2020 Research Prize
Reclaiming Black Settlements: A Design Playbook for Historic Communities in the Shadow of Sprawl

Historic Black settlements in urban contexts across the United States face environmental and industrial hazards that jeopardize their health and survival. In a pattern repeated in city after city, these settlements developed in flood plains or “Bottoms” along rivers and creeks in “throwaway” land deemed uninhabitable by white city planners. Today, as riverfronts become desirable property located along recreational waterfront trail systems and brownfield developments become increasingly common in urban centers, these longstanding communities face new development pressures in the context of urban sprawl.

Historic Black settlements along the banks of the Trinity River in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, also known as Freedmen’s Towns, face many such challenges. Environmental justice, historic preservation, and economic development are all important considerations in shaping an equitable future for these communities. This project asks: what can be done to help promote new development that serves residents, respects descendants of community founders, and gives control over design and decision making to grassroots organizations?

The watershed of the Trinity River in Dallas-Fort Worth spans just under 100 miles. Historic Freedmen’s Towns, founded by formerly enslaved Texans, dot the riverbanks, from Joppa/Joppee to The Bottom, Elm Thicket, Bear Creek, Mosier Valley, and Garden of Eden. Each of these historic settlements are affected by similar issues of environmental racism and outside development pressure. However, they are in different cities and counties and governed by different local policies controlling land use, zoning, development, and preservation. Alone, each singular community faces significant hurdles to achieving equitable development—collectively, they gain significant strength.

During 2021–2022, this project mapped the commonalities and challenges of Black settlements along the Trinity while also partnering with the Joppa/Joppee community to develop the outline for a holistic community design playbook. In partnership with the South Central Civic League, a long-standing neighborhood organization based in Joppa/Joppee, the team explored best practices for negotiating complex regulatory policies, with techniques and strategies transferable to other communities impacted by long-standing patterns of structural racism.

To develop the playbook, we looked at contemporary and historic land use patterns, environmental and ecological challenges, population movement, community organization, zoning patterns, economic development policies, and patterns of demolition and preservation of historic structures and landscapes. The playbook seeks to standardize the approach to common issues: vacant land, demolition of historic structures, lack of community development guidelines, environmental hazards from flooding and industrial land use, and development pressure from recreational trail planning along the Trinity River.

With a focus on grassroots storytelling and capacity building, the design playbook centers the voices of Black communities in the design decision making processes in a complex and fragmented policy landscape.

Summer Studio Brief

The initial undertaking for the project was a summer graduate enrichment studio held in the summer of 2021. The studio utilized interdisciplinary research methodologies from the humanities and design, weaving together experiential learning with themes of resiliency and sustainability. Students were asked to respect and learn from local community leaders, finding guidance for analysis from community-based history and knowledge.

Community Analysis

Dr. Diane Allen worked closely with students to build community analyses and draw actionable conclusions from them. Focusing on research material gathered through site visits, conversations, archival sources, maps, oral histories, GIS data, and community self-assessments in the Joppa/Joppee community workshops, students produced site assessments that could be presented to communities and used in future advocacy projects.

Timelines

Students produced community timelines focused on neighborhood history as reflected through changes in policy and the built environment. Students worked with Dr. Kathryn Holliday to identify national, state, and local placeholders to link local history to larger national narratives, and to link Reconstruction-era origin stories to contemporary issues.

The Beginnings of a Design Playbook

The final product of the studio was the collaborative analysis of Joppa/Joppee, based on the students’ participation in the community workshops, with reference to student Angelica Villalobos’s analysis. Dr. Austin Allen emphasized the importance of the open city as students prepared this final group project: “Open City ……refers efforts by architects and urban designers to translate the ideals of an ’open society’—a society with a tolerant inclusive government, where diverse groups develop flexible mechanisms for resolving inevitable differences—into physical spaces.” [1] The community strategies focused on four themes: Community, Youth Empowerment, Politics + Economic Development, and Landscape and Environment. Students worked collaboratively to finalize the guidelines and strategies for delivery back to the South Central Civic League.

Note
[1] Susan S. Fainstein, The Just City (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2010), 165–166.

Exhibition Design

Dr. Holliday shared exhibition design templates and students collaborated to create the final exhibition form, which combined analysis and storytelling to provide visual and narrative connections between the five communities that were part of the studio. Using the connecting form of the Trinity River, students painted its path onto freestanding panels, including one panel for each community. Panels on the studio’s process and the larger context introduced the exhibition and a panel on visions for the future of Joppa/Joppee closed it.

Community Roundtable at UTA

The culmination of the studio was a community roundtable held in the CAPPA Gallery on the UTA campus, which featured the student-designed exhibition. Each student presented their timeline, maps, and community analysis to community members, city staff, and preservation advocates.

Then, attendees, which included representatives from all the communities studied during the semester, as well as representatives from the Dallas Chamber of Commerce, bcWorkshop, Preservation Dallas, the cities of Irving and Fort Worth, the UTA Libraries, and the Trust for Public Land participated in an open conversation about potential actions moving forward, guided by Dr. Austin Allen. Networks were shared and broadened, building capacity for future work to continue.

Project Team

Diane Jones Allen, Principal Investigator
Focus: Community Engagement Strategies, Ecological Stewardship, Budget Management

Austin Allen, Co-Principal Investigator
Focus: Video Storytelling, Open City framework, Ecological Stewardship, Budget Management

Kathryn Holliday, Co-Principal Investigator
Focus: Community and Oral History, Urban History, Historic Preservation, Exhibition Design, Symposium organization

Shalondria Gallimore, Community Partner President, South Central Civic League

Lauren Wardwell, Research Assistant Graduate student in landscape architecture

Rachel Deleery, Leila Ebrahimi, Cindy Nguyen, and Kayla Ortego, studio participants architecture

Angelica Villalobos, studio participant landscape architecture

More on this Project

Tritima Achigbu, “CAPPA students, faculty aim to preserve a school in the historic black neighborhood of Joppa in Dallas,“ The Shorthorn, March 20, 2020.

Mark Lamster, “Reckoning with Joppa,“ The Dallas Morning News, September 23, 2020.

Haley Samsel, “Historic Black communities in Texas face steep challenges. UT Arlington wants to help,“ Forth Worth Star-Telegram, June 18, 2021.

Onome Aganbi, “Reclamation tour provides an opportunity for CAPPA to redesign historic Black settlements.“ The University of Texas at Arlington, June 22, 2021.

Rachel Stone, “Joppa’s historic segregated school handed to community nonprofit on Juneteenth,” Oak Cliff Advocate, June 23, 2021.

Charles Scudder, “‘A source of pride’: Historic school in Joppa neighborhood to become new community center,“The Dallas Morning News, July 12, 2021.

Ken Kalthoff, “Irving Slave Cemetery to Get Access Sidewalk,” NBC Dallas Fort Worth, February 18, 2022.

Ken Kalthoff, “New access to Shelton’s Bear Creek Cemetery for former slaves in Irving,” NBC Dallas Fort-Worth, June 15, 2023.

Kamal Morgan, “’We Were Here Before Fort Worth’: A Struggle to Preserve Historic Black Settlements,” Star-Telegram, June 23, 2024.