Anchoring Wealth: A People-and-Place Approach to Local Economic Development through Worker Cooperatives in Cleveland

Worker cooperatives—businesses that workers collectively own and manage—offer an opportunity to ‘anchor’ wealth in the community, particularly in communities where deindustrialization has led to high unemployment and disinvestment in community institutions. Cleveland is one such Rust Belt city: greater Cleveland ranks in the top 10 metropolitan areas for concentrated poverty, with 28.2% of the metropolitan area’s poor residents living in extremely poor neighborhoods.

In 2009, a broad group of stakeholders in Cleveland came together to try to address the city’s economic development challenges by means of an innovative ‘place-and-people-based strategy.’ Evergreen Cooperatives is an effort led by the Cleveland Community Foundation, which engaged anchor institutions—University Hospital, the Cleveland Clinic, the Veterans Administration hospital, and Case Western Reserve University—to leverage the buying power of these institutions in arranging procurement from networked worker cooperatives composed of local residents. Cooperatives incubated to-date include a laundry service, a solar panel installation and weatherization firm, and an urban gardening service for local businesses.

Source: Community-wealth.org

The Mayor’s Office of Economic Development invested $1.5 million in low-interest seed loan capital in 2009, and the Cleveland Community Foundation itself capitalized the project with a $3 million revolving loan fund. In 2012, University Hospital committed $1 million to Evergreen over four years. The procurement purchasing power of the university and hospitals stands at $3 billion. That money was previously mostly flowing out of the community; Jane Jacobs, emphasizing the potential for import-substitution at the city level, would not have approved. She wrote in “Cities and the Wealth of Nations,” “economic life develops by grace of innovating; it expands by grace of import-replacing."

The Evergreen Cooperatives are a mixture of Robert Giloth’s “enterprise economy” (investing in local industry, with wariness of ‘chasing fashionable new economic development,’ and emphasis on higher multiplier effects—via attention to sectors, clusters, and anchor institutions) and “social economy” (social returns, cooperative ownership, investor/entrepreneur networks).

The Evergreen Cooperatives are also in some ways an example of Michael Porter’s cluster ideas applied to central city redevelopment. Porter defines clusters as “geographical proximate group[s] of interconnected companies and associated institutions in a particular field, linked by commonalities and externalities.” He practically sparked a movement in the 1990s with his ideas about clusters in the “inner city,” arguing that a cluster approach in central cities could address unmet local demand, and put to work an underemployed workforce.

The cooperatives ‘leverage the advantage’ of being in downtown Cleveland, and make use of clusters that go beyond firms to universities, research institutes, and specialized financial products. The role of the CBOs involved resembles what Porter describes as their ideal role: guiding a business-based model by advising, lending to, and operating a business, while supporting on access to government finance. Additionally, the initiative makes use of what Porter calls “strategic subsidies,” a competitive advantage strategy that diverges from the kind of incentives that seek to lure footloose capital with no inherent logic to be in their particular location.

However, there is a key distinction from Porter’s approach in that the Evergreen Initiative goes beyond creating clusters to thoughtfully plan for jobs for local residents, attempting to root these firms in the community. As Giloth writes of Porter, he is a “welcome alternative to smokestack and stadium-chasing approaches to inner-city redevelopment, [but] has not yet demonstrated concretely how the strategic growth of firms translates into jobs for low-income people or into revitalized places.”

The Evergreen Cooperatives represent an example of what Giloth calls targeted economic development: “targeted” economic development implies that the initiative does not just “assume benefits will flow to excluded populations.” Evergreen Cooperatives provides jobs to low-income residents of seven historically disinvested neighborhoods surrounding Cleveland’s University Circle district. There is a saturation of seventeen of Cleveland’s major institutions in the area of Greater University Circle, with over 60,000 jobs, yet the median income in these residential neighborhoods was $18,500 in 2012, with unemployment at 24 percent.

Indeed, the Evergreen Cooperatives would in fact be an example of what Karen Chapple calls “neighborhood saturation,” which goes one step beyond targeted economic development in order to invest not just in people through jobs and asset-building, but also to invest in place. The broader initiative is investing in physical development (housing stock and commercial real estate), as well as community engagement (better including residents in neighborhood improvement plans). This is an example of “investing in people through place,” and represents an attempt at what Chapple refers to as endogenous development, building up a place with both locally-rooted industry and interventions to create a more favorable environment for future sustainable business development.

Source: REDF

While the Evergreen Cooperatives seem to in theory embody much of what the community economic development (CED) field has learned about best practices, it is difficult to scale. The goal was to create ten businesses that employ 1,000 people from the target neighborhoods. To date, three businesses have been incubated (with others in the pipeline), creating over 100 jobs, with over 50% of these jobs going to people from the target neighborhoods. More impact evaluation is needed of the multiplier effects of the jobs that have been created, as well as more analysis of what the key barriers to scale have been.

Anna is a Master's Student in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, with a concentration on Housing, Community, and Economic Development. Anna’s academic interests and professional experience center around social, racial, and economic justice, and planning for more equitable cities.

Constructing a College Town: Displacement in a Student Housing Building Boom

Waterloo, Ontario, a city of about 100,000 people in a metropolitan area of roughly half a million, is home to both the University of Waterloo and Wilfred Laurier University. Substantial increases in enrollment at these institutions over the 2000s and early 2010s have contributed to a recent building boom in privately-developed, off-campus, purpose-built student apartments centred on the Northdale neighbourhood, located between the two universities (Figures 1, 2). While the formerly middle-class postwar suburban neighbourhood dominated by single-detached bungalows had previously been increasingly occupied by student renters, the municipality has since acted as an enabler by rezoning much of the area to accommodate high-rise residential towers—in some cases up to 25 storeys (Figure 3). These drastic urban changes engender displacement in a number of forms across spatial scales ranging from the local to the transnational and at various temporal moments.

Figure 1: The location of Northdale and adjacent universities. Numbers indicate the locations of photos in this essay. Map Source: © 2016 Google

Figure 2: Combined enrollment increases at Waterloo’s two universities, from less than 25,000 in 2000 to approximately 40,000 in 2015, have led to a boom in private student housing construction in the Northdale neighbourhood, located between the two institutions. Note the house to the right is for sale. Photo: Author

Figure 3: Student housing towers, some up to 25 storeys, now dominate what was previously a low-density suburban neighbourhood characterized by single-family homes and strip malls. Photo: Author

The first form of displacement unfolding in Northdale is direct displacement. Here, student housing development aligns most closely with conventional understandings of new-build gentrification and property-led urban redevelopment. Relatively affordable market-rate apartment buildings are boarded up, torn down, and replaced with student suites only months later, their former inhabitants forced to live elsewhere (Figure 4). New mid- and high-rise student buildings also physically take the place of the post-war bungalow homes that were there before (Figure 5).

Figure 4: On the left, a relatively low-rent apartment building is boarded up prior to demolition in February, 2016. On the right is the same site in October, with student housing development well underway. Photo: Author

Figure 5: Bungalow homes such as these are typical of Northdale’s original development. Photo: Author

One might counterclaim that since some of these houses were owner-occupied, this is not truly displacement as owners were well-compensated for selling their properties to developers, which—presumably—they did of their own volition. This perspective overlooks the actual sequence of events: as high-rise developments took hold on the edge of the blocks along arterial roads and houses mid-block were leased to students, the character and morphology of the neighbourhood itself changed. The change is partly social: student neighbourhoods are notorious for rowdy behaviour, unkempt properties, and parking issues, and Northdale is no different (Figure 6). It is also physical: new buildings remake the streetscape, and quite literally cast shadows across the institutions of the neighbourhood (Figure 7). This portends a second form of displacement, or rather, displacement, whereby a neighbourhood’s initial inhabitants no longer find themselves belonging in the area through a loss of sense of place (see "New-build gentrification: its histories, trajectories, and critical geographies" by Davidson and Lees), especially, in this case, elderly residents wishing to age in place. They are out-of-place; in a word, displaced. Many are thus coerced to sell out. As these homes are rented or redeveloped to house more students, a vicious cycle is perpetuated. Displacement begets displacement begets displacement….

Figure 6: Couches on the lawn and waste and recycling bins in disarray (at right) form common complaints against student tenants in areas such as Northdale. Photo: Author

Figure 7: A modest Ukrainian Orthodox church is overshadowed by new buildings near Wilfred Laurier University, just outside the Northdale neighbourhood. While this particular development is not marketed specifically to students, its proximity to the university means it will likely be heavily occupied by students and young professionals. Photo: Author

A third form of displacement is that of exclusionary displacement. That is, households who might otherwise move into this area are prevented from doing so. In theory, landlords cannot discriminate against non-students. But in practice, the student housing developments are marketed uniquely and aggressively to students. Agents of larger rental companies allegedly distribute fliers to freshman students (who typically reside on-campus for their first year) as early as the first day of orientation week. These campaigns are designed to instill a sense of urgency to find accommodation for the second year right away. Of course, the panic is manufactured. The oversupply of bed spaces in student housing is estimated to be approximately 1200 units.

Yet these surplus student units are unlikely to be occupied by non-student households (with perhaps the not-insignificant exception of recently graduated students). Indeed, it is hard to imagine a family with young children or a couple of elderly pensioners eagerly signing a lease to an apartment in a building otherwise full of undergraduate students. Furthermore, landlords are able to charge more by renting individual rooms within a unit to students than they are renting the whole unit to, say, a family. Rents are thus priced to be unconducive to non-student tenants. Many suites would be far too large for all but the largest families to fill anyway. The student housing neighbourhood thereby becomes an exclusive one.

These forms of displacement are problematic for a number of reasons. Not only are direct displacement and displacement incredibly disruptive to the everyday lives of (former) neighbourhood residents, but all of these types of displacement serve to exclude non-students from important locational qualities, many of which are especially valuable to more marginal sectors of the population, including those with lower incomes or the elderly who are unable to drive. The neighbourhood is one of the best-served by transit in the city, with bus routes to all corners of the region, including three rapid bus routes (one of which will soon be replaced with light rail rapid transit). It is relatively proximate to shopping, services, and employment opportunities in Uptown Waterloo (the city’s historic centre), as well as to Waterloo Park, a major urban green space. The city’s Northdale Community Improvement Plan of 2012 calls for further quality of life improvements including streetscaping, active transport infrastructure, and mixed-use developments. The irony is that despite a professed vision to create an “inclusive” community in Northdale, the current reality suggests that the benefits of these improvements will accrue to an exclusive segment of the population, namely middle-class students (Figure 8).

Figure 8: Plans for Northdale call for improved urban amenities and the creation of a mixed-use district. Rather than foster an inclusive and diverse community, many new businesses—such as the smoothie bar and marijuana paraphernalia shop in this recent development—serve primarily the young student population. Photo: Author

Underlying these three tendencies is a fourth form of displacement associated with the transnational migration of students to Waterloo’s universities. In fact, as overall enrollment has increased, international students have accounted for an increasing share of the total, even offsetting modest declines in the number of domestic students in recent years, forming an important target market for student housing developers (Figure 9). Our intent is certainly not to pin local displacements upon the actions of foreign students. Rather, we would like to point out that even apparently voluntary decisions to study abroad are heavily influenced by global neocolonial power relations that generally (though not universally) position “Western” universities as—at least discursively—higher quality institutions. For many, studying abroad is a mark of social or cultural distinction viewed as necessary to get ahead, or as an alternative source of prestige for those not admitted to top institutions in their home country. So while these transnational movements are not a form of forced displacement in any strict sense, neither are they completely neutral, structured as they are by the globally uneven geographies of higher education and power relations of neo-imperialism. It is also worth noting that many (but certainly not all) international students may feel socially and culturally marginalized—symptoms remarkably parallel to those of displacement.

Figure 9: Signs in Mandarin advertising fast-food delivery in the food court of a student housing complex speak to the targeting of growing numbers of transnational students as an important market for developers. Photo: Author

There is a temporal dimension to these displacements, each of which can be placed on a continuum from having already occurred to being currently underway. Direct displacement is nearly (but not entirely) complete, except perhaps around the edges of the neighbourhood. Indeed, it was largely complete even in advance of the Northdale plan, which cites the presence of very little owner-occupied housing at that time; much of the rental market was geared to students.

Displacement has followed a parallel trajectory as redevelopment has fostered both a changing landscape and sense of place, while encouraging direct displacement. In some ways, however, displacement may lie closer to the current end of our continuum, as early direct displacement did not entail large-scale re-workings of the built environment as do recent and ongoing developments. Contemporary concern exists for the preservation of important cultural and historical landmarks including the commemorative Veterans’ Green and one of Ontario’s first projects to house returning soldiers in 1946, later complemented by small homes constructed in 1948 for the same purpose (Figure 10). While the heritage value of these small homes is recognized in the Northdale plan, it offers few substantial protections. However, they do remain largely physically intact to date.

Figure 10: Small houses such as this one were built in the late 1940s to house soldiers returning from World War II, and are considered by many to be an important part of Waterloo’s built heritage. The sign in the window, advertising a popular bar, is a common mark of student occupancy. Photo: Author

Exclusionary displacement and the transnational displacements of students, meanwhile, are better characterized as ongoing phenomena. Unless more forceful measures are put in place to encourage affordable housing options for non-student residents, it is unlikely that exclusionary displacement can be reversed in Northdale. There is something of a feedback loop at play, where high concentrations of students dissuade non-students from locating there, regardless of the urban amenities on offer. The UK experience suggests that policies to undo student concentrations within particular neighbourhoods range from ineffective (hoping students can be syphoned out of the neighbourhood by purpose-built developments) to deeply problematic (draconian and discriminatory restrictions on student rentals above some threshold). Transnational student mobility is likely to continue as long as global power structures continue to exist, whether these construct Western institutions as “superior,” valuate the cultural and symbolic capital of elites’ study abroad, or incentivize schools to increase foreign student enrollment to maintain growth.

