By Gloria Alamrew

Architecture, at its best, expands. It can reveal the heights of our imagination, reaching upward and spreading outward. It can tell the stories, old and new, of people and time and desires. But for some, architecture can also erase and hide; it swallows entire communities whole. It can push people out. Buildings become forts, impenetrable to those who dare to ask why they’re not being allowed in.

There is an uprising occurring across our continent. With Black Lives Matter movements entering mainstream consciousness, Black people are holding a mirror up to every institution we hold as true in this world. And it is through this mirror that we are showing our counterparts that we don’t see ourselves in this world. Architecture is surely not immune to this study of reflection.

Buildings are often mistaken as ubiquitous tools of function. But we know this isn’t true. They house people, communities, businesses small and large. They hold ice cream parlours and barbershops and skating rinks. They are our churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples. They are hospitals, home to life and death, and all the in-betweens. And indeed they are, often, the in-betweens themselves. They are the structuring nodes of a built environment that surrounds us in buildings and non-buildings, spaces and non-spaces: our parks and community gardens; streets and boulevards and statues; train tracks turned into milelong walkable paths of urban jungle, elevated into the skies, for all to enjoy. But who is all? The mirror being held up has historically been too small for all. There is a reckoning happening in the world that is asking us to question who lives just outside the edges of the mirror. Who is holding the mirror up? And in the world of design, those same questions apply.

Who exists outside of the spaces we have built?

Who have we pushed out?

View of Hogan’s Alley, Vancouver, British Columbia, 1958. Photograph by Major James Skitt Mattthews. Courtesy of City of Vancouver Archives AM54-S4-: Bu P508.53

Through the lens of a global pandemic, we have all learned, firsthand, what it means to fear open space. Seemingly overnight, we were confined to our homes. Excursions to the grocery store were exercises in public safety and anxiety management. We had questions about everything: How close should we be to each other? Can we still go for our daily walks and runs? Will our parks stay open? We called it a shut down, bemoaned the fact that everything was “closed,” but was it? The world for the first time was truly open. Streets and buildings and parks were empty. Hollow beacons to nothing. We felt cabin fever almost immediately, rueing the days when we could go for brunch and get haircuts. We finally understood, even if momentarily, that space only functions optimally if it serves all of us. Imagine that for a moment. Entire cities and nations effectively shut down and sealed themselves off because we understood that there was an imminent threat to all of us.

But what about the threats that aren’t labeled pandemics? What about the threat that lives in the DNA of everything? A threat so insidious and so imperceivable and so indistinguishable from its host that it seems virtually impossible to eradicate—this is the world that Black people are forced to occupy. A space that we can’t quarantine from, a space where masks are ineffective and vaccines prove useless.

The age of the cell phone has provided us with countless examples, on film, of Black people being what I like to call despaced—targeted attempts at forcibly removing Black people from spaces where we are deemed not to belong. We have watched as Black people have been harassed—and even killed—in public spaces. Whether it’s a Starbucks manager calling the police and having two young Black men arrested (their crime: not ordering anything), or a white woman calling the police on Christian Cooper when he was bird-watching while Black in Central Park, or Ahmaud Arbery, who was followed, attacked, and shot to death by a father and son duo while he was jogging, there is a message being relayed to Black communities: You are not welcome here.

Christian Cooper’s story feels particularly cruel, given that the only reason Central Park—designed by the nineteenth-century urban planner Frederick Law Olmsted—exists today is because of the extermination of a Black community known as Seneca Village. More locally, Hogan’s Alley in Vancouver was also home to a thriving Black community before being destroyed for the construction of a freeway in 1970. For nearly six decades, the neighbourhood consisted of Black homes, businesses, and the city’s only Black church. This once uniquely Black community, already inequitably restricted to the inelegant confines of an alley before its demolition, remains the last predominantly Black neighbourhood in Vancouver to date. Discriminatory design is an iterative process, it begins with a bang—the violent removal of entire communities— then twists and turns into more palatable language: “urban renewal,” “neighbourhood rejuvenation,” “livability factors.” These policies and strategies are not new; they’ve merely gotten bolder, sharper, prettier to look at, and easier to digest.

