Today Like Yesterday, Tomorrow Like Today

Abstract

This chapter explores Black place-making as the life-giving work of making freedom geographically. In contrast to white Cartesianism, it considers Black life and landscapes as intrinsically linked to ancestral temporalities, acts of resistance, and everyday inhabitance. Through a study of post-Katrina New Orleans and a critique of urban planning visions for rebuilding the city, this chapter first examines how urban planning works as whiteness to delineate a future without Black geographies. The majority of the chapter explores how thinking in the fourth dimension, at the intersection of space and time, can help secure and emplace an incommensurate Black future that is unfettered and dense with love. To consider Blackness as geographically and temporally expansive, the chapter pairs image and text to render a Black landscape as it might be drawn from the perspectives of the porch and second lines, where all geographies are Black and Black residents are home.