A Collaborative Project in City Planning for Urban Biodiversity in Japan

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From 2014, we have been taking part in a project in city planning for urban biodiversity in Fukutsu city, Japan. Our lab (Keitaro Ito laboratory, Kyushu Institute of Technology) has been directing the project in collaboration with Fukutsu city and high school students from Fukuoka Koryo high school and Fukuoka fishery high school. The project’s origins result from the city government’s desire to make environmental planning part of the basic city planning, resting on the ecological characteristics of the city. They asked us to collaborate in this planning.

The site

Fukutsu city is located in the southern part of Japan. The land area of the city is 52 km2 and the population is 58,000. The city has coastal area to the west and is hilly to the east. In the tidal areas, we can find designated endangered species such as Horseshoe crab. In wintertime, migrating birds (such as Black-faced spoonbill) stay for several months around the coast and in paddy fields. There is a fishport at the sea coast where we have extensive ecological system services. Japanese people, especially the local people around here, they like fish for eating. (I usually eat vegetables and like fish for observing…) Anyway, if we lost Fukutsu’s beautiful environment, nobody would get receive the benefits of ecosystem services, such as fish.

For example, Horseshoe crab (Tachypleus tridentatus), Black-faced spoonbill (Platalea minor), and Loggerhead turtle (Caretta caretta ) are thought of as icons of this area of nature, and the existence of these species is an index of nature’s richness and biodiversity. They were classified as an endangered species and they choose the area for their habitat. Therefore, the city has rich biodiversity, even located beside a big city. People are living with nature.

However, the populations of these species are reported to be decreasing these days.

The city view from the hill top Photo: Keitaro ITO
The city view from the hill top Photo: Keitaro ITO
Horseshoe crab (Tachypleus tridentatus) found at low tide in. Photo: Tsuyazaki-higata
Horseshoe crab (Tachypleus tridentatus) found at low tide in. Photo: Tsuyazaki-higata
The migrating bird, Black-faced spoonbill, in winter time. Photo: Keitaro ITO
The migrating bird, Black-faced spoonbill, in winter time. Photo: Keitaro ITO

Some of the forests have big problems too, such as the expansion of bamboo.Because of the lack of maintenance of forest by people, the forested landscape around the city has changed. As the bamboo comes to dominate the forest, the forest floor is goes dark in deep shade and other biodiversity is significantly reduced.

And unfortunately, people sometimes don’t realise how the nature they live with is important. A lack of daily connection to nature has become normal for them, a situation one can easily observe in visiting local places in this country.

So, one of our important roles is this. How shall we lead the people in a return to thinking about nature in Fukutsu?

The problem of the forest, bamboo population is expanding
The problem of the forest, bamboo population is expanding

Participation 

The city environmental plan is aiming to evaluate the characteristics of the city’s nature through a collaboration with young people and local residents. We think it is very important hear the voices of younger people who are living in and loving this city.

So we conduct project meetings with city government every month and hold workshops about environmental planning with high school students and local citizens every three months. High school student participation has had an especially good effect in this project because they live in the city; sometimes the parents also take part in the workshops. In this series of workshops we continue to discuss how to plan the engagement and how to participate. Typically in Japan, the majority of the participants tend to be elderly people. But in this workshop, students from University and high school students and local residents are actively participating in roundtable discussions, in a format called “World Café.” The mixing of younger and elderly people in discussion is so interesting because we have been able to compare generational experience, discussing present day problems in relation to the environmental situation in former times .

Students making a survey in the coastal area.
Students making a survey in the coastal area.
Round table discussion, students and local residents together.
Round table discussion, students and local residents together.
Fish market: Ecological system services from the sea.
Fish market: Ecological system services from the sea.
The biotope map in the city. Credit: T. Nakamatsu, Y. Hanada and K. Ito
The biotope map in the city. Credit: T. Nakamatsu, Y. Hanada and K. Ito

Analysis and the plan

Now, we are trying to evaluate the present condition of the natural and city environment by using GIS and a field survey. Through this survey, we made a biotope map for preserving the nature in the city that includes, for example, important places for habitat and biodiversity in the city. There are various types of biotopes included in the map, such as forest, river, ponds for irrigation for the paddy fields and coast.

We are aiming to evaluate each biotope for habitat and also people’s activity, because many of the natural elements are preserved alongside human activity, such as paddy fields. For example, paddy fields have water spring to summer. In that period, there are various creatures in the water, and biodiversity is changing by the season. So, we are also creating the calendar of biodiversity in each season.

The plan should be completed in 2017. We are challenging ourselves to make the plan effective for preserving biodiversity and ecological system services. Each biotope has functions, not only as habitat for creatures but also for providing places for ecological learning by children. Landscapes and natural environments afford habitats for play and learning. For example, children are not allowed in some river banks, but if we could evaluate and think of such places in terms of nature restoration and education, such areas could be multifunctional. Therefore, this project also aims to provide natural sites for children’s play and activity. It will help to create places in which young children will have sustained contact with nature in the city.

In this plan, we are thinking of sustainability and ecological services very close to our city. The farmers are producing vegetables in the fields and fisherman catch fish around the coastal area. As we think of sustainability and biodiversity in the city, the plan will be very important for managing the city environment, but also in sustaining people’s connection to nature. Such connection is a key factor in sustainability, since without knowledge of nature, people will be less engaged with the idea of sustaining nature.

Keitaro ITO
Fukutsu, Japan

On The Nature of Cities

The Case for All In Cities

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Introduction, Toni L. Griffin, Ariella Cohen and David Maddox Tearing down Invisible Walls Defining the Just City Beyond Black and White, Toni L. Griffin In It Together, Lesley Lokko Cape Town Pride. Cape Town Shame, Carla Sutherland Urban Spaces and the Mattering of Black Lives, Darnell Moore Ceci n'est pas une pipe: Unpacking Injustice in Paris, François Mancebo Reinvigorating Democracy Right to the City for All: A Manifesto for Social Justice in an Urban Century, Lorena Zárate How to Build a New Civic Infrastructure, Ben Hecht Turning to the Flip Side, Maruxa Cardama A Just City is Inconceivable without a Just Society, Marcelo Lopes de Souza Public Imagination, Citizenship and an Urgent Call for Justice, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman Designing for Agency Karachi and the Paralysis of Imagination, Mahim Maher Up from the Basement: The Artist and the Making of the Just City, Theaster Gates Justice that Serves People, Not Institutions, Mirna D. Goransky Resistance, Education and the Collective Will, Jack Travis Inclusive Growth The Case for All-In Cities, Angela Glover Blackwell A Democratic Infrastructure for Johannesburg, Benjamin Bradlow Creating Universal Goals for Universal Growth, Betsy Hodges The Long Ride, Scot T. Spencer Turning Migrant Workers into Citizens in Urbanizing China, Pengfei XIE The Big Detox  A City that is Blue, Green and Just All Over, Cecilia P. Herzog An Antidote for the Unjust City: Planning to Stay, Mindy Thompson Fullilove Justice from the Ground Up, Julie Bargmann Elevating Planning and Design Why Design Matters, Jason Schupbach Claiming Participation in Urban Planning and Design as a Right, P.K. Das Home Grown Justice in a Legacy City, Karen Freeman-Wilson Epilogue: Cities in Imagination, David Maddox
2. Backwell.GloverPeople of color are at the center of a demographic shift that will fundamentally change the global urban landscape. From the growing proportions of Latino, Asian, and African American residents in resurgent cities of the United States, to the diversifying capitals of Europe and the booming metropolises of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, cities populated by people of color are emerging as the new global centers of the 21st century.

Rising income inequality and persistent racial inequity threaten to undermine the opportunities afforded by the urban renaissance and the diversity that draws and excites newcomers in the first place.
Full inclusion is a challenge in nearly all of these urban communities, as local leaders struggle to both address the needs and harness the talents of their diversifying populations. The challenge may stem from rural to urban relocation, historical and continuing prejudice, migration within countries, or immigration. In the United States, this challenge is characterized most noticeably by race and ethnicity.

Before the middle of this century, the United States will become majority people of color; many American cities have already crossed that mark. This seismic shift requires a redefinition of the meaning of success for cities. How will cities reflect and advance the world we want to live in? How will they foster health and allow all residents to reach their full potential? Fundamental to these questions is the issue of inclusion: how will cities engage those who have traditionally been marginalized, excluded, ignored, or reviled because of race, religion, ethnicity, caste, gender, or national origin?

The guiding principle must be equity, which my organization, PolicyLink, defines as just and fair inclusion into a society in which all can participate, prosper, and reach their full potential. As the United States undergoes historic demographic change and urban renaissance, it has the opportunity—indeed, the obligation—to model equity in its cities. Half a century of suburbanization has stripped inner cities of employment and investment, leaving many urban communities of color stranded in areas of concentrated poverty that are devoid of the kind of resources —e.g. jobs and career pathways, good schools and healthy environments— that would allow them to thrive. At the same time, urban centers are becoming a magnet for a young workforce comprised of all racial and ethnic groups, driving urban population growth and injecting new life, energy, and investment into America’s cities.

With communities of color driving population growth throughout U.S. cities, it becomes essential that cities prepare people of color to take—and create—the jobs of the future. Faced with this opportunity for urban renaissance and the challenge of persistent racial, ethnic, and economic disparities that are undermining growth and prosperity for many urban communities, cities are recognizing that they must invest in infrastructure that fosters opportunity and connection: public transit systems, inspiring architecture, strong community institutions, diverse economies and flourishing cultural centers. Cities are also recognizing that those investments must produce jobs and other benefits for the communities that need them most. The United States cannot afford to leave our fastest-growing populations trapped behind racially-constructed barriers to opportunity and inclusion. Racial and ethnic diversity gives the nation a competitive edge in a world without borders, but only if we leverage the strengths, skills, and energy of all people, especially communities of color.

All In Cities is a new initiative by my organization, PolicyLink, designed to seize this extraordinary moment to lay out a vision of equitable cities‑strong, viable urban centers wherein all people, including those who have historically often been marginalized, can find a place, reach their full potential, contribute, and thrive. The initiative seeks to embed a new aspiration for cities in our culture, structures, systems, and policies, developing a comprehensive policy agenda that will help local leaders create, support, and sustain efforts to build equity within their jurisdictions.

All In Cities builds upon lessons learned from decades of community-driven efforts to create healthy, equitable communities of opportunity, the essence of an equitable city. Those efforts have shown us the building blocks: pathways for all to earn a decent livelihood; access to the essentials for health and well-being, including healthy food, clean water, health care and education; ample decent and affordable housing within reach of job centers, good schools, and reliable transportation, for example. Above all, equitable cities are guided by policies, planning, and investment that are intentional about ensuring that no one, and certainly no group, is left behind or pushed out, including people of color.

All In Cities is not just about making sure that more jobs, apprenticeships, or affordable housing units are available to people of color. These are critical tasks, but insufficient goals. The initiative aims to fundamentally change the economy in ways that expand participation, opportunity, and power for communities of color, and to accelerate economic growth in cities, regions and the nation. To accomplish this, we must disrupt the structures, systems and policies that have perpetuated racial inequities and uneven growth in cities.

In practice, this means that cities must embed a commitment to racial equity throughout their operations and decision making. For example, Minneapolis is building equity into the DNA of its administrative offices, creating an Office of Equitable Outcomes that will assess how local government incorporates equity into its hiring, internal operations, and the regional partnerships it makes with businesses, non-profits, and philanthropic organizations. In Los Angeles, the city is using the construction of a $2.4 billion Crenshaw/LAX light rail line to connect neighborhoods—including the disinvested communities of color of South LA—to the airport, a major employment center. The city is ensuring that this project fosters job growth and economic security where it is needed most, not only by building a rail that will physically connect people to jobs, but by requiring that 40 percent of the estimated 23,000 construction jobs created by the project go to residents of very low- to moderate-income neighborhoods, with 10 percent of those jobs targeted at “disadvantaged” workers such as veterans, the long-term unemployed, and formerly incarcerated people. In Portland, the Inclusive Startup Fund, which provides capital, mentoring, and business advising to startups founded by underrepresented groups, is dismantling barriers to employment and business ownership.

These are just a few examples of cities modeling equity-driven development.  Transforming low-wage jobs into good jobs with dignity, linking unemployed residents to jobs building vital infrastructure in their neighborhoods, ending police brutality, and ensuring poor children of color can access great public schools and the support they need to thrive from cradle to college to career—these are all integral aspects of a new kind of metropolitan development that builds equity into the business models, institutions, and policies that shape urban design, planning, investment, and growth.

PolicyLink is fully cognizant of the challenges facing such sweeping action. But reimagining cities without a front-and-center commitment to equity, including racial equity, is a recipe for failure. Unless equity is deeply held as a value and elevated as the primary driver of policy, it does not happen. Instead, America’s history of racial exclusion repeats and deepens itself as low-income people of color are displaced from newly chic neighborhoods, shut out of all but the lowest-wage jobs, and isolated in aging, disinvested communities—these days, in the suburbs. Rising income inequality and persistent racial inequity threaten to undermine the opportunities afforded by the urban renaissance and the diversity that draws and excites newcomers in the first place. These trends also jeopardize regional and national economic growth, as leading economists now recognize. If people of color are driving population growth, then it’s essential that people of color are equipped to take—and make— the jobs of the future

Growing diversity and urbanization are changing the nation and the world. People of all colors, nationalities, faiths, and incomes will share space, bump against one another, and rise or fall together. This heightens the need for all to join, as equal partners, in building equitable cities. The equity imperative illuminates the path to a stronger city—a thriving, resilient, just metropolis that works for all.

Angela Glover Blackwell
New York

 

The Just City Essays is a joint project of The J. Max Bond Center, Next City and The Nature of Cities. © 2015 All rights are reserved.

Home-Grown Justice In a Legacy City

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Introduction, Toni L. Griffin, Ariella Cohen and David Maddox Tearing down Invisible Walls Defining the Just City Beyond Black and White, Toni L. Griffin In It Together, Lesley Lokko Cape Town Pride. Cape Town Shame, Carla Sutherland Urban Spaces and the Mattering of Black Lives, Darnell Moore Ceci n'est pas une pipe: Unpacking Injustice in Paris, François Mancebo Reinvigorating Democracy Right to the City for All: A Manifesto for Social Justice in an Urban Century, Lorena Zárate How to Build a New Civic Infrastructure, Ben Hecht Turning to the Flip Side, Maruxa Cardama A Just City is Inconceivable without a Just Society, Marcelo Lopes de Souza Public Imagination, Citizenship and an Urgent Call for Justice, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman Designing for Agency Karachi and the Paralysis of Imagination, Mahim Maher Up from the Basement: The Artist and the Making of the Just City, Theaster Gates Justice that Serves People, Not Institutions, Mirna D. Goransky Resistance, Education and the Collective Will, Jack Travis Inclusive Growth The Case for All-In Cities, Angela Glover Blackwell A Democratic Infrastructure for Johannesburg, Benjamin Bradlow Creating Universal Goals for Universal Growth, Betsy Hodges The Long Ride, Scot T. Spencer Turning Migrant Workers into Citizens in Urbanizing China, Pengfei XIE The Big Detox  A City that is Blue, Green and Just All Over, Cecilia P. Herzog An Antidote for the Unjust City: Planning to Stay, Mindy Thompson Fullilove Justice from the Ground Up, Julie Bargmann Elevating Planning and Design Why Design Matters, Jason Schupbach Claiming Participation in Urban Planning and Design as a Right, P.K. Das Home Grown Justice in a Legacy City, Karen Freeman-Wilson Epilogue: Cities in Imagination, David Maddox
22.-Freeman-WilsonI am the mayor of a legacy city, a city that rose and fell on the fluctuations of an industrial marketplace.  Like Detroit, Cleveland, and dozens of other cities that have experienced continuous population and job loss since their peak, my hometown of Gary, Indiana, once provided the backbone of the nation’s economy. These cities led the way in educational innovation, architectural design and cultural development.  In the 1920s, Gary earned the nickname of Magic City because of its exponential growth.  Seventy years later, one half of the city’s population is gone, leaving an overwhelming inventory of vacant and abandoned buildings, a nearly 40 percent  unemployment rate and a 35 percent poverty rate in the rear view mirror.   

The creation of a “just city” is neither easy work nor for the faint of heart. It requires that public service remain the focus of political leadership.
Despite the devastating statistics, Gary is home to people who continue to remain faithful after others left. These individuals are raising children, purchasing and maintaining homes, pursuing business opportunities and continuing to invest their time, talent and treasure in a city that some said was not worth the energy. These individuals are my neighbors, fellow church members, former teachers and classmates.  My “Just City” is dedicated to these legacy residents. Together, we must retool Gary into a city that better serves all of us. This is undoubtedly a complex proposition that requires vision, planning, faith. resilience and cheerleading. 

There are times when older residents long for the “good ole days,” but a vision for the future is also essential. History must be incorporated into a plan forward, and for that reason preservation is an integral part of planning in Gary. The award-winning restoration of Marquette Park Pavilion on Lake Michigan and the planned restoration of the City United Methodist Church are two examples of how historic preservation can work in a city’s future. Building on existing assets such as the lakefront, transportation and the proximity to Chicago also fuel a new vision. But the use of non-traditional economic drivers such as art have the potential to be transformative. Recently, city staff, students from the University of Chicago’s Harris School and Theaster Gates’ Place Lab team developed the concept of ArtHouse, a restaurant incubator built around arts and culture. This addresses the void of restaurants in the city by training entrepreneurs, promoting a burgeoning art scene and encouraging the use of an underutilized facility. Collaborations like this must continue.

A “Just City” requires intentional planning which contemplates the participation of all residents in city growth.  Political cycles and a society that feeds on instant gratification sometimes turn mayors into emergency responders.  Sustainability dictates a deliberate approach to rebuilding. Through planning we ensure sustainability and inclusion while protecting against the changes of political winds. One of the biggest complaints against our administration is that we spend too much money on planning.  While we acknowledge that many plans sat on shelves in the past, the adage that those who fail to plan must plan to fail is even truer with cities—especially legacy cities. Gary has been fortunate to have assistance with planning through the White House Strong Cities, Strong Communities designation and the federal Sustainable Communities program; an ongoing collaboration with the University of Chicago and strong relationships with regional and local organizations like the Northwest Indiana Regional Development Authority, the Northwest Indiana Regional Planning Commission, the Legacy Foundation, the Urban League, the Miller Beach Arts & Creative District and the Central District Organization. We have learned to place a premium on training and technical assistance, a clear shift in the traditional relationship between municipal government and potential funding partners.  Historically, Gary and other municipalities have looked to the federal government to simply write a check. While we still accept checks, we understand the benefits derived from planning.  This approach has paid dividends through the demolition of the Sheraton Hotel, a brownfield that cast a shadow over downtown Gary for over 20 years, as well as the successful completion of the once-stalled redevelopment at the Gary/Chicago International Airport. That project included a public-private partnership and unprecedented reinvestment by anchor community institutions like the Methodist Hospital, Indiana University Northwest and the Northern Indiana Public Service Company.                            

But planning won’t succeed without careful stewardship of our environment.  One of the greatest challenges facing legacy cities is the multitude of brownfields that create health hazards and eyesores in our communities. The contamination associated with these buildings or vacant spaces pose a quandary to me and to city planners. But as with many challenges, this presents an opportunity to create a greener Gary through employing innovative tools such as deconstruction, waste-to-energy technology and other advanced manufacturing and construction methodologies. A more just city requires that we embrace practices that preserve the environment for future generations and encourage manufacturers, even those that have enjoyed favored status because of their decision to maintain jobs in the city, to take a similar approach. Community loyalty cannot be viewed as a license to continue practices that are not good for the environment. Steel and other industry must retool to meet regulatory requirements and for the health and safety of residents. At the same time, they should be allowed to do so in a manner that achieves a delicate balance between preserving jobs and continued employment of workers while pursuing environmental health and green development.

A “just city” dictates the use of technology and innovation, a fact also driven by resource challenges. Whether it is the use of graduate students as consultants, the use of computer programs designed for Detroit and Cleveland, or garnering better methods of delivering public safety, solid waste disposal and communication with residents, innovation is allowing the city of Gary to close the gap created by declining financial resources.  This creates a more just city because it improves outcomes for all who consume government. 

Finally, a “just city” empowers and honors residents. The experience of watching your city crumble before your eyes can be disheartening. One might even argue that there is a form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder associated with the decline of cities like Gary, Detroit, Flint, Michigan, and Cleveland. Citizens become hopeless, cynical, angry and even abusive of the public officials who have a sincere desire to help. This may even lie at the base of the violence that plagues many urban communities. Every effort to rebuild a legacy city must include a robust plan to include residents in the rebirth.  This approach is more likely to prevent disenfranchised members of the community from feeling that revitalization is occurring around them and without their input.  Communities benefit when all citizens enjoy the fruits of growth and revitalization and from the consideration of diverse ideas.  

From our use of 311 technology, frequent public forums, “15 minutes with the Mayor” in city hall, and the use of social media, Gary citizens have been encouraged to raise their expectations of local government. While this can be a double-edged sword in a resource-challenged environment, it also provides a degree of ownership that causes residents to be active participants in the rebirth of the community.  At the same time, we must assist residents in their need to address the personal challenges associated with poverty and disinvestment in the city. Traditional workforce development tools must be enhanced and often replaced by an aggressive approach to human development that teaches marketable skills and provides remediation whenever and wherever needed. The creation of jobs and the development of skills in proportion to the need of Gary residents has been the Achilles’ heel of our administration. We will never achieve success as a community unless we institutionalize support for African-American men and boys. To continuously allow such a large section of our community to be marginalized defeats our collective purpose.

The creation of a “just city” is neither easy work nor for the faint of heart. Some even consider it thankless. It requires that public service remain the focus of political leadership. The most well-intentioned service is fraught with criticism, pitfalls and missteps. But on my most frustrating day, the delivery of good government to the legacy residents of Gary, Indiana reaps many more rewards than challenges, and consequentially it is my honor and privilege to serve my hometown. Ultimately my definition of a just city is one that provides good government to its citizens.

Karen Freeman-Wilson
Gary

 

The Just City Essays is a joint project of The J. Max Bond Center, Next City and The Nature of Cities. © 2015 All rights are reserved.

How To Build a New Civic Infrastructure

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Introduction, Toni L. Griffin, Ariella Cohen and David Maddox Tearing down Invisible Walls Defining the Just City Beyond Black and White, Toni L. Griffin In It Together, Lesley Lokko Cape Town Pride. Cape Town Shame, Carla Sutherland Urban Spaces and the Mattering of Black Lives, Darnell Moore Ceci n'est pas une pipe: Unpacking Injustice in Paris, François Mancebo Reinvigorating Democracy Right to the City for All: A Manifesto for Social Justice in an Urban Century, Lorena Zárate How to Build a New Civic Infrastructure, Ben Hecht Turning to the Flip Side, Maruxa Cardama A Just City is Inconceivable without a Just Society, Marcelo Lopes de Souza Public Imagination, Citizenship and an Urgent Call for Justice, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman Designing for Agency Karachi and the Paralysis of Imagination, Mahim Maher Up from the Basement: The Artist and the Making of the Just City, Theaster Gates Justice that Serves People, Not Institutions, Mirna D. Goransky Resistance, Education and the Collective Will, Jack Travis Inclusive Growth The Case for All-In Cities, Angela Glover Blackwell A Democratic Infrastructure for Johannesburg, Benjamin Bradlow Creating Universal Goals for Universal Growth, Betsy Hodges The Long Ride, Scot T. Spencer Turning Migrant Workers into Citizens in Urbanizing China, Pengfei XIE The Big Detox  A City that is Blue, Green and Just All Over, Cecilia P. Herzog An Antidote for the Unjust City: Planning to Stay, Mindy Thompson Fullilove Justice from the Ground Up, Julie Bargmann Elevating Planning and Design Why Design Matters, Jason Schupbach Claiming Participation in Urban Planning and Design as a Right, P.K. Das Home Grown Justice in a Legacy City, Karen Freeman-Wilson Epilogue: Cities in Imagination, David Maddox
6. HechtIn the United States of America cities have long been gateways to opportunity. For centuries, people from all over the country and the world, including my own grandparents, came to our cities chasing the promise of a better life. America’s bargain with its citizens, rich and poor was, in many ways, a model for the world.

