Community Visions

This final episode celebrates the Black students in UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design (CED). The episode documents the students’ learning journeys and provides an opportunity for reflection of their education within the graduate programs at CED. The series of conversations in this episode will close out this iteration of Community Visions. And since the origins of the Community Visions podcast came from the Black student experience in the 1990s, we would like to close out with the students’ experiences some 30 years later.

The experience of Black students and students of color in planning programs has been studied by academic scholars and the episode provides further insights on the experiences of Black students using CED as a case study. Graduate-level planning programs generally have low levels of Black representation and the episode explores the experiences of the Black students at CED during a time when racial equity and conversations regarding reparations are increasingly included in the educational discourse. 

We speak with Erika Foster, Tucker McPhaul, Xavion Freedom, Keira Thompson, Tera Johnson, Anisha Kimble and Anaise Jean-Phillippe. The students interviewed address how their intentions for engaging the planning and design fields have shifted or remained the same. In addition, the episode explores what learnings the students intend to bring with them as they progress through their academic and professional careers. The episode also provides recommendations for the College of Environmental Design to align its programs and curriculum with anti-racist practices in the planning and design fields.

This final episode celebrates the Black students in UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design (CED). The episode documents the students’ learning journeys and provides an opportunity for reflection of their education within the graduate programs at CED. The series of conversations in this episode will close out this iteration of Community Visions. And since the origins of the Community Visions podcast came from the Black student experience in the 1990s, we would like to close out with the students’ experiences some 30 years later.

The experience of Black students and students of color in planning programs has been studied by academic scholars and the episode provides further insights on the experiences of Black students using CED as a case study. Graduate-level planning programs generally have low levels of Black representation and the episode explores the experiences of the Black students at CED during a time when racial equity and conversations regarding reparations are increasingly included in the educational discourse. 

We speak with Erika Foster, Tucker McPhaul, Xavion Freedom, Keira Thompson, Tera Johnson, Anisha Kimble and Anaise Jean-Phillippe. The students interviewed address how their intentions for engaging the planning and design fields have shifted or remained the same. In addition, the episode explores what learnings the students intend to bring with them as they progress through their academic and professional careers. The episode also provides recommendations for the College of Environmental Design to align its programs and curriculum with anti-racist practices in the planning and design fields.

Racial capitalism can be interpreted in multiple ways and scholars have argued that racism is a core functionality of capitalism, since it is deeply rooted in histories of colonialism and slavery. Another interpretation of racial capitalism is the process of deriving social and economic value from the racial identity of another person and limiting their access to certain financial products, like home mortgages. Although arguments have been made that capitalism is inherently racist, using the terms “racial capitalism” explicitly captures the distinct exploitations that occur along racial lines and how it affects racial and ethnic groups differently. Through this lens, racial capitalism can help people understand how different racial groups may be more negatively affected by the free market since global capital accumulation is dependent on anti-Black racism that exploits Black neighborhoods to cash in on rent gaps after decades of systemic neglect. The spatial distribution of residents in cities and urban centers across the world is deeply affected by how racial capitalism renders people and neighborhoods as surplus, and thus expendable via gentrification. 

This episode dissects racial capitalism, how it facilitates anti-Black housing markets and how western financial institutions have been the underwriters of American anti-Black racism with full support from the government. The episode highlights the pillars of racial capitalism and extractive economies that utilize things like homeownership as a stepping stone for wealth generation while simultaneously serving as a mechanism for exclusion in the mainstream economy. The episode focuses on racialized capital within the broader real estate sector and its political influence; and how local political economies hedge their bets on the spatial flow of capital, thus dictating who has access to space and financial resources. Urban planning is enlaced with racial capitalism and its effects on neighborhoods and housing markets. Planners struggle to create solutions that do not cater to the spatial needs of racialized capital. Planning practice needs to understand its responsibility for producing local political economies that devalue Black neighborhoods and Black people.

Can urban planning reverse the negative trends of racialized capital? How can planning promote a local economy that isn’t dependent on extractive and exploitative economies that have harmed Black communities? This episode features Noni Session and Solana Rice to discuss how racial capitalism has influenced their lives and the work they are doing to bring alternative economic models into cities while simultaneously building resident power to increase community control. The interviews were recorded in February and March 2021.

