Urban redevelopment as soft memory-work in Montgomery, Alabama

ABSTRACT

Scholars are increasingly studying memory-work as an essential place-defining force within cities, but few scholars have analyzed urban redevelopers as agents of memory-work. Using the Montgomery Builds effort to redevelop the Kress Building as a “memory moment,” we argue for a broader reading of memory-work that recognizes the broad spectrum of social actors, interests, and tensions involved in not only doing justice to the legacies of racialized pasts but also appropriating them in the service of urban capital. Central to our argument is a recognition that urban spaces are not just the product of the labor of remembering and preserving, but that these spaces have an affective and material place and impact within people’s lives and connections with the past. In so doing, we articulate how memory works through the remaking of space and place and argue for a broader definition of memory-work, a recognition of the harder and softer socio-political forms they can take in cities, and the way ostensibly painful memories are folded back into urban redevelopment visions in ways that facilitate but also complicate development and racial reconciliation.

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their comments on previous drafts of this manuscript. Their insights pushed us to engage with a complex story and we thank them for their efforts. We also wish to thank the editors of the journal for their insights and help in making this a stronger paper. Admissions are our own. While not directly funded through our National Science Foundation Grant, this work began over coffee in the Union Prevail coffee shop in downtown Montgomery while working on another project funded through the NSF.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We have spelled this word out at request of the journal. We recognize that for some readers the use of this word—in any context—is problematic. We apologize for any offense or injury caused through the use of this language.

2. Monroe Street sits several feet lower than Dexter Avenue the main White business thoroughfare in the city during segregation. As African American customers entered the segregated entrance into the building, they walked up to the Kress Building a potentially subtle, but no less prescient reminder of the racial hierarchy in the city.

3. At the time of the writing of this manuscript, the Bullers had indicated having plans to place story booths in several other cities, although we don’t know what specific role they will play in those locations or who will control the narrative collecting process. An obvious and still unresolved tension potentially runs through story booths in Montgomery and elsewhere in light of the danger of appropriating memories of marginalization for capital gain.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joshua Inwood

Joshua Inwood is an Associate Professor of Geography and a Senior Research Associate at The Pennsylvania State University. His work and teaching are focused on the intersections of race and inequality as well as resistance in urban cultural geography and landscape studies. Inwood’s work engages with critical race theory, Whiteness studies and settler colonialism.

Derek H. Alderman

Derek H. Alderman is a Professor of Geography and the Betty Lynn Hendrickson Professor of Social Science at the University of Tennessee. His research and teaching are focused on the spatiality of public commemoration, urban cultural geography, and heritage tourism—often in the context of race, memory-work and civil rights in the southeastern United States. Alderman is a past President of the American Association of Geographers and the founder and co-coordinator of Tourism RESET, a publicly engaged academic initiative that advocates for socially just commercial promotion of African American heritage within the travel industry.