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.

Ending the American Planning-Inferiority Complex

January 29, 2013 Heated bike lanes?! Traffic-light Pong?! Seventeen-Story Greenhouses?!

Be still my heart.

Throughout my urban planning education, Western Europe has functioned as a shining beacon of possibilities. It exists as the land of enlightenment: where bicycles warrant robust infrastructure investment, where the inner cities are vibrant centers of commerce, where everything is sustainable and gasoline costs around $10-a-gallon.  In fact, if there was one consistent trope throughout my studies, it would be a professor or classmate or academic article pointing a finger towards a new trend or phenomenon in Western Europe and exclaiming, emphatically, ‘we should be more like them’.

And why shouldn’t we?

Western Europe seems to have it figured out— their society is far less auto-dependent, cities such as Amsterdam and Copenhagen actively promote a bicycle-culture, and downtowns boast small streets, mixed-use everything, and world-class subway systems. It’s easy to be envious. It’s easy to use Europe’s successes to highlight the flaws in our own society.  But if the goal is to increase bicycle-usage, reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, to create more vibrant, walkable downtowns, and generally, to Europify our built form, then, without context, maybe comparisons between the United States and Western Europe can be a tad counter-productive.

A few important things to remember before contrasting Europe and the United States:

1. America is more auto-centric than Europe because much of its built form was developed when there were automobiles.

Europe? It developed before cars-- back when you could either live in the countryside and grow your own crops or live walking distance from a town-square or market. Thus, it’s no wonder that Europe’s built form is far more compact than its American counterpart. Because of the crutch of the automobile, (no doubt aided by Henry Ford’s dismantling of American transit networks, FHA regulations that strongly encouraged suburban development, the interstate system, and a whole host of other automobile-centric government policies), American cities instead grew out instead of up.

Although this information is relatively old-hat for any urban planning student—the truth remains: European planners are rarely tasked with moving millions of residents from exurban cul-de-sacs to the inner-city. And instead of anguishing over the last 60 years of American development, we have to be realistic about the challenges we face.  Any American bicycle revolution will inevitably happen in our sprawling American metropolises and will have to look completely different than any European bicycle revolution.  A “we should be more like them” runs the risk of simultaneously over-simplifying our own problems and misdiagnosing our own solutions.

2. The American political and economic climate: not always conducive to investment.

Americans are reluctant to invest in public transportation to the same extent as our European counterparts— and all urban planning students are aware of the pervasive, libertarian, tea-partyer, ‘I’m not going to fund anything that doesn’t directly benefit my current lifestyle’ ethos.  But since political preferences are often related to culture, and culture is often related to built form— one has to surmise that America’s built form has contributed to the libertarian ethos.

In the 1950s and 1960s, as the United States planned and built the interstate highway network, World War Two veterans took advantage of racist FHA home loan policies, and purchased new homes in white, wealthy suburban communities. These communities, located outside the city-center along the interstates, were auto-dependent from birth. Rich white people commuted by automobile—and mass transit would come to be identified as the transit mode for the poor and black, and therefore not worthy of investment. These beliefs have become entrenched.

Similarly, the balkanization of our metropolitan regions has fostered competition between cities and suburbs for business interests— leading to rise of suburbs-to-suburbs commutes.

Compare this with a European city, where the transit-dependent inner city is largely rich and white, and the reasons for the cleavage in the transportation preference between American and European culture becomes clear.

Conclusion

The point of this essay isn’t to say that we shouldn’t strive to build more bike lanes, or we shouldn’t be innovative, or even that we should admire Europe for what they’ve achieved. Even the most gimmicky article that gets us excited about tackling major world issues has value.

But for those not in the urban planning profession, hearing ‘we should be more like them’ is insufferable, and for those of us in the urban planning profession, it creates a false dichotomy: it’s either the American way (cars / suburbs / libertarians) or the European way (bicycles / inner-cities / happiness). Any path towards a progressive built-form inevitably travels through our suburbs, down our freeways, in our economy, and with our politics. We should learn how to navigate this path. We should learn the reasons our cultural biases exist, and how to work within them, and, when necessary, how to change them.

So, Europe: congratulations. We get it. You win. You’re awesome. But please stay out of my articles and away from my classrooms. And Portland, you’re on notice.

Matt Wolff graduated in 2012 with a masters degree in urban and regional planning from the University of Minnesota. He is currently living in Oakland, and can be reached at matthewlwolff@gmail.com

Mobile Internet and Public Space

January 22, 2013 By Mason Smith

The last several years have witnessed the internet hop from our desktop and into our lap, and from our lap straight into our palms. With Project Glass, Google assures us that the internet will soon be sitting on our face. As The Economist’s recent special report on technology and geography cites, the volume of mobile data traffic in 2017 will be 21 times greater than it was last year.

By now most urbanites have experienced firsthand the merits of mobile internet connectivity. We can predict the arrival of the next train to the minute and can easily locate nearby restaurants to sate any culinary desire. We can check in for flights, reroute our drive according to snarled traffic, or order the otherwise belated mother’s day bouquet – all while on the go. No matter your desire, “there’s an app for that.” The digital world is increasingly shaping how we move through, interpret, and interact with the physical world, but at what cost?

A sign from the Tokyo subway, advising against cell phone use

Mobile internet connectivity challenges our engagement with our immediate physical surroundings. Unknowingly, we find ourselves absorbed in our personal screens with blinders raised to the people and activity around us. We’re regularly and subtly forced to choose whether to explore the sites, smells, and sounds that surround us or to refresh the screen in the digital world. A recent Atlantic Cities article cites part of a study that asked smartphone users to recall details of places and the people therein they had visited just ten minutes prior. The memories of the smartphone users were impaired which, as the articles suggests, may mean they weren’t paying attention in the first place. As individuals, we only have so much bandwidth, as they say.

After a spell in the newness of this type of connectivity, I envision a future that draws us back towards physical reality. Policy and design of the built environment should preempt and encourage this shift. And as our dependence on smartphones and tablets is unlikely to diminish, these policies and designs should consider how best to incorporate these devices while mitigating their threat for distraction.

Efforts towards accommodating the rise of mobile internet technology are already sprouting in the private sector. In an effort to discourage mealtime disruptions, a restaurant in Los Angeles offers a 5% discount to its customers who choose to check their phones at the door. Similarly, an Oakland-based group called The Digital Detox hosts tech-free weekend retreats at Northern Californian hot springs to encourage people to reconnect with life’s natural rhythms.

Leaders in the planning community should take inspiration and build on the ideas brewing in the private sector. We should think deeply about how to create spaces that encourage people to disconnect from the digital world and reconnect with our immediate physical surroundings and with each other. Creating “cool spots,” or internet-free areas, is a promising vehicle towards providing refuge from the digital inundation. One form these cool spots could take is that of a small section of a public space sheltered by a permanent canopy that would disenable patrons from going online. The canopy would double as a shade structure and could even play host to greenery or otherwise enhance the physical environment. Dedicating the entirety of a space as internet-free – in a pocket park for example – would make the experience in traditional reality even more immersive.

Another alternative to help reengage people with their surroundings is a social agreement to go internet-free upon entering a designated space during a certain time. San Francisco regularly hosts car-free Sundays along certain streets within Golden Gate Park, which gives rise to a more pedestrian-centric use of the streets. The event has grown to become generally accepted and even expected as a weekly ritual. In a similar vein, public initiatives could promote periods of time in specified public places that are designated in advance as internet or device-free zones. Enforcing disuse of mobile internet devices should be avoided. Rather, a widely supported social agreement combined with the pleasant contagion of going device-free would uphold the new expectations around the use of the space. Reliance on this social agreement would also reduce the need for capital investment and would allow the idea to scale almost infinitely. Security considerations would need to be made, however, as people have understandably grown to rely on mobile connectivity in the case of a potential emergency. Reuse of the space towards a device-free environment wouldn’t require a change to the built environment in this case, but rather a shift in priority away from the virtual and back to the physical.

From our laps, palms, faces, and beyond, the rise of the mobile internet challenges the planning community to reconcile the built and virtual environments. We would be wise to soon address how to accommodate the mobile internet during these years of its formative adolescence.

