Planning for Equity and Racial Tolerance: Reflections from a White Planner on the Zimmerman Verdict

Last week, six jurors acquitted George Zimmerman, a white Hispanic neighborhood watch volunteer, in the shooting and killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager. This sad moment in our nation’s history reveals how racial biases and fears map onto our communities and built environment, a lesson every planner ought to consider. This verdict challenges all of us to ask what biases and privileges do we carry in the work that we do. How do the ways in which we plan our communities either enforce or challenge assumptions of who belongs and who does not?

It seems clear that what can be called casual racism had a significant role in this case. What made Zimmerman think Martin (and the several other African American men he reported to the police) didn’t belong? What assumptions made at least one juror think these suspicions were justified? Why would the police at the scene test the dead black teenager for drugs, but not his killer? Would each of these people have responded differently if Martin had been white? I can’t help but think that the answer is at least “probably” if not “yes.”

These questions have also made me consider how racial bias and white privilege has played out in my own life, and in the work that I do as a planner. I grew up in a mostly white, upper-middle class suburb in California, partly in a townhouse development that looked not too different from Retreat at Twin Lakes, where Martin was staying and where he was killed. While overt racism was not tolerated, subtle biases were rampant. The town rejected new public transit investments and tore down one of the few affordable housing options (a trailer park) to replace it with condos in order to keep low-income people out. I remember being told as a kid that I had to do better in school, or else we would move to East Oakland. At a young age, I learned that white people and white places were at the top of a certain hierarchy, and that others did not belong. I imagine Zimmerman was acting based on similar assumptions.

The research on implicit bias has shown that nearly all of us carry racial assumptions, oftentimes at a subconscious level that we don’t realize or want to admit to. But the consequences of these biases are real and can be deadly, particularly against black men and boys like Martin who are stereotyped in our society as dangerous.

Planning tools are not neutral – they interact with these implicit biases and racial stereotypes, more often than not to keep low-income, African American, and other communities of color separate and unequal from white communities. Single-use zoning and efforts to stop affordable housing developments have been used to keep low-income families (and oftentimes people of color) out of neighborhoods. Non-white renters and home buyers still face well-documented discrimination by both real estate agents and lenders when looking for a home. People of color are shown less home options, and poorer quality options, than their white counterparts. And they are much more likely to end up with a subprime loan, even when they qualified for better terms.

The discrimination may no longer be codified in deeds, but the impacts are clearly visible. Schools are as segregated today as they were 50 years ago, with African American and Latino students overwhelmingly attending low-performing schools in high poverty neighborhoods. But the way I learned this as a kid was that bad students (of color) from East Oakland went to bad schools, as if somehow the students themselves were to blame.

As planners – and especially white planners from the ‘burbs like me – we need to recognize our own implicit biases and think critically about how these assumptions may play out in our work. We need to speak up on issues of equity and inclusion in our cities and towns. We need to recognize when coded racial language is being used (like claims that affordable housing will increase crime rates, or calls for more local control) and engage city staff, electeds, and residents in constructive conversations about race, privilege, and community planning. We need to conduct equity analyses of city plans and policies to identify any negative impacts on low-income communities and communities of color, and ensure these impacts are addressed proactively.

We also need to address these issues at the structural level, creating policies that support inclusion and racial equity. Recent initiatives to promote regional planning, like Sustainable Communities, can help create more integrated and diverse communities that begin to unravel the stereotypes and create better opportunities. We need to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline and provide education and workforce training tied to career opportunities so that all residents can succeed, regardless of where they live. And we need to recognize that demographics in this nation are shifting rapidly, with people of color already the majority in many states and regions. Our suburbs in particular are becoming more diverse, and we need to put strong community development infrastructure in place to support them.

We owe it to Trayvon Martin and countless others to create more equitable communities that promote racial tolerance, not feed into racial fears. For many of us, that work has to begin with an honest look inward at our own biases and assumptions.

Chris Schildt, MCP ’12, is a program associate at PolicyLink, a national research and action institute advancing economic and social equity, based in Oakland. She conducts research on equitable economic growth strategies, including best practices for advancing equity in job creation, entrepreneurship, and workforce development. She can be reached at cschildt@policylink.org.

Historic Sites as Modern Urban Development: A Trip to the Modern City of Teotihuacán

With the monumental Pyramid of the Sun in sight, one passenger in my van ride to the ancient city of Teotihuacán outside of Mexico City complained about our compulsory stop at a “tequila factory.” By the end of my visit to the archeological site, I came to see that the ancient pyramids we were all so eager to see were just as modern as the cinder block tequila factory. It became apparent that tourists are central characters in cycles of local subsistence, in the production of landscapes advertised as ancient, and in shaping notions of what is and is not valid culture and history. These practices are not outside or secondary to Teotihuacan; rather, together they constitute the modern ancient city. As the tour van arrived at the empty outdoor workshop, our driver gave two honks and in seconds a man and a woman scurried out of a building and took their positions before agave-processing machinery—the factory came to life just for us. The woman, wearing blue jeans, converse shoes, and speaking broken English, sat my tour cohort of 10 on a bench and explained the many uses of the agave plant before alleviating the awkward performance with a complementary round of tequila shots. We were then given an hour of free time in the factory’s gift shop and restaurant.

I knew this was coming. Like any privileged western youth preparing for a trip, I consulted the collective wisdom of the tourist community on TripAdvisor.com. I selected the tour company because it was the most affordable. Reviewers and the sites of more expensive tour companies bashed this particular company for “[wasting] your time […] taking you to exhibitions or stores where you are ‘suggested’ to purchase, or to restaurants that pay them a commission.” In short, pricier tours drove you past the obstacle course of tourist traps along the way to the main attraction, the ancient city of the gods.

What the community at TripAdvisor.com was in fact doing was making a case about what constitutes valid, true, and pure culture. They ripped Teotihuacán from its modern position in Mexican history and placed it back in the time of its ancient life—suggesting that meddling with this ancient identity was tantamount to cultural degradation. Those who chose the pricier tour, avoided complicity in these practices of cultural appropriation (for profit) in the hands of those to live less than a mile away from the site.

In my mind, this is an act of historical amnesia, not to mention a superficial understanding of historical time. The pyramids have not loomed in their present state over their surrounding poor towns since the 8^th century. They have a modern history.

Because of my height and small build, I was asked to sit in the middle seat of the van, between the driver and tour guide, Alejandro. He gave his rehearsed remarks in English, yelling over my head to the back of the van. But during the hour-long trip, Alejandro, speaking out of script in Spanish, talked to me about the excavation of Teotihuacan as part of Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz’s Mexican centennial celebrations in 1910, the recent discovery of Wal-Mart’s blatant corruption in the construction of a store at the entrance of the archeological site, and the seemingly unbelievable return of the PRI party to Mexico’s national politics.

The pricier tours that focus on the still-ancient city of the gods ignore the modern city of Teotihuacán. They ignore that for dictator Porfirio Diaz, the archeological site was unveiled in 1910 as a political argument, well understood as an early example of what UC Berkeley geographer Gillian Hart calls re-nationalization (Diaz’ new articulation of ancient Mexican identity) in the face of fervent de-nationalization (Diaz is remembered for opening Mexico to foreign capital leading to dramatic inequality and eventually the Mexican Revolution which began on the year of Teotihuacán’s excavation). UC Berkeley’s own chancellor-historian Nick Dirks’ argument of “history as a sign of the modern” is apt as well. By proposing that the grand civilization in Teotihuacán was second only the Roman Empire, Diaz hoped to assert Mexico’s place in modern western civilization (and implicitly 20^th century capitalism).

The pricier tours also ignore the living city of Teotihuacán, one that is at the center of poor communities’ struggle for subsistence and reproduction. Like the tequila factory owners whom I, and countless other tourists, are “forced” to visit, people all around the pyramids depend on the ancient history that attracts tourists. These cycles and practices are not outside of Teotihuacán; they are modern and living Teotihuacán. These merchants to the tourist industry embody a temporal dialectic between modern poverty and ancient culture necessary for modern life in many tourist destinations.

For the average visitor to Teotihuacán, a walk down the “Avenida de los Muertos,” the archeological site’s central walking path, means avoiding countless street vendors between photo ops. I was no exception. Yet at the end of my walk, after rejecting at least 15 vendors, an old vendor sitting on the stones of an ancient wall responded to my brush off with an exhausted “ustedes por que no nos compran?” (why don’t you all buy from us?) He was speaking not only to me but to the collective tourist, interested in ancient ruins and not the city’s living dependants.  Even as tourists struggle to frame street venders out of their vacation photographs, these vendors exemplify the relationship between past histories and modern poverty in the archeological site. (For a spatial, rather and a temporal, analysis of the visibility of poverty, see Ananya Roy and the #globalpov project.)

My experience of the modern city of Teotihuacan exposed, in my eyes, the necessity to rethink the relationship between time and culture. Cultural sites, to many tourists, are most genuine when seemingly undisturbed by the passing of time. But such sites are nonexistent. Tourists also tend to see themselves outside the cultures they visit (often even try to remain outside so as to keep local culture “pure”). Yet as this story illustrates, in Teotihuacán the tourist is a key character in the region’s modern culture and practices, for better or for worse. There is much to learn about ourselves in examining what we try to ignore.

Luis Flores is a recent UC Berkeley graduate with degrees in Political Economy and History. He is a junior fellow at the Oakland Institute and a 2013-14 visiting scholar at UC Berkeley under the auspice of the Judith Lee Stronach Prize. He can be reached at jr.luisf@gmail.com.

Eyes on the Street: CED Alum’s Film Finds an Audience

While a graduate student at the College of Environmental Design, Darryl Jones completed the short film This Is Market Street as a companion piece to his thesis in landscape architecture. The film, shot in 2012, spurs a dialogue about the future of Market Street, San Francisco’s most central street, and preserves an experience of the corridor before its transformation. This Is Market Street is screening for free at the San Francisco Public Library at 6:00pm on Wednesday, June 26, and at SPUR at 12:30pm on July 11. A panel discussion and Q+A will follow. Presented by Walk San Francisco and the Better Market Street project. For more information, go to http://www.walksf.org.

Why did you make this film? Why Market Street? Why a film?

I have been a hobby filmmaker since I was kid, but the landscape has always been my inspiration. I saw this as an opportunity to merge two of my interests: landscape architecture and filmmaking. For the past few years I have been thinking about how to do it, and it dawned on me that graduate school would be a good place to start. In fact, during a conference at UC Berkeley in the early 2000s, a group of landscape architects deliberated on the idea of how film could be utilized to bring the landscape, and landscape architecture, into the cultural mainstream. Reading about their discussions inspired me to answer their call.

I chose Market Street in San Francisco because currently, there is a huge effort to study and eventually redesign the street. It intrigued me because it is a monumental design project, not the kind you see very often, and I knew it would be happening for several years, so hopefully, the film would have some traction. Also, it is my hope that my film will be an educational artifact, long after the street has changed.

How was making the film? How much time did you spend filming? How much time did you spend on Market Street?

The key to good film production is good pre-production, which I didn´t really do, I’m a little shy to admit. Like I said before, I grew up making films, but I learned how amateur I was as a result of this project. This realization has actually led me to pursue more of these projects. The historical footage is all from a website called www.archive.org, and if you haven´t used it, it is a great resource, even if you´re just curious about history! Some of the footage is from the Prelinger Archives, a Library of Congress collection, which is curated by Rick Prelinger, a Bay Area archivist and writer. He has compiled some amazing collections of archival footage of San Francisco and the Bay Area, including A Trip Down Market Street, which is the infamous film taken from the top of a streetcar on Market Street only days before the 1906 earthquake.

All in all, I spent 14 days shooting and usually was on Market Street an average of two-three hours each day. I complied 55 interviews, almost all of which are in the film. As is typical of documentary filmmaking, I discovered, it really comes together in the editing room. I spent probably triple the time editing than I did actually shooting on Market Street.

Why do you think will Market Street be redesigned and how will it be?

It’s still a little early in the process, and the Better Market Street team isn’t quite in the unique design phase yet. They have presented three options and are at the stage of getting feedback on those options. Part of the purpose of these screenings on June 26 and July 11 is to raise awareness about the upcoming public workshops, where everyone can go to be a part of the decision-making.

Personally, I think San Francisco is ready for a more pedestrian Market Street. That is the key to it becoming more livable, because it’s just a ghost town in some places, and unsafe in others. Since Market Street is so integral to all the other modes of transit and the flow of adjacent streets and spaces, it is going to take some bold experimentation and inspiring proposals to actualize this project.

How do you feel about Market Street? 

