 speaks lecture and planning series presentation. Our speaker for today is Professor Brandy Thompson Summers, assistant professor of geography and global metropolitan studies at the University of California, Berkeley. My name is Carolyn Swope and I'm a PhD student here in Columbia's urban planning program. I will be moderating this session. I'll start with just a few brief technical and logistical announcements and then turn to introducing our speaker. During the talk, I'd like to remind audience members on Zoom to please mute their microphones. We will be recording today's lecture so anyone in the audience who wishes not to be recorded should turn off their video input. Audience and everyone 14 who are also connected on Zoom, please be mindful to mute your sound as well. The chat box should be used only for discussion regarding the session. If you have any technical questions that apply only to you, please message me or my co-host for engineer Helena privately. We encourage all of you to type questions into the chat box during the presentation and after the presentation, we will have some time for Q&A. We'll start that around 2 or 2.15 so that we have time for folks questions. I'll be coordinating the Q&A with attention to diversity and inclusion, so if you have already had a chance to ask a question, please allow others to do so before asking one. To ask questions, participants can use the raise your hand function and we'll call on you to unmute and ask directly or if you prefer, you may also type your questions into the chat box. Again, feel free to do that at any point in the lecture and I can read them out. For our audience in everyone 14, you can raise your hand and I'll call on you so that you can ask your question directly. So with that, I'm delighted to introduce today's speaker. Dr. Summers, as I said, is assistant professor of geography and global metropolitan studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is co-founder and co-director of the Berkeley Lab for speculative urbanisms. Her research examines the relationship between and function of race, space, urban infrastructure and architecture. Her book Black in Place, The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City explores how aesthetics and race converge to map blackness in Washington DC and the way that competing notions of blackness structure economic relations and develop land in the gentrifying city. Her current research focuses on how uses of space and place making practices inform productions of knowledge and power in Oakland, California. She has published several articles and essays that analyze blackness, culture, aesthetics and urbanization that appear in both scholarly and popular publications. She is a member of the editorial collectives at City and Acme and is on the editorial boards of various journals. Dr. Summers' talk today is entitled Spatial Temporalities, The Future Pass of Black Dispossession, which draws on the speculative to highlight a long history of restrictive and devastating policy passed and promoted by local governments and developers in West Oakland. So Professor Summers, if you're ready, I will pass things over to you now. Thank you so much, Caroline. And thank you to this hybrid interesting space. I'm all the way in Berkeley, California. So for those of you who are in New York, hello, I miss New York. I have not been on a plane in over a year and a half. So hopefully I'll be able to get back there at some point. But I do appreciate you joining me today. So I'm actually going to share my screen. Hopefully you'll be able to see it pretty easily and present. Hopefully everyone can see this. So it's just kind of my title page. Again, thank you, Caroline, for the generous introduction as well as the invitation. So I'm going to be talking a bit today about some work that I am in the process of doing. And it's mostly a collaborative project that I'm doing with my good friend and collaborator, Ola Lacon J.F.S., who's actually on the call, so I might actually pull him out to talk. But anyway, beyond that, I wanted to first situate the work. I'm from Oakland, California. And though when I joined the faculty at UC Berkeley, coming from Virginia Commonwealth University, I had intended to have a very different focus on Oakland. But because I came back and saw how devastating and visible the unhoused crisis was in the Bay Area and specifically in Oakland, this just seemed like a really important opportunity to think through on questions of blackness, but also in terms of displacement and dispossession, given my work on gentrification. But this was something new. I wanted to try something different. So hopefully you all will have some great questions and we can chat afterwards. So I'll go ahead and begin. So I want to start with this question. How do you map no place? So as I mentioned in my little, there's a blurb about this talk, I find that there's an intimacy between blackness and placelessness that shows up today as homelessness. Traditional spaces and places as Catherine McKittrick argues, quote, require black displacement, black placelessness, black labor and a black population that submissively stays in place, end quote. The logic holds sway in urban planning and the policies that have destroyed working and middle class black neighborhoods across the United States. At the root of these decisions lies a presumption that there's no place for black people in the city. Simultaneously, there's a presumption of blackness and therefore any black person belongs only in or to the city. So I want you to kind of get your imagination hats on. All right. So imagine, if you will, right, there's an arc. It's a degraded cruise ship that's propped up on blocks and languishing in an empty parking lot in West Oakland against the backdrop of the interstate 880 freeway. In the shadow of the ship, there's this in a weedy lot that's populated by a tent city or homeless encampment. That's an agglomeration of Teslas, we know Teslas, tents and campers. There's charcoal grills. There's a glass in case seating pod. There's charging stations that huddle at the ship's lee. Wires are strong with cheerful penance stretching down from reactors that are attached to the ship's hull to these vehicular generators that are primed for electric cars scattered throughout the camp. Above on the ship, on the sun deck, you can see more generators and further colorful assortment of tarp covered tents and patio umbrellas all framed by a series of penance. The ship's hull, like the facade of the adjoining bow arts train station, so this again imagining a train station next to this cruise ship in a parking lot, and this train station was built in 1912, is adorned with graffiti. One of the more prominent tags on this ship or around this ship proclaims in the red and anti-capitalist Russoian eat the rich with an accompanying sickle and fork emblem. I think we know this pretty well. So let's just take a look at what this could look like, right? So this image, the Ark, is a photo montage by my collaborator, Lake, I'm going to call him Lake, J.F.S., who's part, it's part of this collaborative series that we have called The Apocryphal Gospel of Oakland, which visually constructs the improbable ongoing story of Oakland's unhousing crisis through speculative digital collages. The scene depicted here in the Ark seems improbable, as I described it, and probably looking at it as an allegorical fantasy. However, in December of 2019, several months before COVID-19 took hold, Oakland's then city council president, Rebecca Kaplan, introduced a plan to dock a decommissioned cruise ship at the port of Oakland, adjacent to this West Oakland neighborhood. The idea was to provide emergency shelter for nearly a thousand unhoused individuals. Now, Oakland's port remains one of the busiest in the nation. It's engineered with a federally regulated infrastructure that's designed explicitly for cargo ships, making it structurally untenable for docking cruise liners. Even so, Kaplan and her colleagues argued that a floating hotel could temporarily address the 86% spike in homelessness that Oakland had witnessed between 2015 