i love that this blog is what i sounded like when i left, and i came home telling 'that's what she said' jokes. (to which andrew replied, 'well, i'm glad grad school's over.') that's what you get when you spend a bunch of time in very close quarters and on the road with 21-year-olds. it sort of softens the edges, yes?
whatever, i can still analyze critically. i just also remember what it's like to treat my body like a used car, which i neglected quite a bit when i was in book-a-day mode. a bruise or 40 keeps me grounded, even when i earn said bruises while flying through the air.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
segregated spaces vs. community self-identity
do communities have a right to come together to identify themselves as a community and decide on how to best shape their environment to meet their needs without having to account for anyone else's? yes. indeed, it has been discussed for the last 2 years as the aim. but what when these communities are 'problematic'? all white? all rich? too much power? a community can be a community in space so long as it has equal power to any other community in any other space? maybe that's it. but see, such are the ideals in our constitution, but we haven't been able to pull it off.
if the spaces are exclusionary, the communities that come together to self-identify are bound to be exclusive. do they have a right to have gotten in the space they inhabit by oppressing, expressly excluding others based on anything other than criminal activity? no. how far does this extend? ...i don't know. maybe to nation-states. but people need something to organize themselves by, because people love to organize themselves. for a while, it was by geography and creed, and then by nationality. sometimes, now, by region like the EU. identity boundaries grow like capitalism. which is amoral. and maybe immoral. maybe people don't have a right to divide by income or wealth, maybe that's the fundamental problem. housing doesn't work as a commodity.
and here i go blaming capitalism, but our democratic ideals are moral and our economics are amoral. (or maybe even immoral.) and our democratic ideals are employed by flawed humans (which is what we're all stuck being) and to discuss power is to scratch at something so primal, psychological and mystical that we can't really even talk about power itself but only how we observe evidence of it. humans seek to control their environments, their realities, their identities and their externalities. control requires power. why the urge for this extends to such a significant scale? why does having power so frequently means taking others' power? i have no idea! and to try to answer that is to pontificate about the Nature of Man. ask the bible how that's going for them. and economics, while completely subject to people's emotions, masquerades as this right-angle-having, straight-line-making, rule-having, no-nonsense amoral system.
and humans -- at least a lot of them -- can get their head around it. it's even reassuring, in a world that looks to our category-loving brains to not have any rules.
maybe faith is just a manifestation of the tendency of the human psyche to seek rules in a way it can comprehend, and Nature is too vast for us to trust it without knowing the rules. power. control. anxiety. faith. religion tells us not only that there are rules, but someone or something is in charge of it, and handling the management. we understand heirarchy and can handle having a boss.
maybe economy was something that we constructed to handle our level of management, and made rules that fit our brain, our thinking patterns. control on the ground, between one another. every now and then, our economy with its sort of rules intersect with Nature and religion's rules, and we have to negotiate. our rules are going well. we understand them. they govern a system that seems to function on its own, and we forget that it was a manifestation of our thinking, quit asking questions, in fact ask it for advice. it impedes on people and we point to it indignantly. there are rules! eventually, it would work so well and so cleanly that it would trump Nature, and religion. we're the boss now. it's not right, we just made a monster and it functions just like our brains work so we understand it, love it for being rational in an irrational world, overlook our human additions and our emotional contributions, live within its confines.
at any rate, through us history our economy grew, and our national identity grew around our economy more than around our democracy. rights -- a moral question -- intersects awkwardly with economics -- an amoral system that governs us as profoundly and more instantaneously. in a free market capitalist model, people have the 'right' to as much material wealth as they can acquire, without really having the right to not acquire any wealth.
we don't have any national position on human rights, anyway. human rights are not a concern of nation-states, a product of economics, wealth-acquisition by following rules that fit human brains. human rights are god's department, and he got demoted.
so this is a long and super weird way to say that yes, in matters of geography and governance, communities have the right to identify and participate in government to shape their environment, but they don't have a right to hold more wealth, food, access to government or natural amenities than any other community identifying the same way. do people have the right to exclude once they've identified, even when not being exclusive was one of the requisites to community formation? um, yes? no? fuck. i dont know, this shit's at the root of governments and identity formation and human nature and economic structures and the history of human diaspora. 72 hours just isn't enough time for me to get this one resolved.
if the spaces are exclusionary, the communities that come together to self-identify are bound to be exclusive. do they have a right to have gotten in the space they inhabit by oppressing, expressly excluding others based on anything other than criminal activity? no. how far does this extend? ...i don't know. maybe to nation-states. but people need something to organize themselves by, because people love to organize themselves. for a while, it was by geography and creed, and then by nationality. sometimes, now, by region like the EU. identity boundaries grow like capitalism. which is amoral. and maybe immoral. maybe people don't have a right to divide by income or wealth, maybe that's the fundamental problem. housing doesn't work as a commodity.
and here i go blaming capitalism, but our democratic ideals are moral and our economics are amoral. (or maybe even immoral.) and our democratic ideals are employed by flawed humans (which is what we're all stuck being) and to discuss power is to scratch at something so primal, psychological and mystical that we can't really even talk about power itself but only how we observe evidence of it. humans seek to control their environments, their realities, their identities and their externalities. control requires power. why the urge for this extends to such a significant scale? why does having power so frequently means taking others' power? i have no idea! and to try to answer that is to pontificate about the Nature of Man. ask the bible how that's going for them. and economics, while completely subject to people's emotions, masquerades as this right-angle-having, straight-line-making, rule-having, no-nonsense amoral system.
and humans -- at least a lot of them -- can get their head around it. it's even reassuring, in a world that looks to our category-loving brains to not have any rules.
maybe faith is just a manifestation of the tendency of the human psyche to seek rules in a way it can comprehend, and Nature is too vast for us to trust it without knowing the rules. power. control. anxiety. faith. religion tells us not only that there are rules, but someone or something is in charge of it, and handling the management. we understand heirarchy and can handle having a boss.
maybe economy was something that we constructed to handle our level of management, and made rules that fit our brain, our thinking patterns. control on the ground, between one another. every now and then, our economy with its sort of rules intersect with Nature and religion's rules, and we have to negotiate. our rules are going well. we understand them. they govern a system that seems to function on its own, and we forget that it was a manifestation of our thinking, quit asking questions, in fact ask it for advice. it impedes on people and we point to it indignantly. there are rules! eventually, it would work so well and so cleanly that it would trump Nature, and religion. we're the boss now. it's not right, we just made a monster and it functions just like our brains work so we understand it, love it for being rational in an irrational world, overlook our human additions and our emotional contributions, live within its confines.
at any rate, through us history our economy grew, and our national identity grew around our economy more than around our democracy. rights -- a moral question -- intersects awkwardly with economics -- an amoral system that governs us as profoundly and more instantaneously. in a free market capitalist model, people have the 'right' to as much material wealth as they can acquire, without really having the right to not acquire any wealth.
we don't have any national position on human rights, anyway. human rights are not a concern of nation-states, a product of economics, wealth-acquisition by following rules that fit human brains. human rights are god's department, and he got demoted.
so this is a long and super weird way to say that yes, in matters of geography and governance, communities have the right to identify and participate in government to shape their environment, but they don't have a right to hold more wealth, food, access to government or natural amenities than any other community identifying the same way. do people have the right to exclude once they've identified, even when not being exclusive was one of the requisites to community formation? um, yes? no? fuck. i dont know, this shit's at the root of governments and identity formation and human nature and economic structures and the history of human diaspora. 72 hours just isn't enough time for me to get this one resolved.
Monday, May 26, 2008
"The traditional neighborhood"
I suppose i should lay off the term 'traditional neighborhood.' My first response is usually, 'whose tradition?' but i guess the answer is really everyone's, and then recognize exclusions in the construction of them along the way. minorities weren't included in the original creation of colonial towns and main streets, or residential architecture. the plantation obviously isn't black folks' tradition. getting run out of town, blocked from employment and relegated to poorly thought-out sects of cities and housing projects wouldn't be a tradition to take pride in, and in fact jane jacobs illustrates that immigrant communities in 'blighted' areas of the city hold many lessons. i guess my concern is that 'traditional' still considers a residence a standalone building, but 'whose tradition' is a bit hyperbolic. i know whose, but this doesn't preclude it from being a decent model (although still expandable, and requiring investigation and democratization).
brand: how buildings learn
Reading Stuart Brand’s “How Buildings Learn” is enjoyable and fascinating – thinking about how form follows function…sometimes…or form is ego-filled and aesthetic, architects don’t use the spaces they create and insist upon their talents and genius being ‘art’ rather than ‘craft’ is particularly familiar. But he starts the book by saying, “We shape buildings, and they shape us, and on and on.” This is what I’m intrigued by.
DeCearteau says it too – we give meaning to things in the way that we use them over the way they were intended, and he goes so far as to imply that the original intentions are methods of control, oppression, etc. (Kevin Lynch makes similar allusions in ‘Good City Form.’)
