THE RACIALIZATION OF SPACE AND THE SPATIALIZATION OF RACE

Antwi Akom Professor, Department of Ethnic Studies

University of California at San Francisco and San Francisco State University

My talk today is about the racialization of space and the spatialization of race, and how architecture, technology and community informatics can help us dismantle racism, design for equity, and build more just, equitable, diverse, and inclusive, age-friendly and livable communities for all.

I am a sociologist, a technologist. Currently, I am doing a lot of work with social and spatial epidemiologists. I do a lot of work around community-driven data. I have been inspired by folks like Jane Jacobs and Eli Anderson and Jan Gehl, and others who think a lot about public space and the public realm. I’ve been described as a teacher, a unifier, a poet, an activist, and a catalyst, and yes, that does spell TUPAC when you are reading vertically. Some have called me an eco-visionary because my work is rooted in building real-time data, place-based data, location-based data, data visualization tools, and technologies that meet community needs in the center and uplift community voices. I incorporate Afro/Asian/ Indigenous/Latinx/disabled/poor/rural and other principles of participatory co-design into my work. I have had the pleasure of working with some of the leading designers, architects, starchitects, landscape architects, and engineers in the world.

The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race

I would like to start this conversation by wearing my sociology hat. You can think of me, today, as playing the role of Alexis De Tocqueville for architecture. Because I am not an architect by training, I am hoping that my invisibility, my two-ness, will be seen as helping you see and feel things that you otherwise may not be able to see and feel.

With my social scientist hat on, there are two paradoxes that I would like to put forward today. First, I think architects, as well as designers, planners, and engineers, are suffering from a form of schizophrenia. Everywhere I go, there are a number of designers, architects, planners, and engineers that are frustrated by their inability to make a real difference in the lives of vulnerable populations, to really affect change in BIPOC communities, rural communities, and other low-income communities. George Lipsitz refers to this as the racialization of space and the spatialization of race. Lots of folks like you say it is remarkable that we do not talk more about the impact of race and space in practices of architecture, urban planning, and beyond.

The second paradox that I want to mention is that it is no secret that the field of architecture gets whiter and more male as you go higher and higher toward the top of the profession. We know that women have 42% of architectural degrees, but only make up 17% of principals and partners. We know that only 15% of registered architects are women, and even less than that are People of Color. Some of the key questions that this makes me think about are: how are these issues playing themselves out in the built environment, these pipeline issues, these pathway issues? How do these issues play out in the places and spaces where we live, learn, work, play and pray? What can designing for equity look like if we begin to pay more attention to the racialization of space and the spatialization of race, if we do not ban these conversations from our colleges and universities, in our classrooms and our communities? Can we have those courageous conversations?

That is what I am hoping to do with you all today. Some of the key questions I would like to address are:

1. How can real-time data, location-based data, and experiential data revolutionize the way that designers, architects, planners, and engineers vision and plan with vulnerable populations?

2. How might the power of technology help you all improve your existing and future conditions, analysis, and land-use planning?

3. Can architecture really help dismantle racism? I obviously believe that it can.

4. Can we design for not just equity, but design for a justice that leads to greater gender equity, so that people do not have to leave their communities in order to live, learn, work, and thrive?

Antwi Akom

The two paradoxes are connected. As individuals and as a society, I do not believe we have gotten much better from a Tocquevillian perspective at designing for equity because we have not gotten much better at addressing, identifying, and transforming issues of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusivity in our own lives, let alone in the built environment. Architecture, much like race, is personal. It’s local and immediate. But racial profiling and systemic racism are still disproportionately impacting many of the communities that I work with, people that we love and care about.

HERE ARE 25 WAYS YOU COULD BE KILLED IF YOU ARE BLACK IN AMERICA:

1. Failing to signal a lane change

2. Riding in your girlfriend’s car with a child in the back

3. Running into the bathroom in your own apartment

4. Selling cigarettes outside of a corner store

5. Riding a commuter train

6. Walking home with a friend

7. Making eye contact

8. Selling CDs at the side of a supermarket

9. Wearing a hoodie

10. Walking away from police

11. Walking toward police

12. Missing a front license plate

13. Holding a fake gun in the park in Ohio

14. Driving with a broken brake light

15. Sitting in your car before your bachelor party

16. Walking up the stairwell of your apartment building

17. Calling for help after an accident

18. Holding a fake gun in Virginia

19. On the way to Bible study

20. Holding a fake gun in Walmart

21. Laughing

22. Holding a wallet

23. Attending a birthday party

24. Doing absolutely nothing

25. Not being servile enough

The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race

Unfortunately, the more things change, the more they stay the same. The different ways that we treat immigrants in this country are based on their skin color. European immigrants are treated very differently from non-Europeans. Cuban immigrants are treated very differently from Haitian immigrants. These things impact access to institutional resources and the way that we think about public and private space. I want to start with this point of departure, which is that you cannot talk about placemaking without talking about race making, and its impact on places and spaces.

