This is The Black Urbanist Weekly, an email newsletter that highlights the Black Queer Feminist Urbanist thoughts and commentary of me, Kristen Jeffers, an internationally-known urban planner, fiber designer, and contributing editor. Think of this as an editorial page column, but directly in your email. This year, for my annual wish-making tradition, we are wishing and learning at the same time. This week, what I wish we’d learn collectively as professional urbanists this year. Also, we have a special message from the University of California at San Diego. Learn more about how you can advertise in this newsletter. Prices start at just $75 a week with a four-week commitment. You can also become a Patreon as an individual and support this work for as little as $5 a month.
This week, I’m waving my wish wand at our professional urbanist spaces. Many of these also double as lessons that need learning or review as we head into 2023.
So this week I’m launching into my wishes. I have three this year for metro area leadership and others engaged in professional urbanist practice, that build upon smaller wishes under their categories.
For the record, I have lumped together governments, major nonprofits and foundations, and other entities that exercise decision-making power and those that staff these kinds of entities, across combined statistical metropolitan areas and other global regional distinctions to call them “metro area leadership.”
Additionally, I consider a professional urbanist anyone who regularly engages with how we make and maintain places, online or offline, volunteer or staff, leadership or assistants, neighbors, friends, and citizens.
The ultimate goal is for us to reshape how we approach democracy, especially as it intersects with placemaking and I wanted these characterizations to reflect the realities of regionalism and the realities of how various people do their work. So, let me get my wand out and start waving…
Wish 1: Tax capitalist corporations instead of granting automatic incentives, to pay for public goods…but, dismantle capitalist companies into mutual cost-sharing and cooperative partnerships so that we all share our wealth and resources.
This two-part wish alone sets up the other wishes for success because it addresses directly how we fund and manage the things that we need for human success, no matter who we are and where we live.
If existing companies want to make things on the backs of their employees without directly providing them benefits, then those of you in your metro region’s leadership should mandate that they give back those extra profits to the jurisdictions they reside in. If we have stronger metro area partnerships and councils of governments, then this could look like a region-level tax, that is then divided up by the council of governments into areas determined by committees of relevant stakeholders.
(I also want to add an aside here that it makes more sense to have county-wide school districts, but I realize that in many jurisdictions, that could take up its own whole wish. I’ll address that in future emails).
Then, metro region leadership could stop providing public services in capitalistic ways such as propping up a housing market or demanding fares for trips to jobs that barely pay enough to pay said fares. We could instead allow large for-profit companies to operate in our jurisdictional boundaries, but instead of tax incentives, they have to pick a public good to provide, free and open to the public. They also don’t get to discriminate on their public service, nor do they get to get out of providing the service for a certain period of time, or they lose their business license.
Of course, this is not foolproof, nor is it actually equitable or humane. One, some of these companies may opt to not operate in your jurisdiction, leaving a gap in a needed product or service, such as food. Or, this may bankrupt companies that are built 100% on exploitation. (Even 1% of exploitation is too much exploitation, but roll with me here as I know many of us are just wrapping our hands around reform, much less full abolition)
Or, depending on the size of the company, this would be an undue burden instead of a line-item writeoff that barely registers a blip in a corporate budget, especially if the company exists to build and make something at a pace that is already in the right relationship with nature and humans.
This is where we do an audit of what businesses are needed and what businesses could operate in our region without degrading the environment and the humans in that environment. This is also where we audit ourselves to see how ready we are for the abolition of not just prisons, but any and all carceral and punishing systems, including the voice in our heads that tells us we aren’t good or perfect enough.
This is only the beginning of how we internally have to be at peace with less, figuring out how to set the right boundaries and standards of working together and accepting that things have seasons.
I’m going to talk more next week about social justice groups and organizations can better manage themselves, but we are moving in this direction of people-powered labor and political movements and we need them to not mirror or mimic authoritarian and fascist structures as we release from the neoliberal and colonized ones we’ve fallen sway too.
Wish 2: Rather than shut everything down or ramp everything back up when faced with crises of illness, disability, natural disaster, and/or equity build in resiliency and accessibility… And stop acting like the COVID pandemic was the first time all this came to your attention.
So I talked about this in my Sierra Magazine article at the end of 2020. How are we doing with all that building for resiliency and accessibility?
Not as well as I would like. Often I feel we are just going back to how things were in 2019 just before word started to spread and deaths started to happen around what became COVID-19.
However, I have news for you. Some of what y’all were doing wasn’t working in 2019 and it shouldn’t have taken our COVID-19 lockdowns and mitigations to make you understand.
I was alerted recently to how even I was guilty of saying that the world was better and more united during lockdowns recently by several disabled folks who lost access to skilled nursing services. There are several school districts currently under lawsuits due to not providing accessibility access.
JEDI (justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion) is not just a Star Wars reference, or necessary because of George Floyd, but our system is built on the backs of folks that share my intersections and others being marginalized and it’s broken. No amount of reform is going to make it work.
