Black Placemaking: Celebration, Play, and Poetry

Abstract

Using Chicago as our case, this article puts forth a notion of black placemaking that privileges the creative, celebratory, playful, pleasurable, and poetic experiences of being black and being around other black people in the city. Black placemaking refers to the ways that urban black Americans create sites of endurance, belonging, and resistance through social interaction. Our framework offers a corrective to existing accounts that depict urban blacks as bounded, plagued by violence, victims and perpetrators, unproductive, and isolated from one another and the city writ large. While ignoring neither the external assaults on black spaces nor the internal dangers that can make everyday life difficult, we highlight how black people make places in spite of those realities. Our four cases -the black digital commons, black public housing reunions, black lesbian and gay nightlife, and black Little League baseball -elucidate the matter of black lives across genders, sexualities, ages, classes, and politics.

Where Our Bright Star Is Cast: Religiosity, Spirituality, and Positive Black Development in Urban Landscapes

“…While research in psychology attends largely to urban structural failures and negative developmental outcomes among urban-residing Black youth and adults, a small but growing body of scholarship crafts a picture of positive development among urban-residing Black youth and adults. For example, research on Black placemaking in urban contexts points to the roles of collectivist ideologies, traditions of self-help, and commitments to activism in Black peoples' efforts to create and sustain businesses, community schools, creative enterprises, music, art, community uplift programs, digital spaces of knowledge production, sociopolitical development and protest, and spaces of entertainment, pleasure, and celebration in urban contexts (Hill 2018;Hunter et al 2016). Studies have also begun to highlight outcomes, such as respectfulness, faith, love (Morris 2012), altruism (Mattis et al 2008(Mattis et al , 2009, and civic engagement (Ginwright 2010) among Black urban-residing youth and adults and to demonstrate the role of family, schools, afterschool programs, peers, and natural mentors and positive role models in yielding those positive outcomes (Guillaume et al 2015;Hurd et al 2009).…”

Beyond Housing: Perceptions of Indirect Displacement, Displacement Risk, and Aging Precarity as Challenges to Aging in Place in Gentrifying Cities

“…In fact, this study reveals that the Harlem neighborhood always held value, even in times of economic ruin, based on its cultural significance to the people living there. This set of realities has been called ‘Black placemaking’, to reflect the ways that Black people have created sites of cultural relevance, endurance, belonging, and resistance in spite of segregation, redlining, disinvestment, and neglect [74].…”

Education, race and empire: a genealogy of humanitarian governance in the United States

“…A lacuna in Domosh's paper, and one that should be addressed up front for this paper as well, however, is the focus on the techniques and rationalities of governance rather than on their reception – the multiple ways that these types of programmes have been met with resilience, reworking and resistance by targeted populations (for a few of the many great examples of these types of historical studies, see Camp ; McKittrick ; Stuckey ; for studies privileging resilience in contemporary ‘black placemaking’ and spatial praxis, see Hunter et al . ; Alves ). A genealogical focus on programmes of governance – such as around models of domesticity or systems of education – is important because it helps to make visible and disrupt the ongoing forms of elite power that are often buried in linear narratives of history as progress.…”