Are gateway communities facing a new urban apartheid? lessons from Chelsea, Massachusetts

The Black radical tradition (Robinson, 2000) has recently re-energized the urban geography and planning debates, pushing for antiracist and counterhegemonic spatial practices. Along these lines, Roy suggests stepping away from displacement and gentrification jargon and switching attention to processes of dispossession and racial banishment as primary reconceptualization driving relevant ontologies and epistemologies of resistance (Roy, 2019). This conceptual framework leads to the investigation of how state power and planning practices dispossess and deprive racialized bodies – Black, Brown, and Indigenous individuals – of their place, identity, inner-self feelings, and emotions. In this paper, we are interested in exploring the nature of adaptation planning practices designed in the face of climate change. In this particular realm of planning practice, we want to step away from the mainstream conceptualizations of green gentrification and displacement. Instead, we aim to look at the role of planning in producing urban change that intentionally excludes racialized bodies. By building on existing literature on climate apartheid focused on the connection between climate change effects and initiatives and the segregation and exclusion of disadvantaged populations (Rice et al., 2022), we argue the existence of a new urban apartheid. We draw from Davidoffs’ initial definition of urban apartheid applied to planning to probe the intentional use of public planning to discriminate against specific communities using de jure and de facto discriminatory planning practices (Davidoff & Davidoff, 1970). We advance the argument that adaptation planning uses implementation tools that determine the segregation of certain racialized bodies over others. We make this argument by drawing from in-depth interviews, community engagement workshops, and engaged learning pedagogy experiments designed as part of an ongoing research process in the City of Chelsea, one of the many gateway communities of the Massachusetts Northeast Coast. From a planning perspective, countering this new urban apartheid we suggest requires new ways to engage racialized bodies in collective actions counterbalancing racist planning practices. This horizon of work challenges the ongoing enthusiasm over academic scholarship aiming to empathetically support existing antiracist social movements. Instead, it suggests that a mutual transformative relation between researchers and racialized bodies should be at the core of any antiracist academic enterprise to build movements toward change. The paper draws from the increasingly eclipsed US progressive planning tradition (Angotti, 2011), which has historically combined forms of libertarian pedagogy, social mobilization, and the construction of post-modern epistemologies to shape intentional and collective actions for empowerment (Reardon, 1998). References Angotti, T. (2011). New York for Sale: Community Planning Confronts Global Real Estate. MIT Press. Davidoff, P., & Davidoff, L. (1970). Opening the suburbs: Toward inclusionary land use controls. Syracuse Law Review, 22(2), 509–536. Reardon, K. M. (1998). Enhancing the capacity of community-based organizations in east St. Louis. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 17(4), 323–333. https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X9801700407 Rice, J. R., Long, J., & Levenda, A. (2022). Against climate apartheid: Confronting the persistent legacies of expendability for climate justice. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 5(2), 625–645. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848621999286 Robinson, C. J. (2000). Black Marxism: the making of the Black radical tradition. Penguin. Roy, A. (2019). Racial banishment. In Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode at 50 (pp. 227–230). wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119558071.ch42