A new civic infrastructure, impact investing and civic engagement will drive change. But ultimately, leaders must have the motivation to build resilient structures, practices and solutions to sustain it.
Today, U.S. cities produce 85 percent of the nation’s GDP, are home to more than 50 percent of the population, and spend billions of dollars annually to educate, house and protect their citizens. Meanwhile, American cities are undergoing a major demographic shift. By 2040, America will be a majority-minority nation. And, events in Ferguson and Baltimore have underscored the destructive nature of existing disparities of income, education and opportunity between whites and non-whites.

Addressing these disparities is one of the key social issues of our time. But our current trajectory is too slow, obsessed with short-term wins and incrementalism, where leaders are constantly reinventing the wheel instead of building on the work of those who came before them. We celebrate improvements in one school on one block while tiptoeing around the fact that it is the entire system that needs fixing. We tell heartwarming stories about 100 kids served or 100 young adults placed in good jobs while averting our eyes from the millions more who remain disconnected from opportunity. We talk about how far we have come since the civil rights movement, but are uncomfortable with discussing how far we still must go to achieve true racial equity. Unless we ferociously change course, the new American majority will be less educated, less prosperous and less free.

To build truly just cities, we need a new type of urban practice aimed at achieving dramatically better results for low-income people, faster. This new urban practice will require cities to get key public, private and philanthropic leaders to work together differently, to better harness impact investing dollars, and to leverage technology to engage all residents in solutions.

A New Civic Infrastructure

In this new urban practice, local leaders will need to come together to build a new, more resilient and sustainable civic infrastructure that is focused on getting results.  In many places, like Cleveland and other older industrial cities, the old civic infrastructure disappeared when Fortune 500 companies moved away. Today, public, private, philanthropic and nonprofit leaders are distributing the leadership needed for change so their efforts can survive inevitable turnover and drive large-scale results.

There is no better example of this dynamic than Detroit. With the government in disarray, local philanthropic organizations and business leaders have shared the leadership for more than a decade, making investments that now position the city to take advantage of its fresh start. For example, The Kresge Foundation was the first investor in the city’s new public light rail line with a grant of $35 million.  Quicken Loan’s Dan Gilbert has invested $1 billion of his own money in downtown Detroit and moved 7,000 employees there.

However, one of the most exciting emerging movements around the U.S. is around municipal innovation. From the Offices of New Urban Mechanics in Boston and Philadelphia and the rise of Innovation Teams in the U.S. and Israel, to the racial equity work spearheaded by the City of Seattle, local government is changing the way it works, looking at issues through a racial lens and adopting innovative practices, so that its institutions not only contribute to a new civic infrastructure but its money gets better results for low income people. For example, Boston’s Citizens Connect, a maintenance-request app for reporting problems from broken windows to potholes, has been downloaded tens of thousands of times and been replicated in more than 20 countries. Its Discover BPS product is a Boston public school search engine that helps low income parents understand where their children are eligible to go to school.

Better Harness the Impact Investor 

There is an emerging, global movement around impact investing. From what we know so far, impact investors look much like the charitable giver—they want their dollars to make a difference. They invest in what they’re passionate about and privilege investing in places, like their hometowns or other communities they feel a connection with. To date, a majority of impact investing dollars have gone to the developing world. Now, as more and more people look to cities as units of change, we need to give investors reason to believe there are investable opportunities in U.S. cities. And leaders must come together and create mechanisms for those dollars to land in cities and communities that need them the most.

Luckily, an exciting amount of place-based investment opportunities and approaches have emerged over the past few years, including pay for success, crowd-funding, peer-to-peer lending and locally funded venture capital.   For example, Living Cities and other private and philanthropic funders have invested $27 billion in the Massachusetts Juvenile Justice Social Innovation Financing (SIF) Project, a pay for success initiative. The effort focuses on reducing recidivism and increasing employment for more than 1,000 at-risk, formerly incarcerated young men in the three Massachusettes cities: Boston, Chelsea and Springfield. As private investors, we assume the risk by financing the services up front, getting repaid only if agreed-upon measurable social impacts are achieved. In exchange for taking the risk, the investors receive a financial return. This means that precious government resources are spent only in the event of proven success and government savings.

Institutions like Living Cities and others committed to building this field must figure out how to promote, aggregate and form these options into market so people can more easily invest in the local context. We need to accelerate their growth everywhere.

Civic engagement with a focus on technology 

America has long had a unique brand of civic participation—a combination of individual commitment and group action. Unfortunately, trends over the past few decades show that both are in decline. The 2014 midterm election had an individual voter turnout of 36 percent—the lowest in any election cycle since World War II.

Encouragingly, the work we are actively engaged in at Living Cities is providing us with evidence of a nation that is actively confronting these trends. Now, we have the opportunity to once again be a model for the rest of the world. We must embrace civic engagement not just as a ‘town-hall,’ but as a tool for cities to co-create solutions with their residents. We must use all the power of modern technologies to engage people and communities who have been historically left out of the processes.

We’ve already seen this idea taking seed in New York City, where a participatory budgeting experiment that began in 2011 with four Council Districts has now grown to 24 Districts. The city harnessed digital technologies to open budgeting decisions to community members.  “So far, I love feeling like we have some say in what is done,” said Maggie Tobin, a participant from Kensington, Brooklyn, in Council District 39, to the New York Times. But as the ideas pass to the city agencies involved, she said, “I find myself already being distrustful.”  The process has resulted in better budgeting decisions and arguably better results. In addition, more people of color turned out to vote, and Hispanics, in particular, voted at twice the usual rate. More needs to be done to ensure that those who participate, like Maggie Tobin, have faith that the process will result in meaningful change.

Ultimately just cities are built when leaders are committed to justice as a fundamental, long-term priority. As former Bogota, Colombia Mayor Antans Mockus recently said, “Change isn’t the biggest political challenge, sustaining it is.” Change happens when leaders decide they want to make it happen. I have made that commitment as the leader of Living Cities. I am also committed to supporting public and private leaders to do the same nationwide. These three elements—a new civic infrastructure, impact investing and civic engagement—will drive that change. But ultimately, leaders must have the motivation to build resilient structures, practices and solutions to sustain it. Only then will we have built a just city.

Ben Hecht
Baltimore

 

The Just City Essays is a joint project of The J. Max Bond Center, Next City and The Nature of Cities. © 2015 All rights are reserved.

Justice from the Ground Up

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Introduction, Toni L. Griffin, Ariella Cohen and David Maddox Tearing down Invisible Walls Defining the Just City Beyond Black and White, Toni L. Griffin In It Together, Lesley Lokko Cape Town Pride. Cape Town Shame, Carla Sutherland Urban Spaces and the Mattering of Black Lives, Darnell Moore Ceci n'est pas une pipe: Unpacking Injustice in Paris, François Mancebo Reinvigorating Democracy Right to the City for All: A Manifesto for Social Justice in an Urban Century, Lorena Zárate How to Build a New Civic Infrastructure, Ben Hecht Turning to the Flip Side, Maruxa Cardama A Just City is Inconceivable without a Just Society, Marcelo Lopes de Souza Public Imagination, Citizenship and an Urgent Call for Justice, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman Designing for Agency Karachi and the Paralysis of Imagination, Mahim Maher Up from the Basement: The Artist and the Making of the Just City, Theaster Gates Justice that Serves People, Not Institutions, Mirna D. Goransky Resistance, Education and the Collective Will, Jack Travis Inclusive Growth The Case for All-In Cities, Angela Glover Blackwell A Democratic Infrastructure for Johannesburg, Benjamin Bradlow Creating Universal Goals for Universal Growth, Betsy Hodges The Long Ride, Scot T. Spencer Turning Migrant Workers into Citizens in Urbanizing China, Pengfei XIE The Big Detox  A City that is Blue, Green and Just All Over, Cecilia P. Herzog An Antidote for the Unjust City: Planning to Stay, Mindy Thompson Fullilove Justice from the Ground Up, Julie Bargmann Elevating Planning and Design Why Design Matters, Jason Schupbach Claiming Participation in Urban Planning and Design as a Right, P.K. Das Home Grown Justice in a Legacy City, Karen Freeman-Wilson Epilogue: Cities in Imagination, David Maddox
12. BargmanSoil contamination is a baseline condition for most of the sites I’ve worked on over the past two decades. The toxic imprint derives from industry—steel production, shipbuilding, fabrication of automobile and machine parts, to name just a few—in both urban and rural settings. But it also comes from lead-containing gasoline and paint, banned long ago but still quietly wreaking havoc. It’s a byproduct of the human pursuit of greater material wealth and a more convenient and comfortable life. In other words, it’s the legacy of progress, for better or worse. 

Landscape design and social justice are inseparable—an extension of Olmsted’s ideal: that city dwellers deserve the physical and mental health benefits provided by open access to nourishing environments, regardless of their social or economic status.
As a landscape designer with expertise in toxic remediation and the regeneration of fallow land, the “better or worse” part is vitally important to me. I can say that with certainty, thanks to hindsight and 30 years of academic and professional experience. I didn’t grow up with the term “environmental justice,” which came into use in the 1980s to describe, in part, the unequal distribution of the benefits and burdens of progress. But I now know what a growing body of research shows: in the United States there’s a disturbing overlap between the maps showing where poor people and ethnic minorities live, and where contaminated soils exist.

You might use a stronger word than “disturbing” if you or a loved one were to develop a learning disability, cancer, or liver damage, which are just three of the many proven ill-effects of poisoning by lead, arsenic, and other pernicious elements found in soil. As I write this essay, residents of Vernon, California, in East Los Angeles, a low-income and largely Latino community, were celebrating a bittersweet victory, after forcing the closure of a battery recycling plant owned by New Jersey–based Exide Technologies. The sickening part of the story, pun intended, is that the plant operated for two decades after its environmental violations were first reported to the California Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC). Both the cleanup efforts (just 150 of 10,000 contaminated properties were reported to have undergone soil remediation as of early October) and the official response have been weak. “All of us could have acted sooner to develop a more complete picture of what the operations of that facility meant to the health of the residents around it,” DTSC director Barbara A. Lee said. She hastened to add that “the department had tried to shut down the facility in the past but the courts blocked the effort,” according to one published report.

When I read that I chuckled sadly to myself. It reminded me of an exchange I had a few years ago with a high-ranking city official with oversight of a new development for low-income residents I was working on. The developers were eager to start construction, to show “progress,” so they broke ground before testing the soil. Sure enough, the dirt was hot. I had joined the project late, when the momentum to build the inaugural prototype house was unstoppable. But when I learned the test results, remediation was still possible, and regardless, I was bound to report them. I still get a pit in my stomach when I think of the official’s response, which went something like this: The city has enough problems that are plain to see, so let’s not add to them by disclosing a difficult truth, especially one that’s invisible. To my disappointment, the project team elected not to address the contamination, and I was politely excused from the job.

To me, it’s common sense to start every project with the assumption of site pollution. So the natural thing to do—the right thing to do—is to determine the type and extent of toxicity, and incorporate that information into your design strategy and development plans. That’s my vision of the landscape designer’s role in creating a just city: Scrutinize the site right down to the molecular level, identify who’s in harm’s way and of what, and push decision makers to take active steps to remediate the bad stuff.

That simple idea—the opposite of the prevailing “don’t dig, don’t tell” mentality—was the driving principle of one of my most significant collaborations. Big Mud was D.I.R.T. Studio’s contribution to Operation Paydirt, the brainchild of the ingenious conceptual artist Mel Chin. Like many of Chin’s initiatives, Paydirt—which launched in 2006 and continues to this day—focuses on social justice. D.I.R.T. participated in the project from 2007 to 2009, helping to devise an implementation strategy to address the high lead content in New Orleans’ soil—in other words, a social recipe for just ground. 

As I wrote in the anthology Resilience in Ecology and Urban Design, Big Mud proposed a landscape-recovery strategy that takes into account the many physical and social scales within which New Orleans, like all cities, functions. Working with local lead soil expert Dr. Howard Mielke, we helped reveal the “geography of lead.” Our team then concocted a way to treat leaded soil, by amending it with phosphates and adding clean fill. The phosphates bond with lead to form pyromorphite, which is insoluble in water, neutralizing the toxicity. Clean river sediment abounds in New Orleans from alluvial deposits piled on shore during flooding. Put a layer of that rich Mississippi mud over the phosphate-treated soil, plant trees, et voila—a healthy landscape. Implementation called for the training and employment of community members to collect, stockpile, and deliver the ingredients from a network of holding sites that range in size from extra large distribution hubs we called Mud Depots to smaller Mud Markets, like a neighborhood garden center.

This implementation strategy has yet to be realized. But Paydirt and Big Mud were, and still are, hugely important to me. They crystallized my core belief that landscape design and social justice are inseparable. This notion is actually an extension of Frederick Law Olmsted’s ideal: that city dwellers deserve the physical and mental health benefits provided by open access to nourishing environments, regardless of their social or economic status.

Today I aspire to a similar social imperative but face a different urban landscape, one where poor people and poor soils often go together. To address this inequity—which weakens families and communities through higher instances of illness and learning disabilities, as well as nervous and emotional disorders—I offer a simple proposal. Always test the soil before you create places where people will live, work, and play. If it’s toxic, address it. As Mel Chin said of post-Katrina New Orleans, we have the opportunity to rebuild “from below the ground up.”

Social justice—and soil remediation—must be built into the foundation of a just city. It’s a solution that’s as simple as dirt.

Julie Bargmann
Charlottesville

 

The Just City Essays is a joint project of The J. Max Bond Center, Next City and The Nature of Cities. © 2015 All rights are reserved.

Public Imagination, Citizenship and an Urgent Call for Justice

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Introduction, Toni L. Griffin, Ariella Cohen and David Maddox Tearing down Invisible Walls Defining the Just City Beyond Black and White, Toni L. Griffin In It Together, Lesley Lokko Cape Town Pride. Cape Town Shame, Carla Sutherland Urban Spaces and the Mattering of Black Lives, Darnell Moore Ceci n'est pas une pipe: Unpacking Injustice in Paris, François Mancebo Reinvigorating Democracy Right to the City for All: A Manifesto for Social Justice in an Urban Century, Lorena Zárate How to Build a New Civic Infrastructure, Ben Hecht Turning to the Flip Side, Maruxa Cardama A Just City is Inconceivable without a Just Society, Marcelo Lopes de Souza Public Imagination, Citizenship and an Urgent Call for Justice, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman Designing for Agency Karachi and the Paralysis of Imagination, Mahim Maher Up from the Basement: The Artist and the Making of the Just City, Theaster Gates Justice that Serves People, Not Institutions, Mirna D. Goransky Resistance, Education and the Collective Will, Jack Travis Inclusive Growth The Case for All-In Cities, Angela Glover Blackwell A Democratic Infrastructure for Johannesburg, Benjamin Bradlow Creating Universal Goals for Universal Growth, Betsy Hodges The Long Ride, Scot T. Spencer Turning Migrant Workers into Citizens in Urbanizing China, Pengfei XIE The Big Detox  A City that is Blue, Green and Just All Over, Cecilia P. Herzog An Antidote for the Unjust City: Planning to Stay, Mindy Thompson Fullilove Justice from the Ground Up, Julie Bargmann Elevating Planning and Design Why Design Matters, Jason Schupbach Claiming Participation in Urban Planning and Design as a Right, P.K. Das Home Grown Justice in a Legacy City, Karen Freeman-Wilson Epilogue: Cities in Imagination, David Maddox
9. cruz-forman1. A just city repositions inequality

The conversation about justice and the city must begin with directly confronting social and economic inequality and prioritizing them as the main issue around which institutions must be reorganized. Contemporary architectural and urban practices must engage this political project head-on. We must question the neoliberal hegemony that has been imposed on the city in recent decades, which has exerted a violent blow to our collective economic, social and natural resources, producing an anti-public agenda whose ultimate consequence is an ever-widening gap between rich and poor. 

If we are interested in the Just City, we must begin by confronting the political machinery that endorses uneven urban development.
Today’s urban crisis is exponentially complex, as the consolidation of exclusionary power is both economic and political in nature, driven by one of the largest corporate lobbying machines in history. In the name of freedom, this machine has deregulated and privatized the public assets of our cities, subordinating collective responsibility to serve individual interest. Though the term “crisis” has become ubiquitous, we have become institutionally paralyzed in the context of these unprecedented shifts, silently witnessing the consolidation of the most blatant politics of exclusion, the shrinkage of social and public institutions and their role in the construction of the city. In that way, our crisis can’t be written off as a purely economic or environmental emergency. Rather, it is one of culture—a crisis of institutions unable to rethink unjust and unsustainable urban growth. 

If we are interested in the Just City, we must begin by confronting the political machinery that endorses uneven urban development. In other words, we must possess critical knowledge of the conditions that produced our urban crisis.  Without altering the exclusionary policies that have decimated our public culture today, urban design and planning will remain decorative enterprises camouflaging the greedy politics and economics of urban development that have eroded the primacy of public infrastructure worldwide.

In this context, the most relevant new urban practices and projects promoting social and economic inclusion are emerging not from sites of economic power but from sites of scarcity and zones of conflict, where citizens themselves, pressed by socioeconomic injustice, are pushed to imagine alternative possibilities. It is from the sense of urgency that a new political agenda is emerging, one in which urban design and architecture will take a more critical stance against the discriminatory policies and economics that produced inequality and marginalization. At this moment, it is not buildings but the fundamental reorganization of social and economic relations that is the essential for the expansion of democracy and justice in the city. 

2. A just city reengages the public

Since the early 1980s, with the ascendance of neoliberal economic policies based on the deregulation and privatization of public resources, an unchecked culture of individual and corporate greed has resulted in dramatic income inequality and social disparity. This new period of institutional unaccountability and illegality has been framed politically by the erroneous idea that liberty is the “right to be left alone,” a private dream devoid of social responsibility. But the mythology in which free-market “trickle down economics,” assures that we all benefit when we forgive the wealthy their taxes, has been proven wrong by political economists Saez and Piketty. They have exposed that both great economic upheavals in 20th century America—the crashes of 1929 and 2008— were also periods of the largest socioeconomic inequality and the lowest marginal taxation of the wealthy. The deepening of inequality in America is a direct result of the polarization of public and private resources, and this has had dramatic implications for the erosion of public institutions, and the uneven growth of the contemporary city, with its dramatic increase of territories of poverty.

However, these trends are not inevitable. Broad, structural political and social changes are still possible. Such changes have occurred at certain moments in history, when the instruments of urban development were primarily driven by an investment in the public. For example, there was the New Deal in the U.S. after the 1929 crisis, when a multi-sector institutional momentum took place that re-engaged public priorities by investing in public infrastructure, housing and education to re-energize the economy. Or the post-war Social Democratic urban politics in Europe, that framed the urban and economic growth of the European city by investing in public goods, such as Mitterrand’s Grand Project for Paris. How do we reinvigorate public investment? And how do we ignite new forms of civic participation, to demand these investments? 

A “just city” needs progressive public governance, driven by an ethical assertion that the good of the individual depends on the health of the collective, and an imperative to recalibrate the relations between individuals, collectives and institutions. At a time when the extreme right and the extreme left on the political spectrum share a distrust of government, we urgently need to reclaim the role of government to prioritize public interests, and enact the protection systems—social and economic—that can stem the trend toward radical inequality. We need a new political leadership that engages the marginalized sectors of our societies, committed to efficient, transparent, inclusive and collaborative forms of local governance.

3. A just city redistributes knowledge

Social Justice today is not only about the redistribution of resources; it should also promote the redistribution of knowledges. The polarization of public and private interests in the city has produced a rupture between institutions and publics. At the University of California San Diego, where we lead the Cross-Border Initiative, we have been pursuing new strategies of “knowledge exchange” between the top-down and the bottom-up. In one direction, we examine how specific, bottom-up urban activism can trickle upward to transform top-down institutional policy and practice; and, in the other direction, we investigate how top-down resources can reach sites of marginalization and support bottom up intelligence. This journey from the bottom-up to the top-down is urgent today to rethink urban justice, and it requires new forms of institutional representation and urban education that can translate and facilitate the everyday practices and needs of marginalized communities into new development logics for inclusive urbanization. 

Our campus is barely thirty minutes away from the most trafficked border in the world, occupying one of the most contested and uneven trans-national global regions, where urbanizations of wealth and poverty collide and overlap daily. In the context of such social and economic disparity, many underserved neighborhoods in our region have constructed alternative models of urban sustainability, resilience and adaptation to redefine urban growth. We claim that learning from these bottom-up forms of local socio-economic production is essential to rethinking urban density through new strategies of urban coexistence and interdependence. 

We created the Cross-Border Community Stations Project as a platform for these exchanges, linking the specialized knowledge of the university with the community-based knowledge embedded in marginal neighborhoods on both sides of the border. This two-way flow, as universities engage communities but also communities enter into the universities, suggests the need for new forms of teaching and learning that can expand pedagogical processes beyond the classroom and embed them in the everyday social life of communities. 

This encounter between formal and informal knowledge requires new conceptions of public space, as a space of education and knowledge production. This involves the transformation of empty spaces into active civic classrooms, spaces of knowledge, research production and local economy. The University of California, San Diego refers to these field-based laboratories as “Community Stations,” new public spaces where research, teaching and community activism are co-curated collaboratively and where a new environmental literacy and cultural action can stimulate political agency at the scale of communities. 

In particular, this collaborative urban pedagogical model between research universities and local community-based agencies emphasizes that marginalized communities and major universities can be meaningful partners with knowledge and resources to contribute, in the search for solutions to deep social and economic challenges, to improve the quality of life across these underserved, demographically diverse neighborhoods.  

4. A just city rethinks beautification

A Just City will move the idea of beautification from aesthetics for aesthetics’ sake into an expanded, more complex idea of beauty. As cities become increasingly defined by architecture that only serves to camouflage and deepen exclusionary politics and economics, it is urgent that we challenge the steady march of decorative revitalization. 

Beautification has long been an excuse for the displacement of communities. Yet today, the issue seems more relevant than ever, given the way it has been leveraged for exclusionary ends by seemingly progressive urban agendas such as New Urbanism and the Creative Class movements. It is not enough for New Urbanism, with its obsession with form-based code and stylistic historicism, to retrofit suburbia with a “prettier” themed façade, if the ownership models that define such infill developments remain mono-cultural, aesthetically homogeneous and unaffordable. These neoconservative urban trends have been adopted by many municipalities across the U.S., and have done nothing to rethink existing models of property by redefining affordability and the value of social participation, enhancing the role of communities in coproducing housing, or enabling a more inclusive idea of ownership.

Equally, the Creative Class agenda has only capitalized on the aesthetics of cosmopolitan hipster enclaves that are supposedly driven by artists and cultural producers, without providing truly affordable rents for artists and accessible infrastructures for fabrication and cultural production that are necessary to incentivize local economic growth in and for neighborhoods. With their facades of beautification and innovation, both agendas pave the way to gentrification and fail to advance social or economic justice in the city.

