Race, Space, and Culture: Essays on Cultural Theory the Built Environment

How race and space shape one another in profound and often contested ways. How does race shape the spaces we inhabit, and how do those spaces, in turn, shape our perception of race? This book addresses these questions by bringing cultural theory into dialogue with the practices of design, planning, and architecture. Edited by K. Ian Grandison and Marlon B. Ross, the essays in this collection argue that racial identity is never separate from the landscapes, infrastructures, and built environments that are so familiar that we often fail to see their ideological and economic implications. The first two chapters, authored by Grandison and Ross, frame the theory and methods of what they term "critical landscape studies" with case studies on historic preservation and gentrification, respectively. The other essays build on this approach from different interdisciplinary perspectives—investigating further how race is embedded in the processes of planning, preservation, and urban development, and how spatial practices are never neutral terrains but instead represent contested cultural records. Contributors reveal how the vertical hierarchies of race—long defined by the extremes of whiteness and Blackness—are continually negotiated across the categories of gender, sexuality, religion, and diaspora. The volume also underscores how disciplines that have too often treated space as abstract or universal must confront its racialized dimensions with greater rigor, while design professions must attend to the cultural identities, material interests, and power imbalances that shape and are shaped by the environments they create. From university campuses to gentrifying neighborhoods and from sacred landscapes to sites of ecological struggle, the essays in this collection offer a timely and provocative critical analysis of how space and race interact and inform each other. It challenges readers to see how the politics of racial formation and representation are embedded in the landscapes that surround us, and how those built environments in turn influence cultural perceptions of identity and belonging.