December 13, 2024

Historian and urbanist J. T. Roane’s debut book Dark Agoras traces Black worldmaking practices, socialities and spatial politics from the enslavement-era rural Upper South to twentieth-century urban Philadelphia. Roane takes readers through geographies and communities connected by the Great Migration, the mass movement of Black workers from the rural South to the urban North. For Roane, dark agoras are the gathering spaces enslaved and working-class Black people created beyond institutional surveillance and control. Drawing on analytical frames from Black, Indigenous, religious, phenomenological, geographic and ecological thought, Roane brilliantly makes visible the Black worldmaking practices that have always existed alongside and in tension with the plantation and the capitalist city. This work is vital in a moment when much urban history focuses on structures of oppression. Critical scholarship of this type is vital for understanding how the production of American urbanism is entangled with racism (see for example Rothstein, The Color of Law, 2017). But critique has its limitations, and it can overstate oppressive systems’ relative power and success. Attending to historical resistances and alternatives, as Roane’s book does, can expand pathways for design actors to maneuver within these systems.

Roane’s book, then, is an important project of recovery. He highlights a continuous tradition of Black spatial practices from a broad range of sources including land records, first person accounts, city planning records, designerly publications, police records, personal papers, popular songs lyrics, court testimony, archived correspondence, sociological reports, and mainstream and Black newspaper accounts. The work draws on and joins a lineage of Black feminist literary and historical scholars by reading against the grain of the archives, reframing spatial practices described in official sources as “deviant” or “criminal” as windows into alternate lifeways amid extractive systems. By attending to social-spatial traditions historically rendered illegitimate, Roane helps extend ongoing conversation between design, imagination, everyday practice and justice (a few examples include Benjamin, Imagination, 2024; Costanza-Chock, Design Justice, 2020; and Wilkins, The Aesthetics of Equity, 2007) from an eco-historical perspective.

In chapter 1, Roane explores Black life on antebellum Chesapeake plantations, centering ecological and social relationships mobilized through everyday practices. Roane uses the word plot to describe and draw together a multitude of practices that enslaved people devised in order to, at least fleetingly, enact alternative values around resistance and spiritual and physical sustenance under the acute violences of slavery.  He elaborates plot’s multiple meanings to highlight a set of related practices grounded in rural plantation life: plot as space of interment after death; plot as site of ecstatic spiritual congregation partially outside of white oversight; plot as garden parcel that prioritized physical and social sustenance over profit; plot as a set of practices extended to the regional landscape through intimate knowledge of land- and waterscapes; and finally plot as a mode of insurgent cartography—modes of place-knowing through which enslaved people exercised ways of being that worked at cross purposes to the logics of the plantation.

In chapter 2, Roane elaborates how Black migrants transposed and adapted the various practices of the plot from slavery through emancipation, and from the plantation South to the urban North. He selects from land tenancy records, first person narratives and blues lyrics to compose a picture of migratory and practical connections between Southern rural and Northern urban contexts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He organizes this description by naming and describing two overlapping but distinct domains of Black migrant placemaking in Philadelphia: the underground (the vernacular geography of on-street sociality and taprooms), and the set-apart (the world of ecstatic religiosity within storefront churches, street revivals, temples and mosques). He terms the relationship between these two spheres Black queer urbanism: the underground and the set-apart are held separate but connected as counter-traditions of imagining and living the city.

Chapter 3 turns briefly to the systems, structures and players of the dominant modes of mid-twentieth-century city development and governance. The chapter shows how reformers’ reports, public discourses and design projects produced a vision of “slums” as a foil to mid-century utopian visions of the city. Architects, engineers and planners manufactured the “slum” as backward, unhealthy and delinquent, constructing an urban “other” from which the heroic utopian planner-architect could “save” the city by increasingly technocratic means. Roane describes public housing projects in Philadelphia from the late 1930s to the 1960s as examples of how mid-century reformers attempted to socially engineer the city, incorporating spatial logics of able-bodiedness, normative gender roles and surveillance mechanisms into the design features and social terms of housing provision. He also sharply observes that by the 1960s, these pathologizing “slum” narratives served as a cultural smokescreen for a program of urban clearance which was as much about price stability of urban land as it was about concern for the public good. While this chapter is the shortest in the book, it is a significant contribution to a growing body of scholarship that illuminates the racist normativities that structured mainstream design traditions. However, Roane’s attention to primary sources leaves much room to bridge his analysis to critical histories within architectural and planning history (examples include Cheng et al., Race and Modern Architecture, 2020, and Thomas and Ritzdorf, Planning and the African American Community, 1997).

The remaining chapters return to the genealogies of Black migrant placemaking in Philadelphia, drawing together a trio of twentieth-century movements as key inheritors and elaborators of “the plot.” Roane highlights actors who retooled existing architecture rather than building anew to experiment with social arrangements that ran counter to the dominant social values of the times. Chapter 4 describes the Peace Mission Movement’s reinvention of an existing building complex as a social institution, the Divine Lorraine Hotel. Adherents retooled the edifice to model collective abundance structured by a partial rejection of patriarchal family structures using boarding rooms and the hotel’s banquet tables to reconstitute relations among worshippers as siblings-in-worship who related to one another horizontally as a collective of chosen kin. Chapter 5 reads against the grain of police reports and mainstream newspapers to highlight how residents claimed space they did not technically own through appropriation of the stoop, street and rooftop during the 1964 “riots.” Finally, chapter 6 explores the Black liberation group MOVE’s reconfiguration of row-houses in West Philadelphia into a zone of Black separatist autonomy and radical communitarianism. Roane admits that his accounts of these movements should be understood amidst the critical analysis of these examples from other texts to avoid glossing over of the imperfections of and power dynamics internal to these movements. To architects who may not have encountered discussion of these particular examples in their training, this is a caution to ensure that these efforts are not read as perfect models, but instead seen for the value of attending to the everyday people, practices and spatial strategies hidden in plain sight.

In sum, Roane’s Dark Agoras highlights a portal for design practice: a tangible tradition of world-building that works at cross-purposes to top-down imaginings of the contemporary city.  How should designers rethink their roles in light of the worlds everyday people have devised from below despite, within and against systems that oppress? And what approaches, methods and skills should designers leverage and develop to become coconspirators with placemaking traditions from below?

Alissa Ujie Diamond is an assistant professor of urban and regional planning at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Her research and teaching focuses on histories of spatialized inequity and developing rigorous methods for imagining systems change in the contemporary world.

https://doi.org/10.35483/JAEOR.12.13.2024