The Just City requires a more experiential dimension of beauty, less based on a visual quality and more on a sort of subliminal drama and vibrancy, a process of encountering and co-existing with the “other;” an aesthetic quality that embraces contradictions. It is about the construction of a sense of aesthetics that requires risk. In other words, it is an idea of beauty that does not smother and suppress contradictions or conceal conflict, but emerges out of  socio-economic and political inclusion. A city is beautiful to the extent that it is inclusive, and one whose public spaces are not merely catalysts for architectures of privatization, but are generative of urbanizations of social justice.

5. A just city reimagines citizenship

Antanas Mockus, former Mayor of Bogota, Colombia, insisted that before transforming the city physically, we need to transform social norms. To Mockus, urban transformation is as much about changing patterns of public trust and social cooperation from the bottom-up as it is about changing urban, public health and environmental policy from the top-down. Mockus enacted a distinctive kind of egalitarian political leadership, declaring emphatically the moral norms that should regulate our relations: that human life is sacred, that radical inequality is unjust, that adequate education and health are human rights and that gender violence is intolerable. He reorganized public policy by nurturing a new citizenship culture, grounded in a moral claim that human beings—regardless of formal legal citizenship, regardless of race—have dignity, and deserve equal respect and basic quality of life. 

In rethinking urban justice, Mockus developed a corresponding urban pedagogy of distinctive performative interventions to demonstrate precisely what he meant, inspiring generations of civic actors, urbanists and artists across Latin America and the world to think more creatively about engaging social behavior. Meeting urban violence with stricter penalties will not work. Law and order solutions don’t interiorize new values among the public.

For example, he believed in modeling desired behavior by, for example, showering on public television to demonstrate how one turns off the water when soaping up. One famous example of urban pedagogy is that early in his administration, Mockus replaced the corrupt downtown traffic police force with a troupe of 500 street mimes who stood on street corners and shamed traffic violators by blowing whistles, and pointing, and holding up signs of disapproval: “incorrecto!” To many it looked like a circus, and Mockus drew criticism; but in this act of public shaming, the mimes were instituting a new social norm of compliance with traffic signs; and it worked. Their antics became a citywide sensation; every one was watching on television, and traffic fatalities declined by 50% in Mockus’ first administration. Additionally, Mockus distributed placards across the city, one with a thumbs up sign, the other with a thumbs down; and he encouraged citizens to use these placards to communicate approval and disapproval to one another. The changes were palpable: people began to look at each other and recognize each other. In a very short period of time, a new sense of civic responsibility began to emerge in a city that had fallen into complete dysfunction and violence. At the same time, a new trust in government began to take hold as Mockus won the hearts of citizens, and he accompanied this bottom-up normative change with massive top-down municipal investment in social service and public works, improving peoples lives in very tangible ways.  Naysayers could not deny the proof: During Mockus’ first administration, murders were reduced by 70 percent, traffic fatalities by 50 percent, tax collection nearly doubled, and water usage decreased by 40 percent while water and sewer services were extended to nearly all households.

What Mockus’ work demonstrates is that urban social norms can be reoriented through top-down municipal intervention through community processes. These are fundamental lessons that can be brought to the American city, primarily today when neighborhood violence has been exacerbated by the resurgence of racism and police brutality, but also by current anti-immigration ideology, which together with the exclusionary policies it engenders has deepened injustice in the city. 

From the vantage point of the border territory where we live and work, social norms here have incrementally hardened against immigrants and immigration, alongside the hardening of the legal, social, economic and physical walls between the United States and Mexico. Our borders have been militarized in tandem with legislation that erodes social institutions, barricades public space and divides communities. Such protectionist strategies, fueled by paranoia and greed, are defining a radically protectionist social agenda of exclusion that threatens to dominate public life for years to come. 

A community is always in dialogue with its immediate social and ecological environment: this is what defines its political nature. But when the productive capacity of a community is splintered by political borders, it must find ways to recuperate its social agency and entrepreneurial potential. This is why we have always been inspired by the poor, immigrant neighborhoods on both sides of the San Diego-Tijuana border, whose residents are redefining urban sustainability and pointing to new ways of constructing citizenship. A just city depends on a political leadership that recognizes our interdependence and reaches across borders to produce new strategies of coexistence. And it is precisely within the marginalized yet resilient immigrant communities flanking the border that such a conception of civic culture will emerge, one whose DNA is composed of empathy, collaboration and shared values. 

Isolationism is no longer an option in today’s world of global interconnectedness.  Ethically, we cannot ignore the negative impact that our decisions, choices and habits have on others near and far; nor can we impose our will on others by force. The problems of Mexico and Central America are ours. The fallout of climate change on the global poor, most of which the rich countries of the North have caused, is our responsibility. The dramatic injustices perpetrated against marginalized populations in Ferguson, MO and undoubtedly countless other cities across the U.S. cannot remain invisible, isolated from the halls of Washington. We cannot wish the problems of such places away with market solutions, or with guns and fences; instead we must listen to and cooperate with those most affected by our policies, globally and domestically.

At bottom, we need to recover a sense of collective commitment to the least well-off among us. Social justice must reassert itself at the center of today’s public discourse, and we must also recover a sense of cultural empathy, the sort emblazoned on the Statue of Liberty’s plaque:

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

In a just city, economic and urban growth cannot come at the expense of social equality and inclusion. The drive to privatize must be tempered by an interventionist, disruptive commitment to public investment in infrastructure and general social welfare. The market will not solve our problems. Public and private interests must be harmonized. The public, particularly the poorest members of it, must take their cities back. Government must become transparent, efficient, and inclusive, with massive investment in new strategies of civic engagement to reignite a new public culture capable of making claims on its own behalf. Today, mistrust of government and hollow notions of progress and freedom for all have undermined the possibility of drawing upon the shared democratic values that unite us. Citizenship has become a polarizing concept, caught up in narratives about protecting “our” resources from “them.” In the just city, a more inclusive citizenship culture, based on shared values, commitments and common interests, rather than rigid jurisdictional categories that dehumanize the other, must be the foundation of a new public imagination.

Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman
San Diego

 

The Just City Essays is a joint project of The J. Max Bond Center, Next City and The Nature of Cities. © 2015 All rights are reserved.

Fonna Forman

about the writer
Fonna Forman

Fonna Forman is a Professor of Political Theory at the University of California, San Diego and founding Director of the UCSD Center on Global Justice. Current work focuses on climate justice in cities, on human rights at the urban scale and civic participation as a strategy of equitable urbanization.

Resistance, Education and the Collective Will of the Just City

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Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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Introduction, Toni L. Griffin, Ariella Cohen and David Maddox Tearing down Invisible Walls Defining the Just City Beyond Black and White, Toni L. Griffin In It Together, Lesley Lokko Cape Town Pride. Cape Town Shame, Carla Sutherland Urban Spaces and the Mattering of Black Lives, Darnell Moore Ceci n'est pas une pipe: Unpacking Injustice in Paris, François Mancebo Reinvigorating Democracy Right to the City for All: A Manifesto for Social Justice in an Urban Century, Lorena Zárate How to Build a New Civic Infrastructure, Ben Hecht Turning to the Flip Side, Maruxa Cardama A Just City is Inconceivable without a Just Society, Marcelo Lopes de Souza Public Imagination, Citizenship and an Urgent Call for Justice, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman Designing for Agency Karachi and the Paralysis of Imagination, Mahim Maher Up from the Basement: The Artist and the Making of the Just City, Theaster Gates Justice that Serves People, Not Institutions, Mirna D. Goransky Resistance, Education and the Collective Will, Jack Travis Inclusive Growth The Case for All-In Cities, Angela Glover Blackwell A Democratic Infrastructure for Johannesburg, Benjamin Bradlow Creating Universal Goals for Universal Growth, Betsy Hodges The Long Ride, Scot T. Spencer Turning Migrant Workers into Citizens in Urbanizing China, Pengfei XIE The Big Detox  A City that is Blue, Green and Just All Over, Cecilia P. Herzog An Antidote for the Unjust City: Planning to Stay, Mindy Thompson Fullilove Justice from the Ground Up, Julie Bargmann Elevating Planning and Design Why Design Matters, Jason Schupbach Claiming Participation in Urban Planning and Design as a Right, P.K. Das Home Grown Justice in a Legacy City, Karen Freeman-Wilson Epilogue: Cities in Imagination, David Maddox
4. Travis

What has happened is that in the last 20 years, America has changed from a producer to a consumer. And all consumers know that when the producer names the tune, the consumer has got to dance. That’s the way it is. We used to be a producer—very inflexible at that, and now we are consumers and, finding it difficult to understand. Natural resources and minerals will change your world. The Arabs used to be in the third world. They have bought the second world and put a firm down payment on the first one. Controlling your resources will control your world. This country has been surprised by the way the world looks now. They don’t know if they want to be Matt Dillon or Bob Dylan. They don’t know if they want to be diplomats or continue the same policy—of nuclear nightmare diplomacy. John Foster Dulles ain’t nothing but the name of an airport now…The idea concerns the fact that this country wants nostalgia. They want to go back as far as they can—even if it’s only as far as last week. Not to face now or tomorrow, but to face backwards. And yesterday was the day of our cinema heroes riding to the rescue at the last possible moment. The day of the man in the white hat or the man on the white horse—or the man who always came to save America at the last moment—someone always came to save America at the last moment—especially in “B” movies. And when America found itself having a hard time facing the future, they looked for people like John Wayne. But since John Wayne was no longer available, they settled for Ronald Reagan and it has placed us in a situation that we can only look at like a “B” movie.” Gil Scot Heron,  “B-Movie,” 1981

If the Negro is not careful he will drink in all the poison of modern civilization and die from the effects of it. Ultimately it will do us very little good to simply get more opportunities in the Global South or elsewhere if we do not ask ourselves and resolve the question, “Do we really want to continue to design while mimicking the kinds of socio-political society that marginalized us in the first place?” —Marcus Garvey 

To build a just city, we must turn to equitable social education as an alternative to police power, for such power will always tend towards corruption and abuse.
What makes great buildings, spaces and places? It is when those structures or spaces reflect and serve the people of the community for which they are intended. It is when they lift the spirit while providing shelter and functional use; when they foster positive aesthetic and tactile relationships between the buildings, spaces and/or places themselves and the people they are intended to serve.

I penned that statement more than 20 years ago at a moment when I was striving to define my practice as an architect and interior designer. It was relevant then and remains so today as we struggle to imagine a just city being born out of the troubled world we occupy today.

I grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada during the 1950s and ‘60s. Nowhere on earth, I am convinced, is there a clearer sense of injustice towards black and minority peoples—Native Americans, Mexicans, Jews and Mormons. I learned early that the real architects building community in Las Vegas didn’t have degrees, weren’t of pedigree and didn’t work in an ivory tower. Rather, they were those laborers, dishwashers, maids, porters and nannies of color who worked sometimes two or more jobs and still found the time to confront the challenges of building community in the city that scorned them. 

I never forgot the lesson of Las Vegas while attending and ultimately graduating from “majority” schools with two architecture degrees. Throughout these years of study, I never encountered peers or professors who seemed to know or care about the reality that I knew only too well.

Today my practice centers around culture, community and education—no doubt as a direct result of the revelations of my intuitive knowlege combined with the insensitivity of my formal training. I have heard, over the course of my 30 years of practice, many other black architects utter similar instances in their own lives—and more so than not I might add. Architecture remains one of the most segregated old boy professions amongst many in our present society.

The troubled composer and song writer Gil Scott Heron got it right in the 1980s, commenting on Ronald Reagan’s election, voting apathy and the politics of governance in the most powerful and advanced nation in the history of man, when he reminded us that one cannot make a “classic” out of a “B Movie.” 

Emergence of a viable model for a just city capable of serving a world population projected to rise to between 9 and 12 billion people (if not more) in the next 70 or so years must begin with a new way of existing as a collective humanity. 

As I have espoused before in lectures across the country, “The problem lies not in our abilities, but in our humanity.” What would it take to create a place where the rights of virtually every single citizen is not debated but guaranteed? A guarantee not mandated by laws, but by a collective will of the general populous as right and just and in the best interest of all who live in that community? How can a society realize and maintain a healthy sense of “justice” once conflict arises out of misunderstanding, personal or selfish interests?  What does resolution and mediation look like in a just city? Well, one vision of conflict resolution that comes to mind is this notion of instilling each member of the collective with a strong understanding of assured consistent justice for all. This can only be done through an early, open education that is offered to all coupled with development of accountable agencies equally representative of the populous.

In a review of Paul Chevigny’s book Edge of the Knife: Police Violence in the Americas,  Jerome H. Skolnick offers the following: “The dilemma of civil society is that the police are both essential and mistrusted, because they enjoy the power of exercising force. . . . Civil society has limited the legal powers of the police precisely because people mistrust and sometimes fear them.”

Skolnick then goes on to say, “At the same time, society must ask those whom we fear to protect us against criminals. That dilemma sets a challenge to a civil, liberal and democratic order. To achieve public safety we must offer the police instruments of violence. But we also need to develop institutions of accountability to limit inevitable abuses of legal authority, which will vary depending on the social order that we of the larger polity expect police to reproduce.”

To build a just city, we must turn to equitable social education as an alternative to police power, for such power will always tend towards corruption and abuse.

But we can’t stop with restructuring structures of power. As a trained architect, I am interested in defining intersections between design and culture. My teaching methodology explores justice and culture as potential place makers and form drivers along with issues of design.  This vein of exploration is the virtual key for conceptualizing and deploying design solutions in my practice and especially in my academic studio, where students often are exposed to cultures of color for the very first time. Providing a broader learning experience in design is the goal here.

All of the above comes into play for me when envisioning the making of a just city. I believe we must begin with two primary, essential ingredients, three foundational rights and a collective will. The first ingredient is resistance to the norms and practices that have so far prevented justice from prevailing. The second is a quality and equitable education that is free by right to the average citizen. 

Resistance

A true democratic vision for society is often blurred if not derailed by the very forces that are put in place to assure the viability of its survival.  Resistance, of the collective citizenry, enough to provide a pathway for a true democratic model to emerge, is the first and foremost of the two main ingredients. The philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti made these remarks as he responded to a student’s question, “if everyone was in revolt, would there not be chaos in the world?”

“…Is the present society in such perfect order that chaos would result if everyone revolted against it? Is there not chaos now? Is everything beautiful, uncorrupted? Is everyone living happily, fully, richly? Is man not against man? Is there not ambition, ruthless competition? So the world is already in chaos that is the first thing to realize…It is only those who are in constant revolt that discover what is true, not the man who conforms, who follows some tradition…”

Inherent in the equation for defining the just city is confronting the unjust structures that make up our world and challenging them with a collective resolve. 

Education

Resistance can only evolve if the average citizen has the tools and knowledge needed to advocate for meaningful change. The will of an educated citizenry is needed to protect the rights of the collective. Only with a quality education guaranteed to each of its citizens can a community begin to value those social obligations that are the cornerstones in the construction of the just city.

This right to a quality education for all cannot be shifted, modified or changed in any way that could diminish its power. However this initiative also should not be and cannot be mandated in a just city. Today, U.S. schools are more segregated than they were in the late 1960s. Three generations after the Supreme Court’s landmark decision Brown v. Board of Education, black children still attend separate and unequal schools. As this failure of our legal system demonstrates, the right of everyone to a quality and free education cannot be set in motion through government. Rather, this understanding must lie in the hearts of the collective.

“We must create immediately an atmosphere of freedom so that you can live and find out for yourselves what is true, so that you become intelligent, so that you are able to face the world and understand it, not just conform to it, so that inwardly, deeply, psychologically you are in constant revolt,” says Jiddu Krishamurti.

The educational system of the just city must be representative and inclusive as must be all other systems. Children need to see faces that look like their own in the defining, governing, designing, construction and maintaining of the places and spaces that they live, work, play and grow.”

Foundational rights of the just city

 Citizens are guaranteed the basic human services for quality of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, such as quality air, clean water, nourishing food, proper clothing and adequate shelter.

—Individual rights are not mandated by law. Rather, they are supported by an informed leadership ably prepared to make compelling arguments to a well-educated general populous which can understand the plight of others and empathize with them.

—Diversity is respected while at the same time there is an understanding of the value of collective identity.

The collective will of the Just City

—Works tirelessly in maintaining a proper balance between economic, political, social and ecological concerns.

—Understands the importance of having a political consciousness that supports progressive movements at national and local levels toward respect for others and greater equality.

—Assures all its citizens equity in representation across the boards and at all levels.

—Seeks a balance between economic growth and social obligation.

—Assures allocation of adequate resources for desired outcomes.

—Supports a system of maintenance and of checks and balances that is clearly understood and respected.

—Maintains a high respect for maintenance, accountability and stewardship of the planet and all its living inhabitants.

Towards the just city of the future 

Any society is only as strong as its average citizen. With that in mind, life in a just city will focus more on the health, safety and welfare of the average citizen than on the elite. A just city is a “bottom up” proposition where the majority of the citizens are well-educated. In this model, the average citizen is informed, empowered and has a clear understanding of a broader sense of purpose amongst a wider diversity of community inhabitants. 

Whether or not we will be able to strive towards the highest ideal of a just city is largely a question of our humanity. It is up to each of us to determine whether we are up to the challenge. 

Jack Travis
New York

 

The Just City Essays is a joint project of The J. Max Bond Center, Next City and The Nature of Cities. © 2015 All rights are reserved.

 

The Long Ride

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Introduction, Toni L. Griffin, Ariella Cohen and David Maddox Tearing down Invisible Walls Defining the Just City Beyond Black and White, Toni L. Griffin In It Together, Lesley Lokko Cape Town Pride. Cape Town Shame, Carla Sutherland Urban Spaces and the Mattering of Black Lives, Darnell Moore Ceci n'est pas une pipe: Unpacking Injustice in Paris, François Mancebo Reinvigorating Democracy Right to the City for All: A Manifesto for Social Justice in an Urban Century, Lorena Zárate How to Build a New Civic Infrastructure, Ben Hecht Turning to the Flip Side, Maruxa Cardama A Just City is Inconceivable without a Just Society, Marcelo Lopes de Souza Public Imagination, Citizenship and an Urgent Call for Justice, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman Designing for Agency Karachi and the Paralysis of Imagination, Mahim Maher Up from the Basement: The Artist and the Making of the Just City, Theaster Gates Justice that Serves People, Not Institutions, Mirna D. Goransky Resistance, Education and the Collective Will, Jack Travis Inclusive Growth The Case for All-In Cities, Angela Glover Blackwell A Democratic Infrastructure for Johannesburg, Benjamin Bradlow Creating Universal Goals for Universal Growth, Betsy Hodges The Long Ride, Scot T. Spencer Turning Migrant Workers into Citizens in Urbanizing China, Pengfei XIE The Big Detox  A City that is Blue, Green and Just All Over, Cecilia P. Herzog An Antidote for the Unjust City: Planning to Stay, Mindy Thompson Fullilove Justice from the Ground Up, Julie Bargmann Elevating Planning and Design Why Design Matters, Jason Schupbach Claiming Participation in Urban Planning and Design as a Right, P.K. Das Home Grown Justice in a Legacy City, Karen Freeman-Wilson Epilogue: Cities in Imagination, David Maddox
14. SpencerIf you have never been to Baltimore, you should come to visit. From Baltimore Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, you can ride the light rail to downtown in 25 minutes for one of the best deals in the country. If you ride the train between Boston and Washington, you can walk out of Pennsylvania Station and board the Charm City Circulator to downtown, and it’s free! However, if you live in the city of Baltimore and you want to rely on transit to get you to all of life’s functions, you need to recalculate your aspirations for life’s necessities and ambitions. For the 30 percent of people who live in Baltimore without a car (which, coincidentally corresponds with the percentage of people between 16 and 64 not in the labor force), the pursuit of economic opportunity, particularly beyond the confines of downtown, comes with limitations.

This image of a public servant—say, an airport security guard—forced to sleep on a hard chair because they have no way of getting home after a late shift epitomizes the conditions of today’s unjust city.
The above example serves as powerful reminder of how access to opportunity, transit mobility and the missing luxury of transportation choice is a critical gap in the path to shared prosperity for many in places like Baltimore. It is equally important to understand and underscore that fostering a more just place that includes all, especially those with the most limited means, is not a zero-sum game, but can create greater benefits for everyone.

Baltimore is a wealthy region in the highest-per-capita income state in America. With the Port of Baltimore—the furthest inland deepwater port on the Atlantic coast—significant highway access and the birthplace of the B&O railroad, Baltimore in its heyday boasted one of the best intermodal transportation networks in the nation. At one time nearly 40 percent of the US population was within a day’s drive of Baltimore.

Despite its proximity to abundant wealth, Baltimore is a poor city. The median family income in the city is less than two thirds that of the next closest jurisdiction, and most new jobs, particularly those that pay good salaries, are located outside of the city in areas disconnected from public transit and inaccessible to the 30 percent of Baltimoreans without a car.

There are racial dynamics that further complicate this picture. Baltimore is a poor and majority black city in a wealthy and majority-white metropolitan area. Nearly 70 percent of the regional—read suburban—population is white, while 64 percent of the Baltimore City population is black. The racial dynamics of this spatial mismatch—defined as the gap between home and employment—is real and unavoidable for now.

While there has been a move towards “transit-oriented developments” in the region, these have tended to intensify existing disparities by catering to those who can afford market-rate rents, many of whom also happen to work commute-friendly 9-5 days.  Meanwhile, those don’t have that coveted first-shift schedule—many of them lower-wage service workers—find themselves at the mercy of a broken transit system. In one example, late-shift airport workers at BWI Airport must either take a bus to a transfer point and wait a few hours for the next leg of their journey home, or find a place to sleep in the airport until light rail operation commences in the morning. In other instances, transit services terminate at the edge of business parks, leaving employees trekking the last mile or more on foot.

This image of a public servant—say, a TSA agent—forced to sleep on a hard chair because they have no way of getting home after a late shift epitomizes the conditions of today’s unjust city.

This past June, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan chose to pull the plug on Baltimore’s planned Red Line, a 14.1-mile, $2.9 billion east-west light-rail line which Baltimore residents and transit advocates had been working to make a reality since 2002. If constructed, the new rail line would have been the start of transit system—more than our current disconnected transit modes—that could work for Baltimore’s underserved commuters. It would have created hundreds of new jobs and many new development opportunities in underserved neighborhoods. Afterwards, the state released a map of the proposed reallocation of the funds that showed road projects everywhere but Baltimore, adding insult to injury

Hogan’s decision to cancel the planned investment in Baltimore became public a mere two months after the city broke out in demonstrations and protests over the death of Freddie Gray. Known as the Baltimore Uprising, these demonstrations against police violence and inequality were themselves a warning of the looming volcanic eruption to be expected after generations of unjust treatment and lack of access to economic opportunity.

Yet there are steps policymakers and others can take to interrupt this pernicious cycle and begin to create the conditions for a just city.

Two weeks before the governor’s decision to cancel the Red Line, the Opportunity Collaborative—a public/private collective—released a Regional Plan for Sustainable Development. The effort, funded through HUD’s Sustainable Communities Initiative, began with the premise and understanding that racialized structural and institutional barriers were created that have long denied citizens with reasonable access to opportunity.

The broad recommendations of the Opportunity Collaborative—to retain, attract and prepare a workforce for growing mid-skill career path jobs and to strengthen housing and transportation connectivity to those regional employment centers—would create more inclusive outcomes to improve individual and family well-being and to better position the region and the state in a more competitive global economy.

A just city is one that supports this vision of a shared destiny: one that strives to guarantee access to opportunity for all its citizens without regard for race, income or political affiliation. One step in that direction is to mandate equity analyses of policies under consideration. Similar to the traditionally used fiscal impact analysis, this would give lawmakers a greater awareness of the potential disparate impacts of their decisions before they are made.

