Transformative Planning: Radical Alternatives to Neoliberal Urbanism 9781551646930, 9781551646916, 9781551646954

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TRANSFORMATIVE

PLANNING

Copyright © 2020 Black Rose Books Thank you for purchasing this Black Rose Books publication. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means electronic or mechanical including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system – without written permission from the publisher, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, Access Copyright, with the exception of brief passages quoted by a reviewer in a newspaper or magazine. If you acquired an illicit electronic copy of this book, please consider making a donation to Black Rose Books. Black Rose Book No. TT409 Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Transformative planning : radical alternatives to neoliberal urbanism / Tom Angotti, ed. Names: Angotti, Thomas, 1941- editor. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2019016607X | Canadiana (ebook) 20190166266 | ISBN 9781551646930 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781551646916 (softcover) | ISBN 9781551646954 (PDF) Subjects: LCSH: City planning. | LCS: Urban policy. | LCSH: Urbanization. | LCSH: Equality. | LCSH: Social classes. Classification: LCC HT166 .T73 2019 | DDC 307.1/216—dc23 Cover design by Amanda Bartlett Cover image © AJ Colores / unsplash

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TRANSFORMATIVE

PLANNING Radical alternatives to neoliberal urbanism edited by Tom angotti

Montréal/Chicago/London

Acknowledgements Special thanks to Lacey Sigmon for her assistance in compiling past articles and photos for this collection. I would also like to thank the current Progressive City: Radical Alternatives online magazine (www.progressivecity.net) editorial board members for carrying this project forward. Managing Editors are, along with myself, Allison Lirish Dean, Norma Rantisi and Lacey Sigmon. The Editorial Board members are: Maya Amichai, Pierre Clavel, Deshonay Dozier, Victoria Kaplan, Marie Kennedy, Annette Koh, Jeffrey Lowe, Peter Marcuse, Oksana Mironova, Sylvia Morse, Jacob Ryan, and Samuel Stein. Tom Angotti

CONTENTS Preface

1

Introduction to Transformative Planning

4

Norma M. Rantisi Tom Angotti

CHAPTER 1: ROOTS AND REFLECTIONS ON TRANSFORMATIVE PLANNING

11

Transformative Planning for Community Development

11

Marie Kennedy

Advocacy, Planning and Land: How Climate Justice Changes Everything

25

Tom Angotti

Changing Times, Changing Planning: Critical Planning Today

30

Peter Marcuse

Cracks in the Foundation of Traditional Planning

36

Barbara Rahder

Hudson Yards: A Giant Machine for Accumulating Capital

39

Samuel Stein

CHAPTER 2: RESISTANCE AND ALTERNATIVES

43

Decolonial Planning

43

Annette Koh

Resistance and Planning: Puerto Rico and Beyond

47

Edwin R. Quiles Rodríguez

Bottom-up Planning: Lessons from Latin America’s Third Left,

58

Marie Kennedy and Chris Tilly

Reflections of an Activist Scholar

63

Henry Louis Taylor, Jr.

Progressive Planning and Organizing: Filmmaker-Organizer Partnerships Allison Lirish Dean

75

CHAPTER 3: RACE, DISPLACEMENT AND COMMUNITY PLANNING

81

Introduction

81

Jeffrey Lowe

Towards a Transformative View of Race: The Crisis and Opportunity of Katrina

85

John A. Powell, Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Daniel Newhart and Eric Steins

The South: The Race Culture Sustained

92

William M. Harris

Placemaking When Black Lives Matter

97

Annette Koh

CHAPTER 4: CLIMATE JUSTICE, ENVIRONMENT, SUSTAINABILITY, RESILIENCE

101

Introduction

101

Tom Angotti

Sustainability is Not Enough

104

Peter Marcuse

Resilience is Not Enough: Think Seven Generations, Act Now for Climate Justice

107

Tom Angotti

How Capitalism and the Planning Profession Contribute to Climate Change

114

Dick Platkin

Permitting Environmental Justice at US EPA

119

Natalie Bump Vena

Dots Crying in the Wilderness

125

Jean Garren

CHAPTER 5: GLOBAL URBANIZATION, COLONIAL AND IMPERIAL PLANNING

128

Introduction

128

Marie Kennedy and Chris Tilly

Transnational Organizations and Local Popular Movements

136

Richard Pithouse

Rio's real vs. Unmet Olympic Legacies: What They Tell Us About the Future of Cities

141

Theresa Williamson

From Here to Autonomy: Mexico’s Zapatistas Combine Local Administration and National Politics

150

Chris Tilly and Marie Kennedy

PALESTINE AND PLANNING: The Role of Planning in the Occupation of Palestine

159

Julie Norman

Palestine’s Problems: Checkpoints, Walls, Gates and Urban Planners

164

Tom Angotti

Israel’s War for Water

170

Marie Kennedy

CHAPTER 6: GENDER, LGBTQ RIGHTS AND THE CITY

175

Introduction: Planning for and with Women and LGBTQ Communities: Strategies for Solidarities

175

Heather McLean

Women Plan Toronto: Incorporating Gender Issues in Planning

181

Barbara Rahder

Is there a Place in the Progressive City for the LGBTQ Community

185

Petra Doan

From and Toward Queer Urbanism

192

Kian Goh

Street Harassment: Old Issue, Ongoing Struggle, New Movement

197

Nina M. Flores

Femicide in Ciudad Juárez María Teresa Vázquez-Castillo

201

CHAPTER 7: POLICING, INCARCERATION AND THE MILITARIZATION OF URBAN LIFE

207

Introduction: Policing, Incarceration, and the Militarization of Urban Life

207

Sylvia Morse

Prisons, Policing and Planning: Making the Connections Visible

214

Sheryl-Ann Simpson

The Poverty of Planning

222

Samuel Stein

Immigration Policy and Planning in the Era of Mass Incarceration

227

Silky Shah

CHAPTER 8: CAPITALISM, SOCIALISM AND THE RIGHT TO THE CITY

234

Introduction

234

Tom Angotti

On Ethics and Economics

238

Kanishka Goonewardena

The Socialist City, Still

243

Tom Angotti

Sound Theory and Political Savvy

249

Morris Zeitlin

Whose Right to What City

252

Kelly Anderson

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

260

Preface

By Norma M. Rantisi With the rise of fascist governments and policies, ongoing colonial violence, a prevailing market orthodoxy and the brink of environmental disaster, the challenges to realizing a radical alternative – an alternative centered on equity – seem as profound as ever. The displacement of people along the axes of class, race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and disability is now common-place in our world of militarized borders, widespread surveillance and the increased use of incarceration for private accumulation and social control. This current reality raises critical questions about what space there is for an alternative form of planning, one that is socially, ecologically and economically transformative. How can we begin to envision the strategies needed to combat inequities of the past, the present and (what remains of) the future? Most critically, how can we ensure that such strategies are guided by the voices and actions of those who are most impacted by, and thus knowledgeable about, the polarized landscape of 21st century neoliberalism? Transformative Planning: Radical Alternatives to Neoliberal Urbanism is a book that grapples with these timely (and indeed, timeless) questions. It brings together the work and insights of scholars, organizers and activists committed to criticizing top-down, exclusionary planning schemes and shedding light on the existing, yet often marginalized, strategies that communities have pursued to fight such schemes. As editor Tom Angotti highlights in the introduction, the book is mostly comprised of articles drawn from the publications of Planners Network, otherwise known as PN, with the most recent PN publication being the Progressive City: Radical Alternatives (www.progressivecity.net) online magazine. Founded in 1975, PN is an organization of progressive planning that serves as a voice for social, economic, and environmental justice through planning. We have eight local chapters in the U.S., three in Canada and one in Mexico, as well as individual members that extend as far as South Africa. Our members are professionals, activists, academics, and students involved in physical, social, economic, and environmental planning in urban and rural areas. My own involvement in PN, for which I currently serve as CoChair, dates back to 2002, when I attended a PN conference in Toronto organized by long-time member Barbara Rahder, a Professor at York University and key member of Women Plan Toronto. I was drawn to the group for two reasons. Firstly, it was the only planning organization at 1

Norma Rantisi

the time that would challenge mainstream approaches and explicitly criticize the role that planning has often played in enabling displacement and dispossession. Building on its predecessor of the 1960s, Planners for Equal Opportunity, PN has sought to position the struggle for equity as the mandate of planning and has been vocal on issues ranging from the gentrification of racialized, low-income inner-cities to colonialist practices in Turtle Island, South Africa and Palestine, to the masculinist design of cities to environmental injustice and to the more general planning practice of ‘sanitizing’ spaces for the elite while making them unwelcome, inaccessible and uninhabitable for ‘others’. Secondly, PN has always sought to share progressive planning practices and ideas widely by ensuring that articles in the magazine and presentations at conferences are clear and jargon-free, and that contributors to these activities consist of community organizers as well as academics and researchers. A key objective has been to show how planning can (and has been) utilized for the public good when practitioners and researchers take their cue from those who have the greatest insight into community needs and the means for attaining those needs – the community organizers and activists. When I officially joined Planners Network in 2002, I decided to get involved with the publication. The main editors at the time, Tom Angotti and Ann Forsyth (now Professor of Urban Planning at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and Editor of the Journal of the American Planning Association) were transforming the bi-monthly newsletter into a quarterly magazine called Progressive Planning. Later, Tom and Marie Kennedy would become main editors, and by 2016, it was decided that the print version of the quarterly magazine – and indeed the magazine itself – would come to an end. However, a new group of PN members expressed interest in establishing a strictly online version of the magazine (Progressive City: Radical Alternatives), along with a podcast produced by Allison Lirish Dean (Ear to the Pavement) and social media support, to diversify the mediums of communication and to widen the audience and contributors to PN. Today, with Tom Angotti and Lacey Sigmon, I serve as one of the main editors of the Progressive City online magazine. Sustaining the magazine and the Planners Network organization, more generally, has always been a challenging feat. We are a relatively loose network with modest finances from membership dues and no corporate or foundation sponsorship. And to quote former Steering Committee member and Progressive Planning editor Ann Forsyth, “there have been more 2

Preface

people who were members in spirit than who paid their dues to pay for the newsletter or the web site fees.” As well, with a greater number of planning organizations now seeking to address issues of equity and more blogs and publications covering pressing planning themes, PN is at a crossroads, having to reflect on the role that it can and should play in advancing equity and justice, as we are still faced with the question of how we can best ensure that the voices of community residents are centered in planning initiatives and that planning serves as a tool for those who are most marginalized. The publication of Transformative Planning is an extension of the work that PN been doing over the last several decades and on which we hope to build with the time that we have remaining (PN – and the world, more generally). It speaks to the growing diversity of planning themes that the organization aims to address, extending beyond an earlier focus on the effects of urban renewal to consider how dispossession manifests in different forms for different groups within the Global North and the Global South. The book also speaks to the enduring struggles that committed activists and practitioners face in combatting dispossession and the constant need to identify new strategies for promoting bottom-up forms of resistance and communitybuilding. Transformative Planning stands as a testament to these struggles and as an aspiration to carry the struggles forward with the aim of constructing a socially, ecologically and economically just alternative to our neoliberal present. Norma M. Rantisi Planners Network Steering Committee, Co-Chair Progressive City: Radical Alternatives, Co-Editor

3

Introduction to Transformative Planning By Tom Angotti

Since the 1960s many activists and urban professionals have contested inequalities of class, race and gender in cities around the world. Transformative Planning comes out of this movement and compiles the discussions and debates that appeared in the publications of Planners Network, an association of planners and activists based in North America. Original contributions were added to the collection so that it serves as both a reflection of past theory and practice and a challenge for activists and planners going forward. Modern urban planning is only a century old but now faces extinction along with the urbanized world that fostered global climate change. Unless planning is radically transformed and develops serious alternatives to neoliberal urbanism and disaster capitalism it will be irrelevant in this century. Nonetheless, planning alone is not enough. The last century of urban planning was dominated by white European males who helped to rationalize the hegemony of capitalism rooted in the global North. Planning ignored gaping inequalities of race, class, and gender while promoting unbridled growth and environmental injustices. Just and equitable planning is urgently needed now more than ever. Will activist planners be part of such a transformation and advocates for real, democratic long-term planning? As the number of planning professionals grew over the last century, cities and metropolitan regions expanded following the exigencies of the capitalist growth machine. Planners were usually sidelined or their role was limited to details of physical design – density, road widths, building heights, and symbolic concessions to those displaced by development. Even when they succeeded in shaping relatively livable environments in many of the wealthiest cities and nations, they were absent or sidelined when it came to the vast majority of cities and communities in the world that grew without adequate. resources and infrastructure. Planning mostly abetted inequalities instead of challenging them. It helped to create comfortable enclaves for the wealthy and ignored the vast majority living in communities without adequate infrastructure and services. Official planning was the servant of a capitalist city-building machine that produced unprecedented environmental and public health hazards, fed the fossil fuel industry and reproduced inequalities. Now the Anthropocene is at an historic crossroads. The majority of people on the planet live in large cities and metropolitan regions that are generating the majority of greenhouse gases in the world. The planet 4

Introduction

is warming at a dangerously rapid pace and the majority of the world’s population, which never experienced the benefits of living in formally “planned” communities, needs planning now more than ever before. We need a different kind of planning, one capable of a revolutionary transformation in the ways that people relate to land, water, other species and, most urgently, how we humans relate to each other. We need planners who are dedicated to deep transformations at multiple scales from the household to the community, metropolis and world. This book is filled with ideas, strategies, debate and discussion about both the problems with planning as we know it and strategies to move forward in the twenty-first century and achieve economic, social and environmental justice.

What is Transformative Planning?

The profession of modern urban planning in the United States had its roots in the nineteenth century European cities that grew with the rise of industrial capitalism. Its protagonists were drawn from technocrats – all male – who served the interests of urban eiltes. Baron Von Haussman, a military engineer serving French royalty, is often acknowledged as the pioneer who bulldozed working class neighborhoods in central Paris in order to build the monumental Champs Elysees – a broad avenue that cut through the heart of the city and would conveniently facilitate military access just in case the proletariat should rise up again as they did during the Paris Commune. The function of social control is still at the forefront of modern urban planning today. The “unruly” working class – African Americans, Latinx people, immigrants, women and others who are the foundation of the reserve army of labor – are still being displaced when their communities happen to be in the way of grand civic projects and, as cities became targets for global capital investment, speculative real estate deals. City planners are trained to systematically organize this process and lend it the veneer of being in the public interest. They evolved what came to be known as rational-comprehensive planning. Borrowing the mantle of the Enlightenment, the planners supposedly used reason to organize and control cities that were otherwise chaotic; in reality, they reflected the fears of the new ruling classes of the rising working class. The planners also appealed to elites who were upset by the sheer chaos in the growing property market which allowed cities to grow haphazardly and disturb plans for urban infrastructure. Thus they claimed that their planning would be comprehensive and able to see the big picture. 5

Tom Angotti

In the early twentieth century the products of this rationalcomprehensive approach were master plans, mass transit systems, water and sewer and other infrastructure. This seemed to work in relatively smaller and wealthier cities but by the end of the century the majority of the world’s population lived in giant metropolitan regions with huge peripheries that were hardly integrated with the rest of the region in any rational, comprehensive urban plan. Still, urban planners continued to advance the myths of rational, comprehensive planning or, more commonly, surrender to the interests of elites who occupied exclusive enclaves and sought to maintain their separation from working class communities. They also continued to sell themselves as the experts needed to rationalize the displacement of popular neighborhoods that stood on land that was coveted by financial investors. In the twentieth century a new trend in urban planning emerged, however. Let’s call it radical planning. It broke out in the 1960s with roots in the Civil Rights Movement when some professional planners broke ranks with their profession and joined the movements to stop the displacement of communities of color from central cities that was promoted by “urban renewal” (aka “Negro removal”) plans. This insurgency was dubbed advocacy planning and the planners who identified with it considered themselves advocates of communities whose voices and plans were ignored and who faced massive dislocations. The roots of transformative planning are entwined with the historic struggles for racial justice in the Americas. However, as new struggles for social and economic justice emerged, it became broader and deeper. Womens’ movements helped to deflate the traditional top-down comprehensive-rational approach, calling into question the process of planning as well as its substance. In some places, women came to occupy important positions in a profession that has historically been maledominated, much like the allied professions of engineering and architecture. Community-based, or “bottom-up” planning became a legitimate part of the professional lexicon. Other forms of exclusion, based on age, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, for example, were to be acknowledged as concerns to be addressed. It did not take long, however, before the planning establishment – professional organizations, planning agencies, powerful private foundations and developers – began to coopt the insurgencies and reduce them to new formulaic answers to protest and insurgency. Participatory planning became a specialty and experts guiding the process followed textbook formulas that in too many instances produce participation that robs community people of political power. 6

Introduction

These new community-based planning efforts, however, have turned out to be filled with enormous contradictions. They opened the door to the engagement of the profession with genuine grassroots organizing for social justice but they also led to cooptation, manipulation and the undermining of emancipatory projects. Neoliberalism spawned public-private partnerships that sapped the capacity of the public sector and promoted private interests while leaving once again a false impression that it operates in the public interest. Instead of genuinely intersectional community organizing, professional planners began to create artificial rainbows that quickly disappear at every political turn.

From Physical Determinism to Climate Justice One of the underlying myths about urban planning, inherited from the fields of engineering and architecture, is that changes in the physical city can solve social problems. This is not to say that physical form does not interact with social function, only that changing the built environment alone does not necessarily solve social problems. But cosmetic changes are not enough. Today the majority of the world’s population live in cities and metropolitan regions and they produce the vast majority of greenhouse gases that threaten catastrophic global climate change. The people facing the most serious effects of climate change, in Africa, Asia, the South Pacific, and low-income communities of color in North American cities, demand climate justice and the ability to plan for and control their habitats. They face a system of extractive capitalism that thrives on building more urban enclaves that can absorb the seemingly limitless mountain of excess capital generated by chronic hyper-consumption, planned obsolescence and the growing concentration of wealth in the hands of the few. Now more than ever we need long-term comprehensive planning. But we also need true democracy in which the people in front-line communities control the process. We also need to elevate the wisdom of many indigenous communities that value the earth and all living things, not “land use” by developers and property owners, as the starting point for planning. The future of humans and other species on this planet depends on whether will be a new, radical planning that stands on the shoulders of our ancestors.

Planners Network In the Americas, the seeds of this kind of planning may be found in the near half-century of life around Planners Network (PN). The 7

Tom Angotti

organization started in 1975 as a loose network of professionals and activists dedicated to what was then called advocacy planning. It was started by Chester Hartman, a leading urbanist in the United States, and produced a newsletter, magazine, local chapters, and conferences. Planners Network built on the work of Planners for Equal Opportunity (PEO) which from 1964 to 1974 had brought together many planners who were actively engaged in struggles for racial justice and the civil rights movement in the United States. The PN Newsletter evolved into a bimonthly printed magazine, Progressive Planning, which was published between 2002 and 2016. When print media gave way to digital media, Progressivecity.net became the medium for blog pieces, in-depth articles and a podcast. This book builds on and brings together the best of Progressive Planning and Progressivecity.net and also includes a number of original contributions. I participated in and edited these publications and am pleased to see many of the best contributions preserved in this collection, which is designed to represent the depth and diversity of insurgent, radical and transformative planning. Throughout these decades, I was active in the civil rights, peace, anti-imperialist, and environmental justice movements, and worked as a professional planner and educator. As an editor, I looked for stories and ideas about planning that were related to the big issues of racial and economic inequality, and sought to engage the burning questions facing our urban social movements. On receiving submissions for these publications I would ask myself whether the story helps us confront the hard questions or instead tries to sell neat formulas that obscure the truth – a chronic failing of the mainstream profession. We always faced the tendency to obscure truths with academic jargon and the racism, sexism, and elitism prevalent in the planning profession. Looking back, I am delighted to see how our discourse shifted over the decades, along with the urban social movements, to be much more inclusive, though of course there is much more to be done. The profession and its organizations remain disproportionately white and heavily influenced by the transactional and abusive politics of the male universe. While women now play a decisive role in PN leadership, I hesitate to boast about this because throughout the profession women have been assuming more leading positions even as planning itself remains marginalized. While our editorial policy has favored dialogue and story-telling, we are still dealing with a wider culture in which communication is a means of exerting superiority and promoting commerce instead of a vital means for liberation. Divisions of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation 8

Introduction

may have weakened but they still define the main decision-making processes and bodies affecting the form and function of cities and rural areas. This compilation aims to move beyond critiques of neoliberal urbanism and explore alternative theories and practices of planning. Chapter One goes into greater detail about the origins of advocacy planning and other leading critiques of modern, neoliberal planning. Marie Kennedy introduces the notion of transformative planning and its role in community development. The other contributions deepen the critiques of narrow, technocratic approaches and the orthodoxies of comprehensive rational planning. The chapter ends with Samuel Stein’s sharp critique of the new Hudson Yards development in New York City, an increasingly common type of megaproject designed to maximize capital accumulation for the few and elicit awe among aspiring urbanists. Chapter Two poses alternatives that emerge not from the minds of experts but from struggles of resistance in neighborhoods and communities, many of them struggles against displacement due to real estate speculation and government policies that support it. These include Annette Koh’s call for decolonial planning, Edwin Quiles’ call for resistance based on his career of advocacy in Puerto Rico (a colony of the United States, thus this is fitting discussion to accompany the previous item). Marie Kennedy and Chris Tilly look at alternatives from Latin America. Activist scholar Henry Louis Taylor, Jr. probes problems and issues in the planning academy. Allison Lirish Dean, a filmmaker and podcaster with Progressivecity.net, lays out the challenges and issues of using media to promote radical change. The last six chapters (3-8) begin with introductions that offer overviews of the content. Chapter 3 focuses more specifically on the question of race and its centrality. Chapter 4 breaks down the issues of climate change, climate justice, environmental planning, sustainability and resilience. Chapter 5 addresses global urbanization, colonial and imperial planning, and several contributions discuss planning and the occupation of Palestine. Chapter 6 brings together articles relating to gender and LGBTQ rights. Chapter 7 focuses on policing and the militarization of urban life and Chapter 8 explores capitalism, socialism and the right to the city. The last chapter compiles recent writings on policing, incarceration, the militarization of urban life, and the role of planning. I hope readers will find this unique collection, with its diverse ideas about issues and strategies, both stimulating and rewarding. We will not have accomplished our objective, however, if these readings do not 9

Tom Angotti

provoke people to question planning’s orthodoxies, deepen the discussions about strategy in our movements, and engage in transformative community planning, organizing and development.

10

CHAPTER 1: ROOTS AND REFLECTIONS ON TRANSFORMATIVE PLANNING

Transformative Planning for Community Development By Marie Kennedy Introduction

Transformative community planning is a way of working with communities across divisions. It is not based on the superficial pasting together of short-lived, issue specific coalitions, but on transforming relations between groups. In this sense, it is participatory planning which empowers the community to act in its own interests. If we believe in participatory democracy, it is not enough to work in disadvantaged communities, it is important how we work in communities. In order to create positive social change in the face of pretty big challenges, we need to unleash the creative energies of ordinary people. I will briefly outline a definition of community development that makes sense to me, take a quick look at the historical roots of today’s community-oriented planning, contrast transformative planning with advocacy planning, and gives a thumbnail sketch of lessons I’ve learned through practice and engagement. I will then look more closely at a particular case that combined professional education and community development.

Community Development

Genuine community development combines material development with the development of people, increasing a community’s capacity for taking control of its own development—building critical thinking and planning abilities within the community so that development projects and planning processes can be replicated by community members in the future. A good planning project should leave a community not just with more immediate “products”—e.g. more housing—but also with an increased capacity to meet future needs. In other words, a quality and sustainable product depends on a quality and sustainable process. 11

Marie Kennedy

Unfortunately, public policy and planning practices often do not reflect this understanding of community development. Perhaps that’s why we have so little of it. Too often, success is measured solely by the numbers—the number of houses built, clients served, jobs created, etc. Although these are important outcomes, they are insufficient for community development. And, if we measure success by the numbers alone, no matter how laudable our long-range goals, we’re going to frame our planning practice and lend our support to policies and strat egies that we think are going to be successful in terms of the numbers. If we don’t include less measurable goals (or at least currently less measured goals) in our criteria for success—goals that have to do with empowerment—we’re likely to meet our goals while our communities remain underdeveloped. On the other hand, if community development as I have defined it is our goal, in addition to looking at concrete “products”, we will be interested in evaluating how successful a planning process has been in "lifting all the voices"—in bringing previously marginalized voices into the discussion. In the planning process, how many people moved from being objects of planning to subjects of planning? How successful are we as planners in framing a process that is comfortable and encourages the participation of people who are not used to speaking in public, not facile at articulating their concerns and visions? How culturally sensitive are we to different forms of expression and self-organization? Are we able to successfully confront dynamics of racism, classism, sexism, and other exclusionary patterns of behavior that block full participation by various groups? What practical accommodations do we make to reduce the barriers to participation for groups that have been left out? Overall, how successful are we at nurturing well-informed, genuinely democratic politics and discourse, dialogue about options and about the "values" and "interests by which those options can be evaluated. Success measured in this way requires a transformative approach to community planning. It’s an approach that has evolved from the advocacy planning that was connected to the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

Advocacy Planning In those years, advocacy planning began to successfully challenge the notion of planning as a “neutral science”, as apolitical. It represents an approach to planning that has been institutionalized in some limited spaces—it is a recognized paradigm taught in planning schools and it’s the approach of many community-based organizations. 12

Transformative Planning for Community Development

Advocacy planning can also take credit for institutionalizing community participation in planning, particularly in the public sphere. Of course, this is a two-edged sword: On the one hand, mandated forums for participation can offer a foothold for struggle. On the other hand, participation today is frequently structured into a win-win framework—if we just hear from all the stakeholders, we can figure out what’s best for all. By ignoring power disparities, participation becomes a smokescreen behind which real decisions are made by those who have always made the decisions. The terrain of struggle has changed greatly since the heyday of advocacy planning. Compared to the 1960s and 1970s, redevelopment (like everything else) is much more privatized. This means that—at least compared to things like urban renewal plans— redevelopment is much more piecemeal and the government role is secondary— supporting private developers rather than playing the organizing and coordinating role. The targets of advocacy planning are not as obvious. Development struggles are dispersed and there are fewer opportunities for broad discussions on development goals and strategies and less political pressure points. While advocacy planning is an important thread of today’s transformative community planning, there were significant shortfalls in the vision. Debates among progressive planners today about what our practices should be are a reflection of these shortfalls. Unconnected to social movements and mostly practiced by community-based organizations, advocacy planning today is often reduced to a technocratic practice that differs from traditional planning practices only in terms of who the client is. Dependent on funding sources which usually count success by the number of products produced, the practice of advocacy planning is primarily representative, rather than participatory. A lot of progressive planning is stuck at this place. You can be progressive in many ways— hold progressive goals—and still fall into the trap of “thinking you know better” than the folks who are experiencing the problems being addressed, and that it’ll just be faster and more effective if you do it for people rather than with them.

Transformative Community Planning Compared to Advocacy Planning Today, there is a spectrum of progressive planning practice—from what I am going to call an advocacy approach on one end to a transformative approach on the other end. While none of us probably works 13

Transformative Planning for Community Development

at either extreme end of this spectrum, in order to highlight differences, I will characterize the extremes. Although advocacy planners are concerned with economic justice, with redistributing wealth, they don’t seek, in the main part, to support organizing focused on the redistribution of power and don’t aim to cede control over planning decisions to oppressed people. The model assumes that the repository of knowledge is in the planners. It’s “we’ll figure out what’s best to do and do it for you,” not, “we’ll help you do it.” On the other hand, transformative planners understand that successful redistribution of resources generally follows the redistribution of control of those resources. Furthermore, although advocacy planners frequently have a critical analysis of the structural nature of social and urban problems, they will support organizing that focuses on issues that accept people’s existing ideology rather than trying to take up hard (and potentially divisive) questions such as racism. In part this is because this kind of issue translates more readily into products that are recognizable as legitimate results of a planning process and they concentrate on products over process and efficiency in reaching product-oriented goals over mobilization and empowerment. Both advocacy and transformative planners would acknowledge that there is a political nature to all we do, that all of our work has implications for the distribution of power in society and that there is no such thing as a value-free social science. However, while the advocacy approach reserves this awareness to the planner, transformative planning requires the raising of political consciousness as a necessary corollary to any successful community development process.

The Transformative Planner

A successful transformative planner must actively listen and respect what people know, help people acknowledge what they already know, and help them back up this “common sense” and put it in a form that communicates convincingly to others. At the same time, it means challenging people on exclusionary thinking; having enough respect for people to challenge them. In working in a racially divided city such as Los Angeles or Boston, this means not basing our work on the superficial pasting together of short-lived, issue-specific coalitions, but rather focusing our work on transforming relations between groups. Successful transformative community planning also means planners who are willing to acknowledge that into each planning situation we bring with us our own attitudes and biases—biases that flow from our 14

Transformative Planning for Community Development

own class background and location, our own gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so forth. And, along with acknowledging the baggage we bring with us, we need to recognize that our preferences for certain planning and development outcomes are typically based, at least in part, on these biases and are not always about being “right”— our preferences are just that, they’re our preferences. Successful transformative community planning means wielding our planning tools in a way that puts real control in the hands of people most affected—that frames real alternatives and elaborates the tradeoffs in making one choice or another. It does not mean making everybody a professional planner—a possessor of the particular set of skills that planners have developed through professional education and practice. It does mean using our skills so that people can make informed decisions for themselves. It means including the consequences of different decisions in terms of overarching community values in the trade-offs.

Learning Through Practice and Engagement Many community development professionals are working in a transformative way and by sharing our experiences, we can help each other to be more effective in lifting all voices. I want to briefly share with you some of what I have learned from doing this work for over forty years. One good reason for taking the transformative approach is that even in defining what the problem is, the official experts only have part of the answer, and sometimes they don’t have a clue. In Havana, Cuba, when Mel King, Miren Uriarte and I were doing a mini-course at the university, researchers there assured us that there was no problem of drugs or domestic violence in Cuba, but when we visited Regla Barbon, the director of the Atares community workshop in Havana, she immediately identified these as two of the biggest issues in the Atares neighborhood and told us of the creative ways in which they were addressing these problems. Closer to home, adult leaders in a Cambridge, Massachusetts neighborhood invited me to do a project with neighborhood youth, and confidently stated that the biggest problem was lack of jobs for teenagers. But when my students and I met with the young people, they were very clear that the biggest problem was a lack of appropriate role models. At the same time, we need to understand how our own expertise and know-how can be helpful. In a workshop I ran in Indonesia, a big argument ensued between a social worker and an indigenous leader. The social worker, who was working for agribusiness interests on the

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island of Papua, complained that the natives were lazy and did not want to improve their lives. The indigenous leader angrily retorted that of course they wanted better lives, but that the 60-hour work week and bulldozed landscape being brought by palm oil plantations was destroying the things they valued most: their natural environment and time to create art and music and socialize with others. I was able to bring to the table the fact that indigenous peoples confront this kind of issue all over the world, and that we have learned from centuries of

Regla Barbon, Director of the Atares Neighborhood Workshop co-teaching seminar at the University of Havana. Photo by Marie Kennedy. disastrous development plans that identity and culture are often the most precious things a community has. Unleashing those creative energies means recognizing that the people best equipped to come up with solutions are often the people who experience the problems. In partnership with the Women’s Institute for Housing and Economic Development, we brought a group of recently homeless women into the College of Public and Community Service at the University of Massachusetts Boston as students and had them lead a participatory research project on the issues of women and homelessness. By the end of the process, these women went to the state house to present a set of recommendations to the legislature and social service 16

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agencies based on the first large-scale survey of homeless women in Massachusetts. Their recommendations led to changes in shelter regulations as well as policies for assigning housing and their success gave hope and a renewed sense of self-respect to currently homeless women. We must also be aware, however, that plenty of ordinary people have attitudes that cut against democracy and equality and it is common for people to try to defend their little scrap of privilege against people who have less. We also have to be guided by our own values. The mostly white members of a neighborhood association adjacent to a large public housing development asked my students and I to do a project addressing the frictions that were coming up with new immigrants moving into the development from Haiti, Central America and Vietnam. We met with the neighborhood association and with an immigrant-based social service agency. Pretty soon we realized that the all-white neighborhood association was not willing to let the immigrants have a voice in the solutions. We made our choice, and from then on we just worked with the immigrant-based organization. In fact, we often have to make special efforts to hear the voices of those who have less power and prestige in a situation. When Melvyn Colon, Kathryn Kasch, Andrea Nagel and I did a community needs assessment on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua, we realized very early on that if we just held community-wide meetings, only the men would speak. As a result, we held separate meetings with women and with young people, and discovered they had their own ideas about what was needed. Advocacy planning has been a critical step in the movement for planners to more directly engage with marginalized populations and provide supports to community needs. But to date much of that ‘planning’ has remained technocratic. To be transformative, a centering of community knowledge within planning is needed. This requires a reworking of how planning is taught.

EDUCATING FOR TRANSFORMATIVE PLANNING How we educate planners has a lot to do with whether they can and will work in a way that supports transformative community development. Too often in the United States, but also in several other countries where I have worked, planners are educated to plan for people, not with people. Planning students are taught how to wield the most up-to-date technical tools, but frequently they are not taught how to work with people in a way that puts the power to make decisions into the hands of the people most affected by the problems 17

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being confronted. To highlight the connection between planning education and transformative community development, I will give two brief vignettes—one from teaching at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and one from work with the Grupo para el Desarollo Integral de la Capital in Havana Cuba. Then I will describe in more detail a project I cofacilitated with graduate students in the Colegio de Tlaxcala in Mexico.

Whether in Los Angeles or Havana In the first class of my course in Community Research and Organizing in the Urban Planning Department, in which students would be placed with community and worker organizations, I emphasized the importance of making decisions with those most affected being in the “driver’s seat”, rather than for people based on what the planner thinks is best for them. One student stood up and said, “Why am I paying all this money to get an education if I can’t make the decisions about what is best for people?” Before I could respond, he walked out of my class. Luckily, he was the only one who did so. The difficulties of the technocratic approach to community development were particularly highlighted in attempts to introduce participatory planning in Cuba. In the late 1980s, an extraordinary group of architects and sociologists established the Grupo para el Desarollo Integral de la Capital, which established neighborhood comprehensive planning workshops in 12 Havana neighborhoods. The goal was to better integrate physical and social planning and vest planning decisions in the people of the neighborhood, breaking with the centralized planning of the past. Problems associated with how professionals were trained to be technocratic “experts” arose from the very beginning. Mario Coyula, one of the founders of the workshops lamented that, “now some of the decisions are no longer being made by the central government, but they’re being made by the staffs of the workshops, not by the people living in the neighborhood.” These professionals— architects, engineers, sociologists and community organizers—had been trained to “fix” things for people. At Coyula’s request, Mel King and I facilitated a two week participatory planning seminar in Havana for the staff of the workshops. We arrived in the depths of the economic problems following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Professionals, who had been accustomed to working with adequate resources, could no longer “fix” everything. We started the seminar saying, “You’re going to love this approach, because it’s going to get you off the hook. You can’t fix everything and this approach acknowledges that. It’s 18

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about sharing responsibility for decision-making, getting the people most affected by the decisions being made involved in problem-solving and in taking responsibility for prioritizing the resources you do have.” Regla Barbon who would later become the head of the Atares workshop, was a participant in that early seminar. In her later work, she far outstripped anything we imagined to be possible, developing innovative ways of involving and empowering residents of her community. The next time we facilitated a seminar in Havana, we had Regla co-lead it with us.

San Miguel Analco in Tlaxcala, Mexico

One final example, treated in somewhat more detail, highlights challenges we might face in our practice and teaching of transformative community planning and suggests some workarounds when circumstances are not ideal. Although this community is in Mexico, the situation wasn’t that different from many we face here—a divided community, no organized community-based group to take the lead, a failing economic base, a failing education system, few social services, and a large proportion of adult men gone from the community, in this case as undocumented workers to the U.S. In 2007, along with my husband Chris Tilly and a Mexican colleague, Mercedes Arce, I coordinated a participatory planning course through which doctoral students at the Colegio de Tlaxcala worked in a strategic planning process with the residents of San Miguel Analco, a small, low-income, rural community of about 1400 residents in the state of Tlaxcala, Mexico. We sought to demonstrate that: 1) participatory planning is an effective tool for community development; and 2) structured “hands-on” projects are essential in linking theory and practice in professional education. Right from the beginning, the Analco project differed in several problematic respects from most of my previous projects with students and community groups. The community, which had historic divisions within it, hadn’t defined the project, nor even asked for our help. The students, who were starting work on their dissertations, had little time for a “hands-on” project and had no a priori interest or experience in participatory planning. Both the Colegio administration and the students saw graduate education as strictly theory-based. Finally, the project was to be compressed into one semester instead of the two-semester framework that I strongly prefer. Not an ideal situation. On the other hand, this was a resource-rich course—3 professors for 19

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only 8 students and my Fulbright grant to pay for expenses. We mostly followed a series of steps that I developed working with students in field projects at the University of Massachusetts Boston. 1) The first step involves outside planners getting in touch with their own impressions of the community, so they can set aside their preconceptions and prejudices in order to be open to actively listening

Student Maribel Meza addressing the assembly, San Miguel Analco. Photo by Marie Kennedy. to community residents; 2) gathering background information, both current and historical, so as to have a rough idea of the “facts” of the community, how it developed to be what it is today and what, without intervention, the trend for the future is; 3) identifying and interviewing key informants, in order to get a fix on what influential members of the community see as community needs and resources and how they envision the future; 4) facilitating focus groups, designed so as to “hear all the voices,” that is, to have discussions with youth separate from adults, women separate from men, day laborers separate from land owners, etc.; 5) gathering the whole community together, with an idea of building consensus on goals for the future and identifying community volunteers who will move the process forward; 6) working with a planning team made of community members to develop strategies and action plans; 7) carrying out the action plans; 8) designing and implementing a participatory evaluation. This is a somewhat idealized version of the process of our Analco project. In practice, various stages were overlapping, we weren’t able to get all the key informant interviews or focus groups that we planned, and we never undertook a thorough evaluation. Perhaps most 20

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critically, given the lack of pre-existing community organization in Analco, divisions within the community, and reliance on patronage relationships, we were not able to turn over leadership of the planning team to community members until after we had brought the community together in a community-wide assembly a couple of months into the project. In fact, in Analco, we confronted deep skepticism on the part of both students and residents that anything good could come from a so-called participatory process. It seems that in Mexico, participation has a bad name, having been attached to gatherings organized by politicians in which, in order to garner votes, promises are made which are promptly forgotten after the election. Furthermore, to get folks to attend these meetings, the political party gives everyone a gift—a sack of cement, a blanket, or maybe just a t-shirt. We had nothing to give except our energy and skills. And we weren’t about to promise anything specific, just that we would carefully listen to the community and help them transform their ideas into action and that we would not impose our own preferences. We constantly had to pull our students back from leaping too soon to specific solutions to problems and we had to divert the community from seeing petitioning the government as the only viable strategy. Instead, we helped folks focus on their visions of what a better community would be and on what resources there were within the community to achieve their vision, rather than focusing on problems and on getting the government to solve them. This was not always, or even often, easy. Some focus groups were poorly attended—the one scheduled for day laborers attracted only one couple. When we went to the fields to try to get others to come, the first man we approached immediately asked, “What are you going to give me?” before declining to come. It was also difficult to get a discussion going in the focus groups—mostly, people responded to questions posed by the facilitator. Getting a sizable attendance at a communitywide assembly required basic organizing work—leafleting people as they left church, door-knocking at every house and sending a sound truck around on the day of the event and promising food to follow. But, in the end, it was worth it—the assembly, attended by more about half of the adults in the community, marked a turning point in the project and produced a committed task force of volunteers who worked to develop strategies and action plans and have continued to work on developing their community. What made the difference? In my opinion, there were several fac21

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tors to how we structured the assembly: 1) we provided childcare; 2) we focused on visions for the future rather than on problems; 3) we adapted our methods to accommodate those who could not read or write by expressing visions visually and having color-signified voting; 3) we concentrated on utilizing resources within the community to start moving toward realizing high priority goals; and 4) using fairly simple methods—different colored dots on nametags to assign people to workshops—we got people who hadn’t been talking to each other for years to start working together to prioritize goals. In fact the same three goals were prioritized in each of 5 workshops and residents found that they had overall consensus about what they wanted their community to be. As a consequence, people became enthusiastic about the possibilities for the future. I’m not sure what we would have done had we not had this rather wonderful outcome! So, what is the evidence for our two central propositions that 1) transformative planning enhances community development, and that 2) hands-on involvement with communities enhances professional education?

Results for community development By focusing on resources within the community, the task force work on the three goals prioritized in the assembly led to immediate community development impacts. For the first goal—a healthy population—they were able to receive equipment and a part time doctor for the health center from DIF (Desarrollo Integral de la Familia), now that they had a functioning committee that could manage the program. For the second goal—adequate water and sanitation—a volunteer team borrowed a backhoe and cleaned out the septic that was overflowing into the agricultural fields. For the third goal—more opportunities for education—arrangements were made for students at a nearby teachers’ college to provide after-school mentoring to the telesecundaria students, who had been dropping out at an alarming rate. As these plans were realized, an interesting thing happened—the community undertook additional projects. For example, the jornaleros who would never come to a focus group voluntarily cleaned all the streets of the town, and another group of volunteers painted the health center. The elected community leader told us: “We were stuck in a pothole. You helped us finally get out of it.” With the community in motion, suddenly, the government came through with a number of

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resources that had previously been promised, but never provided. These included a long-needed sewage treatment plant and help with various productive projects, such as greenhouses and an on-ramp to the highway to Puebla, the nearest big city, where many workers from Analco, no longer able to make a living from the land, had construction and domestic jobs.

Results for the students and the Colegio Students expressed enthusiasm after the very first exercise, saying that

Reading the final report before discussing. Photo by Marie Kennedy. this was the first opportunity they had had to reflect on their own practice and experiences related to theoretical concepts. Although they were initially skeptical about the value of residents participating in problem definition and goal setting, by the mid-semester course evaluation, all eight students felt that learning and applying participatory approaches to community development planning would be very useful in doctoral studies and in their profession. At the end of the class, one student spoke for the group in saying, “This class was a very good experience, because [in our graduate education] we’ve spent a lot of time on theory, but it’s very different to go out in the community and try to engage in practice”. In the end, three of the students changed their dissertation topics 23

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in order to continue to work in Analco. And, the Colegio has made a participatory planning “hands-on” course a regular part of the curriculum for both the masters and doctoral programs. Finally, the state government has requested that Colegio de Tlaxcala students and faculty work with other relatively marginal communities on community development, utilizing the same participatory approach.

Conclusion What I’ve learned in 50 years of working as a progressive planner is that every community has a combination of promise and peril. Every community has experiences and traditions of working collectively, of listening to what the most marginalized have to say, of imagining a better world. Every community also has external pressures to conform and compete within the status quo, and internal cynicism, self-interest and despair that often undermine efforts to work together. The challenge is to build on the positive and to find creative ways to overcome the negative. The challenge is to constantly expand people’s self-confidence, their trust in each other, their ability to understand and strategize about their situation, and through this, their control over that situation. Meeting this challenge is what I call transformative community planning. This article was originally published in two parts on November 5th and 12th 2018. It was updated in February 2019.

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Advocacy, Planning and Land: How Climate Justice Changes Everything By Tom Angotti It is an honor to speak at this conference of planning educators dedicated to Justice and the City, but I must confess my discomfort with planning education today, which is at an impasse when it comes to the issues of racial and economic justice. The string of recent police murders of Black and Brown people from Staten Island, New York to Ferguson, Missouri, in cities and suburbs, tells us that progress on racial justice is overrated. Too often discussions in planning education about racial justice skip over these stories of today’s violence and end in abstractions about justice. In our mostly white world of planning education we suffer from a systemic color blindness. And even when race is considered, we only look back at advocacy planning, the 1960s and the great civil rights movement. Or we dwell on only small local fixes. And we don’t act. Let’s be honest. Efforts to open up the white suburbs and redevelop central cities through pluralistic planning are stalled before the roadblocks of institutional racism, segregation and market-driven gentrification. Race still matters, a lot. Forty-seven years after the Fair Housing Act, segregation reigns, a symptom of the wider system of racialized exploitation and violence. So what are planning educators who want progressive change to do? I would like to make a giant leap and connect today’s struggles for Black lives with global climate change. Let me propose that focusing on global climate justice can help us rethink our views on racial and economic justice in the US. We can follow Paul Davidoff and start by linking land use planning with advocacy in the US, but now more than ever we have to address the question of economic and racial justice at the global scale. Today climate change poses an existential threat to all humanity, especially the poor and oppressed who suffer the worst consequences of environmental degradation. Focusing on the big issue of global climate justice is consistent with the legacy of Martin Luther King, who understood that opposition to US foreign policy and the War in Vietnam was connected to the struggle to end the violence against Black people at home. An appropriate starting point for this focus is Naomi Klein’s claim that, in her recent book by the same title, This Changes Everything. She places economic and social justice at the center of the climate debate. This 25

Tom Angotti

is not just a theoretical discussion but reflects a global movement seeking climate justice. Climate justice forces us to re-think everything at a global scale, far beyond the objectives of adaptation and conversion to renewable energy. Here’s an example of what I mean. Most of the world’s largest metropolitan regions are along coastlines and face the certainties of sea level rise. This has been a wake up call, but our urban resiliency plans will do nothing for the Pacific Islanders who are now being forced to abandon their homes. Indigenous people around the world are being displaced by invasive mining and drilling, which leaves the landscape barren and degraded. Global land grabbing is replacing ecologically sound and productive stewardship of the land with unhealthy and polluting monocultures in agriculture. But perhaps the most visible evidence for us of climate injustice is in our own cities where it is disproportionately poor people and people of color who die during heat waves, can’t afford flood insurance, and live in the most vulnerable and polluted environments, victims of the new urban epidemics – diabetes, obesity and violence. As cities and nations deal with sea-level rise and climate change, the most powerful trend in planning is problematic: it would protect the most privileged urban and rural enclaves against the changing climate, as in post-Katrina New Orleans and New York City after Sandy, and sacrifice the rest of the world, which is left to adapt on its own, literally in “sacrifice zones.” This is the problem at the heart of climate justice.

Land Beyond “Land Use”

What does this have to do with advocacy and planning in the US? If nothing else, planning is about land. The global movement for climate justice forces us to question the relationship of humans to land – both urban and rural. The majority of the world’s population lives in cities, which produce 70% of greenhouse gases and occupy only 2% of the earth’s surface. They are consumption machines and giant generators of waste. Rural areas have instead become voids with factory farms producing monocultures, extractive mining, and wilderness enclaves serving the urban world. The city isn’t the problem, the countryside isn’t the problem, nor is it the amount of land being used. The problem is the relationship of people to land, both urban and rural, and the systems of exploitation of both land and people. Bringing home the questions of land and climate justice, Ta-Nehisi

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Advocacy, Planning and Land: How Climate Justice Changes Everything Coates, in his brilliant book, Between the World and Me,1 reminds us how the use of land is related to violence against people of color in the US and throughout the world. This country, he says: . . . acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery…whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion.

He hits on the connection between racial injustice here and global climate justice: . . . the Dreamers [for Coates, a vaguely defined white America] have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself.

For Coates, the global plunder parallels our urban history: It is the flight from us [Blacks] that sent them sprawling into the subdivided woods. And the method of transport through these new subdivisions, across the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose around the neck of the earth, and ultimately, the Dreamers themselves.

The question of land has always been at the center of the civil rights and social justice movements in the US. Slaves could not own property; they were property. Blacks and other minorities have been redlined, foreclosed, and displaced from the land by numerous forms of “urban renewal.” Native Americans were chased off land which they understood, as so many indigenous nations do, as a set of relations not only among humans but incorporating all of nature, as opposed to our culture and profession which treat land as a “thing.” This, surely, is related to climate justice. In the 21st century it is time for planners to stop talking about “land use,” an anthropocentric and racially charged concept. This nation’s expansion through displacement created the idea that land was a thing to be taken, bought and sold, consumed and then disposed of when it no longer yields a profit. Confronting climate justice requires a 1

Ta-Nehisi Coates. Between the World and Me. (NY: Spiegel & Grau, 2015).

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fundamental shift in our understanding of land and the relationship of humans to land.

Advocacy Planning Today

Surely most urban planners understand the link between urban land and climate change. But in practice they tend to look for, or sell, technological fixes that fail to take into consideration economic and racial justice. In his encyclical Laudato Si’,2 Pope Francis, sounding very much like Naomi Klein, states: Technology, connected to finance capital, pretends to be the only solution to problems. In fact, it is incapable of seeing the multiple relations that exist between things, which is why it sometimes resolves problems by creating new ones.

Urban planners all over the world sell technological fixes and best practices, instant recipes for green infrastructure, sustainable communities, citizen participation and – yes – social justice. They advance formulas for urban density and diversity and the cosmopolitan society, and sell popular brands like Smart Growth and the New Urbanism. Local sustainability and resiliency plans seem good because they attempt to go beyond the fashionable fixes and narrow reductionist science, towards a holistic, ecological approach to the city. However, unless local plans place the fundamental inequalities across the land at the center of their work, they will instead turn our cities into fortified enclaves for the privileged while the rest of the planet faces the catastrophic effects of climate change. Therefore, the challenge is not just adaptation or resilience but climate justice, which means asking the question, resilience for who?

Climate Justice and the City

In sum, the fundamental problem is how we, the human species, relate to land, urban and rural, at local and global scales, in an integrated way. One of the least quoted parts of the Pope’s Encyclical says: . . . a truly ecological approach must become a social approach, that 2

Papa Francesco. Laudato Si’. (Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane, 2015).

Translations by T. Angotti]

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Advocacy, Planning and Land: How Climate Justice Changes Everything should integrate justice in the discussions about the environment, to listen to both the cry of the land and the cry of the poor.

Francis talks about “the ecology of daily life,” the defense of public space, acknowledgment of “the other,” and the need to prioritize public transportation, among other public services – but beware the technological fix and be an advocate along with those in greatest need. He opposes the privatization of natural resources and echoes Naomi Klein’s critique of extractive and neoliberal capitalism. Both the Pope and Klein call for defending the commons as public land is plundered through public-private partnerships in which the private partner dominates. If we take off the orientalist blinders of Western urban planning we can learn from some of the more recent breakthroughs that seek to change the way we deal with land, construct new common spaces and develop strong relationships between urban and rural areas. These include, for example, the establishment of the rights of nature in the Bolivian constitution, the alliances between rural and urban workers in the Brazilian Landless Peoples’ Movement (MST) and Via Campesina, urban agriculture in Cuba, and an increasingly expansive view of the Right to the City which includes the rights of those who do not live in cities, and the Slow City movement, which questions the benefits of shrinking time-space differences that was made possible by global technology. Orientalist planning sees global urban problems through the lens of the wealthy and powerful. It has brought us to the brink of a climate catastrophe. It has fostered white privilege and blindness to systemic racial injustice at home. In response, we must struggle for a truly democratic and ecological approach to land in which the primary agency belongs to those who are stewards of the land and respect the ecological integrity of all life on earth, and those who struggle for racial and economic justice. We must be advocates, with them, for they bear an unrecognized wisdom about how we humans can live with the earth and not just on the earth. We must be activists, with Davidoff, Coates, Klein and the Pope. This can change everything. This article was originally published in the Winter 2016 issue of Progressive Planning Magazine.

