The sedimentation of whiteness as landscape

Abstract

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, one of the axioms of a “just recovery” was to redevelop the city’s historic high ground. While the call to limit the city’s footprint problematized low-lying geographies, the majority of which were Black, it ignored Lakeview, a low-lying, predominantly white neighborhood devastated by Katrina. Despite its vulnerability to flooding, Lakeview has thrived in the years following Katrina. Property values are rising and public and private investments are rolling in. Lakeview’s unquestioned future and its (re)valorization in the wake of the storm speak to how racial regimes of property have informed the reconstruction of the city and to the role that urban planning plays in constructing and valorizing landscapes of whiteness. This paper interrogates the ongoing lives of whiteness, asking how whiteness operates as an invisible substrate within planning and property regimes. Utilizing the concept of sedimentation, it explores how planning takes part in concretizing racial formation processes and suggests that the project of sustaining white geographies lays bare deeper questions about the ways that planning enacts multi-scaled, racialized regimes of property. This article excavates the emergence of Lakeview from the backswamps of a delta city to examine the unquestioned valorizations of whiteness as a landscape.

Reimagining landscape: Materiality, decoloniality, and creativity

“…We show in this article that contemporary shifts in the discipline are emboldening the geographers of today to use landscape to explore pressing global concerns and this old geographical term is now central (see e.g. Brand, 2022; Mahanty et al, 2023; Wolford, 2021). Of course, the idea of landscape has been around for centuries (for a description of the etymology of the word ‘landscape’, see Makhzoumi and Pungetti, 1999: 3).…”

Lush aftermath: Race, labor, and landscape in the suburb

“…Just as migrant workers understand the explicitly racializing nature of their labor in the plant nurseries of South Florida, so too do developers, who organize “rules and regulations of the built environment” to maintain the perceived “whiteness and privilege” of HOA spaces (Low, 2009: 80, 87), even as these spaces are no longer exclusively white. 7 Planning’s regulatory powers—both municipal and privatized—seeks to “scale a regime of racialized property from the individual plot of land to the bounded territory of a neighborhood” (Brand, 2022: 2). The work of developers like Jake is precisely to facilitate this scaling.…”

Introduction

“…If an underwritten allegiance to whiteness—and the kind of disciplinary culture it cultivates—continues to ail archaeology, it is not because we do not possess the tools to expose and eradicate it. Surely we could apply “stratigraphic methods themselves [to] help unearth and dismantle whiteness’ seeming immutability” (Brand, 2022, 277) if we saw it as a disciplinary priority.…”