A just Baltimore is a place where the ease and convenience of access is provided for everyone, not just tourists and visitors. Transportation plans and investments must consider the needs and realities of those who depend on public services every day not only on special occasions.

History shows that once services are designed and implemented for a full spectrum of users, more users show up and ridership demand grows.

We must strive for a system that works for all, not just for the moral good it affords us, but for the economic benefits.  There is so much I love about Baltimore—our people, our history and the hidden charm in our many neighborhoods. We are a place that, despite the knocks we took this year, is getting better. It is our choice, our charge and our duty to grow opportunity for all for the benefit of all. In the end, that’s what makes for a more just Baltimore.

Scot T. Spencer
Baltimore

 

The Just City Essays is a joint project of The J. Max Bond Center, Next City and The Nature of Cities. © 2015 All rights are reserved.

Up From the Basement: The Artist and the Making of the Just City

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Introduction, Toni L. Griffin, Ariella Cohen and David Maddox Tearing down Invisible Walls Defining the Just City Beyond Black and White, Toni L. Griffin In It Together, Lesley Lokko Cape Town Pride. Cape Town Shame, Carla Sutherland Urban Spaces and the Mattering of Black Lives, Darnell Moore Ceci n'est pas une pipe: Unpacking Injustice in Paris, François Mancebo Reinvigorating Democracy Right to the City for All: A Manifesto for Social Justice in an Urban Century, Lorena Zárate How to Build a New Civic Infrastructure, Ben Hecht Turning to the Flip Side, Maruxa Cardama A Just City is Inconceivable without a Just Society, Marcelo Lopes de Souza Public Imagination, Citizenship and an Urgent Call for Justice, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman Designing for Agency Karachi and the Paralysis of Imagination, Mahim Maher Up from the Basement: The Artist and the Making of the Just City, Theaster Gates Justice that Serves People, Not Institutions, Mirna D. Goransky Resistance, Education and the Collective Will, Jack Travis Inclusive Growth The Case for All-In Cities, Angela Glover Blackwell A Democratic Infrastructure for Johannesburg, Benjamin Bradlow Creating Universal Goals for Universal Growth, Betsy Hodges The Long Ride, Scot T. Spencer Turning Migrant Workers into Citizens in Urbanizing China, Pengfei XIE The Big Detox  A City that is Blue, Green and Just All Over, Cecilia P. Herzog An Antidote for the Unjust City: Planning to Stay, Mindy Thompson Fullilove Justice from the Ground Up, Julie Bargmann Elevating Planning and Design Why Design Matters, Jason Schupbach Claiming Participation in Urban Planning and Design as a Right, P.K. Das Home Grown Justice in a Legacy City, Karen Freeman-Wilson Epilogue: Cities in Imagination, David Maddox
5.Gates

Governance, despite its own hopes for a universality of exclusion, is for the inducted, for those who know how to articulate interests disinterestedly, those who vote and know why they vote (not because someone is black or female but because he or she is smart), who have opinions and want to be taken seriously by serious people. In the mean time, policy must still pursue the quotidian sphere of open secret plans. Policy posits curriculum against study, child development against play, human capital against work. It posits having a voice against hearing voices, networked friending against contractual friendship. Policy posits the public sphere, or the counter public sphere, or the black public sphere, against the illegal occupation of the illegitimately privatized.
—Stephano Harney and Fred Moten, the Undercommons, Fugitive Planning and Black Study

0. I understand fully the role of planner and their potential to offer more to the city than ever before. The situation at the level of the city and state is such that insider information, a history of connections within the system and traditional “good old boy” engagements work somewhat effectively at shaping the city and are perceived as a status quo that can’t be changed. In many of our cities, the opportunity for certain kinds of ascension into leadership works to create a caste system of entitlement and apathy. Art adds the potential for a critique from within, a critique that exists as a para-institutional engagement harnessing similar power structures and potentially even mimicking structures in order to advance the possibilities that exist for our city’s futures.

There will be no great future city without hacking the systems of power.
1. A just city requires counter-balance. It requires clear knowing of how governance works with an understanding that power corrupts and power constantly needs to be checked by other powers (people power, political power, ethical persuasion, public outcry). A just city requires that those who do not understand their power and feel cheated out of the right to publicly demonstrate their power are given channels and platforms by which to engage. The constant non-engagement between classes, races, political camps and social structures and the intentional separations that happen in micro-units of cities—and, in some cases, whole cities—will not only work against the possibility of a just city, it will signify the concretization unjust, uneven, unethical city.

2. The possibility that artists would contribute in the substantial transformation of major cities throughout the world is not radical news. What feels radical is the level at which artists rarely benefit from their side.

3. The possibility of the city as form becomes more feasible when the artist has a sense of the possibility of direct engagement with the real. I sense of the value of other forms of production in addition the forms that exist in museums, art forums, galleries and homes. The artists would have a chance to deeply embed him- or herself in the complex politics of a place, the near impossible capacity to reconcile social expectant from social engagements. The city waits with neutral need for its ramparts to be tended, nurtured and altogether revisited.

4. Never plan alone. Plans require idea engagement, public and inner-circle critique, and a way of ensuring that great ideas are great for as many as possible and tailored for communities that want and need planning. Plans grow out of a need to get things done. Getting things done requires lots of permission. Plans are ways of sharing ideas so that there’s consensus and sometimes rebuttal, but at least there’s awareness and hopefully, permission. Even though there are lots of ideas that seem perfect to me for projects that I want to do, I’ve found that the most successful ones are those that are inclusive of other values, opinions and leadership.

5. There was an abandoned building in the city about to be demolished. I, along with 17 developers, looked at the building over 20 years, none of us willing to invest in black space. None of us were willing to imagine new futures for the South Side, or able to imagine making an investment that might not yield a return. We weren’t willing to believe in a place that seemed not to believe in itself, or risk other people’s cash on a dream. We could not consider the possibility that this abandoned building might be the crucial link to the growth and redevelopment of a seemingly infertile land. In a way, the challenge was not the challenge of the building, it was a challenge of seeing—of imagination—on the ocular prescription one has. These days, I don’t see as well as I used to. I’ve learned that the blur sometimes makes things more beautiful; it may possibly even bring other things into greater focus. The impossibility of seeing is one of the major challenges of the built world.

6. This moment is ripe for new ways of imagining the form, the materials through which we address the form and the situations through which the form is conceived, exhibited, made visible and legible. The moment is ripe to new ways of imagining who participates in the inception of the form. The city is form and raw material and the location of possibility and the consciousness of our age. The city needs sculpture and praxis; it needs wedging and heat. The city is in the difficult position of no longer knowing itself or its virtues. It has suitors who are not fashioning futures, but instead fashioning wealth generation. If the sculptor is absent from this work, what we will have instead of the beautiful is the most efficient, the cheapest and most extravagant, ideas generated by those who pay not those who feel. The sculptor and the policy expert and the planner together make great cities. They share agency and resource, and stand strong together with ideology and a willingness to have sympathy for the vocations. When our administrations realize the potency of artistic and policy based collaborations, truly transformative works will happen: works that go far beyond mural making and public art programs; the type of work that might allow for innovations in professional bureaucracy.

7. At my undergraduate university, the School of Architecture was on the 5th floor, the Planning Program on the 3rd floor, and the Arts Programming in the basement. We all used to joke that our placement was an announcement of caste, of where we stood in the world; a hierarchy had been made clear. As a result of the professionalization of our creative selves, we were never able to really see how we were all cut from similar cloth, and that if we were to share the same libraries, skill sets, rigor, and lunch rooms, that we could in fact explode any one of the vocations we had set ourselves to do.

8. There should be more female and queer leadership in the just city.  We need leadership that has the potential to ask new questions of the status quo and demand a more complicated set of determinations and willingness to invest in non-hierarchal structures. Leadership that also expects more from the men we work for. By challenging their assumptions and biases, we make room for an open critique of systems of power and pathways for understanding sharing, empathy, public participation and inclusion alongside land use futures, zoning policy and fiscal allocations.

9. There will be no great future city without hacking the systems of power. Policy is simply a way of ensuring legal process around things that matter. Sometimes our ideas need to push the policy envelope a little. I always imagine that this is part of what policy should do: it should capture the needs of communities that change. Policy, like communities, has to be dynamic if it is to capture that possibility of a just city. It has to keep looking for the nuance with the systems of governance to make our cities work better.

Theaster Gates
Chicago

The Just City Essays is a joint project of The J. Max Bond Center, Next City and The Nature of Cities. © 2015 All rights are reserved.

Urban Spaces and the Mattering of Black Lives 

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Introduction, Toni L. Griffin, Ariella Cohen and David Maddox Tearing down Invisible Walls Defining the Just City Beyond Black and White, Toni L. Griffin In It Together, Lesley Lokko Cape Town Pride. Cape Town Shame, Carla Sutherland Urban Spaces and the Mattering of Black Lives, Darnell Moore Ceci n'est pas une pipe: Unpacking Injustice in Paris, François Mancebo Reinvigorating Democracy Right to the City for All: A Manifesto for Social Justice in an Urban Century, Lorena Zárate How to Build a New Civic Infrastructure, Ben Hecht Turning to the Flip Side, Maruxa Cardama A Just City is Inconceivable without a Just Society, Marcelo Lopes de Souza Public Imagination, Citizenship and an Urgent Call for Justice, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman Designing for Agency Karachi and the Paralysis of Imagination, Mahim Maher Up from the Basement: The Artist and the Making of the Just City, Theaster Gates Justice that Serves People, Not Institutions, Mirna D. Goransky Resistance, Education and the Collective Will, Jack Travis Inclusive Growth The Case for All-In Cities, Angela Glover Blackwell A Democratic Infrastructure for Johannesburg, Benjamin Bradlow Creating Universal Goals for Universal Growth, Betsy Hodges The Long Ride, Scot T. Spencer Turning Migrant Workers into Citizens in Urbanizing China, Pengfei XIE The Big Detox  A City that is Blue, Green and Just All Over, Cecilia P. Herzog An Antidote for the Unjust City: Planning to Stay, Mindy Thompson Fullilove Justice from the Ground Up, Julie Bargmann Elevating Planning and Design Why Design Matters, Jason Schupbach Claiming Participation in Urban Planning and Design as a Right, P.K. Das Home Grown Justice in a Legacy City, Karen Freeman-Wilson Epilogue: Cities in Imagination, David Maddox
18. MooreIt was close to midnight. A youngish, jovial-looking white woman with russet colored hair ran by me with ostensive ease. She donned earphones and dark, body-fitting jogging attire. I was walking home from the A train stop and along Lewis Avenue, which is a moderately busy thoroughfare that runs through the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in central Brooklyn, where I live.

Integrated neighborhoods are beautiful expressions of community when, in fact, all members are seen as worthy of police protection or respect from business owners.
Lewis runs parallel to Marcus Garvey. Black. Two avenues to the right is Malcolm X Boulevard.  It’s Black. Fulton Street. Atlantic Avenue. The B15 bus. Bedford Avenue. Marcy Projects. Brownstoners. The C train. Working class renters. Peaches Restaurant. June Jordan. Livery taxis. Restoration Plaza. Jay-Z. Bed-Stuy is quite black. I am, too.

Encountering the strange sight of a white woman running without care on a street in a section of our borough once considered an unredeemable “hood” terrified me. She ran pass the new eateries and grocery shops that sell organic and specialty foods. Within a span of a few blocks, residents and visitors now have their choice of premium Mexican eats, brick oven pizza or freshly baked scones with artisan coffee. Citi Bike racks and skateboard riding hipsters adorn the now buzzing thoroughfare. To many, our part of BedStuy may appear safer, cleaner, and whiter.

And, yet, I was still terrified. It was midnight. Black boys and men have been killed throughout the history of the U.S. for being less close to and observant of white women’s bodies as I was that late evening.

Shortly after I passed by with the white woman jogger, my close friend, Marcus, who lives in walking distance from me—closer to a densely populated public housing development—lamented about the lingering tremors of gentrification. Citing the presumed changes in racial demographics, renovated housing options, and increased business development efforts, Marcus hinted at the frustration of black communities undergoing rapid and contested transformation.

He came upon a flier that was fastened to a tree. According to Marcus, the New York Police Department (NYPD) precinct near his building created a “wanted” sign that was posted not too far from where he lived. The “wanted” were a few black men who allegedly robbed a neighbor. The neighbor was white.

Never before, in the several years Marcus had lived in Bed-Stuy, had he seen anything similar. There were no signs made after black teens were shot or robbed. There were no cries for the “wanted” after black women and girls were sexually assaulted or followed home by a predator. There was no indication of concern for black people besides the ever-present anxiety black bodies seem to cause both to the state and to white people when they dwell en masse in the hood. A cursory review of NYPD’s data on the disproportionate and deleterious impact of stop, question and frisk procedures and broken windows policing on black communities is but one example. Marcus’s critique resonated because it illuminated the ways the state and its citizenry afford value to white lives.

Hence, the reason for selecting the vignettes I’ve opened with here. In both scenes, white bodies signify worth and, therefore, are always centered in our collective imagination. They are esteemed commodities, especially in black spaces—that is, neighborhoods and other publics mostly inhabited and culturally shaped by a majority black populace. Thus, any dreamed and invented “just city” that is structured by a set of race ideologies that do not factor in the hyper-mattering of white lives and the perceived worthlessness of black and brown lives is not “just” at all. That is why catch phrases like “community development” or “urban planning and design” can be counterproductive if, in fact, one’s praxis is not guided by a commitment to a type of transformative work grounded in the belief that black lives actually matter.

The connection between space and race became clearer to me after visiting Ferguson, MO, shortly after 18-year old Mike Brown, Jr. was fatally shot by police officerDarren Wilson. Standing in the same street where Brown’s bloodied body had been left uncovered for four hours—in view of his family and neighbors—forced me to question the extent to which ideas about race and space collude to create precarious lives for black and brown people. In an essay titled “The Price of Blackness: From Ferguson to Bed-Stuy” originally published at The Feminist Wire shortly after my return, I wrote, “Changes in the racial composition of towns precipitate changes in the ways black bodies are policed and valued in many neighborhoods.”

I was drawn to the horrific events unfolding in Ferguson because it occurred to me that Ferguson — like some neighborhoods in New York City, Chicago, Oakland and elsewhere —have not only experienced shifts in its racial composition, but also have undergone changes in government leadership, laws, policing practices and economics that inevitably impact black and poor people.

Mike Brown’s death was a unique tragedy that occurred within a specific place and time, but the conditions within which it took place are mundane and, seemingly, quintessential characteristics of gentrified black spaces. This led me to postulate, “Black lives and white lives are differently valued and are, therefore, differently impacted under the conditions of white racial supremacy across the country.” Thus, beyond the noticeable changes—such as the movement of more white people into otherwise black neighborhoods—the insidious aspect of gentrification is the seeming logic of white significance and black worthlessness that underwrites the process.

“My brief time in Ferguson prompted me to consider the many ways Mike Brown’s death, and life, was warped by the structural conditions mentioned above—all emanating from what scholar George Lipsitz aptly calls the ‘possessive investment in whiteness,’” I concluded upon my return from Ferguson. “Such investments in whiteness, which impact everything from access to housing markets to points of educational access for black people across the country, must also be considered alongside the mundane incidents of police violence and hyper criminalization in the U.S.”

But police violence is one lens through which we can assess the connection between race and space, whether in Ferguson or Brooklyn. 16-year old Kimani Gray was shot and killed by a member of NYPD in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn in March 2013. Flatbush is not too far from Bed-Stuy. Like Bed-Stuy, it is a neighborhood that has experienced an increase in its white populace. While some may argue that the increased number of white people in black spaces is the singular problem, I contend the public should be concerned with the problematic ways whiteness functions as a signifier. As I’ve written elsewhere: 

The more insidious problem is the belief that whiteness at all times and in all places signifies safety and bounty and, therefore, represents a site of investment: new stores selling expensive items begin emerging; the same stores stay open (the doors and not just side windows) twenty-four hours; realtors finally begin to take an interest in property sales; nameless and faceless ‘investors’ begin leaving cheap flyers on stoops or in mailboxes promising cash for homes. Safety becomes a relative experience when gentrification occurs. The presence of white people almost always guarantees the increased presence of resources, like police, which does not always guarantee safety for black people in those same spaces.

A “just city,” then, is a space where one’s hued flesh does not determine one’s full or limited access to equity and safety in communities where she or he lives and works. To vision and create the type of city that is not a built rendition of the biased ideologies we maintain requires a liberated imagination, but we can only free our minds from the chains of anti-blackness and classism when we first acknowledge each has its hold on us. An expanded public dialogue is necessary for us to arrive at this set of shared understandings.

The current movement for black lives is a perfect backdrop for a conversation on reimagined cities that needs to move from the halls of think tanks and municipal development offices to the streets and neighborhoods where all manner of black people dwell.

Imagine dialogues on neighborhood development and urban design occurring among protest participants. Imagine planned public talks hosted on neighbors’ stoops or in the foyers of housing projects. Imagine democratized approaches to urban planning that begins with the people,not the corporate class. Imagine the embedding of urban planners within movement collectives combatting anti-black racism and state sanctioned violence from Ferguson to Flatbush. That type of work is characteristic of the critical first steps needed to inform the creation of the “just” city.

We have reached a critical juncture in the U.S. Indeed, if the Black Lives Matter iteration of the long struggle for black liberation in this country has done nothing else, it has reminded us that the fight for a new, black-loving and just world is an ideological and material struggle. Our public ethos begets our public spaces. And we need unjust spaces no more.

Instead, we need neighborhoods where the value afforded to inhabitants is not based on the color of their skin, or presumed or actual gender expression and sexual identity. Integrated neighborhoods are beautiful expressions of community when, in fact, all members are seen as worthy of police protection or respect from business owners.

In my imagination, a safe and materially just black space is one where residents, whether homeowners or renters, are actually asked about the changes they’d like to see occur. Citi Bike representatives would knock on doors and assess residents’ levels of comfort and desires before placing hordes of bikes on street corners where car services would previously park in wait for residents en route to their jobs, the market, or doctors’ offices. I heard that particular complaint on my block.

In a “just city” residents can actually afford food at eateries and wares sold at businesses in their neighborhoods and, even more,  they are provided access to services so they too can create businesses in the very locales they reside.

I want to live in neighborhood where mostly white police officers do not see or treat me like a potential threat when walking home while my new white neighbors are offered respect regardless of their too loud parties or strong smell of marijuana coming from their direction. I’ve experienced or witnessed all of the above.

I imagine neighborhoods my physically disabled friends can maneuver through with greater ease. My South African wheelchair-bound mentee could not visit me in New York City because it would have been hard for him to make it through most of the city, including my neighborhood, without encountering a range of obstacles.

A safe and equitable space is one that centers the needs and desires of all residents regardless of race, gender, ability, income, or sexual identity. And in the cases when design and redevelopment revolve around those typically centered in the public imagination—characteristically white, sometimes heterosexual, nearly always abled-bodied people with wealth or access to other forms capital—the work must be recalibrated. Yet the only way these forms of erasure can be assessed is by ensuring the group assembled at the planning table is as diverse as the communities it aims to reimagine and rebuild.

The public and private sectors will remain complicit in the creation of inequitable communities as long as both benefit from the structural inequities that surface as a result of race, class, and other forms of stratification. And that is not just.

Darnell L. Moore
New York

 

The Just City Essays is a joint project of The J. Max Bond Center, Next City and The Nature of Cities. © 2015 All rights are reserved.

Why Design Matters

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Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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Introduction, Toni L. Griffin, Ariella Cohen and David Maddox Tearing down Invisible Walls Defining the Just City Beyond Black and White, Toni L. Griffin In It Together, Lesley Lokko Cape Town Pride. Cape Town Shame, Carla Sutherland Urban Spaces and the Mattering of Black Lives, Darnell Moore Ceci n'est pas une pipe: Unpacking Injustice in Paris, François Mancebo Reinvigorating Democracy Right to the City for All: A Manifesto for Social Justice in an Urban Century, Lorena Zárate How to Build a New Civic Infrastructure, Ben Hecht Turning to the Flip Side, Maruxa Cardama A Just City is Inconceivable without a Just Society, Marcelo Lopes de Souza Public Imagination, Citizenship and an Urgent Call for Justice, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman Designing for Agency Karachi and the Paralysis of Imagination, Mahim Maher Up from the Basement: The Artist and the Making of the Just City, Theaster Gates Justice that Serves People, Not Institutions, Mirna D. Goransky Resistance, Education and the Collective Will, Jack Travis Inclusive Growth The Case for All-In Cities, Angela Glover Blackwell A Democratic Infrastructure for Johannesburg, Benjamin Bradlow Creating Universal Goals for Universal Growth, Betsy Hodges The Long Ride, Scot T. Spencer Turning Migrant Workers into Citizens in Urbanizing China, Pengfei XIE The Big Detox  A City that is Blue, Green and Just All Over, Cecilia P. Herzog An Antidote for the Unjust City: Planning to Stay, Mindy Thompson Fullilove Justice from the Ground Up, Julie Bargmann Elevating Planning and Design Why Design Matters, Jason Schupbach Claiming Participation in Urban Planning and Design as a Right, P.K. Das Home Grown Justice in a Legacy City, Karen Freeman-Wilson Epilogue: Cities in Imagination, David Maddox
24. SchupbachMy vision for a just city is one where design and its power as a tool against inequality is leveraged for the benefit of all residents. As the director of design programs at the National Endowment for Arts, and one of the U.S. government’s primary advocates for good design, I spend a lot of time with mayors and other leaders advocating for the power of design. In the words of Charleston, South Carolina Mayor Joseph Riley, a mayor is “the chief urban designer” of his or her city.  Even so, most mayors require education on what design can do—and what it cannot do.

Why does design matter to the just city? 

Residents must be part of the urban design process. They must not only demand good design but also support and reward it.  History has shown good design does not happen without public input.
Design matters because design is all around us. Every object, place and many experiences are designed. Design is a problem-solving tool that transforms an idea into reality. Good designers take their creative genius, apply it to the most difficult problems in our lives and come up with solutions that are sensitive to people’s needs, efficient, and ultimately cost-effective.  A recent British government study showed that every one pound invested in effective design yielded 26 pounds in savings.

Yet there are forces of inequality that are outside design’s reach as a tool. A just city will have fairer tax and fee codes to balance community resources for all of its citizens. A just city will crack down on predatory lending and other detrimental banking practices.  A more just city will have better paying jobs to help lift people out of poverty. A more just city will listen to the #Blacklivesmatter protestors and look at policies to address the unjust penal and policing system.  None of those are design issues.  Still, design can play a role. Here’s how:

Creating a better public realm: Mayor Riley likes to talk about how every citizen’s heart deserves to sing in public spaces. These are the spaces in the city that all of us own—the places where we can mix and build understanding across economic and racial barriers.  It is vitally important that they are designed the right way, and often, they are not. How a building meets the street matters, the materials you use matter, and the scale and size of spaces and buildings matter. It has been proven that better designed streetscapes and public spaces typically have less crime, higher pedestrian activity and increased economic activity.  If done correctly, public space can also have multiple other benefits too, such as the Main Terrian park in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which cleaned up a polluted site in a historically disadvantaged neighborhood (environmental justice benefit) and has public art that encourages exercise (public health benefits).

Many people (and NEA grantees) across the country are dedicated to making better public spaces. I advise you to go seek out their suggestions. It is important you empower not only the designer in the creation of public space but also the public at the same time.