Mason Smith is a graduate of UC Berkeley where he studied Political Science and Global Poverty and Practice as an undergraduate. Mason's primary interests are tactical urbanism and complete streets design. He can be reached at masonglennsmith@gmail.com.

Planning out of Context: Including Youth Perspective in Planning

December 11, 2012 While sitting in urban planning courses at the College of Environmental Design (CED), students are asked to think about the greater good, effective methods to improve cities, and how to plan for the future. Thinking about the future is a theme that is constant in all courses taught at UC Berkeley. Yet, within our Wurster Hall, we are taught that the planning profession is often undecided in the verdict of including or not including communities in the planning process.

Community perspectives in planning are often disputed in the field. Last week, a fellow city planning masters student, Sydney Céspedes, wrote of the role of community participation. However, when planners evaluate issues of community, youth perspectives are often dismissed or simply disregarded. The role of youth in planning is almost non-existent, because issues related to youth are considered to belong to the education field. Unlike some fields, youth in planning should not be thought of an issue but a perspective to challenge traditional comprehensions of who is the planner.

On December 4^th, 15 Latino youth from Boulder, Colorado visited Wurster Hall to present their work on environmental impacts at the local and national level.  The students have been participating in a Science Video Lab through the El Centro Latino Americano para las Artes Ciencias y Educacion (CLACE), where they encourage diverse youth to learn, love, live and embrace science as an everyday experience. CLASE, is funded through a grant from NASA (NICE: NASA innovations in climate education), which promotes climate and Earth system science literary and seeks to increase the access of underrepresented minority groups to science careers, and educational opportunities. Through the efforts of these collaborators, the students from Boulder produced videos on their communities experience and response to climate change.

Their visit to Wurster Hall was just a pit stop before they presented their 3-7 minute videos at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco. The videos presented by the students, although not rooted in planning practice or theory, touched on issues that are constantly debated as cities continue to grow. The videos below use creative to address the environmental issues that the students thought to be the most important to their state and the U.S.

Community Perspective on Climate Change by: Itzel and Gabriel

See the others below:

Carbon Footprint: I have a carbon footprint by: Nancy Contreras and Vero Castro

Climate Change: Colorado Snow and Climate Change by: Darian Valdez

Animal Extinction: Loss of Biodiversity (part 1) by: Jenny Aguilera (with and anticipation for Part 2 in Spring 2013).

Environmental and community concerns are not new to planning, however the method practiced by the students taking part in CLASE can only be described as a breath of fresh air. During their presentation students were asked questions about the role in choosing the topic. A few mentioned that the issues were concerns they had seen in their own community others credited the program with introducing them to new topics they had never been exposed to before.

While the students spoke about their work, I began to question if CED had youth involvement within the community. As it turns, since 2004 the UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education and College of Environmental Design have partnered with schools in the San Francisco Bay area. At Center for Cities and Schools, Professor Deborah McCoy created Y-Plan in 1999 to collaborate with high schools in the Bay Area. Y-plan is a course that brings graduate, undergraduate students, high school students, and government entities work together to develop suggestions that impact their community. Within the past ten years, Y-Plan has been a local leader in giving youth the space to create and present their opinions in planning.

So, now being aware of programs that include youth community participation in planning, is it enough? Has planning seen beyond the traditional, to include the un-conventional planner, in this case youth?

The answer to these questions of course is left to personal opinion. Personally, there is not enough youth participation in planning; it is not due to a lack of interest, rather the traditional tenacious planning that ignores community involvement is to blame. Planning does not solely affect transportation, land use and community development, it affects individuals. If planning is to plan the future, perhaps we, as planners should approach planning with grass roots objectives.

Maira Sanchez is a current graduate student in the City Planning Department at the College of Environmental Design. Her interests are Land Use and Community Development, and she can be reached at sanchez_m@berkeley.edu.

Pedagogy and Social Media or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Twitter

December 11, 2012 The lecture is a reviled pedagogical tool. As a student, no amount of coffee can keep you awake during some especially excruciating ones. Having recently been on the other side of the podium after a long night of rewrites, I can claim that the sentiment is shared on both sides. There is definitely a consensus that a lecture is not the best teaching tool in most circumstances – even the normally opinion-balanced Wikipedia doesn’t try too hard:

“Critics point out that lecturing is mainly a one-way method of communication that does not involve significant audience participation, (as opposed to) active learning.”

“(Lectures) represent a conception of education in which teachers who know give knowledge to students who do not and are therefore supposed to have nothing worth contributing.”

Clearly, we’ve moved far along in understanding pedagogy to recognize that however knowledgeable you are, you don’t know enough. I am also sure there are very few doubts about the effectiveness of active student participation in classes. Unfortunately, in an era of rising tuition, budget cuts and classes bursting at the seams with students, the lecture becomes one of the few pedagogical tools available (or even possible) in the academic space. Knowing these constraints, are there ways to re-invent a pedagogical tool dating back to the Middle Ages (thanks again, Wikipedia!) that align it with contemporary, effective methods of learning?

This fall, I had the opportunity of being a Graduate Student Instructor (GSI) in Prof. Ananya Roy’s Global Poverty class. The scope of the class lends itself to being a seminar class, as does the range of the material and majors ranging from Development Studies and City Planning to Mechanical Engineering and English Literature. Unfortunately, this class is an administrative nightmare due to its size – for this semester, the student count started in the high 800s, before stabilizing at a relatively reasonable (!) 559. Each discussion section has about 30 students and is meant to be the space for active learning, but starting at Berkeley Time and ending at Pacific Time doesn’t leave a lot of time to be a truly satisfying discussion.

At the start of the semester, the idea of using Twitter to spur discussion in class came up during a couple of meetings. Twitter’s 140-character limit on posts lends itself to quick thoughts and questions, while the lack of previews of images and videos helps parse through many posts quickly – both aspects that had the potential to bridge over some of the issues in encouraging discussion in class. As some of you who have taken the class earlier know, the lecture has a strictly enforced no laptops/smartphones rule and the main concern was the utility of selectively allowing use of electronic devices that clearly had the potential of being distractions – how does one know if someone is texting their significant other or commenting on the oppressive global coffee commodity chain? The other, larger concern was how much more effective would this be in getting students to talk? In spite of some apprehension on the part of everyone involved, we decided to experiment with using Twitter as a tool to during lecture. Another major concern – as a student, how much of the lecture would you lose while trying to compose a 140 word tweet in the middle of class?

The first attempt was during the week on different perceptions of the impact of foreign aid, the centerpiece of which is a debate of Jeff Sachs’ and William Easterly’s opinions on the matter. Students were encouraged to tweet using the #globalpov hashtag and all tweets appeared live on a screen behind the lectern.  The discussion following this class is usually contentious, with strong opinions on both sides. The use of Twitter seemed for this class was like adding fuel to the fire – the debate on screen was a lot more explosive than the one between the original authors. The tool seemed effective in getting normally reticent people to share their thoughts. At the same time, the live stream was incorporated into the lecture with key tweets used to segue from one topic to another or to initiate a discussion in class.

At the same time, many students (and most of the GSIs, including yours truly) felt that the live stream running throughout the lecture was too distracting. The effect was apparent in the discussion section too – while more students talked, they seemed to be referencing their friends’ and colleagues’ tweets more than the reading or lecture material itself.

The lessons from this first experiment helped make minor adjustments to the next time Twitter was used in class and a few more tweaks later, there was some stability with the use of Twitter during lecture – the feed was displayed only during some portions of the lecture to initiate discussion on the material covered so far and tweeting would not be as distracting.

The use of Twitter during the lecture seemed to do what it set out to do –upset the one-to-many pedagogical hierarchy of the lecture.

It also lent itself to other experiments, such as GSIs tweeting from relevant fake ids to bring in reading material in the course of the twitter discussion…

… Preparing crowdsourced lecture review notes …

… or let students at opposite ends of the auditorium converse, in the middle of lecture

It was outside the class that Twitter seemed to have an unexpected impact, letting learning continue beyond the four hours of class and discussion time, whether it’s answering questions about the reading material…

…or talking about current events…

… or in trying to earn brownie points from a professor.

