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Arts & Culture

Moms 4 Housing and UC Berkeley Researchers Create An Archive For Activism

Mapping gentrification, redlining and predatory loans, the Archive of Urban Futures also imagines a new future for Oakland.
Pendarvis Harshaw
Nine people embrace each other and smile as they pose for a photo on the front porch of a house.
Researchers from the Archive of Urban Futures and members of Moms 4 Housing pose for a photo on the front porch of a house in Oakland.  (Clara Perez )

During a recent workshop with the Archive of Urban Futures, Azlinah Tambu was asked what she wanted for the future of Oakland.

Tambu, a leader in the 2022 occupation of Parker Elementary School and member of the organization Moms 4 Housing, said she wanted a “Hyphy Rail.” She described it as an “affordable, high-speed train that could rejoin families who were disconnected due to gentrification.”

While the Hyphy Rail might not be completely feasible, it speaks to the mindset that the Archive of Urban Futures is looking for: a new way of imagining transportation, housing and life in Oakland that aims to heal the harms of the past.

On Sunday, June 2, the Archive of Urban Futures and Moms 4 Housing will be at the Oakland Museum of California doing some of this collective imagining. The public is invited to the afternoon of panel discussions, community conversations and a film screening as a part of The Summer Institute.

The one-day event will illustrate the work the Archive of Urban Futures, a collaboration between UC Berkeley researchers and members of Moms 4 Housing, which gained notoriety in 2019 after successfully protesting a major real estate company by occupying a vacant house in West Oakland. Over the past two years, the Archive of Urban Futures has compiled historical documents about the barriers Black people have faced in Oakland when it comes to housing, from redlining to predatory loans. The group has also taken a critical look at the current housing situation in the Town, where unaffordable home prices and mass amounts of unhoused people are a constant topic of discussion. Ultimately, they’ve been imagining what people might want their hometown to look like.

Woman in a white dress and glasses poses for a photo outside of a warehouse.
Dr. Brandi T. Summers stops for a photo outside of a warehouse in West Oakland. (Bethanie Hines)

Dr. Brandi T. Summers, Associate Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley, tells me this isn’t your usual “archive.”

Based on what famed historian Howard Zinn referred to as “archival activism,” Summers says the work of the Archive of Urban Futures is to support activities that directly support social justice. “The work to save a guy’s home is social justice and racial justice,” says Summers, referring to a clip from the short film about Moms 4 Housing titled Housing is a Human Right, by Clara Perez. Summers explains that the footage in the film is also “an archive in teaching others how they can fight for their loved ones or even their neighbors.”

Summers describes the archive as “multimodal,” explaining that this isn’t just a set of papers collecting dust in a library.

“We’ve given community workshops and presentations at the Oakland Public Library,” says Summers. “We have a website with documents from the redlining period. Graduate students produced maps showing changes in race and class in neighborhoods, as well as environmental threats.” And she makes it clear: the purpose of the archive isn’t for the benefit of the institution, it’s for the community.

Summers, an African American woman who was raised in East Oakland, was hurt when she learned that upwards of 70% of the unhoused people in Oakland are Black. When asked to make sense of that number, especially in light of conversations about reparations and land reclamation, Summers says, “Time is a loop, it’s a circle. A lot of what we’re experiencing today might look a little different, but it’s something we’ve had in the past.”

She looks back at the Great Migration of the early-to-mid 1900s, where African Americans fled the south in droves to the inner cities of the North, Midwest and West Coast in search of employment. “Black people in the Bay, in Oakland specifically, we were brought here to fulfill certain labor goals,” says Summers. She points out the makeshift housing that was given to the workers — old army barracks and even railroad cars. “There was never an intention for Black folks to have a home here. And I think that what we’re seeing today is not too far from that.”

Oakland is but one example of this issue, Summers says. Similar statements can be made about cities like Detroit, Baltimore and other post-industrial towns that attracted Black folks from the south nearly a century ago.

Broadening the conversation presents a very gloomy outlook for African Americans in this country, as a whole. But that’s why the Archive of Urban Futures urges the community to conjure up a more vibrant vision of what’s to come.

With an ambitious outlook, Summers says, “Black folks have a long history of taking unpleasant things and making them useful and beautiful.”

The Archive of Urban Futures presents The Summer Institute on Sunday, June 2, from 11:30 a.m.–3:30 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California’s Lecture Hall. A catered reception follows from 4 p.m.–5 p.m. in the California Room. Details here.

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