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tenants to apply for and purchase lands they cultivated. Lands awarded under the Act became known as kuleana lands. In 2017, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg earned vociferous criticism when he filed lawsuits to buy out parcels of kuleana land enclosed within his 700-acre estate on the island of Kauai.
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:
[email protected] 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:
[email protected]
References Chinen, J. J. (1958). The Great Mahele: Hawaii’s land division of 1848. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. Cosgrove, L., & Kliger, B. (1997). Planning with a difference: a reflection on planning and decision making with indigenous people in Broome, Western Australia. Urban Policy and Research, 15(3), 211–217. Dorries, H. (2009). Planning as property: Uncovering the hidden racial logic of a municipal nuisance by-law. Journal of Law and Social Policy, 27, 80–102. Landgraf, K., & Hamasaki, R. (2015). Ē Luku Wale Ē: Devastation upon devastation. Honolulu, HI: Ai Pohaku Press. Porter, L., Matunga, H., Viswanathan, L., Patrick, L., Walker, R., Sandercock, L., & Jojola, T. (Ted). (2017). Indigenous planning: From principles to practice/a revolutionary pedagogy of/for indigenous planning/settler-indigenous relationships as liminal spaces in planning education and practice/indigenist planning/what is the work of non-indigenous people in the service of a decolonizing agenda?/supporting indigenous planning in the city/ film as a catalyst for indigenous community development/being ourselves and seeing ourselves in the city: Enabling the conceptual space for indigenous urban planning/universities can empower the next generation of architects, planners, and landscape architects in indigenous design and planning. Planning Theory & Practice, 18(4), 639–666. Trask, H.-K. (1987). The birth of the modern Hawaiian movement Kalama valley, O’ahu. The Hawaiian Journal of History, 21, 126–153.
Interpretations & Imaginaries: Toward an Instrumental Black Planning History Andrea R. Roberts Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA
Black is no place/floating/ pixels and dots/concentrations and categories/bodies in blankets /on stadium and convention center floors/agency and intention/dreams drowned/submerged –author, post-Hurricane Harvey lament, 2017
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
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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: We must comprehend why, over the past fifty years, African American communities have consistently opposed many of urban planners’ most celebrated efforts, even those explicitly promoted as beneficial to African Americans. We must do more to uncover how a broader range of metropolitan residents interpret their problems and how they imagine workable solutions. (Sies & Silver, 1996, p. 473)
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).
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
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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. Source: Photo by Andrea Roberts (2015).
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
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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
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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 maroon2 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 1. Complete streets might be challenged, expanded to mean completely safe streets free of police harassment or reflective of community needs and aesthetics as Brand notes in her essay. 2. Maroon is a moniker for fugitive slaves who built communities while in exile. 3. “My assumption is that we have long been doulas to the truth: We possess the ability to manage our relationships to structures, nature, and space … Getting Black Texans to remember and recognize the value of their memories is the work of Critical Sankofa Planning. Looking back to look forward. Recollection as resistance.”
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:
[email protected]
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ORCID Andrea R. Roberts
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9979-6026
References Bowley, G. (2017, October 1). In an era of strife, museums collect history as it happens. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/01/arts/design/african-american-museum-collects-charlottesvilleartifacts.html Brand, A. L. (2014). The most complete street in the world. In S. Zavestoski and J. Agyeman (Eds.), Incomplete streets: Processes, practices, and possibilities (pp. 245–265). New York, NY: Routledge. Diouf, S. A. (2014). Slavery’s exiles: The story of the American maroons. New York, NY: NYU Press. Friedmann, J. (2008). The Uses of Planning Theory: A Bibliographic Essay.. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 28(2), 247–257. doi:10.1177/0739456X08325220 hooks, b. (1990). Homeplace: A site of resistance. In Yearning: Race, gender and cultural politics (pp. 41–49). Boston, MA: South End Press. Hunter, M. A., Pattillo, M., Robinson, Z. F., & Taylor, K.-Y. (2016). Black placemaking: Celebration, play, and poetry. Theory, Culture & Society. 33 (7–8), 31–56. doi:10.1177/0263276416635259 Jaffe, S. (2017, October 13). Bernie Sanders isn’t winning local elections for the left. New Republic. Retrieved from https://newrepublic.com/article/145277/bernie-sanders-isnt-winning-local-elections-left Maxwell, C. (2017, November 7). R3 Coalition-CHI event highlights building freedom cities – Gay Lesbian Bi Trans News Archive. Windy City Times. Retrieved from http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/lgbt/R3-Coalition-CHIevent-highlights-building-freedom-cities/60956.html Nembhard, J. G. (2014). Collective courage: A history of African American cooperative economic thought and practice. University Park, PA: Penn State Press. Nieves, A. D. (2008). We shall independent be: African American place making and the struggle to claim space in the United States. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado. Rickford, R. (2017). “We can’t grow food on all this concrete”: The land question, agrarianism, and black nationalist thought in the late 1960s and 1970s. Journal of American History, 103(4), 956–980. Roberts, A. (2015, June 19). Critical Sankofa planning: Mobilizing Texas freedom colony memories [blog post]. Retrieved November 25, 2017, from http://notthatbutthis.com/2015/06/critical-sankofa-planning-mobilizingtexas-freedom-colony-memories/ Roye, R. (2017). A people’s mayor. Dissent, 64(3), 160. Sandercock, L. (1998). Framing insurgent historiographies for planning. Making the Invisible Visible: A Multicultural Planning History, 1–33. Schmidt, D. H. (2008). The practices and process of neighborhood: The (re) production of Riverwest, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Urban Geography, 29(5), 473–495. Schweninger, L. (1997). Black property owners in the South, 1790–1915. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Sies, M. C., & Silver, C. (1996). The history of planning history. In M. C. Sies, & C. Silver, (Eds.), Planning the 21st American city, (pp. 1–34). Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Sitton, T., & Conrad, J. H. (2005). Freedom Colonies: Independent Black Texans in the Time of Jim Crow. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Temple-Raston, D. (2002). A death in Texas: A story of race, murder, and a small town’s struggle for redemption. New York, NY: H. Holt. Thomas, J. M., & Ritzdorf, M. (1997). Urban planning and the African American community: In the shadows. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Woods, C. (1995). The blues epistemology and regional planning history: The case of lower Mississippi delta development commission. Planning Theory. 13(Summer), 53–71.
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