“Things Unseen”: Urban (Dis)placement,Sacred Sensibilities,and Theological Vantage Points

Introduction

American cities are built on Black bodies, both figuratively and literally, with Black burial grounds dating back hundreds of years being discovered beneath concrete urban landscapes with alarming frequency of late. In most instances, the sacred purposes of these urban spaces were long ago lost to layers of urban construction and to equally calcified thinking about Black lives as inconsequential, whether in life or in death. Lost-and-found Black cemeteries are reminders that the fuller meanings of socially constructed urban worlds lie beneath the surfaces.

What is needed are urban theologies and histories capable of seeing these hidden realms of meaning, these subterranean urban story lines. We need theologies and histories that relay the stories and experiences of restive urban populations, render their grievances conceptually accessible, and reimagine and reframe community from their vantage point and in light of their existential imperatives. This concern with hidden worlds and subjugated knowledge aligns with scholarship by womanist theologians, liberation theologians, and other constructionist religion scholars who encourage what theologian Kathryn Tanner refers to as a shift from a “theology organized according to settled topics” to what needs to be “a theology of new, often overlooked, places.” ¹ Among the places routinely overlooked by shapers of worlds are those inhabited by the Black urban poor, places hidden away in marginal, undesirable locations; hazardous, inconvenient, under-serviced locations; unseen from elevated highways, skyscraper boardrooms, governmental high offices, or steepled churches.

The interest in “place” here, and how it is perceived, refers not simply to physical location but also to a sense of positionality and purpose, a state of being and belonging, that gains both material and symbolic reinforcement by and for the inhabitants of a context. Place is inherently relational, in that it stands in contrast to something, someone, or somewhere else, even as it is defined in any instance by its own particular footing and grounding. Place then is a reference point within a broader dynamic, a broader locatability, a broader collectivization. Place encompasses all to which a community of people attaches, including its identity, culture, beliefs, and the soil in which those things are planted and grown.

As such, place is a matter of deep philosophical, theological, and ethical significance—not only symbolically, but also in its physical and spatial aspects. Speaking to meaning which attaches to physical space, social psychiatrist Mindy Thompson Fullilove states: “Buildings and neighborhoods and nations are insinuated into us by life.” ² Too often, however, these deeper existential meanings of place do not factor sufficiently into modern urban imaginaries. Modern urban vantage points on place largely reduce it to a set of consumerist functions and economic utilities—whether referring to physical space or social identity and location. This commodification of place and of people is a dehumanizing dynamic; a dynamic where animate realms become reduced to inanimate objects; easily exchangeable, rooted to nothing deeper than surface realms of mundanity. This state of soullessness and spiritual vanquishment has become regarded and accepted by many as our modern and post-modern state of being. However, the descriptions and prescriptions associated with this viewpoint miss realms and worlds of embodied meaning that require more textured mappings—sociological, anthropological, and theological.

Deeper worlds of constructed meaning are missed, de-formed, and dis-placed within urban America's crucibles of social injustice and disparity. These dynamics are graphically illustrated in urban gentrification processes where “historically disinvested neighborhood[s]” experience influxes of “real estate investment and new higher-income residents,” often resulting in the physical, cultural, and economic displacement of long-term residents. ³

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is one such context notably impacted by gentrification, as indicated by its ranking as the eighth most gentrified city in the US during the period from 2000 to 2013. ⁴ With that as the backdrop, this article explores ways in which academic institutions in Pittsburgh have positioned themselves around local gentrification dynamics. Particular attention is given to academic facilitations of community-oriented analysis and engagement that attempts to counter gentrification's deformative and deracinating effects and that centers responsiveness to gentrification’s effects as a theological or moral imperative toward seeking the good of the city. The analysis here emphasizes the need for analytical tools, especially those rooted in theological considerations, capable of excavating, reinforcing, and reconstructing hidden or lost sacred localized spatialities.

