thinking in all its ramifications – from instrumental rationality to post-structuralism; from liberalism to Marxism; and from Western socialism to neoliberalism. And this expansion has become extremely effective in seeding a unidimensional understanding of ‘scientific rigor’ to which most scholars of the contemporary academy are tethered, regardless of whether we are based in the global North or South, and regardless of whether we adopt mainstream or Southern approaches to knowledge production. What counts as ‘valid scientific knowledge’ in the contemporary academy necessitates conforming to unquestioned and often taken-for-granted ‘rules of practice’ (Nandy, 1989) – ‘rules of practice’ that determine how we frame our scholarships; how we engage in research; and how we interpret and present our research findings. These ‘rules of practice’ equally apply to planning. Moreover, in our teaching and learning endeavors – that concern translating theory to practice – many of us tell our students that the purpose of planning is to establish interventions that may promote something ‘better’ than that which exists. And in order to arrive at spatial interventions that are intended to be ‘better’ than the status quo, we follow the ‘rules of our practice’ that include mapping, demarcating, arranging and representing space. But in so doing, many of us continue to represent these ‘better’ interventions “in accordance with the image of Western modernity’s values” alone (Smith, 1999, p. 53). So while Western systems of knowledge production make allowances for paradigm shifts that are often radical in nature – such as, for example, Western feminism, post-colonialism or Southern theories – in planning we encounter an epistemic problem that we cannot seem to escape from, because most of us are “Eurocentric in a theorizing sense” (Mufti, 2005, p. 473). Let me explain.

As postcolonial and Southern scholars – and here I include my own work – we tend to begin our intellectual projects from different sets of assumptions than those found in the global North. Yet, the methodological approaches we employ to collect, analyze, synthesize and interpret our research findings tend to remain rooted in Western paradigms. With this statement I’m not suggesting that Western analytical frameworks are invalid or irrelevant. Rather, my aim here is to draw our attention to the fact that while postcolonial and Southern planning scholars purposefully aim to produce situated knowledge, many of us continue to interpret our located thinking through a global relational perspective for the purpose of ‘worlding’ our research (Roy, 2015). As a result, we unwittingly become engaged in projects of “re-inscribing only one privileged position” of knowledge production (Smith, 1999, p. 24).

“Postcolonial theory was born in the traps of postmodernity, and it is from there that Foucault, Lacan, Derrida and others have become points of support for postcolonial critique” (Mignolo, 2011, p. 52). These traps equally apply to the Southern turn in planning theory regardless of whether we embrace insurgent modes of planning, or focus on conflicting rationalities. “Postcolonial [and Southern] theories [are] then not so much way[s] of interpreting the post-colony, as method[s] for interpreting the West” (Roy, 2015, p. 205). As a consequence, we draw, more often than not, on Western-established research methods and philosophical standpoints alone in order to theorize from the South, because most of us are socialized as Western thinkers. Hence, students’ astute claim that “colonial city design lives here” in the classrooms and studios of our universities. Hence also their impassioned call to decolonize the academy.

Decoloniality, on the other hand, presents us with an altogether different approach to knowledge production: an approach that is purposefully geared towards rethinking thinking itself. And it does so by calling for an epistemic de-linking from Western categories of thought. As such, decolonial thinking cannot “come from existing philosophies and cultures of scholarship,” because established frameworks “leave intact the logic of coloniality” (Mignolo, 2011, p. 49). Rather, decoloniality draws inspiration from different ways of knowing, including indigenous systems of knowledge production that were relegated as ‘invalid’, ‘mythical’ and ‘unscientific’ with the rise of Western modernity. Thus, and in the words of one UCT student, “our fight is not only for the broadening of access to institutions of higher learning, or for greater social justice in general, it is also for the possibility of imagining something different” (Kamanzi, 2017, p. 6).

However, as Amina Mama, the former Head of the African Gender Institute at UCT, reminds us, “given that most vehicles for scholarly communication in South Africa and globally continue to be owned and controlled by whiteness, it becomes very difficult to challenge Western thinking” (Mama cited in Nyamnjoh, 2015, p. 57). Mama’s reference here to ‘whiteness’ has less to do with pigmentation than with acting as a marker of superiority. In this sense, it then comes as no surprise that student protests began at UCT where a statue of Cecil John Rhodes presided over one of its most public spaces, overlooking a city that remains a remnant of “Europe in Africa” (Baijnath, 2017, p. 155). “Desires to preserve the pristine vision of what the middle class wants Cape Town to be” fly-in-the-face not only of students’ experiences of exclusion, but also of most Capetonians’ everyday experiences of injustice and inequality (ibid.). For this reason, student protests included smearing the statue of Rhodes with excrement to symbolize the rampant realities of Cape Town’s informal settlements where the removal of faeces is an ever-present problem. And in so doing, they brought these realities to one of the most affluent neighborhoods of the city, and to South Africa’s oldest bastions of Western education. Student protests thus gained much support both locally and internationally, because they were located in broader struggles against white privilege and the resilience of coloniality.

From a planning education standpoint, students’ calls for what ‘must fall’ – which began with Rhodes Must Fall and soon escalated into Fees Must Fall – serve as chilling reminders of how dominant spatial imaginaries continue to reproduce spaces of exclusion and injustice despite our embrace of postcolonial or Southern theories.

Notes on Contributor

Tanja Winkler is based in the School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics at the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa. Her research and teaching interests include engaged scholarships and planning ethics. Prior to joining UCT in 2011, she was based at the Universities of Sheffield, the Witwatersrand, and British Columbia. Email: Tanja.Winkler@uct.ac.za

Say Its Name – Planning Is the White Spatial Imaginary, or Reading McKittrick and Woods as Planning Text

My work is about looking at the ways that anti-black racism can be understood as spatial violence rendered through development paradigms across different temporalities and regions. Part of this analysis is to understand the role urban planning, policy-making, and design play in racializing landscapes and shaping narratives that normalize and rationalize continued practices of geographical – and therefore embodied – racism. Framing an understanding of urban planning in this way helps us see parallels across different sites, or the resonances between places such as the South Side of Chicago and New Orleans’s Tremé– both of which are predominantly and historically black communities that have seen waves of anti-black geographical structuring as well as resistance to this structuring. Framing racism as geographical helps us understand its persistence across different contexts (Hunter, 2018) and it situates urban planning as one of the domains through which anti-black landscapes are worked out. These parallels illuminate the composited presence (Dubois, 1999) of colonial and plantation thought and its spatial articulations in ongoing racial geographies and therefore in (possible) future landscapes.

In the urban landscapes where I work, and in my work with students, I center racism as landscape and temporality, only if by some understanding that, being white, I have a role to play in calling attention to the racism of my discipline. Centering racism then in the spatial workings of whiteness and its iterative formations through white supremacist and white privileged spatial logics, development modalities, urban development paradigms and spaces, is how I structure my own questions for planning scholarship, practice and pedagogy.