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Changing Times, Changing Planning: Critical Planning Today By Peter Marcuse Over the last fifty years, times have changed and so has urban planning. Our strategies for changing planning also need to change. In the 1960s, planning was seen as a way of harnessing technical competence to achieve social change, at the grassroots level and nationally and internationally. It seemed to many a field in which one could be both a direct participant in progressive causes (civil rights, peace, justice and equality) and a professional, using training and technical competence in support of those causes. The combination of activist and professional seemed feasible and rewarding even if it was not easy. It had to be fought for at both ends: with poor people in immediate need of food and shelter, with workers fighting every day for fair pay, with African-American prisoners incarcerated in an attempt to keep them down, with residents fighting to preserve their communities against the daily threat of eviction and displacement. Those who were struggling were also suspicious of middle- or upperclass whites telling them what was best for them, and often, consciously or unconsciously, taking over leadership roles in organizations from those more directly involved than themselves. Lawyers often slid into such positions, not merely representing their clients but telling them what they could and could not do (which became what they should do). The temptation for many planners was similar. Advocacy planning was a movement given a name by Paul Davidoff, a lawyer-planner. Advocate planners hoped to avoid the “professional knows best” trap by volunteering their services, setting up storefront community planning and design centers, participating in legislative advocacy and maintaining a commitment to participation and democracy. At the same time, the social change role of planning had to be fought for within the profession. The profession had a long history of under-representation of Blacks and women, with an attendant neglect of their interests and views in the practice of planning. Militant caucuses of both women and Blacks were formed, pushing both for full equality in the profession and for the profession’s full attention to the needs of those constituencies. In response, Planners for Equal Opportunity (P.E.O., the forerunner of today’s

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Changing Times, Changing Planning: Critical Planning Today

Planners Network) was formed, and it set about engaging with issues of equality in the profession as well as with issues of economic justice like welfare reform and labor organizing. Students formed left reading groups, a few taking on reading all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. The War on Poverty bred the sub-field of social planning, which attracted some professionals as well as academics and students, and was accepted in professional associations and conferences of planners. P.E.O. drafted a statement on The Social Responsibility of Planners and pushed to have it adopted as part of the Code of Ethics of the profession. Though it was not, it was considered positively in most of the planning community. So while professionalism remained in some tension with social activism, it was widely accepted that there was an inherent relationship between the two. Planning as a field had a social role to play; the activity of planning was a socially loaded one, an inevitably political one, a value-laden one. Its social role is historically grounded, part of the DNA of the activity, with deep links to utopianism and social welfare and an expanded public role; it has historically been part of urban reform movements and social criticism. Professionalism in planning was not neutral, but led to clear positions on key controversial public policies of the day. There could be debates as to whether the social role of planning was broad enough to require planners to take a position against the war in Vietnam, but the question was a legitimate one debated in the official journal of the profession.

Changing Times Over the last fifty years there have been major changes, and many have not been positive. The relationships of power between the establishment and those subject to it have changed, in favor of the holders of power. This is true in almost every field relevant to planning: capital vs. labor, developers vs. communities, landlords vs. tenants, financial institutions vs. citizens, corporate media vs. local sources of information and entertainment, and in general, market-based and profitdriven operations vs. public, non-profit and individual work. Rapid technological development, effectively used in increasing the reach of global markets, has contributed mightily to this shift in power from local to regional, national and global, and from the public to the private. The shift in power and its accompanying changes have of course not been straight-line, or without hard confrontations, but the

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direction of movement from the welfare state (never fully developed in the United States) to the neo-liberal state (in which the United States is a leading force) has resulted in a quite different context for planning today than fifty years ago. The implications for planners and planning are far-reaching. Planning techniques are tools; how they are used is based on an on-going interaction between the professionals and those they serve. In the earlier period, the profession had a significant degree of autonomy; even the most service-oriented, non-political, non-ideological planning theories suggested that planning should start with an interrogation of the goals of the client, perhaps only in the interests of efficient service, but at the same time opening the door to questions and value judgments, at least making the social content of the goals open and visible. Today, the scope for planners to exert independence in their professional work is much more limited, through no fault of their own. But how planners react to these changes depends on us; planners can silently or even obsequiously serve their masters, or they can insist on their own independence, comment on goals as well as design means, act as citizens as well as professionals and choose who to serve, declining those whose principles conflict with their own. Independent advice is after all what is expected of a professional; it’s what distinguishes a professional from an employee. And for all those involved in planning, professional or not, the activity itself is based on a set of principles, such as comprehensiveness of view, long-term vision, dealing with causes as well as symptoms and being clear on values and goals and conflicts among them. Today, unfortunately, the pressures of reality are on the side of servility rather than independence. The escape route for planners, adapting to the new situation, is to go technocratic (I will call it technicism)—to make the efficient use of the tools of planning an end in itself, regardless of the purposes or the interests they serve. Technicism is more than just striving for technical competence in the use of tools. Technicism is limiting the activity of planning to the technical, to the means for whatever ends are assigned, abjuring any responsibility for ends. Technicists justify what they do on the grounds that they are just technicians, concerned with finding the best means to ends which are put before them, with whose character they have no concern. Planning has always had three currents within it: a technicist, a reform and a utopian current. In the recent past we have

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witnessed a feeble retreat of planning away from its own reform and utopian origins towards the uncritical service of the powers that be.

Alternatives From the experience of the last fifty years, many planners are increasingly able to see an alternate way of proceeding. Witness the durability of the Planners Network, started in 1975 on a shoestring by Chester Hartman and now an established organization with activist planners in thirty-nine states throughout the United States. So is the birth and vigorous young life of Progressive Planning Magazine. So is the linkage of many progressive planners with activist groups such as those in the Right to the City Alliance. So is the reawakened interest in critical urban theory and radical urbanism, with approaches going beyond even advocacy planning towards insurgent planning, planning for a just city, critical planning and community planning. Planners are getting involved on the side of social justice in issues of racial discrimination and segregation, gender and LGBT issues, immigrant rights, social welfare, displacement from gentrification and mega-projects, environmental justice, citizen participation, community empowerment, community and economic planning that gives distorted priority to financial businesses, homelessness, affordable and public housing, mortgage foreclosures and evictions, infrastructure and land speculation and even squatting.

A New Paradigm of Critical Planning As times have changed, so has planning—partly retreating, but also regrouping and pushing deeper into the sources of the problems it exists to address. I believe a new paradigm for progressive planning—I would describe it as a paradigm of critical planning but other names would do as well—is emerging from this ferment. As a slogan for good planning, it might be represented by: Analyze, Expose, Propose, Politicize. Analyzing means stepping back and analyzing the roots of the particular problem, making clear what forces and actors are responsible for it and what structural conditions bring it about. It may involve a bit of muckraking, showing the political connections or interlocking corporate interests or ethically questionable lines of influence involved in producing the problem being addressed. Structurally, it will frequently involve looking at land ownership patterns and the way an untrammeled market has negative consequences. Issues of property rights underlie 33

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virtually any issue with which planners have to deal, and they need to be made explicit. The mystification of issues of property rights and the assumed superiority of the private sector in terms of efficiency need to be addressed. Exposing is, in Leonie Sandercock’s phrase, making the invisible visible—exposing the underlying structural reality beneath the immediate and surface problems of the day. Critical urban theory is a very useful tool for that purpose. Exposing means communicating the results of the analysis, in comprehensible fashion, to the client, but also making the results public and converting the findings into a weapon in the struggle to achieve the desired goals. Combining a documented, reasoned analysis with the exposé through a bit of muckraking can be very effective. It should almost always include highlighting the distributional consequences of the given project—just as environmental consequences must now often by law be disclosed—perhaps in the form of a social impact statement. The social justice sought can often be made dramatically evident by such a statement. Exposing also means communicating to the group being served the full range of alternatives available, starting with the utopian and working backwards to the strategic and the tactical. It means exposing to them the realities of the plan and the planning process: who the planner is and what biases he or she may be bringing to the process, what the opposition is likely to be, what the consequences of losing may be and what compromises might have to be made. Exposing should both permit informed decision-making on strategy and provide a weapon for the implementation of the plan once strategy is decided on. Proposing means developing a vision. This vision should be neither utopian in nature nor the kind of vision that often comes out of the visioning process—a picture of a hoped-for future divorced from any consideration of the politics and power relationships involved in getting there. Proposing should include a realistic idea of what a strongly hoped-for future might look like and a feasible path to bring it about— pushing the limits of the practical based on a conviction of the rightness of the future. Politicizing means squarely addressing issues of power and showing how the resolution of a particular issue may lead to conflict and may require challenging existing power relationships. By the same token, it means paying attention to the strategies for achieving change, which will involve organizing, grassroots work, education, public relations and

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Changing Times, Changing Planning: Critical Planning Today

a long-term approach to achieving the full potential of feasible results. Critical planning that follows this model is obviously geared to the situation in which the group being served is pressing its plan in the interests of social justice. Any planning project has at best an ambiguous relationship to these interests. But even in an ambiguous situation, the principles of critical planning can still be kept constantly in mind and argued strategically. Principles can be adhered to, and selectivity can be exercised in choosing jobs and assignments. And planners can always act as citizens and join activists and community and grassroots organizations in putting the technical in the service of the just. This article was originally published in the Winter 2010 issue of Progressive Planning Magazine.

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Cracks in the Foundation of Traditional Planning By Barbara Rahder Who is a “real” planner? What makes one person a “real” planner and another person not a “real” planner? How is this decided and by whom? What are the common expectations of students entering planning programs (or possibly staying away from planning programs)? In traditional planning these questions are typically answered in the form of a set of myths that undermine the capacity of planners to engage with significant problems. These key assumptions or myths are: planning is a rational process of decision-making, planning is about providing for the public interest/public good; and planning is, first and foremost, about the use of land or space. These underlying assumptions have direct implications for the role of the planner and, consequently, for planning education. First—and this is what I want to emphasize most—if planning is a rational process of decision-making, it follows that planners can be trained to be objective and rational. They can learn how to construct planning processes that will lead to rational decisions, an idea embedded not only in rational comprehensive planning theory but also in much, though not all, of some popular versions of communicative action theory. It follows that planners can control the process, and therefore decisions, about the future. Finally, this makes “real” planners the experts at planning. Second, if planning is about providing for the public interest or the public good, this implies that: 1) the public interest can be known; 2) planners can be trained to identify the public interest; 3) planners can explain to others what is in the public interest; and therefore 4) “real” planners are experts at knowing and using the public interest as the guiding principle in practice. Third, if planning is, above all, concerned with the use of land or space, then “real” planners are land use planners. These assumptions about planning and the role of planners are embedded in the history of the planning profession. Professions, by their nature, are self-protective entities meant not only to uphold certain standards of performance, but also to protect, promote and define those who are on the inside against those who are on the outside. Professional organizations are a means of legitimating and controlling access to self-identified areas of specialized knowledge 36

Cracks in the Foundation of Traditional Planning

and skill. The planning profession sets the boundaries on who is and who is not a “real” planner, at least in part, as a means of legitimizing an area of expertise we can call our own. Students assume, quite rightfully, that planning education is about acquiring the skills and knowledge to be a professional planner. In fact, the Canadian Institute of Planners (CIP) requires planning programs in Canada to demonstrate how they will do this in order to certify these as professionally recognized planning programs. Every five to ten years, each planning program undergoes an intensive review by CIP to make sure it is meeting its requirements. It is not difficult to satisfy these requirements—all of the accredited planning programs in Canada do this regularly. We offer courses in planning history and theory, in local government and planning law. We provide methods and computer courses. We run studios and workshops so that students have an opportunity to apply their new skills and knowledge in a hands-on way. What is not so easy to address is the common belief of students that planning education should provide them with a clear and incontrovertible body of knowledge, and a set of marketable technical skills, that will allow them to go forth and become experts at shaping our common future. Students’ apprehension about what they are learning—or more likely about what they are not learning—is legendary. In both traditional and innovative planning programs, students commonly express a great deal of anxiety and/or disappointment about not being taught the answers to the problems of planning. It may be worse, however, for those who think they have learned the answers, since they will most likely be bitterly disappointed when they go out into the world and discover that nothing appears to work according to plan. So, what is the problem here? Are planning programs failing to provide adequate education? Are planning students’ expectations unrealistic? Has the planning profession failed to adequately delineate the skills and knowledge needed to become a planner? The answers to all of these questions may well be yes, but the problem is actually much bigger than this. I think we have tended to cling too long to outmoded notions of technical rationality— notions that even in their heyday served the interests of the few rather than the many diverse interests of the so-called public. Problems with Traditional Concepts of Planning One of the easiest ways to describe what is wrong is by way of analogy. It seems to me that we have built the foundations of the planning profession on a floodplain. Viewing planning as a purely technical 37

Barbara Rahder

enterprise probably seemed quite rational and reasonable, at least to the engineers and architects—virtually all white males—who were asserting their dominion over urban form and land use in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While the flood waters rose to threatening levels in the 1960s and 1970s, the foundations of rationalist planning remained firm, however tilted. Despite practical and theoretical critiques from women; from low-income and ethno-racial communities; from urban activists, ecologists and left-wing academics, the notion that planning served some monolithic public interest in a fair and unbiased manner appeared to weather the storm. In the lets-make-a-deal 1980s and the privatization frenzy of the 1990s, there appeared to be little left of these old controversies other than a few high-water marks on the walls of the academy. But here we are at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and there are definite cracks showing in the foundation. Our water is sometimes undrinkable—yet if planners were rational, wouldn’t we set limits on the production and use of toxic chemicals and restrict the size and location of factory farms so that the runoff wouldn’t get into our drinking water? Air pollution is causing unprecedented increases in childhood asthma—if planners were rational, wouldn’t we restrict the use of cars and trucks rather than create more suburbs, more expressways and hence more traffic? We are a tremendously prosperous society with more people than ever before, including increasing numbers of children, homeless on the street—if planners were rational, wouldn’t we make sure that everyone had adequate shelter? I have no doubt that we could solve these problems. But I am just as sure that these issues cannot be addressed by rationalist modes of physical land use planning alone or by planners who continue to see themselves as professionals with unbiased technical expertise. The myths of rationalism, a singular public interest, and the separation of space from society are just no longer viable foundations for our profession. This article was originally published in the Progressive Planning Magazine Reader #1.

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Hudson Yards: A Giant Machine for Accumulating Capital By Samuel Stein When phase one of Hudson Yards, a multi-towered mega-project on the far west side of Manhattan, opened in March 2019, its developers declared it a milestone in New York City history. Many supportive city planners agreed. Perhaps they are right, but not for reasons worth celebrating. Its developers call Hudson Yards “the largest private development in the history of the United States,” and boast that it includes the city’s most expensive office building as well as 14 other high-rises.1 Calling Hudson Yards a private development, however, is a half-truth. Hudson Yards is being built by two firms, Related and Oxford Property Group; while Related is a standard property developer, Oxford is the real estate arm of the Ontario municipal workers’ pension fund. The developers say the project costs $15 billion, but that doesn’t seem to take into account the $5.6 billion in public funds already spent or committed to the project.2 It is financed through a Tax Increment Finance-like scheme that relies on public bonding, it was enabled by a Bloomberg-era rezoning, and it has been in city planners’ sights since at least the 1960s.3 The entire complex is being built atop public infrastructure – the rail yards – and the elaborate platforms that enable its construction are owned by the Metropolitan Transit Authority. It’s definitely not a public development, though. There are no public buildings, and there is certainly no public housing. The main “public space” – a gigantic circular staircase to nowhere the developers like to call “The Social Climber” – sits on private property.4 Hudson Yards is the city’s massive monument to private accumulation, and the ultimate example of profit-driven urban planning in the era of the real estate state.5 No one looked across the Manhattan landscape and said, 1

Rosenberg, Zoe. “Norman Foster’s Hudson Yards Tower Poised to Be NYC’s Most Expensive Office Building.” Curbed New York, January 4, 2017. 2 Fisher, Bridget and Flávia Leite. (2018) “The Cost of New York City’s Hudson Yards Redevelopment Project.” Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis, The New School for Social Research, Working Paper Series 2018-2. 3 Brash, Julian. Bloomberg's New York: Class and Governance in the Luxury City. University of Georgia Press, 2011. 4 Loos, Ted. “A $150 Million Stairway to Nowhere on the Far West Side.” The New York Times, September 14, 2016. 5 Stein, Samuel. Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State. Verso, 2019.

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“You know what this place needs? Eighteen million square feet of highrent office space and luxury housing.” Instead, its planners looked at this stretch of active infrastructure and thought: “Someone could be making a lot more money here.” This is not just the opinion of one leftwing critic; it was the very terms on which the Bloomberg administration promoted the project. Hudson Yards was meant to demonstrate that city planning can create new opportunities for real estate investment, which were then supposed to enrich the city through good jobs, high taxes and smart design. A closer look at those three elements shows that someone is certainly being enriched, but it’s hard to say that it’s the people of New York. Let’s take the design first. The aesthetic is all-glass everything, which, when I last visited in the late afternoon, was pretty rough on the eyes as the sun reflected back at me. But those reflections are telling. From the outside looking in, Hudson Yards reflects the city we know and love, but in grotesque distortion. From the inside, it reflects itself indefinitely, forming an apt metaphor for its designers’ self-satisfaction: a spatial selfie. To many New Yorkers first experiencing Hudson Yards, the site – still under construction – will likely feel like a simulacrum of a neighborhood, rather than the real thing. That feeling is intensified by the ubiquitous architectural renderings of finished future buildings and fancy bystanders. They are placed strategically throughout the site to instantiate visitors with the sense that this mess will someday be complete – but it may not be meant for them. Then there are the taxes. Allowing developers to build a whole new luxury landscape in the middle of Manhattan will certainly generate revenue for the city. This is not, however, a self-financing development, as some of its supporters claim.6 Shortly before phase one of Hudson Yards opened, researchers were able to uncover an additional $1 billion in unreported Hudson Yards subsidies; it’s likely there’s more hiding out there. And as Robert Fitch demonstrated in his 1993 book The Assassination of New York, real estate-friendly planners and politicians have channeled subsidies of various kinds to west side commercial developers for decades, only to bail them out when the market softens.7 While Hudson Yards may 6 Fisher, Bridget. (2015) “The Myth of Self-Financing: The Trade-Offs Behind the Hudson Yards Redevelopment Project.” Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis and Department of Economics, The New School for Social Research, Working Paper Series 2015-4. 7 Fitch, Robert. The Assassination of New York. Verso, 1993.

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Hudson Yards: A Giant Machine for Accumulating Capital

soon be a net revenue generator, there’s no guarantee that it will be into the future. Finally, there are the jobs, perhaps the most maddening aspect of this project. Without a doubt, the complex construction of Hudson Yards has employed thousands of workers, and its initial public approval was heartily endorsed by the building trades unions – historically a key part of the city’s “growth machine.”8 Even now, most of the people there on a daily basis are building trades workers. The first phase of the project was built by union workers, with all the associated wages, benefits and safety protections that go along with a Project Labor Agreement. For the next phase, however, the developers tried to go “open shop,” or hire a combination of union and non-union contractors to break the solidarity between locals. For decades, that would have been unthinkable: a massive, heavily financed, technically complex project in the heart of Manhattan would always be built by union workers. The building trades’ union density has since declined, however, and Hudson Yards’ developers decided that their project might be big enough to break the unions.9 For a while, the various building trades locals held out and refused to make individual deals with the developer. Pickets and demonstrations were a regular feature of daily life on the construction site. Then one union broke: the carpenters split off and signed their own contract. There may have been more to this deal than a desire for jobs. It turns out Ontario municipal workers weren’t the only union whose collective capital (in the form of pension funds) was sunk into Hudson Yards; the national carpenters union was an investor, too, and they sided with the project’s developers over the city’s labor movement.10 Since then, several unions tried to hold the line against union busting, but national leaders challenged local solidarity. One of the strongest unions, the Ironworkers Local 46, refused to cross picket lines and work on the next phase of the project, but the union’s DC-based leadership stepped in, removed local president Terry Moore, and told the members

8

Logan, John R., and Harvey Luskin Molotch. Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place. University of California Press, 1987. 9 Chafin, Joshua. “The Brawl Over the Way New York Is Built.” Financial Times, January 16, 2019. 10 Geiger, Daniel. “Related, Carpenters’ Union Strike Deal at Hudson Yards.” Crain’s New York Business, August 7, 2018.

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to work the job.11 Many workers refused to break ranks, but the site’s developers – one of which, it’s worth repeating, is essentially a union pension fund – are waging an all-out attack on union density in New York City. A labor peace agreement was eventually signed, but it was clearly on the developer’s terms as it continued to allow non-union contractors on the site.12 Jobs are being created, but in the process the primary vehicle for economic security is being threatened. The modernist architect Le Corbusier called buildings “machines for living in.” Hudson Yards will be that for some, but for many more it will be a machine for investing in. Given the particulars of its funding and construction, this machine ingests labor’s capital, chews up unions, and spits out profits. Some heralded its opening as the next great chapter for New York City. Let us work instead to ensure that it is something else: the final page of New York’s long, sad chapter of planning for endless real estate accumulation. This is a slightly revised version of an article that appeared in the March 15, 2019 edition of The Guardian under the headline, “Forget ‘Machine For Living In’ – Hudson Yards Is A Machine For Investing In,” and is printed here with permission.

11

Goldenberg, Sally. “Labor Divide Deepens In Ongoing Battle with Real Estate at Hudson Yards.” Politico New York, February 20, 2019. 12 Geiger, Daniel. “Hudson Yards Deal Ends Nastiest Fight in NYC Real Estate.” Crain’s New York Business, March 6, 2019.

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CHAPTER 2: RESISTANCE AND ALTERNATIVES Decolonial Planning By Annette Koh Decolonizing planning requires that we take a long look at how planning’s project of making things better is and has always been subjective and rooted in exploitation. Our concepts of the public good and collective improvement are anchored in the history of colonial dispossession. In North America, European ideas about property and land rights allowed for the expulsion of indigenous peoples in the name of progress — with enclosure and privatization going hand in hand with public investment. Founding mythologies such as Thomas Jefferson’s yeoman farmer and the sturdy pioneer turning wilderness into productive farms valorized “improvement” as defined by colonial frameworks of capitalism and justified the displacement of those who had not properly utilized land by these imported standards. Fences and wheat signified “worthy” improvement, while relational knowledge of place, season, and kinship were invisible. Although disavowed today, urban renewal and the wholescale demolition of working class communities of color in the name of progress relied on the same disregard for social value. In present day discussions about the importance of activating “underutilized” public parks, planning yet again fails to see what already exists there in the rush to make spaces attractive to outside interests. The ease with which planners toss around terms such as “destination” and “world class” [fill in the blank] suggests we prioritize the tourist’s gaze and filling the investor’s pockets. This inability to recognize local meanings of place occurs even when there are no language barriers or cultural divides. Randolph Hester’s insightful study of the seaside town of Manteo, North Carolina revealed how townspeople knew that visitors would see the their “sacred places” only as ugly and ripe for redevelopment — a homely park, a gravel lot.1 1

R. T Hester. “Sacred Structures and Everyday Life: A Return to Manteo, South

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Most of these beloved places generated little economic profit, held no attraction for tourists, and no official “historic” value to be preserved. Not every park needs to be upgraded into an Instagram-worthy location. If we focus on making places appealing to outsiders, we run the risk of disregarding everyday needs and existing uses. The native peoples of North America did not benefit when the New World became a “destination” for entrepreneurial types. Decolonizing planning requires radical restructuring of finance, government, and our relationship with for-profit ventures. The 2016 documentary film Colonization Road is named for the historical and still existing physical infrastructure that Canadian governments built to deliberately facilitate colonization of the interior by white settlers. American boosters for the 19th century speculative real estate boom relied on the publicly subsidized construction of the transcontinental railroads and the dispossession of indigenous peoples from their lands through sanctioned wars and federal laws such as the Homestead Act. Transportation infrastructure was built to speed the exploitation of resources and make land into subdivisions to be advertised and sold. Urban highway construction in the 20th century, now the object of planning disdain, accomplished the rise in property values that Transit Oriented Development advocates now offer as a sure benefit. Today, planners grumble about NIMBYs who reject every rail line and every bike lane. But residents who ask “who is this for?” are asking an essential question, especially when new infrastructure is touted as a spur to economic development. Understanding planning through a historical and decolonial critique makes it evident that even if the designs have changed from car-centric sprawl to walkable New Urbanism, the logic remains the same. The logic of urban planning claims both the public good and private profit. Tools such as tax increment financing and density bonuses are intended to stitch together private property with public benefit. Whether it is antebellum era speculators vying for rail routes or 21st century cities scrambling for Amazon’s second headquarters, the definitions of public good are promoting financial schemes that profit a few. If we confront the ways that colonization persists in planning’s conceptual frames, we stand a better chance of disentangling our field from the harms we have done in the name of progress. In order to esCarolina.” In Dwelling, Seeing, and Designing: Toward a Phenomenological Ecology. (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993).

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Decolonial Planning cape from business as usual, we need to ground our matrix of value outside of extractive frames. In an article I wrote with Dr. Konia Freitas, an urban planner and director of the Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, we wrote that the “dominant Western spatial imaginary defines control over land primarily as the power to exclude.”2 A decolonial spatial imaginary would reject exclusion as the organizing principle. Decolonizing planning is essential for spatial justice — for public spaces open to all and housing accessible to the poorest. I began to learn about Native Hawaiian relationships to aina (usually translated as “land”) in my studies in Honolulu. In Hawaii, a complex worldview and set of governing practices placed primacy on mutuality and livelihoods. It is far from my place to attempt to define aina, but for some insights we can look at works such as Dana Naone Hall’s Life of the Land or Jonathan Osorio’s I Ulu i Ka ʻāina.34 As a newcomer to Hawai‘i, I found myself trying to merge planning systems with indigenous concepts, to see how I might fit into a web of relationships rather than a system of codes and finance. I learned a whole different approach to time and the rigid separation of past, present and future that is part of planning orthodoxy. “ ka wā a ua, i ka wā a o e” is a Native Hawaiian proverb that can be translated as “The future is in the past.” I’ve learned from the Ngāi Tūhoe’s insistence that treaty settlement with the government of New Zealand restores their stewardship of the Te Urewera region, but that Māori stewardship of land is much different from ownership of property and should not be described as ownership. Decolonizing planning is not just a critical lens or a pointed metaphor. It is a project with practical aims. Decolonizing planning would reconstruct legal and regulatory regimes, redefine what we mean by “highest and best use.” It would make stewardship rather than ownership the most valuable relationship to land. It would foreground use rights and livelihoods, rather than enforce trespassing laws. I admit that I am not entirely sure how one goes about decolonizing a county planning department, but the head of Hawai‘i County’s planning de2 Annette Koh, and Konia Freitas, “Is Honolulu a Hawaiian Place? Decolonizing Cities and the Redefinition of Spatial Legitimacy.” Planning Theory & Practice, 19, 2 (2018): 254–288. 3 Dana Nãone Hall. Life of the Land: Articulations of a Native Writer. (Honolulu: Ai Pohaku Press, 2017). 4 Jonathan Osorio. I Ulu i Ka ʻāina. Hawaiʻinuiākea Sc ool of Hawaiian Knowledge. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013).

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partment came to our Decolonizing Cities symposium in November 2018 and asked that very question. Planners at the Department of Hawaiian Homelands and in other community organizations are also figuring out how to sustain people’s connection to the ‘aina by making operating expenses a self-generating fund that reinvests in local needs. There is no need for the jet-setting urbanist flying from symposium to symposium to offer a list of ten things to decolonize your city. The process is necessarily site-specific. Who are the native peoples? What are their philosophies of land? What enabling laws or governing bodies must be created or changed to make that worldview part of planning? It might be something like the Te Aranga Design Principles adopted in Aotearoa/New Zealand, in which Māori cultural values set the parameters, process, and outcomes for urban design.5 This goes far beyond aesthetic elements to encompass relational obligations, physical access and cultural norms. Who has been harmed by Western conceptions of improvement and progress, and how can we make restitution to them today? If planning has blotted out native meanings in the past, then planners today need to make space for living and evolving native presence. Decolonization is a reckoning with past injustices, but it must go beyond “truth and reconciliation” apologia and should not fix indigenous cultures in stone, frozen in the past. Decolonial planning is a path forward into reconfiguring planning institutions and logics so as to escape our field’s compulsion to prioritize property values over people’s needs. Decolonizing planning is both a desired outcome and a process for addressing planning’s dangerous tendency to impose a singular vision on the world around us. This article was originally published on Progressive City on March 4, 2019.

5

“Auckland Design Manual Te Aranga Principles,” Auckland Design Manual, http://www.aucklanddesignmanual.co.nz/design-subjects/maoridesign/te_aranga_principles.

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Resistance and Planning: Puerto Rico and Beyond By Edwin R. Quiles Rodríguez Given the present crisis, imagining an alternative city requires a combination of critical analysis and imagination. It requires that we have one foot on the street, and that we get lost in the alleyways inside the city. It requires a mix of critical analysis and imagination joined with a commitment to collective action. It requires participating in a continuous dialog with alternative views and the projects leading to change. It involves working creatively with the resources available, respecting diversity, dignity, and the natural and built environments. For those of us who make the city by living, creating, thinking about, or appropriating places, we need to put our ears to the earth, be aware of the projects that emerge and come together among citizens and that, although they are at the individual or local scale, can have repercussions for the development of projects at national and even planetary scales. Only then can we, as professionals and in solidarity, join this creative mass that strives for a more dignified, livable, accessible, democratic and sustainable city and nation. When proposals emerge through a participatory process from within community spaces, they are powerful tools to the extent that they promote and facilitate the insertion of the disadvantaged in decision-making and allow them to put into practice their thoughts and ideas, and—why not?—their dreams. We need urban planning with a broad vision, capable of providing the networks and infrastructure that allow for local development, an urban planning capable of consolidating both the macro environmental structure and the development of structures at the community scale. All of this should be framed in the context of sustainability that responds to other urgent problems, such as social and energy crises and the decline in urban centers, while it fulfills the needs for the nation’s growth and development. The main responsibility of urban planning, according to Jordi Borja from Catalonia, is to generate public space: “… polyvalent functional space that connects places, that organizes the relations between them, provides continuities and points of reference, urban landmarks and protective environments, whose significant strength transcends its apparent functions.”1 When it does this it performs an 1

Jordi Borja. “La ciudad conquistada.” Café de las ciudades, 1, 2 (2002).

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eminently organizational and political function. It can facilitate or hinder daily life. It can serve to bury contradictions and conflicts, silence divergent lifestyles and the dissident ways that urban space is appropriated. Or it can be a tool for the cultures and ways of life that are seldom or never considered in decision making processes or genuinely contemplated. It can control and dominate subaltern populations, or it can detonate processes of change.

Planning of Resistance This is the practice of urban planning that I call planning “of resistance.” It is critical of the interests of the few when they prevail over the majority, and the ways in which they limit the right to the city for others. Urban planning of resistance supports the struggles of alternative groups that defend their communities, land, access to urban space, and counterhegemonic projects. I am convinced that social and political change has an impact in urban space, whether it is evident or not, and that urban planning should make this evident. It is crucial to start thinking about this as a new specialization that accompanies the processes of change, recognizing that it is going to take time, trial and error, and reflection. Creativity and imagination are an essential part of change in the new, contested city. Without a doubt the economic, social, political, environmental and ethical crises that surround and live within us have an important impact on and are intensified in cities. This happens due to the agglomeration of people, places and processes, and the complexity of their interactions. Examples of how the crisis manifests itself in the urban environment are: the enclosure of neighborhoods and the proliferation of surveillance and fear; the exclusion and institutional violence against people who use the city in different ways – for example, to protest; the abundance of non-spaces, “places for nobody,” spaces that have no identity and are impossible for any social group to appropriate; the decline of places for production and work and the rise in the number of shopping centers; the occupation of land by homeless people and growth of improvised shelters; the privatization and commodification of public space; the surplus of expensive housing unlikely to be sold; and the lack of opportunities for low-income people to meet their needs for housing. Without wanting or pretending to say all that needs to be said, I would add to this list: the lack of sustainability in the models for urbanization and development in sensitive areas that are ecologically

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important and that should be preserved, the displacement of communities to make way for speculative redevelopment for the elite; poorly functioning physical infrastructure and inefficient social infrastructure and public services; unstable employment, underemployment and informality; the deterioration of buildings and urban centers and the inability of political institutions to contain the decay; the huge decline in agricultural land due to urban uses and consequently the increasing dependence on imported products; population loss; abysmal social inequality, and the obstinate opposition of real estate capital to land use planning at the national scale to govern urban regions.

Developers Shape Growth Facing a scarcity of developable urban land, capital increasingly takes over land in the suburban peripheries that have been occupied for long periods by low-income communities. Promoters, also known as developers, increasingly define the growth patterns of the city, the permitted uses and users, and the limits of acceptable behavior. Currently, citizens in our country find that many of the things they have depended on are under question, or have simply been lost. We are being invaded and many sudden changes are being imposed on us on different fronts. In response to these changes we do not always have an answer or immediate option, nor the organizational capacity to fight back. The worst thing is that within the current state of affairs there is no light at the end of the tunnel given the increasing loss of citizen power and its concentration in the political apparatus. To put this in the context of the economy, it should be noted that we are experiencing a recoil from the 12.4% unemployment at the beginning of the recession, between the fiscal years 2007 and 2012.2 By March 2014, unemployment was at 14.7%, 0.5% more than in the same month in 2013. Between May of 2013 and May of 2014, the labor force was reduced by 13,000 people.3 Our economy is not based on production; it depends largely on governmental transfers, public indebtedness, and the huge informal sector. It is too early to evaluate the impact of the new economic and administrative policies regarding the development of the country and land use and management patterns, although we can recognize that the sacrifice is always greater for disadvantaged communities. In any 2 3

Planning Board. “Economic report to the Governor of Puerto Rico,” (2012). Puerto Rico Department of Labor and Human Resources.

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case, the struggle of communities must be sustained in order to protect the rights they have won and to keep at bay the capitalist interests that threaten them.

Resistance and Alternatives

Facing the increasing loss of control over the socio-spatial environment, several groups have emerged to discuss and propose different ways of using, looking at, forecasting, debating, building and inhabiting the city, and using urban space to achieve social and political goals. These groups defend the right to maintain their ancestral communities, to use public space in ways they find necessary and acceptable, to satisfy their real needs as they define them, and to participate in decision-making. Playing the game of protest and proposal, they create innovative forms of communication and participation, and they also make proposals that should be studied in depth. They use performance, music, design, community radio, encampments to occupy and other methods to create and defend physical spaces of struggle. How else do these protest and alternative movements manifest themselves? How do they redefine the experience of making and living in the city? Today the street is the most important site for these struggles. Appropriating the street as a political space and space of affirmation is an act of resistance in itself. There, protests, proposals and alternative visions become visible and confront the established order. According to Saskia Sassen, the street is where “… those who lack power, those who are disadvantaged, marginalized, and minorities facing discrimination, can gain a presence in global cities …” These practices make possible: “… the creation of new types of political subjects that do not need to enter the formal political system.”4 The appropriation of public space is fundamental because it helps to legitimize and make evident the confrontation and the alternative viewpoint. It transforms spaces in a way that, although possibly ephemeral, can necessarily influence the construction of collective identities and consolidate the political forces of change. Protests, marches, and street performances confront authority and at the same time the participants face alternative messages, analysis, and proposals. These are ways to use the environment as a stage, screen and curtain, to appropriate and turn it into an educational space of convergence, and to promote changes that change relations of power. 4

Saskia Sassen. La ciudad global. (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1999).

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Policies that reclaim the streets support and complement other strategies of negotiation strategies and collective affirmations to defend our rights. Communities threatened by displacement, university students, groups for global justice, the disadvantaged, and those with critical views seek not only to protest but to seek opportunities to negotiate and put forth proposals. In the case of communities threatened with displacement, they prepare counterproposals that guarantee their right to stay, balance the growing needs of the city with those of their communities, allowing new construction to coexist with the preservation and revitalization of the elements that bring identity, facilitate, and give continuity to life in the community. This is a way to be part of the city on terms that are acceptable to everybody. In this context, urban design as an instrument of negotiation amplifies, like a metaphoric loudspeaker, the voice of the citizen. Among the proposals coming out of resistance – to mention only a few – we find self-management projects that sometimes emerge from protests and that question the current development model and propose that it be more equitable and solidary. This includes production and consumption cooperatives, barter and fair trade including agricultural markets in public squares and La Chiwinha5. There are also educational art projects in public spaces such as Beta Local that enhance the creation of tools that give people access to technology, promote autonomy and make possible the participation of all in the construction of another, better country that is possible. Other educational projects are the Secundaria Montessori de Puerto Rico, Estancia Montessori and Nuestra Escuela, that work with the concepts of education as liberation that, following Paolo Freire, question the banking model of traditional education and transform the students into co-creators of the educational process. Others, like Casa Pueblo, Ciudadanos del Karso and Coalición ProCorredor Ecológico del Noreste, work to raise awareness about the defense and management of the environment and natural resources and the need for sustainable development. All over the country low-impact organic agricultural projects such as Boricua are developing, most of them initiated by young people in rural areas and urban neighborhoods like the communities of Caño de Martín Peña, under the guidance of the ENLACE projects and the Compañía para el Desarrollo Integral de la Península de Cantera. In other areas, projects like Crearte encourage young people and 5

Chiwinha is an Aymara word for gathering place.

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children to use their creative capacity to interrogate, rethink and recreate their environment. That same intention to question, confront reality and promote dialogue in public spaces also moves many other theater and street performance groups, among them Papel Machete, Jóvenes del 98 and Agua, Sol y Sereno. We also see how citizen groups transform places of exile into projects that develop spaces of convergence in sites like the street of Loíza, and others fight to rescue their history and to keep people active and in their communities. For their part, the young people of the Capetillo neighborhood occupied an abandoned greenhouse to create a garden and community space, and in so doing avoided the erosion of their land, thus replacing the image of decay for one of renewal, confronting control and planning from outside with the development of community spaces. The list is very long and many are outside my knowledge. In this necessary task of preserving and strengthening individual and collective memory and identity, diverse groups work to reclaim the places and structures whose study and conservation allow for the rewriting of their histories from the point of view of the new subjects. Among others, it is worth mentioning the citizen groups that have worked to preserve the sites of important historical events, like the Ponce massacre, several tobacco stores in Comerío and Cayey, an old school in Jayuya, the former post office of Guánica, the Hacienda El Molino in Toa Alta, the remains of “royal roads” in Guavate and the house of Defilló, related to the family of Pablo Casals in Mayagüez. I would also mention the proposal to change the name of streets and places to transform their symbolic power and acknowledge the history that we have not yet finished writing. An example of the latter is the proposal to change the name of Brumbaugh Street in Río Piedras to De los Mártires because it was where two members of the Partido Nacionalista (Nationalist Party) were murdered. Along this same line of thinking, I propose to change the name of Ponce de León Avenue, named after a slaveowner and conqueror of indigenous people, to remember Dr. Gilberto Concepción de Gracias or to Felisa Rincón de Gautier, two important figures in the development of San Juan. The reclamation of public space as a place for all has supported several important initiatives. Amongst them is the project Desayuno Calle, a banquet to share food and conversation in unused public spaces, and various cycling projects like La Masa, whose main objective is to reclaim the right to inhabit the city in diverse ways. Other processes, such as the recent strike by the students of the University of Puerto Rico and the Foro Social de Puerto Rico show different ways of 52

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doing politics—more participatory and democratic—that, as we have seen, have clear consequences for the way that we appropriate and use public space and create places of convergence. Other more recent projects such as Cinema Paradiso and Casa Taft 169 in Santurce present proposals to recover abandoned places, create cultural spaces and spaces for citizen engagement. The cinema project has served as a catalyst and helped to revive the immediately surrounding area. Other citizen groups that build spaces of community autonomy are: the communities of the Parcelas Hill Brothers and the Parcelas Falú in Río Piedras and Alto del Cabro in Sarturce, which decided to prepare their own design proposals to create a park that takes into account their own, self-defined needs. Thus they sought to be the subjects and not simply the objects of the project. In this kind of collective action, many citizen groups stand out: Consejo Vecinal de Río Piedras, the communities of Mainé and Los Filtros de Guaynabo, Barriada Morales de Caguas, Villa Caridad de Carolina and Villa del Sol in Toa Baja. In the elaboration of these proposals for change, community groups have on numerous occasions counted on advice from professional allies and the old Community Design Workshop of the School of Architecture (Taller de Diseño Comunitario de la Escuela de Arquitectura). I would include in this list other forms of land tenure such as the Community Land Trust (Fidecomiso de Tierras) of the communities of Caño de Martín Peña and the proposals to create alternative communities where other forms of collective and personal relationships, of spirituality, production and consumption, are being practiced. An example of the former is El Llamado del Caracol, an alternative cultural and spiritual event. Although ephemeral – it lasts only one weekend – this proposal presents an opportunity to experiment and put into practice concepts relating to coexistence and to change paradigms in areas like nutrition, care of the physical and spiritual body, sustainability, construction, and the management of community spaces. This activity takes place for a few days—only a fleeting moment—but it is enough time to get to know these new spaces up close and see them as an everyday possibility. Protests and initiatives to create projects and spaces of liberation where the right to live with dignity can be exercised are not limited to the scale of the city as a whole. It is important that they also include the spaces of daily life. For example, we need new forms of collective housing based on the possibility of sharing some space among families while safeguarding the privacy of intimate spaces. The proposals to create places to live with diverse and divergent 53

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lifestyles require the design of new spaces or the transformation of existing ones to meet functional needs, and the creation of new forms of symbolic representation and appropriation of space. These approaches, or let’s call them “new urban milestones,” are essential goals in this necessary process to create places that are different from the unsustainable, consumerist and inequitable urban model that has been imposed on us. In addition to the projects already mentioned, I think of innovations like the paper “lamps” that we proposed and that several artists and the children of the community of El Caño made to symbolically recall their heritage and challenge the theft of the originals by using a gesture of collective affirmation. I would like to reaffirm the importance of transforming the places of nobody into places of social life and celebration. Besides the previously mentioned projects of Desayuno Calle and Cinema Paradiso, examples of places of social life are street celebrations like the Festival de la Calle Loíza, the Fiestas de Cruz, and the murals that brighten up the blind and silent walls of the city. There are other intangible ways of highlighting walls, places and pavements, for example with smells and sounds and with the presence of bodies. Regarding the latter, what comes to mind is the space around the Dos Hermanos bridge, used by the women’s group 32 x Oscar to publicly say “enough” and to demand an end the ignominy and incarceration of the Puerto Rican political prisoner. The weekly ritual performed in the same place transcends the transitoriness of the place that is now associated with them and their discourse. Their bodies may or may not be in the place, but their presence and message remain and are reinforced every time that they return. These sites are not only marks and incisions that celebrate otherness and the construction of other, better and possible worlds. They are also a reflection of the reality that we need to abolish. I am referring, for example, to buildings with empty apartments because the people that need housing can’t afford them. I also think of plazas such as La Convalecencia in Río Piedras where use is restricted and continually monitored by the representatives of “law and order” for fear of the people; I think of the homeless encampments and remember the abandoned lots, and the decay of urban centers such as in Río Piedras, a product of speculation and government corruption.

Making The City We Aspire To This is an urgent collective task: make the city and life that we aspire to, the city full of opportunities for coming together, reciprocity, good 54

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living, good government, fair and humane economic development, affordable housing, inclusive spirituality, integrated community development, and respect for diversity. It is a labor of much patience whose triumphs and failures are manifest one way or another in the space that we inhabit. This is well known by some community groups such as those in the neighborhood of Antonsanti Street in Santurce, who, despite not having prevailed in their struggle against displacement, marked the city with signs that, although portable and ephemeral, left indelible traces in the collective memory about the possibility of confronting the imposition of ideas with creative acts of disobedience. How can architects and planners be involved in this process of creating a new city, new specializations and new ways of appropriating public space? They can be professionals that join and advise the protest movement and the development of comprehensive proposals, identifying specific needs, the culture of space and the availability of resources; they can be involved in the formulation of counterproposals or alternative design proposals when projects are not acceptable to the citizens. They can develop inclusive design processes that allow people to be part of the decision-making process; design places that can be appropriated and used in multiple ways, and create opportunities for citizens to acquire the language and tools that expand their knowledge and capacity to engage in the development processes and management of land. The task of the environmental designer is to stimulate critical observation and dialogue with the citizens, and reveal the hidden histories about the contribution of groups that have been made invisible in the struggles for land and the production of space. Again, this professional practice linked to the processes of social and political transformation can be nothing less than a new form of protagonistic citizenship. It is based on self-management, a critical perspective, and compromise. Only then this mass of people “on foot” can recover, claim and appropriate space from which they can exercise power in and on their daily lives. According to David Harvey: “… as long as the working class does not learn to confront the bourgeois capacity to dominate and produce space, to shape a new geography of production and social relations, they will always play from a position of weakness rather than strength.6 6

Raúl Zibechi .“Autonomías y Anticipaciones, América Latina en movimiento.” Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Programa Democracia y

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To the neoliberal project, urban space is key for the maintenance of global economic networks. It is where knowledge, people, resources, and opportunities are concentrated. Precisely because of this, many of the proposals and struggles for change occur in the cities. This is why control of the social production of space becomes of central importance.7 This is why Jordi Borja says that: “… it should be assumed that public space is a political space, for the formation and expression of the collective will. It is the space of representation, but also of conflict.”8 None of this should underestimate the processes of change in rural areas that are a product of the defense, revaluation and application of the knowledge and ancestral cultural practices closely linked to Mother Earth and sustainable development. Again, the urban planning of resistance should be aware and involved in the struggles on the streets as well as in the processes of everyday life, with one foot on the avenue and the other getting lost in the alleys and processes of the inner city. This involves incorporating and contributing to the construction of transformative political discourses and practices. It should seek to make visible the protest movements that struggle for land and resist oppression; it should also involve the everyday actions carried out by anonymous people who do not gain attention in the media. I believe that the urban planning of protest and resistance is a small-scale design project and as such does not favor the big demiurgic plans imposed by those “who know” and decide for those who “do not know.” By working with people within their immediate realities they promote the taking of control, an awareness that can serve to detonate creative processes that, in the long term, can enhance their power and thus contribute to social transformation. We cannot build other possible worlds if we do not free cities of the absolute and controlling power of capitalism, if we do not collectively build spaces of participation and emancipation that enhance, facilitate and conspire to institute resistance, creativity, dialogue, equality, exchanges among equals, and justice and solidarity as a way of life. All of these go along with new spaces, which, according to Raúl Zibechi, are flexible, changing, autonomous, rebellious, creative, integrated and Transformación Global, 191 (2007). Alessandra Oliivi. “La política de los lugares: prácticas de resistencia en la ciudad contemporánea.” Universidad Internacional de Andalucia, ayp.unia.es/dmdocuments/scyt3_com09.pdf. 8 Jordi Borja. “La ciudad conquistada.” Café de las ciudades, 1, 2 (2002). 7

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integrating diversity, multifunctional, without fixed structures separated from daily life, without stable and consolidated forms of the division of labor, spaces that enable the capacity for action among the oppressed.9 Ecuador’s former president Rafael Correa (and many others as well) said, “We are not in an era of change, but in a change of era.” We urgently need to create new spaces and new metaphors to represent the images of these new processes and projects, to make possible the construction of the new city, that other world that we need to create from scratch. A city that not only facilitates and stimulates alternative proposals but also serves to symbolically represent the processes and projects of change. Space is neither neutral nor merely a functional container; it is also a means of expression through which symbols are constructed. It can support the consolidation of the hierarchical relations of domination and exploitation or it can reinforce the construction of citizen power and facilitate the process of decolonization where respect for diversity, the right to happiness, and a good life rule. This is a revised and ex anded version of an article ublis ed in Claridad’s En Rojo supplement. This article was originally published in 80 Grados on June 27, 2014, and was translated for this book in February 2019 by José Alavez.

9

Leo y Javier Encina Ramos. “UNILCO-Espacio Nómada: Arquitectura y urbanismo participativos desde las resistencias populares de las ciudades hambrunas de Argentina,” http://ilusionismosocial.org/pluginfile.php/275/mod_resource/content/ 7/ARQUITECTURA%20Y%20URBANISMO.pdf.

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Bottom-up Planning: Lessons from Latin America’s Third Left By Marie Kennedy and Chris Tilly For the last sixty years, two major versions of the left dominated the progressive end of Latin America’s political spectrum. One has been armed guerilla movements, inspired by the Cuban revolution, but now largely extinct (with Colombia as the main exception). The other has been mass populist movements linked by patronage or party discipline to left or center-left electoral parties. Both varieties have declined, though left and center-left parties enjoyed a temporary upsurge in the 2000s. But both persist, and the 2018 triumph of center-left populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador testifies to the continued vitality of the electoral variety. Both of these lefts have helped make positive changes in Latin America—challenging inequality, attacking illiteracy, improving services to the poor, redistributing land, and mobilizing ordinary people to defend their rights. But neither has had a strong tradition of bottom-up planning. The military model at the core of the guerilla insurgencies and the model of charismatic leadership at the core of electoral leftism are centralized, top-down models—structures that can represent the interests of poor majorities, but usually without directly involving them in the decisions that affect their lives. But there is a third left stirring in Latin America. Like the other two, it makes demands for economic justice and human rights. But even more centrally, it strives for the transformation of people—“selfmanagement, independent thought, and self-construction,” in the words of social psychologist Maiqui Pixton, who works with housing cooperatives in Buenos Aires. The third left avows autonomy from the state rather than pursuing state power and promotes bottom-up decision-making. Latin America’s third left has received far less attention in Northern media than the first two. But its accomplishments hold important lessons for North Americans trying to carry out progressive planning within hostile policy environments.

The Rise of Autonomy

The boundaries of this third left are debatable. We would include Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), Argentina’s autonomista current of workplace and community organizations, and Mexico’s Zapatista movement, as well as varied other groups in just about every 58

Marie Kennedy and Chris Tilly

country in Latin America (we wrote about many of these movements in Progressive Planning Magazine Nos. 154, 156, 160, 164, and 167). The military dictatorships and authoritarian regimes that dominated the area in the 1980s have given way to competitive elections and relative freedom to dissent, with some exceptions. At the same time, U.S.-backed neoliberal policies of free trade, balanced budgets, privatization, and reduced government intervention in the economy continue to fuel the “incredible shrinking state”. The two older lefts emphasized making demands on the state with the goal of taking it over. But in the context of states with shrunken capacity, this approach falls short. The third left instead pursues autonomy—still making demands on the state, but with much more focus on organizing people to do things for themselves. This includes economic, political, and cultural autonomy. In the economic sphere, MST settlements in Brazil farm previously unused agricultural land they have occupied. In Argentina workers take over and run bankrupt enterprises. And Mexico’s Zapatistas carry out subsistence agriculture as well as producing fair trade coffee and indigenous crafts for sale. All seek to link scattered productive projects into a broader “social economy” prioritizing human needs rather than profits. In many cases, environmental sustainability is part of the package: for example, the Zapatistas grow organic coffee and deploy a corps of agroecology advisors to help peasants farm sustainably. Political autonomy means independence from the state and political parties. The degree of independence varies. As Lula wound up his successful 2002 run for the Brazilian presidency, MST organizer Jonas da Silva in 2002 told us, “We are critical of Lula, but we’re campaigning for him. What matters is not the election, but democratizing the media and breaking up the large land-holdings.” When Lula won the MST challenged him with an accelerated program of land occupations. In contrast, the Zapatistas refused to support Mexico’s López Obrador in his multiple campaigns for president, arguing that his program simply puts a kinder face on a brutal system. The MST demands government funding to buy agricultural inputs and create community infrastructure; the Zapatistas refuse all government aid (but “tax” the government and NGOs for projects they carry out on Zapatista turf). Other organizations walk a fine line: for example, Argentina’s Unemployed Workers’ Movement (MTD) of La Matanza seeks government funds for projects, but refuses the patronage-linked welfare checks that have “destroyed many organizations,” in the words of activist Soledad (who prefers to be identified only by her first name). All of these 59

Bottom-up Planning: Lessons from Latin America’s Third Left

A member of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Maranhão, northeast Brazil, explains that they are occupying this site to demand land to establish a selfsufficient farming community. Photo by Marie Kennedy.

organizations couple building broad alliances with maintaining independent politics, including the right to criticize any party as well as the state itself. To build cultural autonomy, Latin America’s third left places enormous emphasis on education. The MST and the Zapatistas both take over the schools in their communities, train their own teachers, and implement their own curriculum. Autonomista workplace and community organizations in Argentina typically require members to take classes in principles of cooperativism, and quite a few of the workerrun businesses host community cultural centers. Activists from Haiti to Chile use low-powered, local FM radio stations to promote discussions about social justice and give voice to the voiceless.