and 2019. Kaplan then noted that the cruise ships had been used as emergency housing in the aftermath of disasters like Hurricane Katrina. And homelessness, as we know, is an unnatural disaster. But Kaplan's plan was just one in a long line of attempts to ameliorate the crisis. Oakland and other Bay Area cities have been experimenting since 2015 with other emergency proposals, including legalizing tent camps and encampments in specific parking lots and on certain vacant lots. So the floating hotel for unhoused Oaklanders never became a reality. Still Kaplan's proposition had been pretty prescient. On March 9, 2020, a ship named the Grand Princess belonging to Princess Cruise Line docked at the Port of Oakland with more than 2,400 passengers aboard, 21 of whom had tested positive for the coronavirus. The Grand Princess had cut shorter crews to Hawaii and had been stranded in California waters for 10 days with no place to go. So Oakland's housing population, excuse me, homeless population consistently makes up over half the total of Alameda counties. Between 2015 and 2019, the number of those unhoused in the city jumped from over 2,100 people to over 4,000. The epidemic of homelessness across the Bay Area tends to be narrowly framed as a result of a housing crisis as opposed to a crisis in affordability. Accordingly, rather than address income inequality in a massive low-income housing gap, local policy makers often propose simply to build, betting on an additional development to solve the problem, despite the fact that most resulting projects produce luxury and or high-end residences. And this isn't just in Oakland, right? We see this all over the country. In other words, city administrators tend to see homelessness as a social problem rather than an issue that is political and economic. For example, California Senate Bill SB 50, supported in 2020 by Oakland's current Mayor Libby Schaff, advocated upzoning with the idea that this would lead to large-scale housing production, but this failed measure pushed for increased development, especially around transit centers. So this would have further compromised the fragile infrastructural balance between transportation options and the extent housing stock, which even before the near doubling of the unhoused population had threatened working-class communities throughout the region as rampant speculation and financialization exacerbated long-standing transportation issues. So Schaff had promised in 2016 to build 17,000 new housing units by 2024, setting aside 28% of that number for low-income residents. But again, by two years later, by July 2018, less than 6% of the newly constructed homes were reserved for affordable housing units. As of May of this year, Oakland had built over 22,000 new units, exceeding the original goal by more than 5,000. Nevertheless, only a small number of these units were actually priced below market rate, and the city is currently on track to build only half of the Mayor's promised affordable units. So West Oakland, where the Grand Princess was docked, is the oldest neighborhood in the city of Oakland and was once home to the largest Black community in Northern California. But as the overall Black population in the city continues to dwindle precipitously, so does West Oakland's concentration of Black residents. Across the 20th century and into the 21st, Black people throughout the United States have been targeted by spatial exclusions and dispositions that are rooted in racial capitalism. Yet racial disparities in Oakland's rates of homelessness remains particularly stark, with African Americans comprising an astonishing 70%, 70% of those experiencing homelessness, while making up just about 20% of the overall population. Black and Indigenous populations continue to be the only ones whose numbers are diminishing in Oakland, while the total number of Black residents who are homeless continues to grow. Most reports produced by the state acknowledge this disproportion, albeit typically only as a data point, rather than a focus for targeted response. So it's not an accident that the arc that we've located in this dry dock shipping yard or at least a parking lot besides a defunct train station is an ad hoc solution to the housing crisis fused into a landscape that itself is symptomatic of a decades-long ascendancy of car culture and the defunding of mass transportation. Thus, rather than the arc being docked at the point of Oakland in this kind of imaginary space, it has landed unceremoniously in a massive West Oakland parking lot that in reality, as well as in Lake's image, harbors dozens of unsanctioned camp dwellers. Nor was it a coincidence that passengers embarked from the Grand Princess in West Oakland, their medical status was triaged in an 11-acre, quote, containment area in the Port's gigantic parking lot. The parking lot, as a typology, one of the most spatially dominant landscape features of 20th century urbanism represents a planning failure. Parking lots were thought of in the mid-20th century as this temporary form of land use or a kind of land banking against the future. Ultimately, they were thought to not necessarily be inhabited, right? But they've taken on new and important meaning in the contemporary struggles over the uses of and the right to public space in America's cities. Cities don't systematically catalog their parking anchorage. However, it's estimated in the U.S. that there's more than 500 million parking spaces in off-street surface lots alone. Perhaps, not surprisingly, parking lots have become central fights that are waged by unhoused people against the state, as well as central to the state's strategy for addressing a generalized problem. Parking lots have been used since the 1940s as a spatial resource for mitigating homelessness deployed as a temporary solution that in practice remains ever present. In this doubling of eras or recurrence of things past, provisional solutions harden into legacies that extend across generations, all the while retaining their official status as impermanent, improvised, and based on reaction to emergency. We're living though in the second decade of the 21st century with unprecedented levels of income inequality, food insecurity, ostentation, precarity, and austerity. The world is organized by private property and market exchange. It's fashioned by corporatization and burdened by social repression, environmental destruction, and racial reckonings. So, the arc in this case shows us this condition by laying out a space resembling what Jaubiel calls, quote, a zone of social abandonment, a place that's neglected by the state and treated as a repository for the poor, unemployed, disabled, and or the homeless. The arc, again, is this dystopian hybrid, a landlocked vessel that's poised between the apocalypse in progress and this new post-apocalyptic normal that's replete with signs of entropy, as well as innovation, resurrection, and abjection. The scene, though, is exaggerated, as you can see, yet the best sci-fi, right, like the best sci-fi, it's also familiar in that the world emerges post-disaster, and then that's emerging right now post-disaster, though we are certainly not post, draws on memories of the pre-disastrous in order to visualize itself. To put this another way, dystopian narratives look backwards, right, serving to warn us about the impending catastrophe, but when it comes to considering black homelessness and what it tells us about the urban spatialities in which we're currently living, as well as those in the making, this speculative timeline folds into a more complicated knot. Here, we can presume a truth that's explained by the writer D. Scott Miller in the Afro-surreal Manifesto, the Black as a New Black, the future is already here. So, as he says, there's no need for tomorrow's tongue speculation about the future. Concentration camps, bombed out cities, famines, and enforced sterilization have already happened. To the Afro-surrealists, the tasers are here. The four horsemen ride through too long ago to recall, what is the future? The future has been around so long that it's now the past. So, mindful of these histories, the