Interrupting a white will to improve: race, design, and community self-determination

Abstract

This critical case study investigates the cultural politics of one urban renewal effort rhetorically designed to serve the needs of most marginalized community members in Oakland, California. We extend recent scholarship examining the broader landscapes of young people’s lives and examine how the “urban” is made and remade in ways that impact education equity. Informed by critical urban theory and critical whiteness studies, we argue that urban planners enacted a white will to improve: a paternalistic approach to design that utilizes liberal democratic norms of voice and inclusion to deflect attention to the material realities of racism. Paying attention to contests over the urban—specifically the ways in which the “targets” of urban renewal interrupted official urban design processes—offers an important location for considering more ethical approaches to advancing community self-determination and education justice.

Keywords:

• Critical urban theory
• whiteness
• democracy
• design
• reform

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgements

We want to acknowledge Andrea Del Carmen Vázquez, Charley Brooks, Pia Wong, Ronald David Glass, and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and critical feedback on this project.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 In compliance with IRB requirements, we use pseudonyms to describe the specific organizations and individuals involved in the Oakland planning process. As we later outline, naming Oakland is one exception. We needed to anchor our inquiry in Oakland to acknowledge histories of struggle and resistance in the town and to convey how distinctive legacies of race and place structured the design process.

2 We situate our study in relation to Sideris’s (2021) excellent analysis of Colorado State University and its complicity in displacing historically marginalized residents via an urban renewal project. We encourage readers interested in our analyses to visit Sideris’s piece and the complementary, parallel insights that emerged from our distinctive analyses.

3 Although demographic labels can at times obscure more than they reveal, we approach census categories and demographic variables as instructive preliminary data for grasping the extent to which historically underrepresented communities attended community events. More precise figures comparing attendees at community engagement workshops and city-wide demographics include white (52% in attendance compared to 25.4% in Oakland census data); Asian (21%–17%); Black (15%: 27%); and Latinx (7%: 25%).

4 For example, a teacher might listen to a parents’ expressed concerns about their child by responding in ways that fit the child within the school’s Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports system. This example of “listening to respond” privileges school-centric understandings of parent and family concerns, hopes, or aspirations. These patterned interactions mirror how Miami Planners funneled community concerns into what they described as “our process” so that “we can have a better product moving forward.”

5 CCBR is not the focus of this article, and we do not have adequate space to elaborate on this methodology as such. But we would like to caution that CCBR itself is an “ethical minefield” (Glass et al., 2018, p. 6). Like more traditional forms of research, CCBR is enmeshed in and shaped by oppressive social forces. Our analysis points to how a white will to improve can masquerade even within processes formally named as “participatory” or “inclusive.” We worry that swift or reductive appropriations of CCBR can result in processes that resemble how InnovateEquity team member, Carl, described the urban planning process: “This is all just smoke and mirrors.” Still, we see CCBR, particularly in its original formation (Rappaport, 2020), as a powerful methodology for producing knowledge alongside BIPOC and leveraging research as a tool for building organizing power.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ethan Chang

Ethan Chang is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Administration at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. His research extends collaborative, community-based research—a methodology that aims to produce knowledge that emanates from and is answerable to nondominant families and youth. He is also interested in learning and leadership development informed by critical race and ethnic studies.

Shun-Nan Chiang

Shun-Nan Chiang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research concerns the contemporary theorization of the problem-solution relationship and the historical dynamics between agricultural development and public health. He is also interested in exploring comparative methodology, the epistemic potential of collaborative research, and critical analysis of technology in the development context.