Planning concepts like “eye’s on the streets” inherently villainize Black bodies and are highly dependent on surveillance as well as the presence of law enforcement, and this is just one of the ways that urban planning is implicated in the over-policing of Black neighborhoods. This episode anayzes the planning policies that serve as the drivers of gentrification that displace and criminalize Black residents. For the purposes of this episode, gentrification is defined as “a profit-driven racial and class reconfiguration of urban, working-class and communities of color that have suffered from a history of disinvestment and abandonment. The process is characterized by declines in the number of low-income, people of color in neighborhoods that begin to cater to higher-income workers willing to pay higher rents. Gentrification is driven by private developers, landlords, businesses, and corporations, and supported by the government through policies that facilitate the process of displacement, often in the form of public subsidies. Gentrification happens in areas where commercial and residential land is cheap, relative to other areas in the city and region, and where the potential to turn a profit either through repurposing existing structures or building new ones is great” (Causa Justa :: Just Cause 2015). Because of its connection to maximizing profit from increased land values, gentrification requires privatized spatial securitization as well as increased policing from law enforcement agencies. 

How can we invest in Black neighborhoods in ways that do not displace or criminalize Black people? This episode examines the planning policies that promote gentrification in Black communities that disrupt neighborhood ecosystems. Although gentrification is experienced at the neighborhood level, we also discuss how global capital influences planning policies and fuels gentrification through real estate investments. The episode illustrates how communities are resisting gentrification and explores strategies to administer neighborhood “improvements'' without displacing or criminalizing Black residents. Finally, the episode challenges the existing perceptions of “expertise” and underscores the importance of localized knowledge and lived experiences of neighborhood residents. 

We speak with Antionette Carroll and Dr. Brandi T. Summers to hear about their lived experiences and how their work has supported resistance efforts against gentrification in their communities. They provide examples of how these efforts play out in practice and talk through some of the theoretical underpinnings of gentrification. These interviews were recorded in February 2020. 

The policies and practices of urban planning is focused on a heterosexual public that marginalizes differences in gender and sexuality. In addition to historical and current homophobia and transphobia, the compounded impacts of anti-Black racism has required Black LGBTQ communities to create space for themselves, establish communities of healing and thrivance, and fight for resources on a level that is incomprehensible to most. Specific to the realm of urban planning, the failures of the practice and the reliance on a military state jeopardizes the lives of Black LGBTQ people, especially Black Trans people.

There is also a dynamic to be explored within the broader Black communities throughout the United States. Unfortunately, Black LGTBTQ communities are forced to navigate homophobia and transphobia within different Black communities while also resisting systemic anti-Black racism (in addition to homophobia and transphobia). How can we understand true allyship and how can we re-envision urban planning so that inclusive spaces are prioritized and space is not defined by sexuality and gender identity?

We speak with Joe Hawkins and Janetta Johnson to understand their relationships to place and how they've worked to bring the needs of their communities to the forefront. By sharing their individual experiences, we hope to demonstrate the power, compassion and self determination of Black LGBTQ communities in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. These interviews were recorded in September 2020 and October 2020.

For our second episode, we explore how the movement of Black people is policed in urban settings by government agencies that go well beyond police departments. This episode looks at the perceptions of transit infrastructure and how it connects to other issues, including increased land values and gentrification. We also discuss how the self-agency of communities is quite different from the professional practice of community engagement that has been traditionally employed by local government agencies because it is a challenge to the status quo. 

Can we reprioritize the policies and practices of transportation planning, and urban planning in general to meet the spatial and movements needs of Black communities? Or will that cause these systems to collapse? What are the tools we can use to authenticity building partnerships with residents in a transformative way?

We speak with Dr. Destiny Thomas and Naraji Smith to hear about their lived experiences, and the transformational work they continue to do.  We will hear how to build inclusive approaches to building community self-determination as it relates to transportation and it's intersectionality to other issues we face in the urban environment. These interviews were recorded in August 2020 and September 2020

This introductory episode acknowledges that the conversation around anti-Black racism is happening on stolen and occupied Indigenous land.  Settler colonialism and settler privilege have enabled us to frame the Native American experience in the past tense, as if they are no longer here. The resulting effects of invisibility is exacerbated when groups are excluded from the decision-making process and their population numbers aren't large enough to be considered. The current western structures of democracy require it to be a numbers game. 

There are shared experiences and histories among Black and Indigenous people in the United States. To understand the foundations of urban planning, we must understand that the root of anti-Blackness comes from the transportation of enslaved and stolen Africans to build a nation that was violently stolen from Indigenous people. Given this relationship with one another, where might the liberation of Black and Indigenous communities intersect and where might they be in conflict?

In the Bay Area, space is racialized on land that was originally stewarded by the Ohlone people. In this episode we speak with Jose Garcia AKA Peps 357, Mary Jean Robertson and Sharaya Souza to address the question of solidarity and understand their lived experiences and perspectives when it comes to a built environment that is shaped by western colonialist ideologies and occupies their land. These interviews were recorded in September 2020.