So, I read McKittrick and Woods’s Black Geographies and the Politics of Place (2007) as a planning text in order to understand how essentialism and the demarcation of space (re)situates black bodies and spaces as being “elsewhere” (p. 4). This means that the margin of non-white experience and vision are outside the normal in a way that erases everyday struggles and spatial productions (4) and racializes space toward related processes of expulsion, vulnerability, displacement, abandonment and discovery. I read McKittrick and Woods (2007) as planning text to articulate how geographies of racial exclusion evidence the “workings of modernity” (p. 4), the white spatial/racial imaginary and American practices of democracy and citizenship (which are spatial and therefore the domain -in part- of urban planning). I read McKittrick and Woods as planning text to say in my work and teaching that black geographical thought is “situated knowledge” (p. 4) and that geographical imaginations are political, spatial, human and therefore possibilities for disrupting plantation futures (McKittrick, 2013). Space and therefore urban planning are sites of racial production, as well as the sites where ‘unknowable figures’ produce unknowable places (McKittrick & Woods, 2007, p. 4).

This is all to say that in thinking about racial geographies and how the white spatial imaginary works through urban planning and design, is to ask questions (and to force my students to ask questions) about: who is erased? what is erased? what remains and what is reconstructed? what was and is imagined?

Planning is full to the rafters (Morrison, 2004) with the white spatial/racial/colonial/plantation/post-colonial/post-emanciptation/neoliberal imaginary. Defining the “problem” (Dubois, 2005) of urban landscapes and visualizing their futures are central to the practice of urban planning and design– and are therefore central to the working-out of anti-black geographies and are therefore central to black death and spatial dismemberment. The white spatial imaginary is in both the absences it has created and the new spatial logics it has imagined and built. It is in the transition from plantationism to modernity to neoliberalism. It is a racial project (Omi & Winant, 2014) reiterated in and through space – and it is always contested. So, what if we were to excavate the past and the present and name where whiteness has shaped space, displaced memory and body, co-opted labor of the mind and body, erased struggle and meaning? What if we were to name whiteness and to excavate its centrality in our thinking? 

If we asked these questions, we would encounter whiteness in what is absented. In my work in post-Katrina New Orleans, I spent time with residents in the all-white community of Lakeview. Lakeview had seen some of the most devastating flooding and destruction from Hurricane Katrina and, like other communities equally flooded, residents were involved in the painful process of making sense of the future amidst a sea of ruins. Unlike other communities equally flooded, residents in Lakeview were more equipped to recover because they were supported by the ways that whiteness intersects with financing, recovery, planning and visioning policy to elevate and expand a simple yet devastating privilege. The privilege of being white amidst recovery was, perhaps unsurprisingly (and yet still horribly) absent in much planning discourse (and it still is). Whiteness was absented at the same moments that blackness and black geographies were held up as all of the failures of environmental, social and developmental policy, only to rationalize a new wave of clearance, expulsion and redevelopment for non-white communities. Whiteness was absented but of course, this is how whiteness works.

All of this struck me again and again talking with white residents and listening to their rationalizations and visions for recovery. What continues to strike me most was the unquestioned ease within which the white spatial imaginary of recovery – a stark and yes, vocalized articulation that the future city would be whiter – was played against black geographical claims and histories in nuanced and deeply troubling ways. “There is no one down there,” someone told me about the Lower Ninth Ward at a planning meeting, justifying his view for why no transit service should be extended or no street repair funding should be given to the Lower Nine. “There is no one down there.”

Of course, there were people there. Not only were there actual literal and physical bodies there - there were bodies, homes and histories that had been swept away. There were bodies, homes, histories and hopes that were therefore also being swept away by the erasure of not seeing.

Now, you can mark this off as some racist white supremacist raging at a planning meeting. You can tell me that planning works to alleviate social injustice and that our ethical codes and commitments require that we center inequality. But we can all look around cities and suburbs and see where they are going and know we are –very simply and devastatingly– not doing enough. To call it an anomaly allows whiteness to continue to operate tacitly. To call it an anomaly allows whiteness to remain central in the work of urban planning visioning, policy-making and development. To call it an anomaly ignores the question that we have largely failed to ask - how does whiteness work through urban planning? Is urban planning the white/spatial/racial imaginary?

I see the imaginary of whiteness at work in and across different planning modes and temporalities. It is in a design movement to envision the Lower Ninth Ward as a future wetland in the place that residents have (despite literal and figurative odds) rebuilt their homes. It is in the expendability of this labor and love, which strikes me as the not-quite-exact-but-still-the-same exercise in seeing black spaces, bodies, work, dreams and claims as expendable.

I see the white spatial imaginary at work in the new luxury condos occupying the higher ground in New Orleans. I see the white spatial imaginary at work in the exchange of highways for bike lanes and blue ways as our go-to planning spatial logics. I see the white spatial imaginary at work in the continued denigration of black geographies and new modes of clearance with racial diversity as a savior of black landscapes (while we fail to desegregate white geographies). I see the white spatial imaginary at work in the filling up of black spaces with dog parks and programmed spaces because non-white bodies are apparently not allowed to have free space. It is in the appropriation of black and non-white cultural and spatial practices and the regulation and displacement of these practices.

If we asked these questions about whiteness as urban planning, we would also encounter whiteness in what is problematized. New Orleans’s Claiborne Avenue is a rebellious space (McKittrick, 2016). It is has died and been resurrected again and again – from the neutral ground’s public presencing of black bodies celebrating and living despite the spatial incarcerations of the Jim Crow South to the murals of history and memory of black cultural spaces and practices that line and occupy the spaces under the mid-twentieth century highway. Claiborne Avenue is caught between the white spatial imaginary and the black spatial imaginary (Lipsitz, 2011), between impulses that erase and displace and impulses that mark, claim and imagine space as free (Kelley, 2002). It is a liminal space. For planners, this space under the overpass of the expressway is easily condemnable, easily reimagined as a space filled with new programming or new spatial logics of environmental resilience – it is problematized. We should pause at the ease of our condemnations.

If we asked these questions about whiteness as urban planning, we would also encounter whiteness in what is envisioned. My research practice now bounds different historical black mecca neighborhoods in the American North and South and much of my time is spent in the archive, tracing back what has been erased if only because it is one way of making claims on the future. Beginning with the past (Wilson, 2016) calls attention to whiteness and subaltern epistemologies (Woods, 1998). We know the archive is replete with the white spatial imaginary, and it is easy to note this in what is not archived. But the archive is also a space of trauma, coldly and almost meticulously cataloging the intersections where the white imaginary exists as a vision for the future. Whiteness is traumatizing in the archive but we have to name it and stay with it if we want to eviscerate it.