Bottom-up Planning

In addition to autonomy, the other axis of Latin America’s new left is horizontalidad, a word that translates rather poorly as “horizontalism”—in contrast with the top-down verticalismo that continues to characterize much left activity in Latin America (and elsewhere). This means “having everybody decide,” says Argentine social psychologist/activist Pixton. The specifics vary. The Zapatistas use village-wide meetings to decide local issues, rotate regional leaders, and use intensive consultation to reach movement-wide decisions. The MST uses a 60

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more traditional set of pyramidal elected councils (with some less traditional aspects, such as mandating an equal number of women and men representatives at every level). Argentina’s worker-run companies typically combine frequent workplace-wide assemblies with an elected management council that has executive powers. Housing cooperatives in Argentina bring together coop members and skilled professionals (architects, psychologists, and others) in participatory design and planning. But in every case these organizations are committed to broad participation, bottom-up decision-making, and transparent governance. This is participatory planning in practice, with plenty of imperfections but a genuine effort to shift power downward, and a goal of empowering people to move beyond the immediate project to tackle other issues in their lives. Again, education is a key ingredient: activists seek to give people the tools to participate meaningfully—to break dependency and transform themselves into decision-makers. Horizontalidad is an ongoing experiment. According to Soledad, “When a small group of us was dreaming about a community center, we had a lot of prejudices. We doubted that the community would accept the values and principles that we had agreed on. But we were wrong—the community was able to contribute.” She laughed, “When we formed the ‘educational community’ to govern our day care center, we feared that the parents wouldn’t speak up. The other day, one of the mothers said, ‘Now, you can’t get us to shut up, can you?’” Autonomy and horizontalidad complement each other. Fewer strings leading to the economic and political centers of power means more room for input from people at the base. On the flip side, autonomy is a hard road, and mass participation increases the chance of success. “None of us alone is as good as all of us together,” declared Soledad, quoting a movement slogan.

Lessons for the North

Is the idea of transferring some of this third left energy to the United States and Canada just a pipe dream? In fact, many of the ingredients are present in the North as well. Traditions of autonomy and participation in the United States and Canada extend back to early cooperative movements and the New England town meeting. These traditions enjoyed a revival in the 1960s and 1970s in settings ranging from food coops to the Black liberation movement, and activists and organizations with roots in that seedbed are still around. We may not have laws that endorse expropriation of land or factories not being put to productive use, as in Brazil and Argentina, but eminent domain laws— 61

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much under attack for misuse on behalf of large corporations and developers—embody the principle that the public can take property for the social good. And one hidden asset is millions of Latin American immigrants who have been exposed to the third left in their home countries. The two main arms of community-based planning in Anglo-America today are community development corporations (CDCs) and Alinskystyle organizing. Both have done much to advance community interests; neither model embraces autonomy or horizontalidad. But faced with neoliberal federal and state governments rolling back many of the gains of the 1930s and 1960s waves of reform, new experiments are sprouting. Local groups (including some CDCs and organizations coming out of the Alinsky tradition) are pushing participatory planning and budgeting. Community-supported agriculture projects promote local food self-sufficiency. Neighborhoods declare themselves “empowerment zones” without funds from the federal government, and community organizations fight for “moral site control” in a way that echoes Latin American land takeovers. If we want these initiatives to survive and spread, we should build stronger ties of communication, learning, and solidarity with Latin America’s third left. This article was originally published in the Summer 2006 issue of Progressive Planning Magazine and was updated in February 2019.

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Reflections of an Activist Scholar By Henry Louis Taylor, Jr. Introductory Remarks by Contributing Editorial Board Member Jeffrey Lowe

On Friday, April 6th, Henry Louis Taylor, Sr., received the Urban Affairs Association's (UAA's) 2018 Marilyn J. Gittell Activist Scholar Award. Gittell spent her entire 50-year career with the City University of New York, and focused her scholarship and community activism on concerns about racial, gender, and educational justice and on citizen participation and community control. She passed away in 2010. As the receiver of the award named in her honor, Taylor is recognized with high esteem by his UAA colleagues for achievement in research exemplifying a direct relationship between activism, scholarship, and community engagement. Planners Network applauds UAA for choosing Henry Taylor, a faculty member for nearly four decades in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Buffalo, as the recipient of the 2018 Marilyn J. Gittell Activist Scholar Award. We find his scholarly activism unswerving and in adherence with our principals for planning to be a tool for eliminating inequalities and changing the fundamental political and economic structures of society. And Progressive City is proud to be publishing the speech that Henry Taylor gave when accepting the award. What follows next is Taylor's reflection upon his career, as well as his understanding (based on his experiences) of the risks and rewards for using scholarship as a force for social change.

Reflections of an Activist Scholar

It is a great pleasure to share my reflections with you on being an activist-scholar. It is particularly rewarding to have this conversation on the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. Today, I will discuss my quest to connect activism to scholarship, and will divide the presentation into four parts. First, I will give a brief history of my journey to activism and scholarship, and then discuss the importance of the interplay between the two; after which, I will illustrate the use of activist scholarship to produce and implement knowledge for social change. I will conclude by discussing the challenge of linking scholarship to activism. I am an activist turned scholar, not a scholar turned activist. I started my professional career as a clinical audiologist. My father, who received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1954, always challenged

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me to use my skills and talents in service of Black people and to help build a better, more just and humane world. So, I obtained a Master’s Degree in clinical audiology, and became director of audiology at a small Speech and Hearing Clinic in Newport News, Virginia. In the late 60s, like many of my peers, I was radicalized, moved my clinical operations to near-by Hampton Institute, a historically Black college, and joined a militant organization modeled after the Black Panther Party. I was the only college educated Black in the organization, and the cadre asked me endless questions about Black history, the nature of capitalism, and where the movement was headed. I had few answers. I knew about the cochlear microphonics of the Sudanese rat, but had limited knowledge and understanding of Black history, as well as the complicated social, economic, political and cultural problems facing African Americans, and most importantly, how to resolve them. So, I decided to get a doctorate in history to deepen my knowledge and understanding of these complicated issues. After gaining admissions to the University at Buffalo (U.B.) history department, I joined the Detroit-based Black Workers Congress (BWC), which was headed by James Forman, the former head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The BWC grew out of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, viewed Black workers as vanguard of the Black freedom struggle, and was an active participant in the nascent anti-revisionist community movement. At U.B., my studies focused on Black urban history, with an emphasis on change over time. I viewed history as a continuum moving from the past to the present and into the un-created future, and I wanted to understand how Black positionality in the city and metropolis were impacted by change over time. The intent was to understand what problems were resolved as Blacks moved from one epoch to another, and which of those problems persisted, becoming increasingly complex and difficult to solve with the passage of time. Once identified, interventions strategies could then be devised to remedy them, thereby creating the possibility of another, and more just and equitable, future. As a student, I correlated my research and studies with my practical activities in the Black Workers Congress. I wanted to understand more deeply how Buffalo’s changing economy and city building process were impacting Black steel workers and the neighborhoods in which they lived. Based on my experiences with the steel workers and my involvement in the larger struggles in the community, I started to question if the complicated problems facing Blacks could be solved within a capitalist framework. 64

Reflections of an Activist Scholar

Regardless, given my limited knowledge of history, I decided to take three years of coursework, and by the time I completed this phase of my studies, I considered myself a Black Marxist, operating in the Black radical tradition of scholar activists, such as Carter G. Woodson, Oliver Cox, W.E.B. DuBois, Harold Cruise and Cedric Robinson. After completing my prelims, the organization sent me to Cincinnati, Ohio to organize Black workers. This was a significant stage in my political development. I put my education on hold, and became immersed in Black working class life and culture, while doing organizational work locally and nationally. To support myself, I worked at the University of Cincinnati Medical School recruiting Black and Latinx students and designing learning modules to help them negotiate the medical school curriculum. During those days, my street knowledge of the daily struggles of the Black working class expanded exponentially. At the same time, my appreciation of the gulf between scholarly knowledge and the practical work unfolding in Black neighborhoods increased. Organizationally, we approached our work in cities with limited knowledge of local conditions, including the political economy and population dynamics. For example, members of BWC often had little knowledge of how the changing local economy, city building, and public policies were underdeveloping the Black neighborhoods in which they worked, nor did they understand how market forces were undermining Black living standards and quality of life; and most important, they did not know how to attack or remedy these issues. My comrades were courageous men and women, who were ready to die for their beliefs, but bravery and street smarts alone could not compensate for our limited knowledge, nor could it provide us with a strategic agenda to bring about fundamental social change. By the late 1970s, the Black Workers Congress had been destroyed by a combination of the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program [COINTELPRO] and our own youthful mistakes and lack of knowledge. Stranded in Cincinnati, I contemplated the future as I completed my dissertation. I concluded that the schism between knowledge and the Black freedom movement was a serious issue that needed addressing. During this reflection period, Michael Frisch, a friend and chair of my dissertation committee, introduced me to the work of Theodore Hershberg and the Philadelphia Social History Project at the University of Pennsylvania. Ted talked endlessly about the connection between the organization of research and the production of knowledge for social change. He believed in collaborative research and focused on change over time. Here, Hershberg sought to construct interactive 65

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linkages among the past, present and uncreated future of cities. He used an urban as process conceptual framework that models a dynamic interactive relationship between the city and its neighborhoods and the group experience and behavior of different races and ethnicities. In this framework, the type of city and neighborhoods in which people live mattered. They mattered because an interactive relationship exists between people and place. People act on place and place acts on people. Ted’s conceptual framework and organizational approach to research would be a major influence on my future work. At any rate, sitting in my small apartment in the Mt. Adams section of Cincinnati, I decided to leave the medical school, get a position at a major research university, and ultimately to build a research center that produced knowledge in service of the Black liberation movement and the struggles of oppressed people. About a year after receiving my doctorate, I took a joint position at the Ohio State University in the Black Studies and History departments. Here, I started developing a prototype of my research center called the Cincinnati Urban History Project (Project), and I used the university’s work study program to staff it with graduate and undergraduate students—a strategy I learned from Ted Hershberg. I used the Project to study the relationship between city building and Black neighborhood development in Cincinnati. Concurrently, I collaborated with other senior and junior scholars studying Cincinnati. This collaborative approach was based on the Hershberg thesis that socioeconomic problems are too complicated for any one scholar to grasp, therefore research teams are needed to work on them. I creatively applied this thesis by working with other Cincinnati scholars on a topic of mutual interest—the Black urban experience. In 1988, I culminated this phase of my work by organizing a three-day conference to identify the best studies on Blacks and Cincinnati. I selected the top papers, and put them, along with my own work, in an edited volume, Race and the City: Work, Community and Protest in Cincinnati, 1820-1970. Based on this collaborative work, I started to view individual racism as a component of institutional and systemic structural racism, which was operationalized within a regional political and economic context that dictated social relations. For example, my spatial analysis of Black Cincinnati from 1850 to 1950 showed that Blacks lived in shared residential space until the rise of profit-based homeownership and a modern system of land-use regulation destroyed those types of residential settlements. In Cincinnati, then, contemporary racial residential segregation was spawned by intentional federal and state policies and 66

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market forces combined with the rise of homeownership as an instrument of wealth production. Within this context, the actions of individual white racists were subsumed within a larger system of structural racism. This finding reinforced my thinking about the necessity to center fundamental structural change in the struggles of African Americans and other oppressed people. The work on Cincinnati laid the foundation for my future research and practical activities on Blacks and the city. Significantly, development of the Cincinnati Urban Studies Project brought me back to University at Buffalo. While going up for tenure at Ohio State, a headhunter recruited me for an administrative post at U.B. I wasn’t interested in the job; I loved being at Ohio State, but the interview gave me an opportunity to get away for a few days and see some old friends. While at U.B., I discussed my views on the relationship between research and problems facings the Black community with the search committee and vice-provost. Later, the vice-provost contacted me and said they wanted me to come to the university and build the type of research unit I had discussed with them. He said U.B. would establish an interdisciplinary Master’s Degree associated with the center so that it would have an academic arm. This was the opportunity I had been waiting for. In the fall of 1987, I returned to the University at Buffalo to found the U.B. Center for Urban Studies. The establishment of the U.B. Center gave me an opportunity to institutionalize the connection between activism and scholarship. My aim was to turn research into a weapon of struggle in Buffalo and across Western New York. I forged an action research strategy based on interactions with neighborhood residents and stakeholders, with the intent of exposing oppressive conditions, raising political consciousness, and catalyzing neighborhood change. For example, our studies on poverty and the growth of an underclass led to formation of the region’s first community economic development corporation, the Office of Urban Initiatives. The unit was housed in my Center and worked mostly on Black neighborhood development issues; our market study of a Black inner-city neighborhood led to the regeneration of a major shopping center, while our studies of U.B.’s Buffalo campus sparked the onset of a comprehensive redevelopment effort in that community, which included a new subdivision. Around 1997, I decided to relocate the Center from the College of Arts and Science to the School of Architecture and Planning, where I could more effectively engage the community. Based on our experiences, I concluded that our work could move to a higher level by using 67

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neighborhood planning and development as tools for transforming underdeveloped Black communities. Relocating to the School of Architecture and Planning would facilitate that quest.

The Connection Between Activism and Scholarship

Why is this connection between activism and scholarship so important? The goal of activist scholars is to consciously produce and implement knowledge for social change. The intent is to understand the world, so that we can change it. This is important because Blacks, Latinx, and other oppressed peoples are beset with core problems, which circumscribe their life chances, produce undesirable social, economic, health, cultural and political outcomes, and continually reproduce their positionality at the bottom of society. These are real-life conditions, and they can only be resolved by producing and implementing a knowledge base with the capacity to guide the struggle to eliminate them. The reason is these core problems--inferior education, inadequate housing, poor health care services, food insecurity, joblessness, low-wages, underdeveloped neighborhood and powerlessness--are “wicked problems” that require institutional and systems change to be eliminated. Social change, then, requires the production and implementation of knowledge to solve these wicked core problems that undergird racism, along with economic exploitation and oppression. Furthermore, because of the complexity of bringing about social change, we must learn from our errors, miscalculation and flaws in thinking, and then we must use this insight to refine and improve our knowledge base. Thus, the interplay between knowledge production and implementation can be conceived as an ongoing process of experimentation, where feedback loops are established between theory and praxis, so the two can reinforce each other. Undergirding this struggle as experimentation viewpoint is the perspective outlined by Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) and Charles Hamilton in their 1967 classic Black Power: “We start with the assumption that in order to get the right answers, one must pose the right questions. In order to find effective solutions, one must formulate the problem correctly. One must start from premises rooted in truth and reality rather than in myth.” This powerful trilogy— ask the right question; formulate the problem correctly; and start from premises rooted in truth and realty—forms the basis of my approach to linking scholarship to activism, and explains the importance of establishing interactive connections between the two. Toward this end, I think that multiple forms of research can contribute to the production and implementation of knowledge for social 68

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change. In some instances, I engage in theoretical studies, which are unrelated to local problems. Then, in other instances, I am involved in action-orientated research to shed light on specific urban or neighborhood problems, while in other instances, I work with specific neighborhoods to develop transformative plans. Here, the focus is on engaging in implementation research, where theory is integrated with practice, thereby enhancing the possibilities of success. In my view, then, research that produces and implements knowledge to solve core problems can range from action-research and community-based participatory research to implementation research and theoretical studies based on archives work and/or big datasets. Moreover, the methodologies supporting such studies can range from quantitative studies with carefully constructed methodologies to ethnographic fieldwork to interpretative synthesis of the literature in a particular field, and the final products of this work can be books, published articles, technical reports, along with blogs and op-eds, or even reports to other comrades. Also, the rhythm of carrying out such work can vary. In some instances, for example, my work is exclusively focused on theoretical studies, and I am isolated from engagement in struggle; while at other times, I am almost completely absorbed in on the ground struggles. At still other times, a balance exists between my scholarly activities and engagement in struggle. However, I consider all these activities part of my political activism, with each activity informing the other. For example, even when I am totally emerged in the heat of battle, I never cease being a scholar, trying to integrate my academic knowledge with community and street knowledge, and using insights derived from the synthesis to help advance the struggle. In my world, activism and struggle are never separated. My point is that many different types of research and methodologies can contribute to the production and implementation of knowledge for social change; but regardless of the approach used, one should always follow the Ture and Hamilton credo—was the right question posed? Was the problem formulated correctly? Was the premise rooted in truth and reality? Within this context, to be implemented, knowledge must always be recreated as programs and activities called reforms. Thus, when linking theory to practice, we must distinguish between liberal and radical reforms. Liberal reforms are those designed to mitigate socioeconomic conditions among oppressed people, without bringing about fundamental change in the operation of institutions or systems that spawn racial and social injustice and inequity. These reforms inevitably lead folks down the path of liberaldogoodism, where they engage 69

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in activities that make them happy, but that do not alter the conditionality under which oppressed people live. On the flipside, radical reforms seek remedies that alter the operation of such institutions and systems. These reforms are linked to freedom dreams and radical visions of other possible worlds, situated in the uncreated future. Radical reforms, when implemented, force neoliberal capitalism to ingest viral remedies that are toxic to its system. Operating within this framework, the goal of the activist scholar is to produce knowledge and convert it into radical reforms that can spawn systemic structural changes in society. Lastly, before moving on, I want to stress the importance of conducting studies of social movements, as well as studies of smaller, less celebrated struggles against oppression and exploitation. Efforts to bring about social change will always be met with resistance. The Black abolitionist, Frederick Douglass once said, “Power concedes nothing without demand. It never has and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” In essence, discussions about the interplay between theory and practice implicate the role of knowledge production in illuminating and facilitating the struggles of oppressed people. Thus, we need studies of such movements, especially the civil rights, Black power, and new left movements, to deepen our knowledge and understanding of them and the lessons they can teach us.

The Work: From Theory to Practice

Now, I want to shift to a discussion of two projects to illustrate the role that activist scholarship can play in bringing about social change. First, I will discuss my work on neighborhood life and culture in Cuba, and then converse about efforts to apply the insights learned from the Cuba study to neighborhood development in the United States. The task of developing radical reforms requires imagining other possible worlds and how these alternative realities can emerge out of our current situation. So, in 1998, when my friend, Jose Buscaglia, asked if I wanted to spend a month teaching in Cuba as part of a U.B. Summer Study Abroad program, I immediately said yes. I had long admired the Cuban Revolution, respected Fidel and Che, and knew about the alliance between Black radicals and the Cuban government. However, my enthusiasm went beyond the romanticism of a Black radical sojourning to a revolutionary mecca. As a historian and urban planner, who studies and does practical work in underdeveloped U.S. neighborhoods, I wanted to gain insight into Cuba’s approach to neighborhood development and learn how they grappled with the issues of race and class. I wanted to determine if any of their experiences could be creatively applied to our 70

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situation in the United States. Once in Cuba, I worked with faculty members at the Universidad de la Habana School of Social Sciences to design an exploratory research course, which blended ethnographic fieldwork with classroom lectures taught by myself and social science faculty at the universidad. The Cubans allowed my students and I to visit any site or facility desired, and to travel freely throughout Havana and across the island. Classes were held during the week, including taking fieldtrips, and we travel to various parts of the country on the week-ends. Additionally, the students did a group research project on the San Isidro neighborhood located near the Convento Santa Clara, where we stayed. Unlike other groups, the Cubans allowed the U.B. delegation to live in a community setting in Habana Vieja, the oldest section of the city. Habana Vieja was a mostly Afro-Cuban working class neighborhood; and in this community, I became immersed in everyday life and culture. I hung out mostly with street hustlers and ordinary Cubanos. My intent was to learn about their Cuba, so I formed deep friendships with them. They took me into their homes and their lives, and showed me a Cuba that tourists rarely, if ever, see. During this same period, a close Cuban friend introduced me to Nehanda Isoke Abiodun, an African American woman living in political exile on the island. Nehanda was a Harlemite, close associate of Assata Shakur, the most famous US exile, and a member of the Republic of New Afrika and the Black Liberation Army. She was granted political asylum in 1990. Nehanda was the last African American to be given such as status. Thus, my relationship with Cuban academics, working class Cubanos, and an African American living in exile gave me an opportunity to learn about the island through Cuban eyes, filtered through the lens of an African Americans. My overarching goal was to gain insight into race relations and the Cuban neighborhood development process, and to determine what, if any, community development concepts could be uploaded and creatively applied to our situation in the United States. Within this context, I wanted to understand how public policy and socialist culture filtered down through the Cuban bureaucracy to ordinary Cubanos. Then, in 2004, the Bush Administration ended U.S. Summer Abroad Programs in Cuba. This breakpoint created the opportunity for me to summarize my Cuban experiences in a book length manuscript. I decided to undergird the project with house-to-house surveys, so I had a deeper understanding of how ordinary Cubanos viewed neighborhood life, education, health care, and the social supports system, as well as how they made 71

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ends meet. Concurrently, I decided not to ask the Cuban government for permission to do the study. I wanted my findings to be free from any taint of government influence or censorship. This research project, then, was a stealth one. I organized a research team composed of 20 ordinary Cubanos and paid them a small stipend to participate. I explained the secrecy of the project to team members, taught them how to conduct survey research, established a system of quality control, and took digital photographs of every completed survey, as a security measure, in case the government seized the hard copies. I used a snowball sampling technique, and the team conducted 398 house-tohouse surveys in about seven different Havana neighborhoods. The project had four important takeaways, which I believed could be creatively applied to our situation in the United States. First, the Cubans conceptualized neighborhoods as physical and social spaces, and placed great emphasis on the development of social capital and granting control over neighborhood space to the residents. Second, the government transformed underdeveloped neighborhoods into familyfriendly communities that supported solidarity, resiliency, reciprocity, good health, and the development of social capital. These neighborhoods were highly organized, structurally functional places based on community control, participatory democracy and neighborhood-based service delivery, including primary education and health care. Third, the Cubans used mass homeownership to spawn neighborhood stability by anchoring people in place, which laid the foundation for building of trust and solidarity. Lastly, they used a neighborhood-government partnership to sustain the community’s growth and development. Thus, although neighborhood residents were poor, the operation of their communities as a structurally functional places changed what it meant to be poor. In summary, the Cubans intentionally designed their underdeveloped neighborhoods as structurally functional spaces with the organizations, institutions, services, supports, and cultural frameworks needed to nurture and help residents grow and develop. In this setting, residents were given the power and authority to control their space and anchor their neighborhoods in solidarity, reciprocity, selfreliance and participatory democracy. Within this framework, the Cubans smartly provided the most vulnerable communities with the greatest government support and assistance. Lastly, we should be careful not to romanticize these Cuban neighborhoods. Life was hard and very difficult, but the community’s organization, structure and function turned them into places that facilitated the development of 72

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residents, thereby spawning desirable social outcomes, even though people faced many challenges. Reflecting on the Cuban experience, the really big question that intrigued me was could their principles of neighborhood development could be creatively applied to underdeveloped communities in the United States. I am currently working with Buffalo’s King Urban Life Center to find out. The King Center’s host neighborhood is a marginalized, Black rust belt community of about 3,300 residents, situated in a low market demand area, characterized by the serious loss of housing units, vacant land, abandoned structures, poorly maintained rental properties, and a declining population. I am vice-president of the Center’s Board of Directors, and a member of its neighborhood development committee. Our efforts to regenerate the community have moved through two stages and is entering a third. First, to gain insight into the economic, social and political forces underdeveloping the neighborhood, my students and I, in partnership with the residents, conducted a yearlong study, which included field observations, focus groups, survey research, parcel level assessment of structures, and an analysis of property ownership. Second, this past fall, based on insights derived from the research study, I taught a studio course to develop a plan to regenerate the King Center neighborhood. The intent was to integrate the core principles derived from my study of Cuban neighborhoods into the redevelopment strategy for the King Center community. Toward this end, the plan sought to integrate community building activities with the neighborhood’s physical design and development, while it aimed to use a radical community land trust strategy to gain control over the neighborhood development process. A cooperative housing strategy was proposed to deepen and expand the communal property ownership ideal, while an aggressive building code inspection and housing receivership strategy was suggested to improve the quality of rental housing, while maintaining its affordability. Third, we are now in the process of forging an implementation strategy to guide the plan’s execution. For this implementation strategy to work, we will need to privilege community organizing and use it as the engine to drive the community building and participation process. Finally, the most critical component of this plan will be a strategy to generate sustainable resources to finance the effort. Of course, to be completely transparent, I have absolutely no idea if this bold neighborhood regeneration strategy will work, but we intend to try. Either way, however, the results of this experience, along with the lessons learned, will be 73

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studied, analyzed, and published. In closing, I want to say a few words about the challenge of doing this type of research. To start, I believe that activism and good scholarship are intertwined. The struggle to transform the conditions of life among oppressed people and build a better and more just and equitable world is an extraordinarily complex task, which requires the highest level of scholarship, accompanied by battles down on the ground. There can be no progress without struggle; and struggle without the guiding light of knowledge will fail. Given this reality, I see no contradiction between activism and good scholarship. Yet, at the same time, I know that some people will downplay the complexity of struggles to solve the core problems facing Blacks and oppressed people. These folks want to separate activism from scholarship, and they view civic engagement as a “thin,” non-scholarly, citizenship thing. Of course, this type of thinking is misguided and should be ignored; but my larger point is this--when scholarship is connected to activism, the quest for tenure and promotion, in most instances, should take care of itself. This tenure and promotion issue notwithstanding, I believe one of the big challenges facing activist scholar is asking the right question to guide the research process. Core problems, and their offshoots are very complex, and posing research questions, which will push us beyond descriptive analysis, or symptomatic issues to causality is arduous. Moreover, understanding a problem and knowing how to solve it are two fundamentally different things; and one does not automatically follow the other. For example, I think we understand the socioeconomic and political forces that create extreme loss of housing units, unbuilt lots, abandoned structures and poorly maintained rental properties in underdeveloped rust belt cities, but knowing how to solve this complicated problem in low-demand market areas remains elusive. I want to close this presentation as I started it. In my journey across time, I have come to believe that connecting activism to scholarship is our best hope for solving the core problems facing the oppressed, advancing the struggle of the American people, and building a more just, equitable and humane society. Knowledge alone, however, is not enough. As Frederick Douglass said, “Without struggle, there is no progress. There never has and there never will be.” And this is exactly why scholarship must be linked to activism. Thank you. This article was originally published on Progressive City on June 11, 2018.

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Progressive Planning and Organizing: Filmmaker-Organizer Partnerships By Allison Lirish Dean Activists on the left are really into making videos these days. To say that picking up a camera to document grassroots and progressive movements has become as commonplace as picking up a phone is to exaggerate only slightly. The explosion of advocacy videos is reflected, for example, in the headline, “It’s Not a Movement without a Movie,” seen recently in the online journal of New York City politics, City Limits. Ask any politically conscious documentarian why she makes films and one reply will be a desire to change the world. But even if you believe that media can accomplish this, it’s less clear how. To start, films with advocacy goals should be integrated into organizing work. But how can organizers and filmmakers work together to ensure good results? This question doesn’t have a simple answer, but media makers who wish to distinguish themselves in a civic sphere “swimming in video,” as the City Limits piece puts it, need to consider it.

Why Use Video?

One reason to use video/film is the emotional immediacy of the medium. “It can be very difficult to get anything across without a coherent communication strategy that involves video,” says Ellen Schneider, founder of Active Voice, a San Francisco-based non-profit that helps filmmakers integrate their films into communication strategies. Milly Hawk-Daniel, director of communications for PolicyLink, an Oaklandbased think tank, agrees. “Film is useful for some audiences in building public will for change.” But once you’ve identified your audience, which techniques best convey the message? And how can video be useful to urban planners concerned with social justice? Isabel Hill understood video’s inherent strengths when she made Brooklyn Matters, a documentary that critically examines developer Forest City Ratner’s mega-plan for the Atlantic Yards site near downtown Brooklyn, New York. “There was a real need for the visual—the misconceptions about this project were enormous,” explains Hill. During a key moment in the film, Ron Shiffman, founder of the Pratt Center for Community Development, describes how difficult it is for the public to comprehend the 75

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project’s scale based on the developer’s drawings. In order to experience it, Shiffman urges, viewers should visit Donald Trump’s Riverside South project on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Hill cuts to a shot of Trump’s towering skyscrapers as Shiffman asks us to envision these buildings with fifteen to twenty extra stories. The moment is tremendously effective. Streetfilms is a web-based project that uses video to advocate for livable streets. Unlike Brooklyn Matters, an hour-long documentary, the average Streetfilms video runs three to four minutes. One Way is the Wrong Way, which can be seen at www.streetfilms.org, exposes a New York City Department of Transportation plan to convert several two-way streets in Park Slope, Brooklyn, into one-way streets. The video follows Graham Beck of Transportation Alternatives, a local advocacy group, as he uses a speed gun to prove cars move twice as fast on one-way streets as two-way streets. Viewers experience a dramatic difference between the one-way streets, which run through residential neighborhoods but feel like highways, and the two-way streets, which are populated with families and cyclists. Streetfilms’ most requested DVD is about Ciclovía, a weekly event in Bogotá, Colombia, in which over seventy miles of streets are closed to traffic, enabling residents to walk, bike and enjoy other activities. The video brings viewers into streets teeming with people having fun. “We have plenty of stories of people saying our video is helping the push for Ciclovías in their cities,” says Clarence Eckerson, director of video production. A successful web video can spread quickly. According to Eckerson, Streetfilms has had 600,000 unique viewings of videos on its site, and they get posted on other sites constantly. There are limitations to this format and method of distribution, however, because not everyone has internet access. Furthermore, web videos do not necessarily bring people together for discussion and debate as traditional screenings can. Both Hill and Eckerson approach filmmaking with a professional understanding of the politics that surround the planning process. From 1999 to 2001, Eckerson was Chair of Brooklyn’s Transportation Alternatives Committee, and Hill previously worked for the New York City Department of City Planning. Hill attributes at least part of the success of her work to the different perspective she brings, “that of a planner, someone deeply politically involved in the issues.” Brooklyn Matters touched a nerve, so much so that after the first couple of screenings Hill found she didn’t need to market the film. “People came to me—small non-profits that were in the neighborhood, 76

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civic associations, churches… People knew that there were problems with the project and they were waiting for something to help them understand it.”

So Many Films, So Few Resources

Hill was so passionate about her subject that she financed Brooklyn Matters herself. And though Streetfilms is bankrolled by entrepreneur and activist Mark Gorton, for most filmmakers, financial support is problematic. Foundation grants are an option, but issues often unfold more quickly than the grant cycle. Isabel Hill, for example, shot and edited Brooklyn Matters in just four months. Funding sources have also tightened, though the need for video in organizing campaigns has grown. From state arts councils to private foundations, scarce money is doled out in competitive stakes. In addition, some foundations support organizing but not film production, and few are willing to support projects that integrate the two. One solution for filmmakers is to circumvent conventional funding mechanisms by partnering with organizations that want to use media and can help pay for it. In this arrangement, the organization gets to use the video in its work and can focus on organizing rather than making films. Collaboration between filmmakers and organizers isn’t new. In the 1930s, the Film and Photo League (FPL) documented the era’s political movements and the resulting films were shown as part of organizing campaigns. In the 1960s, the Newsreel Group further developed the idea of film as an instrument for social change. By participating in the movements they sought to document, filmmakers blurred the boundary between filmmaker and organizer. For both the FPL and Newsreel, pressures to ensure that these films were politically useful created certain tensions between film producers and organizers. While the relationship between politics and media has evolved since then, these tensions persist.

Organizations and Filmmakers, Together and Apart The primary challenge filmmakers and organizers face in collaboration is negotiating their respective principles and priorities. Hammering out editorial issues from the start can minimize roadblocks. Producing their own films is so appealing to organizations because it allows them to tailor their message. This customization is important in an age where balancing the distortions of the mainstream media is critical to building a movement. 77

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For Corporate Accountability International, a Boston-based watchdog group, commissioning films is a considered element of its organizing strategy. Making A Killing, by Kelly Anderson and Tami Gold, helped it successfully push implementation of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which sets global standards for marketing and promoting tobacco products. Anderson and Gold shot, directed and edited Making a Killing, but Corporate Accountability International had the final say over what and how information was presented. The primary audience of the film was journalists and international policymakers, so a lot was riding on how the story was told. “We want to present everything in a form that journalists can take and use,” says Communications Director Nick Guroff. “If you are not creating media that can be used by news organizations that is well factchecked and upfront about its potential biases, then you’re wasting resources.” For Kelly Anderson, who has made films for organizations as well as independent documentaries aired on HBO and PBS, collaborating with Corporate Accountability International was a positive experience. The group understood that effective filmmaking requires outside expertise and money. The budget for Making a Killing, which the group was able to raise funds to support, was $150,000 for a half-hour piece. Most importantly, says Anderson, Corporate Accountability International “knew who their audience was and what messages they needed to deliver, and were willing to let us figure out how to visualize that information.” Not that there weren’t disagreements, Anderson remembers, but in the end there was never any question about who had editorial control. Ellen Schneider points out that sometimes an organization’s priorities fall more within the sphere of public relations—heightening visibility, raising funds or building a base. But organizationally-branded videos don’t have to be constrained by PR conventions. Schneider encourages organizations to see the value in talking about their work in a way that goes beyond simple marketing. To filmmakers concerned that branded films won’t be perceived as journalism, Ellen Schneider says, “It should be clear to an audience who created the film and who paid for it, but when I see a film, what sticks with me is how the story was told, and whether or not it feels true. The more nuance and complexity the better, whether the film was made and paid for by an organization or not.” Organizational branding can, however, be an obstacle to distribution—the practice violates PBS’s underwriting guidelines, for example, 78

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and can lock a film out of certain festivals. Filmmaker Jonathan Skurnik is uncomfortable with the trade-offs associated with organizational financing, preferring collaborations with organizations where advocacy is an important goal, but where he maintains editorial control. In making A Day’s Work, A Day’s Pay, Skurnik and his partner Kathy Leicther followed two groups, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and Community Voices Heard (CVH), as they confronted the failings of welfare reform. CVH continues to use the film, but the groups did not have any financial or editorial input. “With a sponsored film,” Skurnik says, “a big goal is how to make the organization appear in the best possible light. But with A Day’s Work, A Day’s Pay, that was not our goal. If the organizations made mistakes, those mistakes were there. We did not try to hide what a struggle it was.” Schneider says this candid approach can benefit an organization in the end by making a film more interesting. Progressive filmmakers wishing to maintain their independence may have to prove they share the advocacy goals of their intended collaborators. ACORN and CVH initially resisted working with Skurnik, but he kept showing up at rallies and requesting meetings, eventually earning their trust. While his film was still in production, Skurnik’s team designed an outreach plan, the Workfare Media Initiative, and got $200,000 in funding to implement it. This ensured that the film was integrated into an organizing campaign with substantial results.

Organizing Goals and the Call to Action For Bruce Orenstein, founder and director of the Chicago Video Project, his sixteen years of organizing experience are the key to balancing the respective priorities of video and organizing. “Organizations may have the policy arguments, but it’s important to be able to translate that into a story, which isn’t easy to do,” says Orenstein. “At the same time,” he points out, “a lot of media people lack the content and the goals to frame a project effectively, and lots of products end up lacking an underlying purpose.” “One thing that is really important in any film that’s designed to work with an advocacy goal is that there’s an explicit call to action,” says Orenstein, whose approach to filmmaking is modeled after his work as a community organizer. “You introduce the problem. You have testimony from people experiencing the issue directly. You then go into why the problem exists—why, for instance, the community doesn’t have affordable housing. Then you explain the political 79

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roadblocks to change, and then look at some models of how other communities have succeeded in solving the problem. Finally, you have a call to action.” A call to action can be within a film, or happen around a film. A screening can be one component of a larger event where viewers sign postcards or petitions or commit to attending a rally or volunteering. The Workfare Media Initiative ensured that opportunities for action accompanied every screening. This can be difficult, however, with films such as Making a Killing, which was often shown in disparate locations without the guiding presence of organizers. Decisions about a film’s tone, the techniques employed to deliver the message and the balance between complexity and simplicity cannot be made without a clear understanding of the audience. Making a Killing, for example, needed to compel international policymakers. “We couldn’t produce something that was just meant to tug at the heartstrings,” says Guroff. “It also had to be grounded in peer-reviewed journals and scientific research.” Streetfilms toes a more heterogeneous line. “Our target audience is anyone who wants to listen, from traffic planners to the concerned mom who wants her kids to be safe,” says Eckerson. “We don’t want the traffic engineers to think, ‘This is silly,’ but we also want to avoid being overly technical.” Orenstein notes that videos are but a starting point. “The root of a lot of the problems we are trying to solve is that one side has more power than the other—so change occurs when that balance of power is forced to shift. Videos are used to mobilize people, resources and allies. But they don’t create change in and of themselves.” This article was originally published in the Summer 2008 issue of Progressive Planning Magazine.

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CHAPTER 3: RACE DISPLACEMENT AND COMMUNITY PLANNING Introduction by Jeffrey Lowe Any sincere consideration given to the professional practice of urban planning in North America must assign primary attention to race. The profession emerged about five decades after the abolition of chattel slavery on the continent, during a period of time known as the Progressive Era because of activists’ demands for using the scientific methods of the social sciences to reform government. As a nascent profession, however, planning failed to actively contest racial inequality and subjugation. Instead, it did just the opposite. Planning framed the boundaries for continued state-sanctioned racial oppression through policies and regulatory practices that lessened the humanity of individuals already considered less than human from the bygone epoch. Planning played a strategic role in solidifying spatial and land use decisions that ignored the question of whose quality of life is most likely to be improved and whose will be lessened when it comes to the question of race. At opposite ends of the racial continuum, Blackness in personhood and community lacked worth, while anything associated with the identity and places of whiteness assumed optimal value. Planning systematically structured and sustained this status quo by connoting humanity to be bound up in a whiter hue with the purest of European physiology and power. As a result, urban planners' recommendations to policy makers that resulted in the displacement of communities of color in order to achieve an improved quality of city life became easily justifiable and considered the normative action to take. In many ways, the quality of life for communities of color experiencing displacement became worse with the rise of neoliberalism. Under neoliberalism, enhancing the economic value of the already well-to-do, who happen to be most exemplary of whiteness, becomes the modus operandi for state intervention. There is no concern for the economic well-being of communities of color who do not fit within schemes that maximize capital accumulation through privatization. Beyond the economic, other quality of life measures not easily commodified or privy to exchange values such as health, freedom, family and community take a back seat to those with market-driven 81

Introduction

potential. Reducing quality of life to basic economic measures without changing the racial continuum mentioned earlier, it is no wonder that racial inequities and social injustice rose under neoliberalism. Neoliberalism shifted public resources to the optimal benefit of private resources; it fueled changes in normative values (societal notions of what ought to be) that materialized in the form of policies obliged to the privatization of urban planning functions. For racial groups experiencing the most severe deprivation, this action reeked further violence and displacement upon them. The message was clear, particularly regarding housing and land use concerns: your lives do not matter, and you must vacate the premises in order to improve the economic well-being of others in their movement towards greater power and privilege which is bound up in whiteness. No nation-state in North America can deny the centrality of race in the urban planning function, and that planning implementation under neoliberalism has exacerbated displacement of communities of color. The number of displaced communities of color is too numerous to name here. However, it is worth noting a few cases to illuminate the point. Some scholarship on neoliberalism in North American contextualizes the nexus between race and displacement. In a dissertation entitled “Selling Mexico,” Tracy Butler describes how urban planners successfully established Cancún, in Mexico’s state of Quintana Roo, as an international tourist destination through the displacement of the indigenous Maya population from native land.1 In Canada, Ted Rutland's recent work, Displacing Blackness, chronicles the continued violence, plunder and displacement, both through physical dislocation and symbolic deracination, eradicating civic and cultural institutions of the Black Haligonians from Africville and other settlements.2 These were a product of policies established in HRM by Design and the Regional Plan for metropolitan Halifax, Nova Scotia, that focused on attracting more well-to-do and privileged households to the center city. In the United States, the siphoning off of public housing to market-based approaches such as HOPE VI has resulted in the loss of one in every four housing units. Just as Negro removal became a euphemism for urban renewal, New Deal Ruins author and PNer Ed Goetz, like other activists and schol1

Tracey A. Butler. Selling Mexico: Race, Gender, and American Influence in Cancún, 1970-2000, (2016). 2 Ted Rutland. Displacing Blackness: Planning, Power, and Race in Twentieth-Century Halifax. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018).

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ars, considers HOPE VI to be Negro removal revisited at the twilight of the 20th century.3 Now, as we ready ourselves to traverse the third decade of the 21st century, neoliberalism intensifies displacement experienced by communities of color through gentrification processes that seem ubiquitous. So the struggle continues. Perhaps, however, the struggle points the way to a better future. As articulated by Frederick Douglass before the dawn of the 19th-Century Civil Rights Movement: If there is no struggle, there is no progress...The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.4 Progressive planners across the continent engage in the struggle to dismantle the racial continuum and stop the displacement now exacerbated by neoliberalism while advancing racial justice through community planning. A legacy of the 20th-century civil rights movement's fight to overcome racial oppression, community planning builds upon the gains of that movement and, with the theoretical underpinnings of advocacy and equity planning, requires that professionallytrained planners join with activists as well as work within governments to develop transformative plans that end the violence and improve the overall quality of life of the racially oppressed. Community planning includes indigenous residents in processes where they lead in determining and prioritizing the best use of the places where they live. It facilitates movement organizing, expanding political capacity or power for community control over revitalizing places rather than privatization of land for profit making. In this sense community planning is radical because the processes carried out by urban and regional planners include and remain in alignment with the collective contestation of displacement and the intention to construct normative racial justice. The readings in this chapter of the book represent one original essay in addition to five articles on race, displacement, and community planning as an alternative to neoliberalism. The authors range from eminent scholars and activists to students and future professionals. Acknowledging the past and present under neoliberalism, these authors contend urban planning does not have to maintain the status quo and continue to develop schemes for displacement and other forms of spatial violence 3

Edward G. Goetz. New Deal Ruins: Race, Economic Justice, and Public Housing Policy. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013). 4 Frederick Douglass. Selected Speeches and Writings. (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2000).

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that supports racial inequality. They reject pursuing technocratic rumination about the current state of the profession and instead illuminate the progressive planning responses in language, practice, thought and imagination that will ensure that the racially oppressed receive priority attention concerning quality of life improvements. Each reading points to different approaches that arrive at a common place: planners must intentionally engage in community planning processes. Sometimes the processes happen under frameworks known by other names, such as multicultural, radical or abolitionist planning, but all fit under the progressive planning umbrella. Accordingly, these essays make an important contribution to a progressive planning legacy involved in building the radical left. Collectively the readings offer foundational insight and reflection from progressive planners contesting neoliberal urbanism in the nations of North America. What is more, the readings advance strategies and complexities for future action by those in the movement who will continue in struggle to expand the breadth and depth of community planning. This is much needed to achieve the societal transformation so that racial equality and social justice become normative.

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Towards a Transformative View of Race: The Crisis and Opportunity of Katrina By John A. Powell, Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Daniel Newhart and Eric Steins “You simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals….so many of these people…are so poor and they are so Black, and this is going to raise lots of questions for people who are watching this story unfold.” — Wolf Blitzer on CNN, September 1, 2005 Immediately after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, journalists and laypeople struggled to find the words to express their outrage over the situation. In a very real way, the devastation wrought by the storm challenged normative perspectives on race and class in this country. The disturbing images of poor African Americans struggling to survive in an abandoned city and the inadequate response of the government forced uncomfortable thoughts into the national consciousness. Suddenly, race and class mattered, and mattered more than most people were prepared to acknowledge. When a national dialogue began, however, it was clear that the existing vocabulary was incapable of explaining what everyone was seeing. Like Wolf Blitzer, many people were left stumbling over the links between race and class and trying to figure out why Katrina’s destructive force disproportionately impacted African-American and poor communities. Soon after the levees broke, politicians and pundits tried feverishly to ease our discontent. They assured us that nature is colorblind and that the government response, although clearly inadequate, was not a result of racial animus. We were told that class and poverty, rather than race, were the keys to understanding the crisis. Conservatives even went so far as to drape poverty in the rhetoric of welfare-asdependency, arguing that government assistance had created a culture of victimization. Progressives, for their part, talked about the absence of an adequate safety net to deal with persistent poverty. Still, questions about why African Americans are more likely than whites to be poor, and why poor African Americans are more likely to live in areas of concentrated poverty, were neither asked nor answered. The mainstream media did make an effort to broach the issue of race, but the resulting discussions either suffered from a reliance on 85

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racial stereotypes, or failed to move beyond race-based human interest stories. There was little critical discussion about how historical patterns of segregation contributed to the racial layout of the city, and how structures worked together to produce racial disparities and economic inequality.

Trapped in Individualistic Mode

For far too long, Americans have been trapped in an individualistic mode of thinking about race and racism that requires that there be a racist actor in order for there to be a racist action, and that separates race and class into distinct categories. As the full extent of the damage to New Orleans became clear, the nation as a whole struggled to make sense of the situation by filtering visual images and sound bites through the dominant individualistic framework. Consequently, people asked: Is President Bush a racist or simply incompetent? Were so many poor African Americans affected by the storm because they were poor or because they were Black, or was it because of their culture? Would the response to Katrina have been different had New Orleans been mostly white? How could so many things have gone wrong in a country that prides itself on responsibility and opportunity? Unfortunately, narrow thinking about racism as a product of individual intent is not particularly helpful. Not only does it tend to be divisive—the conversations that follow often center on assigning blame and finding culpability rather than on making change—it diverts attention away from the role of structures and institutions in perpetuating disparities, while simultaneously locating racism in the mind of individuals. Katrina has provided a rare chance to discuss the links between race, equity, justice and democracy. Those who rejected racism as a contributing factor to the disaster, as well as those who knew it was somehow relevant, focused so much of their attention on identifying or dismissing the racist behavior of individuals, including the president, that the overall discourse on the role of race and racism lacked substance. For the most part, there was no discussion of the myriad of ways that race informed the social, economic and political factors that converged long before Katrina made landfall and made New Orleans ripe for a disaster that would hit the city’s Black residents the hardest. Just about everyone failed to discuss local patterns of residential segregation. They ignored the fact that grossly disproportionate numbers of African Americans lived in neighborhoods that were below sea level. Some pointed out that African Americans comprised 98 percent 86

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of the Lower Ninth Ward, but said little if anything about how this came to be. Similarly, some noted the sickeningly high poverty rate among the city’s Black residents, but said nothing about how racialized poverty contributed to the crisis. Neither the concentration of subsidized housing nor the lack of car ownership among poor Blacks—which made it impossible for many to flee in their own vehicles as was called for by the city’s middle-class-oriented evacuation plan—were mentioned. Racialized divestment in schools, public health and other critical institutions in the core city, which impacts the suburbs as well, has existed for decades, but unlike the wind and the water, it garnered little attention. We do not believe that anyone intended to strand poor Blacks in New Orleans. Nonetheless it was predictable, given that we tend to regard poor people differently than we do others. The inability of Americans, both white and Black, conservative and progressive, to analyze the Katrina disaster in a way that would have rendered visible the central role of structural racism in the disaster was the result of the narrow way we tend to understand racism. The normative conceptualization of racism is that it is a deliberately harmful discriminatory act perpetrated by people who possess outmoded racial beliefs. It is the aberrant behavior of white supremacists and is easily identified by the discriminatory intent of perpetrators. Furthermore, it is static. It is an offense committed by a particular person at a specific moment in time. Racism happens, and then it ends.

How Space is Racialized

We need to ask how and why segregation is maintained. The answer can no longer be found in explicit arrangements of de jure segregation, but instead in the impacts of a variety of structural arrangements. The creation and re-creation of Black ghettos in the United States is no mystery. We can trace the ghettos back to race-specific practices by governmental agencies, including the Federal Housing Administration, and to uneven tax allocation, zoning laws, transportation spending and the devolution of power to ever-smaller jurisdictions. The degree to which this discussion is largely “off-the-table” is not a function of the relative difficulty of pinpointing the origin of the conversation, but rather reflects the degree that individual agency has been privileged at the expense of collective action and social structures. Answering why segregation persists to this day is somewhat more complicated. Part of the reason is because it fosters racialized poverty and opportunity. While poverty is certainly a phenomenon that crosses racial and geographic lines, the face of poverty in this country is over87

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whelming urban and African American. Segregation also helps usrace society. It continually helps recreate the social categories to which we commonly ascribe racial meaning. White space, or the outer-ring suburbs, plays an important role in maintaining an increasing fragile white privilege. So too does the existence of ghettos. Divestment from urban areas (53.1 percent of African Americans live in central cities) has had radically disparate racial effects, even in the absence of overt racial intent. Consequently, areas of racialized poverty are accepted as natural, as if they have always, and will always, exist. Residential segregation has produced “white space,” which is tremendously unstable. As globalization expands in a post-Jim Crow era, and as the identity of a particular space comprised of individuals who are “white” comes under assault, “white space” means less and less. Many whites are averse to being labeled racist, but they also refuse to surrender forms of privilege, such as access to preferred residential space. What needs to be propelled forward is the idea that racialization of space affects us all.

A New Lens, Vocabulary, Avenue for Change

Employing this lens provides a new vocabulary for talking about race and thinking about racial justice. No longer must we be caught up in issues of guilt and blame, in pointing fingers or decrying our innocence. Using this new lens allows us to understand how race continues to sort opportunity in this country, without having to find racists. First, we must eliminate concentrated poverty. Prior to Katrina, New Orleans had one of the highest rates of concentrated poverty in the country, second highest among the nation’s fifty largest cities. Most of these places need to be rebuilt, but they neither can be rebuilt as static replicas of what they were, nor can this opportunity be used as an excuse for displacing residents. There is tension here, to be sure, between the right of displaced residents to return and creating affordable housing that is not concentrated in a few sections of the city. This tension, however, can be mitigated in large part by involving those most affected by the storm in the planning process. There are multiple proposals on the table for how this can be accomplished including: housing voucher programs, expansion of the low-income housing tax credit, inclusionary zoning and models based on previously successful housing programs, such as the Gautreaux experiment in Chicago and HUD’s Moving to Opportunity program. The very scale of the rebuilding that needs to occur can be an advantage, as well as a challenge, because it offers an opportunity for a re-visioning 88

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of what an integrated and livable city might look like. Also, a racially and economically just framework has to focus on access to opportunity. It is clear that this needs to occur in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast area, but it also must include the thousands of displaced residents who may or may not return voluntarily. We run the risk of simply shifting the Black urban poor from one city to another, and from one opportunity-deprived community to another. The planning process must include provisions for connecting the “Gulf Coast Diaspora” to affordable housing, job training, economic opportunities, quality education, transportation and healthcare. We must treat the citizens of New Orleans as a democracy should, that is, with equal opportunity for all. We must focus on providing access to opportunity explicitly, both during the reconstruction process as well as afterwards. The reconstruction of the Gulf Coast will be labor-intensive and require tens of thousands of people working in tandem in order to be successful. Current and former residents of the Gulf Coast should be hired first, and local laborers should be paid a living wage. We must put job training programs into place so that residents are able to take advantage of the opportunities available during the redevelopment. Citizens need to have meaningful oversight of the billions of dollars that will be brought in by private development corporations to guarantee that development occurs in a way that benefits their communities, and not simply the shareholders of these companies. Transit problems were a principal reason that the violent impact of Katrina was so disproportionately shouldered by poor African Americans. We must not allow this to occur in the future. State and local authorities should implement immediate plans for the evacuation of residents who lack access to personal transportation. Transit also remains a key factor in connecting people with parts of metropolitan areas where opportunity flourishes, job growth is occurring, and highquality schools exist. The expansion of public transit has to be a priority going forward. Access to educational opportunities significantly affects well-being later in life. Not only must the public schools of New Orleans be repaired, but planners must think proactively about the linkages between residential integration and school integration. In 2003-2004, for example, 46.9 percent of public schools in Orleans Parish were in the “academically unacceptable” category, in contrast to only 5.7 percent of schools across Louisiana. Planners must begin to consider how residential segregation, which leads to school segregation, is affecting test 89

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scores, causing all of our children to suffer today and shutting them out from opportunity in the future. Lastly, health and environmental concerns are going to remain a part of life in the Gulf Coast area for decades. Officials need to take all precautions to ensure the safety of workers involved in the cleanup and redevelopment process. They need to mandate uniform standards for cleanup so that some communities do not disproportionately shoulder the burden of exposure to toxins. Most importantly, there needs to be a long-term monitoring and grievance system established to ensure the health and safety of Katrina survivors, one that provides affordable access to healthcare if health problems arise in the future. There have been remarkable advances in “green building” over the past two decades, as well as in more environmentally-friendly methods of construction and waste disposal. Redevelopment plans need to include environmental planning as an explicit part of the process. Throughout this process, we must be proactively attentive to the ways in which all of these aspects of opportunity—housing, education, job training, employment, healthcare and transportation—interact with one another structurally. Adopting a regional approach to planning, therefore, is essential. Segregation, fragmentation and concentrated poverty create barriers to opportunity for people of color and undermine the vitality and competitiveness of the entire region. An approach to rebuild in a just way must look at the region as a whole unit and create ways to more equitably distribute resources and opportunity throughout. It is not a coincidence that some of the poorest parts of New Orleans are also the places where the African-American population is very high. It is important to consider how segregated space interacts with race and poverty, economic health and democratic norms. The resource disparity between cities and suburbs hurts not only inner-city residents and those that live in areas that have become isolated, but also encourages a dysfunctional fragmented system. This system encourages destructive competition, such as sprawl, inefficient duplication, divestment in infrastructure and people. The health of the city and older suburbs is linked to the health of the entire region. Finally, we must keep the discourse of race and racism alive and inclusive, rather than subterranean and divisive. This will take some strategizing given the current inadequacy of public discourse. We might support national and local media campaigns, community initiatives, grassroots organizations, interdenominational efforts and political maneuvering to transform our understanding of race and class. We will need to pay particular attention to not only the needs 90

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of poor and middle-class Blacks and other nonwhites, but to those of poor and middle-class whites as well. Globalization and devolution place the vulnerable on precarious footing, which will require us to work together to recreate more equitable life opportunities in New Orleans and throughout the nation. Given the hesitancy of the United States to confront or discuss race, even after a disaster like Hurricane Katrina brought it to our attention, it is time for a new way of speaking about race and racism. As we stumbled over words to describe the pictures that appeared in our newspapers and on our television sets, we discovered that we did not have an adequate frame for articulating what was going on, not only in New Orleans, but all across this country every day. Katrina demonstrated that race and class are still salient topics in the US, but discussing and understanding how they matter is an important part of envisioning a racially just and democratic society. This article was originally published in the Spring 2006 issue of Progressive Planning Magazine.

