Associate Professor of Design and American Studies Javier Arbona-Homar has recently co-authored an article with Julie Sze on “Waterfront/battlefront: Vallejo’s Black landscapes of resistance against police and environmental violence.” The chapter is published in The Routledge Handbook of Architecture, Urban Space and Politics, Volume II: Ecology, Social Participation and Marginalities, edited by Nikolina Bobic and Farzaneh Haghighi (Routledge, 2024).

In “Waterfront/battlefront,” Arbona-Homar and Sze examine how places and landscapes are transformed through struggle. Their chapter takes a look at how waterfront spaces are excavated and remade in the face of historical and continuing anti-Black violence. The waterfront is one such space where legacies of oppression continue into the present day, imprinted upon buildings and development projects. These projects maintain and expand white supremacy to make what the chapter summarizes with the word concrete to show the shape of a politics of spatial violence in a context of fierce Black and working-class resistance in the United States. The chapter is grounded in Vallejo, California, located in the northern part of the San Francisco Bay Area region. Although this case seems both local and US-specific, Vallejo is important internationally due to histories of militarization and neoliberal urbanism that continue to shape racial violence in policing and pollution. Vallejo also shows how resistance persists. Thus, Vallejo has long been a contested experiment in municipal transformation in advance of other cities. It teaches about contested places and how place-based conflicts encode longer political memories of racism and anti-racism. The authors focus on two waterfront developments (a police station and a “green” cement factory) as examples of neoliberal development that tightly link anti-Black racism with carceral, economic and environmental injustices. By reading legacies of racial and environmental violence on the Vallejo waterfront, the text reveals waterfront spaces in flux or, in other words, the waterfront as a battlefront that can reveal spaces of resistance.