True to this, not new to this: Land Stewardship, Mutual Aid, and Freedom-Making

The inaugural Housing Commons Research Centre webinar, True to This, Not New to This, grounds our ongoing discussion series in historical context. Rather than treating community-led housing and collective land models as new innovations, this session reframes them as part of a long lineage of collective survival and self-determination.

From Reconstruction-era freedom colonies and land banking networks to 20th-century co-ops, community land trusts, and encampment organizing today, these practices demonstrate that mutual aid, shared ownership, and collective stewardship are not theoretical ideals; they are living traditions of care, resilience, and resistance.

Sam Carter-Shamai:
Urban planner, researcher, and artist whose work revolves around land, memory, and Black community-building. His HERE Project examines Reconstruction-era collective land banking systems in Gloucester County, Virginia, uncovering strategies of mutual aid, stewardship, and autonomy, and connecting them to today’s community land trust and commons-based housing models. Sam’s practice spans public space design, archival storytelling, and community-engaged research, with a focus on how histories of landholding shape contemporary movements for housing justice and collective ownership.

Darold Cuba:
Founder of MarronageOrg (Director) and Oxbridge Africas (OA), is an intellectual historian of political thought whose interdisciplinary work explores post-emancipation marronage, specifically US freedom colonies and the concept of “landed Blackness” – autonomous Black communities formed to resist systemic racism and institutional white supremacy. Through research and storytelling, Darold highlights community autonomy and historical resilience, linking the legacies of maroon communities across the African diaspora and long traditions of land-based mutual aid to contemporary movements for land and housing justice.

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