On belonging and becoming in the settler-colonial city: Co-produced futurities, placemaking, and urban planning in the United States

Abstract

With a few notable exceptions, settler-colonial theory has not been applied to the study of U.S. cities and urban planning. Settler-colonial theory is a relatively new field of scholarship that interrogates the destruction of Indigenous laws, ways of knowing, and connections to place to make way for a new settler futurity. This futurity is particularly pronounced in cities, where Indigenous peoples have been rendered almost completely invisible and where their opportunities to shape urban development are highly circumscribed. We use settler-colonial theory, as well as Indigenous scholars' responses to it, to extend ideas of belonging and becoming in urban planning and placemaking. We turn to the theory and practice of co-production as one possible intervention into how the relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous placemakers could be conceived and enacted in the urban environment.. . . to think of the United States as a settler society illuminates forms of power that organize American and American Indian lives in perhaps unexpected ways.

Capitalizing on Heritage: St. Augustine, Florida, and the Landscape of American Racial Ideology

“…Coulthard asks, “Why not critically apply the most egalitarian and participatory features of our traditional governance practices to all of our economic activities, regardless of whether they are undertaken in land-based or urban contexts?” (2014: 172). These “grounded normativities” provide models for literally and materially disrupting settler colonialism through the radical resurgence of democratic governance and ecologically sustainable existence through Indigenous place-making that was never fully settled and is actively unsettling colonial relations today through a “presencing of the present” (Barry and Agyeman 2020; Coulthard 2014; McKay et al 2020; Simpson 2017; Ugarte, Fontana, and Caulkins 2019). Indeed, pan-Indigenous social movements in Latin America have succeeded in institutionalizing their worldviews, to varying degrees of success, in the constitutions of several states, this the result of many years of grounded democratic, egalitarian practice and liberationist politics (Garcia 2012; Mignolo 2011; Walsh 2010).…”

Toward pluralizing ecology: Finding common ground across sociocultural and scientific perspectives

“…These are cases of African Americans making ecologies (Quizar, 2018). Indigenous peoples and other racialized and marginalized peoples in the United States have their own ecologies emerging from their diverse experiences, environmental linkages, and spatial contexts (Barry & Agyeman, 2020; Gilio‐Whitaker, 2020; Marez, 2018). Communities of diverse heritages in America might create different meanings and interpretations of environmental change.…”

Provincializing planning: Reflections on spatial ordering and imperial power

“…The first is a body of work that has primarily challenged the canon of Anglo-American urban theory and emphasized the inadequacy of Eurocentric planning and planning concepts within the global South (see Connell, 2014; Robinson, 2006; Roy, 2009; Watson, 2009). A second strand specifically engages with the violence of settler colonialism, examining planning’s centrality to processes that dispossessed Indigenous peoples and sought to erase other forms of knowledge (see Barry and Agyeman, 2020; Barry and Porter, 2012; Bhandar, 2018; Porter, 2010). A third strand has sought to critically re-evaluate British colonial history through a series of careful detailed historical and conceptually sophisticated accounts that have examined the racial and imperial construction of spaces and cities through colonialism (see Home, 2013; King, 1977; Legg, 2008; Yeoh, 2003).…”