Abstract
While planning theory has long acknowledged the profession’s role in producing racialized spatial realities, few have explored how place-based trauma shapes places and affects spatial processes and lived experiences. To fill this gap, I employ my experience as a practicing planner working primarily in Black communities in Jackson, Mississippi, to conceptualize communal trauma as a place-based theory that can help planners understand how racialized communities hurt and address it. In this paper, I, first, analyze autoethnographic data as trauma imaginaries, the intersection of spatial imaginaries and trauma. From this analysis, I then construct communal trauma as harm and wrong committed against targeted racialized groups so horrendous that it induces a traumatic condition. Finally, I discuss the implications for the field of planning. I propose that identifying trauma imaginaries as an indicator of communal trauma can help planners develop trauma remediation approaches that advance ethics and justice in the field.
Introduction
As the small community center fills with residents, elected officials, and other community leaders, I grow nervous yet excited at the idea that I would be “making a difference” in my community. I had just completed graduate school and returned to my hometown, Jackson, MS, to work as a professional planner for a private firm. It’s my first public meeting in this new role, and I am eager to practice all the communicative, equity, advocacy planning techniques for citizen participation learned in graduate school. After Roy, a principal, and planner at the firm, introduced the project, I attempt to engage the audience in a fruitful discussion about improving the neighborhood. But I’m met with silence. As I survey the crowd, I see blank faces, troubled faces, and even angry faces. I grow increasingly nervous. Finally, an elderly black woman speaks, “I am happy to see a young woman doing something like this.” She points to me, “This is my first time seeing a young black woman talking about planning, and I’m encouraged, but, and I don’t mean no harm by you, but how is this gonna be different?” I stand awkwardly in silence and nod to indicate I am listening. She continues, “We have been planned and planned, and nothing has happened. Nothing ever happens on this side of town. While ya’ll [consultants, non-profits, city officials] make thousands of dollars, we still struggle. We talk, ya’ll extract; we treated like prostitutes— worse than prostitutes, at least they get paid. This community has been raped. Planning ain’t never benefited the black community.”
Although a little deflated, I understood. Not only did I learn about planning failures in Black communities in graduate school, but I lived through them. However, the metaphor of planning as a violent crime struck me as a particularly traumatic response. At the time, I did not realize that this language, these feelings, and the visceral reactions to place and spatial processes would reoccur throughout my career. Even when I moved to Los Angeles, California, a vastly different place from Mississippi, even when I talked to planning colleagues practicing across the United States, this pattern emerged. These expressions were not unique to this project; they were more than just feelings of distrust of authoritative planning, only requiring more communicative engagement (Huxley and Yiftachel, 2000). Instead, they revealed a psycho-socio-cultural phenomenon in spatial processes mostly unexamined in planning literature but impacting planning practice.
In this paper, I explore this phenomenon by engaging autoethnography. Although challenging to define because of its multifaceted nature, autoethnography always relates the personal to the social, political, and cultural (Adams and Holman Jones, 2008; Bochner, 2012; Ellis, 2004; Ellis and Bochner, 2000). I examine the psycho-socio-cultural responses, profoundly rooted in place and tied to collective memories, that emerged in my work as lead planner for the West Jackson Planning Process. 1 Voice of Calvary Ministries (VOCM), a local community development non-profit, believed that a planning project initiated from within the community could help bring much-needed improvements to the community without creating the harm done by governing agencies. In 2012, the VOCM secured Community Block Grant Funds to begin a planning process for a 4.25 square mile district encompassing over ten active neighborhood associations in West Jackson. The project aimed to identify the most productive avenues for development in ways that prioritized community voice. We cycled through phases of research, analysis, and intervention design while collaborating with the community. For over 2 years, I facilitated various community engagement processes, leaning on communicative, advocacy, and equity planning theories and my experience as a community native. Yet, all my training had not prepared me for the psycho-socio-cultural phenomenon I observed.
In employing autoethnography, I found that the interactions I experienced were spatial imaginaries that carry the hallmarks of trauma. The term trauma, originating from the Greek word, sraῦma, meaning to wound or damage, has abandoned a strictly medical context to permeate political discourse, mass media, and everyday language. It commonly refers to an event that disturbs an individual’s or collective’s well-being (Alexander, 2013: 14). I situate this work in trauma theory because I found that harms and wrongs (see Schweitzer, 2016) committed against a targeted racialized group induce traumatic conditions that impact every aspect of place production, including lived experiences. Conceptualizing these harms and wrongs as trauma helps contextualize place-based processes within national histories and provides a concept to describe psycho-socio-cultural processes happening in place.
While planning literature has long acknowledged the profession’s role in producing racialized spatial realities (Sandercock, 1998; Thomas, 1998a; Yiftachel, 1998), few have explored how communities hurt due to place-based trauma. In this paper, I first discuss the methodology for this theory-building work. Second, I present and analyze the data as trauma imaginaries, the intersection of communal trauma and spatial imaginaries. Third, I construct communal trauma as an analytical planning concept. Finally, I discuss three significant implications of communal trauma theory for the planning practice.
Motivations and methods
A few weeks after beginning the process, we initiated a steering committee made wholly of community members. Dr. Jackson, a prominent member of the community, has reluctantly joined the committee, even though she feels pressure from her local organization not to participate. We meet in her office to discuss the tension she felt around the project. “Jocelyn,” she speaks slowly and clearly, “you don’t really know this community. I know you grew up here, but you are young. Your people aren’t from here. You don’t know the history. You don’t know what we have been through as a community.” She proceeded to tell me some of the histories, ending with, “So you see, we have experienced a lot of trauma.”