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The South: The Race Culture Sustained By William M. Harris We Black Southerners know. We know the significance of skin color. We know that standard of human worth has not changed over four hundred years of living with European Americans. We know that W.E.B. DuBois was right in 1903 to offer that, “The problem of race in America is the color line.” We know that little has changed for us in the attitudes of white Southerners. It is in this context of white Southern attitudes and actions that this essay presents views of progressive planning responses to the issues of white Southern attitudes and behaviors. It is essential that we attempt some level of clarity on what constitutes progressive planning as envisioned by African Americans in the South. In setting forth the invitation to this special issue of Progressive Planning Magazine, the editors provided descriptors of progressive planning. Their presentation is helpful. However, for Blacks living in the South, greater clarity is required. For us, progressive planning is to be defined in addition to described. We see progressive planning as the aggressive, non-compromising agent for sustained social change that will redistribute all levels of wealth (jobs, economic development, property ownership, education, etc.), public policies that will protect and preserve the African American quality of life in the present and future, and establish guidelines and strategies for reparations in the social, economic, political, and environmental spheres. In this essay, the presentation centers around the roles and strategies that planners should play in addressing the factors offered in my definition above. No effort is devoted to planner roles have been in the past. Such discussions lead too heavily to the blame game. Thus I am not going to present and address here the known history of abuses by whites against African Americans in the South. As planners, we are first futurists. As progressive planners we are strategists who value at the highest level the quality of life for all citizens, giving the priority of our attention to the oppressed.

Change Intensity Working in the South to bring about sustained social change that benefits the Black community has been (and remains) a very high risk undertaking. The risks have taken many forms: violence to persons and

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property, political isolation, social exclusion, and economic ostracism. These risks hold for all, independent of race and gender. We progressive planners know that risk taking must be measured in terms of benefits and costs. Where Southern Blacks are concerned, costs usually outweigh the benefits, especially in the short term. We also know that involvement must be sustained over the long term in the face of these costs if positive goals are to be realized.

Attack Violence In the South, African Americans, especially males, remain targets of violence. Recent instances in Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, and other states demonstrate the concern. The Southern Poverty Law Center continues to report cases of violence committed by whites against Blacks. Although these instances are troubling, the situation becomes dire when white police violence against Blacks is added. White racial violence toward African Americans in the South is present and pervasive. What is to be the role of progressive planners in addressing this issue? There are two immediate avenues available to confront the problem. Research and data analysis are mainstream activities of planners. Progressive planners must exploit existing data and also create new research into the types of violence, levels of damage (to persons and property), locations, and frequency of violence that will provide evidence to challenge and support legal redress. The second step is to be visible and involved advocates for the oppressed. Appear in court, speak before elected officials (local, state, and national) in support of the oppressed Black community being attacked. The research and reporting are very low risk activities. However, participation in public arenas requires courage to withstand the sure-to-come critical challenges by white Southerners.

Public Policy Intervention

The "Separate but Equal" legal doctrine is no longer applicable. The subsequent "Black Codes" are no longer applicable. However, these antecedents continue to raise their heads in public policy in the South and elsewhere in the nation. Currently nearly all the Southern states have passed laws that are designed to restrict suffrage for African Americans. These new voting regulations require identification mechanisms that target the Black poor, elderly, and underemployed as unqualified to vote. Second only to the denial of travel (a primary condition of maintaining slavery), denial of suffrage is central to the 93

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welfare and security in a representative republic. What should be the appropriate role of the progressive planner in this context? Here the prescription is not complex. Get involved. There are three immediate roles that may be identified for the progressive planner. On the legal side, progressive planners must take the initiative to bring suit in courts at local, state, and national levels, challenging these regressive political renderings. Second, progressive planners must appear in every media available to expose the racism inherent in these laws. And third, the progressive planner must join coalitions with the NAACP, SCLC, civic advocacy groups, and African American congressional leadership to produce policies that repeal or limit the effectiveness of anti-suffrage laws in the South. There can be no alternative to this necessary direct action involvement.

Construct Housing The issue and intent here is not focused upon actual or physical manufacturing of housing or the built environment. To construct housing is to make "fair housing" a reality. We progressive planners know the historical and continuing racial discrimination in housing. We are aware of the racial segregation at the neighborhood level that brings about intensive racial segregation in our public schools. We are knowledgeable of the race-specific practices in home lending by banks and mortgage institutions. These data are readily available and most have been reported in the press and white papers. This area is of critical importance. Housing remains a major ingredient in the building of wealth. With African Americans owning only about one-percent of the nation’s wealth, it is clear that housing discrimination is a major deterrent to the building of wealth in the Black community. There are productive roles for progressive planners in the fair housing milieu. One thing is clear; the answer is not more research and academic publications. What is needed is action, the responsibility of progressive planners. Four actions must be taken by progressive planners. The first is to demand a congressional audience to lay out the issues, consequences, and future hazards of continued racial discrimination in housing. The second is to develop public policies that do more than articulate a principle of fairness, but rather limit decisionmakers’ options to skirt the law. Third, progressive planners must work with grassroots advocates in the Black community who struggle on a continuing basis to bring about equity in housing opportunities. The fourth intervention takes place at a personal level; to identify and work successfully with African Americans, live near us and 94

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share our challenges to life and living.

Treat Health Inequalities When the nation’s health issue is raised, again African Americans are clearly oppressed. African American women receive less effective medical care for similar diseases than their white cohorts. The incidence of HIV/AIDS is much more severely present in the Black community than elsewhere. Black childhood poverty is triple that of whites. Death from the major killer diseases affect African Americans adversely more than whites. Of course, many factors contribute to these disparities. However, some are clearly race-specific. Since the early work of Benjamin Chavis and subsequent efforts by Robert Bullard, we progressive planners know the devastating impacts of environmental racism (the siting of hazardous wastes facilities, brownfields, etc.). Even when the current administration has moved to expand the health care of the oppressed, many states continue to resist and even refuse to advance the quality of health care for their citizens, especially the poor, inner city and rural African Americans, and the unemployed/underemployed. Health planning is no longer the narrow domain of health planners. Health planning is a national issue that immediately (and long term) affects the quality of life for all in the environment. What, then, are roles to be played by progressive planners? There are three roles that demand immediate involvement by progressive planers. First, progressive planners must present forcibly in every available public forum the case for national health insurance that will target oppressed and marginalized groups such as Blacks in the South. A second responsibility for progressive planners is to join African American advocate groups that seek to change public health policy, present cases of treatment disparities by the medical profession toward women and children, and educate the Black public about health dangers that negatively impact them. The third area of intervention must target and expose policies, institutional failures, and racist practices by individual physicians. There can be no easy solution to a problem that has had negative impacts upon Blacks and has been neglected for so long.

Blacks in the South

White racism is part of the DNA of American culture. A social-politicaleconomic-environmental disease itself, eradication will prove to be challenging and enduring. For progressive planners this is a difficult arena. Few white planners see themselves as racist. Few believe their 95

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efforts in projecting the nation’s future development as inherently racist and exclusionary. Few discuss openly the ethical and practical consequences of their actions as professionals. But progressive planners are NOT excluded from this group. A major first step in successfully solving a problem is the identification of boundary conditions (bias, limitations, etc.). The first boundary condition for progressive planners is to identify and openly admit their own racism. Once the problem is identified, efforts can be made by ethical people to seek solutions that are beneficial to all. As progressive planners work to build a better, safer, and more fair and just community, they must analyze themselves and be open to the observations and criticisms of those affected most by their practices. White Americans easily point to the need for African Americans to bail themselves out of their second-class citizenship. Reference to shoe strings, learning to fish, and removing the chip on your shoulder are examples. Frederick Douglas, W.E.B. DuBois, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. all recognized and pronounced that power concedes nothing without struggle. Vincent Harding posited that the most salient contribution of African people to the Western Hemisphere has been their struggle against oppression. Surely white progressive planners must know or acquire the knowledge of this fact and move with dispatch to address the terrible continuing wrongs put upon Blacks. This article was originally published in the Spring 2013 issue of Progressive Planning Magazine.

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Placemaking When Black Lives Matter By Annette Koh What would placemaking look like when Black lives matter? Washington D.C.’s director of planning illustrated the racial limits of DIY optimism, stating, “I’ve told my staff that PARK(ing) Day is really nice. But if five Black males took over a parking spot and had a barbecue and listened to music . . . would they last 10 minutes?” Who gets to “disrupt” the public space paradigm, and who gets arrested for disturbing the peace? Twenty years earlier, Oakland-based landscape architect Walter Hood pointed out the irony that “congregating on corners implies illicit activities and trouble” in inner city communities, while in other areas of the city, it is encouraged and seen as a sign of vitality and community spirit. How much have things really changed? Placemaking as a policy is no longer a flash in the pan fad. These projects to “collectively reimagine and reinvent public spaces” run the gamut from DIY pallet furniture to multi-million dollar park renovations. A flurry of foundations, private and public, now offer placemaking grants and dozens of American municipalities have embraced pop-up plazas and parklets as low cost ways to increase livability. Placemaking has captured imaginations because it emphasizes the active over the static, the small-scale intervention over the mega project and creative engagement instead of passive provision. The bottom up nature of placemaking lends its street cred and the participatory process avoids the contentiousness of public hearings. Given the planning profession’s track record of spatial discrimination dressed up as urban panacea – Exhibit A is urban renewal – this speedy popularization of placemaking has also prompted criticism and reflection. Last year, Project for Public Spaces issued a call to planners and designers to formulate a placemaking code of ethics. Guideline #7 reads: “We will actively promote inclusion in all of our projects. We know that place is a common denominator for all people, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, or income, and we will not engage in projects that discriminate against any community or individual.”1 The intent is laudable. But “inclusion” doesn’t undo existing injustices. In particular, viewing place as “common denominator” runs the risk of erasing major differences in the ways people experience place 1

“Equitable Placemaking: Not the End, but the Means,” Project for Public Spaces. June 19, 2015. http://www.pps.org/reference/equity-placemakinggentrification/.

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and public spaces. In the United States, these major differences cleave along racial and class lines. Persistent inequalities and decades of discrimination mean a code of ethics isn’t going to cut it. We need an actual politics of placemaking. Our naiveté borders on negligence if we don’t explicitly address how the very presence of certain bodies in public has been criminalized and the color of your skin can render you automatically “out of place.” Stop-and-frisk policies have criminalized an entire generation of Black and Latino youth in the name of public safety. What kind of places are we making in American cities where a 12-year old kid is shot in his own neighborhood park? The fundamental problem with placemaking as currently popularized is that it does not challenge the logics that undergird discriminatory policies such as broken windows policing. Urban design arguments for the activation of public space still take “disorder” as a neutral category, rather than one shaped by legacies of vagrancy laws and Jim Crow. As the murder of Alton Sterling revealed, the idea that “public space and culture should belong to those who produce them” does not apply to all. When placed in the context of ongoing struggles, placemaking’s proverbs take on a sinister tone. Jane Jacobs’ injunction that neighborhoods need “eyes on the street” has been embraced by placemaking advocates as a beneficial outcome to increased attention to public spaces. We should ask ourselves if those eyes are attached to a person socialized to see non-white people as inherently dangerous. Having more “eyes on the street” might only result in more calls to the police about “suspicious behavior” or worse yet, armed vigilantism. Saying that “great places benefit everyone” and will connect all residents, rather than divide or displace, is unrealistic given deeply embedded racism and classism. When we say a park is under-used, we should qualify that by saying “underused by middle-class professionals” if what we are objecting to is the presence of poor and homeless people who cannot afford to purchase a cappuccino as “rent” for a coffee shop table. When we talk about “activating public space”, we should talk about who is already active in those spaces—people who in fact may have nowhere else to go. The ability to define an activity as desirable or undesirable, or define a “great place” or a “sketchy place” is a form of power that planners exert unthinkingly. Quality of life and livability are not value-neutral concepts. As planners and urban designers, we render and enact particular visions of the 98

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good life that are often coded in racial and class terms—sipping a craft cocktail at a sidewalk cafe versus brownbagging a forty on the corner. William H. Whyte’s work on the social life of small urban spaces is a touchstone text for placemaking advocates. But while we remember the importance of people-watching perches, we pay less attention to his insistence that we must welcome the weirdos and the bag ladies too. Whyte argued that public space is for “controversy, soapboxing, passing of leaflets, impromptu entertaining, happenings, or eccentric behavior.” Placemaking must make room for politics because public space is inherently political. Some uses and users will be controversial. Oft-repeated mantras to “activate under-utilized space” skirt perilously close to Manifest Destiny justifications that indigenous peoples weren’t properly improving the land that colonists wanted to control. Underutilized was deployed by a University of California official in the People’s Park struggle to delegitimize the presence of protestors and homeless campers nearly 30 years ago: “The park is underutilized. Only a small group of people use the park and they are not representative of the community.” After the killing of Philando Castile during a traffic stop, one transportation planner called for colleagues to “advocate against slippery measures that are used as pretext in racism.”2 The article on Vision Zero in Progressive City is another example of how a seemingly uncontroversial pedestrian safety program might make New York City less safe for many residents.3 Placemaking promises resident-led urban revitalization instead of top-down urban renewal. Instead of taking a meat ax to the Bronx, we are invited to practice urban acupuncture to revive neglected neighborhoods and stimulate investment. But the racial and spatial inequalities of American cities shape placemaking possibilities in ways that undermine good intentions. Street food and multimodal streets are celebrated as the future of urban livability, but depending on who and where, the same activities morph from good ideas to criminal behavior, e.g. permit violations and jaywalking tickets. When we talk about livability, we need to talk about how livelihoods have been criminalized. Making ends meet in a post-industrial America can put you in 2 David Levinson. “Not in Our Name,” Transportist. July 8, 2016. https://transportist.org/2016/07/08/not-in-our-name/. 3 Josmar Trujillo. “Vision Zero: Racism, Policing, and Rethinking Safety,” Progressive City. December 14, 2016. https://www.progressivecity.net/singlepost/2016/12/14/VISION-ZERO-RACISM-POLICING-AND-RETHINKING-SAFETY.

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jail for misdemeanor violations or worse. As Eric Garner said just before his death, “This stops today.” Planners need to grapple with the reality that placemaking can and does replicate inequalities and exclusionary practices. We should constantly examine best practices and concepts such as accessibility and livability for implicit bias. In my most optimistic moods, I imagine placemaking as a gateway concept to the right to the city. But we need to ask ourselves uncomfortable questions and make a pointed political commitment to ensure it doesn’t become an aesthetically pleasing fig leaf for the exclusionary policies of the 21st century revanchist city. A first step would be to adopt the Movement for Black Lives policy platform. Placemaking for all is impossible to achieve with the overpolicing of communities of color. This article was originally published on Progressive City on April 3, 2017.

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CHAPTER 4: CLIMATE JUSTICE, ENVIRONMENT, SUSTAINABILITY, RESILIENCE Introduction by Tom Angotti The planning establishment, long rebuffed in its efforts to promote planning in cities, has never missed an opportunity to “re-brand” itself, thinking that it can convince the people holding the economic and political power of the usefulness of planners. This has resulted in a long chain of proposals from planners for quick fixes and feeble attempts to confront the crescendo of environmental and public health crises facing the world. Today, with global climate change and the majority of the world’s population living in cities, urban planners are facing a truly monumental challenge. The problem is that the professional planning establishment, even when it endorses bold political and economic changes, ends up spending most of its time promoting watered-down technocratic palliatives that fail to confront structural inequalities and the fundamental root of the crisis – the system of global capitalism. Planners are reluctant to face capital’s deep stake in the fossil fuel industries, urban transportation dominated by the private automobile, and the culture of hyperconsumerism. Even more serious, however, technocratic planners turn their backs on the climate justice movement which represents the frontline communities that are most affected by extreme climate and also deeply committed to change. This scenario around climate change is a renewed version of the planning profession’s habitual tendency to evade issues that are deeply connected with economic, social and racial justice.

Planning and Public Health Modern urban planning emerged in the midst of public health crises and evolved to play a role in addressing urban environmental problems. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, industrial cities battled communicable diseases such as tuberculosis, which were exacerbated by poor living conditions in working class districts. Planners fought for land use regulations, housing reforms and modern infrastructure that would reduce public health risks, and they were successful wherever local wealth and resources were available. But the

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pattern was set when reforms failed to address gaping inequalities. Enormous imbalances in wealth across, among and within cities would become a given that continued to shape cities and regions. Perhaps just as critical was the way that urban planning encouraged conspicuous consumption and waste, only exacerbating environmental injustices and laying the foundation for the global climate crisis that first came to light in the latter part of the 20th century. After drugs, immunization and planning reduced the public health risks, dramatically larger metropolitan areas around the world suffered from catastrophic air and water pollution, untamed vehicular traffic, massive waste, and new public health epidemics such as obesity and diabetes. Capitalist industry promoted personal cars and personal electronic devices, all of which reproduced inequalities. Growing environmental movements pushed for a more comprehensive approach to the environment, and one response was a strategic focus on sustainability of the environment and life. Planners quickly invented sustainability plans and promoted sustainable development. They tossed the largely ignored comprehensive land use plans that they produced in the twentieth century. As Peter Marcuse and others in this volume note, they put aside racial and social justice implications and failed to explicitly acknowledge what gets sustained and what doesn’t, and who benefits and loses. The limitations of sustainability plans became apparent in the 21 st century as floods, wildfires, famines and other catastrophic events possibly linked with global warming created severe emergencies. The rising climate justice movement asserted that it was not enough to sustain grossly unequal cities; if disasters occur, bouncing back to poverty and exploitation is unacceptable. In response, the discourse from the powerful shifted towards promoting resiliency. Sustainability plans gave way to a slew of resiliency plans that discussed strategies for adapting to climate change. However, without shifting the imbalance of economic and political power these new plans can also reserve resilient cities for those already monopolizing land and resources. Frontline communities that have historically faced catastrophic situations without outside help may once again miss a seat in Noah’s ark. If the US government’s racist response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans is any indicator of what is to come, only the white and powerful may be the beneficiaries of planning for climate change. Master plans, sustainability plans and resiliency plans, especially in a North America immersed in short-term pragmatic thinking and free102

Introduction market capitalism, have too often been short-term, technocratic responses to serious long-term structural crises. They fail to address the fundamental inequalities that reproduce public health crises, environmental pollution, and climate change in the long term. Perhaps the biggest oversight of planning, however, is the extent to which the profession has contributed to the creation of a huge structural divide between metropolitan areas, which now house the majority of the world’s population, and rural areas, which are overrun by extractive capitalism, industrial agriculture and secluded enclaves for the super-rich. This huge divide removes the majority of urbanites from direct contact with the catastrophic destruction of nature across the earth’s surface and in the oceans, which has accelerated with unregulated capitalist expansion. Mining waste, logging, pollution, and greenhouse gases are devastating the earth’s last remaining wildlife habitats and carbon sinks, including the oceans and rain forests. It is time for a truly radical turn in planning away from technological fixes and trendy “plans.” It is time to plan for another world in which environmental justice is possible.

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Sustainability is Not Enough By Peter Marcuse "Sustainability" as a goal for planning just doesn't work. In the first place, sustainability is not a goal; it is a constraint on the achievement of other goals. No one who is interested in change wants to sustain things as they are now. Taken as a goal by itself, "sustainability" only benefits those who already have everything they want. It preserves the status quo, making only those changes required to maintain that status. You could argue that the status quo is not sustainable socially, because an unjust society will not long endure. That is more a hope than a demonstrated fact. You could also argue, and with more evidence, that the status quo is not environmentally sustainable; indeed, that is the origin of the "sustainability" slogan. But changes can be made within the present system to cope with problems such as environmental degradation and global warming. Nor is it inevitable that such changes will be socially just. Certainly "sustainable" means sustainable, physically and environmentally, in the long run. But what does "in the long run" mean? How long is that, and who is to determine it? Never mind Lord Keynes' "in the long run, we will all be dead." We may be dead, but our children and their children will live. Two quite separate problems arise here, one social and political, the other scientific.

The Social Problem The costs of moving towards environmental sustainability will not be born equally by everyone. In conventional economic terms, different people have different discount rates for the same cost or benefit. Meeting higher environmental standards increases costs; some will profit from supplying the wherewithal to meet those standards. Others, not able to pay for them, will have to do without. Thus, the effects of income inequality are likely to be aggravated by the raising of environmental standards in this way. This problem is evident when it comes to the issue of atomic power plants in developing countries that have no other available sources of energy, or in the rain-forest disputes in South America. Similar issues are raised in the environmental justice movement in the United States. Better environments for some will be at the expense of worse environments for others, as waste disposal sites, air pollution, and water contamination, are moved around. Even when there is a solution that improves conditions for some without

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hurting others, the benefits will be unevenly distributed.

The Scientific Problem Our knowledge is limited, and the further out into the future we wish to project it, the more the uncertainties grow. Malthus calculated, with the best scientific knowledge of his day, that food production would not sustain a world population much beyond its size at that time. Since then, world population has increased more than five-fold, and is better nourished and lives longer. We know we need to deal with the problem of global warming, and we know that relying on technological fixes is dangerous. Those two propositions should lead us to scale down certain activities linked to growth, and to seek substitutes for others. They mandate adoption of specific policies to achieve specific goals by specific actors in a specific timetable. But absent those specific policies, long-range concerns do not help very much in making decisions about shorter-range questions.

Not Just Environmental In any event long-term environmental considerations are not the only long-term considerations that need to be taken into account. Matters that have both short- and long-range implications include: social justice, economic development, international relations, democracy, democratic control over technological change, and globalization. For a given policy to be desirable, it should meet the constraints of sustainability in each of these dimensions. Environmental sustainability seems at first blush to be the most "objective," the most inescapable, of all these constraints. If humankind dies off, the game is over. But may that not also be said of freedom, democracy, or tolerance? Since none of these deaths will be one-shot catastrophes, is the danger of environmental degradation a greater danger in the long run than war, fascism, poverty, hunger, or disease?

Environmental Justice In practice "sustainability" had its origins in the environmental movement and in most usage is heavily focused on ecological concerns. But why, given limited resources and limited power to bring about change, are efforts thus focused? I would suggest that the environmental movement is a multi-class, if not upper- and middle-class movement, in its leadership, financing and politics. While the environmental justice movement is making a substantial contribution to both social justice and environmental protection, the environmental 105

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movement as a whole often proclaims itself to be above party, above controversy, seeking solutions from which everyone will benefit, and to which no one can object. How nice it would be if we could find such a program we could all rally around, and escape the unpleasant business of facing conflicting interests, having to deal with the unequal distribution of power, the necessities of redistribution, and the defeats that accompany the victories? No wonder "sustainability" is an attractive slogan! But if our goal is redistribution of wealth or opportunity, sharing power or reducing oppression, sustainability does not get us far. All uses of the sustainability concept are not subject to the criticisms I have made. One leading definition is that of the World Commission on Environment and Development (1987): "Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." Fine. Clearly here the goal is "meeting needs," and the remainder, making it sustainable, is a constraint on the appropriate means to be used. Other formulations focus on the "carrying capacity of supporting ecosystems," an elusive concept. To the extent that sustainability requires the review of policies designed today to meet the needs of today in such a way that they do not make things worse in the future, it is an important concept, though for planners it is not a very new one. Among those devoted to the concept, there is also an important debate about the relationship between growth and development, a difficult issue conceptually and one viewed very differently in the developed as against the developing world. So the discussion of sustainability can make a real contribution to advancing the understanding of policy alternatives and their implications. The pursuit of sustainability is a delusion and snare to the extent that we call for "sustainable" activities that are of universal benefit; activities that everyone, every group, and every interest will or should or must accept in their own best interest. It is a delusion to think that only our ignorance or stupidity prevents us from seeing what we all need to do. Indeed, a just, humane, and environmentally sensitive world will in the long run be better for all of us. But getting to the long run entails conflicts and controversies, issues of power and the redistribution of wealth. The "sustainability" slogan hides these conflicts instead of revealing them. This article was originally published in the Winter 2004 Progressive Planning Magazine Reader

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Resilience is Not Enough: Think Seven Generations, Act Now for Climate Justice By Tom Angotti In the wake of the climate crisis planning for resilience has been embraced by urban planners. Clearly, if communities are more resilient they are able to cope with natural disasters and would be in a better position to meet future challenges. Planners can learn from many communities that have historically been resilient – for example island people from the Caribbean to Southeast Asia that have faced catastrophic threats for centuries. Local governments all over are moving from sustainability plans to resiliency plans and incorporating resilience into their growth and development strategies. Like “sustainability,” however, resilience is not enough. Environmental and climate justice advocates have long maintained that “bouncing back” to the same old structures of social and environmental inequality insures that communities of color continue to be the most vulnerable to environmental contamination and destruction. Planning that does not disrupt the imbedded systems of inequality sustains the conditions in which the wealthy and powerful protect their privileged enclaves while the most vulnerable are expected to blindly follow empty calls to be “resilient.” The focus on resilience also tends to obscure the role of disaster capitalism, which instead of preventing crises takes advantage of them to protect and enrich the one percent. Planning resilience has been promoted by a host of experts, nonprofits and governments. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change defines resilience as the capacity of systems to absorb disturbances while “maintaining the same structure and means of functioning” and to “adapt to stress and change.”1 The Rockefeller Foundation launched the 100 Resilient Cities program. One approach is found in Daniel Lerch’s Community Resilience Reader, also published by the PostCarbon Institute. Lerch says there are six foundations for community resilience, summarized below:  

People and the “power to envision the future of the community and build its resilience” Building complex systems

1

Harriet Bulkeley. Cities and Climate Change, (London: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2013), 147.

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   

Adaptation and learning from experience Transformation, or purposefully disrupting systems Sustainability, or insuring that what is done works for other communities, future generations, and ecosystems Courage to confront problems and make hard decisions.

As attractive as these may sound, however, resiliency plans often reflect the views of resilience from the vantage point of the wealthiest nations, particularly the United States, and the most privileged communities. The rights and agency of native people and people of color, whose histories are prime examples of resilience, are invisible, submerged or only acknowledged in passing. The analysis and proposals are too often presented in the voice of the collective “we.” This harkens to the mythical supposition that, despite inequalities, “we are all in the same boat,” in search of that magical equilibrium promised by the capitalist marketplace and its institutions that will “raise all boats.” There is a deadly silence about the obstacles to resiliency posed by private property and extractive capitalism.2

Urban Planning for Resilience Let’s consider one of the more popular texts on resiliency. In the second edition of Resilient Cities, edited by Peter Newman, Timothy Beatley and Heather Boyer,3 the authors outline ten steps towards the resilient city: 1. Develop a strategy before implementation 2. Learn by doing and planning 3. Focus on “green icons” such as public buildings and transportation 4. Use “TOD, POD and GOD” – transit-oriented, pedestrianoriented and green-oriented development 5. Move towards resilient infrastructure with gradual and transformative steps 6. Use pricing to promote change 7. Re-think rural areas 8. Regenerate households and neighborhoods 2

Naomi Klein. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014). 3 Peter Newman, Timothy Beatley and Heather Boyer. Resilient Cities. (Washington D.C.:Island Press. 2017).

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9. Promote and facilitate localism 10. Change the rules and laws Resilient Cities offers up important strategies and tools that community planners can and should use in planning for resilience. However, the seemingly practical approach feeds into a pragmatic, professional interest in developing plans that will produce immediate and middlerange results – like TOD and changes in infrastructure design – that do not solidly engage fundamental long-term structural issues such as fossil fuel dependency or seriously challenge economic and racial inequalities. When focusing mainly on the local scale they distract attention from the huge regional, national and global transformations necessary to deal with climate change. In the United States TOD often enhances inequalities, leads to green gentrification and does little to challenge the dominance of the car culture. While local urban planners can help with many small steps forward, change the way of thinking about the urban environment, and trigger discussions of larger issues, too often planners in our pragmatic society stop with the small steps. Most importantly, in a nation sharply divided by race and class since its birth, making cities resilient requires incorporating environmental and climate justice in the foundation of any long-term strategies.

Resilient Cities: Following the Path of Traditional Urban Planning The thinking behind resiliency planning is in line with mainstream planning, not a fundamental departure from it. Resiliency is about protecting the basic structures of the failed system, solving problems through innovation while salvaging the basic systems of economic and political power. This reactionary impulse is imbedded in the history of urban planning. The first modern town planning in late nineteenth century Europe sought to fix the disastrous environmental and health conditions of the nineteenth century industrial city while enhancing capitalist development. In the twentieth century, this produced many “beautified” cities (via the City Beautiful movement) and many orderly suburbs (via the construction of suburban new towns and neatly planned subdivisions). The newly planned cities preserved and improved upon the system of class oppression, enhancing the separation of classes in urban space and, in many countries, institutionalized segregation by race and ethnicity. Just as modern town planning was a reaction to the problems of the nineteenth century city, planning in the late twentieth and early 109

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twenty-first century is a reaction to the unregulated, poorly planned growth of large metropolitan regions in all parts of the world. The byproducts of profit-driven metropolitan expansion include chronic and unmitigated air and water pollution, widespread dependence on fossil fuels, the unprecedented plunder of rural areas for natural resources, industrial agriculture and the loss of food sovereignty, the expanded pace of species extinction, growing waste streams, and global warming. The pragmatic, technocratic response in the last century was to give up on the notion of strong government-led planning and management regimes in line with neoliberal capitalism. This is especially the case when it comes to the “less developed” nations where the massive expulsion of people from rural areas created urban majorities living in so-called “informal” neighborhoods. Ignoring the many examples of resilience in these neighborhoods (where the majority of the world’s people live) professional urban planning has forever sought to pacify, ignore or bulldoze them, or replace them with new “planned” communities.

Resiliency, Technocratic Fixes and Capitalism In his encyclical on climate change, Pope Francesco identified capitalism as the source of this tendency towards technological fixes. Technology, connected to finance capital, pretends to be the only solution to problems. In fact, it is incapable of seeing the multiple relations that exist between things, which is why it sometimes resolves problems by creating new ones.

New technologies must be profitable to investors; they are excellent generators of profit. Capital is not interested in financing alternatives that do not produce profits. Reducing consumption and waste, making products that last longer, producing public transit instead of cars, creating public goods and public space – these are of only marginal interest because their profit margins are lower (unless there are massive state subsidies, which of course create other problems for capital). According to Francis: The alliance between economics and technology ends up leaving aside everything that is not of immediate interest to them. Thus all that can be expected is some superficial proclamations, isolated philanthropic actions…

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Technological fixes are the methodological foundation for twenty-first century urban planning. The deep positivist bias that notoriously undergirds capitalism in the United States has become hegemonic in the latest surge of globalization, challenging the very foundations of the European welfare states and post-colonial national regimes. It has led to the hegemony of new technocratic tools that aim to promote planning and development, usually advanced by the World Bank, multilateral agencies, and international financial institutions. The drive for the technocratic fix to resolve environmental disasters took off after Rachel Carson’s path-breaking exposure of the negative effects of pesticides in her classic 1962 book, The Silent Spring.4 Carson rang an alarm bell warning that the unregulated use of chemicals was having catastrophic effects on human health and the environment. The establishment response, however, was to implant a relatively weak regulatory regime that allowed continued expansion in the use of many new and exotic chemicals in the environment. Environmental legislation in the US was a step forward but left relatively untouched the power of most corporations and their ability to evade responsibility for the damage caused by their products. The environmental impact statement (EIS) became a major technological instrument available to planners in government at all levels to deal with the potential negative impacts of new urban development. The EIS, however, only requires disclosure of potential negative environmental impacts and does not prevent new projects or products from being introduced, even when they may have severe negative impacts and those impacts are widely acknowledged. Subsequent reforms such as Superfund cleanup, for example, use inadequate government tools to partially remediate some of the worst environmental contamination caused by corporate irresponsibility. Even these inadequate mechanisms are under attack today as powerful economic interests in the US are allowed to undermine scientific evidence by presenting “alternative facts” about toxic use based on research they fund and endorse. The reactive approach imbedded in the US contrasts with another major model, the precautionary approach, which was formally adopted by the European Union and others, even if it has not been fully exercised in practice. The principle behind this is that if there are any substantial doubts about the long-term effects of a product then it is best to limit or prevent their production. This approach puts greater value on potential long-term impacts and long-term planning. Yet we 4

Rachel Carson. Silent Spring. (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1962).

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have to strain to hear the voices of any planners in the US demanding a paradigm shift towards adoption of the precautionary approach. Imagine what the urban world would look like today if a century ago when the private automobile was invented there had been a precautionary planning process premised on a projection of what cities would look like seven generations (over a century) later if the automobile became the main means of urban transportation. Imagine if a century ago when oil and gas production exploded there had been a precautionary approach limiting their use in heating and cooling, the production of construction materials and the mechanization of agriculture. Imagine if industrial agriculture had been limited by strict regulation of artificial fertilizers, pesticides and the construction of dams and irrigation systems. These three sectors – transportation, energy and agriculture – now account for three-fourths of global greenhouse gases. It is impossible to turn back the clock but it would be possible to stop the short-term thinking and follow The Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy: “In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.” Seven generations is more than a century.

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Resiliency planning today is in fashion and planners want to be up-todate. In the era of neoliberalism urban planning lost a great deal of legitimacy. When long-term comprehensive planning became unwieldy and unproductive in the twentieth century because cities became giant metropolitan regions, strategic planning, an innovation that started in the Pentagon and business schools, became the favorite tool of urban planners. Sustainability and resiliency plans are both forms of strategic planning. They are generally filled with technological fixes, framed in the context of broad aspirations and good intentions. They often take the form of “best practices” that get marketed as solutions. As in the business world, the future horizon never goes far beyond a few years or at most a decade or two – the time horizon for a return on investments. Restoring the old system leaves unchecked all of the inequalities and structural problems that were undisturbed or even worsened by disaster. “Bouncing back” means going back to the system that exposed the most vulnerable people and species to catastrophic conditions. It means that the next round of disruptions will produce unequal results, albeit in different configurations. In the end, there is no guarantee that the whole thing won’t collapse. Capitalism reproduces catastrophic conditions. Then it expands by making money on quick fixes. They aren’t solutions but part of the problem. What happens when a lot of individual, local 112

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systems survive but throughout the world many species become extinct due to the “external” effects of the internally resilient systems, and in the long run it ends with a massive extinction? Planners should start with the principle that land, water and fire (energy) should not be for sale. Planners should help build the commons. They should stop talking about “land use” and start talking about the quality of life. They need to help humanity learn how to live with land and other species on the earth, not how to exercise monopoly control over them. Planners need to spend as much time dealing with time as they do with space because they have for too long conspired to make the fast city instead of the just city. They look at the immediate future instead of seven generations ahead. They promote the environment without environmental justice. They must advocate for the right to the city and, just as important, the rights of nature. To do all of this they should engage and ally with community and environmental justice movements, and help generate real dialogues across geographical, race and gender boundaries while rejecting phony strategic planning exercises. They need to be the first to declare that resilience is not enough. This is an abridged version of an article originally published on Progressive City on December 6, 2017.

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How Capitalism and the Planning Profession Contribute to Climate Change By Dick Platkin Environmental sociologist John Bellamy Foster has long maintained that capitalism is inherently harmful to the environment. In several books published by the Monthly Review Press he explains that the capital accumulation process (the perpetual reinvestment of profits to maximize return) is integral to capitalism. Foster’s books, which every progressive planner needs to look at, include What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism (with Fred Magdoff), The Vulnerable Planet, and The Ecological Rift (with Brett Clark and Richard York). Foster shows how, other than during short periods of global depression, capitalism results in increasing levels of energy-intensive economic activity, with a host of unavoidable and expanding environmentally harmful externalities. This resulting environmental havoc, especially the increasing levels of the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change, is merely the unaccounted cost of doing business. Foster further argues that these externalities cannot be eliminated through careful planning, product substitution, government regulations, or programs such as a carbon tax. Climate change denial is not limited to those who argue that global warming is a hoax or only results from natural fluctuations. Foster explains that denial includes those who claim the cause of climate change is not found in the capital accumulation process, and, instead, point to population growth. He identifies another form of denial among environmentalists who do not dispute that capitalism is the cause of climate change but who maintain careful planning and regulation can successfully overcome the non- and anti-ecological features of capitalism through a no-growth capitalism. Foster further argues that established approaches to mitigate climate change, such as product substitution, technological efficiency, international treaties, localization, environmental regu-lation, pricing, personal self-restraint, and even adaptation, will fail because of the basic operations of the capitalist economic system. In his view these “no-growth” models of capitalism are both theoretically and practically impossible. The conclusion is inescapable. The circle cannot be squared, and no efforts to create a green capitalism – in terms of broad programs that result in reduced per capita greenhouse gas emissions sufficient to bring 114

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CO2 levels below .350 ppm or even a safer target of .250 ppm – will succeed. These strategies are all intended to allow “economic growth” to continue and are, therefore, self-defeating in averting climate change.

Problems Facing Planning and Alternatives to Capitalist Growth Foster carefully examines the option of rigorous economic planning to create an ecological capitalism. He sees many practical problems, not just theoretical barriers to these green capitalist utopias. For these reasons he argues that production solely to meet human needs, including a livable environment, is an impossible goal under the current economic system: 1. The capitalist system is so inherently unstable and, therefore, prone to unpredictable economic, political, military, and now climate crises, that these rapidly unfolding events effectively thwart rational planning. 2. The capitalist economic system requires an enormous sales and marketing effort to overcome its perpetual glut of overproduction, including severe crises of overproduction. While the economic system is capable of prodigious production, it is extremely limited in distribution and consumption. 3. Planned obsolescence is built into the capitalist system, with enormous waste resulting from discarded products and production lines, especially as the product development cycle has become so compressed. 4. Luxury goods are produced for an opulent minority. 5. The class contradictions of the capitalist system require a huge penal and police system to control the working class and enormous military establishment to confront insurgencies and inter-imperialist competitors. 6. At the financial level the economic system has developed elaborate speculative instruments that accelerate the business cycle and magnify climate-related disruptions, such as the floods and droughts that hamper agricultural production. 7. Technology produces toxic waste at all steps of the production process: extraction, shipping, fabrication, distribution, sales, use, and disposal.

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8. Many products are cheap (e.g., plastics) but highly destructive at all stages of production. Packaging and containers comprise half the price of goods. For cosmetics and household goods the price is even higher.

Planning, the Urban Growth Machine and Climate Change Foster does not, however, explain how the capital accumulation process operates at the municipal level, and how the myriad of local greening schemes now being planned and implemented are inadequate or could potentially be enhanced to succeed. While other researchers, in particular Harvey Molotch in Urban Fortunes and Tom Angotti in New York for Sale, have identified the capital accumulation process as the driver of the urban growth machine, especially through speculative real estate investment and supportive infrastructure, we still do not have a clear understanding of the environmental implications of this process and how the city planning profession has played a deliberate or unintended role. We can, however, use Foster’s global insights in understanding and changing urban environments. While liberal city planning’s major achievements, such as sanitation, parks and open space, mass transportation, public housing, the War on Poverty, Model Cities, and the Great Society, have improved the quality of life for most urban residents – and temporarily reduced inequality – the planning profession’s acquiescence to militarism and auto-centric cities has played a major, ongoing role in the generation of the greenhouse gases responsible for climate change. These are the climate consequences of “redevelopment,” traditional zoning, shopping centers, freeways, suburbs, and single-family homes. Megastorms, such as Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, did not just happen, but are a result of enormous industrial processes, including the construction of vast, sprawled metropolitan regions. In the next phase of this dangerous progression, neoliberal planning has been more than complicit in the generation of urban real estate bubbles. In parallel with cutbacks, furloughs, spying and policing, it actively promotes the deregulation of zoning, environmental review, and mitigation programs. As a result, neoliberal land use rationales, policies, and practices ensure that the generation of greenhouse gases will seamlessly continue onward from the liberal era. While neoliberal planning tolerates beneficial but peripheral programs, such as design review, streetscapes, biking, tree planting, community gardens, and recycling, this is because these popular programs seldom interfere with the urban growth machine and the 116

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larger capital accumulation process. In fact, sophisticated developers have learned that they can garner support for their detested megaprojects by offering local critics such “community benefits” as parklets, temporary jobs, speed bumps, landscaped median strips, and occasional meeting rooms. From the standpoint of the both the environment and equity, liberal and neoliberal planning has failed in the United States. The role of progressive planners is, therefore, to explain this failure and then offer alternative planning approaches that can actually make a difference. Beyond a critique of the planning profession and sharing an explanation of how its history, even when well-intentioned, has contributed to the current and projected climate crisis, there are some options that we must now analyze, develop, and explain in accessible language. Option 1 is the eco-socialist vision advanced by John Bellamy Foster in which the purpose of production is consumption and the entire production process is carefully assessed to eliminate the many excesses and environmentally harmful externalities that Foster inventories. But, what would eco-socialist cities look like? On this topic Foster is vague, but we have the conceptual tools and knowledge to develop his vision. While the steps from a political vision to achievement of the enormous political victories that would make eco-socialist cities possible are intricate, a clear vision does make that overwhelming process more attainable. Option 2 is what we can call utopian seeds, and they are likely to become a major component of eco-socialist cities. These include experimental ecological communities, as well as the programs, such as biking, community gardens and playgrounds, that I labeled as peripheral under neo-liberal planning. But, these “crumbs-off-the-table” can grow into major components of urban life under different circumstances, such as eco-socialist cities. Option 3 is the fight backs that so many progressive planners undertake, usually when they are contacted by local communities involved in campaigns to resist liberal and neoliberal planning projects. From experience we know that few of these campaigns are, in themselves, victorious. We also know that in those rare cases, the urban growth machine, in its economic and political dimensions, still grinds on and on. But, our challenge is not just to offer our technical and political skills to local communities, but share our insights and visions of alternative cities in which these perpetual campaigns would no longer be necessary. These three alternatives to liberal and neo-liberal planning are 117

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already underway, but without our continuous help there is no guarantee that any of these approaches will succeed. Likewise, there is no guarantee that they will fail, and this open future is what should drive us. This article was originally published in the Summer 2013 issue of Progressive Planning Magazine.

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Permitting Environmental Justice at US EPA Natalie Bump Vena As part of efforts to reform how facilities receive permits, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is promoting policies that effectively entrust corporations with protecting our most vulnerable communities from environmental hazards that their own businesses produce. By encouraging fenceline residents—people who live next to toxic facilities—and corporations to enter into informal talks about the location and management of potentially dangerous operations, EPA officials show little commitment to compensating for differences in power, let alone redressing discrimination by race and class. On June 6, 2018, I observed this philosophy in action during an allday conference at Columbia Law School, “Key Issues in US EPA Region 2”. The U.S. EPA has ten regional offices, and I live in Region 2, which encompasses New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and eight tribal nations. Only one panelist, Carol Ann Siciliano, explicitly addressed environmental justice, a movement seeking to prevent and remediate the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards on low-income people and communities of color. Even given the deregulation frenzy at today’s EPA, Siciliano’s statements startled me. She presented corporate social responsibility programs as effective tools for advancing environmental justice. And for her, the “regulator”—a local, state, or federal government agency—should have a modest role in the permitting process for facilities that emit pollutants. “What’s the role of the permit writer?” she asked. “To start the conversation and get out of the way.” Siciliano, a career EPA lawyer, leads the Cross-Cutting Issues Law Office within the agency’s Office of the General Counsel at D.C. headquarters – “the chief legal advisor to the EPA.” In addition to environmental justice, attorneys in the cross-cutting group specialize in a number of areas, including children’s health and the Endangered Species Act. Siciliano also co-leads the EPA’s initiative to consider environmental justice in the permitting process and works actively with the EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council. Her brand of environmental justice reflects both the Trump Administration’s particular assault on social justice and longstanding trends in neoliberal governance. In early spring 2017, Trump’s proposed 2018 budget eliminated the U.S EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice, which

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had been established in the early 1990s. Soon after, Mustafa Ali, one of that officer’s senior advisers, resigned, telling The Washington Post, “I haven’t seen yet any engagement with communities with environmental justice concerns.” Ultimately, the Trump administration kept the Office of Environmental Justice, but moved it from the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance to the Office of Policy in April 2018. E&E News reports that while some cast the move as promoting efficiency, others feared environmental justice would become more vulnerable to prevailing politics in the Office of Policy. But Siciliano’s belief that corporate social responsibility can mitigate environmental justice precedes the Trump Administration and will likely survive it. The EPA Region 2 Update is a biennial conference, and in 2016, Siciliano spoke there about citizen science and environmental justice under Obama. In that talk, she encouraged corporations to “engage effectively” with communities, in order to minimize the need for government intervention. She wanted the regulator’s role in permitting negotiations to decrease, saying, “The facility and the regulator engage in permitting and enforcement together. The community and the regulator engage in tips and conversation but the two sets that should be talking are the community and the facility.” At the 2018 Region 2 Update, Siciliano spoke about communityindustry partnerships with even greater optimism, asserting that facilities, like oil refineries and waste incinerators, in fact benefit fenceline communities. “The business, and you know this, is deeply important to the community,” she said. “They provide the jobs. They provide tax revenues that support municipal services. They engage in local philanthropy and they might even provide a little bit of a community identity. So there are natural allies here—the community and the business should be able to work together.” Siciliano suggested that corporations act in the best interests of communities where they locate environmental hazards, but even their assurances of economic prosperity usually fall flat. Georgetown Law Professor Sheila Foster and environmental justice lawyer Luke Cole have noted, “The economic development promises are rarely realized,” and local residents receive “few, if any, jobs” at a given facility. Siciliano’s choice to largely ignore the inequities that produce environmental injustice perhaps made her cheerful outlook possible. She viewed decisions to site facilities in particular places as reasonable business decisions, minimizing the discrimination that continues to explain the location of environmental hazards in low-income areas and 120

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communities of color. “The factory, the incinerator, the wastewater treatment plant arrives, probably in a borderland somewhere where property values are very low,” Siciliano generalized. “There may have been neighbors and the neighbors may care but back in those days they didn’t have a voice and they didn’t have a say. So here we are.” She did not explore why these neighbors “didn’t have a say.” In fact, Foster and Cole have also argued that residential segregation, by race and class, creates conditions ripe for environmental injustice, with corporations siting environmental hazards where real estate is cheap, after decades of disinvestment, where businesses believe poor and non-white residents are unlikely to obstruct operations. By eliding the reasons why some people live near environmental hazards and others do not, Siciliano absolved government actors from the responsibility of remedying past wrongs, namely the ways in which officials made residential segregation public policy through tactics like redlining and what Richard Rothstein calls “racial zoning.”1 Rather, Siciliano encouraged community organizers in the audience to share their concerns with industry representatives in informal meetings, with no government presence or legal representation. “Reach out to the facility that’s across the street,” she recommended. “Ask for a tour. Ask for a meeting or three. Ask them the hard questions.” These included: “What are the pollutants you discharge? What is your compliance history?” She directed community organizers to tell facility representatives “what you’re worried about,” including “the smells, the scum, the early morning trucks.” Siciliano further counseled residents to “go in there, if you can, with a spirit of curiosity and an open mind.” She also had advice for industry on how to best manage their relationships with communities. “Listen compassionately to your neighbor…let folks yell at you. They will yell at you. But if you listen in a spirit of generosity and courage, you might be able to build a bridge of trust.” Science and Technology Scholar Gwen Ottinger has shown how these kinds of informal encounters and cooperative relationships can effectively disempower fenceline communities through her research in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley. She recounts how once refinery officials in New Sarpy, LA began listening to community members and treating them with respect during meetings, local citizen scientists stopped 1

Richard Rothstein. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. (New York, Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017).

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sampling air quality and ended their demands for relocation, despite continuously high rates of cancer and respiratory illness among residents. Refinery officials further appeased neighbors with cheap and easy fixes, like cleaning up litter that had accumulated on facility grounds. To use Siciliano’s language, the oil refinery successfully built a “bridge of trust” so that the community no longer protested its operations, even though the health risks of the facility’s chemical emissions remained unknown. Endorsing the tactics Ottinger criticizes, Siciliano stated in her June remarks that industry could mollify locals with modest fixes that did not transform fundamental operations. “You might learn that the community isn’t so much worried about pollution. They might be worried about the trucks that rumble past the school bus stop every single morning. Or idle next to the bus stop. That’s what they’re worried about. Well maybe that’s something that you can address.” She further outlined how a facility’s efforts to “listen” and “hide nothing” could prove economically profitable: “There is a return on the investment of a clean relationship with the community that can in turn facilitate rapid permit issuance, and stability and predictability.” Siciliano concluded her talk at the Region 2 Update by describing a particularly successful community-industry partnership that culminated in the U.S. EPA awarding a Clean Air Act permit for a “waste-toenergy” facility in Puerto Rico. She left the company unnamed, saying it approached the community where they wanted to build “on their own initiative and with some encouragement from EPA and they learned the community was deeply worried about lead.” In response, the company conducted its own study modeling how much lead the facility would emit, showing “their treatment would be very effective and that their levels of [lead] release would be about 200x lower than the applicable standard.” Siciliano continued to gush over the facility’s actions. “And then, I love this part…as a final display of goodwill, they volunteered to install monitors, ambient air monitors in the community so that they in the community could know in real time how much lead was actually in the environment. This was a lot…It costs money. But for some members of the community, their fears were relieved, they were alleviated.” Siciliano acknowledged that other community members remained dissatisfied, saying, “We did end up getting litigation.” Still, she described the case as “a really great example of how a community and a facility can work together to try to figure out what was deeply concerning and what to do about it.” 122

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2014 Climate Justice March in New York City. Photo by Tom Angotti

In fact, the facility and the community reached no such consensus. Based on my own digging after the conference, I figured out Siciliano was describing Energy Answer’s permit application to build a waste-toenergy facility (or waste incinerator, as the community called it) in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. On its website, EPA Region 2 describes the project as “a new resource recovery facility capable of generating 77 MW.” The EPA issued the facility’s final permit in 2014, and then extended it in 2015 and 2017. Energy Answers still has not built the facility in part due to local opposition in Arecibo, a community already living with an old battery recycling facility that is now a Superfund site. Carlos Garcia, a resident of Arecibo who is asthmatic and whose daughter and grandchildren are also asthmatic, called the incinerator’s construction a “matter of life and death” for the community, according to a video released by Earthjustice.2 Social Justice News Nexus reports that a number of community organizations share Garcia’s view and are fighting the incinerator, including Ciudadanos en Defensa del Ambiente, Comité Basura Cero Arecibo, and Madres de Negro de Arecibo.3 2

“Fighting for their Lives,” Earthjustice. https://earthjustice.org/video/protect-arecibo-defend-nepa. 3 Shelby Fleig. “Arecibo Community Cautiously Optimistic After Energy Answers Withdraws Incinerator Proposal from Control Boards Critical Projects

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Vermont Law School and Earthjustice are now representing the local coalition and have, among other actions, submitted comments under the National Environmental Protection Act (1970) opposing the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s funding of the facility. The community coalition has gained ground. According to Earthjustice Attorney Jonathan Smith, the USDA now seems unlikely to finance the project. And this past February, Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rosselló withdrew his support of the incinerator. Contrary to Siciliano’s message, the case of Arecibo serves as a “really great example” of how corporate social responsibility programs fail to alleviate local concerns about environmental injustice and establishes the dangers of government officials entrusting public health to corporations. Instead, we need regulators to manage formal processes for the permits of polluting facilities, with procedures that ensure fenceline communities have meaningful involvement and effective representation. This article was originally published on Progressive City on October 8, 2018.