yet to come prospects, I want to consider here, black homelessness in West Oakland as occurring in a collapsed or simultaneous parascience or Afro-surreal time, in which the complexes of events and seem mappable, really, along this kind of past, present, future access, and they're in fact all happening at once. In this folded and disjunctive temporality, events from the past are noticed or they're only received in the present, determining the experiences of the here and now as well as likelihoods for the future in this unfanceful but often denied ways. And then further, the future past of black dispossession and homelessness doesn't take place just anywhere. Because Oakland has cleared so much land but provided no adequate means for housing people, informal settlements emerge and are often contained within vacant spaces where built structures used to be. Tent camps grow under bridges and underpasses or at least beneath overpasses and in parks along with deindustrializing margins, right? More encampments are set up in parking lots than any other kind of open urban space. However, unlike a public park or the no man's land under an overpass, parking lots are officially sanctioned spaces for temporary, i.e., emergency habitability. Given Oakland's long and destructive history of both clearance and containment of black residents, the parking lot, as I see it, is this useful urban typology for thinking about black homelessness in this city. The parking lot, as the arc shows, is a node where the simultaneity of the past, present, and yet to come can be seen and felt with particular clarity. So in thinking about this, I have two major questions. First, I'm thinking about how we might consider the relationship between parking lots as the central, even redundant features of the built urban environment and the politics of black clearance and containment, right? And then secondly, what does it mean for black people in Oakland and elsewhere to continue to live the same experience again and again and again decade after decade? So since, oh, my image isn't showing up. Well, that is horrible because it was a great image. Well, we'll just have to imagine it. All right. So since World War II, the Bay Area is one of the fastest growing urban centers in the country. And more than 50,000 black migrants arrived between 1942 and 1945, mostly from Louisiana, where my family hails from, Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. This influx coupled with the displacement and dispossession of Japanese Americans in their internment camps established black people as a city's largest racial minority. But anti-black racism coalesced as the Bay Area's go-to racist practice proliferating and intensifying for years to come. This restructuring of racism in California from the targeting of Japanese immigrant populations to the assailing of black American migrants aligned with much of what had already occurred in other parts of the United States, particularly the South. So since the National Housing Act of 1934, discriminatory housing policy in the practices such as red lighting, which we're familiar with and restrictive covenants, have cordoned off certain neighborhoods from black residents across the United States. At the same time, segregation facilitated the emergence of vibrant and growing black communities in urban locales. By 1940, for example, in Oakland, nearly 60% of the black population lived in West Oakland and a robust commercial district and cultural district had grown up alongside Seventh Street in West Oakland and therefore it became known as Harlem of the West. By the end of the Second World War, Oakland was overpopulated. Black inhabitants were over represented in public housing and specifically in West Oakland, it was full of overcrowded, dilapidated housing stock. With the waning or closing of defense industries like shipbuilding and the unemployment rate climbing, even as commercial infrastructure scaled back, the population of homeless black families expanded. There was a local journalist writing in 1943 who described, quote, the tragic spectacle of black families going from door to door, begging for sleeping accommodations in sheds, garages, at any place they could have shelter, end quote. Black Oaklanders were not yet camped in parking lots at this time, but a pattern of black dispossession was calcifying in the city, laying this foundation upon which the present crisis of displacement would occur. By 1950, 80% of the black population in West Oakland or excuse me, 80% of Oakland's black population lived in West Oakland and the city council and planning commission officially considered the whole neighborhood to be blighted. This made an easy way for demolition via urban renewal policies or what James Baldwin famously called Negro removal. The urban renewal excuse me, urban renewal and its primary vehicle slum clearance accomplished the clearance and containment of black people really in two ways through the widespread demolition and limited reconstruction of residential buildings and the devastating construction of a transportation infrastructure, including major roadways and a robust public transit system, that privileged white movement over black life and left landscapes across the city lying fallow for years on end. The Federal Housing Act of 49 did though provide cities with the capital and apparatus for urban redevelopment and public housing allotting or allocating 135,000 public housing units nationwide. In Oakland, however, public housing was viewed as an issue primarily impacting black and other people of color since white working class residents by this time had largely aspired to flee the city and purchase homes in the Tony suburbs. Oakland requested only 3000 new public housing units under the 1949 program far fewer than were contained in existing but dilapidated war housing. As the city level dozens of those war housing units, only 500 public housing units were constructed to take their place. Thousands of black Oaklanders were left once again without shelter. So during the same period, federal commitments to the construction of affordable housing for all were shifting towards federal and municipal plans for the revitalization of downtown as a way to really strengthen the local tax bases. So cities began to use federal funds to deploy the powers of eminent domain to redevelop instead of revitalize blighted neighborhoods, aka those neighborhoods that were mostly inhabited by black people. In 1954, Oakland's Mayor John Hulaham formed a redevelopment advisory committee primarily comprised of real estate, banking and commercial retail elites, executive from let's say the Bank of America Kaiser Industries Sears and Roebuck as well as the Oakland real estate board, right? Oh, as well as the East Bay Homeowners Association or Home Builders Association. So the result was this Oakland citizens committee, Oakland citizens committee for urban renewal or occur in turn. And they ended up producing the general neighborhood renewal plan through which they asserted their prerogatives to strengthen the downtown business district, which ended up being of course a priority. The GNRP that renewal program was unanimously approved and planned for the destruction of a 250 block area of West Oakland, including that burgeoning or the robust seven street commercial corridor moved ahead. So they had plans to destroy it. In 1956 was the advent of the Oakland redevelopment agency. They announced a plan for the redevelopment of an area called Acorn. So it was called the Acorn area redevelopment project, which designated about 50 blocks in West Oakland for demolition as the first of five major slum clearance areas in the city. In particular, this Acorn plan focused on industrial and middle income residential development, but made no provision for public housing, despite the overwhelmingly poor population in this area. The Acorn project was celebrated by city officials and developers as an opportunity to attract white residents in the hopes of having them return to the area and have it be this elite quote elite residential neighborhood. It was honestly one of the nation's first