Many of these issues are recognized locally. In September, 2016, the city—along with the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation—held a forum to discuss repurposing surplus student housing to address shortages of affordable housing and other needs. Time will tell if planners are able to reverse the negative effects of displacement and fulfil the Northdale plan’s promise of creating an inclusive community.

Evelyn Hofmann is a master’s student in the School of Architecture at the University of Waterloo. Her thesis research is focused on the relation between contemporary border space in France and virtual utopian forces of migration. 

Nick Revington is a doctoral candidate in the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo. His research interests include housing, urban change, and the role of capital therein.

New York City’s High Line: Is an Evaluative Framework Problematic in the Public Sector?

As we become more cynical of the federal government’s ability to get things done, there is a growing movement to empower cities to step up and take more control over their own economic destinies by “measure[ing] what matters.”

Measurement[1] is often carried out under an evaluation framework that is set up to identify priority areas for growth and then determine progress toward reaching the desired outcome. Evaluation frameworks are one of several tools appropriated from the private sector that bring a data-driven approach into the public sector (and also, increasingly, in the nonprofit sector).

Map of New York City's High Line and Surrounding Neighborhoods. SOURCE: Michael Levere, Department of Economics, UC San Diego

The High Line – a nearly one-and-a-half-mile linear park in Manhattan built on an elevated section of a disused railroad trestle – is a useful case in considering both the effectiveness and problems of an evaluative framework. The park was completed in New York City during the Bloomberg administration[2] - Bloomberg had, of course, been founder, CEO, and owner of Bloomberg L.P. prior to his election as mayor. Of his many contributions, Bloomberg brought the rigors of “evaluation” into many areas of his administration, including the planning department.

The original planning framework for the High Line was developed in 2002 by Friends of the High Line and takes a fairly balanced approach to acknowledging competing needs for the space. The plan proposes balancing preservation with growth. It includes input from community members wanting to preserve the existing character of the neighborhood and to create affordable housing.

NYC planning director at the time, Amanda Burden, told the New York Times in 2012: “I like to say that our ambitions are as broad and far-reaching as those of Robert Moses, but we judge ourselves by Jane Jacobs’s standards.”

However, a combination of factors resulted in an outcome more apropos of Moses than Jacobs. One factor was the rezoning along the High Line, which came as a result of a strong push from property owners. No affordable housing requirement was set, further contributing to increase in property values along the high line and gentrification.[3]  

An additional factor was the evaluation approach taken by the Bloomberg administration. Out of the data-driven corporate environment emerged PlaNYC, a sustainability plan launched in 2007 that created an evaluative framework for sustainability as part of city development policy.

The Open Space Sustainability Indicators below from the 2010 plan show a deceptively simple goal for park space in the city and how it was measured.  

PlaNYC 2010 Open Space Sustainability Indicators

SOURCE: 2010 PlaNYC

The goal is essentially to measure success through distance of residence from the park, with the High Line an example of a park helping to achieve this goal. The city planned to look at what portion of New Yorkers live within ¼ mile (goal: 85%) and a ½ mile (goal: 99%) of a park or playground.

Close proximity to the High Line has generally increased property values in the adjacent neighborhoods. And the High Line has been good, economically speaking, for the city. But the park is clearly not benefiting the members of the original neighborhood to that extent that it could because it is now too expensive for original residents and has brought in a different character of economic activity.

Of course, officials and other parties responsible for the High Line were not acting in lockstep from an evaluation framework at every point in their process. However, the measurable goal for open space in the 2010 plan belies what was most important to accomplish. Ideally, city governments have a responsibility through their economic development plans to shape the urban environment in ways that work for everyone, rather than a small few.

NOTES:

[1] What is meant by “measuring what matters” in this economic development context is that cities step up to build up their own local economies by essentially determining their own economic development priorities and ultimately reshaping the local urban environment.

[2] The High Line was completed during Mayor Bloomberg’s term except for the third and northernmost section section of the park, the High Line at the Rail Yards, which opened to the public on September 21, 2014.

[3] While it is difficult to assess the extent to which the High Line played a role in contributing to gentrification in surrounding neighborhoods, we do know from recent research by an economist at UC San Diego that the opening of the High Line led to a large increase in home values, both the year after the park opened and also close to the park opening in 2008 and 2009 possibly in anticipation to the park opening. The Guardian discusses the High Line as an example of “environmental gentrification” – the growing phenomenon of rising property values in the wake of a large-scale urban greening project. The New York Times also describes gentrifying factors.

Rebecca Coleman is a Masters student in the Department of City and Regional Planning focusing on housing, community, and economic development. Before graduate school, she worked as a program manager at a nonprofit consulting firm in Boston on an initiative to improve life outcomes for black men and boys. Rebecca holds a B.A. and a B.S. from UC Berkeley. 

Collateral Damage for Global Capitalist Production: An Industrial Disaster in Karachi

Firefighters trying to control a blaze at a garment factory in Karachi, Pakistan, which killed 314, and injured more than 600 people. PHOTO: AFP

Ambulances and fire brigade vehicles outside a building, after a fire at a garment factory in Karachi September 12, 2012 (a day following the eruption). PHOTO: REUTERS/Akhtar Soomro

On September 11, 2012 a fire broke out in a garment factory, located in Baldia Town, Karachi, Pakistan (on the same day, incidentally, another fire broke out in a shoe making factory in Lahore, another urban center in Pakistan).

Baldia Town is located inside the Sindh Industrial Trading Estate (SITE) in the Karachi metropolitan area. Reportedly, 314 people died in the garment factory fire, which was said to have erupted due to a short circuit, and over 600 were seriously injured, while 100 were rescued. The factory belonged to Ali Enterprises, owned by two Pakistani industrialists. The company is a member of the Pakistan Hosiery Association and an active sales and income tax filer. According to news reports, there were about 1,500 workers present in the four-story, 2,000-square-yard factory when the fire broke at around 6:00 pm. At the scene of the tragedy, it was reported that the fire department arrived 90 minutes after the fire erupted. The Fire Department’s spokesperson said that there was so much heat coming from the building that fire fighters could not enter it and were trying to put out the fire from the outside, suggesting that the effort would need to be complemented aerially, requesting assistance from the Pakistan Air Force. An opinion piece remarked: “Even if it had [arrived on time], the fire brigades were hardly capable of doing their job effectively. With no ladders, hammers or even the proper attire, they watched helplessly as the fire continued to ravage the building and the people inside. With the little equipment they did have, they managed to break down one wall and get some of the workers out. By this time, volunteers from the colony behind the SITE area had come to help, risking their own lives – many suffered burns and ended up at the hospital as well.”

When the fire finally died down after 12 hours, the extent of the damage came into full view: the loss of life had been this significant due to the exit doors being locked from the outside, which trapped workers inside the blazing structure. Locking doors is a common practice in production industries in Pakistan to discipline labor. The practice allows factory owners to make sure workers don’t take any unauthorized breaks.

A sign board at the factory explaining the evacuation plan in case of emergency. PHOTO: AYESHA MIR/ THE EXPRESS TRIBUNE

A woman holds a portrait of her son while waiting with others to identify his body. PHOTO: REUTERS “If my son does not return, I will commit suicide in front of the factory,” one woman shouted before news cameras as relatives tried to console her [SOURCE: NY Times]

There were further reports that there was only one exit in the building, which also made the rescue mission difficult. In an attempt to save their lives, some trapped workers broke doors and windows (which were grilled and locked as well). According to a news article: “In desperation, some flung themselves from the top floors of the four-story building, sustaining serious injuries or worse. But many others failed to make it that far, trapped by an inferno that advanced mercilessly through a building that officials later described as a death trap.” It has been termed as the worst industrial disaster in Pakistan’s history.

Firefighters battling the fire following day. PHOTO: AFP
Note the lack of firefighting gear of the Fire Brigade staff.

The factory was producing garments for the international garment industry on contractual assignments, producing apparel for foreign brands based in Europe and the US. Much of the denim was produced for German textile discounter KiK, which claims to control enforcement of labor laws and security standards for its suppliers. ‘KiK’ stands in German for 'The Customer Is King'. According to the Clean Clothes Campaign, the firm is Germany’s seventh-largest textile retailer and was set up in 1994 by German entrepreneur Stefan Heinig, establishing a discounter model of low-cost retailing for clothing. It operates over 3,200 stores in eight European countries.

Men, women and children – most of them migrant workers from outside Karachi – worked at the factory in Karachi. The city is home to many other factories inside several industrial zones around the metropolitan area – a contending site in the geography of Fröbel et al (1978)’s “new international division of labor.” It is a metropolis competing with others like it in the global South, in global capital’s race to the bottom. According to the Pakistani Textile Workers Union, a high working pressure and overtime with unpaid additional work were frequent at the factory, which was also suspected of using child labor and locked workplaces analogous to prison cells. The owner of the factory had reportedly prevented inspections of the factory, and a few weeks prior to the fire, it had passed an internationally recognized safety test.  

The point here is not to spotlight any evilness of an individual person or firm, but the economic mandates of global production and competition under capitalism. Pakistan has one of the largest labor resources in the world, being the 10th largest country in terms of available human workforce, offering the “continuous flow of penniless job seekers” that Fröbel et al (1978: 845) point to as one of the features of the new geographies of capitalist production.

The conditions under which Pakistan’s blue-collar labor works have often been raised by trade unions and workers’ rights organizations. Industrialists in Pakistan, eager to bring in business for their firms and to beat competition from other countries as well as other local garment producers are likely to offer very low rates for garment production to their foreign clients, which have the effect of very low pay for garment work coupled with long and demanding hours on the job and unsafe and onerous working conditions. Global demand directly affects the volume of orders and urgency with which these are required – both of which put a toll on workers, who are relatively fixed over short periods of time, so the entirety of orders have to be completed often by working even longer hours than usual. If standards of living were higher in Pakistan, it would not be one of the ‘winners’ in the race to the bottom, and it not would be a destination for garment retailers to dump their production process at. If people were better off than they are right now, they wouldn’t be desperate to earn the little money under exploitative conditions that they are currently agreeing to by doing garment work at the going rates.

The incident was highly publicized in the local media and by civil society bodies. The Chief Justice of the Sindh (provincial) High Court took suo moto* notice of the incident. The provincial Minister for Industry and Commerce announced his resignation. The Commissioner of Karachi ordered the police to lodge a first information report against the factory owner, and their names were placed on the Exit Control List so they wouldn’t be able to flee the country until proceedings were completed. The government and top politicians took notice of the incident and responded by announcing monetary relief packages for affected families of workers who perished and those who were injured. However, a news report from one year after the incident stated that none of the bereaved had received any payments to date due to bureaucratic hurdles. The judicial tribunal probing the incident was highly critical of the factory owners and government, which failed to enforce the law. It also criticized the police’s forensic department for failing to conduct a scientific investigation. Since the fire, which raged for so long that half the building collapsed, the factory has effectively shut down. The owners, however, were granted bail for a paltry sum, even though they were charged with premeditated murder of the victims.

While local authorities took action, the factory fire was singled out as a particularly unfortunate case, and in my view, not enough pressure was placed on policymakers to take preemptive steps to ensure avoidance of such disasters in the future. Interestingly, no one addressed the low wages and exploitative conditions of garment work – the only focus was on completing safety checks according to regulation.  Even on this front, no policy steps were announced to allow for strengthening of compliance to occupational safety and health regulations for factory workers. The incident also failed to generate a movement within the working class and their supporters demanding better working conditions at garment factories.

For the sake of economic growth, policy makers in Pakistan, as in much of the global South, are willing to overlook the dire circumstances that people live and work through every day. In a populous country such as Pakistan, life is cheap, and is disposable for profit.

* A Latin term, literally meaning "on its own motion". Pakistan's constitution affords a provision whereby superior courts can hear cases of their own initiative, without a party bringing a petition to court.

Zahra Khalid is a graduate student in city planning at UC Berkeley. Her research interests include peripheral urbanization and securitization in War on Terror geographies.

Geographies of Tech Wealth: San Francisco to "Silicon Border"

As the companies, workers and wealth of Silicon Valley creep north into the city of San Francisco, the effects of an industry with a relatively small but highly paid labor force are leading to widespread social unrest. Embodied in the symbolic protests around “Google Buses,” lower-income residents are reacting to tech’s ability to produce so much wealth that is thinly distributed to a small labor force, disinvested from  local infrastructure (with private transportation), and funneled to comically useless purposes like the “Google Barges” mysteriously floating in the Bay. However, conversations about tech wealth are often limited to its distribution—with even mainstream economists (as well as The Economist) conceding that, “Facebook will never need more than a few thousand employees.” Clearly, the other side of this is production; even with its relatively small labor force, Facebook can generate billions in wealth and profits. Instagram, the hip photo sharing mobile application, famously had only 13 employees when it sold for $1 billion (that’s around $77 million per employee).

What is going on is not only a lack of distribution but an industry’s ability to generate massive profits without the need of a sizable labor force.

San Francisco: Canary of “Wageless  Life”

If Detroit is the metropolitan victim of “deindustrialization,” then San Francisco is the victor of the “high-tech economy.” But the centrality of San Francisco in new modes of profitability is experienced in highly unequal ways. While the clashes between long-time residents and the inflow of high-wage “techies” are amplified by the geographic constraints of the San Francisco peninsula, this isn’t just a story about inequality, nor about a lack of housing supply as some cheekily imply. 

More than inequality, San Francisco’s unrest stems from a population facing an economy that no longer needs them. Those being evicted from communities of color are not only facing gentrification but also perpetually low-wage labor in an economy that doesn’t need them to produce competitive profits.

Economist and presidential advisor Larry Summers made headlines early this year when he shared his fears of “secular stagnation”--effectively insufficient demand to grow the economy. But as Michigan economic sociologist Greta Krippner has pointed out, this is not a new process, since the rise of “financialization” in the 1980s was already a response to the economic stagnation that began in the 1970s in the U.S. It is in the context of what appears to be the geographic limits on U.S. profits (because of limits of domestic demand, global competition, and over production) that tech provides an avenue for profitability relatively unencumbered by the physical constraints of labor and time.