Critique is not the only task. Imagination is also critical, but in order to plan free spaces, envision new radical possibilities and have freedom dreams (Kelley, 2002), we have to name and name again, search and search again for what is tacitly hidden in our landscapes and for the voices whose claims on the future are silenced by the hegemony of the white/spatial/racial/ colonial/post-colonial imagination. If we were to excavate the past and the present and name this imaginary as worked out through planning – would this lead to new futures and new visions? Would it challenge us methodologically? Theoretically? Pedagogically? If we were to center how our imaginations are “riddled with the stories racism built” (Klonaris, 2016, 84), what other futures would we uncover? Plan making is imagining. It is envisioning a future that details – both through words and images – who will inhabit where. It is a pronouncement of inclusion and exclusion – both of bodies, but also of racialized landscapes. For planning futures to be different, they have to be full to the rafters with non-white, non-supremacist imaginations.

So is it everywhere? Yes, it is everywhere. It is hopeful to think that black and other non-white male, non-patriarchal, non-heteronormative geographies are also everywhere. It is imperative that we do that work alongside naming whiteness. But it is also imperative that we develop spaces where we ask our students to do this work, to think through how racial imaginaries are at work in their discipline. I have seen students grapple with the almost mind-numbing presence of whiteness and anti-black development modes in and across planning’s historical and contemporary processes. I have seen the same students articulate a different vision – a critique of the white spatial/racial/plantation/ colonial/post-colonial/neo-colonial/neoliberal imaginary and then a vision for something different. Often students do this work through creative writing or an artistic practice because this opens up the space for new imaginaries, new words to evoke a different future.

The work with students is often uncomfortable. Seminar discussions try to push past the easy responses that argue about lack of intention, lack of knowledge and the ‘anomaly’ of racism. I’ve learned at least to stay in the moments of discomfort because it is only there that we get somewhere else. But the discussions and understanding about the sheer breadth of whiteness in urban planning leaves my students and myself, I think, feeling raw and without words or language at some moments. So then – we have to invent new language. We have to question when words like blight, renewal, revitalization, redevelopment and resilient surface to rid non-white bodies of their claims to space, history, labor, love, time, otherness, memory, and beauty.

Both critique and vision are imperative but naming whiteness as a spatial/racial imaginary –as a mode of delineating and distributing through our discipline – is quite simply not done enough in urban planning. We need to center whiteness, white supremacy and white privilege not because we want to reify it (Ahmed, 2007), but because we have to name it to see its inner and multifaceted workings. We need to map its contours and histories, if only to then ask; what if urban planning could become central to the working out of geographies, where no one had to move or be permanently expelled – where healing was not piecemeal (Jordan, 1965)?

Note on Contributor

Anna Livia Brand ’s research focuses on racialized and resistant constructions of the built environment in black mecca neighborhoods in the American North and South. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. Email: annalivia@berkeley.edu

Wakanda! Take the Wheel! Visions of a Black Green City

If the trends hold true, Marvel’s Black Panther movie could be the highest form of escapism, not only for Black folks within the U.S. but across the African diaspora. Fans are preparing outfits that cosplay just ain’t ready for and haven’t seen before. Not since Alex Haley’s televised miniseries Roots (1977) have African Americans scheduled gatherings around a screen en masse for a collective viewing experience. In this case, instead of imagining a possible past bound up in slave narratives delivered on the small screen, the Black Panther movie provides images of a possible future of Black self-determination on the big screen. Marvel’s fictional African country, Wakanda, is a tectonic change and paradigm-shifting in the ways Black countries, cities, neighborhoods, and spaces are depicted and understood. This is particularly true for African countries, whose only redeeming qualities within the American gaze tend to be natural landscapes, particularly wildlife reserves and national parks like the Serengeti, full of charismatic yet endangered fauna.

While Wakanda is a mythologization of an African country, it boasts a historical past and present outside the very real complications of colonization, which has a violent history of pilfering natural resources and depleting the wealth of Black nations, leaving behind resource scarcity and unstable economies (Rodney, 2012). Wakanda is governed by a benevolent kingdom and has a powerful but hidden presence on the world stage. The narrative of its natural wealth is expressed through the fictitious extremely rare ore, vibranium, with its large deposit only found on Wakandan lands (Coates, 2016). Wakanda is depicted as a sovereign African nation that produces and has access to the most advanced technologies on the globe (Coates, 2016). Its autonomy as an African nation is directly connected to their control over vibranium, scientific knowledge of its energy manipulating properties, and the concealment of these facts from the rest of the world (Coates, 2016). It is because of this and its governance by a benevolent kingdom, Wakanda has a forceful presence on the world stage. Wakanda, as a utopic Black imaginary, brings together a great African past and a bright Black future as it ruptures the toxic narratives relegated to the global south, Black and Brown nations, and non-white governed spaces.

We Should Pause to Acknowledge that this Film Comes at a Poignant Time …

In the midst of cinematic excitement about Marvel’s Black Panther and a month before its release, the current president was said to have articulated a disparaging and overtly racist slur leveraged at Black and Brown expatriates and those actively immigrating to the U.S. by questioning: “why do we want all these people from ‘shithole countries’ coming here?” (Watkins & Phillip, 2018) This is just one example of how the change in administration has ushered in an upsurge of old-school overt racism and conjured up white supremacist images and narratives many hoped were relegated to the past. It is also a display of how predominantly non-white countries, landscapes, and people are thought about and understood as blighted, corrupt, and lacking. Today African Americans are finding racial erasures and threats in whole new ways with some harkening back to the good old days.

Current gentrification policies and practices are impacting African Americans and displacing them from what were once called chocolate cities, predominantly Black cities governed by predominantly Black leaders. This has led to the rupture of social, cultural, and economic safety nets as long-term residents are pushed outside of their neighborhood, city, and sometimes even their state. While the promise of the green city was to provide healthy urban ecology to mitigate environmentally compromised areas that impacted low-income residents and people of color, the reality of the green city is creating and reproducing new forms of gentrification.

(Re)Imagining Racialized Urban Environmentally Just Futures …

The move from imagined spaces to real material changes is particularly important for Black neighborhoods facing green gentrification, which occurs when green space creation, restoration, and beautification projects attract wealthy white populations, which in turns leads to a rise in housing costs and causes the displacement of long-term low-income residents and people of color (Gould & Lewis, 2017). Municipal governments and developers are creating plans for these green projects with renderings minus a Black population, visually announcing these green cities and their neighborhoods as whites only.

The concept of the green city has a lineage that dates back to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, in which the White City was introduced and gave rise to the City Beautiful movement. The White City, named for its white buildings, was accompanied by expansive heavily manicured green spaces, reflecting the prestigious European parks and open spaces grounded within a French aesthetic. Frederick Law Olmsted, as one of the architects of the White City, was also influential in the mass proliferation of parks including the iconic Central Park and Yosemite National Park, which are based in a British aesthetic at the turn of the twentieth century. The white buildings and the green spaces of the White City are still integral to city planning renderings and are recognizable in the visual articulations of green city planning projects which also feature an overwhelmingly white population in spite of the current demographics of neighborhood.

