2026 Theses Master's

Quilted Urbanism: Resistance, Cultural Memory, and Collaborative Design in Jackson, Mississippi

Solorzano-Castañed, Elisa Sofia

This thesis proposes quilted urbanism: a planning framework that reads cities from the fragments up, through the material, relational, and cultural practices communities use to sustain urban life where formal systems have withdrawn. Grounded in fieldwork conducted in Jackson, Mississippi, the research examines how quilting can serve as both metaphor and method for reimagining planning practice in cities shaped by racial capitalism and organized abandonment.

Jackson is the majority-Black capital of Mississippi, where a 2022 water crisis left 150,000 residents without clean water and the 2023 passage of House Bill 1020 stripped Black voters of judicial self-governance. The work traces these conditions to over two centuries of racialized spatial planning, from Indigenous land cession and the plantation economy through redlining, highway construction, and serial annexation, arguing that Jackson’s crisis is not local failure but a structured outcome.

The methodology mirrors the framework: archival research, nine qualitative interviews with organizers, artists, quilters, and planners, participant observation, and a participatory engagement research design tested iteratively in the field. The fieldwork documents cooperative land trusts, urban farms, heritage quilting practices, and mutual aid networks that sustain life where the state has withdrawn, practices this work argues constitute a legitimate form of planning.

The framework operates through four terms: threads (community leaders and networks), stitching (the relational labor of connection), quilt blocks (tangible spatial interventions), and pins (planners as temporary supports, then to be withdrawn when the community can hold the structure independently). Everyone is a quilter, roles are fluid, what makes the quilt work is the stitching, the actions through which people come together.