Making the Cotton District (White): Urban Renewal, New Urbanism, and the Construction of a Nostalgic Neo-Plantationist Pastiche

Abstract

Sometimes heralded as the first ever new urbanist development, Starkville, Mississippi’s Cotton District neighborhood stands out as a relatively dense, walkable, and mixed-use neighborhood in the otherwise car-centric landscapes of the rural south. Together with the neighborhood’s colorful buildings reminiscent of the grand homes of the antebellum South, these elements obscure the fact that the neighborhood as it exists today is the result of a federally funded urban renewal project that razed much of the adjacent Black neighborhood of Needmore and opened up the present-day Cotton District as a space for new investment. In excavating the details of these different elements of the Cotton District’s history, our central conceit is that the Cotton District represents what we call a “nostalgic neo-plantationist pastiche” produced through the material and symbolic displacement of Blackness and its replacement with both material and symbolic whiteness. By conceptualizing this landscape as constituted fundamentally by white nostalgia for a mythical, bygone era of plantation capitalism, and instantiated through a bricolage of architectural and design styles, we seek to draw attention to the precise ways that this landscape actively (re)constructs the past, rather than simply representing it. At the same time, the case of the Cotton District offers an opportunity to reconsider received wisdom in urban design and planning concerning the historic and contemporary linkages between urban renewal and new urbanism, and racial inequality and urban planning more generally.

美国密西西比州棉花区的Starkville社区, 被认为是有史以来的首个新城市开发项目。不同于以汽车为核心的其它美国南部农村景观, Starkville是一个相对密集、可步行、多用途的社区。色彩斑斓的社区建筑, 让人联想到美国内战前宏伟的南方家园。这些元素掩盖了一个事实：Starkville社区是美国联邦政府资助的城市振兴项目的成果, 它极大摧毁了附近的Needmore黑人社区, 棉花区也是新投资的空间。在挖掘棉花区历史中这些元素的细节时, 我们的主要观点是：棉花区体现了物质性的和象征性的白色取代黑色的物质性和象征性的“怀旧新种植主义的模仿”。该景观本质上是由白人对逝去的神话般的种植园资本主义时代的留恋所构成, 并在建筑和设计风格上得到体现。我们试图提请人们关注该景观主动(重新)构建过去的精确方式, 而不是对过去的简单再现。这个棉花区案例, 允许我们重新思考城市设计和规划中的现有认知, 将城市振兴与新城市主义、种族不平等与城市规划的历史和当代相互联系起来。

El barrio Cotton District, de Starkville, Mississippi, a veces distinguido como uno de los desarrollos urbanísticos más novedosos de todos los tiempos, se destaca en el paisaje rural sureño como un vecindario relativamente denso, transitable y de uso mixto, por lo demás centrado en el automóvil. Junto con las coloridas edificaciones del barrio, que nos recuerdan las mansiones del Sur anterior a la Guerra Civil, estos elementos ocultan el hecho de que el barrio, tal como ahora existe, es el resultado de un proyecto de renovación urbana, financiado con fondos federales, que arrasó gran parte del adyacente barrio negro de Needmore y abrió el Cotton District actual como espacio para nuevas inversiones. Explorando en detalle los diferentes elementos de la historia del Cotton District, nuestra presunción central es que éste representa lo que podríamos llamar “un pastiche nostálgico neoplantacionista” producido gracias al desplazamiento material y simbólico de la negritud, y su sustitución con una blancura material y simbólica. Al conceptualizar este paisaje como constituido fundamentalmente por la nostalgia blanca por una era mítica y ya terminada de capitalismo de plantación, e instanciada a través de un bricolaje de estilos y diseños arquitectónicos, buscamos llamar la atención sobre las precisas maneras como este paisaje (re)construye activamente el pasado, en vez de simplemente representarlo. Al mismo tiempo, el caso del Cotton District presenta una oportunidad para reconsiderar la sapiencia recibida en diseño y planificación urbanos, en lo que concierne a los vínculos históricos y contemporáneos entre la renovación urbana y el nuevo urbanismo, y, de modo más general, entre la desigualdad racial y la planificación urbana.