After having many conversations like the one with Dr. Jackson, I began to reevaluate the planning concepts learned in graduate school. My everyday experiences in practice revealed a massive dissonance between how planning defines and situates itself and how the communities I worked with describe the profession. Planning literature addresses the “dark side of planning” by exposing the power structures (Yiftachel, 1998), discusses race injustice (Song, 2015), and more recently, exposes racialized planning that has perpetuated white supremacy (Williams, 2020). While essential contributions, assessing the field through the lens of residents whose lived experiences are directly impacted by planning decisions provides a unique set of information. In practice, I gathered valuable data to interrogate the day-to-day practice of planning. As a result, autoethnography emerges as a powerful way of knowing. In it, I honor my experience as a “complex and multi rhythmic knowledge-making space” (Isoke, 2018: 157−158) and embark on a mode of inquiry that puts issues of being into circulation and dialog (Bochner, 2012: 53).
Methods
Autoethnography is “an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experiences (auto) to understand cultural experience (ethno)” (Ellis et al., 2011). Because of the experiential nature and definitional variety inherently implicated in this method, autoethnographic processes and products look different but unite under one purpose: to advance the understanding of social phenomena (Boylorn and Orbe, 2016). In this work, I use narrative reflection informed by an interdisciplinary survey of the literature.
I begin by writing my memories, thoughts, reflections, and feelings about my observations as a planner. I ask reflective questions, such as What are the most memorable moments of the project? How did I feel then, now? How does my positionality shape my perspective on these events? Setting the narrative aside, I then read through the project archives and used open coding to identify concepts and themes. I reflexively compare the narrative to the dataset to understand and analyze the data; here, I do memory-work (Giorgio, 2013), seeing what is present, what is not, and exploring why. Next, I surveyed the literature to provide further context from the concepts, themes, and observations. Finally, after another round of coding to re-identify concepts and themes now understood through literature, I rewrote the narrative.
Through this iterative process, two findings emerged. First, the interactions I experienced held the characteristics of spatial imaginaries; they illustrate how the residents perform discursive practices that construct and shape place (Redwood Hill) and the spatial process (planning). While planners typically focus on how structural ideologies and managerial strategies shape place, spatial imaginaries strongly influence how people interact, perceive, and exist in places and spatial processes. Spatial imaginaries emerged in academic literature when Harvey (2005) applied geography to Mill’s (2000) sociological imagination, arguing that place is just as vital as biography and history in connecting individuals to societal issues. If the sociological imagination enables us to know the context by which people have social and historical meaning within their timelines (Mills, 2000), Harvey (2005) argues that this knowledge requires a spatial consciousness. Spatial consciousness allows people to understand how place influences all interactions and transactions people experience (Harvey, 2005).
While there are many varying definitions, conceptualizations, and languages describing spatial imaginaries, for this work, I define spatial imaginaries as performative discourses that construct, influence, and produce space and place and the collective understandings of place and spatial practices (Davoudi et al., 2018; Watkins, 2015). A performative discourse “materializes the phenomena it names, regulates, and constrains” (Butler, 2011). As a discursive practice, spatial imaginaries represent a place in ways that produce knowledge and construct meaning (Hall, 2017). Spatial imaginaries simultaneously materialized space and place while also being shaped and reproduced by space and place. Thus, spatial imaginaries are not merely representations of space; instead, they produce place through performative discourses (Gregson and Rose, 2000; Watkins, 2015).
Second, trauma emerged as a prominent theme throughout the narrative and archive. The data revealed three major themes that align with the characteristics of trauma: (1) disruption of time and place coordinates, (2) destruction of place leads to challenges in identity, (3) placelessness threatens the collective well-being. Despite definitional nuances across disciplines, trauma always involves a rupture affecting how people conceive, render, and experience time, identity, and place (Caruth, 1996: 3). The following narratives expose a breach in time as the presence of slavery illustrate the past is ever-present, display a rupture in identity as the destruction of place psychosomatically challenges belonging, and reveal a fracture in place as the dominating fear of placelessness shapes the planning process. These findings correspond with residents’ language and descriptions, like Dr. Jackson, who proves histories of place-based trauma during the community engagement process.
An autoethnography
Because of these two findings, I translate this data into trauma imaginaries, defined as spatial imaginaries that express, articulate, and bring forth the trauma embedded in place and spatial processes. As I embark on this memory-work, this act of witnessing (Ropers-Huilman, 1999), I acknowledge that this story does not exclusively belong to me; it is intertwined with others’ stories and contextualized by histories that link our identities, set our positionalities, and guide our interactions. Consequently, autoethnography involves relational ethics. Although the West Jackson Planning Process is public knowledge, I composite and pseudonymize neighborhood organizations and people to prevent any specific group or person from being identified. I tell of experiences with Redwood Hill, a pseudonymized neighborhood in the planning district in these autoethnographic excepts. For each of the narratives, I use existing literature to construct them as trauma imaginaries. In doing so, I establish the foundations for the concept of communal trauma.
Whose ya’ massa’?
Roy approaches my desk with furrowed brows and clenched lips and hands me a single sheet of paper. I accept the paper cautiously. Puzzled, I look at Roy anticipating an explanation. Receiving mere silence, I turn to examine the document. It’s a flyer with a cartoon image of a plantation owner. In large font, it read, “whose ya’ Massa’ 2 now?” Questions flood my mind: What is this? Who would do this? Why is my boss giving this to me? Then, I see the West Jackson Master Plan logo at the bottom of the page, and the meaning sinks in. Someone or some group had chosen to participate by critiquing the “master” planning project, using the play on words. While I applaud this sophisticated act of resistance, it bothers me. The satirical flier reveals a frustrating truth: the past is ever-present, disrupting linear notions of time-place coordinates. The legacy of slavery still haunts; no, it re-materializes as master planning becomes just another manifestation.
