IN-PERSON: Livable Cities – New York

Abstract

The Black radical tradition (Robinson, 2000) has re-energized urban geography and planning debates, pushing for antiracist and counterhegemonic spatial practices. Along these lines, Roy suggests stepping away from displacement and gentrification jargon and switching attention to processes of dispossession and racial banishment (Roy, 2019). This conceptual framework leads to the investigation of how state power and planning practices dispossess and deprive people racialized as Black, Brown, and Indigenous of their place, identity, inner-self feelings, and emotions. In this paper, we explore the nature of planning practices designed in the face of climate change. We step away from mainstream conceptualizations of green gentrification and displacement. Instead, we look at the role of planning in producing urban change that intentionally excludes racialized bodies (Rice et al., 2022). In-depth interviews, community engagement workshops, and engaged learning pedagogy experiments designed as part of an ongoing research process in the City of Chelsea, one of the gateway communities on the Massachusetts coast, support the existence of a new urban apartheid. These findings build on existing literature on climate apartheid and draw from Davidoff and Davidoff initial definition of urban apartheid (Davidoff & Davidoff, 1970). We probe the existence of de jure and de facto discrimination through climate change adaptation and mitigation planning to open the field up to new directions for progressive planning.