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The Importance Of Owning Physical, Black Spaces For Our History, Creativity & Future

I’ve been thinking a lot about space, the politics of it, who owns it, how do different people access it. I’ve been thinking about space from a historical perspective, in particular, the urgency for safe Black sanctuaries in charged and violent times.

Throughout history, our very towns and cities have been designed to uphold structural inequality. In the United States, ‘redlining’ is a form of discriminatory practice, marking out areas where banks avoid investments based on certain areas and demographics, leading to the systematic denial of various services to working-class citizens and (typically) communities of colour; services including banking, insurance, health care and affordable, healthy food. Redlining and similar discriminatory practices like zoning have served as significant contributing factors to urban decay, racial segregation and further marginalisation.