That’s a tough question. I think Market Street inspires me. It feels like the center of the city, and I believe that is a really important feeling for a city to have. Feeling like you’re at the heart of it all is one of the best feelings about cities; when you say to yourself "I’m really here right now—this is where the energy is". It’s no mistake that tourists come to Market Street. Obviously, they come for the cable cars a lot of the time, but I think they really come to experience the heart of the city. There is something monumental about its size and orientation that cannot be denied, and when you revisit history, you start to really root for Market Street.

Is the redesigning process on Market Street similar to what is happening in other cities?

I’m not sure I can answer that accurately, but from my experience I have definitely seen these projects in other cities. My hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina, redesigned their two main streets in recent years, to much success. However, cities are always making plans to revitalize their streets, so it’s nothing new. But the scale of what is being proposed for Market Street may be very ambitious compared to other cities.

Do you think your film will make a difference?

I certainly hope so! If anything, I just hope it will encourage people to be excited about how design affects their lives, and that they can be a part of the conversation.

Is it home? [Watch the film to understand the significance of this question!].

Haha, good question. For me, truthfully, it isn’t. I live in Oakland, so that may be why. But I certainly feel a connection with Market Street, and the more time goes by, the more it becomes familiar to me and the more I admire it.

Darryl Jones is a recent graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his Masters of Landscape Architecture. He is an active artist, designer and filmmaker whose work focuses on the relationship between people and their environment, specifically as a human being on foot. He currently works at a small architecture practice in San Francisco, CA. Darryl can be reached at DarrylJones@cal.berkeley.edu.

The Robert Taylor Homes: Failure of Public Housing

Growing up in the Chicagoland area, I was constantly told to avoid the area surrounding the Robert Taylor Homes. It was not a recommendation, but rather a command from my parents, repeated numerous times throughout my childhood. I never really questioned their reasons until this semester when I took a course on international housing in the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley. I decided to do some research. The Robert Taylor Homes, located on the South Side of Chicago, are widely considered the greatest public housing complex in the world—and one of the greatest historical public housing project failures. City planners and historians pinpoint limited eligibility, racist intentions, and overreaching modernist design for the poor outcomes. However, after looking into the project in more detail, I think it is equally essential to consider the placement of these projects in deserted areas as well as their lack of state-sponsored maintenance.

By the mid-1900s, nearly seventy-five percent of Chicago’s African American citizens resided in a series of neighborhoods on the South Side referred to as the "Black Belt." The overwhelming majority of homes in the Black Belt were decrepit and nearly uninhabitable, and segregated economically, with the poorest African Americans residing on the northern tip, and their wealthier counterparts living on the southern end. Most strikingly, the Black Belt’s infant mortality rate was sixteen percent greater than anywhere else in Chicago between 1940 and 1960.

In 1946, the Chicago Housing Authority finally acknowledged the substandard living conditions of Black Belt ghetto residents and proposed the development of public housing in regions with lower populations within Chicago.

Although African Americans anticipated an improvement in their living conditions with the creation of public housing projects such as the Robert Taylor Homes in 1961, they were sadly mistaken. For this reason, I believe that the projects did more harm than good. The twenty-eight buildings were colossal and gloomy, reaching over fifteen stories each, with perpetually broken elevators. According to the Affordable Housing Institute, overcrowding was unavoidable, as over 27,000 individuals crammed into a space designed for no more than 11,000. Nearby streets were covered in litter, and the neighborhood lacked any semblance of banks, libraries, or even grocery stores; residents were thus unable to attain public services or purchase basic food staples.

Due to an “obsession with cutting cost,” the city of Chicago and state of Illinois lacked the requisite budget to keep the buildings in good condition, and they deteriorated drastically after only several years of existence as crime continued to dominate.Furthermore, it is somewhat troubling to learn that approximately ninety-five percent of Robert Taylor’s 27,000 tenants were unemployed, and drug deals worth nearly $45,000 took place each day. These numbers truly reveal the devastating conditions surrounding this massive, modernist housing project for low-income Chicago residents.

The Chicago Housing Association’s sanguine, post-war perspective on public housing simply resulted in a perpetuation of the already catastrophic subsidized housing on Chicago’s South Side. It is important to ponder the role public administrators played in establishing the budget for construction of the homes as well as their annual maintenance. I believe that until the demise of the Robert Taylor Homes, many city planners failed to recognize the association between proper facility maintenance and their external safety, such as low crime rates, as contrasted with the internal safety of the structures themselves.

Ultimately, I believe that public housing projects are described to young children from certain socioeconomic classes and ethnicities, like myself, with a negative connotation that most of us do not even think to challenge. The dismissive reputations of affordable housing ingrained in many children by their parents, whether intentionally or not, can tremendously shape our outlook on these federal actions as adults. Fortunately for those individuals like myself able to receive an unbiased, critical education, these perceptions are able to be shattered and we can see projects such as the Robert Taylor Homes for what they are: tremendous public housing failures that resulted from pairing lofty ambitions with insufficient funds.

Ariel Prince is an undergraduate student in Political Science at UC Berkeley. She focuses her studies on the intersection between government legislation and the overall well-being of citizens in the United States, and has spent significant time examining housing and financial policies following World War II. She can be reached at arielprince@berkeley.edu. 

HOT Lanes and Equity: Challenging L.A.’ Transportation System

Los Angeles is known for three things: Hollywood, wealth—and insane traffic congestion.

L.A. is thus constantly working to devise strategies to decongest its transportation system. Last year, the city embarked on a one-year demonstration program, administered by Metro in conjunction with Caltrans and primarily funded through a $210 million grant from the US Department of Transportation. The program, Metro ExpressLanes, seeks to utilize congestion pricing to transform High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes to High Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes. This means that lone drivers are now able to buy their way to the carpool lanes.

The program aims to convert 25 miles of existing carpool lanes on the 10 and 110 freeways in downtown Los Angeles into high occupancy toll lanes. According to City of Los Angeles officials, the program is geared towards improving traffic flow in the Los Angeles clogged freeway system and providing enhanced travel options.

Whenever I travel, I like to keep my planning eye open and on my Spring break trip to Southern California, I was introduced to the 110 and 10 freeway tolling program first hand. It costs about 25 cents to $1.40 a mile, depending on traffic and time of travel, to use the HOT lanes. The estimated average toll for a motorist is between $4 and $7 a trip, though it could be as high as $15.40. Anyone using these lanes without a FasTrak transponder risks a fine of at least $25. For one weekend, I experienced what those who can’t buy their way into these new lanes, popularly referred to as HOT lanes, go through on a daily basis. Hours of waiting while watching an almost empty lane beside me made me question the rationale behind HOT lanes.

A panel on transportation equity a week later, on the 6^th April, 2013, hosted by the College of Design and Environment Students of Color (CEDSOC), reminded me of my L.A. experience and I began to wonder whether initiatives such as the Metro Express Lanes program truly meet equity standards.

So what is transportation equity?

Several transportation studies define equity as the fairness with which impacts—benefits or costs—are distributed. Transportation equity can be categorized into 3 main areas.

Horizontal equity is concerned with the distribution of impacts between individuals and groups that are considered equal in ability and need. This approach assumes equal individuals and groups should receive equal shares of resources, bear equal costs, and that transportation policies should not favor any individual or group over another.

Vertical Equity with respect to economic and social class assumes the distribution of impacts between individuals and groups that differ in abilities and needs. Transportation policies are equitable if they favor economically and socially disadvantaged groups, thus compensating for overall inequities.

Vertical equity with respect to mobility need and ability focuses on the distribution of impacts between groups that differ in terms of mobility ability, need and the extent to which transportation policies meet the need of travelers with mobility impairments.

At the CEDSOC panel, Joel Ramos, Senior Community planner at TransForm, an organization that advocates for sustainable transportation and smart land use, described transportation equity as transportation decisions that cater for accessibility, convenience, speed and affordability.

The question whether the HOT lines meet transportation equity becomes even more complex. Transportation researchers in support of HOT lanes argue that distribution of traffic through congestion pricing eventually leads to improved speed for everyone. Researchers arguing against HOT lanes, on the other hand, cite inequity based on income. This modal split is a compromise of mass transit and carpooling and spatial equity where programs may disadvantage certain parts of the city where HOT lanes apply or do not apply.

The L.A. program seeks to address income equity through issuing discount facilities to low-income households. In addition, some of the tolls’ income is reinvested to purchase extra passenger buses. Nevertheless, the use of discount facilities for low-income drivers does less to convince me that HOT lanes are a viable long-term solution to congestion and that the program does not disadvantage low-income households.

Evaluations on the San Diego’s I-15 HOT lanes suggest that users of the HOT lanes were more likely to have higher incomes than drivers in the regular lanes. For instance, drivers coming from households with annual incomes of $20,000 to $40,000 a year made up 3% of FasTrak users. Moreover, some researchers argue that those with the lowest income who might actually be priced out of HOT lanes are likely priced out of car ownership as well. They often rely on public transit and their travel times and options are even more limited, since the L.A HOT lanes utilize former HOV lanes previously made for buses as well as carpooling. In this case, the conversion of HOV lanes to HOT lanes significantly reduces the travel time for those using mass transit options who are likely low-income groups. Again, what if a higher number of drivers (both high and low-income) are able to access HOT lanes? Doesn’t that consequently slow traffic for carpoolers and mass transit, thus impeding transportation equity for low-income drivers and carpoolers?

Besides pricing out low-income drivers, the L.A. program is likely to negatively affect carpooling. Cities across the world have used carpool fast lanes as a means to decongest regular lanes, reduce travel time for travelers and green gas emissions. The conversion of HOV lanes to HOT lanes seems contradicts the existence of carpool lanes and is likely to negate some or all of the travel time advantages that would exist with HOV lanes, leaving no motivation for HOV lanes especially for those who can afford to buy their access to the HOT lanes.

This program assumes that distributing traffic in regular and HOT lanes will translate to reduced travel times for everyone. However, I believe that cities need to think of ways of decongesting traffic by addressing the core roots of congestion: the automobile. While I appreciate multiple approaches to transportation planning, a strategy that promotes more choices for private cars seems counterproductive. Instead, we should focus on improving the use of mass transit. Ultimately, this would discourage the use of private cars and reduce congestion without imposing unnecessary costs to travelers that hinders equity for all.

Keziah Mwelu is a first year master’s student in the Department of City and Regional Planning, UC Berkeley. She is an urban planner from Kenya interested in urban development policy, governance and equity. She can be reached at mwelu.keziah@gmail.com.

The Tactics That Be: Contesting Tactical Urbanism in New Orleans

The stretch of St. Claude Avenue (LA-46) that coincides with the catchment area of St. Claude Main Street ­– one of four Main Street organizations in New Orleans – will soon be host to a number of “parkettes.” As a matter of the organization of public space, parkettes – like their cousins, “parklets,” “pocket parks,” “mini-parks,” etc.­ – are relatively innocuous. They stem from the Park(ing) Day tradition that Rebar – a design firm that specializes in the “re-imagining” of contemporary cityscapes – launched in San Francisco and which has since spread to cities across the US. They tend to be situated in proximity to commercial properties, contain plants and seating, and are chartered on the premise that anyone can occupy the space. Why, then, have these seemingly innocuous installations stirred such discontent amongst New Orleans’ downtown residents?

The St. Claude Avenue commercial corridor serves as a boundary for a number of New Orleans communities: the Marigny, the 7^th Ward, St. Roch, the Bywater, and St. Claude/Upper 9^th Ward – at the same time dividing and uniting these neighborhoods. Over the past five years, this stretch of St. Claude has become host to a number of art galleries, storefront theaters, and cafes that import beans roasted in Portland or New York. St. Claude Main Street and the St. Claude Arts’ District have promoted the Avenue as a vibrant new hub of New Orleans’ arts and cultural scene, specifically at some remove from its straightforwardly tourist counterpart along, say, Royal St. in the French Quarter.

When local historian and long-time New Orleans resident Christine Horn asked whether anybody really wanted “parkettes” along the St. Claude corridor, the discussion was never really about the small, designer installations in themselves. For Horn, the most outspoken critic of the parkette program, along with her neighbors and fellow long-term residents, the parkettes serve as a stand-in for the much broader, amorphous, and rather uncritically-received tactical urbanism movement.

Tactical urbanism is a particular articulation of “creative place-making” – an ethos that today shapes many local urbanist initiatives in cities across the country, praised by urban enthusiasts and idealists for its ability to catalyze “vibrancy” and civic engagement. “Guerrilla urbanism,” “pop-up urbanism,” “city repair,” and “DIY urbanism” all describe the same set of phenomena that tactical urbanism has categorically linked together. Guerrilla gardening, weed bombing, and “site previtalization”; pop-up retail, mobile vendors, and gourmet food trucks; pavement-to-plazas, intersection repair, and pocket parks – such are the “tactics” for reclaiming urban public spaces that tactical urbanism has canonized in its handbook. To Horn and her neighbors, the arrival of tactical urbanism to the Crescent City appears to be merely the most recent in a series of enterprises to transform public space in the likeness of those that the city would most like to attract: people with money.

