Urban inequality is often taught through theory and statistics. But for UC Berkeley Geography Continuing Lecturer Seth Lunine, the most meaningful insights come from spending time with the Bay Area communities who live the realities that students study.
At a recent Social Matrix event, titled “Promise & Precarity: Exploring Oakland Through Community-Engaged Scholarship,” Lunine discussed how he combines classroom learning on racialized inequalities in urban development with hands-on research in Oakland neighborhoods.
“A lot of our community engaged scholarship is novel,” Lunine said. “There’s no template or equation. It’s a lot of learning by doing.”
Lunine teaches both lower-division American Cultures Engaged Scholarship (ACES) courses on California and the Bay Area, as well as upper-division field classes that take students into Bay Area neighborhoods to observe and engage with urban change firsthand. His courses encourage students to grapple with questions such as: How do local governments facilitate gentrification? What role does the state play in criminalizing people? And what do community needs and solutions look like?
In Fall 2024, students in Lunine’s Geography 50AC: California course took part in an ongoing project to interview members and stakeholders at Canticle Farm, an intentional community where people choose to live together based on shared values like service, spirituality, nonviolence and healing across social differences. The community is located in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood. The students created story maps to visualize how redlining, criminalization and local history has shaped Canticle Farm, which is located in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood.
Students also worked with Troy Williams, the executive director and founder of Restorative Media Inc., a nonprofit organization that uses multimedia production and platforms to amplify the voices of those impacted by mass incarceration and systemic injustice. Williams, who was formerly incarcerated, taught students every step of production, from interview questions and narration to lighting, directing and recording.
At the Matrix event, Lunine presented an interactive activity similar to what students do in the field. He showed a photo of a street mural in Oakland and asked the audience to interpret it. As people identified cultural icons, Lunine explained the paradox: Oakland celebrates its cultural authenticity while obscuring gentrification.
“This highlights and represents the authenticity of Oakland, while at the same time veiling processes of gentrification, displacement and racial banishment of the people responsible for building these things,” Lunine said.
Students in his courses see these dynamics firsthand. They examine data showing that Oakland's Black population has fallen from 43% to 21% over the past decade, while 70% of the city’s unhoused population is Black, and they observe how local policies reinforce these inequalities, according to Lunine.
Encampment policies, he noted, often push unhoused individuals into industrial zones already concentrated in poverty. Gang injunctions — court-issued restraining orders that restrict alleged gang members’ actions even when they haven’t committed a crime — illustrate another layer of displacement and control, Lunine argued.
Working with collaborators, such as formerly incarcerated Black men at Canticle Farm, students understand how these policies disproportionately affect real people, linking abstract statistics to lived experience.
“This is community-based scholarship — it’s an outcropping of the course,” Lunine said. “It’s students who self-select to do a lot of extra work, taking a big chunk of time. But they tend to be happy they did it. I think we do a lot better when we’re working in the service of something greater than ourselves.”