attempts at reverse integration. So black people in Acorn attempted to stop the bulldozing of their homes by suing the city on the grounds that black homeowners were losing their properties without having anywhere else to go. Ultimately, they ended up lacking the political power to fight this destruction and the federal court sided with the city. So between the April 1962 and May 1965, crews destroyed the majority of the 610 structures. The land laid bare and had been home to 4,300 people, right? So the Oakland redevelopment agency had designated nearly half of this land about 32 acres for industrial development, right? So again, they're prioritizing commercial and industrial real estate over residential. So the remaining 34 acres were earmarked for housing. Priority was given to development of industrial sites all over the residential units. However, by 1967, no homes had been built in Acorn. Bacon lots dominated the landscape. And this image here on this map that I'm so proud of my undergraduate research assistant, but she was building really looking at this map of Oakland. And what she's done is taken a map from the 1940s and instead layered on it the kinds of movement in terms of parking and vacant lots, as well as highway construction by 1968. So you start to see the areas in the teal color where you're seeing these empty spaces proliferate. So the Acorn project never achieved the city's aims to create an integral place, that is to make the neighborhood less black, right? So the redevelopment agencies commissioner lamented, quote, West Oakland used to be an area where rich white Americans lived before it became a mostly black area. Acorn was a chance to reintegrate West Oakland, but I'm afraid that hasn't happened. Acorn was also a template for the city and addressing lingering housing crises such as this experimental management of black and low income populations. The project complemented several others orchestrated by the redevelopment agency later in the 60s, including the clearing of more than 70 blocks in West Oakland to make room for the construction of the US Postal Service Distribution Center, along with the surface and underground lines for BART, which is the Bay Area Rapid Transit System, and most notably, new highways, interstate highways. Further renewal projects were put forward as the redevelopment agency focused on development in the downtown core, immediately adjacent to West Oakland. These plans promoted transit, right? Commercial construction, and inevitably parking. So the expansion of the federally subsidized interstate highway system decimated black communities nationally throughout this era, as hopefully most of you know. Construction was often routed through black and lower income neighborhoods where it contributed to blight, installed infrastructural impediments to social and logistical circulation, and accelerated the deterioration of formerly robust communities. In California in particular, these new expressways further facilitated the clearance and containment of black people who continue to live in city cores bypassed and encircled by freeways. Three interconnected freeways completed between 1952 and 1985, first the Nimitz, which is the highway I-80 that was in the backdrop of the arc. The Cypress Freeway, which is a two-tiered portion of the Nimitz Freeway of I-80, and the Grove Shafter Freeway, the I-980, they sliced West Oakland into these smaller bits. The Cypress Freeway funded through the Federal Highway Act of 1956, and then later completed in 1958, literally cut the neighborhood in half along a north-south axis, displacing hundreds of black residents and placing a physical obstruction between the westernmost section of the neighborhood and the rest of the city, notably downtown. So it was really this barrier where you couldn't just drive into or walk into downtown. The symbolic barrier that had already existed between West Oakland and Oakland at large was made literal. It's been dubbed the Berlin Wall by local residents. The Cypress Freeway ended up collapsing in the devastating 1989. Oh my goodness, my images! The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and it was not rebuilt. As a result, there is a parkway that's there instead of the Mandela Parkway. The Nimitz and Grove Shafter freeways are, however, still there. So here's that 1946 picture I was showing you before. Intimately connected to freeway infrastructure, the parking lot emerged as a key signifier of mid-century enemy West Coast style, desolate, but functional, even futuristic, and the surface parking lot became this polyvalent sign of the modern city. Both urban and suburban municipalities began to require that new construction account for widespread dependency on cars, the stipulation that often remains in force to this day. As a major transformation of the built environment, freeways and interstate highways established in the postwar years tended to generate both fanfare as well as protests across the country. Surface parking lots in comparison were and still are built much more frequently, gaining at best minor recognition. Parking lots were parking lots. For the most part, they existed not so much from building something new and demolishing something old. Jane Jacobs even called parking lots border vacuums. They're these bleak spaces that unstitched the urban tapestry. As the 1960s dawned, the parking lot was emerging as the ultimate manifestation of spatial clearance, cleansing, and removal of permanent temporariness in cities. So let's see if this works. So I wanted to kind of show this distinction between, let's see if I go back. So here's 1946. Here's the layered 1968 where you see this proliferation of vacant spaces and parking lots as well as this move towards freeways. And then we go to 1993 where you see even more, though 880 freeway got fatter, essentially. The Cypress Freeway, however, though by 1993 had collapsed, its carcass was still there, right? You couldn't, they hadn't constructed Mandela Parkway at the time. So it wasn't something that you could move across. So West Oakland lost a total of nearly 14,000 residents between 1960 and 1966. 8,000 units were raised. Three quarter of those 8,000 demolished dwellings had been occupied by low income, mostly black people. Contributing to this reduction in housing density, Oakland Zoning required that all new, oh gosh, that all new apartments provide one off-street parking spaces per unit. As a result, the land was suddenly burdened with a new requirement to provide parking that residents didn't pay for, right? The number of units per acre fell 30% and land values fell by 33% as well as property tax revenues and construction investment declining proportionately. So as substandard housing was removed from West Oakland, still more vacant lots were left behind. A portion of these remained unbuilt, excuse me, remained unbuilt, right? And they were converted into surface parking lots for a new population of commuters from the East Bay suburbs, hopefully coming into Oakland as they thought. An area that had been notorious for human overcrowding was soon overpopulated by parking lots. So urban renewal then intensified the precarity of Black life in West Oakland in particular. Black labor had been key to Oakland's wartime emergence as an industrial powerhouse, but as state and federal governments poured funds into advancement of white suburbanization, the urban core was left to decay. A polluted pavement scape that was littered with vacant parcels, surface parking lots, and unfinished projects, these industrial parkes or scars. These dystopias of half a century ago were perpetuated across the intervening decades by the continuing neglect of Black residents in regards to education, employment, healthcare, day-to-day mobility, and of course, housing. A powerfully destructive trajectory was established for Black Oaklanders towards the end of the 20th century, and its results were visible across the city today as the looming threat of gentrification ended up becoming a reality. I love drawing on Octavia Butler because she essentially was a fortune teller. Okay. So when I moved to Oakland, as I mentioned