Placemaking with low-income communities and communities of color has become a lost art. We have gotten good at placemaking for the 1%, but not with the 100%. We have gotten good at building places, but not those that poor people can afford. Our librarians, our teachers, our firefighters, our designers, our architects, our planners, and our engineers, they cannot afford them either. Right?

What we have seen is an explosion in homelessness, and people who really have no place to live. Our excuse, for those of us who have not gotten swept up in this wave is, “Well, I got in early.” But what about the next generation of librarians or teachers or firefighters, designers, architects, and planners? Where are they going to live? How are they going to survive? If we want to design for equity, if we want to engage in more equitable development, architecture, and land-use practices, consider not only the 1% but design with the 100%.

It is not enough to ask how we can build healthier communities, happier communities, greener communities, more livable communities, or more age-friendly communities. Those are all important questions. But we first have to address these real structural inequalities in terms of race, class, gender, immigration, poverty, sexual orientation, and other forms of social inequality that are impacting the shape of our communities, past, present, and future. To us, the real challenge of designing for equity in the 21st century is to reimagine and redesign the built environment in neighborhoods, public spaces, and places with communities

Antwi Akom

that have been locked out of sustainability, shareable city, smart city, and social justice conversations.

Will we design our neighborhoods and our communities for rich folks or for poor folks? For people of color, or for white folks? For eco-haves or eco-have nots? Who will have a say in how we redesign our communities: powerful elites, or everyday people? How do we redesign our communities not for but with those folks who are disproportionately being impacted by two of the greatest challenges of our lifetime – climate change and income inequality? How do we redesign with those populations who have limited access to food and who are facing unprecedented environmental threats? My term for this situation is called “eco-apartheid.”

Eco-apartheid is a systems theory that examines the ecological impacts of structural racialization. An article I published in Teachers College Record in 2011 highlights the ways that structures and institutions cumulatively cause unequal built environment health benefits and burdens based on race, class, gender, language, and immigration status, as well as their interconnections.

What do I mean by all that theory? Let’s try to bring this into the real world and into practice. I want to talk about what I mean by this idea of cumulative causation and eco-apartheid. Close your eyes for a minute and imagine that all of you are Black, living and growing up in West Oakland. How many grocery stores do you think that there are in our neighborhood in West Oakland? Ten? Five? No. There are two grocery stores in our neighborhood for Black kids and Brown kids growing up in West Oakland.

How many liquor stores do you think there are in our neighborhood? Remember, we are talking about eco-apartheid, the racialization of space and the concept of cumulative causation. Five liquor stores? Twenty? Forty? More! Depending on how you draw the boundaries of our neighborhood, there are between fifty and sixty liquor stores in our neighborhood. So, if you are a young Black child, and you are on your way to school and you want to get some food, it is easier to find a liquor store or a corner store. What kind of food is available at corner stores? Chips and all these unhealthy foods.

As you eat those foods, and you are on your way to school, what is the race and the gender of most of the teachers that comprise urban schools? The answer is white women. That is all good. But the folks who are teaching in our schools, they do not look like us and they share a very different lived experience than we have. When we sit down in that classroom and cannot sit still in our seat, we are all sugared up from the food that is available to us in our neighborhood. What is the general diagnosis for us Black and Brown children? The answer is attention

The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race

deficit disorder. The point being that the outcomes matter more than the intent. You could be a well-meaning teacher, but because of structural issues, we have too many people being misdiagnosed in terms of access to institutional resources and privileges in our neighborhoods and our communities.

Eco-apartheid suggests that “environmental bads,” like toxic waste, are located more in low-income communities and communities of color while “environmental goods,” like grocery stores, open space, and parks, are in wealthier neighborhoods. Is that true? Absolutely. Eco-apartheid is also a more powerful definition than environmental racism because it begins to capture inequalities beyond race, including space, place, and waste. Eco-apartheid explains the urban grocery gap, the fresh produce gap, the transportation gap, while simultaneously centering race and racism in their political implications.

