A Prototype Wakanda? Culturally-Relevant Infrastructure Is Artist’s Response to Gentrification
Since moving to Leimert Park 33 years ago, artist Ben Caldwell has witnessed enormous changes to his neighborhood, once dubbed "The Black Greenwich Village" by director John Singleton. Marked by idyllic tree-lined streets and Spanish colonial revival homes, Leimert Park has been home to notable residents like Ella Fitzgerald, Ray Charles and former L.A. mayor Tom Bradley. Despite continuing to be a center for Black artists, music, literature and entertainment, places like Fifth Street Dicks, a popular hang-out for Black poets and writers, and Babe's & Ricky's Inn Jazz club have shuttered, and the Metro's new Crenshaw/LAX line, which is slated to start full service by late 2023, will only continue to change the neighborhood's character.
With the Metro's announcement, community leaders like Caldwell have been thinking about strategies that will buttress the neighborhood against unchecked gentrification and cultural whitewashing. During a phone conversation with KCET, Caldwell recalls, "How can we fight off feelings of erasure due to gentrification? And how can media be used as a way to propagate and make new stories?" Drawing on his experience as a filmmaker, educator, entrepreneur and community activist, Caldwell's answer to the very real fears around gentrification and the attendant dispossession of Black people and their social contributions is Sankofa City, a multi-pronged media project that celebrates Leimert Park's unique history while embracing technological change and redevelopment in ways that empowers people of color and their communities.
Described as a community design project, Sankofa City utilizes emergent technologies to embed Black history and cultural cues into everyday life and public infrastructure — a prototype Wakanda in Leimert Park, if you will. The project, which Caldwell has been spearheading for more than a decade now takes a "human-centric" approach, as he defines it, to public infrastructure, rewriting technological tools in order to shift our relationship to our surroundings and each other. "Normally, BIPOC people aren't given a say in the decisions that affect their neighborhoods. [Sankofa City] imagines if they were, while also using media to create mechanisms for the community to engage with each other" on a richer level, he says.
"Sankofa" is a term borrowed from the Akan people of Ghana, and means "to go back and get it," referring to the importance of engaging with the past when building the future. (The Adinkra symbol of a bird turning backwards to eat an egg is another representation of the term). In a larger sense, the phrase also signals the necessity of archiving BIPOC histories, from cultural to social to geographical, especially in the light of mainstream erasure. This concept underlines an important aspect of Sankofa City and Caldwell's creative approach in general.
For him, Sankofa City isn't science fiction, it's a creative response to show how Black history and culture can be made more accessible and interactive as one goes about their everyday (a necessary action in light of the recent GOP-led efforts to ban education and books related to Black history via panic over critical race theory). One of Caldwell's first forays into worldbuilding aspects of Sankofa City was the Leimert Phone Company, made in collaboration with the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication. In 2014, the group set up a few installations at the Leimert Park Art Walk, including a payphone repurposed into an interactive social hub where residents could play games informed by the heritage of the village, among other activities concerned with deepening community bonds. That was joined by a bench transformed into a public drum machine, a modern callback to the days when live jazz would fill the streets.
To have your culture be the starting point of design allows a freedom to radically redefine standards set by outside narratives.Irvin Shaifa, architectural designer
Presently, Caldwell has been working with the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) to dream up another facet of Sankofa City — autonomous cars. Students gather every week at either KAOS Network or SCI-Arc to design cars that use the "community as a starting point," says Caldwell. He runs the course alongside his teaching assistant, Irvin Shaifa, an architectural designer, and Raul-David "Retro" Poblano, a Sankofa City co-founder, and a transportation systems designer and vehicle engineer. "To have your culture be the starting point of design allows a freedom to radically redefine standards set by outside narratives," Shaifa said about the intentions behind their course. During their presentations, students shared designs inspired by Adrinka symbols, basket weavings and cyberpunk aesthetics. Others gestured to the social life of Leimert Park, with one design revamping the public trolley to invoke the mood of the neighborhood's community pop-ups, where camaraderie and music fill the street. Throughout, Caldwell encouraged his students to break away from the standards, to embrace a sense of play and risk-taking.
Each electric car told a story, a particular narrative "infused with the spirit of Leimert Park," Caldwell explains. His class marks the beginning of a 3-5 year plan that will culminate with the creation of a pilot vehicle thanks to support from the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI), which provides funding for zero emission transportation projects. Working in collaboration with community organizations like the Institute for Maximum Human Potential and Urban Movement Labs, Sankofa City strives to "activate civic change, community empowerment, and cooperative economic development," says Poblano. A VR prototype of the car, designed by Poblano, lives at KAOS and provides a glimpse into the final product. The team has also produced short videos that dramatize what Sankofa City will eventually look like by the year 2050. Beyond the "community-driven aesthetics," as one student put it, the cars will serve as cultural guides thanks to the interactive displays sharing videos about Leimert Park's heritage, from background on businesses (past and present) and significant landmarks, to information on art and music produced in the area.
Caldwell sees Sankofa City as an exercise in "integrating tools for our own use, rather than being used by them." In a 2018 video produced in collaboration with the artist and USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab, everyday objects are repurposed into portals reflecting the perspectives and roots of Leimert Park residents. SankofaRed, the first physical prototype of the neighborhood payphone mentioned above, makes an appearance in a scene where a visitor uses it to request an autonomous car. Past performances at Vision Theater and World Stage come alive thanks to videos that play on touchscreens within the vehicle. Folks have access to locally-grown fruits and vegetables, available for free in boxes set up around the village. The beauty of Sankofa City is its flexibility, how it molds itself to the curiosities and visions of Leimert Park residents. Caldwell and his team hope that their project becomes a model for other BIPOC cities looking for innovative approaches to preserving the stories of their neighborhoods, places that often contribute enormously to the cultural landscape at large with little to no acknowledgement or investment from those outside the communities.
Although the results might appear to be futuristic and cutting-edge, Sankofa City is guided by simple, though generative, questions: what would a city look like if designed by those who know it best? For Caldwell, Sankofa City allows Leimert Park residents to "create their own slice of utopia based on the cultural history" of their beloved village.