Whereas previous initiatives to attract capital to New Orleans’ downtown neighborhoods may have proceeded under the banner of cultural sensitivity, tactical urbanism ups the ante by explicitly affording the promise of ongoing community input and engagement in order to keep new design – as St. Claude Main Street manager Michael Martin puts it – “indigenous” and “born out of on-the-ground conditions.” At least, it does so in theory. Community support and indigenous design, the logic goes, might mitigate some of the tensions inherent in neighborhoods undergoing rapid social transformation by gentrification.

Carrying out this promise in practice, however, is much messier. “The community” must be conjured, constructed, and represented, through various practices and technologies, which range from the focus group to civic media platforms for participatory urbanism. Horn’s critique is thus not about the parkettes themselves, but rather about the failure to accurately represent and meaningfully engage with the community during the planning process.

In May 2012, St. Claude Main Street, in partnership with the Bywater-based design studio Civic Center, received a $275,000 grant for their Arts District & Parkettes Program. The funding source, ArtPlace, is a coalition of foundations (thirteen of the nation’s largest: Ford, Bloomberg, Rockefeller, etc.), supported by six of the largest banks (Bank of America, Citi, Chase, etc.), and is overseen by the federally funded National Endowment for the Arts.

St. Claude Main Street’s programming for the ArtPlace grant consists of four parts, three of which will go “unseen” through investment in arts organizations and artists to develop organizational and personal capacity and place promotion. The fourth component is the parkette program, to be “based on programs in San Francisco and New York City where community organizations collaborate with property owners, the municipality, and residents to build small, public greenspaces along commercial corridors” by employing “tactical urbanism processes that will help us build resident buy-in and thus assure that the park designs will be respondent to how people actually use the space.”

At a community meeting in July 2012, St. Claude Main Street announced its plans for the grant-funded programming. Talk at the meeting, however, was not about how badly the Avenue needed parkettes, but rather about how to mitigate the forces of gentrification that have been so rapidly and dramatically transforming the neighborhoods along the St. Claude corridor.

What concerned Christine Horn most was that if the programming was premised upon the success of parklets in San Francisco as the representatives of St. Claude Main Street intimated, then shouldn’t San Francisco’s guiding principle of “pre-existing community support for public space at the location” apply? There is no answer to this question in the case of the St. Claude parkettes, since funding was allocated for the development of parkettes before the affected communities were consulted. The parkettes were, in fact, written into the ArtPlace grant application prior to any community meeting.

The problems that tactical urbanism must address do not stem from any spatial or design flaw, but that it presents its tactics sans strategy. Those who subscribe to this regime of small-scale spatial intervention must remember that even cheap, quick, and tactical appropriations of public space entail a level of responsibility to the public – especially when they proceed under the guise of “pre-existing community support” or “resident buy-in.” There is no spatial or design fix that can undermine the constellation of forces that conspire to rapidly and dramatically transform neighborhoods, or alleviate the anxieties borne of such transformations. There is only earnest engagement with and respect for those affected by spatial intervention.

As a design form that privileges the social life of small urban spaces, the parkettes are brilliant. But they are nonetheless a symptom of, not a reprieve from, a long failure to meaningfully communicate and engage with disadvantaged communities in the reconfiguration of public space.

Aaron Shapiro is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He studies cities, intellectual technologies of urban revitalization, and commodity aesthetics. In particular, he is interested in the transformations of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the city’s shifting demographics, the mobilization and engagement of new residents in shaping the city’s developmental direction, and the quantification of the region’s cultural economic assets and social entrepreneurial endeavors as evaluative techniques of urban governance. He can be contacted at ashapiro@asc.upenn.edu. 

Who Says Nobody Walks in L.A.?

Quick Quiz: Which of these cities is the more walkable city in CA?

A.)  San Luis Obispo

B.)  Los Angeles

C.)  Monterey

D.)  Richmond

When one thinks of walkable cities, Los Angeles probably doesn’t immediately spring to mind. After all, Southern California was the birthplace of the pervasive car culture in Los Angeles, and hearing statements like “I live by the 60 (Pomona Freeway)” are commonplace when Angelenos identify their address and current location. But, according to Walk Score, a website that measures walkability in North American cities, the answer to the question above is B.) Los Angeles.

In fact, Angelenos are so fond of walking that over 150,000 people came together on Sunday, April 21 to uncover the mask of LA’s car-obsessive culture and celebrate walking and other non-car transit modes at CicLAvia.

What is CicLAvia? Only the most exciting event in Los Angeles! CicLAvia is named after ciclovías, which translates from Spanish to ‘bicycle way.’ Over thirty years ago, the city of Bogotá, Colombia organized ciclovías to occur every Sunday, in which it closed the streets to cars and opened the streets strictly for pedestrian and bicyclist use. Ciclovías in Colombia continue to this day. In October 2010, the idea reached Los Angeles.

The first CicLAvia event in Los Angeles took place on October 10, 2010 and included 7 miles of roadway extending from Boyle Heights to East Hollywood. Instead of noisy, polluting cars, the street corners were filled with capoeira dancing, local food vendors, bike floats and giant chessboards.

CicLAvia was so successful that this year, the organizers added more than 8 miles of roadway to reach the Pacific Ocean, bringing together 150,000 people to enjoy the route to the sea.

Events like CicLAvia are crucial to supporting pedestrian safety, because pedestrians are more likely to die in Los Angeles due to a car crash than in any other city, with the exception of New York City, according to a recent study by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute. In Los Angeles, about 33 percent of all fatal crashes involved pedestrians, which is about three times the national average and almost two times higher than the California state average of 17 percent. However, these percentages do not accurately reflect the risks of walking in Los Angeles because although there are fewer motorist fatalities, the number of non-motorists deaths in collisions actually increased. There is no denying that support for pedestrian safety is often not a priority.

Despite the fact that 20 percent of the population in Los Angeles county walk or bike to their destinations, less than 1 percent of transportation funding goes towards bettering pedestrian infrastructure.

In light of the knowledge that it can be unsafe to walk in Los Angeles, what can CicLAvia offer for pedestrian safety? CicLAvia gives credence to the adage “there’s safety in numbers.” More than 100,000 bicyclists and pedestrians come out to enjoy Los Angeles, as it becomes a giant street park. But CicLAvia is more than a park. At CicLAvia, I’m not just working off the chocolate brownie I ate, but I’m also rediscovering my city–the local shops and network of community organizations. As more people join CicLAvia events, more people realize that walking in Los Angeles means realizing the health and social benefits of being a pedestrian. People might be more inclined to support measures to increase pedestrian safety.

There are many ways to improve pedestrian safety in Los Angeles. Los Angeles policy officials and transportation planners can increase pedestrian and driver education on rules of the road, invest more in pedestrian infrastructure, and improve the pedestrian infrastructure we have now through better signage and crosswalks. Such projects are already underway. One example is the MyFigueroa Project that will transform the Figueroa Street Corridor into a complete street–a street designed for bicyclist, transit rider, and pedestrian safety and convenience.

And fellow Angelenos can also take part in this effort by supporting pedestrian advocacy groups like Los Angeles Walks and enjoying free and fun events like CicLAvia.

When I first heard of CicLAvia I thought it was just an awesome party for bicyclists—and it is, to an extent. I admit that CicLAvia is more commonly associated with cycling, but as I rode my beat-up blue road bike at my first CicLAvia in 2011 and found that I couldn’t move as freely as I wanted without injuring someone because there were too many bicyclists, I dismounted my bicycle and just walked.

I remembered that I first experienced Los Angeles as a pedestrian. I was born in Los Angeles, and growing up, I walked everywhere. I walked to school. I walked to visit my friends. I walked to the bus stop. I realized that I first fell in love with the city when I was walking through its mural painted streets under the shade of trees, not when I was encased in a car on concrete freeways. I remember spending an evening in the summer walking with a friend to a park in Los Angeles where I met new people that lived in the neighborhood as we played la lotería, a board game, and ate burgers and oranges. I realized that when I walked, I could experience the community around me more easily than when I was in a car. This is why I hope and believe that Los Angeles can become a model walkable city.

Jimena Cuenca is an undergraduate Geography student at UC Berkeley. She studies how city planning is connected and can contribute to bettering environmental health. She likes to explore new and old surroundings on a bus, a bike, or on her feet. You can contact her at jcuenca@berkeley.edu

What is the Color of Planning and Design?

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This is the question that a new course, “Race, Equity, and the City,” in the Department of City and Regional Planning (DCRP), College of Environmental Design (CED) at UC Berkeley takes seriously and challenges graduate students to consider.

In the spring of 2012, a set of difficult interactions transpired between students in city planning and architecture about representations of race and ethnicity. An infamous flyer introduced Pepe, the Donkey, to the CED. Pepe was a jenny (female donkey) from Oaxaca that was photoshopped into our world to cordially invite CED students for a placid Thursday afternoon happy hour. What followed brought confusion and astonishment to many of us at the CED, as Pepe’s racialized blunder became the source of further racial faux pas between students.

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The impropriety of using an animal to represent a national and cultural group became even more poignant for two specific reasons that specifically concern our intellectual community at the CED.

First, the representation ignored the history of racial stereotyping that defined racist anti-immigration discourses in California and the US before the civil rights era. Racism once filled the American public imagination. Its echoes reverberated in urban policy through urban renewal and the displacement of minorities, as well as racial covenants and zoning which continue to affect people of color in our cities. Second, the image arose from an international studio where pedagogy is fraught with concerns pertinent to professional ethics and positionality beyond the development of formal design solutions. How is the privilege of entering and leaving the site, the evidence gathered in a temporary international visit, and the products of the studio managed to ensure concrete benefit for residents long after our departure?

The representation didn’t answer these questions. Rather, it aimed to symbolize a friendly pet in need for translation in the walls of Wurster.The translation didn’t work and many students across the DCRP found it reductive. The image reified and silenced rather than provided agency and voice to the people it sought to represent and were absent from the conversation: people of color and immigrants who are our “others” not just in Oaxaca, but also closer to home in our classrooms.

In the aftermath students and faculty realized the need for a reflection on how we talk about race in our department and in the CED in general. What does it mean to incorporate questions of race and ethnicity, equity and justice, power and privilege, and broadly defined “cultural competency” into the masters curriculum?

Motivated to see immediate change, a group of masters students from the College of Environmental Design Students of Color (CED-SOC) committee along with us--Ariel Bierbaum and Fernando Burga--began meeting to create a student-led reading course on these topics. Our simple goal was to educate ourselves on how to talk about race beyond Pepe and its reductive stereotype. We aimed to engage the debates, categories and concepts from other intellectual fields where the subject of race holds traditions of inquiry. In the middle of the fall semester, we were asked to develop this ad-hoc reading group into a full-fledged class and co-teach it in the spring of 2013.

We began the hard work of designing a syllabus based on precedents. We scanned and reviewed up to 20 syllabi that included a wide range of topics: Critical Race Theory, ethnic studies, multiculturalism, segregation, urban design, urban renewal, and sociology of race. We focused on pieces that would offer both clear theoretical frameworks as well as empirical grounding. We also considered cases that placed primacy on urban space, urbanism, and planning practice in their discussions. As planners and designers we considered this an essential aspect of how we constructed this space in our community. The design of this syllabus allowed us to conceive of “Race, Equity and the City” as more than just a class.

Based on the in-depth analysis of readings, the in-class discussions provided us with a set of interrogations about identity, memory, history, and place and on the ways in which planning and urban design practices are implicated in the spatialization of racism. In class, we actively dug deep into particular issues in urban places that intersect in various ways with planning practice, including segregation, environmental justice, transportation and regional planning, education, criminal justice, and labor. Through all of these discussions, we grappled with the historical, ethical, and political trajectories of planning practice and specifically the technologies of our field of practice. How do the forms of data analysis and representation open up or foreclose certain outcomes that further racial justice? How do our processes privilege some over others? What is our own positionality and privilege – as people of color, as white people, and as planning professionals? How can we harness action from this space of interrogation to confront these tensions and make them productive?

As an innovation in critical pedagogy, our course brings together readings and seminar discussion about these issues with personal reflection and studio production. The course has drawn graduate students from City and Regional Planning, Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, Public Health, Environmental Science Policy and Management and the School of Information, who all maintain a commitment to using our scholarship and professional practice as a tool to alleviate racial inequity in our places. All represent a cross section of minority groups that make up our national social landscape. Together they also represent a self-selected group of students who joined our class not only to learn about race and equity in the city, but also be active in the transformation the curriculum in the CED.

We challenge students to understand, problematize and challenge, but then also deploy the tools of planning in ways that support goals of racial justice. We have challenged students to enhance their critical analysis by visually representing readings, and by understanding representations as texts calling for critical analysis.

