Andrea Roberts is an urban planner who researches intentional communities built by Black people. Her experience in community development under Houston mayors Bill White and Annise Parker inform her efforts to move disappearing African American communities—facing sprawl, gentrification, and resource extraction—from the margin to the center of public discourse. A scholar activist, she founded the Texas Freedom Colonies Project, a research and social justice initiative that has developed an online atlas of unmapped Black settlements in Texas. She is an assistant professor of urban planning at Texas A&M University and associate director of the Center for Housing & Urban Development. She earned her Ph.D. in community and regional planning at the University of Texas at Austin.
(Fall 2021)