Race and ecology in the built environment

In this special issue, we seek to document alternative futures that emerge from racial disparities in the built environment. To do this, we focus on the ways that the built environment is made through processes of race and racism, which generate a site of encounter that contributes to ever-changing social relations. Our focus on the built environment emerged from on-the-ground, place-based struggles, where community building in the name of racial justice transformed streets, buildings, and public and private spaces into landscapes of mutual aid. By centering race, racism, and racialization, the articles in this issue take an ecological approach building from Black and Indigenous geographies to position the built environment as a site of struggle against the forces of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and anti-Blackness. Key to these formulations are the ways that loss and the remains of humans, non-humans, and objects continuously challenge how people engage with and draw meaning from the built environment. We argue, in disrupting how the built enviornment is constituted, marginalized human and non-human onto-epistemologies are sustained through their encounter with these spaces. This introduction traces the ways that archives, loss, and ecologies are central to understanding the role of race in the built environment.