Maintaining infrastructure: The maintenance of the designed part of cities, the buildings and infrastructure, matters. It shows respect for the entire public when you respect the public space. A just city is well-maintained across all of its neighborhoods. At the most basic level, the public infrastructure needs to work. Public water systems impact public health. Street lights lead to safety. It is all connected. Dr. Mindy Fullilove urgently talks about how the aging lead pipes in historically underserved neighborhoods are poisoning the children and holding them back in educational ability—maintenance matters. Even where you put flood infrastructure matters. In Fargo, ND, the huge drainage basins they built in response to the disastrous flooding of the Red River tore apart some of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods. To fix this mistake, they have used NEA funds to work with artists and designers to rethink the spaces as community commons for the neighborhoods—spaces to gather and be active that can also flood.

Improving connectivity: Transportation is a design issue. It helps determine street life, walkability and much more. Because of the gentrification of strong market cities and the hollowing out of the inner core of weak market cities, many lower income people have moved to the first ring of suburbs, which are often poorly served by public transit. This trend means if they do not have cars, they are unable to easily access the economic centers of their community. Some cities are responding to this trend better than others. In Atlanta, there are stories of people taking Uber to the nearest bus line because it is not walkable. Whereas in Houston, the city is redoing all of its bus lines—literally throwing out the map and starting over – in order to better serve lower income residents. What it all boils down to is people need to be able to get to jobs, and not everyone can afford a car and gas.  If we want to create accessible cities with economic opportunity for all, we must design better transportation systems.

Zoning for progress: There may be no topic more important to urban designers and more impenetrable to the public than zoning. These are the laws that regulate land use in most of America. They must be modernized if we want to build thriving, inclusive neighborhoods. Too many communities try to work within outdated regulations instead of tackling the issue head on, or they use zoning as a way to keep existing power systems in place—regulating affordable housing out of communities, for instance. It is a tool that must be used carefully though, as evidenced by the recent backlash to the rezoning plans in New York City. The intention was to help the market build more affordable housing, but instead the plans have led to a gold rush of speculation of the existing properties and begun to price out longtime residents.

Engaging all residents: Residents must be part of the urban design process. They must not only demand good design but also support and reward it.  History has shown good design does not happen without public input.  Most of the design people I know who care about inequality are asking important questions right now: When does design matter to the civic engagement process? How can it give voice to the previously unheard or underserved? How can design help them take control of the development decisions in their own neighborhoods?  We at the NEA are working with field partners to expand on what we already know: designers can help residents see what proposed change could look like sooner rather than later through temporary or inexpensive installations, and design processes can help residents envision their own future in inventive ways.  I suggest you check out the work of the Kounkuey Design Initiative in the Coachella Valley in California to get a sense of what design can do to engage and give voice to residents. They are one of many designers working in this space.

Experiment: We all know that there is limited funding out there to support our cities. To combat this, be experimental.  Try small things.  There has been an explosion of “tactical urbanism”—a fancy term for small temporary projects—happening across the nation in which designers and others act on their own initiatives to solve urban problems. Parking Day is one example of such works—it’s when people create a temporary park in a parking space.  While some probably think these projects do not address the big issues needed to be addressed in a just city, I have seen many of them impact their communities in important ways, such as the Market Street Prototyping Festival in San Francisco, in which the Planning Office is using temporary experiments to learn about what works before they undertake a massive rebuilding of the street. We’re seeing experiments all over the place and in unexpected places—take the work of Emily Roush-Elliot, an Enterprise Rose Fellow working closely with residents of Greenwood, MS.  As a first step to engage this historically disadvantaged African-American community, Emily and her co-workers took a muddy lot and, using a few concrete pavers and some benches, created a small new park.  This space brought residents out of their homes to discuss housing and economic needs and set forward a whole series of activities that are chipping away at years of disinvestment and distrust. Inequality will die from a thousand cuts, not a silver bullet.

Don’t forget about beauty: Aesthetics are subjective, but good design is not. In 2010, the Knight “Soul of the Community” study investigated just why people move somewhere. It asked the question: “Great schools, good transit, affordable health care and safe streets all help create strong communities. But is there something deeper that draws people to a city—that makes them want to put down roots and build a life?” After interviewing more than 40,000 residents over three years, the top three answers for why someone loves living in a place shocked almost everyone—they are “social offerings, openness, and aesthetics.” Doesn’t a just city build the place that people want to love? Don’t all residents deserve beauty? Many people have made the case as to why beauty is a tool for justice—the most famous being Elaine Scarry in her landmark work “On Beauty and Being Just.” While it is a must read, I do prefer the TED talk of another author in this series, Theaster Gates, who, amongst other ideas, makes a great case for how beauty begets beauty; beauty is a positive beacon shining a light to show that change is possible, and hence beauty can change how people act.

Design Matters

Remember, design is a tool—not a solution.  It is imperative that when trying to build a more just city you remember the anthropological history of a place and understand what has shaped it up to this point. Any leader or resident or designer must dig into the history of a place and look at the policies that have shaped it. If you do that and use the tools of design the right way, I am convinced that design will matter, that engaging smart designers will help as we try to bend the arc of history towards just cities.

Jason Schupbach
Washington

 

The Just City Essays is a joint project of The J. Max Bond Center, Next City and The Nature of Cities. © 2015 All rights are reserved.

Defining the Just City Beyond Black and White

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Introduction, Toni L. Griffin, Ariella Cohen and David Maddox Tearing down Invisible Walls Defining the Just City Beyond Black and White, Toni L. Griffin In It Together, Lesley Lokko Cape Town Pride. Cape Town Shame, Carla Sutherland Urban Spaces and the Mattering of Black Lives, Darnell Moore Ceci n'est pas une pipe: Unpacking Injustice in Paris, François Mancebo Reinvigorating Democracy Right to the City for All: A Manifesto for Social Justice in an Urban Century, Lorena Zárate How to Build a New Civic Infrastructure, Ben Hecht Turning to the Flip Side, Maruxa Cardama A Just City is Inconceivable without a Just Society, Marcelo Lopes de Souza Public Imagination, Citizenship and an Urgent Call for Justice, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman Designing for Agency Karachi and the Paralysis of Imagination, Mahim Maher Up from the Basement: The Artist and the Making of the Just City, Theaster Gates Justice that Serves People, Not Institutions, Mirna D. Goransky Resistance, Education and the Collective Will, Jack Travis Inclusive Growth The Case for All-In Cities, Angela Glover Blackwell A Democratic Infrastructure for Johannesburg, Benjamin Bradlow Creating Universal Goals for Universal Growth, Betsy Hodges The Long Ride, Scot T. Spencer Turning Migrant Workers into Citizens in Urbanizing China, Pengfei XIE The Big Detox  A City that is Blue, Green and Just All Over, Cecilia P. Herzog An Antidote for the Unjust City: Planning to Stay, Mindy Thompson Fullilove Justice from the Ground Up, Julie Bargmann Elevating Planning and Design Why Design Matters, Jason Schupbach Claiming Participation in Urban Planning and Design as a Right, P.K. Das Home Grown Justice in a Legacy City, Karen Freeman-Wilson Epilogue: Cities in Imagination, David Maddox
19. Griffin_RE
When I think about the just city, it’s always black and white

I was born in Chicago the evening before President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. Growing up on the south side of Chicago meant that on an average day, I rarely saw or interacted with a person who didn’t look like me. All of my basic needs were met on the south side of Chicago—schooling, shopping, summer jobs, recreation and entertainment. My teachers were predominately black, and my classmates were 98 percent black. This environment did not make me feel isolated, segregated or unusual—I just felt normal.

I offer ten values as my initial metrics for designing for the just city.
Television was my only reminder that I was a “minority”. While I did not regularly see people who looked like me on TV, this didn’t stop me from deciding at the age of 14 that I wanted to be an architect—just like Mike Brady, patriarch of “The Brady Bunch.” By the time I entered college at the University of Notre Dame—and the field of architecture—my context became the exact opposite. For the first time in my life, I actually felt like a minority. And today, professionally, I remain a minority in my chosen field. I am the only African-American full-time faculty member at the City College of New York’s School of Architecture, and one of less than 300 African-American women to be licensed in the United States.

My just city is black and white because I grew up in a racially segregated city

I certainly did not realize how much of an impact Chicago’s urban form and spatial patterns would have on my perspective about cities. Nor was I aware of the profound impact that Chicago would have on my interactions with fellow urbanites and the work to which I would come to devote my career.

My work in architecture, urban design and urban planning spans several cities in the U.S., including Chicago, New York, Washington, Newark, Detroit and Memphis. All of these cities have similar racial patterns of segregation, and all have similar urban conditions, thanks to the impact of segregation on people and place. I would eventually come to know these urban conditions as the environments of social and spatial injustice. I now simply call them the conditions of urban injustice or justice. I define urban justice as the factors that contribute to our economic, human health, civic and cultural well-being, as well as the factors that contribute to the environmental and aesthetic health of the built environment.

There are three conditions of urban injustice that I always seem to confront in my work in cities—conditions that began to reach the height of national awareness at the time of my birth in 1960s Chicago.

The first urban injustice condition is concentrated poverty

On the ground, spatial segregation has created pockets of concentrated poverty in our cities that, in turn, have created spatial and social isolation of those cities’ residents. Over multiple generations, this isolation has had a devastating impact on family structures, social networks, educational systems and access to economic opportunity.

For example, in Newark, N.J., where I served as the director of planning and community development for newly elected Mayor Cory Booker between 2007 and 2009, nearly 50 percent of all the people living in the central ward of the city lived in poverty, a condition that has persisted since a federal slum clearance boundary was drawn around the same area in 1961 and which suggests multiple generations of concentrated poverty.

The second urban injustice condition is disinvestment, crime and the architecture of fear

In the mid-1960s, attempts were made to revitalize the center city through programs such as Model Cities, a federal program that brought funding for redevelopment into communities with the greatest social and physical deterioration. However, the civil unrest of 1967 deepened disinvestment, and the city’s reputation for high crime and political corruption limited its ability to attract widespread capital investment for many decades.

At the height of disinvestment and the federal programs designed to reverse this trend, including Model Cities and Urban Renewal, developers and institutions that felt unable to control the disinvested and crime-ridden environments around their land holdings directed architects to protect them from the adjacent urban decay via windowless recreation centers to keep children safe, elevated and enclosed skywalks from Newark Penn Station to the Gateway Center office campus that removed people from the dangerous streets, and a public community college constructed with uninviting, barrier-like building materials that created a fortress, protecting knowledge from the very public it was situated to serve.

And the third urban injustice condition is socio-economic division

From 2000 to 2006, while serving as deputy planning director under Washington Mayor Anthony A. Williams, I saw that spatial segregation sharply divided the city along the north-south axis marked by Rock Creek Park and the Potomac River, separating rich and poor residents by employment status, income and educational attainment. Fifteen years later, residents of color see that this dividing line is pushing swiftly eastward; they fear they will be pushed across the Anacostia River and, ultimately, outside the city limits.

My just city is also for women, children and people of color (or what the PolicyLink CEO, Angela Blackwell Glover, calls “the least not”)

At the center of these environments of urban injustice, I find an increasing number of women, children, immigrants and people of color struggling to stake their claim in the just city. National trends report that women are poorer than men in all racial and ethnic categories. Some 75 percent of all women in poverty are single, with over a quarter of these women being single mothers, according to the Center for American Progress. Nearly a third of all children in this country live in poverty, giving the U.S. the sixth highest poverty rate for children out of the forty-one wealthiest countries worldwide, according to UNICEF.

Since the start of the 2008 recession, more millennials and a widening spectrum of working folks previously perceived as middle-class are finding it harder to maintain the things we have always associated with a middle-class lifestyle: a decent salary that enabled access to affordable housing in a livable community and to services and amenities in proximity to one’s home or work. In 1967, 53 percent of Americans were in the middle class, classified as earning between $35,000-$100,000, but by 2013, only 43 percent of Americans fit this category, The New York Times reported in 2015.

And more recently, the televised exposure of the unspoken, underestimated, often disbelieved struggle for civil rights by a cohort of people based on their gender, sexuality and/or race reminds us that the good intentions put into law the day after my birth, and those since, have not yet been fully realized and/or continue to be challenged. Many people in this cohort do not have confidence in their right to ownership, inclusion and belonging to the public spaces of the city because of the frequent reminders expressed by those who presume to judge and challenge those rights.

But I am optimistic about cities—American cities, in particular—and our collective ability to facilitate and create greater urban justice for all.

I don’t want my just city to be just black and white

I am optimistic and, once again, inspired by television and pop culture. I watch the new show “Blackish” and enjoy how brilliantly it exposes the generational gaps between the parents, who are my age, and their children, as well as between the children and their grandparents. It reveals how middle-class African-American parents can afford to expose their children to a world that in many cases is broader, with greater global access to opportunity and diversity than our own upbringing, and without the baggage of racial limitations. However, at the same time, the parents—and especially the father—hold tightly to the racial lenses through which they grew up viewing the world, as well as the cultural self-identities we of this generation still desperately want acknowledged and integrated into the American cultural normative.

I am also optimistic because of my work as the founding director of the J. Max Bond Center on Design for the Just City at the Spitzer School of Architecture, The City College of New York. The Center is named after famed African-American architect, J. Max Bond, who was the cousin of civil rights activist Julian Bond, who recently passed away. Max Bond viewed architecture as a social art, one with a responsibility to design the built environment in a manner that expresses the cultural traditions, needs and aspirations of our society.

Inspired by his position and my own belief that design can have an impact on urban justice, both the Center and a graduate seminar course I developed of the same name aim to examine the unresolved issues of race, equity, inclusion, ownership and participation in urban communities; to create a clear definition of the just city; and to develop a set of evaluation metrics that assess the effectiveness of design tactics in facilitating urban justice. I have taught the class over four semesters with 45 students in total (five African-Americans, 10 foreign-born students, four openly LGBTQ students, 19 women and 26 men). Each semester, the students’ observations and discussions remind me of the black-white lenses through which I view the world, and have awakened my desire and need to broaden the prescription of those lenses and widen my view of the just city to incorporate other racial, ethnic, gender and generational perspectives.

In the end, I want more than a livable city, more than a sustainable city, more than a resilient city. I want more than equality, which doesn’t always account for the limitations, disadvantages, or, in some cases, the privileges that render the positions of some in the city unequal.

I want a just city where all people, but especially “the least not,” are included, have equitable and inclusive access to the opportunities and tools that allow them to be productive, to thrive, to excel and to advance through the social and economic ranks of social and economic

Within my work as a practitioner, educator and researcher, I believe I have tried to create places and spaces that promote greater urban justice. Over my career, I have worked on the redevelopment of the Anacostia Waterfront in Washington, where our aim was to direct the city’s growth in a manner that would include existing Washingtonians; I have changed land use and zoning regulations to support higher quality infill housing design standards; and I have created a comprehensive and integrated citywide framework for new neighborhood typologies and reconfigured infrastructure systems to support shifting demographics of Detroit. I believe my intention was to create a more just city, even though I would not have used this term to describe my intentions.

As a reflection on the impacts of these and other design and planning efforts with which I have been involved, I feel the pressing need to become more articulate about the specific impacts of my design work on facilitating my vision for the just city. To do this, I realized that I must first create a clear definition of what it means to have this just city. So, as I look to assess the impact of my past projects, and to work with greater clarity to continue my quest for equitable and inclusive access for all, I offer these ten values as my initial metrics for designing for the just city.

1. Equity – The distribution of material and non-material goods in a manner that brings the greatest benefit required to any particular community.

2. Choice – The ability for any and all communities to make selections among a variety of options including places, programs, amenities and decisions.

3. Access – Convenient proximity to, presence of, and/or connectivity to basic needs, quality amenities, choices, opportunities and decisions.

4. Connectivity – A social or spatial network tying people and places together, providing access and opportunity for all.

5. Ownership – The ability to have a stake in a process, outcome or material good, such as property.

6. Diversity – Acceptance of different programs, people and cultural norms in the built environment and decision-making processes.

7. Participation – The requirement and acceptance of different voices and the active engagement of both Individuals and communities in matters affecting social and spatial well-being.

8. Inclusion and Belonging – The acceptance of difference, the intention to involve diverse opinions, attitudes and behaviors, and the ability of spaces to engender integration, fellowship and safety.

9. Beauty – Everyone’s right to well-made, well-designed environments.

10. Creative innovation – Nurturing ingenuity in problem solving and interventions that improve place.

By offering these values, I know I run the risk of communicating a top-down proclamation, implying a city is not just unless it succeeds at these specific values. Quite the contrary—I believe it is imperative that each city or community decide for itself what values is should assign to become more just. I only insist that there be clear intention, expressed through a clear and collectively developed definition, so that when we achieve the just city, we will know it when we see it.

Toni L. Griffin
New York

 

The Just City Essays is a joint project of The J. Max Bond Center, Next City and The Nature of Cities. © 2015 All rights are reserved.

An Antidote for the Unjust City: Planning to Stay

People & Communities, Place & Design, The Just City Essays, , ,
Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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See the full list of Essays
Introduction, Toni L. Griffin, Ariella Cohen and David Maddox Tearing down Invisible Walls Defining the Just City Beyond Black and White, Toni L. Griffin In It Together, Lesley Lokko Cape Town Pride. Cape Town Shame, Carla Sutherland Urban Spaces and the Mattering of Black Lives, Darnell Moore Ceci n'est pas une pipe: Unpacking Injustice in Paris, François Mancebo Reinvigorating Democracy Right to the City for All: A Manifesto for Social Justice in an Urban Century, Lorena Zárate How to Build a New Civic Infrastructure, Ben Hecht Turning to the Flip Side, Maruxa Cardama A Just City is Inconceivable without a Just Society, Marcelo Lopes de Souza Public Imagination, Citizenship and an Urgent Call for Justice, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman Designing for Agency Karachi and the Paralysis of Imagination, Mahim Maher Up from the Basement: The Artist and the Making of the Just City, Theaster Gates Justice that Serves People, Not Institutions, Mirna D. Goransky Resistance, Education and the Collective Will, Jack Travis Inclusive Growth The Case for All-In Cities, Angela Glover Blackwell A Democratic Infrastructure for Johannesburg, Benjamin Bradlow Creating Universal Goals for Universal Growth, Betsy Hodges The Long Ride, Scot T. Spencer Turning Migrant Workers into Citizens in Urbanizing China, Pengfei XIE The Big Detox  A City that is Blue, Green and Just All Over, Cecilia P. Herzog An Antidote for the Unjust City: Planning to Stay, Mindy Thompson Fullilove Justice from the Ground Up, Julie Bargmann Elevating Planning and Design Why Design Matters, Jason Schupbach Claiming Participation in Urban Planning and Design as a Right, P.K. Das Home Grown Justice in a Legacy City, Karen Freeman-Wilson Epilogue: Cities in Imagination, David Maddox
13.Thompson-FulliloveIn 1993 or thereabouts I entered a contest for women to depict what they did on a particular day. That day, I went to meetings early in the morning at Harlem Hospital. I took photos of the abandoned buildings on West 136th, where I parked my car, and photos of a huge plastic bag in one of the stunted trees. Later, on my way back to my office on W. 166th Street, I stopped to take a photo of man who was selling nuts on the street in front of a burned-out building.  He smiled with tremendous pride—when I took him a copy of the photo a few weeks later, he grinned and said he’d send it to his mother so she would know he was trying to make something of himself. There were photos of the Stuyvesant High School students that I was mentoring for the Westinghouse Science Competition, and photos at home in Hoboken with my daughter Molly and some chocolate chip cookies fresh out of the oven. We were reading Ian Frazier’s New Yorker article about plastic bags in trees. I didn’t win the contest, but the exercise etched what I saw in memory.

The extreme commodification of the land is leading to the destruction of human habitat. It is inimical to public health to sell off our neighborhoods and displace our communities.
Harlem had been devastated by decades of policies of disinvestment. Walking the streets was a painful experience because so many of the buildings had been burned out, and garbage blew in the courtyards and rats ran in and out. Working people were struggling to control the neighborhood, but drugs and violence were the order of the day. Most of my research was focused on describing the problems in front of me—filling out our understanding of a terrible statistic reported in 1990 by Drs. Harold Freeman and Colin McCord: that a black man living in Harlem had a shorter life expectancy than a man in Bangalesh, at that time the poorest country on earth. Some of what I wanted to describe was the historical process that had stripped this neighborhood of its life-giving qualities. I was describing an unjust city.

The more I learned, the more I realized that urban policies were playing a critical role in the neighborhood’s collapse.  From the stories people told us, I hypothesized that Harlem had collapsed from a series of blows, each one undermining and deforming the social structure, so that death and disorder replaced hope and social productivity. As my colleagues at the Cities Research Group and I deepened our explorations, we were able to name the terrible series of policies—urban renewal, deindustrialization, planned shrinkage, mass incarceration, HOPE VI, the foreclosure crisis and gentrification—that have and continue to undermine poor and minority communities.

We’ve grouped these policies together under the rubric “serial forced displacement.” Displacement traumatizes people and destroys wealth of all kinds.  Repeated displacement takes even more of the wealth and integrity of the weakened population. As St. Matthew put it, “even what he has shall be taken away.” Through the lens of the agony of Harlem, I learned the somber fact that policies that destroy some communities and neighborhoods are catastrophic for the health of those in the direct path of the upheaval, but they also endanger the health of the whole of the US, and through us, the whole world.

Let us take one example, New York City’s implementation of the mid-1970s policy of “planned shrinkage.”  This policy was designed to manage “shrinking population” in the city by “internal resettlement” of people from very poor neighborhoods and clearing the land for later use.  Planned shrinkage was implemented by closing fire stations in those communities.  This triggered a storm of fires: South Bronx neighborhoods lost as much as 80 percent of housing; Harlem lost 30 percent.

We can trace many lines of disruption that rippled out from these epicenters of destruction. The upheaval caused massive social disorder and a “synergism of plagues,” as Rodrick Wallace called it.  What no one knew when the policy was implemented was that a new virus—which we now know as the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)—was present in the very poor neighborhoods. HIV began to spread in the South Bronx and other NYC communities.  The crack epidemic took hold, accompanied by massive violence, family disruption, and further spread of HIV infection. Mass incarceration was the federal response to the drug epidemic, unleashing an era of imprisonment that had horrific consequences for families and neighborhoods.  By 2015, The New York Times reported “1.5 million missing black men,” many in prison and others who had died prematurely. Population fell, families fell apart, unemployment grew, church attendance declined, and trauma became a nearly universal experience.

Having hypothesized the downward spiral of community collapse, my team and I realized we had to start searching for ways to rebuild. We worked first with families, then neighborhoods.  But we learned that the fate of neighborhoods rested in the hands of cities. A great deal of our attention has been directed at learning what actions cities could take to counter serial forced displacement and to rebuild the much-needed social bonds.

In 2007, I went to my hometown of Orange, NJ, for a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the fight against school desegregation.  My parents, Ernest and Margaret Thompson, had led that fight. My father went on to organize for the political representation long denied to the African-American population, then 20 percent of the city. In 1958, he and others in Citizens for Representative Government created the “New Day Platform,” which advocated for education, youth recreation, representative government and a more beautiful city hall, among other issues. Their work led to a more inclusive democracy and better schools for all children.

While planning for the celebration of Orange’s desegregation, I learned that a local community development corporation, HANDS, Inc. was continuing the work my father had pioneered.  It was fighting to protect local housing infrastructure and to rebuild community in the face of serial forced displacement. I became so interested in the city of Orange that in 2008 I co-founded the free people’s University of Orange along with Patrick Morrissy, Molly Rose Kaufman, Karen Wells and others.

The University of Orange has participated actively in planning efforts in the city.  The UofO lead the development of the Heart of Orange Plan, which became an official plan in 2010, endorsed by the state of New Jersey Department of Community Affairs, making the area eligible for tax credit monies.  We have also invited architects and urbanists from Columbia University, Parsons The New School for Design, Montclair State University and Pratt Institute to work with us to understand the city. We have slowly developed a sense of the city’s potentials and its vulnerabilities.

