The imaginaries and value-laden premises of landscape design are often communicated through the informal sketches of a parti—a designer’s attempt to create an organizing theme or symbol that gives shape to the sense of place the designer hopes to invoke. When examining placemaking histories, evidence of strategic, discrete land accumulation and institution building (churches and schools) is coupled with complementary naming conventions of these anchor sites and the settlement itself. Roberts explores whether place naming is a parti or explanation of the driving theme of Black placemaking employed by the founders of historic Black settlements founded between 1865 to 1930 in Texas. Her presentation examines the relationships between the naming of settlements, their anchor institutions, and nearby natural landscape features through qualitative analysis of four years of crowdsourced story and image entries submitted to The Texas Freedom Colonies Atlas. For example, she identifies certain religious naming practices associated with African American histories of pre- and post-emancipation precursors to the church, such as the brush arbor. Roberts argues that Black founders’ place naming conventions reflect Black design imaginaries or partis of freedom, agency, and anxiety about engagement with the dominant white culture outside settlements.
Dr. Andrea Roberts is an Associate Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning and Co-Director of the School’s Center for Cultural Landscapes at the University of Virginia’s (UVA) School of Architecture. Before joining UVA, Dr. Roberts was an Associate Professor of Urban Planning at Texas A&M University (TAMU). She is a scholar-activist who brings 12 years of experience in community development, nonprofit administration, and advocacy to her engaged research and public scholarship. In 2014, she founded The Texas Freedom Colonies Project, the vehicle through which she mentors and trains future planners, preservationists, scholars, and community-based researchers to challenge freedom colony invisibility, environmental injustice, and land loss through heritage conservation. She and her team richly map these settlements via the interactive The Texas Freedom Colonies Project™ Atlas and Study, which spatializes sites’ histories through participatory action research methods, including oral histories. The Project and related scholarship are part of her work to propagate interdisciplinary research and pedagogical frameworks, including Critical Place Studies and Diasporic, Black Feminist, and African American Planning Studies.
She has received awards for her engaged scholarship from The Vernacular Architecture Forum and the Urban Affairs Association. Roberts was a 2020-21 Whiting Public Engagement Fellow, an African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund grant recipient, and a 2020 Visiting Scholar at Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, Abolition. Most recently, she served as Co-Project Director for the 2022 NEH Summer Institute for Higher Education Faculty—"Towards a People's History of Landscape: Part 1: Black & Indigenous Histories of the Nation's Capital.”
Dr. Roberts is also the Consultant/Owner of Freedom Colonies Project, LLC, which provides research services to preservation organizations and public design projects. She served as a Texas State Board of Review member and a National Monument Audit Advisory Board member. Currenrly, Dr. Roberts is a Mellon Initiative in Urban Landscape Studies Advisory Board member. She holds a Ph.D. in planning from The University of Texas at Austin (2016), an M.A. in government administration from the University of Pennsylvania (2006), and a B.A. in political science from Vassar College (1996). She is currently authoring a book, Never Sell the Land, about her experiences identifying Black planning and historic preservation practices that sustain cultural resilience within freedom colonies for The University of Texas Press.