Welcome back to The Black Urbanist Weekly. I’m Kristen Jeffers and I’m currently producing this weekly digital newsletter on my site, via email and various other places, to share my thoughts, my Black, Spiritual, Southern, Working-Class, Educated, Queer, Femme thoughts on how places and communities work. Think of this as my weekly column, sitting on your proverbial print paper’s editorial page or as so many other of your favorite newsletters do, in your inbox.
This week’s edition is #13 and I am continuing the series I started last week reflecting on my work over the past decade (2009-2019) and getting ready to usher in a new decade and the tenth year of this online platform.
This week, revisiting my first book A Black Urbanist on its fifth anniversary. Next week will be my traditional wishes post. The following week a Patreon-only preview of what my next book will address, which is the lessons I’ve learned in producing a platform like this and engaging in community work, for the last decade.
Everyone should mark your calendars for the release of A Black Urbanist Journey: Wisdom, Lessons and Models from Ten Years as The Black Urbanist on October 17, 2020.
I hope you’ll consider being a Patreon supporter, as that will help me keep the lights on and the work moving forward in an authentic way. You’ll continue to hear from me weekly. Now, on to the newsletter this week.
Really Revisiting A Black Urbanist
Before I get deep into how I see A Black Urbanist on its fifth anniversary, I wanted to talk about why I put it together.First, I was going through some professional setbacks, while also still grieving the loss of the site’s original muse, my father.
Then, I also noticed, especially as I continued to attend Congresses for New Urbanism and the occasional other major planning, design and development oriented conferences, that all the well-respected scholars and leaders all had books. The people consistently getting invited to do keynotes, of which I’d just done my first major one, had books.
Plus, it was National Novel Writing Month and National Blog Posting Month and I didn’t have anything else better to do. I was able to take my keynote money and continue my job search at the time and give myself something more positive to do besides stare at the ceiling in my teen hood bedroom, where I’d also just returned to for the second time since college.
The book doesn’t completely hide the fact that I was in a state of repression. I knew I was something like queer, but I wasn’t ready to claim that identity. I was beating myself up constantly for these thoughts and also the debts I’d incurred trying to live my urbanist dream life in Downtown Greensboro. I also still experienced pressure feeling tokenized and even persecuted, for having spoken out against teen curfews in Greensboro, as well as expressing support for Black Lives Matter and other similar movements which have always just made common sense to me.
Yet, I was able to pull together pages. I created a framework of cities needing Heart, Commons, Market and Mobility, that I didn’t fully embody myself, but felt like could grow into a bigger platform and a theory of practice, much like so many of my other fellow urbanist leaders. In other words, I tried to use both my marketing and management strategy and create my own catchphrase — my “eyes on the street”.
Even though it was reviewed on the Huffington Post, previewed in Greensboro’s new (and sadly no longer in print) 1808 magazine and I had a very well-attended book signing at Downtown Greensboro’s Scuppernong Books, I was not able to really embrace it and even consider expanding it and publishing it with a well-known urbanist press.
I also knew I’d have to make peace with how I really believed and all the parts of my identity and that was exceptionally scary. I decided to just clutch my book tight, control who could access it (hence why there are very few print copies and it’s technically out of print besides on Amazon and Gumroad). It’s been a gift, meaning free, to each and every one of you who subscribe to my email list via the top of my website.
And as I prepared many times to try and re-release it and try to do more with it, something just never felt right about making it my key book and my touchstone book.
I do believe that we need a heart for loving ourselves, and helping and serving other people, a working common governance, a working marketplace (which I believe also encompasses person-to-person bartering, trading and selling), and the ability to move around.
But, I realized that I only really cited and compared myself to white males in the book. That I still inadvertently thought that the only way people would listen, is to amplify those voices. I felt like other black women wouldn’t want to speak out and that many were being either silent or safe. I erased a reference to my fellow queer community in the section on the corner store, because I didn’t want to defend my now community to others. I wasn’t even aware that there were enough black urbanists in the world to read this book and use it as motivation to keep doing what they are doing in their communities.
Finally, I had only really lived in one state, in one faith practice, with a lot of conservative narratives and in other places, spaces and mindsets that didn’t really serve me then and don’t serve me or the work now as it’s evolved.
So, in lieu of re-writing this book and touring with it and selling it hard as we go into 2020, I decided to start from scratch and write a completely new book — A Black Urbanist Journey: Wisdom, Lessons and Models from Ten Years as The Black Urbanist. It’s outlined and so far, I feel like it’s raw and real. Patreon subscribers will get to preview some of the pieces of wisdom in two weeks.
In the meantime, for those of you who are still on this journey, thanks. For others who need to go on a different path, I appreciate that too.
What matters most, is that I’m going to finally give you the Black, Spiritual, Southern, Working-Class, Educated, Queer, Femme thoughts you need both to keep doing your work or to get started if you haven’t already.
And I’m going to be myself— 100%.
I’ll be announcing pre-orders at the beginning of the calendar year, along with several opportunities to do some pre-book launch workshops and sessions.
Other Things on My Mind
Something about cool airport renderings always gets me. I’m just shocked that Charlotte-Douglass hadn’t already done this kind of renovation of its front lobby, but a lot of airports are still adjusting and shifting to an era of heightened security, but also accommodating us travelers who want to feel like they aren’t trapped inside metallic objects for several hours.
This is #goals— write books, make them bestsellers, use the money to invest back into my community, all with my NC State degree (and my UNCG one too, but this person is a Wolfpacker across the board).
As I said over on my LinkedIn and Twitter, the need to be inclusive isn’t new to those of us who are calling for that kind of inclusion. But its still good to see older tables pull up a chair in this way.
And if you can’t go fare-free, I hope you’re one of the systems like the DC region’s WMATA and Seattle that are looking into sliding-scale options for those folks for whom payment is a burden. Also, if you’re going to have fares of any kind, it’s long overdue to be able to put these cards in our smartphone wallets and to add money directly from those wallet apps.
And I had to go back and add this to the Patreon version, but yes, the CityLab changes are on my mind, as are the whole urbanist media landscape. More thoughts to come, but I wanted to make sure I dropped this here, since it’s starting to hit your timelines as well as this newsletter.
Before You Go
—Check out the job board. I’ve added a couple of job-seeker and job-poster friendly Patreon levels, but I’ve also created a survey to gauge what you want in this kind of resource going forward.
—Check out Kristpattern on Instagram and DM me if you’re interested in anything for sale over there. The holidays are here, folks. And these are great black queer woman-owned gifts you can give this season!
— If you’re excited about my next phase and how my perspective can help motivate your group of any size Book me for a lecture, workshop or both. Also Les, my wonderful life partner and sales director is great at hyping you up, making you laugh and helping you or your organization make radical changes in your life and health Book her too. And listen to my wonderful podcast mentee’s The Crossroads Podcast, which also discusses environmental issues from a black woman’s perspective.
—Finally, even if you aren’t in the job or opportunity market or have jobs and opportunities to post, I’ve refreshed all my Patreon levels. All of you are at least at the $1 a month level, which is why you’re seeing this newsletter. $5 allows you to ask me one question a month that I will research and answer in-depth and make part of a permanent Q&A, $10 gives you first dibs when the podcast relaunches and when we start doing live events again.$20 grants you digital copies of all my future books, including the one I just teased. $50 gets you something free out of the Kristpattern store. Learn more and upgrade!
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