Repair and Healing in Planning

Contents

Introduction: Repair and Healing in Planning: Promising Experiences and Grounded Possibilities

Courtney Knapp, Jocelyn Poe and John Forester

The Reflective Practitioner in the Context of Racial and Environmental Justice

Michael Méndez

Neighborhood Repair and Resilience in the Face of an Economic Shock

Claudia B. Isaac

Just Talk: The Promise and Peril of Dialogues about Whiteness

Kathryn Quick

Trauma Informed Planning and Healing Centered Engagement

Nicole Lanphier

A Note on Reparative Planning

Mia Charlene White

Introduction: Repair and Healing in Planning: Promising Experiences and Grounded Possibilities

Repair and healing pose central problems for planning – socially, economically, and environmentally. If we are to acknowledge and atone for histories of racialized and gendered violence, exploitation and neglect in our communities, we must do better to create healthy conditions for enduring kinship, solidarity, and mutuality. This collection of Interface essays presents critical, practice-oriented cases that address the reparative or healing potentials of planning practices. Each essay not only suggests our field’s potential to be a repairing force, but it also addresses the wicked challenges that can accompany such a transformative reorientation. Our contributors explore reparative planning ethics in practice, not abstractly wrestling with the conceptual distinctions of rights and obligations and duties, but specifically engaging the work of (re)creating and sustaining social and political relationships, addressing community traumas and mistrust, and building mutuality across difference.

Our concerns in this Interface require us to be both historically rooted and future-oriented, to ask through actual cases: where have we come from, and how can we collectively create better futures? As editors, we recognize these problems as both structural and personal, as both institutionally staged and emotionally compelling. In our own work, our struggles with the shadows and objects of white supremacy and systemic racism in their diverse forms have shaped our vocations as planning scholars (Forester, 1989; Knapp, 2018a; Poe, 2021) as we have followed and worked with others who have critically probed these issues too (Baum, 1997; Erfan, 2017; Marris, 1986; Sandercock, 2004; Williams, 2020). However, our personal understandings of racial identity and race, racism and white supremacy have been shaped as much by our subjective experiences – the people and environments we have related to, the social and cultural values that have surrounded us, the particular histories of the places where we have lived – as by any scholarly knowledge of these forces. We are all too familiar with the legacies of racial and sexual violence, the traumas wrought by racism, anti-semitism, patriarchy, homophobia, capitalism, colonialism and more. Whether we are wounded by or are complicit in these forces, it is not so much humanity in general, but individual people in particular, one by one by one, who suffer because of their persistence. Yet along with the contributors whose essays follow, we have tried to resist being so captured by yesterday’s terrors that we cannot imagine today’s and tomorrow’s possibilities.

Learning from reparations literature (Darity & Mullen, 2020; Ogletree, 2002; Táíwò, 2022), we understand the work of repair and healing – what we might call a reparative praxis – to involve dialogue and action, acknowledgment and atonement. Without dialogue we have no coalitions, no organizing, no recognition, no solidarity, no rebuilding together. Without action we have no change in resources distributed or invested, no institutional forms disrupted and restructured. Without acknowledgment, we do not honor, but dismiss community agency. Without atonement, we do not take responsibility to redress past harms – to create new futures.

Reparative praxis is contextual: it must be as pervasive and flexible as the structures that make it necessary to create meaningful change. Three guiding principles that have emerged from our work suggest common threads in these essays that explore reparative planning practices: radical honesty, confronting whiteness, and radical imagination.

Dialogue and acknowledgment require radical honesty, with and about oneself despite the pain and discomforts that may bring. Such honesty demands that we critically examine the historical development and current conditions of our communities, that we “get real” – with ourselves, our families, our neighbors, our colleagues, our elected and appointed leaders – about the lasting effects of segregation and the racialized appropriation of social, economic and ecological resources – the uneven geographical development of the places we call “home” or serve through our professional work. Honesty demands that we locate ourselves and our personal, social and spatial ties within these landscapes of inclusion and exclusion. This self-examination can be awkward and uncomfortable, yet critically important in fostering critical and self-reflexive – and indeed anti-racist – planners. So, several authors that follow suggest that autobiography can provide an entry point into deeper dialogues and collective reckonings, an insight at times explored in the planning pedagogy literature (Hoch, 1993, Sweet & Etienne, 2011, Knapp, 2018b).

Acknowledgement and atonement require confronting whiteness and all the associated structures that create the necessity for reparative praxis. This requires the work of “getting real with ourselves and one another” described above, but it goes beyond building awareness and mutual understanding to actually making amends. Often in the United States, amends-making involves a formal, public apology, an admission of guilt. However, reparations and reconciliation process experts remind us that amends should be more than discursive, symbolic gestures; they also demand a promise of enforcement and non-repetition: a commitment by the perpetrators of harm to take solid, irreversible action not to perpetuate the damages of the past. This promise – that the future can be fundamentally different from the past – opens up ample space for imagining and experimenting with new forms of togetherness, solidarity, and community building: for practicing atonement through action.

Atonement and action require us to use radical imagination to create distinct policy and legal mechanisms that redistribute resources towards reparative ends. While stressing the fundamental importance of dialogue, this collection of essays also draws explicit and implicit attention to the critical limits of dialogue and deliberation. These author-practitioners encourage us to ask ourselves: if talk is not to be empty, what do I do? How do I act? What does solidarity mean in the context of my particular role and work? Again, autobiography may provide an entry point not only to dialogue, but also from dialogue to solidarity and further action.

The answers to these questions are, like reparative praxis itself, contextual. However, several common themes endure: fostering and sustaining conditions for trust, for example by exercising transparency, clearly communicating goals and interests, and respecting the diagnostic capacity of communities to identify their own assets, opportunities, and planning and development strategies; exercising solidarity within institutional and policymaking contexts, which might mean speaking truth to power, recommitting to compliance, monitoring, enforcement and non-repetition policies, or sustainably resourcing community-identified planning implementation pathways. White planners, policymakers, and academics in particular might exercise solidarity by convening and facilitating those critical dialogues about race and racism within white communities, rather than placing the burden on students, colleagues, and constituents of color.

Although the work described above may well be unsettling, it should not be despairing: reparative praxis is a forward–facing, freedom-seeking project. One of the most exciting challenges of this work involves building solidarity across time – drawing inspiration from past freedom struggles, building intergenerational solidarity – and space too, across neighborhood boundaries, across cities and regions, state and federal policymaking, global justice and reparations movements. Our history is replete with examples of ordinary people coming together to plan and develop their communities in ways that have counteracted, subverted and outrightly defied lines of color and class. Reparative planning will surely involve identifying and elevating these examples of POC-led, interracial fugitive planning and freedom-dreaming from throughout history, as they might inspire new social configurations in the present and possibilities for the future.

In the essays that follow, we find cases that illuminate the challenges of not being captured by what we hope to resist. We glimpse the sources of solidarity that might inspire and empower reparative work. We see the legal and institutional structures that shape this work. Not least of all, we see the ordinary ritual forms, the breaking of bread, that allow congregation, the knitting together of new community. We see, too, through issues of autobiography, self-reflection and self-reckoning, our struggles to understand our own baggage and our presumptions, our own complicity and responsibilities in structures and norms that burden others. We see the abiding problem of false promises in the worlds of planning and public policy making: as official after official, committee after committee, can vow to do right and then do nothing, can take a righteous public position and then not follow through. We note, too, that as “participation” addresses change, it threatens loss, and loss and healing require mourning (Fullilove, 2016; Hofman in Laws & Forester, 2016; Marris, 1986; Poe, 2021).

These challenges reveal the complications of a reparative praxis and the deficiencies of the existing field of planning in areas of repair and healing. We see these essays not only as examples, but as provocations, as we collectively seek to refine our understanding of planning ethics and practice. We ask our readers to consider: (1) How do these essays support the need for reparative praxis?; (2) What can we learn from the struggles presented?; and (3) What issues must be addressed to consider a reparative future?

We hope to identify the beginnings of an emerging field as we consider issues of repair and healing as central problems of planning. In doing so, we sketch an applicable framework – to mark relationships between the field of reparative praxis and that of justice and equity scholarship. For as planners seek to address issues of justice and equity, they face the grounded, engaged challenges of remedying past harms to create just futures.

Toward these ends, we are pleased to present a selection of cases to provoke further discussions about reparative planning. Mike Méndez discusses critical reflexivity as planners struggle with environmental justice policymaking in California. Claudia Isaac examines challenges of developing a Community Benefits Agreement and coalition building across racially diverse communities. Kathy Quick presents a searching discussion of the potential – and limits – of task force dialogues within the context of police-community relations. Nicole Lanphier discusses applications of “trauma informed planning” to community engagement situations where apprehension and mistrust is commonplace. Mia White then explores the planning classroom as a site for candid self-exploration and the cultivation of anti-racist commitments and planning tools.

We have asked our contributors to discuss actual cases and lived experiences, to ground and specify any more general and theoretical claims about planning, healing, and repair. We have sought to counter the sweeping abstractions of racial capitalism, colonialism, and even white supremacy with grounded experiences of reparative practices. We wanted contributors to depict not only the looming shadows of traumatic histories but the dawnings of radical imagination, providing glimpses of healed – or healing – communities, too.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

The Reflective Practitioner in the Context of Racial and Environmental Justice

Racial and environmental justice are still thorny issues in the field of urban planning. In comparison to white, wealthy communities, poor planning decisions and discriminatory practices continue to exacerbate the consequences of environmental contamination in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color (Bullard, 2000; Mendez, 2020). Activists have been gaining scholarly and regulatory support for changes to policy and planning processes since the 1980s (Cole & Foster, 2001), but planners have been slow to incorporate an explicit environmental justice framework into land-use policies (Brinkley & Stahmer, 2021; Zúñiga & Mendez, in review).