The thing I’m waiting to see from Brand is an acknowledgement of the wealthy framework that he writes from. (I understand now that wealth is associated with whiteness because of the way racism evolved in this country as a color-coded construct, and non-whites were systematically denied and blocked from acquiring wealth. This went on overtly for years, impeding generations the opportunity of family wealth, property, inheretance, etc. which probably impacts non-whites as much if not more than current conditions and obstacles to equality.) He’s heralded low-road buildings for their flexibility for users and lack of impact on aesthetics, but analyzing Building 20 on MIT’s campus and the way it functions for science geniuses is something different than analyzing run-down and vacant warehouse spaces or abandoned row-homes in impoverished neighborhoods and their flexibility for prostitutes, drug sales, or squatting. Yes, it IS fascinating that adultery goes on in storage spaces, but these are paid-for, gated and locked rental properties that must be afforded. Is there the same intrigue for unexpected nooks where an old mattress waits for a trick? I think there is, but it’s absent from Brand’s analysis so far.
The other thing that I’m finding annoying is his strict focus on signature homes and buildings. The patterns are worth noting in the way that corporate, residential, and institutional spaces behave and change, but what about a read on tract development with homogenous aesthetics, strict imposed neighborhood restrictions, limited floorplan choices that have to function broadly for a certain targeted audience (ooh, how does floorplan creation and approval for tract development forecast the kind of people and lifestyles that will reside there? No big cavernous, messable studio space means no sculpture artists working where they live, for one.) Or a look on what Kevin Lynch assesses regarding economic restrictions and site development – that the urge to recoup expenses and work at an industrial, global-economy pace makes places all developed and finished at once instead of over time and with any human touch or authenticity.
His inclusion of weather is an interesting link to place. He talks about weather interacting with low-road buildings and it being interesting and not something to blame on anyone since the building was intended for a different purpose, and new modern magazine architects building high-concept, anti-box shapes that ‘cook the building’s contents – people and books’ or almost always leak.
He also mentions that modernism became the ‘international style’ (because no one wants to claim it, he quotes) and that cities started to look like one another. I think this could also be tied not only to the style but to the global-economic conditions. We’re moving around more than ever, we’re participating in a global economy more than ever. If buildings reflect values and historical contexts, it’s powerful to observe that the places that are participating in this international system are also adapting an international style. It certainly doesn’t relate to the style’s ability to mold to surroundings and situations specific to place, as he goes on and on to say in the ‘magazine architecture’ style – it’s about architect’s egos and art more than place. But it’s important to think about power as this aesthetic spreads, who’s behind it and what it says and whether people are subscribing to it or not. China is a good place to look at this, and the buildings going up in anticipation for the Olympics and Kkskdjf’s wierdy black something building is a good example. It’s overusing materials like crazy in a country with the highest human population in the world and limited resources as it is, in a growing climate of concern for ecology and sustainability – to reflect what? Something about the values and trends of architecture, sure, but situated in a historical, economic and cultural context that must be considered.
DeCearteau says it too – we give meaning to things in the way that we use them over the way they were intended, and he goes so far as to imply that the original intentions are methods of control, oppression, etc. (Kevin Lynch makes similar allusions in ‘Good City Form.’)
The thing I’m waiting to see from Brand is an acknowledgement of the wealthy framework that he writes from. (I understand now that wealth is associated with whiteness because of the way racism evolved in this country as a color-coded construct, and non-whites were systematically denied and blocked from acquiring wealth. This went on overtly for years, impeding generations the opportunity of family wealth, property, inheretance, etc. which probably impacts non-whites as much if not more than current conditions and obstacles to equality.) He’s heralded low-road buildings for their flexibility for users and lack of impact on aesthetics, but analyzing Building 20 on MIT’s campus and the way it functions for science geniuses is something different than analyzing run-down and vacant warehouse spaces or abandoned row-homes in impoverished neighborhoods and their flexibility for prostitutes, drug sales, or squatting. Yes, it IS fascinating that adultery goes on in storage spaces, but these are paid-for, gated and locked rental properties that must be afforded. Is there the same intrigue for unexpected nooks where an old mattress waits for a trick? I think there is, but it’s absent from Brand’s analysis so far.
The other thing that I’m finding annoying is his strict focus on signature homes and buildings. The patterns are worth noting in the way that corporate, residential, and institutional spaces behave and change, but what about a read on tract development with homogenous aesthetics, strict imposed neighborhood restrictions, limited floorplan choices that have to function broadly for a certain targeted audience (ooh, how does floorplan creation and approval for tract development forecast the kind of people and lifestyles that will reside there? No big cavernous, messable studio space means no sculpture artists working where they live, for one.) Or a look on what Kevin Lynch assesses regarding economic restrictions and site development – that the urge to recoup expenses and work at an industrial, global-economy pace makes places all developed and finished at once instead of over time and with any human touch or authenticity.
His inclusion of weather is an interesting link to place. He talks about weather interacting with low-road buildings and it being interesting and not something to blame on anyone since the building was intended for a different purpose, and new modern magazine architects building high-concept, anti-box shapes that ‘cook the building’s contents – people and books’ or almost always leak.
He also mentions that modernism became the ‘international style’ (because no one wants to claim it, he quotes) and that cities started to look like one another. I think this could also be tied not only to the style but to the global-economic conditions. We’re moving around more than ever, we’re participating in a global economy more than ever. If buildings reflect values and historical contexts, it’s powerful to observe that the places that are participating in this international system are also adapting an international style. It certainly doesn’t relate to the style’s ability to mold to surroundings and situations specific to place, as he goes on and on to say in the ‘magazine architecture’ style – it’s about architect’s egos and art more than place. But it’s important to think about power as this aesthetic spreads, who’s behind it and what it says and whether people are subscribing to it or not. China is a good place to look at this, and the buildings going up in anticipation for the Olympics and Kkskdjf’s wierdy black something building is a good example. It’s overusing materials like crazy in a country with the highest human population in the world and limited resources as it is, in a growing climate of concern for ecology and sustainability – to reflect what? Something about the values and trends of architecture, sure, but situated in a historical, economic and cultural context that must be considered.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
"At the very end of his book Mann confronts the clash between environmentalists and developers, a theme that has lurked in the background of much of his text. He sees this endless controversy as a clash between two conflicting philosophical principles: nomos (rationality, artifice) and physis (irrationality, nature). He comes down tentatively and without much conviction somewhere in the middle. We have to accept the need to bring order to nature, but at the same time we must respect the rights and historical accomplishments of native peoples, who were anything but the ignorant savages we heard about in school. Our learned tour guide seems unwilling to choose sides."
-Robert Finn, reviewing 1491 by Charles C. Mann
http://www.bookreporter.com/reviews2/140004006X.asp
why why why why is nature so often portrayed as Other, and particularly as irrational? nature is the definition of rational, despite its inability to organize itself into an mf grid.
this is the designer in me who learned the golden rectangle before learning point, line and shape as well as the girl who learned permaculture in the jungle. nature knows what it's doing, we need to learn to trust it and quit trying to live with our feet floating above the ground. but it gets at christy's question, too, about the re-imaging of dirt away from 'abject' to 'romantic' and appealing to wealthy/white folks being attracted to a photo of, say, a white hand with dirt under the fingernails holding up a dirty bunch of carrots. there was a time when this wouldn't have been acceptable, and now its premium. how'd that happen? what are the implications? is it culturally biased/culturally exclusive/a move in the right direction facilitated by cultural luxury but relevant universally? i don't know.
ok more reading, seriously.
-Robert Finn, reviewing 1491 by Charles C. Mann
http://www.bookreporter.com/reviews2/140004006X.asp
why why why why is nature so often portrayed as Other, and particularly as irrational? nature is the definition of rational, despite its inability to organize itself into an mf grid.
this is the designer in me who learned the golden rectangle before learning point, line and shape as well as the girl who learned permaculture in the jungle. nature knows what it's doing, we need to learn to trust it and quit trying to live with our feet floating above the ground. but it gets at christy's question, too, about the re-imaging of dirt away from 'abject' to 'romantic' and appealing to wealthy/white folks being attracted to a photo of, say, a white hand with dirt under the fingernails holding up a dirty bunch of carrots. there was a time when this wouldn't have been acceptable, and now its premium. how'd that happen? what are the implications? is it culturally biased/culturally exclusive/a move in the right direction facilitated by cultural luxury but relevant universally? i don't know.
ok more reading, seriously.
design for ecological democracy
doesn't that sound grandiose?
its hard to argue with randy hester, and its also refreshing to read practical things and examples of beautiful development and urban design projects. the thing he does the best, though, is figure out how to ask the 'right' questions to get the 'right' answers out of people, in a way that's hard to accuse of being manipulative. he has a pretty impressive arsenal for public process: so far, my favorites are sacred space mapping and power mapping. both of these are strategies to get the community to understand something important about the process, that understanding will make them be better able to tackle the problem at hand. (knowing that there are places that are important to place history/identity that are shared [or universally disliked] and that there may be bigger forces driving a project than it first appears, and knowing their motivations is important.)
