Last year marked a widespread reckoning with racial injustice in the wake of George Floyd’s killing and amid a pandemic disproportionately affecting communities of color. But that’s not what prompted Oakland artist and designer Walter Hood, 2019 recipient of both the Dorothy & Lillian Gish Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship, to focus on social justice and the environment. “I have always paid attention to that,” he says. “Environmental degradation is linked to how we value the people on the land.”

A tenured professor at UC Berkeley, Hood recently co-edited Black Landscapes Matter (University of Virginia Press, 2020), a book of essays that draw a line from colonial plantations and slavery to segregated cities such as Charlotte, North Carolina, where he was raised. “Racist policies in the built environment promote disinvestment in Black geographies and cultural landscapes,” he explains.

Since 1992, his firm, Hood Design Studio, has focused on improving areas alongside polluted waters, under freeways, and in flood zones, all places where the poorest populations often live. With many projects in the works, the landscape design concept for South Carolina’s upcoming International African American Museum among them, Hood says he is busier than ever. But we spoke about what matters most to him now: bolstering redlined, ecologically marginalized, yet resilient Black communities.

Do you think climate change is exacerbating racial and social inequities?

When I’m asked about sea level rise, I say I am interested in people and their relationship to water, but right now I am less concerned about climate change than I am about the widespread erasure of Black geographies and cultural landscapes. We cleared out Black neighborhoods to build infrastructure and roadways. But with that went Black culture.

During the 20th century, we pushed the less privileged into places we knew were harmful. We put them next to our sewage treatment plants, we put them in the flattest areas, we marked them off with a freeway and put them over a buried creek. We put them in places where rising water and the entropy of nature push back violently.

“We really need to make environmental changes that take on long-term ecology, the challenges of poverty, and issues of race.”
—Walter Hood

**Your work for Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America at the Museum of Modern Art in New York proposes a series of towers in West Oakland. How was the idea developed?**

My office is located in West Oakland, off a stretch of San Pablo Avenue where the landscape has gotten worse during the last 25 years, while Emeryville at one end and downtown Oakland at the other have gotten better. Everything in between is redlined on a map, so developers don’t create high-density/market-value projects. We are only building low-income and elderly housing in West Oakland because it has been devalued. Even the historic California Hotel, where Billie Holiday sang at a time when Blacks couldn’t go anywhere else, was turned into housing for poor people.

I took the Ten-Point Program of the Black Panthers and imagined that 10 nonprofits would each build a tower—“Black Towers/Black Power”—in shapes inspired by inventions patented by African Americans. So the building dedicated to the inventor of the pencil sharpener has a beautiful hollowed core. You can be inspired by metrics other than poverty.

Your work has always had a political thrust, and, with your recent awards, you now have a bullhorn. How will you use it?

We really need to make environmental changes that take on long-term ecology, the challenges of poverty, and issues of race. I would urge President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to say that all across America we are going to invest in high-poverty areas with poor infrastructure. They should say we are going to dismantle freeways and figure out other ways to move cars through historic neighborhoods.

We should be taking on something at the scale of what America can do. There was a time after the Depression when we built federal highways, New Deal housing, towns, and dams. Now we need to take on impoverished redlined areas and fix them—without displacing people as we have in the past.

We can create equitable futures for everyone.

—

Head back to the May/June 2021 issue homepage