Through my environmental planning work in California (serving as a planning commissioner, gubernatorial appointee to regulatory boards, legislative consultant, and lobbyist), I have witnessed the tensions to address structural inequality and racism numerous times. People outside California often assume that the entire state is a bastion of progressivism. They see California as a homogenous entity that uniformly values environmentalism and justice (Mendez, 2020). This image, however, universalizes the idea of the environment (including its problems) and detaches it from its cultural settings. It also obscures how the localization of environmental policy and science within the state involves processes of public contestation and legitimacy (Goldsmith et al. 2021). For example, in the last 5 years, California has confronted multiple high-level lawsuits involving, and news media investigations into, racism in the state’s environmental agencies and regulatory boards. In 2021, a senior supervisor at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California committed suicide after he was fired for nearly two decades of enacting racism and sexual harassment in his division (Elmahrek, 2021).

At the California Air Resources Board, often considered one of the most powerful environmental regulatory boards in the world, Black employees issued a 13-page letter that identifies issues with the agency’s hiring practices, lack of support for Black employees, and lack of representation. Black employees further reported being told by white managers to “tone it down” during meetings about environmental justice implementation. Employees also described attempts by board staff to discredit environmental justice advocates of color (Kahn, 2020). In the most egregious case, the City of Oroville sued the California Department of Water Resources, alleging a regional office operated as a “water mafia,” and demanded millions of dollars for infrastructure damage and costs associated with dam spillover and the evacuation of 188,000 area residents. The city not only alleges disregard for the public’s safety, but also a toxic work environment rife with racism, sexual harassment, and theft that contributed to the failure of the dam (Ravani, 2018).

In forthcoming research my coauthor, Michelle Zúñiga, and I analyze the challenges urban planners have in navigating a new California state mandate (Senate Bill 1000) to implement environmental justice policies in local land use plans. Interviews with planners and community groups from conservative rural and suburban regions reveal how local governments (particularly elected officials) often try to diminish the effective implementation of the law. For example, our analysis of 35 city and county general plans shows limited discussions of environmental racism and structural inequality, along with minimal resources to carry out measures and engage in substantive community engagement.

Nonetheless, community groups and planners have pushed back against some of these inequitable outcomes. They have successfully advocated for the adoption of environmental justice advisory groups to help oversee the development of the general plans and provide a contextual analysis of the land-use policies needed in environmental justice communities. In addition, community groups and planners have worked closely with the Bureau of Environmental Justice within California’s Attorney General’s Office to ensure compliance with the state law. The Attorney General’s Office can file a lawsuit against a local government for failure to comply.

That threat of lawsuits can be a powerful tool. For example, the office successfully sued several jurisdictions for their failure to comply with the state’s greenhouse gas reduction targets in their general plans. Recently, the Attorney General’s Office used this authority to force the City of Huntington Park into a settlement agreement to bring them into compliance with Senate Bill 1000. Although the city mentions environmental justice in their 2019 adopted general plan, they do not identify environmental justice communities nor do they include explicit environmental justice policies as called for by the state law. In sum, our research underscores that environmental justice will not be fully realized in the urban planning field without strong oversight, substantive community engagement, and racial diversification of institutions (Zúñiga & Mendez, in review).

Planning scholar Julian Agyeman (2020) argues that throughout the United States, discriminatory forms of planning and resistance to a racial justice lens are a common practice in the profession. Too many practitioners today employ planning “as the spatial toolkit, consisting of a set of policies and practices, for maintaining white supremacy”. He explores how urban planners of color advocate for new methods to reimagine inclusive urban spaces by challenging the legacy of racist planning and inequitable housing and infrastructure policies (Agyeman, 2020). For instance, in 2020, almost two-dozen planning directors from cities across the country published a joint statement recognizing the role their departments have had in facilitating systemic racism and segregation. The statement invited other planning directors to sign on, and it highlighted a set of commitments focused on diversifying city planning departments, addressing displacement and environmental injustices resulting from development, and promoting affordable housing and economically diverse neighborhoods (City of Philadelphia, 2021). While this is a positive step forward, the signatories of the joint statement also acknowledge the challenges they face locally. Emily Liu, director of the Louisville Metro Planning and Design Services, contends that “these [racial justice] conversations can be very difficult with suburban cities.” Liu, however, underscores the importance of having these public conversations and is hopeful that younger residents and planners will continue to push for an equity lens in planning policies (Abello, 2021).

Ideas and beliefs about issues like environmental justice or climate change, hence, evolve together with the representations, identities, debates, and institutions that give practical effect and meaning to policies (Corburn, 2005). In other words, the ways in which we conceptualize climate change or environmental justice don’t just happen. People are behind our government, policies, and environmental values. Planners occupy a position in which they are often helping to translate community concerns to policymakers and other disciplinary experts. In this process, they are forced to synthesize disparate worldviews, values, and expertise to resolve complex environmental problems (Forester, 2020; Krumholz, 1982; Susskind and Ozawa, 1984). Their efforts to mediate or transform institutions can be contentious and face significant resistance – often resulting in status quo outcomes. More importantly, planners pushing for racial and environmental justice are extracting extra labor in the process – in terms of physical, mental, and emotional work. Planners of color, in particular, can spend more time advocating for racial justice in their institutions and as a consequence may encounter setbacks in their career advancement (Harrison, 2019).

In sum, these episodes show that the regulatory culture of state and local planning institutions is still facilitating discriminatory practices and other forms of intersectional inequality. Scholars and practitioners need to investigate and critically reflect on how these institutions are diversifying their workplaces (the planning profession is still largely white and male) and ensuring that racial and environmental justice is not co-opted or suppressed (Crenshaw, 1989; Jacobs, 2019). As Justin Steil (2022, p. 14) indicates, to understand justice and what it requires of everyone, “we must understand how systemic unjust advantage is continuously reproduced.” Urban planning as a profession has played a key role in creating inequitable outcomes in neighborhoods, institutions, and for environmental health. Yet, planners still have not come to terms with their role in maintaining or helping to dismantle structural inequality (Steil, 2022).

The act of “critical” reflective practice, therefore, is not just an academic exercise. It has important implications for practitioners, who often work in contentious and rapidly changing environments (Schon, 1983; Wilson, 2021). Critical reflective practice provides the ability to reflect on one’s professional experiences, actions, and positionality, to engage in a process of continuous learning. In essence, it can assess the ways that emotions, knowledge, prejudices, and values combine in developing urban planning decisions that are inequitable. Planners make practical judgments every day, and these often go unnoticed or forgotten as they move from project to project.

Allowing time for critical reflective practice can be a powerful tool for planners to think purposively about their prior actions and to learn how in the future they can better challenge multiple forms of inequality embedded in the urban planning profession. Such an approach has led one county planner, Jonathan Pacheco Bell, to advocate broadly for planners to step away from their office desks and embed themselves in local communities, in what he calls, “Embedded Planning.” He believes that “for planning to achieve equity in communities, planners need to see the realities of community life…[and] connect with the people we serve” (Pacheco Bell, 2018). While he still works in an office and attends community meetings, he argues for prioritizing street-level engagement. Pacheco Bell often goes directly to constituents’ localized spaces: homes, churches, businesses, and bus stops to perform plain language outreach, conduct neighborhood organizing, give walking tours, mentor students, do empathetic code enforcement, and more. Pacheco Bell argues that working in such a manner helps produce more equitable plans, policies, and ordinances.

This type of emerging embedded planning offers a multidimensional view of the interactions between people’s well-being and the varying contexts of climate or environment or community shaped by wider political, institutional, economic, and social structures (Goldsmith et al., 2021; Mendez et al., 2020). For practitioners, in particular, such an approach can provide valuable contextual analysis and reflection on what hinders racial and environmental justice reform within the planning and regulatory institutions. These innovative practices are leading the way for planners to be more honest with themselves and others on how they are helping to change the legacy of racial injustice in the field of urban planning.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Neighborhood Repair and Resilience in the Face of an Economic Shock

In this essay, I relate the story of a community engagement initiative launched by the City of Albuquerque (City) to ensure that redevelopment of the Albuquerque Railyards (Railyards) will be equitable and beneficial to their adjacent neighborhoods of Barelas and South Broadway. Since 1993 I have worked with these neighborhoods on issues of affordable housing advocacy, anti-racism activism, program evaluation and CED research and practice. My experience as a facilitator in the Railyards project led me to see more clearly diverse relationships that these neighborhoods have negotiated over years, so I see new challenges to ensure that facilitation processes do not undermine their own redevelopment and reparative processes.

This 2019 process has shown me profound differences between South Broadway and Barelas concerning their racialized histories, philosophies of redevelopment, and strategic priorities and alliances with governmental, non-profit and financial institutions. Their institutional and organizational structures and alliances differ; their requirements for Railyard redevelopment also differ.

Built early in the 1900s, the Railyards once employed nearly 25% of the Hispano and Chicano Barelas population (CABQ, ND). In the historically African American South Broadway, although residents had little access to employment in the Railyards, Black-owned businesses flourished, providing services and retail to both Railyard operations and Railyard workers (Banks, 1969). When the Rail Yard closed in the 1970s, both neighborhoods suffered devastating economic consequences. Both neighborhoods have responded to this loss ever since, drawing on historically constructed identities to recover from loss, even as demographics in both neighborhoods have shifted.