Shrugging my shoulders, I turn to my boss, saying, “Well, I get it. Naming the project master plan was a mistake,” but I think to myself, even though that phasing came from the funding source and community partner. But I know the wording was not the issue here, even though “master” does connote oppressive power dynamics. I know that changing the name [which we did—from Master Plan to Planning Guidebook] would not help; neither would our transparent, communicative approach nor ethical, equitable practices. I recognized a more profound issue was present.
The flier linking master planning to the U. S. slave plantation through an image of a plantation owner signaled a performative discourse that materialized planning as an act of oppression and produced the neighborhood as a place of the past, the plantation. Although this neighborhood has been owned and occupied by Black residents for over 40 years, a community-initiated planning process evokes the “plantation” as a place and time. The legacy of slavery still dominates the Black spatial imaginaries in communities in Jackson, Mississippi.
The plantation as an ever-present spatial imaginary also operates as a trauma imaginary as it illustrates a breach of time-place coordinates, one of the main characteristics of trauma (Caruth, 1996). The flier is not reminding the community of a historical past; rather, it brings forth the past and acknowledging its existence in present-day spatial processes. The trans-Atlantic slave trade dislocated people from place, destroyed cultures, and violently stripped people of identity, forcing them to into deplorable and dehumanizing conditions. In its original form, this traumatic experience ended over a century ago, yet the plantation lives on and manifests in twenty-first-century planning processes. McKittrick (2013) explains how the plantation, as a logic and geography, shapes and produces the present-day places we inhabit. Plantation futures is a “conceptualization of time-space that tracks the plantation toward the prison and the impoverished and destroyed city sectors” and explains the continuation of the antiblack violence of slavery in present-day society (McKittrick, 2013: 17). This concept helps us trace the displacement of African bodies from African soil to the present-day displacement of black bodies from black communities when that neighborhood becomes desirable to those in power. It traces the acts of dispossession of land from the bodies that called it home. It charts the intentional erasure of African culture during the slave trade to the erasure of black culture in gentrified neighborhoods. It maps the constriction of mobility on the plantation to current mobility limitations within landscapes of segregation and surveillance. Because plantation logic and geography reify in the United States’ racist structures, it invades lived experiences within black communities, making the proclamation “black lives matter” and the Movement for Black Lives necessary over a century and a half after the institution of slavery has ended.
Although many scholars hold that planning emerged as a professional field in the early twentieth century in the United States, decades after the legislation that ended slavery passed, this trauma imaginary reveals that the logic and geography of slavery connect to the present-day practices of planning. Woods (1998) asserts that slavery is one of the earliest master planning projects. It is preceded only by the “first real plan” of the colonial settler society: “the total elimination, marginalization, or exile of indigenous people,” to create a place for settlers while erasing the places well planned by indigenous people (Woods, 1998: 41). The concept of master planning and the language of “master” evoke subjugation and oppression, linking planning to the well-planned plantation, a landscape that dehumanizes, erases, and dispossesses. Thus, planning is indicted in this trauma imaginary because planning made possible, structured, and reified traumatic colonial projects.
I am Redwood Hill
By October, just a few months after the flier incident, we believed we were making headway. As we listened and responded, more and more people become open to the process. Bertha, the neighborhood association president, calls to set up a meeting about the planning process. Although delighted about her initiating contact, I’m apprehensive. A day later, she walks into our office, swaying and fidgeting. I realize this big personality with a big voice is just as nervous as I am. I think that perhaps she feels like she is on enemy territory. After exchanging southern niceties, we sit, and she looks down, then turns directly to me. She says, “We just need to know. . . we need some understanding.” I nod, anticipating her questions. I begin to restate the background and our intentions for the plan. But as I open my mouth to speak, she signals with her facial expression to let her finish. She continues, “You see, many of us have been in Redwood Hill for generations. We, our families, put our blood, sweat, and tears into this neighborhood. I am Redwood Hill just as much as I am Bertha. And many neighbors feel the same.” I sit back in my seat and take a breath as I begin to understand. This resistance isn’t personal; it is about preserving her identity.
She stiffens, and her eyes narrow. She sits up and frowns, and although she raises her voice, it shakes, “But Quick-Take 3 ravished our neighborhood.” She pauses and swallows, “My heart is heavy. We still suffer the consequences of Quick-Take. People lost their homes. I still don’t know where some of my neighbors are. We ain’t the same, and we can’t bear to go through that again. We wouldn’t survive. This would no longer be Redwood Hill; it would no longer be us.”
I exhale, “Mrs. Bertha, we are not trying to take your property.” Then I paused, unsure about what to say. How could I comfort her when I represent the very thing that destroyed a part of her community? I remembered the devastating impacts of Quick-Take. I remember sitting on the edge of the bed, watching the news with my mom. I watched residents respond emotionally as the interviewer asked about losing their property by eminent domain for future development in the location of an existing neighborhood. I remember thinking, why is this happening? This isn’t fair; this is colonizing. Has anything really changes? As this memory popped into my mind, I understand the fear and anxiety around the “West Jackson Planning Process.” She is fully engaged in resisting the project because previous planning projects had destroyed her neighborhood, challenging her and her neighbor’s identity in the process. I realized that she wasn’t being contrary or paranoid; instead, her resistance to the planning project reveals desperation and determination. A deep fear of loss is producing these visceral reactions to the planning process. She is afraid of losing her place. She is afraid of losing herself.