Working hand in hand with financial speculation, tech is the new industry with the promise of fixing the West’s “New Growth Conundrum.” Chillingly, as the eviction of Bay Area workers foreshadows, a larger economic transition may push a significant part of the domestic labor toward what Yale historian Michael Denning has called “wageless life.” For Denning, these are workers who are a “relatively redundant population,” or to borrow a term from a different context, “populations with no productive function [in the tech economy].” Demand doesn't seem to be the root problem as Summers suggests, as expansions in credit access and the household debt burden have long buttressed wageless demand.

Some might note that high-wage jobs in San Francisco aren’t the only jobs generated by the tech economy. This is true, and following the money of the information economy eventually leads one abroad.

“Silicon Border” and Microwork: The Travels of Tech Wealth

To say that tech and the information economy do not distribute wealth is not to deny that it travels. Of course, venture investments and speculative growth are enabled by flows of global capital. However, equally dynamic is the outsourced production of microchips and the novel “Impact Sourcing” or socially targeted “microwork,” both of which skip the domestic U.S. labor force and seem to be jumping directly to the global South, pre-branded as a poverty solution too!

Tech wealth, in the form of wages, is distributed to somewhat familiar outsourced manufacturing sites. One peculiar example of tech wealth’s international travels is a 4,500-acre free enterprise zone in development not a mile south of the U.S.-Mexico border outside Mexicali. Dubbed “Silicon Border,” this commercial development is managed by the firm Jones Lang LaSalle, whose website prominently features their “2014 World’s Best Outsourcing Advisors” recognition.

Rendering of phase 1 of Silicon Border development, to include a “Science Park” as well as housing and a commercial units. Source: Silicon Border.

Marketing its first of four phases, investors seeks to attract tech industrial work for semiconductor manufacturing, boasting the site’s  “Asian manufacturing cost structure in strategic North American location, [Mexican] Government incentives ranging from tax holidays […] free trade zone status […] with USA and 43 additional countries [and] access to reliable electric power, fresh water, waste water treatment and fire suppression systems [in the middle of the Yuma desert].”

Map produced by Silicon Border developers shows the massive scale of the development when compared to Mexicali, with a population of 700,000. Also, blue boxes represent other, smaller, manufacturing parks all built along international railways and international ports of entry. Source: Silicon Border.

If Silicon Border represents an adaptation of well-known models of securing cheap manufacturing labor abroad, the novel emergence of “microwork” is outsourcing with a social conscious. Microwork initiatives operating globally seek to build a business model around recruiting un- or underemployed workers to perform simple data-based tasks online (think of it as a global information assembly line). While the microwork model is in its infancy, it has already attracted companies like LinkedIn, Google, and Microsoft to this “pay-as-you-go” labor model. Differentiated from outsourcing with the brand “socially targeted sourcing,” this model is promoted as a 21st century solution to poverty that provides not only employment but equips workers with information and communication skills.  In the words of the Rockefeller Foundation, social targeted sourcing generates both “financial and social value.” A  report commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation last year estimated that the market for microwork sourcing could rise to $20 billion by 2015.

Diagram mapping the locations of Impact Sourcing Service Providers, most operating in the global South. Source: Rockefeller Foundation.

Perhaps rather than questioning the distribution of tech wealth, we should question the terms of its production and forms of its global movements. The travels of tech wealth are dynamic, but profoundly uneven and unequal. As UC Berkeley MCP student Christina Gossmann shows, there even exists an extensive economy of electronic waste in the rubbish dumps of Kenya—a nation that is working to connect to streams of tech wealth by marketing itself as a potential “Silicon Savannah.” (Also see the Silicon Cape initiative in South Africa).

The eviction of working class families from San Francisco, and rise in inequality, should not be approached as a starting point, but rather as a symptom of a dangerous shift in production to rely heavily on tech wealth. The effects of this are not only domestic, but also unequally global, as this short article has suggested.

To quote artist and journalist Susie Cagle’s brilliant animation of the “class wars” in San Francisco: let’s stop talking about buses, “let’s talk money.”

Luis Flores is a Judith Lee Stronach Fellow at UC Berkeley and runs the Collective History Archive, an interactive oral history platform on debt, the recession, and the “New Economy.” He is a research intern at Causa Justa :: Just Cause. Luis can be reached at jr.luisf@gmail.com

Crowdsourcing 2.0: Why Putting the Slum on a Map is not Enough*

There was a time—not too long ago—when informal settlements the size of small cities were practically invisible. Large and empty beige-gray fields, intercepted by an occasional thin blue line, signifying water, and several thicker, windy white lines that stood for major roads, would pop up on the computer screen when searching for infamous slums such as “Kibera” on Google Maps. The information void stood in stark contrast to the hundreds of thousands of people living in Kibera, ironically tucked away between some of the city’s most valuable and celebrated resources: the Royal Nairobi Golf Club, Ngong Forest and the Nairobi dam.

Googling Kibera would not reveal much information about the slum, but more significantly, information also lacked within the slum. In the eyes of the government, the slum did not exist or matter and only few stories, usually about gangs and murders with attention-grabbing sensational headlines bordering sinister hilarity, were deemed newsworthy. For relevant and current happenings, residents would therefore consult their social networks: neighbors, friends and family. As the extensive literature on social capital and intelligence has shown, who you know (rather than what you know) contributes enormously to slum dwellers’ complex networks of resilience.

But there are situations when those networks are simply not enough.

One of those situations presented itself on the night of the 30th of December 2007. After Kenya’s general election on the 27th of December, hopes—and polls—were at a peak for the opposition party’s Raila Odinga. But after a three-day delay, incumbent President Mwai Kibaki was unexpectedly pronounced the winner. What exactly happened next and who is to blame continues to be widely debated, but what we do know today is that inflammatory text messages and emails had played a major role in inciting the violence that lasted for two months, resulted in the death of over 1,000 people and the displacement of 350,000. Most of what would later be called “ethnic cleansing” took place in informal settlements, including Kibera, the same areas with the least access to information. Nobody knew whether and when it was safe to step outside the house. After only several days, a small group of programmers released software that would use the same tactics as the perpetrators of violence—SMS and emails—to create an alternative information-sharing platform. Ushahidi, Swahili for “testimony,” mapped reports of crime and violence that could easily be submitted and accessed online or by mobile phone. In both, the global South and its North, crowdsourced crisis-mapping has served as populist tool for asserting political contestation and for checking state violence, in effect producing a “politics of witnessing” at a global scale.

Open Street Map displays various resources in Kibera including hospitals and schools.

Ushahidi shined a spotlight on a long ignored problem: the lack of information on and for informal communities. Although constituting a significant urban demographic in cities of the Global South—and the majority in some, including Nairobi where an estimated 60% of the population lives in slums—slum residents are often ignored in planning processes and budget allocations.

With the goal to change the situation by literally putting Kibera on the map, an international development practitioner and a programmer founded MapKibera in 2009. Through support from local techies who helped train Kibera residents in using OpenStreetMap (OSM) techniques—including GPS surveying and satellite imagery digitizing—Kibera began making a geospatial appearance. In the years to follow, citizen journalism efforts ensued, developing atop the MapKibera information on OSM. The Voice of Kibera community news website and the Kibera News Video Network journalism project indiscriminately cover everyday Kibera, from local fires and elections to a marvelous Bulgakov-esque exploration of Kibera from a dog’s perspective.

Even today, few of Kibera’s resources appear on Google Maps.

The Ushahidi Platform places reports submitted via SMS and email on a map.

MapKibera was the first mapping initiative of its kind. By training local residents in geospatial data collection and visual storytelling through photography and video, MapKibera has significantly contributed to the democratization of media. It also made international news and brought much-needed attention to Kibera. Kibera’s data and founding members traveled the world, presenting their initiative and findings at research and innovation hubs. It was actually at one of those trips to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab where I first heard about MapKibera. Without a doubt, MapKibera’s approach and legacy for the Information and Communications Technologies for Development (ICT4D) community cannot be denied.

But is uncovering and making information publicly available enough? The most recent decision of the City County Council of Nairobi not to include informal settlements in the new Master Plan of the city—the first since 1973—indicates that it might not be. With a saturated map served on the OSM silver platter, neither the city nor residents seemed to make much use of it. The City insisted on a dearth of quality information, thus justifying its denial of actively planning for informal residents’ needs and wants in the city’s future development. Residents already knew the locations of basic mapped amenities such as schools, taps and pharmacies in their neighborhoods.

What was needed was information that would allow slum dwellers to assert political agency and claim access to basic needs such as decent housing, water, education and health care—citizen rights that are constitutionally backed since 2010. One example of pro-slum advocates moving towards this target-driven data collection direction is the Spatial Collective, a Mathare-based social enterprise, founded in 2012 by several experienced participatory mappers. Similar to MapKibera, the Spatial Collective benefits from Kenya’s mobile phone penetration rate--more than 77% of Kenyans regularly use a mobile phone--and widely available cheap Internet service to tap into an already existing information system to access local knowledge. They use this data to map slum resources but also their most basic needs. Crime and rape reports, for instance, allow for specific interventions such as installing lamps for safety. But before anything else, the Spatial Collective conducts a needs-assessment and baseline survey to evaluate whether what they do actually makes a difference.

As international development practitioners and technology enthusiasts forge ahead with increasingly popular crowdsourcing initiatives, I recommend the community engage not only in data collection, but in also purpose-driven, accountable data-collection that targets one particular goal at a time. A foreign-founded and partially–funded initiative, the Spatial Collective has drawbacks of its own. But if there is anything we have learned from ICT4D projects by now, it’s that nothing’s perfect.

Christina Gossmann is a Master of City Planning student at UC Berkeley. Before returning to graduate school, she worked as a freelance journalist and researcher in cities of the Global South. Email her at christinagossmann@gmail.com and follow her at @chrisgossmann.

*This story originally appeared, in a slightly different version, on Barefoot Lawyers International and The Con.

Fear and the Urban Form

Gated community in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Source: Tuca Vieira.

“I don’t mind the American soldiers on our streets. If I could talk to them I’d ask: Why are you so afraid of us? Why do you fear us so much?”

So answered my Afghan friend, when I asked him how he felt about the American troops parading the streets of Kabul. I expected him to be appalled by the invasion on his privacy, or sovereignty. But what appalled him most was their fear, and how it seeped into his everyday life. When he looked at them too long, they pulled out their gun, he said. I thought the high walls and barbed wires of Kabul’s new architecture conveyed the same message.

Anthropologist Teresa Caldeira, in her book City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in Sao Paulo, analyzes the escalation of crime in Sao Paulo since mid-1980s that generated widespread fear. This led to “new strategies of protection and reaction in the city, of which the building of walls is the most emblematic. Both symbolically and materially, these strategies operate by marking differences, imposing partitions and distances, building walls, multiplying rules of avoidance and exclusion, and restricting movement,” she writes.

Fear is an emotion induced by a perceived threat, and the perception of threat is dependent on many things – including, but not limited to, gender, age, sex, race, neighborhood cohesion, confidence in police, personal experience of victimization, levels of local incivility and financial conditions. In the previous examples fear is a result of the loss of power in structurally unequal relationships with a collective “other”, whether it is the U.S. military that elicits a fear of violent contestation or the wealthy elite in Sao Paulo. In both, the nature of the observer and nature of the observed environment influence one’s perception of threat. But the relationship between fear and our built environment is for me, most peculiar. Probably because it is hard to tell whether form follows fear or fear follows form.

Can we Design away Fear?

In Afghanistan, "HESCO Barriers" line corridors protected by sand barriers thick enough to withstand the impact of a car bomb. Source: NPR.

If fear indeed follows form, I am tempted to ask: Can we design away fear? There has been no dearth of attempts made in the past to do this.

After the Industrial Revolution, modern architecture sought to assuage the fear generated by rapid industrialization and urban problems of ‘disorder’ – giving birth to modernism. The profession of planning meanwhile diverged from its initial agenda to become primarily curative rather than preventive or formative.  Postmodern urbanism sought to improve upon the shortcoming of modernism and to respond to the peculiar nature of fear that it in part caused. But it ended up falling in the same traps (see Nan Ellin's 2007 Architecture of Fear).

Architect Nan Ellin says in Architecture of Fear, “Contemporary insecurity has elicited a reassertion of cultural diversity, nostalgia for an idealized past, an infatuation with mass imagery, flights into fantasy worlds, a marked privatism, and a spiritual turn. In urban design, these tendencies are primarily manifest as historicisms, regionalisms, and allusions to mass culture.”

The contemporary focus on crime and safety in relation to the built environment began with the American-Canadian journalist, author and activist Jane Jacobs in the 1960s. To her, a safe city was the traditional city with streets and blocks, diversity, functional mix, concentration and buildings of different age. Her observations were astute but without systematic empirical evidence.

In 1972, architect Oscar Newman developed a more targeted response to safety through design, with the concept of Defensible Space. His answer to the problem was introducing a more graduated territoriality through the creation of semi-public and semi-private spaces – and to some degree, by putting up fences. His work was evidence-based with, for instance, detailed spatial descriptions and statistics.

But can crime really be prevented through environmental design? It is a question open to debate. Any effort to understand the relationship between fear and the built form based purely on empirical evidence is futile, because actual crime figures do not present the whole picture. Let me illustrate with an example.

Take a neighborhood with very sophisticated surveillance, security systems and 24-hour guards. Measures that make impossible for one to bat an eyelid without someone cooped up in a surveillance room knowing about it. Actual crime rates are reduced to a minimum here. But is this an ideal living environment? Are we not bargaining our sense of security for our sense of freedom? Are we not compromising our ‘right to the city’?

Secure but Segregated

The latest and perhaps more extreme reaction to the problem of crime and fear of crime in cities are enclosed housing developments, often called gated communities. A gated community is a housing development on private roads closed to general traffic by a gate across the primary access. The development may be surrounded by fences, walls or other natural barriers that further limit public access. These housing developments have become popular in some severely crime-ridden developing countries, such as South Africa and Brazil but to a large degree are also found in the USA, where more than seven million households (about 6% of the national total) are in developments behind walls and fences.

