What if the “City of Yesterday” Loved “Yay Area” Urbanism?
A Case for Rooting California Forever’s City Planning in Regional History, Resilience, and Imagination.
--
It was 1999. For weeks, my 34-year-old mother laid out clippings in the hallway of the two-bedroom apartment that our eight-person family called home in Mountain View, California.
I remember her calling to double-check the real estate ads that could fit our growing needs: marking up and crossing off false flags. She already made great efforts to check in with any debt collectors and credit card agencies. She would become a pharmacy technician, often taking night classes at a for-profit trade college. Meanwhile, my father worked his 12-hour electrician shifts at the (now-closed) Owens Corning fiberglass company in San Jose. Dad also worked part-time at Home Depot to bolster their savings for the down payment. Thankfully, my grandmother Mamo would pick us up from Theuerkauf Elementary to stay in East Palo Alto until they came to pick us up.
From this overcrowded unit in the Shoreline Village Apartments, the noise had to be minimal. Our young Southeast Asian landlord allowed this equally young, hard-working Black couple to grow our family — as long as we were well-behaved. To ensure it, every night, my parents would escort us upstairs in two rounds: half of the six children at a time so as not to raise neighbors’ suspicions.
But some hope seemed on the horizon. Mom found a multifamily home around the corner from our school in the Rex Manor neighborhood. You finally could walk home from school, she would tell us smiling, proud of her house-hunting efforts.
That is until, in 2000, when the small efforts of a tech company named Google (now Alphabet) reached IPO levels of success. Google going “public” shifted the speculative values of the South Bay housing, especially in the epicenter of Mountain View. That potential house only two blocks away, instead of two miles, from our elementary school now doubled in price. Since no new housing was being constructed in the low-density suburbs, it never went back down.
Thus, it catapulted our search radius out of the entire region. Eventually, my parents turned to an agent for help. The bank’s subprime mortgages for first-time homebuyers seemed to favor financing purchases in planned communities being purpose-built just at the base of the Altamont Pass mountains located in a town straddled between three highways: Tracy, California. After our childhood football practices or scrimmages on the weekends, sometimes Dad would drive take us to Tracy to see what was being built just for us: the site he was sacrificing precious time away from his family to finance.
That initial excitement turned into exhaustion as we realized no schools were built and the traffic was inhumane for anyone, let alone six children all under the age of 12. For a year, we commuted to the Bay Area with my mother waking up at 4:30 a.m. to try to make our 7:30 school times. She would deputize the older three siblings to get the younger three ones dressed while she would prepare for her job at Kaiser, often fueling herself on ginkgo biloba supplements and tea with toast. We were late so embarrassingly often that the school district could tell. The jig was up. We could not legally remain enrolled.
Like thousands of families seeking “peace of mind” and “more for less” in the exurban hinterlands, we became a part of the silent, 30-year, ongoing Black urban exodus from the Bay Area due to high housing costs. Yet, this inability to sustain our social and cultural connections to the Bay Area was not simply an inconvenience. Before any public healthcare options were available to the working poor, life-sustaining diabetes medicine was still paid out of pocket. Since we were the highest earners in the local working-class family unit, my mother was my Mamo’s safety net when she would have to choose where to spend each month.
Moving meant Mom had to stop working at Kaiser in Redwood City to be a full-time homemaker in this new city. Our moving meant slowly eliminating the benefits of helping Mamo. And with a new mortgage — a subprime one with variable interest rates that could and did rob many Black middle-class families by the time the Great Recession landed— my father could not spare anything. This remained true even as he frequently worked on holidays and even became the vice president of his union.
Occasionally, Mamo would come to stay with us in Tracy during our first year away. But with her own kids barely finishing high school (while being bused outside of EPA to Belmont), she could never stay longer than a couple of days. I would write her letters and call her, but the distance added up. At 52, my grandmother took on a job at the newly-opened Krispy Kreme in Mountain View, for which she was grateful. But she was not making enough there either. Little did we know, she began rationing her insulin due to inconsistent access and no health care.
At 53, Mamo had a series of minor strokes. Then, a major one that landed her in the hospital in Redwood City, blocks from where Mom used to work. Her death in 2001 sent both me and Mom into a spiral of depression, who were closest to her. Unfairly, my Mom blamed herself but it was impossible to parent her, my young aunts and uncles, plus her own young tribe.
Today, I reside in and teach city planning in Philadelphia, where people often question how a Northern Californian like me ended up here. Apparently, I should want to come back to the Bay Area where my immediate family lives. But I mostly grieve it for what could have been, had the prosperity of the tech industry created a true rising tide for all.