Bertha brings forth another spatial imaginary: belonging is placed. Her declaration, “I am Redwood Hill just as much as I am Bertha,” is a performative discourse that produces place as her identity and the identity of her neighbors. In this practice of spatial consciousness, Bertha acknowledges the centrality of place in her biography and how belonging to place is intrinsically tied to identity (Harvey, 2005). This spatial imaginary is not uncommon among many groups as scholars have long theorized the intrinsic relationship between place and identity (Price, 2013; Proshansky et al., 1976).
This spatial imaginary transforms into a trauma imaginary because Bertha distresses the rupture of identity that happens when place—and belonging to place—is violently disrupted or destroyed. This disruption of identity, the second main characteristic of trauma (Caruth, 1996), is rooted in place. In Bertha’s proclamation, “This would no longer be Redwood Hill; it would no longer be us,” she expresses the interconnectedness of identity and place and laments the devastating impact of Quick-Take. Jackson State University’s 2008 Quick-Take Plan was an effort to accelerate eminent-domain processes to take private land for a mixed-use development. While the plan failed, it forced many residents out of the neighborhood, leaving behind blighted landscapes, still unoccupied.
A psychosomatic reaction accompanied Bertha’s expression of loss, not just of neighbors, neighborhood character, or equity, but also identity. This trauma reaction to neighborhood destruction can be understood as root shock, “the traumatic stress reaction to the destruction of all or part of one’s emotional ecosystem” (Fullilove, 2016: 28). In Fullilove’s (2016) study of urban renewal, an infamous planning failure that swept through the United States, she connects psycho-physiological processes to environmental processes by asserting that if place is integral to identity, then the destruction of place is akin to the process the body undergoes when it goes into shock to compensate for the loss of fluids. Like biological systems, a person’s mazeways, the external harmony between that person and the world, experiences a shock (Fullilove, 2016). This root shock impacts the health and wellness of residents who experience this place-based destructive trauma.
Deepening this concept by mapping it onto to place, Till (2012) derives “wounded cities” as the “densely settled locales that have been harmed and structured by particular histories of physical destruction, displacement and individual and social trauma resulting from state-perpetuated violence” (Till, 2012: 6). This concept holds that the city is not merely a composition of properties; instead, it is socially and psychologically intertwined with humanity; that is, “places become part of us, even when held in common, through the intimate relationships individuals and groups have with places” (Till, 2012). When places are “wounded,” it not just a spatial or material process. It is also a psycho-socio process that impacts residents, communities, and social structures. Because this process happens in a community, these experiences are internalized as collective memory and transferred, often generationally, through communal activities. These concepts explain why Bertha’s spatial imaginary is linked to identity and the traumatic process that occurs when the psycho-socio ties to place are disrupted.
Quick- Take, ultimately a tool of planning, deeply wounded the neighborhood. Eminent domain, a controversial planning tool in the United States, erases and displaces in the name of public good. However, it is a traumatic process for those who survive it. And for black communities, who are disproportionately affected by eminent domain (Fullilove, 2016), it is traced to plantation logic, reifying the trauma of the slave trade. As such, this act not only causes a breach in place-based identity but also disrupts collective racial and cultural identities. In this way, planning influences identity-forming processes and induces spatialized trauma for communities of color.
Ain’t nobody ever planned for us
It was the day of the public meeting. After my conversation with Mrs. Bertha, Redwood Hill neighborhood leaders invited us to discuss the plan with their association, whose members have been incredibly cynical about the process. Roy and I walk into the stuffy, hot building, not sure what to expect. They greet us warmly and direct us to our seats. I wait patiently for our turn to speak, mentally tracking agenda items and comments. Finally, Michelle, the secretary of the group, introduces our agenda item. With an intensity that made me feel like I had taken the stand in a courtroom, she says, “There are some people trying to “plan” (said with air quotes) Redwood Hill. We all know what that means.” Heaving, she raises her voice, “They are planning for white people. Ain’t nobody ever planned for us or with us. They are planning for the others, and they gonna remove us. And where are we gonna go? This is our neighborhood; we worked hard to make it our home when they wouldn’t even let us on the east side. Now they want to move us outta the way. If we let them do this, Redwood Hill won’t exist anymore. We can’t be complacent about this. We must act, we must fight, if we don’t, we will disappear, and white people will thrive on our property.”
Wow, how are we supposed to follow that? I think to myself. Yet having had the conversation with Bertha, I understand where Michelle is coming from. While her body language seems intimidating and her impassioned speech threatening, I feel she is protecting her neighborhood. Again, I think about how these acts of resistance aren’t personal but indicative of the painful histories of planning and policy-making that have been so oppressive for this community. As I sit in the seat, pleading with my eyes for Roy to respond first, my thoughts shift from just getting through this meeting to how do we get through this planning process when there is so much baggage. In the beginning, I believed I could make a difference in my community. Now I begin to question the role of planning in black communities. Am I doing the right thing? Can we heal from this?
Michelle presents a spatial imaginary that discursively constructs a spatial practice, planning, rather than a specific space or place. “Planning is for white people” reveals that residents perceive, conceive, and construct planning as a practice of whiteness, 4 by white people and for white people. This speech points to how planning operates as a governing tool to reify racial hierarchy and sustain white supremacy. This performative discourse constructs a trauma imaginary because the process of planning as an exclusionary act threatens collective black being. In this way, planning induces trauma because it disrupts conceptions of place, the third main characteristic of trauma (Caruth, 1996).