Developments of this kind create spaces that contradict the ideals of openness, heterogeneity, accessibility and equality. This is fairly evident in the city of Los Angeles. Like in many other global cities, as the economic disparity deepened over time so did the lines of segregation.  Most of L.A.’s public life takes place in segregated, specialized and enclosed environments like malls, gated communities, entertainment centers and theme parks. Many of these changes in urban environment are furthering separation between social groups that are increasingly confined to homogenous enclaves. The consequences of this new ‘separateness’ can be drastic. Defensible architecture and planning may end up promoting the same conflict that it was intended to prevent.

Freedom from Fear

The city of Oakland recently received $7 million from the federal government initially intended to deter terror attacks at the port of Oakland. Instead, these funds are being used by a Oakland police initiative that will collect and analyze surveillance data. Source: Globalresearch.org

Different cultures have different ways of fearing. The meaning a society attaches to the fear of God or the fear of hell is very different from the fear of pollution or the fear of cancer. As Frank Furedi explained in “Culture of Fear”, we associate fear with a clearly formulated threat and today we represent the act of fearing itself as a threat.

In that sense we are all victims, even if we have not personally experienced an act of crime, since we are all aware of it, and live in fear of it. This is a fear we are reminded of every day in media, daily conversations and sub-consciously, through our environment. This fear infringes on our everyday behavior, activities, sense of security but also freedom.

As architects and designers, we need to view the issues of safety and fear from a new lens. Maybe crime prevention alone is not a solution. An alternative to ‘gatedness’, a neighborhood that is secure but not segregated, needs to be imagined, if we hope to finally reach the root of the problem.

Tanvi Maheshwari is a Master of Urban Design student at UC Berkeley. She is currently pursuing her thesis on the subject of fear and its relationship to urban form in the Indian context. 

She can be reached at 

tanvi@berkeley.edu

.

The Significance of Community in Modern Planning Theory

Reflections on: "Sense of Community in the Urban Environment: A Catalyst for Participation and Community Development," by David M. Chavis

David Chavis’ 1990 article, “Sense of Community in the Urban Environment: A Catalyst for Participation and Community Development," highlights the effects that perception of environment, social networks, and how residents’ sentiments about their communities can further influence the behaviors and perspectives of others. The article further emphasizes the importance of citizen participation in community organizing and explains why it has been regarded as key to improving the quality of the physical environment, enhancing services, preventing crime, and improving social conditions. 

I view the institution of a locally-driven planning process as being essential to the establishment of a general sense of community. The maintenance and enlargement of self-sufficient, self-governing bodies (community organizations), further signify the additional role that empowerment has in local development. According to Chavis, a working definition of the term “sense of community”, suggests local processes of development that create opportunities for membership, influence, mutual needs to be met, and shared emotional ties and support. Essentially, a sense of community points to the strength and shared benefits of social capital. The more invested we are in community, the more power and ownership we feel we have in the communal environment. It is through this process that a sense of community contributes to individual thought for collective development.

I find it immensely intriguing, that when we compare communities that seem to be thriving, both socially and politically, to low-income communities, plagued with the accompanying concerns of crime, disinvestment and unemployment concentrated in a single area of poverty, one tends to wonder if there is a specific criterion of that qualifies it. Trends in both these specific communal types seem to possess a constant, regardless of country, city, location, ethnic makeup, etc. However one might evaluate the success of a community, the residents of perceivably well to do communities possess a notably stronger sense of community, than do residents of less socio-politically affluent communities. This sense of community therefore compels residents to develop and maintain social networks, in addition to in social capital. This investment in social capital is yet again, another product of that sense of community. A sense of community can have a great influence on one’s desire to control or contribute to the environment, often helping to address problematic concerns that may be regarded as problematic. For instance, I view the formulation of this ‘sense of community’ as being instrumental to the effectiveness of the Occupy Movement. A collective effort, with one voice, and a common goal. The control or occupying of space is but a means by which to establish an improvised locale for a “quartered” community. The resolve to maintain these claimed spaces was clear in the emergence of riotous protest as Occupiers clashed with law enforcement (in their attempts to divide the urban community, before conquering the social community). Another example of this can be seen in 1957’s, Little Rock’s Nine during the integration of Central High School. The local community viewed academic integration as problematic. When the National Guard intervened, (an additional group of “outsiders”) to enforce the law, the resistance became unpredictably explosive.

Although the concepts of Social Capital and Networks could quite easily take us into totally separate discussion altogether, in this context, I view social capital and social networks as being interdependent. Social capital deals with the product, the talent, skill or unique ability one contributes to the greater community with which he holds membership. Social networking speaks to the ways in which members of that community bargain to benefit one from another by the utilization of this collection of gifts and talents. All these are major players in the establishment and maintenance of a sense of community.

Apart from physical features, one of the key distinctions between these community types is the length to which residents will collectively go to protect “their” society. Examples of this are seen in high-price residential communities like Pleasanton, CA. for example. A highly expensive neighborhood where the rent you pay for a 2-3 bedroom condo, could match that of the cost of a home mortgage in parts of a city like Oakland. The economic support or disinvestment in local businesses is another way communities might protect their neighborhood. According to Chavis, perceived control relates to the beliefs an individual has about the relationship between actions (behavior) and outcomes.

The protection of a society further suggests that there are boundaries involved. These boundaries could be physical barriers such as gated communities, rivers, railroad tracks; or even socioeconomic barriers such as highly priced property, educational requirements, and other forms of exclusive criteria. These boundaries form due to society’s perception of “the other”. Therefore, in order to retain some sense of emotional security—to live without fears—communities tend to form boundaries in which to maintain, occupy, and repel others from entering.

Working to help establish a sense of community in modern planning today should be held as a vitally important aspect of the planning process. The mural below depicts this perfectly. It was designed by a youth empowerment program in Oakland CA, Youth UpRising. The youth of Castlemont were included directly in the planning process. This mural is a reflection of what the young people view as the areas of concern in their community and what they actually want their community to evolve into. Considering the impact that community and developmental endeavors can have on the outcomes of specific regions, in order to further eliminate the formation and spreading of concentrated despair, community building must become a more integral part of the planning process.

Julian Collins is interested in topics of housing, community and economic development. He received his Bachelors from the University of Illinois, Chicago in Urban and Public Affairs and is now pursuing a Masters at the UC Berkeley in City and Regional Planning.

Bogotá’s Bucolic Exodus: Aspirations of a Rural Life or Suburban Sprawl?

Illustration of the migration pattern. Source: Author

Yearning for a rural lifestyle is a legitimate desire for all city dwellers. It is more than understandable to think about a nicer place if you can afford it, considering that “nicer” often means more greenery and nature. Nevertheless, countryside living is not only an aspiration for people in Bogotá who are planning a systematic exodus from the city’s current sense of collapse, but also for displaced rural people who try to make a living in the city. Sometimes there is a situation of urban dwellers colonizing farmers’ land, or the current national social illness of forced displacement.

In Bogotá, like in many cities, transportation deficiency, generalized security concerns in many areas and the increasing cost of living are negatively influencing the everyday experience of its citizens. It is therefore perfectly reasonable to consider moving to a place where the pace of daily activities is slower, groceries are cheaper and air is cleaner. Large cities and capitals offer job opportunities, cultural exchange and superior levels of health and education that do not exist in rural areas. In this sense, despite its utilitarian purposes, the city has become increasingly unaffordable, insecure and threatening, especially for rural migrants.

La Calera, for example, is one of the “rural” paradises desired by high-income people in Bogota, and utterly pursued as a pot of gold by real estate developers. However, this place is one of the city’s principal natural reservoirs, in terms of water supply and green areas. If Bogotans continue running away from the city to settle permanently in a place that is geographically guaranteeing our city subsistence, we are threatening urban collective survival. And on the other hand, people that are actually living in places like this cannot migrate to the city with no credit history or any urban expertise, because life in the Colombian countryside is just too different.

Displaced communities in Downtown Bogota. Source: RCN La Radio

How do we interpret the trend of urban dwellers dreaming of the countryside and rural dwellers being forced to move to cities? Will we see Colombian cities filled with “for rent” signs and rural parcels abandoned or used for suburban homes, violating not yet written environmental policies? For a poor peasant for example, starting from scratch in a city like Bogota can lead to a sense of not belonging. Working in minimum wage jobs, whether in the formal or informal sector sometimes results in resignation, resentment and even violence, as a consequence of being forced to obey a system that apparently has not been designed for equality. In this sense, the question would be if this two-way rural-urban migration corridor is leading to any collective improvement for any of the participants involved.

Maybe visualizing these possible outcomes of current mobility trends can help us achieve a balance. If there is no urban expansion, inner city land values will be increasingly raised to the point of absolute unaffordability, but at the same time, suburban sprawl has a huge impact on ecology and demand for infrastructure that is equally destructive.  On one hand, real estate speculation of suburban developments is supplying housing demand for high-income households only. And on the other hand, barely legal urbanization in risky areas of the city is only supplying housing lots for many of the low-income people that are coming into the city as cheap labor. This way, both the high-end suburban housing and the informal inner city housing seem like extreme responses to these recent moving trends.

La Calera suburban housing. Source: SkyscraperCity.com

Maybe it is about public policies that ensure affordable housing for all citizens, regardless of their incomes. Or it might be about adaptability. Bogotá could (and should be) more inclusive for migrants by providing jobs and housing opportunities, whether they come from the countryside, from other cities, and even from other countries. Also, maybe the city can offer better conditions so its actual inhabitants don’t feel the urge to escape. Probably cities can be understood beyond the utilitarian aspects of just being destinations for concentrated job opportunities. In this manner, the urban experience could be positive for all. What if we bring more high quality services to the countryside and bring more environmental qualities to our cities? This way we might not be forced to endure this polarization of individual needs that are turning migration processes in Colombia into an evident symptom of inequality.

I envision a more inclusive Bogota indeed. And this probably demands a deeper understanding of the rural-urban mutual dependency, for both in citizens and policy makers. In this sense, some of the government’s efforts providing affordable housing for rural migrants are strategies of more equitable policies that somehow still seem insufficient. This raises the question about the causes of these inequity indicators in Colombia’s capital. Will affordable housing ever be enough and what will happen when the city runs out of land? Is increasing new housing supply the solution for a larger scale political conflict that is massively displacing people from our most forgotten rural areas? And on the other hand, how can policies also regulate this recent trend of suburban sprawl that is also taking over the countryside? Maybe this recent circular migration pattern is an opportunity to visualize how a city embodies the illnesses of a country. But also, an invitation to ask ourselves: Is moving the solution? Where will these exoduses lead us to?

Maria Luisa Vela is a first year graduate student at UC Berkeley, pursuing a Masters in Urban Design. She is a practicing architect from Bogota, Colombia and is currently interested in the relationships between public space and housing typologies for designing better neighborhoods in Latin American cities. She can be reached at marialuisavela@gmail.com

Redefining Shrinking Cities

In Volume 26 of the Berkeley Planning Journal, Ph.D. student Aksel Olsen’s ‘Shrinking Cities – Fuzzy concept or useful framework?’ enters the debate on urban decline. In this post, Masters of Urban Design student Tanvi Maheshwari explains why practitioners should look beyond simplified versions of the shrinking cities phenomenon.

Shrinking cities have been the subject of much conversation in recent years. With Detroit filing for bankruptcy protection and the growing concern about aging cities in Europe, the discussion is gathering ever more momentum. In a climate of hasty blanket statements and one-size-fits-all solutions, Aksel Olsen takes a step back to critically examine the phenomenon of shrinking cities, in order to find real, practical solutions.

A significant number of cities and regions across the US and Eastern Europe currently face population decline, economic contraction, or both. The ‘greying of Europe,’ where nearly a third of the population will be 65 or over by 2060, is increasing pressure on social services, urban infrastructure, and the labor supply. The trend is raising new concerns for planning and design, such as how to create different types of mobility structures for the elderly population. For Eastern European cities, the out-migration of young workers seeking better employment opportunities has made the equation even more difficult. As tax bases shrink, planners and politicians in both the US and the EU will need to attract and retain a younger workforce, in part by reforming immigration policy, and make the urban environment accessible for the elderly.

Percentage of Population over 65 in Europe. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Europe_population_over_65.png.

Shrinkage is not a new phenomenon. During the post-war years in the US, the middle classes fled in hordes from dense city centers to rapidly developing suburbs, aspiring for space and racial homogeneity, thus hollowing out the city cores. In the present context, however, intra-city shrinkage is not planners’ primary concern. In fact, many American suburbs are shrinking as well. Cities in the Rust Belt grew in an era when large-scale manufacturing required large amounts of labor. With much of their traditional labor force no longer as in demand in the modern economy, many Rust Belt cities such as Detroit face population and economic decline. Leaders in these cities have attempted different strategies, with varying success, to reinvent their image and their economy around creative industries, a manufacturing renaissance, or the service sector.

Decline of Detroit. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Abandoned_Packard_Automobile_Factory_Detroit_200.jpg.

But shrinkage today is a complex phenomenon, not limited just to the Rust Belt. It is afflicting much more heterogeneous regions, including those around the Californian cities of Fresno, San Francisco, and San Jose. It should be noted that the time period when shrinkage was observed in these cities mostly coincides with the 2001–2002 recession. During this time, San Jose did indeed lose population at a rate of three per thousand or so for a two-year period. However, while the rate of population decline was at about three per thousand in 2002 and 2003, the number of occupied housing units appears to have increased over the same period at a rate of seven per thousand. This may mean that the shrinkage observed is San Jose may just a change is demographics, like change in size of household. It may not be valid to call San Jose a shrinking city, as shrinkage may be just a temporary result of a city in flux.