it's all about framing the question correctly, and this is something that has always been interesting to me -- and a little bit easier than other things. what is the problem we're trying to solve? are we trying to create a better car, or are we trying to have a transportation option that maximizes privacy, flexibility and independence? what of these features are most/least important? is there another way to solve it? do we need to make housing subsidies fair, or do we need to make housing affordable? hester illustrates this beautifully when he talks about manteo, north carolina. when the town was sold the idea of becoming a tourist desitination, public participation provided a number of suggestions about where to put big, placeless hotels. when the idea was to revitalize manteo without sacrificing what makes manteo a unique place, the unique amenities came forward and reinvigorated a unique craft, which boomed and brought tourists to manteo to see what it was all about.
he also explains a case study of harvard's day care playground, where at first blush parents wanted a playground that mimicked plastic suburban ones. upon closer examination, the parents wanted a lot of nature and hiding coves and a big tree that the kids could climb. the difference? the first time, they were asked, what kind of playground do you want? and the second time, they were asked, what are your best memories of play from your childhood that you would want your children to experience as well, and what's the best way to make that happen? (granted, he says that to get to the answers, the parents were willing to undergo a guided visualization that was something like self-hypnosis. good luck doing that with city council.)
but it takes an unraveling of the question, and examining the assumptions in the presentation. ask questions to questions. get to the bottom of things. i've always had a tendency toward this sort of thing, and grad school has really helped me do it better.
its hard to argue with randy hester, and its also refreshing to read practical things and examples of beautiful development and urban design projects. the thing he does the best, though, is figure out how to ask the 'right' questions to get the 'right' answers out of people, in a way that's hard to accuse of being manipulative. he has a pretty impressive arsenal for public process: so far, my favorites are sacred space mapping and power mapping. both of these are strategies to get the community to understand something important about the process, that understanding will make them be better able to tackle the problem at hand. (knowing that there are places that are important to place history/identity that are shared [or universally disliked] and that there may be bigger forces driving a project than it first appears, and knowing their motivations is important.)
it's all about framing the question correctly, and this is something that has always been interesting to me -- and a little bit easier than other things. what is the problem we're trying to solve? are we trying to create a better car, or are we trying to have a transportation option that maximizes privacy, flexibility and independence? what of these features are most/least important? is there another way to solve it? do we need to make housing subsidies fair, or do we need to make housing affordable? hester illustrates this beautifully when he talks about manteo, north carolina. when the town was sold the idea of becoming a tourist desitination, public participation provided a number of suggestions about where to put big, placeless hotels. when the idea was to revitalize manteo without sacrificing what makes manteo a unique place, the unique amenities came forward and reinvigorated a unique craft, which boomed and brought tourists to manteo to see what it was all about.
he also explains a case study of harvard's day care playground, where at first blush parents wanted a playground that mimicked plastic suburban ones. upon closer examination, the parents wanted a lot of nature and hiding coves and a big tree that the kids could climb. the difference? the first time, they were asked, what kind of playground do you want? and the second time, they were asked, what are your best memories of play from your childhood that you would want your children to experience as well, and what's the best way to make that happen? (granted, he says that to get to the answers, the parents were willing to undergo a guided visualization that was something like self-hypnosis. good luck doing that with city council.)
but it takes an unraveling of the question, and examining the assumptions in the presentation. ask questions to questions. get to the bottom of things. i've always had a tendency toward this sort of thing, and grad school has really helped me do it better.
Monday, May 19, 2008
James Loewen : Sundown Towns
Ok, so apparently I wasn’t ready to take the time to write the answer to that question and managed to avoid writing altogether. Oops.
Fair enough, I wrote until I puked last Monday and opted to give it a rest on Tuesday, and then Wednesday was lost largely to driving to Berkeley to meet with advisor Laura and buy Even in Sweden. Ever since starting said book, I’ve been in a bit of elevated anxiety about this whole thing, since that book is poetic and beautiful and sort of ethereal when I was just getting the hang of hard and dense, and I suspect that whatever Laura asks me is going to come from that book and I don’t know how to work it yet.
So I had myself a little freakout. No big deal. Get back to it.
Sundown Towns is a really great, useful book. It’s sort of written in this tone that seems to aim to be a New York Times bestseller instead of an academic staple—and this is maybe why academics don’t know/love James Loewen as much as I think they should. Things I like the best:
• His account of the Nadir of race relations:
To express that US history has been one improvement upon the next, marching ever forward to the luminous future is to really mislead and misrepresent the truth about where we’ve been as a nation and it particularly confounds the state of race (mostly black-white) relations. There were moral advocates for the liberation of black slaves in the 1840s and 1850s, and while ultimately the elimination of slavery was done in an effort to save the Union (important mostly to economics and, in some ways, a move to keep more power in the hands of fewer people) there were real efforts to incorporate blacks into mainstream society because it was the moral thing to do, and it was a strength of the Republican party. Due to political forces that he spells out better than I can remember without the book in front of me, things started reversing for blacks starting around 1890 and continued to rescind until the civil rights movement. Which wasn’t that long ago. Which my parents lived through. Which ran deep and can’t be corrected overnight, especially when it had such huge impacts on spatial segregation and a huge gaping divide between 2 races/cultures who have now gigantic obstacles in getting to know one another. (Well, whites have trouble getting to know black culture in any sort of honest way. Blacks have to know white culture to a larger degree because they have to come to it and work within it to survive in many ways, but I think it could be said that this isn’t the most honest way to know white culture either.)
• The way you try to solve a problem depends entirely on how you understand or frame the problem:
This is obvious, but it starts to explain why running black folks out of towns came to be—because the problem was black people, and the solution is to get black people out. If the problem was racism, the solution would have to be something else. Why was the problem black people? I’ll have to go back and dig for Loewen’s unraveling of this. George Fredrickson is helpful here, too, in explaining that racist ideologies were in place from a history of exclusion, rationalizing slavery by considering black folks sub-human, and eugenics (scientific linking of genetic traits to moral traits).
• Black people showed up in, and were run out of towns in every state in the US. Racism and exclusion was not just a southern problem.
• Often, there’s a story of one black criminal (substantiated or not) that served as the catalyst to ridding a town of all blacks and becoming sundown towns. These catalyst stories don’t account for drawing the conclusion that if one black person committed a crime, this somehow means that all black people need to go. There’s that issue of framing the problem again.
• Black people were written out of suburban CC&Rs explicitly. They were also denied access to federal housing assistance after WWII.
RANDOM THOUGHT: The fact that this shit isn’t taught to everyone is a fucking travesty. My mom didn’t know this!! I forget that other people don’t know. And the implications are HUGE—not knowing that black people were explicitly excluded from advantages offered to white people within my parents’ lifetime makes it so much easier to assess that POC, especially blacks, are poor because they’re not motivated/don’t work hard enough/prefer living off of handouts even though this flies in the face of real rational self-interest that our current economic theory is founded upon. (See also Elizabeth Blackmar’s free riders and shirkers.) Blacks were relegated to inferior housing in urban centers in a system that uses property tax to fund schools (so sent to schools with less resources) and denied access to decent wage-paying jobs until … well, until civil rights, but spatial segregation, hollowed cities, shitty school system structures, and still alive-and-well prejudice means that blacks still earn less than whites on average in the same positions and have more obstacles to becoming qualified for jobs with decent earning potential in a cut-throat economy exporting labor and expecting government to act like a private agency and sell to the lowest bidder instead of guaranteeing a living wage. Fuck. It also pushes racism into this reaaallly insidious, underground victim-blaming place. I think this is what Racism Without Racists is about, and some of what’s behind the part of the cabrini green question that wonders why ‘they just didn’t take care of what they were given.’ If ‘they’ would just behave like the rest of us [white people], they’d get along fine. I’m not racist, I just think they need to try harder and quit being so lazy. Uh, ok.
• Impacts on black people/impacts on white people:
I need to finish reading these chapters, but he offers pretty familiar-to-me-sounding accounts of white people growing up without any real contact to black people saying all sorts of racist stuff and using epithets while claiming to not be racist or not mean anything by it.
RANDOM THOUGHT AGAIN: Racism is more than a black/white issue, but lots of what I’m reading is focusing there. Even in Sweden will be an important addition because it talks so much more about immigrants, mostly Arab/Muslim, being ‘problematic’ and the issue of national identity and national culture being something to investigate. This means also re-reading Bellah and that ‘On Nationalism’ article from Ari Kelman’s class. Maybe I can talk Rebecca into re-reading it too and having dinner with me one day…
Fair enough, I wrote until I puked last Monday and opted to give it a rest on Tuesday, and then Wednesday was lost largely to driving to Berkeley to meet with advisor Laura and buy Even in Sweden. Ever since starting said book, I’ve been in a bit of elevated anxiety about this whole thing, since that book is poetic and beautiful and sort of ethereal when I was just getting the hang of hard and dense, and I suspect that whatever Laura asks me is going to come from that book and I don’t know how to work it yet.
So I had myself a little freakout. No big deal. Get back to it.
