Mapping as Black Memory-Work: Toward a Restorative Cartography of Urban Renewal/Removal in Knoxville, Tennessee*

Abstract

ABSTRACT GIS students and faculty at the University of Tennessee are engaged in a long-standing and ongoing community-academic partnership with the Beck Cultural Exchange Center, a local African-American-led nonprofit heritage advocacy organization. The partnership supports the Beck’s development of a “Black restorative cartography” that carries out the memory-work of publicly working through the wounds of racist urban development by mapping and honoring African American places and institutions destroyed or displaced by urban renewal in Knoxville from the 1950s to the 1970s. A key Beck goal is the creation of what we term a “geo-memory overlay”—a geospatial and commemorative draping of pre-urban renewal locations on top of contemporary city maps to provoke a reckoning with the city’s occluded history of Black urban place-making. The purpose of this paper is to delve—conceptually and operationally through the Knoxville partnership—into what Black restorative cartography is, how it works as a means of creating memories in communities, and what is required to realize the full transformative potential of cartography as a tool of historical justice. Geospatial scientists can play an essential role in assisting restorative Black memory-making, but this demands centering Black ways of knowing and mapping while recasting seemingly technical mapping operations as politically- and emotionally-laden recovery practices. Keywords: Black geographies, historical justice, memory-work, restorative cartography, urban renewal