While the city of Jackson’s economies and geographies make erasure seem unfeasible, Michelle’s fear is not unfounded. Across the United States, planning often leads to dispossession, displacement, and gentrification processes that erase, disrupt, and destroy Black communities. These processes are not merely coincidental; instead, they result from intentional cumulative and circular development that happens as the modern nation-state development model (Myrdal, 1962). In Winant’s (2018) analysis, development is circular in that it reiterates the cycle of racial oppression and antiracist resistance practices. Development is cumulative in that it operates in conjunction with other racial projects, past and present, to maintain racial order. In this way, racially oppressive practices and their counterpart, antiracist resistance, reifies through development practices and policies (Winant, 2018). This reification happens within and is a product of “deathscapes,” Mbembé’s (2003) term to describe postcolony. Mbembé (2003) argues that multiply concepts of sovereignty originate in and because of modernity (and the age of empire) and “to exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power” (12). The United States’ development as a (sovereign) Nation-State is a deathscape, as it is designed to institutionalize, operationalize, and produce (the imaginary of) white homogeneity—that is, white supremacy. Goldberg (2002) argues that the nation-state as a dominating institution plays a critical role in managing racial threats “through repression, through occlusion and erasure, restriction and denial, delimitation and domination” so that homogeneity can dominate (Goldberg, 2002: 33).
In the Redwood Hill spatial imaginary, reification happens in planning practices. As a tool of the nation-state, planning has and continues to enable racial hierarchy through design, policy, regulations, and practices (Huxley and Yiftachel, 2000). While the definition and boundaries of planning might differ, most theorists agree that the chief goal of planning is to “first and foremost act to improve people’s physical living conditions” (Yiftachel, 1998: 396; also see Fainstein and DeFilippis, 2015; Hall, 2014). While this goal seems promising, the Nation-State’s influence translates this goal into improving white people’s physical living conditions and thus becomes a goal to achieve white, heteropatriarchy, capitalist homogeneity (Goldberg, 2002). Thus, planning becomes one of many racial projects that has destroyed black communities’ health, wealth, and wellness (Omi and Winant, 2014).
Many scholars discuss the lasting impacts of racial segregation embedded in the landscapes of nearly every U. S., racial zoning’s impact on reinforcing a racial hierarchy, and the intentional relationship between racial oppression and housing that limits mobility (Boyer, 1986; Delaney, 2010; Lipsitz, 2011; Rothstein, 2017; Thomas, 1998b; Whittemore, 2017). Using the celebrated notion of the public good, planners impose nation-state (imagined) homogeneity, even within socially, culturally, ethnically heterogeneous places. This imposition requires violence, erasure, and removal. Planning as “an act for white people” is not merely the perceived reality of Redwood Hill but indicates how the profession has interacted with black communities throughout its history. Thus, government-sanctioned planning and development provoke fears of perceived and real threats to Black being because it changes geographies in ways that reify racial hierarchies.
The persistence of spatialized racial hierarchy reveals that planning has, at best, not addressed the underlying problems of racism and, at worst, worked to uphold racial order, rather intentional or unintentional. In this way, planning has induced trauma by causing a breach in place. McKittrick (2011) illustrates how this trauma is trapped in place by defining the black sense of place as “materially and imaginatively situating historical and contemporary struggles against practices of domination and the difficult entanglements of racial encounter” (949).
Toward a theory of communal trauma
Analyzing these experiences as trauma imaginaries reveals how racialized communities hurt and how trauma saturates place. From this analysis, I conceptualize communal trauma to understand the intersection of spatial processes and layers of trauma present in the trauma imaginaries of Redwood Hill. Communal trauma is harm and wrong committed against targeted racialized groups so horrendous that it induces a traumatic condition in which one or more of the following processes occur:
(1) It disrupts conceptions of time and place.
(2) The destruction of (the relationship to) place challenges identity, causing psychosomatic reactions.
(3) Targeted groups perceive spatial processes (planning and development) as threats to collective well-being.
These traumatic conditions exist and evolve in collective memories of racialized harms and wrongs tied to a shared identity, experience, and place, and it is worked through in everyday consciousness. I present communal trauma as a placed-based trauma to understand psycho-socio-cultural aspects of place and provide a foundational framework for communal trauma theory with four critical characteristics.
Communal trauma is not victimhood; it is a legitimate response to harm and wrong
Communal trauma does not characterize people or places as inherently damaged, resulting in retraumatization. Instead, it interrogates how racialized ideologies, policies, and practices that intentionally harm targeted communities are embedded in place and spatial processes triggering placed-based trauma with generational implications. This trauma is neither a choice nor an indication of a cultural flaw; it is not a weakness (Visser, 2015) but a natural, protective function that signals potential danger (Menakem, 2017: 7). Trauma imaginaries operate as a critical response to an event that signals a need for safety and survival. They signal that planning processes lack ethics and justice, generating communal trauma.
Thus, present in each of these imaginaries are performative discourses of resistance; the trauma imaginary itself is an act of resistance to oppressive spatial processes. It reflects these past histories and an expression of trauma through acts of resistance. Just as racial hierarchies reify through plantation logics and operations of the nation-state, “differential modes of survival” (creolization, the blues, maronage, revolution, and more) emerge and reify (McKittrick, 2013). As much as Redwood Hill is a survivor of violent planning policies and practices, it is also a geography of “survival, resistance, creativity, and the struggle against death” (McKittrick, 2013). Each of the Redwood Hill narratives indicates histories of harms and wrongs. This agency and participation are vital for planning as it reveals communal trauma through the expression of trauma imaginaries.