For a popular course that involves itself in contemporary debates about development, the #globalpov helped take the conversation far beyond the walls of Wheeler auditorium…

…and initiated the creation of this video, based on class material (and a deep, abiding love for Bono?)

It’s perhaps too early to comment on how effective social media can be for education. In light of the problems that face public education, especially in California, a conversation on the use of social media in education can safely and appropriately be relegated to the backburner. The debate over using social media for education is a never ending one, both sides being equally interesting cases.

But this experiment over the last few months has had at least one convert: me. For a self-proclaimed Luddite, I saw no benefit in using Twitter in class. As a GSI policing the 600-strong auditorium, ensuring that open laptops aren’t checking out 9gag seemed like an additional burden. Making a twitter handle was a big, unwanted step but the benefits soon began outweighing the constant urge to update my feed. Discussion sections became easier to start off – knowing what my students were tweeting (and tweet-stalking them before a section) helped prepare discussion questions. Active tweeters were usually not the ones who spoke up in section, and referencing their tweets in class helped break the ice. The ego boost received on being quoted or re-tweeted helped, of course, in the conversion.

Now that the semester is over, I expect the conversation to continue on Twitter and keep tabs on what’s happening in one of my favorite classes, just as some of these Cal alum are doing…

Join the conversation on Twitter using the #globalpov hashtag.

Siddharth Nadkarny is an architect from Mumbai, India and currently pursuing a Master of City Planning degree at UC Berkeley. His interests lie in international development and urban systems.

Participatory Budgeting, Practical or Pointless?

December 4, 2012 “How would you spend three million dollars?” is the provocative question written in big, bold letters across flyers advertising Vallejo’s citywide participatory budgeting project. The city will allocate 30% of the Measure B tax sales to projects suggested and voted on by the residents of the city. The first city-wide project to be implemented in the United States, participatory budgeting (PB) is a relatively new concept in this country having just been realized for the first time in Chicago in 2009 and then later in New York City in 2011. An interesting time for PB to take root in the U.S. as people continue to feel the effects of the recession and as disillusionment with the government has continue to prevail in the American spirit since the financial crisis. Even more interesting for the project to be brought to Vallejo, which in 2008 was the largest city at the time in California to declare bankruptcy. The city was just released from this perilous financial legal status in 2011.

The November 18^th assembly, held in a community room in St. Vincent’s Church, is one of nine where residents and community members are asked to share their personal experiences and brainstorm with other strangers in order to decide what is the greatest need and provide ideas on projects that will address these needs. This was the only assembly to be held in Spanish (two other assemblies provided interpretation for Spanish speakers). A PHD student in sociology, two other graduate planning students and I seized on the opportunity to use our Spanish speaking skills and volunteered as facilitators or as scribers. As a student who came to graduate school for city planning with the interest in studying participatory processes, getting to partake in one of the assemblies was a rare opportunity to experience direct democracy in its rarest form. Democracy as a rule is messy. Even more so, it’s costly and usually a lengthy process. PB may have been bought to Vallejo but certainly not without some ridicule and skepticism, only passing in the city council by a slim margin of 4 to 3, with the Mayor Osby Davis voting against it.

Many of my peers and colleagues who have organized or engaged in community-led projects can attest to its shortcomings. Still, even I was (perhaps naively) surprised during the first weeks of starting UC Berkeley’s City and Regional Planning program when I seemed to be in the minority opinion that participatory planning is a vital and useful component of the profession. As one member of my cohort put it “City Planning is a professional degree, I mean we don’t tell doctors how to do their jobs.” I was stunned. Isn’t this Berkeley after all, the hallmark of progressive, radical thought? Perhaps we don’t tell doctors how to do their jobs but maybe we should, or rather we should recognize that there are key answers to be found when consulting the people themselves as to how their health needs can be better met. And in fact there are many in the medical field that have long been championing community-based treatment strategies such as the infamous Dr. Paul Farmer. Founder of Partners in Health, Farmer’s international organization debunked the myth that drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR TB) and HIV/AIDS could not be treated in developing nations. The solution? It wasn’t enough to offer free treatment to the poor but by also consulting and monitoring their needs for food, housing, and safe water, Farmer was able tackle DR TB in places like the rural, squatter settlement neighborhoods in Haiti. The success of this holistic approach all started with his simple insistence on asking patients what else they needed so they would keep taking their treatment. It started by including the patient in the process of their recovery.

Participatory budgeting is a lot like the community-based health approach model. Eventually, experts (city planners, engineers, architects etc.) will presumably sit down to discuss the plausibility and logistics of implementing the projects that get the top pick. Before then, residents are asked to go above their usual call of civic duty (voting on election day) and give their personal experience the respect it deserves by offering solutions to the issues they are concerned about.

At 2:00pm we walked into the community room. Fifteen minutes later I’m disappointed, as more folks haven’t showed up, there are approximately 30 people from the community. Today will be a small group it seems especially in comparison to the first two assemblies that boasted around a 100 residents each. After an introduction and a video explanation of the project, the residents are broken up into groups depending on the randomly assigned number on their nametag. There are just 6 people in my group and my task will be to keep track of the proposals as well as keep the facilitator aware of time. Forty-five minutes is all they’ll get for brainstorming, which normally might mean heavy tight constraints on a larger group. Some residents of the group include two employers of an insurance company, a woman who works in a wine shop and her elderly aunt. There are moments of lingering silence in the beginning, as the facilitator attempts to get the conversation going. In the end though, folks got really excited about the ideas they proposed. Some creative ideas included a mobile library with wifi and purchasing a van for free transportation to local businesses.

Do I think participatory budgeting or planning will solve all our urban problems? Of course not, and the 3.2 million allocated to citizens is just a small portion of the overall budget in Vallejo. The spillover effects of participating in decision-making processes, however, are innumerable. For residents I think it means a better understanding of the variety of opinions that must be heard and mediated with for these types of political decisions. It can mean a greater sense of community and maybe even a little less disillusionment with the way government is operating. Participatory processes may not be the end all solution but I think it is a step towards meaningful civic engagement.

Sydney Céspedes is a student at UC Berkeley in the Master of City Planning Program. Previously she attended Hunter College of the City University of New York for her bachelor’s degree in Political Science. Sydney has also been published in the Hunts Point Express, a local newspaper serving the Bronx community of Hunts Point and Longwood. She can be reached at syd2987@berkeley.edu.

Refugees! Nairobi’s Urban Planning Concern: Solutions and Challenges

November 27,2012 Are refugees an urban planning issue? Yes.

Gone are the days when the description of refugees was some tented camps in the middle of nowhere. Political instability, increasing human conflicts and climate change related disasters have led to a surge in the number of refugees and displaced persons worldwide. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates the number of people of concern (refugees, internally displaced persons, stateless people, etc.) to be more than 35 million. The UNHCR is currently in charge of 10.5 million refugees spread across the globe.  Of these, more than half reside in urban areas.

Africa hosts 20% of the world’s refugees, with about 2 million in the eastern Horn of Africa and especially in Kenya. For a long time, Kenya served as a haven of peace to refugees from neighboring war torn and famine prone countries: Somalia, Southern Sudan, Ethiopia and DR Congo. Traditionally, refugees in Kenya were held in camps (Kakuma and Daadab) far from urban areas. However, as the world continues to urbanize, refugees too are moving into urban areas in search of better livelihoods. Nairobi currently hosts about 52,000 refugees. Given their limited access to resources, they end up in informal settlements and low income communities. This poses a challenge to the Government and urban planning authorities to rethink their planning policies. According to UNHCR, there are three durable solutions to refugee populations: repatriation to the country of origin, integration in to host country or resettlement to a third country.

Daadab Refugee Camp in Kenya

Dr. Ronak Patel from the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative suggests that an appropriate solution to the refugees in Nairobi would be integration into the local urban communities. According to Dr. Patel, this would leverage development resources from humanitarian organizations and benefit local communities. Other researchers have also argued that refugees contribute to the economy of Nairobi and Kenya at large and that proper integration would serve to harness these benefits. While these arguments might be true, various challenges exist to undermine this alternative/response.

