PLACE, SPACE, HOME
By Claire Griffith
In mid-December when I learned COVID restrictions in Copenhagen would be increased again, the first thing I did was visit a bookstore, eager for some company for the long December days ahead. Along with Rupi Kaur’s poetry (because we can all use a little more poetry in our lives these days), I brought home professor Leslie Kern’s Feminist City. She was my traveling companion as I folded up my nest in Copenhagen, stuffed it into suitcases, and reassembled it in the square, white-walled room I now call home in Madrid.
For me, these first days of arrival are always imbued with the sense that the feeling of home is something connected-to-yet-larger-than-the components that signify that this space is my home, my nest. There’s an anticipation of the warm nest-yet-to-be twinged with mourning the nest-that-was. Perhaps this space is what made Kern’s description of University of Minnesota Professor Zenzele Isoke’s research on homemaking pop.
In the midst of my own micro-scale transformation of a space to a place to a home, I wanted to understand how Isoke’s writing on Homemaking could be placed in dialogue with process of Placemaking. Placemaking, as defined by the nonprofit Project for Public Spaces [hyperlink], links creating quality public spaces which “contribute to people’s health, happiness and well being” through cooperative design processes with the community (“What is Placemaking?”).
Placemaking, according to the Project for Public Spaces is not an application which can be installed top-down in a particular place (they argue interventions in public spaces that not build social capital in the community are just “reorganizing the furniture” which does not constitute actually making a place (Kahne, 2015)).
While I think proponents of Placemaking like the Project for Public Spaces would argue that Placemaking is inherently a home-strengthening process, Isoke’s political theory of homemaking took me in other directions.
Isoke elaborates her political theory of homemaking in her 2011 article “The Politics of Homemaking: Black Feminist Transformations of a Cityscape” in which she focuses on the narratives of four Black women activists that she interviewed between 2005 and 2007 in Newark, New Jersey.
The life-work of these women reflects a narrative of Newark which affirms this place as “a home that is worth staying and fighting for” (117). In formulating her framework of homemaking, Isoke draws on bell hooks writings on homeplaces: “political spaces that black women create in order to express care for each other and their communities, and to re-member, revise, and revive scripts of black political resistance” (117).
“Homemaking, as an active form of resistance,” Isoke writes, “is more than just being attentive to and providing care to individuals. It also requires building an enduring affective relationship to the physical environment...[it] transforms the built environment of the city into a home: a place of belonging, a place of remembrance, and a place of resistance” (119). This process “is not rooted in a mere psychological attachment to the city of Newark or nostalgia, but an active and collective working toward physical, symbolic and relational transformations” of a city, grounded in the “bodily sacrifices [Black women] make in order to create, nurture, and reproduce political space” (119).
In these narratives, time is an essential dimension of homemaking: these women are embedded in legacies of political mobilization and resistance against injustice. Their practices of homemaking entail “establish[ing]new geographic relationships between the past and present, and creat[ing] new spatial possibilities in a blighted geographic area” (125). Although each of the women engaged in homemaking situated their work as activists within the larger historical legacy of Black social mobilization in Newark, homemaking is inherently future-oriented and imaginative.
I am still squaring the world I found by delving into Isoke’s writings with the initial spark that led me here. Beyond questions of Placemaking, I wonder how the context of public participation in urban planning could be reconfigured if we wiped abstractions like “urban planning or “community stakeholders” from our vocabulary, replacing it with a framework which seeks to engage in and support home-making.
Isoke does not touch on how practices of homemaking intersect with formal processes, such as planning, however I imagine, especially given the legacy of urban planning as imposing, reinforcing and perpetuating social inequalities (look for example at Emily Badger and Darla Cameron’s reporting for the Washington Post on how “man-made lines divide America’s cities,” or Richard Rothstein’s amazing book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America [side note, you can also listen to Rothstein in conversation with author Ta-Nehisi Coates]), we white people will need to do a lot of work before she, or the activists she interviews, would be willing to trust such moves as more than just equity-washing.
Especially in light of the blatant outright and tacit support for white supremacy we saw on 6 January 2020 at the U.S. Capital building, we’ve got a lot of work to do to get our own house in order at personal, professional and societal scales.
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Isoke writes with empathy and poetry, and I fear I cannot do justice to her voice nor the voices of the women she writes with/about. However, many of her writings are available for download through her page at the University of Minnesota (https://cla.umn.edu/about/directory/profile/isoke001), and I encourage you to read and enjoy her in her own words.
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References
Digital Scholarship Lab. “Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America 1935-1940.” University of Richmond. Accessible at https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/
Isoke, Zenzele (2011). “The Politics of Homemaking: Black Feminist Transformations of a Cityscape.” Transforming Anthropology vol 19 (2). pp 117-130. Many of Isoke’s publications are available for download through her University of Minnesota faculty page, https://cla.umn.edu/about/directory/profile/isoke001
Kahne, Juliet (2015). “Does Placemaking Cause Gentrification? It’s Complicated.” Project for Public Spaces. https://www.pps.org/article/gentrification
Kern, Leslie (2020). Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World. Verso, London: UK.
Project for Public Spaces (2007). “What is Placemaking?.” https://www.pps.org/article/what-is-placemaking