in August of 2019 prior to the onset of the pandemic, I was astonished by the explosive growth of homelessness that was immediately recognizable in the dozens of encampments that were spread across Oakland in parts of neighboring Emeryville as well as Berkeley. Large and elaborate sites, they swelled along pedestrian parkways in public parks under freeway overpasses and in empty commercial lots and in parking lots. Some of the most glaring examples spread around the periphery of West Oakland's Bart Station, and a barren asphalt lot where dozens of tents were created, and they had made these makeshift communities of unhoused residents. If you're driving along the Interstate 880 freeway along the southbound overpass, it was impossible to miss the nearly five-acre expanse sprinkled with tents, charred in abandoned cars, stationary RVs, and cobbled together plywood and metal structures that were crammed behind a chain link fence around a lot on Wood Street in West Oakland. Even so, the East Bay's economy had grown. It was not uncommon to see Tesla's whiz by Wood Street or other encampments beneath the Interstate 80 or Interstate 580 along the edges of West Oakland. This incongruence between the vision reflected, at least for me, this frightening sense of how our new shared reality was really operating under late-stage capitalism. So people living without housing tend to really be pathologized in ways that personalize and medicalize their predicament as if private failings and health problems were responsible for conditions that are in fact driven by racial capitalism. This is what Peter Marcuse calls, quote, neutralizing homelessness. Impoverished neighborhoods and homeless people's camps in California have in recent years been compared with slums in Pakistan, Brazilian favelas and shantytowns in Mexico, conditions that in an earlier era would have been characterized again as blight. Throughout my research, I found that official responses to such extremity tend to come in three forms. One of the more popular arguments about the cause of homelessness generally is that cities lack enough affordable housing. I mentioned that earlier. This position has been readily adopted by the city of Oakland and indeed there's some truth to it. A similar argument emerged after the Second World War with the designation of shipyard ghettos. Since 2008, however, the restructuring of the East Bay's racial geography has been profoundly intertwined with the foreclosure crisis, even as skyrocketing housing costs across the Bay Area have been made national news. Black people overall pay more of their income for housing and are more susceptible to being evicted from their homes. And data show that the subprime mortgage fiasco disproportionately impacted black homeowners through West Oakland. Yet a push for more housing, even affordable housing, activates a new real estate or a new crop of real estate development. And it's not necessarily good for a low-income black people. Here again, the past ends up being prologue, right? In the post-war years, the federal government sought to expand housing stock by offering financing options to white Americans, propelling the growth of suburban communities while at the same time disenfranchising black urbanites left behind. If we fast forward to the first decades of this century and racialized disinvestment, technology booms and financializations were creating these conditions that made poor and working-class city neighborhoods exceptionally vulnerable to gentrification as well to do white folks moved in, right? So the second area where cities really think about homelessness is that the spread of encampments are explicitly managed through these policies of clearance and again containment, this theme that just keeps coming up for me. So as of April of 2021, an estimated 140 encampments could be found all across Oakland. And the High Street encampment, there was a, you'll have to take a look at it, I can send a link, but the New York Times did this intensive photo essay showing various parts of the city, but particularly in East Oakland, which was the location of the High Street encampment. But a disproportionate number of camps continue to be located in West Oakland. In October of 2020, a city of Oakland passed its encampment management policy or the EMP to establish criteria for encampment interventions, right? So this policy created the encampment management team or EMT. So both of them together emphasize management as opposed to the eradication of conditions that drive the proliferation of encamped communities. So the EMT, which went into effect in January of 2021 focuses on the designation and protection of high sensitivity areas, meaning that the city will enforce the removal of encampments from parks along waterways and on other public lands. Similar to explanations for slum clearance from the mid century, a justifiable focus on health and societal well-being is unjustifiably leveraged to further disenfranchisement of the unhoused. Excluded from public civic spaces, homeless people are de facto restricted to industrial wastelands. Of all the interventions that are advocated by the city, few are more dystopian than its contract with the organization called Operation Dignity, which was founded in 1993. Operation Dignity is a third-party contractor whose work with the city throughout the encampment removal process, right? So according to Oakland City Auditor, closures and cleaning interventions must be preceded by certain steps, including but not limited to at least 72 hours advance notice of clearance. They just get a few days to, you know, clean up their stuff, right? So despite this euphemistic language of closures and cleaning interventions, the city and Operation Dignity are doing something certainly more insidious. The city frames the removal of encampments as necessary for safety and hygiene. Again, this framing is reminiscent of rhetoric during the urban renewal period when the city allowed portions of West Oakland to fall and disrepair in order to qualify for federal aid that would then facilitate the clearance of the entire area, right? In fact, in 1961, Assistant City Manager of Oakland admitted that the city had purposely disinvested the areas comprising that Acorn neighborhood I discussed earlier for several years because they knew that their development plan would be approved, so they just let it lay fallow. To designate an area as unsafe and unsanitary might reflect true conditions, but it doesn't address the processes by which the area got that way. So the last area by which the, I think, contemporary American cities, but specifically Oakland attempt to address and manage homelessness is through design. Oakland has initiated several programs and policies to address homelessness, most of which placed responsibility on homeless individuals. The city's offered various contemporary, excuse me, temporary solutions which operate alongside community-generated projects produced by artists, activists, organizers, and unsheltered individuals themselves. These include the provision of transitional housing, shelter beds, RV parking sites, and the controversial community cabins. I wish you could see it! Okay, this program is also known as the Tough Shed program. These are really toolshed communities erected on surface parking lots and in other vacant spaces, such as beneath the Interstate 980 Freeway. The Tough Shed experimental program came about in 2017, but at the end of 2017. But it was expanded after the city received a combination, combined $11.7 million from the state of California as well as Alameda County as part of the Homeless Emergency Aid program, or it's called HEAP. Following the city council's declaration of a shelter emergency crisis in 2017, the city started buying these toolsheds and they were the Tough Sheds that are produced by this Denver-based Tough Shed Inc. company. They established not only the community cabins through Tough Sheds or toolsheds, but they also established RV parking sites and surface lights all over Oakland as part of Emergency Homeless Response. So far, Oakland has spent nearly $9 million of those funds