Plotting from a plat: tracing spatial design along Seattle’s Yesler Way, 1850s-2010s

Abstract

Amid the redevelopment of Seattle’s Yesler Terrace, C. Davida Ingram wrote, ‘residents have made their lives possible in places where others only see the impossible.’ Thinking with Ingram, this article asks ‘what goes unnoticed’ in the reproduction of the built environment along Yesler Way over time. In contrast to its plats—the plans and designs undergirding the colonization of sdzídzəlʔalič, renewal of Profanity Hill, and redevelopment of Yesler Terrace—I lift the spatial practices and vernacular spaces of marginalized inhabitants who were simultaneously rendered out of place yet sustained life here. Following interventions in Black Studies, I describe this work as plotting and consider its specific forms in and through the built environment. Alongside this theoretical framework, I suggest critical fabulation as a method that locates and centers inhabitants’ plottings, and as such, reveals histories of and precedents for alternative buildings and landscapes. I caution practitioners and scholars against producing and describing violence in their work, and I instead advocate for learning from inhabitants as they imagine, practice, and create place for themselves.