Integrating the Shadow of The City: On Double Rock, HOPE SF, and Transformation

Abstract

The Alice Griffith community is embedded in an unresolved historical relationship with systemic racism. After decades of deliberate marginalization in San Francisco and centuries of systemic violence in the United States, to correctly address the alienation and the psychiatric implications of serial forced displacement community-led initiatives, grounded in professional support that center dialogue, participatory citizenship, and urban alchemy are the needed ingredients to integrate the shadow of the city. This community-led practice would subvert the dominant neoliberal trends of public-private partnerships to work at the side of Alice Griffith residents to facilitate empowered self-efficacy and participatory placemaking. HOPE SF’s mixed-income initiative emphasizes replacement housing, retaining original residents, therapeutic service connection, closing the achievement gap in education, and human capital development as means to deconcentrate poverty. Complementing these important avenues toward inclusion, we need to be willing to address the shadow of racism that has formulated conditions in the community. Policies that reconceptualize the subject (Double Rock residents and their community) and centralize participatory citizenship for sustainable and equitable futures are necessary. This would require transformative, nonhierarchical, democratic practices within organizations and administrative bodies that can help professionals to conceive of their community work from different foundations and support transformative outcomes.