From Nowhere to Now-here: Centering Black Senses of Place and Placemaking in Speculative Design

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Abstract
This paper positions Black senses of place and the labor of placemaking as central to speculative design practice. We foreground the social, cultural, and historical specificities of place as experienced by Black communities long subjected to racial violence. Drawing from a participatory speculative design project with seniors and youth in Detroit, we show how visions of sociotechnical alternatives emerged from community members’ situated experiences of their neighborhoods and place-based cultural practices. We argue that speculative design must engage placemaking to confront three interrelated forms of nowhereness, namely the rendering of Black life as placeless within racialized spatial orders, the erasure of Black futures through dominant technocratic futurity, and speculation itself operating from and for nowhere, detached from place and accountability. We conceptualize and advocate for a shift from nowhere to now-here within speculative design, offering practical implications for grounding futurity in lived places, relational labor, and Black livingness. This reorients speculative design toward a place-based practice that centers the agency of impacted communities in imagining and enacting sociotechnical worlds otherwise.
Funding Information
  • National Science Foundation (2121723)
  • University of Michigan National Center for Institutional Diversity’s Anti-Racism Collaborative (n/a)
  • University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School (n/a)
  • University of Michigan Center for Racial Justice (n/a)
  • Detroit Community-Academic Urban Research Center (n/a)
  • Michigan Institute for Clinical and Health Research (n/a)
  • University of Michigan School of Social Work (n/a)
  • Rutgers University School of Communication and Information (n/a)