In this guest post, Dr Naama Blatma, University of NSW, Dr Sage Ponder, University of Texas at Austin, and Dr Suraya Scheba, University of Cape Town, describe the results of their workshop Reparative urban futures: reconfiguring infrastructures and institutions towards liberation, which was supported with a USF Event Support Funding grant.
Infrastructural repair and processes of abolition are two of the most pressing areas of research within urban geography today, yet more can be done to bring them together. Our two-part event, ‘Reparative Urban Futures’, fostered dialogue between academics and community organisers by centring their shared commitments to place-making and the valorisation of racialised lives in cities. Our aim was to advance conversations about i) existing, real-world practices contributing to the disruption of oppressive systems in place, ii) the repair of historical harm through infrastructural interventions, and iii) the prefiguration of more just futures that take Black and Indigenous spatial praxis seriously.
We came together twice during 2025: first in a broad-based coalitional 2-day online community forum in March that took place across 9 time zones and included groups working in and across more than 20 cities around the world; and then in a smaller, intensive 3-day academic workshop held in August in Sydney, Australia. These gatherings allowed us to draw stronger connections between abolition, repair, and reparations and the ways they manifest through both community organising and theoretical reflection. In this blog, we share insights from each of the two events and how we plan to take them forward.
The first part of this event series was held on March 13-14, 2025, as an online community forum, bringing together community organisations and academic partners from around the world – the UK, South Africa, Philippines, USA, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Australia, Kenya, and Nepal – to share their stories and lived experiences about reclaiming, repairing or repurposing both social and physical infrastructures in cities. We heard from over 30 participants representing approximately 15 organisations that span a range of institutional orientations – from formal city offices to grassroots organisations, about the multiplicity of tools and strategies mobilised by communities in addressing, repairing and moving beyond racially- and economically-inflected infrastructural harm.
With tens of participants flowing in and out of the Zoom room according to their time zones and capacities, we held six roundtable discussions and seven keynote-style interventions around diverse topics, such as land and housing justice, solidarity and innovative methods for change, environmental justice, working with/in the state, and abolition as theory and practice. Out of this event, we developed several thematic layers that emerged through dialogue, co-thinking, and sharing of strategy and praxis to offer possibilities for other worlds being seeded now, and in the face of slow and immediate violence at multiple scales:
- Engagement/ Disengagement with/from the state and other institutions of power
Interdisciplinarity and innovative methodology
Scales of solidarity
Black survival, love and resurgence
Memory justice, history and time
Reclaiming, repurposing, repairing infrastructure
Within our effort to shine a light on communities’ voices and actions, and diversify our ways of learning and knowing about repair, reparations and abolition in cities, we invited an illustrator, Dr Anna Carlson, to participate in the community forum and create visual mapping and representations of our discussions. Anna succeeded in putting together an insightful, creative, and powerful series of illustrations, collected in a zine titled ‘Threads and Seeds,’ that captures the essence of communities’ work beautifully and grounds them in this moment. The zine and images were shared with the forum participants with extended permission to use these in their promotional and other material, to help grow their work.
Following the online community forum, we hosted a 3-day academic workshop in Sydney, with scholars from South Africa, the United States, Chile, the Philippines, Brazil, and Australia. As part of the workshop, we were fortunate to be guided by Wiradjuri and Gamilaroi woman, Lorna Munro, an Aboriginal Elder, multidisciplinary artist and radio and podcast host at Sydney’s Radio Skid Row and long-time active member of her Redfern/Waterloo community, in a tour of Redfern/Waterloo, learning about the Black history of Sydney and the staunch organising of its community against dispossession, gentrification and displacement.
The categories and approaches to reimagining urban infrastructures and urban futures developed through the online workshop were centered in our 3-day in person gathering and fused with our experience in Redfern, sparking a broader conversation and what we hope will become an ongoing engagement in global solidarities rooted in diverse experiences of Blackness, Indigeneity and mutli-racial coalition building, which purposefully decentre whiteness in reimagining urban futures otherwise. This framework set the context for further intensive conversations focused on understanding the significance of place and place-making in rethinking and reimagining how urban infrastructures might be shaped to facilitate our freedom dreams rather than capital accumulation.
As we move forward, we are reminded of the need to continue thinking about the ways that theories and knowledges are produced in and about our cities. Communities are already doing the critical work of repairing urban infrastructure while envisioning pathways towards reparative futures. As scholars, we must go beyond simply learning and documenting what communities are doing; they are not just knowledge holders. They are knowledge producers and grounded city planners. Thus, only by centering their ideas, visions, and impact in the world can we begin to develop the conceptual language and methodological toolkit required to bring forward a different agenda, one that recognises that the very same infrastructure used to dispossess, abandon, enslave, disenfranchise and divide us, can be taken back and taken over to imagine and produce different futures for everyone.