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To carry out this mission, the course is organized around two assignments: the Racial-Spatial Autobiography and the Cartographic Thesis.

The Racial Spatial Autobiography challenges students with the question: How can you visually represent your racial identity, sense of place, spatial practices, and locational experiences?

Personal perspective, experiences, and identities influence professionals’ and scholars’ motivations, understanding, and commitment to their practice. Despite this, we are often told to check ourselves at the proverbial door of the academy or the office. The Racial-Spatial Autobiography disrupts this paradigm of professional and intellectual practice, and specifically invites all of our multiple selves to become visible in a graphic essay.  The Racial-Spatial Autobiography was the first exercise of the semester and set the reflexive tone of the class. Students shared their personal reflections through space and identity using diverse media--painting, collage, mappings, websites, photographic essays, bookmaking. Through each of these unique creations, students articulated their own racial and spatial identities, and the ways in which these identities have shaped personal and professional trajectories.

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The second assignment, the Cartographic Thesis, is a synthesis of students’ prior experiences with knowledge from the semester. Students make compelling arguments about a particular site and its attendant urban policy issues. Each thesis investigates, interprets, and illustrates urban phenomena, challenges, and potential planning interventions that reinvigorate a conversation about race and equity in planning. Students have selected topics that relate to their own coursework or research. By “plugging” into work outside the class, we aim to expand the conversation about race and equity in the city beyond the walls of our weekly seminar. The centerpiece of the Cartographic Thesis is the Racially Just Criteria, which are metrics or frames used to develop context-sensitive, practical outcomes that address past and present racial inequities in the city.  Drawing on texts from the seminar, students developed original criteria that ground abstract concepts in the specific context in which students work.

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We have captured the work of the semester--the “dirty design” process–on our blog. Like all visual representations, these images are more than just a record. They are a statement of commitment to design as a tool in analyzing, deconstructing, and reimagining ourselves and our work through a lens of racial justice.

Our conversations over the semester and our students’ culminating projects have demonstrated that we can have a conversation about race – one that is personal and intellectual and that engenders compelling products, cases, and research questions. We have taken a moment of conflict and turned it into a positive outcome.

With this blog piece, we would like to announce “Race, Equity, and the City” to our department, college, and the world beyond through the virtual pathways of the web. We would also like to invite those of you that are local to our Final Review on May 3rd from 9 – 12pm on the first floor of Wurster Hall, where the final projects will be presented and displayed before an audience.

This final act of the semester will provide the platform for future endeavors that develop from the pedagogy and questions that defined this class, and the original tensions brought forth by Pepe. We are considering teaching the class again in the Spring 2014 and seeking funding  to turn some aspects of the class into a working group/incubator model where issues of race and equity can encompass a wider umbrella of practice and theory. In following posts we will reflect on the experience of the class and consider concrete steps in moving forward.

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Ariel Bierbaum is a PhD student in the Department of City and Regional Planning. She studies the relationship between gentrification processes and public education. Ariel’s professional background includes experience in city government, community development, community engagement, strategic planning and organizational development, and university-community relations. She can be reached at arielb@berkeley.edu.

Fernando Burga is a PhD candidate in the Department of City and Regional Planning. He studies ethnic politics, immigrant empowerment and gentrification in Miami, Florida. Before coming to Berkeley Fernando worked as an architect and urban designer in Washington DC, in projects ranging from affordable housing to community master-planning. Hi is currently a fellow at the Center for the Research of Social Change at UC Berkeley and can be contacted at hfburga@berkeley.edu.  

My Beloved Boston

When I learned of the two explosions that rocked the Boston Marathon my first thought was that it was another electrical fire, like the one last year, that blackened the neighborhood and permeated the deserted streets with noxious fumes. I never thought of bombs; I never thought of acts of terror, this accusatory and amorphous allegation that (in my mind) is too commonly spoken these days. As news from my hometown inundated my iPhone, the truth became depressingly clear. Boston was bombed at the heart of the city, at an event that had long brought my city together, among ourselves as we celebrated this country’s oldest marathon and with the rest of the world who had traveled to my city to run it.

I felt so bewildered to be half a world away in Berkeley. As my classes continued and my classmates went about their daily lives, my mind was back in Boston’s Back Bay. Two bombs had exploded near the Public Library, where I would secretly steal away to study in high school, only blocks away from the apartment where I was born and lived for the first three years of my life. I walked around Berkeley in a daze of perplexity and longing, remembering only last year how I purposely walked down Boylston Avenue burrowed into jacket to hide from the windy cold. I recalled bringing my out-of-town friends to nearby Newbury Street to stroll beside the old-world brownstones while we window shopped and later walked back to Cambridge across the Massachusetts Avenue bridge, the beautiful Boston skyline at our back and my university, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, out before us.

Over the coming days, I could not get Boston out of my mind. I could not focus on my city planning readings from the other side of the world when my heart was back in my hometown. I could not struggle through their opaque language when I struggled for even a simple explanation of why I was so distraught. I did not know any of the victims of the bombing. My best friend was there, and because she is a reporter for National Public Radio her voice echoed in my mind as I listened to news from back home. But staring at the photographs of my city, especially of those who lost their lives and limbs because of this act of violence (senseless, as violence almost always is), I dwelt amid my own grief and fury.

All week I had been receiving emergency text messages from MIT about suspicious packages around campus, daily reminders that those I was thinking of back home were preoccupied with alert. Then on Thursday evening I received a text message about a shooting outside MIT’s Stata Center, designed by world-renowned architect Frank Gehry, its jagged edges and curves prominent on a campus otherwise defined by industrial architecture. An MIT police officer had been shot. My Facebook feed lit up with updates from my friends and fellow students that they were safe at home or locked in their offices on campus. One inside Stata posted a picture of the police cars outside. I was devastated. My sister is a law enforcement officer, so I thought of her. I was devastated to quickly learn from my MIT friends that the officer had died. I was devastated that only days ago the Senate had failed to pass even the most benign gun control measures. I had NO IDEA that this was connected to the Boston Marathon bombings. It was difficult to sleep that night as my friends in Cambridge and into the suburbs posted stories about hearing gunshots and grenades outside. I listened into Boston’s police dispatcher (live online) but all I could comprehend was confusion.

The next morning things became clear and my world fell apart. The suspects in the shooting of the MIT policeman were the two blurry-faced brothers whose pictures were released the day before. The older one had been killed; the younger one – only 19 – was still hiding. My entire city was in lockdown searching for this kid, this kid from Cambridge who murdered four other young people and maimed dozens of others. I soon learned that he and his brother lived only blocks away from MIT. I had walked by their home countless times as I visited friends in East Cambridge. When I lived on campus we may have even shopped at the same supermarket. I had certainly been to the 7/11 where they had been the night before, before they killed Officer Sean Collier only blocks away. Those streets of East Cambridge are dark and deserted at that time of night. I know from too many late nights on campus studying, too worried about writing my master’s thesis to even think about the work that the MIT police did day in, night out to keep us safe.

I could not tear myself away from the news that day as my city was locked down in search of this boy from my neighborhood. Dzhokhar had recently graduated from Cambridge, Rindge and Latin, a school that represents what I love most about Cambridge, where children of professors and children of immigrants and children who were refugees from conflicts such as Chechnya intermingled and grew up together to hopefully become the citizens that this country needs to be more aware of the world around them. When he was found that evening (after the city’s eyes were finally allowed back on the street), I was wishing they had found him dead. I did not seek vengeance but I did not want to confront the why? Why had a boy from my neighborhood committed such violence? Neither did I want to face the inevitable injustices committed in the name of “justice”, especially the displacement of his trial from Massachusetts, where we do not have the death penalty, to the federal jurisdiction where they do.

I was distressed to see the American flags amid the celebrations of Dzhokhar’s capture. It was not that I wanted to deny my fellow Bostonians their freedom to rejoice after such a wrenching week, but I did not understand the place of the flag when a fellow American, a neighboring resident of Cambridge, was the one who was responsible. The news has since taken more difficult turns, from conservative calls for Dzhokhar to be tried as an enemy combatant to even progressive consensus that he should be denied his Miranda rights. The media searches for explanations back in Chechnya to what motivated these Cambridge brothers to commit their crimes. I too am interested in their Chechen background. In high school I took a class called “Children in War” and our final project was to write a diary from the perspective of one of the children we had read about. This was the mid-1990s and I wrote about Chechnya.

Yet fast-forwarding to April 2013, I could not be anywhere other than Cambridge. I could not point my finger at Chechnya, because as my grandmother always tells me, that means three fingers are pointing back at me. I am not blaming Cambridge or Boston or anybody who knew these brothers for their horrific acts. As Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote, “Terror never paves the way to justice, but leads down the shortest path to hell.” I cannot put the explanation down to extremism when Tamerlan and Dzhokhar spent most of the last decade amid the diversity that is Cambridge, nor can I explain why I am infinitely more haunted by the bombings in Boston than by the daily atrocities carried out in Syria, not to mention American terrorism in the drone attacks that kill countless (literally) civilians. As I grieve for the victims I want to feel fury at the perpetrators, but that almost feels like turning the anger against myself and my own neighborhood where the Tsarnaev brothers and I walked down the same streets. For me, and perhaps for others who think of Cambridge as home, justice can never be done when the injustice goes beyond the killings and collides with our conscience because it was committed by our neighbors against our neighbors. As I grieve for the real victims of Boston’s tragedy, I also grieve for my myself and my fellow Bostonians, and amid my confusion I grieve for the perpetrators because they too were part of my beloved Boston.

Julia Tierney is a first year doctoral student in City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley where her focus is on international development and comparative urbanism, with a focus on Brazil and Lebanon. She graduated with a Masters in City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012. She can be reached at jtier@berkeley.edu.

The Color of Elsewhere: Identity and Wealth in Rural America

Most of us have heard of the growing racial wealth gap and the statistics that show how white America continues to diverge from households of color when it comes to building assets, particularly in the form of quality homeownership. While we may tend to think about this disparity in the context of urban and suburban environments, it is crucial to also relate the issue to the households that live on the other 90% of the U.S. landmass, known as rural and small town America. To place myself in context to the issue, I’ll note that I worked as a researcher at a rural housing organization headquartered in Washington, DC, called the Housing Assistance Council (HAC) before coming to UC Berkeley to study planning. At HAC, I delved into learning about rural development, a field that I had rarely before been exposed to, and discovered some of the complexities of planning and development in small town communities. Nuancing my understanding of rural poverty and rural communities of color was strong takeaway from my work, particularly through examining historical social interactions between different populations and historical relationships to land.

A recent report from HAC shows that rural America has diverse racial and ethnic characteristics when taken as a whole. While these regions have a larger percentage of non-Hispanic whites (78%) in comparison to non-rural communities (64%) overall, rural people of color live in a variety of settings, such as Native American lands, the Lower Mississippi Delta, the southern Black Belt, and the colonias region along the U.S.-Mexico border. Populations such as migrant and seasonal farmworkers are also often found in rural areas. In examining the poverty rates among non-Hispanic whites and people of color, the gap between the two is wider in rural locations than throughout the U.S. overall. Additionally, the issue of persistent poverty—counties with continually high rates of poverty over the past 20 years—has much to do with these rural communities of color. Large parts of rural regions of color, in addition to several communities in Central Appalachia, make up the vast majority of counties in the U.S. with a history of persistent poverty.

Clearly, the wealth gap applies to rural landscapes, and considering rural demographics helps remind us of the multifaceted nature of race, ethnicity, and asset accumulation. Black identity in a given urban inner-city, for example, can be very different from black identity in a given county in the rural Mississippi Delta. Each has a unique connection to the surrounding environment, and develops in part due to a unique political and economic history of marginalization. In considering planning and development avenues, these unique connections and history may translate into a need for entirely different planning processes and sets of stakeholders across the two locations. If we return to the crux of the racial wealth gap—housing and homeownership patterns—we see that while the rural story often parallels dynamics in urban and suburban areas, rural housing displays some important differences from other housing patterns that are worth considering.

Similar to disparities throughout the rest of the U.S., rural households of color are less likely to be homeowners than non-Hispanic whites, and many of these households were hard-hit by the recent foreclosure crisis. Other patterns of housing hardship, however, may be different in rural regions. For example, in rural and small-town areas high-cost lending and low access to mortgage credit are more prevalent than in other places, and households of color are more likely to face high-cost loans.

Housing distress itself can also manifest differently in rural areas. For instance, in a past interview I conducted with a rural Minnesota housing services provider, I discovered that families at-risk of homelessness in the area were more likely to “double-up”, or move in with another family, than families throughout the rest of the state. So, in the service provider’s area, due to doubling-up, there was a lower proportion of federally-recognized homelessness than might have occurred if sharing housing was a less-common response to dealing with economic hardship. What is hidden behind the low rate of homelessness is the fact that many families still experience housing distress and need better access to housing resources in an area where homeless services are few and far between. Later, I learned that this pattern is not unique to rural Minnesota, and is in fact the case across many other parts of rural America.

