Planners As Supporters And Enablers Of Diasporic Placemaking: Lessons For Planners

Abstract

Professional urban planners have long struggled with questions about how to better support the planning and development of socially equitable and racially just communities. This dissertation project expands this conversation by exploring three centuries of 'diasporic placemaking' in the southeastern U.S. city of Chattanooga, Tennessee. I define 'diasporic placemaking' as creative, everyday practices through which historically uprooted and migratory populations create communities of material security and cultural belonging from shared social and physical environments. From there, I ask how planners might come to better support and enable multiracial diasporic placemaking in Chattanooga and other complex, racially and culturally diverse cities. The project builds upon literature in citizen participation, planning education, placemaking, theories of diaspora, cultural studies, and participatory action research. Methodologically, it combined ethnographic techniques (narrative interviews, participant observation, and archival analysis) with an action research partnership between the author, Chattanooga Organized for Action and the Chattanooga Public Library. Together, we launched two experimental initiatives: the Sustaining People and Reclaiming Communities (SPARC) Initiative and the Planning Free School of Chattanooga. Both were designed to be alternatives to mainstream planning initiatives underway in Chattanooga and to be created with and for the benefit of low income residents, especially communities of color. The dissertation proposes that diasporic placemaking, as a theory and practice of sociospatial development, should be incorporated into mainstream citizen planning and equitable community development discussions. The history of multiethnic placemaking in Chattanooga provides keen insight into how collaborations and contestations between historically uprooted populations have generated local urban social and spatial orders. Assessing other cities in the same light may help planners and other urban professionals understand how to integrate antiracism values and practices into urban planning and redevelopment in more substantive and transformative ways. Furthermore, this dissertation proposes that a new era of citizen planning for community self-determination and interdependence lies before us. This updated mode of placemaking should understand how formal politics operate and help residents understand how to navigate public bureaucracies, but it must be ultimately concerned with shifting the powers of urban storytelling, analysis, and decision-making power into the hands of society's most underrepresented and marginalized members.