on the actual Tough Sheds and RV parking sites. So, you know, these settlements can never really be on private property, right? The various legislative measures have prohibited the establishment of camping, or excuse me, encampments within 25 feet of homeless shelters, within 50 feet of private residents or parks, within 100 feet of high schools, 150 feet from preschools, middle schools, or child care centers. So, essentially, they can't be around anybody, right? The irony, of course, is that some of today's encampments map onto the very parking lots that were produced through urban renewal and the removal of black homes half a century ago. Consider, for example, this co-governed homeless camp at the Peralta and Third Streets location in West Oakland, which is maintained in partnership between an unhoused community of residents and a housing outreach and support service provider. This camp is literally located on the vacant lot that's owned by California's Caltrans, which is like CDOT, right? And it emphasizes the links between transportation containment, if you think about state agencies, and homelessness, right? It's this layering that's occurring again. Another encampment site is directly behind the Seventh Street Post Office Distribution Center that, again, raised a whole community of black homes as well as commercial areas, right? This is, again, the location where in 1960 more than 400 homes and businesses were demolished to make room for that very distribution center. All right, we're going to go back to our imagination and hope that my image shows up. Okay, so let's imagine again the dystopian near future, right? So we were in the past, we got the present, we're thinking about the future. So foreshadowing this ever-expanding use of parking lots, right? And the, in the reinvention of housing options in Oakland. So let's look at, I am so sad. Oh my goodness. Okay, I cannot believe this. Where are my images? Okay, we're going to pause for a moment because you have to see the images. Okay, what is going on? All right, let's try again. They're here in my presentation. We're going to try to present. Folks in the room are also saying maybe you could share the presentation with us, and then if the images are showing up for you, we can read it. Maybe you could put it in the... Oh, PDF. I see that. Okay, let's try one more time. And then, do you guys see that? We see it now, yeah. All right. So those are tough sheds, right? So we're going back to, these are the community cabins, right? This is what they produced. Okay. So now we see that. Oh, I'm sad you didn't see the other images. Look at that. These are beautiful images. I love the pictures. Okay. And then you didn't... Okay, you saw that. All right. Now we're imagining tough towers, right? So this was another incredible image or images that Lake produced. It's tough towers in 2021. So if we think about these images, we're seeing the ways that the future folds back into the present day to depict a kind of utopianism after the end of utopias, right? So in this prophetic scene, we're examining an elaborate vertical settlement that strains against the edges of an asphalt-covered parking lot on Harrison Street in downtown Oakland. And this literally is a location I went with my daughter. We took pictures of this parking lot that exists today and Lake created these incredible images and built on this existing structure, right? Or existing space. So again, in downtown Oakland, this is tough towers, right? This modular provisional encampment for the unhoused that's administered as the logos inside the images tell us by the city of Oakland and sponsored by the Home Depot, which does distribute tough sheds as well as the tough shed company, right? So in tough towers, we're visually exacerbating Oakland's multi-million dollar expansion of the community cabins program to really riff on the likely perpetual kind of temporary housing solution that tough sheds in the community cabins program uses, right, as viable residences. Each of the tough towers, the units of the tough towers is a single tough shed that's stacked 10 stories high. These building blocks are intricately configured for structural stability. They're colorful frames connected by open stairways, billboards are cantilevered off the high units, and they advertise informal businesses. And we kind of imagine eyebrow threading or vegan tacos, right? So tough towers really is equipped with, as you see, a cell phone tower that's granting its inhabitants access to next generation wireless and broadband networks. Other kinds of technology are present too, right? A squad of golden drones hover, as you see, screening and surveilling residents and their guests. So it's easy to imagine that these are transmitting, evolving demographic data to the Oakland Police Department, which I could go on forever talking about them. All right, so tough towers is contained within its lot. It's stretching the borders but not breaching them. The towers serve as a temporary housing, like most of the emergency housing solutions proposed in Oakland over the decades. But again, imagine that this image shows us a structure that appears to be permanent, even if it's precariously so. The toughness that's ascribed to tough towers invokes this rhetoric of self-determination of resilience as well as dignity. Policy jargon that most often, other than that, functions to circumvent civic accountability and to shift the burden of resolving the city's housing crisis onto individuals and grassroots organizations who receive little more than performative assistance from above. This logo studded Oakland of the near future, really near future, looks peppy and inventive, designed forward. It seems to represent a victory for the city, which has apparently partnered with multinational businesses to offer terrific optics. It looks like a win for everyone except the people who actually live there, but so on the one hand, tough towers operates as this top-down system imposed onto its residents, who we understand have no other options, right? But on the other hand, we could imagine that the marginalized residents of this dystopian towers continues to live with the urban, adapting opportunistically to the political excesses that surround and manipulate them. All of which means that the unhoused will further adapt the structure of their settlement to discover ways to make these uninhabitable spaces inhabitable. So tough towers like the Ark is a fantasy that renders visible what present-time platform capitalism actually entails. Lake's images really clarify what's going on already, right now, exposing that which gets hidden under narratives of personal responsibility and short-term solutionism. This is what we see when we acknowledge the long deray of our ever-present past. So no official explanations have been given for the staggering 86% jump in homelessness in Oakland between 2015 and 2019. In 2021, the City Auditor's Office determined that the city lacked an efficient strategy or an effective strategy to deal with the crisis that's unfolded over these years, and it hasn't properly accounted for the declining conditions in the encampments. There really isn't a clear understanding of encampment activities. There's no budget that's sufficient to address the problems that have befallen those assembled into these communities. And really, the City Auditor's audit specifically analyzed the city's encampment management services, including its crisis response and long-term housing options, but by and large, the auditor concluded that the city is failing in its attempt to address and ultimately eradicate homelessness, at least within its city limits. So these policy prescriptions by the city and also by the county of Alameda, which in which Oakland is in, are quick fixes at best. None of them really address the long-standing political and economic issues that face marginalized groups, specifically Black Oaklanders. We can imagine that in the yet to come in which we are already living, which is also a long ago out of which we've never emerged, the most intensely marginalized residents of dystopian cities will continue to