Aksel Olsen’s paper argues that shrinkages in Eastern European cities, the Rust Belt in the US, and in the Californian so-called “Sun-Belt” cities are not comparable. In fact, bundling them together creates a fuzzy definition, watering it down to the point where it is no longer useful to describe the vastly different trajectories of urban evolution. The scholarly definition of shrinking cities is ‘a densely populated urban area with a minimum population of 10,000 residents that has faced populationlosses for more than two years and is undergoing economic transformations with some symptoms of a structural crisis.’ A tighter definition, taking into account specific contexts, would be more helpful to planners.

The typical definition of a “shrinking city” is flawed in two key ways. First, it fails to distinguish shrinkage due to an aging population from shrinkage due to shifting industries. Each requires different policy strategies. A lower fertility rate may be a long-term problem, but in the short term, the migration balance matters more because it has a greater effect on the economically active population. Further, a thriving city center may still experience population growth despite industries moving out. The San Francisco Bay Area during the Dot Com Crisis of the years 2000–04 would be an example of population growth and a changing job base. This distinguishes a Detroit from a San Francisco.

Second, the typical definition of shrinking cities is too shortsighted. Planners should look at the long term. Olsen equates short-term forecasts of “shrinkage” to comparing ‘weather’ with ‘climate’, one representing short-term changes and the other, long-term structural changes.

A city with a rapidly growing economy might shrink deliberately, to create a better quality of life for a smaller population, or may going through a phase of transition. In the 1980s, Pittsburg began to focus on high-end retail. Pittsburgh seems to be in the midst of a transition to an entertainment economy, even as the city continues to lose population, again underlining the complex patchwork of prosperity and decline, here at the city scale. Despite half a century of population loss due to industrial decline, Pittsburgh is, if not thriving, certainly outperforming both the Rust Belt and the nation as a whole. Its unemployment rate of 7.8% is well below the national average.

Pittsburgh Skyline. Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pittsburgh_Skyline.JPG.

Should shrinking cities then be defined as simply a state of being, defined on the basis of population loss or job loss? Or should a deeper investigation be made into its underlying causes? The latter is essential, if the city has to devise policy directions to deal with the situation. Growth and decline are a part of the natural cycle of a city’s life. If short-term fluctuations are assumed to reflect broader trends, urban policy-makers will fail to identify the true causes of shrinking cities resulting in uninformed policy decisions and a trivialization of the issue. Planners should think about ways to preserve affordable housing to prevent gentrification when there is rapid growth occurring.

Olsen’s paper left me convinced that contextual analysis, that is, a qualitative typology to define shrinking cities instead of a quantitative one, would lead to more useful observations. These can serve as a comparative framework for analyzing similar cities worldwide. A qualitative approach leads to more relatable comparisons between shrinking cities of erstwhile East Germany and the Rust Belt in the US, instead of the Sun Belt.

I would argue for uncoupling ‘prosperity’ from ‘ever increasing growth’, and urge cities to plan for ‘smart decline.’ Shrinkage may not always be a bad thing. In the words of Aristotle: “A great city should not be confounded with a populous city.”

Tanvi Maheshwari is a Master of Urban Design student at UC Berkeley. She is interested in urbanism of the global south and segregation in the public realm. She can be reached at tanvi@berkeley.edu.

The Battle of Baxter Creek: Resolving Power Struggles in a Community Green Space

This is a tale of a well-intentioned stream restoration project in a residential park-neighborhood of Richmond, CA that sparked a community power struggle. The unintended consequences of the restoration left the neighborhood divided. Neighbors who wanted to reduce criminal activity in the park were pitted against those attempting to promote local pride with aesthetic improvements. It provides an interesting case study bothfor understandingsuccessful urban creek restoration and neighborhood-level politics.

Booker T. Anderson Jr. Park is a family-oriented green space serving a neighborhood located in Richmond, CA -- a city with high levels of crime. Beginning in the year 2000, an unappealing, blighted, channelized stream crossed the park that separated the park’s community center from a playground, soccer and baseball fields. Lisa Owen Viani, then graduate student at UC Berkeley, developed a project to transform this eyesore to a riparian green space, including a lush thicket of native willows based on regional heritage.

However, as time passed, the design’s obstructed sight-lines resulted in unintended public safety issues. One incident involved a police chase of an armed individual who fled into the understory of the willow thicket as kids were playing in the nearby playground and fields. This situation created a heightened fear of the willows among residents and park users. It also alerted the police to this area as a potential zone forcriminal conduct. Residents also reported increased muggings and drug and sexual activity in the area since the landscape project was implemented.

In the summer of 2007, while the director of the Parks Department was on leave, department staff responded to an outpouring of complaints by commissioning a “city maintenance crew who’d clear-cut everything below about five feet,” according to the Berkeley Daily Planet, which dubbed it the Richmond “Chainsaw Massacre.” While this resulted in improved sight lines that addressed the safety concerns of both the neighborhood and police department, some residents believed this to be a misallocation of limited resources that diminished the positive effects of the restoration.

It is important to understand how this community power play surrounding the stream restoration evolved. The seeds of this battle were sown over a decade ago when Lisa Owens Viani gathered support from a consortium of citizens, scientists, government and non-government agencies, including the Urban Creeks Council (UCC) and the City of Richmond. The UCC and the Friends of Baxter Creek received $150,000 to restore the storm drain to a ‘natural’ creek with riparian vegetation. At the time, typical restoration practice was placed-based. This method restores habitat to an historic state that once existed, from which plant and wildlife succession would follow naturally. Historically in the Bay area, many low-elevation streams were dense with thickets of willows. Using this method, the creek became a thriving ‘natural’ area that benefitted the ecosystem and the neighborhood, as well as providing a sense of identity among organizations from multiple local, regional, and state community interests.

In the ensuing years, the willows began to dominate the urban stream and the project soon became problematic for the community. The dense thicket of trees was no longer perceived as a safe place for children to play along the banks of the creek to catch tadpolesand butterflies. Several public meetings were held during the initial development; however, not all interested parties felt that the city had given them an accurate portrayal of how dense the thicket would become, a factor that contribute to the concerns of both the neighborhood and police department.

In reality, the 2007 “Chainsaw massacre” only destroyed eight willows out of several hundred on the project site, while the remaining trees were merely trimmed to allow for protective sight lines. But, after the uproar, a stakeholders’ meeting was quickly organized by the leader of the original project, Lisa Owens Viani, and supporter Ann Riley, a well-known stream restorationist and staff member of the Water Board. At that meeting, City Council member Tom Butt said that some members of the community desired ‘natural’ growth while others favored surveillance-ready spaces. He pointed to a gap in communication between planners and neighborhood stakeholders such as the local Neighborhood Watch group. This lack of communication ultimately prevented all of the stakeholders from coming to an agreement as to what defined a desirable park.

After the dust settled on Baxter Creek, valuable lessons emerged for planners, restorationists, and the surrounding neighborhood. The traditional historical ‘place-based’ method of restoration is not always the best for a given community. The sociological environment of the neighboring community is a key element in a successful restoration project. Tailoring the project to the needs of the neighborhood is as important as selecting the type of plants and wildlife to returning a creek to an enduring and healthy state. In addition, a plan needs to account for the maintenance of the restoration over time.

As it turned out, the City responded by funding $60,000 to further investigate neighborhood concerns, supplement the willows with a flowering chaparral understory (a novel approach in contrast to traditional riparian planning), and maintain four safety sight lines between the community center, playgrounds, soccer and baseball fields. The UCC immediately began their outreach to residents, which included door-to-door and mail surveys, along with four community meetings held over the course of a year. In 2008, an agreement was reached to construct a written management plan that would address the interests of all stakeholders, any change in maintenance crew protocols, and turnover among governing bodies. Since then the rancor from the Baxter Creek power struggle has subsided.  Good landscape projects require prudent planning. From this experience, future landscape designers can take-away valuable lessons about the need to tailor restorations to a given community and ensure that they will be maintained over time.

Ken Schwab is an undergraduate of the University of California, Berkeley, where he is majoring in Conservation and Resources Studies at the College of Natural Resources. He is currently working an honors thesis, funded by SPUR and mentored by Dr. Vincent Resh, on the longest post-project monitoring of a ‘daylighted’ urban stream which includes: community perception, biological and habitat assessments, and a pioneering economic evaluation. He is actively involved with the Strawberry Creek Restoration, with Dr. Katharine Suding, which received a grant from The Green Initiative Fund (TGIF) -- Fitting Plant to Place: Site-Specific Restoration Planning on Strawberry Creek. Ken can be reached at ken.schwab@berkeley.edu.

Vestiges of San Francisco’s Unbuilt Waterfront

San Francisco has oftenserved as a blank canvas since its rapid rise to prominence after the Gold Rush in the mid-1800s – the subject of countless visions for how the built environment should be designed. Whilesomewereoutlandish and others more grounded, the many ideas advanced over the years for guiding the City’s development have each presented a roadmap for moving forward, complete with nested values of what is most important for the future. Such is the subject ofUnbuilt San Francisco – an exhibit currently presented at five locations around the Bay Area, including at UC Berkeley (more details below). On display are plans, renderings, models, and other media depicting unrealized visions for the San Francisco Bay Area. Some of these proposals, such as a BART line running into Marin County, many wish had been built; others, like Marincello, a 30,000-person community in the now-preserved Marin Headlands, we cannot imagine advancing today. The exhibit covers a journey of great breadth, ultimately leaving the viewer with anuneasy sense of what could have been.

In the 1960s, a large planned development was proposed to be built in the Marin Headlands by the Gulf Oil Corporation. In the face of strong opposition from various environmental groups, in 1972, the company reluctantly sold the land so it could be incorporated into a new national park – the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Source: Thomas Frouge, developer

The lasting impact of the Unbuilt San Francisco exhibition, though, is not simply an understanding of the Bay Area’s various unrealized futures, but more fundamentally an appreciation of how the choices made in the past impact how we see things today.

San Francisco’s ever-evolving waterfront is an excellent case study. Indeed, the edge of the Bay might have turned out quite differently than what we see today. A turn-of-the-century plan imagined the Ferry Building at the foot of Market Street surrounded by towering Roman-style columns. Decades later, another would have replaced San Francisco’s beloved waterfront monument with a modernist-inspired World Trade Center, surrounding a large sun dial. These ideas may sound outlandish today, but they were seriously considered at the time.

This turn-of-the-century vision would have created a grand public space in front of the Ferry Building encircled by classically-styled columns and arches. Source: Willis Polk (1897)

Another vision would have done away with the Ferry Building altogether and replaced it with a modern World Trade Center. The slender center tower and sun dial seem to allude to the structures they would have replaced. Source: Joseph H. Clark (1951).

One idea in particular has had an enduring influence on how we envision the waterfront today: the proposal for an elevated high-speed motorway running the length of the Bay’s shoreline.

In the 1950s, following the national trend, an ambitious network of limited-access freeways was conceived for San Francisco, crisscrossing all corners of the 7-by-7-mile city. Despite being swept up by the freedoms of automobility, freeways were far from welcomed in San Francisco. As the first few structures went up, including the double-decker Embarcadero rising between Market Street and the Ferry Building, people began to realize the damaging effects the roads were having. In swift response, the now famous Freeway Revolt was born.

Citizens crowd into City Hall wearing signs on their heads to express their opposition to the freeways being erected all over San Francisco. Source: San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.

Freeways in San Francisco were opposed for various reasons, but much of the discourse centered on aesthetics and access. Beyond being unsightly, neighborhoods that received the early motorways were walled off from their surroundings and quickly succumbed to blight and loss of vitality. After years of fierce opposition, the citizens' revolt was ultimately successful in blocking most proposed freeways, and the Embarcadero was only partly completed (it was originally proposed to connect with the Golden Gate Bridge). Just 21 years after the Embarcadero’s completion, it took only seconds for the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake to damage the structure enough to warrant taking it down. Though many enjoyed the access it provided and called for reconstruction, then-Mayor Art Agnos envisioned a new aesthetically-pleasing waterfront, and fought for the freeway to be replaced with the grand boulevard we know today. Few look back longingly.

Citizens crowd into City Hall wearing signs on their heads to express their opposition to the freeways being erected all over San Francisco. Source: San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.

The unrealized vision for a complete freeway network in San Francisco has left citizens sensitized not only to future roadway proposals, but also to any project that might possibly impact the waterfront’s aesthetics, access, or views. One need look no further than the controversial 8 Washington project rejected by voters earlier this month – what would have been a 134-unit luxury condominium development along the waterfront, adjacent to where the Embarcadero Freeway used to stand – to see this. The project had diverse opposition – from those who questioned building $5 million condos in a city struggling to provide affordable housing,to those who criticized its parking ratios – but most discourse concerned appearance and accessibility. Critics focused on the project's 13-story height, roughly twice that of the late freeway, claiming it would have blocked views and access to the Bay, thereby tarnishing the waterfront’s appeal.

This rendering, drawn up by supporters of 8 Washington, takes an elevated perspective, showing the tall buildings of the Financial District in the background, to downplay the project’s heights.

The opposition's image instead takes a ground-level perspective, juxtaposing the Embarcadero Freeway in front of 8 Washington, to illustrate the development’s towering design.

In typical San Francisco fashion, the 8 Washington debate became so heated that it was the subject of not one but two propositions on the November ballot earlier this month. Voters were asked if they approved of the decision to allow the project to exceed existing height limits. The ‘No on B & C’ campaign strategically employed the slogan “No Wall on the Waterfront” and made direct comparisons to the Embarcadero Freeway (campaign ad embedded below). Former Mayor Art Agnos reemerged as a spokesperson for the opposition, proclaiming that “8 Washington will be the first brick in a new wall along the waterfront.” Despite the obvious differences between the fallen freeway and 8 Washington, people were concerned that the progress made along the waterfront in recent years would be lost if the proposal moved forward. Ultimately, both initiatives were soundly voted down almost two-to-one. The developer may choose to return with a new down-sized proposal, but at least this version of 8 Washington joins the list of San Francisco’s unrealized visions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cujWdElxCHk#action=share

Ideas remain unrealized for many reasons – because they do not match prevailing values, they were not well-conceived, or perhaps they just were not well-articulated – but some nevertheless persist, influencing decision-making to this day. The many unbuilt visions for San Francisco’s waterfront have not only influenced what was actually built, but have left a more enduring impact on how people imagine its possible futures. Turning over the waterfront to the purely utilitarian role of moving automobiles was ultimately rejected, replaced by a more aesthetically-focused public space. The discourse surrounding this unbuilt vision continues, sensitizing people to anything that might once again “wall off” the Bay’s shoreline. Planners and designers would be smart to inform themselves of the waterfront’s complex evolution, lest they propose something that has no chance of actually being built.