The influx of refugees in any country is always perceived as a threat to the stability of existing population and limited resources. In Kenya, refugees are now perceived as a threat to the country’s security and economic prosperity. This is fueled by the recent security threats and bombings in the capital, which have adversely affected the tourism sector.  A bombing on Sunday November 18^th reinforced this perception. A Matatu ferrying residents to one of the city estates was allegedly bombed by a man thought to be a refugee from Somalia leaving seven people dead and several injured. Immediately, ethnic clashes erupted between the locals and Somalis in Eastleigh Estate in Nairobi. The locals blame the Somalis for the insecurity that has befallen the country in the last few months.

Wreckage of the Matatu that was bombed leaving seven people dead.

Youths Fighting Residents of Eastleigh after the Matatu Bombing on 18^th November 2012

Refugee integration would also be hampered by limited resources and a feeling of deprivation from the host communities who view refugees as competitors to the already scarce resources. While the notion that refugees contribute to the economy of the country could be true, the question still remains: Can the benefits of integrating them outweigh the costs? Refugees now own part of the City of Nairobi called Eastleigh which locals prefer to call “Little Mogadishu” attributed to its inhabitant’s majority of whom are of Somali descent. Eastleigh is home to the greatest and cheapest domestic ware and clothing shopping malls in Nairobi. It’s now Kenya’s “Dubai”. Although this might sound great, the feeling from local businesses is that it’s depriving them of market due to its cheap goods, which are allegedly smuggled into the country.  Besides Eastleigh being an economic hub for the Somalis, there is substantial evidence that it also serves as the recruiting base and hiding place for the Al-Shaabab Militia who are perceived as a security menace to the country. Shopping Malls in Eastleigh Nairobi

Given the history of refugees in Kenya, integration policies could be one of the answers. However, the above allegations whether real or perceived raise several questions: to what level should refugees be integrated to the local communities, what are the risks involved, does the government have the right resources and needed mechanisms to safely implement such policies without comprising the stability of the nation, and finally are the locals ready for such a thrust?

Keziah Mwelu is a First year master’s student in the Department of City and Regional Planning, UC Berkeley Interested in Urban Development and Housing Policy.

Around the World by Bicycle

November 27, 2012 Which city is the “Amsterdam” of the US? Is it possible for a country's economy to rely on the automobile industry, but its citizens to prefer travelling by bicycle? Why do Canadians cycle more than Americans, and the Japanese cycle more than Canadians? Do citizens of Copenhagen use their bikes to have fun or to conduct business? Does cold weather prevent us from riding a bike? What is the relationship between the bicycle, obesity and diabetes?

These were some of the questions that J. Pucher, Professor in the School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University in New Jersey, focused on during his very interesting talk earlier this month at the Institute for Urban Research and Development at UC Berkeley. Actually, the discussion had already begun some hours earlier, when I had the chance along with several other researchers from UC Berkeley to have a brown bag lunch with Professor J. Pucher (many thanks to Dan Chatman, Assistant Professor of City & Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, who organized it!). Within almost an hour we managed to “travel” around the world discussing about recent trends in cycling research. Starting from Berkeley (where about an impressing for the US 8% of commuting trips are made by bike), we continued to Downtown LA, New York (where a new bike share program is about to start – Citi Bike), Amsterdam, Berlin, Copenhagen (where, contrary to the US, there is no gender imbalance in cycle use) and then Beijing, Sydney and Tokyo (where almost 18% of trips are made by bike although cycle infrastructures lag behind those of western Europe).

The discussion continued with a much wider audience at Prof. Pucher’s afternoon lecture “Promoting Cycling and Walking for Sustainable Cities: Lessons from Europe and North America”. He argued in his passionate talk that cycling and walking are the most environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable of all transport modes, and also a clever way to maintain high levels of public health. Technologically advanced countries with high per capita income and high levels of car ownership like the USA, Canada and Australia could have higher levels of walking and cycling and much lower levels of car use just for a simple reason: a large share of trips today (41% in the US) are shorter than 2 miles. Northern European cities are great examples of cycle integration, but as Prof. Pucher noted “citizens of Amsterdam and Copenhagen were not born on bicycles, as many believe”. These cities heavily invested in cycle and pedestrian infrastructures and discouraged car use before seeing significant increases in walking and cycling trips during the last 30 years. A smooth integration of bicycle with transit, education and enforcement are also important for enhancing cycle use. Prof. Pucher enriched his presentation with very interesting photos from cities around the world (especially North European), which have already promoted policies and programs to make cycling and walking safe and convenient for daily travel. He also included highlights from his new book (along with Ralph Buehler, and “a galaxy of international authors” as Prof. D. Banister has written about the book) "City Cycling" with MIT Press, which provides an overview of cycling trends and policies in cities across the globe.

My conclusion: When you build it, discourage car use and promote cycle culture, they will come. It doesn’t matter what comes first, but it is sure that all together can create a success cycle story.

Quiz answers:

1. Portland, 2. Yes, Germany, 3. Japan cities are more compact than Canadian and much more than US cities, 4. Business (90%), 5. No, residents of Northern European countries cycle much more thantheir neighbors in Southern European countries, and Canada more than the US, 6.  Really bad…

by Dimitris Milakis, Marie Curie Research Fellow at the Institute for Urban and Regional Development at the University of California, Berkeley

Internet and Food Trucks in Los Angeles: Does Technology Dignify Urban Existence?

November 20, 2012 Born and raised in Los Angeles, I often find myself arguing against visitors that claim, “Los Angeles has no culture”. At their claims I offer an extensive list of places to visit in Los Angeles that exist beyond the boundaries of the tourist areas.

Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Yelp! And other forms of social media leap borders and reconstruct understandings of “space” in culturally diverse cities. Habitually, these technological outlets allow for residents like myself, to no only guide others, but to also venture into unknown sections of Los Angeles cultural web.

Through technology, cities like Los Angeles no longer exist within the boundaries of buildings or constrains of physical space. Instead, they become Google maps, Yelp! Reviews, Tweets, or Instagram images referencing preferred places to eat, drink and experience Los Angeles.

Standpoints and debates about “what” is the real Los Angeles are endless. Traditionally, Los Angeles is often associated with crime, riots , and the car. With the rise of technology so did new methods of comprehending and exploring the culture of the city. Serendipitously in 2007, an explosion of Gourmet food trucks began emerging onto the Los Angeles landscape  offering the best of technology, public space and cultural identity.

Visitor or not, the perception of the existing Los Angeles food truck culture is largely linked with the image of a bright colored mobile vehicle branded with a Facebook or Twitter label surfaces.

However, the contemporary food truck culture that is driven by technology undercuts its long-standing member, the Latino operating food truck, the Lonchera.

Since the mid 1970’s, food trucks in East Los Angeles have contributed to their cultural landscape and local economies. Loncheras, are food trucks, with consumer-coined names that often reflect the ethnic, immigrant and working class areas in which they do business.  Notwithstanding the history, their technology driven networking presence pales in comparison to that of the Gourmet food truck.

Location is key to not only the vendor but also the digitally inclined city foodie. The debate to be made is not are Loncheras a part of Los Angeles cultural past, but rather do the proprietors of a business with immigrant roots have equal fame as their food truck heirs?

The use of technology, such as Twitter, Yelp, etc continues to revolutionize the image of the city, by creating a list of selected spaces which are meant to embody the shared experience of culture to the visitors and residents of Los Angeles. However, the knowledge of technology is not available to all food truck business owners in Los Angeles. Driving through car-oriented Los Angeles, there is no doubt that Loncheras and Gourmet trucks are physically present in the city landscape. Debates on the best use of technological tools to further street vending are not new, however they fail to acknowledge the educational and economic differences between Gourmet food Trucks and Loncheras.

Whether be on Food Network, local television, Tumblr, or Twitter, food trucks continue to be a form of fascination to residents and visitors of Los Angeles. The Internet no longer brings a holistic representation of all residents in city; rather it screens active sectors of cultural spaces that are in need of consideration. If the culture of any city is ever to be fully understood social media should be used to connect people to spaces, rather than reinforce traditional forms of social separation.