Key Words:

• anti-Blackness
• displacement
• new urbanism
• urban renewal
• whiteness

关键词：:

• 反黑人
• 迁移
• 新城市主义
• 城市振兴
• 白色。

Palabras clave::

• blancura
• antinegritud
• desplazamiento
• nuevo urbanismo
• renovación urbana

Notes

1 Camp died in October 2020 of COVID-related complications, even receiving an obituary in The New York Times (Genzlinger 2020).

2 See the “Renewing Inequality” interactive map and Web site at https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/renewal/ for more on the various places and people affected by urban renewal.

3 Although certainly not the only place such a claim is made, arguably the most significant is in the city of Starkville’s Wikipedia entry, where the claim is featured in the opening paragraphs, which in turn reproduces the mythology around this claim.

4 The news of Needmore’s impending demolition was not taken lightly. Starkville officials were at pains to justify the project to the public, publishing a series of interviews with city officials about the program in the Starkville Daily News in the week following its announcement (Starkville Daily News 1969c, 1969d, 1969e). When a public meeting was held on 10 November 1969 in the junior high auditorium, roughly 250 residents attended to express their concern for over three hours (Starkville Daily News 1969b). As larger protests over desegregation and racial inequality rocked Starkville in the coming years, the urban renewal authority offices were even a target of a firebombing (Connor et al. v. Palmer et al. 1970). There is a considerable chance that the firebombings were perpetrated by white residents to further inflame tensions and implicate Black residents in the violence, but the choice of the urban renewal authority as a target speaks to the centrality of Starkville’s urban renewal plan in local understandings of racial inequality. This resistance to urban renewal is further seen in a 1973 letter from the Oktibbeha County NAACP to the city regarding suggestions, concerns, and demands for racial justice, which specifically mentioned that “future urban renewal areas or clearance of blighted areas in the city should not be forced in a dictatorial manner on the people involved” (Connor 1973).

5 The neighborhood analysis report would go on to win an award from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which commended the plan and used it as a model for other cities to mimic in their urban renewal planning documents (Starkville Daily News 1969a).

6 In addition to his previously established report with local officials, Camp himself would go on to serve as mayor of Starkville from 2005 through 2009, further entrenching his relationship with local government.

7 Spruill is herself one of the city’s largest residential landlords.

8 As Falconer Al-Hindi and Staddon (1997) noted, Andres Duany’s Seaside development draws on a similar mixing of these cities’ architectural styles, meaning that while the resonance of re-creating the architecture of urban enslavement is a bit more pronounced in a place like Starkville, the use of these styles in new urbanist developments is not entirely unique to the Cotton District.

9 Unlike Camp’s other real estate acquisitions and developments around the neighborhood, Planter’s Row was designed from the start to be owner-occupied, with commercial spaces on the ground floor, for small-scale entrepreneurs to live and work (Langdon 2017). Although Camp would apparently lose money on this project, the discursive linkage between the “planters” and ownership and entrepreneurship, as opposed to the typical student renters in the neighborhood, is suggestive of a particularly uncritical, if not outright celebratory, usage of terminology associated with plantation slavery.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Taylor Shelton

TAYLOR SHELTON is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geosciences, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA 30303. E-mail: [email protected]. Broadly trained as a geographer, his research focuses on the variety of ways that urban spaces and social inequalities are represented, reproduced, and contested through maps and data.

Brian Williams

BRIAN WILLIAMS is an Assistant Professor of Geography in the Department of Geosciences, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS 39762. E-mail: [email protected]. His interests include political ecology, Black geographies, environmental racism and environmental justice, and historical and contemporary geographies of agriculture, land, and foodways in the U.S. South and Latin America.