Civic Resilience Laboratory

Presentation: From Redlining to Resilience: The Nehemiah Initiative and the Politics of Interstitial Adaptation in Seattle

This presentation examines Seattle’s Nehemiah Initiative (NI) through the lens of “”messy-resilient”” urbanism — asking how community-based, bottom-up initiatives operate in the interstitial spaces between market forces, formal institutions, and decades of institutionalized racism, including restrictive covenants and redlining that have long shaped Seattle’s historic Black community.

Gentrification and displacement represent a slow-moving socioeconomic crisis demanding adaptive responses at multiple scales. The NI — a coalition of Black churches redeveloping community-owned properties in Seattle’s Central District — offers a compelling example of interstitial adaptation. Rather than informal spatial practices alone, the NI forges new working relationships that deliberately jump scales: simultaneously deploying oppositional forces against market indifference and co-opting forces that harness land ownership, professional expertise, university partnerships, and institutional resources. The result bridges local agency and systemic change, producing landmark policy outcomes, including Seattle’s Religious Organization-Owned Property Ordinance.

Ten years after Messy Urbanism, this case asks: how do community-based resilience strategies intersect with — and reshape — formal institutions without surrendering self-determination? The NI suggests that interstitial adaptation need not be informal to be insurgent. When communities build new pathways across scales, they create durable forms of resilience capable of repairing cities fractured by racist planning histories.

Keywords: Anti-displacement, Insurgent planning, Interstitial adaptation, Scale jumping, Urbanism of belonging,

Bio: Rachel Berney, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in Urban Design and Planning at the University of Washington, Seattle, where she studies just urban design, equitable development, and community engagement. She is Co-Director of Urban@UW’s Research to Action Collaboratory, which catalyzes cross-boundary teams to turn co-created ideas into implementable solutions. Since 2019, she has collaborated with the Nehemiah Initiative Seattle — a coalition of Black churches countering gentrification and displacement in Seattle’s Central District — through research, teaching, and advocacy. Her current book project, Staying Power: Planning Tools and Strategies to Counter Displacement in Gentrifying Communities, reflects this work. Her research appears in Planning Theory, Journal of Urban Design, and other volumes.