Horing the Enslaved Amidst Richmond’s Infrastructure and Floodway

Situated in the heart of Richmond, Virginia, lies Shockoe Bottom—the city’s oldest community that played a major role in the narrative of American slavery between the late 17th century and 1865. Since then, the neighborhood’s past has slowly been erased with the addition of major municipal infrastructure projects, Interstate 95, rail, and urban renewal. Despite these obstacles, the City of Richmond is striving to uncover, ackwledge, and pay tribute to Shockoe’s profound history, where more than a quarter of a million enslaved individuals were sold on 11 acres of city-owned property. The city and key stakeholders are collaborating to devise a comprehensive plan for a park aimed at preserving, revitalizing, creating, and memorializing historic sites. The plan includes transforming existing public property into sacred spaces of plazas, museums, and parks connected with pedestrian paths. These spaces will also intricately connect to the nationally recognized Lumpkin’s Slave Jail Site/Devil’s Half Acre archaeological site that is buried 14 feet below current grade and within a floodplain, which the design will address, in addition to combined sewer facilities and railroad trestles. In this engaging session, participants will have the opportunity to gain insights from the design team on invative techlogies employed, the power of collaborative partnerships, and the importance of community engagement.
At the conclusion of this session participants will be better able to:
• Demonstrate the benefits of techlogy, such as digital twins, for digitally visualizing and comparing the current site conditions with historical maps from 1877, thereby enabling a deeper analysis of environmental changes and developments over time.
• Identify ways to use the public engagement process to educate the community about the history of the site and the timeline of this effort. Learn how to expand accessibility and reach a broader audience that includes diverse perspectives and fosters a more comprehensive, community-driven result.
• Recognize the essential coordination and overlap between the imperatives of historic preservation and the pragmatic realities of engineering.