(2018). Race and Spatial Imaginary: Planning Otherwise/Introduction: What Shakes Loose When We Imagine Otherwise/She Made the Vision True: A Journey Toward Recognition and Belonging/Isha Black or Isha White? Racial Identity and Spatial Development in Warren County, NC/Colonial City Design Lives Here: Questioning Planning Education’s Dominant Imaginaries/Say Its Name – Planning Is the White Spatial Imaginary, or Reading McKittrick and Woods as Planning Text/Wakanda! Take the Wheel! Visions of a Black Green City/If I Built the World, Imagine That: Reflecting on World Building Practices in Black Los Angeles/Is Honolulu a Hawaiian Place? Decolonizing Cities and the Redefinition of Spatial Legitimacy/Interpretations & Imaginaries: Toward an Instrumental Black Planning History. Planning Theory & Practice: Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 254-288.

From 1870 to 1920, previously enslaved Texans founded more than 540 ‘freedom colonies.’ Since then, descendants left behind seemingly intangible Black geographies where evidence of their placemaking has disappeared. However, in Shankleville, Texas, settlement founder descendants sustained attachments to, and stewardship of, their communities, even as the population decreased and physical manifestations of place dissipated. To understand how place attachments are sustained in Shankleville, I analyze descendants’ stories, storytelling practices, and the spaces in which these performances take place. In these counterpublic spaces, descendants reproduce an identity rooted in a foundational story about their freedom-seeking, fugitive slave founders. Their ritual performances of these stories at a sacred spring in Shankleville cement attachments and catalyze descendants’ involvement in heritage conservation and preservation projects. The meanings and values informing these commemorative practices disrupt commonly held assumptions about Black community formation, Black heritage, and what constitutes legitimate preservation practice.

Problem, research strategy, and findings: When Arnstein created the ladder of participation, local governments engaged predominately urban African-American neighborhoods through federally funded programs. Fifty years later, preservationists and heritage conservationists pursuing participatory engagement models in these communities find sustaining interest difficult. Absent from planning literature is guidance on how to ensure grassroots preservationists of color retain control during engagement. In this study we ask practitioners and scholars to consider the optimum approach to researching or preservation planning in this context. Through participatory action and ethnographic research, one of us (Roberts) helped design a hybrid forum-style symposium dedicated to preserving historic Black settlement heritage. As a researcher and symposium co-planner, I documented local preservation knowledge using questionnaires and performative storytelling while helping descendants of historic African-American settlements identify shared priorities and challenges. Findings suggest action researchers and preservationists must “remix” roles and the rungs of Arnstein’s ladder of participation to sustain and center stakeholder involvement when planning with marginalized communities. Remixing consists of strategically sampling, looping, and layering promising local knowledge with that of experts to support citizen-centered preservation planning. By centering culturally informed planning approaches and negotiating with stakeholders, professionals can create the conditions for participation that support sustained involvement. Symposium co-organizing and data collection catalyzed the ethical coproduction of knowledge and fostered ongoing research and collaborative projects after study completion. Takeaway for practice: Remixing as praxis offers a framework for engaged preservation and heritage conservation that reinforces citizen empowerment through identification and application of innovative practices rooted in local knowledge. Identifying local practices that foster attachment and break down the hierarchy between expert and grassroots practitioners is essential to achieving praxis.

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.

National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) integrity evaluation is the primary means by which historic resources are documented, designated, managed, and interpreted in the United States, measuring the degree to which a property's defining features, linked to a specific period of significance, are unchanged. Standard application of this integrity process fails to recognize more complex and layered historic places that often comprise contested spaces with underrepresented histories. The cultural landscape concept can strengthen application of the NRHP integrity evaluation, with an understanding of place and placemaking that is both process and feature based, considering these places as evolving systems with critical inherent change. Case studies illustrate how current applications of integrity lack cultural and environmental literacy and how this practice marginalizes, erases, or ignores minoritized groups' heritage. The authors argue that resistance to change, including cultural discontinuity or normative processes of change over time, perpetuate assumptions that marginalize lived experience, local constructions of landscape dynamics, and place meaning. Inequalities, misapplication, and erasure perpetuated by the currently accepted approach to assessing "integrity" in historic places is revealed. Recommendations are presented to broaden our thinking and evaluation of integrity with application of the cultural landscape lens to a range of historic resources.

Public history depicting Southern landscapes subjugates Black lived experience, foregrounding Anglo settlerism and romanticizing antebellum-era spaces. This article engages a novel and digital humanities platform as counternarrative spaces dismantling dominant narratives informing these landscapes. The Cutting Season (2012) depicts a Black woman engaging folklore, archives, and family history; solving a murder on a plantation; and constructing a counternarrative of the landscape. Similarly, The Texas Freedom Colonies Project Atlas crowdsources stories and archival material to document Black settlements where descendants are displaced-in-place. By recording Black women’s embodied place memories, the site helps Black women resist the deliberate forgetting of endangered settlements and reconstruct emotional geographies. Black women’s counternarratives illuminate their emotional geographies, world building, and rebuilding of communities presumed inert or placeless.