I don’t think my written review or this handy meme summary can adequately convey how important this book is to my ongoing understanding of urban planning under neoliberalism, and the many ways our field fails Black people relegated to the margins of gentrified cities.

In Black in Place, Brandi Thompson Summers catalogs the “ongoing neoliberal project” of the H Street NE corridor in Washington, D.C. The corridor has had many lives, including its current gentrification following years of disinvestment. I was most struck with her definition of H Street as “the most ordinary of D.C.’s riot corridors.” While this is not the core focus of Thompson Summers’ work, I think she offers one of the most nuanced histories of the 1968 uprisings I’ve seen, going to great lengths to explain the underlying conditions that led to the riots as a meaningful act of political protest, despite our media’s longstanding sensationalist coverage of urban rebellions. The 1968 riots are particularly formative in Thompson Summers’ history of H Street, as they led to much municipal handwringing, aka numerous plans and reports about how to rebuild the corridor.

I think Black in Place has an incredibly useful response to a pressing question many planners ask when working in “overplanned” communities like H Street: if all these plans, revitalization projects, and community visioning exercises have occurred, why are the only “effective” plans the ones that led to gentrification? The answers are damning, but also illuminating if we hope to do better moving forward. H Street’s most recent set of revitalization plans took place during the advent of the urban tourism industry, which thrives on a cultural economy. In the cultural economy, cities attract residents and tourists by commodifying their various cultures into “authentic” experiences designed for elite consumption. This rampant commodification of all elements of society is essential to neoliberalism, another core “reason why” the current H Street plans were effective. In the neoliberal city, DC leaders and developers formed public-private partnerships that primed neighborhoods for speculative reinvestment and the production of “authentic, diverse” spaces. :( On H Street, these public-private partnerships came with significant capital to move the needle on the corridor’s development trajectory, such as tax increment financing dollars, Great Streets investments, and other funded plans. As broader societal changes made it profitable to invest in H Street, all of a sudden, there were few of the “insurmountable obstacles” that hindered revitalization plans in earlier decades.

For those working to decode the co-opted language of urban redevelopment, Black in Place offers the incredible gift of translation. Black in Place clearly defines the terms, logic, and value systems of the “neoliberal project of gentrification.” In this project, diversity transitions from a social justice ethic to an aesthetic lifestyle amenity, at the same time that DC itself is transitioning from “a chocolate city” to “the city of amenities.” When quoting developers, elected officials, planners, and other key players in H Street’s gentrification, Thompson Summers makes it clear that these players are defining “growth” as profit, “success” as higher occupancy rates or property values, and “diversity as the disinviting of Black residents.” Thompson Summers correctly illustrates how diversity is operationalized in neoliberal cities as a race-neutral policy that is the “healing” solution for black space, by giving it a “proper use.” This helps us understand the moralistic framing of many gentrifiers, planners, and developers, who see enforcing “diverse” aesthetics on (formerly) Black space as a “cure” for government disinvestment. Thompson Summers even has a term for this: black aesthetic emplacement, “a mode of representing blackness in urban capitalist simulacra, which exposes how blackness accrues a value that is not necessarily extended to Black people.” In layman’s terms, black aesthetic emplacement is the process by which cultural and spatial creations of Black people are depoliticized, airbrushed for their most exceptional histories, made into an aesthetic, and then sold to the highest bidder. This process is intended not to provide Black people with “cultural capital”, but to achieve raised property values and other neoliberal measures of success, while simultaneously displacing the very people who contributed to said success.

This pattern of displacement applies to both Black residents of H Street, and the nuanced Black history of the corridor. This book describes the historic preservation and cultural tourism initiatives on H Street, which have in effect created an “official history” for the corridor rife with nostalgia. Thompson Summers lays out how in this function, nostalgia replaces nuanced memory, by creating a neighborhood that had a “momentary period of black degeneracy” in between its past and future (present?) glory. This is tied to the tourism industry’s push towards the Disneyficiation of cities, and the idea that the core urban problem is “an image crisis that needs to be fixed”, not rampant disinvestment in Black spaces and exploitation of the Black people living in them as part and parcel of racial capitalism. The revisionist official history of H Street indicates *which* Black histories preservationists seek to return to: often, “approachable histories” of respectable or exceptional Black people. These histories are often considered the “heyday” or “golden era” of a neighborhood. Thompson Summers posits that by working to preserve/officially mark “the heyday” of a community, we’re ascribing a moral and financial value to a certain time period, and negating other time periods marked by disinvestment. This made me question how my own support of historical preservation work may be playing into this value system, which at its worst, can justify gentrification and displacement as a way to “return the community to its former glory.”