Process,” Social Justice News Nexus. Aril 3, 2018. http://sjnnchicago.medill.northwestern.edu/blog/2018/04/03/arecibocommunity-cautiously-optimistic-energy-answers-withdraws-incineratorproposal-control-boards-critical-projects-process/.

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Dots Crying in the Wilderness Jean Garren Roughly a quarter of the nation's population lives in rural areas. Actually, most people think that roughly three-quarters of the nation's population live in urban areas, for that is how the data is ally disappear behind rings of suburbs, walls of skyscrapers, miles of asphalt, and inner-city chaos. Rural America comprises a racially, ethnically, and culturally diverse – and largely ignored – invis ble minority under siege. Perhaps the operative word is "invisible," for rural America is not labeled on maps; it is, when one thinks about it, only noticeable through absence. A tiny dot – or no dot at all – may mark a rural center whose constituency lies scattered in many directions for many miles, off the highways on rough dirt roads, behind hills or at sparse intervals across an empty horizon. Because it is invisible, rural America is at the mercy of the collective imagination and myth-formation of the urban majority, for, despite its invisibility, rural America is highly visible. Every Dances with Wolves, every 4x4 crashing through the empty terrain of a television commercial, every rugged lonesome handsome Marlboro man, every "Colorado Rocky Mountain High," every tourism Get-Away-From-It-All brochure, sends the message that out "there," where people are not, is where one wants to be. I am bemused by neoVictorian architecture and neo-traditional town planning, and tend to agree with those who consider them manifestations of an urban wish to escape to sometime past, anywhere else. And escaping to rural America they are, in droves. It's the "quality of life." It's not, however, the way of life. I confess to living in an attractive, rather isolated county of still less than 18,000 people. Originally settled around 1875, it has four incorporated towns (the core with a population of around 8,000, the peripheral rest smaller by great magnitudes) and a quota of "blink and you've missed it" unincorporated dots. I confess to tenanting from a rancher and a coal miner whose family homesteaded here eighty-some years ago. And I confess to believing that between those who have lived their generations on the land and those who have not, there are fundamentally different ways of being in the world. Where I live – and, from having read journal articles and APA newsletters from around the country, elsewhere as well – the two are becoming less and less compatible, more and more at conflict. Planning literature speaks much about preserving the form of rural life – cluster development, open space

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preservation, and other "design solutions" – and little about preserving its substance. Even the word "rural" itself has defied academic definition; nor do traditionally rural people tend to define themselves as "rural." From out here, then, it often seems as though we, the minority, are being invaded by foreigners hell bent on parodying, commodifying, and destroying our customs and cultures, and usurping our lands. Over the past five years my county has grown by 15%. Over the past ten years, use of our adjoining National Forest has exceeded projections by 300%. Better than 3,000 acres per year (around 38,000 cumulative) are losing traditional uses, most recently to 35-acre building sites for the very rich who are able to retain a preferential agricultural tax rate. Eroding roads have been blazoned across our hillsides; castles built on our river banks and fragile ridges, and in the middle of our critical wildlife habitat. Under our state's statutes, enacted primarily by urban legislators, we have little power to do much about it. So we battle livestock-harassing dog packs, cut fences, ditch destruction, flagrant trespass, proliferating noxious weeds, and the normal hazards of fluctuating markets, agribusiness conglomerates, and a welter of regulations. Beleaguered, since the value of our land for trophy homes far exceeds its value for agriculture, we capitulate to the 35-acre projects. It is, however, the concomitant and crippling local and national economic shift that may, in the long run, be most insidiously destructive. As Rural America is "discovered" by the affluent, Service America finds us, too. One can talk about urban corporate layoffs; the past ten years have seen virtually all of our good-paying mining jobs disappear. For agriculture it's a double whammy: a century-long supportive symbiosis between the two has been erased. For those whose forefathers were miners and who themselves have been miners all their lives, the loss is severe. Along with no historical memory, Urban Cowboys, "hummingbirds" and "lone eagles" bring no jobs but low-wage jobs for those with rural skills. If one chooses not to sell out, what jobs are there in the increasingly high-priced tourism/recreation-oriented core, many miles away? And the socio-economic cost to labor is not calculated by employers. The small dots, once our social, cultural, and modest economic support systems, are becoming rising-cost bedroom towns of the core. Our schools are becoming overcrowded, our roads increasingly illmaintained, and the county's "tax reform" budget follows the demands of urban money and power. And rural America needs. Above all, we need the assistance of those who are not urban graduates of urban planning programs conceptualizing in terms of urban solutions for urban problems – and there 126

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doesn't seem to be a Department of Rural Planning around. Although much can be learned from urban planning, there is much urban planners need to unlearn when they come to rural areas – primarily that rural planning is not about design, and that rural customs and cultures are surely not those of the urban world. If rural America is to be functionally saved, if our customs, cultures, lands and children are not to be ousted by "foreigners," rural planning foremost needs to be about resistance mechanisms and about acquiring the time to accommodate change with dignity, hope, and economic resilience. It needs to be about fundamentally rethinking regulatory schemes for the benefit of those who are here rather than coming. It needs to be about job retraining and economic development unrelated to exploitative industries. And, it needs to be about advocacy in the public arena and above all about sensitivity and balance. For us all, it's a formidable challenge. This article was originally published in the Progressive Planning Magazine Reader #1.

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CHAPTER 5: GLOBAL URBANIZATION, COLONIAL AND IMPERIAL PLANNING Introduction by Marie Kennedy and Chris Tilly Our first visit to Buenos Aires, in 2005, was a revelation for both of us. Four years earlier, in 2001, the Argentine financial system had collapsed after years of neoliberal austerity. Ordinary Argentinean people responded in ways that make Occupy Wall Street, a reaction to another financial crisis, look tame. Neighborhoods formed mass assemblies to govern themselves and provide essential services. Workers whose workplaces had closed took over or “recuperated” the enterprises to run them as cooperatives. Unemployed people mobilized to demand sustenance. Mass protests threw out five presidents in succession in less than two years. Though the visit was inspiring, it was also sobering. Four years after the initial mobilization, the energy of the uprising was dissipating. We attended a neighborhood assembly that was dominated by squabbling between the leaders of two left factions, while other community members drifted away. Most of the movements of the unemployed had devolved into clientelist foot-soldiers who mobilized in return for welfare checks assured by their political patrons. Many of the occupied businesses were struggling with the ability to maintain and upgrade equipment, since unclear title blocked their access to financing. One measure of the nation’s disenchantment with the resistance was the fact that first Buenos Aires and then in 2015 Argentina as a whole elected as chief executive a charismatic, populist hard-core neoliberal, Maurcio Macri. Why is it important for US and Canadian planners to pay attention to the rest of the world, and how should they think about planning on a global scale? The answers to these questions are themselves global, as reflected in the varied countries that appear in this section of the book— but our own connections with Buenos Aires, limited as they are, constitute a handy microcosm for illustrating our answers to these questions. In brief, we would point to two processes that offer answers to the “why” question, and three principles that begin to speak to “how.” The two processes are learning/teaching and engaging in solidarity. The three principles are the importance of global interconnections, the equal 128

Introduction importance of local conjunctures, and the value of both scaling down to the local level and scaling up to the global level to build strategies for progressive change. These principles tell us to think globally and locally, and to act locally and globally. In explaining these ideas, we point to examples from around the world, but also return repeatedly to the case of Buenos Aires and Argentina.

Learning and Teaching As with education itself, dominant ideas about cross-national learning emphasize hierarchy. Mainstream planners of the imperial North suppose that they have much to teach their “less developed” counterparts in the global South. Social scientists and practitioners of planning and social policy embedded in institutions from the US State Department to the World Bank often view the United States and its ruling ideas at the top of the hierarchy, with much to teach the slow students from the rest of the world, and little to learn from them. Various stripes of progressives have at times simply inverted the hierarchy, insisting that we should imitate other systems ranging from Swedish social democracy to China’s revolution. Argentina’s example, along with others, exposes the fallacy of this hierarchical view of learning. Argentina was a diligent student of US policy recipes, even pegging its currency to the dollar. This studious imitation led straight to economic collapse. The problem is not limited to learning from the United States: Cuban socialism during its heyday disastrously imported from its Soviet tutors construction systems designed for cold weather and scorched earth urban renewal practices, both entirely inappropriate for the island’s warm climate and its organic urban communities. The example of Buenos Aires also points out how much we have to learn from both problems and innovations in other parts of the world. In terms of problems, consider the siren song claiming that privatization leads to efficiency, with one key target being water and other public utilities. Half of Argentina’s provinces sold their water systems to private multinationals during the 1990s. Under companies like France’s Suez, the privatized water systems failed to meet basic human needs for water, widened inequalities between the services received by rich and poor, and skimmed profits at the expense of quality. While we were in Buenos Aires the government was revisiting the sale of their water utility to Suez, and in fact re-municipalized water the following year.

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n 1998, workers “recu erated” t e bankru t MPA alu inu roducts factory, once Latin A erica’s largest factory. t includes a cultural center t at builds solidarity with the broader neighborhood. Photo by Marie Kennedy. In terms of innovations, the recuperated enterprises came up with creative solutions, including financing mechanisms, that cooperatives elsewhere in the world can learn from. Large facilities devoted part of their space to community cultural centers, knitting strong political and social ties with surrounding communities. Inspired by the example of worker cooperatives, one Buenos Aires municipal legislator discovered a forgotten law on the books that created a mechanism for government funding to housing cooperatives for upgrading purposes, and community organizers and planners began mobilizing such cooperatives in shantytowns, tenements, and squatted buildings—another instructive example for elsewhere. Activists in these and other movements coined the term horizontalidad (horizontalism, more or less) for participatory, egalitarian forms of organization that share power broadly rather than concentrating it among elected or self-appointed leaders—an idea borrowed by the Occupy movement and many others. Beyond Argentina numerous innovations from around the world hold lessons. On the positive side, Brazil’s constitutional mandates for deep popular participation a variety of policy processes, Cuba’s experiments with urban agriculture, and the anti-displacement policies put in place 130

Introduction by the Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona for All) party—to just cite three examples we are familiar with—offer fruitful learning opportunities. One of the most unique and important innovations comes from the Zapatistas in Mexico. When those of us in Canada and the US think of building local control over planning, we tend to think of community organizing or running progressive candidates for local office. Our article in this chapter the Zapatista movement’s radical experiment of creating a parallel local government and competing with the “official” government on its own turf by offering services, policing, and even jurisprudence. Improbably, they have scored important successes, yielding provocative lessons for activists elsewhere—another example of the payoff to global learning networks. Again, the conclusion is not to rank the popular movements and progressive planners from the global South above those in the North in a hierarchy of learning. The point is that learning can and should happen in all directions. We came to Buenos Aires expecting to learn, but we also found we had things to teach. Argentinean activists loved to talk about the diversity of their society, listing migrants from Spain, Italy, and Germany but omitting the native presence that still exists despite a fairly genocidal stripe of colonialism. Coming from the US where critiques of racism and settler colonialism are central to left discourse, we found ourselves doing some unexpected consciousnessraising among our radical Argentinean comrades. Certainly the cooperatives of the recuperated enterprise movement saw a value in mutual learning: the year after we were there, they helped organize the first of a series of Latin-America wide meetings of activists from occupied enterprises, bringing together militants from half a dozen countries.

Solidarity A compelling reason for thinking globally about planning is the value, and indeed necessity, of solidarity. Once again there is a risk of getting trapped in hierarchical thinking: we in the wealthy North must help our poor brothers and sisters in the South. Certainly there have been times when such help was needed. When Argentina was ruled by a brutal military from 1976-83, solidarity from the North as well as from other countries in the South helped prevent what would have been even worse human rights abuses. But we need Argentina’s solidarity as well. Argentinean employees of Walmart have formed part of a global front pressing the world’s largest retailer to respect worker rights and raise labor standards. The progressive governments that held power from 2003131

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2015 thanks to Argentina’s bottom-up movements challenged the global financial sector with two debt defaults, and formed part of a global chorus critical of US-led military adventures in the Middle East. While these examples do not speak to planning per se, they speak to the global structures of economic, political, and military power that constrain planning’s progressive possibilities in both North and South.

Global Interconnections, Local Conjunctures, and ScaleJumping We propose three principles for implementing global processes of learning and solidarity, suggesting them as a starting point for discussion, not the last word on the matter. The first, and most obvious, is the need for global interconnections. As Richard Pithouse points out in his article in this section, this may start with individual connections between activists and planners, with bilateral relationships a next step, as in the links between South Africa’s Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign and the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign. But over the long run, broader international networks are the most generative. (Our own visits to Argentina, as it happens, were facilitated by a gathering of retail workers’ unions from across the Americas, and a global network of sociologists.) The World Social Forum, while it lasted, was a remarkable space for global networking, learning, and beginning to build collaboration and solidarity. Its location in Brazil meant that participation was tilted toward Latin America and wealthier countries in the North Atlantic (wealth translating into greater access to air travel than, say the countries of Africa), but its reach was indeed global. Perhaps an even better example of the importance of global links— though not an urban one!—is Via Campesina, the global alliance of peasant movements that was initiated by Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), but today includes organizations on every continent, including the Family Farm Alliance in the US. Via Campesina intentionally rotates its headquarters, for fixed multi-year terms, across countries and continents to build global organization and unity. Through the network, the alliance teaches techniques for everything from grassroots organizing to setting up a seed bank, and does consciousness-raising about issues including gender equality and environmental sustainability. Via Campesina also emphasizes the importance of understanding local conjunctures—both to guide local strategy and to root lessons from experience in their local contexts. Though Via Campesina universally 132

Introduction calls for advancing women’s equality and developing women’s leadership, they recognize that the appropriate next steps will look different in the Middle East than in Brazil. Argentina’s recuperated enterprises build on anarchist, syndicalist, and cooperative traditions brought from Spain and Italy; US or Canadian cooperatives must build on different traditions. Linking together the two previous principles, a final point is that progressive planners and activists must be prepared to jump scales. At a time when so many national governments around the world fall somewhere on a spectrum from neoliberalism to fascism, the national policy arena, often our go-to target for policy proposals, is often singularly unpromising. Though we can’t give up the fight over national policy, it can be more effective to jump to a regional or local scale, or to a global one. With a neoliberal regime in power at present, Argentina’s cooperative movement builds power locally within the recuperated enterprises, in labor-community alliances, and in pressing municipal and provincial governments for support. The movement also continues to build networks of learning and solidarity with other recuperated enterprises and cooperatives around the world—one example is a production chain that links Argentine cotton production cooperatives and apparel manufacturers with Italian free trade networks that market the products. Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement, now functioning under a far-right government, likewise invests both in local organizing and in strengthening the Via Campesina global alliance. In the US and Canada the Fight for $15 movement, unable to win minimum wage increases at the national level, has won state and local minimum wage increases. At the same time, the Service Employees International Union, a major funder and organizer of the US Fight for $15 movement, has also offered technical assistance and organizing support to unions organizing cleaners and security guards in Europe, South Africa, India, and Mexico (not always successfully, and not always in a way respectful of local knowledge and initiative—but we can learn from failures as well as successes. The point is not that some scales are always a better strategic bet than others, but that progressives need to be prepared to shift their efforts across scales as the terrain changes. We have spotlighted these processes and principles to argue that for progressive planners, there are tremendous advantages to walking on two legs. In order to be effective, to contribute to grassroots power, to formulate successful strategies, they must keep one foot firmly planted in their local context. But in order to mobilize the energy of mutual 133

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learning and solidarity, they must engage with the global. The articles in this section speak in this spirit to the deep commonalities, crucial differences, and all-important connections among radical approaches to planning around the globe. Theresa Williamson’s account of the Rio Olympics. City bids for megasporting events, like the Olympics or the World Cup, like many local stadium deals, often come under criticism from progressives for displacing affordable housing and small businesses, heightening inequalities, and consistently under-delivering on promised economic benefits and under-estimating the costs. Writing as the 2016 Rio Olympics opened, Williamson describes how Rio decisively opted for private commercial gain over human rights. She also points out that media and public debates about the Olympics plan opened up new, progressive lines of discussion. As we write, Brazil has elected a hard-right government more determined than ever to favor economic elites over the country’s low income and marginalized majority. The spaces of democratic discussion that Williamson describes will be a critical battleground in coming years.

Palestine and Planning The last section of this chapter includes four articles about planning and Palestine. Many in North America understand the issue of Palestine’s status as either a question of national independence, ethnic conflict or human rights. We focus here on the role of planning in both creating the divide between Israel and Palestine and making it difficult if no t impossible to find a way out. Israel’s land use policies systematically dispossess the Palestinian people. Attempts by Palestinians to plan, even when done in cooperation with Israeli planners in solidarity, are blocked by the occupying powers. Palestinians face military threats, checkpoints, walls and house demolitions, all of which prevent them from exercising their right to the city. Though this example of contemporary colonization is extreme, the case of Palestine connects back to the other themes in this chapter. Planners from the US and elsewhere (the two of us included) have learned from Israel’s occupation of Palestine and from the grassroots strategies Palestinians have employed to press for liberation. These strategies have ranged across scales from highly localized resistance to

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Palestinian boys in Gaza. Photo by Marie Kennedy. a global solidarity movement. Planners from the US, the largest provider of military, financial, and political support for Israel’s policies, have a particular responsibility to challenge their government’s stance, but all of us have much to learn from this case.

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Transnational Organizations and Local Popular Movements Richard Pithouse It’s often assumed that the international reach of big multinational institutions like the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), along with many of the NGOs allied to them, needs to be matched by a counter internationalism from below. In the richer parts of the world, where there is better access to transport and communication technologies, it may well be possible for popular organizations to organize across borders and to send representatives to international meetings on their own terms. But in the poorer parts of the world it is often extremely difficult for popular organizations to work internationally. In these cases, the assumption that an effective response to the big multinational institutions must be a global response results in a tendency by NGOs to substitute themselves for popular organizations in international networks. There is no doubt that big multinational institutions have a very strong influence on how elites around the world understand cities and the competing claims of their residents. This influence can take the form of simple coercion, as with World Bank structural adjustment programs. It can also take the form of “partnerships,” as with various projects of organizations like USAID or the Cities Alliance, in which governments are won over with funding and the idea that these organizations offer “world-class” technical expertise. But these organizations don’t just try to subordinate or co-opt governments to their agendas; they also work with academics, NGOs and the media to shape the general understanding of cities and the competing claims of the different people and social forces that inhabit them. They also support projects that, like Slum Dwellers International, aim to mobilize poor people to accept oppression and to work within its limits rather than to challenge it directly. Given the tremendous power of the big multinational institutions, it is no surprise that so many people argue that their global power must be challenged by global alliances of poor people and their supporters. This is not a new idea. When capitalism first spread across the globe, it was often argued that the workers’ movement must also internationalize itself. But although there were lots of inspiring examples of international cooperation between trade unions in different countries, the workers’ movement ultimately failed to organize itself in a truly international 136

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manner. On the contrary, workers often accepted the division of the working class into hierarchies based on nationality, race and gender. This meant that workers in the dominated countries often had to wage their own struggles as independent interventions because the workers’ movement that called itself “global” wasn’t really for all workers and didn’t recognize the realities of particular places in the world. This fact should lead us to be cautious of any easy optimism about a global solidarity against the big multi-national institutions. We also need to remember that, while organized workers in many countries have their own resources in the form of union dues, the urban poor often have extremely precarious livelihoods and are not able to fund their own organizations to undertake international work. International networking usually happens through the internet and international air travel. Many poor people’s organizations do not have regular access to the internet—it’s often a struggle just to gain and sustain access to electricity. And of course, air travel is often entirely unaffordable and it’s sometimes difficult for poor people to get visas. When donors are willing to fund international networking by popular movements, they usually do so on their own terms and for their own projects and not in dialogue with the movements. And when movements are able to raise their own money they are often confronted with urgent immediate expenses for the costs of day-to-day organizing—costs that escalate enormously when state repression has to be confronted. Popular organizations will simply not survive if they do not prioritize collective work, like holding regular meetings, opposing evictions and supporting prisoners, over individual opportunities for international travel. Moreover, because most of the organizations that network internationally are professional organizations, they can often make decisions quite quickly and on an individual basis. But if a popular movement is democratic, the decision-making process is inherently slow. For instance, if a shack dweller’s movement receives an email inviting the movement to send a representative to a meeting, the movement may not receive the email until a few days after it has been sent. Once it does receive it, it will have to find space on its regular meeting agenda to discuss the invitation. This may be difficult if it is in the midst of confronting urgent issues like evictions or arrests. Once the issue has been discussed, the movement may decide that it needs to do some research on the proposed invitation before it can consider it carefully. Once that has been done, it may have to refer the invitation back to the branches of the movement for further discussion. If people agree to 137

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accept the invitation, they’ll then have to elect a representative to attend the meeting. That person will then have to begin the process of applying for a passport and a visa. All of this could easily take a few months. But most of the time, when an invitation is sent a reply is expected within days or, at best, a couple of weeks. If movements allow themselves to be pressured into giving up democratic politics, which is slow politics, for the fast politics of the NGO world, they tend to lose their mass support very quickly. These material and political constraints to international networking mean that in poorer parts of the world, like Africa, it is donor-funded NGOs rather than popular organizations that are able to monopolize or to regulate access to international spaces like the World Social Forum and regional social forums. And if popular movements are able to win some autonomous access to these spaces, they often find that all the important decisions have already been taken care of on email by NGOs and academics before the meetings start. The pervasive substitution of popular movements by NGOs in international forums and networks leads to all kinds of problems. The power relations between the NGOs and the popular movements will always be driven by class and may well also be driven by race, gender and nationality. While NGOs often tend to present the problems faced by poor people as technical policy questions, popular movements, driven by the day-to-day concerns of their members, often see the root cause of the problems in political questions about power relations. Moreover, the donor-funded NGOs tend to orient much of their work around the concerns and interests of their funders in the global North. In some cases, this leads them to try and capture the representation of popular movements in the South in order to deliver the appearance of popular support for the projects of their funders and allies in the North. In these cases, the NGOs tend to become very anxious, and in some instances highly authoritarian, when popular movements insist on representing themselves and on developing their own analysis of their situation. In South Africa, NGOs that work with the big multinational organizations as well as those that oppose them have both responded with shocking authoritarianism that, in some respects, mimics that of the state when popular movements have insisted on the right to represent themselves. But perhaps the most fundamental difference between the donorfunded professional NGOs and the popular movements is that the former can only make arguments about how to achieve a better world, while the latter may attain the mass support to actually force governments, 138

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wealthy communities and big business to make concessions. NGOs often justify their power over popular movements by saying that the movements are parochial and don’t understand the big picture. It is true that NGOs are often better placed to have a global picture, but while this is important, they usually fail to confront local political realities on the ground, which have to be confronted before any kind of popular mobilization is possible. And there are a lot of examples of how highly mobilized communities have won all kinds of victories and concessions from governments and multinational organizations by having organized themselves to become a powerful force on the ground. Ideally, on-the-ground movements should be able to have a conversation, on the basis of equality, with the NGOs and academics that are more easily able to take a global view. There is much that both sides can learn from each other. But for as long as the NGOs and academics deny this equality, that conversation cannot happen. What happens instead is often more like a form of top-down, stultifying instruction far removed from the lived realities of life and struggle confronted by popular movements. In South Africa, the two most important popular urban movements walked out of the national NGO-dominated networking forum—a forum that also sought to regulate international networking—in 2006 because they felt that they were systematically disrespected by the NGOs and treated as if they were stupid rather than poor. They also felt that the NGOs were exploiting the movements so that the NGOs could develop their own power in international networks, rather than supporting the movements to develop power on the ground. This walkout meant that the movements gave up access to NGO money and opportunities for international travel. But by building their own power in their communities on their own terms, the movements were later able to form more equitable relations with different NGOs that were prepared to put aside assumptions of superiority and to respond to the challenge issued by the movements to support, rather than lead. The movements were also able to develop their own relationships, often non-professionalized, with activists from other countries. Through these relationships, it slowly became possible for the movements to make international connections on their own terms with the political support of people that they knew and trusted. For instance, the shack dwellers movement Abahlali baseMjondolo was able to elect representatives to visit London and New York last year. Important solidarity initiatives were developed during these trips. Ashraf Cassiem from the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign in Cape Town 139

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was able to visit the United States recently, and after his visit, a Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign was formed. This mode of developing international connections is far from perfect. For a start, it’s been based on individual relations with activists from the North who have come and lived in communities of struggle. These activists have earned the respect of the host communities and gained a real understanding of their situation and the political choices with which they confront that situation. But the problem with this mode of developing an internationalism to counter that of the big multinational organizations is that the reality of the global political economy means that while American or British activists may be able to afford to come and live in a struggling community in South Africa for a few months, a similar exchange doesn’t happen with Nigeria or Pakistan. But because these relations are based on slow politics, and on a clear understanding of the realities on the ground, they have enabled fruitful experiments in international networking, including the beginnings of direct, unmediated relationships between at least some people in popular movements in different countries. We should not assume that international networking is automatically superior to local activism. To do so not only marginalizes the poor from their own struggles, it is also politically wrongheaded because it doesn’t take into account the important reality that local expressions of international power can and often have been beaten back by local organization. We should recognize that international networking is valuable but that popular movements can’t rely on the professionalized circuits of NGO and academic activism to achieve this. If popular movements are going to be able to represent themselves, to share their experiences and to build genuine solidarity internationally, then they will have to look for ways to build slower and more democratic processes that enable direct horizontal relations, including solid personal relations, between movements. This article was originally published in the Spring 2010 issue of Progressive Planning Magazine.

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Rio's Real vs. Unmet Olympic Legacies: What They Tell Us About the Future of Cities Theresa Williamson From New York City to Berlin, Hong Kong to London, conflicts have been increasingly recorded in recent years between two urban camps. First there are those who view the city as fundamentally commercial, drawing on the city’s origin as a place of exchange made possible thanks to agricultural production – a place of economies of scale and agglomeration economics, most dramatically represented in the concept of the global city.1 At their extreme, proponents of this vision of the city will insist cities are essential links in a global economic system and that this is what makes them important. Second are those who experience the city as fulfilling a human need for connection and social interaction. “The city… is a natural manifestation of that social instinct that we have. Cities define us. It’s where we’re born, get educated, grow up, get married, where we pray and play, where we get old and where we die,” explains political theorist Benjamin Barber. This perspective on the city is most clearly represented in those who fight for recognition and implementation of the Right to the City, as explained by David Harvey: “The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is…a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the process of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is…one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.”2 Those adamant about this vision will argue there is no compatibility with the first vision and that economic localization is the way of the future. And it can be argued to be a central solution to many of the world’s current dilemmas, if we are to believe, as Barber insists, that cities are where most important decisions that affect people’s lives today are made.3 1

Aaron M. Renn. “What is a Global City?,” Newgeography. December 7, 2012. http://www.newgeography.com/content/003292-what-is-a-global-city. 2 David Harvey. “The Right to the City,” New Left Review. September/October 2008. https://newleftreview.org/II/53/david-harvey-the-right-to-the-city. 3 “Why Mayors Should Rule the World,” TED. June 2013. https://www.ted.com/talks/benjamin_barber_why_mayors_should_rule_the_ world?language=en.

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In Rio de Janeiro during the pre-Olympic period (2009-2016) the seesaw came thundering down on the side of the heavily commercial approach. A huge one-time Olympics injection of US$20 billion has been applied almost exclusively towards investments that support vision #1. As a result, the underlying nature of this approach and the inherent conflict between these visions has become palpable.

Purported Olympic Legacies Made possible by the state of exception afforded by Rio’s hosting of mega-events, we have seen mass investment in construction – from golf course to public housing, diverse transport infrastructure to luxury developments, not to mention the future Olympic infrastructure – along with promoting rampant runaway real estate speculation, suppression of dissenting voices and exclusion of low-income groups, the building of museums like the Museum of Image and Sound and the Museum of Tomorrow, and using market principles to justify heightening segregation, which in turn fuels inequality and crime.4 Though some of these investments appear on the surface to support the second vision (such as the BRTs, public housing and family clinics), upon closer observation each has come at significant cost to the supposed beneficiaries and the lack of consultation and evaluation have not allowed a decisive positive conclusion about their impacts to be reached. On the other hand, all of these have heavily benefited the corporate interests behind them. According to the Mayor, Rio has gained a great deal from the preOlympic period. Such claims are made when relying on broad and sometimes poorly conducted economic projections and expressed through statements like this one made in 2011: “The expected gross economic impact of the 2016 Games on the Brazilian economy is US$51.1 billion,” rather than looking at the distribution of those same resources ($1 billion alone is going to one man5) or awaiting actual results (like current projections putting revenue at $4.5 billion6).7 4

Jules Boykoff. “Six Months Out from Olympics, Rich Not Poor, are the Big Winners,” From Brazil. February 4, 2016. https://frombrazil.blogfolha.uol.com.br/2016/02/04/six-months-out-fromolympics-rich-not-poor-are-the-big-winners/. 5 Jonathan Watts. “The Rio Property Developer Hoping for a $1Bn Olympic Legacy of His Own,” The Guardian. August 4, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2015/aug/04/rio-olympic-games-2016property-developer-carlos-carvalho-barra. 6 Andrew Zimbalist. “The Summer Olympics Should Always Be in Los Angeles.

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Since the primary public legacy that can be touted is around transport (where 55% of public investments in Rio’s Olympics have been directed), numbers are published reflecting the growth in cycle lanes, bus corridors, metro expansion, and mode availability. However, though an increase in modes is easy to market as a legacy, the focus should be on actual impact which, as summarized by the Metropolis Observatory, is not so sunny: “The territorial distribution of mobility investments made until this point in the context of the mega-events appear to reproduce the same logic of organization of space… There are no elements that permit us to infer that the enormous investments in mobility have produced a better distribution of people or jobs in the metropolitan region and, much less, that the system will meet the demands of the metropolis.”8 All recent Olympics have come with promises of legacies to be left for the host cities and their citizens. Rio’s legacy pledges initially included such important promises as: the upgrading of all favelas according to the well designed “Morar Carioca program” (at his TED Talk Mayor Paes stated that “Rio has the aim to have all its favelas completely urbanized by 2020”9), the planting of 24 million endemic tropical trees (later changed to 34 million) to offset Olympic carbon emissions, and the cleaning up of the Guanabara Bay and Jacarepaguá Lagoon. This list later changed. As of August 2015 the Paes administration had made 27 legacy promises to the IOC, under the headings of Mobility, Infrastructure, Sports Facilities and Environment.10 Housing was now off the list. This was up from a different set of 17 in 2009, which included those mentioned in the previous paragraph. Based on the new list, publicly, the Paes administration recognizes only one unmet Forever,” Time. July 13, 2016. http://time.com/4396796/olympic-host-city/. Helen Trouten Torres. “Rio World Cup and Olympic Legacy: Economics,” Rio Times Online. September 13, 2011. https://riotimesonline.com/brazil-news/riobusiness/rio%E2%80%99s-world-cup-and-olympic-legacy-economics/. 8 “Mega-events: Impacts of the World Cup and Olympics in Brazil,” Observatorio Das Metropoles. April 30, 2015. http://observatoriodasmetropoles.net.br/wp/livro-megaeventos-impactosda-copa-e-olimpiadas-no-brasil/. 9 “The 4 Commandments of Cities,” TED. February 2012. https://www.ted.com/talks/eduardo_paes_the_4_commandments_of_cities. 10 “Principais Legados dos Jogos 2016 para a Cidade do Rio,” G1. http://especiais.g1.globo.com/rio-de-janeiro/olimpiadas-rio-2016/principaislegados-dos-jogos-2016-para-a-cidade-do-rio/. 7

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legacy: the cleaning of Guanabara Bay.

Reflecting on the ‘Real’ (and Unplanned) Olympic Legacies Since these highly debatable or unmet official legacy promises are now well known, let’s look at what might be considered the ‘real’ list of legacies – yes, positive ones – from these games for Rio’s average, and low-income, citizens. These are not the legacies the city government will tout as such, but the real-world positive outcomes experienced in Rio as a result of hosting the Games.

Real legacy #1: growing quality and quantity of international media attention Fortunately, the Olympics brought more than a state of exception to Rio. The games also brought a huge swarm of international media attention and scrutiny. Traditionally, global media coverage of Rio had been superficial. Interviews were conducted by phone from São Paulo, Mexico City, or New York since international media rarely had offices in Rio and were not familiar with the inner workings of the city and its government. Articles were issued thanks to press releases or police reports. Rarely did reporters dig deep, and rarer still were everyday cariocas, particularly from the favelas, quoted. Favelas were seen as no-go zones, stereotyped, stigmatized and sensationalized from a safe distance over decades by journalists. But all of that was about to change. Shortly after the Olympic decision, freelance journalists from a number of countries began setting up shop and seeking to understand the city so they could be in the best possible position to report. Others began visiting Rio regularly, to develop understanding so they could quickly come and go as needed. They were quickly followed by Latin America correspondents for a number of international outlets, moved from elsewhere in the Americas to Rio, so that they would be well-positioned to report as interest grew over the years to follow. And there were the publications that moved some of their top global reporters to Rio, as well. Finally, in some cases entire regional offices moved to or opened up in Rio. These thousands of journalists were not just visiting Rio for a few days or weeks. They were moving, making Rio home for over a half-decade. Many of them came with families, all of whom would be impacted by and experiencing the city. As these outlets began reporting more frequently, with increasing nuance, context and understanding, a Crash-like sub-tension could be sensed. There began a significant jump in global reporting on favelas, 144

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with a significant growth in the number of favela residents quoted. Local media for decades had issued an uncreative, sensationalist and counterproductive narrative on these communities that had been perpetuated by the global media: they were criminal by nature, ugly, a blight, there was nothing redeeming about them, they were a lasting reminder of Brazil’s failure to develop and of its lack of control. Rarely did the media discuss hard-won squatters rights, Rio’s architectural establishment’s conclusions about the importance of favela upgrading, historic improvements in housing due to the favela tradition of self-help and collective action, or even the importance of favelas to mainstream carioca culture. And never did the Brazilian mainstream media discuss the systemic and historic legacies that had led us to where we were now. All of a sudden the international media was doing all of this, beginning with the issue of evictions in Favela do Metrô in 2011, for the World Cup, and covered by both The Guardian and Al Jazeera. When The New York Times covered Vila Autódromo’s eviction in March 2012,11 followed by global interest around the case of Amarildo’s disappearance and police brutality following the 2013 protests, and through to today where community reporters are actually reporting directly through global platforms, the change has been palpable. The topic of forced evictions alone has been intensely documented as one of the most talked-about negative consequences of the Games, with some 70,000 people removed from their homes in the worst sweep of evictions in Rio history.12 A deep centuries-old wound was exposed. Favela community threads on Facebook regularly celebrate international reporting with the likes of Alemão Coletivo Papo Reto’s post, “One more example of our participation in international media. All this while our own media continue ignoring the favela.”

Real legacy #2: deepened questioning and social catharsis The Olympic Games have thus gifted an unexpected legacy to Rio: the outside perspective that has provided the essential spark for the local 11

Simon Romero. “Slum Dwellersare Defying Brazil’s Grand Design for Olympics,” New York Times. March 4, 2012. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/05/world/americas/brazil-facesobstacles-in-preparations-for-rio-olympics.html?_r=0. 12 Maria Eduarda Chagas. “Book Maps Forced Eviction of Residents During Eduardo Paes Administration,” Rio on Watch. May 5, 2015. http://www.rioonwatch.org/?p=21863.

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social catharsis that is inevitable and necessary. Examples include the great Brazil race debate that’s been taking place in the international media, while local media are ambivalent. Stories ranging from the multi-month research by The Globe and Mail along with smaller pieces in NPR and Global Post have been translated and shared widely in Brazil. In addition to ushering in an age of nuance in favela reporting and public debate over Rio’s deep historic divides, the global media presence in Rio has led a number of Olympic legacy promises and impacts to be publicly questioned. The investigation that led to the discovery of the extreme level of pollution in Rio’s Guanabara Bay where Olympic sailing would take place was led by the Associated Press. Water that cariocas had been recreating in for decades and taking for granted as it was, all of a sudden became a public issue in Rio, thanks to the global media.

Real legacy #3: mainstream global questioning of the value of the games One of the primary legacies of Rio hosting the 2016 Olympic Games is thus what it has taught the world about urbanism, inequality, poorly applied power, and the IOC and impacts of mega-events on cities. Not to suggest that Rio is the first city to experience these costs of Olympic developments, but that it is the first city to experience those costs so publicly, and thus to make them global public knowledge. As a result of Rio and the accumulation of past experience, very few democratic cities are vying for future Games. The massive investments for the games and presence of the global press in Rio took place in the context of massive growth in social media. Though social media’s growth in Brazil has no direct relationship with the 2016 Olympic Games, the fact that the games’ implementation cycle occurred simultaneously with the expansion of social media in the country – now second in the world both on Facebook and Twitter – means for the first time in Olympic history the day-to-day impacts were documented by those experiencing them on-the-ground. It took several years for the mainstream media to catch on, but today one can say that real-time news from the favelas can reach the world in a matter of minutes. As reported in October 2015: “While the killing of an 11 year old in Caju by the Military Police only one week before was only minimally reported in the national press, and while it took the international media five months to report on the devastating eviction of Favela do Metrô starting in 2010 following local reports, Eduardo Santos’ execution re146

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ceived widespread attention from both the national and international mainstream media immediately. The evidence filmed by a community witness and quickly uploaded onto social media provoked local mass news reporting that included community perspectives and challenged the authorities’ reactions, as was also done by the BBC and The Telegraph, showing a groundbreaking shift in the ability of communityreported events to break and reach mass in moments.”13 Shortly thereafter, the critical role of social media in this case was highlighted in a Guardian report.

Real legacy #4: growing, more organized and networked civil society And access to social media, combined with the brute force and sheer volume of resources shaping pre-Olympic Rio, have played a key role in emboldening and uniting social movements and facilitating organizing, including that which led to the largest public uprising in Rio since the early 1990s, the June 2013 protest where at least 300,000 cariocas took to the streets. Dozens of events can be identified on any given day, and the interconnectivity among frustrated cariocas is growing dramatically, each day. The combination of rapid, top-down regeneration of the city in a highly social, democratic context experiencing this boom in social media access and use by traditionally marginalized communities has created the unexpected legacy of the games offering favela residents the chance to reach mass audiences with their own message of indignation, on the one hand, and community qualities, resilience, and strength, on the other.

Real legacy #5: favelas are increasingly viewed with nuance and recognition of their struggle, value and qualities We are therefore seeing a reduction in the stigmatization of what may be the world’s most stigmatized urban communities, due to the combination of community access to social media and global attention. In fact, increasingly, favelas are being recognized for their qualities. Since the 1992 Earth Summit when the community began its long trek to reestablish a vocation for its residents, Vale Encantado – located in 13

Federico Olivieri and Marta Ill-Raga. “Execution in Providencia Highlights Growing Role of Social Media in Combating Police Violence,” Rio on Watch. October 6, 2015. http://www.rioonwatch.org/?p=24581.

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the middle of Rio’s Tijuca Forest – has developed its own local cuisine, opened a cooperative restaurant, installed locally produced solar panels, gardens, and most recently biodigesters – including one recently launched that will make the community’s sewage the cleanest in Rio. If we base ourselves in the traditional stigmatizing view of favelas, Vale Encantado sounds absolutely unique. And it is. But not because it is a rare example of a favela containing assets. Rather, because it is uniquely itself. Which is, exactly, what every favela in Rio can claim. The same applies to Vila Autódromo whose residents were so committed to their community and its memory that they gave the City of Rio its biggest pre-Olympic marketing battle of all.14 Or the South Zone’s Vidigal with its vital history as the 80-year-old favela with luxuriant ocean views that received the Pope in 1980 and successfully organized to end the sequence of favela evictions that marked Brazil’s dictatorship in Rio, today known for culture and friendliness that led it to be the focal point of favela gentrification in recent years. Or the West Zone’s Asa Branca favela marked by its keen self-planning culture from the 1990s onwards, that kept drug trafficking at bay and resulted in a particularly walkable and functional community design. Or North Zone Maré’s long history beginning as an area of precarious homes on stilts in wetlands, and expanding to boast over one hundred community organizations and newspapers, including a museum that stores artifacts from its entrepreneurial past and present.

Real legacy #6: igniting the possibility of an alternative ‘singular city’ urban model Ironically, it is precisely the over-the-top, intensely corporatedominated vision dominating policy-making and economic development in Rio de Janeiro during the pre-Olympic period, that has ignited alternative visions of Rio, and that could one day give way to a new model of city, termed here the ‘Singular City.’ What is a Singular City? A city that recognizes its unique localized attributes and, through careful cultivation of those attributes, through citizen-led channels, develops in singular ways that distribute gains across the population. Interestingly enough, the heavily corporate city Rio has attempted 14

Jo Griffin. “Change Beckons for Vila Autodromo, the Favela that Got in the Rio Olympics’ Way,” The Guardian. April 26, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/apr/26/rio-dejaneiro-favela-change-vila-autodromo-favela-olympics.

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to create, resulting in exacerbated urban problems of spatial, economic and social inequalities, is creating the conditions for Rio as the Singular City. And it is the special brew that resulted from the mass descent of the global media upon Rio, combined with the simultaneous rise of social media across Rio’s favelas experiencing some of the most brutal consequences of urban redevelopment associated with the games, that have resulted in a growing awakening, in which the city's deep divides are coming to a head and creating demand for the Singular City. This article was republished on Progressive City on October 5, 2016.

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From Here to Autonomy: Mexico’s Zapatistas Combine Local Administration and National Politics By Chris Tilly and Marie Kennedy Authors Note: This article appears as originally published in 2006. Andrés Manuel Ló ez Obrador, entioned in t e article, was elected Mexico’s resident in 2018. The situation in Chiapas remains much as described. In January of 1994, the ski-masked Maya rebels of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) rocked Mexico by rising up in arms in Mexico ‘s southernmost state, Chiapas. Twelve years later, the Zapatista movement is still at work amidst a long-standing but uneasy truce, and it continues to attract the attention of much of Mexico, if not the outside world. Movement spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos, now calling himself Delegate Zero, is touring the country to campaign against all of the candidates in this year’s Mexican elections and in favor of a grassroots left movement to transform the country. Perhaps of more interest to progressive planners, however, is the unfolding of autonomous local government. Zapatistas in dozens of Chiapas municipios (the main unit of local government in Mexico, typically the size of a US county) are carrying out an intriguing experiment: Without unseating the official governments, they have created parallel “autonomous” governments that deliver services, administer justice and attempt to model an ideal of good government—all based on traditional Mayan forms of governance. Whatever the final outcome, this new demonstration of Zapatista audacity is definitely worth understanding.

Mexico Since 1994: The More Things Change… Since 1994, the national government has sporadically negotiated with the Zapatistas while simultaneously building up troop strength. Thousands of troops today are posted in Chiapas (estimates range from 18,000-70,000), with added backup from paramilitaries. Nonetheless, the Zapatistas continue to demand autonomy for Mexico ‘s sixty-two indigenous groups that comprise 7 percent of the population and have long been poor, dispossessed and despised. With participation from organizations representing fifty of the indigenous groups, the Zapatis-

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tas succeeded in negotiating the San Andrés autonomy accords, signed by the government in 1996. Implementing the accords, however, required an act of Mexico’s Congress. Hope for such legislation ran high when voters in the 2000 elections, for the first time in seventy-one years, broke the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s (PRI’s) control of the presidency. President-elect Vicente Fox, who ran on the ticket of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) but garnered support from across the political spectrum as the candidate of “change,” vowed to resolve the problem in Chiapas “in fifteen minutes.” He endorsed a version of the San Andrés accords, but in Mexico’s Congress, where no party held a majority, leaders of his own PAN, the PRI and the left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) instead cut a deal to pass a watered-down, ineffectual autonomy law. After a prolonged silence, in August 2003, the EZLN announced that it would implement the San Andrés accords directly, through five newly created “Good Government Councils,” each grouping a number of autonomous municipalities. As of 2006, Fox’s six-year term is ticking to an end. The current front-runner for president is the PRD’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a populist in tailored suits who governed Mexico City before throwing his hat into the national ring. López Obrador is the hope of some on the left, and the despair of others. He pledges to prioritize job creation (Mexico’s job growth has lagged far behind the expansion of the workforce, swelling the informal sector) and to rebuild the welfare state— which sweetened the PRI’s pill of one-party rule until debt crisis and market-friendly reformers dismantled it. But he also promises the economic powers-that-be in Mexico to maintain financial stability and fiscal restraint— promises at odds with the increases in spending that would be needed to carry out the populist planks of his program. Moreover, many Mexicans view the PRD, like the other major parties, as corrupt.

What Is Autonomy? There’s alot more to autonomy than simply declaring it. In the early years of the Chiapas stalemate, being an autonomous municipality meant in some cases that the Zapatistas maintained roadblocks, charged tolls and posted signs (“You are entering autonomous territory”); in other communities, autonomy was primarily a state of mind. Over time, however, the military wing of the Zapatista movement ceded more authority to the civil wing, and the civil wing built up local 151

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communities’ abilities to consult, plan and decide. Gloria Benavides, a former member and prominent civilian supporter of the EZLN and known to many, including the government, as Comandante Elisa, wryly stated, “The political discussion on the civil side often results in good ideas; when the military decides, things usually go badly.” The building blocks of autonomy are, in order of increasing geographic scale, communities, municipios and regional organisms. At the regional level, the Good Government Councils, which are decisionmaking bodies, coexist with the Caracoles, complexes of regional services. (Caracol translates to “snail” or “conch,” and is used as a symbol for communication.) The Caracol based in the village of Oventik, in the centrally located Chiapas highlands, provides the space for the Good Government Council that serves the seven neighboring municipios. In that Caracol, we noted primary and secondary schools, a large clinic and a cluster of “productive projects:” cooperatives for crafts, cultivation of coffee and mushrooms and beekeeping; an agroecology group that consults with local farmers; a shoemaking shop; and a language school for international visitors. Importantly, the Caracoles also serve as contact points for supporters from Mexico and around the world. As the Political Commission of the Oventik Caracol expressed to us, the Caracol is “a window, a door so that all can enter into the communities, so that they can see and be seen. Through the people who enter from all parts of the world, we travel to all parts of the world.” The rubber really hits the road, however, at the municipal level. In Magdalena de la Paz, the seat of the autonomous municipio of the same name, we were treated to the unusual spectacle of two parallel and competing sets of government institutions. There are two primary schools, two clinics and two city halls. On one side of the central plaza is a large, windowless shed of rough boards with a metal roof where we were met by men and women wearing traditional Mayan garb— beribboned hats set off by short white tunics or woolly ponchos for the men, multicolored blouses and skirts with distinctive weaves identifying the community of origin for the women. Across the plaza stands the home of what the autonomous authorities call the “bad government,” a standard-issue brick and stucco office building. We didn’t go inside, but in front stood a group of men (only) wearing the cowboy hats, plain-colored shirts and jeans typical of Chiapas mestizos (assimilated mixed-race people). To complete the picture, the official government calls the municipality “Magdalena Aldama,” substituting the name of a mestizo hero of Mexico’s independence movement for 152

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the suffix “de la Paz,” which means “of peace.” Such dual local power is typical of the Zapatista municipios. As Miguel Pickard of the Center for Economic and Political Research on Community Action (CIEPAC) explained, “The Zapatista presence in the communities ranges from a tiny minority to an overwhelming majority.” The Zapatista organization itself has very exacting requirements: In addition to adhering to its ideological principles, members must follow a set of standards that includes rejecting any aid from the official government and abstaining from alcohol. So it is not surprising that at least some in each community decline to join. “The issue,” Pickard said, “is how to convince people to give you legitimacy, if not through an election.” (The Zapatistas reject the current electoral system.) How do the autonomous authorities manage? It’s certainly not through access to greater resources. Unlike the official government, the autonomous authorities do not charge taxes (the Zapatista highway tolls were dropped in 2003). Instead, they discuss the community’s needs with them, take up voluntary collections based on ability to pay and solicit voluntary community labor. Coffee and craft co-ops bring in additional revenues. International solidarity supplements these internally generated funds—the clinic at Magdalena, for instance, has been supplied by Médecins du Monde for a number of years—but doesn’t provide a dependable resource base.

Good Government Pays Instead of revenue collection, the key seems to be, in the words of the Maya communities, good government. As the municipal authorities of Magdalena told us through their spokesperson, “The idea is to demonstrate that we can do this work. We’re trying to end the government’s power to use the people just to build the strength of the parties. We are resolving all our problems on our own, with our own words, in our own way, without the involvement of the [official] government.” According to CIEPAC’s Pickard, it’s working. “The most impressive thing I hear about,” he said, “is the justice system. For the first time in over 500 years, indigenous people are getting justice! They’re getting it in their own language, they can be heard, it’s not corrupt, the authorities can’t be bought off.” The result, he added, is that Zapatista, non-Zapatista and even anti-Zapatista community members seek out the autonomous judicial authorities, even for complex and contentious issues, such as conflicting land claims.

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Zapatista Good Government Council (Junta de Buen Gobierno) in Magdalena de la Paz, Chiapas, Mexico. Photo by Marie Kennedy.

