Rememorying property: the present pasts of urban vacancy

The continual upheaval of cities, the shaping and reshaping of urban futures, produces recurrent vacancies – erasures, silences, openings – that are co-constitutive of this re-development. The concept of vacancy has long served as a spatio-legal justification for racialized dispossession, rendering land empty and communities illegible to open up frontiers for proprietary “improvement.” Urban development, as the ongoing re-production of vacancy, reflects the persistent interface of settler colonial and racial capitalist logics in liberal regimes of property. And yet this vacancy is not absence. Layered histories of both violence and resistance persist, continuing to shape urban spaces. Here, I consider the enduring resonances of two vacant geographies in Philadelphia that continue to define re-development in the city and beyond: the 1682 “Great Treaty” between William Penn and Tamanend of the Lenni Lenape Nation, and the 1985 bombing by Philadelphia police of the headquarters of the Black liberation movement, MOVE. In doing so, I draw on Toni Morrison’s concept of ′rememory′ to develop a critical approach to geographies of vacancy that, in holding together multiple spaces-times, acknowledges the resonant wounds of settler racial capitalist property regimes that define our cities while also re-membering spaces of multitemporal resistance that refuse erasure.