In the body, trauma is helpful to analyze a threat to self. However, if unaddressed, it becomes stuck in the body, never moving through and out of the body when the danger is no longer present (Menakem, 2017). Likewise, communal trauma can be trapped in place if unaddressed, resulting in ongoing trauma imaginaries. Redwood Hill is one example of how trauma imaginaries persist in racialized communities disrupting planning practice. These trauma imaginaries necessitate a conceptual understanding of trauma to understand how communities hurt and respond meaningfully.
Communal trauma is multilayered
Communal trauma builds upon psychological, collective, racial, and cultural trauma theories to understand how trauma affects every aspect of life, individual-identity (psycho), collective-social-spatial (socio), and collective-biological-geographical (cultural) processes. Psychologically, a person experiences a “wound inflicted upon the mind” because their identity is challenged (Alexander, 2013). Psychological trauma is present in Redwood Hill when Bertha is psychosomatically disturbed when discussing Quick-Take. She also communicates this disturbance at the neighborhood level, making it a collective trauma. Collective trauma emerged as a concept in the early twentieth century as researchers understood how communities could be “in shock” rather than individuals (Anderson, 2006; Erikson, 1991).
Other prominent layers present in communal trauma are racial and cultural trauma. Race and culture are complicated concepts that warrant discussions beyond the scope of this article. However, I do want to acknowledge that although they are deeply intertwined, they are not interchangeable. Yet, their traumas are very similar. Psychologists define racial trauma as “the events of danger related to real or perceived experience of racial discrimination” (Comas-Díaz et al., 2019). Racial trauma is race-based stress that describes the effect of day-to-day interactions such as microaggressions that impact racialized groups’ health and well-being. It is the stress that accompanies what Fanon (2008) describes as being black “in relation to the white man” (90).
Cultural sociologists define cultural trauma as a process initiated by a “horrendous” event that is believed to have significantly affected a cultural membership, forever embedded in their memory and permanently changing their identity (Alexander, 2013; Smelser, 2004). This process is a struggle of meaning as the event causes “an acute discomfort into the core of the collectivity’s sense of who they are, where they came from, and where they want to go” (Alexander, 2013: 19). Cultural trauma focuses on historical events that shape cultural identity.
Both racial and cultural trauma address a specific trauma that happens due to practices that impact a group with a shared physical, geographic, and social identity; thus, communal trauma encompasses both. For example, in Redwood Hill, Michelle’s trauma imaginary of planning is for white people is racial stress resulting from histories of race-based discrimination. Furthermore, the evocation of the slave plantation directly relates to Eyerman’s (2001) theorization of the trans-Atlantic slave as cultural trauma. Eyerman (2001) proposes that the African American identity would not exist if it were not for the institution of slavery. Reconstruction’s failure to successfully integrate Blacks into full citizenship ignited a fight for the meaning of memory and representation. The event of slavery caused “a dramatic loss of identity” and continues to be re-worked in collective memory (Eyerman, 2001: 1). Cultural identity is filtered and renegotiated through racialized processes. While Eyerman (2001) discusses African American identity as a cultural membership, it is also a racialized identity. African American culture is very complicated, multifaceted, and intertwined with other histories and identity-forming processes. However, processes of racialization, that is, creating the other, or as Du Bois and Gates (2007: 116−117) puts it, the marking of race “upon them in color and hair,” induces a commonality in which communal trauma operates.
Communal trauma centers the role of place in identity formation
Whether at the individual or collective level, trauma is always an identity informing process, and identity is always placed. Thus, communal trauma analyzes trauma as a spatial phenomenon. Bertha’s concern reveals the intricate relationship between identity and place. To be placed is to be located spatially, socially, and culturally (Sundstrom, 2003). Place provides kinship and belonging, critical components shaping identity. Belonging to a place is belonging to a people, having a “home” (Hall, 1995), and possessing a pastness (Wallerstein, 1991). Personal biographies are attached to place, as “we associate places with the fulfilling, terrifying, traumatic, triumphed, secret events that happened to us personally there” (Gieryn, 2000: 48). Places meaningfully shape our identities and realize our social interactions and networks, making relationships possible and allowing for community formation (Hague and Jenkins, 2004; Relph, 1976).
Communal trauma acknowledges the centrality of place in histories of racial domination. Place (space, land, coordinates) becomes a central tool of oppression, as property ownership (owning place) became synonymous with symbolic and material power and whiteness (Harris, 1993). The production of space and place also becomes the production of excluded (abnormal) and included (normal) bodies—as spatial processes essentially become an exercise of power (Razack, 2018). In Mohanram’s (1999) comparison of the spatial characteristics of the black body and the white body, the white body is mobile and unmarked while the black body is static and marked. That is, racial difference is also a spatial difference (Mohanram, 1999). This spatial distinction occurs throughout United States histories: the middle passage cargo versus the deck, the plantation slave quarters versus the big house, the surveilled black neighborhoods versus the unobserved white neighborhood.
The disruption and destruction of place is a traumatic event that shatters a community’s sense of time, identity, and place. If place plays an integral role in shaping identity, then planning is as much about shaping identity as it is about shaping place. This relationship lives within the colonial matrix of power, in which identity-making processes are processes of power (Mignolo, 2011; Rose, 1995).