The green city has also been understood to be the next iteration of the Garden City movement, which interestingly enough has its origins in science-fiction. Ebenezer Howard is credited as the father of the Garden City movement and was heavily influenced by the science fiction/fantasy utopian dystopian genre, which was popular during his time. It was specifically the novel of Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward 2000–1887 that acutely influenced him (Schuyler, 2002). Howard’s book To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898) is said to have “done more than any other single book to guide the modern town planning movement and to alter its objectives” (Mumford, 1965, p. 29). The garden city movement was the planning impetus behind the creation of the suburbs in an effort to marry the built environment and natural environment; town and country. This is to acknowledge that city planning employed science fiction/speculative fiction to create real material change. My desire, therefore, to use Marvel’s Black Panther - a science fiction/speculative fiction film – to tap into new aesthetics and rethink urban design is not unfounded. It is, however, complicated by the work of unthinking Eurocentrism, which “sanitizes Western history while patronizing and even demonizing the non-West” (Shohat & Stam, 2014, p. 3). It is a large ask and an even bigger task to move from fiction to fact, by planning with a healthy grounding in environmental and social justice, as well as understandings of global cultural land-use and housing knowledges, which function outside of Eurocentric ideologies.

Birnin Zana, Wakanda’s capital city, also known as the Golden City, gives us a glimpse of a non-white, urban, environmentally just future grounded in an African aesthetic. In so doing it also grants us a vision of a Black green city in the now and present. Marvel’s Black Panther (2018) trailer gives us just a peek; an air-craft flies through a layered force field, revealing the metropolis below as Okoye announces, “We are home.” The flyover reveals a Stefano Boeri Architetti’s Bosco Verticale, (vertical forest) skyscraper, trees, green roofs, colorful buildings, and a train, most likely public transportation, for this bustling urban space. This may be the only representation of a utopian Black city and it is far removed from the dominant depictions of Black spaces as ghettos, slums, or apocalyptic landscapes commonly displayed on U.S. big screens. The presence of current Italian architecture, the vertical forest, speaks to the difference between adoption of cultural productions through choice and of foreign cultural implementations through force. The Golden City demonstrates that these are urban creations of a different ideology for a different land and for a different culture. The concept art depicts a new Black green urban aesthetic grounded in understandings of African cultural productions; shapes, colors, designs, and functions. We can’t ignore this moment for new possibilities.

As we revel in this cinematic event that is Black Panther, I ask that we don’t come back empty handed after the credits roll. The film represents a type of speculative black fiction or Afrofuturism - or my preference, Afrocentric speculative fiction (there’s an ongoing debate on these terms) - and I think it’s worth paying special attention to this depiction of a futuristic and green chocolate city. Going even further, I also ask us to unthink the Eurocentrism which has become naturalized in the production of space and within the city planning field (Shohat & Stam, 2014). By recognizing and acknowledging that most of our urban spaces are western cultural productions, we can move to create a different, more holistic and inclusive urban landscape that privileges diverse understandings of land use and infrastructure, as well as aesthetics rooted in non-western ideologies.

Moreover, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) can’t just be a tagline or named within a mission statement. DEI must be a holistic praxis girded by environmentally and socially just theory and implemented as the guiding framework. This means we must move to include different ways to design our cities using global knowledges. We stand at a pivotal time of intensifying urbanization and climate change, yet we are building our cities within twentieth century sensibilities for twenty-first century realities. The City Beautiful Movement, Howard’s Garden Cities, and Frederick Law Olmsted and Company’s proliferations of urban and park spaces, are all based in Eurocentrism, which has colonized our landscapes unquestioned for far too long. Can Wakanda take the wheel? The answer … Yes! It can both steer and stir us into thinking differently about cities, urban green spaces, neighborhoods, and our future.

Notes on Contributor

C. N. E. Corbin is a PhD Candidate at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management. Corbin’s research focuses on how historical processes of urbanization and current urban environmental policies and practices are impacting vulnerable populations and their access to public green spaces. Email: uc.corbin@berkeley.edu

If I Built the World, Imagine That: Reflecting on World Building Practices in Black Los Angeles

Social scientists and policy advocates typically emphasize Black Americans’ deficits due to structural disadvantages without much regard for the agency that we have to build on our cultural assets (Hunter & Robinson, 2016). Planning theory treats matters of race and ethnicity from this perspective, as if Black lives are doomed. At the other extreme, urban scholarship fetishizes the growing mélange of America as a cosmopolitan set of “mongrel cities” or a coming “diversity explosion” (Sandercock & Lyssiotis, 2003; Frey, 2014). These lamentations prompt us, like Robin D. Kelley (2003) and Steven Duncombe (2007), to ask: Where are the Black dreams and urban fantasies motivating the quality of lives we seek? In planning, we need more sincere, imaginative, diverse approaches to shape the built environment that demonstrates how, as Black Americans, our race is not just a burden on our life chances. Race also acts as a resource to build worlds nuanced by our diverse ethnic, class, gender, educational, regional, sexual, and spiritual identities.

One approach, nimble enough to highlight these nuances, is ‘world building.’ World building is a conceptual practice most attributed to production designer Alex McDowell, the founder of the University of Southern California (USC)-based non-profit; the World Building Institute (WBI). WBI partners with organizations to prototype speculative ideas that innovate on the theory of a storytelling system and ‘the future of narrative media.’ Yet, it is also a practitioner-driven tool, as it was the approach used to construct the story world for the Tom Cruise-starring feature film Minority Report (2002). In this article, I offer another minority report from the streets of Leimert Park Village (LPV) in Los Angeles: there are plenty of people, especially Black Americans, whose imaginations could be brought into reality with existing technology. But without moral architecture in place, exclusion will form cities’ futures as well as their pasts.

World Building at First Glance: Elitist, Transient, Color-blind

As the entertainment capital of the world, it should surprise few that Los Angeles has been prototyping a cinema-inspired community planning tool. In January 2015, I participated in one of three World Building Workshops for a future Downtown Los Angeles (DTLA) Imagination Corridor. The attendant developers, civic elites, academics, and artists entertained each other with high-brow, high-tech ways to move, live, and make on Figueroa Street. In my Making Workshop, there were no overtures to any particular ethnic cultures or even what kinds of people would want the things imagined for the DTLA Imagination Corridor. But USC staff made it clear that this was the first time anyone had used world building for a real place. Therefore, as a first-year PhD student, I suspended criticality and went along with the rudderless brainstorming, unable to contribute to my own satisfaction; as sophisticated as the tools were, there was no space or vocabulary for me to connect my experiences and aesthetics with those of my team members (Figure 1).

