ABSTRACT
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, long home to a vibrant African-American community, was depicted across the media, within local policy-making, and in urban planning and landscape architecture circles as being unsustainable. On the surface, this rhetoric focused on the neighborhood’s topography and its landscape below sea level. The depth of flooding during Katrina was used as the justifiable metric and spatial logic for imagining the city without the Lower Nine.
The community’s residents, in the midst of their work to come home and rebuild, spoke against this anti-Blackness clearly and loudly. In the midst of rebuilding, Lower Nine residents used the disciplines of urban planning and landscape design and the public forums of participation to articulate an understanding of sustainability based on their own culture and history.
This chapter argues against the depths of anti-Blackness that permeate urban planning and landscape design futures. Tracing Lower Nine residents’ engagement with urban planning and landscape design as a forum for escaping the confines and logics of racial capitalism, the chapter presents a coherent understanding and critique of racial capitalism in the landscape so that we might instead imagine landscapes that retain their Blackness.