In September 2023, an anonymous private entity finally went public with their five-year quest to acquire enough land parcels in eastern Solano County to design a town, rebranded as the “City of Yesterday.” Honorably, the project aims to be a pressure valve for the housing demands emanating from San Francisco and Silicon Valley, given how the lack of housing has made the California Dream a mirage for many.
Yet, I wonder aloud: Does anyone planning this new town know what it means to be displaced, economically or otherwise? Does anyone know what it means to love the lost (Black) spatial imaginaries of the Bay Area’s yesterday? Whose freedom dreams can California’s cities (and their patrons) equitably enable for designing “neighborhoods of tomorrow”? Which yesterdays are being invoked for tomorrow’s landscape?
I testify to my pain and pleasure because stories are the ethical lenses through which I teach planners to filter their work of making cities rich in spaces for exchange: a root ingredient of urban innovation. Reckoning with the yesterdays of my grandmother’s Black, female, working-class, disabled life (and untimely death) is what motivated my early passion for socially just policy and planning. But so did my love for her East Palo Alto and understanding their historic fights for creating a dignified town in the shadows of Palo Alto; their dreams perpetually deferred by deprived access to basic amenities like clean water, healthy food, and education.
This reflective, regional approach animates how I view the emergent comprehensive vision of the California Forever entity — composed of founders, investors, and owners with wealth from LinkedIn, Emerson Collective, Apple, Andreessen Horowitz, Stripe, and more — who identify as “Flannery Associates.” I testify to this lived experience of a “root shock” — a series of traumas and indignities visited upon those dispossessed by displacement — to give some moral and ethical context to how this team might plan with their privilege in mind. Big Tech owes a sociospatial debt to the many publics whom they have affected spatially with their “innovations,” especially in the wake of a recent wave of downsizing and layoffs.
As Flannery Associates / California Forever has gone public and testified at civic forums, it is clear these new plans, thankfully, will participate in public and governmental processes through city-making. If designed thoughtfully, their desired “decades-long conversation” has the potential to address the previous decades of displacement and lack of investment in public accommodations that have driven population loss for the first time in California’s history.
This article is an intervention: as an educator, a Bay Area native with family ties to Solano County, and an Afrofuturist planner who cares about both preserving and reimagining culture in diverse neighborhoods. Beyond my own lived experiences, I use their website, news reports, and scholarly articles to argue that the City of Yesterday can repair our collective experiences with what we call the “hope impulse” — if they are willing to bravely depart from business-as-usual urbanism. Practically, I offer a sample of a diagnostic I have developed around “design justice” to help critically reflect and map out processes. Last, I propose one obvious opportunity to incorporate a suppressed local culture into the planning and design, which could excite a likely disengaged, uninformed, and overlooked group in the region: Black displaced Bay Areans.
Towards A Post-” Techno-Utopia”: Designing Restorative Narratives and Spaces Amid Distrust
In planning and community design, a good process creates good products, not the other way around. We also know that justice means development inspired by the reality that every community has assets; sustainability from indigenous planning reminds us that even the land has a story worth listening to. This informs the Planning Code of Ethics, adopted in 2005 and revised in 2016, to explicitly encourage equity and integrity in participation.
It should come as no surprise that some healthy distrust surrounds California Forever’s dream development, which has assembled around 55,000 acres in private purchases since 2018. A good first step to overcome that distrust is a codesigning trustworthy, authentic narrative around the place brand that invites deeper relationships and shared stewardship over what interventions become built. This shared storytelling is no easy task. Even planning scholars are just now beginning to define how art-based methods, for instance, can develop, market, and sustain authentic place identities. How you communicate that is a dimension of what urban designers regard as “interactional justice.”
At the University of Pennsylvania, I have developed a four-part course around design justice that I offer as a mini workshop to planning and architecture students when learning about community engagement, especially in predominantly Black and immigrant-based Philadelphia. Among others, it is inspired by the author, technologist, and designer Sasha Constanza-Chock of MIT, who has been pushing for a democratic approach to engagement and technology known as “Design Justice.”
With this framework in mind, California Forever’s team might ask three kinds of specific questions to be humane yet innovative about planning as a PROCESS of futuring, not merely a set of transactional products to emplace (e.g., housing, transit, jobs).
- PERSONAS: Who are we to do this work? Who do we need to be or become to connect with audiences as stakeholders?
- PRACTICES: What communication methods are we using and why? What is the planning culture motivating and driving this long-term process of design?