Eco-apartheid also suggests that policy is not neutral. So, it captures the racial and the spatial reproduction of inequality. This builds off of the work of Tim Wise, who asserts that the history of the United States is systematic, institutionalized, racial privilege – for white folks and white-looking folks. An early example is the naturalization law of 1790 – the first law passed by Congress after the Constitution was ratified, which said that whites and whites only could be free citizens of the United

States. Another example is the Homestead Act of 1862, which guaranteed white folks 162 acres of land if they just agreed to live on the land, improve the land, and pay a small registration fee. Black people could not even get 40 acres and a mule. Let’s look at federally subsidized, underwritten and guaranteed Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Assistance loans, which led to the creation of the white middle class. When you do that for Black people and other people of color, you call it welfare, but when we do that for white folks, we call it good sound economic policy.

Because of these systematic institutionalized racial privileges that are passed from one generation to the next, the average white family has twenty times the net worth of the average Black family, eighteen times that of the average Latinx family, and ten times that of the average Asian American family, depending on how you disaggregate Asian American. We cannot even calculate Indigenous people, which shows how far Indigenous communities have fallen behind in terms of the wealth gap. This racial privilege is not just because of white people’s hard work, better value,s or better morals. It is because of systematic, institutionalized racial privilege passed from one generation to the next.

I will give you an example: I have a grandfather-in-law who fought in World War II. His best friend, his brother-in-arms, was a white male. They saved each other’s lives, they saw their people die on the battlefield, they stood up and they fought for their country. When they came back to the United States from fighting in the war, they wanted to live near each other and they settled on a place in the Monterey Peninsula. My grandfather’s white friend found property that he thought they could both buy, in a place called Pebble Beach, California. He got the land. When my Black grandfather went there to buy the lot next door, he was prevented from buying that land because of redlining, blockbusting, and restrictive covenants. Some forty or fifty years later, the white grandfather’s home is worth $32 million dollars – talking about the racialization of space, the spatialization of race. My Black grandfather was able to get a place in a town called Seaside or Marina and worth a couple $100,000 in today’s dollars.

Just that example alone should crystallize for us that this is not only happening in terms of wealth, but also in terms of health. This is how we create healthy communities and sick communities. Whiteness, as a skin color, becomes a key ingredient to accessing healthy property in the United States. Property rights have been equated because money talks with human rights. Have things changed? No, they haven’t.

Mortgage algorithms also perpetuate racial disparities. In an analysis of two million documents, racial biases still present when we control for debt to income or loan to neighborhood value. Lenders were 40% more likely to reject Latinx people, 50% more likely to reject Asian Pacific Islanders, 70% more likely to reject Indigenous people, and 80% more likely to reject Black people. The racialization of space is real, and it is deeply connected to both the past and the present. What Critical Race Theory is trying to do is to highlight the role that the past is played in our present land use conditions. Together we have to address what our future can really be like.

I will put out a challenge to those of us listening today: What if we create the next generation of designers, architects,

The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race

planners, and engineers at the intersection of social justice, technology, ecology, human rights, and activism? What if our next generation designing for the equity movement places access to opportunity at the center and commits to protecting our most vulnerable populations? What if the goal is to correct centuries of disinvestment and inequalities in our neighborhoods and communities? What if we do not just build hybrid cars? What if we build a hybrid design for equity?

I like the way Deanna Van Buren talks about the Designing for Justice movement. Can our designing for equity and designing for justice movement help make our communities more just, more equitable, more diverse, and more inclusive (JEDI)? Can this movement help make them immune from gentrification and displacement? Do you all believe that this is possible? And if so, what might such a movement look like?

A few examples that I have seen in the field, and this is probably the most obvious one, is to imagine what would happen if more female architects designed buildings such as sports venues and theaters. If we eliminated paradox one, as I outlined above, then we would eliminate the line of women waiting outside the ladies’ room for lack of space, while the men’s room remains accessible. This might seem obvious, but it’s an example of how underlying issues that we need to address are holding us back from reaching our full potential.

In Vienna, Austria, you see designers planning the city to work specifically for women and children by widening sidewalks, increasing access to public transport, building ramps to accommodate people with strollers and wheelchairs, making sure that there is the kind of lighting that we need, so all people, particularly vulnerable populations, can feel safe.

