Lance Freeman’s A Haven and a Hell: The Ghetto in Black America provides a rich historical account of the creation and perpetuation of the black American ghetto focusing on ghettos outside of the eleven states that originally constituted the Confederate States of America. The temporal scale of this book ranges from 1880 to present day, drawing deeply form primary sources including census data, newspapers, court rulings, and biographical vignettes. The book walks chronologically through the history of the black ghetto, beginning with their establishment as blacks migrate to the urban north during reconstruction to places of gentrification and displacement in the present. Through time, historical patterns emerge in urban planning policy such as redlining, segregation, and racially restrictive covenants which both concentrated black institutions and fostered a black sense of place while simultaneously being used as an instrument of oppression. Freeman’s work is illustrative of the ghettos capacity to be both self-generative and destructive.
His work resonates with the concept of a Black Spatial Imaginary, which was first introduced by George Lipsitz in his 2007 piece titled The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race: Theorizing the Hidden Architecture of Landscape. The Black Spatial Imaginary provides a lens to contemplate the movements and spatial location of black communities by engaging with past, present, and future places for blackness. Freeman, while not explicitly engaging with the racialization of space outside of the ghetto, speaks to the importance of the ghetto in establishing the humanity of blacks and providing a space to create a culture uniquely theirs. This is particularly relevant in planning as development pressures continue to displace vulnerable and minority communities. Seattle’s own Africa Town, located in the rapidly gentrifying Central District, is emblematic of this movement. As Freeman alludes to in his closing chapter, the built form of the Central District is changing dramatically, but its survival as a black-affirming neighborhood in Seattle depends on the willingness of the black community to reinvest.
Full article published in The Journal of Planning Literature