Land is power. Power is land.
Black power is the Black man in control of Black land.
The Black Panther Party grew out of the West Oakland neighborhood here in Oakland,
California in the late sixties.
They came about because of the incarceration
of African-Americans within a ghettoized system -- through
planning and through police oversight,
African-American neighborhoods were kept in the segregated state.
It was traumatic. And
like most movements in this country over time,
the Black Panthers were pretty much deconstructed by the FBI,
but their history and their legacy is pretty powerful here in Oakland.
And for close to 50 years,
Brown people and people of color have held power here. So
the Black Panthers' legacy is part of this cultural
identity of place,
but it's also part of the political power that still exists within this
landscape.
My project "Black Towers / Black Power" reimagines
what a typical street might look like in West Oakland, California.
It's inspired by the Black Panther Ten Point Program.
The program suggests we should stop
asking others to provide answers for us.
Let's be self-sufficient, let's have housing.
Let's take care of our community. Let's stop capitalist theft.
Let's think about education,
about the economy of how our food comes into our neighborhood,
and who's in control of those things.
Within a one mile stretch on San Pablo Avenue,
there's the highest concentration of social services and low-income
housing in Oakland.
And my project purports to suggest that maybe we can
rethink this through the insertion of 10 highrise buildings.
San Pablo Avenue is central to my project.
It's planted with lush plantings.
The paving is based on the prints of black panthers.
The public spaces are imbued with our radical heroes.
Huey Newton sits in his chair.
There's a statue of Angela Davis.
The spaces here are Black spaces and
architecture begins to create community space.
And so you could imagine walking down the street and coming upon every
useful service or activity that could empower you.
You can go to a place that teaches you about civic lessons,
about jurisprudence, where you can go and get educated.
That is about empowerment.
Architecture to me in the U.S. Means power.
It's tied to this idea of ownership and property.
And so for me,
"Black Towers / Black Power" is about how do I take that object of
power and bring it into a space
and allow those who haven't had that power to somehow
transform it and use it in a way that empowers
themselves. It
has been really hard for brown and Black people to
imagine a future in this country.
In order then to think about possible futures,
somehow you have to find that parallel universe and fiction in a
way is that parallel universe. By using fiction,
it's possible then to re-imagine ourselves in new places,
and then find ways to get there. My
design creates a set of imaginative
political recreational domestic spaces
that begin to suggest that maybe Black people in this country could
have a future, a future that's dynamic,
a future that inculcates the familiar,
but also builds on all of the possibilities and all of the
resources that we've been part of within the country.