What about housing equity? I think Dudley Square in Boston is a classic example of resistance, agency, and political contestation leading to designing for equity. The city had planned on gentrifying a neighborhood and turning it into an area of luxury condos and hotels. Instead, folks were able to take over the land from the private developer using eminent domain and convince the city to sell it cheaply. Then, they were able to put up 225 units of affordable housing as well as urban farms. developers. David Adelaide, in Detroit, raised $5 million, largely from family and friends, and created an investment fund that is accessible to neighborhood residents. So, when developers come in, instead of you losing your home, you actually get to own your home and build equity in your neighborhood.

I mentioned Deanna Van Buren. One of her projects involves restoring Oakland through running the country’s first design studios with incarcerated men and women, incorporating restorative justice and design. Instead of building prisons, they build spaces to amplify restorative justice. She started with schools, and the early data shows that it has reduced violence up to 75%. It is reducing the impact of post-traumatic stress disorder on survivors of violence as well as young people in school. Then there is our own work where we have recognized that zoning is the real DNA of the built environment. We had the opportunity to work with the Memphis 3.0 Comprehensive Plan. We became a part of community-led, reinvestment-forum-based coding that focuses on equity and creating degree change maps that prioritize public investment. We helped bring in $200 million and public infrastructure, affordable housing, parks, greenways, and we renewed public assets. This was the winner of the Congress for New Urbanism 2021 Design Award. This plan included the missing middle strategies that are a key ingredient of designing for justice and designing for equity.

How do you pay for all this? We think it is really important that you invest in infrastructure. The miracle of Minneapolis is a great example where they took one half commercial tax revenue, and they redistributed that tax revenue to the poorest areas in the city. So, everyone has access to quality civic and green infrastructure, such as schools, parks, and playgrounds.

What about walkability? We know how important that is to designing for equity and justice. If sitting is the new smoking, then walkability is the secret sauce to help us have more complete communities. But –walkability for whom? We always like to lift up the work of Morgan Dixon and GirlTrek, who draw on women’s liberation in the civil rights movement to get one million women walking out for the health of their neighborhoods.

I also want to lift up the role of community

GirlTrek has rallied to mobilize Black women and girls to walk for their health, together, across the country. They walk five days a week, thirty minutes a day, for eight weeks straight to reach, restart, jumpstart, kickstart healthier lives and to combat these statistics that say, “Black

The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race

women are going to die earlier, younger, and at higher rates than any other group in the country.” Four out of five Black women are over a healthy weight. All of this is preventable. We know that walking changes things when Black women walk together. Four years ago, when Morgan first started, she mobilized 10,000 women; now it is one million. I invite you to check out her TED talk.

Our organization Streetwyze is in conversation about partnering with Morgan, and the great work that they are doing so that we can design our neighborhoods for justice and equity. Organizations such as GirlTrek, Gehl, Opticos, and Designing for Justice are transforming through the Designing for Equity movement, changing things from top down technical approaches to bottom up community-driven approaches that can create the next generation of JEDI designers, architects, planners and engineers. But, the real question remains: how do we scale this up? How do we move from local work to making this national and international, yet still remain relevant locally at all scales?

Our answer to this has been Streetwyze, a next generation participatory planning

3.0. We begin to answer these questions about how you integrate community voice with participatory planning processes. We think the missing link is something that we refer to as “tech-equity.” Our methodology is to create more tech-equity with everyday people and vulnerable populations. We call this “people powered placemaking,” which is a real-time, two-way communication with everyday people, who can participate in the design solutions that meet their everyday needs. Streetwyze is a mobile, mapping, and SMS platform that collects real-time data about how people are experiencing spaces in places. We turn this data into actionable analytics.

For example, we might have decent information that the communities you are working with live near a park; but what we really want to know about is community members’ experience in that park. Is that the park where the drugs are sold? Is it safe enough to bring your children here? Do the swing sets even work at the park? Streetwyze gives you both that experiential and proximal data. In doing so, we are able to address two key questions: 1) How do you democratize data? and 2) How do you democratize decision-making?

Imagine us giving architects, designers, engineers, and planners this 360-degree view of what is happening on the ground beneath the regulatory datasets that you generally use, and beyond the one-anddone town hall meetings where the same people speak, driving the decision-making of development processes during a time that I have to take my child to school, or work two jobs, so that I could not be at that meeting. Streetwyze brings a level of inclusivity. We address key questions around social and structural determinants.

