The Mechanics of Urban Repair: A Framework for Reparative Urbanism

Abstract

When demographic information is superimposed onto spatial conditions, legible patterns of dispossession, severance, erasure, extraction, and exposure emerge and persist across many Black neighborhoods in America. This landscape of vacant land, fractured street networks, eroded commercial corridors, and depleted public space is not incidental, but symptomatic of deeper, designed processes of deconstruction. While planning disciplines have begun to address these harms through reparative policy, design disciplines have been slower to acknowledge their role in producing them and to develop spatial remedies. The Mechanics of Urban Repair defines reparations as the act of reconstruction, where urban design operates alongside public policy, regulation and implementation mechanisms to acknowledge, redress, and eliminate the accumulated harms. The thesis produces a reparative urbanism framework in the form of a spatial toolkit that links specific design strategies to recurring conditions of harm across U.S. cities to be applied where spatial restitution remains unsettled.