improvise, to generate opportunities, render unlivable places livable again. In doing so, they will continue to cope with the conditions generated by decisions many decades old and circumstances that are no longer clearly visible. Black migration for wartime jobs and the city's inability to house shipyard workers, the urban renewal area of demolition, the rapid construction of interstates and freeways that decimated neighborhoods of West Oakland, and the pre-pandemic jump in the unsheltered population, these histories collectively extend their temporal tendrils into the encampments across Oakland today. Through those encampments, the past of the 1940s and the 1960s and the 1990s and the 2000s continue to plot what's likely to happen in two or five or 20 or 50 years. So in looking at what's happening today, how then are we able to think about a future, right, that's already here, when it's the past that's never gone away? Honestly, clearance and containment, moving populations into particular locations and containing them there are central to urban policymaking. In the economy at large, time might have moved linearly from the post-war era to the present, but urban dynamics keep us as Black people in a cyclical routine, clear and contain. That's what's happened when the two temporalities of the way back then and the pretty soon and the two spatialities of get going and stay here collide and fuse. We are always already living out a future that was set in motion by past choices, yet this fact is constantly denied in political discourse and represented in policy decisions. Solutions end up being fetishized, yet positives as separable from still active legacies. What could seem like dry details of urban planning and economic history or like sci-fi scenarios dependent on time travel and seer-like predictions or like satirical takedowns of exaggerated corporate good citizenship. There are also mundane facts of what we see when we drive through parts of Oakland now, today. These pasts persist in the present as traces, as ghosts, as spores, half denied or invisibilized and half accepted as normal conditions of the 21st century East Bay housing economy. Once it was beat up old Victorian homes in West Oakland that were being destroyed to make room for freeways, industrial districts and surface parking lots, now the unhoused are being corralled into the same locations where those Victorians once stood. Those who were dispossessed then couldn't afford the houses now. If those buildings were still here, they wouldn't have been able to renovate them into these multimillion dollar assets. Parking lots themselves are contentious aspects of this feedback loop. They don't cause or resolve the housing crisis, but they're a tool constantly being deployed as a short-term fix for constantly presumed dearth of housing. The parking lot as an interim solution has operated in the past is operating in the present and in the future will continue to operate as a battleground where cities oscillate between clearing the unhoused away and containing them within the makeshift but impermeable borders of the lot. It's hard to conceive of the current cataclysmic conditions facing the growing unsheltered population in this wealthiest nation in the world. It's anything. I mean, we can't really think of it as anything but surreal. But the surreal is usually understood as a departure from reality as we know it. A concerted move away from the observable world. The surreal shows up as alternate or a non-reality, right? There's a narrow space between the aggressive objection of the contemporary encampment, which might seem surreal if it wasn't so normalized and the bright and unnerving Afro-surrealist exaggerations of Lake's arc or tough towers, right? One could also say that the contemporary encampment with its battered vacation campers and blue tarps and repurposed woodshipping pallets represents a grubby hypertrophy of the streamlined urban renewal vision of the 1960s and 1970s or the can-do efforts of the 1940s and 1950s. Perhaps it's time to imagine not a future divorce from the past but a layered present in which our awareness and acknowledgement can help make room for a truly radical reimagination of interior and exterior life alone. As geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes, what the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities. And I want to leave with this image that I saw on Twitter last week, which I think represents kind of our understanding of what's going on, right? So here we have someone who's critiquing, I guess, communism by showing an image from today, saying this is an example of housing plans under communism. And the reply, as you see, is actually pretty correct. This is the literal current housing plan under capitalism, right? This is existing today. So if you're going to take a look at anything, take a look at Big C Capitalism, probably a little C as well. But anyway, thank you so much. I don't know how much time is left because I was just chatting, chatting, chatting, but I do appreciate you all listening. So thank you. Thank you very much, Dr. Summers, for your talk. I think that's given all of us a lot of food for thought and created some new horizons and possibilities for how we think about a lot of issues in urban planning. So I'd like to open up the session for questions at this point. And I see the first question coming in from Stefan. So Stefan, do you want to read your question out loud or I can read it? Yeah, sure. Either one. You can read it, Carolyn, if you want. Okay. So Stefan says, alongside these future passive zones of social abandonment, and he loves the Jalbiel reference, I'm curious as to whether your research also engages more optimistic future paths for foregrounding black alternative imaginings. For example, could Black Panther histories with major roots in Oakland connect with bright aphorocerealist aesthetics of political power building with contemporary activism like in the Moms for Housing? In short, might there be experiments and possibilities of an optimistic sort from below too? Interesting. So thank you for that question, Stefan. I saw you during my presentation nodding and stuff, so I really appreciated that. So I think part of it is recognizing that we might have to upend a positive negative binary that in dealing with the aphorocereal, it's not necessarily about what's a hopeful future. It's really examining what exists currently. So in a way, having Lake produce these images was more so taking something to its extreme. Our intention for this work is, you know, what I was referencing before. We're not coming up with solutions. We are not going to be the ones fetishizing solutions as so many others do. Instead, we're calling attention to how absurd the current policy prescriptions and past policy prescriptions have been. So part of it is recognizing that the condition and crisis of the unhoused and really thinking specifically about the over population of black homeless residents in Oakland and elsewhere is a symptom, right? It is not the disease itself. It's a symptom of the disease. So if anything, we want to be able to highlight the fact that the folks who are supposed to be focused on creating a solution aren't necessarily looking at the true problem. So certainly we could look at alternative imaginings. And I think it's really important to imagine a different kind of future, but again, not to necessarily couch it and thinking about positive or negative, which I don't think you're necessarily falling back on, but I do think that acknowledging what's currently happening can allow us to say, okay, either we're going to start over, right? Which is actually what I would like, start over and not necessarily fix what's existed in the past, or it's going to be the cycle that's happening constantly. Last thing though, I do think that various histories and thinking about the Black Panther Party, thinking about moms for housing and other activities that have very much these roots in the past are important to understanding how folks are today combating various forms of racial capitalism that have put black people in particular