07 A Walk Through Flushing
The layered histories of Black and Asian communities in the Queens neighborhood.
with Daphne Lundi as Laudi CoLab
Writing:
A Walk through Flushing
Published in The Margin. 2024
As friends and collaborators that come from the Black and Asian diaspora, we wanted to explore the histories of Black and Asian communities that have called Flushing home through our writing and art. As urban planners we were curious about the spatial politics that drive settlement, segregation, and displacement in the built environment. A launching off point for our work was the reflection on how few neighborhoods exist in New York City that have Black and Asian communities living side by side. In the 1980s, Flushing’s Black and Asian communities represented almost one-third of Flushing’s population. We wanted to better understand the histories that have shaped the ongoing evolution of the neighborhood. We went on walks, dug through historical texts and images, and pondered what the fragments might tell us about how neighborhoods change and what gets forgotten. Most recently, we shared our observations and research in a visual essay in The Margins, a digital magazine published by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.