| Map of the lands included in the Central Park, from a topographical survey, June 17th, 1856; [Also:] Plan for the improvement of the Central Park, adopted by the Commissioners, June 3rd, 1856. Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, The New York Public Library. Courtesy of New York Public Library Digital Collections — Map of the lands included in the Central Park, from a topographical survey, June 17th, 1856; [Also:] Plan for the improvement of the Central Park, adopted by the Commissioners, June 3rd, 1856. Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, The New York Public Library. Courtesy of New York Public Library Digital Collections

When we reckon with the facts that Black people are over-policed and live under massive surveillance, we have to wonder if slogans like “cities for all” are really true. Keeping Black people out has been literally designed into the very ethos of entire cities. The mirror being held up is showing you that design is, indeed, designed. Anti-Black policy lives in every part of urban infrastructure: neighbourhood zoning, housing, access to transportation, schools, and healthcare. The de-spacing of Black people has been written into our history. Once you look into that mirror, you can’t unsee it.

So Black people build our own worlds. Not out of brick and mortar, but out of people, in the ether that is the digital world. Both familiar and unknown, we turn to these online spaces and build communities of healing. Quarantine during a global pandemic has pushed us all deeper into an over-dependence on technology. FaceTime and Zoom hangouts appear as standard fare now. But for Black people, they signify something else. Technology has put on full display, for the entire world, our unedited, raw trauma and grief. Having to watch people that look like you continue to be murdered, on a seemingly endless loop, can breed contempt for that very technology. Many of us refuse to watch the videos, not wanting to subject ourselves to yet another example of how easily we can be removed from this world.

But when we still cannot physically gather in meaningful ways, we use the technology to our power. Black people are the most innovative designers, builders, and community-makers that I know. We understand that when the streets can’t hold us, we can. We understand that by going inward, into these digital spaces, we can build worlds that you can’t see. Our churches are now Zoom get-togethers where Black folks hold space for each other, where we can laugh and grieve and pray together. Our museums are Instagram accounts dedicated to displaying the glory that is Black art—created by and for Black people. Our parks are the group-chats where we play and remind each other to breathe. Our statues are what we see when we hold the mirror up to each other, and affirm one another with the words, “I see you.” We are reflected infinitely. There is no end to us.

Black Stories in the Digital Space, Instagram, 2020. Screenshot taken from @gumbomedia

In our digital spaces—planned, designed, built, and inhabited by us— we find refuge and reprieve. While we strive to tear down the old, physical manifestation of a world that was never designed nor built for us, we remind each other in the digital realm that we are always still fighting, we are always still building—we are still here. We offer up blueprints for a world on the outside that can reflect this inclusivity. A world where Black people can go to Starbucks, or birdwatch, or go for jogs and be safe. A world where pushing us out is considered poor design.

The context of quarantine has pulled back the curtains on just how vast this world really is. Depleted of people, we’ve seen now that there has always been room for all of us. The larger global community ceased operations because of an understanding that space only functions optimally if it serves all of us. Our new blueprints echo that same message: make it work for all, or we will tear this one down, too.

The mirror is being held up to you. Will you look?

Bio

Gloria is an Edmonton-based, Ethiopian-Canadian writer and editor. With a background in philosophy, her writing focuses on critical analysis and centres around Blackness, culture, and womanhood, and the myriad ways they intersect. You can find her work in Huffington Post Black Voices, FLARE Magazine, Zora Mag, Bustle, Avenue Edmonton, and CBC Arts, among others. When she's not working, writing, or fulfilling her duties as an editor on the Gumbo Media team, she is most likely tending to her indoor jungle of over 30 plants.

By Gloria Alamrew

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