In 2007, the City acquired the site and began a decades long attempt to reinvigorate the City economy, to respond to adjacent neighborhood needs, and to remediate environmental contamination there. By 2019, limited redevelopment progress had been made: initial environmental remediation, hosting a weekly outdoor summer market, and leasing the site as a location for films and weddings, for example. The Mayor’s Office, The District 2 City Councillor, the Railyards Advisory Board, the City Metropolitan Redevelopment Agency, the City Economic Development and the City Equity and Inclusion Departments developed a call for proposals to assess the feasibility of developing this site (and implicitly, to understand why previous redevelopment attempts had not been successful). As an “Equity Consultant” on the private, multi-disciplinary consultant team, I was asked to bring an equity eye to this study: to conduct interviews and convene focus groups in Barelas and South Broadway to determine the equity issues to be addressed in any planning and development there.

Our task was to generate policy and practical recommendations to ensure coherence between Railyards development and revitalization of the adjacent neighborhoods. These recommendations, along with infographics and transcriptions of focus groups, were published on the City’s Railyards web site (Report, Isaac et al., 2019).

I now realize that I went into this process with a presumption that the best outcome would be progress toward creation of a single, collaborative organization to see that equitable redevelopment recommendations would be enforced, and to support the community-controlled guidance of the development process. This presumption was grounded in my knowledge that both neighborhoods had similar overarching objectives: to oppose gentrification; to ensure affordable housing; and to protect the cultural and social fabric of the neighborhoods. I learned that these common goals were an insufficient foundation for common action – that it was unproductive to seek an outcome that didn’t recognize the divergent strategies and philosophies of the two neighborhoods. My presumptions led me to focus on what the two neighborhoods shared, and on my belief that I could attend to their differences.

The neighbourhoods’ differences derive from quite distinct, historically situated intra-neighborhood and institutional negotiations, designed to advance their redevelopment objectives. Because of this missing element, our report overstated the feasibility and utility of creating an independent Community Development Corporation (CDC), with substantial community representation on its board, to vet potential development projects against our list of equitable development criteria. Despite that misstep, I believe other recommendations (and the transcriptions included in the Report) provide useful insights to guide parallel engagement approaches linking the City and these neighborhoods. For example, we recommended that all potential developers negotiate legally binding and enforceable community benefits agreements (CBA) with neighborhoods before gaining City approval to proceed.

The Community Development Corporation Recommendation

Reviewing this experience, I now understand why the prospect of a community driven Railyards CDC has gained little traction in the neighborhoods or the City. Neighborhood representatives were unsure that a CDC could be “shared” between them and align with the distinct development agendas of Barelas and South Broadway organizations, while being driven by City resources and approvals.

Even if they had embraced the CDC recommendation, the neighborhoods would have found it difficult to assert their self-determination goals in light of broader City interests in downtown redevelopment. It was illuminating (and humbling) to have tested my naïve assumption that our few months of facilitated conversation (added to the complex history of neighborhood-City engagements) could lead to inter-neighborhood solidarity and commitment to new cooperation between neighborhoods and agencies able to re-allocate necessary City, County, State, and Federal resources. Both neighborhoods have built productive relationships with external governmental, non-profit and for-profit partners. Each also has contentious relationships with some external players. These always fluid relationships respond to different neighborhood needs, priorities, and activist priorities, again, all focused on neighborhood-derived reparative goals.

The Stadium GO Bond and Debates About Community Benefits Agreements

In consultation with neighborhood representatives and the MRA manager, I drew from Policy Link (N.D.) and Shelterforce (N.D.) to communicate the principles of equitable development. Focus group participants and interviewees affirmed and expanded community benefit criteria elaborated in a previous development plan (CABQ, 2014). That discussion identified requirements for equity on this particular site, including: anti-gentrification policies; ensuring a stable stock of affordable housing; production of multiple career ladder jobs and local entrepreneurial opportunities; assurance that economic and cultural activities on the Railyard site would benefit the commercial corridors in both neighborhoods; and that design and arts and culture programming within the Railyards would respect and celebrate these historic neighborhoods. Though the Report didn’t specifically call for a coalition-based CBA, it did recommend that all City-approved land lease and development agreements on the site include an enforceable set of community benefits

These strategies came to a head in the 2021 lead up to a bond issue to fund a stadium for the New Mexico United soccer team. The team had indicated a preferred site in Barelas, just adjacent to the Railyards. The City Council utilized the Equitable Development Report and the Nashville MLS Soccer Community Benefits Agreement (2018), to build community benefits language into the bond language, including a stipulation that no lease could be signed without a signed and adopted CBA (Albuquerque City Council, 2021). The bond issue failed for diverse reasons, but neighborhood opposition appears to have played a significant role.

Divergent public responses emerged from the neighborhood organizations. Initially, three central Barelas organizations supported the bond issue as an employment generator, on the condition of negotiation of a legitimate CBA (Barelas Community Coalition et al., 2021). Some Barelas residents raised concerns, however, and allied with city-wide advocacy organizations to shift Barelas opinion to oppose the bond. The opposition objected to the size of proposed funding, the proposed location, and whether the stadium would meet equitable development criteria as feasibility studies had proposed (Isaac et al., 2019; Leland Consulting Group, 2019).

Less divergence appeared within South Broadway, though I heard anecdotally that some residents supported the bond issue. Still, South Broadway opposition to any stadium was strong, particularly concerning its chance of providing substantial full-time, career ladder jobs. South Broadway actors were also concerned that neighborhoods would lose leverage in a CBA negotiation if bond funds had already been approved.

This case demonstrates some of the challenges associated with implementing CBAs as a successful tool. CBAs are usually grounded in solidarity between all community actors affected by a development. The solidarity-based, common purposed, and shared goals that usually characterize CBAs was not reasonable in this case. Looking long-term, I find it challenging to consider how municipal policies can insist on negotiation of CBAs when the specific content of those agreements uncover community contention. The only course of action in this case would have been negotiating different CBAs with each neighborhood (at best a challenging process).

Lessons Learned

This experience affirms Iris Marion Young’s (2016) assertion that communities negotiate spaces of protected identity while simultaneously seeking avenues of outreach and collaboration to their benefit. Raymond Rocco’s (2022) discussion of hybridity and Lefebvre’s (1991) conception of spatial production help me understand the conflictive processes that create hybrid urban identities and interests within a community. Just as struggles over spatial practices become embodied in all plans and public documents, the same applies to the Equitable Development Report. Our Report provides a snapshot of the state of alliances, agreements, and conflicts that map hybridity and cosmopolitanism (conflict and strategic cooperation) in Barelas and South Broadway. This experience provides a humbling reminder that community-based redevelopment remains more complicated than it may appear, and planners ignore that to our detriment.

Parallel Strategies for Engagement in Ongoing Redevelopment

Organizations within South Broadway and Barelas are doing development and implementation within each neighborhood, mobilizing their own resources, partnerships and political alliances to get development done. Moreover, past community planning failures concerning the Railyards have made neighborhood organizations rationally uneasy about committing to city-sponsored agreements appearing to conflate their interests. If collaborative alliances might still be possible, City planners (and equity consultants like me) will benefit from considering differing engagement processes, as quite distinct manifestations of loss as well as distinct demands and expectations emerge from organizations in each neighborhood.

As an institutional actor, the City might more productively focus on building synergistic social capital with each (bonded) neighborhood, rather than relying on bridging social capital in between the two neighborhoods (Cohen, 2001).

The grounds for bonding social capital in Barelas link to historical connections to the pre-railroad era of agrarian labor processes, land ownership, and commercial arts and cultural programming. In South Broadway, bonding social capital is also influenced by Railyard history, but it is grounded in neighborhood and cultural markers embedded in church and other social networks, deeply engaged with access to community services, fair lending and fair housing. These different priorities and aspirations limit the likely success of a CBA based in inter-neighborhood solidarity.

Shifting Political and Economic Environment

Since 2019 the Railyards have become very visible in the actions and initiatives of government agencies, non-profit and private sector developers, city-wide housing and economic justice organizations, and elected officials at all scales of government. The Railyard redevelopment process has surfaced as an important site of neighborhood, downtown and regional development. Now that the Stadium Bond Issue has failed, several community organizations and agencies are discussing whether anchor enterprises might meet neighborhood and City economic interests. This increased visibility increases the urgency for neighborhoods to decide exactly how they will engage in the redevelopment process, and what benefits they will insist on receiving.

This process reminded me of my hubris in expecting that a few months’ engagement might foster solidarity and strategic collaboration. What we did create together, however, was a synthetic expression of expectations from both neighborhoods about what would constitute equitable development on the railyards site. That work remains useful for each neighborhood to make claims on external agents seeking both to participate in the development process and capture agencies of the state (Poulantzas, 2014).

Hybridity, Cosmopolitanism, and the Struggle over Spatial Practices

Each neighborhood fostered resilience (and built on assets) in different ways. This was heartening, and I am intrigued by the ways that each neighborhood used this City-initiated community outreach effort to focus their attention to try: (i) to retrieve what they lost with the closing of the Railyard, (ii) to rebuild based on unique neighborhood assets, and (iii) to assert what is owed them as affected neighborhoods (Isaac, 2017).

I went into the facilitation hoping that this community engagement initiative would not only document the multiple and diverse human, social, and organizational capacities of South Broadway and Barelas, but that it would also help forge a collective, multiplex, identity (Rosaldo, 1993; Sandercock, 2016). Our governance recommendations might have been more successful had we actively sought ways to enable the neighborhoods to chart parallel courses of engagement with the Railyards redevelopment process.