Maira Sanchez is a Master Student at the Department of City and Regional Planning

Smart Apps for Safer Cities: Taxi Crimes and Panic Buttons

November 20, 2012 For a previous blog post, I had asked my Kenyan friend Freddie why he preferred using mobile banking rather than the ATM for making payments.

“There has been a trend lately in Nairobi of thugs hijacking you, taking you to the ATM and forcing you to withdraw money,” he said.

His answer struck me, because the story was a familiar one. Known as "paseo millonario" (Millionaire Ride) or “secuestro express” (Express Kidnapping), this particular method of abduction is common and on the rise in Latin America, especially among taxi usage. And when car-less, taxis are pretty much the sole means of getting around Latin American mega-cities past 10-11pm, unlike in New York City, where taxis are chosen over the subway out of a convenience. During several months doing research in Brazil and Colombia last year, I heard endless abduction stories from colleagues and friends. Never was I allowed to hail a taxi on the street, because everybody knew at least one person who has been taken on a "millionaire's ride."

"Trust me, you won't regret paying a little more," my Bogotan friend Mario would tell me every time when it got too late to take the TransMilenio, and he would call a door-to-door taxi service to pick me up.

Taxi kidnapping have become so frequent that the United States is issuing official warnings. In its 2012 Crime and Safety Report on Bogota, for instance, the United States Department of State Overseas Security Advisory Council describes a "common trend in taxi-related crime" when the victim, traveling alone, has hailed a taxi on the street. The taxi driver will usually stop abruptly to allow a accomplice to enter the vehicle. According to the report, the driver and accomplice will then proceed to rob the passenger and take the passenger to as many ATMs as possible. After a day or two of forcing the victim to withdraw the daily maximum amount at various ATMs, the victim is usually released. Not surprisingly, the Department of State Overseas Security simply advises not to hail taxis on the street.

Naturally, I wondered if there were any other precautions one could take, and in a Smart Cities presentation at UC Berkeley I learned that there are, in fact, several innovative (& free!) tactics of trying to make one's taxi travel more secure.

The first of its kind is Taxiaviso (Taxi Warning), a smart-phone application that was deployed in Mexico in 2011. Once hailed, the taxi can be verified prior to boarding: The user types in the license plate number and the system momentarily responds with a verification or denial. Taxiaviso also allows the user to double-check approximate prices, track the car's route via GPS and take a photograph of the driver’s credentials (usually displayed on the taxi's window). All recorded information is sent to the user's social networks, such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Finally, in the very unfortunate case that something should go wrong, the user can push an on-screen panic button that will send an emergency message to those networks. According to Emilio Güemez, inventor of Taxiaviso in an interview with El Universal TV, the main goal is not only to keep friends and family up-to-date with your taxi safety status, but to create a reputation system for taxis based on evaluations. At the end of the ride, Taxiaviso asks the user to rate the taxi on several scales and provides a space for commentaries on the overall taxi experience--a Yelp for taxis so to speak.

Two other taxi-safety apps have been launched in Bogota, Colombia. Taxi Seguro (Safe Taxi) and Denuncie al Taxista (Denounce the Taxi Driver).

Very similar to Taxiaviso, Taxi Seguro also allows passengers to track the cab’s route using a 10-second-intervall-updates GPS system, determine the approximate duration of the ride, enter the license plate and take photographs of the driver’s credentials. It, too, includes a panic button but this panic button will actually alert authorities in addition to sending an email to a number of friends and family. Yes, emergency emails (rather than calls or text messages) do not seem tremendously effective and Taxi Seguro is in the process of looking for a partnership that will allow them to send panic text messages rather than emails. In the (likely) case that the app user cannot reach the phone while being robbed, the alert is also sent out when the taxi significantly deters from its planned route or the ride takes much longer than estimated. People like it. According to El Tiempo, almost 16,000 users from Colombia, the United States, Mexico, Spain, Canada, Chile, Australia, France and Venezuela have downloaded TaxiSeguro.

The second Colombia-based app, Denuncie al Taxista, allows users to inquire about a taxi's reputation by tweeting #TaxiSeguro + license plate, report misconduct by tweeting #denuncio + license plate, doublecheck on prices and praise a taxi driver to the Twitter handle @DenuncieTaxista.With over 33,000 followers, Denuncie al Taxista provides a good overview of good and bad taxi companies and drivers. In Bogota, the number one rated taxi driver is Sil866. According to 37 positive reviews, he provides excellent service, exact change and groovy music. Teo474, on the other hand, is probably the highest-charging taximan in town, as confirmed by 14 negative reviews.

Interestingly, Taxi Seguro also exists for taxi drivers. Born out of a collaboration between the Vodaphone Portugal Foundation in partnership with the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Public Security Police, this system contributes to drivers’ safety through prevention or discouragement of possible assaults by displaying a Taxi Seguro sticker on the vehicle and facilitating a faster and more efficient police response. It allows the driver to push a type of panic button that will alert the police who can then track the cab via a combination of GSM, GPS, Internet and digital cartography technologies. When alerted, the police listen in to what is happening inside the vehicle and, based on what they hear, deploy units to make an arrest. Since its launch in Februrary 2007, the Portuguese Taxi Seguro system has been implemented in thousands of vehicles in the greater Lisbon area. According to a Vodaphone-sponsored video, a similar system is being considered to improve security at gas stops and pharmacies.

The U.S. and England have introduced several similar apps, but they have not taken off as in Mexico and Colombia.

There are of course several major downturns. First of all, all of these apps rely on a third party's response, and second of all, you need a smart phone to use them. While smart phone penetration in Latin America is quickly catching up with the global average, distrust in the police remains a major issue. Whether informing your social network first or authorities directly, the effectiveness of the app will boil down to the police responding. And unfortunately, in Latin America you may find yourself pushing the panic button in vein. According to The Christian Science Monitor, Latin American police, having recognized their bad reputation, are trying to boost their involvement in and response to their communities. Until that happens, the safest option might actually be to listen to your friend, wait for the door-to-door taxi and pay that extra charge.

Christina Gossmann is a Master in City Planning student at UCBerkeley interested in the interaction of technology and media in the urban space.

Homeowners and Developers Still Losing to Investors: Any Relief from the Courts?

November 13, 2012 Months of being far away from home seem to have made me more patriotic than I have ever been. I now care more about what happens in my country and I simply can’t help but read the newspaper every other day. As I perused through the Kenyan Daily Nation newspaper, a headline caught my attention “US agency in Sh620m test of new land laws”. The content of the story turned out to be a discourse that has become mundane here in the US and Kenya since the Economic recession set in 2007. Home foreclosures and forced evictions have become commonplace and the following tale of several court battles is just the tip of iceberg of what has been happening and is expected in the housing industry.

According to the article, Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), a U.S Government development finance organization devoted to providing private investment capital, has sued a real estate developer in Kenya. The developer allegedly defaulted on a loan, and OPIC is seeking to auction the developer’s property, valued at $12 million, to recover its $2.8 million investment and interest of about $2.2 million. This is however proving difficult due to provisions enshrined in the newly enacted Kenya Land Act, which bars lenders from unilaterally disposing off property used as collateral in case of default before meeting certain conditions. Already, OPIC’s lawyers have entered into a pact with an investment company willing to purchase the property at $6.2 million. At the same time, the borrower has identified a financier to acquire the land which the property sits on at $9million. He has also filed a case in court on the basis that OPIC is undervaluing the property.

The Land Act is deemed one of the most progressive legislation the country has ever had. OPIC, through its lawyers, is now seeking amendment of the Land law or having that law declared unconstitutional. An astounding 100% of the contested property units had been purchased by clients off plan and they have been waiting for the completion of the development. Given the current circumstances it’s only safe to assume that these aspiring homeowners have lost their investments.

In a different case, residents of Mukuru, an informal settlement in Nairobi, are faced with eviction notices. They have launched a case in court against mighty and powerful landholders who had irregularly allocated slum land to themselves and used the titles as collateral for hefty loans. Residents can only hope that the court will come through for them and give them the right to develop decent homes on the land they have squatted for generations.