Going forward, ignoring these events and people and hoping they go away isn’t acceptable if we claim we are being equitable in our urbanism. Trying to make us all be in the same room at the same time to make these decisions, much as we are seeing with voter suppression efforts that take away opportunities to vote up to several weeks in advance or failures to provide adequate public engagement technology and follow-through, continue to erode trust in a metro area leadership that only includes those elected, appointed, and professionalized in it.
Allowing our healthcare and education systems to rot, while investing more in punishments and sanctions of people just doesn’t work and will eventually make us go extinct.
Now public engagement as its done now isn’t perfect, but some of this is because as a society, we are in need of slowing down and understanding what true inclusion means and deal with sites of hate and discomfort. We also need time to properly grieve and learn how to use all of our emotions, so that we don’t weaponize them against ourselves and others.
Urbanism, and civilization as a whole, will not survive if we don’t re-learn how to share, collaborate, and hold space to transfer emotions to their rightful ends.
Wish 3: Acting as combined regions, not as competitors in a survival-of-the-fittest all-stakes city game.
If you’re walking away from capitalistic behavior and back towards being a civic democracy with levels of reasonable representation, then you aren’t concerned or pressed with the eleven-block town next door and how they managed to have all the shops. You might be thinking about combining resources, especially if only one of you actually has the post office and the shopping center. Or the metro stop. Yes, my time living in an unincorporated pocket surrounded by various other jurisdictions including our main jurisdiction has made me very passionate about this one. I told you to kill civic inferiority, but if you still haven’t, this is how.
These three are enough to keep you occupied through 2023 and beyond, so I’m not going to keep you long here on the email because I would love for you to get started on them or share updates on what you’ve been doing around these areas.
By the Way
If you’re new here, I write out my grand thesis of the week above, then I share other articles/videos that were noteworthy for me this week in this section. Apologies in advance for things behind a paywall. Some things I subscribe to and others I grab just before the wall comes down on me. I will start marking these articles and describing them.
Despite some of my writings as I’ve processed personal issues around my time in the Kansas City metro region, it was such an honor to have been part of the urbanist community in Kansas City, as they were laying the literal trackwork for free transit fares. I also worked for one of the best-run bike-share systems in the country, which is also co-located and run by a wonderful combined bike and ped advocacy group. Much of my issues stemmed from what happens when we are dealing with our own personal racial and class dynamics in small workplaces and in segregated regions, but overall, Kansas City is setting a great standard for how to do outreach and provide equitable transportation systems.
Meanwhile, you might have heard that DC proper has joined in with the vision I had for making fares obsolete, however, there are some hiccups and I hope we can resolve them. I am also very excited that DC will potentially have 24-hour transit service, rather than placing that burden squarely on Uber and Lyft to provide overnight service when they barely provide during the day service adequately.
Finally, I can’t leave out how thrilled I am that the person that brought the food hall to PG County, Maryland (Riverdale Park to be exact, next to my absolute favorite Whole Foods location), but West Baltimore will be joining in on the food hall fun. And before you jump on me, everyone eats and everyone deserves a quirky food showcase. I do hope there are ventilation considerations because you’re more likely to find me at the ones with solid outdoor all-weather patio space.
Before You Go
Check out some special announcements from me and this first one from the University of California at San Diego.
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN URBAN STUDIES AND PLANNING
The Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of California, San Diego invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor working in the area of urban studies and planning to begin July 1, 2023.
This is a position for a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at UC San Diego, a rapidly-growing department with strategic emphases on social and spatial justice; climate justice; and multinational planning.
The department is interested in candidates who have demonstrated commitment to excellence by strong engagement in teaching, research, and service toward building an equitable and diverse scholarly environment. The successful candidate will be an excellent scholar with an active research program in one or more of the following areas: transportation planning; climate change mitigation and adaptation; environment and land use planning; health and wellness, and/or spatial analytics.
The University of California, San Diego is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer advancing inclusive excellence. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, age, covered veteran status, or other protected categories covered by the UC nondiscrimination policy.
Department: https://usp.ucsd.edu
Apply link: https://apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF03452
Open date: November 21, 2022
Next review date: Tuesday, Jan 31, 2023 at 11:59 pm (Pacific Time)
Apply by this date to ensure full consideration by the committee.
Final date: Friday, Mar 31, 2023 at 11:59 pm (Pacific Time)
Applications will continue to be accepted until this date, but those received after the review date will only be considered if the position has not yet been filled.
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I’ll be live on LinkedIn and YouTube and Instagram talking about everything I mentioned above and then some for my Open Studio/Office Hours sometime this week. Don’t worry if you can’t watch live, it will be archived publicly on all spaces.
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I have created a special landing page, www.theblackurbanist.com/books, that’s not only a home for my upcoming volume, A Black Urbanist Journey to a Queer Feminist Future, but I have embedded my Bookshop.org booklists here as well since we were having so many issues with the link. Go here for all things books I’ve read and my book when it comes out!
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Finally, as we are now in December, all 2022 opportunities for me to work with you will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. I will publish an updated capabilities deck in my December 19 email for 2023. In the meantime, my Calendly links are still open for those case-by-case bookings.
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While I’ll be shifting my capital campaign to a different platform, if you want to send me money for quick expenses or like a tip jar, you can Venmo me.
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Until next time,
Kristen