When it comes to addressing the racial wealth gap in rural America, and improving housing conditions across the board, understanding some of the ways in which rural areas are different is vital to instigating effective and equitable change. Some of the most important affordable housing work in rural areas may have to do with improving infrastructure, both at the financial level and with respect to site development and connectivity, whereas in urban and suburban areas this infrastructure may already be mostly present. Also, rural planners and policy-makers have to notice the unique manifestations of housing distress and housing preferences in their regions, and then be able to translate those needs into economic progress in a country that mainly has eyes for the big city.

Thus, we should use the example of rural to caution against “prescriptive” planning approaches that attempt to replicate a particular development solution across varied contexts. While attempting to transport planning examples even between separate urban environments can be dubious at times, clearly the process becomes even more so when attempting to translocate an urban planning paradigm to a rural area. We also owe it to the world to learn a little bit more about planning outside of urban areas. To get rid of the racial wealth gap, even if we aren’t experts, it is critical to stretch our minds beyond standard approaches and to advocate for a variety of policies to fit the multitude of planning contexts that exist in this country, as well as to understand how these different policies may interact with one another across varied geographies.

Stefani Cox is a master’s student in City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. She studies equitable and participatory planning with respect to economic and housing development, and has spent time working on issues of housing and community health in Washington, DC, and Chicago, IL. She can be reached at stefanicox@berkeley.edu.

Planners’ Responsibility? A personal exploration of Race and Ethnicity in Kenya and the United States

Growing up in Kenya, I did not engage with race or ethnicity through academic research rather than through social, economic and political affairs. But it only took a few classes and interactions at UC Berkeley for me to appreciate the amount of research that has gone into race in relation to professional practice in the United States. I have found that race in the United States is an academic research issue and that it also affects every other aspect of life and determines how people interpret the environment around them, sometimes unconsciously. During my short stay here, there is not a single public place I have gone to that did not remind me of race. One day, for example, I was in church and the pastor mentioned that Michelle Obama is an inspiration to women. From the congregation, someone asked: “What about for white women?” Was Michelle a woman or black first? Another day, I invited a friend to the same church. When I asked him what he thought of the church, he said it was a great church, that there was a sense of community but that he was not used to the style of a white preacher. Again, I thought “Mmmm?!!”

At school, race has been central to most class debates. It’s not unusual to find scholars whose research interests and career goals are shaped by their experience with race. To me, it seems that racial equity is a common denominator for scholars interested in social justice in the United States, at least according to my experience at the Department of City and Regional Planning.

Race and ethnicity is not just an issue here in the States. Back in Kenya, where I come from, ethnicity defines our political and social ideologies, resource allocation and interpretation of law and marriage patterns--love alone no longer defines whom you marry. Ethnicity also shapes the conversations and jokes people can make in public. Despite carrying out its first general elections under the dispensation of a new constitution that is based on equity and respect for diversity, the determination of Kenya’s fourth President in the just concluded elections, majorly depended on ethnic alignments.

But what do race and ethnicity have to do with city planning? The above scenarios have prompted me to reflect on the role of planning education in shaping the decisions planners make. Does or can racially sensitive planning education affect how professional planners make decisions? Do planners need to study race issues in order to understand how their planning actions or race-based decisions impact different ethnic communities?

Planners have the power to control resource allocation and distribution. Planners’ decisions may determine where people live, shop, go to school, what services they can access. Planners determine people’s quality of life. Knowing the role of planners, the decisions they have made in the past and the consequences of such decisions, could planning schools have played a role in shaping planners’ decisions? In other words, can planning schools contribute to racial justice and social inclusion? Is there a course that can adequately equip planners with skills necessarily to address racial discrimination or “negative ethnicity” in city planning?

Spring 2013 saw the Department of City and Regional Planning in UC Berkeley launch an optional course on “Race, Equity and the City” which seeks to “explore the connections between race, racial justice, and equity and the scholarly and professional practices of city planning and how to conceptualize a "racially just" set of criteria to apply to planning practice and processes.”

I think such a course is needed in a context where race is central to almost everything. Moreover, based on U.S. planning history, it seems necessary to include racial issues as an integral part of a planner’s school curriculum. But a question that arises for me is whether racial discrimination and negative ethnicity in city planning is a result of ignorance, inadequate planning tools to address racial justice or simply prejudice? Is it something that can be dealt with through planning education and equipping planners with “racially just” planning tools?

These questions might not have straight answers. I, however, believe that racial and ethnically unjust decisions in planning or elsewhere are manifestations of deeper issues: insecurities, power struggles, contest over limited resources/opportunities, fear of the unknown, prejudice and mistrust. So, while planning schools should institute race and ethnic studies, there is also a need for the adoption of other tools besides planning education to equip planners and the society at large with mechanisms to achieving racial justice. Therefore, there is need for planning schools to go beyond awareness creation and problem identification to devise innovative ways of engaging with racial injustices. Besides training and requiring planners to be culturally and racially sensitive, another strategy is to restore the trust of marginalized communities by encouraging planners to work within their own community as well as in other racially and culturally different communities.

A planner is supposed to be a generalist, but are race and ethnicity in the realm of a planner’s responsibility? Levitt Williams, whose developments during the 1960s are believed to have fueled white middle class suburbanization and inner cities blight, once said: ”We can solve a housing problem, or we can try solve a racial problem. But we cannot combine the two.” I believe as planning schools, students and practitioners, we need to challenge ourselves to do both.

Declaration: In this blog piece race is used in the context of the US while ethnicity is used in the context of Africa. 

Keziah Mwelu is a first year master’s student in the Department of City and Regional Planning, UC Berkeley. She is an urban planner from Kenya interested in urban development policy, governance and equity. She can be reached at mwelu.keziah@gmail.com.

How the Other Half Lives: Exploring Trailer Parks in the American Sun Belt

I believe that trailer parks are an important source of affordable housing for low-income households. I also believe that they serve as an important transitional step for social mobility. These conclusions are a culmination of a complex and emotional, although enriching personal journey of writing my senior thesis at UC Berkeley.

As an urban studies undergraduate, I first sought to investigate the concept of colonias because to me it represented the Third World phenomenon of informalities on First World territory. The journey began in the summer of 2012 when I received the Judith Lee Stronach Summer Travel Scholarship to explore poor migrant settlements near the U.S.-Mexico border. During my travels, I drove along the U.S.-Mexico border through the States of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas to study this phenomenon of underdevelopment. But what I saw was very different from what I expected, based on the academic papers and scholarly books I had read.

Naively, I had expected to find isolated pockets of poverty that could be addressed through institutionally coordinated efforts and proactive legislation. But what I found were not isolated settlements but whole poverty-stricken neighborhoods, suburbs and, in some cases, cities, built entirely of mobile homes and trailer parks. I had never inquired into this scattered pattern of settlement clusters before, where people seemed to be camping permanently in mobile homes over the vast expanse of desert land. Initially, residences looked empty, isolated and neglected, uprooted and restless. But after spending a few weeks in the Sun Belt, I began to question my preconceived notions about life in the desert. I became conscious of very different ways of life that exist outside American metropolises. I started to wonder whether there was not one, but multiple American Dreams.

Instead of just focusing on colonias, I decided to make trailer parks a central part of my research since they represent a lion’s share of low-income housing in California. Tracing back trailer park evolution in history allowed me to better understand how they had become such a big part of American culture. I also learned about the complex social, economic, environmental, and cultural challenges in the border region and its relationship to the trailer settlements within the state in the UC Berkeley course, “The U.S.-Mexico Borderlands,” taught by Professor Michael Dear in the Fall semester of 2012.

Following my travels, I learned that throughout the 20^th century, U.S.-Mexico border issues and American planning ideology have precipitated negative attitudes towards trailer parks and low-income population residing within. Institutional, social, and economic barriers impeded the transition to conventional housing and reinforced the status quo of the informal trailer park stature. I, then, incorporated the infamous Duroville settlement as a case study in order to examine life in an informal trailer park with the most dramatic conditions. Finally, my research came full circle to cumulatively encompass first world informalities, trailer parks and colonias—all in one paper.

When Assistant U.S. Atty. Leon Weidman declared that the Duroville Trailer Park’s “leaking sewage, 800 feral dogs, piles of debris and fire hazards are a deadly threat to its roughly 5,000 tenants” and should be closed immediately, locals were not surprised. The farm belt of California is full of people living in their cars or in beat-up trailers. Some don’t even have that; they sleep outside. Duroville trailer park, located in the Imperial Valley, consists of about 200 trailers, with a population varying from 2,000 to 6,000, depending on the growing season in one of the most productive agricultural industries in the nation.

Duroville was first formed in 1999 when, according to the New York Times, the local Indian tribe leader, Mr. Duro, declared that the new trailer park on the reservation would be free of local code-enforcements. Coincidentally, Riverside county officials had just decided to clear out illegal trailer settlements in the area, which created a large demand among the low-income population. Indian reservations with their lax land use policies empowered trailer park owners to shun certain housing responsibilities and exploit the vulnerable and desperate trailer park population that had nowhere else to go. Subsequently, Duroville degenerated into a slum-like settlement with terrible living conditions.

Duroville is a culmination of a long history of systemic trailer park exclusion, discrimination and abuse that have precipitated since the trailer park heyday of the World War II Era. However, Duroville is just one of many cases illustrating the affordable housing crisis in California. Thousands of people live in severely substandard housing in California where the waiting list for affordable housing contains thousands of people.

In the current context, local governments lack political and financial capacity to address the affordable housing crisis, and therefore continue institutional efforts to zone or regulate low-income trailers out of sight or existence. While redevelopment agencies are being shattered and counties are unlikely to cough up millions of dollars to relocate the residents in the near future, life in low-income trailer parks goes on as usual. As humble as home can be in the trailer park or illegal trailer community, most residents prefer self-sufficiency to dependency. Moreover, there is great deal of pride involved in achieving “homeownership” status, stability associated with real estate ownership and benefits with raising a family in a close-knit community. As the Duroville community clearly demonstrated, trailer parks can achieve an incredible unity and coherence at beating the odds of survival in the worst of conditions and represent a dynamic vernacular environment worth of the American Dream.

Many Americans, by choice or out of necessity, live in trailers permanently and at odds with the current regulations and social ideals. Society’s refusal to reevaluate the housing needs of the poor contribute to the shortage of affordable housing. In my research and this blog post, I hope to bring awareness to the little-known community life that has been burgeoning in trailer parks and elucidate the evidence that trailers remain the last resort of affordable housing for low-income populations.

Tomas Janusas is a senior in Urban Studies in the college of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley. Born and raised in Vilnius, Lithuania, he now lives in San Francisco. He is a curious fellow in everything urban, and especially fascinated by beautifully perverse American urbanism. You can find him at tomasj@berkeley.edu.

Expanding the Intellectual Commons: Planners’ and Librarians’ Shared Responsibility for Open Access Publication

Urban planners and librarians share a number of virtues and values: we frequently work for public agencies, we’re inclined to make the fruit of our work readily available to society at large, and we share the goal of expanding the commons despite an era of increasing privatization.  As such, we need to work together to highlight the importance of publishing in open access venues. Scholarly publication is a cornerstone for advancing academic discourse and relies on peer-reviewed publication, most often in scholarly journals.  In the 17^th century when small scholarly societies began advancing scientific knowledge through the publication of journals in their fields they developed the peer-review process and the scholarly journal structure as we know it today.

Traditionally, the sharing of scholarly knowledge through journals has been an expensive enterprise and, by the middle of the 20^th century as journal publishing grew, publishers were providing critical (and costly) services such as editing, printing, subscription oversight and distribution of print issues to subscribers throughout the world. It turns out scholarly publishing is also an extremely profitable industry. Commercial interests such as Reed/Elsevier, Taylor and Francis, and Springer have turned scholarly publishing into a multinational, multi-billion dollar industry. Since 1989, journal prices have increased an average of 7.3 % each year, far exceeding the consumer price index. In other words, a journal that cost $100 in 1986 costs over $670 today. In 2010/2011, Elsevier posted profits of 35% compared to profits of 24% and 27% reported by Apple and Google that same year.

By the 1990’s, the Internet allowed journals to go online. Potentially, anyone, anywhere in the world with access to the Internet could have access to published research findings. Yet the current publishing model is based on a 17^th century model even though the kinds of services once provided by publishers such as printing and distribution are no longer necessary.

Meanwhile, universities already paying the salaries of faculty who write the articles and serve on editorial boards and act as reviewers for free – now find themselves in the position of buying back the content from commercial publishers that was freely provided to the publishers in the first place. UC Berkeley currently pays $6 million a year for electronic scholarly content.

