When grief is a place too, but I can wind a fiber to liberate me from it…
My hometown was built with yarn and fabric. Could I not build my Black queer feminist accessible urbanism with that instead of the grief and loss and lack of not having perfect spaces and places?
I used to say my urbanism started with a map, and yes, yes it did.
But for the last 15 years, it’s honestly been fueled by a state of grief.
And it’s that time of year that I think about that state of grief.
Not just because this is the time of the year, I saw urbanists decide that George Floyd was the reason we finally needed to take equity seriously in 2020.
It’s because in April 2010 my dad became seriously disabled, to the point of having mobility and transportation challenges. And then, just 3 years nearly to the date later, he died in his home after a home invasion.
I wanted to discuss in this edition of the newsletter how this platform has been a response to grief and how I aim to honor my Dad’s memory and my legacy by doing something that brings joy to community building. Oh, and by the way, that thing I’m doing is a deferred dream of my Mom.
So as we do over at Defying Gentrification, Crafting Liberation these days, and as my Dad liked to do so much, let’s start with a song.
My Dad was so excited when he found this song on a CD.
And the radio dial would get turned all the way up when this jam came on.
It’s why, rather than a bunch of DC scenes, when I hear this song, I imagine driving with my dad in Greensboro from our ancestral homeplace down West Market Street all the way downtown, then hooking a right onto Spring Street right before it turns into Freeman Mill Road. We’d dart briefly onto Florida Street, then Luray, then right on Rockett, especially after the Freeman Mill Road tree-lined median was put in.
I never imagined that those trees would be busting loose as they are 30 years later, but my dad’s house, my childhood house, would be torn down.
It has felt like an overnight scenario.
Which, by the way, was one of the number one songs on Greensboro’s 102 Jamz as well as of course blasting out of every speaker in DC in the late 1990s when it came out.
Just like we can’t wait to get to Atlanta, to North Carolinians who are millennials and older, DC was a beacon.
And when I lost my first urbanist muse, my Dad, so suddenly in 2013, I suddenly felt the urge, the inexplicable urge to get on the road, much like he did, to find this place that loomed large in his mind. (California did as well, but today we are talking about DC).
And I say all of this to say that I wanted to take some time to ensure that I haven't been using urbanism as a grief response, with no purpose and plan besides being y’alls trauma porn.
In 2018, I’d gotten over my first hurdles, but as I said in Les’ and my vows, Les became a needed interruption when she told me that her time in urbanism was fraught. And then, during the period from 2021 to 2024, when we conducted our joint tour in the urbanism industry, I witnessed many horrors.
In case you missed our wedding vows on IG…
I know horrors sounds so dramatic, but I’m sensitive and I have no problems telling you that I am terrified every day of what it means to not be able to afford food, transportation, healthcare, and such, just because I can’t put myself in the box.
But I know you may not see them as horrors. And you can’t understand why I wouldn’t just put myself in the box. Why would we just walk away from it all and risk repossession, eviction, and worse?
Especially my elders in urbanism who remembered Reagan. And my just older than me peers who got in good with Obama.
Heck, even my now wife had to really observe what I was going through being a policy child of Obama who didn’t get here in time and dealt with the first wave of wrath from the first Trump admin’s cutbacks.
Many of you who are fans of me and my peers like Charles Brown, Veronica Davis, Tamika Butler, Christine Edwards Pitkin, and others who fill offices and digital Black urbanist spaces all over the world, want to just stop at our words. This also is my moment to tell all of you who love my brand of urbanism and you’re new to the discipline to peep them and my other peer Dr. Matthew Jordan-Miller Kenyatta, who’s doing some dope art+urbanism at Temple Contemporary in Philly and my mentees Desree “Dee” Powell and Jacob Smith in their entreprenuerial ventures in urbanism.
Y’all love it when we show up with the books and theories. When there’s a grant to put everything together in a pretty bow.
And one day, very soon, you’ll get a book out of me, but only because I’ve finally found the space and time to not do it in a state of rage and grieving.
Because I know some of y’all have been entertained with that, too.
And so if I’m just entertainment, which I don’t mind as a theater kid who just got married in the middle of an Off-Broadway stage play, then I want to bring forth something that does create joy and liberation.
Hence our title, Defying Gentrification, Crafting Liberation.
The crafting liberation part is what I’m aiming to showcase when I release that book. I want to find a storefront, or at the very least, part of a blackbox theater, or somewhere where I can throw a party. I’ll line the walls with an art market with some of my favorite vendors that I would put on a proverbial main street. And of course there will be music and food and my zine-like retrospective of 15 years of blogging and newsletter writing.
Then after that party, it would become my studio space, open and available for those who are vulnerable and need a place to kick back and do art, along with those who want to sip and paint/stitch/weave/draw, dream!
I am reaching out to coffee houses and sober bars, and other artist spaces to see if they want to partner.
I made some amazing connections at the Neighborhood Design Center’s inaugural Regional Placemaking Forum a couple of weeks ago with creative placemakers.
I submitted my grant for my Metro-inspired fashion line to DC’s Arts and Humanities Fellowship program last night (yes, the one that still has some NEA funding).
And, yes, sometimes I cry and rage. While I make clothes. After all, that was one of my mom’s dreams, and now, in this version of me, everything is on the table.
Happy Summer Solsitce y’all and when I come back to this newsletter, I will be back with a preorder link and a date and time for you to show up and do this creative placemaking thing with me!
Oh, and Ima leave y’all with this entire 11-minute mixtape from Oddisee that just dropped a month ago, and my, it’s a perfect soundtrack for this particular dispatch!!!!
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_mzTak-Eq09vs4YhUNIGwFupDvJNSqTmMU
Until next time,
Kristen
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