Draft:New Article: Place Unmaking

Place unmaking is a sociological phenomenon that serves to contrast proper placemaking. While placemaking has somewhat of a strict definition with regards to community building, place unmaking is a loose and uncommon term used by authors for varying purposes. However, commonalities exist between authors, with themes of segregation, disrepair, and social othering.

Definitions

Segregation

University of Virginia professor B. Brian Foster describes place unmaking as a defense mechanism by marginalized persons when they stand out as minorities. Through an ethnography in rural Clarksdale, Mississippi, Foster observed how Black residents found their communities and culture to be deeply commodified by White tourists that served as the economic backbone of the city. “White spaces” had emerged in Black communities where, despite Black people providing goods and services, Black people themselves did not feel welcome or safe. Sociologist Zandria Robinson further states how Black residents of Memphis, Tennessee approaching possible encounters with White people would always have to come with the expectation that a White person may say or something racist. A maxim that Black people in the South would have to live by is that any place “where one or two white folks are gathered, racism shall (or could) also be in the midst.” In the case of Clarksdale, all-white spaces in local blues audiences were what Foster described as “a congregation of racist possibilities.” As place-unmaking involved a pattern of staying away from perceived White or otherwise threatening spaces, the proper place making for Black Clarksdale residents would involve gathering in their own perceived “Black spaces.”

Disrepair

Chicago journalist and community organizer Jamie Kalven uses the term of place unmaking in a more literal and liberal sense alike. His archival work of Chicago neighborhoods presents place unmaking not only as a erasure of communal living and identity, but also fixates it as a crime against humanity. The city’s urban renewal is widely criticized in his work, as he deems it not only a failure but blatantly anti-urban. The resulting mass migrations away from the city have then been labeled as a “bureaucratically-driven refugee crisis”, with the effects comparable to natural disasters. The Chicago Housing Authority is cited as a source that corroborates Kalven’s claims as over 400 acres of land that was demolished remained as vacant rubble as of 2014. While much of the criticisms that public authorities had on the city had to do with these vacancies, Kalven’s work further emphasizes overlooked narratives in “the assault on the identities of those for whom these doomed placed were home, on the forms of meaning and beauty they created there, and on the historical continuities woven over generations into place.”

Gentrification

Independent journalist Peter Moskowitz writes in How to Kill a City of a similar systematic unmaking of third spaces and homes as other journalists such as Kalven do. A question of who has the right to live where is a central component of what makes up a home. When mentioning his own experience of having been born and raised in New York City, Moskowitz acknowledges himself as someone who is nevertheless “also a gentrifier, and [comes] from a family of gentrifiers.” Modern city-making is in itself a paradox as the authenticity and “chaos” the city invites to the private industry is “killed” when they move in.