Orange grew at the foot of the Watchung Mountains, a crossroads of east-west and north-south movement, in the heart of the Lenapehoking.  Its excellent water and good transportation made it a natural site for industry. Hat making boomed after the Civil War, reaching a peak of 4.2 million hats a year in 1892.  The new bourgeoisie equipped the city with a Stanford White library on a busy Main Street, a Frederick Law Olmsted Park and housing enclave, dozens of churches and synagogues, two settlement houses and a park-like cemetery.  The African-Americans and Irish and Italian immigrants were tucked into ghettoes, their children sent to inferior public schools, while the well-to-do created superb schools and tracks for their own children to prosper.  The city is so packed with the best and worst of American urban accoutrements that the University of Orange has developed a signature tour, called “Everything You Want to Know About the American City You Can Learn in Orange, NJ.”  Orange has the advantage of being a small city, so visitors can see all of this in 2.2 square miles.

But Orange now, like many other postindustrial cities, is worn-out.  Sixty-five percent of the largely black population of 30,000 is poor and working poor. Many residents have immigrated from other countries and they speak a wide array of languages. Orange is a city in search of a future. In New Jersey, such places are being converted by “transit-oriented development,” which means the unskilled workers are being replaced by those who commute to Newark—or more likely New York—to work in finance, insurance and real estate, the FIRE industries post-industrial cities have come to rely on. Orange lies just a bit west of Hoboken, Jersey City and Harrison, FIRE cities already remodeled as dense bedroom communities.

For the people who live in Orange, transit-oriented development would be the next turn of the wheel of serial forced displacement. But it would also mean a loss of the complex vitality of people and institutions. Urban bedroom communities are monocultures, a variation on housing projects, albeit with better amenities.

At the University of Orange, we’ve posed the questions: Can’t we take a more interesting path? Can’t we develop new industries? Can’t we help the workforce acquire skills so that they can compete for higher paying jobs and therefore hold on to their homes when the gentry arrive? Couldn’t we combine of the idea of the civil rights movement’s Freedom Schools and Edison’s concept of the “Factory of Invention” to make a “post-industrial city reimaging lab”?

Some exciting opportunities have opened up that are helping everyone in Orange explore these possibilities. The John S. Watson Center at Thomas Edison State College has helped a consortium of cities, including Orange, develop an economic development strategy that will entitle the cities to apply for new federal funds.  The Board of Education, with the support of nearby Montclair State University, has been able to develop community schools, including adult education.  The University of Orange helps to manage the Adult School, which includes courses for workforce development. The Worldwide Orphans Foundation is bringing its first US-based toy library to Orange, and will be training local people to be toy librarians. At the U of O, we are partnering with a local arts organization and a university to understand how the insertion of a highway in 1970 might be mitigated. This project is supported by Arts Place. What we are learning as we go is that building the just city takes all of us.

When I learned of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation initiative focused on creating a culture of health in New Jersey, I convinced our local partners that we should apply for funding. The leaders of our “Healthy Orange” coalition will be expanding our connections to all sectors of business, industry and civic organizations and to all the ethnic and religious groups. Our leaders are insisting on engaging the current residents, which is critical in charting a path forward that is not another round of forced displacement. Instead of planning around this pattern of expulsion, we want to create a “plan to stay.”

This concept, first advanced by Catherine Brown and William Morrish, is the antidote to serial forced displacement.  Groups planning to stay are asked to answer two questions:

  • What brought you here?
  • What would it take for you to be able to stay?

These simple questions lead to the kind of complex interventions that have a shot at helping Orange become a healthy place. In the year ahead, I look forward to the work of Healthy Orange, as it brings all voices to the table to create a blueprint for action, continuing the long struggle for equity and democracy in our city. This is how we get to the just city in Orange and everywhere.

But I worry.  One night, in 2010, I was invited to speak in Harlem. I walked down St. Nicholas Avenue, and passed a brand new building.  A gym occupied its first floor and little white girls in pink tutus were doing ballet. I stood there slack-jawed, too stunned to even take a photograph. The old Harlem was truly gone.

It is not simply that I want to feel at home in my hometown—of course I do. Rather, I fear for all of us. The extreme commodification of the land is leading to the destruction of human habitat.  We are literally chopping the ground out from under our feet: it is inimical to public health to sell off our neighborhoods and displace our communities. The 1958 New Day Platform had it right. What we need for public health are ecologically-sensitive and equitable programs that support the whole city and give all of us a chance to live in a kind and beautiful place.

Mindy Thompson Fullilove
New York

 

The Just City Essays is a joint project of The J. Max Bond Center, Next City and The Nature of Cities. © 2015 All rights are reserved.

Creating Universal Goals for Universal Growth

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Introduction, Toni L. Griffin, Ariella Cohen and David Maddox Tearing down Invisible Walls Defining the Just City Beyond Black and White, Toni L. Griffin In It Together, Lesley Lokko Cape Town Pride. Cape Town Shame, Carla Sutherland Urban Spaces and the Mattering of Black Lives, Darnell Moore Ceci n'est pas une pipe: Unpacking Injustice in Paris, François Mancebo Reinvigorating Democracy Right to the City for All: A Manifesto for Social Justice in an Urban Century, Lorena Zárate How to Build a New Civic Infrastructure, Ben Hecht Turning to the Flip Side, Maruxa Cardama A Just City is Inconceivable without a Just Society, Marcelo Lopes de Souza Public Imagination, Citizenship and an Urgent Call for Justice, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman Designing for Agency Karachi and the Paralysis of Imagination, Mahim Maher Up from the Basement: The Artist and the Making of the Just City, Theaster Gates Justice that Serves People, Not Institutions, Mirna D. Goransky Resistance, Education and the Collective Will, Jack Travis Inclusive Growth The Case for All-In Cities, Angela Glover Blackwell A Democratic Infrastructure for Johannesburg, Benjamin Bradlow Creating Universal Goals for Universal Growth, Betsy Hodges The Long Ride, Scot T. Spencer Turning Migrant Workers into Citizens in Urbanizing China, Pengfei XIE The Big Detox  A City that is Blue, Green and Just All Over, Cecilia P. Herzog An Antidote for the Unjust City: Planning to Stay, Mindy Thompson Fullilove Justice from the Ground Up, Julie Bargmann Elevating Planning and Design Why Design Matters, Jason Schupbach Claiming Participation in Urban Planning and Design as a Right, P.K. Das Home Grown Justice in a Legacy City, Karen Freeman-Wilson Epilogue: Cities in Imagination, David Maddox
1.-HodgesThere is a difference between equality and equity. Equality says that everybody can participate in our success and equity says we need to make sure that everybody actually does participate in our success and in our growth. A just city is a city free from both inequity and inequality.

Growth for the sake of growth alone cannot solve inequality and inequity. But solving such inequalities and inequities can spur growth.
We pay a significant price for inequities—in the billions in our cities, in the trillions nationwide. Growth is commonly pointed to as a solution, but growth for the sake of growth alone cannot solve these inequalities and inequities. However, solving these inequalities and inequities gets us growth.

Inequities make our cities risky business ventures. We don’t have the workforce that we need because we are not getting everyone into the workforce; we don’t have the consumer base that we need because not everyone can afford to consume. It creates an atmosphere where people are hesitant to invest because they don’t know if they’re going to have the consumer base or the workforce base that they need.

My city of Minneapolis suffers from some of the largest racial disparities in America on almost any measure: Employment, housing, health, education, incarceration—the list goes on. For example, while 67 percent of white kids graduate on time from Minneapolis Public Schools, only 37 percent of African American and Latino kids do, and just 22 percent of American Indian kids. When you consider that in just a few years, a majority of Minneapolis’ population will be people of color, this disparity is economically unsustainable, in addition to being morally wrong.

Minneapolis is in the midst of a building boom; cranes dot the sky as far as the eye can see. But growth alone can’t solve our equity problem. It’s not turning Minneapolis into a just city, because our current growth doesn’t include everybody.  Even though our overall unemployment rate has declined, the gap between white people and people of color remains the same.

The moral of this story is that if your boat is leaky or you don’t have one to begin with, the rising tide can’t and won’t lift you.

In our just city we must accept that inclusive growth is a better strategy than growth alone. Inclusive growth means that your life outcome is not determined by your race, age, gender, or zip code. Inclusive growth means we aren’t leaving any genius on the table. To achieve this, we need two things: universal shared goals about what we want for ourselves as a people and as a community, and the policies that will ensure that people get there.

What is a universally shared goal? There are a lot of them in America: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for starters, or dignity for our senior citizens through a safe retirement (Social Security) and accessible, affordable health care (Medicare). Often, we don’t even have to voice shared goals such as these to know that we all want them.

As mayor, one of my jobs is to help make sure that everybody in our community shares our goals as a city and has a say in the goal. Residents must understand that there’s something in it for them. When there’s something in it for everyone, everyone wants that something—and inclusive growth offers something for everyone.

For instance, in my region of Minneapolis–Saint Paul, if we eliminated all disparities by 2040, our regional planning agency estimates that 274,000 fewer people would live in poverty, 171,000 more people would have high school diplomas, 124,000 more people would have jobs—and all of us would benefit from $31.8 billion dollars more in personal income. The same pattern holds true globally—the International Monetary Fund found that for every 10 percent decrease in inequality, the length of periods of economic growth increase by 50 percent. So if we reduce our inequalities, we will grow faster and for longer than if we had done nothing at all. In America, we could add $1.2 trillion to our economy by eliminating inequity. Inclusive growth should be a shared goal—and must be one, if we are truly committed to building a just city.

Inclusive growth requires that we tailor our policies. Let’s say we have a goal: We want everybody to be able to look over a six-foot fence to see a ball game. Folks that are over six feet tall are going to be able to see over that fence without a problem, but because I’m short, I’m going to need a box to stand on to be able to look over that fence.

If we are all invested in making sure that everybody reaches a goal, because we know there’s something in it for all of us—whether we are white people, high-income people, people of color, or lower-income people—then we need to tailor policies to make sure that that happens. The great news is that we have tools to help make this happen.

Education spurs growth—and according to the Federal Reserve, there is a 15-17 percent return on investment for education in early childhood. It is one of the many reasons I started my Cradle to K initiative, which is focused on getting kids aged zero to three the brain development they need so they don’t begin their education at a severe, and often times insurmountable, disadvantage. The initiative is working on closing the word gap, parent involvement, early childhood screening, and improved mental health services.  Now if you couple that with access to affordable childcare, which allows parents to participate in the workforce, and if that childcare becomes child development-centered childcare, you get a win: parents participate in the workforce, and kids get the development-centered childcare that will help them succeed. We can all support that.

In Minneapolis, we are also spending a fair amount of time on removing obstacles that keep people from participating in the workforce and in shared success. For example, we are participating in initiatives like President Obama’s TechHire to make sure people have the right training for the jobs that are available.

Another priority is connecting people to jobs. The data shows that investment in transit creates 31 percent more jobs than investment in roads and bridges, so we are focusing on transit as tool for growth. In Minneapolis and Saint Paul, $2 billion dollars’ worth of private investment was generated around our light rail green line before it even opened in 2014. Transit not only gets people to jobs, but bring jobs to people. That green line light rail serves some of the poorest neighborhoods in Saint Paul, and that development is going where that development is needed most. It’s a tailored strategy that is getting us to our overall goal: people being able to participate in growth.

Entrepreneurship, too, spurs growth. Another one of our universal goals is to dismantle Byzantine barriers to investing in small business. Our Open for Business Minneapolis initiative has completed a stem-to-stern review of all the regulations governing small businesses in Minneapolis to make sure that we’re eliminating the obstacles and we’re getting rid of the roadblocks like unnecessary background checks for specific licenses and increasing the number of inspectors serving the city. Taking this kind of action is good for anyone who wants to invest or develop in our city. It reduces obstacles for everyone. But it especially reduces obstacles for, and spurs investment among, entrepreneurs of color and immigrant entrepreneurs—which spurs growth for everyone, because we know that entrepreneurship in immigrant communities and communities of color is growing far faster than white entrepreneurship.

When it comes to creating a just city, cities alone can’t do it, counties alone can’t do it, the federal government alone can’t do it. We all have to be working to build the relationships and partnerships with advocates, business leaders, federal and state delegations to make sure that we have the same universal goals and that we’re working together to get the ships sailing in the same direction. Building true partnerships across sectors and communities is the hardest thing we have to do, but it’s also the most powerful.

As Mayor it is my job to have the vision. But visions are worthless if you can’t build coalitions necessary to make them realities. Every day I work hard to bring people to the table, to make sure that all voices are not only being represented but heard. I also strongly believe in leading by example. I personally aim to set the standard for inclusive growth. My office is a living testament to what we can achieve.

We are not going to be able to grow our way into equity, but we can leverage equitable strategies to achieve growth. And once we achieve that, we will have a just city.

Mayor Betsy Hodges
Minneapolis

 

The Just City Essays is a joint project of The J. Max Bond Center, Next City and The Nature of Cities. © 2015 All rights are reserved.

Justice that Serves People, Not Institutions

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Introduction, Toni L. Griffin, Ariella Cohen and David Maddox Tearing down Invisible Walls Defining the Just City Beyond Black and White, Toni L. Griffin In It Together, Lesley Lokko Cape Town Pride. Cape Town Shame, Carla Sutherland Urban Spaces and the Mattering of Black Lives, Darnell Moore Ceci n'est pas une pipe: Unpacking Injustice in Paris, François Mancebo Reinvigorating Democracy Right to the City for All: A Manifesto for Social Justice in an Urban Century, Lorena Zárate How to Build a New Civic Infrastructure, Ben Hecht Turning to the Flip Side, Maruxa Cardama A Just City is Inconceivable without a Just Society, Marcelo Lopes de Souza Public Imagination, Citizenship and an Urgent Call for Justice, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman Designing for Agency Karachi and the Paralysis of Imagination, Mahim Maher Up from the Basement: The Artist and the Making of the Just City, Theaster Gates Justice that Serves People, Not Institutions, Mirna D. Goransky Resistance, Education and the Collective Will, Jack Travis Inclusive Growth The Case for All-In Cities, Angela Glover Blackwell A Democratic Infrastructure for Johannesburg, Benjamin Bradlow Creating Universal Goals for Universal Growth, Betsy Hodges The Long Ride, Scot T. Spencer Turning Migrant Workers into Citizens in Urbanizing China, Pengfei XIE The Big Detox  A City that is Blue, Green and Just All Over, Cecilia P. Herzog An Antidote for the Unjust City: Planning to Stay, Mindy Thompson Fullilove Justice from the Ground Up, Julie Bargmann Elevating Planning and Design Why Design Matters, Jason Schupbach Claiming Participation in Urban Planning and Design as a Right, P.K. Das Home Grown Justice in a Legacy City, Karen Freeman-Wilson Epilogue: Cities in Imagination, David Maddox
10. GoranskyThe purpose of this essay is to share some considerations about the meaning of “just City” from the perspective of a lawyer dedicated to the reform of justice administration and, in particular, to the design of systems that promote, encourage and facilitate the approach of justice for the people. This historically means not only a change in the rules and culture but also a change in the design of the spaces in which justice is administered.

A just city is only achieved when its inhabitants have a sense of belonging, respect for the rights of others and for the place in which they live.
It is also written from the perspective of a city dweller from Buenos Aires, a city in which more than 3 million people live, and where 1.2 million cars and 1.2 million people in public transportation arrive every day from the suburbs. Traffic and traffic violations are one of the most serious problems and affect our everyday life in a dramatic way.

The guiding principle of these reflections is that a just city is only achieved when its inhabitants have a sense of belonging, respect for the rights of others and for the place in which they live. In no other aspect is this clearer than in transit, in which the disregard for the laws brings enormous cost not only in human lives but also can easily become a very heavy burden in everyday life, in which aggression and lawbreakers are the norm. For example, in Argentina it can be said that traffic rules are not respected and more than 7,000 people die each year in traffic accidents, and more than 120,000 are injured in varying degrees. This is one of the highest rates of mortality from traffic accidents and is significantly higher when compared with the rates of other countries in relation to their population and number of cars.

When I think of a just city there are some general issues that arise and are central to its development. First, is the need for an equitable distribution of resources among all the people and neighborhoods, in accordance to fairness.  Fairness does not necessarily mean equal amounts of money everywhere but an adequate amount of resources to ensure that people from all parts of the city have the same opportunities to enjoy the benefits of community life, including access to education, health, safety, justice, etc.

On the other hand, is important to assure the participation of all inhabitants in the management and administration of the city. A just city always has different ways to encourage its citizens to participate in the discussion of the problems that affect them and in the process of decision-making. Therefore there are accessible public spaces designed to appeal to neighbors and to foster community life.

In particular, a just city is a city in which everyone respects the general rules of coexistence, where respect of others and the environment is a shared value. This means some basic things, like speed limits and throwing trash into trashcans and much more complicated matters.

What is important though is that people follow the rules of the city because they recognize the city and its rules as theirs. This is why is so important to have a system that allows people to move around in a friendly environment, otherwise we will have a dangerous, aggressive and corrupt city — corruption starts with small bribes to transit agents.

A just city is also a place where everybody lives safely and the rights of all are respected. That means that ensuring security should not come at the cost of disregarding privacy and intimacy. With accessible new monitoring technologies, the boundaries between privacy and security become complicated. While having a camera on the dashboard of every police vehicle seems like a good idea, the over-extension of surveillance should be at the center of the debate between politicians and inhabitants if we are going to build a just city. Sometimes better lights, more illumination, are all we need to make ours streets more secure and to invite people to walk around at night.

And a just city is conceived and designed for their people to have a simple, economic and fast access to the different areas of public administration. In particular, those responsible for the administration of justice: police, courts, prosecutors, defenders, prisons, etc. The design of each court, each police department and each place of incarceration deserves special attention to ensure that they serve their purpose. For example, the courts must allow the public to sit comfortably and see the way justice is done; the places of incarcerations must assure the dignity of the prisoners; the police departments needs places where victims of crimes can be properly heard, protected and assisted.

Very often judicial buildings are chosen and designed by lawyers formed in systems where justice is kept away from the people. Consequently the buildings are located and designed to meet the needs of those who administer justice and not to those who need justice. Often these buildings and offices are true labyrinths inaccessible for regular people. For example, in Buenos Aires, the Federal Building is far for everything and there is nothing around it — no place to meet people, to have a coffee, is dangerous at night, etc. Buenos Aries’ Justice Palace is a complicated labyrinth were visitors routinely get lost. Only a few years ago an NGO won a case that ordered ramps be built for disabled people entering the building.

In a just city, justice is at the service of the people and with that purpose there is a network of public transportation that communicate all the public services with the different areas of the city, has understandable signs to facilitate the access to the different offices, and has systems that enable the access of people with different capacities. That is why is so important to decentralize the courts and the prosecutors’ offices. Years ago I was in charge of a unit that lead programs in connecting the prosecutors with the community, in the reorganization of the Prosecutors Institution and in the launch of the first-ever decentralized prosecutors office in Buenos Aires. The main goal of all these projects was to strengthen the idea that justice is a public service and to work with people of other disciplines to design institutions that fulfill the needs of all.

And last but not least, a just city is a city that chooses to remember and share its history with the generations to come and exhibits its past in memory sites, in public places in which, at the same time, democratic values ​​and human rights are promoted. In Argentina there are many places where we can learn about what happened during the dictatorship that ruled my country from 1976 to 1983. Clandestine centers of detention where people was detained, tortured and killed are now museums or memorial sites that allow us to know what happened and to say that this will never happened again, never more.

Mirna D. Goransky
Buenos Aires

The Just City Essays is a joint project of The J. Max Bond Center, Next City and The Nature of Cities. © 2015 All rights are reserved.

A Democratic Infrastructure for Johannesburg

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Introduction, Toni L. Griffin, Ariella Cohen and David Maddox Tearing down Invisible Walls Defining the Just City Beyond Black and White, Toni L. Griffin In It Together, Lesley Lokko Cape Town Pride. Cape Town Shame, Carla Sutherland Urban Spaces and the Mattering of Black Lives, Darnell Moore Ceci n'est pas une pipe: Unpacking Injustice in Paris, François Mancebo Reinvigorating Democracy Right to the City for All: A Manifesto for Social Justice in an Urban Century, Lorena Zárate How to Build a New Civic Infrastructure, Ben Hecht Turning to the Flip Side, Maruxa Cardama A Just City is Inconceivable without a Just Society, Marcelo Lopes de Souza Public Imagination, Citizenship and an Urgent Call for Justice, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman Designing for Agency Karachi and the Paralysis of Imagination, Mahim Maher Up from the Basement: The Artist and the Making of the Just City, Theaster Gates Justice that Serves People, Not Institutions, Mirna D. Goransky Resistance, Education and the Collective Will, Jack Travis Inclusive Growth The Case for All-In Cities, Angela Glover Blackwell A Democratic Infrastructure for Johannesburg, Benjamin Bradlow Creating Universal Goals for Universal Growth, Betsy Hodges The Long Ride, Scot T. Spencer Turning Migrant Workers into Citizens in Urbanizing China, Pengfei XIE The Big Detox  A City that is Blue, Green and Just All Over, Cecilia P. Herzog An Antidote for the Unjust City: Planning to Stay, Mindy Thompson Fullilove Justice from the Ground Up, Julie Bargmann Elevating Planning and Design Why Design Matters, Jason Schupbach Claiming Participation in Urban Planning and Design as a Right, P.K. Das Home Grown Justice in a Legacy City, Karen Freeman-Wilson Epilogue: Cities in Imagination, David Maddox
15. BradlowThere are two main legacies that define urban inequality in South Africa: housing and transport. Apartheid was not only a racial ideology. It was also a spatial planning ideology.

Johannesburg’s development into a wealthy, white core of business and residential activity, with peripheral black dormitory townships, was a result of specific legislation and government action accountable only to white citizens. Black people were confined to houses in townships that had little economic value. Black townships were synonymous with urban poverty. These houses were far away from business activity and jobs. As population movement controls eroded in the late 1980s, informal settlements began to concentrate next to formal townships. The story of Johannesburg, the financial center of South Africa, can help understand how the struggle to build these connections defines the extent to which Johannesburg can be considered “just.”

Key is linking opportunities for expression of political will beyond the ballot box to policies concerning the distribution of resources for which the public can both advocate and hold authorities accountable.
Today, Johannesburg offers unique insights into the prospects for other cities in Africa. This is not because most cities in Africa are similar to or are likely to become similar to Johannesburg. But Johannesburg has a basic historical characteristic that resembles that of many African cities: it was planned for inequality. Johannesburg’s uniqueness also marks it as a lodestar for other African cities. It is a meeting point of migrants from all over the continent, and an economic engine of growth on the continent. These flows of people, money, and goods, in and out of the city, mean that the impact of the city is continental.

The notion of a just city in Africa will have to accommodate the extent to which the hopes of earlier generations of social scientists and policy-makers for rural-led development on the continent have now been rendered moot by economic patterns that are both global and local. In Johannesburg, one of the most industrialized cities on the African continent has become a magnet for rural South Africans, and international migrants from other African countries. The primary infrastructural challenge is not only about identifying technical shortcomings or mere numbers of delivery. It is about generating the voice from below to demand that infrastructure reach those who need it most, and to ensure the political will to manage contentious distributional decisions about land and public finances.

I want to show why this is so difficult, and how, in order to make the decisions that are “just,” we need to first make sense of the history that lies behind those decisions.