Race, Power, and Place

From America's earliest urban formations, urban spaces have been characterized by what urban geographer David Sibley refers to as “geographies of exclusion”—human landscapes where “power is expressed in the monopolization of space and the relegation of weaker groups in society to less desirable environments.” ⁵ A previously well-established dynamic in western European cities, it achieved “New World” expressions in colonial New England and eastern seaboard towns that were constructed around central squares which concentrated the bulk of social resources within easy reach of its wealthier residents inhabiting that space, while town dwellers with fewer resources were further removed. ⁶ These economic geographies typically conformed to racial and ethnic geographies, with Blacks and ethnic “others” relegated to remote or concealed spaces and in degrees of subservience and subjugation corresponding to their gradations of freedom as enslaved, indentured, or quasi-free persons. Over time, geographies of racial-ethnic and economic status became more fixed and pronounced within American urban spaces, especially in the form of densely populated and largely segregated Black or ethnic reserves (i.e., modern ghettos), separated from more prosperous and privileged White spaces by physical distance and social boundaries.

Settler engagements with places, and the narrations of those histories, are replete with settler conquest, justified in their execution and (until very recently) their historical contextualizations in the name of progress. A 1986 history of Pittsburgh written by Franklin Toker, a Harvard trained professor teaching at the time at University of Pittsburgh, opens with the line: “In the beginning was the land … Nature's first and richest gift to Pittsburgh.” Of course, the land was not gifted to the settlers, it was taken from the native populations. Toker does acknowledge Native American populations dating back 17,000 years on the lands and rivers that became Pittsburgh, but states, at any rate, “the Indians had left The Point by 1754.” In fact, the various native peoples inhabiting the area upon the arrival of the settlers in the 1600s and 1700s did not simply leave; they were driven out or killed (including through smallpox infected blankets the settlers gave them as gifts). These sanitized historical characterizations launch Toker's account of Pittsburgh's evolution along an inevitable course conforming to the religion of progress that undergirded “its confidence of place,” shown, says Toker, “in a hundred ways.” ⁷

Toker's sanitized historical renderings also portrayed Blacks as “a community that appeared at the start of Pittsburgh.” This masks the fact that Pittsburgh's Black population records 150 enslaved Africans in the 1790 census. Toker goes on to lift up Pittsburgh's Hill District neighborhood as “the heart of a [Black] community that … spread out to a score of urban and suburban neighborhoods” by the mid-twentieth century and that serves as an exemplar of a Black community that became “one of the most stable in the United States.” ⁸ Inexplicably, Toker is writing this more than two decades after the Lower Hill District was bulldozed to make way for a downtown Civic Center, displacing 8000 Hill District residents and 400 businesses and contributing to a larger exodus that saw the fractured and now isolated neighborhood's population decline from 60,000 in 1950, to 20,500 in 1980, to 11,000 in 2010. ⁹ Toker's Pittsburgh is a peaceable city, where group self-conceptions of social place attach freely and smoothly, when in fact the actual history of Pittsburgh's evolution has been infinitely more contentious and violent than that.

It is safe to say neighborhood residents have not always seen eye-to-eye with developers, government officials, and community leaders on urban redevelopment plans, even where the redevelopment plan presumes to advance the interests of neighborhood residents. For example, the logic framing a 1990s redevelopment plan in one of Pittsburgh's rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods was the need “to rebuild a stable residential community of homeowners and renters [by demolishing] poorly-managed high-rise apartment buildings [and replacing them with] higher quality mixed-income rental and affordable homeownership options.” According to the planners, this “would help support an economically and culturally diverse population that would engage in the ongoing improvement of the community.” ¹⁰ The initiatives in these instances were intended to benefit the local community—and quality of life benefits did in fact accrue to residents capable of pivoting into the new neighborhood economy of scale. Nevertheless, it is instructive that neighborhood improvement was seen as requiring the removal of impoverished physical structures (and, implicitly, large numbers of persons inhabiting those spaces) while replacing both with what would align more fully with top-down definitions of neighborhood long-term viability.

