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

ABSTRACT

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

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank the editors and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and feedback, which greatly improved the clarity and depth of our arguments. Any errors or omissions are entirely our own.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Janice Barry

Janice Barry is an Assistant Professor in the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo. She is also a Registered Professional Planner whose scholarly work focuses on questions of Indigenous recognition and reconciliation in and through planning. Her research focuses on the policy, organizational structures, norms, and discourses that shape planners’ identities, ethics, and sense of appropriate courses of action, with a particular interest in how these catalyze and constrain relationships with Indigenous peoples.

Julian Agyeman

Julian Agyeman is a critical urban planning and environmental social science scholar. He is the originator of the increasingly influential concept of “just sustainabilities,” the intentional integration of social justice and sustainability. He centers his research on critical explorations of the complex and embedded relations between humans and the urban environment, whether mediated by governments or social movement organizations, and their effects on public policy and planning processes and outcomes, particularly in relation to notions of justice and equity.