The housing story here in the United States is not any different from the Kenyan context despite the diverse development background. The global economic recession of 2008 emanated here in the US, and with it came to light the defects and malpractices in the housing industry that have kept minority families out of homeownership. Monday, October 15th saw the filling of a landmark case by the American Civil Liberties Union against Morgan Stanley alleging violation of the Fair Housing Act. Morgan Stanley is accused of racial discrimination in the secondary mortgage market by pooling and selling securitized mortgages primarily to black neighborhoods. Predatory and subprime lending is understood to be one of the major causes of the recent home foreclosure in the US. Majority non-white households were subjected to subprime loans despite their qualification for prime loans, thus exposing them to the risk of foreclosure. According to an article by Elvin, et. al. at the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, the share of African-Americans pushed to high cost loans went up from 37% in 2004 to 54% in 2006, while that of Latinos shot from 25% to 46%. Both of these groups are high relative to White households, which increased from 13% to 22% in the same period.

He notes that subprime lending and Wall Street securitization have replaced the local loan sharks and slumlords of old with entrepreneurial brokers and lenders to push high cost credit backed by mortgage companies and other financial investment institutions. The Morgan Stanley case is just one of the many cases that have been reported or should have been held against several investors.

Generally, a large number of borrowers in the US have lost their homes to the foreclosure since the economic downturn began. In mid-2008, the number of homes at risk of foreclosures jumped 57% and bank repossessions doubled. The distressed homes were sold at an average of $161,214, which was 27% below the average market rate.

Owning a home is one of the dreams every family hopes to achieve regardless of their economic status or nationality. Homes account for about 60% of the total wealth of American households. These statistics indicate that middle class households invest all their savings in acquiring a home, and if there is anything to protect, then it should be a home. On the other hand, investors should be able to get back proceeds from investments even after borrowers default. However it is disturbing just how far they can go to recover money, including going for below market prices and evicting families.

As Kenyans take refuge in the Land Act and the new 2010 Kenya constitution, Americans too got a bunch of laws to rely on. In response to ills that led to the recession, the US Government enacted the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in 2010. The statute seeks to promote financial stability by improving accountability and transparency in the financial system and to protect consumers from abusive financial services practices. Although the enactment of the 2010 Kenya constitution was in no way influenced by the recession, the laws emanating from it have shown great interest in individual right protection and especially in issues affecting the ordinary Citizen. The discussed court scenarios provide opportunities for these laws to be tested on the delivery of their promise.

It’s the hope of every Kenyan and American that such policies will be used to enhance home equity and the protection of property rights. We can only watch and see how the courts and policy makers will use such tools to rescue those caught up in the complex web of land and mortgage investments.

Keziah Mwelu is a First year master’s student in the Department of City and Regional Planning, UC Berkeley Interested in Urban Development and Housing Policy.

"Sit/Lie" Laws Don't Rest Well with Planning Philosophy

November 6, 2012 It is a brisk morning as I walk hurriedly in my New Yorkers fast pace shuffle up the slight hill on Bancroft Street towards Wurster Hall, the building of the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley. I pass a man who looks to be in his mid to late 40s sleeping on a heating grate. Generally if I get to school before nine I see this same gentlemen sleeping there most cool mornings. Other students join the daily walking ritual passing this homeless man without so much as a glance. As it turns out if Measure S passes this November 8th, this man along with other homeless folks will no longer have the right to sit, lie down or sleep on the sidewalk from 7:00am to 10:00pm. Violation of this law can result in criminal prosecution although proponents for the measure insist that the homeless will be given the opportunity to seek the services they need but for some reason have resisted thus far.

The sidewalk holds a symbolic weight most people do not consciously acknowledge but undoubtedly respond to in their daily grind. The difference between suburban neighborhoods with sidewalks to those without makes a bold statement of who is welcomed. It was not uncommon in my old neighborhood on Long Island to get strange looks on the few occasions I opted to walk to a friend’s house. On one occasion I remember walking back from a fast food joint late one evening with a group of friends. A group of 16 year olds walking down a sidewalk (one of the few that existed, probably because of its proximity to commercial and retail businesses) warranted enough suspicion for a police officer to slow down in his vehicle, roll down his window and inform us that loitering was not allowed. What this officer was implying as he equated walking on a sidewalk with loitering was that we were not using the sidewalk as the neighborhood’s perceived acceptability, namely this was a space designed for patrons to go to and from their vehicle. We were perceived to be in violation of this norm.

Photo by Sydney Cespedes

The city space is not likely to run into quite this same dilemma. City sidewalks are actually for walking after all. But laws and regulations such as Measure S do present this same exclusive “normalization” of spatial use and they are a blunt reminder of the social stratification implicitly (and often explicitly) ingrained in our legal institutions. Criminalization of the homeless and the poor has its roots in our history, particularly with vagrancy laws that became racialized after the Civil War. It wasn’t till just a few decades ago that the US Supreme Court ruled against vagrancy laws but the response hasn’t necessarily to rethink government’s responsibility of the homeless population. Instead, local laws have evolved to target specific, unwanted populations. If Berkeley passes Measure S they will be just like the dozens of other cities to pass similar laws in the last decade. Among the proponents of the measure are small business owners who claim that homeless people in front of their storefronts scare away customers but the city of Berkeley has never actually implemented a study evaluating if any causal relationship exists between the presence of homeless people to the decline in business profit. In today’s economy it is easy to sympathize with the struggling business owner but without actual data to suggest the homeless may be contributing negatively to their profits, it is no wonder Measure S raises a few eyebrows. Opponents against the measure also argue that the initiative does not obligate the city to create any new programmatic services or shelter to accommodate the wave of homeless people who will theoretically be ushered into these resources and thus stretch their capacity to properly serve all new clientele.

I for one can’t get over the psychological and symbolic meaning of the “no sitting” laws. For me, it brings up feelings of living in an Orwellian society where children are not allowed to play in the street and elderly men are forbidden to play board games on cardboard boxes on the sidewalks. These laws imply a private societal life and a transient public existence. The reality is, this isn’t the population that is meant to target and the fact of the matter is, laws like these gets enforced with a purpose. Essentially, if you are not homeless or don’t look homeless you probably won’t be affected by Measure S even if you and your friend decide to have a chat while sitting on the sidewalk. But the existence of these laws provide the precise foundation and normalization of a police state where we ask law enforcement officials to police inconsequential actions instead of real criminal dangers.

Sydney Céspedes is a student at UC Berkeley in the Master of City Planning Program. Previously she attended Hunter College of the City University of New York for her bachelor’s degree in Political Science. Sydney has also been published in the Hunts Point Express, a local newspaper serving the Bronx community of Hunts Point and Longwood. She can be reached at syd2987@berkeley.edu.

How Local Knowledge Shapes Public Space

I like to think that the role of urban planning is to find bridges between the micro and the macro, the individual and the city, the neighborhood and the nation. It’s easy to talk the talk, but the line hides the tussle between what James C. Scott refers to as ‘institutional knowledge’ and ‘local knowledge’. Bridges tend to form from the large scale to the small scale and tend to miss out the details that make things work on ground. A great illustration is the latest app from Apple’s stable of #fail. Last week, Apple Maps recommended I take a U-turn on the 101… Ruth Miller wrote on this blog a few weeks ago - “Technology built on a fundamentally broken system preserves that dysfunction.” A system is only as robust or functional as the information that forms its framework and this is where technology comes into play. Remember the Google Maps on your phone? The reason why it worked well (and the reason why I want to go back in time and stop my phone’s OS from upgrading) is it collated information from many sources at different scales and augmented institutional knowledge of the road network (streets, signal times, one-way or two-way streets etc.) with local knowledge (shortcuts, where to take a U-turn on a street, quicker routes). This would not have been possible without GPS on one hand and the internet on the other – two different scales of gathering information somehow meeting in the middle, creating relatively more complete forms of information.

Let’s try extending this aggregation of information to a larger scale. Can technology address the selective knowledge that forms the basis of a broken institutional system – a system based on convenience, flatness and inequality in information that institutional knowledge encourages – and help create better urban systems? In a way, technology has already begun addressing information disparities in such systems. My favorite example is Padmapper.com, which by the simple act of aggregating information from rent advertisements on a physical map of a neighborhood becomes an effective tool to address information asymmetries in rent markets. Are there ways in which a simple app that collects local knowledge be institutionalized to intervene and change dysfunctional public systems?

