Article Database

Urban Planning and the African American Community: In the Shadows

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Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1997, Vol 42(12), 1133. This book documents the many ways in which contemporary poverty, health risks, and related social problems among low-income urban African Americans are rooted in decades of urban planning that created racially based residential segregation. The book describes many examples of equity planning, which develops and implements redistributive policies that generate resources and political power for low-income and minority groups. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)

The City After Abandonment

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A number of U.S. cities, former manufacturing centers of the Northeast and Midwest, have suffered such dramatic losses in population and employment that urban experts have put them in a class by themselves, calling them “rustbelt cities,” “shrinking cities,” and more recently “legacy cities.” This decline has led to property disinvestment, extensive demolition, and abandonment. While much policy and planning have focused on growth and redevelopment, little research has investigated the conditions of disinvested places and why some improvement efforts have greater impact than others.

The City After Abandonment brings together essays from top urban planning experts to focus on policy and planning issues related to three questions. What are cities becoming after abandonment? The rise of community gardens and artists’ installations in Detroit and St. Louis reveal numerous unexamined impacts of population decline on the development of these cities. Why these outcomes? By analyzing post-hurricane policy in New Orleans, the acceptance of becoming a smaller city in Youngstown, Ohio, and targeted assistance to small areas of Baltimore, Cleveland, and Detroit, this book assesses how varied institutions and policies affect the process of change in cities where demand for property is very weak. What should abandoned areas of cities become? Assuming growth is not a choice, this book assesses widely cited formulas for addressing vacancy; analyzes the sustainability plans of Cleveland, Buffalo, Philadelphia, and Baltimore; suggests an urban design scheme for shrinking cities; and lays out ways policymakers and planners can approach the future through processes and ideas that differ from those in growing cities.

Redevelopment and Race Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit

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In the decades following World War II, professional city planners in Detroit made a concerted effort to halt the city’s physical and economic decline. Their successes included an award-winning master plan, a number of laudable redevelopment projects, and exemplary planning leadership in the city and the nation. Yet despite their efforts, Detroit was rapidly transforming into a notorious symbol of urban decay. In Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit, June Manning Thomas takes a look at what went wrong, demonstrating how and why government programs were ineffective and even destructive to community needs.

In confronting issues like housing shortages, blight in older areas, and changing economic conditions, Detroit’s city planners worked during the urban renewal era without much consideration for low-income and African American residents, and their efforts to stabilize racially mixed neighborhoods faltered as well. Steady declines in industrial prowess and the constant decentralization of white residents counteracted planners’ efforts to rebuild the city. Among the issues Thomas discusses in this volume are the harmful impacts of Detroit’s highways, the mixed record of urban renewal projects like Lafayette Park, the effects of the 1967 riots on Detroit’s ability to plan, the city-building strategies of Coleman Young (the city’s first black mayor) and his mayoral successors, and the evolution of Detroit’s federally designated Empowerment Zone. Examining the city she knew first as an undergraduate student at Michigan State University and later as a scholar and planner, Thomas ultimately argues for a different approach to traditional planning that places social justice, equity, and community ahead of purely physical and economic objectives.

Redevelopment and Race was originally published in 1997 and was given the Paul Davidoff Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning in 1999. Students and teachers of urban planning will be grateful for this re-release. A new postscript offers insights into changes since 1997.

Black Placemaking in Texas – Sonic and Social Histories of Newton and Jasper County Freedom Colonies

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While public awareness of incorporated black historic towns and urban neighborhoods in places like Rosewood, Florida, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Eatonville, Florida grow, less is known about unincorporated Black settlements in Texas. From 1865 to 1920, African Americans founded at least 557 self-sustaining freedom colonies in Texas. The authors engage the history of Black placemaking through the lens of Texas freedom colonies in Newton and Jasper Counties, areas better known for racial violence than liberation. The paper argues that biases in public history and historic preservation policy toward white settlerism, building integrity, and property ownership inhibit the documentation, recognition, and, consequently, the preservation of freedom colonies and their origin stories. The authors argue that freedom colonies’ marginal status necessitates creative approaches to mapping and crafting arguments for these communities’ “historic significance” and protection. Authors mapped freedom colonies through collection and analysis of both publically available data and intangible heritage, specifically sonic and social histories in Newton and Jasper County during a pilot study. This initial mapping exercise gave birth to the statewide crowdsourcing and mapping project, The Texas Freedom Colonies Atlas. Housed on multiple digital humanities platforms, the Atlas contains a map of 357 settlements and translates local constructions of historical significance to policymakers and cultural resource managers.

