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The team received a National Endowment for the Arts grant to support cultural mapping that visibilizes hidden African American heritage and urbanism in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The goal is to develop exhibition content in support of future reparative municipal policy and planning that address the needs of an underserved Black community. Mapping communicates spatial segregation practices forced on Black communities since Emancipation in 1863, while appreciating resilient forms of Black placemaking despite injustices. The project improves models of cultural inquiry in urban design entailing social, environmental, and economic repair. Mapping is an indispensable resource for designers wanting to engage in the deep social and cultural dimensions of design/planning, and their future markets.
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Per policy expert Nancy Duxbury, cultural mapping makes “visible the ways that local cultural assets, stories, practices, relationships, memories, and rituals constitute places as meaningful locations, and thus can serve as a point of entry into theoretical debates about the nature of spatial knowledge and spatial representations.” Here, mapping narrates three themes in racialized geographies relevant to U.S. Black communities: 1) segregation by design with impacts on housing, education, health, and commerce due to the denial of private development capital and public goods/services, 2) a subaltern urbanism within the White city, including appreciation of Black institutions and placemaking, and 3) “thick descriptions” of everyday life illuminating community and environmental structure.
Cultural mapping is an indispensable design service in addressing social justice and can be used in engaging social and environmental repair—particularly important for confronting the complexities in climate change. Cultural mapping also provides a valuable framework for developing community resiliency that incorporates sustainability principles. Project planning was made possible by a federal National Endowment for the Arts grant.
Drawings describe “hypersegregation” processes that forced the consolidation of Black communities, as theorized by scholars in American Apartheid and The Color of Law. Here, de jure discrimination was constructed through federal/local governmental policy, real estate market segmentation, and societal behavior. Spatial hypersegregation—measured by meeting the dimensions of segregation: unevenness, isolation, clustering, concentration, and centralization—pushed Black lives outside the formal economy governing law, finance, and property. Multi-modal drawings, numbering more than 90, employ the “deep map” to sketch a memoir of the historic Black community along Spout Spring. Drawings combine archival materials, photographs, maps, interviews, interpretive text, and other data sets describing local segregation processes leading to serial displacement, informal community formations, and eventual erasure. Cultural mapping animates diverse data sets through visual literacies ranging from serial “filmstrip” narratives, to collages, “thick description” drawings (an invention of anthropologists) that chronicle personal contributions—ethnography or the body in space, and geospatial constructions of the community’s built environment.
Change requires storytelling. This new descriptive agency involving humanities scholars, community organizers, artists, archeologists, and architects/urban designers models an equity-based planning approach beginning with stories that build coalitions.
The University of Arkansas Community Design Center is an outreach center of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, and one of a few university-based teaching offices in the United States dedicated to delivering urban design work. Originated in 1995, the center advances creative development in Arkansas through design, research, and education solutions. Nationally recognized in public-interest design, the center has its own downtown facilities and 5-6 professional design/planning staff, some who also teach. Beyond the focus on urban projects, UACDC has developed eight place-making platforms to shape civic design and public policy at state and municipal levels. These interdisciplinary platforms include 'missing middle housing,' 'agricultural urbanism,' 'transit-oriented development,' 'context-sensitive street design,' 'watershed urbanism,' 'big box urbanism,' 'smart growth' and 'low impact development,' vocabularies which are locally articulated but hold universal currency.