This community planning experience has demonstrated two potentially contradictory tensions in poor communities of color: neighbourhood participants demonstrated cosmopolitanism through informal and formal interaction between community members (Sandercock, 2016); but, individual neighbourhoods have reason to protect themselves from imperial assets used against them (Isaac, 2017). These complex, historically racialized and class-conflictive dynamics within and between neighbourhoods and outside actors have fostered capacity building at the neighbourhood level. As Warren et al. (2001) noted, social capital flourishes in poor communities because of the absence of other forms of capital. These histories of conflict and selective/strategic collaboration have created a very interesting hybridity in this segment of the downtown “pocket of poverty.” This experience has also helped to clarify the challenges that outside agents, including the City, face in planning within this hybridity.

Likewise, neighborhood organizations seem to benefit most when they ground their claims for reparation, resources and services in that same history, challenging redevelopment strategies that commodify and essentialize neighborhood identity, while leveraging financial, physical and human resources that can advance their asset-based designs. They also recognize that if they do not engage in the Railyard Redevelopment Planning process, they will not be able to organize against any Railyard redevelopment proposals that would be detrimental to neighborhood interests.

This facilitation surfaced neighborhood expectations about how this development process should proceed: transparency and communication from the City to neighborhoods about their redevelopment goals; respect for the diagnostic capacity of those neighborhood organizations to analyse local conditions; and defining together community benefit agreements (specifying who participates, the timing and pacing of negotiations; and baseline components in any agreement if neighborhoods are going to advance healing from disinvestment).

The Equitable Development Report provides a workable synthesis of the concerns of multiple organizations across the two neighborhoods that guide productive City engagement with them. That the document is publicly available and contains transcriptions of all the focus groups increases the probability that it will be used by external (and internal) actors as part of their self-education as they shape their activities and engagement.

The equitable development of the Railyards community engagement effort represents a useful learning moment about how neighborhoods derive their own strategies for healing, repair and reparation from loss, in this case the closing of a major economic engine.

Convening the conversation, with open publication of the results, may have focused the intra-neighborhood conversations in both neighborhoods, and clarified what repair means for each of them. In turn, that might also have clarified the reasons for their parallel rather than coalition engagement. That clarity may not have been fully evident between the neighborhoods, nor evident to city agencies, before the facilitation.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Just Talk: The Promise and Peril of Dialogues About Whiteness

Through a consideration of community dialogues about safety and policing, this essay reflects upon issues of Whiteness, justice, and possibilities of healing and repair as they arise in planning practice. If planning has any potential as a healing or reparative practice to address legacies of harm, trauma, and pain in the United States, it needs to confront Whiteness explicitly through an assertive, anti-racist agenda. In planning, Whiteness is typically “both encompassing and veiled” as a quality of access to advantages of government choices, as a system of exclusion and othering of non-White people, and as a means of protecting privilege even despite laws and actions to disrupt White advantage (Goetz et al., 2020, p. 145). Whiteness is an essential foundation of the history, culture, and government of the United States as a nation-state (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2021). It is a system that privileges White, heteronormative men above all other identities and functions as an implicit norm by which all others are considered “different kinds of being different” (Fuentes, 2016, p. 60). By cloaking itself as unremarkable, Whiteness is a category of identity and power that White as well as other people have historically and comfortably avoided even seeing, much less reckoning with (Baldwin, 1964; Kendi, 2019).

The Potential and Perils of Dialogues

If unmasking Whiteness is a necessary condition for repairing its damaging effects, how can that be done? Carol Anderson has powerfully documented how White rage is a consistent, violent, revanchist response to Black progress and to White confrontation of the fact of racism. But she concludes, “[H]onest, fact-based dialogues about race and racism… are how we begin to defuse the power of white rage” (Anderson 2016, p. 175). Her faith in the transformative potential of dialogue to support healing from the violence of Whiteness inspires me as a planning practitioner and a scholar of deliberation. I’ve come to believe that planners can make a unique and important contribution to equitable urban futures, democracy, and communities by becoming highly competent at eliciting different points of view, facilitating dialogue among different parties, and regarding difference and conflict as a resource for transformative learning and commitment building.

My hope for the potential of dialogues originates both from my own positive, early experiences with deliberative decision-making and from a long tradition of planning that embraces deliberative, communicative processes as an essential part of conceiving and advancing towards a desired, shared future. Patsy Healey (1992) called for planning through debate and interaction to collectively imagine and mobilize future action, yet she also cautions against misreading this to imply that communicative processes will necessarily advance justice (Healey, 2003). John Forester (1999, pp. 207–211) illuminated how dialogue among individuals with related histories of trauma enables transformative social and political work by building solidarity, trust, and a political strategy for advocacy. Forester (1989) called on planners to insert into these processes a norm of resisting inequality, to counter the momentum of a planning environment that is heavily structured and influenced by power.

Leonie Sandercock consistently called for planning to take on as its central project the injustice operating along dimensions of difference including gender, class, ethnicity, and race (Sandercock, 2003; Sandercock & Forsyth, 1992). Notably, Sandercock’s vision for planning that is “political, therapeutic, audacious, creative, and critical” involved disrupting planning’s traditional “habits of thought and action” by elevating the plural “storylines” of cities and their inhabitants by engaging multiple voices and experiences (Sandercock, 2003, p. 227). In their ideal form, deliberative democratic dialogues promote justice (Young, 2002), sometimes by introducing opportunities for empathy with others’ experiences (Feldman et al., 2006; Innes & Booher, 2010) that subsequently might lead to redistributing resources, recognizing a new priority, stopping a damaging action, or making repair. Together, these students of planning and injustice have asked if, when, and how “talk” in planning might be “just.”

Just Talk: Dilemmas From Dialogues About Policing

A few vignettes of “just talk” illuminate the promise and perils of dialogues. They are drawn from three extended series of multi-stakeholder dialogues about policing and public safety in which I have been a process designer, discussion facilitator, or co-chair (Lemmie et al., 2021; M Safe, 2021; Quick, 2021). Encounters with police are one of the most commonplace experiences of government for black, indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) in the U.S. (Soss & Weaver, 2017). Neighborhoods with higher proportions of BIPOC residents experience greater policing surveillance than White communities (Epp et al., 2014; Garcia-Hallett et al., 2020). This is a planning problem, as recognized by Norman Krumholz (1992) and Zapata and Bates (2015), who argued that “equity planning” must extend beyond planning’s conventional focus on the built environment to incorporate all place-associated aspects of inclusion and exclusion that are important to Black, indigenous, and other communities of color.

In Falcon Heights, Minnesota, the eleven members of the Falcon Heights Task Force on Policing and Inclusion – created after Philando Castile was killed by a police officer in Falcon Heights – met 13 times and hosted five community dialogues. White individuals, who comprised two thirds of the Task Force membership, initially defined the issues primarily in terms of “policing” or a “bad apple” officer and focused their attentions on policing reform. However, these deliberative processes led these Task Force members to an expanded view of the issues and their own responsibilities and commitments (Quick, 2021). Whereas initially most of the White participants in the Task Force and community dialogues had focused their attention on a police department or police culture “over there,” outside their direct responsibility, but something they hoped to influence through external pressure, they came to see the problem as “in here,” recognizing Whiteness as a social system that they are inside, and responsible for sustaining (via complicity) or disrupting (via voice and action). In the end, the diverse membership of the Task Force reached a consensus position strongly advocating that White privilege be challenged through ongoing community mobilization and engagement.

This raises a dilemma of “just talk” in two senses. First, consider what this “just talk” context illuminates about deliberation and justice. I assess this deliberative process as only partially positive because, while we made some progress on policies for equity, the process of gaining White participants’ buy-in was laborious and often hurtful to BIPOC participants. When the Task Force was meeting in 2016 and 2017, there was no critical mass of White Americans recognizing and reckoning with pervasive, systemic racism. Despite the resilience of White complacency at that time, White members of the Task Force did come to see racism as a manifestation of Whiteness that pervades their own attitudes, accords them privilege, and is their responsibility to help dismantle. This is important progress towards justice, but it came at a particular cost to BIPOC individuals who had to work strenuously to educate and persuade White Task Force members to support them. As they shared their experiences and advocated for change, initially some White listeners second-guessed their interpretation of events or concluded their experiences were anomalous rather than part of a pattern. Both reliving these experiences through sharing them and having their validity questioned were traumatizing.

Second, this example evokes the ongoing anxiety about whether deliberation can be “just talk,” mere talk, not action. I have long felt that talk is action, having agency to change hearts and minds. However, the dialogues in which I have been involved around policing and race are particularly fraught when it comes to the connection of talk to further, subsequent action. When the Falcon Heights Task Force efforts were commended a year later by a City of Excellence Award from the League of Minnesota Cities, several BIPOC task force members were enraged by others celebrating what they themselves saw as an utter lack of follow through. One responded to the announcement, “Our efforts on the Task Force have become exactly what I feared: used as political rhetoric to say ‘We tried’ or to relish the thought that we did our part in the struggle of equality. Not one thing has been implemented from recommendations put forth by the Task Force, a fear I voiced at the beginning of the process.”

This respondent was expressing a well-informed fear of investing labor and hope in a deliberative process that may ultimately only be a virtue-signaling, performative process without further material outcomes that improve his safety and that of other African American men in police encounters. The same concerns arose throughout another deliberative process about policing that I more recently facilitated, the M Safe Implementation Committee to review policing on the University of Minnesota campus (M Safe, 2021). One of the participants conveyed that her students and colleagues were constantly asking her about the M Safe Committee, with a sense of fear that it would be risking too much to hope, “Is this really real?” Elaborating, she explained that BIPOC, disabled, and immigrant community members were watching M Safe with a knowledge that promises of change are often made by institutional leaders, but too often ultimately dwindle into an excuse of “Well, we tried, but it’s just really hard.”