For all you app designers out there, here’s an interesting case to consider - one related to land use and land titles. Pali is a former agricultural settlement in a tony suburb in northern Mumbai, India. Colloquially called a ‘gaothan’ or hamlet, the neighborhood would probably be better described with an oxymoron – an urban village. The gaothan was settled in the late 17^th/early 18^th century, well before Mumbai became the behemoth it is now. With the intent of maximizing agricultural land, houses were packed closely together without a lot of space left over for infrastructure or open space.

By this time, formal property registration systems were already in place in the region, either through local chieftains or British colonizers and all land marked within the boundary of the village was owned by individuals who lived in the village, except for a minimal network of pedestrian pathways. But access pathways are not the only public space in any community, and soon the formal property ownership and rights system was supplemented by an informal system of congregation spaces and spaces for incorporating physical infrastructure, all located on private, individually-owned land but having informal public rights. These were not just spaces to hang out, but infrastructure spaces that worked as drainage channels during heavy rains, spaces where light poles were installed to illuminate public pathways and in some cases, the only access points to some parts of the gaothan.

While these seem small bits and pieces of public space for a neighborhood with over a thousand residents, they add up to a surprisingly large network spread across the neighborhood.

How does this network operate? It does not seem to fit into any institutional notion of property rights or land use. It’s not protected through easement laws since the location and size of the space is dynamic, not derived by formal or informal restrictions on built form, not generated through formal or informal built form incentives. For that matter – considering most land-owners police the space for ‘undesirable’ activities – it’s not even a public space.

The mechanics of this ‘public space’ network operate on local knowledge. Every household seems to know exactly what parts of someone else’s land are they allowed access to. Every time a house gets rebuilt, the exact location and size of this public-private land may change, but it remains in some (usually expanded) form. It gets perpetuated through a system that works on the creation of community capital. Allowing a celebration or a prayer on your land added to your clout within the community. If you let others use your space, someone else reciprocates by letting you use theirs. Sacrificing a few square feet of housing on your own plot of land gained you access to a substantially higher area in other parts of the gaothan. The incentive to access more space balances the incentive to build a larger house.

The reassignment of agricultural land to housing for an expanding city growing around the gaothan should have changed the dynamics of this system too. However, photographs taken in 2008 reflect similar built form to open space proportions as maps from the early 1900s, indicating a robust, flexible system that could adjust to changing needs. Over the years, with changes in demographics, educational and professional profiles, secular activities began replacing religious activities in most spaces and the location and sizes of some spaces began to change every time a house was reconstructed or expanded to reflect the change in use.

When this information is deemed too complicated for institutional systems of recording land use/property rights, this local system of community capital is reduced to the plot lines you saw in the first image, ignoring the system’s contributions to public infrastructure. Combine the missing information with built form guidelines implemented in the late 1990s that see the low rise, low density neighborhood as an oddity and you get this:

More than the sudden increase in density is the fact that most re-construction since the late 1990s has followed the law to the letter: building over the entire extent of the plot, yet building as much as the law allows. Where the entire plot has not been built upon, claim on land is strengthened by cordoning off unused portions. Cumulatively, the public space network is now shrunk to a shadow of its former self. Considering the role this network played in augmenting the neighborhood's physical infrastructure, the impact of new development on one plot is felt all over the neighborhood.

Let’s cut through the why and where quickly, and say we need to maintain what’s left of the public space network, or maybe even add to it. In line with digitalization of land records around the country, rumor has it that the city is planning to start its own database of land use and titling information that can be regularly updated by the government and accessed by citizens. In all probability, this database will follow the legacy of information recording systems and reduce this neighborhood to a dense network of private land – technology that perpetuates a dysfunctional system. What technological intervention will be needed to bridge institutional and local knowledge here? What might make a good bridge is to have a real-time system of updating land use and property rights based on this local knowledge - a Padmapper for land use in this neighborhood - that plugs into the land use and property records system.

Any app makers out there willing to help out with constructing the bridge?

Siddharth is an architect from Mumbai, India and currently pursuing a Master of City Planning degree at UC Berkeley. His interests lie in international development and urban systems.

Debt: The Token to the American Dream

October 30, 2012 If you work hard, you could be rewarded a better life. Working hard could make climbing the ladder of opportunity easier. Since the 1920s, homeownership has been viewed as the token to the American Dream. If you worked hard, you would be able to own a home. Owning a home gave a person of stability and comfort. Just to sign your name on the dotted line motivated people to resort to extreme measures and take out loans to hold on to their token to the American Dream. Hard work was the answer.

Today, education is that token. It has been instilled in many young minds that if you go to college, it will lead you to a better life—the American Dream. This intangible yet "promising" dream is deeply rooted in communities striving for something better. Times have changed and so has our economy. Lower levels of education have shifted from inadequate to an extreme necessity. Simply obtaining a bachelors degree seems like it just isn’t enough; one might consider it the bare minimum. Without higher education, it is almost impossible to survive in this country. People need higher education or some sort of additional training to make ends meet.

October 10, 2012, Devin Fergus, along with UC Berkeley’s own Carolina Reid, hosted a lecture about asset building at the College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley. Professor Fergus is an Associate Professor from Ohio State University who teaches African American and African Studies. Fergus explained how the rise of hidden consumer finance fees has impacted individuals from wealth and opportunity since the 1970s. The foundation of Fergus’ lecture was from his second book: Land of the Fee: The Hidden History of Consumer Finance Fees and Why It Matters, 1980-2008. Fergus gave a brief history lesson on how the rise of consumer finance fees has affected housing, employment, transportation and education. He explained how predatory lending and unsecured loan alternatives (such as Pay Day Loans) have hindered many people from a piece of the American Dream when working hard just wasn’t enough. As a student, I couldn’t help but focus and relate the housing crisis to our higher education system, specifically student loans and alternative online institutions and how citizens strive for economic improvement.

Fergus mentioned that ‘fear of debt’ is the number one reason why college-qualified students do not enroll in college. As a student who is relying heavily on student loans, I am ashamed to admit that I really do not know the complete details of how my loans work–I am sure I am not the only one. The one thing I do know is that when I graduate, I need to be able to pay off my debts. Assuming when I graduate I’ll have a high paying job doesn’t seem realistic in this economy. Since the 1980s, there has been an extreme erosion of grants and low interest loans for college students. Fergus mentioned that two out of three students have an average of 23,000 in debt and often times over the years, due to lack of knowledge of the loan’s fees and penalties, those students will pay three or four times than their original loan amount. Late fees and other penalties are on the rise, partially due to the fine print provided by the student loan lenders.

Profiting off of dream seekers: A thing of the past? No. Home mortgages, specifically subprime lending, have been the leading factor in the housing crash. Banks, investors were giving loans to people who did not have the proper financial knowledge or the money to afford even a down payment.  Often times these agreements had hidden fees and expensive penalties for late or no payments. The fine print on these contracts exists on mortgages and on student loan agreements. Instead of banks lending to undesirable families, now schools are enrolling individuals who were struggling to make ends meet into their universities.

Online universities, like the University of Phoenix, and DeVry University were designed to give opportunity to the citizen who wanted to learn, provide for their family, and to be able to survive in this country. But some of these school are promising degrees or certificates that are essentially useless or do not require higher education. Some of these career paths will lead people to a job that will not be able to repay their debts, thus leaving them with years and years of debt. These institutions are willing to enroll anyone just to get federal funds at the student’s expense. Basically, school costs money, and some of those promising careers cannot repay the long-term cost. This act of ‘predatory learning’ is how institutions commoditize education. People are left with very few options that they turn to any source that could potentially improve their lifestyle. I am not discrediting online or 2-year institutions. However, these institutions, as well as 4-year accredited public or private institutions, could do a better job making education affordable. Education institutions should offer degrees for careers that would not leave them financially worse-off than before.

Homeownership was viewed as the token to a better life, now it is education. Hidden fees and vague details on student loans are impacting individuals from wealth and opportunity. Fergus mentioned that it would take a person with a PhD to fully understand the details of a student loan. This form of asset building, obtaining higher education, is suppose to help citizens build a better life not hinder them. Yet the price and struggle to obtain a great education seems to be worthwhile knowing that this debt will better you family and generations to come. This is a huge risk; especially when the degree, career you’re pursuing might not help pay your debts; and when there are unclear, hidden term and agreements from your student loan.

