Seattle Black Spatial Histories Institute

Since 2021, I’ve been grateful to be a collaborator (or perhaps a spatial and pedagogical consultant? We’re still figuring it out!) within a project called the Seattle Black Spatial Histories Institute (SBSHI). What the Institute does is train cohorts of community researchers—that is, not university based-researchers, but people from the community who get selected through a competitive application process—in archival, oral history, and place-based methods, and then support them over at least two years through stipends and workshops as they develop, conduct, and share research. Researchers gathering oral histories according to community-identified themes, and are also encouraged to develop projects according to their own interests, community-relations, and areas of focus. The outcomes are shared through public installations and events—we’re still thinking about all the forms those might take—and the interviews themselves are transcribed and archived at Pacific Northwest Black Heritage Society and the Seattle Public Library. SBSHI is now working with its second cohort—the model is to stager the cohorts in two-year cycles so that one is ending just as another begins.

SBSHI is housed within/a sub-program of Wa Na Wari—a community space for black arts and belonging located in Seattle’s historically Black Central District Neighborhood. Several of the founders of Wa Na Wari participated in People’s Geography work and events, and my connection to them emerged directly from that work. The collective is located in what used to be a residential home in the heart of a historically segregated/redlined neighborhood. It’s also right in the heart of ongoing displacement in the wake of ongoing gentrification and development. Indeed, the neighborhood has gone from being 75% Black residents and the beating heart of Black Seattle around the turn of millennium to being roughly 10% Black in 2020. And not because there are no Black people in the region, but because of the displacement and disbursal of that community that has happened over the last 10-20 years. Black and brown residents of this neighborhood have been displaced to locations across the Seattle metro area.

In that context, the backstory of Wa Na Wari is striking. It was founded in 2019 by a four artists—two Black, two white—who all lived in the Central District. Faced with the displacement they saw happening around them, they started thinking about how they might respond. They held a series of intensive community conversations and listening sessions that identified the erosion of strong cultural and community spaces as a pressing concern. Based on that, they started to think about ways to hold (they use that word very deliberately, hold) space for the Black community to continue to gather in critical mass in the neighborhood in and through community events and activities explicitly counter to what they felt was the creeping naturalization of gentrification and the erasure of Black presence and history in the neighborhood.

And the way they decided to do that was in and through a specific space—a house that was part of a larger group of properties that had been part of one of their Black family’s history for several generations but was at risk of being lost to pay for the needs of an elderly owner. So the collective asked themselves, what if we could pay the rent, maybe even eventually buy this one house using art and community? And that’s how Wa Na Wari, which—as a nod to the ancestry of that one Black family--means “our home” in Kalabari, was created. 

Wa Na Wari has since become something of a success story and a model for arts-based community building. It has been described “the house that fights displacement with art”, and the leadership cohort are fond of saying that the best way to fight gentrification is to throw parties. And that’s not a joke, because it gets at some really fundamental things. They are deliberately facilitating opportunities for contact and connection, holding space for Black sociality, for relationships, for organizing plots, despite and against the space-time expansion the Black community has experienced in the wake of gentrification. They are constantly showcasing Black creativity and hosting events of different varieties and scales, even to the degree of once a year shutting down a 10-block area for an event that invites the public to come experience and imagine what the space of the neighborhood could be like if this kind of vision were scaled up to a larger district for Black culture and arts.

In the process of holding those events they have had neighbors call the police in on them, they have had the city come after them for ostensible zoning and permitting violations, and they have actually used those responses as data points to start identifying structural and policy interventions which might aid their anti-displacement, arts-driven vision. They have now spent years organizing to change the neighborhood culture, to change the city zoning regulations around what can be done on residential plots and working to extend their model and organizational capacity to other spaces where arts and cultural activity could help subsidize vulnerable community members and generate economic activity so others, too, can hold space and stave off displacement. This model has been so far been successful at gaining public support, raising funds to support the work, and continuing to respond to community needs.

The work of SBSHI needs to be understood within the above context. It is framed explicitly as a collective project of public-facing memory and narrative work—as a way to intervene in and (re)shape the narratives, sensibilities, and indeed place-based knowledges that circulate in and about spaces and in turn influence the kinds of futures and social relations that can be imagined for and from those spaces. The work of the Institute is all about studying Black spatial histories and patterns, “gathering” and “activating” particular knowledges to highlight collective capacities, practices, relations, and ways of being together. In the process it engages broader communities and publics in thinking carefully about and making these things critical, activating the past toward new, imaginations of what might be possible in the future (and counter to the pernicious imaginations of life and community which often come attached to the interests of tech-driven real-estate capital). It invites people to think about the vibrant communities and ways of life that did thrive, still thrive, and could be amplified and expanded here.   

I can’t take any credit for this vision, but my faculty collaborator (Jin-Kyu Jung, who is also a collaborator on the “Smart” urbanisms work) and I have learned a lot from being part of the project. Our role here has so far largely been to help develop the “spatial” and to contribute pedagogically to the “Institute” aspects of the work--which is a direct shout-out to the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute (DGEI) if anyone is familiar with that!—and to pursue sources of funding that are only available to people based in universities. I also helped develop a “Space and Place Activity Book” offering suggestions and exercises for people and communities who are interested in getting more of a hands-on sense for place-based spatial thinking and methods.  

In the long run, we’re hoping to be able to work with the organizers and researchers to keep refining the Institute model and activating the spatial data gathered through their process. This feels to us like a creative engagement with all the things that thread through other parts of this website and my work—engaging place-embedded stories and modes of sense-making and acting, explicitly toward different formations of place-based narrative, value, social reproduction, commons and commoning and more! In any case, we feel very fortunate to be a part of this collaboration and are excited to keep contributing to and learning from it.