Rising costs and decreased buying power has also led to an increasing lack of access to scholarly materials for citizen scholars, planning professionals, and general community members as content is either no longer acquired or is hidden behind fee-walls or restricted to members of university communities.

But the transformation from print to electronic distribution so profitable to commercial distributors also promises a solution to the problem.  Peer review can be achieved via proprietary systems managed by commercial vendors, or through alternate means in open access journals. Open access, simply put, is free access which is made increasingly viable as the costs of electronic distribution become negligible. The costs of managing peer-review, editing, and hosting digital content remain and as such two basic forms of open access have developed: gold and green.

Gold open access journals provide their articles for free at the time of publication. About 30% of open access journals (many in the biomedical and life sciences) charge authors a fee to publish in their journals, the other 70% have developed other business models. Increasingly universities and granting agencies are subsidizing these fees, as is the case with theBerkeley Research Impact Initiative.  Some have even argued that open-access publication is a disruption innovation that is inevitable: “Using the 2000 to 2009 data, it is likely that Gold OA journals will publish half of all scholarly articles by 2017 and will publish 90 percent of the articles by 2020.”

Green open access refers to the self-archiving of an article, sometimes a pre-publication version, often in an institutional repository such as the University of California’seScholarship or in a subject repository such as the National Institutes for Health (NIH) PubMed Central.  “Green OA sits alongside the subscription journal system and does not attempt to replace it. Rather, it is a supplement that provides a version of the content to people who would not otherwise have had access to it,” writes Lewis.

We applaud the Berkeley Planning Journal as a noble example of gold open access, hosted by the university and retaining caliber articles.  As a student-organized, peer reviewed journal, its costs are borne by student editors and hosted on university servers. The planning profession is already heavily reliant upon grey literature (plans, consultant reports, conference proceedings) which are already widely accessible for free via government websites.  As such, the shift to open access scholarly publication should be viewed as complementing those freely available, non-peer reviewed sources.

As planners and librarians we have a shared responsibility to expand the intellectual commons by promoting open access scholarship that it is widely available to academics and practitioners alike.  Let’s continue to work together to promote open access so that our work inside the academy is widely available to other academics, practitioners, citizen scholars, and the broader public communities we hope to serve.

David Eifler received an MCP from Berkeley in 1985 and is now the Interim Head of UC Berkeley’s Environmental Design Library.  When he’s not worrying about access to information he’s busy trying to teach his 15 year old son, Camilo, proper citation techniques.  He can be reached at deifler@berkeley.edu.

Margaret Phillips began her career as a librarian at UC Berkeley in 1991 -- after the card catalog but before the Web. Contact Margaret at mphillip@library.berkeley.edu.

Urban Agriculture for Food Security: Good but Not Enough

For 12 years, City Slicker Farms (CSF), an urban farming and food justice organization in West Oakland, California, has been growing fresh fruits and vegetables for residents who otherwise have very limited options for healthy food. In 2011, CSF produced and distributed 9,000 pounds of produce and cultivated more than 69,000 square feet of land. Working there as a farm intern, I helped to grow and harvest hundreds of pounds of lettuce, peas, and squash, which we sold to local residents at a weekly, sliding scale farm stand.  Yet, through all our hard effort, we only delivered produce to 510 people, 2% of the 25,000 residents in the community.

Today, with the rocky state of the economy, rising food prices, an increase in diet-related health concerns as well as the environmental concerns associated with food production, cities are increasingly turning to urban agriculture. Community gardens, urban farms, and backyard gardens are popping up all over the urban landscape. Abandoned lots are converted to booming gardens and vegetables are sprouting up in the most unlikely places: on rooftops, in traffic circles, even in truck beds. I too am taking advantaged of a few small dirt patches and empty containers around my house to sow a few seeds. However, while these efforts play a role in the growing societal shift in our approach to food, ultimately, urban agriculture will not solve the ever-growing need for increased access to healthy food that plagues the nation.

One of the biggest challenges to our food system is the growing number of families who don’t have access to food—let alone real food, that is minimally processed, healthy, sustainable, and affordable. According to the USDA, today more than 15% of all households—approximately 18 million American households—are food insecure, up 1.5 times since 2000. Right now, we need to focus efforts on finding ways to sustainably feed these families, the some 50.1 million people, who are without fresh food, in a way that is beneficial to both the people and the planet. It is this massive scale that renders the production of urban agriculture insufficient.

Urban farming and gardening efforts like CSF have blossomed in recent years.  Yet, their ability to boost the food security of a metropolitan region still remains unproven. R. Ford Denison, a professor at University of Minnesota, estimates that a farm the size of Connecticut is required to grow enough food to feed New York City. Coupled with rising urban property costs and high real estate values, there is not enough space, nor resources, to accommodate the dietary demands of a dense urban population.

While limited in its reach, this is not to say that urban agriculture is counter-productive to the food movement. There are many environmental and social benefits of producing food in an urban environment. Much of the time, it isn’t just about the food, it is about community. Gardening is a means of bringing communities together, creating a sense of place and building social cohesion, by sharing the labor and the fruits of the labor with those around you. And it is healthy. Not only does gardening increase physical activity, but urban farms also provide green space in a densely populated, cement-laden landscape.

In cities overrun by processed foods and fast food restaurants, urban agriculture helps reconnect city dwellers with their food, providing a new sense of awareness of what food production entails and what it means to eat real food.  It can also act as a means of nutrition education, encouraging people to eat fresh fruits and exposing them to new and different types of food as well as help increase overall consumption of healthier foods. In their annual report, City Slicker Farms, for example, reported that before shopping at their farm stand, 44% of their customers ate produce a few times a week or less. Since shopping at the farm stand, half have increased their consumption to at least once a day.

But what about the other 24,500+ West Oakland residents? With only one small grocery store in the entire neighborhood, they continue turning to corner stores that expose them to very poor and limited food options, or they travel long distances to do their shopping—most likely on public transportation. Sure, urban agriculture plays a role in creating a societal shift in the way we think about what and how we choose to eat. But what it is not is a means to solve the growing food crisis that provides real, healthy food for all people. Realistically, the amount of food required to sustain our growing population far exceeds the productivity potential of urban agriculture.

In comparison, focusing efforts on bringing a grocery store to the area has the potential to reach a far larger percentage of the population and could have a much greater impact on overall health. Working with a community to create a store that meets their needs and is attentive and mindful can not only provide increased access to more people, but can also provide some of the added benefits similar to those of an urban farm: When done correctly, it too can act as a meeting hub that can strengthen the community. Such a store also has the potential to engage and inform residents about healthy food options that are fresh and affordable as well as provide employment opportunities and improve overall economic development.

The need to increase food access is a much larger issue than growing a hundred pounds of tomatoes in an abandoned lot. In a system that needs to provide increased food access to increasing numbers of people, more energy must be spent on creating outlets capable of reaching a large audience. Only this will produce a real systemic change.

Lauren Heumann is a first year dual City Planning and Public Health Master’s student at UC Berkeley. Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, she has been gardening and raising chickens since an early age. Today, while she only has space for a few fresh herbs, she can also be found at the local farmers market, selling fresh produce and eggs with Say Hay Farms, a small, 20 acres, ecologically sustainable farm. She can be reached at lheumann@berkeley.edu. 

A Trip from Theory to Practice: The Redevelopment Roadshow of the Barcelona Model

I booked a trip to Barcelona for my winter break. I didn’t have a particular reason to visit, other then it was my last extended holiday for the foreseeable future. The city never came up in any of my classes; no close friends or relatives live there. So I decided to turn a class project into a study of Barcelona’s contemporary planning methods. Because I knew nothing about Barcelona, it was an opportunity to exercise my library privileges and contrast what I was able to pull from the literature to what I would see on the ground. In a planning journal, I found an article critiquing the “Barcelona Model.” Without any knowledge of The Model, I understood its relevance. Joan Clois, former mayor of Barcelona, recently began his tenure as head of UN Habitat. It was clear that his experiences as mayor were the frameworks upon which UN Habitat’s work was based. I knew that because I worked at UN Habitat and had experienced the changes that took place within the institution. I sat in meetings with Joan and was impressed by his insight into various cities but also put off by his emphasis on commodification.

The Barcelona Model                                                                                       

In 1992, the Olympic Games came to the port city of Barcelona, Spain. The city council used it as an opportunity to refashion the shoreline and industrial neighborhood, Poblenou, making room for the "knowledge economy" and tourism. Knowledge economy is defined by the OECD as a shift towards economies with a greater dependence on knowledge, information and high–level skills. The result, in Barcelona, was a shoreline divided into three sections. The southern edge of the city's waterfront would remain a robust working port; the central area became a marina/tourist area and the northern edge, the former industrial neighborhood would house their expanding tech, research and design sector. The shift was defined by planners as turning the “Catalan Manchester” to a European “Ideopolis.”

Planners rebranded Poblenou “22@ Barcelona.” Their presentations cite the work of Tom Cannon, a Professor at the University of Liverpool and the Chief Executive of Ideopolis International, and are riddled with knowledge economy jargon. The rebranding focused on the change from an industrial to an innovation district. Hence the name change to 22@ Barcelona, a play on the old industrial land use designation, 22a. The @ symbol, laden with futuristic technological undertones, talk of social cohesion and sustainability litters the marketing and planning material.

That kind of presumptuous marketing was off-putting. But as I read more, I found impressive positive impacts. Over the last twelve years, just in this neighborhood, the city has developed 8,000 new and refurbished homes with 25% of new construction set aside for affordable housing; 4,500 new companies have entered the area amounting in 56,000 new jobs. Innovative land use and financing models have appropriated former private land into public amenities with landowners agreeing to pay for half of the infrastructure improvements. Through a multimedia project, students interview elderly people to capture the historical memory of the neighborhood; parents can freely access multimedia classrooms and a digital literacy program to help them navigate the school system. Additionally, the city provides educational programs for primary school students and internships for secondary students in the fields of health, energy, media, design and information technology services. Poblenou is also home to almost all of the contemporary buildings Barcelona is known for.

Reading about Poblenou or 22@Barcelona, I was quite impressed but there were also a lot of critiques. The critics pointed to planning being used as a tool for urban commodification; privatization resulting in heavy land speculation; cultural activities centered on the “brand” of Barcelona; the tension between an authentic interest in social justice and entrance into the global market; a focus on dangerous employment stratification resulting from the service-based knowledge economy. But the criticisms left out any information about the jobs that were created or the grandmothers that were interviewed. Even as I agreed with the problems, I got that stiff feeling of the ivory tower, unwilling to join the party.

Up Close and In Person

I came to Barcelona with these ideas swimming through my head. I decided to stay in another part of the city, El Gothic, which turned out to provide a great contrast to Poblenou, showcasing the difference between an area transformed slowly over time and one that was flattened and built from scratch. I loved the natural beauty that emerged from the chaos of the mundane and the way the street art made the neighborhood a public art gallery.

By the time I got to Poblenou, I was well-acclimated to central Barcelona. The wide streets and giant modern buildings sat in stark contrast to the central city. Aside from the vacant plots it was hard to get any sense of what this place had been before. More importantly, the neighborhood, in form, felt oriented around the buildings, not the people.

In looking back at my film roll, I realized how much I was looking up rather than at the street. Walking from one activity area, like a park, to another felt like an interminable stretch. The main commercial street, built like a multimodal dreamscape, was wide enough to accommodate four lanes of traffic, two streetcars, two bus lanes and a wide pedestrian/bike median. It felt as if the planners forgot how to create spaces for the old men to sit on benches and see the kids across the street, playing ball.

But, across the city I could see how redevelopment had been integrated in the fabric of the city. All was not lost in the specter of redevelopment. The entrance to the Caixa Forum, in Poble Sec, was turned into a place for dance rehearsals; La Boqueria, a market with tourists abound was still a local market for the residents in El Gothic and back in Poblenou artists took a construction site as an opportunity to showcase their work and spread some love. The experience of being in Barcelona animated the documents I read and highlighted holes in each. Clearly, the planners were able to meet both their social and economic development goals, but in doing so missed opportunities to build from the strengths of the old industrial core. The academics meanwhile, displayed the problems of becoming tangled in a global corporate web but buried any gains that were made for the residents. I took plenty of lessons from the experience. For the planner in me, it was really clear that our expertise may build the bedrock for change but the success of the place hinges on a more complicated back and forth, between our plans and a reinvention by the people who live and work there. And for academics in me, our critical hype machine can stop the party before the guests start to dance.

