Radical placemaking is a verb

Abstract

How might the practice of radical placemaking make new lifeworlds possible? In this commentary, I respond to Kass and Dunlap's argument that procedural abolitionism bears responsibility for counterinsurgency in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd rebellion. While I appreciate the urgency of critically examining strategies for abolition, I come to different conclusions than the authors’ divide between procedural, insurrectionary, and autonomous strategies for abolition. Instead, I point to radical placemaking as enacting a solidarity that allows for a prefigurative politics to emerge beyond the boundaries of ideological difference, demonstrating the importance of solidarity in worldmaking.

The 2020 George Floyd uprisings thrust abolition as theory and practice into the mainstream – in graffiti, on Instagram, and in classrooms. Kass and Dunlap join the growing reflections on this rupture in the constant struggle of abolition and reckoning with the ways that statist counterinsurgency co-opted the uprisings to increase police budgets (Chua, 2020; Chua et al., 2024; Maher, 2022). While Chua et al. (2024) and Chua (2020) emphasize the need for procedural, autonomist, and insurrectionary forms of abolition, Kass and Dunlap argue that procedural strategies have been insufficiently accountable to the workings of counterinsurgency. They uplift the riot as ‘legitimate’ abolitionist practice, although I am not sure why rioters would be concerned with legitimacy or who would have such determinate power.

Kass and Dunlap (2025) narrowly define procedural abolition as something that is done by a ‘non-incarcerated academic/advocate’ seeking relief from the state that, they argue, can often undermine the radical potential of insurrectionary and autonomous abolitions. This evokes a unitary state and implies that incarcerated people do not engage in procedural abolition. People who are incarcerated are just as diverse in their viewpoints as those of us on the outside – some reject all authority of the state (James, 2005), some seek non-reformist reforms to reduce the harms of incarceration and keep people alive to see the horizon of abolition (Gilmore, 2007), and others embrace carceral ideologies.

I have learned from incarcerated organizers who do not operate from rigid ideologies, but rather how to balance the existential need to survive for tomorrow with the struggle to call out the illegitimacy of the carceral state that actively seeks their death and disablement. Their practices range from a riot, a hunger strike, collecting testimonials, writing bills, and other everyday acts of keeping each other alive in a form of mutual aid – the same people may engage in insurrectionary, autonomous, and procedural abolition. I do not believe that their imaginations have been dulled by violent and banal experiences into procedural abolition. As I write in 2025, I am collaborating with Ralph Dunuan, a self-identified abolitionist organizer who is writing and fighting for non-reformist reforms from inside the Washington Corrections Center. After 10 years in solitary, Ralph began to analyze intergenerational trauma to Indigenous families and expanded his imaginary of abolition towards organizing from the mainline to Instagram (Dunuan, 2025).

Kass and Dunlap suggest that procedural, insurrectionary, and autonomous strategies should not actively exclude each other, asking how procedural abolition might better work in tandem with the other two forms. I respectfully suggest that the answers are already in the million experiments in placemaking, and geographers have only to look for them (Interrupting Criminalization et al., 2023). In the wake of the 2020 uprisings, there were many people who pandered to counterinsurgent claims of ‘outside agitators’ and compromised their values for clout and cash. There are many people who are so rigid in their ideology that they forfeit opportunities for solidarity. I suggest that it is less that ‘freedom is a great number of places’ (Kass and Dunlap), so much that place-making is an active process. Below, I explain how radical placemaking produces a prefigurative politics where the material and affective practices of solidarity produce worldmaking (Boggs, 1977; Getachew, 2019; Kelley, 2019).

Radical placemaking

A formal definition of placemaking is ‘the set of social, political and material processes by which people iteratively create and recreate the experienced geographies in which they live’ (Pierce et al., 2011: 54). Placemaking is not necessarily liberatory – it can be carceral or abolitionist. While originally coined in urban planning (Jacobs, 1961), I build out radical placemaking from geographers who trace liberatory practices (Daigle, 2024; Gilmore, 2017; Guild and Whetstone, 2021; Hawthorne and Heitz, 2018; Heynen and Ybarra, 2021; Inwood and Alderman, 2021; Mei-Singh, 2021; Winston, 2023). Following Moulton (2021), I think with land as mnemonic and actor in the material practice of place-making where dispossessed and oppressed peoples have experimented with freedom, kinship, and communality that leave traces on the land.