Paradoxically, I regard it as a small marker of the powerful potential of “just talk” that a police chief recently complained to me that he wished we could “just stop talking about racism.” It is disheartening that he is unwilling to confront the truth that racism is a fundamental part of police-community relationships, and I feel strongly that not talking about racism will exacerbate rather than alleviate racism. However, given the unfortunate resilience of racism and dogged resistance to addressing it, it is somewhat encouraging that talk alone can agitate discomfort in the status quo. To be clear, my purpose in engaging in dialogues about policing is not to aggravate law enforcement professionals, but rather to create the conditions for anti-racist change, which I profoundly believe is as much in their interest as it is in anyone’s. Those conditions, perhaps, are aided by small actions of “just talk.”

Reflections

Sherri Arnstein’s (1969) famous cautions about manipulation, placation, and tokenism through citizen participation, conceived at the height of racial tensions in the American civil rights movement of the 1960s, used to strike me as somewhat outdated, given growing interest in more participatory and inclusive planning processes. These days, I feel quite the opposite. We need to denaturalize our easy familiarity with Arnstein’s ladder and re-foreground the civil rights struggle in which it was forged over 50 years ago. When we keep our eye on how and why disenfranchisement happens, Arnstein’s ladder regains its potency as a tool for diagnosing the kinds of abuses of power we must confront to dismantle Whiteness and heal.

I was naïve and wrong to think we were “beyond” the concerns Arnstein was writing about. My longstanding concerns about illegitimate, non-inclusive, non-coproductive “participation” processes (Quick & Feldman, 2011) did not prevent me from facilitating processes that were fundamentally more burdensome to some Task Force members than others because of the racialized power relations of the governance and societal contexts within which the dialogues occurred. My aspirations to diminish the harms and impacts of historic power dynamics through careful design and facilitation largely reflect my Whiteness. Thoughtful design can help but it does not dislodge deeply entrenched, racialized inequality in who names and frames problems, who sets the agenda, the value given to different lives and concerns. I acknowledge this to double down on the necessity of persistently, actively confronting Whiteness with recognition and stamina (Menakem, 2017).

Whiteness can easily dominate deliberative dialogue, in multiple ways. Norms of “orderly” discourse can be used to suppress displays of deeply felt emotions (de Souza Briggs, 1998), and thus to squelch discussion about the racism that brings forth rage, grief, and despair. Good process design and facilitation of dialogue – for example to ensure diverse participation, avoid domination of airtime, privilege minority voices, or lead with values – may enhance marginalized groups’ influence (Bryson et al., 2013; Nabatchi, 2010; Young, 2002). The Falcon Heights experience is but one example of the pattern that successful efforts to confront Whiteness are far too often built on the emotional labor, risk-taking, and re-traumatization of BIPOC individuals who feel compelled to try to change systems by changing minds. That dynamic is neither just nor healing. And, even if the experience of dialogue is positive and constructive, mediating power “at” the table of deliberators or negotiators is not a way to redistribute power in the broader world (Innes, 2004, p. 12).

The vignettes I shared serve as a testament to the intransigent Whiteness of institutions that resist change. Whiteness, so very prominent in planning and other forms of policymaking, remains highly resilient and powerful. My multiple, decidedly mixed experiences with trying to confront Whiteness through dialogues have led me to a messy mix of cynicism, dwindling hope, and a continuing, restless desire to make deliberation better. While reflecting on these experiences to write this essay, I have despaired over the slowness of the struggle against deeply ingrained, societal injustice. This is a familiar kind of challenge for planners. It is always our dilemma to reckon with larger forces – climate change, poverty, civil war, technological change – as they instantiate themselves in a particular community. That community context is also a scale that permits dialogue, deliberation and ongoing conversations to seek to imagine and facilitate a more desirable future. While voicing caution about the perils of “just talk,” I am far from giving up on it. Striving to confront Whiteness through local actions is meaningful, and dialogue is a crucially important part of planners’ work for justice and repair.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Trauma Informed Planning and Healing Centered Engagement

Increasingly, therapeutic planning literature has been exploring trauma-informed approaches that recognize and acknowledge community traumas or stressors as fundamental to designing sensitive, responsive, appropriate solutions. But trauma-informed work often addresses individuals’ management of trauma instead of asking how collective groups might engage in transformational spatial and/or social change. One possible approach to bridging this gap is found in Healing Centered Engagement, an assets-based practice that advances a collective view of healing. This essay examines two cases to explore how Healing Centered Engagement might help planners to address community trauma.

Trauma-Informed, Healing Centered

Shawn Ginwright identified limitations of trauma-informed care approaches in the context of his work with African-American youth in Oakland, California. He suggests, “current formulations of trauma-informed care presume that the trauma is an individual experience, rather than a collective one” (2018). Ginwright also identifies risks of focusing on the treatment of the negative manifestations of trauma rather than fostering aspirations and hope for future possibilities. Ginwright offers Healing Centered Engagement as a means by which planners might refine trauma-informed approaches to address these limitations.

In both of the following examples, communities experienced conditions that fostered difficult relationships between the communities and their respective local authorities, as well as anti-social behavior – in the Irish context of these cases, “anti-social behavior” is a legal term that includes harassment, behavior that causes significant or persistent alarm, distress, fear or intimidation, or significant or persistent impairment of another’s use or enjoyment of their property. In both cases, community stress and trauma resulted and led to distinct community responses. Employing a Healing Centered Engagement approach in the analysis of these examples provides additional insight into the cases, and it demonstrates potential for future application of Healing Centered Engagement in planning contexts.

The Greenway Case

Recently, I facilitated a discussion group as part of a pre-planning public consultation on behalf of Wicklow County Council. The Council in conjunction with the National Transport Authority were considering a new greenway, which would provide for public use of green space, including woods and a river, that is currently largely inaccessible. Planners suggested that the greenway would enhance the community by making greenspace accessible, and by increasing the permeability and connectivity of the area, providing a more direct path through neighborhoods by way of the woods. The project was in such early stages that there was no formally proposed route, just a general idea of where the greenway might pass through the residential area.

Before the consultation began, organizers told me and other facilitators that tensions had been running high around the project, and that a small but vocal group of residents opposed the project and were likely to attend that evening. I went into the discussion room with my curiosity piqued. As predicted, the room was tense and combative. Participants who were averse to the project spoke at length about their concerns, and they resisted discussion about any potential benefits of the greenway. Hallmarks of NIMBYism appeared: the greenway was a nice idea in theory, but not by my house. Yes, it increased access, but that just meant increased anti-social behavior and crime. How could the children in the neighborhood be safe if there were strangers using drugs right there on the greenway, with easy access to the housing development?

Over the next hour, a history of the neighborhood from the residents’ perspective began to unfold, starting with the present and working backward. The area now, participants said, was safe – children could play outside unattended, crime was unusual – but this hadn’t always been so. As detail and history emerged, the area’s past became more vivid. Participants explained that for years, their development (which backs onto the wooded area where the greenway would go) had experienced incidents of anti-social behavior and other destructive crime: both cars and homes had been broken into and set on fire. To address these multiple issues, residents had prevailed upon the Local Authority, and eventually a 6-foot wall was built that barred public access to the development. From the vocal residents’ perspective, that self-segregation had been an effective strategy. The greenway, they feared, would see the removal of the wall, open the development for public access again, and the previous problems would victimize them once more.

It is necessary here to add a contextual note: Particularly in the US, segregated built-environment is tightly intertwined with long-standing racist policies and social ideologies that persist. In the greenway case, this is not so, even implicitly. While there is structural and societal racism in Ireland, this history differs from that in the US. Societal divisions in Ireland often fall along class lines, and while class and race can be bound together, in this case class mattered, not race. Recent data shows the area’s population as virtually all White Irish (not including White Irish Travellers, an ethnic group subjected to systemic racism and social stigma). Significantly too, sectioning off the development was no preemptive maneuver by residents, as if in response to a perceived, stereotypical threat of the “Other.” This was a response to the lived experience of repeated violence and trauma.

The greenway case begs the question: how else could community response to collective stress unfold? The greenway response built defense and division into the landscape of the community – it created safety for a small group by way of a barrier between people. What alternatives might there be that offer more opening?

Flanagan’s Fields

The neighborhood of Rialto in Dublin has a long legacy of stress/trauma. One spot of particular notoriety is the 11-acre housing development Fatima Mansions. The development was originally constructed between 1947 and 1950 and provided relief from tenement living in the area. However, a lack of supportive social infrastructure led to problems for the development, and one consequence was a devastating manifestation of Dublin’s opioid epidemic in the 1980s. In the mid-1980s, the Dublin City Corporation (now Dublin City Council, or DCC) attempted a refurbishment of Fatima Mansions that included improvements to apartments, built environment interventions (e.g. sealing off some of the multiple entrances to the estate), and the demolition of one block of flats (Shine & Norris, 2006). The project was ultimately unsuccessful, as Shine and Norris point out: “The refurbishment did nothing to tackle the social and economic problems of the estate or to improve other aspects of residents’ quality of life in the long-term” (p. 40). Trouble persisted – a 1998 Irish Times headline read: “Fatima Mansions, a place known to residents as the heroin supermarket.”