Erasures and re-placements of people's constructed meanings are expressions of violence, whether taking the form of eradications of African peoples and cultures during American slavery, or eviscerations of contemporary Black neighborhoods and social and psychic dislocations of the persons inhabiting those worlds. W.E.B. Du Bois reflected on the “soul” violence endured by Blacks during enslavement and afterwards, stating: “In those somber forests of his striving his own soul rose before Him, and he saw himself … [and] … He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the World, he must be himself, and not another.” ¹¹ The violence to Black souls Du Bois alludes to in this passage relates to social-structural imprisonments that deny Black people a “place” of their own—a place formed of their own volition and one free of the deformations and destabilizations imposed by a hostile society.

Fullilove characterizes urban dislocations of persons from their neighborhood environments as “root shock,” which she defines as a “traumatic stress reaction to the destruction of all or part of one's emotional ecosystem.” ¹² Theologian Harvey Cox also alludes to a psychic fracturing within urban spaces, referring to a woundedness that urban populations experience when deprived of “channels to make their legitimate needs felt throughout the whole system.” ¹³ Urban geographer Chiara Valli (drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu's analysis of symbolic power) discusses this kind of violence and injury with specific reference to gentrification. Valli equates gentrification to a form of power that “sustains and reproduces itself via the devaluation and misrecognition of … subjects that exist but become deprived of their meaning in order to legitimate the meanings and values attributed by the dominant group.” ¹⁴ Valli's interest is not only in how populations are affected by “the class and racial violence inscribed in gentrification,” but also in the scale of resistance that may be triggered in response to these social and symbolic forms of violence. ¹⁵

The problems and promise inhering in social configurations of community and place begin then with how these dimensions are imagined and with whose imaginings are granted empowerment and embodiment. One vantage point historically for conceiving of urban community has been Christianity and on matters of race in particular it has contributed to disfigurements of the American social landscape. As Swedish Nobel Laureate Gunnar Myrdal's influential 1944 study An American Dilemma points out, America's inundations in racial injustice controvert American moral and democratic ambitions and its image and imaginings as a people acting “under the influence of high national and Christian precepts.” ¹⁶ Theologian Willie James Jennings also speaks to these distortions and blindnesses, referring to Western theological distancing from the “deep theological architecture that patterned early modern visions of peoples, places, and societies.” This reflects Western theology's “diseased social imagination,” says Jennings, preventing its “ability to discern how its intellectual and pedagogical performances reflect and fuel the problem.” ¹⁷

Theological blindnesses have led to distortions of place, but often (in the case of urban dislocations of peoples) it has led to theological silence. Theological readings and renderings of urban life are needed which convey moral objections to the violence of desecration and erasure, while centering the voices and experiences of local populations most affected by these adverse and traumatic dynamics. Countering theological blindnesses on these matters requires a systematic academic engagement with community contexts in ways that are capable of facilitating richer understandings of local vantage points on social, spatial, and spiritual meanings of place.

Academic Resourcing of Community Voice, Visibility, and Flourishing

(Re)collections of former communities haunt our urban (re)imaginings and stalk our (re)constructions of urban space. Theologian Walter Earl Fluker characterizes these often-unperceived vestiges of forgotten community presence in terms of “an old ghost” that “dwells in the in-between, living-dead [socio-religious] linguistic spaces.” But he also underlines the importance of invocational practices that enable theologically minded scholars and practitioners “to speak from those spaces … as part of our ongoing theological and churchly missions.” ¹⁸ Historically, it has been theological disciplines that have laid special claim to a discernment of unseen worlds and to a knowledge acquired from what St. Augustine termed the “contemplation of eternal things.” ¹⁹ To the extent those capacities have proven effective, that discernment and knowledge should extend as well to urban community ghosts that inhabit more historically proximate invisible realms—and these theological and allied disciplines must produce the griots, the tellers of sacred communal history, who restore through their probings what has been lost and concealed. Stories of lost community are crying out to be told, and sharper theoretical and methodological tools are needed to effectively pierce the veils impairing our view of these unseen realms.