Eastern Michigan University Political Scientist Richard StahlerSholk writes that in one Zapatista region he studied, officials reported that they hear more complaints brought by non-Zapatistas than Zapatistas! The Magdalena officials confirmed that people often come to them after failing to get satisfaction from the official side of the plaza. People displayed a refreshingly pragmatic attitude, saying that when a case proves especially difficult, they consult with the “bad government” to resolve it. Many non-Zapatistas also sign up for “good government” driver’s licenses, according to Pickard, even though the official police do not recognize them. Zapatista governing structures are also, quite explicitly, schools of participatory democracy. Policing and jurisprudence lean heavily on discussion and negotiation rather than coercion. Municipios choose their leaders in assemblies. At the next level up, in the Caracoles and the Good Government Councils, the movement rotates people through for short stints, trying to spread around the experience of governing. Another advantage the autonomous councils bring to the table is that they build on long-standing Maya traditions. Bernardo, a young Mayan taxi driver who swore he would never join the Zapatistas because “they want to run the country like Fidel Castro—you know their slogan, ‘Everything for everybody,’” nonetheless told us he likes the fact that they are preserving Mayan ways. Language and costume are the most visible signs, of course. Enrique, a young Zapatista activist, noted that collective work and community collections are part of the Maya culture as well. (One powerful Maya custom is that communities only speak through designated spokespersons; thus, although we had 154

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individual conversations with several members of Zapatista communities, we were told in no uncertain terms that it would be inappropriate to identify them, so we are using pseudonyms.) Alberto, an anthropologist who studies the Maya, added that Mayan peoples value simplicity and humility, and view costly possessions with suspicion—perhaps rendering the unfinished boards of Magdalena’s “other” city hall more appealing than the polished surfaces of the official one. A final element of modern-day Maya culture is the community church. Alberto declared that worship consists of “a Catholic façade on top of traditional Maya religion.” Thus the typical Maya church has walls lined by a dozen or more saints wrapped in layers of cloth and decked out with mirrors and pine needle-strewn floors (but no pews) where families come to burn rows of candles and traditional healers make offerings of incense and live chickens. Enrique commented that in divided communities like Magdalena, the church and its associated saint’s day fiestas are the one space where everybody gets together. He said that lay preaching within the church is the most important forum for Zapatistas to address the rest of the community. The Zapatista local authorities, however, are seeking to break with some age-old traditions, in the name of…tradition. Current-day Mayan society before 1994 was, like most surviving pre-modern cultures, oppressively sexist. Arranged marriages codified male authority in the home and the village and widespread domestic violence kept women socially and physically subordinated. But during the EZLN’s 1983-93 underground phase, Maya women threw themselves into organizing and came to make up one-third of the rebel army’s ranks. Their payoff was a Revolutionary Women’s Law, promulgated by the Zapatistas during the 1994 uprising, proclaiming equal rights, including the right to choose who and when to marry, and whether and when to have children. The existence of the law does not mean that gender equality has been achieved in Zapatista communities. Paciencia, a young activist, stated, “It’s not easy to change this in just a few years.” But the fact that the communities endorsed it at all is a milestone. In Magdalena, the municipal council consisted of five men and six women. They proudly told us that including women was a new policy, but claimed that it was also a return to ancient Maya custom: “Before the arrival of the Spanish, women were so important that they performed all offices. It was the Spanish who put an end to this when they came, so now it is necessary to reclaim this practice.” This amazing declaration was blunted somewhat by the fact that the other two arms

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of government, the judges and the police, were all male, and that although all the male councilors were present, only two of the six women were (presumably because the others had household duties). Members admitted, “We still have a long way to go.” It would be a mistake to view Zapatista autonomy as simply a process separating a few communities from the rest of Mexico. Although local administration is the most concrete aspect of autonomy today, Zapatismo envisions autonomy as all of society governing itself, replacing the state and neoliberal capitalism with “freedom, democracy and justice.” In short, autonomy in its full realization amounts to revolution.

Missed Connections Stubborn independence, intensive consultation with the community and deep roots in Mayan culture have helped the “good governments” to win local support. But the same factors have in some cases estranged the Zapatistas from potential allies, Mayan and otherwise. According to a 2004 report by the Network for Peace-Chiapas, a broad coalition of groups working for peace and indigenous rights, many grassroots Chiapas organizations formerly allied with the Zapatistas have distanced themselves over the issue of whether to accept government aid—especially once a new state administration elected in 2000 showed itself more disposed to dole out aid to community-based groups. Political Scientist Stahler-Sholk commented that government aid programs have been “clearly tailored and administered in Chiapas for the political purpose of dividing communities and attracting supporters away from the Zapatista cause.” Does this mean that Zapatismo is shrinking? “We know of thousands who were Zapatista and left, who couldn’t take the hardships,” says Ernesto Ledesma of the Center for Political Analysis and Social and Economic Research (CAPISE). “We also know of thousands who have joined. If you ask, twelve years after 1994, are there more or fewer Zapatistas, the answer is we don’t know, nobody knows.” Some sectors of the broader Mexican and global left have also become disillusioned with Zapatismo. To be sure, some of this boils down to straightforward ideological disagreements, in part because the Zapatista perspective has more in common with the anarchist tradition than the socialist one. José (a pseudonym), a recent college graduate and militant in the Chiapas-based People’s Resistance Movement of the Southeast (MRPS), which has moved away from supporting the EZLN, offered meaty criticisms of Zapatista actions—and particularly inactions. José lamented that on many occasions the Zapatista movement 156

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has failed to speak out against fierce repression of non-Zapatistas. Global activists have likewise been perplexed as to why Zapatismo has declined to send representatives or even messages of solidarity to likeminded global gatherings, such as the World Social Forum, but continues to organize its own global conferences, to which it expects others will come. Some of this standoffishness doubtless stems from simple left sectarianism; however, there is more to it than that. Zapatismo is very consciously accountable to the communities that support it and deeply committed to decision-making through consultation. But given the revived Maya customs of decision-making via wide-open community assemblies and the search for consensus, this is bound to imply long silences toward the outside world, and in some cases, no statement at all. Perhaps this is not all bad. “The Zapatistas say little and do much,” noted Alberto, the anthropologist. “That’s the opposite of the politicians, who say alot but do very little.” In any case, there is a very real tension between being a truly community-based movement and serving as a touchstone for the left in Mexico and the world. A final reason for strains between Zapatismo and the broader left is simply that the Mayan languages, worldview and style of communication are utterly foreign to most people formed in a more western way of looking at the world. As Ernesto Ledesma of CAPISE put it, “Left intellectuals speak from the head; Mayas speak from the heart.” Certainly these two left intellectuals found ourselves struggling to communicate. In our group’s meetings, the Maya custom of having a designated spokesperson and a required set of greetings, sometimes supplemented by the Zapatista variation of ensuring that each person says his or her piece, tended to lead to very formal and repetitive—if sometimes insightful and even poetic—presentations and responses to questions.

The “Other Campaign” and the Challenges of Autonomy This varied set of baggage accompanies the Zapatistas’ still considerable political prestige as they embark on the Other Campaign (Otra Campaña, or Otra for short), their answer to the presidential campaign. Delegate Zero has an ambitious itinerary that entails a visit to every state of Mexico before the July elections to listen and speak with those who want to build “democracy, liberty and justice” from below. The Zapatistas identify this campaign as a risk equal to the initial 1994 uprising (among other things, the physical risk to Marcos himself is 157

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enormous), but essential to break through the geographic isolation of their autonomy project. Some on the left criticized the Otra for attacking López Obrador when he was the presidential candidate of the center-left PRD, on equal terms with the others. But Ledesma of CAPISE points out that the party’s vote against the San Andrés accords, which would have codified indigenous autonomy, is “fundamental to understanding the Zapatistas’ fury against the PRD.” He added that Jesús Ortega, who coordinated the vote deal, was named by López Obrador to run his campaign. Moreover, the criticism of all the parties resonates with ordinary Mexicans’ disgust for politics as usual. There is no doubt that Marcos will give the candidates some “Pepto-Bismol moments,” in Ernesto Ledesma’s words. The big question is whether the Other Campaign will achieve its bold goal to build a new, nationwide movement. “It’s a bet on the grassroots organizations around the country,” Ledesma said. “The Zapatistas have bet everything on this initiative—and it might not work.” For those concerned with community development, the most recent twists in the Zapatistas’ path hold a mixed set of lessons. They have taken the process that is sometimes called “indigenous planning”— grounding decision-making about space and public life in the strengths, resources and traditions of a particular community—farther than almost any other group of similar size and prominence. Their pioneering development of autonomous governments in the shadow of the official ones offers a provocative model worth emulating and adapting. At the same time, their community-rooted, Maya-inflected style of politics, the reason for their success in Chiapas, has itself thrown up barriers between them and a broader progressive movement. With the Other Campaign, the Zapatistas hope to bridge these barriers and put Mexico ‘s political and economic elites on the defensive once again. If they can successfully mesh local grassroots autonomy with national coalition-building, all of us should be taking note. This article was originally published in the Spring 2006 issue of Progressive Planning Magazine.

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PALESTINE AND PLANNING The Role of Planning in the Occupation of Palestine Julie Norman Activists in Palestinian solidarity networks are increasingly using international law to protest the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. They focus largely on visible grievances, such as armed incursions, the separation barrier and military checkpoints. Often overlooked by foreign observers, however, is the critical role played by urban planning in the occupation and in the violation of human rights. Planning laws and building codes allow for the systemic appropriation of Palestinian land, eviction of families and demolition of homes. Since I first began fieldwork in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in 2005, I have seen countless olive trees razed, wells and water tanks destroyed and homes and schools demolished, all “legitimized” by controversial planning policies. Most Palestinians are well aware of these actions. It is critical that progressive planners, international activists, policymakers and scholars understand the laws and policies used by the Israeli government to justify them.

Land Confiscation Despite activist claims that land confiscation and settlements are violations of international law, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem estimates that 42 percent of Palestinian land is controlled by Israeli settlements. How is this justified? First, prior to 1979, Israel justified land confiscation and settlement development by claiming “security reasons.” During this period, Israeli authorities argued that international law, in both Article 43 of the Hague Regulations and Articles 27 and 28 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, allows for the occupying power to take measures to ensure the safety of the public and the security of occupying forces. According to Israel, the settlements contributed to this security. Palestinians, however, successfully challenged the security pretext before the Israeli High Court in the 1979 Elon Moreh land case, which ruled that land expropriation was illegal if undertaken for civilian settlement rather than direct military purposes. Settlement expansion did not cease with the Elon Moreh ruling. 159

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Instead, the legal justification shifted from the security rationale to asserting that private land was “state land” in accordance with Ottoman law. Israel justifies the application of Ottoman law in this case by claiming that it is the occupier maintaining the pre-existing laws of the territory, as mandated in both the Hague and Geneva Conventions. Though formulated for different purposes in a different political and economic era, Israeli authorities have drawn on this law to justify land confiscation. The Ottoman Land Code of 1858, later incorporated into Jordanian legislation (when the West Bank was part of Jordan), was established to encourage the gradual privatization of land. This allowed for increasing revenue from property and agricultural taxes. In an effort to encourage cultivation, the law stipulated that land that was not cultivated for three consecutive years, or was not cultivated more than 50 percent, came back under the control of the Ottoman ruler (or later the Jordanian state). The Land Code was later amended in 1913 by a Turkish law that stated that the state could not seize land if it was formally registered to an individual by the Lands Registrar. Israel has strategically leveraged both Ottoman and Jordanian laws since the start of the occupation. First, in 1968, Israel issued a military order (MO 291) freezing all land registration in the West Bank, so that 70 percent of West Bank land is not officially registered. Israel then applied the original Ottoman Land Code to these lands so that noncultivated or undercultivated land could be seized and become “state land.” Notwithstanding the fact that landowners should not have to answer to the state regarding their activities, the application of the law in this way is particularly problematic in that occupation authorities often make it difficult or impossible for farmers to develop land, plant crops or construct sheds, stables, wells and other structures that would make cultivation possible. Indeed, the situation is a catch-22 in that Palestinians cannot register land under MO 291, yet they cannot legally cultivate land that is unregistered without facing demolition orders. The legal rationale for land appropriation is different in East Jerusalem, which, since annexation in 1980, falls under the authority of the Jerusalem Municipality and the Israeli Ministry of the Interior. As an urban area, expropriations in East Jerusalem often involve neighborhoods or houses rather than expanses of land, thus affecting less territory but larger populations. Approximately 6,000 acres of private Palestinian property have been expropriated for “public use” in East Jerusalem,

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making room for twelve “neighborhoods” considered settlements by human rights groups.

House Demolitions Land expropriation has led to the demolition of many Palestinianowned buildings under a cloak of legality. According to the organization known as Bimkom (Planners for Human Rights), from 2000 to 2010 at least 4,500 demolition orders were issued in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, including houses, schools, agricultural structures and even sheds and tents. While activists are quick to point out that property destruction is illegal under international law, the state uses what it claims are legal mechanisms and seemingly benign planning regulations in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to justify demolitions. With the signing of the Oslo Interim Agreement in 1995, approximately 60 percent of the West Bank was designated as Area C, allowing for exclusive Israeli control, including the application of planning laws and policies. Home to approximately 150,000 Palestinians, Area C has seen increasing restrictions on Palestinian construction and development, while Israeli settlements in the same area have continued to expand. The majority of demolition orders in Area C are considered administrative demolitions, issued for building without a permit. Since most states and municipalities require permits for construction, these demolition orders might seem to be a legitimate response to illegal building, however, upon closer investigation, it is clear that it is nearly impossible for Palestinians living in Area C to obtain permits. The confiscation of land surrounding Palestinian villages as “state land” means that building cannot legally expand beyond the central village boundaries. Moreover, building permits are rarely granted for building on recognized village land because the planning codes for those areas are still based on the Mandatory Regional Outline Plans developed by the British in the 1940s, which no longer can accommodate current needs. In other cases, permits are not granted because Palestinians cannot prove ownership of their land. This fact actually prevents some Palestinians from applying for permits since they risk losing their land if they cannot then prove ownership. Finally, other permits are denied if the proposed structure is in a closed military zone (as in the Jordan Valley), near actual or planned roads or within a declared nature reserve or archaeological area. Because of these policies, over 94 percent of permit applications in Area C were denied between 2000 and 2007, forcing Palestinians to build without permits, and thus making these structures liable for 161

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demolition. Permits are required not only for erecting new structures, but also for planting fruit trees and vegetables, installing wells or water pumps and repairing infrastructure, thus making orchards, water cisterns and other property liable for destruction as well. In the few cases where plans have been made for building in Area C, they have been developed solely by the Israeli Civil Administration without local consultation. This results in highly restricted plans limited to village centers that have no room for expansion and fail to consider the agricultural needs of the village. This was facilitated by a military order abolishing local and district planning committees. The centralization of planning not only removes local participation from the planning process, it also makes it nearly impossible to challenge or appeal planning decisions. The legal rationale for home demolitions is different in East Jerusalem, but as in the West Bank, the issue of planning, and the justifications for home demolitions, are linked to land expropriation. In East Jerusalem, 35 percent of the Palestinian land annexed in 1980 by Israel has been used for the development of Jewish Israeli neighborhoods (considered settlements under international law), and an additional 30 percent has been declared “green zones,” where building is not allowed. In the remaining areas, Palestinians are forced to build illegally either because permits are rarely granted due to the inability to prove ownership, or more commonly, due to a lack of proper surveys. According to B’Tselem, most existing Palestinian neighborhoods are not included in municipal plans, and construction is allowed in only 11 percent of East Jerusalem. Thus, although Palestinian neighborhoods are densely populated, any attempts to acquire permits to expand are generally denied, once again forcing Palestinians to build illegally. In some cases, building permits are denied when the applicant cannot guarantee adequate parking, road access, electricity, water, sewage or other infrastructure. Yet the same municipal authorities limit the development of such infrastructure in Palestinian neighborhoods by not providing services or not allowing permits for their construction. As noted by the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), Palestinian residents in Jerusalem receive just 8 percent of municipal spending but contribute approximately 40 percent of the city’s tax revenue. The lack of infrastructure in Palestinian areas is then cited as a rationale to deny building applications, forcing residents to build illegally.

Conclusion Israel has used planning policy to exert control over the occupied Pal162

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estinian territories through strategic interpretations of international law, while also creating “facts on the ground.” Israel selectively applies Ottoman, British and Jordanian planning laws in the West Bank. It is easy to overlook grievances over zoning regulations and municipal codes when in a protracted conflict situation, but these seemingly banal legal requirements ultimately sustain the occupation policies that most directly affect the daily lives of Palestinians. Planners and those concerned with basic human rights need to study and understand how planning regulations can play such a critical role in denying people their right to their property, home, and livelihood. This article was originally published in the Fall 2012 issue of Progressive Planning Magazine.

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Palestine’s Problems: Checkpoints, Walls, Gates and Urban Planners By Tom Angotti Aut or’s Note: n t e decade since t is was written, the problems have only grown: checkpoints remain, the wall is in place, and there are twice as many Israeli settlements, abetted by Israeli planners. It takes two hours every day for Palestinians to cross the military checkpoint from Bethlehem to Jerusalem so they can get to work. Bethlehem is in the West Bank and Jerusalem, though divided, is part of Israel. The checkpoint is flanked by the giant Israeli Wall. Once they are in Israel, Palestinians are then confronted with gated communities that are off-limits to them. The checkpoint, the Wall and the gate are the most visible signs of Israel’s control over Palestinians and their land. But the invisible weapon is urban planning. Israeli geopolitical strategy to control and occupy all of Palestine has been imbedded in its approach to housing, urban development and the location of human settlements. Behind the physical and symbolic barriers lie the invisible urban and military planners.

The Checkpoints The Bethlehem checkpoint is one of around 500. Some divide Israel and the West Bank, like the Bethlehem checkpoint, but most are within the West Bank. To get an idea what this means to Palestinians, imagine having to pass a military checkpoint to commute between San Francisco and Oakland. Or to go from your house to your backyard orchard. The Israeli Army controls all movement between West Bank towns, within some towns and also between Israel and the West Bank. Israel doesn’t allow Jewish citizens to enter the West Bank, except for those living in illegally-built settlements in the West Bank. They take exclusive Israeli-built and -protected roads to get to and from their homes. These roads are off-limits to Palestinians. This is one of the most developed examples of apartheid urbanization in the world, with separate settlements, separate roads and separate standards of living. The Palestinian commuters from Bethlehem to Jerusalem, mostly men over the age of thirty, are herded like cattle through turnstiles and fences and run through metal detectors, surveillance cameras and

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document checks. They are the “lucky” ones—the small minority that got permission to enter Israel to work, where there are more jobs and higher pay than in the West Bank. But the commuters have to go back to Bethlehem the same day or they will be hunted down. Every worker has a magnetic card that must be swiped in the morning and again in the evening so that the Israelis will know if they miss the return trip. Palestinians are, in effect, prisoners of a powerful security state able to engineer the movement of people and their use of public space. Israel is the world’s leading innovator and producer of high-tech military and surveillance equipment, and a major contributor to the strategy and technology of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. As an older white North American, I could avoid all this humiliation at the checkpoint and didn’t even have to stand in line or flash my passport. I fit the acceptable racial profile. On the Israeli side, I stood with two women from Women for Human Rights, an Israeli group that witnesses this daily violation of the right to the city and takes notes documenting it. Young Israeli soldiers toting rifles and machine guns swaggered and smiled at us. On the Palestinian side, there were only street vendors and taxi drivers. Paradoxically, once in the bustling streets of the West Bank town, despite the occasional bombed-out and demolished building, occasional tourist destination and the everpresent Wall, I felt free and welcomed.

The Wall Israel started building its giant Wall enclosing the West Bank in 2002, after the launch of the second Intifida, the Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation. While Israel claims the purpose of the wall is defensive, a careful look at its route shows that it was planned as a land grab that would further shrink the boundaries of a future Palestinian state. Violence and attacks on Israelis have declined sharply in the last few years because of political agreements between the two sides, not the Wall, which is filled with gaps, far from complete and possible to evade with a little ingenuity. The Wall, like the Israeli settlements—with some 300,000 settlers in the occupied territories— aims to create “facts on the ground” that would dictate the parameters of an eventual negotiated settlement. The Wall, most of it built on Palestinian land, takes huge loops that incorporate illegal Israeli settlements built on Palestinian land. If completed, the 760-kilometer Wall would effectively turn the Palestinian territory into a handful of isolated Bantustans and make a viable Palestinian state with a unified economy and infrastructure impossible. 165

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Following the example of Gaza, Israel would effectively turn Palestinian towns into prisons and be able to monitor and control all movement between them. This dark dystopia would result in one of the most technologically sophisticated apartheids in the history of cities.

The Gated Communities The Israeli settlements in the West Bank are designed and function as exclusive gated communities. While some actually have physical gates, many do not, controlling access through other means. The “gates” are often symbolic and take the form of electronic surveillance perimeters. Israel’s Former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon engineered the location of settlements with the strategic thinking of a military planner playing the urban planning game. The settlements are placed on hilltops where they can oversee the daily life of Palestinians and, should the military need to intervene at any time, provide them with the most strategic sites. The idea is that the architects and planners charged with developing the settlements blend military and urban planning so as to create a symbolic and real sense of superiority and control over the land and people below. Palestinians are not allowed in, though exceptions are made for some service workers. In his brilliant book, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, Eyal Weizman shows how Israel’s control of the high ground and monopoly of the underground water supply constitute a “vertical occupation” that has resulted in the destruction of Palestinian agriculture and the displacement of entire villages.

Gentrification and Ethnic Cleansing in Israel The planning paradigm for the Israeli settlements in the West Bank has been reproduced within the state of Israel and is now deeply imbedded in the urban structure. We see it in the gated Israeli communities that have sprung up on hilltops in the mixed ArabIsraeli regions and cities. There, too, the exclusive neighborhoods seek to reinforce economic and social dominance through segregated living and work environments. After creation of the state of Israel in 1948, most Palestinians fled or were forced out of their homes and villages and became refugees. But many stayed, and today Palestinians within the state of Israel account for about 20 percent of the population. Half of all Palestinian households are under the poverty line compared to a national average of 18 percent. They remain second-class citizens, usually living in segregated residential enclaves and often threatened by displacement and gentrification. It is here that Israel’s urban planners play their role, 166

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often unconsciously, as implementers of a broader geopolitical strategy, a land grab and ethnic cleansing of historic proportions. The Palestinian population in Israel is concentrated in the Galilee region in the north, the Negev desert to the south, East Jerusalem and in “mixed towns” like Haifa. In all of these areas, exclusive Israeli hilltop settlements are part of a conscious policy of “Judaizing” areas with Arab populations—a concept that might also be called ethnic cleansing— through government land use and housing policy. The Israeli government owns 94 percent of the land and leases it freely for the construction of new Jewish settlements; they also provide the infrastructure and subsidize services. The Palestinian population, however, is rarely given permission to build or expand. To meet the needs of a rapidly growing population, Palestinians often build without legal approval, but they are subject to heavy fines and/or demolition orders. Some 18,000 Palestinian homes have been demolished. Jaffa was an Arab settlement on the Mediterranean Sea that is now a neighborhood in the metropolitan region of Tel Aviv, Israel’s largest city. Palestinians there are being pushed out by real estate investment. As land values and rents go up, many Palestinians can no longer afford to stay. Fahdi, a community organizer in Jaffa fighting gentrification, says there is a larger significance to his struggle. “My family was from a [Palestinian] village north of here. It was confiscated by Israel. My family had papers showing they had owned the land since the Turkish period. They came to Jaffa. I am a citizen of Israel, but we can’t get our land back. Everything for me starts with that.” Fahdi described the recent case of a Palestinian who couldn’t get permission to add rooms to his house and now faces eviction for a building violation. He has an option to buy but with current real estate prices what they are, cannot afford to. In another case, a renter facing eviction is willing to buy the property valued at approximately $160,000, but the government will only accept cash and no bank will lend the family money because they do not have sufficient income. Fahdi noted that while Palestinians struggle to hold on to their homes, gentrifiers move in with ease and have no problem getting permission. They include Jews from Europe looking for second homes by the sea, and Israeli settlers from the West Bank who bring with them both an ideological mission to separate themselves from Palestinians and guns that are publicly displayed to make sure their mission is known. In the Galilee region, the landscape is also being transformed by Israeli hilltop settlements, while Palestinian towns are unable to get 167

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official permission to grow. According to Neighbors, a group of Israelis and Palestinians dedicated to planning with social justice, 91 percent of the land in Arab settlements is used for housing as opposed to 55 percent in Jewish settlements. This is a direct result of the official policy of limiting the growth of Palestinian towns. With so little land for expansion, there is little room left for public open space and services. In the southern region of the Negev, 76,000 Bedouins live in settlements that the Israeli government has designated as unrecognized, illegal and subject to eviction whenever the land is needed for infrastructure or the military, or simply at the whim of the Israeli government. And in Arab East Jerusalem, which is directly administered by an Israeli civil administration, Palestinian neighborhoods get minimal services like garbage collection and street repairs while also facing incursions by both Israeli gentrifiers and religious sects seeking to Judaize the city. Thus, urban planning throughout Israel is firmly rooted in Israel’s long-term geopolitical strategy of controlling all of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, the dream of Israel’s Zionist founders. Its realization was interrupted by the resistance of the Palestinian people who owned, lived on and worked most of that land. Israel now directly controls 78 percent of it, and the rest is under limited Palestinian control in the West Bank and Gaza (Israel can and does intervene militarily and take land when deemed in their interest). Incredibly, if a settlement is ever reached in the current negotiations, Palestinians are likely to end up with only about 15 percent of the land.

The Right to the City Despite official policy, there are many hopeful signs of change. Resistance and struggles against displacement are widespread in Palestinian communities, which work in partnership with human rights and social justice groups in Israel. The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) organizes protests and Planners for Planning Rights (Bimkom) brings professional and legal expertise to bear to protect communities from displacement. A host of organizations continue to challenge the Israeli checkpoints and Wall. But Israel has little incentive to change course and agree to a twostate solution and the establishment of full rights for Palestinians. It has the most powerful military and largest nuclear arsenal in the Middle East and is one of the largest recipients of U.S. military aid. And the Bush administration carried forward the U.S. tradition of tolerating the Wall, checkpoints and gradual incursion of Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory even while issuing ineffective verbal protests. While the 168

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incoming Obama administration has given no signs it will change course, there is an opportunity now for progressive people in the U.S. to raise their voices as President Obama seeks to reinvent the U.S. role in the Middle East and address continuing demands from Arab nations for a just peace in Palestine. Obama opposed a U.S. war in Iraq that mimicked Israel’s high-tech, scorched-earth strategy—the same strategy that failed miserably in Israel’s 2003 attack on Lebanon. But it will take a lot of pressure from within the U.S. to move Obama’s cautious foreign policy team past the powerful Israeli lobby. Urban planners should tell the incoming administration and Congress that the right to the city is a fundamental human right. This article was originally published in the Winter 2009 issue of Progressive Planning Magazine.

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Israel’s War for Water Marie Kennedy In South Africa, residents of Soweto are smashing water meters and taking Johannesburg Water to court in protest against prepayment meters, which they claim are unconstitutional (the South African constitution guarantees water as a human right). In Michigan, activists striving to prevent bottling companies from further water takings are seeking legislative oversight and a constitutional amendment to protect against Great Lakes water diversions or exports. In Plachimada, Kerala, India, Adivasi women started their yearslong dharma, or sit-in, in 2002 to prevent the local Coca-Cola bottling plant from stealing and polluting their water. This year, Kerala banned colas, and Coke Pepsi Free Zones are spreading across the country. From Atlanta to Cochabamba to Buenos Aires, people outraged at steeply rising water rates coupled with lousy service are driving out private water companies and insisting on public accountability for the management of this most precious resource. In practically every country in the world today there are clashes over water—who owns it, who controls it, who needs it. But you don’t hear much about the role of water in the Mideast, particularly in the context of the armed confrontations between Israel and their Arab neighbors. Yet Israel’s expansionist program is as much about water as it is about a clash of religion or security. For Israel and the other countries of this arid region of the world, control of sufficient water is security.

Water, Israel’s History and the Occupation Many believe that water was the underlying reason for the invasion and occupation of the West Bank in 1967. Among Palestinians, it is understood that the location of the apartheid wall (security fence in Israeli terminology) has more to do with continued Israeli control of the Western Mountain Aquifer than with security. The possibility has been raised that a major reason for the removal of the settlements in Gaza was that the Coastal Aquifer upon which these settlements and all of Gaza have depended became almost useless due to over-pumping and pollution. Some believe that the reason for the widespread destruction and de-occupation of Southern Lebanon in the recent war was to realize the age-old hope of Zionists to include the southern bank

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of the Litani in the state of Israel. So, what is the basis for these speculations? Water has been a key element of local and regional politics in the Middle East for centuries. The early Zionists recognized that water was critical to the realization of their dreams. In a proposal to the League of Nations in 1919, the World Zionist Organization delineated borders for the future Jewish homeland based on watershed boundaries so as to include the headwaters of the Jordan River, the lower Litani River in Lebanon and the lower reaches of the Yarmouk River. In the 1947 partition plan, none of these areas were included in the new state of Israel. Israel now controls all these areas, however, with the exception of the Litani River. In 1973, Israel’s former prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, reiterated the importance of expanding Israel’s borders based on access to water: “It is necessary that the water sources upon which the future of the Land depends should not be outside the borders of the future Jewish homeland. For this reason we have always demanded that the Land of Israel include the southern banks of the Litani River, the headwaters of the Jordan and the Hauran Region from the El Auja spring south of Damascus.” The National Water Carrier, designed to irrigate the Negev Desert in the south of the country with the water from the Sea of Galilee and the Jordan River, was completed in 1964. Israel began to withdraw water from the Jordan, soon taking more than its previously agreed-upon share. Syria and Jordan responded by starting construction of diversion schemes of their own. In 1965, Israel attacked the Arab construction sites and the ensuing border conflicts culminated in a full-scale war in June 1967. Ariel Sharon, the general in charge of the war, later commented, “People generally regard 5 June 1967 as the day the Six-Day War began. That is the official date. But, in reality, it started two-anda-half years earlier, on the day Israel decided to act against the diversion of the Jordan.” Whether or not water was the primary cause of the Six-Day War, the result of the war for Israel was control of and direct access to significantly increased water resources—estimated to be a 50 percent increase in freshwater supplies. As Vandana Shiva writes in her book Water Wars, the result of the war “was in effect an occupation of the freshwater resources from the Golan Heights, the Sea of Galilee, the Jordan River and the West Bank.” Confiscation of almost all West Bank wells was one of the first military orders of the occupation and, until 1982, the military controlled West Bank waters. Now the Israel water company Mekorot is in charge. Management has deeply discriminated against Palestinians and has 171

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been wasteful of water when it concerns Jewish settlements. No new Palestinian wells have been permitted for agricultural purposes since 1967 and very few have been permitted for domestic purposes. Israel has set quotas based on 1968 usage of how much water can be drawn by Palestinians from existing wells. When supplies are low in the summer, Mekorot closes the supply valves to Palestinian towns and villages, but not to illegal Israeli settlements. Settlers continue to fill swimming pools and water lawns while Palestinians lack water for drinking and cooking. Furthermore, settlers receive heavy subsidies for water to promote agriculture while Palestinian farmers pay the same amount for irrigation water as for drinking water. Twenty-five percent of West Bank Palestinian villages are not connected to water service. When tensions are high and closures common, it is almost impossible for water tankers to enter Palestinian areas and for villagers to get to nearby wells.

Israeli-Palestinian Water Inequities According to most estimates, Israel uses 73 percent of the water available from West Bank aquifers and West Bank Jewish settlers another 10 percent, leaving West Bank Palestinians with 17 percent. Israelis get about 350 liters of water per person per day while Palestinians get just seventy liters—less than the 100 liter minimum standard of the World Health Organization. About a quarter of all of Israel’s water comes from the Western Aquifer and over a third comes from the Jordan Basin. The occupied West Bank sits on top of 90 percent of the replenishment area feeding the Western Aquifer, which flows underground from the highlands of the West Bank to the lowlands of Israel. A separate Palestinian state on top of the Western Aquifer would give the Palestinians upstream claims to the lion’s share of this water. Israel would have downstream water rights, but those rights would be limited, like Mexico’s water rights to the Colorado River. And if the eastern border of a Palestinian state were to be along the Jordan River, Palestine would have downstream water rights to the Jordan. Such considerations no doubt led former Agriculture Minister Rafael Eitan to declare that relinquishing control over water supplies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories would “threaten the Jewish state.”

Water and the Wall This concern about water may explain the route of the apartheid wall. As Noam Chomsky points out, if the wall were really a security wall it would be built “inside Israel, within the internationally recognized border, the Green Line established after the 1948-1949 war.” But, the 172

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wall that is being built follows quite a different path. Elisabeth Sime, a director of CARE International in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, put it succinctly: “The route of the wall matches that of water resources, the latter being conveniently located on the Israeli side.” When completed, the wall will divide the West Bank into a northern and a southern section. Writing in Stop the Wall in Palestine, Abdel Rahman Al Tamimi, an engineer with the Palestinian Hydrology Group, notes that the wall “will make the upstream of the aquifer inaccessible to Palestinians ensuring that Israel will control both the quantity and the quality of the water.” He goes on to speculate about what this will mean to any final status negotiations. The aquifer is under the most fertile lands in the West Bank, thus water usage in the area is closely tied to agriculture. Inaccessibility to the lands because of the Wall will deem these lands dried and useless in just a few seasons; the agricultural sector will first diminish and then wholly disappear. This major creation of facts on the ground will make the lands, by force, unused and then the request by Palestinians in any negotiations for water for the area will be argued by Israel as baseless. The Coastal Aquifer, Gaza’s only natural freshwater supply, was at one time providing about 18 percent of Israel’s water. Serious overpumping from this rather shallow aquifer has allowed salt from the Mediterranean and other nearby saline aquifers to be introduced. Salting, along with pollution from pesticides, fertilizers and fecal matter (the latter mainly from the refugee camps, most of which have no proper sewage control) have rendered this water unfit for drinking in many areas. Citrus, the traditional main crop of Gaza, is highly saltintolerant and is becoming obsolete. One wonders to what extent the lack of potable water figured in Israel’s decision to pull out of Gaza.

Israel’s Growing Water Shortage and Lebanon In fact, in spite of controlling the Jordan Basin and the Western Aquifer, Israel is once more running out of water. The Coastal Aquifer is gone and the flow of the Jordan River has dropped 90 percent over the last fifty years, primarily due to over-extraction. Some observers speculate that Israel is once more turning eyes toward the Litani River in Lebanon, the only country in the region with a water surplus. After the 1967 war, Moshe Dayan, Israel’s defense minister during the war, said that Israel had achieved “provisionally satisfying frontiers, with the exception of those with Lebanon.” Both David BenGurion and Moshe Dayan at various times advocated Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon and the Litani. Over the years, the Litani River has

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continued to be in Israel’s sights. It’s difficult to know what role water played in Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1978, 1982 and again this year. During the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon between 1982 and 2000, rumors abounded but were never substantiated that Israel was diverting water from the Litani River. What is known is that Israel prohibited the sinking of new wells, seized all technical documents relating to the Litani and, in the barrage of 1993, drove hundreds of thousands from their homes in southern Lebanon. And in 2006? In a final hard push, the day before the cease-fire went into effect, Israeli ground forces advanced to the banks of the Litani. Again, hundreds of thousands of refugees were driven from their homes. Israel destroyed vast portions of the water infrastructure of southern Lebanon, including the Litani Dam, the major pumping station on the Wazzani River and the irrigation systems for the farmland along the coastal plains and parts of the Bekaa Valley. As quoted in the LA Times ( 22 August 2006 ), UNICEF water and sanitation specialist Branislav Jekic said, “I have never seen destruction like this…. Wherever we go, we ask people what they need most and the answer is always the same: water. People want to move back to their communities. But whether they stay or not will depend on the availability of water.” In this issue of Progressive Planning you will read of other struggles for safe, affordable, accessible water in many parts of the world. Many have predicted that wars of this century will be over water rather than oil. Nearly 2.2 billion people, one-third of the world’s population, are thirsting for water. In Haiti, Gambia and Cambodia, people are subsisting on less than six liters of water per day. Millions die every year from water-related diseases. The story of Israel is only one among many of the powerful taking water from those with less power. It is only one among many stories of environmental degradation and wasteful uses of water. In the United States we only have to look to the High Plains Ogallala aquifer, which runs 1,300 miles from Texas to South Dakota and supplies the breadbasket of this country with its water, to find an even more egregious example of over-pumping: The aquifer is being drawn down eight times faster than nature refills it. And we only have to look to Las Vegas, with its green lawns, swimming pools and golf courses in the middle of a desert, to find a culture even more wasteful of this precious resource. Let us hope that throughout the world, more and more people will look and then act before it is too late. This article was originally published in the Fall 2006 issue of Progressive Planning Magazine.

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CHAPTER 6: GENDER, LGBTQ RIGHTS AND THE CITY Introduction: Planning for and with Women and LGBTQ Communities: Strategies for Solidarities Heather McLean When I was a planning student in the late 1990’s, women activists contesting patriarchal city building with Women Plan Toronto (WPT) sparked my interest in planning for women and LGBTQ communities. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, WPT encouraged public sector planners and policy makers to plan women-friendly neighbourhoods that included accessible and affordable housing and public spaces and parks amenable to children, seniors and people with disabilities. WPT also advocated practical alternatives to address women’s planning concerns, including strategies for designing public transportation suitable for wheelchairs and strollers and ensuring women’s and children’s safety in urban design. Moreover, by facilitating non-hierarchical and participatory workshops, WPT encouraged refugee women, older women, single moms and lesbians to rely on their embodied knowledge while engaging in planning meetings. Through these activities, WPT unsettled paternalistic planning practice that often celebrates white male urban experts while ignoring the experiences of women and LGBTQ communities. However, I have learned from experience as a planner and community development researcher over the past two decades that my perspective as a white, able-bodied and cis-gendered woman working within the privileged university and community development sectors is undoubtedly limited and limiting. If I want to co-create healthy and socially just cities for all women and LGBTQ people, my only way forward is to practice planning from an intersectional standpoint, one that takes seriously the ways in which class, race, sexuality, ability, colonialism, citizenship status and other hierarchies of power are interconnected and impact those marginalized in society. I was also born and raised an unwelcome yet grateful guest in land belonging to the Tk’e lú s te Secwepemc, in a place named British Columbia. Working with a context 175

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of ongoing settler colonialism, I need to keep learning from and centering the voices and experiences of women of colour (including Black and Latinx women) and Indigenous activists, community workers and planners fighting for housing and food justice, contesting the privatization of public services, and envisioning and enacting anti-racist and decolonial alternatives in a time of climate change. I am committed to planning for more socially just communities, as best as I am able and being cognizant of all the pitfalls it entails and all the mistakes I will surely make and have made. There is so much to learn from Indigenous women and women of colour activists and LGBTQ communities of colour and 2-spirited1 activists who have always practiced community building on their own terms. In her book As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance Nishnaabeg artist and theorist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson describes how women and 2-spirited people in her community collectively engage in planning by “hunting, fishing, harvesting rice and medicines, making maple syrup, parenting, and storytelling.”2 By practicing these place-based activities, community members share cultural memories and governance protocols, foster food security, maintain housing, and promote well-being. At the same time, Black and Latinx women and LGBTQ residents oppressed by white supremacist and colonial planning in the United States continue to establish food, transportation, and housing cooperatives, strategies that catalyze radical, grassroots and anti-colonial community organising. For decades women across the so-called Global North and South have practiced radical and inclusive community planning out of necessity by establishing solidarity economies and cooperatives, community kitchens, and urban gardens Intersectional, anti-colonial and anti-racist feminist activists and community planners also point out how, over the past two decades, the neoliberalisation of planning has undermined grassroots efforts to forefront the needs and experiences of women and LGBTQ communities. Since the mid 1990’s city officials and private sector planners have reconfigured the physical and social infrastructure of cities with 1

“Two-spirit” refers to a person who identifies as having both a masculine and a feminine spirit and is used by some Indigenous people to describe their sexual, gender and/or spiritual identity. 2 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

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policies that cut back public sector safety nets and promote promarket planning policies. Accelerating the privatization of city services, the contracting out of formerly unionized municipal jobs, and the abandonment of publicly-owned and affordable housing and transportation, such policies privilege capital accumulation and market competitiveness at the expense of public sector services. Fifteen years ago, Punam Khosla argued that low-income women of colour facing barriers to well paid, full time jobs were hit hardest by the privatization of public housing and schools, and the contracting out of unionized labour.3 Her Toronto-based research showed how women of colour were most likely to be employed in precarious, lowpaid work, often situated in office parks and industrial sites in areas underserved by public transportation. Khosla and other feminist activists globally demonstrate how urban revitalization planning involving the demolition of public housing neighbourhoods in favour of ‘socially mixed’ planning designed to attract middle class and professional home-buyers disproportionately displaces women and LGBTQ communities. Often these projects result in the loss of affordable housing options for single mothers, women with disabilities and low-income women, and LGBTQ residents of colour. Moreover, replacing public housing neighbourhoods with more upscale shops and services displaces affordable spaces, everyday places where residents hang out and forge friendships and communities. Feminist planning researchers and activists also charge that policies promoting competition amongst community planning groups puts women and LGBTQ communities particularly at risk. For example, as Brenda Parker argues in her book Masculinities and Markets, contemporary neoliberal strategies follow a masculinist myth of choice and responsibility, the idea that individuals and individual organizations naturally choose entrepreneurial competition for resources over more collective approaches to social challenges.4 Ensnared within a constant race for dwindling grants and resources, what Indigenous writers refer to as a colonial “scarcity mentality,” grassroots community planners and advocates find themselves too overwhelmed competing for funding to spend much 3

Punam Kholsa. “Making Low nco e Wo en of Colour Count in Toronto,” Canadian Dimension. November/December 2004. https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/making-low-income-womenof-colour-count-in-toronto. 4 Brenda Parker. Masculinities and Markets: Raced and Gendered Urban Politics in Milwaukee, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017).

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time investing in projects for women and LGBTQ communities. Meanwhile, as planners cut back transportation they place women and LGBTQ communities reliant on these services at risk. Indigenous activists living near Highway 16 in North-West British Columbia, a route renamed the “highway of tears,” show the connections between violence against women and transportation disinvestment. They contend that the lack of public transportation connecting remote communities in this area combined with the large population of transitory men working in the extractive industries has contributed to a high number of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Indigenous women water defenders fighting fracking and pipeline development in this region also point out how the violence of extractive industries and gender-based violence are deeply entwined. At the same time, neoliberal planning models can be tricky as they often appear to offer progressive and liberal alternatives. Planners and planning consultants often claim that neighbourhood revitalization initiatives are progressive strategies that foster ethnic diversity and celebrate creative and trendy urban design. However, within a neoliberal context, planning initiatives celebrating diversity often reinforce gendered, classed and raced hierarchies. As John Paul Catungal warns, planning strategies promoting diversity often gloss over racialized structural inequalities and “reduce people of colour and their cultures to spices” to attract investors and homebuyers.5 Contemporary revitalization initiatives designed to attract gay and lesbian professionals also reinforce exclusionary power dynamics. As neighbourhoods become increasingly expensive, trans women, queer youth of colour, 2-Spirited people and politicized gender-queer activists engaged in radical, anti-racist, anti-capitalist and migrant justice projects are pushed out. The gentrification of San Francisco’s LGBTQ neighbourhoods provides a powerful example of how these exclusionary dynamics are playing out. Over the past ten years, planners and developers have marketed the city’s Black and Latinx queer neighbourhoods as edgy, artsy and “ethnic” spaces amenable to Silicon Valley’s tech workers. However as middle-class (and disproportionately white) professionals working in this industry have moved into these areas, they have displaced communities built from decades of activism and struggle. In many cases, affluent gentrifiers, including gay and lesbian gentrifiers, 5

John Paul Catungal. “White Male Urbanist Fatigue Syndrome,” Intimating Racial Knowledges. October 26, 2016. https://blogs.ubc.ca/racialknowledges/2016/10/.

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in San Francisco and the Bay Area have worked with local law enforcement and Business Improvement Association organizations to increase police presence. As a result, there has been an increase in violence towards LGBTQ communities of colour, especially trans women and sex workers. Used to being pushed to and working from the margins, women and LGBTQ activists and community advocates keep carving out spaces for hopeful, collectivist, anti-capitalist and anti-colonial alternatives to planning for socially and ecologically just communities. Currently collectives including Sisters Uncut in the UK and Black Lives Matter are fighting for housing, childcare, public transportation and safe and secure employment for all women and all LGBTQ people. Working crosssectorally these activists are envisioning and enacting queer and feminist alternatives to planning historically meant for a privileged few. To conclude, a subway stop away from where I am writing this in Glasgow, feminist and LGBTQ activists and community organisers meet regularly in Kinning Park Complex (KPC), a community-led social centre that exists because a group of moms occupied the building in the mid-1990’s when city council cut its funding. Currently, KPC supports itself with funding from the third sector and various social enterprise projects and programs a range of grassroots neighbourhood planning projects for the disinvested Kinning Park neighbourhood. While KPC hosts a range of grassroots programs including community kitchens, gardens and upcycling programs, it also provides affordable space for a range of grassroots feminist and LGBTQ activist campaigns. As a result, alternative and radical planning projects are continually emerging from the space. For example, last summer, housing activists who regularly hold meetings in KPC converged with a broad network of migrant justice activists to resist Serco when it announced that it planned to evict 300 asylum-seeking families. Serco is a private sector company that the UK government hires to house refugees and asylum seekers across the UK. In response, activists including Afghani hunger strikers and women from Ubuntu, a grassroots night shelter program led by and for women who have experienced the violent UK detention centre system, rallied together in large-scale public protests in Glasgow’s city centre. In response, Serco backed down and halted the violent evictions. Because it provides such a multi-faceted convergence space for community members to learn about housing and food activism, KPC exemplifies the generative potential of planning for and with women and LGBTQ communities. As state-led planning institutions continue to 179

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forge public-private partnerships and contract out to private sector organisations like Serco, community-led spaces like KPC point to radical spaces for envisioning and building anti-racist and de-colonial cities for women, children and LGBTQ communities.

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Women Plan Toronto: Incorporating Gender Issues in Planning Barbara Rahder Grassroots women can organize to change the way cities are planned and developed. Women Plan Toronto (WPT) is an example of how they can do it. WPT is a grassroots women's organization that uses participatory methods to involve diverse women in changing urban planning processes and outcomes in Toronto. Its purpose is to raise awareness and advocate practical alternatives for addressing women's planning concerns. WPT is needed because of the critical urban problems faced by women. In the following, I will give a brief background on the status of women in Canada. I then outline a few of the projects WPT has organized to include women's concerns in the planning process. I will conclude with a brief analysis of the organization's main strengths and weaknesses. Status of Women in Canada Canadian women tend to live longer, earn less, do more unpaid housework and child care, have more difficulty finding affordable housing, and experience more violence than Canadian men. In most age groups, women and men are found in equal numbers, but over the age of 65, 62 percent are women, and this proportion increases with increasing age. There is a significant wage gap between men and women. In 1993, a woman working full time in Canada earned an average of 72 cents for every dollar earned by a man. The gap is smaller among professionals, but still wide. According to a survey for the Canadian Institute of Planners, women planners earn 82 cents for every dollar earned by a male planner. Much of women's work is unpaid. In 1992, Canadian women spent an average of 1,482 hours on unpaid housework, including child care, compared to 831 hours for men. Women have more difficulty finding affordable housing. According to the Canadian government, affordable housing is defined as housing costing less than thirty percent of total household income. Among homeowners, affordability is a problem for twenty percent of women, compared with twelve percent of men. It is significantly worse for renters, where 46 percent of women, compared with 27 percent of men, have problems affording shelter. Women experience more violence, particularly in the home. One in 181

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four women in Canada have been abused or assaulted at some time in their lives, many as children, and one in eight have been abused by a male partner or spouse. An estimated thirty to forty women are murdered by their male partners each year in Ontario, accounting for seventy percent of the women murdered in the province. This rate is similar for Canada as a whole, but more than double the rate in Switzerland or Great Britain. Anishnaabe (aboriginal) women, immigrant and racial minority women, and women with a disability face more barriers to needed services than white women in Canada.

Women Plan Toronto What do these facts have to do with urban planning? Women Plan Toronto began to explore the implications of women's needs and experiences in relation to urban planning in 1985. WPT began by holding a series of informal discussions with women to find out about their experiences and ideas relating to Toronto's urban environment. These groups included employed women, full-time homemakers, homeless women, immigrant women, Anishnaabe women, high school and university students, elderly women, women with disabilities, and single mothers. Most groups identified problems related to child care, public transit, and personal safety. All of the groups explored ideas about what the city might be like if it were more woman friendly. Suggestions ranged from calls for "equal pay for work of equal value" to a wish for more public washrooms for women. Over the past thirteen years, WPT took up various issues and started various projects. Some of the most notable projects are: Safety Issues. The WISE report – "Women in Safe Environments" – was a ground-breaking 1989 project that documented women's concerns about safety in relation to urban planning and design practices in Toronto. Done in cooperation with the Metro Action Committee on Public Violence Against Women and Children (METRAC), the WISE report spawned safety audits of the public transit system, public parks, and underground parking garages. By 1990, the City of Toronto had established a Safe City Committee under the auspices of the Department of Planning and Development, and has subsequently developed stringent regulations for the design and lighting of public spaces. Municipal Elections. In 1991 and in 1994, WPT conducted workshops with women's groups and produced a booklet on women's election issues. The booklet included a report card ranking the record of various candidates on women's issues, and provided examples of questions 182

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women might want to ask candidates at public meetings. This was a tremendously successful campaign. The women's report card was reprinted in Canada's largest daily newspaper, the Toronto Star. Housing WPT been an active advocate for social housing and housing densification, but it has also been involved in creating housing for women. The group worked with Sistering, a women's drop-in center, and with the Older Women's Network, a senior's advocacy group, to build social housing for older low-income women. Resisting Mega-Projects. When Toronto was competing to host the 1996 Olympic Games, WPT produced an intervenor report entitled "How Women Lose at the Games." The report is currently being re-circulated as Toronto is bidding again for the Games in 2008. The report documents the social and economic costs and risks to local women, as well as the lack of benefits for them, associated with hosting the Olympic Games. Another group, Bread Not Circuses, spearheads the opposition to the Games in Toronto, and produced a similar intervenor report documenting the social and economic costs for poor people in general. The International Olympic Committee decided to hold the Games in Atlanta in 1996, but we don't yet know about the Games for 2008. Resisting the Megacity. Another recent project focused on the municipal elections for the new megacity of Toronto, which is an amalgamation of the six former cities of Toronto, York, East York, North York, Scarborough, and Etobicoke. WPT worked with other groups, first to resist amalgamation, and then to develop a pamphlet highlighting gender-related issues such as why women must vote and how to ask questions about issues that affect you. The pamphlet highlights proposed changes in areas such as income support, social and community services, housing, safety, transportation, health, education, and human rights. It provides basic information about the implications of amalgamation under each category, and then lists practical questions women can ask their local candidates, such as what will you do to protect vulnerable people, particularly women, children and persons with disabilities?

The WPT Organization A gendered perspective on urban issues is central to the group's work, and a key characteristic of WPT's organizational structure, which is composed of voluntary committees called "circles." The term circle suggests that there is no hierarchy among participants – everyone who attends a meeting is allowed to participate in decisionmaking – though the more one participates, the more comfortable, knowledgeable, and 183

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potentially influential she might be in the group. The structure of the organization, then, fluctuates with its membership, depending on who is involved, what their interests are, and what issues are on the public agenda (or put on the public agenda by WPT). There is one part-time staff member, and a core of about seven or eight volunteers who are usually very active in the circles and on various projects. Another fifty women or so are less active members, and up to another 300 individuals and organizations are part of a broader network which is kept informed, and sometimes mobilized, around important issues and events. The main strengths of WPT are also its main weaknesses. The informality and lack of hierarchy gives volunteers a great deal of freedom to work on the issues that are of most concern to them, but can also be confusing to new members who don't necessarily know where or how to fit in. Similarly, the small core of active volunteers who do the bulk of the work provides continuity and an organizational memory, but without turnover in the core, this group can burn out. WPT appears to shrink and expand, then, according to the energies of those in the core. Some members of WPT also worry that they have become so successful as the voice of women that they are now the token women's group that gets consulted by planners who are more interested in appearing to be politically correct, than in actually addressing women's concerns. Women Plan Toronto has had a palpable impact on urban planning in Toronto. For more than a decade the organization has worked hard to focus attention on women's needs in the city, to critique the inequities of mainstream planning, and to develop alternative visions of what planning and urban life might be like if our diverse needs were taken into account. The women whose efforts sustain the organization pay a price for their involvement. Their work is unpaid and its value often unrecognized. But their hard work has begun to change the way planners and decision makers address issues critical to women. This article was originally published in the Progressive Planning Magazine Reader #2.