In the early 2000s, the Dublin City Corporation launched another regeneration project, this time in strong collaboration with residents. This iteration made plans for the redevelopment of the apartment blocks, ultimately proposing to pull down all the apartment blocks and replace them with a mixture of approximately 600 units including public and private housing. A sports complex and community facilities were also planned for the site. Residents were relocated to other parts of the community for the duration of the project. Although all apartment blocks were demolished, following the global economic crash in 2008, the last apartment block scheduled for redevelopment was never rebuilt, and the site was left empty within the development.

In 2010, a local Rialto Resident’ Association (Back of Pipes) took collective action. They requested permission from DCC to begin a community garden, dubbed “Flanagan’s Fields” on the empty site. At that point, the community around Flanagan’s Fields was fragmented due to the economic crash, the recent displacement of residents during the redevelopment process, and the influx of new residents. The area also still carried the legacy of years of poor provision of services. The Back of Pipes residents began the garden with the aim of creating a space where people could meet and “have something to talk about,” a space for connection.

Over the years, the garden has attracted several residents, who have their own plots. Flanagan’s Fields has also welcomed a range of community groups. The garden features a geodesic dome greenhouse – made by a local group, the Grow Dome Project – now used for hydroponic gardening and as a gathering space. Other groups using the space have included local schools’ homework groups who have garden plots, Tús (a community work placement scheme), Eco Unesco (Ireland’s Environmental Education and Youth Organisation), a Parent and Toddler group, and several other organizations who host their own events and raise awareness of other available community resources (youth groups; men’s sheds; daycares; and crèches, or nursery, facilities). In addition to providing access to garden space, Flanagan’s Fields has helped to facilitate a social network that provides significant benefit to the surrounding community. Notably, Flanagan’s Fields continues to operate in its original location, despite there being no guarantee of continuation–the contract for the site is renewed annually, and at any point DCC can choose to reclaim and redevelop that land.

From Individual Towards Collective Experience

Understanding how collective trauma may present itself is critical for planners engaging with communities. Berglund & Kitson (2021) note, “unaddressed collective trauma may cause distrust, disempowerment, and difficulty taking part in collective action.” The Bridge Housing Corporation (2018) provides a further list of conditions of community trauma for consideration, noting similar manifestations but adding several, including “difficulty envisioning the future and positive change.” Erfan (2017) provides an interesting note that therapeutic planning strategies may have applications even in situations where the community is not obviously traumatized. Echoing Peter Marris’s Loss and Change (1975), Erfan suggests “all situations of social change can trigger something similar to the trauma and grieving process that is initiated by loss” (Erfan, 2017). This has important implications: initially, the community in the greenway case did not have an obvious traumatic history, in contrast to Fatima Mansions, for example. However, an awareness of both the signals and the prevalence of collective trauma encourages consideration of trauma as a potential factor in community reactions to planning projects.

Foregrounding the collective framing of trauma and remembering that any community experiencing change can exhibit signs of this, may provide a useful lens for analyzing community feedback. During the greenway case consultation, participants articulated, even embodied, several signals of collective trauma, including a distrust that current systems could deliver the new public space and increased access in a safe way, and a difficulty imagining positive change in the community. An awareness of the impact of unaddressed collective trauma provides a mechanism to reinterpret the discussion feedback; it shifts from what might first register as NIMBYism regarding the greenway proposal, becoming recognizeable instead as a collective trauma-response.

A growing body of interdisciplinary literature speaks to the idea that collectively experienced trauma requires a different approach than individual experiences (see: Saul, 2013; Freitag et al., 2014; Matlin et al. 2019). Pinderhughes et al. (2015) provide a particularly useful set of case studies and a potential framework for addressing and preventing community trauma. Healing Centered Engagement positions trauma and well-being as a function of the environments where people live their lives. When people are involved in advocating for policies and opportunities that address causes of trauma, the act of advocacy and direct action contribute to a sense of purpose, power and control of their environment. Ginwright posits that all of these are ingredients necessary to restore well-being and healing (for examples of what this might look like in a planning context, see: Berglund & Kitson, 2021; Erfan, 2017; Poe, 2021; Reece, 2020). Shifting from the individual to the collective model of trauma suggests the potential for revised engagement strategies and interventions that are more sensitive to the underlying needs of the community. Erfan suggests that planners would do well to take a sensitive approach rather “than to act as fully logical and optimistic champions of social change in the face of community resistance” (2017, p. 46). Indeed, during the greenway consultation, one community member remarked “every time we try to tell you [the greenway] won’t work here, you and your colleagues just try to get us to say something positive about the project instead of listening to what we’re saying.” This was a clear articulation that the consultation was undermining the sense of purpose, power and control of their environment for some of the community members present, and so was working against healing, even as it advocated for public amenity space.

From Mitigation Towards Aspiration

Moving from a deficit-focused to an asset-based approach enables planners to consider both community responses and planning interventions. Healing Centered Engagement suggests responses or solutions by imagining what we would like to see, rather than by solely focusing energy and attention on mitigating what we do not want – or, as Ginwright puts it, expanding on the question “what happened to you” to include an exploration of “what’s right with you” (2018, n.p.). Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) practices stretch back to the 1990s in the United States, and focus on “identifying and building on the strengths, or ‘assets’ of individuals and communities” (Blickem et al., 2018) to reduce health inequalities (see also: Brooks & Kendall, 2013; Foot & Hopkins, 2010; Grigg-Saito et al., 2008; Mathie & Cunningham, 2003). Freitag et al. (2014) discuss an asset-based approach to building adaptive capacity into communities. They assess the role of social capital in community resilience to natural disaster. They argue “In the immediate aftermath of a disruption, social capital is a crucial substitute or backup for vulnerable large, complex systems and institutions and built infrastructure” (Freitag et al., 2014, p. 333). This underscores the importance of community connection to collective healing, and so fostering this connection becomes a vital component of asset-focused planning work.

The greenway case provides an example of a response driven by the intention to mitigate a negative or unwanted experience. The goal of building a wall was to decrease harm resulting from antisocial behavior and crime by limiting access to the development. But because the entire aim of the project was to prevent access to the development, it did not involve any additional complementary community-building efforts, nor did it foster any additional interpersonal links between community members. In contrast, the Back of Pipes Residents Association took an aspirational approach with Flanagan’s Fields. They aimed to create a shared space for positive interactions to occur. Because they worked to foster connections, their response remained flexible and fluid. It invited more community responses to grow up around it and connect to it, thereby increasing the community’s access to an increased variety of supports and services. Notably, the secondary community benefits – benefits from the resulting network – did not depend on the continued existence of Flanagan’s Fields in its original form. The garden provided an avenue for community members to build interpersonal relationships, to develop personal relationships to place, and to invest in the community. Gilmer et al. (2021) explain this: “communities are imbued with numerous facets of resiliency that can be built upon and broadened through the sharing of existing skills among community members” (p. 8). Flanagan’s Fields itself can change and adapt as new needs and circumstances emerge, and community benefits of increased safety, connection, and capacity remain intact. This adaptability translates into increased resilience and sustainability. The original response can sustain alteration, and it might even be removed without losing the net-positive effect in the community.

These examples demonstrate that considering the aim of a community response or a planning intervention – whether it is designed to mitigate a negative condition or to encourage a positive condition – might indicate the limitations/possibilities of the strategy. If the aim of a response is mitigation, we might foresee potential limitations in terms of resilience, and anticipate future consequences. For example, the wall in the greenway case is now having an unintended consequence: efforts to preserve the effects of the wall on the development are eclipsing consideration of the proposed greenway, a type of amenity space known to be beneficial for human and environmental health. Although residents said they liked the idea of a greenway in theory, it is at odds with the community’s original mitigation response. Although the benefit of building the wall was limited to residents of the development, the opposition to the greenway is a negative consequence for a much broader area. These are the types of future consequences we can look for in relation to mitigation responses: what might the future implications of the response be? Might it prevent or deter future developments/interventions? For whom are there benefits or consequences now, and for whom in the future? Might this cause or deepen a divide?

If the driver of a response or intervention is asset-focused, we might be able to imagine new possibilities for building resilience into communities. Flanagan’s Fields suggests that solutions that focus on bringing people together have the potential to be adaptable and responsive to shifting conditions. This flexibility presents interesting prospects. For example, the Northern Ireland-based organization Groundwork runs a project called Meanwhile Gardens. This project constructs accessible community gardens in public spaces that have been earmarked for future development, but which are not currently in use. These gardens offer a space for connection, and encourage both individuals and community organizations to become involved. Because these spaces are laying a foundation of connection and community networking, the fact that they are ephemeral in the landscape may not have much bearing on the benefits they can offer. They present a flexible option for connection that can perhaps outlive the gardens’ original footprint. In relation to aspirational or asset-focused solutions, we can begin to ask what other related aspirations does this response invite? Whose aspiration is this response reflecting, and who else should be included? Does it provide the opportunity to connect to other responses and start to form a network?

Conclusion

The cases presented above are simplified for clarity, but any work with multiple communities is complex and difficult, and messy. Planners might develop both better understanding and practice by studying and/or partnering with community development organisations already engaged in applying elements of Healing Centered Engagement approaches to their trauma-informed work (see: Area Resources for Community & Human Services, n.d.; Bridge Housing, 2018; Falkenburger et al., 2018; Groundwork, n.d.; Neighborhood Resilience Project, n.d.; Pottstown Trauma Informed Community Connection, n.d.). Healing Centered Engagement approaches can strengthen trauma-informed planning practices by providing increased awareness and sensitivity – and help us move closer to transformational social change and healing.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

A Note on Reparative Planning

To love one another may just be the fight of our lives. – Amanda Gorman

Justice is what love looks like in public. – Cornel West

Can planning ever be held accountable for the trauma and pain its labors have wrought over the centuries? This is a central question my students and I have wrestled with in courses titled “Fugitive Planning” and “Black Geographies” and “Race, Space, & Environmental History” – classrooms crafted to engage critically with the socio-spatial realities of planning’s harm. By planning, we mostly mean what you think: state-actors implementing formal measures which mark and orient the experience of space. By trauma and pain, we mean what haunts people and landscapes crafted through planning. In these courses, we conceive of planning as constituted through and alongside war, colonization, empire, human theft and human trafficking for the purposes of forced reproductive/labor/capital production, whiteness and anti-blackness, nationalism and xenophobia, racial capitalism and patriarchy.