Although concerns with matters of spirit may favorably position theologically minded disciplines for this work, that positioning can also create a distance from details and realities of inhabited temporal realms. Too often our theological vantage points afford only a dim and remote view of the struggle taking place on the streets beyond the campus. Jennings references this disconnection, stating: “The social vision that holds court in the theological academy imagines its intellectual world from the commanding heights of various social economies: cultural, political, and scholastic.” ²⁰

Acknowledging the distance that looms between steepled locations and the social urgencies of restive communities is an initial step toward fuller accountings of community loss and grievance. Additionally though, the academy can serve as medium and mediator in the relationship between the academy and community and in the work of (re)imagining and (re)shaping just and flourishing urban communities. That includes facilitating analytical methods concerned with ethical and empirical approaches to community studies and mobilizing social resources and infrastructure on behalf of community justice and flourishing.

Within the context of several Pittsburgh neighborhoods undergoing significant gentrification and change, greater proximities between the academy and community life have been pursued with varying but notable degrees of emphasis on resource distributions, programmatic alliances, and instructional partnerships. For example, the University of Pittsburgh (UPitt), located adjacent to the Hill District neighborhood, has been entwined on both sides of the redevelopment equation. On the one hand, it has been a driver of some of that activity and, on the other hand, it has been a sympathetic and responsive partner toward community grievances pertaining to that redevelopment.

Specifically, the university became part of a high-profile struggle over the redevelopment of a large 80-acre low-income housing complex bordering its campus. The Hill District complex, called Allequippa Terrace, was built during the Depression-era and was Pittsburgh's first and largest public housing complex with approximately 1800 units. ²¹ In the early 1990s, Pittsburgh's mayor proposed using $31 million of available federal monies and funds from a private developer toward a joint venture to raze the Allequippa complex and replace it with 1200–1500 “mostly private housing units.” ²² Allequippa residents were pushing for the complex to be refurbished and mobilized against the mayor's proposal, leading after months of dispute to the abandonment of the proposal in 1995. ²³ Shortly thereafter, Allequippa residents acceded to a deal between the Pittsburgh Housing Authority and a Boston developer to demolish much of the complex and replace it with two phases of mixed-income housing in what would be a renamed community, Oak Hill.

The first phase of construction and reconstruction began in 1998 and was to include 500 public units and 350 market-rate units. A subsequent second phase was to include 200 public units and 325 market-rate units. ²⁴ What actually took place was the construction of 639 phase one units, 70 percent of which were low-income, and an extended battle between the developer and UPitt over 12 of the 20 acres of the land on which the second phase units were to be built. ²⁵ The Housing Authority decided in favor of the university in 2007 and the university executed a long-envisioned plan to build a sports complex for its soccer and baseball programs. ²⁶ In an effort to win resident support during the negotiations, the university offered Oak Hill residents an opportunity for a resident-run concession stand at the sports complex. The response from one resident council member was: “We want our homes [and, in any event] we don’t play soccer.” ²⁷ Meanwhile, Pittsburgh Housing Authority proceeded toward completion in 2011 of a scaled-down version of its Phase Two housing plan on Oak Hill's remaining acreage, including “86 new mixed-income housing units, … 14 townhouses, a swimming pool, and basketball and tennis courts.” ²⁸

Nevertheless, UPitt has developed very rich community engagement partnerships in the Hill District neighborhood and in other Pittsburgh neighborhoods, including Pittsburgh's predominantly Black, low-income Homewood neighborhood. UPitt has invested tens of millions of dollars in the development of a Community Engagement Center and a biosphere project in Homewood, in collaboration with and on properties owned by Homewood's Bible Center Church whose pastor is UPitt vice provost and social work professor John Wallace. UPitt also has a Community Engagement Center in the Hill District whose programs include a STEAM initiative that provides science, math, and arts training to neighborhood youth and serves as a “front door” to the university's academic resources (paralleling work done at its Homewood engagement center). ²⁹