Race and Spatial Imaginary: Planning Otherwise/Introduction: What Shakes Loose When We Imagine Otherwise/She Made the Vision True: A Journey Toward Recognition and Belonging/Isha Black or Isha White? Racial Identity and Spatial Development in Warren County, NC/Colonial City Design Lives Here: Questioning Planning Education’s Dominant Imaginaries/Say Its Name – Planning Is the White Spatial Imaginary, or Reading McKittrick and Woods as Planning Text/Wakanda! Take the Wheel! Visions of a Black Green City/If I Built the World, Imagine That: Reflecting on World Building Practices in Black Los Angeles/Is Honolulu a Hawaiian Place? Decolonizing Cities and the Redefinition of Spatial Legitimacy/Interpretations & Imaginaries: Toward an Instrumental Black Planning History

All authors

Edited by Lisa K. Bates with http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3887-8754, Sharita A. Towne, Christopher Paul Jordan, Kitso Lynn Lelliott, Lisa K. Bates, Sharita A. Towne, Christopher Paul Jordan, Kitso Lynn Lelliott, Monique S. Johnson, Bev Wilson http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3892-456X, Tanja Winkler, Anna Livia Brand, C. N. E. Corbin, Matthew Jordan Miller http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3140-4756, Annette Koh, Konia Freitas & Andrea R. Roberts http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9979-6026

https://doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2018.1456816

Published online:

25 April 2018

Figure 1. Futuristic artistic rendering of public autonomous vehicles shuttling people around Leimert Park Village in 2050 (Courtesy of Karl Baumann, 2016).

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Cinema, design, and planning: each has ignored how white supremacy constructs taste and prestige. In a consumer society highly driven by neoliberal privatization, taste matters everywhere. Designers and filmmakers, compared to planners, tend to be very aware of their own tastes. The white, colonial spatial imaginary is a product of the ‘habitus’ of those who enforce Eurocentric, market-based, bourgeoisie sensibilities under the universalist guise of ‘good design,’ ‘good films’ or ‘good plans.’ Good for whom and where? Habitus is a sociological term that is rarely taken in a spatial sense; but, in fact, it is both. Nicole Mann reminds us that Pierre “Bourdieu has described habitus as a ‘sense of one’s place… a sense of other’s place’ in the world of one’s surrounding environment” (2012, p. 276). Habitus would appear to be co-intimated with the imagination of space, no? We must turn our attention to peoples whose tastes have not been reflected in plans for their spaces.

Sankofa City: Where Black Dreamers Plan, Design, and Film

Afro-futurism is often defined as the practice of imagining the future from a Black cultural perspective (Womack, 2013), but according to avant-garde filmmaker Ben Caldwell, one of the long-standing business owners in LPV, it simply represents a way that Black people can “stay ahead of the curve” (Baumann, 2016). Staying ahead of the curve is what motivated the four-year partnership between Caldwell’s business KAOS Network and a USC Professor Francois Bar through the Leimert Telephone Company, a public musical instrument project. In Fall 2016, the community was receptive to the PhD student Karl Baumann who helped evolve the partnership by proposing a community-based USC workshop called Community World Building: Designing City Futures in South LA.

To my knowledge, LPV is the first neighborhood in the country to spur an Afro-futuristic cultural turn within planning through a world building process. Over the course of a 10-week semester, we generated future worlds with weekly prompts, helping us to imagine life in 2050. The group members had already been playing with a new place identity: a futuristic place called Sankofa City, which simultaneously blends urbanism with the Africanist symbology of the sankofa bird, prominent in West African spirituality.

The four dominant generative modes were:

How did we call into focus such sharp, spatial visions? In short, the approach mimicked a design charrette. Each team worked on a specific aspect of LPV in 2050. However, the innovation came with the guidance by Karl Baumann, the PhD candidate leading the workshop. Instead of being told to come up with a wish list of improvements in that dimension, as traditional public participation sessions do, we were told to imagine ourselves as a person in that place. The protagonist in our narrative was to be a young person of color, to be specific. We were prompted to engage in role-play by imagining what a typical day would be like navigating that new world. What might it sound like? What might it smell like? What might it taste like? Who else would be there? This not only intensified the quality of our separate interventions, but it increased our interest collectively. Each team’s characters began to talk across the modes and imagine how their protagonists might find it exciting or difficult to exist in that world. We were literally building a new set of narrative-driven worlds through placemaking (Figure 2).

Race and Spatial Imaginary: Planning Otherwise/Introduction: What Shakes Loose When We Imagine Otherwise/She Made the Vision True: A Journey Toward Recognition and Belonging/Isha Black or Isha White? Racial Identity and Spatial Development in Warren County, NC/Colonial City Design Lives Here: Questioning Planning Education’s Dominant Imaginaries/Say Its Name – Planning Is the White Spatial Imaginary, or Reading McKittrick and Woods as Planning Text/Wakanda! Take the Wheel! Visions of a Black Green City/If I Built the World, Imagine That: Reflecting on World Building Practices in Black Los Angeles/Is Honolulu a Hawaiian Place? Decolonizing Cities and the Redefinition of Spatial Legitimacy/Interpretations & Imaginaries: Toward an Instrumental Black Planning History

All authors

Edited by Lisa K. Bates with http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3887-8754, Sharita A. Towne, Christopher Paul Jordan, Kitso Lynn Lelliott, Lisa K. Bates, Sharita A. Towne, Christopher Paul Jordan, Kitso Lynn Lelliott, Monique S. Johnson, Bev Wilson http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3892-456X, Tanja Winkler, Anna Livia Brand, C. N. E. Corbin, Matthew Jordan Miller http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3140-4756, Annette Koh, Konia Freitas & Andrea R. Roberts http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9979-6026

https://doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2018.1456816

Published online:

25 April 2018

Figure 2. Residents and students building working models of Sankofa City at KAOS Network in Leimert Park Village (Courtesy of Karl Baumann, 2016).

Display full size

In successive sessions, we built on these story-driven sketches and translated them across more elaborate mediums to allow more input: dioramas using toys and props, then digital 3-D models, and finally a science-fiction film about Sankofa City from the eyes of a Black international visitor. In January 2017, the film was part of our pitch to the community forum Vision 2020 Stakeholder Group, who were skeptical about what our innovations meant for them. Thankfully, the community members were co-producers. We knew that we needed to design for public facilities in LPV to include the needs of homeless people. We knew that youth needed jobs and might embrace autonomous vehicle fabrication as a new local, manufacturing opportunity. One of our teammates, a transportation engineer and designer, verified the possibility as feasible. Lastly, this film was jointly produced by USC students and KAOS Network, who both shared the rights to use it for their many overlapping, yet unique needs.

Conclusion: Towards More Colors in the Sky

Urban planning and design, like many disciplines and professions, has produced too many cloud-counters of Black pain and not enough Black possibility. World building is a process-based, culture-producing intervention that can produce a visionary inclusive future, if we will it. As I have explored race, arts, and economic development in South Los Angeles, this new mode of Black urbanism has helped advance community plans. Over the past year, the Sankofa City team has quietly expanded its Afro-futurist world-building beyond LPV. They have screened the film as a teaching tool to organize communities, such as South Side Chicago. I plan to participate in the December 2017 Los Angeles session with newfound appreciation for the sincerity of these efforts. Stay tuned.