Radical placemaking is a verb. By this, I mean that it is an active process where people can simultaneously burn things down and decide what they want to build instead (Heynen and Ybarra, 2021; Morgan et al., 2022; Ybarra, 2023). This often, although not exclusively, is clearest in material practices of taking space such as through a riot, a police precinct shutdown, graffiti, sit-ins, and teach-ins – that can turn sites of harm into places where we enact relations of care. I use radical placemaking to signal that these often-nascent practices pull out the decayed weeds of racial capitalism and settler colonialism from the roots of society, tilling the political soils and planting seeds for new flowers to bloom. Most seeds planted will not grow, but some will.

Radical placemaking is the material work of solidarity on where oppressed peoples can make freedom together – even if ephemerally – in ways that allow for a prefigurative politics to emerge. I think one of the most important things about radical placemaking is that people come together beyond ideological differences. Many of the same people whose politics align across those three categories, and many others who did not identify as abolitionist in Seattle 2020 showed up to shut down the freeway at night, watched films in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, and spray-painted graffiti at the George Washington statue at the University of Washington. Some of these people showed up at City Council meetings calling for police reform, and some people did not. They talked, and sometimes they argued, and sometimes they were a hot mess on Instagram. They were passionate in their disagreements about how to address harm and seek safety (Chua, 2020; Dixon and Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2019). Radical placemaking is characterized by spontaneity and play in defiance of strict definitions that political ideologies and academic theories might impose. Cross-pollination across ideologies and life experiences is part of how radical placemaking offers opportunities to rethink the politics of the possible.

Sin, Contra, y Desde el Estado

The strategies of working within the state, against the state, and without the state can be in opposition to each other or they can be complementary, particularly for organizers who work across local, state, and national scales. I think about the ways that many of us are called to work ‘sin, contra y desde el estado’ (Mijente, 2022). Rather than seeking to seize or smash a singular state, we power-map to find pressure points to yield results (perhaps at the local level) and when total opposition is necessary (perhaps the federal level), while engaging in autonomous organizing to keep us alive in the meantime. Here, the ‘we’ that keeps each other safe and alive is pod maps of oppressed people, particularly those targeted for premature death and disablement due to their racialization and/or immigration status (Gilmore, 2007; Mingus, 2016; Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018).

The popular framework sin, contra y desde el estado is one of many calls for a prefigurative politics that make new worlds possible. In June 2018, I participated in a direct action that signaled the possibilities for working within and against the state. We blocked the entrances to the US Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) offices to specifically call out the hypocrisy of the City of Seattle claiming to be a ‘sanctuary’ city while collaborating with HSI to surveil and deport residents. Organizers shut down the streets for cars planning to pay exorbitant downtown parking rates, but left bike lines and sidewalks open for everyday commuters.

I felt hope in a moment of placing my body on the line against the state, calling out Seattle's ‘sanctuary’ for the counterinsurgency and violence it sought to conceal in self-referential celebration. I was reprimanded for laughing and smiling in front of cameras because I was supposed to relay the gravity of state violence. I felt joy in autonomous practices beyond the state that we brought with us King County Jail, creating a queue to make phone calls and semi-privacy around the single toilet in the group cell. That morning, Mijente released a policy proposal, not to ‘defund’ US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but to abolish it (Mijente, 2018). These coordinated actions demonstrated the possibility of simultaneously working against, within, and beyond the state.

Conclusion

I am grateful for the opportunity to critically assess organizing during the George Floyd uprisings. It is easier to critique movements if you do not acknowledge your role in joys, mistakes, and heartaches of radical placemaking. For that reason, I appreciate Chua's (2020) willingness to place herself in her assessment of what was achieved and what work is necessary to support autonomous communities. I also appreciate Chua (2024: 136) call to resist the idea ‘that we should have been narrower in our framing, rigid in our theories, or exclusive in our organizing, accepting only the purest souls to the cause’. In 2025, as the USA continues in crisis, there are few pure souls, but many who are questioning state violence. I hope that radical placemaking, whether a riot or a poetry reading, can invite everyone to a party where we make a world where we all can live.