- PLACES: What is the origin story of this place? Who exactly do we know and imagine living here later? Where are they living now? What would they need to come? Why? What do they love and appreciate about the planned region now and before? What does their pluriverse look like, ideally, and in reality? How does that group(s) express their sense of place where they live now? Which sites can best tell that story? How might we democratize the designs of the physical space?
Answering many of these questions, especially around the Places dimension, might lead one to believe they possess a sense of “cultural competency”. That would be again falling into the trap of viewing spatial practices as a product, rather than a dynamic relationship. California Forever, while being solution-oriented, can also model what is dubbed “cultural humility.” Cultural humility means accepting that there are unknown unknowns here. There are also hidden knowns and silenced knowns, which have caused harm to the keepers of these lifeways that no amount of surveying will fully reveal…until trust is won.
The Power of Narrative: Challenging California Forever’s “Pity” Rhetoric and Benevolence Persona
“Eastern Solano County is also an area ready for a new community. We’re excited to tell our story.” — California Forever, September 2023
The City of Yesterday needs to view planning and its storytelling apparatuses through the “appropriate technology” lens of design justice. While we are more critical now, the modernist, state-driven era of American planning in the 20th century was a techno-utopian age of its own, especially for some who saw their interventions as creating public harmony between “man” and “nature” or increasing efficiency. The destruction of Seneca Village (and its birds) was deemed rational and necessary to create New York City’s Central Park. Did they achieve it? Sure. But at what costs to which peoples and species?
Moreover, everyone deserves to be engaged and excited about their hopes. While the California Forever website rightfully tries to beat back allegations of a “techno-utopia” in their FAQs page, the solution is not reverting to a neutral middle space of providing “the basics.” This is an over-correction and probably a futile one, given that news outlets have already labeled it a “utopian city” and they explicitly promote solar farms. It is not the entire concept of utopia — an imaginary place of collective possibility and hope — to blame here. Instead, it is unaccountable, ego-driven, elitist utopianism that has damaged and alienated our sense of social connection, which “techno” has come to represent.
Repair and restoration can be a concrete frame for generating authentic utopian visions among those facing disadvantage. Perhaps this utopian city could be rooted in mutual benefit and mutual aid as its socially innovative DNA. Unfortunately, the current persona does not prioritize that message. Some of the loudest talking points have been statistics about the failing economy and fears of the existing residents for their young’s futures. In bold and large quotations, for example, their website touts their own survey results.
Last month, 81% of Solano parents we surveyed said that their kids won’t be able to find a future in their own neighborhood when they grow up.
This survey-driven narrative of deficit paints a depressing picture and sends a not-so-subtle psychological message: Solano County, you need us to come here. This rhetorical stance stoking pity through scientific instruments oddly echoes the approach of multinational entities — the Amazons and Olympics — who extract economic and spatial benefits from cities by stoking desperation. Is this the most strategic and sustainable persona to serve the City of Yesterday’s future residents from Fairfield, Rio Vista, Vallejo, or beyond?
Truthfully, billionaire-backed California Forever choosing Solano County could hardly be without its deep-seated self-interests. The narrative does not emphasize the fact that the financiers’ companies also need Solano and there is potential for symbiosis not found anywhere else in Northern California. Urban tech workers are fed up with forking over significant pay for less housing space while some still require commutes, especially post-pandemic. The regional transit options have not been able to offload the need for cars, especially with the stalling of High-Speed Rail. Rooting new opportunities in a historic, partially rural community located strategically between two major urban metropoles is a win-win. These assets should drive the persona and the plans.
In his interview with ABC10, California Forever’s founder and CEO Jan Sramek begins to paint a sobering humane picture of the true costs of long commutes: moments lost with his young children. Bay Area natives know this well. This cost looks like my family too. My Dad recently retired after over 35 years of working at a fiberglass plant in San Jose. That job afforded him training in a union-backed trade and a family-supporting salary: all without having an expensive four-year college education. Yet, the spatial mismatch between housing and work locations required his near-total absence for four days a week during my entire childhood. Not only did Dad work twelve-hour shifts but he commuted nearly three hours each way and would regularly accept overtime days during holidays. For these jobs of the future in this new boomtown, there should be explicit consideration of those who have already been enduring the indignities and trade-offs of the old economy.
Rather than reproduce the same top-down systems of design, the mantle of the planning team might be to answer the silent core question: What about the unaccountable “winner takes all” urbanism — which concentrated profits for a creative few, deepened economic segregation, and shrunk the unique countercultural soul of the Bay Area — can we invert here? While “Design Justice” could have been applied to Big Tech and its cities years ago, perhaps this city is a chance to start afresh: to learn from the mistakes made in the marketplace by practicing a reparative form of urbanism rooted in what Rumi the Sufi poet once said, “The Wound is Where the Light Enters You.” Beyond remembering inequities, perhaps there is redemption awaiting in this emergent geographic space to celebrate concrete examples of resilience.
