Unsettled Accounts

Unsettled Accounts is a community-university collaboration dedicated to documenting, investigating, and archiving past and present injustices in housing and land ownership in Boston, which have had a disproportionate impact on Black Bostonians. Co-led by Roxbury activist Dianne Wilkerson and Northeastern urban planning and public policy professor Lily Song, the project works in partnership with the Reckonings Project, the ICA (Institute for Contemporary Art) Teen Photography Collaborative, and Homes for Equity.

The oral history project emerged as Wilkerson’s research and advocacy on reparations exposed gaps in knowledge and information about this aspect of Boston’s history. Since 2022, Song and research assistants Aakilah Rashid, Maria Salim, and Ethan Matthews have interviewed Black Bostonians who lost their homes or businesses. Working with Dzidzor Azaglo, Jeta Perjuci, and Gregory Lord from the Reckonings Project, the team at Unsettled Accounts has worked to amplify the voices of impacted communities by developing a digital archive, interactive workshops, and public events with community-based partners. See more here.

Project Lead

Full Profile

Lily Song

Assistant Professor of Race, Social Justice & the Built Environment

Dr. Lily Song is an urban planner and activist-scholar who holds a joint appointment between the School of Architecture and the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University. She is an award-winning educator who teaches courses on anti-displacement, participatory action research, public participation, community-driven design, and community development. Song’s research and scholarship focus on the relations between urban infrastructure and redevelopment initiatives, socio-spatial inequality, and race, class, and gender politics in American cities and other decolonizing contexts. Her work both analyzes and informs infrastructure-based mobilizations and experiments that center the experiences and insights of historically marginalized groups as bases for reparative planning and design. She has published in a number of journals, including the Journal of Architecture Education, Journal of the American Planning Association, Journal of Urban Affairs, International Development Planning Review, and Planning Theory and Practice.