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Is there a Place in the Progressive City for the LGBTQ Community Petra Doan Planners seeking to create progressive cities must recognize that the increasingly visible lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community has deep roots in the most major cities, but also is a group that continues to suffer from an epidemic of intolerance. Although the Supreme Court ruling on same sex marriage granted LGBTQ partners who choose to marry the same benefits as heterosexual couples, much work remains to be done. As the horrific massacre at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando made clear, there are a variety of issues related to intolerance and safety for LGBTQ people. This paper examines the nature of this intolerance and then considers ways that progressive planners might seek to incorporate non-normative sexualities and genders into the public domain, reduce inequality that arises due to anti-LGBTQ discrimination, and provide material support to the most vulnerable members of the LGBTQ community.

Epidemic of Hatred and Intolerance One measure of the progressive nature of a city is the level of acceptance of minority groups. An alternative approach to is to measure the prevalence of hate crimes which are prejudice-related actions committed against individuals based on their membership in certain minority groups. Hate crimes against people of color or religious minorities (Jews and Muslims for instance) demonstrate that our cities continue to struggle with racial and religious intolerance. However, hate crimes against LGBTQ people also continue unabated and sometimes those crimes occur at the intersection of race and sexuality or gender identity. It is certainly true that trans women of color are the most frequent victims of horrific homicides at a rate that far exceeds any other subgroup. The intensity of intolerance for difference might be considered as a counter-indication of progressivity. One way to conceptualize intolerance is through the variety of forms which such behaviors can take. Gordon Allport has proposed a Scale of Intolerance which is reproduced below in Figure 1. This scale varies from relatively “harmless” jokes (and other micro-aggressions) and mild verbal harassment to discrimination, physical attack, and attempts to exterminate minority populations. The more intense the intolerance the more dangerous a 185

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place must be considered for a given minority group.

Source: Gordan Allport, 1954 There are no definitive sources of data on the occurrence of hate crimes. The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) has offices in sixteen major metropolitan areas that are staffed by LGBTQ individuals who collect information about crimes that have occurred in their area. Since these incidents do not require a formal police report, the NCAVP argues that their statistics are more representative of the actual violence experienced by LGBTQ people, some of whom may be reluctant to report crimes to the authorities. Over the four-year period from 2011 to 2014 there were 10,922 hate incidents with an average of 2,731 incidents per year. While the NCAVP does not formally use the Allport Scale, their descriptions of the types of crimes committed bears a striking resemblance to Allport’s scale. Figure 2 presents a listing of the types of hate crimes reported to the NCAVP and experienced by LGBTQ individuals over the years 2011 to 2014. These percentages indicate that discrimination and physical violence were the most prevalent forms of hate violence, followed by verbal harassment, threats, harassment, and bullying. The second major source of hate crimes data is collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from information that is reported to them by local law enforcement. To be labelled a hate crime, the police must have direct evidence that hatred was a motivating factor. In some cases, certain jurisdictions have never reported a single hate crime, since local law enforcement remain unconvinced that hate crimes ever exist. The FBI reports that over the four year period from 2010 to 2013 there were 4,938 hate crimes committed against LGBTQ people and an average of 1,191 per year. Accordingly these data are likely an underestimate of the actual number of hate crimes, but these statistics do reveal the locations of such crimes. As can be seen in Figure 3 the hate crimes reported to the FBI occur in both private and public spaces. Approximately one third are committed in or around

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private residences, but the remainder occur in various types of public spaces, many of which should be of interest to planners interested in creating safe spaces in the Progressive City. Of particular interest to planners are the following locations: bus and train terminals, parking lots and garages, alleys and streets which account for roughly 30% of the hate crimes. The remainder of the crimes take place in commercial or retail spaces, bars and clubs, schools and colleges, and other locations. Overall these figures suggest that violence against LGBTQ people happens in a wide variety of settings, suggesting that very few places can be considered safe from such incidents.

Source: Table constructed by the author based on National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs Annual Reports, 2011-2014

Source: Table constructed by t e aut or based on t e FB ’s Unifor Cri e Reports, 2010-2013

Measures to Protect the LGBTQ Population Non-discrimination ordinances are the most common method of protecting all minority populations, and a critical first step in protecting LGBTQ people is the adoption of such ordinances that are inclusive of sexual orientation and gender identity and appearance for housing, employment, and public accommodations. While many cities have taken important steps in these areas, the enforcement mechanisms for such measures vary. The Human Rights Campaign now publishes a

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Municipal Equality Index that rates over 400 cities in terms of their non-discrimination policies, their employment policies, their municipal services, their police forces, and the overall relationship with the LGBTQ community. While a number of large cities have achieved a rating of 100%, many other cities lag far behind. There is clearly much work to be done. Recently neo-conservative strategists in the wake of the 2015 Supreme Court decision (Obergefell vs. Hodges) legalizing same sex marriage have taken a two-pronged approach. First they advocate the adoption of Religious Freedom Restoration Acts at the state level that seek to validate religiously based discrimination against LGBTQ persons on the part of individuals and businesses. Twenty two states have already passed these measures, but their full effects on discrimination against LGBTQ people have not yet been assessed fully. Second they advocate for legislation that restricts the use of restrooms by transgender people, by requiring that sex assigned at birth is the only basis for determining which bathrooms should be used. Seven states have proposed such restrictive laws, but only the State of North Carolina (HB 2) has formally signed such a law. This conservative backlash to more open and inclusive policies can also been seen in cities like Houston. These measures are a central component of efforts to criminalize transgender individuals. While these measures are being tested in the court system, transgender people in these localities are subject to arrest and widespread harassment for simply using the restroom. The battle over restrooms has long been a marker for civil rights struggles since restricting access to public restrooms is an effective means of restricting access to public spaces and limiting mobility. In the 19th century there were no public restrooms for women, since women were expected to remain in their homes. Jim Crow laws in the late 19th and early 20th centuries restricted access to public bathrooms based on race. These restrictions were not fully dismantled until the 1970s. It wasn’t until the 1990s that full access to restrooms for the disabled was mandated. Access to restrooms for the transgendered is the civil rights struggle of the early 21st century. Progressive cities should ensure equal access to bathrooms for all their citizens so that everyone can access these vital public accommodations. Some municipalities (Philadelphia and Seattle for instance) have begun the process of creating gender neutral bathroom facilities in all new construction, but many cities have not yet addressed this critical issue. While public support for LGBTQ rights is rising in many areas there is still considerable resistance. A significant issue in many cities is the 188

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number of LGBTQ youth who have left their families due to unsupportive parents. Many of these LGBTQ youth flee their families and flock to cities, creating a wave of highly vulnerable young people. Some of these youth do not identify as traditionally gay or lesbian, but adopt their own labels including: queer, gender queer, non-binary, and a range of other inventive terms. Many of these young LGBTQ people have difficulty finding places to live and may end up as homeless and living on the streets because the cost of living in urban areas is rising. The hazards facing these young queer people is often multiplied when they are unable to find adequate work and may end up surviving through sex work or other black market employment. Progressive cities should recognize this vulnerable population and provide drop-in centers and training programs to support such homeless LGBTQ youth. San Francisco’s LYRIC (Lavender Youth Resource and Information Center) is an effective model for providing services to this population that could be usefully emulated elsewhere. A related aspect of progressive cities should be the recognition of existing queer spaces within them. Most large cities have neighborhoods familiarly known as gayborhoods or gay villages that are urban areas where LGBTQ bars, LGBTQ businesses and residences are in close proximity. Because these businesses and homes were often located initially in run down areas that have been rehabilitated through sweat equity as well as investment capital, many of these neighborhoods have now become so gentrified that younger LGBTQ people can no longer afford to live there and many LGBTQ institutions (bars, businesses, and community organizations) can no longer afford the existing rent and are forced to move elsewhere seeking cheaper accommodations. This trend is exacerbated when city officials adopt planning documents that fail to recognize the LGBTQ community has existed in a specific location for several decades. When those officials then seek to promote redevelopment of the area, often using terms like “family-oriented” that are code words for no longer LGBTQ friendly, this lack of recognition is exacerbated. Although cities like Chicago and San Francisco have attempted to recognize their gay areas, many other cities have simply ignored the presence of LGBTQ people either because officials are unwilling to discuss sexuality in public documents or because the benefits to encouraging rapid redevelopment are greater than the benefits of preserving community spaces. Atlanta is an example of a city whose plans for the redevelopment of Midtown made no mention of the sizable LGBTQ presence in the neighborhood. The area has become 189

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significantly less LGBTQ friendly as large scale condominium developments have replaced gay bars and LGBTQ oriented businesses have closed or moved elsewhere due to rising rents. Planners have a range of tools that might be used to recognize and preserve these unique cultural areas, including cultural overlay districts and/or historic preservation districts, that might provide the same kind of neighborhood recognition that are given to ethnic neighborhoods, often known colloquially as Little Havana, Little Saigon, Koreatown, etc. Recognition is only a first step, but unless such areas are recognized as vital components in the urban mosaic, they are not likely to survive. The National Park Service has recently embarked on a campaign to recognize and preserve LGBTQ properties and landmarks that might provide some useful support to cities interested in protecting LGBTQ neighborhoods. Other more far-reaching measures such as providing more affordable housing, allowing neighborhood associations greater say in land use decisions, and limiting condominium conversions and large scale redevelopment projects might also be considered. Furthermore, since bars are often a central focus of LGBTQ neighborhoods, attempts to close down or squeeze out such establishments often have the effect of undercutting the attractiveness of the area for LGBTQ residents. Similarly, the increased traffic and noise that such establishments generate might serve as a disincentive to gentrification, helping to preserve a community resource. Affordable housing measures are especially critical for both younger and older LGBTQ residents. LGBTQ youth are often attracted to gayborhoods, but as such places become more developed, rising rents make finding nearby inexpensive lodging nearly impossible. As land values increase, the pressure to convert existing apartments in older housing into single family housing further exacerbates the lack of affordable housing. Efforts to preserve at least some older housing units with apartments for those who are unable to afford sky high rents is an important next step. Similarly, as rents in gayborhoods increase some form of rent stabilization for older LGBTQ individuals should be considered, so they are not forced to sell out once they are living on restricted incomes. Some cities are exploring ways to provide affordable living for LGBTQ seniors such as Philadelphia’s John C. Anderson Apartments and advisory services for LGBTQ elders such as Openhouse in San Francisco and Services and Advocacy for Gay and Lesbian Elders (SAGE) in New York City. In addition, many gayborhoods are the locus for health services and training tailored to the LGBTQ community, providing HIV treatment, 190

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safe sex counselling, gender identity services, and general support for LGBTQ individuals in crisis. Reaching a dispersed LGBTQ population to provide essential services is significantly more difficult than simply locating such services in and around a known LGBTQ neighborhood. This is particularly true for supporting LGBTQ people of color who may be especially hard to reach without a central and visible location. Public support for such critical services can be a vital component of enabling LGBTQ individuals to live healthy and productive lives in the face of widespread discrimination and threats of violence. While these measures may not be adequate to ensure the preservation of gayborhoods, they make significant steps to signaling to vulnerable LGBTQ populations that they are welcome and valued in the Progressive City. By reducing inequality and empowering this too often neglected population to participate more fully in the life and governance of the city, the Progressive City can be further enabled. This article was originally published on Progressive City on October 5, 2016.

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From and Toward Queer Urbanism Kian Goh “The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationships to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire.” —David Harvey, “The Right to the City” “. . . Queer space finds in the closet or the dark alley places where it can construct an artificial architecture of the self.” —Aaron Betsky, Queer Space “Our visions begin with our desires.” —Audre Lorde

In early 2008, a group of parents and children, parks advocates and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth rallied together to protest the proposal for a large-scale retail and entertainment development at Pier 40, on Manhattan’s Hudson River Park. The LGBT youth, led by community organizing group FIERCE, had been working since 2000 to keep the park and piers safe and accessible. Carrying signs that read “Save the Village” and “LGBT Youth and Little Leaguers UNITE!,” queer youth and neighborhood advocates and residents formed an unlikely alliance of community opposition to large-scale privatized development. For FIERCE, it was a particular triumph, a milestone to organizing work that had engaged and dealt with several years of tension between established West Village residents and the LGBT youth who call the piers home. From organizing in response to harassment and arrests of youth, to campaigning for later park curfew hours, to insisting on the right of queer youth to inhabit Village streets, FIERCE and their constituents fought for both a voice at the decision-making table and the right to public space. Memorialized in the documentary Paris Is Burning, the piers at the end of Christopher Street have long been an epicenter of queer congregation. Like the bodies that inhabit them, the piers epitomize a wary comfort on the edge and, like so many edges, especially water edges, a place of possibilities. The crumbling infrastructure, left to rot after the city’s shipping heyday, offered a perfect in-between space for those looking simultaneously for escape and belonging. The piers became not

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only popular cruising grounds, but important centers of community, where a boy or girl getting off a bus after fleeing from far-away oppression could count on finding support and an extended family. In recent years the piers and adjacent Hudson River Park have reflected the continuing demographic and economic changes in the West Village. Piers and park are now smartly landscaped with popular jogging and biking paths, nearby residential towers are home to some of the priciest square footage in the world and the Stonewall Inn, a few blocks down Christopher Street, is now a gay tourist destination, a mere symbol of an uprising. Many streets in the Village barely hold on to their bohemian, countercultural history, and the signs that remain are as much due to nostalgia as any kind of radical agenda. But still youth come to the piers, motivated by accounts they’ve read, watched, heard about or even something more intangible—a shared history, a cultural memory of those places of possibility. In his book Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire, historian Aaron Betsky explores the making of queer space. He describes a space “not built, only implied, and usually invisible . . . useless, amoral and sensual space that lives only in and for experience.” Betsky’s queers, almost exclusively gay white men, through opportunism, innovation and desperation, “queered” spaces using actions, signs and symbols, particularly interstitial spaces of the city, areas of informal gathering not often in view—discos and clubs, bathhouses, bars or sections of parks at night. Queers invented, with limited resources, ephemeral spaces of display and experience within the city, new spatial and cultural permeabilities. Early queer spaces were necessarily interior, where darkness and seclusion offered possibilities for remaking both the spaces between and the bodies themselves. Stonewall and the Castro proved decisive breakout moments—not the invention of queer spaces but the spilling out of queerness into public streets. Through the 1980s and 1990s, queers increasingly occupied and queered public space and public imaginations. Gay pride parades grew and multiplied, slowly making the transition from protest to celebration. Groups like ACT UP stormed streets and institutions at the height of the AIDS epidemic, making demands for not just public visibility, but acknowledgement of gay bodies and gay acts in a time of crisis. And gays enthusiastically went about the creation of distinctly gay neighborhoods in large cities across the country. From the West Village to Dupont Circle and the Castro, gays proved incredibly adept at revitalizing urban spaces. Emblazoning the exteriors in ways that reflected 193

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past splendorous interiors, such gay facades indicated when neighborhoods were safe for further exploration by less brave and foolhardy groups, often with the effect of stimulating gentrification. Recent mainstream gay activism has steered far from its spatial repercussions. Both the gay marriage and gays-in-the-military movements constitute a desire for stamps of approval. From interiority to parades and protests to, now, efforts to get to do just like everyone else, it can be argued that, historically, the mainstream gay agenda was largely an assimilative one. It is then no surprise that public queer spaces remain ephemeral—signs and symbols remain, but the critical agenda, the instrumentality of queerness, disappears, covered and recovered by years of cultural and physical renovations.

Re-Queering With gay neighborhoods established, tightly and seamlessly woven into the urban fabric, and pride parades not just celebratory but wholly commodified, is there still the possibility of a queer urbanism? Do queer actions still have the ability to reformat urban space? Clearly, the demarcation of queer public space has not ceased. Even while pride parades lose their ability to shock, drowned out in thumping club music and rainbow ad banners, a number of other queer marches have sprouted in place. The increasing prominence of dyke marches across the country and the Trans Day of Action march in New York City attest to a renewed queer claim on public space. The recent queering of ethnic pride parades as well show a fascinating confluence of often complex issues of identity, visibility and representation. In Manhattan’s Chinatown, local organizers led by QWave, a queer Asian women and transgender group, have successfully petitioned for and organized an LGBT contingent in the annual Lunar New Year Parade for two years running. Similar efforts are ongoing to ensure LGBT inclusion in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade and India Independence Day Parade in the city. Beyond parades and marches, we can also observe what could be called a conscious re-queering of spaces. FIERCE’s work on the piers is a primary example. Not content simply to ensure that successive waves of queer youth retain access to spaces of community and safety, FIERCE has held numerous organized events on the piers, including film nights and mini-balls, revisiting the days of “voguing” balls. This kind of re-queering goes on every day, but is particularly evident in the hours after the annual gay pride parade, when thousands of young LGBT people of color flood the Hudson River Park. Kept from the 194

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piers by police barricades, young queers enact a parade of sorts along the promenade. Police control is particularly evident at these times, a reality that itself has spawned a community-based counter-movement, a cop watch project run by various local community groups tasked with keeping a record of, and hence a tether on, police harassment.

Radical Queer Urbanism Even in the age of post-queer liberation, the work of radical LGBT activists constitutes a new in-between queer space, between the increasing invisibility of mainstream gays and lesbians of television and movies, of townhouses and magazines, and the violence and discrimination that still confounds LGBT people in many parts of this country. Distinct from previous struggles, these activists work in a space that is still relatively new for LGBT movements, carving out new spaces not only of visibility, but of safety, resilience and in public urban space, oftentimes far from established gay centers. In New York City, in addition to FIERCE, groups like Queers for Economic Justice (QEJ), the Audre Lorde Project (ALP) and Make the Road New York work to address the most critical lapses of urban services and safety. QEJ’s Shelter Project organizers work in the city’s homeless shelters, reaching out to homeless LGBT people, offering support and community, and making connections to additional social services. QEJ’s work not only permeates the interior space of the shelter, but creates tangible connections to wider networks in the city. This work brings to light the issue of homelessness, a particularly fraught queer space all too prevalent among urban LGBT youth. The Audre Lorde Project’s Safe Neighborhoods campaign is creating a network of safe spaces in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, without police intervention. In a country where one in every one hundred people is in the criminal justice system, ALP organizers are aware that the increased criminalization of young people of color helps no one. By establishing visible safe spaces among local businesses and gathering areas, and conducting trainings on homophobia, transphobia and ways to prevent violence without relying on law enforcement, the initiative attempts to create a new model of community accountability for safety and welfare in urban neighborhoods. Make the Road New York’s GLOBE initiative, working largely with immigrant communities in Bushwick, Brooklyn, engages neighborhood schools as partners in creating supportive environments for LGBT youth. Sited at the intersection of immigrant and LGBT rights and safety, the initiative negotiates and pulls apart spatial and social 195

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boundaries that are complicated and operate on multiple levels. Each of these initiatives asserts that the safety and welfare of LGBT people in cities cannot be divorced from the social, economic and spatial conditions of urban environments. From direct acts aimed at changing discriminatory bureaucratic policy to the more consuming work of changing prevailing public opinion, these campaigns literally broaden the possibilities of movement for queers in the city. They map, both literally and otherwise, paths forward for urban social movements that are critically inclusive. This article was originally published in the Spring 2011 issue of Progressive Planning Magazine.

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Street Harassment: Old Issue, Ongoing Struggle, New Movement By Nina M. Flores “Damn, sweet cheeks!” “Honey, you lookin’ fine.” “Come on boo, gimme a smile.” My name is not sweet cheeks, honey, or boo, but as I walk on city sidewalks and ride public transportation, street harassers refer to me as all three, and those are just the names that are fit to print. Harassers comment on my appearance, my clothing, the bags I carry, the direction I’m walking, the books I read on the bus – in short, reinforcing the message that as a woman in public, my very presence makes me fair game for unsolicited and undesired attention. Women around the world are routinely subject to demeaning, embarrassing and threatening displays of street harassment as part of their daily lives which produces clear differences between how women and men experience the same public spaces. As the anti-street harassment movement grows, planners have an opportunity to create meaningful change. Harassment in public is surely among the oldest issues facing women in cities. Ask a woman if she has ever experienced street harassment and you will hear stories about being bombarded with sexually explicit comments as a teen walking home from school, being catcalled while eight months pregnant or being groped on subways and buses. You will hear stories about crossing the street in order to avoid walking in front of a group of men, returning home early so as not to be in public alone at night and jogging with headphones just to ignore the insults hurled from cars as they speed by. Then there will be the stories from women whose street harassment evolved into stalking, assaults and death threats. Street harassment encompasses incidents occurring in public, meaning public spaces like streets, sidewalks and parks, as well as modes of public transportation. Street harassment refers to unwanted or undesired attention in public including verbal comments or catcalling, physical contact such as groping or touching and non-physical contact such as gesturing or leering. Incidents may evolve, beginning with verbal comments or leering and escalating to include physical

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contact such as groping. Or incidents may unfold as more than one harasser takes part. Photographer Ruth Orkin immortalized one such moment in her famous black and white photo titled “American Girl in Italy” which depicts a distressed woman walking alone down a city block lined with men whistling, gesturing and staring. Although this photo is partially an attempt to reenact the travel experiences of both Orkin and the woman in the photograph –they met in Italy while traveling alone and agreed to shoot photos to capture their experiences on city streets – the multiple and varied responses directed at the woman are real. And, although this photograph was taken in 1951, harassment of women on public streets is still an ongoing issue more than 60 years later. Although it is most common to hear about men harassing women, same sex harassment happens, as does harassment based on gender expression or assumptions about one’s sexual orientation. But street harassment isn’t limited to sex or gender, and can also be driven by intersections of race, ethnicity, class, age or ability. The frequency with which women experience street harassment can be seen as a proxy for sexism and patriarchy in public; however, intersections with other systems of oppression such as sexuality or race reflect dominant narratives based on heterosexism and whiteness. Street harassment also differs from sexual harassment in the workplace. Unlike the public spaces of cities, places of employment are subject to sexual harassment laws and policies, and employees are often required to complete trainings defining harassment and detailing the consequences. Urban dwellers are subject to no such laws or trainings, leaving public space as a highly unregulated realm where women frequently experience harassment when they traverse the city. In other words, street harassment is often an expected occurrence with unacceptable implications for women’s access to public space. Despite the widespread presence of street harassment in public space, the issue receives little city-level attention. On one hand, addressing street harassment from a physical planning perspective presents a bit of a spatial challenge. Although built environment strategies such as increasing lighting or creating more open spaces are used in an attempt to increase physical safety, it is unrealistic to assume that defensible design practices will prevent verbal comments or obscene gestures. However, it is also likely that many city planners are simply unaware that the issue exists, or worse, do not see street harassment as a planning problem. 198

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But organizers, urban dwellers, and other community planners are taking action, and an anti-street harassment movement is building at the individual level where residents are engaging in creative projects designed to respond to harassers, and among activist groups who are spearheading organized campaigns to resist street harassment. For instance, in a recent project Yale MFA student Hannah Price began photographing men in the moments after they harassed her in public. In interviews she describes the photos as her way of dealing with the sudden uptick in catcalling after moving to Philadelphia from suburban Colorado. In New York, street artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh creates posters with hand drawn sketches of women that include messages to potential harassers such as “My Name Isn’t Baby,” or “Stop Telling Women to Smile.” The posters can be seen on the streets of major cities across the country. Anti-street harassment organizations such as Hollaback! and Stop Street Harassment collect stories from those targeted by street harassment, and offer a public venue for sharing experiences, receiving support and finding resources. Hollaback! also maps where street harassment is occurring, and chapters are now active in more than 70 cities and 24 countries. Additionally, both individuals and organizations are taking to social media to continue raising awareness, share experiences and discuss strategies for combating street harassment. Street harassment is also present on college campuses, the surrounding neighborhoods where students live, and even along routes K12 students take when walking or biking to school. As part of the growing movement against street harassment, several college campuses have added Take Back the Streets campaigns to the annual Take Back the Night events organized around women and safety. Another next step? Addressing street harassment of minors, especially within the context of national level Safe Routes to School initiatives. According to the National Center for Safe Routes to School, these programs focus on “connecting the trip to school with safety, health, and community...” In short, public health and community safety are issues that easily connect to addressing and reducing street harassment of students on their way to and from school. What can city planners do? Join the conversation, for one. Recognize street harassment as a safety issue impeding equal access to the city. Need proof? Look to Twitter and other social media for cues about street harassment in your city or region. Survey residents and find out

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where street harassment is occurring and how. Seek out the individuals and community organizers who are resisting harassers and harassment every day. Raising awareness is effective, but only gets us so far. Now is the time to expand dialogue to broader audiences, and to continue organizing for local solutions and responses. Hopefully 60 years from now we will no longer talk about street harassment in terms of “what can be done,” but instead be celebrating what works. This article was originally published in the Spring 2014 issue of Progressive Planning Magazine.

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Femicide in Ciudad Juárez María Teresa Vázquez-Castillo Femicide is a word whose definition women in Ciudad Juárez can explain very well. They learned and appropriated the word in the process of trying to make sense of the more than 400 murders of women that have taken place in this Mexican border city since 1993. In the last thirteen years, mothers, friends, activists, students, academics and other sectors inside and outside Ciudad Juárez have organized what is now an international movement of women. Their main concerns have been to find the murderers and to claim justice, to find who is committing these heinous crimes against women. This article, however, urges progressive planners to focus on what needs to be done to stop the femicide in Ciudad Juárez. In this fast-growing region characterized by uneven urbanization processes, the maquiladora industry, the narco-economy and corrupt police, women’s lives are endangered as they move through unsafe public space that lacks protective urban infrastructure. Many different hypotheses have emerged about the femicide. Public officials have been appointed to “investigate” the cases, only to then be removed. None of these public officials was awarded decision-making power to act or prosecute. Researchers and journalists have even denounced and publicized the names of the culprits supposedly involved in the femicide, but the Mexican government has neither taken any legal action nor initiated a serious investigation. After thirteen years the gender violence continues, and it is now spreading to other urban areas, such as Chihuahua City. Meanwhile, some people are in jail, accused of being the murderers even though they claim they are innocent. The mothers of the victims have denounced that some of those in jail are scapegoats, there to placate the public’s outrage. Yet even with these people behind bars, the murders have continued. Two lawyers of the jailed have been killed and the lives of two journalists who have written books about the femicide in Juárez—Huesos en el Desierto (Bones in the Desert) and Harvest of Women —have been threatened, too. One of them was even kidnapped, severely beaten and hospitalized for several months. In order to understand this femicide, it must be put in the context—of the characteristics of the city, the urbanization that has taken place here, the profile of the women who’ve been murdered, and the responses that have emerged both to protest the femicide and to claim justice.

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Ciudad Juárez Ciudad Juárez is a border city of approximately 1.3 million inhabitants located across from El Paso, Texas. About 60 percent of the population is immigrants who are unable to cross the border into the United States and therefore stay in Ciudad Juárez. The city has become one of the fastest growing in Mexico, not only because of the immigration, but also because of the investment made here. In the 1960s the Border Industrialization Program started promoting assembly plants, or maquiladoras. In 1992, with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), favorable conditions for foreign capital permitted the siting of further maquiladoras. According to the Instituto de Estadística, Geografía e Informática (INEGI), by 2000, about 308 maquiladoras employing 250,000 workers existed in Ciudad Juárez. Many of those employed are single young women migrating from others states. Sexist men in border states who resent the increasing presence of working females in public spaces call these womenmaquilocas, meaning flirtatious women who work in maquiladoras.

Race and Class of the Femicide It is not difficult to infer the class and racial implications of the atrocious murders of the more than 400 women who have been reported kidnapped, raped, tortured, mutilated and killed. The murderers have been killing only young working-class women of a certain profile: short and thin with long, dark hair and brown skin. The victims have been between fifteen to thirty-nine years old, and many were originally from other Mexican states. While the murderers enjoy impunity, public officials and the local police have accused the victims of being prostitutes, of leading double lives and of being the provokers of the assaults. The records, however, show that many of the victims were maquiladora workers, while others were students, housewives or workers in another economic sector.

Roles of the Urbanization, Maquiladoras, and the NarcoEconomy Many explanations for the femicide have been advanced. From a planning perspective, it is important to understand the urbanization of Ciudad Juárez and the roles of the maquiladora industry and the criminal economy. First, as new waves of immigrants, attracted by the possibility of crossing the border and by the jobs available in the maquiladora industry, have arrived in Ciudad Juárez, the pressures on housing and urban services have increased. As has been the case in 202

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other Mexican and Latin American cities, the new arrivals tended to relocate to the edge of city, where land was cheaper but infrastructure and urban services were lacking. The layout of Ciudad Juárez is sprawling, and many of the women kidnapped and murdered either lived in the “new” settlements on the edges of the city or their bodies were found in these newly urbanized areas. The murderers have attacked women who are most vulnerable in the urban space of Ciudad Juárez—those who use public transportation, who do not have a car and who, in many cases, walk long distances in order to take a bus or a collective taxi. Thus, the rapid urbanization process prompted by the relocation of global capital to the border area has created an unsafe city that lacks urban infrastructure, some of the most important of which are affordable housing, appropriate transportation and public lighting. Impunity in the city is rampant in this border area that is now known as one of the most dangerous cities for women. The criminal narco-economy has free rein and has taken the lives of both men and women in the region. Some of the names denounced as possible culprits have been identified as men belonging to the high society of Ciudad Juárez and to the business and economic elites in the region. In addition, some local journalists affirm that those potential murderers might be linked to the criminal economy in the area.

A Planning Point of View From a gendered planning perspective, the built environment of this city contributes to the violation of human rights. You might ask: How can a city reproduce human rights violations of young low-income women? I recently saw the answer in one of the latest European documentaries about the murders in Ciudad Juárez. In this film, the filmmaker follows the routine of a young woman from the time she leaves home to the time she comes back home from work. The woman leaves home late at night to go to her job in the maquiladora. Maquiladoras have different shifts and her shift starts at midnight. In order to catch the bus, she needs to walk in the dark, with no sidewalks or streetlights to guide her way. She carries a flashlight to see where she is walking. Like many other people who go to Ciudad Juárez either looking for a job in the maquiladoras or trying to cross the border, this young woman lives in the informal settlements of Ciudad Juárez, many of which lack access to urban services. This lack of urban services has a gender component, that of not providing safety to women in Ciudad Juárez. The work of the mothers, relatives, activists, academics, students 203

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and other men and women in the region and around the world has created a growing global movement of women protesting the femicide in Juárez. At the local level, the light posts in Ciudad Juárez, painted in pink with a black cross in the middle, serve as memorials for the murdered women. In some cases, those post have the legend: ¡Ni Una Más! Not one more! Big crosses have been planted around the city as if the city itself had become a huge cemetery as well as a huge memorial site for the murdered women. In addition to crosses, the residents of Juárez witness the visits of women from around the globe who travel to take back the streets and participate in international demonstrations in Ciudad Juárez. In 2004, the US portion of a demonstration gathered in El Paso, Texas, the twin city of Ciudad Juárez, and marched, crossing the border to meet the women in Ciudad Juárez. Different local and bi-national organizations have emerged to respond to the femicide. Some have survived the threats, intimidation and lack of resources for many years, while others have not. These organizations include: Justicia para Nuestras Hijas (Justice for Our Daughters); Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa (Our Daughter Come Back Home); Comité Independiente de Derechos Humanos de Chihuahua (Independent Committee for Human Rights in Chihuahua); Casa Amiga (Friendly House); Amigos de las Mujeres de Juárez (Friends of the Women of Juárez); El Paso Coalition Against Violence on Women and Children at the Border; and other human rights organizations and NGOs. These groups have organized conferences and meetings and presented two films about the femicide: Señorita Extraviada or Missing Young Woman (Lourdes Portillo) and La Batalla de las Cruces (Patricia Ravelo). The Mexico Solidarity Network organizes groups in the United States to periodically visit the mothers of the victims and learn about Juárez so as to serve as constant witness to the violence.

What Remains to Be Done? The question always remains for progressive planners and planning academics as to what needs to be done by different social actors in the city and in the world to stop this femicide and to make both private and public spaces safer for the women of Juárez. The response needs to be informed by the twelfth demand of the Resolutions of the International Conference on the Killings of Women of Juárez hosted by the Chicano Studies Department at UCLA on November 1, 2003. The mothers and activists who attended the conference wrote these resolutions, the twelfth demand of which reads: 204

Femicide in Ciudad Juárez We demand that the government of Ciudad Juárez, its planning entities and major employers in the region work jointly to provide the necessary infrastructure that will make Ciudad Juárez a safer place for everybody, in which women can have the freedom of movement, as any other human being, without fearing for their lives and their safety.

After the failure of the political and legal entities to bring justice to the murders of the women of Juárez, women participating in this transnational and international women’s movement have started pointing out some solutions, very basic in appearance: adequate street lighting, transportation provided for the maquiladora workers and affordable housing close to jobs. These solutions target the provision of safer urban infrastructure. This war against women is affecting all residents of the city as the impact of the tragedy has resulted in the disintegration of families, the departure of families from Juárez and, in some cases, the suicide of men close to the victims. The call then is for progressive planners to get involved and support the women of Juárez. Through a participatory approach, and in conjunction with different community organizations inside and outside Juárez, progressive planners could help develop a city plan from the grassroots, a plan that includes elements to be implemented at both the individual and group levels in order to end the violence. This is a call for Planners Network to establish a relationship with the groups supporting the movement of the Women of Juárez in order to jointly organize a bilateral/international meeting to work out a grassroots plan for Ciudad Juárez. This plan, the purpose of which would be to make Juárez a safer city and to stop the femicide and the terror, could effectively be carried out by grassroots organizations and civil society actors in Juárez.

Conclusion Roads, housing and other urban services are not in place to support the labor force that has emerged as a result of the infusion of global capital in the form of the maquiladoras. Therefore, men and women working in the maquiladoras look for shelter in areas that were previously undeveloped, but these areas lack services. Globalization, which has manifested itself in the movement of firms to other countries, has prompted an unplanned urbanization in Mexico for which the planning offices have not made the maquiladoras accountable. I am not saying that we need to take away our eyes from the murderers, but I am saying that, in addition to finding who is responsible, we need to think about what can be done to 205

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create an infrastructure that makes Ciudad Juárez a safer city for all women and men. Although new infrastructure, an improved urban form and community development will not stop the femicide, these are powerful tools for creating safer urban spaces. In addition, women and men in Ciudad Juárez deserve a democratic, grassroots planning process led by their voices and their demands. For socially responsible planners, to ignore the femicide in Ciudad Juárez is to ignore justice in cities, especially now that the femicide has spread to other countries like Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. These countries have also opened their doors to the maquiladoras, and the women murdered have been mostly indigenous women. This article was originally published in the Spring 2006 issue of Progressive Planning Magazine.

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CHAPTER 7: POLICING, INCARCERATION AND THE MILITARIZATION OF URBAN LIFE Introduction: Policing, Incarceration, and the Militarization of Urban Life By Sylvia Morse Planning is about what happens on land--where we live, where we work and spend money, and how we get there. In most of North America, which of us go where, and to what extent we can choose, is largely determined by the white ruling class which controls land through ownership and policing of property. Contemporary Black liberation movements have driven many more planners, like those in this book, to ask: where is the field of planning on policing and incarceration? The answer is that carceral systems have long been an integral tool of planning. Anti-racist planning must begin from this reality, devising new strategies to dismantle these codependent white supremacist systems and affirmatively plan for a just city.

Property, Policing, and Incarceration Wealth in the United States is largely built through the commodification and development of land. Throughout the life of this country, this resource has been hoarded by white people through violent theft and exclusion. European colonizers stole land from indigenous people, redefining ownership by recognizing development as the only legitimate reason to claim land.1 They built industry and real estate on this stolen land through the violence of slavery.2 As Professor Cheryl I. Harris 1

“Because the land had been left in its natural state, untilled and unmarked by human hands, it was […] the appropriate object of settlement and appropriation. Thus, the possession maintained by the Indians was not ‘true’ possession and could safely be ignored.” Cheryl I. Harris, "Whiteness as property." Harvard Law Review 106 (1992): 1721. 2 “Race and property were […] conflated by establishing a form of property contingent on race – only Blacks were subjugated as slaves and treated as property.” Harris, "Whiteness as property," 1716.

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writes, “Although the systems of oppression of Blacks and Native Americans differed in form [...,] undergirding both was a racialized conception of property implemented by force and ratified by law. The origins of property rights in the United States are rooted in racial domination."3 The construct of whiteness, and thus race, served to maintain this consolidation of property. According to Harris, “whiteness and property share a common premise – a conceptual nucleus – of a right to exclude.”4 This exclusion has largely been enforced through policing. European-descended workers were given access to whiteness, granting them some property rights and protection from slave status; through slave patrols,5 lower class white people protected not only the assets of wealthy whites but also their own status as white people. The policing of property to protect whiteness has continued long past the era of slavery. 6 Today, on publicly-owned land, jails and prisons cage mostly Black and brown people. As a funnel for incarceration, streets, sidewalks, and parks are policed to restrict and control African diasporan and indigenous-descended people’s ability to draw any value from the land: to walk, drive, or take public transit to work, home, or a friend’s house; to sell goods or services; to enjoy life; to move into a neighborhood.8 Racism, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore has defined it, “is the 3

Cheryl I. Harris. "Whiteness as Property," Harvard Law Review, 106:8 (1993), 1715-1716. 4 Cheryl I. Harris. "Whiteness as Property," Harvard Law Review, 106:8 (1993), 1714. 5 “Deliberately and strategically, the planter class extended special privileges to poor whites in an effort to drive a wedge between them and black slaves. White settlers were allowed greater access to Native American lands, [and] white servants were allowed to police slaves through slave patrols and militias.” Michelle Alexander. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. (New York: The New Press, 2012), 25. 6 “The racialization of crime—the tendency to "impute crime to color”' to use Frederick Douglass's words—did not wither away as the country became increasingly removed from slavery. [...] Police departments in major urban areas have admitted the existence of formal procedures designed to maximize the numbers of African-Americans and Latinos arrested— even in the absence of probable cause.” Angela Y. Davis. Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011), 3031. 8 Ruth Wilson Gilmore documented that definitions of legality and criminality shift over time, which she argues are adapted to the aims of social control. “While common sense suggests a natural connection between "crime" and

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state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of groupdifferentiated vulnerability to premature death.”9 The policing of land puts the lives of people of color at risk both in the short-term, in confrontations with police, and in the long-term by limiting access to resources and perpetuating poverty. Black liberation movements have recently drawn particular attention to murders of and violence against Black people by police and vigilantes. As Sam Stein notes in his piece, “The Poverty of Planning,” Trayvon Martin, a child who was walking to his family’s home, was killed by George Zimmerman, who was acting as “a neighborhood watch volunteer” obsessed with keeping Black people out of a gated community in Florida. Dajerria Becton, a 15 year old Black girl leaving a pool party in a segregated Texas suburb, was violently tackled and threatened with a gun by officer Eric Casebolt after police responded to 911 calls regarding a dispute in which a white resident told the Black teenagers to “go back to your Section 8 housing.”10 Saheed Vassell, a man well-known in his gentrifying Brooklyn, New York neighborhood as a friendly neighbor who also experienced mental illness, was killed by police after they received a 911 call from someone who mistakenly thought he was carrying a gun. These recent cases of racial violence-along with other viral videos of white people calling police on Black people for barbecuing, selling water, or wearing a backpack--have spurred a conversation about the power of white individuals to police Black and brown people’s behavior in public spaces, or even on their own property, and particularly in neighborhoods of color in which white people are seeking to buy land. Police do not choose their targets only in response to individual calls. As New York City activist Josmar Trujillo wrote, “gentrification doesn’t need to pick up a phone or lodge a complaint to make its influence felt. "prison," what counts as crime in fact changes, and what happens to people convicted of crimes does not, in all times and places, result in prison sentences. […] Laws change, depending on what, in a social order, counts as stability, and who, in a social order, needs to be controlled.” Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 12-13. 9 Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 28. 10 Olga Khazan. “After the Police Brutality Video Goes Viral,” The Atlantic. July 23, 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/07/after-thepolice-brutality-video-goes-viral/564863/.

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The presence (or even just the promise) of white and well-heeled bodies in a neighborhood produces a powerful political pull [and…] intensifies police responsiveness, zealousness and aggression.11 This is evidenced in the case of Skid Row in Downtown Los Angeles, California, where real estate interests and local government have collaborated with police to implement a policy of removal of homeless and poor people to advance land speculation and development.12 There, as in New York City, then Police Commissioner Bill Bratton oversaw the use of “broken windows” or “order-maintenance” policing to arrest and evict poor residents from areas targeted for redevelopment plans. Policing homelessness not only leads to incarceration (and in some cases death13) for poor Black and brown people, but also criminalizes poverty and housing insecurity. This notion of criminality enables public officials to frame policy as a moral question, not about society’s obligation to house people but instead whether it should punish these “wrongdoers.” Building public perception of Skid Row residents as “criminals” made it easier for developers and their government allies to question residents’ claims to their homes and ultimately evict them.14 At the same time, those behind development in Downtown LA could turn to the planning field to justify their plans as advancing the public interest of walkable, dense, mixed-use urban cores. 11

Josmar Trujillo. “Police and Gentrification,” Medium. April 9, 2018. https://medium.com/copwatch-report/police-and-gentrification6c7c2cd24f67. 12 Pete White, Co-Executive Director of LA Community Action Network (CAN) observed that “global investors kept asking [ Los Angeles Mayor Anthony Villaraigosa...] about resources and buying land. Specifically, they asked, “What about Skid Row?” Villaraigosa and [Police Commissioner William] Bratton answered them by discussing a homeless removal strategy. The plan authorized the police to clear the land for global investment in this particular area. [...] The police are the frontline of defense so that investors can come in, spend resources, and buy up space. The city is responding to the desires of big capital.” Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton, “Asset Stripping and Broken Windows Policing on LA’s Skid Row: An Interview with Becky Dennison and Pete White,” in Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter, ed. Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton (Brooklyn:Verso Books, 2016), 177– 78. 13 In 2015, police escalated a confrontation and killed Charly "Africa" Keunang in Skid Row. 14 Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton. “Asset Stripping and Broken Windows Policing on LA’s Skid Row,” Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter, (Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2016).

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Local government, real estate investors, and police departments expressly use policing and incarceration as tools of land development and planning. Yet planners and urbanists define the field so narrowly that we can champion urban design outcomes for the ideals they represent without confronting state violence when it is used as a means to the end of redevelopment. Sam Stein writes that, “in the context of racial capitalism, a blind adherence to quality of life planning only makes cities prettier and more efficient killing machines.” Put another way: police are doing urban planning, and if planners do not challenge them then we are doing police work.

A Way Forward: Confronting the Carceral State in Planning The anti-racist planner, understanding that land and carceral systems are symbiotic projects of white supremacy, must address policing and incarceration as part of our work. As Sheryl-Ann Simpson writes in this volume, “choices have been made to arrest rather than to care. [...] [P]lanners need to make our own choices: to [...] continue to simply fiddle in the margins, or to take up and integrate the policing and prison system – including advocacy for alternatives – as a critical urban issue running through all areas of planning practice and research.” Even within the current rigid confines of our existing planning processes and systems, the rigorous anti-racist planner has endless opportunities to fight the carceral state. For starters:    



Planners could factor arrests from policing and ICE raids into analyses of indirect displacement risk in a given area or surrounding proposed development plans. Planners working for housing agencies have the power to challenge laws that exclude tenants based on criminal history. Transportation planners should refuse policing as a strategy for improving safety or quality in public transit and on streets. Conversations about public housing must start from an understanding of the racialization of property and the state’s use of land use controls to police the behavior of Black and brown people; planners should partner with tenants to develop models of resident-ownership and self-governance. Academic institutions should teach the history of policing in land use law and policy and foster interdisciplinary programs. 211

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In some cases, the anti-racist planner can challenge the use of public land and resources for police and incarceration. In New York City, at the time of this writing, the de Blasio administration is moving forward with a proposal to build four new jails in what it calls a borough-based jail system. This is presented as a prerequisite to closing the notorious jail on Rikers Island.15 The four new jail sites are undergoing environmental and city land use review as a single project, with formal public involvement limited to land use impacts. The city’s borough-based plan and environmental assessment statement do not include alternative no-build scenarios in which Rikers would be closed and the jail population reduced. A starting place could be to confront the fact that most people incarcerated on Rikers, disproportionately people of color, have not been convicted of a crime: 72% of the City’s annual jail admissions (and 72% of the daily jail population) is being held pre-trial, and 55% of this population is being incarcerated for a misdemeanor.16 What if the planners who worked on these plans demanded consideration of scenarios including the elimination of cash bail, pre-trial detention, and order-maintenance policing? Going further, what if planners unilaterally refused to plan for the construction of new human cages?17 Community planners could facilitate a planning process, with an abolitionist framework, among people who have been incarcerated and their families. Organizers from the No New Jails NYC coalition have begun to do just that, conducting participatory research and facilitating community meetings to identify programs that could be funded with the budget for the borough-based jails. This abolitionist invest-divest framework,18 endorsed in the Movement for Black Lives platform,19 is 15

The City of New York, Office of the Mayor, Smaller, Safer, Fairer: A Roadmap to Closing Rikers Island. 2018. https://rikers.wpengine.com/wpcontent/uploads/Smaller-Safer-Fairer-1.pdf. 16 The City of New York, Office of the Mayor, Smaller, Safer, Fairer: A Roadmap to Closing Rikers Island. 2018. https://rikers.wpengine.com/wpcontent/uploads/Smaller-Safer-Fairer-1.pdf, 50. 17 For instance, Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility has led a campaign for architects to refuse to design solitary confinement cells, facilities for executions, and other prison architecture. 18 Abolitionists like Angela Y. Davis have long argued that “the transformation of imprisoned bodies—and they are in their majority bodies of color—into sources of profit who consume and also often produce all kinds of commodities, devours public funds, which might otherwise be available for social programs such as education, housing, childcare, recreation, and drug pro-

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echoed by the 85 organizations and activists from the No Cop Academy coalition in Chicago fighting the construction of a new police training facility. If we stop caging people, what could we build? The transformation is not only in freeing up those funds, but in freeing people to plan on free land. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, drawing on W.E.B. Du Bois’s lessons from the Reconstruction period, reminds us that “abolition isn’t just absence. [...] Abolition is figuring out how to work with people to make something rather than figuring out how to erase something.”20 In tearing down our systems of property, policing, and incarceration, we can, for the first time, plan.

grams.” Angela Y. Davis. Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011), 88. 19 “INVEST-DIVEST,” Platform, The Movement for Black Lives. https://policy.m4bl.org/invest-divest/. 20 Clément Petitjean. “Prisons and Class Warfare: An Interview with Ruth Wilson Gilmore,” Verso Books Blog. August 2, 2018. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3954-prisons-and-class-warfare-aninterview-with-ruth-wilson-gilmore.

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Prisons, Policing and Planning: Making the Connections Visible By Sheryl-Ann Simpson In August 2014, attention turned towards Ferguson, Missouri, as a Black teen was shot and killed by a police officer. This event, along with a killing in New York, sparked attention and protests across the US. But the truth is police violence, and even killings, are the everyday in Black and brown communities across the US. According to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, drawing on data from the CDC, at least 4,531 people were killed by police between 1999 and 2011. Of those, 26% were Black, and 1.9% were Native, communities that make up 13% and 0.8% of the total population. Yet the mainstream planning academy has been largely quiet in terms of recent events, and the larger issue of the relationship between policing, prisons and urban planning. The effects of contemporary security logistics aren’t as obvious as in Haussmann’s Paris, but they are the result of the so-called War on Terror and War on Drugs, along with processes that have internalized the border and resulted in the targeting of migrant and migrant-seeming people. These have reshaped our cities and regions with the tacit and active consent of planning. While contemporary impacts are less obvious, they can be made visible. Particularly in a moment when data, analysis and so-called designthinking are totally on-trend within mainstream planning, not paying attention to these issues is nothing more or less than a choice. So along with the other articles in this issue I hope that this piece – some fairly quick back-of-the-napkin work – will help to start conversations, and spark new research and action around planning responses to the various disparities associated with the US police and prison systems.

Following the Data One of the first challenges in examining patterns in this system is a lack of complete data. For example, recent research by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) found that police killings are consistently underreported, and projects like FatalEncounter.org rely on crowdsourcing to create a complete database of police killings. Just finding arrests data

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can also be difficult. Only thirty-three states participate in the FBI National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). In another three states, one to four agencies participate. The non-participating states include New York, Florida and California. Still, over 3,000 municipal agencies are included in the NIBRS database (see Figure 1) and we can see patterns emerging around arrests. Overall rates of arrests are quite low. This suggests that arrests are concentrated in certain municipalities, and when you start to pull apart the data, we see that larger cities are more likely to have higher arrest rates. We also know that these arrests are not evenly spread across these large cities. The Million Dollar Block Project from Columbia University’s Spatial Information Design Lab – led by Architect Laura Kurgan – visualized some of this disparity in New York City. The project examined patterns of imprisonment, and found areas where governments were spending the eponymous million dollars to incarcerate residents of single city blocks. Also, not every arrest leads to the same type of sentencing. The combined impact of uneven arrest and sentencing patterns is also visible in the US prison population, where communities of color are consistently overrepresented. Drawing on calculations from the Prison Policy Initiative, Figure 2 shows the patterns of racial disparity in the prison population for Latino, Native, and Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islander communities. Arizona is the one state where all three communities are overrepresented. On the other hand, white populations are underrepresented in all states except Hawai’i, and Black folks are overrepresented in the prison population of every state except Montana. Looking at Figure 3, which combines US Census data with data from the NIBRS, there is no clear pattern between arrest rates – represented by the size of the points – and the percent of Black people in a municipality’s population – read along the horizontal axis line. If there was a relationship, the problem of overrepresentation in prisons might be explained by overzealous policing in cities and towns with larger Black communities. Instead, the results in Figure 3 suggest that Black people are being arrested, sentenced and imprisoned at disproportionate rates regardless of the rates of incarceration or the numbers of Black people in the community. Figure 3 also makes the important relationship between race and income visible. Just to get technical for a second, this graph uses the log of median household incomes; this log transformation is a pretty typical move to force data into a normal distribution – with most results in the middle and fewer at each extreme. Normal distributions make certain comparisons and calculations easier than

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using raw data. In Figure 3 we see that the transformation works for municipalities below the median for percent Black population. But for the municipalities above the median there is a persistent negative relationship between percent Black population and median household incomes. This highlights the increasing income inequality in the country, along with the spatialized and racialized character of this inequality.

Income, Race and Profitable Prisons It is important to think about the relationship between income and race because it is expensive to get arrested or go to prison, and prisons are also a growth industry. Figure 4 maps the size and location of prisons run by the top two private prison corporations, and shows the prisons they manage for ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Prisons managed by just these two companies have the capacity to hold 6% of the US population of imprisoned people. These corporations, along with various contractors and other advocates, have also nudged governments towards shifting the costs of housing prisoners onto the families, friends, loved-ones and communities of people in prison – and remember these are disproportionately communities of color. The Center for Public Integrity reported on some of these costs, which include toothpaste, doctors, winter clothing, toilet paper, electricity, email and room and board fees. Companies like JPay make a profit from fees for money transfers from families, and in some states

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have negotiated exclusive contracts for transferring funds to people in prison. The JPay CEO describes the $50 million revenue his company made from fees alone as a drop in the bucket of prison profits. Private prison companies have also wrangled occupancy requirements out of some states, which require that law enforcement agencies agree to keep occupancy rates in these prisons above a certain level. So just to be clear here, states are agreeing that they will arrest and imprison a certain number of their residents so that these corporations are guaranteed a profit. These agreements are not about justice – not even revenge- or punitive-based justice – and certainly not about rehabilitation or restoration. They are about profit and capital.

Costs to Local Government While governments do manage to skim a bit off of these prison profits, the police and prison system is also a large expenditure for governments, particularly for municipal governments. Figure 5 looks at all census-designated places in the US, and suggests that, as with arrests, people who are incarcerated are also urban residents, and the system is being paid for by cities. Total municipal budgets in the US add up to about a third of total state budgets, but states contribute to 37.8% of police, judicial and legal and corrections system (PJ&LCS) spending,

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while cities contribute 31.5%. Figure 6 draws on data from the US Census, BJS and the Federal Transit Administration to compare expenditures in the PJ&LCS, public education and transit.