Communal trauma contextualizes current events in past histories
Communal trauma fully recognizes that harmful place-producing processes do not just occur spontaneously. They are intentional acts that happen in Mignolo’s (2011) “colonial matrix of power.” Inspired by Quijano (2007), the colonial matrix of power, abbreviated as coloniality, explains the continuation of colonial power dynamics long after the destruction of Euro-centered colonialism. Coloniality holds that for all its enlightenment, modernity also produced “poverty, misery inequalities, injustices corruption commodification and dispensability of human life” through othering and racialization (Mignolo, 2011: xviii). Quijano (2007) argues that if we trace present-day resource distributions, exploitation, and social domination globally, we will find that the formally colonized populations, those distinguished by race, ethnicity, and nation, still overwhelmingly experience oppression. The social category of “race” is key to marking the colonizer and colonized (Quijano, 2007). From its inception, racial hierarchy has structured every aspect of the United States. These logics of race still operate in post-colonial societies. Within this historic context, communal trauma is produced, maintained, and reified through coloniality despite colonialism’s perceived end.
Communal trauma provides a model that can understand and analyze present-day trauma imaginaries in the context of past histories. For example, Because of the failure to mitigate the traumas of slavery, slavery appears in the Redwood Hill case. Even though laws, culture, and geography change over time, racial domination persists due to the reification of a homogenous society (Goldberg, 2002: 176). Thus, state-sanctioned racial hierarchy only mutates in response to changing social and economic structures. This trauma is not merely the history of the Atlantic slave trade that dislocated and destroyed cultures but also the continuous blow to African American cultures as they work through ongoing targeted harms and wrongs.
Planning tied to dominating government institutions, or what Williams (2020) calls racial planning, aligns with the logic of coloniality. Racial planning is both a progressive advancement of place for some and a traumatic practice of disinvestment, removal, erasure, and dispossession for others. In the United States, Du Bois and Gates’ (2007) “double consciousness” or, to center place, McKittrick’s (2011) “black sense of place” illustrate this parallel history, as black communities are constantly navigating a dual consciousness and developing strategies of resistance planning to combat racial planning. Although nuances exist in these processes across places, a “black sense of place” reveals the preeminence of racial oppression in spatial processes.
Implications for the planning field
Although communal trauma theory derives from a specific case (Redwood Hill) in a specific geography (U.S. South), it can help planners in places beyond this region understand how past histories impact present-day spatial processes. Using trauma imaginaries as a tool of analysis, this autoethnography reveals the role of planning in inducing communal trauma, showing how state-sanctioned racial planning dominates and oppresses communities. This experience analyzed through racial-state, deathscapes, and coloniality theories illustrates how communal trauma is not a phenomenon unique to Mississippi, rather a product of systemic ideologies, processes, and practices co-constructed with the modern nation-state. Therefore, racial planning enables racial hierarchy and induces communal trauma through design, policy, regulations, practices, and the field across varying geographies (Huxley and Yiftachel, 2000). Because of this pervasiveness, I offer three suggestions for how communal trauma theory can impact planning practice.
Ethical practice
Many scholars discuss the lasting impacts of racial segregation embedded in the landscapes of nearly every U.S. city. Often in planning literature, these discussions are framed as histories, past planning events from which we can learn. However, hardly any literature addresses the ongoing psycho-socio-cultural implications of past planning acts. Communal trauma helps planners understand the ever-present past and how racial planning induces a trapped-in-place trauma. If planning has induced communal trauma, as Schweitzer (2016) argues, the field has an ethical obligation to acknowledge trauma imaginaries and redress communal trauma.
Planners have the expressed goal “to maximize the health, safety, and economic well-being of all people living in our communities” (American Planning Association, n.d.). Planners also have the ethical obligation to “seek social justice by working to expand choice and opportunity for all persons, recognizing a special responsibility to plan for the needs of the disadvantaged and to promote racial and economic integration” (American Planning Association, 2016). Planners cannot realize either of these principles without addressing communal trauma because communities cannot maximize health if trauma remains present. Neither can planners seek social justice without acknowledging their role in oppression and holistically dismantling the structures that allow trauma to persist. However, acknowledging is just the first step; planners must seek reparative actions to mitigate trauma to achieve these goals.
Sandercock (2004) offers a “therapeutic planning” imagination as a means by which public institutions can undergo social learning processes in ways that elevate the position of historically oppressed voices and bodies. Schweitzer (2016) situates Sandercock’s “therapeutic imagination” in political theory to examine the ethics governing public institution planners’ role in social learning and healing. She argues that Sandercock’s “therapeutic imagination” creates an opportunity for planning to heal relationships with communities that have a collective memory of harm in ways that incite a social and institutional transformation toward inclusivity. As such, identifying injury is only one phase in restoring relationships; but planners have an ethical obligation to “remedy what harm they can as well as make a credible commitment to reform” (Schweitzer, 2016: 131). Communal trauma theory helps planners understand what harm has been committed to take steps toward remedy to achieve ethical practice.
Reparative practice
Schweitzer’s (2016) argument for restorative ethics points to the need for compensation or reparations to remedy past harms and wrongs. One approach to remedy is a reparative praxis that acknowledges induced communal trauma and involves trauma-informed and trauma-remediation practices. Reparative planning “seriously consider[s] planning’s entanglement with white supremacy” (Williams, 2020: 7). Reparative planning, as a process of transitional justice, seeks to not only redress past harms, but redistribute resources, undermine dominant power structures, and honor community agency. 5 In short, a reparative planning framework disrupts distributions for white advantage while paying for past racial injustices.
Reparative planning engages directly with communal trauma—seeking to understand and address the past and ongoing harms of racial planning through a trauma-informed lens and post-traumatic growth model. Investing in a reparative praxis is crucial for racialized communities to experience ongoing healing processes and become healthier. To do so, Williams (2020) calls for a deeply politicized “therapeutic planning” that leads to a just end. Planners can begin to evaluate how they engage with each one of these principles in their practice and begin to pivot as necessary.