Unbuilt San Francisco is a collaborative effort of AIA San Francisco, Center for Architecture + Design, Environmental Design Archives at UC Berkeley, California Historical Society, San Francisco Public Library, and SPUR. The exhibition will be on display at various locations throughout the Bay Area through the end of November 2013. More information about specific dates and locations of showings can be found on the organizational websites linked above.

Mark Dreger is working towards his Masters in City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, concentrating in transportation and urban design. He is a San Francisco native and interested in the nexus between systems of mobility and the public realm. He can be reached at m.dreger@berkeley.edu.

The Small Indiscretions Of Lagos

Source: http://theglobenewspaper.blogspot.com/2013/09/how-to-ensure-transparency-in-land-deals.html .

An article in South Africa's Mail & Guardian boldly declares: “Nigeria's property boom is only for the brave.” Lagos is one of the continent's fastest urbanizing, rapidly expanding, bursting at the seams, oil-financed megacities. In this frenzy for investment, migration, and growth, Africa's amorphous--and apparently brave--middle class persists in jockeying for space in an exponential metropolis. So, too, does international real estate capital. Making space for its clean landing in Lagos demands at times the material expansion of the city, dredging the lagoon to build the new high-end enclaves of urban investment. And while real-estate interests demand firm ground, Lagos' slums barely stay afloat.

But space isn't enough. Congestion requires bravery, a necessary tool for navigating the uncertainty of Lagos’ land markets. To prove one’s bravery, the Mail & Guardian proposes a trial of agility: buy property in Lagos. The city's unhinged and impenetrable property record-keeping regime is reminiscent of public land holdings in North America's disorganized land management systems. Assuming they exist, Lagos’ land records are dispersed across multiple bureaucratic bodies and determining the validity of property ownershiprequires a laborious dive into the catacombs of municipal administration. This prompts awkward questions to your Lagos-based real estate agent: Do you even know who owns this building? This bureaucratic wall demands a similar fix to the ever-present problematic of African corruption: the transparency of land tenure. Instead, the 419 property scam abounds, where brokers successfully sell homes and land they do not own to unwitting buyers. A meticulous hustle that requires a fast pitch and often a forged title, the 419 scam is the illusion of trust, the predatory imitation of formality, and a stereotype of Nigerian technique.

But in the rush of urban life, trust is more expedient than validity. There is little time to find out what is real and trust will have to suffice. For those Nigerians unwilling to bet against uncertainty, the 419 has spawned a beleaguered, self-proclaimed lawyer who posts swindle avoidance advice on Nairaland. In 2010, with more 419-avoidance work than he could come to terms with, our lawyer falls apart: "I thought I knew every trick in the book and how to deal with them but they kept on coming at me like a heavy downpour and I couldn’t catch my breath in most situations. In fact it was so bad that I almost gave up handling property matters and questioned my competence in some instances." Lagos is underwater. This small public vestige of (fee-for-service) help can hardly keep his own head above water, let alone your property deals.

Our beaten-down west African private investigator shares his encounters with the 419 in a series of extravagantly informative vignettes replete with dodgy surveyors and GPS systems seemingly always on the fritz; subtle discrepancies in forged family deeds crafted by an insider mole; an un-earthing of the hidden remains of "buyers beware: not for sale" sign in the last minutes before a land-deal. Oh, the crushing suspense! Avoiding ruin requires constant vigilance and flexibility, something this intrepid lawyer (barely) manages to post publicly online. He is the public defender of proper land circulations, plugging the holes through which the 419 siphons off common capital.

Is this Nigeria? In Chimamanda Adichie's novel Americanah, the devastatingly insightful protagonist, Ifemelu, struggles with her identity as a been-to (that select group of young returnee Lagosians hungry to compare the city to elsewhere). Ifemelu writes in her blog, The Small Redemptions of Lagos: "Lagos has never been, will never be, and has never aspired to be like New York, or anywhere else for that matter... [Nigeria] is a nation of people who eat beef and chicken and cow skin and intestines and dried fish in a single bowl of soup, and it is called assorted, and so get over yourselves and realize that the way of life here is just that, assorted" (p. 421).

Met with the disparaging comments about North American blacks from fellow Nigerians, Ifemelu struggles to speak for either place:

Her Nigerian co-worker--a huge fan of the American show Cops--asks, "Why is it only black people that are criminals over there?"

To which Ifemelu, after a protracted silence, slowly responds: "It's like saying every Nigerian is a 419."

An amused retort: "But it is true, all of us have small 419 in our blood!"

Ifemelu gives up arguing with her co-worker, quits her job, and begins her new blog, a lyrical accounting of Lagos’ cityness emblazoned with a large, abandoned colonial mansion as its masthead. (I imagine this mansion with a hand-painted sign boldly inscribed on its facade: NOT FOR SALE). It is her return to Nigeria. It is not a relocation with an eye to elsewhere, but a feeling that "she had, finally, spun herself fully into being". Nearly unbundled by the constant re-education of this month's latest scam strategy, our own intrepid protagonist--the Nairaland Lawyer--persists, posts, and spins together his own income-generating position from the deluge of pleas for help from his online readers.

As the Mail & Guardian recounts, a solution to this exasperation and this bravery-in-the-face-of-uncertainty is the transparency of land laws. Routinization, organization, reliability: undifferentiated goods. Here, the security of tenure smooths out life for the West African middle class, opening new vistas of re-assuring liquidity for formal housing finance--no more borrowing from family, as you can finally borrow from the bank. Here, the security of tenure smooths out business for the global financial class, opening new landscapes of liquidity free from burdensome local uncertainties--no more worrying if your debtors will repay or if the deed you bought is legally attached to land.

Lagos is churning uncertainty into routine, but the city’s poorest residents are increasingly displaced. Nigerian architect Kunlé Adeyemi, alongside place-based community organizations, designed and built the first floating school in Lagos’ lagoon slum, Makoko. Prince Adesegun Oniru, the Commissioner for Waterfront and Infrastructure Development in Lagos State, responded by declaring the school illegal. He states, “The floating school has been illegal since inception…The simple answer to the floating school is that it is an illegal structure and it shouldn’t be there.” Since mid-2012, the government has been systematically demolishing Makoko, dispossessing the poor of their already tenuous claims to water-bound residence.

Lagos has a routine. It is a social infrastructure spun together by a series of “tentative cooperations based on trust.” These are the everyday negotiations of making life work in the exponential metropolis. The swindle is one part of this infrastructure, but does not represent it. The swindle violates it. If the formal routine--the new visibilities, formalities, and transparencies--succeeds in making urban life more durable for the African middle class, it will open the doors of institutional trust at the same time it drowns Makoko’s schools. It will stop all this needless spinning together, making work, and siphoning off. It will save Lagos from its own scam, but narrow the city’s robust assortment of life in the process.

Chris Mizes is a PhD student in City and Regional Planning at UCBerkeley. He is interested in landscape politics, infrastructure, land tenure, and African urbanisms. He blogs about his research interests at spacewithinlines and can be reached at mizes@berkeley.edu.

St. Louis’ Ballpark Village: Subsidizing the Status Quo

Some see the rising steel structures in downtown St. Louis as milestones in a long-awaited project, others as an unwelcome reminder: as construction on the Cardinals’ Ballpark Village becomes more visible, controversy surrounding the $650 million development has also grown.

Ballpark Village has been envisioned as a new downtown destination for over a decade, but like thousands of other developments nationwide, remained just a vision until earlier this year due to the recession. The 2007 plan included high-rise condominiums, bars, shops, restaurants, plus the introduction of a street grid intended to integrate the project into the surrounding downtown neighborhood. The current construction, however, will include none of the mixed-use features, and replaces much of the planned development with a bemoaned surface parking lot.

But is a Midwestern parking lot worth discussing within a larger planning context? The success of American cities in the 21st century has to a large extent come from the reclamation of - and reinvestment in - urban identities. Ballpark Village, by contrast, neglects downtown St. Louis’s urban character, which is increasingly dense, walkable, and home to a wealth of independent shops and restaurants. In ignoring the city’s resurgent urbanity, developers have also shown a disregard for St. Louis’s historical position as a major American metropolis, missing out on an unequivocal opportunity to showcase a nationally meaningful urban identity.

St. Louis, Missouri, is a city that has undergone multiple transformations, which map closely onto broader national trends. It has morphed from Mississippi trading post to peripheral Rust Belt manufacturing center, to glimmering site of the magnificent 1904 World’s Fair, to metropolis known for blight rather than bustle. In the last half-century, St. Louis became a laboratory for misguided urban renewal attempts that coincided with the construction of one of the nation’s most impressive monuments to modernism, the Arch. St. Louis’s urban fabric and population have also continuously been shaped by federal housing policy: the massive ambition of the Arch, appearing just a few years after the ill-fated construction of Pruitt-Igoe, one of the country’s most infamous housing projects, attest to the city’s synchronicity with nationwide sentiments and policy currents. Appropriately, Al Jazeera opinion writer Sarah Kendzior writes that in the 21st century, St. Louis has become “the gateway and memorial of the American dream.”

1965 construction of the St. Louis Arch, roughly 10 years after the completion of Pruitt-Igoe. Source: National Park Service, Jefferson National Expansion Memorial.

Today, St. Louis’ identity reflects each of these national epochs, but amajor piece of the city’s character comes not from its industrial history, housing projects, or architectural talking points. Instead, it draws from America’s favorite pastime—baseball. St. Louis’ relationship with its baseball team, like many American cities', is a historic relationship closely tied to the city’s identity and a source of pride. The Cardinals’ Busch Stadium, located centrally in a downtown area, is a boon to the city. Frequent ballgames draw spirited crowds, who often venture outside the ballpark to downtown restaurants and fill area bars following both raucous wins and disappointing losses.

Rebuilt in 2006, Busch Stadium was unusual in that it was financed predominantly by the Cardinals’ private funds (nearly 90%). The city did, however,cover a local admissions tax on tickets, as well as assist with initial public infrastructure costs. There’s no doubt that the construction of the new stadium in 2006 was a worthwhile investment with a sizable return for the city. But does this justify the team’s newest endeavor?

The reality of the project today, after six years of delay and economic uncertainty, is far less ambitious than that initially proposed. The development’s first phase is now slated to offer a baseball history museum, a “Cardinals Nation” restaurant, a cowboy bar, and a two-story “Budweiser Brew House.”

An early plan for the development shows the introduction of six city blocks. Source: nextSTL

An early 2013 plan also shows the diminished street grid and the replacement of housing and retail with surface parking. Source: nextSTL

Critics, including leading urban blog voice Alex Ihnen of NextSTL, as well as a few local aldermen, are particularly incensed by a400-plus-space parking lot. Developers promise the lot holds potential for additional uses in the next phases of development, but there are currently no concrete plans for the space. Alderman Scott Ogilvie told the St. Louis Riverfront Times in August that "It is literally the exact opposite of the kind of development that creates better urban environments,” arguing that a taxpayer subsidy should go to development that has more to offer the city.

Ogilvie’s argument has merit. A much-cited analysis published by the Brookings Institution studied the economic effects of sports and found little significant gain when public funds are invested in sports teams and stadiums.The authors found that rather than attracting additional spending, new sports facilities simply “realign” purchases that fans might’ve made elsewhere. That is, it’s unlikely that they’ll bring additional revenue downtown to anyone but the Cardinals’ owners and stakeholders.

Private interests vested in Ballpark Village’s construction will profit the easy way: with no obligation to deliver progress or innovation to downtown St. Louis. Ballpark Village, which city aldermen voted to give TIF (tax-increment financing) benefits, is receiving substantial public funds. When applied discriminately, TIF can be a powerful tool for revitalizing neighborhoods and drawing businesses and people to struggling areas. But without a mixed-use district that includes housing options as well as restaurants and bars, the project won’t bring anything new to downtown St. Louis. What does this mean for the city that represents the “gateway and memorial of the American Dream”? Ballpark Village is an unprecedented opportunity for the Cardinals and the City toleverage St. Louis’s love of baseball and create a walkable, mixed-use new stadium area. This will not only draw crowds from the suburbs on game days, but may convince St. Louisans of the vitality and viability of actually living downtown.

More than that, though, Baseball Village prompts questions regarding urban identity and development that are playing out not just on the local scale, but nationally as well. Foremost--how is urban identity constructed? An excellent video on Buffalo, New York’s history as “America’s Best Designed City” showers attention on the city’s points of planning pride. Cincinnati has just begun construction on the downtown Cincinnati Streetcar. The Marcy-Holmes neighborhood in Minneapolis launched its own participatory community planning website over the summer, where residents can suggest and vote on riverfront improvements and bike lane additions, among other things.

Instead of capitalizing on urban character like projects in these cities, however, Ballpark Village has St. Louis once again apologizing for its urbanity, attempting to make itself more palatable to nonresidents. The city’s immense and meaningful history deserves better. A new downtown parking lot in St. Louis can—and should—serve as a contested space: one that was initiallypromised to St. Louis’ residents as a vibrant mixed-use district. The project still holds the possibility of fulfilling the positive expectations kindled by the original plan, but onlyif St. Louisans demand more from the developers, the Cardinals, and local government.