As a future planner, asset building involves a series of skills. One must have better resources that will help people understand their options. People need help translating the fine print of these loans. High interest loans (whether for home mortgages or student loans) are making asset building almost impossible to achieve. Owning a home was a way a validating if you made it in this country. But now people are even sacrificing their beloved houses to this pursue this new path to the American Dream. How can one pursue “happy” without knowing the details of how to get there.

I was told that if I worked hard in school, I would get a great job. The motto was once applied to working hard in the workplace. Now education is that ladder to success and fortune. But how long will it take before I can reap the rewards?

I am victim of those students. I am also a witness to some students whose families are putting their homes on the line, just to get a shot at the American Dream. I have tons of debt that I hope will be able to repay with my shiny new degree. As we’ve witnessed over the last couples years, houses aren’t as valuable as they once were; yet education is worth more. With my degree depreciate too? Now higher education is what every American needs. It is amazing that my bachelor’s degree cost the amount of a new Mercedes Benz; better yet, the debt I’ve accrued could be a hefty down payment on a home. The joy of seeing my name on a piece of paper on graduation day is the ticket to a better life. Well in this day and age… maybe.

Jasmine Sadat is a Philadelphia native who obtained her BA in Sociology from Spelman College. She is currently a first year masters of City & Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. She is interested in Urban Policy; Community and Economic Development; Socio-spatial segregation; and Local Government. Her email is jsadat@berkeley.edu.

Berkeley's First Sunday Street

October 23, 2012 Editor's Note: Sunday Streets, Ciclavia, CiLAvia, Oaklavia. Cities all over the world are embracing the concept of open street events, where streets are closed to cars and opened to walking, biking, and imagination. The City of Berkeley welcomed its first Sunday Street event on October 14, and crowd estimates range from 30,000 to 40,000, or over a quarter of the City's population.

Berkeley's Sunday Street was quintessentially Berkeley - with slow food, silent dance, giant chess, a parklet, and thousands of families. Sarah Fine captured the excitement, and shares it below.

From Sarah Fine:

I was so excited to see Sunday Streets come to Berkeley, and I spent the first hour of it riding my bicycle up and down Shattuck on the wrong side of the street (it felt great). Later on, it was too crowded to really ride around but in slowing down, I saw a lot of charming things (including some objects that are permanent fixtures of Berkeley that I'd just never noticed before, like the giant tuning fork!) It's tremendous how reorienting yourself on a street and not looking out for vehicular traffic can really let you see a place with fresh eyes.

Of the Sunday Streets innovations, I think I was most inspired by the many uses of the diagonal parking bays along the southern end of Shattuck between Haste and Center. Although the latest Downtown Berkeley Plan calls for a different modification of those parking bays,  Sunday Streets' repurposing offered another vision of what could be done with the spaces--and all in the name of fun, which nothing related to parking can ever lay claim to. One use (shown) was dodgeball, but there was also a bicycle rodeo, a climbing wall, a tiny disc golf course, a Balkan dancing demonstration, a makeshift stand-up comedy stage outside Pegasus Books, three somber kids playing violins, and probably a million other wonderful things I didn't happen to see.

The green bike boxes on Hearst were a demonstration produced by the East Bay Bicycle Coalition, painted with spray chalk. And Moe's Books sponsored the mobile reading room, which may be even better use of a travel lane than a bike lane.

I actually didn't catch who sponsored the yoga, break dancing demonstration with tiny b-boys, or the miniature instrument area for kids. (Someone with an adult-sized piano was leading everyone singing Old McDonald when I took that photo, and I assume he was a music teacher of some kind.) If anyone can identify the groups or individuals organizing these events,  I'd love to know.

Sarah Fine is a second year masters student in the Department of City and Regional Planning and the University of California, Berkeley.

The Next Step: How Mobile Money Could (Rightly) Supersede the Government

October 16, 2012 Newspapers hail it as a life-changing tool. The UN named it a potential accelerator on the path towards the Millennium Development Goals. Customers everywhere use it. By now, most everyone should have gotten the message: mobile money – the use of a mobile device to transfer, deposit or withdraw funds - is big. Just how big exactly though, we might not even imagine.

Mobile money has made an enormous impact as a financial inclusion gadget, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. Due to their informal status, many urban dwellers do not qualify to open a bank account. E-money enables them to obviate the bank altogether without having to hide cash under their mattresses or travel long distances to transfer money. It has been so good at including marginalized populations into the financial system in fact that philanthropic funds and multi-lateral organizations hastened to open up their generous funds to them. Through the Mobile Money for the Unbanked program, Bill and Melinda Gates now proudly award grants towards the expansion of mobile banking.

But the "unbanked" are not mere consumers of mobile money, Bill Maurer, Professor of Anthropology at UCIrvine, argued at the Territories of Poverty conference on September 15^th 2012 at UCBerkeley.

"The poor need to be seen as monetary innovators, not just the targets of development," he said during a panel discussion titled “Geographies of Penality and Risk.”

Poor people, he argued in a recent paper published in the Journal of Development Studies, have adapted mobile money as a system for value transfer and storage, but they have also modified it to serve as a system for saving and, as of recently, payment. Airtime, the amount of minutes or text messages that can be purchased for a prepaid cell phone, not only enables communication but also acts as a currency to purchases a commodity.

Essentially this means that users of mobile money have literally succeeded in creating an alternative currency—they no longer need cash. Predicting the replacement of the official governmental monetary system, cash, with unregulated mobile money might seem astonishing in the academic setting. In the field, it is quite simply nuts. I decided to chat to my friend Freddie about it.

I met Freddie when I first went to the Mecca of mobile banking, Kenya, in 2010. This is where mobile money really took off. M-PESA (“M” for mobile, and “Pesa” for “money” in KiSwahili), a mobile banking service provided by Safaricom, went from zero to two million in two years following its launch in 2007, double the customer target for that time period. M-PESA's successful idea spread all over the world: Wizzit in South Africa, M-Sente in Uganda and Eko in India, among others, offer similar services.

Freddie is a tall, quiet 25-year old from the Western part of Kenya. He moved to Nairobi eight years ago and has been working as a guide and reporter for Voice of Kibera. “All my family and friends use M-PESA,” he answered when I wrote to him the other day, "because it is the fastest way to send money across the country." And the safest way too.

"There has been a trend lately in Nairobi of thugs hijacking you, taking you to the ATM and forcing you to withdraw money," he said. "But if my phone is robbed, my account is not affected."

Freddie himself has been on M-PESA since he moved to the city. A lot of people he knows pay their bills though M-PESA, anything from water, electricity and hospital bills to school fees and traffic tickets. Freddie mostly uses it to pay for his Tuskers when he runs out of cash at the end of the night.

Freddie also told me that banks have been complaining. Even Kenyans who had access to banks are using M-PESA. According to the World Bank, 93% of Kenyans use mobile phones and 73% are mobile money customers. In 2011, a quarter of Kenya's GDP moved through M-PESA, a share most likely to have grown even more by now.

What happens when so much money moves into the uncontrolled mobile market and what is the role of the state in this new money system? The active modification of mobile banking to mobile saving to mobile payment has brought with it regulatory concerns.

M-PESA does not provide security in case of financial default, reimbursement in case of fraud or interest for saving money. And yes, the national bank system would be weakened. According to the Wall Street Journal, the World Bank has actually issued a warning about "the way payment systems are developing."

Strategies such as mandatory limits on the mobile balance to avoid money laundering and risky defaults as well as partnerships with commercial banks are beginning to counter these concerns, though they do not, of course, replace the regulatory power of a government. But maybe the free market should be left to do its magic in this particular case. When governments fail to provide necessary services, new and affordable free-market technologies are a great alternative--at least for the time being.

"M-PESA is rocking," Freddie wrote to me in his last email. I could not agree more.

Christina Gossmann is a Master in City Planning student at UCBerkeley interested in the interaction of technology and media in the urban space. Check out her blog.