Sundown Towns is a really great, useful book. It’s sort of written in this tone that seems to aim to be a New York Times bestseller instead of an academic staple—and this is maybe why academics don’t know/love James Loewen as much as I think they should. Things I like the best:
• His account of the Nadir of race relations:
To express that US history has been one improvement upon the next, marching ever forward to the luminous future is to really mislead and misrepresent the truth about where we’ve been as a nation and it particularly confounds the state of race (mostly black-white) relations. There were moral advocates for the liberation of black slaves in the 1840s and 1850s, and while ultimately the elimination of slavery was done in an effort to save the Union (important mostly to economics and, in some ways, a move to keep more power in the hands of fewer people) there were real efforts to incorporate blacks into mainstream society because it was the moral thing to do, and it was a strength of the Republican party. Due to political forces that he spells out better than I can remember without the book in front of me, things started reversing for blacks starting around 1890 and continued to rescind until the civil rights movement. Which wasn’t that long ago. Which my parents lived through. Which ran deep and can’t be corrected overnight, especially when it had such huge impacts on spatial segregation and a huge gaping divide between 2 races/cultures who have now gigantic obstacles in getting to know one another. (Well, whites have trouble getting to know black culture in any sort of honest way. Blacks have to know white culture to a larger degree because they have to come to it and work within it to survive in many ways, but I think it could be said that this isn’t the most honest way to know white culture either.)
• The way you try to solve a problem depends entirely on how you understand or frame the problem:
This is obvious, but it starts to explain why running black folks out of towns came to be—because the problem was black people, and the solution is to get black people out. If the problem was racism, the solution would have to be something else. Why was the problem black people? I’ll have to go back and dig for Loewen’s unraveling of this. George Fredrickson is helpful here, too, in explaining that racist ideologies were in place from a history of exclusion, rationalizing slavery by considering black folks sub-human, and eugenics (scientific linking of genetic traits to moral traits).
• Black people showed up in, and were run out of towns in every state in the US. Racism and exclusion was not just a southern problem.
• Often, there’s a story of one black criminal (substantiated or not) that served as the catalyst to ridding a town of all blacks and becoming sundown towns. These catalyst stories don’t account for drawing the conclusion that if one black person committed a crime, this somehow means that all black people need to go. There’s that issue of framing the problem again.
• Black people were written out of suburban CC&Rs explicitly. They were also denied access to federal housing assistance after WWII.
RANDOM THOUGHT: The fact that this shit isn’t taught to everyone is a fucking travesty. My mom didn’t know this!! I forget that other people don’t know. And the implications are HUGE—not knowing that black people were explicitly excluded from advantages offered to white people within my parents’ lifetime makes it so much easier to assess that POC, especially blacks, are poor because they’re not motivated/don’t work hard enough/prefer living off of handouts even though this flies in the face of real rational self-interest that our current economic theory is founded upon. (See also Elizabeth Blackmar’s free riders and shirkers.) Blacks were relegated to inferior housing in urban centers in a system that uses property tax to fund schools (so sent to schools with less resources) and denied access to decent wage-paying jobs until … well, until civil rights, but spatial segregation, hollowed cities, shitty school system structures, and still alive-and-well prejudice means that blacks still earn less than whites on average in the same positions and have more obstacles to becoming qualified for jobs with decent earning potential in a cut-throat economy exporting labor and expecting government to act like a private agency and sell to the lowest bidder instead of guaranteeing a living wage. Fuck. It also pushes racism into this reaaallly insidious, underground victim-blaming place. I think this is what Racism Without Racists is about, and some of what’s behind the part of the cabrini green question that wonders why ‘they just didn’t take care of what they were given.’ If ‘they’ would just behave like the rest of us [white people], they’d get along fine. I’m not racist, I just think they need to try harder and quit being so lazy. Uh, ok.
• Impacts on black people/impacts on white people:
I need to finish reading these chapters, but he offers pretty familiar-to-me-sounding accounts of white people growing up without any real contact to black people saying all sorts of racist stuff and using epithets while claiming to not be racist or not mean anything by it.
RANDOM THOUGHT AGAIN: Racism is more than a black/white issue, but lots of what I’m reading is focusing there. Even in Sweden will be an important addition because it talks so much more about immigrants, mostly Arab/Muslim, being ‘problematic’ and the issue of national identity and national culture being something to investigate. This means also re-reading Bellah and that ‘On Nationalism’ article from Ari Kelman’s class. Maybe I can talk Rebecca into re-reading it too and having dinner with me one day…
Monday, May 12, 2008
PRACTICE ESSAY 1
Question:
Why did Cabrini Green and places like it fail? Why didn't they take care of what they were given, if it was better than what they had before?"
(Address assumptions in the question ('they' behavior), history of public housing and public subsidies, city form, Nadir of race relations, garden and radiant city philosophies, crime/drugs and role of neighborhood, district and city politics)
Hopefully I'll get to do this today, but I have to read and I've spent all day writing so far.
Why did Cabrini Green and places like it fail? Why didn't they take care of what they were given, if it was better than what they had before?"
(Address assumptions in the question ('they' behavior), history of public housing and public subsidies, city form, Nadir of race relations, garden and radiant city philosophies, crime/drugs and role of neighborhood, district and city politics)
Hopefully I'll get to do this today, but I have to read and I've spent all day writing so far.
elizabeth blackmar, appropriating the commons
"Property can be thought of as enforceable claims to the benefits of resources. These claims carry with them duties and liabilities. The Anglo-American legal tradition has recognized essentailly three kinds of property rights. Private property is the right of individuals to exclude others from the uses or benefits of resources. (Legal individuals can be human or 'artificial persons,' as in the case of corporations.) Public property, owned by governments, gives state officials the right to determine who has access to resources held on behalf of a wider constituency. Common property is an individual's right not to be excluded from the uses or benefits of resources. Historically, common property rights were recognized and enforced for members of a bounded community. Thus, common property is usually distinguished from 'open access' or unappropriated resources that are beyond a prescribed political jurisdiction (as might be the case with fish outside territorial waters)" (Blackmar 51).
Ok, so:
private property = it's mine, i have the right to exclude whomever i want. no punks in my mall, no gay people in my house, whatever.
public property = it's the government's. in a representational government, representative officials say who can be there and who can't, presumably based on the desires of the broader constituancy. i guess this is why parks can close at a certain hour and homeless people can be run out, because officials have the authority from the community to do so?
common property = close to public, but requires some distinction as to who has the right to use. since it states 'for members of a bounded community,' it begs a question of membership. resident? taxpayer? citizen? human? it gets complicated. this is central to the issue of american indians and card-carrying...do you have enough 'native blood' to belong? can you prove it?
this article tackles 'the tragedy of the commons,' a 1968 article that i countered to argue for fruit-bearing treens in public spaces for mark francis' class last spring. what the tragedy of the commons states is basically that people operating in their rational self-interest will use resources from the land to their own benefit rather than the benefit of the collective, and each individual operating this way in the same commons will eventually ravage and destroy the commons because they have no personal stake in maintaining them. this has been used over and over to defend privatization -- if someone has stakes in land or resource, then it means that it will be better cared-for than without. the essay uses sheep herders as the example and grass as the resource.
'tragedy' assumes a few things without naming them as assumptions.
first, that it's not in anyone's self-interest to value commons as an entity onto themselves; that common space, sharing, and interacting with one another are inconsequential to people, or that valuing this is an exception to natural human behavior rather than the rule. i don't believe this.
we're social creatures, first and foremost. we like together and form communities. we watch each other. given the opportunity, we monitor one another. Allan Engler points out, “supporters of capitalism cite what they call the tragedy of the commons to explain the wanton plundering of forests, fish and waterways, but common property is not the problem. When property was held in common by tribes, clans and villages, people took no more than their share and respected the rights of others. They cared for common property and when necessary acted together to protect it against those who would damage it…Capitalism recognizes only private property and free-for-all property. Nobody is responsible for free-forall property until someone claims it as his own. He then has a right to do as he pleases with it, a right that is uniquely capitalist” (58-59).