Allison Allbee is a second-year Master’s student in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. Born and raised in San Francisco, she now lives in Oakland. She is photographer and wing suit jumper.  You can find her at thevisualfield.net and alliebird@berkeley.edu

Hacking: The Informal Transportation System in Baltimore

As planners, we applaud innovative public transit strategies that reduce GHG, VMT, increase TOD and affect a host of other planning acronyms. Unfortunately, planning has failed to unearth one particular strategy: a simple solution to urban transit used in Baltimore, Maryland, which draws on urban social capital within the context of a racialized space to mobilize community transit services. As a Baltimore native, I know it is hacking, Baltimore’s unique informal transportation system.

In response to the unavailability or ineffectiveness of formal transit services, residents depend on modes of reciprocity and informal, interpersonal connections to acquire auto rides, constructing a particular mobility culture known as hacking. To hail a “hack,” as it is termed, a person can go to any inner city street and dangle two fingers downward, alerting anyone in the incoming traffic that they are seeking a hack. Any driver can stop, pick up a potential rider and transport them to their destination. The system of pricing is unwritten, informally established through routine use throughout the city. It is a discounted and bargained rate, which accounts for time, convenience and distance.

Hack Price Estimates in the Vernacular of Urban Residents

Type of Hack	Hack Price
1. “Round the corner”	$2.00-3.00
2. Up the “ave” (along the same street)	$3.00-4.00
3. Same side of town, past the “ave”	$5.00
4. City to county	$6.00-7.00
5. “Over east” to “over west”	$8.00
6. Roundtrip	$10.00

Hacking differs from the gypsy cabs popular in New York and perhaps other similar cities in that any driver at any time can start or stop as a hack provider, allowing any city resident to expect to encounter a hack in any area of the inner city. These notions envelop a particular neoliberal preoccupation of residents in conditions of subalternality, a state of spatial, social and political marginality wherein the absence or retreat of macro-level services galvanizes the provision of resources by individuals and communities. Paradoxically, though hacking is categorized as a felony, many people use this mode to meet a host of daily needs. Since my family of 5 and I do not own a vehicle, we often use hacks to get my nephew school, to buy groceries, to get to work and other destinations.

As one hack mentioned, "I'm a good American hack. I hack, I work, I go to church." This sentiment confronts the hyper-visible illegality of the hack business and exposes the dual-embodiment of the hacking culture as a representation of people, their way of life and their views of urban citizenship. It becomes an expression of insurgent citizenship, the right to the city and the right to pursue economic opportunity within the American system. It is a practice rooted in black exclusion in public transit, and a collective effort of communities engaging with their own human and social capital to counteract their shared socioeconomic vulnerabilities. In this, a historicization of black urban culture is seamlessly produced and re-produced through the hacking experience. Through this lens, we realize how the experiences and practices of urban subsistence are reproduced across a global topography, driving alternative modes of living and surviving against conditions of both racial and spatial inequality. It unveils global solidarities between hacking and other alternative systems, especially used in subaltern struggles for identity and place throughout the Global South. As such, the people of the city, as African urbanist AbouMaliq Simone so succinctly states, become the infrastructure, as we theorize on American urban landscapes with a view from the south.

Moreover, it is a form of spatial movement circumscribed and confined within the city limits; its practice is foreign to adjacent counties just outside the bounds of the city, congruent with the theory of mobility as social differentiation. Though, unlike some cities in the global South, such as São Paulo and Guatemala City, where urban spaces are narrowing into privatized enclaves, the urban milieu is expanded and broadened through the business of hacking, producing a more democratized, public space. In fact, it becomes a space of social production in which the private sphere is made public, changing the social culture of the city throughout these liberated networks of social interaction and informal service provision. In a holistic sense, its existence contributes to a more integrated city, through which urban exchanges and interpersonal connections are fostered, reproduced and ingrained.

So why should planning care? The implication of hacking is not that every city should encourage informal transportation – although on days when there are severe delays on AC transit buses, I especially wish that there were. The lesson is that planning research and practice must extend itself to include counter-narratives of subaltern urbanity that can only be discovered through an excavation of the knowledge power of urban residents, and a concurrent empowering of communities in the practice of planning of urban futures. As a native of the city, my knowledge of the often secreted intricacies of urban life in Baltimore offers an awareness of not only hacking, but also informal food systems, microfinance practices and other creative processes which are absent in planning research on Baltimore.

Planning curriculum as a whole must adapt and planners must develop and master specialized methods and practices that employ local knowledge and engage with participatory planning. These methods must apply to learning at both local and global scales and the lessons learned between these spaces should be linked. Such a transformation prioritizes residents’ experiences of urban space and the concomitant identity formed around that existence and operationalizes their role in the planning process, while enhancing the policy solutions and planning prescriptions that come from this knowledge. Thus, such an act makes the planner more, and not less effective. Subaltern theorist Gayatri Spivak reasons that the subaltern can be understood as “marking the limits of our archival recognition.” To plan for and with the complex spaces and communities whose racial and socioeconomic realities are uniquely tied to their experience of urban space, our field must stretch to truly understand them.

Kristen Johnson is a first year’s Master’s student in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. She was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, and her focus is on urban development in African cities, particularly in the informal sector. She can be reached at kristen.johnson@berkeley.edu.

Living the (Planner's) Dream

“Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect,” mused master wordsmith Tom Stoppard. And he's right. But what of life completely void of any boxes? That, dear friends, is the life of a Fulbright recipient. There are no restrictions. No one to whom I must report, no one to whom I am beholden to submit reports or publish articles. Every aspect of my research is something I dreamed up, something in which I am truly interested and to which I am totally committed. It's the ideal research scenario. The crux of my current project is the generation of a dynamic image of Johannesburg to show how spaces are used and connected, framing the study of people within a city in terms of how they interact with the built environment. Johannesburg, perhaps more than any other city in Sub-Saharan Africa, is poised for tremendous growth. It is the economic hub of the region and has enormous social capital that is growing by the second; yet over a quarter of the population is unemployed and an estimated fifth of its residents live in abject poverty (Official Website of the City of Johannesburg). This stunting of growth is in no small part due to the physical residue from the apartheid era, but to be able to effectively reverse it requires an understanding of the linked spatial and social dynamism that defines the Johannesburg of today.

To develop Johannesburg in any way, be it economically, socially, or physically, a clear picture of the present state of the city must be attained. It is in the dissonance between how the city was planned and how it is actually used that the ways in which development can occur are illuminated. Spaces within a city that are activated are integrated into the urban fabric economically, socially, and culturally, and to have a clear picture of which spaces are activated and which are deactivated is essential. The areas residents avoid and the times they travel tell us  about the security and limitations on mobility, while the paths they take tell us about the linkages between places within the city. And there is no better way to capture all of this information than with a map. The generation of such maps was the essence of my Fulbright.

For my project, I chose to focus on the inner-city area that has a reputation for being the most violent and crime-ridden of all. I had previously conducted research there and found it to boast an air of hope that was missing elsewhere in the city. You see, in other parts of Johannesburg the general attitude among the economically disadvantaged was survivalist – doing enough to get by and move somewhere that they hoped would be slightly better. When asked what they saw as the main issues, Hillbrow residents didn't mention the crime or the violence that residents elsewhere invariably cited; instead, they cited the lack of investment and interest in the area due to its negative reputation. Somehow in Hillbrow, people had visions that went beyond the immediate and the practical: they wanted to do more than survive.

My fieldwork started out swimmingly – door after door after door, flung open at the mere mention of my Fulbright. I spoke to the right people, got the right maps, and got myself the right fixer. I was totally self-reliant. I had no need to go through organizations to make contacts or follow standardized protocols; instead, I made all of my own choices and formed all of my own relationships, facilitated in large part by the contacts I had made during my previous two stints in Johannesburg.

My first plan of attack was to present residents of my study area in the city-center with a street-level map of Hillbrow co-opted from GoogleMaps on which they could pinpoint locations and routes that they frequented. This approach was a dismal failure. When presented with a map, it was all residents could do to find their own home within five minutes, let alone identify other key places that figured into their lives. But as always, the wisdom of American urban planner Kevin Lynch reigned eternal, and cognitive maps were the order of the day.

Once the cognitive map collection started, patterns began to emerge. The maps depicted lives centered around home or transit that rarely extended more than a few blocks radially, with very few exceptions. There were distinct communities and linked areas within the city, oftentimes correlated to specific demographics, largely due to the lack of cohesive public transportation that would facilitate movement both within the city-center and the general metropolitan area. One of the more disturbing findings of my research that became apparent early on, however, was that the activated spaces of my study area still experience high levels of crime and violence. My hope had been that the activated corridors of the city would correspond to lower levels of crime and violence, making the spaces ripe for development clear-cut and easily defined. No city is ever quite so straightforward, though, and the search for ideal development sites continued.

It should come as no surprise that as the months of fieldwork went by, my project became increasingly personal. Informants became friends and the city streets became my community. Eventually the statistics of crime and violence caught up with my reality and one of my closest friends was murdered. My faith in Hillbrow was shattered. From the beginning I had known that there were murders in Hillbrow almost daily, so this murder did not change the reality of the space in the slightest. It was my own perception that was altered and nothing more, but reconciling my perception with the quantitative picture of Hillbrow that had dictated my research seemed an insurmountable task. Without any stringently established protocols to fall back on, it became harder and harder to remain emotionally divorced from my project. I fell down the rabbit hole. My perceptions became conflated with the hard facts of my research. At first, I chastised myself. Where was my professionalism? My ability to separate emotion from work? But then I realized that perhaps when studying people, a bit of subjectivity might not only be unavoidable, but ultimately quite useful. The study of a city is the study not only of statistics, but of people, and objectivity may cloud judgment more than clear it.

Research cannot be conducted solely based on emotions and instincts, but that does not mean that they cannot serve as another tool in the planner's toolbox. It is through the stories of a city's residents that a clearer picture of its potentials and its pitfalls emerges, and through the simple experience of walking a city that an accurate picture can begin to form. Cities are a complex amalgamation of the subjective and the objective, of people and statistics, and every so often it's okay to step outside the box of standardized research methodologies. It's okay to be both a planner and a person.

Anna Premo received her master's degree in city planning from MIT where she was part of the International Development Group. A 2012 Fulbright recipient for South Africa, she is now living in Johannesburg at the Cities Institute at the University of Witwatersrand and can be reached at anna.e.premo@gmail.com.

Synthesizing the Past in the Present: The Story of One L.A. Parcel

Planning historians criticize Los Angeles for having little history. Admittedly, Los Angeles has a much shorter history than China and exhibits fewer famous historic monuments than Greece. But history is not exclusively constrained by length of time or number of monuments – history can also be measured by rates of change. Each day, we Angelinos walk, run, socialize, and drive throughout our 231 year old community. Most are unfazed by the historical significance of the existing structures that line our streets. We unconsciously dismiss that World Wars, racial riots, the entertainment business, and natural topography influenced the layout of our current Los Angeles. While attending the University of Southern California, I always focused on the existence rather than the evolution of specific sites surrounding my community – Little Tokyo, the Coliseum, the Fashion District, and the Natural History Museum. My myopic perspective overlooked the historical richness of Downtown Los Angeles.

An assignment in an urban planning class expanded my historical understanding of my surrounding environment. I constructed the history of a parcel of land by piecing together Sanborn maps, archived newspaper articles, and historic photographs. Analyzing these sources for my assigned parcel, 3335 South Figueroa Street, I found that the site had transformed from exclusively residential into a commercial center and then into a mixed-use, residential and commercial property. Surprisingly, I found that the building that I lived in had synthesized its previous land uses into its current use. Because my building visually portrayed its past, I wondered if the rest of the downtown buildings evidenced their histories.

First, let us look at the history of my parcel and the community to understand the city’s complex transformation. With this understanding, we become more aware of the historical richness of our own communities – whether we live in Los Angeles or other metropolises.

The first Sanborn map, which details the parcel’s residential land use, dates back to 1894. Within twelve years, housing density dramatically increased, creating a residential community in today’s urban jungle. The subsequent Sanborn map shows how the community developed by 1906. First, one dwelling transformed into a school, indicating that families in the community demanded public services. Second, residents constructed new homes, added garages and patios to their existing homes, and meticulously landscaped their residences. This dramatic increase in housing density and longstanding tenures of residents seemed to create a permanent residential community in the downtown area. However, the booming economy quickly sparked commercial development. Surprisingly, this historical trend recently repeated itself. As a five-year resident of Downtown, I have seen young professionals matriculate to the area, which caused new commerce to develop around the residential communities.

The shift from residential to commercial use paralleled the emergence of American consumer culture between 1900 and 1930. As incomes increased, the ability to own automobiles became tangible for many middle class families, perpetuating construction and consumption. City planners approved construction of eight retail and automotive stores on the periphery of the property, attracting residents and passing drivers. This physical determinism induced consumption. The longstanding tenure of these automobile stores portrays the significance of the automobile in Los Angeles. This auto-centric culture permanently endured; today, cars outnumber the pedestrians and commercial establishments outnumber residences. Arguably more car-dependent than any other American city, Los Angeles reinforces its historical reliance on the automobile today more than ever.