Time and again, we come to the same conclusion: accountability often seems impossible, and yet necessary – it must be pursued despite its impossibility so we learn how to practice and struggle with language for imagining futures. As faculty leading these courses, I do not position myself as neutral on the question of justice. Our new language must never again reify neutrality. In fact, when recently asked in an anti-racist writing workshop for faculty, “For whom do you design your curriculum,” and, “What values inform your curricular choices?,” and, “Do you articulate your own positionality when lecturing?,” my answers were immediate. I design a curriculum for students in the hopes they will pursue justice, healing, and transformative solidarity. These aspirations define my norms and values: the geographic experience of being a Black identifying, disabled woman of African American and immigrant Korean descent matters to me and for my classrooms. There is no neutral disembodied place from which I call for spatial justice vis-a-vis the harms of historical and current planning.

Where once I felt a deep discomfort involving my history and my own struggles in teaching or writing (as if any of us is disembodied), today I use a “trauma-informed pedagogy.” I follow in the footsteps of the late and great Toni Morrison, who wrote about the power of using autobiography and autoethnography to “bring forth” and “unforget” our interior lives because they are in fact public sites of memory (Morrison, 1995). I saw Ms. Morrison’s social theory (to “unforget”) in action over and over in my ethnographic work post-Katrina, where friends and mentors would teach me that in Turkey Creek and North Gulfport, Mississippi, the water and the land are bound up in a Black sense-of-place. I was guided into the knowledge that the creek has nourished Black fugitives from surrounding sites of human bondage and death…that the creek had been a site of baptism, and that it made perfect sense for flood management and watershed trainings to occur in the church, a space which has for centuries narrated the possibility for collective and liberatory spirituality. It makes sense then that as I write, I feel Ms. Morrison has whispered the obvious to us: planning is a site of memory, but whose memory and to what end?

I do not believe I can opt-out of these uneasy questions. These involve historical, state, and institutional alchemies which require that we confront central facts of psycho-social vulnerability in a capitalist, misogynistic, white supremacist society. Like many of you, my students and I have suffered from both direct and indirect traumas, all accelerated and magnified by two years of Covid. Students realize that in the last few years, the United States has experienced more deaths than births¹. Even as we examine new research, we have to grapple with the painful ways in which research itself (when it lacks relationship-building as a central foundation) can itself be a colonizing process. Students inherit their own adverse childhood experiences of all kinds – largely and overwhelmingly owing to social harm related to familial insecure housing, food access, mental/healthcare access, disability and more. Many families struggle with intergenerational traumas. Refugee experiences are quite diverse and connect to “climate grief,” easily leading me pedagogically back to the need for a fugitive planning² framework that recenters the masses, the “undercommons,” and our mutual concerns.

Woven through these emotions and hauntings is the grieving that exists in indigenous communities having already survived presumed extinction and obsolescence. We must put that recognition into conversation with everyday news items which pit communities against one another in massive, never-ending media ponzi schemes.

I have found that the only meaningful salve is mutual study³ and mutual creation. Together we uncover how geography matters, how spaces and places matter, for mental and environmental health – because the first space is the body, and the geography of that body cannot be disconnected from the Earth and from social health and social history. Our bodies present a social history (not floating individually apart from context) which requires healing through public memory and environmental psychology.

From this perspective we can again ask, “How can planning ever be held accountable for the trauma and pain its many-headed hydra have wrought over the centuries?” Now more than ever, this question animates my struggles over how to retrain and redirect energy so that I can work with others to co-create belonging and mutual aid. In a context of so much displacement and dis-belonging from the bigger and grander “we,” nothing seems more important. Planning has not enough yet to say about the grief, emotion, and rage of this disbelonging – and yet these are the portals (particularly grief) through which we come together to remember what has been wrought, in order that we might imagine collective futures. To consider reparative planning requires that we take seriously the human need for healing trauma. Healing is no closure; healing denotes wake-work⁴ and space-making for grief and witness. Through the practice of wake-work (including grief) we create new possibilities for transformative planning and transformative, insurgent solidarities.

We see a multitude of examples of public, spatial wake-work, from the removal of statues which previously celebrated J. Marion Sims, who tortured Black enslaved women and poor Irish women in the name of gynecological advancement, or in “rasquachification,” the Chicano practice of cultural placemaking as resistance to gentrification, erasure and marginalization.

For some students deeply wedded to epistemological notions of “the individual’’ and “neutrality,” the pedagogy of wake-work can seem a Sisyphean battle. It takes practice and struggle to imagine that reformulating planning can be a legitimate intellectual and political commitment, with planning’s future essentially vested in Morrison’s site-of-memory formulation: planning is a site of memory, but whose memory and to what end?

“Grief as a portal to reparative planning” can sound much less like knowledge and a lot more like nonsense, particularly coming from a Black woman professor of African American and Korean descent. But this imperative to imagine is what the late and dear Peter Marcuse meant when he talked about transformative planning. We have not held seriously enough the late and dear bell hooks’s call to truly build the beloved community through a praxis of confrontation with imperialist, white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy. But it is never too late.

Thirty one years ago, Latasha Harlins, a 15 year old African American girl, was shot to death in Los Angeles by an immigrant Korean woman convenience store owner, Soon Ja Du, 51. This occurred only thirteen days after an unarmed African American man named Rodney King sustained a prolonged and brutal beating by a swarm of eight Los Angeles police officers, following a stop for intoxication and speeding. Both were signal events immediately preceding the LA riots, the strong memory of which underscores ongoing difficulties between African American and Asian community organizing in today’s landscape of anti-Asian violence. Both events were recorded, one by a convenience store video device, and the other by a public observer, George Holliday, recording from his apartment. Rodney King sustained a skull fracture, a broken right leg, facial lacerations/broken facial bones, broken ribs, shattered teeth, third degree burns to his chest where he had been injured with a stun gun, and permanent brain damage. Latasha Harlins was walking away from Du following a disagreement and a physical altercation (Du grabbed at Harlins’ backpack and Harlins struck Du multiple times in the face), when Du retrieved a gun from beneath the store counter and fatally shot Harlins with a wound to the back of her head. Fifteen-year old Harlins was killed instantly.

As a child belonging to both communities and processing those events from Queens, NY, I often felt a deep and silencing rage. I did not have the words to express what I saw or felt igniting in New York as a result of the racial relations unfolding on the TV. I understood but could not speak the unrecognized trauma related to war occupation, abandonment, exile, displacement, exclusion and estrangement that was and is so much a part of my family’s complicated war stories. I could not know about the construction of these places and hierarchies, the awful set-up of it all. I saw that the shooter and my own mother shared a name. I saw the girl’s picture and felt she was me. I saw violence unfold in a place in which planners had forsaken real people, real families and real futures. As is now common knowledge (Pulido 2000), we know that planning⁵ has shaped the lives of African Americans and immigrants of all kinds in Los Angeles and elsewhere through racially restrictive covenants, housing discrimination, highway development, lending discrimination, occupation discrimination, and resource deprivation. Even as a child, I understood no one cared if we poor people killed each other. Today I am clear: the root of anti-Asian violence and xenophobia is the same root as anti-Black violence and racism: the social trauma of colonization, white supremacy and racial capitalism. These harms are geographic and planned, they sit in the body, and we project them onto each other. We cannot escape each other’s pain without the work of the undercommons, nor can we escape the co-structuring alienation of social-psychological harm without resources and support. Racial capitalism has abandoned us all and we are unwell. Prayers for all our dead.

The jury found Du guilty of voluntary manslaughter, an offense that carries a maximum prison sentence of 16 years, with a jury recommending 10. A new trial judge, Joyce Karlin, decided to suspend the 10 year prison sentence, instead adding five years probation, 400 hours of community service, and a $500 fine. A state appeals court later unanimously upheld Judge Karlin’s sentencing decision, 3–0, on 21 April 1992, about a week before the LA riots. The Harlins family later received $300,000 in a settlement. In the LAPD case, initially four officers were tried and all were acquitted. In South Central Los Angeles, the reaction to the acquittal was particularly intense and began a few short hours after the acquittal announcements. At the time, more than half of the population of South Central was Black. Tension had already been mounting in the neighborhood in the years leading up to the riots: the unemployment rate neared 50 percent, a drug epidemic was ravaging the area, and gang surveillance was very high. The Black community had been protesting brutal mistreatment by the hands of the LAPD for years, with their entire community regularly criminalized across a variety of institutions. When the riots ended, 63 people had been killed, 2383 had been injured, more than 12,000 had been arrested, and estimates of property damage totaled more than $1 billion. Koreatown, situated just to the north of South Central LA, was disproportionately damaged with approximately 2000 Korean small businesses destroyed.