Additionally, Blackmar points out that also missing from this analysis is labor. Economists elaborated that common property offered no incentive to labor, and without incentives to it society would have to deal with "free riders" who don't pay their way, and "shirkers" who "cost too much and do too little." Anxieties of these people -- fueled by history of exclusion and a fear of a backlash from folks excluded (black people written out of opportunities for self improvement, immigrants used as strike-breakers) -- sponging off of public coffers morphed the way the public realm was utilized, from charging admission to formerly tax-funded venues like parks and zoos to expecting the government to run like any other private agency, and contract jobs to the lowest bidder (and assuming the false opposite, that if you don't, the ONLY outcome is the government overspending for less result.) (Blackmar 70-71)
She writes: "In retrospect, we can see that removing public labor from public property lifted a very big stick out of the bundle that historically had compromised American public space by integrating matters of governance, maintenance, use, and accountability. And in retrospect, we can also see that what was at stake in cracking the whip on shirkers and free riders was a determination that the politics of public space would no longer at its heart be a contest over the redistribution of wealth, even at the most basic level of paying public workers a fair wage" (71)
She actually offers a possible truism that i disagree with substantially. She asks, "When did people not resist paying into a common fund in order to sustain facilities that they only partially used themselves and that might be widely used by people they did not know?" (76) I can apprecate an American history containing a current of resistence to tax increases as the public sector expanded, but consider also Mexican migrant Hometown Associations. Throughout the united states (and presumably anywhere else), Mexican migrants are organizing in new locations to collectively send remittances back to the towns they've migrated from to fund community redevelopment projects. The mexican government is currently matching these dollars three for one, and they are being used to build parks, renovate churches and various other projects for municipal support. in addition, it's worth noting that migrant remittances are Mexico's second-largest source of income, just behind oil. (get sources for this from leticia.) obviously these people are demonstrating a willingness not only to send money back home, but to go to an additional effort to cooperate to put these dollars to work for the commons, even when dollars in the united states are few and these individuals may never return to mexico again. it suggests something about the importance of culture to political economy, and the power of the two to shape one another. what's going on with the united states culture that has devalued the public sector so tremendously? I can't offer any succint and essentialized answer. but i do think that our unique history of racism and exclusion in a country full of immigrants and our experience of slavery offer some clues.
Ok, so:
private property = it's mine, i have the right to exclude whomever i want. no punks in my mall, no gay people in my house, whatever.
public property = it's the government's. in a representational government, representative officials say who can be there and who can't, presumably based on the desires of the broader constituancy. i guess this is why parks can close at a certain hour and homeless people can be run out, because officials have the authority from the community to do so?
common property = close to public, but requires some distinction as to who has the right to use. since it states 'for members of a bounded community,' it begs a question of membership. resident? taxpayer? citizen? human? it gets complicated. this is central to the issue of american indians and card-carrying...do you have enough 'native blood' to belong? can you prove it?
this article tackles 'the tragedy of the commons,' a 1968 article that i countered to argue for fruit-bearing treens in public spaces for mark francis' class last spring. what the tragedy of the commons states is basically that people operating in their rational self-interest will use resources from the land to their own benefit rather than the benefit of the collective, and each individual operating this way in the same commons will eventually ravage and destroy the commons because they have no personal stake in maintaining them. this has been used over and over to defend privatization -- if someone has stakes in land or resource, then it means that it will be better cared-for than without. the essay uses sheep herders as the example and grass as the resource.
'tragedy' assumes a few things without naming them as assumptions.
first, that it's not in anyone's self-interest to value commons as an entity onto themselves; that common space, sharing, and interacting with one another are inconsequential to people, or that valuing this is an exception to natural human behavior rather than the rule. i don't believe this.
we're social creatures, first and foremost. we like together and form communities. we watch each other. given the opportunity, we monitor one another. Allan Engler points out, “supporters of capitalism cite what they call the tragedy of the commons to explain the wanton plundering of forests, fish and waterways, but common property is not the problem. When property was held in common by tribes, clans and villages, people took no more than their share and respected the rights of others. They cared for common property and when necessary acted together to protect it against those who would damage it…Capitalism recognizes only private property and free-for-all property. Nobody is responsible for free-forall property until someone claims it as his own. He then has a right to do as he pleases with it, a right that is uniquely capitalist” (58-59).
Additionally, Blackmar points out that also missing from this analysis is labor. Economists elaborated that common property offered no incentive to labor, and without incentives to it society would have to deal with "free riders" who don't pay their way, and "shirkers" who "cost too much and do too little." Anxieties of these people -- fueled by history of exclusion and a fear of a backlash from folks excluded (black people written out of opportunities for self improvement, immigrants used as strike-breakers) -- sponging off of public coffers morphed the way the public realm was utilized, from charging admission to formerly tax-funded venues like parks and zoos to expecting the government to run like any other private agency, and contract jobs to the lowest bidder (and assuming the false opposite, that if you don't, the ONLY outcome is the government overspending for less result.) (Blackmar 70-71)
She writes: "In retrospect, we can see that removing public labor from public property lifted a very big stick out of the bundle that historically had compromised American public space by integrating matters of governance, maintenance, use, and accountability. And in retrospect, we can also see that what was at stake in cracking the whip on shirkers and free riders was a determination that the politics of public space would no longer at its heart be a contest over the redistribution of wealth, even at the most basic level of paying public workers a fair wage" (71)
She actually offers a possible truism that i disagree with substantially. She asks, "When did people not resist paying into a common fund in order to sustain facilities that they only partially used themselves and that might be widely used by people they did not know?" (76) I can apprecate an American history containing a current of resistence to tax increases as the public sector expanded, but consider also Mexican migrant Hometown Associations. Throughout the united states (and presumably anywhere else), Mexican migrants are organizing in new locations to collectively send remittances back to the towns they've migrated from to fund community redevelopment projects. The mexican government is currently matching these dollars three for one, and they are being used to build parks, renovate churches and various other projects for municipal support. in addition, it's worth noting that migrant remittances are Mexico's second-largest source of income, just behind oil. (get sources for this from leticia.) obviously these people are demonstrating a willingness not only to send money back home, but to go to an additional effort to cooperate to put these dollars to work for the commons, even when dollars in the united states are few and these individuals may never return to mexico again. it suggests something about the importance of culture to political economy, and the power of the two to shape one another. what's going on with the united states culture that has devalued the public sector so tremendously? I can't offer any succint and essentialized answer. but i do think that our unique history of racism and exclusion in a country full of immigrants and our experience of slavery offer some clues.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
delores hayden
i was excited to read delores hayden, who offers feminist critiques of suburbs. i was particularly excited to find an article drawn from her book that my advisor reccommended be on my reading list -- now i don't have to read the whole thing.
i found myself captivated, and jotting notes of the history she traces of public subsidies and cronyism that brought about the suburbs, beyond just the invention of the car. it's one of those things that i've had an impression of being true but didn't have the evidence. Things i wrote down include:
-look up post WWII VA Bill - vets get homeloan at 4% with little/no money down. was this different than the GI bill that was for whites only, or is that the same thing? (edit: it's the same thing.)
-William Levitt, among the first tract suburban home builders, said "No man with a house can be a communist, he has too much to do." I don't know if he had ties to McCarthy when he said that, but eventually the two were pals. It's way significant that in the 50s, patriotism was demonstrated by spending your money, and that the nature of american identity shifted from the democratic nature of our government for all [white people] (political) to your ability and willingness to demonstrate your participation in capitalism (economics). He was playing on his personal interest and prospects for wealth as well as national cold-war anxieties (and eventually, hysteria). and to be honest, I don't all-the-way understand how fear of a communist economy grew to be such a global force. but i'm not adding another book.
(Leticia showed up, and I left this post for a few days. I'm back.)
Levittowns are significant in everybody's writing, from Kevin Lynch and Jane Jacobs writing about their form, Hayden writing about the political economic forces that made them possible, and Loewen's inclusion of the fact that they were explicitly racist. Talking about them is a possible and really good exam question, that I'll have to come back to to tie together --later.
Tax subsidies for greenfield development, hightways, and 'economic stimulus building' at highway nodes began to appear beyond existing suburbs to predicting and making possible future suburbs, sort of like an anti-environmental Johnny Appleseed (who was a real estate speculator creating future orchards for cider production; he wasn't just some hat-wearing wierdo concerned with nutrition on the frontier)(see Michael Pollan's 'The Botany of Desire'). This is not because of the nature of things by themselves, but reflect the growing power of auto manufacturers, energy companies (who had a huge interest in the 'all-electric home,' for obvious reasons) and real estate developers who profit from growth in the context of post-war anxieties, a baby boom, civil unrest (black people were part of the filthiness of the cities) conspicuous consumption and a fear of communism.
In this new development, there were no requirements for public space! Public gathering points were desirable to and created by only the people who stood to profit from them, and so were always private centered around consumption -- like shopping malls -- and, particularly when these places were being erected as community forecasters instead of current community amenaties, there was no one around to advocate for anything public. not only is a mall a community space reinforcing a culture of consumption (and unattractive or unwelcoming to folks who can't participate in the spending), but they also behave very differently than free public spaces or commons. Try holding a protest at the mall, or a union strike. Private property rights protect the mall's right to evict people who are not in accordance with what they can deem acceptable behavior. (they do this every day, well before anything would escalate to civil disobedience. this is often recognized readily by people falling outside of norms while staying relatively invisible to people falling within norms, as David Sibly points out. punk rockers get asked to leave for looking spiky and broke, but 'regular-looking' people may never notice the absence of spiky punk-rockers. they probably assume that they're self-selected away; they have no interest in being at the mall. eventually, this is probably true, but it's important to understand the exertion of power before it becomes a result of personal choice. this is probably why today there's not as many black people in suburbs even though segregation is no longer legally enforced. but i'm ahead of myself.)
*******To say that private spaces masquerading as public spaces is significant, and problematic beyond what i've just said, it implies that true public spaces are important and worthwile. I think that they are. They're fundamental to democracy, if you ask me. though I'm going to have to do a little research to remember who said what that lets me say something like that.
