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.'
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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.
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