The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race: Theorizing the Hidden Architecture of Landscape

Abstract

A primary goal of landscape architects and other citizens concerned with the built environment should be to disassemble the fatal links that connect race, place, and power. This article shows that the national spatial imaginary is racially marked, and that segregation serves as a crucible for creating the emphasis on exclusion and augmented exchange value that has guided the contemporary ideal of the properly-ordered, prosperous private home. For aggrieved communities of color and other non-normative populations, on the other hand, a different spatial imaginary exists. This perspective on space revolves around solidarities within, between, and across spaces. It views space as valuable and fi nite, as a public responsibility for which all must take stewardship. Privileging the public good over private interests, this spatial imaginary envisions the costs of environmental protection, effi cient transportation, affordable housing, public education, and universal medical care as common responsibilities to be shared rather than as onerous burdens to be avoided. This paper argues for a two-part strategy that entails fi rst, a frontal attack on all the mechanisms that prevent people of color from equal opportunities to accumulate assets that appreciate in value and that can be passed down across generations, and second, the embrace of a spatial imaginary based on privileging use value over exchange value, sociality over selfi shness, and inclusion over exclusion.

Race, Charter Schools, and Conscious Capitalism: On the Spatial Politics of Whiteness as Property (and the Unconscionable Assault on Black New Orleans)

“…Simply laying a pencil where the French Quarter divides uptown from downtown reveals the mass concentration of schools uptown and the gross absence of schools downtown, even though the majority of the students who attend public schools live in the downtown neighborhoods; downtown neighborhoods in Figure 3 include Bywater, the Lower 9th Ward, New Orleans East, and Village de L'Est. The spatialization of race and the racialization of space (Lipsitz, 2007) are clearly evident, particularly as public schools are geographically reorganized, commodified, and wedded to the perpetuation of racial and economic power and subordination.…”

“…Finally, an uneven urban space economy was produced through the phased nature of the blueprint-an example of what Lipsitz (2007) calls the "spatialization of race" and the "racialization of space." Although the SFMP includes six different building phases, only Phase 1 is actually funded.…”

The Postcolonial Ghetto: Seeing Her Shape and His Hand

“…However, other analyses of racial space (e.g., Lipsitz, 2007;Silva, 2001) demonstrate that entitlement requires exclusion. The space of privilege produces, and is agonistically constituted by, the space of oppression.…”

Racial formation, inequality and the political economy of web traffic

“…Race and space have been so intimately intertwined in the U.S. that they are essentially co-constitutive (Delaney, 2002;Lipsitz, 2007). Space makes race, and race -its meaning in both concept and everyday life -expresses itself in particular kinds of spaces and spatial configurations.…”