NOTE: St. Louis has also had some of its own great urban ideas! See, for example: the Sustainable Neighborhood Small Grant Competition, the Trestle railroad bikeway and the Sustainable Land Lab project.

Anna Carlsson is a third-year undergrad at UC Berkeley pursuing degrees in Political Science and German. She’s interested in the dynamics of urban development and political representation (especially in her hometown of St. Louis, MO) and hopes to gain an international perspective on urban issues while studying abroad in Berlin next semester. Anna can be reached at asc92@berkeley.edu.

Landscapes of Abundance… or Debt & Decay?

Greece. The word brings to mind a dazzling array of images. Whitewashed houses topped with cobalt blue roofs. Windmills and grape vines. Anthony Quinn dancing with a glass of ouzo by the sea. Yet what the word does not automatically trigger is desperate landscapes comprised of abandoned, half-constructed homes.

This article explores the vernacular architecture of Greece (in particular the island of Santorini), and also investigates such landscapes in times of economic debt & crisis. As the US government finally reaches a deal to end government shutdown and avoid default, we can look to other countries for precedents regarding how debt crises affect building, planning and constructed landscapes at the local level. This isn’t an alarmist cry against the certainty of a debt-ridden future. Instead, I tracethe possibilities of how debt affects the built environment, and ask if we should begin thinking about parallel models and case studies. Although Greece and its islands may comprise a much smaller geographic scale than the US or Canada, it is an instructive example and microcosm that we can learn from.

Greece’s ongoing debt crisis was triggered by the 2008 recession and resulted from a confluence of factors: 1) government deficit 2) government debt and 3) the structural weakness of the Greek economy. While the crisis drastically impacted Greek employment, tourism, and Euro exchange rates at the macroeconomic level, it also had a far more micro effect on Greeceat the local level. Examples of these incremental and parochial consequences come from the Greek Islands, where the effects of the recession are amply visible to the naked eye.

Half constructed house, Santorini. SOURCE: Nicola Szibbo, 2013

While driving and hiking around the Cyclades and the Dodecanese, one significant element in the fabric that I quickly noticedwas the striking amount of half-constructed buildings and homes (primarily residential building types). This was most apparent on the island of Santorini, readily apparent in the semi-rural areas removed from the tourist centers of the island. I found the contrast to be unsettling and raised important questions about urban and rural development on the island. How could so many buildings be left unfinished?

Imerovigli, Traditional Cave Vault Houses. SOURCE: Nicola Szibbo, 2013

Santorini, in particular, is known for its whitewashed roof vault construction. The particular building type is an important bioclimatic adaptation—the whitewash aids in the albedo effect, a passive cooling technique. The cave vaults also help keep the houses cool in the summer, as the earth dampens the diurnal and annual temperature fluctuations. In addition, such vaulted cave houses were often built into the earth around them, saving the need for extra materials and reducing space needs. The Cycladic islands naturally have scarcity of timber, although the island is blessed with an abundance of rich volcanic soil.

Source: Nicola Szibbo, 2013 (adapted from Frewin Poffley, 2013)

The island is crescent-shaped, and is actually an active volcano. Its volcanic nature is thought to have led to the demise of the Minoan civilization in Akrotiri at the south end of the island in mid-second millennium BCE. The island has often served as basis for the myth of Atlantis, as Plato recounts many similarities between the two places. The rich volcanic soil of the island has led to the harvesting of vegetables and fruit, in particular grapes for local assyrtiko and vinssanto wines, cherry tomatoes, fava beans and white eggplants. These local foods have become the foundation for the island’s popular gastronomic scene.

Unfinished house and/or commercial property. SOURCE: Nicola Szibbo, 2013

Half-constructed homes, Santorini. SOURCE: Nicola Szibbo, 2013

With its unique crater formation, the island has served as a mecca for tourism since the 1800s. Its natural viewsheds have created amphitheatric locations for towns such as Oia, Fira and its highest point, Venetian-settled Imerovigli. The rest of the island slopes down gradually from the caldera rim to the sea, and it is here on the eastern and southern ends of the island that you find an abundance of half-developed homes.

I asked our local guides, Yiannis and Paros, aboard a sailing trip that circumnavigated the island, why there were so many half-constructed homes (masonry and concrete structure present but lacking plaster or interior finishing). Paros answered that this was primarily a result of the economic recession—residents hadbegun the construction of homes, and then did not have the finances to finish them. Additionally, Paros mentioned that many of the partially finished buildings were illegal homes. Construction had stopped, as they did not have the requisite building permits from the government to continue. This also relates back to economic hardship, as proper permitting is often expensive and time-consuming.

Despite claims that Santorini managed to completely circumvent the negative effects of the recession, I remain unconvinced. How can one side of the island—the whitewashed rim with its vibrant architecture—look so profoundly magical, while the other seems desolate and abandoned? This was not the Greece I was expecting. The island had revealed a duplicitous nature—one side based on the bustling tourism industry, and the other suffering under the harsh, local reality prompted by the economic crisis.

Now, after 3 years of economic crisis, the Greek economy is beginning to stabilize. Whether or not some of these half-constructed buildings will be adaptively ‘re-used’ is a major question still to be answered. In a similar forlorn way, these abandoned, empty homes reminded me of the foreclosure crisis experienced here in the US. Is there a way to move forward with building from a sustainability standpoint? What can Greece learn from the foreclosure crisis in the US, and the US learn from the debt crisis in Greece?

Nicola Szibbo is a PhD candidate in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. Her interests include vernacular architecture, green neighborhood rating systems and sustainable urban design in Europe, Canada & the United States. You can reach her at nszibbo@berkeley.edu.

World-Class Urbanism: A Glance at TEDCity2.0 and Place-making in the 21st Century

What defines the world-class city?

Who defines the world-class city?

These are the questions with which University of California Berkeley professor of City Planning Ananya Roy begins her headlining talk at TEDCity2.0. Roy takes the audience through an examination of the “cottage industry” of city officials, advocacy groups, and others who spend countless hours pondering this notion of world-class city identity. In municipalities across the globe, from Shenzhen, China, to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, local leaders want to know whether they have the “it” factors for achieving world-class city status.

UC Berkeley Professor Ananya Roy. Source: TED Talks

Yet Roy argues that in the pursuit of becoming a world-class city, these leaders and their upper-class allies ignore and marginalize the very people who make the city successful. She notes that we frequently define the world-class city by physical markers such as having “spectacular architecture,” or being “always under construction.” Meanwhile, these cities are run by the cheap labor of workers we cannot see, and they begin to blandly resemble each other in their race to the forefront.

TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, has been around since 1984, but has spawned a number of topic-specific events since then, such as TEDGlobal, TEDWomen, and of course, TEDCity itself. Aside from Roy, TEDCity2.0 features a number of notable speakers, including U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Shaun Donovan, and Enrique Peñalosa, former Green Party mayor of Bogotá, Colombia. The conference’s impressive lineup of presenters and its focus on “re”making the city (the four sections of the event are entitled “Redefining Citizen,” “Reinventing Urban Experience,” “Reimagining the City,” and “Redrawing Geographies”) suggest that TEDCity2.0 is a small-scale reflection of the very same chase for world-class identity that Roy discusses in her speech. So does TED as a whole reproduce similar issues as world-class cities when it comes to structural marginalization?

Perhaps this is not how it has to be. In describing world-class cities, Roy tells us that we can redefine our conceptions of them through three different approaches: solidarity, visibility, and dwelling. In solidarity, we as consumers take some responsibility for the sources of our goods, as seen through examples such as the fair trade movement. If we have visibility, we pledge to see the urban poor majority as the dominant force in today’s city-making. And by dwelling, Roy means that we should challenge the development patterns of world-class cities, which benefit the rich and often involve displacement and undervaluing of the spaces inhabited by the poor. In these ways, Roy asserts that we can envision and create the City2.0 upon which the TED conference is based.

TEDCity2.0 is clearly reaching toward Roy’s vision, as the unspoken theme of the conference seems to be “re”discovering the city as human. For instance, after Roy’s remarks, peace activist Mohamed Ali tells us how a terrorist is born, by taking us into the perspective of a young rural migrant to Mogadishu, Somalia, and showing us the denial of opportunity he faces upon arrival. Later on, Kasim Reed, mayor of Atlanta, recounts the story of a long-time resident he meets while campaigning for office, and the lack of investment that makes her neighborhood one of the more challenging parts of city. Overall, TEDCity2.0’s speakers encourage us to connect in meaningful ways with others. And not simply the “others” that look like us. Maybe it is these stories that will lend us the inspiration and know-how to make the world class city more equitable.

Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed. Source: TED Talks

But there are also ways that TEDCity2.0 might not go far enough. Just as Roy describes how the invisible workers of today’s global cities need to become visible, perhaps the individuals who create TEDCity2.0 need to be seen in order for the event to reach its highest aspiration. This may mean anything from acknowledging and meeting the individuals who literally constructed the TEDCity2.0 stage to gaining a deeper history of the many people whose stories inspired the speakers that stand upon it.

There is a near-undeniable trendy and sexy feel to TED talks that makes us want to spread their messages to others through Twitter, Facebook, or Google+, yet it’s also important to ask ourselves what this really accomplishes. Is this true visibility and solidarity? While TED creates a fantastic space for exploring and deconstructing global cities, we must also think about the next steps. Otherwise, the event becomes the very epitome of what it analyses, a spectacle built upon the experiences of the underclass. If TED does alter how we think about the City2.0, the question we should ask ourselves is what exactly to do now with our new ways of seeing the world?

It’s precisely the answers to this final question that will define the next generation of planners, leaders, and activists. It’s the answers that will determine who we see at the next TEDCity event. But it will take time to see whether these are also the answers that will finally empower Roy’s urban majority to claim the numerous platforms that they have built throughout the world.

Stefani Cox is a master’s student in City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, where she studies community and economic development through the lens of equitable and participatory processes. She can be reached at stefanicox@berkeley.edu.

A New Mid-Market Street: Who is Left Behind?

All eyes seem to be on San Francisco’s Market Street these days. A long-stalled planning effort to redesign the street to improve conditions for transit, bicycling, and walking – dubbed the Better Market Street project – is at last progressing, with a final design concept being decided upon in the coming months. The many agencies involved in the project have struggled to create a unified vision for the corridor, since its character is so multifaceted and the street serves many competing roles. The backbone of San Francisco’s transportation network and its cultural center, Market Street is arguably the City’s most important street. Cutting diagonally from the waterfront on the edge of the Financial District all the way to the foot of Twin Peaks, Market Street is simultaneously a connector, a dividing line, and a place of its own.

Despite the slow progress of the Better Market Street project to reorganize mobility along the corridor, many land use and other place-based changes are already well underway. Along Market Street’s long-distressed Mid-Market / Civic Center section, high-profile technology firms like social networking giant Twitter are moving in, and their wealthy, well-educated workforce is following close behind. Such a rapid shift in demographics is changing the character of the area, leaving one asking: whose interests matter and who is being left behind?

Mid-Market has long been a place of concern – almost every Mayor in recent memory has made efforts to “clean up” the so-called blighted area. Directly adjacent to the Tenderloin and Civic Center neighborhoods, this middle section of Market Street is troubled by homelessness, drug addiction, prostitution, and other quality-of-life issues. On some blocks, almost half of storefronts are vacant and many buildings are falling into disrepair. Attempts to spark vitality by reviving the area’s roots as a theatre and arts district have only been somewhat effective. Now, the new concept is to reorient Mid-Market into a technology hub, which means remaking the area to attract newcomers, largely to the detriment of current residents.

In 2011, San Francisco officials enacted a package of loans, grants, and tax breaks to lure investors to Mid-Market. Though controversial, the plan seems to be producing results. Twitter’s arrival last year was the subject of most headlines, and other big technology firms like Dolby Labs and mobile-payment service Square have also recently moved into the area. But the allure is not just tax breaks – younger workers are increasingly forgoing life in the suburbs for a more lively urban experience. The advent of corporate shuttle buses carrying thousands of workers who live in the City to their jobs south of San Francisco each morning makes this point very clear. Tech firms are realizing this and are beginning to move the center of gravity from Silicon Valley to San Francisco, situating themselves where their employees want to live and work. Retail businesses are correspondingly turning-over, with expensive coffee shops, gourmet restaurants, and boutique chocolatiers taking their place. Change is afoot.

By early next year, the 754-unit luxury apartment complex NeMa (standing for “New Market”) will be complete, bringing thousands of new affluent residents to the area. A good number will work in the burgeoning tech industry. Mid-Market’s revitalization involves a very real change in the area’s identity, as the City caters to those who stand to bring the most capital into the area, with little attention given to the thousands who live on the streets and in low-rent housing. Just last month, police shut down an over 30-year tradition of Tenderloin residents playing chess on Market Street’s sidewalk – one of the corridor’s only visible images of community. SFPD Capt. Michael Redmond said the games had “turned into a big public nuisance” and he suspected they were “a disguise for some other things that are going on,” such as drug dealing and gambling. This once-forgotten stretch of Market Street is suddenly valuable, and the last thing the City wants to do is scare affluent people away.

What will all these changes ultimately mean for the neighborhood? Market Street will surely continue to be a place where people of all walks of life come together, but a process of harsh gentrification is nevertheless occurring. As Mid-Market reorients itself to be attractive for a younger and more affluent demographic, current lower-income residents are viewed as a nuisance – an expendable population tolerated only until renewal takes-off. San Francisco needs to reflect on the type of city it wants to be. As things are going, there will need to be a big change in perspective, unless it wants to relegate itself to being a playground for the rich.

Mark Dreger is working towards his Masters in City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, concentrating in transportation and urban design. He is a San Francisco native and interested in the nexus between systems of mobility and the public realm.

