This is The Black Urbanist Weekly, an email newsletter that highlights Kristen Jeffers’s Black Queer Feminist Urbanist commentary on one key issue every week. This week we are challenging ourselves to properly solve the urbanist joy equation. Please support this work on Patreon and forward this to a a friend or colleague who would get value out of this email.

We have to get back to joy in our placemaking, sustaining and stewarding. That’s easy once you ground yourself and ensure that you’re in the right relationship with the environment.

I’m not just talking about the physical spaces we create and the natural resources we steward.

I’m talking about going within, to our heart center, where our emotions live and this concept of joy lives.

Joy, as defined by Merriam-Webster (and paraphrased by me) , is a feeling of great happiness or a source of great happiness. There’s also a British informal use listed that equates joy with luck.

In a lot of spiritual and faith circles I’ve encountered, the definition of joy is having peace without full understanding of all that’s going on, as well as gratitude with the notion of being alive, and using that basic gratitude to have joy during times of major sorrow or transformative change.

Additionally, in an urbanist joy context, many of you are familiar with Charles Montgomery’s work, highlighted in this review of his 2013 book Happy City from the Institute of Livable Cities.

However, this review is not equitable. Scratch equitable, it’s very colonial and racist. It fails to offer examples of any African cities, African/Black or African/Black ways of creating happy cities. It assumes that these and other “developing” countries are only practicing development at all costs and that no one in these countries feels that this kind of development as wrong.

The author even uses the word colonial in a positive light, while ignoring that there are European models that are just as destructive, and sometimes the influence for these “developing” models. Additionally, other than the author, no women are mentioned as experts or authors. We’re also left to slot in how class distinctions, gender perceptions and health and wellness abilities also factor into the happiness equation, at least if we stop with this review.

It also was written well before the inter-instituttional conflict that resulted in the creation of Placemaking X and well before conferences like The Untokening and the recent racial reckonings inside offices and firms around pay equity and positional equity prompted by the death of George Floyd in May of 2020 and many firm’s response to that incident, without addressing internal conflicts inside of their own firms.

I want to believe that Charles himself has continued to build a broad social circle. He invited me on a hike of Grouse Mountain during the Pro Walk, Pro Bike, Pro-Places 2016 summit in Vancouver and I wasn’t the only person of color (I was the only queer woman of African/Black decent though, but I was in small number even at the event itself) No, I didn’t successfully summit on foot, but someone else in the group was generous there to help me pay the fee to use the sky lift.

This might seem like a tangent, but not really considering on that trip and others. I’ve encountered and networked with all kinds of people in all kinds of spaces. On that trip in particular tour of Hogan’s Alley on that trip and connected with some activists and authors that are hoping to tell that story and the story of the adjacent Vancouver Chinatown in more spaces. Some of the most physically ugly spaces (say a McMansion basement), have been the sources of some of the largest vessels of joy in my life.

Meanwhile, I’ve been made to feel small and insignificant in some of the most beautiful convention halls around the world, sometimes just minutes after being on the stage as a globally-renowned presenter and expert.

I know I’ve been angry and sad and disgruntled, even violent in many of my recent posts and in-person interactions and of course, y’all know I don’t shy away from the loud and proud amplification of my intersections.

However, the longer I do this work, I’ve learned that I will not last as a person engaged in land use, if I don’t seek to understand what nature and the stories collected in the places you inhabit have to tell me. I also have to be at peace with my own body and how my body and its parts interact with other bodies in nature.

I can only do so much artificial and superficial work to myself and the world around me, before the world does its thing and opens up and sucks me in.

This could happen on a natural course of me returning to the land as bodily dust or it can be forced or me or forced upon others.

I know I can’t force you to ground yourself or be a certain human towards me or others.

But I can’t let 2021 end with really stating how I feel at this end of this year, this second full Covid-19 pandemic year, on the eve of my 36th earth year, manifesting and crafting the 12th year of The Black Urbanist platform and the seventh year of my Kristpattern platform.

How I believe that we restore joy and balance in our working community and our grassroots communities.

I want to ask a few more questions, in addition to last week’s questions, of all of us, based on how we do this work:

If you own or run a firm/business/think tank/nonprofit, with employees and or properties, are you actively examining pay equity, along with checking to ensure people, especially those regularly marginalized are adored and fully implemented across the board, rather than tokenized, pidgenholed, diminished or abused? Have you made peace and restitution to former employees, contractors and joint venture partners who you have wronged before you came into right relationship with this work and the people who do it? If you are a builder, are you educating the public with why your work costs as much as it does? Are you in this because it’s an “investment” or are you in it because you believe that shelter is a human right that does occasionally incur fees and provides a livelihood for yourself, but not at the inequitable expense and time of others?

If you are an individual individual employee/advocate of a firm or organization like that above (or a government entity), do you have the right tools and strategies to endure a long creation process, especially when it’s exactly what the community you’re working in needs for equilibrium? Also, as a peer, are you standing in the gap when it comes to your privilege? Are you happily being used as a token thinking that’s the only way you can get ahead? Do you think you’re not worthy enough to be seen or adored, therefore staying in a position that actively hurts you because it’s safe? Do you believe there’s room for all of us at the table and that the table can grow? Are you practicing self-care in order to properly practice community care?

If you are an elected/appointed leader, are you in the right place? Are you the right person or should you be mentoring other leaders to step into your place to serve the community with whatever is needed. Are you listening to the community and guiding them to the right place?

If you’re also a media/content makers, small shop owners and anyone else who influences how we see the cities and places that surround us — are you using the kinds of words and language that helps communities grow? Are you aware of class, ability, gender presentation and racial presentation distinctions that could be affecting how your message comes off and how effective and inclusive it is, for actual actions to happen?

Once again, I’ve been taking myself through these processes and questions where appropriate. I haven’t always answered these questions well and sometimes its even driven me to the point of violence. Also, I don’t have to speak of how conflicts of interest regularly arise even with my own home and with several of you who I consider close friends.

I want 2022 to be the year that we solve the joy equation in urbanism — not just with the spaces we physically create, but by the relationships we have with ourselves to activate and enhance and operate those spaces.

Will you join me?

Before You Go

I have updated my Patreon levelsto better match how I intend to do my work for 2022.

I will not be going away in January, but I will be spending more time in my fiber design studio, my video and media production studio and I welcome any and all compensated inquiries for keynote speeches in Covid-safe environments, facilitating workshops with people ready to make radical change, and folks who want to sponsor Open Studio with Kristen Jeffers or this year’s in-person Black Queer Feminist Urbanist Summit in October.

I am in conversations with a host committee and we will announce our schedule and where we will be in a few weeks.

Additionally, my book A Black Urbanist Journey to a Queer Feminist Future is in manuscript edits and I’m still incubating the Black Queer Feminist Urbanist School and Index with a goal to have all three of these projects premiere at this year’s October summit.

Finally, next week, I’ll be sharing some of my specific lessons learned, as we get to a two part 11th annual Urbanist Wishes! Also, for those of you wanting to purchase individual fiber objects, fiber lessons and some of my surface printed objects, I’ll be sharing more information on how that can happen, but if you can’t wait, feel free to pledge on Patreon at the Fiber Art Class or Endowment levels to receive singular or join access to those offerings along with Urbanist Study Hall, which is an automatic ticket to the summit and access to all prior training materials.

Until next time,

Kristen

P.S. What I mean when I call myself a Black Queer Feminist Urbanist.