Take the houses back/take the land back: Black and Indigenous urban futures in Oakland

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this piece, I consider how two emergent movements from the Lisjan Ohlone land of Oakland, California, Moms 4 Housing and the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, are shifting the urban geographies of Oakland. As cities become increasingly unequal and exclusionary spaces, movements such as these urge urban scholars to act in ways that are accountable to the peoples who are being dispossessed, as they make demands of the city and/or build autonomous spaces amid mass dispossession. How might these movements push the methodological and conceptual possibilities of urban geographies as well as urban scholars’ accountable relations to cities and their peoples. I consider what urban futures these two movements reveal amid a housing crisis that is tightly bound to long histories of colonial and racial capitalist dispossession in the Bay Area, and how these Black and Indigenous women-led movements offer routes toward housing justice and the decolonization of land.