Constructing the Antiracial City: City Planning and Antiracialism in the 21st Century

Abstract

This study asks: How does racism continue to shape city spaces in the 21st century marked by more subtle forms of new racism or antiracialism? This article performs a rhetorical analysis of the city of Cleveland’s urban planning documents from the early 2000s to explore how rhetorics of contemporary urban planning rely on a form of neoliberal racism or antiracialism to at once recognize race while eliding the relevance of racism in the construction of urban spaces. Three strategies—market logic, hegemonic memory, and multiculturalism—give appeal to the plan by giving voice to issues of race, diversity, and even urban inequality while filtering out the more complex issue of structural racism.

Keywords:

• Antiracialism
• City Planning
• Hegemonic Memory
• Market Logic
• Multiculturalism
• Racism

Notes

1. “Connecting Cleveland” (n.d.) cites the city as the “8th most segregated” among 23 urban areas studied by the Brookings Institute (p. 6).

2. Cleveland’s planning documents can be accessed by clicking on a link, “Citywide Plan,” on the city’s Planning Commission home page. From there, viewers can click on “Plan Contents,” which will provide 10 other links, including a plan “Introduction,” which provides an overview of the plan; a “Glossary”; “Development Opportunities,” which includes maps; “Funding Resources”; “Links to Other Plans”; a 38-page “Summary Document,” divided into sections on Housing, Retail, Economic Development, Recreation, Community Services, Safety, Transportation, Arts and Culture, Sustainability, and Preservation; and links to “Land Use & Zoning,” “Concepts, Policies & Recommendations,” “Capital Improvements,” and a “Plan Narrative.” The majority of this article’s analysis comes from the “Summary Document.”

3. Opportunity is also clearly gendered as when men benefit from the exclusion of women from the political and economic spheres. Here, however, I am choosing to focus on race.

4. “Connecting Cleveland,” (n.d.) 6, 11, 32; “Population,” (n.d.) p. 1.

5. In 2015, the unemployment rate among African Americans was double that of White Americans. According to data from the Labor Department, the Black unemployment rate was about 9.5 percent. See Olivera Perkins (2015).

6. This is especially true of Cleveland, a city that lost over 100,000 manufacturing jobs between 1980 and 2005 (Atkins et al., 2011).

7. See (Lipsitz, 2011, p. 26).

8. Lefebvre’s original work on “right to the city” can be found in Henri (Lefebvre, 1996).

9. People’s plan for restructuring toward a sustainable Detroit (February 24, 2014). Detroiters Resisting Emergency Management. Retrieved from http://www.d-rem.org/peoplesplan/

A partial list of member organizations of Detroiters Resisting Emergency Management (D-REM) includes: Building Movement Detroit; Cooperative Economics; Detroit Eviction Defense; Hood Research; International Socialist Organization; James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership; We the People of Detroit, as well as a number of local church communities.