Rebuilding Black Communities, With Love

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After nearly twenty years of studying and teaching urban planning and development, this is a love letter and a proposal by Dr. Annalise Fonza. It illuminates what she has learned about the redevelopment of former black ghettos and black urban communities, and in light of her constant engagement with urban and regional planners and black urban residents, in various urban cities across the United States. Dr. Fonza's first signicant experience with the redevelopment of black communities was in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and in the shadow of the late-great John Lee Johnson. Currently, Dr. Fonza lives in Kansas City, Missouri, and in this book she draws upon the example of Ollie Gates, who is the owner of Gates Bar-B-Q, to articulate her position on the redevelopment of former black ghettos and places that were designed to confine, control, and impoverish their residents. She hopes that what she has written here, while brief in pages, will help others to think more deeply about urban plans and proposals to develop former black ghettos and 21st-century urban black communities. She also hopes that this proposal will cause city planners, local officials, social activists, and urban people to reconsider the power of love and what it has done, in theory and in practice, for urban America. Dr. Fonza is also a womanist - as opposed to feminist - and she wants this writing to be known as a womanist planning proposal. 

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About the author

annalise fonza

Dr. Annalise Fonza is an educator and the owner of AM Consulting, LLC, which is based in Kansas City, Missouri. She earned a PhD in Regional Planning from the University of Massachusetts; a Master of Urban & Regional Planning from the University of Illinois - Urbana; and a Master of Public Administration from the University of Missouri Columba, She is also a graduate of Clark Atlanta University, where she had the pleasure of being chosen the very first Miss Clark Atlanta University (homecoming queen 1989-90). Dr. Fonza is from Springfield, Illinois, but currently she lives in Kansas City, Missouri. Her first family's roots, maternal and paternal, are on the Missouri-Illinois border.