Mandela, Massachusetts: Design Futures for a Proposed City
Did you know that in the 1980s there was a referendum for majority Black neighborhoods across Boston to incorporate and form an independent city called Mandela? Neither did I. After two years studying urban planning a stone’s throw from Greater Roxbury, I had no idea about the referendum. Finding this history left me thinking: What does the Mandela history mean for Boston now? What could Mandela have been (in our wildest dreams)? This spring, I created an interactive public art project across Greater Roxbury to unearth this history and encourage people to stop, reflect and engage in the landscapes they come across every day.
The City
Mandela, Massachusetts was a proposed city named after South African activists Nelson and Winnie Mandela, that would have been created as a result of many districts in Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan, and parts of Jamaica Plain, the South End and Fenway (altogether called “Greater Roxbury”) reincorporating to form an independent city. The city of Mandela would have been a 12 square mile area, encompassing over 130,000 people (74% Black and 10% Hispanic), with 22% of the Boston population at the time, and more than 2,500 parcels of cleared land (GRIP 1986, WGBH 1988). The proposal was defeated in 1986 and 1988 due to a lack of community support, but the legacy of Mandela influenced the trajectory of Greater Roxbury and has implications for Boston’s planning and design today.
In the early 1980s, Andrew Jones and Curtis Davis, newcomers to Boston, formed the Greater Roxbury Incorporation Project (GRIP), working with many longtime community activists including George Russell, Chuck Turner, and Sadiki Kambon to get the Mandela Referendum on the ballot twice. GRIP’s idea to reincorporate was motivated by the Boston city government’s “overassessment” and “underservice” of Black neighborhoods, and the undetermined fate of remaining land parcels (Miletsky and Gonzalez 2016). GRIP took inspiration from global movements for Black land control and self-determination, from Julius Nyerere’s ujamaa policy to the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program, and they proposed Mandela as a city where putting the needs and interests of Black people at the forefront would serve the needs and interests of all.
While the 1986 GRIP report proposing the referendum focused on economics and governance for Mandela, and papers like Miletsky and Gonzalez (2016) give rich insights into this history, the Mandela referendum did not mention design or aesthetics, and I saw this project as an opportunity to add another voice to the history through art.
The Project
Inspired by the work of Monument Lab, and interdisciplinary artists like Alexandra Bell and Arielle Gray reimagining public space, I created Mandela, Massachusetts, a participatory art project in two parts.
The first part was to Spread the Word: I designed realistic posters, postcards, and stickers about Mandela that were in conversation with everyday artifacts. Then, they were printed and disseminated (posting in high-visibility areas like walls and bus stops, and even on car windshields) across Greater Roxbury. The colors, textures, and images in the materials are inspired by global Black architecture and aesthetics, activists, 1980s street art, and the Roxbury Love mural by Gomez and Burns. Roxbury Love, formerly located at Warren and Clifford Streets, was the only physical manifestation of Mandela in Boston before it was demolished in 2019 without any warning to the community, and I included it as a motif throughout the materials.
The second part worked to Spark Conversation. All materials had a QR code that linked to a Typeform survey where people who encountered a poster, postcard, or sticker could share their reactions. The survey had question prompts like “My Mandela would look like…” and “Mandela would be a home for…” so that people could use their imaginations and create a shared vision for the city’s design.
The Materials
City of Mandela is a bumper sticker, placed on large telephone poles, and electric boxes. The piece plays off of the Boston city seal. I replaced the sketch of the Boston harbor with the Roxbury Love mural, used the date of the first Mandela Referendum, and adjusted the city motto from “SICUT PATRIBUS, SIT DEUS NOBIS” (Latin for “God be with us as he was with our fathers”) to KONTWOL TEREN E DETEMINAISIN PWOT TET OU” (Igbo for “land control”, Portuguese for “and”, and Haitian Creole for “self-determination), what I would imagine as priorities for the city of Mandela. The languages represented Black immigrant populations in the Boston area. When looking close enough, you can start to see the Black power fist within the wreath around the city seal.
The postcards Greetings from Mandela and Nubian Streetscape referenced American tourist ephemera. Both of the postcards use the back as a pedagogical tool to learn about the cultures and assets of Greater Roxbury. Greetings from Mandela plays on a vintage Century postcard’s kitschy style and updates it using landmarks in the Greater Roxbury area, including Franklin Park, the Roxbury Love Mural, and even Harvard Medical School. Nubian Streetscape starts to imagine what an imagined Mandela would actually look like at a human level. A collage of architectures, textures, and colors from places with diverse Black identities that interact with Greater Roxbury, from Port-au-Prince to Niamey, it also has cartoon-like clouds filled with the Black Panther Party and GRIP writings and a banner from an old Boston postcard that welcomes you into this alternate (yet not impossible) reality.
The largest material, the People of Mandela poster, is an overview of the history and aims to give a greater emphasis on the people involved in Mandela. It also includes the clouds as another indication of whimsy and imagination. I also layered several partly hidden newspaper clippings from the 1980s that tell the story of Mandela if you look closely enough.
Reflections
My hope for these materials, still scattered around Greater Roxbury, is that they provoke and inspire, both creating physical space that honors Black identities and histories, and creating virtual space for imagination and reflection. In the survey, people shared some of their thoughts, frustrations, and hopes for the city.
Most respondents had hopeful visions about both what Black Boston is and what Mandela could be: “uncompromising unity”, “diversity in its truest form,” “a police-free city” “socialist and equitable,” and “a beautiful, bustling environment full of loving, helpful and inspirational innovators”. Granted, it wasn’t all consensus: within a day, one response said we can amplify Black identities and Black joy by “giving them money” and one remarked that we can do this “[by Black people] assimilating”. One person stated they would see “Black-owned business,” while another said Black self-determination looks like “Anti-capitalism… merely buying black will not save us”. Another respondent stated that Black Boston is “underserved and underrepresented”, which clearly echoed the motivations for reincorporation that GRIP outlined back in 1986.
People suggested many urban design ideas from “public art,” “art that tells history,” and “beautiful murals,” to “affordable housing”, “trees” and “community gardens”. There was an emphasis on “play”, “playgrounds” and “children playing,” a proxy for “beauty, safety, and joy”. Another quote stood out to me: “I’m not Black”, they said, “but Black freedom means freedom for people like me, who are brown and queer,” and I found this to be a perfect illustration of Mandela’s idea that focusing on the needs and interests of Black people leads to liberation for all.
For a second I considered putting these responses in an envelope and sending them straight to the city government, but I think that the impact of a project like this is bigger and, in a way, much less straightforward. Through public art installations like Mandela, Massachusetts, we can employ, adapt, and challenge planning tools, such as tactical “do-it-yourself” urbanism, or community engagement and visioning surveys. As Black planners, designers and artists, we can choose to employ the tools of the institutions, if we want to, in order to redraw the lines and boundaries imposed on us, or we can employ our own tools entirely, through ephemerality and celebration. An installation as small as a postcard can encourage people to imagine space differently, and, at the most basic level, acknowledge and valorize histories of Black activism, challenging traditional site-based urban design to do the same.
