Spatial Planning as Settler Enchantment in Albuquerque, NM

• In Event: Unsettling Settler Romances

Abstract

Over the last few decades, scholars across disciplines have traced the complex entanglement of placemaking and nostalgia in urban space—often, sketching the logics of value that bind them (Zukin 2009, Lindner and Rosa 2017, Summers 2019). Fewer have traced the similarly charged relationship between spatial planning and romanticism toward the future. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, this relationship is shaped by trajectories of revaluation and devaluation marked by inclusionary impulses, on the one hand, and enduring colonial configurations, on the other. Both feature centrally its Pueblo-style architecture, acequia management system, and sustained network of land grants. Its branding is similarly shaped by fraught, intersecting imaginaries of Southwestern identity and multiracial democratic possibility—each, with distinct attachments to American idealism and settler mythmaking (Goldstein 2014). Examining local attempts to thwart two crises—a potential 55,000-unit housing shortage by 2045, and the possible depletion of groundwater by 2120—this paper explores the intimate if at times conflicting relationship between desire, as an affect, and spatial tie, as a material and governed reality (Anderson 2020). It denaturalizes terminality, or the tendency to assume a fixed ending to a particular condition of living, while 1) taking seriously the scale of potential catastrophe and 2) sketching its enmeshment in a longue durée of dis/possession. All the while, it stresses the potential of actual solvability, even and especially outside the normative grammars of spatial planning. I situate this interplay within broader narratives of New Mexico as the “Land of Enchantment,” which at once conjures its romanticism and flags its groundedness. In doing so, I show that where seductive horizon meets un/settled terrain, colonial arcs may be undone and remade.

Author

• Emma Kahn