Tomorrow I’ll Be at the Table: Black Geographies and Urban Planning: A Review of the Literature

Abstract

This article reviews the literature on black geographies as it relates to the everyday work of urban planners. We outline the major claims and contributions of this scholarship to deepen our understanding of the relationship between the social and physical worlds. This article argues that this literature is a critical, yet missing, contribution to the field of urban planning because it provides different ways of knowing and understanding the experience of racial difference and therefore challenges us to invite more diverse views to the table and build more informed professional practices, pedagogical foundations, and empirical scholarship.

Racialized geographies of housing financialization

“…Similarly, automated home valuation systems incorporate race, or proxies for race into hedonic models, naturalizing the withholding of finance to spaces coded as non-white. Contemporary cycles of neighborhood disinvestment and revalorization rely on the ongoing abstraction of complex, entrenched histories of racialized processes into risk, justifying neighborhood decline and dispossession, or displacement, redevelopment, and raced gentrification (Brand and Miller, 2020; Sims, 2016).…”

Examining privilege and power in US urban parks and open space during the double crises of antiblack racism and COVID-19

“…Practice, research and design at this stage should include an integration of activism and scholarship rooted in cross-disciplinary studies such as Black geographies, critical race theory, and environmental justice. These fields focus on the effects of racialized power, its spatialized production and manifestations (e.g., Brand and Miller 2020 ; Lipsitz 2007 ; Pellow 2016 ; Bates et al 2018 ), as well as hierarchies of both race and gender in environmentalism (Frazier 2019 ; Taylor 2002 ), and present new ways of imagining, valuing and recognizing space, place-making, and resilience created within Black communities with and in absence of whiteness, and as it relates to nature (Allen et al 2018 ; McKittrick and Woods 2007 ; Frazier 2016 , 2018 ). In particular, we see this step leading into an understanding and valuing of place-making and sense of place (both theory and practice).…”

“…Recently, Brand and Miller developed a bibliography for urban planning researchers and practitioners that includes works that unpack the racialized spatial imaginaries that are relevant to SES practice and research. Unfortunately, while urban planning education does typically include topics on environmental justice and equity planning, deeper exploration into critical race theory and Black geographies scholarship has not been incorporated into planning curricula (Brand and Miller 2020 , p 6). It is increasingly clear that sources, such as those from Brand and Miller’s bibliography need to be incorporated into more planning curricula to ensure the next generation of planners understands the relationship between racism and the built environment (Edwards and Bates 2011 ; Greenlee et al 2018 ).…”

Speculating on vacancy

“…Toward this end, Gunn frames Black feminist imaginaries as participating in “radical speculation,” moving political engagement past “the mental hurdles of feasibility” to engage in “speculative play,” free to “imagine futures, reclaim histories, and create alternative realities” (2019, p. 16). This kind of radical speculation also emerges in Black geographies scholarship, where the imaginative serves as a key site for creative resistance – to counter the processes that foreclose Black lives and futures, to prefigure alternatives, and to develop new analytical registers (Brand & Miller, 2020; McKittrick, 2006, 2013, 2016; Woods, 2017). In considering the ways that “the cyclical and death‐dealing spatialization of the condemned and those ’without’ remains analytically intact” through discourses and studies of racial violence, Katherine McKittrick calls for a “re‐imagin[ing]” of Black geographies, emerging from “practical activities of resistance, encounter, and anti‐colonial thinking” (2011, p. 995).…”

“…In the context of an increasing reliance on Big‐data and predictive analytics in urban planning and governance (Kitchin, 2014, 2017), I suggest that the resulting “neutral” speculative cartographies of property not only naturalise racialised notions of proprietary risk and valuation but also extend them into future city spaces. Finally, I contend that cartographic speculation serves as an important site of contestation over urban futures, especially as urban scholars, planning practitioners, and racial justice activists increasingly work to cultivate alternative or “otherwise” spatial imaginaries (Bates et al, 2018; Brand & Miller, 2020). I reflect on the potential of speculative (counter) cartographies of property to contribute to new political realities, not just prevailing geographies.…”