Yet, this would require breaking with dominant practices in multiple ways. In “Rewriting Planning History: Official and Insurgent Stories,” (1998), indigenous planning scholar and storyteller Leonie Sandercock charts how planning has tended to legitimize its “righteous image” by clinging to “celebratory” and mythological narratives through ‘official history.’ If California Forever wanted to, of course, they could look to the Solano County Historical Society’s written and museum-based history. They could look to its already-acknowledged national and state historic landmarks celebrating its beautiful valleys, architectural fabric, and material-based heritage: the Saint Vincent Hill District, the naval stations, and more.
However, to bravely urbanize around contemporary and diverse pasts, however, this City of Yesterday might look to unofficial cultural archives and insurgent histories to find inspiration for this invented landscape. Oral and intangible repositories like music have provided exactly that function.
The “YAY AREA”: A Black Spatial Imaginary to Inspire and Reconstruct Locally-Loved, Lost Urbanisms
In August 2023, the City Council of Vallejo authorized the renaming of a mile-long stretch of Magazine Street to “E-40 Way” in honor of its native hip-hop entrepreneur Earls Stevens or “E-40.” On Saturday, Oct 21, Vallejo Mayor Robert McConnell renamed the rapper’s childhood street in his honor, declared Oct. 21 to be “E-40 Day,” and even gave the rapper a key to the city of Vallejo. This is significant, as he is only the second person to ever receive that honor in the 172-year history.
E-40's debut album came out when I was only three and due to my Christian upbringing, it was not until high school that I could listen with friends — mainly exiles from Oakland — who knew of him. Like Mac Dre, Keak da Sneak, or The Pack, E-40’s near-instantly classic songs like “Yay Area” from his My Ghetto Report Card (2006) album are part of a soundscape that is uniquely Bay Area and nationally respected. Screaming “Yay Area” to each other like the song became an everyday greeting that even younger rappers like Drake still echo.
His most popular song “Tell Me When to Go” (2006) named to the world many of the dance moves that the music video provided as a tutorial: the mosh pit of syncopated dreadlocks swinging to drums. His generation of “Hyphy” music inspired the dance culture known as “Turfing” and formed scenes of turf battles in public spaces: skate parks, school benches, civic auditoriums, gas stations, and parking lots. This underground culture going mainstream set college campuses ablaze all over the region and beyond, especially HBCUs. When I returned to the Bay Area to attend Stanford University, my fellow Ujamaa house residents from all over the world were eager to see this famous yet regionally-specific dance and music culture in action. (Of course, I only gave them what limited moves I knew as a nerd. LOL).
The City of Yesterday concept is enmeshed in a culturally diverse region worth deeper articulation than demonstrated so far. Given this rich context emanating from Sonoma County’s very own, what is the design culture that will motivate and aesthetically drive this decade-long process of introducing a new “retro” city? Let’s be clear: Solano County is no “tabula rasa” and there is no need for a new Western frontier. The farmlands and pastures should not be confused as a blank slate.
The CEO mentioned in his ABC10 interview being vaguely and predictably “inspired by American and European forms” for potential urban designs. That preference is still leaning Anglophonic in a country where regional dialects have rarely been translated into intentionally developed cities, but they certainly have at the scale of neighborhoods and enclaves.
Unfortunately, there is a trend in the art and design world towards minimalism: neutrals and muted aesthetics that do no favors to the vibrant, colorful, culturally relevant aesthetics birthed in ethnic communities. Arguing that “the world is becoming less colorful,” the popular educational media account known as “Cultural Tutor” on X (Twitter) has thoroughly charted this Westernized drift away from distinctive palettes. Spatially, this looks like what urban critics dub “gentrification architecture” in its new homogenous housing stocks. California Forever should resist these sanitizing trends to dignify existing fabrics and emphasize culturally resonant vernaculars.
Couldn’t this city be an opportunity to better invite home-grown particularities into the landscape, rather than reproduce the incessant referencing of European urban forms? While resources are always a factor — especially for their timetable — there should be no generic “good design” held up as the standard without the direct engagement of current and future residents. So far, the vision written about (and visualized in 2D form) sounds very populist and universalist, almost to the point of being generic. This impulse to default design traditions toward Europe (or America) acts as foot soldiers of what I call a copy-paste urbanism that has proliferated globally. Solano’s urban spatial character deserves better than the flattening of their distinctiveness.