Reflective practice
Communal trauma theory can provide insight for how to engage in a deeply politicized “therapeutic planning” process that leads to ethical, reparative planning and achieves the American Planning Association’s goals for planning. While the framework of communal trauma helps planners understand disruptions of time-space coordinates, the method for identifying trauma imaginaries can help planners participate in reflective processes. Through the autoethnographic process, I learned to position myself in local histories. Instead of dismissing intense, awkward, and uncomfortable conversations, I analyze them to understand the underlying issue. Through the critical and reflective process, I identified the trauma imaginaries that were impacting the planning process. Planners must engage in critical thought to identify and assess how their practices and processes uphold white supremacy and induce communal trauma.
If planners implement a reflective practice of identifying the trauma imaginaries present in the communities they work in, they can make meaning of complicated or contentious community engagement processes. By bringing those imaginaries to the forefront of planning processes to be understood, planners could implement what Sandercock (1998) describes as humanistic approaches.
Because diverse patterns of deprivation appear in different geographies, trauma imaginaries may appear different in a different context. Thus, the reflective process may look different for planners across the globe as varied modes and mechanisms of racialization manifest in other places, yet all advance the dominant power structure’s agenda. In places impacted by processes of othering and power-difference hierarchies, trauma imaginaries will be present. For example, in Jerusalem, the white-black binary does not exist in the same way as in Redwood Hill; however, the process of othering is achieved using development, planning, and housing policies to segregate groups along national, ethnic, and class lines in Jerusalem, a place radically different from Mississippi (Shenhav, 2003; Yiftachel, 2006). To abolish racial planning and move toward ethical, reparative planning, these trauma imaginaries must be addressed no matter how different they are in other geographies.
If planners reject racial planning and engage in reflective processes, the field could be better suited to address place-based trauma. Through her therapeutic planning intervention, which sought to address collective intergenerational trauma within a comprehensive planning process, Erfan (2017) suggests three ways that planning is well-suited to address place-based traumas. First, planning involves collective and public activities, making the general public relatively accessible through planning processes. Second, planning as a future-oriented practice can navigate trauma’s time-space coordinates as traces past-future relationships. Third, as applied social science, planning can ground discussion around trauma and healing in material realities of everyday life.
While planning may have the access and capacity to address place-based traumas, to do so without implementing critical, reflective processes that lead to reparative praxis could induce more harm. Planning must resist the white savior complex pervasive in planning literature and center community histories, knowledge, and planning approaches. While, as the paper outlines, planning has done much harm in racialized communities, planning history tells a story of a “heroic, progressive” field, “part of Western or Enlightenment project of modernization” (Sandercock, 1998: 3). Understanding planning in this way ignores trauma and positions the planner as the solution, which has not worked well for Redwood Hill’s black residents and other groups that have been racialized or characterized as subdominant in a racial hierarchy. Instead of positioning planners as solutions, planners must acknowledge racialized communities hold knowledge integral to liberating spatial orders. Essentially, planners can learn how to disengage from racial planning by understanding the resistance planning processes present in racialized communities. Through a critical and reflective process, planners can invest in the agency of the communities they serve to envision spaces and places that dismantle white supremacy. For far too long, planners have seen resistance as an opposition to public good and economic development when they should come alongside communities in solidarity.
Conclusion
After sitting for nearly 8 hours in our office, Clara, a vocal community member, stacked the papers proclaiming, “I think that is everything.” She had volunteered to read through the plan to fact-check and copy edit. Clara had been vehemently opposed to the plan at the beginning of the process. Fortunately, instead of withdrawing from the project, she inserted herself into the middle, correcting, chiding, and providing critical feedback. Somewhere along the way, we gained her trust, and I’d like to think in our own little way, became colleagues. Clara stood to leave, and she turned to me, saying, “this is the first time someone has done a plan in our neighborhood where we have gotten all of the raw data.” She continued, “Thank you for listening to us and for creating a guidebook instead of a plan. That is what we need, rather than someone coming in telling us how it’s going to be. I appreciate that.” I responded, “Thank you for your input. We wanted to do what is best for the community no matter the circumstances.” At this moment, I knew the actual planning interventions resulting from the process weren’t going far, but I counted it as a success because, to some extent, the community got what it needed.
While in practice, I did not fully understand the phenomenon I was experiencing, I begin to respond to the trauma imaginaries present. As a reflective practitioner, I intuitively responded to these interactions, these trauma imaginaries, in the best way possible. Our team acknowledged the community’s pain and oriented our work to their needs. We became active listeners to understand how planning has impacted the residents’ lived experiences. We engaged in ethical processes, being transparent about the data and past planning failures. We aligned the plan’s values with the community and began to resist oppressive planning structures, which meant that sometimes we were at odds with the organization paying for the plan. We even engaged in reparative planning acts such as providing monetary compensation to neighborhood organizations from the project’s funding. While we were able to achieve some measure of community trust, I believe going into the process with a communal trauma framework would have provided an opportunity to partner with the community for a healing process that could have resulted in a justice-centered approach to healthy growth for West Jackson, instead of merely providing a guidebook.
In theorizing communal trauma by analyzing the trauma imaginaries presented in autoethnographic data, I introduce an innovative way to analyze the presence of trauma in racialized communities. Trauma imaginaries and communal trauma are emerging concepts that will grow as future research seeks to understand how they operate in different places and different racialization processes. The more we understand the multilayered, place-based trauma impacting spatial processes, the better we can develop post-traumatic growth practices in collaborations with communities that can help achieve the goal of planning.