UPitt has placed considerable emphasis on instructional and research-related engagement with neighboring communities. For example, its Institute of Politics, founded in 1989 by political scientist and social work scholar Moe Coleman, was an early bridge between UPitt, its surrounding communities, and the city's policy leaders. Coleman, who lived during his early years in the Hill District and in one of its low-income housing complexes after his home was demolished to make way for the Civic Center, brought this background and years of community organizing experience to the UPitt institute and to his roles as School of Social Work professor and interim dean. ³⁰ The institute's Elsie Hillman Civic Forum promotes “social responsibility and public service by providing educational programs, research projects, and civic engagement and leadership development for students and community leaders.” ³¹ In 2000, UPitt formed a Community Outreach Partnership Center designed to further its engagement with community through faculty, staff, and student instructional and research activities focusing on problems identified by its neighboring communities. The center celebrates the fact that “the tenets of this community-based work have become institutionalized” at UPitt. ³²

Although operating at a different scale of resources and neighborhood involvements than UPitt, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary (PTS) is also situated within an area of extensive gentrification. PTS is located in East Liberty, a neighborhood that (along with Homewood) received substantial numbers of displaced Hill District Black residents during the 1960s and 1970s. It is also directly adjacent to Larimer, where a large concentration of low-income Blacks resided for decades prior to the neighborhood's more recent gentrification. With an imposing 13-acre fenced campus and a chapel whose prominent steeple and resounding bell tower chimes are discernible a half-mile in all directions, PTS presents a distinctive contrast to what at one time at least were low-income Black neighborhoods bordering the campus.

Larimer, once known as “Little Italy” with a 1940s population of 14,000 predominantly Italian residents, transformed almost overnight when low-income public housing was built on the Larimer-East Liberty border during the 1960s and the Italians exited en masse. Since the 1970s, Larimer has been a predominantly Black neighborhood, with Blacks numbering approximately 3300 out of 4000 residents in 1990 (85 percent of total), 2300 of 2600 residents in 2000 (87 percent of total), and 1500 of 1750 residents in 2010 (86 percent of total). ³³ The demolition of low-income public high-rise complexes on the East Liberty/Larimer border during the 1990s that displaced hundreds of African Americans contributed to declining Black population numbers in Larimer (and in East Liberty).

These Larimer/East Liberty public housing complexes were replaced by new chain stores such as Target and Whole Foods, displacing not only Black residents but also smaller Black commercial establishments within the neighborhood. By the 2000s, new condominiums were being built on the East Liberty side of the border and then in 2014 Larimer received a $30 million US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) neighborhood redevelopment grant for the demolition of “sub-standard” housing stock and the construction of hundreds of mixed-income housing units. The HUD grant was matched over the next few years by other public and private sources and used to finance construction of 334 units of mixed-income housing, two-thirds of which were to be earmarked as affordable. ³⁴

Larimer's redevelopment pattern was an example of slow violence through neighborhood starvation, as resources left with the exodus of the Italian population in the 1960s and did not flow back in until the 1990s extensions of the newly redeveloping commercial zones on its East Liberty border and then the 2014 HUD grant's major injection of housing construction funding. That inflow of resources, however, came too late to invigorate much of the Black community life that struggled to take root and fully form in Larimer from the late 1960s onward, or to stave off the displacement of Black residents and small businesses in Larimer or in East Liberty.

Larimer and East Liberty have been markedly refurbished and revitalized, but in the process many Black residents have been pushed from place to place. Black renters and homeowners in Larimer and East Liberty were pushed out or pulled under by resource constrictions and social decline in the neighborhoods from the 1960s onward. Residents of the demolished high-rise complexes were forced out to low-income housing in neighborhoods further away. Many of the Black residents of these neighborhoods had located there in the first place as a result of previous displacement from the Hill District due to downtown expansion.