Beyond public space, these first new developments had no zoning requirements whatsoever -- no examination of well-designed neighborhoods or transit either. They were built from the notion of the 'garden city,' building little small-towns that replicated the (presumably understandable) desire to have a small-town life without the noise or dirt (or diversity) of the city, but still have the access. (jane jacobs talks about this a lot, and it extends what loewen notes about the solution always coming from the way you frame the problem. in this case, no one bothered to look at successful city examples or get to the root of some city problems (noxious industry and OVERcrowding [not high density], and more difficult to talk about, the Nadir of black-white race relations.) However, because they were made possible with PRIVATE funding rather than public, they didn't bother with things like schools, road maintenence, trash collection or sewers. They built private service roads and no infastructure, and had no accountability or promise to even maintain the roads. The true libertarian market-analysis would suggest that a savvy consumer would pick up on these things and the development would fail because no one in their right mind would buy in to such a place, but the truth is that they did sell, and it was federal public money in the 60s that retrofit these developments with proper infastructure -- thus, offering William Levitt and the suburban residents a HUGE invisible subsidy (that still exists, though it's buried now under more complex planning processes, zoning, city budgets and public-private partnerships that are SO CONVALUTED that the simple process of endorsing policy with private individual purchasing power is rediculous, especially when it creates artificially low prices that are, on the surface, in a private consumer's best self-interest.)
Gail Radford cites the 1930s as a period when Americans "developed a two-tier policy to subsidize housing. Cramped multifamily housing for the poor, the elderly, femaile-headed families, and people of color would be constructed by public authorities, and more generous single-family housing for white, male-headed families would be constructed by private developers with government support [invisible subsidies and allowance of explicit exclusion of minorities]"(Hayden 45). And the consequences are profound -- for housing, culture, public sector and urban design -- "inadequate financial resources behind one effort [public housing] and wasted material resources [expedited obselescence, poor land-use] behind the other. And worst of all, it mystified many working-class and middle-class Americans, who saw minimal subsidies for the poor but never understood their own tract housing, highways, and malls were far more heavily subsidized” (Hayden 45, italics my editions).
RANDOM THOUGHTS
Can a capitalist economy ever be truly sustainable? It's built on GROWTH and PRIVATE SELF-INTEREST, not staying sufficiently the same. and we keep increasing the population. and communalism will only work in capitalism when it's realized by individuals that collectivism/collaboration is in a self interest, and then it will be figured out how to make profitable.
where are the women? theyre the ones i know the least about as i look at this history of the 20th century, and I know they had some things going on, esp. during WWII. I know about the rosies, but I don't know how their history influenced the shaping of space.
i found myself captivated, and jotting notes of the history she traces of public subsidies and cronyism that brought about the suburbs, beyond just the invention of the car. it's one of those things that i've had an impression of being true but didn't have the evidence. Things i wrote down include:
-look up post WWII VA Bill - vets get homeloan at 4% with little/no money down. was this different than the GI bill that was for whites only, or is that the same thing? (edit: it's the same thing.)
-William Levitt, among the first tract suburban home builders, said "No man with a house can be a communist, he has too much to do." I don't know if he had ties to McCarthy when he said that, but eventually the two were pals. It's way significant that in the 50s, patriotism was demonstrated by spending your money, and that the nature of american identity shifted from the democratic nature of our government for all [white people] (political) to your ability and willingness to demonstrate your participation in capitalism (economics). He was playing on his personal interest and prospects for wealth as well as national cold-war anxieties (and eventually, hysteria). and to be honest, I don't all-the-way understand how fear of a communist economy grew to be such a global force. but i'm not adding another book.
(Leticia showed up, and I left this post for a few days. I'm back.)
Levittowns are significant in everybody's writing, from Kevin Lynch and Jane Jacobs writing about their form, Hayden writing about the political economic forces that made them possible, and Loewen's inclusion of the fact that they were explicitly racist. Talking about them is a possible and really good exam question, that I'll have to come back to to tie together --later.
Tax subsidies for greenfield development, hightways, and 'economic stimulus building' at highway nodes began to appear beyond existing suburbs to predicting and making possible future suburbs, sort of like an anti-environmental Johnny Appleseed (who was a real estate speculator creating future orchards for cider production; he wasn't just some hat-wearing wierdo concerned with nutrition on the frontier)(see Michael Pollan's 'The Botany of Desire'). This is not because of the nature of things by themselves, but reflect the growing power of auto manufacturers, energy companies (who had a huge interest in the 'all-electric home,' for obvious reasons) and real estate developers who profit from growth in the context of post-war anxieties, a baby boom, civil unrest (black people were part of the filthiness of the cities) conspicuous consumption and a fear of communism.
In this new development, there were no requirements for public space! Public gathering points were desirable to and created by only the people who stood to profit from them, and so were always private centered around consumption -- like shopping malls -- and, particularly when these places were being erected as community forecasters instead of current community amenaties, there was no one around to advocate for anything public. not only is a mall a community space reinforcing a culture of consumption (and unattractive or unwelcoming to folks who can't participate in the spending), but they also behave very differently than free public spaces or commons. Try holding a protest at the mall, or a union strike. Private property rights protect the mall's right to evict people who are not in accordance with what they can deem acceptable behavior. (they do this every day, well before anything would escalate to civil disobedience. this is often recognized readily by people falling outside of norms while staying relatively invisible to people falling within norms, as David Sibly points out. punk rockers get asked to leave for looking spiky and broke, but 'regular-looking' people may never notice the absence of spiky punk-rockers. they probably assume that they're self-selected away; they have no interest in being at the mall. eventually, this is probably true, but it's important to understand the exertion of power before it becomes a result of personal choice. this is probably why today there's not as many black people in suburbs even though segregation is no longer legally enforced. but i'm ahead of myself.)
*******To say that private spaces masquerading as public spaces is significant, and problematic beyond what i've just said, it implies that true public spaces are important and worthwile. I think that they are. They're fundamental to democracy, if you ask me. though I'm going to have to do a little research to remember who said what that lets me say something like that.
Beyond public space, these first new developments had no zoning requirements whatsoever -- no examination of well-designed neighborhoods or transit either. They were built from the notion of the 'garden city,' building little small-towns that replicated the (presumably understandable) desire to have a small-town life without the noise or dirt (or diversity) of the city, but still have the access. (jane jacobs talks about this a lot, and it extends what loewen notes about the solution always coming from the way you frame the problem. in this case, no one bothered to look at successful city examples or get to the root of some city problems (noxious industry and OVERcrowding [not high density], and more difficult to talk about, the Nadir of black-white race relations.) However, because they were made possible with PRIVATE funding rather than public, they didn't bother with things like schools, road maintenence, trash collection or sewers. They built private service roads and no infastructure, and had no accountability or promise to even maintain the roads. The true libertarian market-analysis would suggest that a savvy consumer would pick up on these things and the development would fail because no one in their right mind would buy in to such a place, but the truth is that they did sell, and it was federal public money in the 60s that retrofit these developments with proper infastructure -- thus, offering William Levitt and the suburban residents a HUGE invisible subsidy (that still exists, though it's buried now under more complex planning processes, zoning, city budgets and public-private partnerships that are SO CONVALUTED that the simple process of endorsing policy with private individual purchasing power is rediculous, especially when it creates artificially low prices that are, on the surface, in a private consumer's best self-interest.)
Gail Radford cites the 1930s as a period when Americans "developed a two-tier policy to subsidize housing. Cramped multifamily housing for the poor, the elderly, femaile-headed families, and people of color would be constructed by public authorities, and more generous single-family housing for white, male-headed families would be constructed by private developers with government support [invisible subsidies and allowance of explicit exclusion of minorities]"(Hayden 45). And the consequences are profound -- for housing, culture, public sector and urban design -- "inadequate financial resources behind one effort [public housing] and wasted material resources [expedited obselescence, poor land-use] behind the other. And worst of all, it mystified many working-class and middle-class Americans, who saw minimal subsidies for the poor but never understood their own tract housing, highways, and malls were far more heavily subsidized” (Hayden 45, italics my editions).
RANDOM THOUGHTS
Can a capitalist economy ever be truly sustainable? It's built on GROWTH and PRIVATE SELF-INTEREST, not staying sufficiently the same. and we keep increasing the population. and communalism will only work in capitalism when it's realized by individuals that collectivism/collaboration is in a self interest, and then it will be figured out how to make profitable.
where are the women? theyre the ones i know the least about as i look at this history of the 20th century, and I know they had some things going on, esp. during WWII. I know about the rosies, but I don't know how their history influenced the shaping of space.
Harvey: The Political Economy of Public Space
It was just a year ago that I first attempted to decipher anything called 'political economy' in a formal way, and the phrase threw me into a fit of underacademic-identity anxiety. after much effort from an entire class of graduate students to make michael p. smith speak comprehendably to only somewhat above-average education levels, we finally got him to say that politics and economy belong in the same dialogue, and that once upon a time politics and economics were the same thing instead of separate disciplines.
oh. ok.