Notes on Contributor

Matthew Jordan Miller is a writer, photographer, and researcher focusing his PhD candidacy in urban planning on ways that cities develop Black commerce and culture in Los Angeles. He is a first-generation college graduate from the Bay Area who earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Email: millermj@usc.edu

Is Honolulu a Hawaiian Place? Decolonizing Cities and the Redefinition of Spatial Legitimacy

In conversations about the colonization of Hawai’i, well-meaning people may acknowledge the forcible annexation but usually refuse to consider the restoration of Hawaiian sovereignty. If the illegal occupation of the Hawaiian Islands by the United States ended, some fear there would be a forced exodus of those who cannot claim Native Hawaiian ancestry ¹ .

In conversations about homelessness in Honolulu, well-meaning people may acknowledge the lack of affordable housing but harp on the notion that the people sleeping on sidewalks and in parks are unfairly ‘privatizing’ public lands. Outrage over the ‘illegitimate’ use of ‘our’ public space is a constant theme in Honolulu media and local politics.

How do these flashpoints reveal colonized understandings of spatial legitimacy? They rely on a dominant Western spatial imaginary that defines control over land primarily as the power to exclude. The idea of exclusion spans political and cultural issues over the legitimacy of knowledge, the use of spatial technologies and the power that planners exert; the power to define process and who is included or not; and finally, the incommensurability of western and indigenous ways of thinking about land and rights to land.

Hawaiian sovereignty frightens people because the prevailing definition of nationhood is in terms of walls and borders, bans and deportations. The emergence of homeless encampments in public view frightens people because this use of space threatens not only property values but also the concept of private property. Who decides what land is for? When spatial legitimacy is predicated on determinations of illegitimacy, conversations about the future revolve around how to exclude the unwanted. An indigenous urban imaginary that does not rely on a system of extractive and exclusive property ownership opens other possibilities for spatial politics.

We must point out that Hawai’i has never been fully subsumed within a private property regime. In 1995, the Hawai’i State Supreme Court ruled in the case of Public Access Shoreline Hawaii v Planning Commission of Hawaii County that the county had erred in limiting ocean access via private lands because of “undue reliance on Western understandings of property law.” Nor were the courts the only space of contestation over the meaning of land in the second half of the twentieth century. After the 1959 imposition of statehood and the 1961 implementation of the state land use law, Honolulu entered a period of massive development fuelled in part by military spending and tourism. In response, the anti-eviction struggles in the 1970s and 1980s included Native Hawaiian and non-Hawaiians jointly asserting that their right to live off the land pre-empted claims by the government or private landowners. These assertions of land-as-livelihood were not limited to the rural fringes. In fact, a fishing community sprang up in the industrially zoned Sand Island adjacent to Honolulu International Airport.

However, an earlier ruling by the State Supreme Court had rejected the idea that Native Hawaiian gathering rights could be exercised on developed lands because this “would so conflict with understandings of property, and potentially lead to such disruption, that we could not consider it anything short of absurd.” ² The court’s dismissal of even the non-controversial practice of gathering traditional plants illustrates how indigenous practices are not understood as urban possibilities. In this view, indigenous placemaking is only possible in rural communities. Honolulu is given up as lost, as wahi pana (significant places) are buried underneath concrete (Landgraf & Hamasaki, 2015). At the height of the Kalama Valley anti-eviction struggle, a representative of the landowner told activists, “In today’s modern world, the Hawaiian life-style should be illegal” (Trask, 1987, p. 142).

The assumption that indigenous values and lifeworlds cannot be manifested in contemporary cities bolsters the colonial construct of indigenous life as incompatible with modernity and cedes the urban realm as a perpetually colonized space. We need to decolonize the city.

It’s true that Native Hawaiian identities and aesthetics are increasingly incorporated into urban development in Honolulu, usually via naming, art, or landscape design elements. The visible presence of indigeneity in the urban landscape is important. But the presence of cultural practitioners at the groundbreaking ceremony, or the presence of native plants in the landscaping, do not decolonize a place. Nor do buildings function as indigenous places because we call them by Hawaiian names. Even if they are named after native birds, these soaring condos are economic assets, legitimated by the private property regime, enforced by ‘No Trespassing’ regulations.

Indigenous urbanism in this mode is neither relational nor transformational, but only an acknowledgement of existence. Architects and planners frequently refer to the importance of preserving a ‘Hawaiian sense of place’ but focus on place as environmental amenity or represent Hawaiianness as a bygone history with a plaque to commemorate the ‘inhabitants of old Hawai’i.’

What if we demanded that a ‘Hawaiian sense of place’ be generative of social, economic and political meanings rather than aesthetic choices? What would it mean to decolonize Honolulu so that we support the flourishing of indigenous values of land and kinship within the urban core? How could we wean ourselves off ‘undue reliance on Western understandings of property law’?

We offer three suggestions that were explored at the Decolonizing Cities symposium in May 2017, a collaboration between the Center for Hawaiian Studies, the Department of Urban & Regional Planning and the Indigenous Politics program at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. ³

First, we need to ride the currents to cross oceans and learn from other places. Scholars and practitioners in Australia, Canada, the United States, and Aotearoa (New Zealand) – including our symposium speakers, Theodore Jojola, Hirini Matunga and Libby Porter – are seeking to decolonize cities in ways that assert the present-day legitimacy of indigenous worlds (Porter et al., 2017). Aotearoa (New Zealand) shows possibilities for how to recognize and formalize relationships with the land that do not rely on ‘ownership’ frames. ⁴ Canada and Australia demonstrate how mundane bureaucratic logics can stymie such efforts (Cosgrove & Kliger, 1997; Dorries, 2009).

Second, we must demonstrate that decolonial practices and indigenous urbanism are not counter-factual fantasies that require a time machine. The Hawaiian proverb “I ka wā ma mua, i ka wā ma hope” can be translated as “The future is in the past.” At the symposium, scholars, activists, historians and poets involved in the forthcoming DeTours: A Decolonial Guidebook to Hawai’i shared how they rewalk and remake the always present past as a way to break settler colonialism’s frames. The DeTour activists began their archival activism by investigating Puʻuloa, known to Americans as Pearl Harbor. Underneath surveillance towers, Kyle Kajihiro and Terri Keko’olani spoke into view the indigenous abundance (oysters and fish ponds) that predated its conversion to the hyper militarized Pearl Harbor. To speculate about the past is to make the present strange and open up possibilities of decolonization that could subordinate property paradigms to Native Hawaiian understandings of land as responsibility rather than commodity.

