EPISODE · Dec 21, 2025 · 9 MIN
BELONGING
from Queering the Grid · host Walking Chicago
bell hooks' Belonging: A Culture of Place is a "deep cut" of hers that I read as an urban planning manifesto. She wrote it much later in life as she moved back to take care of her elderly parents in Berea, Kentucky. It is a profound and powerful text and the question of how we each "belong" to place is one I wish more people thought about. Granted I am a huge nerd and think about it way too often, but there's really something there as it relates to the subject at hand: grid resilience. In this episode I turn a niche peeve of mine into a case study in ethical leadership and systemic design. I argue that technical expertise is insufficient without empathic literacy to understand the human impact of our work, and I use a personal anecdote from my transportation outreach consulting days to make my point. I critique a concept called "planning fatigue" as a call for any consultant, designer, or policymaker: without a genuine commitment to praxis and shared ownership, even the best-intentioned interventions will fail, damaging trust and perpetuating inequity. In this episode I positions myself not just as a planner, but as a translator and practitioner striving to mend the disconnect between policy and lived experience: skills that have helped me move across industries and identities.For obvious reasons, none of us are ever taught the skills of love as praxis, which is why her work has spoken to countless millions across decades. Unfortunately she is easy to quote and today, her words are something most only see in aesthetic Instagram carousels, stripped of any power and meaning, reduced to fluff facilitating all of ours' compulsive doomscrolling, consuming media and electricity at rates that are now alarming, not only because sleep is now considered an enemy of profits, but because charging an ever-growing array of screens is not good for any of us either and if there is ever one person who could find just the words with which to describe the feelings this all produces in each of us it would be the one and only Ms. hooks.
What this episode covers
bell hooks' Belonging: A Culture of Place is a "deep cut" of hers that I read as an urban planning manifesto. She wrote it much later in life as she moved back to take care of her elderly parents in Berea, Kentucky. It is a profound and powerful text and the question of how we each "belong" to place is one I wish more people thought about. Granted I am a huge nerd and think about it way too often, but there's really something there as it relates to the subject at hand: grid resilience. In this episode I turn a niche peeve of mine into a case study in ethical leadership and systemic design. I argue that technical expertise is insufficient without empathic literacy to understand the human impact of our work, and I use a personal anecdote from my transportation outreach consulting days to make my point. I critique a concept called "planning fatigue" as a call for any consultant, designer, or policymaker: without a genuine commitment to praxis and shared ownership, even the best-intentioned interventions will fail, damaging trust and perpetuating inequity. In this episode I positions myself not just as a planner, but as a translator and practitioner striving to mend the disconnect between policy and lived experience: skills that have helped me move across industries and identities.For obvious reasons, none of us are ever taught the skills of love as praxis, which is why her work has spoken to countless millions across decades. Unfortunately she is easy to quote and today, her words are something most only see in aesthetic Instagram carousels, stripped of any power and meaning, reduced to fluff facilitating all of ours' compulsive doomscrolling, consuming media and electricity at rates that are now alarming, not only because sleep is now considered an enemy of profits, but because charging an ever-growing array of screens is not good for any of us either and if there is ever one person who could find just the words with which to describe the feelings this all produces in each of us it would be the one and only Ms. hooks.
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BELONGING
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