Antwi Akom

With Streetwyze, you can determine the real condition of community resources. For example, the public data set from the Alameda County Department of Public Health suggests that East Oakland is a food oasis. The public data is what the mayor, the designers, and the architects see. When you compare this with the data from Streetwyze, you realize is that what look like grocery stores are not, in fact, grocery stores. Most of them are in fact, liquor stores or corner stores, with only a handful of them being grocery stores. In Streetwyze you can upload picture, audio, and video, which is so important with vulnerable populations, Gen Z, millennials, and people whose first language may not be English.

When you are thinking about designing for equity and justice, it’s important to have the lived experience of people on the ground. Streetwyze can provide that view. For example in East Oakland, we have had major policy and social impacts. Prior to our work, there was no farmer’s market at the local high school; in part due to this work, a farmer’s market is now in place there.

We were also able to connect with the CalFresh fund, to go to each of those corner and liquor stores and, in collaboration with the store owners, make sure that they were restocked and reshelved with more culturally and community responsive, healthy, affordable food. Then this data was also used to help pass a multi-million-dollar food commissary in Oakland for the Oakland Unified School District.

Streetwyze caught the eye of then-President Obama, who invited me and the other co-founders to the Frontiers Conference where we presented our work along with other top innovators in the world, after which we were invited to participate in the Opportunity Project, launched in 2014. The Atlantic’s CityLab has named Streetwyze one of the top twelve data tools to help vulnerable populations. GreenBiz has an article that talks about Streetwyze as being one of the few processes and platforms to measure different forms of resiliency: social resiliency, cultural resiliency, climate resiliency, and built environment resiliency.

We have also partnered with grassroot organizations as well as big organizations like Google. On Google Streetview cars, we put air quality sensors – we partnered with Google and Aclima. As those Streetview sensors were driving through neighborhoods in West Oakland, we would collect data on black carbon, nitric oxide (NOx) and oxident (Ox). We have been collecting one of the most valid and reliable datasets on the relationship between asthma and air quality that we could possibly have.

We have been invited to do anti-gentrification mapping in the city of San Francisco, making and designing parks that are more diverse and inclusive. We’re trying to understand who is and isn’t using the parks and where parks are located. This helps us understand the relationship between vulnerable populations, parks as cooling centers, and climate change. We have worked with the Oakland Department of Transportation to create safe and accessible walking and biking lanes. We have created and led the racial equity impact assessment for the downtown Oakland plan.

Streetwyze has been used in terms of new-market tax credits. Right now, we are just seeding your imagination with different ways that our platform has really impacted designing for equity and designing for justice. The old way of doing new-market tax credits involved a blanket approach to what community needs and wants are. At Streetwyze, we are able to get a much more hyperlocal and local approach to community wants and needs.

We have been able to partner with folks like Enterprise Community Partners, who launched an opportunity index on housing, powered, in part, by Streetwyze. We were able to provide real-time data on housing, help them build out an evidence-based assessment framework, help them make it open source, and help them build a community engagement partnership toolkit. With some of my colleagues at UCSF, we have mapped the geography of homelessness. Finally, we have worked with Walter Hood Design on community art revitalization and reimagining the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) headquarters and BART, so that it could be more culture and community responsive and more accessible with and for diverse cultures.

Streetwyze been able to create safer water fountains in San Diego, better bus stops in Fresno, healthier food in the Bay Area. We have expanded nationally and internationally. What we have learned –and this is coming from Brian Stevens’s book, Just Mercy – is that ultimately, we will not be judged by our technology, our design, our intellect, or our reason, and not by how we treat the rich, the powerful and the privileged, but how we embody

Antwi Akom

empathy and compassion, and how we treat the poor, the condemned, the most vulnerable amongst us. That is the nexus where we begin to understand our collective humanity and who we are as a people, as well as our purpose on the planet.

We came here today because we believe, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, that the moral arc of the universe is long and bends towards justice, but only if we embody justice in our minds, our hearts, our bodies, and our daily actions. We cannot reach our full potential and as designers, architects, planners and engineers, we will not do so until we start seeing and designing for equity in a way that restores the dignity, humanity, and access to institutional resources and privileges. This would center community voices with the world’s most vulnerable populations.

We hope you join us in building a new design for equity and justice revolution. We hope you begin to integrate the power of local and official knowledge and technology in a way that shows how the field of architecture can dismantle racism, and help neighborhoods and communities become more transparent, open, connected, smart, shareable, sustainable, and equitable for all.