Third, we need to demand more from the planners and politicians in Hawai’i who have adopted and adapted Hawaiian concepts, namely ahupuaʻa, kuleana, and aloha ‘āina. The ahupuaʻa is the fundamental Hawaiian land use principle that respects, among other things, the primacy of ecological function in relation to urban use. As the ahupua’a division typically extended from the uplands to the sea, the concept has been embraced as a Hawaiian term for watershed. ⁵ Conservation planners reference the concept when discussing how stream restoration connects to shoreline management. The city of Honolulu has even installed signage demarcating ahupua’a boundaries. Kuleana is a Hawaiian term that encompasses a depth of meaning, including right, privilege, and responsibility. It is used in its original incarnation invoking place-based rights as specific land parcels assigned to Native Hawaiian family lineages, and has also been adopted as a synonym for responsibility in the public discourse. ⁶ Kuleana embeds a philosophy of aloha ‘āina, or love for the land, as an ongoing practice and ethic. But when we talk about ahupua’a, kuleana or aloha ‘āina today, it rarely is with any understanding of the ongoing and historical processes of dispossession that have detached people from places. Honolulu realtors bestow an annual ‘Aloha ‘Āina’ award that is painfully inapt, given the real estate market’s role in the homelessness crisis which disproportionately impacts Native Hawaiians. Saying a word and living by its logic are two very different propositions. The concepts of ahupuaʻa, kuleana, and aloha ‘āina shape spatial legitimacy through relational practices, not exclusionary definitions.

Notes on contributors

Annette Koh recently completed her Ph.D. in urban and regional planning from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Her dissertation examined temporary placemaking in urban Honolulu within a contested redevelopment district. Current research interests include the politics of civic engagement and the role of creative inquiry in participatory planning practice. Email: koha@hawaii.edu

Konia Freitas was born and raised in Hawaiʻi on Oʻahu island. She currently serves as the Chair of Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her academic areas of interest span indigenous planning, Hawaiian focused education and indigenous research methodology. She has professional land use planning experience and holds a Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Planning. Email: antoinet@hawaii.edu

Interpretations & Imaginaries: Toward an Instrumental Black Planning History

While few scholars would say Black people don’t have a past, some may contend they do not possess a placemaking history informing specific planning practices the field is compelled to propagate. Relatedly, my own scholarship seeks out Black placemaking history and methods and is based on an epistemology of planning, preservation, and research which I call Critical Sankofa Planning (Roberts, 2015). Sankofa means, ‘go back and get’. Critical Sankofa Planning is a process of looking back, believing there’s wisdom there, and applying that knowledge to current dilemmas while refraining from romanticizing some mythic past. I mine Black collective memory, cultural performance, and oral tradition for both planning wisdom and cautionary tales. My teaching and research is generally preoccupied with how to develop more instrumental planning theories and histories (Sies & Silver, 1996, p. 9) and specifically, with how Black planning imaginaries can disrupt cunning and virulent white/colonial spatial imaginaries in historic Black communities. Essentially, how might historical and contemporary Black imaginaries be made visible and instrumental in a discipline often implicated in gentrification and cultural erasure? I recently contemplated these questions while speaking at a conference plenary session which commemorated the anniversary of Mary Sies and Christopher Silver’s, Planning the twentieth Century American City. I began with a passage from Sies’ introduction to the 1996 edited volume:

The Sies and Silver anthology is not the only book on insurgent planning historiographies and ethnohistories of place (Nieves, 2008; Sandercock, 1998; Thomas & Ritzdorf, 1997; Woods, 1995). However, I find Sies’ passage striking for its acknowledgment of the white supremacy at the heart of planning history which leads its emissaries and educators to marginalize Black planning heritage and epistemologies of place. More directly, the passage brings attention to the ways planning pedagogy and practice undermine Black agency and capacity to imagine and interpret places , problems, and possibilities. Essential to this subjugation is token inclusion through abstraction (accumulation of Black bodies at meetings or dots on a map). I bring attention to how Black community and planning transpire in ways that transgress these abstractions and assumptions.

An instrumental planning history and theory, rooted in a Critical Sankofa, requires that scholars and educators prioritize documenting Black interpretations of place, placemaking, and preservation. Scholars committed to this work identify the ways Black imaginaries and interpretations manifest; how they have become instrumental; and integrate these imaginaries and interpretations into planning pedagogy. In this essay, I bring attention to four spaces or spheres in which planning imaginaries and interpretations rooted in Black agency are instrumentalized and at times actualized: mutual aid groups, the streets, Neo-Black Power city politics, and Black vernacular place preservation (Figure 1).

Race and Spatial Imaginary: Planning Otherwise/Introduction: What Shakes Loose When We Imagine Otherwise/She Made the Vision True: A Journey Toward Recognition and Belonging/Isha Black or Isha White? Racial Identity and Spatial Development in Warren County, NC/Colonial City Design Lives Here: Questioning Planning Education’s Dominant Imaginaries/Say Its Name – Planning Is the White Spatial Imaginary, or Reading McKittrick and Woods as Planning Text/Wakanda! Take the Wheel! Visions of a Black Green City/If I Built the World, Imagine That: Reflecting on World Building Practices in Black Los Angeles/Is Honolulu a Hawaiian Place? Decolonizing Cities and the Redefinition of Spatial Legitimacy/Interpretations & Imaginaries: Toward an Instrumental Black Planning History

All authors

Edited by Lisa K. Bates with http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3887-8754, Sharita A. Towne, Christopher Paul Jordan, Kitso Lynn Lelliott, Lisa K. Bates, Sharita A. Towne, Christopher Paul Jordan, Kitso Lynn Lelliott, Monique S. Johnson, Bev Wilson http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3892-456X, Tanja Winkler, Anna Livia Brand, C. N. E. Corbin, Matthew Jordan Miller http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3140-4756, Annette Koh, Konia Freitas & Andrea R. Roberts http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9979-6026

https://doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2018.1456816

Published online:

25 April 2018

Figure 1. Pictured: (l. to r.) Henry Hadnot, Fred McCray, and Bobbie Joe Hadnot outside of the former GW Carver School, at Dixie Community, Jasper County, Texas. The men have transformed the school into a space for the Community and Family Historical Preservation Association’s activities and events. Photo by Andrea Roberts (2015).

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Mutual Aid as Insurgent Survivalism

I noted, while anxiously watching my hometown contend with Hurricane Harvey - online and on television, a growing mutual aid movement. Though overshadowed by the Cajun Army and other individual heroic efforts on television, impromptu and intentional groups of the most disaffected and disenfranchised sprung up online. Some created spontaneous rescue staging spaces under freeway underpasses, while others more deliberately took on the functions of government: rescue, social service provision, and temporary housing. Ad hoc relief groups highlighted the Red Cross’ reputation for a lack of financial transparency while soliciting and distributing donations. For the Black Women’s Defense League recovery meant locating safe shelter for transgender evacuees or those on parole. The League also collected and redistributed hair products to displaced women. In these ways the Black Women’s Defense League instrumentalized a Black heritage of cooperation and self-determination through mutual aid (Nembhard, 2014) and built a world they envision, even amidst disaster. These organizations demonstrate what I call an insurgent survivalism, affirming not only immediate recovery but also illuminating ways we can expand how participatory recovery and planning should look.

