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Rachael Baker, York University, Canada
Since the 2012 death of 17-year old Treyvon Martin and the tributary #BlackLivesMatter campaign and social movement that followed, the deaths of black men, women and trans people at the hands of police continues to arouse mass street-level direct action and dialogue throughout the United States. On April 12th, 2015 25-year old Freddie Grey of Baltimore suffered a spinal cord injury and died while in police custody. His death was preceded by several weeks of marches in the streets of West Baltimore protesting police brutality; like the marches in Ferguson, and Staten Island; and the fires and protests in Los Angeles, Detroit, and Chicago decades ago that continue to inform the social and racial climates of those cities today. During the week of Grey’s murder, Harvard University’s African American Student Union and the Graduate School of Design hosted an urban planning conference with racism as the topic of discussion (El Nessar, 2015). The student-led conference addressed what young scholars see as lacking in their discipline, and called attention to the need for planners to be conscious of how urban planning intersects with common social maladies; racism in particular.
Early contemplations of urban planning envisioned a society free from the constraints of capitalism and bureaucracy that depended, as Hall describes, on the voluntary cooperation of citizens to work and live side by side (Hall, 2014). As the world’s population becomes increasingly urbanized, cities ever more become sites for addressing global concerns about sustainability, a myriad of issues planners often approach through strategies such as growth management, the implementation of green infrastructure and ecological governance, and greater efficiency in urban transportation systems. The genealogy of urban planning indicates that environmental health and safety have always influenced the design of neighbourhoods and public spaces, which suggests that sustainability in urban design is as much a matter of functionality as it is prevention. However, the recent (and systemic) deaths of people of colour in public and private urban spaces is indicative of, as Harvard’s planning students and #BlackLivesMatter point out, a gap in how policy makers and urban planners consider the social outcomes of urban design and conceptualize sustainability. Given the widespread climate of racial inequality concentrated in cities throughout the United States, is the pursuit of the sustainability model, design strategies that up hold environmental outcomes as the foremost concern of urban redevelopment, truly the most pressing path forward for shaping our future cities? The antonymous contradiction of sustaining, which means to both suffer as well as strengthen, suggests that a ‘sustainable’ urban future will ensure more of the same; an uneven urban geography that affirms the lives of some while others scrape by. To sustain is either to thrive, or just barely surv