I venture to say that the “Yay Area” Era (late 1980s to 2000s) is a temporally-rooted form of nearby Black urbanism that should be considered a precedent by the highly experienced team assembled to manifest this emerging vision. As defined in my recent article in the Journal of American Planning Association’s Special Issue on Anti-Racist Futures, Black urbanism is defined as:
the multiple “ways of seeing, planning, and designing with Black value(s) as core to the sensibilities, stories, and spaces of built environments. In planning, Black urbanism is a praxis of valuing Black imaginaries on, insights about, and interpretations of place-based policy, placemaking processes, and preservation precedents reproduced in pedagogy and practice. In everyday life, Black urbanism is a sense of place refracted through the multiple binoculars of Blackness” (Kenyatta 2023).
Black urbanism is a capacious framework has been emerging in name at least since 1969, but it has precedents that are as global as much as locally rooted today: Jakarta, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Detroit, Philadelphia, Birmingham, and more. This is a counter-canon I have been working to both assemble and deploy in a profession that has been relatively silent about non-White, non-European urbanist traditions. In this same article, I found that top planning journals have hardly published anything consistently about Black urbanism over the last 30 years; less than 1%. Therefore, it is reasonable to think entire generations of trained planners and designers may never have encountered this canon formally, despite valuing “diversity.”
Indeed, recently, Bloomberg’s CityLab promoted the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research (SPUR) Association’s exhibition called Grand Reductions: Ten Diagrams That Shaped City Planning (2012, 2013); SPUR did not include a single visualization from a Black architect, planner, or designer. If planners do not work in predominantly Black cities or embody African American identity themselves, there has been little systematic impetus to go beyond these Eurocentric references. California Forever could give them one and break this silence at some meaningful scale.
While professionals can locate vernaculars in policies, design motifs, and official histories, stakeholders and users might simply have a mental map or oral history that has never been tapped into before. This is the work of a planning and design team: to “Blacklight” that as organic fuel for landscape interventions and shaping urban forms.
What other hidden histories and folklore might inspire the public spaces, neighborhood amenities, and themed stories of this City of Yesterday?
Undoubtedly, this “Yay Area” place identity and contemporary cosmology rooted in sonic history is but one of untold numbers of spatial imaginaries to draw from while assembling an organic sense of place. Finding out what topographies speak to hidden histories, such as that of the Travis Air Force Base’s African American pilots advancing the lineage of Southern Tuskegee airmen, can be an adventure.
Cultural heritage architects in firms like Perkins + Will offer precedents for working with African Americans. They use innovative techniques like translating sounds into wave patterns and forms to generate a skin for a building. Their museums — from Motown to the Smithsonian — offer brilliant examples. However, young award-winning landscape architects and historic preservationists like Allison Nkwocha have been doing brave, interdisciplinary work to recover mythologies (e.g., Flying Africans in the Deep South) as design inspiration to rejuvenate landscapes. The possibilities are innumerable.
Blacklighting New Norths for the North Bay: Resilience as an Aesthetic of Utopia
Eventually, once we resettled in Tracy, my Mom found new careers as we grew into adulthood. She eventually earned her associate degree. In a most interesting turn, thanks to her accompanying my younger sister to her modeling jobs, Mom evolved to do some acting roles. In one of her roles for a web series, The North Pole, my Mom portrays a mother residing in Pittsburgh, California. In her scene in Episode 3 (co-starring Bay Area legend Mistah F.A.B.), she chides her son for visiting her late in the exurbs, saying how much she misses them all being together back in North Oakland.
Unlike other roles, she tapped into our lived experience of displacement and dispersion. Art can come from harmful experiences. Light can enter that space and illuminate the depths of our humanity.
The “Yay Area” aesthetic of resilience and resistance — born out of “ghetto report cards — and its attendant ways of being are available for creative translation…if California Forever values it. I am sure other cosmologies without the benefit of being framed by a musical genius like E-40 exist beyond African Americans and their countercultural public spaces. If California forever sees this as the beginning of a decades-long conversation, let that marathon begin without the baggage of deprivation. Let it prioritize untapped opportunity and curiosity about where the Bay Area wants the light welcomed in: culturally and socially, not just economically. Like the agricultural fields of Solano, abundance resides there, too.
Dr. Matt Kenyatta is an artist, author, and advocate. A proud graduate of Stanford, MIT, and USC, he researches, teaches, and writes about city planning and fine art, especially public space, cultural landscapes, and futurism. He resides in Philadelphia by way of California. You can follow him here on Medium, on Instagram (drmatt.kenyatta) or book time on his calendar to talk about art, cities, and Black history.
