Academic Research
Black in the City
The revitalization of traditionally Black communities looks at land as a commodity rather than a foundational piece to the story of its inhabitants. This revitalization often works to bring in outsiders and subsidize their visions rather than supporting and amplifying existing parts of the community’s social structure. This process ultimately erodes the social fabric of a neighborhood and drives up rent, displacing people from their homes and removing the communal aspects of living in the city from the neighborhood. Revitalizing a neighborhood equitably based on the cultural values and narrative surrounding the community will improve the health of that community without displacing long-time citizens. Revitalization should be about the overall health of the existing community members. This case study looked at regenerative placemaking nodes within Tacoma’s traditionally Black Hilltop neighborhood. The neighborhood is currently grappling with issues of displacement after decades of disinvestment from the area. The case study found that placemaking efforts largely happen in silos and finding a way to work together to convey community priorities to local government proves challenging as there are no existing pathways to easily facilitate that conversation. Moving forward, working together to create pathways towards conversation with city government, quantifying communal results to facilitate organizational growth, and figuring out who has the organizational capacity to do the work is what will ultimately lead towards policy change and equitable revitalization.
Radically Reimagining Landscape Architecture as Liberatory Praxis
Radically re-imagining landscape architecture serves as a conceptual and methodological foundation for the rest of this resource. Here, radical, from the word radix meaning "root," facilitates an analysis of the past to uncover the root of landscape architecture while re-imagination takes the information gleaned and builds toward a reconfiguration for the future to better align its practices with its goals. This re-imagining requires embracing the political dimensions of design and the tradition of oral storytelling in the margin in order to utilize design as an active tool for the facilitation of spatial justice. Ground In this framework, ground considers not only the physicality of landscape projects, but also the reciprocal ecologies between people in the margin and the margin itself and different ways of understanding the interplay between layered and interconnected elements of the community. Ground serves as an archival construction for understanding the symbolic, political, social, cultural, and communal realities of the past and possibilities of the future. It aims to recognize and acknowledge the uneven landscapes of power responsible for creating marginality in landscapes and ways to responsibly navigate within that marginality moving forward. The (Re)Creation of Knowledge The (re)creation of knowledge unpacks the way that we learn about, research, and collaboratively reflect on narrative threads of community. The process acknowledges the biases present in prevalent information about communities in the margin and the process of gathering that information, communicates with communities to gain a more comprehensive understanding of their multi-storied reality, and aims to guide the design process based upon this new reciprocal relationship.
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