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Lisa K. Bates

Portland, OR

Lisa K. Bates is an activist scholar who uses community-engaged research, art practice, and spatial intervention to develop new visions of Black history, present, and possibility. Bates is Associate Professor in the Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University.  She has a PhD in City and Regional Planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 2016 she was awarded the Dale Prize for urban planning scholarship that advances community self-determination and racial justice.

Photo credit: Kelly James

Untitled Black Spatial Imaginary Project


Lisa K. Bates is an activist scholar who uses community-engaged research, art practice, and spatial intervention to develop new visions of Black history, present, and possibility.

Artist Bio

In this project, Lisa K. Bates works as a scholar, artist, and activist to better understand how we make the city viable for Black life. Bates draws a thread through ongoing, intergenerational resistance to anti-Black urban development in Northeast Portland to develop a Black space-time memory and imagination. Collaborating with Black activists and artists, the project will culminate in a book of essays and visual art highlighting how collective remembering, envisioning, and developing actually existing Black spaces, can imagine a city that loves Black people. It recognizes this imagining as a radical act of restructuring space and place to constitute freedom.


Status

In Progress