To consider the meaning of a “just city” is not a new endeavor. Cities have been sites of struggle for as long as humans have realized advantages to living and working close together. But the gains to urban agglomeration are founded on major infrastructural needs. A fundamental role for government institutions in cities has been to provide the basic services and infrastructure such as water, sewers, roads, and trash collection, which are required for the health and opportunity of the people who live in cities. Building the infrastructure of a just city requires a consideration of the political relationships that underpin what might otherwise seem like a simple question of technical engineering.

Behind infrastructure lies the basic consideration of a just city: politics. And the stakes are always high. To those with easy access to land, services, and infrastructure, both health and economic opportunity are much easier to come by than to those who must navigate life in the city without basic services and economic infrastructure.

Often, proposals to address the severe strain on services and infrastructure that characterize the rapid urbanization process in the Global South fall into three not entirely distinct categories. (1) The state should provide through big, top-down plans; (2) the market should provide through privately-funded infrastructure that addresses business needs; (3) communities of urban residents should provide through self-help mechanisms because of failures of both the state and the market.

Though I have observed and participated in such debates in cities throughout Africa over the last 5 years as an urban planning professional and researcher, I am disheartened at how little the debate seems to be moving towards generating practical processes for achieving meaningful scale of delivery of services and infrastructure. This is especially alarming when one considers the persistent growth of inequality and exclusion in cities, which are the primary hope for improving health and economic outcomes.

In this essay I propose a basic barometer of just city-making that can help move beyond old debates that have resulted in benefits for a few and a persistent struggle for the many in African cities. In short, the extent to which a city is just will depend on the extent to which a city has the institutional mechanisms to effectively connect the state with both the market and ordinary residents.

The ballot is only democracy in its crudest form. A city that moves towards more “just” outcomes anticipates both conflict and collaboration with representative groups of various segments and interests of society. These social groupings express themselves not merely during periodic elections. Without effective connections between the state and residents, cities will struggle to have the information and political will to address their infrastructural requirements in order to access health and opportunity. Likewise, without effective connections between the state and the market, cities will find it difficult to create the conditions for privately sourced investments that address public needs.

We are faced with what is, in practice, an often confusing cycle: just processes will depend on just outcomes, and just outcomes will depend on just processes. Primarily, this means linking opportunities for expression of political will beyond the ballot box to policies concerning the distribution of resources for which the public can both advocate and hold authorities accountable.

When South Africa made the transition to parliamentary democracy in 1994, municipal government structures across the country were in flux. After the first elections, a delayed process of urbanization took flight. On the one hand, new migrants from rural areas heralded an explosion of informal settlements near black townships and in the traditional central business district. On the other hand, new inflows of private investment heralded an explosion of new shopping malls and corporate offices that sprawled northwards. Taken together, these two processes strained the existing infrastructural capacities of the city.

While talk of infrastructure often foregrounds considerations of engineering and construction, the changes brought on by population growth and private development highlighted considerations that were not technical, but political. The challenge of the past two decades has been to link hard infrastructural investments to pathways to economic opportunity for the poor majority still excluded from so many of the benefits of the city. In Johannesburg, a municipal government designed to serve only white residents, was progressively merged with neighboring municipalities to integrate overwhelmingly poor black townships with much more affluent and white areas. In the early 1990s, a semi-formal body known as the Metropolitan Chamber represented a possibility of constructing a post-Apartheid city that would highlight principles of equity. Some community groups, key NGOs, business leaders, and officials from all local municipalities in the Johannesburg region, all sat together to develop a participatory vision of possible spatial transformation of the city. While some community-based activists have complained to me that this institution was not wholly inclusive of all parties in the city, it did produce a plan that represented a significant integration of a city planned to exclude, especially through public transport and more inclusionary location of public housing.

By 2000, the city was formally amalgamated into a metropolitan municipality, which unified the tax bases of poor and rich areas. In interviews that I have conducted with private developers who work in different areas of the city, the overwhelming majority report next to no interaction with city authorities on planning matters prior to the amalgamation of five separate municipal authorities into the metro municipality in 2000. Likewise, city officials note that no spatial development framework existed for the city until 2003, and that spatial planning was more or less a dirty word up to that point, because spatial planning was the essence of Apartheid planning. A fiscal crisis in the city in 1997-98 led to a corporate reorganization of the city that ring fenced departmental budgets, which created a number of municipal-owned entities for electricity, trash, and roads. While this solved a short-term financial crunch, it meant that operational management of the city was increasingly fragmented.

Most significant is that grassroots organization has diminished in the past 20 years. Community-based activism was strong in Johannesburg in late 1980s and early 1990s, helping to bring down Apartheid through rent boycotts, strikes, and protests against illegitimate “local authorities” in black township areas. The civics movement, as the community-based activist groups were known, had joined hands with the trade union federation COSATU to form the United Democratic Front (UDF), the most significant part of the internal struggle to bring down Apartheid. When leaders of the ANC returned from exile, they resolved to dissolve the UDF. Civic movements and organizations, which had once comprised a large part of the UDF, struggled to survive as the new, democratically-elected government, led by the African National Congress, pledged to deliver what was essentially a technical fix: housing and services for all. It was difficult to organize without an obvious common enemy, especially when so much has been promised.

Yet, despite great success in terms of the technical scale of delivery, so much of post-Apartheid opportunity in Johannesburg remains linked to where one lives. The South African government has built over 2 million houses across the country in the past 21 years. But the scale of need in cities, especially in the fast growing urban centers like Johannesburg, has grown faster. There are an estimated 180 informal settlements in Johannesburg today. Moreover, the public housing investments that have been made, are primarily located far away from economic opportunity. Building large amounts of housing on cheap land makes it easier to achieve scale in delivery, but compounds the spatial legacies of Apartheid. Despite major public investments in basic infrastructure in township areas in Johannesburg, especially in the southern parts of the city like Soweto, only some retail development, and no major corporate development, has followed.

Absent effective state intervention or well-directed public investment in infrastructure, developers have told me that they sought cheap land, producing spatial change in the city that is uncoordinated and encourages single use. The sprawl northwards has stretched the bulk infrastructure of the city, which depresses the possible effects of significant public investment. The city has been unable to build or encourage more inclusionary precincts based on principles of mixed-use, high-density, and mixed housing.

The state, developers, and community organizations have progressively moved apart at the same time that only strong political will could have reduced the spatial gap that defines post-Apartheid inequality. Across the city, opportunity literally evades the poor by virtue of their distance from jobs.

The current city government has plans for public transport-led development to stitch together the divided city. The mayor, Parks Tau, calls this plan the “Corridors of Freedom,” in which projects like a bus rapid transit system will make it cheaper and quicker for poor workers in township areas to reach their places of employment. The city plans to use its own land holdings and is buying up land around the corridors linking townships to business nodes. But it will be difficult for the city to reshape the property market along these corridors using only its existing land holdings. Tools to incentivize development, such as tax increment financing, and cross-subsidization of market-rate development for more affordable development are still embryonic. The uncertain political will to direct land and public finances toward a more equitable development trajectory remains at the heart of the urban infrastructure story of Johannesburg. It is difficult for civil society groups to coalesce around a citywide vision for inclusion in the city because of a historical institutional trajectory that has fragmented planning responsibilities and progressively shut down opportunities for public deliberation.

Johannesburg’s future prospects hinge on the same issues that define other rapidly urbanizing cities and city-regions on the continent. Indeed, the infrastructural deficits are even greater in most other major African metropolises than those in Johannesburg. Every city has its own particular stories and trajectories. Yet, there is a general thread that emerges from the experience in Johannesburg—especially for other rapidly urbanizing contexts—across Africa. These are contexts in which the demands for new infrastructure to accommodate new urban residents dovetail with severe inequalities due to historical legacies. In this sense, the challenge of urban development in African cities is to create the institutional spaces for deliberation and democracy that can enable civil society to articulate a vision of citywide change. This voice and this vision will be the basis of capable institutions of urban governance to actually deliver this change.

African urban futures are not wholly path-dependent. But technical fixes alone will not solve the highly consequential challenges of what is emerging as Africa’s first urban century. A half a century ago, people in many countries on the continent struggled for the end to colonial rule. Now there is a new basis of struggle for opportunity: urban space and infrastructure.

The gap between the slum and the gated villa is characteristic of African urban development today. This makes the deficit of “democratic infrastructure” a fundamental issue. Inclusion, equity, and justice, in Africa, will be defined by how social demands for infrastructure and spatial integration in the city are both articulated and realized.

Benjamin Bradlow
Boston

The Just City Essays is a joint project of The J. Max Bond Center, Next City and The Nature of Cities. © 2015 All rights are reserved.

Cape Town Pride. Cape Town Shame

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Introduction, Toni L. Griffin, Ariella Cohen and David Maddox Tearing down Invisible Walls Defining the Just City Beyond Black and White, Toni L. Griffin In It Together, Lesley Lokko Cape Town Pride. Cape Town Shame, Carla Sutherland Urban Spaces and the Mattering of Black Lives, Darnell Moore Ceci n'est pas une pipe: Unpacking Injustice in Paris, François Mancebo Reinvigorating Democracy Right to the City for All: A Manifesto for Social Justice in an Urban Century, Lorena Zárate How to Build a New Civic Infrastructure, Ben Hecht Turning to the Flip Side, Maruxa Cardama A Just City is Inconceivable without a Just Society, Marcelo Lopes de Souza Public Imagination, Citizenship and an Urgent Call for Justice, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman Designing for Agency Karachi and the Paralysis of Imagination, Mahim Maher Up from the Basement: The Artist and the Making of the Just City, Theaster Gates Justice that Serves People, Not Institutions, Mirna D. Goransky Resistance, Education and the Collective Will, Jack Travis Inclusive Growth The Case for All-In Cities, Angela Glover Blackwell A Democratic Infrastructure for Johannesburg, Benjamin Bradlow Creating Universal Goals for Universal Growth, Betsy Hodges The Long Ride, Scot T. Spencer Turning Migrant Workers into Citizens in Urbanizing China, Pengfei XIE The Big Detox  A City that is Blue, Green and Just All Over, Cecilia P. Herzog An Antidote for the Unjust City: Planning to Stay, Mindy Thompson Fullilove Justice from the Ground Up, Julie Bargmann Elevating Planning and Design Why Design Matters, Jason Schupbach Claiming Participation in Urban Planning and Design as a Right, P.K. Das Home Grown Justice in a Legacy City, Karen Freeman-Wilson Epilogue: Cities in Imagination, David Maddox
21.-SutherlandI have lived in an array of fascinating cities, and visited a host of others. I have loved many (New York, Hong Kong, Harare and Berlin); been miserable in a few (London and Pretoria); oddly disappointed by some (San Francisco, Dublin and Sydney) overwhelmed by others (Shanghai and Cairo); and frankly terrified by at least two (Port Moresby and Lagos).

There is a growing impatience that 20 years after democratic elections in South Africa, Cape Town remains smugly indifferent to the vast gap in lived experiences within its city boundaries.
But there’s only one city I have ever really called home: Cape Town. When asked where I am from, I never say “South Africa,” always just “Cape Town.”  Despite the fact that I have not lived there for the past 15 years, it remains my cultural and geographical touchstone. Last year, the New York Times and the Sunday Telegraph both named Cape Town as the most desirable city in the world to visit:

You can go almost anywhere to experience the city’s in-your-face beauty—adrenalin junkies plunge into the marine-rich waters around Dyer Island to go nose-to-nose with Great Whites; shoppers scour Woodstock for the latest in Afro-chic design, then quench their thirst with local craft beer; foodies are spoilt for choice in valleys carpeted with vines, where world-class chefs prepare Michelin-rated fare at bargain prices.[1]

And much of that is true. Each time I return to Cape Town, I think to myself, “it can’t be as beautiful as I remember.” But when I sweep over the curve of Mandela Boulevard, and begin the descent to the City Bowl, I always catch my breath in wonder.  On the left, Table Mountain with a rolling white table-cloth of cloud; the pink evening sea-skyline broken only by the umbrella cranes of the harbor on the right, and our brooding Lion’s Head on Signal Hill peering down over the multi-colored houses of Bo-Kaap and District Six.

Sadly though, my home-city, like many a family home, is deeply dysfunctional. Putting on its Sunday best for visitors, it works hard to sweep undesirable realities under the carpet. In particular, this means hiding family members who can’t (or won’t) be part of its pretty facade, behind closed doors.

One of the most persistent legacies of apartheid is its geography. This is particularly true in Cape Town. Many descriptions of the city begin with a plane sweeping majestically over Table Mountain, and then effortlessly leap-frog into the natural beauty surrounding the Afro-chic of the city center. Hardly ever is a mention made of the informal settlements surrounding the airport:  the tin shacks of Cross Roads, that are home to around one in four residents of Cape Town. No comment is made about the soul-destroying legacy of the ‘Coloured’ (mixed race) population group’s housing under apartheid: sullen, concrete hostels that pepper the sides of the highway into town, and continue to sustain the drug-fueled gangster culture that is largely responsible for making Cape Town one of the murder capitals of the world.  Driving instructions to the ‘must visit’ Cape Wine Lands seldom refer to the dusty Cape Flats you’ll pass along the way—home to the estimated 100,000 gang members of Cape Town—or to Khyalitsha township, Cape Town’s Soweto, hidden behind barren windswept dunes. Little more than 20 minutes from the city center, they are a world apart from the ‘craft beers of Woodstock’ and the ‘Michelin-rated fare at bargain prices’.

Like white South Africans under apartheid, the geography of Cape Town enables visiting tourists the opportunity to see only what they want to. This is especially so for ‘gay Cape Town’. Centered around the tiny, privileged enclave of De Waterkant, the annual week-long Cape Town Pride celebrations are deservedly a firm fixture on the global gay agenda.  On a continent in which 34 countries (out of a total of 52) outlaw homosexuality, five with the death penalty, Cape Town has come to be called the ‘Gay Mecca of Africa’. Embracing this designation is a conspicuous part of the city’s carefully curated global image of a city that celebrates diversity and prides itself on opportunity, equality and justice for all.

My vision of a ‘just Cape Town’, however, is one that shifts this from being (at best) an aspirational intention or (at worst) cynical marketing to something that is real and genuine for more than just the wealthy, mostly male, overwhelmingly white participants that currently flock from across South Africa and around the world to attend Pride events such as the Millionaire’s Ball and Beach Sports Day. Such activities suggest that the struggle for visibility, dignity, respect and safety are well and long won for queer people in the city. While this is true for the small minority that live and visit the city bowl and surrounding historically white suburbs, it is certainly not so for gay, lesbian and gender non-conforming township residents, squeezed into the less lauded and visited parts of greater Cape Town.

There is a growing impatience that 20 years after democratic elections in South Africa, Cape Town remains smugly indifferent to the vast gap in lived experiences within its city boundaries. During pride week, for instance, not even lip-service is paid to the fact that township based NGOs estimate that at least 10 lesbians are raped each week, to punish them for transgressing gender norms and boundaries. If even one of these vicious acts happened in or around De Waterkant, the response would an outraged howl for action. But most of these rapes happen behind the windswept dunes of Khayelitsha or in the darkened tin shacks of Cross Roads, so no speeches or protests are made about that devastating reality during Pride. No demands are made on the City Council to work towards improving policing, housing and transport for vulnerable sexual minorities who are protected, at least in name, by the national constitution, which however flawed still sets South Africa apart from the state-sanctioned homophobia of most countries on the continent.

For me, building a just Cape Town would involve transforming Pride from being a week of parties and celebrations to becoming a year-long campaign to make Cape Town a safe and welcoming space for all queer people. Central to such a process would need to be queer people themselves. Grassroots LGBTI organizations have a deep knowledge of challenges facing queer people outside of historically white apartheid Cape Town. Such knowledge is a critical resource to plot what is needed to transform Cape Town. The wealthy party crowd that makes up much of Pride has an enviable level of social capital that could open doors, networks and resources to profoundly influence urban planning and development in Cape Town.  But experience has shown that being queer has not in itself provided enough cohesiveness or empathy to overcome the differences caused by other factors such as race, class, and gender.  Repeated attempts to change Pride, almost since its inception, have collapsed in acrimony with organizers’ protests about the need to deliver on events that will appeal to essential corporate sponsors being dismissed amid accusations of racism and deliberate exclusion.

What might help to overcome this impasse?  I think some of the most creative development and transformation approaches being explored in South Africa, and indeed across the continent and the global South, are focused on ways in which city (rather than national) policies can promote greater social integration and advancement for vulnerable and excluded groups. But I have found no documentation that looks at how sexual minorities can be included in this cutting edge thinking.

But then, neither have I have seen much evidence of LGBTI organizations linking their struggles to other equally compelling social justice issues. For instance, it’s an oft-cited statistic that in South Africa poor girls are more likely to be raped than to finish school, such is the pervasive endemic of gender based violence. In such a context, it makes little sense to seek solutions specifically for “lesbian rape”.

Hence, I am convinced that if we are to ever build a Cape Town that truly welcomes, celebrates and protects all her queer residents, that the starting point needs to be to a recognition that single-issue, identity politics simply doesn’t work in profoundly unequal and systemically violent cities. That in such spaces, addressing the needs of one vulnerable and marginalized group cannot hope to bring about the structural transformation that is required to ensure a life free of fear, stigma and discrimination.

So I recognize that for my vision of a just Cape Town to become a reality it will need to involve a real rainbow coalition of the marginalized, excluded, exploited and abused.  n other words, a coalition with the capacity to speak to the needs of not only queer people, but also the aged, the homeless, the unemployed, victims of gender based violence (particularly women and children), and migrants.

Now that would be a Pride worth attending.

Carla Sutherland
Cape Town

 

The Just City Essays is a joint project of The J. Max Bond Center, Next City and The Nature of Cities. © 2015 All rights are reserved.

 

Notes

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/citybreaks/11271025/The-worlds-best-cities.html

A City That Is Blue, Green and Just All Over

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Introduction, Toni L. Griffin, Ariella Cohen and David Maddox Tearing down Invisible Walls Defining the Just City Beyond Black and White, Toni L. Griffin In It Together, Lesley Lokko Cape Town Pride. Cape Town Shame, Carla Sutherland Urban Spaces and the Mattering of Black Lives, Darnell Moore Ceci n'est pas une pipe: Unpacking Injustice in Paris, François Mancebo Reinvigorating Democracy Right to the City for All: A Manifesto for Social Justice in an Urban Century, Lorena Zárate How to Build a New Civic Infrastructure, Ben Hecht Turning to the Flip Side, Maruxa Cardama A Just City is Inconceivable without a Just Society, Marcelo Lopes de Souza Public Imagination, Citizenship and an Urgent Call for Justice, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman Designing for Agency Karachi and the Paralysis of Imagination, Mahim Maher Up from the Basement: The Artist and the Making of the Just City, Theaster Gates Justice that Serves People, Not Institutions, Mirna D. Goransky Resistance, Education and the Collective Will, Jack Travis Inclusive Growth The Case for All-In Cities, Angela Glover Blackwell A Democratic Infrastructure for Johannesburg, Benjamin Bradlow Creating Universal Goals for Universal Growth, Betsy Hodges The Long Ride, Scot T. Spencer Turning Migrant Workers into Citizens in Urbanizing China, Pengfei XIE The Big Detox  A City that is Blue, Green and Just All Over, Cecilia P. Herzog An Antidote for the Unjust City: Planning to Stay, Mindy Thompson Fullilove Justice from the Ground Up, Julie Bargmann Elevating Planning and Design Why Design Matters, Jason Schupbach Claiming Participation in Urban Planning and Design as a Right, P.K. Das Home Grown Justice in a Legacy City, Karen Freeman-Wilson Epilogue: Cities in Imagination, David Maddox
11. HerzogSince humans settled about 10,000 years ago, we have significantly altered and explored the landscape to create the civilization we now have. The landscape has been a source of material and non-material resources, feeding us in all senses. Ecologically rich landscapes associated with technologies were essential for all societies to emerge. The shape of landscapes along our history, have reflected how we produce our habitat and the goods that sustain us, our economies, and the way we live and relate to each other.

Every single urban dweller deserves the right to green landscapes—safe and healthy with trees and clean waters, silent and peaceful.
What do I mean by “landscape?” Landscape is the outcome of human interventions and natural processes and flows that transform environments along time; they are a dynamic and continuous change in urban, suburban and rural areas. The result is a mosaic of gray (buildings and infrastructure—transportation, water, sewage, and energy systems), and green and open areas (ecosystem remnants; parks and squares; rivers, lakes and ocean fronts; urban trees; green roofs and walls and so on). Urban landscape is where we live, work, play, learn, create and get together. Therefore, healthy urban landscapes are indispensable for just cities.

Healthy landscapes are multifunctional and biophilic—they prioritize people and biodiversity over other uses—and are closely correlated with human’s physical, mental and spiritual health and well being. For instance, in Boston, the Emerald Necklace was conceived in the late 19th Century to regenerate the polluted industrial city. It is an early example of a green infrastructure along the Muddy River that connects parks, squares, the Jamaica Lake, and the first built wetland. After more than a century, the greenway protects the river from diffuse pollution, erosion and rainwater run-off, biodiversity thrives and people move and have multiple passive and active activities. So, there are genuine intrinsic material and non-material values of a green-blue landscape.

Why is that? I believe we need nature in our lives, and the landscape we live in and access everyday matters a lot! Every single urban dweller has the right to such green landscapes—safe and healthy with trees and clean waters, silent and peaceful. Ecological components (parks, squares, green streets, community gardens, green school yards etc.) should be distributed in the urban tissue, accessible to all people. In Rio de Janeiro some beaches are known to be the most democratic spaces, where all people meet and enjoy nature.

The market has ruled over the urban landscape, with economies prioritizing urban sprawl and segregation from the early times of industrialization, investing in high and fast economic return. Today, the city is a huge business, and the land is the precious asset that is in an unfair dispute between the corporations and the population. Corruption is a tremendous driver to maintain the urban expansion changing the landscape, and perpetuating the concentration of decisions and financial gains in the hands of few, in spite of the needs of the common.

There is a factor that plays an important role in many societies: fear. Security comes first, and what is the response of frightened urbanites? Divide the city! Divide the landscape! Live in “safe” gated developments. The market loves and uses this fear in its favor. And what about the rest of the working population? Depending on the educational opportunities to which they had access, they may have to live in poorly serviced degraded landscapes, in distant neighborhoods with precarious transit systems, or in worst-case scenarios, slums in vulnerable areas where the formal market cannot operate. In both cases most of the landscape has been depleted and converted into inert inhospitable surfaces, and their gardens and plants play a mere cosmetic role.

Rio de Janeiro is an excellent example of hostile and segregated urban landscape, in spite of its stunning hills and ocean views. The area was originally covered by Atlantic Rainforest. The steep hills and waters in the lowlands dominated the landscape until the late 1800s. In the process of the fast urbanization after the 1900s, the landscape was deeply transformed, land was created and ecosystems disappeared. Most of its wetlands and rivers vanished underground or in drainage canals connected to sewage disposal. The city has sprawled since the 1960s, driven by car-oriented transportation. The lack of proper social housing left almost no choice for less privileged people but to live in areas vulnerable to landslides (the steep slopes in the massifs that divide the city) and floods (the lowlands), or in distant regions. The city is socially segregated, with wealthier people living in areas close to the ocean and green areas, and poorer residents residing in the favelas (slums) located in the slopes facing the fabulous sights. Air, water and even beach pollution is a serious issue that threatens the health and well being of the population, both rich and poor. Fear dominates residents from all social classes. Old and new buildings, residential and commercial complexes are gated and hire private security.

How to achieve safe and healthy landscapes for all is a huge challenge. I believe people and biodiversity have to be the top priorities. The urban form matters and requires a proper balance between multiuse built and open vegetated areas in dense, socially diverse urbanization. Urban sprawl impacts not the only the landscape but also requires heavy investments to keep the entire territory healthy (pollution free) and safe under official public control.