Streets as the Archives of Now

Knowledge forms are central to planning research because they are the foundation for theory, practice, and action. Planners’ preferences for certain knowledge forms may color the way they define problems, set priorities, frame debates, and which “variables” are relevant (Friedmann, 2008, p. 252). Consequently, interrogating the archive is essential to understanding place identity and community preservation tactics (Schmidt, 2008, p. 477). Often, the authority of plans, maps, and quantitative data supersedes knowledge predicated on ephemeral mediums common to Black communities such as cultural practice and memory. Black placemaking has long occurred as performance, celebration, and protest in city streets (Hunter, Pattillo, Robinson, & Taylor, 2016) and the Movement for Black Lives is one example. Accordingly, curators at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) anxiously collect Black Lives Matter T-shirts, clothing, and brooms used for post-protest clean ups in Baltimore and Ferguson’s streets (Bowley, 2017). These processes also constitute the Black production of spaces which hold the archive of now– the Critical Sankofa imaginaries of mobile, Black commons. In our classrooms, we might encourage students to both curate the material culture of protests and grievances while interpreting the ephemera as valid planning knowledge. Further, establishing historical continuity across demonstrations from the Edmund Pettus Bridge to Ferguson to Charlottesville to residents at meetings rejecting bike lanes in gentrifying neighborhoods, increases future planners’ capacity to question the theoretical underpinnings of concepts like Complete Streets (Brand, 2014, p. 259). ¹

Neo-Black Power Politics as Development Strategy

“Rooting for All the Black Folk: 7 Cities in America Elected their 1st Black Mayors Tuesday Night,” was The Root’s humorous take on election victories November 7, 2017. However, behind the amusing title is evidence of momentum. Randall Woodfin in Birmingham, AL, a left-wing Democrat unseated a Chamber-of-Commerce-style Democrat centrist, and Ras Baraka, son of Black Arts Movement leader Amiri Baraka, was elected mayor of Newark, NJ. On June 6, 2017, Ckokwe Anta Lumumba, became mayor of Jackson, MS (Roye, 2017). Committed to building a “solidarity economy,” Lumumba has made city-backed cooperatives the centerpiece of his revitalization plan. As cities clamor to entice Amazon with tax incentives, Lumumba emphasizes a bottom-up, grassroots approach in which the community is “filling its own gaps and dictating what their labor will be …” (Jaffe, 2017).^. The new mayor not only repudiates neoliberal development models, but visibly asserts a Black Power imaginary reflected in red, black, and green website colors and a continued partnership with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement.

Mississippi-based members of the Malcolm X Movement and University of Illinois scholar Stacey Sutton unpacked the Black Power imaginary during a recent event, “Building Freedom Cities: From Jackson, Mississippi to Chicago.” At the event, Sutton and others recounted finding strength in establishing cultural continuity and exchanging wisdom associated with historical, southern Free the Land! Movements, the latest electoral victory in Mississippi, and new urban resistance coalitions which embrace Black feminist and queer communities (Maxwell, 2017). This decidedly diasporic and transformational approach to planning in the Trump Era makes apparent the need to reframe the geographical definitions (urban, ghetto) assigned Black interpretations and imaginaries, so that they reflect changes in settlement patterns, alliances, and concerns. Further, Lumumba’s election provides educators with a case study for examining how Black grassroots movements interpret, imagine, and actualize aims, particularly when studying the relationship between electoral politics and the growth machine. The Free the Land! imaginary should also prompt educators to prepare future planners to contemplate more transformational strategies for how public land is allocated or made available for community use.

Vernacular Black Place Preservation

Like Lumumba’s supporters in Mississippi, descendant communities associated with historic Black settlements are linking imaginaries to their interpretations of what ails Black communities. While Lumumba’s core supports favor the Free the Land! ethos associated with a separate Black Nation rooted in the Black Belt South (Rickford, 2017, p. 957), my study participants, descendants of freedom colonies (Sitton & Conrad, 2005), favored a financial and psychic retreat from urban housing market volatility and suburban cultural alienation. Land-owning Black families, who owned less than two percent of Texas farmland in 1870, but accumulated 31 percent by 1900, founded more than 540+ Texas freedom colonies (Schweninger, 1997, p. 164). Predominately Baby Boomers, freedom colony descendants in the study told me they sought freedom from the white gaze and microaggressions, spaces to incubate dreams, intergenerational wealth, and a homeplace (hooks, 1990).

From 2014 to 2016, I observed the ways descendants instrumentalized this land-based heritage in East Texas freedom colonies to reproduce identity and place where little extant structures and people still lived full-time. While the nation is better acquainted with East Texas through the James Byrd dragging death (Temple-Raston, 2002), counternarratives arose during my research that bridged a heritage of self –determination with contemporary preservation of settlement heritage and remaining structures. In Shankleville, the descendant community performed, recounted, and ritualized their foundational story. Storytelling catalyzed annual pilgrimages commemorating their maroon ² Founders’ lives through scholarship competitions and community town halls, in a settlement in the forest with less than 50 households (Diouf, 2014).

In Dixie Community, the Hadnot and McCray families reclaimed a school and converted it into a new community center. Fred McCray explained, “We have a vision, and we want to do a lot of things.” McCray and others transformed the 50s era gym into space where they host family reunions, 4-H club meetings, and BB King tributes. They have plans to make the center a shelter during hurricanes and floods.

Conclusion

Educators must prioritize making students aware of the knowledge forms and planning approaches associated with Black placemaking heritage and preservation practice. Academic programs should train students to partner with grassroots planners and movements, to learn ways planning practitioners can help catalyze Black intellectual return to the mechanisms and traditions which foster community resiliency in the face of disaster, asset building, conservation of local knowledge, minimizing internal divisions which limit conditions of belonging and facilitating diasporic organizing.

While students express interest in Black planning and placemaking in my classroom, planning educators compete with subtle imaginaries which lead students to believe that actualizing the equitable city is only a green infrastructure or complete streets project away. Alongside these concepts, find a home for Critical Sankofa Planning which privileges people over buildings, honors and critiques the past, and affirms Black communities’ capacity to imagine and interpret their futures (Roberts, 2015). ³

Notes on Contributor

Andrea Roberts is Assistant Professor Urban Planning and Faculty Fellow of the Center for Heritage Conservation at Texas A & M University. Her scholarship and teaching investigates the ways African Americans and the African Diaspora deploy planning and placemaking heritage in service of contemporary preservation and social justice aims. Email: aroberts318@tamu.edu