On your next visit to Downtown LA, take a look at the price of valet parking (I have paid up to $20) or the cost of street parking meters per hour (up to $4.00).

During this period of commercialization, venue construction also occurred. The Shrine Auditorium, which hosted automobile and entertainment shows, was built on the adjacent parcel of land between 1920 and 1926. The construction began a process of displacing residents, which further catalyzed the transition of the parcel into commercial use. By the mid-1900s, all residences in the area were demolished and replaced by commercial structures; complete gentrification had occurred. The area’s quaint, suburban history quickly disappeared. Noisy automobiles and clattering construction displaced the quiet, landscaped dwellings, leaving little evidence of the area’s past residential charm. These economic decisions by retailers also changed the social fabric of the community; business transactions replaced personal interactions, much like today’s commercialized and individualized culture of Downtown LA.

Between the 1950s and today, Downtown Los Angeles has experienced considerable transformation. Commercialization increased rents, forcing working class residents to move away from Downtown’s core. Then, in the early 1960s, the downtown area began to decline when developers constructed mass amounts of office space west of Downtown, attracting businesses towards the neighborhoods of Century City, the Wilshire Corridor, and Hollywood. At the same time, public transportation failed to fully develop due to the large number of automobiles in the area.

Since 1998, the Figueroa Corridor Partnership, a business that works with the local government, has significantly improved the downtown neighborhoods. The partnership revitalized Downtown by cleaning up the area, increasing safety, and attracting businesses. Today, the demand for housing in Downtown Los Angeles has infiltrated both the commercial core and the area surrounding USC. University Gateway, a giant apartment and retail complex exists on the parcel I examined.  The site serves a variety of economic and social purposes; it houses students and provides the local community with a market, a drug store, and multiple restaurants.

By detailing the complex past of one street corner in a small community within Downtown Los Angeles, we become aware of the powerful influence of our social and economic decisions on current structures throughout our cities. Due to these rapid changes, structures transformed quickly, destroying the visual remnants of Los Angeles’ historic past. But before we Angelinos dismiss our seemingly lackluster history, we should look at what exists around us, because the physical structure of the surrounding buildings might visually reveal our community’s historic past.

Paris Rebeil recently graduated from the University of Southern California with degrees in Business Administration and Policy, Planning, and Development. She currently attends Loyola Law School, Los Angeles and plans to practice real estate law. Paris can be reached at parisrebeil@gmail.com.

Musings from an Architect growing up to become a Planner

The formulation, formation and function of a city has always intrigued me. To understand it better, I began by studying architecture, and now, the pursuit has led me to learn about planning. I would like to take this opportunity to illustrate how, in my own experience, architectural practice has evolved and how the role of the architect seems to have expanded from the master mason to a master planner.

Some experiences more than others (some of which were also more frustrating than others) have played an important role in making me—the architect—want to pause, learn more and grow up to become a planner. I say grow up, because in order to even attempt at changing the world, it is essential for architects to broaden their skill sets. Only then, with their spatial sensibility and experiential sensitivity, will they be in an extraordinary position to make a tangible difference.

Having lived in five different cities in India—Gandhinagar, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Chennai and Mumbai—I never had any particular attachment with one place. Instead, I would compare: People in Kolkata were friendlier, while they were more conservative in Chennai; our house in Chennai was twice the size of our house in Mumbai, though it cost the same; it would take 40 minutes to drive from one end of Chennai to the other (10 miles), 40 minutes to drive from Ahmedabad to Gandhinagar (20 miles), 40 minutes to drive from Andheri West to Andheri East in Mumbai (4 miles). And I could go on. Once, I asked my grandfather what the difference was between Gandhinagar, Ahmedabad and Kolkata. He said, “Gandhinagar is a town, Ahmedabad is a city and Calcutta is a very big city.”

For a long time, that was my definition and standard understanding of scale.

When I looked back, I realized that I didn’t remember those cities by their architectural language or by their road designs and infrastructure, not even by their urban fabric. What I remembered best was houses I lived in and friends I made. This changed radically when I began studying architecture.

Only during my Architecture degree in Mumbai did I learn that Gandhinagar was planned on the principles of Swiss-born modernist architect Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh, Ahmedabad was filled with buildings designed by American master architect Louis Kahn, and Mumbai and Kolkata featured some of the finest examples of Indo-Saracenic and Gothic revival architecture (like St.Paul’s cathedral in Kolkata, Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai). As I revisited all those cities, I viewed them through a completely new lens. I began labelling and defining everything I saw. Suddenly, cities became diagrams that allowed me to criticize and experiment. The more I analyzed a place, the more I distanced myself from it. I did indeed learn more about each city, but with knowledge came awareness, and with awareness came power.

In order to use the power more responsibly I decided to travel more. I went to other Indian cities: Jaipur, New Delhi, Chandigarh and Agra—cities where architects and planners worked closely with the king (Jaipur and Agra) and the state (New Delhi and Chandigarh) to build identities and define imaginations for kingdom and country to follow. None of these architects were natives to the cities they designed. They just needed a canvas to express their ideas and spread their imaginations.

Walking through those buildings, I understood architecture’s universal appeal: In the Assembly building in Chandigarh, I felt as if the building was designed for me. Although there was a spatial explosion of volumes, the fun detailing on the columns (concept sketches on some, marks made in the concrete by Corbusier, some cut-outs sculped out in the concrete) made the space more perceptible.

Following the three-week long trip, I began working on my thesis in which I re-imagined the architect’s role as one who reveals infrastructure and makes it an integral part of the citizens’ experiential realm. In doing so, I hoped to not only provide citizens with knowledge of how the city works, but also to enable them to experience its workings in their daily routine. Thus, I made the human experiences of traversing physical infrastructural systems a prerogative.

Over the next two years, following graduation, I worked as an architectural intern in Turku (Finland) and then as an architect in Mumbai (India). First, for six months, a friend and I worked under Italian-Finnish architect, Marco Casagrande, on a proposal to erase the modernist gridiron highway stretch that divides the Turku cathedral from a public park, and to instead connect them as one large public plaza. Our drawings were published in the local newspaper and the designs brought back memories of pre-1960s Turku. Citizens wrote on the newspaper's website that they were reminded of cobbled streets, trams connecting different parts—and they  wanted it back. Today, Turku is considering an ambitious project, transferring the highway to the underground and freeing up the surface space for pedestrian and public transport use only.

The architect planted an idea, the people exalted, and the city obeyed.

Back in Mumbai, I worked on projects ranging from private bungalows to vehicle showrooms and industrial sheds. Being budget- and client-driven projects, they revealed a world of compromise and manipulation. Here, the architect had become the draftsman and construction supervisor who had to deal with corrupt municipal officials, devious contractors and shifty clients. The more I learnt about the city, the more I despised it. From the simple place where people lived, worked and made friends, it became a place where people plotted, manipulated and networked purely for selfish benefits. The machinery that the city runs on had started crumbling.

The architect needs to break the shackles and take on larger responsibilities. Not as Howard Roark (The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand) but as Dominick Cobb (Inception by Christopher Nolan), the architect needs to plant an idea, and then let the people develop it as their own, giving them ownership and making them responsible for it.

One semester into the planning program at UC Berkeley, I feel that the architect’s sensibilities can flow very seamlessly into the planner’s visions, and together they  must synergize into one solid alliance. The time has come for Frank Lloyd Wright’s words to come alive – “Maybe we (architects) can show the government how to operate better as a result of better architecture”.... and planning!.

Arijit Sen is a First Year Master’s student in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. He is an architect from Mumbai, India and has worked and travelled extensively in Europe and India. He can be reached at arijitsenarijit@berkeley.edu.

A Tale of Two Parks: Contesting History Along the Calexico/Mexicali Border

February 5, 2013

Having grown up two blocks from the Calexico/Mexicali international border, the infrastructure of national sovereignty (barriers, checkpoints, military-grade trucks, and surveillance towers) was a normalized inconvenience to me, as it meant two-hour delays to traverse the 200 feet to and from Mexico. Certainly, the area’s most striking feature of national planning is the border fence itself. Normalized but never naturalized, this chunk of steel stitched arbitrarily through the flat desert cannot easily claim legitimacy. Over the winter break, I became aware of how municipal planning decisions around the barrier (particularly two parks) consciously aid and undermine this project of imperial legitimacy.

I found that the planning decisions around the barrier enacted a process described by Columbia Professor Timothy Mitchell in his book Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics and Modernity. Twentieth century imperialism, Mitchell argues in it, was articulated as the rational conquest of nature by universal modernity rather than a process of arbitrary violence—urban renewal, agriculture industrialization, and irrigation projects were among the most common expressions of this. In this particular border territory, two parks, one in Calexico and the other in Mexico, contest the legitimacy of the border division: the Mexican park by inserting history into the landscape, the U.S. park by suggesting ahistorical peace.

Less than thirty feet away from the international barrier stands a Mexican municipal park commemorating one of the Mexican-American War’s most dramatic episodes: the Parque Niños Héroes (Park of the Heroic Children). It commemorates the 1847 siege of Chapultepec Castle, the decisive event in the U.S. invasion of Mexico City that resulted in the annexation of half of Mexico (including California). The story goes that on the day of the siege, the Mexican federal army was away and left only six teenage cadets (ages 14-19) to guard the national castle. Facing the force of the invading U.S. army, the Mexican cadets fought helplessly to protect the castle. The siege concluded, as any elementary student in Mexico can tell you, with the suicide of Juan Escutia, a cadet who wrapped himself in the Mexican flag and jumped to his death from one of the castle walls.

The decision by Mexicali municipal planners in the 1910s to place a replica of the national monument to the Niños Héroes at the center of this public park imprinted the border landscape with the history of its violent production. In fact, municipal planners filled the surrounding area with reminders to the violence of foreign occupation.  The street separating the park from the border fence, for instance, is Av. Cristóbal Colón, (Christopher Columbus Avenue). At the head of the park is the Municipal House of Culture—a century-old neoclassical building that still bears the name of tortured Aztec Emperor Cuauhtémoc on its relief. And a short walk away, one finds large boulevards named after revolutionary heroes, reformist politicians, and rebel poets and clergymen.

The Parque Niños Héroes stands as a stark foil to Border Friendship Park, located less than a mile away on the U.S. side of the international barrier. This smaller park, awkwardly located at the mouth of the international port of entry, becomes too congested with automobile traffic to encourage widespread public use. Surrounding the park is Imperial  Ave., numbered streets, and avenues named after early 20^th century desert pioneers. Border Friendship Park makes no reference to the history and politics of the border; it only affirms peace with the present territorial arrangement.

Once again, boulevards, parks, and buildings on the southern side of the barrier mark the land with violence and remind residents of the unnatural processes that produced the border. But on the U.S. side, rational and universalizing claims of apolitical space are made with numbered streets and avenues named after “desert pioneers” who conquered the scorching desert with their ambitious irrigation infrastructure (see: All-American Canal and Imperial Dam).

If my 22-year-long unawareness of this bi-national contestation is any evidence, both these sets of municipal planning decisions exert little effect on those who actually occupy these spaces and who are unconcerned with claims of national sovereignty (included are bi-national families, agricultural laborers, drug smugglers, and adventure seeking teens). In a sense then, these parks deny agency to the inhabitants of this particular border region—a recognition that would undermine claims of national sovereignty for both nations.

The Mexicali park that leads to the neo-classical House of Culture (offering dance, painting, theatre, and music classes to Mexicali youth) is flanked by the block-wide “La Casona” strip club, attracting mostly American youth. Along the park, street vendors depend on the line of cars entering the U.S. to sell food and artisanal goods. Rather than reacting to the reminders of violence, vendors and businesses neighboring the barrier try to attract U.S. clientele and dollars.

Border Friendship Park made headlines a decade ago when reports surfaced that it was a popular spot for drug smugglers. With a clear view of incoming international traffic, spotters would track the movement of concealed narcotics from the park. These reports led the Calexico City Council to build an extension Police station at the head of the park. Border Friendship Park, the “wedge of grass” now sandwiched between a police substation and Homeland Security at the international checkpoint, poorly hides the incomplete and imperfect exercise of U.S. sovereignty over the border and the narrative of border friendship it promotes.

These two parks reveal an interesting history of imperial contestation through municipal planning, but speak to the limits of attaching a space to historical moments irrelevant to the everyday life of those using the space. The failures of these planning decisions stem from the assumption that border communities feel themselves to occupy two distinct places with different histories—rather than one profoundly interconnected and common place.

Luis Flores is a recent UC Berkeley graduate with degrees in Political Economy and History. He is currently a researcher for the Oakland Institute and works at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. Luis can be reached at jr.luisf@gmail.com.