How to Stop the City of Berkeley’s Criminalization of the Homeless

One of the most popular pieces of advice to incoming students concerns walking around People’s Park and Shattuck Avenue, two of the most popular homeless encampment areas. While some claim that “no story of Berkeley is complete without the story of the homeless, whose presence has become familiar to residents,” many avoid these areas because they wish to avoid either the homeless themselves, their belongings (e.g. the sight and spread of their tattered blankets) or their companions (e.g. cats, dogs and other pets). Particularly on Shattuck Avenue, the downtown area where many local stores and restaurants are located, business owners express resentment, claiming that the homeless people have affected their daily operations. They have urged the city government to do something.

There have been recent attempts. The City of Berkeley proposed a controversial ballot measure to ban anyone from sitting or lying at the sidewalks during the day through Measure S, otherwise known as Civil Sidewalkers, in late November 2012. First-time violators would face a penalty of $75 or community service, while subsequent violations could be charged as misdemeanors. Measure S was voted down by a majority of Berkeley voters.

The message is clear: as the measure would have forbidden the basic activities of the homeless in commercial areas, it was really aimed at reducing the visible signs of homelessness. As advocates of the measure claimed, “living on the street is unhealthy, and sends people into a downward spiral” while “keeping shoppers away and hurting local merchants.” In their opinion, the assumed benefits of Measure S were to improve the quality of life of the homeless community by transferring them to the appropriate social services and to increase economic activity of local merchants in the area.

But how likely are policies such as Measure S able to accomplish what they are intended to? According to an article published by the Policy Advocacy Clinic at the UC Berkeley’s School of Law, “Will Berkeley’s ‘Measure S’ increase economic activity and improve services to homeless people,” the benefits are “neither proven nor promising.” Indeed, a similar sit/lie law, passed in San Francisco, was proved to be a failure. According to a recent report from the City Hall Fellows, the measure is radically ineffective in dissuading the city’s homeless from sitting on pavements, and it poses an extra cost to the police force, whose time could probably be better spent on inspecting other activities.

Although voters in a city that is no stranger to political movements said “no” to Measure S, Berkeley is far from having ended anti-homeless efforts by the city government. The victory for homeless rights advocates has proved extremely short-lived: Councilmember Jesse Arreguín has proposed a new series of actions to target the homeless community, dubbed the “Compassionate Sidewalks Plan.” The Compassionate Sidewalks Plan convenes a group of representatives to develop new regulations and law enforcement strategies based on consensus. But certain residents and community activists speculate that this plan is simply a masked version of Measure S, only this time more stakeholders—community members and government officials but not homeless people – are included in drafting a new measure.

Should the homeless be wiped off the streets of Berkeley simply because their appearance seems to deter shoppers and threaten the city’s image? At the very least, I believe, decisions about public space should not be weighted solely in favor of profit.

It is possible that the Compassionate Sidewalks measure would start a trend of criminalization and discrimination in Berkeley against those who are in need. The danger is that if any such measure was passed, the trend would officially be established, could be hard to terminate, and potentially lead to laws that further target homelessness and associated activities (e.g. cooking and congregating in public). Even if the policy successfully displaced the homeless community from the city’s surface, they will only migrate from one place to another, unseen from public view. In the absolute worst case, a sense of alienation is created among the needy, which further intensifies the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor.

Compassionate Sidewalks is a thinly veiled attempt to hide homelessness, and it undermines efforts that could have addressed the true roots of the problem. Therefore, for incoming students, my alternative piece of advice would be to learn about the transient population first-hand instead of passively consuming formulated opinions about homelessness. A good start would be to volunteer with a student group like the Suitcase Clinic, or to visit People’s Park and Shattuck Avenue and talk to the homeless face to face instead of shying away uncritically.

Allista Cheung is an undergraduate student in Economics and City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. She can be reached at allista.cheung@gmail.com.

Third Nation or Trans-Nation? Remapping the US-Mexico Borderlands

UC Berkeley Professor of City and Regional Planning Michael Dear’s ambitious new book, Why Walls Won’t Work, offers an engaging view into the everyday lives of residents on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Dear prompts a critical re-evaluation of our understanding of the U.S.’ southern border with Mexico, and his timely discussion is relevant to the proposed federal immigration bill, which, if passed, will likely spur further border securitization. Central to Dear’s argument is a framing of the borderlands stretching from southern California to the Gulf of Mexico as a “third nation,” distinct from the U.S. and Mexican nation states. However, by proposing this spatial category, Dear reproduces a territorial model for understanding a region largely defined by its tumultuous engagement with and subversion of the nationalist (territorializing) claims and technologies of the U.S. and Mexican governments. Borrowing a term from anthropologist Nicholas De Genova, I will suggest that instead of redrawing an alternative boundary, we should approach the region as a “transnational conjunctural space,” (see De Genova’s Working the Boundaries).

Dear stakes his provocative assertion that the barrier will fail based on the historic and continued practices of transnationality (and economic interdependence) that undermine the wall’s claims of territorial national sovereignty. Drawing on borderlands historiography, Dear takes us back to the Comanches raids along the southern border prior to the U.S.-Mexican War (see Brian DeLay’s illuminating War of A Thousand Deserts) to suggest that the borderlands share more than a common history, but also blurred cultures, value systems, and practices of mutuality—in short, what Dear identifies as an alternative nationalism. Dear highlights the two dimensions that compose the “third nation’s” nationalism. Firstly the crossings, tunnels, economic interdependence, and other material exchanges that make up what Dear calls the “third nation before the wall,” and secondly, the cultural and language exchanges that make up what Dear calls the “third nation of the mind.” However, Dear for the most part engages these dynamics as parallel, rather than intersecting and inseparable. An illustration of this approach would be a focus on the ways that transnationality is experienced unevenly and unequally by borderlands residents, (for a rigorous analysis of the “nation form” see Manu Goswami, 2002).

Daniela De Leo, in her review of Dear’s book in Volume 26 of the Berkeley Planning Journal, questions the efficacy of a nationalism operating outside a formal nation-state. Perhaps this ambivalence comes from the lack of physical mediums through which nationalism can be performed and distributed in non-state spaces (Benedict Anderson’s famous example of the printing press in Western Europe comes to mind). I share De Leo’s concern. In the southern borderlands, these potential mediums are violently disrupted by physical and legal barriers—or more precisely, access to existing mediums is highly unequal. As geographer Doreen Massey would put it, “different social groups, and different individuals, are placed in very distinct ways in relation to these flows and interconnections.”

From the privileged perspective that comes with U.S. visibility, transnational fluidity seems remarkable. But from the perspective of Mexican citizens, physical transnationality can only be experienced after years of paperwork, steep fees, and too often, the risks involved with undocumented entry into the US. Similarly, cultural exchanges and economic interdependencies are highly uneven and often perpetuate inequality.

Alternatively, UC San Diego architect Teddy Cruz looks at borderlands through the lens of political economy, focusing on the vastly uneven experiences of transnationality along the border, resource flows, and the particular effects of borderlands capitalism. Instead of a coherent alternative nationalism, Cruz sees creative informality, which he argues, forces us to develop a new political language and spatial categories.

I do not suggest that alternative nationalisms can only emerge from state formations or that the “nation form” is an outdated frame, since nationalist movements from India to South Africa suggest otherwise. But in the US-Mexico borderlands, where the experience of transationality is highly uneven, I fail to see the usefulness in attributing territorial nationality to a place of informal dissonance, but exciting political creativity, as Cruz proposes.

Rather than a third nation, the southern borderlands lend themselves to an exciting alternative to bounded geographic models. Lucidly explained by Doreen Massey in her seminal essay, “A Global Sense of Place,” I want to suggest that we approach the southern borderlands not as a third bounded space carved out of a national boundary, but as a dynamic node of global interconnections where local histories, global capital, and uneven transnational agency come together in illumining ways.

Luis Flores is a 2013-14 visiting researcher at UC Berkeley under the auspice of the Judith Lee Stronach Baccalaureate Prize. His project, “Discovering the IRCA Generation” aims to produce a political economy of immigrants’ integration into housing markets during the 1990s and 2000s, illuminating the dangers of articulating assimilation with financial participation, as well as emphasizing the transnational dimensions to the Great Recession. Luis was raised along the southern border in the town of Calexico, California. He can be reached at jr.luisf@gmail.com

Dispatch from Dublin: Authenticity and Entrepreneurialism in the City of Saints and Scholars

Dublin is a city of juxtaposition. And perhaps city-ness is nothing more than a multiplicity of juxtaposition in form and function. But as it reimagines its past and rebrands its future as authentic, Dublin gives this truism some shape.

During our summer research with the Annenberg Scholars Program in Culture and Communication and the National University of Ireland Maynooth, we grappled with the prevailing forces shaping Dublin’s realities. In particular, we reckoned with what David Harvey identified as an emergent but dominant mode of urban governance: entrepreneurialism [1]. The city as enterprise. The city as facilitator and partner. The city as both place and place-maker. What was the relationship between “the political economy of place and the cultural politics of place” [2]?How did the contingencies of Dublin – the city and the city-brand – and Ireland – the nation and the national imaginary – shape the city government’s entrepreneurial endeavors?

Attending the Dublin City Council's StartUp City charrette, we began to see how the city's ongoing transformations and internal tensions were etched into the built environment. The event, in which teams variously comprised of city officials, urban designers, hackers, and entrepreneurs presented proposals for improving city support for small to medium-sized enterprises, was located in the City Council's Wood Quay offices along the River Liffey. Once there, we found ourselves in the City Wall Room, an immense conference space in the office building's basement, named for the Viking-built wall undergoing archaeological excavation at the time of the site’s construction – the wall that lay dormant behind the speakers, their Prezis, their future-motifs. Not only were Dublin’s deep past (as Viking settlement) and immediate future (as an entrepreneurial e-city) juxtaposed in this ethnographic moment, so too were the specters of its more recent history – a history of vast public campaigns to halt construction, a history of voices extinguished, of democracy, public space, and urban identity in doubt.

 One StartUp City team focused on encouraging street markets by streamlining the bureaucracy for establishing new hubs. While officials and developers see these hubs as catalysts for entrepreneurship, urban livability, and local investment, commitment to existing markets was waning. The sites of extant locales have increasingly become targets for large-scale development projects that cater to the ongoing hope for middle-class influx.

Hopping between these market hubs, we saw an abundance of forms, styles, and purposes: from the sidewalk vendors in the Liberties selling cell phones, toilet paper, toys, batteries, and watches, angry with the City Council for doubling their stall fees; to the Temple Bar Food Market and Cow’s Lane Designer Market, where gourmet fare is hocked upscale tourists and locals and is carefully managed by the city’s Temple Bar Cultural Trust; and the Ballymun Farmer’s Market, inside a new but failed shopping mall in a northern suburb dominated by social housing.

In a subtle yet striking juxtaposition, two types of markets emerged after the Celtic Tiger crash: sprawling, outer-city car boot sales and curated, inner-city flea markets. In poorer suburbs, car boot sales attract hundreds of vendors and thousands of visitors. Furnishings, appliances, toys, and jewelry sell for a couple of Euros. Vendors pay a small fee to set up shop, their wares laid out on a table or blanket as they chat with friends nearby, bargain with shoppers, or peruse cars arrayed in rows, face-to-face, boot open. Vendors are usually under- or unemployed, and the sale is only one of their many informal trades.

Meanwhile, the inner-city’s flea markets cater to a younger, hipper crowd, selling homemade and vintage jewelry, vinyls, antique furniture, old fashionable clothing, and art. A founder of the Dublin Flea believes that this new interest in markets is partly a shedding of the middle-class fear of being associated with peasant culture. City Council representative Siobhan Maher, on the other hand, imagines it a tourism amenity: “visiting people want to find the quirky stuff.” Perhaps the street market presents a variety of opportunities for what Sharon Zukin calls “shopping for authenticity” [3]: a few extra dollars for vendors and for the government, a way to encourage individual entrepreneurship at a low risk, and a way to validate authenticity through consumption.

But authenticity can be an elusive siren. And the quest for it dictates much of urban governmental action. Cities seeking to foster authentic built environments and a creative material personality must make concessions; the role of government must be transformed. The City Council, wary of its own preponderance, strives to become a facilitator of authentic creativity and urban place-making.

Channels are thus created for the sourcing of citizen input at the front-end of development. The Studio, an “interdisciplinary” branch of City Council founded after the economic crisis, looks for “new ways to engage with the public that are less formal [and] less officious.” The hyper-localized urban connaissance of what it means to be a resident of Dublin, on x street in y neighborhood, becomes the currency of city officials. New rituals and frameworks for public engagement are enacted. The Dublin City Beta Project transforms the city into a “test-bed” for seemingly radical, citizen-sourced design concepts to improve street life. Citizens become users of the city-as-product, and the entrepreneurial city knows what its users want.

The Digital Dublin Master Plan and Dublin City Public Realm Strategy each project an image of perfected, open city-ness, in which consumers of city-space provide constant input to the City Council in real time, a feedback effect that risks being construed as a substitute for democracy.  These newly-minted initiatives are aspects of an explicit imperative to “open” the city – to make big data available, open source, for developers and citizens. The open city extends beyond the digital and into the public realm, where clever “hacks” of public space are now praised and promoted by city officials. Reports like these are mechanisms of power, not because they shape the future, but because they coordinate “a shared belief in the future” in the present [4].

In Dublin, city of juxtaposition, these techniques call attention to themselves. Public spaces are no longer the physical and social domain of the commons but “a key part of the city’s identity and distinctive character [whose] quality affects the city’s competitiveness and ability to attract investment.” Smart, open, transparent, walkable, consumable cities. The imperative is to spatialize a city-image attractive to consumers of urban authenticity. What comes into relief, however, is not a city trying to improve the conditions within its territory, but an enterprise with the singular objective of competing with its global peers in attracting capital.

Aaron Shapiro and Emily Ladue are doctoral students at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Aaron studies cities, intellectual technologies of urban revitalization, and commodity aesthetics. In particular, he is interested in urban design and planning as spatial techniques of government. He can be contacted at ashapiro@asc.upenn.edu. Emily is studying urban development, dispossession, and consumption in US cities. She is also a filmmaker looking to express this research through video projects. Her email is eladue@asc.upenn.edu.