The experience certainly contributed to my ability to get anything out of Harvey's article, though I still hate the way these people organize a sentence and rely on lingo, and anyone citing Richard Sennett is going to take me at least an hour and a half to read. Gear up.
The article uses a case study from second empire paris to describe the process of segretation of space by class interest happening simultaneously with militarization and the emergence of conspicuous consumption as a social value/practice.
If this sort of thing didn't exist before, is this tied up in deepening lines between physical space and exclusionary spatial practice? Sure. If anything, it points out the deeper causes for spatial practice to be spatially exclusionary -- the behavior differences between classes arent neccesarily new, but there were other forces at play that separated spaces further, so that exclusion might happen not just at a specific locality (you can't come in this restaurant dressed like that) but more district-wide (Ugly Betty belongs in Queens, and midtown manhatten is something different.) It made the grain coarser, and there are several ways to observe this in place.
He states his conclusion pretty clearly: "The character of public space counts for little or nothing politically unless it connects symbiotically with the organization of institutional...and private spaces. It is the relational connectivity among public, quasipublic and private spaces that counts when it comes to politics in the public sphere." The bourgeoisie in paris could "assert their hegemony in politics as well as in economy at the same time that they claimed privileged access to and control over the public spaces of their city" (31-32) This has implications for the role of public space in facilitating democracy, or maybe more specifically, dissent and disobedience. walk through open plazas and public-looking gathering spaces in san francisco and ask yourself, 'could we hold a protest here? could workers strike here?' when a space masquerades as public but behavior is actually policed, it can be profoundly disempowering for already disadvantaged groups and increases power of the already powerful, who use the commons for something very different and have agency in government and the knowledge of the internal system to enact their politics within the institution.
Here's what I'm interested in further - He goes on to assert that "no amount of 'new urbanism' understood as urban design, can promote a greater sense of civic responsibility and particiaption in the intensity of private property arrangements and the orgainzation of commodity as spectacle...remains untouched" (33). I appreciate the clarification -- you can't just build it differently and expect behavior to change without changing this other stuff too. And the way things get built -- new urbanism included -- is clearly processed in a capitalist political economic context, and if it is a process of privileged power and control, it's bound to be impossible to build anything that really shakes the system. But which comes first? can building spaces with intention of facilitating participation and responsibility help to change the system? Or do we have to find some way to change the system so that we can build our cities in a more egalitarian way? I mean, I sort of think that if the public spaces and public sphere serves in part to make room for educating folks with less access/agency (signage, teach-ins, demonstrations), then they have to exist for the system to change. or else we have to find a different space for that education and communication to happen in. the internet helps, but you still have to know how to use it (and it has to stay neutral) and be able to get to it/own a computer and pay a utility bill for it. and surveilance is a huge and still-growing issue. (how did i get on that wierd 5-year special-search list, anyway? I'll never know.) and i don't think it's a substitute for the physical environment, by any means. we didn't evolve as a species to live in computer-land, and no technology fetishizing or sci-fi future-human-evolution sketch will make it so.
oh. ok.
The experience certainly contributed to my ability to get anything out of Harvey's article, though I still hate the way these people organize a sentence and rely on lingo, and anyone citing Richard Sennett is going to take me at least an hour and a half to read. Gear up.
The article uses a case study from second empire paris to describe the process of segretation of space by class interest happening simultaneously with militarization and the emergence of conspicuous consumption as a social value/practice.
If this sort of thing didn't exist before, is this tied up in deepening lines between physical space and exclusionary spatial practice? Sure. If anything, it points out the deeper causes for spatial practice to be spatially exclusionary -- the behavior differences between classes arent neccesarily new, but there were other forces at play that separated spaces further, so that exclusion might happen not just at a specific locality (you can't come in this restaurant dressed like that) but more district-wide (Ugly Betty belongs in Queens, and midtown manhatten is something different.) It made the grain coarser, and there are several ways to observe this in place.
He states his conclusion pretty clearly: "The character of public space counts for little or nothing politically unless it connects symbiotically with the organization of institutional...and private spaces. It is the relational connectivity among public, quasipublic and private spaces that counts when it comes to politics in the public sphere." The bourgeoisie in paris could "assert their hegemony in politics as well as in economy at the same time that they claimed privileged access to and control over the public spaces of their city" (31-32) This has implications for the role of public space in facilitating democracy, or maybe more specifically, dissent and disobedience. walk through open plazas and public-looking gathering spaces in san francisco and ask yourself, 'could we hold a protest here? could workers strike here?' when a space masquerades as public but behavior is actually policed, it can be profoundly disempowering for already disadvantaged groups and increases power of the already powerful, who use the commons for something very different and have agency in government and the knowledge of the internal system to enact their politics within the institution.
Here's what I'm interested in further - He goes on to assert that "no amount of 'new urbanism' understood as urban design, can promote a greater sense of civic responsibility and particiaption in the intensity of private property arrangements and the orgainzation of commodity as spectacle...remains untouched" (33). I appreciate the clarification -- you can't just build it differently and expect behavior to change without changing this other stuff too. And the way things get built -- new urbanism included -- is clearly processed in a capitalist political economic context, and if it is a process of privileged power and control, it's bound to be impossible to build anything that really shakes the system. But which comes first? can building spaces with intention of facilitating participation and responsibility help to change the system? Or do we have to find some way to change the system so that we can build our cities in a more egalitarian way? I mean, I sort of think that if the public spaces and public sphere serves in part to make room for educating folks with less access/agency (signage, teach-ins, demonstrations), then they have to exist for the system to change. or else we have to find a different space for that education and communication to happen in. the internet helps, but you still have to know how to use it (and it has to stay neutral) and be able to get to it/own a computer and pay a utility bill for it. and surveilance is a huge and still-growing issue. (how did i get on that wierd 5-year special-search list, anyway? I'll never know.) and i don't think it's a substitute for the physical environment, by any means. we didn't evolve as a species to live in computer-land, and no technology fetishizing or sci-fi future-human-evolution sketch will make it so.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
post-conference+good city form and a conversation with andrew
So for the last 2 days, I attended a conference about regionalism that was held at UCDavis. at the end of each day, andrew asked me what i said, which i think is pretty funny.
on both days, i made a comment about the tensions and rhetoric around 'top-down' and 'bottom-up.' people have a tendency to get sort of excited but myopic about what these things mean, and there is usually an inference of a value preference -- that top-down is worse, or less desirable, and bottom-up is better. usually, though, bottom-up refers to 'grassroots' (which Isao Fujimoto refers to as 'grass-tips') organizations that already have some degree of agency. you have to be able to have some sort of organizational framework from which you can participate in governance anyway, and having the agency to participate is different than being empowered to participate. (this is what I pointed out on day 1.) in addition, there has to be a top structure to bubble ideas up to, and a means to imposing or sanctioning them in the first place -- basically, you can't forget that when you advocate for bottom-up process, that there is a top to work up to, and you can really only know that your bottom-up process was effective when it changes the top - and imposes those changes across it's jurisdiction. then it comes from the top-down. and so on. this is insightful, but i don't know what to do with it.
the other thing I got to comment about was on the power of drawing a line on a map, and that this is tied up with our tendency to equate what we can see with our eyes with what we can prove. we rely enormously on visuals and visualizations for evidence, but drawing a line on a map is not politically innocent and can have huge implications. what function is it serving? what information is it binning? why do we only draw one, with no overlaps? it's a question i ask to all visualized data -- why is this data presented in this way, and what story is it trying to tell? is it manipulated blatantly, aggregated a wierd way or leaving anything out? blah blah. it's not to say that maps aren't useful, but it's important to remember this facet of our conversation, and that we don't map lived experience but (usually) imposed political lines crafted by political process. this is probably culturally loaded as well.
leticia called and was incensed that a room full of planning and regionalism experts had never heard of migrant hometown associations sending remittance money for community development projects. do you people think you're the first ones to look at regionalism? hello!! what experts?? it was interesting, and probably a little crushing for her. "if you people don't know about these organizations at all, you're fucked." well...yes. do you think people are just sitting around being sad that they're poor?
she asked this sort of rhetorically, but i think there might be an answer, and it's probably tied up in the dominant culture. yes, i think they have no idea of how disenfranchised people organize. this could come from 2 important elements of mythology -- the 'rugged individualism' that is so adored here, and the 'mlk myth' of social movements. i've made that second one up a little bit, but i'll explain both...
if the majority of the people in the room are white, and the people who aren't are there because they've learned their way around (and probably internalized) dominant white culture, there is at least some significant exposure to the belief that hard work got them where they are. whiteness abounds with the assumption that the institutions and structures that have assisted them are either invisible or available to everyone equally if they just act responsibly enough to use them. it's like they don't even know how to conceive of people being impeded from these institutions -- yet of course, they are -- so they certainly can't relate. or imagine them to go looking for their solutions. therefore, they probably just hang out and be sad about being poor.
the other piece is about the mythology of mlk and the civil rights movement, that angela davis pointed out in a speech last year. it's dangerous to remember the civil rights movement as always huge, and mlk as the sole voice and powerful leader, because it makes us think that that's what social movements look like, and that since something like mlk is so big and intangible we should wait for a leader like that to come along again and wait around in the meantime. this story leaves out the women that stayed up all night doing the simple work of mimeographing bus-strike pamphlets, and were awake early early to pass them out at busstops. it leaves out the gritty, simple, small steps and bits that led, eventually, to social revolution. mlk was a great leader, and an incredible speaker, but remembering him by himself and not in the context of the on-the-ground movement that he put a face to is disempowering to his legacy and to folks who hope to emulate it. if policymakers are waiting for the next martin luther king, they're certainly going to miss mexican migrant hometown associations.
i'm sorry you didn't know this, my friend. history is simply not as powerful as mythology, and it's mythology that's embedded in the imaginations of most people comfortable identifying as 'american.'