Although PTS has had a privileged vantage point on these decades of change within its adjacent neighborhoods, at least in the sense of physical proximity, it has not focused much institutional attention on these matters or taken any strong institutional stands against the disruptions of Black communities in these instances. PTS's Metro-Urban Institute (MUI) has been the main exception, however, to the seminary's institutional disengagement on these pressing matters within its surrounding communities.

Since its founding in 1991, MUI's engagement with local communities has included mobilizing policy-oriented and service-oriented responses to: public health problems disproportionately impacting low-income communities; developmental practices that have polluted and degraded urban environments (especially in low-income areas); deteriorating relationships between law enforcement sectors and Black poor populations; and economic underdevelopment and social dislocations of the poor. As part of its approach, MUI has developed programmatic partnerships with community stakeholders; facilitated cross-sector community dialogues between community leaders and the seminary's students and personnel (especially via conferencing and community participatory research); and offered educational platforms to non-matriculants through PTS pre-bachelor's and master's level certificates.

MUI has also been at the forefront of PTS's evolving commitment to community-based student research through the seminary's urban ministry, missiological, and field education courses and through a contextual analysis course co-developed by MUI that is a requirement for all Master of Divinity students. Additionally, MUI had a student fellows program where a select number of students were selected for a year-long placement in community organizational contexts and developed an action-research project with guidance from MUI staff and their placement organization.

Over time, PTS's community-focused instruction and engagement as well as its attention to community struggles and grievances have become a more central part of its educational approach. The extent to which this results in grounding the seminary's pedagogical, scholarly, and applied trajectories in the social realities of its neighbors is not certain but appears promising in light of recent PTS strategic reconfigurations. Ultimately, though, the communities beyond the gates will make that determination.

Vantage Points, Visibility, and Voices

Whatever hesitancies academic institutions may have about responding to community urgencies and necessities, aggrieved communities are watching and are aware of responsiveness and unresponsiveness across institutional sectors to their concerns. These communities and their struggles may be largely out of view of those positioned at steeple levels, but institutional indifference and inaction toward their struggles may be more visible than realized.

When positioned in the central square in Larimer, PTS's high steeple is visible above a thick tree line when looking west from the square. When standing on the grounds of the seminary campus, however, or gazing out the windows of its chapel, auditoriums, and classrooms, Larimer is hidden from view. The juxtaposition of these divergent locations is both ironic and instructive—the community being able to see the seminary, but the seminary unable to see the community.

Urban campuses physically adjoin the worlds of neighboring residents, but the two are also tied together by a mutual stake in the flourishing and well-being of their intersecting contexts. Perceptions of interests and imperatives require a two-way looking glass between campuses and neighboring communities. Proximity matters, and the onus for closing the distance falls on the empowered party—in this case, the academic institutions. Academic pedagogies, programs, and research practices that facilitate up-close, ground-level interactions with social worlds beyond the campus gates, and that privilege the voices that have been subjugated, the stories that have been untold, and the life worlds that have been erased, should be recognized more widely as an academic imperative. Immersive and reflexive community-oriented pedagogies, programmatic initiatives, and research agendas should be a core rather than auxiliary focus of higher education and especially of theological educational contexts.

Nevertheless, the voices and stories of the aggrieved are going to be heard, and their stories are going to surface, one way or another. As stated in scripture: “There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known. What you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight, and what you have whispered in the ear in the inner rooms will be proclaimed from the roofs” (Luke 12:2–3 NIV). Proclamation is an obligation that comes with leadership.

As another passage makes clear, even if those who know the truth fail to testify and remain silent, “the stones will cry out” (Luke 19:40). The stones of the few Black congregations still standing as Black institutional redoubts within Larimer, the memorial stone erected at Freedom Corner in the Hill District, and the murals painted on the walls of old buildings in these neighborhoods cry out about Black communities erased and livelihoods lost. The stones will cry out even if the faithful do not.

Even if theological institutions move hesitantly and fitfully into responding to these calls for solidarity, let the remnant presence of those stones be building blocks upon which imaginings of widely and equitably flourishing communities are proclaimed and constructed.