There must be effective participation by the residents, not only in the process, but in the choices and outcomes that affect their daily lives. There is a people-nature reconnection movement that is happening all over the world. Citizens are fighting and working together to protect and enhance green and blue (water) areas, they are collectively planting food. These civic movements are improving the sense of community and the local culture. There are many examples that are blooming and transforming hearts, minds and landscapes, gathering people in public spaces to learn about the sources of life. They are even inspiring an increasing number of cities to prioritize the conversion of gray surfaces into high performance landscapes, building green infrastructures and emphasizing mass and clean transportation for all. Social media is playing an important role to connect people with varied social, cultural and educational backgrounds and enable the exchange of knowledge and experiences.

An excellent example of citizens’ engagement power is Verdejar, a social-environmental NGO founded 18 years ago. It is located in one of the largest and most problematic favelas in Rio de Janeiro. Their activities started with one resident planting native trees in a degraded slope at the Misericordia Hills to provide shade, prevent erosion, and protect it against further invasions. Others joined and became dynamic members. People gained environmental and civic awareness. The result today is a vigorous shift in the former depleted landscape. Part of the hills is covered by replanted forest, agroforestry and vegetable gardens. Landscape social and ecological functions are restored, with a focus on local culture enhancement. The mission of Verdejar is both educate and apply local sustainable development in a very harsh social environment.

The quality of the landscape can be measured to assess how just and livable an urban landscape is. Ecological, social, and disaster loss indicators (quantitative and qualitative) can be used to evaluate how the landscape performs, and how it both benefits and threatens people (e.g. biodiversity, waters, air, Urban Heat Islands, well-being and happiness, health, access to green public spaces, mobility, degree of concentration/pulverization of land ownership, floods and landslides). Freiburg, Germany is a pioneer green city, where residents articulated to fight against a nuclear power in their vicinity in the 1970’s. The city is now a reference on green technologies, but not only. It has developed new green districts based on landscape planning and design, as Rieselfeld and Vauban. The development strategy was to sell the public land in small lots, combining privately financed and subsidized housing construction. The districts’ landscapes have integrated built and green areas, natural drainage systems, bioclimatic architecture, clean energy and transportation. The results are high living standards in safe, healthy, socially active and ecological diverse landscapes for all.

In the current scenario, the risk of extreme weather events affect mostly—but not only—poor and vulnerable people. Adaptation of cities to a changing climate based on ecosystems is a smart decision and residents must be aware of how the landscape can be planned and managed, know what is at stake, and decide on what they want for now and for their future. I believe Verdejar is an excellent model of how ecological education and resident’s engagement valued and transformed the landscape into a more resilient and adaptive form, where heat waves, strong storm threats and pollution are mitigated.

Ecological landscape planning and design with the introduction of green infrastructure have a great potential to reshape lifeless cityscapes, regenerating natural processes and functions, enhancing people’s lives. In Seattle the Thornton Creek landscape project regenerated a water course that was buried under a parking lot, with community’s participation reaching public and private goals to support economic development and environmental sustainability.

Committed interdisciplinary practitioners and scientists’ teams, stakeholders representing all segments of society with a deep landscape comprehension, combined with education and engagement of decision makers may be a strategic approach to leverage the urban transformation we urgently need.

I believe it is time to reshape our modern paved urban landscapes that reflect the social and ecological predatory society we have been living in for the last two centuries. We must recreate resourceful new habitats for all of us, and for the biodiversity we depend upon.

My vision of a just city has a green-blue landscape that permeates human interventions, and offers well being for all residents on a daily basis. This landscape has clean waters surrounded by greenways, mimics nature and the natural flows, is full of life, and connects people and biodiversity in urban environments. The green landscape incorporates built structures with green roofs and walls, has productive gardens and the aesthetics looks like the native ecosystems, requiring low maintenance. The landscape is essential to enable all urbanites to understand how biodiversity and waters are critical to just, safe, prosperous, sustainable, resilient, and livable cities.

Cecilia Herzog
Rio de Janeiro

The Just City Essays is a joint project of The J. Max Bond Center, Next City and The Nature of Cities. © 2015 All rights are reserved.

Paleo Cities and the Return of the Hunter Gatherer

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Why do you feel and behave the way you do?

Have you ever noticed how incredibly adept you are at bargain-hunting in the local supermarket; beachcombing for washed up treasures; or foraging for mushrooms, nuts, and berries? Have you ever wondered why sweet melodies of birdsong and fertile meadows of fragrant flowers lull you into a serene sense of security? Or why you so readily disclose secrets to a barber or hairdresser?

Socially, we can eschew the greed and self-interest that neoliberal capitalism rewards and instead foster cultures characterised by the type of sharing and cooperation that were central to hunter-gatherer society.
Are you familiar with the rush of adrenaline, tunnelling of vision and sharpening of focus that attends the sudden tightening of a fishing line, the spotting of a stag in the mist, the aiming of an arrow, or the placement of a penalty kick? Are you familiar with that ecstatic trancelike state of mind in which your feet need neither encouragement nor instruction to hurtle up steep mountain trails in pursuit of some invisible quarry?

When a dark shadow passes overhead, do you flinch with panic as if being preyed upon? When the traffic growls beneath your office window, do you feel anxious and irritable as if threatened by wild beasts?

How easily do you lose track of time staring into the warm flames of a log fire, perhaps enthralled by a storyteller? How often do you jolt out of sleep having dreamt of falling from a high branch or cave ledge, only to find yourself lying safely on a mattress? Do you struggle to fall asleep when the moon is full?

Why do you take such an interest in nature; in observing and contemplating species and their ecological interactions—which trees bear fruit, where a bird builds its nest, when a pod of dolphins enters the bay? Why do you watch Animal Planet, book expensive wildlife safaris or read articles on The Nature of Cities?

Perhaps these feelings and behaviours are relics of our deep evolutionary past.

Image 1_credit_Russell GaltTry as you might, you’re no urbanite

Between 7 and 10 million years ago, our primate ancestors split from the line that led to our closest ape relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos (Hecht 2015). By 4.4 million years ago, our ancestors were walking upright, and by 1 million years ago, their brains were very much larger than those of other apes and they were able to use fire, fashion tools, hunt animals, gather wild foods and live in social groups (White et al. 2009). Agriculture appeared and began spreading merely 10 thousand years ago. It has still not reached all humans. If, 1 million years ago, our ancestors qualified as humans, then for over 99 percent of human history, we have been hunter-gatherers.

Humans are remarkably adaptable creatures. We have colonised virtually every corner of the planet and may one day colonise other planets, too. However, notwithstanding several examples of recent and relatively speedy human evolution—mutations responsible for lactose tolerance, blue eyes, and malaria resistance have all appeared since the dawn of agriculture (Schaffner and Sabeti 2008)—it seems reasonable to suggest that many of our uniquely human traits are adaptations to the hunter-gatherer way of life.

According to Professor Yuval N. Harari, “Our eating habits, our conflicts and our sexuality are all the result of the way our hunter-gatherer minds interact with our current post-industrial environment, with its mega-cities, aeroplanes, telephones and computers.” The modern world gives us more material resources and longer lives than any generation before us, but “it often makes us feel alienated, depressed and pressured” (Harari 2014). Indeed, the Paleolithic world which shaped us and which we may still subconsciously inhabit bears little or no resemblance to the modern industrialized world and least of all to cities.

Image 2_credit_Russell Galt

The return of the hunter-gatherer

In recent years, a movement has swept through trendy urban neighbourhoods, affecting restaurants, gyms, running clubs, retail outlets and even hospitals. The growing popularity of so-called ‘Paleo-living’ has manifested in the mushrooming of self-help guides such as the Primal Blueprint (Sisson 2009), snack foods such as kale chips and coconut yoghurt, minimalist fitness crazes such as CrossFit and barefoot running, and professional bodies such as the Paleo Physicians Network promoting ‘Evolutionary Medicine.’

Proponents of Paleo claim that by emulating the eating habits, social dynamics, sleeping patterns and physical movements of our ancient ancestors, we may live longer, healthier and happier lives.

To the average urban dweller, chasing deer to the point of exhaustion, scavenging carrion from cackling hyenas, scaling lofty trees to earn a few berries, or scrabbling through soil to yank up tubers may seem like outlandish and unnecessary behaviour. Yet certain lifestyle principles can be gleaned from our hunter-gatherer past that are entirely relevant to our urban future.

With respect to our diet, we can steer clear of the artificial additives, refined sugars, industrial oils and other processed foods that pervade most grocery stores today. Instead, we can opt for foods less obviously alien to the hunter-gatherer palate. This leaves us with many options as their diets varied considerably – seeds and nuts accounted for roughly two thirds of the traditional !Kung diet, whereas the Inuit people ate little but meat and fish (Jabr 2013). We can certainly eat fresher, rawer and more varied foodstuffs; we can ‘go organic,’ espouse entomophagy, and make use of apps such as Falling Fruit to locate edible fruit trees and reap urban harvests.

Socially, we can eschew the greed and self-interest that neoliberal capitalism rewards and instead foster cultures characterised by the type of sharing and cooperation that were central to hunter-gatherer society (Hefferman 2015). We can relearn the healing powers of play and positive touch (Gray 2009). We can choose to cuddle our children and devote meaningful time to their upbringing (Newman 2010). We can refuse to discard the elderly as “economically unproductive” and rather embrace them as the ‘libraries of society.’ We can prioritize small, tightly-knit and highly-dependable friendship circles over superfluous undependable online networks (McRaney 2012).

In terms of exercise, we can escape the gym, kick off our shoes and try moving ‘naturally,’ as if fleeing a predator, tracking prey, hauling a carcass, climbing a vine, clinging to a cliff-face, hopping across boulders, or building a shelter. Exercise is not only about moving our bodies, it is about exposure to the elements, the sun, moon and stars. Erwan Le Corre, founder of MovNat, detests confined environments, insisting that “we are not meant to be disconnected from the natural world and our own true nature… chronic pain, immobility, depression and lack of vitality, these are the symptoms of the zoo human syndrome.” Similarly, Christopher McDougall, author of the international bestseller, “Born to Run,” speculates that “perhaps all our troubles – all the violence, obesity, illness, depression, and greed we can’t overcome – began when we stopped living as Running People… deny your nature, and it will erupt in some other, uglier way” (2009).

Image 3_credit_Russell GaltImage 4_credit_Russell GaltThe birth of Paleo Cities

Readers of The Nature of Cities may wonder whether the Paleo movement holds any promise for the liveability, sustainability and resilience of cities. For instance, could the Paleo principles provide a useful framework for addressing chronic urban challenges such as nature deficit disorder, obesity, malnutrition, loneliness, inequality and ecological degradation? Could they be applied to urban design, planning and management to foster more cohesive communities, engender intergenerational friendships, induce play and collaboration, and reconnect citizens with nature?

It may still rest on slender science and bold assumptions, but Paleo-living is on the rise. Love it or loathe it, the movement merits our attention. With a little imagination, we may yet witness the birth of Paleo Cities and the return of the hunter-gatherer.

Russell Galt
Cape Town

On The Nature of Cities

References

Hecht, J. (2015). Ape fossils put the origin of humanity at 10 million years ago. 2 October 2015, New Scientist. Available here.

White, T.D. et al. (2009). Ardipithecus ramidus and the Paleobiology of Early Hominids. Science 326(5949), 75-86.

Schaffner, S.F. & Sabeti, P.C. (2008). Evolutionary Adaptation in the Human Lineage. Nature Education 1(1), 14.

Harari, Y.N. (2014). Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (London: Harvill Secker) at p.45.

Sisson, M. (2009). Primal Blueprint (Malibu: Primal Nutrition Inc).

Jabr, F. (2013). How to Really Eat Like a Hunter-Gatherer: Why the Paleo Diet Is Half-Baked. 3 June 2013 in Scientific American. Available at: [accessed 16 October 2015].

Hefferman, M. (2015). Why it’s time to forget the pecking order at work. Presentation on TED. Available here

https://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_heffernan_why_it_s_time_to_forget_the_pecking_order_at_work?language=en 

Gray, P. (2009). Play as a Foundation for Hunter-Gatherer Social Existence. American Journal of Play, 1, 476-522.

Newman, S. (2010). Raising Baby Hunter-Gatherer Style: Can today’s parents follow our ancestors’ parenting practices? 12 October 2015. Available here

McRaney, D. (2012). You are not so smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself (Oxford: Oneworld Publications).

McDougall, C. (2009). Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen (New York: Random House Inc.).

Cities in Imagination

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Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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Introduction, Toni L. Griffin, Ariella Cohen and David Maddox Tearing down Invisible Walls Defining the Just City Beyond Black and White, Toni L. Griffin In It Together, Lesley Lokko Cape Town Pride. Cape Town Shame, Carla Sutherland Urban Spaces and the Mattering of Black Lives, Darnell Moore Ceci n'est pas une pipe: Unpacking Injustice in Paris, François Mancebo Reinvigorating Democracy Right to the City for All: A Manifesto for Social Justice in an Urban Century, Lorena Zárate How to Build a New Civic Infrastructure, Ben Hecht Turning to the Flip Side, Maruxa Cardama A Just City is Inconceivable without a Just Society, Marcelo Lopes de Souza Public Imagination, Citizenship and an Urgent Call for Justice, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman Designing for Agency Karachi and the Paralysis of Imagination, Mahim Maher Up from the Basement: The Artist and the Making of the Just City, Theaster Gates Justice that Serves People, Not Institutions, Mirna D. Goransky Resistance, Education and the Collective Will, Jack Travis Inclusive Growth The Case for All-In Cities, Angela Glover Blackwell A Democratic Infrastructure for Johannesburg, Benjamin Bradlow Creating Universal Goals for Universal Growth, Betsy Hodges The Long Ride, Scot T. Spencer Turning Migrant Workers into Citizens in Urbanizing China, Pengfei XIE The Big Detox  A City that is Blue, Green and Just All Over, Cecilia P. Herzog An Antidote for the Unjust City: Planning to Stay, Mindy Thompson Fullilove Justice from the Ground Up, Julie Bargmann Elevating Planning and Design Why Design Matters, Jason Schupbach Claiming Participation in Urban Planning and Design as a Right, P.K. Das Home Grown Justice in a Legacy City, Karen Freeman-Wilson Epilogue: Cities in Imagination, David Maddox
26. MaddoxResilience is the word of the decade, as sustainability was in previous decades. No doubt, our view of the kind and quality of cities we as societies want to build will continue to evolve and inspire new descriptive goals. Surely we have not lost our desire for sustainable cities, with ecological footprints we can afford, even though our focus has been on resilience, after what seems like a relentless drum beat of natural disasters around the world. The search for terms begs the question: what are the cities we want to create in the future? What is their nature? What are the cities in which we want to live? Certainly these cities are sustainable, since we want our cities to balance consumption and resources so that they can last into the future. Certainly they are resilient, so our cities are still in existence after the next 100-year storm, now due every few years. And yet…as we build this vision we know that cities must also be livable. Indeed, we must view livability as a third indispensible leg supporting the cities of our dreams: resilient + sustainable + livable.

A key problem for the idea of a “just city” is that it works so well in metaphor. Making a reality of justice is harder.
But we have to hope that justice hasn’t gone out of style. Because while resilience is the word of the decade, we’ve struggled with just cities for a much longer time. Largely we have come up short.

So this imagining needs a fourth leg. These are the cities of our dreams: resilient, sustainable, livable, just.

Let’s imagine.

We can imagine sustainable cities—ones that can persist in energy, food and ecological balance—that are nevertheless brittle, socially or infrastructurally, to shocks and major perturbations. That is, they are not resilient. Such cities are not truly sustainable, of course—because they will be crushed by major perturbations they’re not in it for the long term—but their lack of sustainability is for reasons beyond the usually definitions of energy and food systems. We can imagine resilient cities—especially cities that are made so through extraordinary and expensive works of grey infrastructure—that are not sustainable from the point of view of energy consumption, food security, economy, or other resources.

We can imagine livable cities that are neither resilient nor sustainable.

And, it is easy to imagine resilient and sustainable cities that are not livable — and so are not truly sustainable.

Easiest of all is to imagine cities of injustice, because they exist all around us. The nature of their injustice may be difficult to solve or even comprehend within our systems of economy and government, but it’s easy to see.

The point is that we must conceive and build our urban areas based on a vision of the future that creates cities that are resilient + sustainable + livable + just. No one of these is sufficient for our dream cities of the future. Yet we often pursue these four elements on independent tracks, with separate government agencies pursuing one or another and NGOs and community organizations devoted to a single track. Of course, many cities around the world don’t really have the resources to make progress in any of the four.

Metaphor

A key problem for us, in all of these concepts, is that they exist so beautifully in the realm of metaphor. They work in metaphor. Everyone can agree that “resilience” is a good thing. Who wouldn’t want that? Raise your hand.

I thought so.

But an operational definition is really about difficult choices. Bringing a word like resilience—or sustainability, or livability, or justice—down from the realm of metaphor is hard because it quickly becomes clear that it is about nothing else but difficult choices. Choices that often produce winners and losers. We have to be specific about the choices involved in resilience or sustainability or livability or justice, and the trade-offs they imply. As societies we have to be explicit about these trade-offs—about their consequences. I think often we don’t have open and fair conversations about these issues because we don’t want to know about these trade offs, maybe not so much because we care about the losers, but because the winners of the world have so much to lose. Think developers who consume green space—often with the government’s blessing—without concern for sustainability issues or accommodations for the less wealthy. Or the growth- and consumption-obsessed nations driving the climate change that may destroy communities around the world, communities that have little responsibility that climate change.

Green

Most people in my circles make strong claims about the critical value of nature and ecosystems. Nature is thought to provide key benefits for resilience, such as technical aid to storm water management. Nature—and we way we use it—is the key foundation to sustainability. Nature cleans the air and water. It provides food. Nature provides beauty and serenity for people. This is all to say that nature and “green” provide immense and diverse benefits to societies, cities, and their people.

Do we believe these benefits are real? Are true? I do. If we believe in these benefits, then who should have access to them? Everyone. Does everyone have access to these benefits? No. That’s as true in Cape Town as it is in Los Angeles or Manchester.

If the benefits of green are true—in the broad sense of nature and in our approach to the built environment—then it is clear that issues of green and nature are also questions of justice, and that there is a key and essential role for nature to play in the notion of just cities.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has long had a definition of environmental justice. It intends to specifically address the fact that environmental “bads”—dumps, incinerators, legacies of industrial pollution, and so on—are disproportionally placed in poorer neighborhoods. That’s a fact that results from a host of reasons: inadvertent, economic, political and sometimes more cynical. Here is the EPA’s definition. Environmental justice will achieved:

…when everyone enjoys the same degree of protection from environmental and health hazards and equal access to the decision-making process to have a healthy environment in which to live, learn and work.

Many have written about the limits of this definition, although to me it is pretty strong and progressive, especially the part about decision-making. But it lacks the idea that everyone also deserves equal and fair access to environmental “goods” and the services they provide: healthy food, resilience to storms, clean air and water, parks, beauty. So an improvement to the definition, a more complete manifesto of belief, would be that environmental justice is achieved:

…when everyone enjoys the same degree of strong protection from environmental and health hazards, the same high level access to all the various services and benefits that nature can provide, and equal access to the decision-making processes for both to have a healthy environment in which to live, learn, work, and prosper.

Although some of the world’s cities are better than others in fulfilling this dream, probably none fully achieve it, although more embrace the idea of it. Most don’t even come close.

For example, there is a crisis of open space in many of the world’s cities. My city, New York, offers about 4m2 of open space per capita in the form of parks and plazas. Although the distribution of this open space is not entirely equitable (and some of the parks in poorer neighborhoods are of less quality) New York is to be commended for an explicit PlaNYC (New York’s long term sustainability plan) goal that says every New Yorker should live within a ten-minute walk of a park. We’re about 85 percent of the way to achieving this goal. This is the kind of specificity that can take green’s contribution to livability down from the level of metaphor and into on-the-ground evaluation and action.

Many of the world’s cities don’t fare so well. Although New York is a fairly dense city, Mumbai has 1 percent of the open space per person that New York has, its public commons gobbled up by cozy and opaque relationships between government and developers.

Not that the United States has so much to brag about. The Washington Post reported that in Washington DC there is a strong correlation between tree canopy and average income—the richer people get the benefit of trees. In Los Angeles, areas dominated by Latinos or African Americans have dramatically lower access to parks (as measured by park acres per 1,000 children) than areas dominated by whites. Countywide only 36 percent of Los Angelenos have close access to a park.

These are patterns the world over: when there are open spaces and ecosystem services at all, they tend to be for the benefit of richer or more connected people. This has to change in any city we would call just.

Values

“It is difficult to take in all the glory of the Dandelion, as it is to take in a mountain, or a thunderstorm.”

Charles Burchfield (1893–1967) is legendary for his watercolor landscapes, painted near his Buffalo, NY, home. He was also a great journalist and over his lifetime wrote over 10,000 pages in various handmade volumes. It was there, on 5 May 1963, that he wrote the quote above.

DandilionSeedHeadAndTheMoonBirchfield2And so they are difficult to take in, both for their beauty and their complexity. How can you describe and assess them? Convey them to one who hasn’t seen? You finally stumble, awestruck, into saying that they are “beautiful,” or “majestic,” or just “amazing.” But all of us—as scientists, decision-makers, participating citizens—typically have to comprehend, describe and quantify such entities and then communicate the results in ways that aren’t hopelessly obscure—that are somehow specific and not just metaphorical. That is, we need to communicate a very complicated thing in a simple, essential and, above all, useful way.

We need to communicate what we value and build our cities accordingly.

Words like improvisation and imagination and intuition can sound awkward in the context of city-building and policy. Yet these are the very abilities that we require to be able to see past and beyond the details—this object is here, that process is there—to create and understand how a vast and majestic thing works and how it might change.

Perspective is another important word—a sense of what you value in the vision you are creating. The Dandelion seeds are close up in Burchfield’s picture. He values them. The sky is there too. You need to see the patterns and perspective and not only the details—the beating of the heart and not just the heart’s location in the chest.

How do you “take in” a complicated multidimensional thing like a mountain? Or a park? Or a community garden? Or a city? Or justice? It starts with an act of imagination.

It is this act that requires of us that we imagine, in specific terms, what the just city would look like. I think it would look something like the modified EPA definition I presented above. We already know what this just city doesn’t look like. You probably just have to drive around your own city. (My apologies if your city has solved this. Shout your solution from all the rooftops and soapboxes. The world needs to know.)

We need the imagination to dream about what this just city looks like, the nature of it, if you will. And then we need the courage to make it happen on the ground, by creating actual urban plans that address justice explicitly, that put justice into literal practice, in law and regulation and real action, the imagining of, say, the EPA definition, in detail, in all cities around the world.

To say this requires a sense of hope. Given the distance we have to travel to achieve just cities, in greenness or most any other sense, we have to hope.

A closing idea from Buzz Holling

One key [to resilience] is maybe best captured by the word “hope.”

Although Buzz Holling was an original elucidator of the ecological resilience concept, here he used a word that is fundamentally a human concept. What does it mean to hope? At its most basic, it is a desire for and the belief in the possibility of a certain good outcome.

So, here’s my vision of the just city. It’s green. It’s full of nature’s benefits, accessible to all. It is resilient, and sustainable, and livable, and just. It is a city that has a clear and grounded vision of what these words mean. It acts on justice and the place of nature in the city. It has the hope to believe that these things can can be achieved, and the courage and faith to bring them to life.

David Maddox
New York

The Just City Essays is a joint project of The J. Max Bond Center, Next City and The Nature of Cities. © 2015 All rights are reserved.