Part 1: 

Twelve people pose in front of The Renaissance Mural, honoring the Bronzeville community’s rich history and bright future.

In the historic neighborhood of Bronzeville lives data artist and urban planner, Chandra Christmas-Rouse. Sharing a mutual interest for temporality, it becomes apparent that Chandra’s attentiveness towards spatial agency in regard to contemporary and future manifestations of the Black imagination is the impassioned epoxy made in response to socio-political disinvestment. As we begin our conversation, it’s impossible not to feel a radiance of hope emitting from Chandra’s verbal potency. Our discussion starts with the literary infrastructure that continues to shape her ongoing practice today. 

Chandra Christmas-Rouse: Saidiya Hartman’s theories around critical fabulation really inspired my desire to interrogate the multiple histories that exist within the neighborhood of Bronzeville, in the pursuit of planning multiple better futures to exist. I was able to take a lot of the more popular depictions in the archive of the neighborhood, zoom out, and start to imagine, question, and critique who else lived there that wasn’t being captured in more traditional documentation methods or institutional archiving methods. 

The work of Dr. Margaret Taylor Burroughs—how she had the vision to utilize her private home in Bronzeville as a public collection of black history and black artistic artifacts inspired me as well. This is often a case study that I lift up in my work about what’s possible when we blend public and private space more, when we think about what types of urban planning policies and regulations will better center the traditions and values and cultures of communities.

In relation to urban planning and development, I am interested in what spaces in this domain embody these principles and how their communal utility is critically viewed today. Chandra continues, listing various ones that, based on experience, serve as a North Star towards the future she would like to see: 

C: The Bronzeville Kenwood Mutual Aid Network, like many of the mutual aid type initiatives and collectives that were particularly prominent during the start of the pandemic, for example. I want to see more spaces that reflect those values of cooperative economics and more communal aspects. Those are one type of space that I did a lot of imagining around and brainstorming with community about. What are the elements that bring people to act as  tenants of mutual aid and of a space that reflects those values? 

Another space that’s really important to me is using our transportation infrastructure as a kind of community network. There’s been a lot of talk about the removal of benches and shelters from bus stops. I would love to see more community-oriented infrastructure around the bus lines and transit lines in the neighborhood. 

Senior Workshop in May 2021

Lastly, I would say, more spaces that center intergenerational conversations. I had a big focus on elders and youth in my work and what it takes to develop shared language between these groups and bring them closer into community. Organizations and schools that cater to the needs of youth and thinking about public safety. Senior housing, buildings and neighborhoods, I think are other spaces that model it (in terms of a blueprint for what it looks like to create those spaces). 

One group whose work I have returned to a lot is called BlackSpace. They’re headquartered in New York City, and they’ve created a manifesto that I think has a lot of the principles and values that I look to in order to cultivate these types of spaces. 

Like the various spaces Chandra mentioned, she views Threewalls as another important example of guiding organizational support within public space and development. We speak further on the shifts that have occurred in her practice during her time at Threewalls, and the impact of its structural values. 

C: One of the biggest values I gained at Threewalls was the ability to learn from such a diversity of perspectives, and different creative practices. I feel like my work was able to expand by learning how to communicate my work to different types of audiences. That felt really valuable for me. I also think I kind of entered this space thinking that my final chapter of this work would be very much an activation of space, which I did at the end of my fellowship. But I then made the decision to create a book project as the final chapter of something that folks could turn to, to see new ideas and [have] a conversation starter beyond a more temporary space like the event that I hosted. I think that was a shift from how I entered this space, thinking that I would close out this work versus where it’s at now. Now, I think a lot of my focus really is on maintaining the relationships and connections that I’ve built to youth and elder focused organizations and how to continue to cultivate connections to those spaces. 

I think what really anchored my work was this accessibility manifesto that I had developed at the beginning of my fellowship. It’s really been a blueprint for how I put care, specifically around access into practice and to hold myself accountable and practice this work in public. It’s one way that my work and practice are anchored in care through their influence and that guiding document. I also think about how much of the work that I do is trying to help people see their relationship to space and to each other differently. To approach a relationship differently requires a lot of compassion and empathy. Part of that work starts with how we give that to ourselves. Being able to really help people trust their own imagination, what they want their space to look like and how that then relates to their ability to trust and care for others. I think that’s another way that I think about how my work can be more anchored in care as a practice. Through access and the ways that folks are relating to themselves with grace so that they can move in more compassion with each other, really helps people move between this space of healing and dreaming. It’s something I come back to often—of how I am helping to facilitate someone’s journey to move between those spaces and what does it take to do that with ease.

Related Links:

Saidiya Hartman interview with The White Review

History of the home of Dr. Margaret Taylor Burroughs 

Block Club Chicago and CBS news on the removal of benches at bus stops

BlackSpace Urbanist Collective

Related Links

• Saidiya Hartman on critical fabulation with The White Review
• History of the home of Dr. Margaret Taylor Burroughs
• Block Club Chicago and CBS news on the removal of benches at bus stops
• BlackSpace Urbanist Collective