Reflecting on these case vignettes, we can understand how the Black and Korean communities have over time become mutually retraumatized, and how in a context of today’s increasing prevalence of anti-Asian violence, communities struggle to find common ground. From the holistic perspective of an ecological approach to social work, “retraumatization” describes the relationship people have to their physical and social surroundings, and how events in that landscape can trigger intense negative emotions, an inability to control emotions, and strong physical reactions to triggers. Environmental psychology presents a related framework that I explored with respect to post-Katrina redevelopment practices (White, 2012) – ideas often explored in urban design and architecture. Planning practitioners concerned with communal trauma have pursued environmental and community psychology frameworks to build heuristic models of community spatial organizing and transformation. The harm and violence which develops from community retraumatization can be understood as injustices rooted not in isolated moments of conflict, but rather as the result of sustained state-created conflict where market forces and structural disenfranchisement repeatedly infringe upon self-sovereignty, human health and well-being, and environmental integrity.

Gajeok Gathering:⁶ A Blues Epistemology

We are near the one year anniversary of the Atlanta Spa shootings in which eight people, including six people of Asian descent were murdered. This happened in an area besieged by traffic and noise from a highway, clubs, newly expensive housing and a railway junction; “that had been no more than a desiccated lot near a rail yard where four train lines met until strip clubs and massage parlors began opening there.” These are spaces which represent the geographies and intimacies of four continents (Lowe, 2015),⁷ connected by a US military complex (often one of the only ways for Black and Brown people to pursue economic access and education) across the Asian diaspora, a complex dispossessing and displacing people for crumbs – and bringing them to the United States to live out what can often be categorized as highly vulnerable, marginal lives. One of the dead again shares my mother’s exact name, and was my mother’s age – someone whose family would have survived Japanese colonization, the Korean war, the US military complex and the related sanctioned sex trade. What is the site of memory here, and how do we teach each other the space-making practices of wake-work, in order to move toward a horizon of repair? Prayers for all our dead. Soon Chung Park 박순정, age 74; Hyun Jung Grant [김]현정, age 51; Sun Cha Kim 김선자, age 69; Yong Ae Yue 유영애, age 63; Delaina Ashley Yaun, age 33; Paul Andre Michels, age 54; Xiaojie Tan 谭小洁, age 49; Daoyou Feng 冯道友, age 44. Rest In Peace.

These horrors continue to unfold as we are bombarded with media about the “Black-Asian problem” trope, despite the fact that the vast majority of anti-Asian violence, historically and contemporarily, has been perpetrated by white men and by the American state. This is a narrative which absolves the violence of racial capitalism and Christian nationalism – the strongest predictor of xenophobic views. Generally speaking, neither in K-12 education nor in schools of higher education (let alone in planning schools) are students exposed to transformative, radical education about third world histories of resistance and solidarity.

Into this moment, we need to interrogate planning pedagogies. Continuing reticence or lack of fluency on the part of well-meaning planning faculty, when it comes to white supremacy and racial capitalism, demeans the work of justice. White supremacy is an ideology, a pattern of values and beliefs ingrained in nearly every planning system and institution in the United States. It is a belief that to be white is to be human and invested with inalienable universal rights and that to be not-white means you are less than human – a disposable object for others to abuse and misuse. White supremacy is also a set of interlocking systems predicated on three pillars: slavery/capitalism, genocide/colonialism, and orientalism/war. We live, die and try to survive despite these inherited, planned systems.

If we wrestle with the idea that planning is a theory of communal trauma, then we might debate the potential of reparative planning in terms of spatial wake-work centering those insurgent planners focused on building Gajeok/the beloved community, fearlessly using blues epistemology⁸ to enable the transformational solidarity and healing placemaking we need. The transformation of conditions-of-possibility is what the term “abolition” suggests. Abolition has been developed in a context of visioning a world without prisons (most famously through the work of Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mariame Kaba, and the organization Critical Resistance in particular), and can be defined as “a movement that seeks to end prisons, police, and border walls (because they are institutions of war built on colonial and capitalist legacies of indigenous, Black, brown, Asian and poor violence.”⁹ For Black and Asian communities then, any abolitionist horizon for reparative spatial planning – where we understand space as Gajeok relationships requiring an ongoing working with Blues epistemology from the undercommons – would need to grapple with a central impasse: Black communities rejecting calls for greater police in the face of violence, and Asian communities calling for more. As planners and geographers who think about the interconnectedness of people and places, we have a responsibility to remind our communities, our publics, of this fundamental relationality.

The idea of reparative planning ultimately marks a horizon and process, rather than a destination, for redressing legacies of injustice and for marking the present moment’s pain and contradiction. The horizon requires new relationships predicated on abolition which rework public memory so that we can grieve/remember together, forging new intimacies and possibilities alongside the knowledge that atrocities will continue to unfold as a function of our shared and haunted landscapes. This essay’s haunted landscapes are defined by the premise that white supremacy and racial capitalism are the root of all race-related violence in the United States. Anti-Asian racism has the same root-source as anti-black racism: colonization, white supremacy, and racial capitalism.

There is no closure to these haunted landscapes because we cannot undo the harm or bring back the dead, even if we bulldozed the highways and decommodified housing (and yet we should still try). We cannot stop the atrocities because as Frantz Fanon¹⁰ told us, we have inherited an embedded and intergenerational array of traumas which are daily exacerbated by economic predation and a lack of caring, safety net investments which include housing, food, and access to sustained mental/health care. And yet, in church they say among the survivors are those who will be called, and we are called to keep pushing towards the idea of reparative planning.¹¹ If thinking about the planning labors of our BIPOC undercommons¹² is too far beyond the pale, consider the planning labors of Fred Rogers versus Robert Moses. Which kind of planning vision will help us practice movement towards a reparative horizon? Our focus matters.

When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another’s

spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are

hurtful and abusive. Love and abuse cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect

are, by definition, the opposites of nurturance and care.

– bell hooks, All About Love

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

Notes

1 https://carsey.unh.edu/publication/snapshot/2020-deaths-exceeded-births-in-record-number-of-states.

2 Fugitive planning is a framework developed by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney (The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, 2013) wherein fugitivity is developed from an exploration of blackness and Black critique as something fugitive – an ongoing refusal of standards imposed from elsewhere. The refusal happens in the “undercommons,” meaning in the spaces where the practice of experimentation and social reproduction happens informally, improvisationally, not sanctioned by the state or the managerial class – often through some praxis of radical mutuality, radical mutual aid.

3 A term introduced in Moten and Harney’s 2013 book, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study: https://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/undercommons-web.pdf.

4 Wake-work refers to a concept written about by Christina Sharpe in her 2016 book “On Blackness and Being” wherein she conjures a present reality defined by wake of the transatlantic slave ship, while at the same time ours is a reality defined by the work we do “in the wake,” i.e., wake-work. Wake-work never happens in a vacuum in the same way wakes are never empty rooms. Wake-work is cooperative and experimental work which welcomes grief and memory, as well as laughter, fear, uncertainty and non-resolution: see Sharpe (2016).

5 Los Angeles Citywide Historic Context Statement: African American History of Los Angeles, Prepared for: City of Los Angeles Department of City Planning Office of Historic Resources, February 2018.

6 Gajeok is the Korean word for family. I attended a political Gajeok meeting in preparation for organizing activity and planning around the 1 year anniversary of the Atlanta spa shootings. I have practiced the word in my mouth many times, in unison with others – and felt that the poetics of language and words truly have the capacity to transform…if even at the scale of momentary witness. My heritage is African American and Korean, and so Gajeok is a complicated concept I choose to politicize and not turn away from.

7 This refers to the seminal work by Lisa Lowe (2015), The intimacies of four continents. Lowe examines the relationships between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, exploring the links between colonialism, slavery, imperial trades and Western liberalism. Reading across archives, canons, and continents, Lowe connects the liberal narrative of freedom overcoming slavery to the expansion of Anglo-American empire, observing that abstract promises of freedom often obscure their embeddedness within colonial conditions. Race and social difference, Lowe contends, are enduring remainders of colonial processes through which “the human” is universalized and “freed” by liberal forms, while the peoples who create the conditions of possibility for that freedom are assimilated or forgotten.

8 Blues epistemology is a framework developed by the late Clyde Woods in his 1998 book Development Arrested (Verso). Blues epistemology is an African American social theory of space predicated on soul survival against all odds, meaning-making around historical spatial harm, and counternarratives which provide a pathway for reframing possible futures. A blues methodology is a reflective community-based inquiry approach that assumes our historical selves are embedded into the local landscape. Blues localizes geographic knowledge, defies disciplinary boundaries and maintains “historical continuity” as we make places and spaces (Woods, 2007, p. 51). It builds from a tradition of spiritual blues, which is an African American way of being in two worlds at the same time.

9 https://www.plannersnetwork.org/2018/08/response-to-abolitionist-planning/.

10 Frantz Fanon was a decolonial psychiatrist from Martinique, who wrote about human suffering and trauma in ways unrecognized by mainstream society or the psychiatric community. In particular, he was concerned about reframing post-war and refugee trauma as more than simply mysterious or personal burdens, as if any post-war mother’s mental and physical health could ever truly be considered independent and autonomous from context and culture and environment. Fanon worked to link “madness” to the contradictions in colonial and post-colonial societies: see Fanon & Markmann (1967).

11 As has been explored, the idea of reparations is not new: https://whyy.org/articles/reparations-would-help-cities-urbanists-need-to-advocate-for-them/.

12 Think of the undercommons as a space populated by people and creatures in a rhizomatic, acentric, non-hierarchial network of partnerships, of Gajeok, of mutual study. Perhaps they are struggling to create and maintain decommodified community land trusts for housing and local agriculture, perhaps they are working to build community mental health clinics on every block, perhaps they are grieving together and memorializing lessons learned across time, practicing how not to dehumanize aggression and trauma.