in these precarious conditions and positions. So in a lot of ways, I do think that that kind of political activism is invaluable at the same time as critiquing a past, a long past of policy that has just not helped the people that it supposedly is looking out for. But I appreciate that question. I have a question, actually. So I read and really enjoyed your book, Black in Place, about DC. And I'm curious, well, this is actually sort of a selfish question because my favorite topic, I'll frame it in a way that makes it relevant for others too, hopefully. So I'm curious how you think some of the concepts and ideas that you talked about here might apply in DC and what about the Oakland case study you think is particular versus what might perhaps be more universal across, you know, a shared history of dispossession that most if not probably all cities in the US share with one another. I'm curious how you might apply some of these ideas in DC and how they might be different in that context. Well, thank you for reading the book. I appreciate that. So, you know, in terms of Black in Place, one of the main analytics I really work with is thinking about blackness as an aesthetic. So I talk about black aesthetic and placement and the ways that cities attempt to ultimately gentrify and push out black people by using the blackness that their bodies or culture generate to kind of create places that are exclusionary and essentially make them unwelcome. And so as it relates to Oakland and thinking more about time and temporality, you know, Oakland was another chocolate city and me growing up in Oakland really, I mean, that was my experience. Oakland was a black city. Everywhere I went, it's like I carried Oakland with me, especially around the Bay Area in terms of visiting other areas. So thinking about the emplacement of blackness in Oakland is still incredibly prevalent. You see this in the public art, you see this when people rely on the legacy of the Black Panther Party as a way to generate conversations around diversity. The Bay Area, you know, there were a former, Gene Kwan, the former mayor of Oakland, a few mayors back, was on record speaking about the fact that Oakland wasn't black, but it was diverse, right? There was this push against understanding it as a black city and instead wanting to welcome this form of diversity. And you certainly see that in DC as I discussed in the book, but in other locations, diversity is supposed to make us feel good. Black is supposed to make us in a lot of ways feel bad, but you have to have a little bit of black in order to show that you're progressive enough to invite other people into the city. Oakland is very complicated in that sense because it does have this legacy of not only kind of black pride, black culture, but also if you think about black politics and organizing and organizing outside of the state, it was really important to be disruptive. And so the state can't contain that disruption if you rely on that kind of political infrastructure that exists again outside. So with imagining the importance of community-based work, honestly, black feminism in terms of creating spaces for black people to still reside, I do think that in relationship to the book, Oakland unfortunately is further along. It's kind of, I mean, going back to actually Steffen in terms of the negative and optimistic, it's like it's really further along. The fact that the last census had the black population at 24% and that it's now at 20%, just kind of like, it just, it stuck me because I didn't expect that the numbers had dwindled so much. And why I do believe that the population is important because I do think that black people are actually remaining and making space in the city is really important to the place being open to encouraging other people. So yeah, thinking about, you know, Carolyn, I appreciate you bringing up black in place because I think honestly, like the next book was for me supposed to be more positive and focusing on the ways that black people are making space in Oakland. And then when I moved here, I was just completely depressed. It was like I need to figure out what's going on here before I could look at the ways that there's resistance and that resistance is being really adopted by the folks who live here. The last thing I'll say with my lab, the Berkeley lab for speculative urbanisms, the focus that we're really trying to draw on here is the speculative, not speculation in the sense that we have, you know, developers coming in and essentially targeting and tarnishing communities, but speculative in the ways that methods are drawn on that don't necessarily require the way planners, sorry, y'all who are trying to be planners, but the way planners have truly destroyed communities. It's creating a different language, a new way of thinking forward that enables the kind of quotidian and mundane living to emerge. Oh, an audience member. Hello, audience member. Hi, my name is Taisha and I'm a first year PhD student. And I like a way to use the imagining of the future in your research. And I think now in the sustainability research, we kind of use this approach. And I'm not sure whether you used corrective envisioning by the cities in your research. Do you think about bringing some value in the context of urban planning to use this, like a corrective and creative power of the people in this process to think of what they could imagine on the alternative instead of what planners are putting to them? Well, thank you for that question. So I mean, I think it's a good one in the sense that there is this attention to fixing what has occurred in the past, right? So that corrective component I think is important. But my concern is that going back to this concept of the symptom versus the disease. If you, I think in a lot of ways planners, like the kind of legacy of Robert Moses can't completely just be erased, you have to understand how it was able to happen. So me being in geography, it's helpful to understand the conditions that undergird what's happening, right? And I think drawing on understanding how something was able to happen can enable you to correct, right? And so there needs, in terms of imagining, you still kind of do have to go back to the past. You don't reinscribe the same thing. So it's not that you create exclusivity or exclusive conditions or that you necessarily privilege a certain group. You need to see, well, there are policies, there were structures, there were theories, there were epistemologies that were enacted in order to get us to this point. So we need to further understand what happened in order to not reinscribe those same theories, epistemologies methods, etc. So the corrective component still requires an acknowledgement as well. And I've talked to different planning groups about this and planners, the fact that we have to also let go of the concept of being an expert, especially when you're going into someone else's community. And so it's the actual living that we should care about. So it's more important, I think, to ask the people who are doing the living what is needed and then figuring out through skill what can be done versus determining what should be for a particular future, right? Correcting the past can be an important concept, but honestly learning how to work with communities I think is a much more effective strategy around that. Thank you. Thank you. Any further questions from the audience online or folks in the room? So I think we will wrap up there. But on behalf of GSTAP and the Urban Planning Program in particular, I'd like to thank you again, Dr. Summers, for your great presentation today. And we really appreciate you taking the time to share your work with us. Thank you for having me. Thanks also to everyone who attended and make sure to join us next week at the same time for our next Lips Talk by Professor Willow Langamom, whose talk will be on. She's fantastic. Good talk will be on the Fight for Fair redevelopment along Mary Lynn's purple line. So thank you again, Dr. Summers, and if the Ph.D. folks want to... Oh yeah, I'm sticking around. ...get set up there. And folks on Zoom, see you next week.