Black in Place also takes up a key question for planners in “the city of amenities”: what does authenticity even mean?!? In Thompson Summers’ definition, authenticity was created on H Street at least in part by commodifying Black cultural signifiers as part of a “diverse” corridor grounded in white spatial comfort. H Street’s “diversity” can become an amenity due to the abnormality of any kind of integrated space in American life. In this way, H Street serves as an example of Elijah Anderson’s cosmopolitan canopy, a “self-contained, social, exceptional space where people interact easily and ‘appreciate’ diversity.” In the cultural economy, these cosmopolitan canopies are amenities for elite consumption. In Thompson Summers’ description of how the annual H Street Festival is a prime example of this consumption, I was struck by how she laid out the neoliberal logics undergirding this festival in its current form--it functions as both an open house for potential investors, and a “guilt eraser” for white gentrifiers given the manufactured showcase of diversity.

Black in Place drives home that this diversity is manufactured through the intense surveillance and containment of Black mobility on and through H Street. Thompson Summers uses the H Street streetcar as an example of how modern transit investments are often less concerned with benefitting the needs of transit-dependent riders, and more concerned with providing amenities to support transit-oriented development, which is known to increase property values. With this framing she captures the two transit systems on H Street: 1) a “streetcar to nowhere” that primarily functions as an investment vehicle, and 2) a major transit hub where riders can transfer between a number of different bus routes, but are policed if they linger in “the wrong ways” as they move through H Street. This duality extends to the entire corridor, where elite actors are committed to “unseeing” Black people actively being displaced or marginalized within the corridor. Unseeing is a really dynamic concept: it allows new residents and visitors to “unsee” the Black poor in order to maintain the myth of gentrification as healing a place; it allows historians to “unsee” Black histories that are less respectable, thus absolving the state of its role in disinvestment; and most crucially, actors can “unsee” what Thompson Summers calls the “excess of blackness” left after black aesthetic emplacement has its way.

So, where do planners go from here? In her conclusion, Thompson Summers points to recent uprisings in post-chocolate cities as a guide--she’s centrally asking what we can learn from people’s movements that are imagining and building new ways for us to be in relationship with the land and with each other. I’m currently learning from housing justice organizers here in Raleigh, and this has been invaluable as I work to improve a field that rarely designs policies to center people on the margins of planning. I’m also mindful of Thompson Summers’ note to avoid the logic that “people with problems are problems”, as it’s a mentality that allows displacement to be seen as a “solution” to a space’s challenges. I think housing-first models are great examples of rejecting this mindset in our work, as are planning interventions that take housing out of the speculative market--as Black in Place notes, the market incentivizes gentrification and displacement due to its unending need for higher property values. I look forward to being a continual student of cooperative economics and social housing models that resist commodification of housing and neighborhoods, in hopes that I can better advocate for these models in my work. Finally, as a Black planner, I have a distinct responsibility to ensure my work is accountable to and supportive of the vast Black communities where I am living and working. I’m thankful to be growing my network of Black planners who are equally committed to building our politics and ethics as practitioners, including through my firm’s Black Employee Resource Group, who I will be discussing this book with very soon! I think Black in Place underscores how essential it is that Black planners interrogate our roles in the development process, lest we become “ideal Black neoliberal subject[s]--monetizing Black history while at the same time attempting to increase investment dollars...thereby defining the successes and failures of Black [communities] according to the logic of the market.”

In summary: I would highly recommend this book to any planner, as I think our field has much to learn from Thompson Summers’ strong sociological and aesthetic critique of the communities we are shaping. In the urge to move away from “overplanned” communities and towards equitably planned ones, I think it’ll be essential to understand the limits of diversity, and the dangers of capitalizing on the cultural economy.