︎ Black Urbanism: Life at the Extensions


Aug 18, 2022


Through the lens of Black and Southern urbanisms, this seminar considers how processes of re-composition, repair, and refusal that produce repeatedly mutating re-arrangements of social life might be used as a method to generate new questions about the spatial and temporal dimensions of urban change.

An entire substrate of  transitional constellations of effort, provisioning, care, and regulation operate in tandem, and sometimes in conjunction, with more conventionally organized social and political institutions. Not simply as a parallel world or a reiteration of the well-worn binaries dividing formal and informal, or separating explicit from tacit, but as a series of catalytic operations that run underneath the discernible infrastructures of urban life—operations that often are not detectable unless they are being re-arranged. While such arrangements might be understood as compensatory and adaptive, they are also conspicuously abductive. Rather than the corollary of deliberate actions, these are operations offering hypothetical propositions for how things might take place or indeed might already be taking place.


(AbdouMaliq Simone)