ब्लैक उर्बनिस्म

I dragged this extract from an article on Archinect because I think this is relevant to our meeting point
Paul Goodwin responds to Heather Ring's question "Does black urbanism emerge from a place of struggle or resistance? Is it linked to a socio-economic situation, or could black urbanism come from a high rent neighborhood?"

Paul: I think historically it has emerged from a place of political struggle, but it has also been appropriated by suburbia. This came home to me recently at a seminar on Black Urbanism we hosted at the ICA. There I described the idea of the "black urban presence" and its relationship to political struggle.

In 1989, I was in Paris and was studying West African immigrants and their role in the housing protest movements. At the centre of those movements were immigrants from Senegal who became politicized through a number of brutal expulsions from gentrified housing in the Eastern part of Paris. In the 20th arrondissement, in the poorer northern poorer part of the city, the expelled families spontaneously congregated in a square and were joined by a number of political squatting groups and created an urban village. They set up tents and refused to move from that village for three or four months. It became a big national media event. They cooked out there, the children played games and it was life in the open air. It was a galvanizing moment and a number of other movements started on the back of these protests, including the Droit Au Logement (DAL) a national homeless movement which is now international.

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Open for reinterpretation