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
i'm re-reading an excerpt of 'good city form' by kevin lynch right now, and a year later and upon closer examination, i keep spotting ways where he is reflecting his own cultural bias and that he's writing to an audience that shares the values. he makes some killer observations, but isn't as critical as i would expect on suburban forms or wide stretches of nature, and less bothered by concentrations of wealth than jane jacobs is. it's not bad, i suppose, but it's good to be attuned to.
after reading (a little, and then talking to danny for an hour and a half about his convoluted anxiety issues), i came back down from the roof and talked to andrew, more about the conference and talking to leticia, and then about his lack of patience for academic naval-gazing. i'm not sure now how this exactly evolved into a conversation about the agricultural revolution and native americans, but it did. i explained kevin lynch's tracing of the city as always and inherently a place of stratified power, but i also think that this was an extention of the power shift embedded in the agricultural revolution -- i'm with daniel quinn here. once humans had the ability to exert some control over the food supply, we removed ourselves from the way the rest of nature exists, dependent on the web of everything else. with a surplus of food and the ability to craft tools, we as a species are sort of living 'with our feet off of the ground,' as andrew put it. but built into that change is the fact that some people get to control these new amenities and some don't. i remember a sociology class that offered a theory about this connected to the shift away from matriarchal societies. women controlled life and had power, but with a surplus of food men could control life and took power. historically, this correlates with the falling off of fertility goddesses in art and artifact.
so cities are naturally a built reflection of stratified power, and cities predated war rather than formed as a strategic fortification against it. and this happened six or seven times independently through history.
what i don't understand is where American indians/first nations peoples fit in this. some of them lived peacefully, and some warred, but there wasn't the same formation of a centralized power geography the same way there was in mesopotamia or tenotchitlan (from what i know.) and inherent and unifying was their respect for earth and nature, which didn't exist in the european cultures. and without the power of a photo of the planet from space, to show everyone that resources are limited. where did this come from? why was it different from other cultures? is it a myth? were there other cultures that had similar reverence to nature, like feudal japan? i have no idea. i would like to know. is this known?
ok that's all.
on both days, i made a comment about the tensions and rhetoric around 'top-down' and 'bottom-up.' people have a tendency to get sort of excited but myopic about what these things mean, and there is usually an inference of a value preference -- that top-down is worse, or less desirable, and bottom-up is better. usually, though, bottom-up refers to 'grassroots' (which Isao Fujimoto refers to as 'grass-tips') organizations that already have some degree of agency. you have to be able to have some sort of organizational framework from which you can participate in governance anyway, and having the agency to participate is different than being empowered to participate. (this is what I pointed out on day 1.) in addition, there has to be a top structure to bubble ideas up to, and a means to imposing or sanctioning them in the first place -- basically, you can't forget that when you advocate for bottom-up process, that there is a top to work up to, and you can really only know that your bottom-up process was effective when it changes the top - and imposes those changes across it's jurisdiction. then it comes from the top-down. and so on. this is insightful, but i don't know what to do with it.
the other thing I got to comment about was on the power of drawing a line on a map, and that this is tied up with our tendency to equate what we can see with our eyes with what we can prove. we rely enormously on visuals and visualizations for evidence, but drawing a line on a map is not politically innocent and can have huge implications. what function is it serving? what information is it binning? why do we only draw one, with no overlaps? it's a question i ask to all visualized data -- why is this data presented in this way, and what story is it trying to tell? is it manipulated blatantly, aggregated a wierd way or leaving anything out? blah blah. it's not to say that maps aren't useful, but it's important to remember this facet of our conversation, and that we don't map lived experience but (usually) imposed political lines crafted by political process. this is probably culturally loaded as well.
leticia called and was incensed that a room full of planning and regionalism experts had never heard of migrant hometown associations sending remittance money for community development projects. do you people think you're the first ones to look at regionalism? hello!! what experts?? it was interesting, and probably a little crushing for her. "if you people don't know about these organizations at all, you're fucked." well...yes. do you think people are just sitting around being sad that they're poor?
she asked this sort of rhetorically, but i think there might be an answer, and it's probably tied up in the dominant culture. yes, i think they have no idea of how disenfranchised people organize. this could come from 2 important elements of mythology -- the 'rugged individualism' that is so adored here, and the 'mlk myth' of social movements. i've made that second one up a little bit, but i'll explain both...
if the majority of the people in the room are white, and the people who aren't are there because they've learned their way around (and probably internalized) dominant white culture, there is at least some significant exposure to the belief that hard work got them where they are. whiteness abounds with the assumption that the institutions and structures that have assisted them are either invisible or available to everyone equally if they just act responsibly enough to use them. it's like they don't even know how to conceive of people being impeded from these institutions -- yet of course, they are -- so they certainly can't relate. or imagine them to go looking for their solutions. therefore, they probably just hang out and be sad about being poor.
the other piece is about the mythology of mlk and the civil rights movement, that angela davis pointed out in a speech last year. it's dangerous to remember the civil rights movement as always huge, and mlk as the sole voice and powerful leader, because it makes us think that that's what social movements look like, and that since something like mlk is so big and intangible we should wait for a leader like that to come along again and wait around in the meantime. this story leaves out the women that stayed up all night doing the simple work of mimeographing bus-strike pamphlets, and were awake early early to pass them out at busstops. it leaves out the gritty, simple, small steps and bits that led, eventually, to social revolution. mlk was a great leader, and an incredible speaker, but remembering him by himself and not in the context of the on-the-ground movement that he put a face to is disempowering to his legacy and to folks who hope to emulate it. if policymakers are waiting for the next martin luther king, they're certainly going to miss mexican migrant hometown associations.
i'm sorry you didn't know this, my friend. history is simply not as powerful as mythology, and it's mythology that's embedded in the imaginations of most people comfortable identifying as 'american.'
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
i'm re-reading an excerpt of 'good city form' by kevin lynch right now, and a year later and upon closer examination, i keep spotting ways where he is reflecting his own cultural bias and that he's writing to an audience that shares the values. he makes some killer observations, but isn't as critical as i would expect on suburban forms or wide stretches of nature, and less bothered by concentrations of wealth than jane jacobs is. it's not bad, i suppose, but it's good to be attuned to.
after reading (a little, and then talking to danny for an hour and a half about his convoluted anxiety issues), i came back down from the roof and talked to andrew, more about the conference and talking to leticia, and then about his lack of patience for academic naval-gazing. i'm not sure now how this exactly evolved into a conversation about the agricultural revolution and native americans, but it did. i explained kevin lynch's tracing of the city as always and inherently a place of stratified power, but i also think that this was an extention of the power shift embedded in the agricultural revolution -- i'm with daniel quinn here. once humans had the ability to exert some control over the food supply, we removed ourselves from the way the rest of nature exists, dependent on the web of everything else. with a surplus of food and the ability to craft tools, we as a species are sort of living 'with our feet off of the ground,' as andrew put it. but built into that change is the fact that some people get to control these new amenities and some don't. i remember a sociology class that offered a theory about this connected to the shift away from matriarchal societies. women controlled life and had power, but with a surplus of food men could control life and took power. historically, this correlates with the falling off of fertility goddesses in art and artifact.
so cities are naturally a built reflection of stratified power, and cities predated war rather than formed as a strategic fortification against it. and this happened six or seven times independently through history.
what i don't understand is where American indians/first nations peoples fit in this. some of them lived peacefully, and some warred, but there wasn't the same formation of a centralized power geography the same way there was in mesopotamia or tenotchitlan (from what i know.) and inherent and unifying was their respect for earth and nature, which didn't exist in the european cultures. and without the power of a photo of the planet from space, to show everyone that resources are limited. where did this come from? why was it different from other cultures? is it a myth? were there other cultures that had similar reverence to nature, like feudal japan? i have no idea. i would like to know. is this known?
ok that's all.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
starting
i don't know if i have anything to contribute to the blog universe, but i'm going to give it a try. i've been digging a few blogs lately, and the best ones inspire me to write. and also to tune in. surely there are things going on in my life. and even though they might not be interesting to the masses, i think writing about them will help me to see them more clearly. and maybe to focus for real, instead of this faking-it thing i've been doing for so long.
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