Count the Outside Children! Kinkeeping as Preservation Practice Among Descendants of Texas’ Freedom Colonies

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Andrea Roberts, PH.D., assistant professor of urban planning and Faculty Fellow with the Center for Heritage Conservation at Texas A&M University, explores the intangible heritage of Texas Freedom Colonies. Though some buildings that were located in these freedom colonies remain, the names of the towns and settlements themselves have been changed, and there is no formal history of these places. Descendents of freedom colony residents keep the history alive through genealogy (kinkeeping) and family histories that, together, validate the significance of Freedom Colonies during the years immediately after emancipation.

Haunting as Agency: A Critical Cultural Landscape Approach to Making Black Labor Visible in Sugar Land, Texas

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This paper contextualizes the most recent discovery of 95 forgotten graves of incarcerated laborers at a public school construction site within ongoing tensions around public history, race, and development in Sugar Land, Texas, a Houston-area bedroom community. Unearthed along with the graves is the state’s long history of Black labor exploitation, from enslavement to convict leasing to employment with Imperial Sugar. In this article, I engage the haunting of Black laboring bodies in the landscape from the perspective of both that of a researcher and former resident of Fort Bend County confronted with the purposeful forgetting of Black geographies, bodies, and lives. I expose through critical analysis of government documents, online digital exhibits, maps, photos, and autoethnographic recollection of the area, the haunting of Black laboring bodies in not only the site of burial discovery but also two sites within the Sugar Land cultural landscape: Mayfield Park and the Imperial Sugar Refinery. I argue developers and government agencies perpetuate a mythic local history that, until the discovery of the 95, allowed them to disassociate itself from Sugar Land’s history of Black labor exploitation before its incorporation as a city. The 95’s haunting allows for an inventive awareness of the Black laboring bodies and thus redefines the cultural landscape rooted in plantation logics as a Black geography. I conclude with a discussion of the ways Black laboring bodies’ haunting creates a space for a critical cultural landscape solution.

Adaptive Liminality: Bridging and Bonding Social Capital Between Urban and Rural Black Meccas

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African Americans’ memories of the Great Migration and urban displacement surface in popular film and culture as a desire to return to rural homeplaces while retaining access to opportunity in urban meccas. The author argues that real examples of this “limbo imaginary” are relevant to research on Black meccas. Findings from the author’s ethnographic study of rural Freedom Colonies (settlements Black Texans founded 1865–1920) showed that, for African Americans, embodying urban-rural liminality is an existential space of opportunity and ingenuity. Urban baby boomers in the study call Houston and rural Black meccas (Freedom Colonies) home, holding dual senses of belonging and commitments to place preservation. These baby boomers performed liminality during homecoming celebrations where they commemorated ancestors and reconnected descendants’ ties to settlements severed during the Great Migration. The article recommends that researchers and urban planners help communities identify liminal spaces appropriate for catalyzing inter-generational bridging and bonding of urban-rural social capital to preserve endangered communities of color.

Demystifying Academic Writing in the Doctoral Program: Writing Workshops, Peer Reviews, and Scholarly Identities

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This article discusses a course at The University of Texas at Austinwhich sought to facilitate doctoral students’ development of scholarly articles while simultaneously fostering their sense of scholarly identity. The article was co-authored by the instructor and two cohorts of doctoral students based on immediate as well as retrospective learning outcome assessments. The social constructivist approach to writing pedagogy fostered students’ scholarly identities and demystified the publication process. However, efforts should be made to maintain the practice of writing, sharing, and reviewing and the course should more explicitly foster critical reflections on the relationship between writing, scholarly identity, and knowledge production.

Social Justice & Inclusion in Historic Preservation: A Bibliography

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Bibliography of academic and practitioner articles and statements about historic preservation and social justice. The list was developed in 2020 by The Texas Freedom Colonies Project research team and will be updated annually.

Preservation without Representation: Making CLG Programs Vehicles for Inclusive Leadership, Historic Preservation, and Engagement

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This article examines public historic preservation agencies’ ability to support social inclusion aims within the context of the Certified Local Government (CLG) program. Though administered by the Texas Historical Commission, Texas’ State CLG program is federally-funded and makes available special access to technical assistance, grants, and loans to qualifying communities contingent on compliance. Program surveys the state staff administered to city and county historical commissions with the CLG designation indicate challenges around diversifying their leadership and identifying training opportunities. This article reviews those surveys to detect insights into how the state CLG program can create spaces in which local commissions can increase their “representativeness” through changes in assessment and training content. Specifically, I analyze two government assessment tools used to evaluate local CLGs’ ability to meet federal and state training and participation expectations. I compare these survey results to self-assessment activities and questionnaires collected during a pilot training on implicit bias, outreach, and cultural resource surveying I conducted with multiple CLGs in Gonzales, Texas. Findings suggest more creatively designed training and capacity building is necessary around inclusion, identifying structural barriers to participation, and foundational knowledge of historic preservation and planning practice, and ethics.