Figure 7 looks at spending for the forty-nine largest municipalities exploring the same types of expenditures. Additional data from The Trust for Public Land adds information about municipal spending on Parks and Recreation programs. One thing to note before getting into the comparison is that in

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municipalities we really are talking about police spending. In these large cities the median portion of the PJ&LCS spent on police is 94.5%. Denver, at 39.9%, has the lowest rate. Looking across the country, states contribute 13% to the total police spending, and cities 60.4%. Comparing state and large municipality expenditures we see the larger median levels of PJ&LCS spending in municipalities as compared to states, and that cities with smaller budgets are often using a larger percentage of their budget on PJ&LCS spending. We can also see that in these cities PJ&LCS spending is comparable to school expenditures and dwarfs spending in other areas. Municipal spending falls well within the traditional purview of planners, impacting issues such as employment accessibility, urban design, housing, community development and sustainability. Advocating for resources in public schools, transit and parks and recreation, planners could also align themselves with advocates for an alternative justice system focused on community stewardship, caring, health and peace. All of this also means that

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the police and prison system is also costing communities who are often marginalized in multiple ways. This system costs low income, Black and other communities of color by removing community members – largely men, but increasingly women – and breaking social and cultural ties in the community. These are also community members who – if they were under an economic system where work and living wages were valued – could be contributing financially to their communities. The folks left behind – largely women – are now working and going without in order to pay the monetary price for their imprisoned loved ones. They are also paying to try and stay in touch through visits, or even just phone calls and letters, connections that are shown to reduce repeat offences. Finally, these are the communities where public resources that might provide alternatives or support people returning from prison are often limited.

The Challenge for Planners In the US, choices have been made to arrest rather than to care, to imprison rather than to focus on restorative justice options and to offload the cost of the prison system from collective government responsibility towards privatized solutions. In this model, individual families must take on the costs, risks and responsibilities, and private corporations make the profits. These choices are also part of more general trends around gendered and racialized inequality and politicaleconomic neoliberalization. Planners need to pay attention to these choices, and understand the connections between the things that we comfortably think of as planning issues, and the impacts of the police and prison system. The process of neoliberalization was at least in part related to left-radical actors ignoring the state, while regressive-liberal actors were happy to take up the slack. As we move into a period of seeming permanent austerity, planners need to make our own choices: to ignore these issues and processes and continue to simply fiddle in the margins, or to take up and integrate the policing and prison system – including advocacy for alternatives – as a critical urban issue running through all areas of planning practice and research. This article was originally published in the Spring 2015 issue of Progressive Planning Magazine.

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The Poverty of Planning By Samuel Stein All over American people are rising up in anger over the repeated murders of Black men and women by police, and the impunity most of them are granted in the courts. This is a distinctly urban phenomenon. Mass movements have sprung up in most of the country’s major metropolitan areas – New York, San Francisco, Chicago, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Madison, and beyond – and reflect a widely recognized truth about our cities and towns: life chances for people of color remain dramatically lower than their white neighbors. Racial capitalism continues to reign, locking up Black men and women by the millions, curtailing their choices in the “free world,” and sometimes ending their lives abruptly in a hail of police bullets. Given both the incredible importance of this issue and its centrality to urban life, one might imagine that urban planners would be all over it, designing policies, programs and public spaces that would aim to fight back against this brutality. So where are the planners? As Sylvia Morse showed in the Winter 2015 issue of Progressive Planning, we are largely silent, missing in action. As a discipline and a profession we have said nothing about these deaths and what it would take to end them. It turns out, however, that we have a lot to say about the circumstances that caught the police’s attention in the first place.

Remembering the Dead Michael Brown was 18 years old when he was murdered by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, a Black suburb of St. Louis, Missouri. Walking in the street with a friend, they were confronted by Officer Williams, who shouted profanities at them and insisted that they move to the sidewalk. A few minutes later, Brown was dead, left bleeding on the pavement for an hour and a half before detectives arrived on the scene. Eric Garner was 43 years old when he was strangled to death by Office Daniel Pantaleo on a street corner in Staten Island, New York. Garner was known to many in his neighborhood of Tompkinsville as a local character, a guy you would see, recognize, maybe smile and chat with for a bit. The police knew him too. The NYPD had arrested him several times before for “quality of life violations” – things that are barely illegal but challenge prevailing norms of public behavior. On the day he was killed, he was standing outside a corner store, allegedly selling loose cigarettes.

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Akai Gurley was 26 years old when he was shot to death by Officer Peter Liang in the stairwell of his building. Gurley and his girlfriend decided to take the stairs after the elevator they called for failed to come. The stairwell was dark – despite numerous complaints, the New York City Housing Authority had failed to repair the lights – and Officer Liang, a rooky cop patrolling those staircase, was apparently startled. Without warning, he shot Gurley dead with a single bullet to the chest. Rekia Boyd was 22 years old when she was killed by Officer Dante Servin in North Lawndale, Chicago. Officer Servin went out for a bite around 1 am, carrying a loaded automatic weapon on his hip. He drove by Douglas Park and saw a group of four Black men and women hanging out. He warned them that the park closed at 11 pm, and that they were in a residential area. Officer Servin claimed he then mistook one of the men’s phones for a gun and shot indiscriminately into the group, striking Boyd in the head and abruptly ending her life. Trayvon Martin was 17 years old when he was slain by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida. Zimmerman was a neighborhood watch volunteer at The Retreat at Twin Lakes, the gated community where both Zimmerman and Martin resided at the time. He peered from his window as Martin walked toward the townhouse where his father’s fiancé lived. Zimmerman grew furious, calling 911 on this alleged “intruder.” Minutes later, he shot Martin dead, just 200 feet from his soon-to-be step-mother’s home. Charly “Africa” Leundeu Keunang was 43 years old when his life was taken by three Los Angeles police officers whose names have, as of this writing, not been released. They were called to San Pedro Street in LA’s quickly gentrifying Skid Row, in response to an argument between two homeless men. The officers confronted Africa, who pushed back and attempted to retreat into his tent. They pinned him down and punched him in the face again and again. Minutes later, two officers and a sergeant shot Africa dead.

The Way Planners Work These cases, seared in our memories, share much in common. All of those brutalized were African Americans; most of them were men, and most of them were young. They were attacked in their own neighborhoods. These are the facts that have bound these deaths together into a common narrative. But they share another common thread: they all relate to the most common concerns of American planning professionals. Michael Brown first came to Officer Wilson’s attention because he 223

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was walking in the street instead of the sidewalk. For decades, planners have encouraged cities to prioritize pedestrian access through a number of common strategies, including traffic calming measures, car-free streets and streetscape enhancements. Many planners would leap to the defense of pedestrians over any other mode of transportation, arguing that walkability is at the heart of good city form. Eric Garner was the kind of person Jane Jacobs, patron saint of progressive planners, argued makes a neighborhood whole. He was the familiar, friendly face of street life, providing “eyes on the street” and increasing human interaction without the intrusive familiarity she felt marred small town life. People like Garner are the human pulse of neighborhood life. Akai Gurley’s death has been frequently linked to the malfunctioning lights in his public housing stairway. If they had been working, the argument goes, Officer Liang might not have fired his gun at all. This bit of magical thinking harkens back to a much earlier obsession with light. Since the days of Jacob Riis and Teddy Roosevelt, “progressive” reformers have linked darkness with danger, depression and squalor, and sought to fix structural problems like housing affordability with architectural interventions that increase the flow of light and air. Rekia Boyd’s murder was preceded by a dispute over nighttime park closures. Planners have long debated the merits of park closure, and many have argued that our public open spaces are unnecessarily hard to access, especially at night. They have moved towards more open and subtle park designs, which shun towering fences or walls. Trayvon Martin was killed inside a gated community, the kind of space that planners and designers love to hate. Gated communities are derided as militarized spaces of exclusion, unnaturally separated from the urban spaces that surround them. In contrast, “New Urbanism” is touted as the preferred suburban form, with relatively high density, walkable streets and central public spaces all contributing towards a better community. After Martin’s murder, the popular planning blog Planetizen, the New Urbanist website Better Cities & Towns and even the New York Times published editorials speculating that Martin might still be alive today had his step-mother-to-be lived in a smarter environment. Africa Leundeu Keunang was a homeless man in a part of the city that is transforming into a wealthy enclave. American planners have long focused on homelessness as an urban problem. From the Progressive Era through the 1960s, planners focused on providing temporary shelter for itinerant workers. As the country entered the neoliberal era 224

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and “modern homelessness” became a structural urban problem, planners increasingly focused on design for exclusion. In City of Quartz, Mike Davis describes how LA’s premier planners, architects and designers utilize the tools of their trades “in a relentless struggle to make the streets as unlivable as possible for the homeless and the poor.”

Cities on Fire

For all their official silence, the discipline and institutions of planning actually have quite a lot to say about the situations in which these Black men and women initially found themselves. The problem is, planners have nothing to say about the reason we all know their names. We continue to focus on issues that amount to quality of life for some and life and death for others. We have diagnosed a set of problems with American cities – poor walkability, not enough light, etc. – and set out to treat them without challenging deeper inequalities. In a sense, this “quality of life” approach recalls Martin Luther King’s warning 46 years ago. “I've come to believe,” he told his friend and collaborator Harry Belafonte, “we're integrating into a burning house." Planners are helping make cities more usable and accessible to all, while ignoring the fact that if you’re Black the police might kill you for exercising your right to the city. But maybe it’s actually worse than that — less facilitating integration into a burning house than stoking the wood beneath it. For by strengthening our cities without confronting the horrors they produce, planners are making a deadly urban system more efficient, resilient and appealing. A similar dynamic exists with planners and the discourse of “livability.” Since the 1970s, planners have focused on small-scale interventions to make urban spaces more pleasant. Key priorities have been walkability, mixed-use development, and contextual design. Almost entirely lost in this argument is the question of who can live in these so-called livable spaces. In the context of a capitalist land market, these reforms usually coincide with rising property values, development pressures and rent hikes. “Livability” then becomes a two-faced slogan, implying its opposite – displacement – for those who can’t afford to buy into the new urban lifestyle. Planning has nothing to say about the most important issue of the day in American cities. If planners are to revive the discipline from irrelevance, we must place front and center the fact that lived experiences of cities are dramatically different for different groups in society. Quality of life planning is worse than meaningless in the context of killer cops; it helps propel a pattern of white inclusion and Black denial, or, worse 225

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yet, white life and Black death. In the context of racial capitalism, a blind adherence to quality of life planning only makes cities prettier and more efficient killing machines. This article was originally published in the Spring 2015 issue of Progressive Planning Magazine.

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Immigration Policy and Planning in the Era of Mass Incarceration By Silky Shah On November 20, 2014 after years of overwhelming pressure from the immigrant rights movement and undocumented communities, President Obama announced he was taking executive action on immigration. It was a calculated move. With less than two years before the next presidential election, President Obama is thinking of his legacy and the viability of the Democratic Party in 2016. The action provides expanded relief for undocumented youth, or “dreamers,” and undocumented parents of U.S. citizen children. It would benefit roughly 4 to 5 million of the 12 million undocumented people living in the United States. Unfortunately the action also includes, not surprisingly, increased militarization at the southern border and a revamped and potentially harsher system of targeting immigrants who don’t qualify for relief. The president clearly stated, “we’re going to keep focusing enforcement resources on actual threats to our security. Felons, not families. Criminals, not children. Gang members, not a mom who’s working hard to provide for her kids.” This may seem reasonable and even justified to many. However, the statement not only conceals the fact that “family detention” (women and children) is expanding, it perpetuates the ongoing criminalization of immigrants and the unchecked culture of xenophobia that enables the president to make such remarks. The drive to criminalization runs in tandem with the wider culture of punishment in the United States that has targeted people of color and poor people and led to mass incarceration on a globally unprecedented scale. Today the U.S. is the world’s leading incarcerator and immigrants are the fastest growing population behind bars.

History of the Expansion of Immigrant Detention The expansion of immigration detention follows a similar if somewhat delayed trajectory as the rise of mass incarceration, which grew from 300,000 people in prison in 1970 to over 2 million today. The detention of immigrants, once a little known practice, began to expand in the early 1980s. Initially several thousand Cubans and Haitians arriving on Florida’s shores were swept into newly opened detention facilities. After three decades of expansion, the detention system now captures and holds close to half a million immigrants over the course of a year (e.g., 478,000 in 2012). 227

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Immigration policy began to increasingly emulate the criminal justice system in the 1980s when, during the height of the War on Drugs, Congress amended the Immigration and Naturalization Act to require the mandatory detention of immigrants with certain criminal convictions. This meant that their detention was automatic and compulsory, without any consideration of their circumstances. This policy expanded in 1996 under the Clinton administration with the passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) and the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA). The 1996 laws, as they are often referred to, marked a paradigm shift for immigration policy in the U.S. and dramatically increased the use of detention. This was accomplished by expanding the use of both mandatory detention and the application of the legal rubric of “aggravated felonies.” Paradoxically, many crimes considered aggravated felonies in the immigration context are neither aggravated nor felonies in the criminal context. For example shoplifting, a misdemeanor in the criminal context can be considered an aggravated felony under immigration law. Additionally, the 1996 laws rendered any non-citizen, including legal permanent residents, liable to detention and deportation.

Administrative Changes: ICE After the 9/11 attacks, the Immigration Naturalization Service or INS was divided into U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It also moved from the Department of Justice to the newly created Department of Homeland Security. Immigration was now a national security issue. Nowhere was this clearer than in ICE’s strategic plan for 2003-2012, Operation Endgame, which stated its purpose as, “promot[ing] the public safety and national security by ensuring the departure from the United States of all removable aliens through the fair and effective enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws.” Prior to the passage of the 1996 laws, the number of immigration detention beds in use was roughly 6,000; today it’s over 34,000. Those detained range from undocumented immigrants to asylum seekers to visa holders to legal permanent residents. Detention takes a terrible human toll on those in its grip. Immigrants in jails and detention centers lack medical and mental health care, outdoor recreation and nutritious and appetizing food. ICE’s national detention standards regulating conditions of confinement are not codified in law; therefore they only serve as mere recommendations with ICE as the oversight body. All detention is essen228

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tially indefinite. There is no sentence, immigrants are either waiting for a hearing or to be deported and can sometimes spend months or years locked up. Largely due to the lack of medical and mental health care over 140 immigrants have died in detention since 2003. Tiombe Carlos, an Antiguan legal permanent resident who came to the U.S. when she was four, was one of the 34,000. She had a long history of mental illness and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia at age 15. After serving a multi-year sentence for disturbing the peace and an altercation with a police officer she was transferred to immigration detention. She was first detained in Boston for six months, and then was moved to Pennsylvania to be closer to her family at the York County Prison, which contracts with ICE to hold immigrants. Carlos’ lawyer, her family and the advocacy group, Physicians for Human Rights, pleaded for her release on account of her mental illness and her family ties in the U.S., including a 14 year-old U.S. citizen daughter. ICE refused and in October 2013, Carlos committed suicide after being held in detention for nearly three years. She was 34 years old. Sylvester Owino, a Kenyan immigrant who came to the U.S. in 1998 on a student visa, was detained in 2005 after serving a two-year sentence for robbery. Owino had left Kenya due to persecution relating to his political beliefs and feared that if he returned he would be tortured or killed. For this reason he petitioned for relief under the Convention Against Torture and should have been released while he awaited a ruling on his case. Despite this, ICE continued to hold Owino in detention for nine years, first in a facility in San Diego and then at the Etowah County Jail in Alabama. After recently being transferred back to California, Owino finally had a hearing before a judge who, upon reviewing his case, immediately released him on bond in March 2015. Isolation is key to the continued use of immigrant detention. Most of these facilities are far from urban centers. Due to high demand for bed space in certain parts of the country, immigrants can be transferred hundreds of miles from their homes while they await their hearing. Many are transferred multiple times: immigrants detained in New York, for example, have been held in New Jersey and transferred to Texas or Louisiana. Throughout this process there is little possibility for contact with family members or attorneys. Unlike the criminal justice system, immigrants in detention are not afforded the right to a lawyer, with roughly 80 percent of immigrants going through their proceedings without counsel.

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Contract Facilities York County Prison, where Tiombe Carlos spent the last years of her life, and Etowah County Jail, where Sylvester Owino was held, are two of over 200 facilities that contract with ICE to hold immigrants. ICE itself only operates six facilities nationwide and relies heavily on county and state jails and private prisons for detention. This has been a windfall for counties that are cash-strapped due to the recession. On average ICE will pay $120 per day to house someone in detention, though many counties take a lot less. To expedite the relationship rather than go through a formal proposal process, ICE signs Intergovernmental Service Agreements (IGSAs) with counties, which means there is usually no opportunity for public comment. Beyond renting out space in existing county jails, many counties have built facilities to attract contracts, issuing bonds worth tens of millions of dollars to pay for the large and costly new jails. Securing these lucrative federal contracts initially guarantees job growth. However, many counties ignore the studies that have shown that in the long-term prison building in rural communities discourages economic development due to the stigma related to being a “prison town.” Due to the high cost of building and operating prisons, some counties will in turn contract with private prison companies, such as Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group to run their facilities. These companies will also directly contract with ICE and are deeply vested in the continued use of immigration detention, as nearly 60 percent of all detention beds are privately-run. Both CCA and GEO have lobbied to influence immigration policy and to support funding for immigration detention. In a 2007 SEC filing, CCA stated, “We are dependent on government appropriations.... The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws.” Just two years after this statement was made by CCA, the late Senator Robert Byrd wrote language into the DHS Appropriations bill requiring a minimum number of immigrants be detained at any given time. The language, which is now referred to as the “bed mandate” or “immigrant detention quota,” currently states, “[t]hat funding made available under this heading shall maintain a level of not less than 34,000 detention beds.” This means that despite current efforts for reform, such as executive action or comprehensive immigration reform, the population in detention will either stay the same or continue to grow.

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Northern Triangle Immigration Last year, as tensions in the Northern Triangle region of Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras) became critical, thousands of Central American women and children fled to neighboring countries as well as to the southern border of the U.S. Despite initially referring to this situation as a humanitarian crisis, President Obama warned Central Americans that if they came they would be turned back or be detained first and then sent back. The practice of holding women and children in detention had mostly ended in 2009 due to popular protest. Last summer in response to the increase in Central Americans at the border, ICE opened two new detention facilities to house families. The expansion has continued apace and the current projection is that by mid-2015, only one year after the crisis, some 3,000 beds will be used for family detention, whereas previously the number had been decreased to only 100. The average age of children in these facilities is just 6 years old. Despite having recognized and legitimate claims to asylum, which should ensure their release, many women in family detention centers are often held without bond or given excessively high bonds in order to “send a message” or deter further migration from the region. As we near the end of President Obama’s tenure, his legacy on immigration will no doubt be mixed. On the one hand, Obama gave hope to many by announcing relief for dreamers and undocumented parents of U.S. citizen children. On the other, he detained more people than any other president in U.S. history and his administration continues to target immigrants for detention and deportation by focusing primarily on non-citizens with criminal convictions and recent border crossers. What’s clear is that the system will not be reformed through piecemeal efforts that only provide relief for some. The reliance on detention has become a part of the fabric of the U.S. and in order to fully address its impact we must reverse course and stop treating immigration as a threat to public safety or national security for which prisons and deportation are the answer.

Post-script to “Immigration Policy and Planning in the Era of Mass Incarceration” The previous article was written in Spring 2015 towards the end of the Obama administration and since then the landscape on immigration has worsened considerably. In the last two years of the Obama presidency there was a substantial rise in immigration detention with the average daily population increasing from 34,000 to 38,000. Several new 231

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facilities were opened clandestinely through Intergovernmental Service Agreements with counties and legal challenges were made against relief efforts for “dreamers” and their parents. The end of the Obama years in office proved to follow much of the rhetoric coming from the White House in late 2014, which supported “innocent” young people and families and simultaneously ramped up border militarization and harsh enforcement in the interior. Very few anticipated the results of the 2016 presidential election, although it was clear that a Trump presidency would have a dramatic impact on the issue of immigration in the United States. President Obama spent eight years building up the infrastructure for a harsher and more sophisticated deportation regime and then handed it over to Trump, who ran on an essentially white nationalist platform. It is now 2019, two years into Trump’s presidency, and in every way possible he is waging a war against immigrants. The administration is ramping up detention, increasing criminalization of immigrants, eroding due process for people seeking asylum, and separating families in alarming ways. The early days of the administration saw the introduction of extreme executive orders, including one that implemented a travel ban which suspended entry for people from seven Muslimmajority countries and led to hundreds of travelers being detained. While the initial “Muslim ban” was ruled unconstitutional, a revised version was ultimately upheld the following year by the Supreme Court. In 2018, with former Attorney General Jeff Sessions at the helm, the Department of Justice implemented a “zero tolerance” policy at the border in order to deter families seeking asylum from coming to the U.S. While the practice of separating parents from their children at the border had already been taking place, the new policy went a step further by prosecuting parents for unlawful entry and transferring them to federal jails. After considerable protest and media attention the administration issued an executive order to stop family separations, however hundreds of children continue to be separated from their parents, some of whom have been deported. Immigration detention has increased by 30 percent since Trump came into office. While the “bed mandate” or quota language was removed from the federal appropriation language in 2017, the detention system now incarcerates more than 50,000 immigrants at any given time, which exceeds the appropriated amount from Congress which has funded 45,000 beds for fiscal year 2019. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has raided other Department of Homeland Security (DHS) accounts, including critical funds for agencies like Federal 232

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Emergency Management Agency, in order to expand the detention system. People are detained for longer periods of time and the mismanagement has led to more transfers within the system and harsher conditions for detained immigrants. In part due to lack of medical and mental health care, more than 20 people have died in detention since Trump came into office, two children have died in Customs and Border Protection custody, and one child died after being released from a family detention center in Texas where she had contracted a treatable respiratory infection. The racism and xenophobia of the current administration has increased awareness of detention and deportation policy significantly. The polarization around Trump has fueled greater scrutiny of the harshness of the U.S. immigration enforcement system and has prompted more principled and visionary positions among some elected officials, including the call to abolish ICE. Organizers and advocates across the country are waging campaigns to end ICE detention contracts in their communities and pushing for cuts to the DHS budget. While it is difficult to predict what lies ahead for the immigrant rights movement, the links between mass incarceration and immigration policy are clearer than ever before. This article was originally published on Progressive City on February 2, 2017.

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CHAPTER 8: CAPITALISM, SOCIALISM AND THE RIGHT TO THE CITY Introduction by Tom Angotti In everyday theory and practice, it is automatically assumed that planning must accept and pragmatically adjust to the political economy of capitalism which is of course based on the sanctity of private property. We are told that capitalism functions through the laws of supply and demand, in response to consumer needs, and that the proper place for planning is to regulate the land market so that it serves the broad public interest. We are also warned that infringing on the rights of private property is tantamount to socialism – that dirty word that triggers fears of dictators and monsters. The popular narrative is that socialism failed in the last century, proving that there is no alternative to capitalism. Most importantly, it teaches us that even while regulation can be a good thing too much of it leads to “creeping socialism.” This is the depressing ideology that underlies conventional mainstream planning. It is steeped in a pragmatism that scorns any effort to even imagine another city and world. Any major changes we might suggest will be branded as unrealistic, utopian or socialist. It lazily accepts simplistic one-dimensional views of capitalism and socialism that turn people away from any discussions of larger systemic questions and towards a defeatist incrementalism. Confounding this ideological orthodoxy, however, there is a newfound interest and acceptance of socialist ideas in twenty-first century North America. This is not entirely surprising because the attraction of socialism today springs not from abstract debates but from the movements against injustices in an urban world characterized by structural inequality and segregation. In this respect it is no different than the original socialist movements of the nineteenth century that arose in reaction to the exploitation of labor by industrial capitalism. Today we live in a largely urbanized world where inequalities and segregation are everywhere, in the cities of the global North and the global South. And capitalism never ceases to reproduce and widen inequalities.

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The Myths of Market Magic The world of free competition between the owners of capital never existed outside the pea brains of neoclassical economists trained by and for the business world. The inexorable pull of history has been towards the overwhelming dominance of monopolies and the even greater hegemony of global finance capital over the industries that produce and sell things. This concentration of capital is evident in urban land markets. Private land ownership is often touted as an “American dream” that allows everyone to get a piece of the economic pie. But in the Americas owning a homestead was fundamental to colonial expansion and limited to white settlers. It led to the slaughter of people who stewarded land instead of exploiting it for profit and produced an urban landscape defined by racial segregation. The extreme financialization of capital today produces huge speculative returns for urban real estate and reproduces urban inequalities. Following Karl Marx, David Harvey has called this the capital fix.1 Cities are the natural environment for these fixes because of the way urban land markets work: investment in key locations tend to grow over time because these are the most accessible locations where property values grow exponentially over time. It’s not the law of supply and demand for apartments or office space that matters most, though that does figure in the calculations. It is location. Urban plans, infrastructure investments, and government regulations are usually shaped to promote the growth of this capital; piling more growth around central locations increases even further their value and the profits of investors. Planners who respect the sanctity of private property and capital fixes dutifully follow the growth machine and are among the most loyal servants of capital. As land values in centrally located areas grow, they create pressures on existing property owners to raise rents or sell their properties. This results in the displacement of small owners and tenants, those without the resources to pay. In North America the displaced are disproportionately people of color, new immigrants and low-income working people. Displacement is an inevitable product of the capitalist city. Just as extractive capitalism continues to displace people from rural areas and create new flows of immigrants and refugees to cities, it endlessly churns urban populations to keep its capital flowing.

Why Urban Utopias Matter When radical planners point out these problems they are inevitably 1

David Harvey. The Limits to Capital. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).

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reminded that “there is no alternative,” to use the neoliberal catchphrase popularized by conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. They point to the failed states of twentieth century socialism as evidence. Planners are too often stymied by such a provocation. They turn away from the many examples in contemporary capitalist economies of successful attempts to limit and control the movement of capital, construct urban infrastructure to meet public needs, and the use of state intervention to improve the quality of urban life. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and East European socialist bloc in the early 1990s, capitalist dogma loudly declared socialism an abysmal failure. This required ignoring the multiple decades during which socialist governments financed huge stocks of new housing and planned cities with modern infrastructure where evictions and displacement were rare. It focused on the problems, which were substantial, and ignored the big differences among socialist nations (for example, did you know that in Cuba most people own their own homes, not the state?). This is not to deny the real problems of twentieth century socialism, only to warn against the intellectual laziness that accepts the powerful myths about world urban history that paralyze any search for alternatives. We need to look to both the past and future, know our histories and imagine better futures. Consider what our cities would be like if the real estate industry did not control land. Consider an economy based on meeting peoples’ needs instead of exploiting labor for profit and maximizing consumption. Consider an urban world in which all people help plan and govern. This is what socialism can be in the twenty-first century. We need to reject business as usual, organize with urban movements, be bold and show that another world is possible.

The Right to the City The Right to the City movement can be traced back to the powerful 1968 rebellion of students and workers in Paris. This was a revolutionary moment that opened up larger questions of who has access to and controls urban space. Marxist scholar and activist Henri Lefevre witnessed this uprising and his extensive work led to a larger movement geared towards understanding and changing cities.2 Lefevre was influenced by the works of Friedrich Engels in the nineteenth century that shined a light on the miseries of the urban working class in England and launched a sharp critique of housing reforms that did not target the fundamental problem of solving the housing question within the 2

Henri Lefevre. Writings on Cities. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).

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confines of capitalism.3 Marx and Engels also sharply criticized the trend at that time known as utopian socialism; this has too often been misused to diminish the power that activists, planners and revolutionaries can muster behind newer and better utopias – alternatives to the capitalist city.

3

Friedrich Engels. The Conditions of the Working Class in England. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973); The Housing Question. (Moscow: Progress, 1970).

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On Ethics and Economics By Kanishka Goonewardena As a student, practitioner and professor of planning committed to socialist ideals over a quarter of a century in three countries and six cities, I can claim to have lived with a certain ‘identity crisis’. Am I a planner, an activist, an intellectual or even a radical of some kind—or, better, a combination of these? Accompanying this existential question is a nagging angst, rooted in the contradiction between my sense of what planning could be and what it is. These two have been drifting apart since I started thinking about them. And the recent discussion on the ethics of planning in these pages, following the attempts by the American Planning Association (APA) and the Canadian Institute of Planners (CIP) to modernize their professional ‘ethical codes’, tells me that this issue is not just my problem. Ethics in planning has quite properly become a matter of public dispute—thanks above all to the exemplary writings of Peter Marcuse. But I see no harmonious resolution of it on the horizon. So let me reflect on our so-called ethical dilemmas, in a way more autobiographical and anecdotal than academic. I entered planning via architecture, even before I really knew it, as an undergraduate student in Sri Lanka in the mid to late 1980s. Politically this was an overwhelming time for most of us, as the Sri Lankan state was radically challenged by militant Tamil separatists operating in the North and East and by an ultra-leftist Maoist movement in the South. Revolution was in the air and we were radically politicized in the universities, which were centers of militant organization. I always recall this context to remind myself of my attitude towards architecture at a moment when it seemed that another world was not only possible but also inevitable. For even if we were mistaken then about the balance between the real and the possible, we had firmly registered the injustices of our world and resolved to make another one. I could not therefore avoid the question in studios and lectures: how could architects be revolutionary? Although this was rarely addressed by our teachers—many of them were trained at places like the Architectural Association in London—a couple of us discovered in our dusty university library a few precious books like Town and Revolution by Anatole Kopp, which we read alongside cheap Soviet editions of Marx, Engels and Lenin. We realized then that architecture and revolution were indeed once united in a moment called ‘modernism’ and that urban planning was

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central to it—even if I was unaware of Marshall Berman’s classic All That Is Solid Melts Into Air at the time. Being inspired by the architects of Red Vienna, Neues Frankfurt or Russian constructivists like Konstantin Melnikov, Moisei Ginsburg and the Leonid and Victor Vesnin brothers did not, however, help me much in my first job after college—as an apprentice in Colombo to my favorite teacher of architecture, a brilliant designer trained at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in the 1970s. It was a dream position for an aspiring architect, but I quickly lost the kind of discipline needed to work on fancy residences for wealthy clients in a place engulfed by burning ethnic and class conflict. I think he kindly ‘let me go’ before I quit—to take up a much less coveted job as an architect in a government office. There I thought I could be more relevant to the needs of ordinary people of Sri Lanka, who could not afford architects. So I became an urban planner, hoping very much to serve the common rather than the private interest. It was the only decision that struck me as being—as I understood this loaded word— ethical. Ethics and planning in this sense were umbilically linked in my mind: planning was simply what enabled me as an architect to be ethical in practice. Yes, I am known to be utopian, but even then I was not so naïve as to think that a public servant in Sri Lanka, an architect at the national Urban Development Authority, could really be revolutionary. Nonetheless, I was in principle committed to the prevailing state policy of building low-income houses for the masses and investing in urban planning and design to serve those who were otherwise denied their ‘right to the city’. This was however the same state that was also murdering my fellow students by the thousands, in the North and the South, often on the mere suspicion of being ‘insurgents’. Even before the word became fashionable in the 1990s, then, I had a practical lesson in the limits of ‘insurgent planning’. But I did not give up on revolutionary architecture and planning. I left my government job and, thanks to some generous scholarships, devoted nearly ten years of study in the USA to my abiding topic and attendant ‘theory’. I have to fast forward now to get to the point—which arrived just after I had become the Director of the Program in Planning at the University of Toronto in 2010. It was a letter from our provincial professional planners’ institute, saying that our planning program was due for an accreditation appraisal. And it promised more than business as usual—which is tedious enough, involving reports whose thickness alone damages the environment—because we were told that we would be evaluated according to a new set of rules, drawn up in accordance 239

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with the Canadian Institute of Planners’ hyped-up Planning for the Future initiative. This intensely debated project assumed a sweeping mandate to modernize the planning profession in Canada by revamping many things, particularly the standards for professional ethics, membership, competence and accreditation. I noticed the word excellence appearing with alarming frequency in the mass of documentation associated with Planning for the Future, and this made me approach the whole enterprise with due diligence. The missionary zeal of Planning for the Future rested on a simple observation, in itself reasonable enough: the planning profession had not kept up with the demands placed on it by a rapidly changing world. Both Jane Jacobs and Lenin would have agreed with that. Yet the more one got into the substance, the more problematic it all became. To begin with, the basic concept of planning at the core of Planning for the Future offered a shockingly narrow view of the diverse array of activities in which various kinds of planners are actually engaged, by summarily reducing all that to an outdated notion called ‘land use’. It did not help that this had been the Canadian Institute of Planners’ operative yet archaic definition of planning for some fifty years, which if anything needed to be radically reformatted. But in many ways the future promised by Planning for the Future looked worse than the past, not least when it came to the crude redefinition of professional planning competence in a direction that was most unapologetically technocratic. This flew in the face of much good work done in critical planning thought, especially by those who drew on Jürgen Habermas’s celebrated distinction between instrumental and communicative reason to restore a liberal moral dimension to planning practice. We know that this is a practice increasingly subjected to the nihilist means-ends calculus characteristic of technocracy—of the sort that once claimed in Vietnam to ‘bomb the village in order to save it’, provoking a memorable ethical refutation from Marcuse and other progressive planners. One did not of course have to be a revolutionary to find fault with Planning for the Future. Intelligent liberals and even neoliberals also read between the official lines of the Canadian Institute of Planners, expressing concern over its tendentious technocratic thrust. I have had the pleasure of talking to some of them about this noxious futurism. And one of the most articulate in their ranks, a partner of a leading international planning and urban design firm based in Toronto, once told me what he asks young people applying to work with him: not if they know cost-benefit or input-output, but whether they have read Middlemarch. He and I inhabit different political worldviews, but we 240

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agreed on the relevance of George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) to a proper education in planning, which is the business of planning schools that the Canadian Institute of Planners was proposing to subsume under its technocratic vision. But not without a struggle, much to my delight. Emails started flying between distressed professors across planning schools in Canada as soon as the threat of new accreditation standards—developed without any meaningful consultation with planning schools—became reality. The Association of Canadian University Planning Programs (ACUPP) mobilized rapidly, like an innocuous neighborhood suddenly galvanized against impending bulldozers. So I got involved in the fractious negotiations between the Canadian Institute of Planners and representatives of Canadian planning schools, and especially in animated deliberations on Planning for the Future among fellow faculty and with students. This was not Sri Lanka in 1989, and we were not debating revolution with T-56s and AK-47s in attendance, but I relished the occasion to search our souls, asking questions about who we are and what we do. Among the positions around which some consensus emerged within the assembled group of faculty was the view that the Canadian Institute of Planners has and should have no monopoly over planning—particularly planning education. Universities too have a vital and critical role to play in planning, and their autonomy and critical distance from the professional world is absolutely essential to it. Mutual respect for theory and practice, so to speak, was one of the demands we put to them as a pre-condition for any agreement on new accreditation standards. As one of us wrote in an internal communication: ‘The unique contribution that university planning programs could make to the “future of planning” derives from the fact that we don’t have to worry from 9 to 5 about how to satisfy our clients’ demands, make a profit for our firms and hustle for the next contract; it rests on our privilege and duty to read, think, write and teach with minds of our own’. That the technocrats of the Canadian Institute of Planners regarded our eminently liberal protestations with disdain was perhaps predictable. Unexpected was the way in which the essence of Planning for the Future once revealed itself to me. This happened not in a formal meeting, but in a Toronto pub, during a random altercation of sorts with a bureaucrat of the planning profession, who could not contain himself at my insistence that our planning program ‘would prefer not to’ seek professional accreditation under the proposed terms. He cut off my Bartleby-inflected rant on the humanist mission of the university, dispensed with the bombast of the Canadian Institute of Planners, and 241

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told the truth: Planning for the Future is not about ethics, it is about jobs. How could I ignore the plight of poor professional planners whose work is everywhere being stolen by others—architects, engineers, lawyers and God knows who else? I was stunned as he said it better than I could: what Planning for the Future is doing is nothing else but redefining planning in such a way that it would be possible to put a fence around it and say, hey, ‘only we can do business here and not you infidels’. I appreciated the candor, but could not resist a response after a few drinks. Even if the bottom line were jobs, would not restricting the definition of planning so tightly decrease rather than increase the work available to those who used to be called planners? Would not the future be better if we asked instead how to broaden rather than reduce the scope of our critical engagement with the problems of the world, not in competition but in cooperation with kindred spirits—experts, intellectuals, activists? There is more to the unfinished Planning for the Future story than I can say here, but at least one lesson from it should be clear: ethics is a code-word for economics. Capitalism destroys the distinction between being good and having goods. So it is utopian in the bad sense of the word to imagine that we can somehow fix our problems in the ethical realm without also and at the same time addressing fundamental contradictions in economics if not indeed in society at large. As philosopher Theodor Adorno put it, ‘the wrong life cannot be lived rightly’. What is to be done then about the appalling gap between our professed commitment to social justice and the actually existing ethical standard of our so-called profession—which is anchored by the ‘client’ who pays the invoice, not some ethereal notion of common good? I am drawn strategically to what Lenin called ‘dual power’, which in our context points to the necessity of struggling for a better ethical code within and against the official organizations of planning, while also acknowledging in practice that much of the terrain of radical planning lies beyond those institutions. It would be dialectical to say that revolutionizing planning cannot dispense with revolutionizing the world, especially if we are to say—like I did in Sri Lanka and still do now—that planning can be revolutionary. This article was originally published in the Summer 2014 issue of Progressive Planning Magazine.

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The Socialist City, Still By Tom Angotti Over forty years ago when Planners Network started, many progressive planners proposed or discussed socialist alternatives to capitalist urban development and planning. Central planning in the Soviet Union, China and the emerging socialist nations of Africa and Asia was a reality, although there were differing judgments about the merits of these regimes. Many progressive planners went to Cuba and were inspired by the possibilities of revolutionary power. In the US, the civil rights, antiwar and new social movements were significant political forces and generated interest in socialism and Marxism. It was not unusual then to contemplate the prospect of planning without private property, even in North America. Marxist analysis was more commonly used to look at urban class and racial divisions. Though often the main theoreticians were European—North Americans have always had a strong pragmatist bent—Marxist categories were often used in urban analysis. The Soviet Union is no longer and the mass movements have dispersed. With the Reagan Revolution, the entire political spectrum shifted to the right. TINA (“There Is No Alternative”) is touted as the only alternative. US free-market capital rules a global empire. The US model of sprawled, segregated urban development is spreading across the globe. The failed socialist alternatives are criticized for being utopian. Progressive planners in North America take part in the debates about New Urbanism, smart growth, equity planning, environmental justice and other major issues. But there’s virtual silence when it comes to the themes of socialism and Marxism. Is Marxism relevant today as a theoretical or practical reference for progressive planners? What does dialectical and historical materialism have to offer in explaining urban phenomena and charting the course for progressive planners that deal with issues such as displacement, environmental justice, transportation equity, housing equity and participatory democracy? What can we learn from the history of socialist cities? In charting alternatives to capitalist urban development, is there a place for socialist alternatives, and if so, what is it?

Marxism Isn’t Religion

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unregulated “market” is good and “planning” is evil. This simplistic dualism results in a simplistic public discourse about urban planning. Marxism is commonly treated as simply an alternative set of dogma. I never was religious and distrust all holy texts. So did Marx, who didn’t like being called a Marxist. People use scriptures all the time to bless the cruelest atrocities. So I’m not going to defend “Marxism.” Marxist fundamentalism isn’t the answer to right wing fundamentalism. Yet this is the “Marxism” that is most often taught in Political Science 101, and too often propounded by self-declared Marxists. Those who simply reduce all problems to the struggle between an angelic working-class and demonic capitalist-class (or vice versa) belong in Bible School or on a throne. Dialectical and historical materialism, the basic methodology of Marxist thought and action, rejects the use of simplistic dualisms, abstractions divorced from practice, and static social and economic categories. Our all-American pragmatism pushes us too quickly to “get things done” without evaluating the underlying class and social forces we’re working with. Pragmatism is no doubt one of the occupational hazards of all practicing professions, but it can create serious problems when it’s used to shape political strategies.

Class and Race In the US the most perilous tripwire for Marxism has been the question of race. Too often class oppression is understood in a static way as separate from racism. Too many socialists, especially those with roots in organized labor, have failed to see racism as fundamental to the birth and expansion of US capitalism and fully entwined with class oppression. This is the only modern capitalist country that was founded on slavery. Large sectors of the white working-class continue to support racial apartheid. How can we understand the urban problems of segregation, inequality, suburban exclusion and urban rebellions without connecting racism with the growth of capitalism? How else can we understand North America’s suburban culture, the equation of public space with violence and danger and the readiness to kill people of color and bomb their cities in military exploits around the world to salvage the sprawled, gas-guzzling metropolis? If there is any struggle that is central to the issue of labor’s political power in the US, it’s the struggle for racial equality. Indeed, the reason for the historic political weakness of workers, unionized and otherwise, has been the division of the working-class along racial lines from the time of slavery and Jim Crow until today. The same dialectical optic that is needed to get at the connection between race and class needs to be applied to the questions of inequality of women, immigrants, 244

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gays/lesbians/transgendered, people with disabilities, and the elderly. This isn’t strictly a matter of separate identities. It is the class struggle, never a “pure” struggle and always mediated by social identities and specific environmental conditions. Readers may find similar views in Andy Merrifield’s book, Dialectical Urbanism (Monthly Review Press).

Urban Poverty and Displacement While constantly in need of updating, the basic foundations of Marxist urbanism still seem to be valid. In the nineteenth century Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote extensively about the miserable living conditions faced by the industrial working-class in Europe’s large cities. They maintained that the accumulation of capital in large cities was accompanied by the accumulation of misery—the formation of separate working-class neighborhoods with inadequate housing in an unhealthy environment. Today, conditions have improved vastly in the developed nations of Europe, North America and East Asia (less than 20 percent of the world’s population) in part due to a century-and-a-half of workingclass organizing, in part due to the enormous expropriation of wealth from poor nations by the rich. As capitalism has become increasingly global, the extreme conditions of inequality once observed in Birmingham now apply everywhere. The hundreds of global metropolises where finance capital is headquartered are miniature reproductions of London and New York City, with ghettoes and gold coasts, opulence and suffering, native elites and struggling immigrants. The metropolitan revolution is a by-product of the global rule of monopoly capital, not an outgrowth of local urban development. Outside the world’s metropolitan regions the majority of the population lives under conditions of increasing marginality, with their traditional sources of food and income priced out of the market by transnational corporations. Since capital now rules the globe, the urban mess belongs to capitalism, which continues to reproduce it everywhere it goes. Oil and auto monopolies give us sprawled metropolitan regions that consume inordinate amounts of energy, extend the journey to work, create public health crises, pollute the air and contribute to the global environmental crisis. Capitalism’s urban environmental crises of the nineteenth century were nothing compared to today’s global warming, ozone alerts and epidemics of cancer, heart disease and obesity, all tied to the structure and process of urban development. In a series of brilliant essays written in 1872-1873 and published as The Housing Question, Friedrich Engels picked up on perhaps the fundamental problem with the capitalist city. Unbridled real estate development, he said, forced working people out of their centrally245

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located neighborhoods so the property could be redeveloped for profit. Today, as global capital reaches cities everywhere with lightning speed, the process of urban redevelopment has accelerated. Displacement has become part of our everyday life, at home and at work. The commodification of land and housing makes planning in the public interest a difficult if not impossible task. Master plans and land use regulations are market-driven and growth is always good. In the latest phase of capitalist development, everything has been transformed into a commodity, including water, clean air and the human body. Towns and neighborhoods are branded, public places are privatized, nothing is left outside the capitalist circuit.

Lessons From The Socialist City For most of the twentieth century, billions of people throughout the world lived in cities where capitalist growth was not the driving force. In the Soviet Union, China before Deng, and scores of less developed countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America that in myriad and diverse ways set out to develop cities and economies based on social cooperation rather than competition, there were many experiences worth looking at. In attempts to build socialist cities there were many successes and failures, but too often urbanists and planners in the West hear only about the failures, if anything. A balanced assessment of these experiences can offer us many important lessons. In socialist cities, housing, public transportation, health care and education were offered at virtually no cost to the users. There were experiments with cooperative living. Tenants were rarely evicted. Private vehicular traffic, and all the environmental and public health problems that come with it, was minimal. There was no CBD enclave as we know it, and residential segregation by class and race was relatively limited. In the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, planners created over a thousand new towns following comprehensive master plans. Unlike the West, planned cities were actually built (of course, usually not as they were planned), and comprehensive planning was the rule, not the exception. We also know the serious problems with socialist city planning. Some of these were the same old problems that came with capitalism, aggravated by insensitive technocrats in power. Urban residents were the objects of top-down urban planning and had little say in shaping or changing their neighborhoods. Old neighborhoods were summarily wiped out by planners and replaced by planned communities, though unlike capitalist cities displaced people usually got free housing in new 246

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buildings in exchange. Many new problems emerged in the socialist cities. Stability of tenure became stagnation and lack of mobility. Elimination of the capitalist housing crisis gave way to a socialist housing crisis where government planners simply did not divert enough resources away from production, which itself became inefficient, and when they did they were unable to meet the rapidly changing needs of individuals and households with serially-produced industrial housing. The housing crisis was perhaps the main social problem underlying the collapse of the Soviet system and was intimately related to structural deficiencies in production, a lack of real democracy and the growth of inequalities. The Soviet system collapsed from its own inertia, but it was pushed into oblivion by a much stronger, better organized and more powerful force—the US and its Cold War allies. Savage, unregulated capitalism swiftly filled the void left by the Soviet collapse and in a short decade reduced much of the old Soviet Union to Third World status. With the collapse of the social welfare system, life expectancy dipped sharply, mortality rates spiked and the big cities sprouted CBDs, traffic jams and smog, ghettoes and gold coasts. To many who saw no hope or inspiration for a democratic socialism in the Soviet Union, its collapse wasn’t mourned. But to everyone who at any time dared to dream of alternatives, of a Utopia, this was an historic set-back. Now we have TINA: There Is No Alternative. Accept the inexorable march of capitalist development, let the “market” decide, and planners get out of the way. Cuba is one socialist country still trying to hold on to the social welfare gains they made over five decades. Planners there face enormous dilemmas and contradictions that often force them to compromise socialist principles. Socialism is no ideal utopia but a real struggle to end exploitative relations among people and improve the quality-of-life for all. As with all historic processes, there is no straight path to the future.

Community Versus Class Struggle? Catalonian urbanist Manuel Castells was one of the first Marxists to analyze contemporary urbanization and community struggles, starting with his classic work, The Urban Question. Castells, however, expressed a more sophisticated version of dualist thinking with his critique of community struggles, which he saw as divorced from class struggle. To be sure, there are enough reactionary and exclusionary communitybased organizations around to lend credence to this theory. But we also have a good share of reactionary and exclusionary labor unions. Many struggles to improve community life— from the suburban fights against Walmart to central city fights against displacement and 247

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gentrification—lead people to confront corporate control over their lives. Some are militant and consciously anti-capitalist, many are not. The same can be said for union struggles. There’s nothing innate to community struggles that make them any more prone to narrowness, bigotry or conservatism. We need only look at the community movements in Latin America for examples of highly organized, class-conscious community movements. And in this age of hyper-consumerism, capital is being confronted more and more at the point of consumption, not just the point of production.

Keep Utopia Alive

Practicing urban planners face a real ethical dilemma. Are we simply stuck with serving developers (“the market”) or can we serve broader interests and help diminish inequities? Don’t try to answer this question in the abstract. First develop a relationship with social movements that are struggling to develop both the theory and practice of alternative forms of urban living that don’t rely on capitalism’s drive for profits. There is no shortage of community-based organizations struggling for a more open, democratic society, building new relations of cooperation and solidarity among people. There are little pieces of utopia: progressive local development corporations, non-profit and employee-owned enterprises, community land trusts, co-operative and mutual housing, consumer and credit co-ops, and so forth. All have severe limitations in an economy and society built around corporate greed. But they are a testing ground for an alternative society. Progressive planners need to consider them and make a personal commitment to put their progressive ideas into practice. Utopias are critical components to progressive urban planning and it is important that we know their history and theory. We should keep in mind the classical critique by Friedrich Engels of utopian thinkers of his day. The problem, he said, was that they divorced their ideal communities from the real on-going political struggles. They tried to create socialist enclaves by turning their backs on the revolutionary struggles and the working-class as a whole. Too many Marxists have taken this critique out of context and adopted the simplistic dualism of reform versus revolution. History shows that the two can and must be understood as a dynamic relationship. This article was originally published in the Progressive Planning Magazine Reader #2.

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Sound Theory and Political Savvy By Morris Zeitlin Progressive planners are practical utopians. We do what we are forced to do to earn a living but are inspired by what we could and should do. This contradiction can be a source of both stress and strength in the daunting and bewildering time in which we live – a time of transition from an obsolescing social order to a higher yet dimly visible one on the horizon. To understand the often con- founding events and changes, and our perplexed selves, we need to understand the current times in the context of history.

Pragmatism Rules The ideology dominating our social environment makes it difficult to do this. The pragmatist outlook restricts vision to the here and now, to thinking and doing what is practical within the existing social order. It regards social innovation as an impractical idealistic utopia. From childhood to maturity, the media targets our minds to make us obedient subjects, obscuring our understanding of history lest it threaten the social order of the ruling class it defends. Pragmatism focuses on particulars and limits the scope of our vision. It can help to relieve traffic snarls but its blindness to general conditions is sure to choke highways. It is a static philosophy validating what is but preventing any forward thinking. Out of sync with nature's and society's laws of motion, it is alien to the scientific objectivity and comprehensive scope planners need. Marxism, on the other hand, is a dynamic philosophy. Based on a dialectical analysis of history, it searches for relations within and between wholes. In the words of Marxist philosopher Bertell Ollman, "It uncovers relations among what is, and what should be and what can be done about it all." It allows us to knit together into a comprehensive whole what pragmatist thinking and analysis "consign to separate mental compartments." In this light, the Marxist study of history discovered its motive force: the struggle between ruling and ruled classes driving society from lower to higher social orders, from antiquity up to our time. Just as capitalism emerged out of feudalism's insoluble inner contradictions, capitalism's insoluble inner contradictions lead to its decline, ultimately to be replaced with a cooperative social order, socialism – next higher stage in human history – by the working-class capitalism exploits. This, in a nutshell, is what Marxism is. To master the reasoned

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exposition of its principles requires much further study, but that effort will be rewarded with profound intellectual growth.

Which Side Are We On? To which social class do we planners belong? Clearly, we don't own the means of production or engage in trade. Therefore we belong to the class that earns its living by selling its physical and mental labor to the classes – and the institutions they control – that do own the means. In other words, we are part of the working-class. Many of us, however, come from the middle-class, with its typical ideological ambivalence, or from its neighbor, the upper-income working-class. The schools we've attended in the course of our professional training imbued us with the pragmatist ideology of the ruling class. That is why many of us tend to be ambivalent about politics and experience a great deal of anxiety about our work, problems that can be remedied by mastering Marxist theory and committing ourselves to the interests of the working-class. Whether we want to or not, we are involved in the class struggle. Personal integrity and peace of mind demand that we clearly see which side we're on and live, think and act accordingly. This brings us to the contradictions in our daily work. The upperclasses who employ us assign us to untangle the discords and conflicts created by their system of private ownership of the means of production and commodified land. The tangles threaten breakdowns in the cities and their system of market-driven capital accumulation. They need us to do that but no more than that, lest doing more lead to more extensive demands from the working-class for political changes they fear even more. Here lies the conflict between the humanitarian aspirations of progressive planners to make cities serve the people and the pragmatic chains capitalism shackles them with. Our humanism leads us to holistic perceptions of the world, the nation, the city, the neighborhood and the people in the global community. Holistic Marxist theory teaches us that the crises of American cities are local manifestations of the general crisis of capitalism, modified by the particularities of local, regional and national geography, politics and economics.

What Can We Do? How can we cope with the vexing dualities in our jobs? This calls for ongoing deliberation in the pages of PN Magazine, but here are a few thoughts to kick off the debate. Progressive workers can best overcome the conflict between job demands and political wisdom through 250

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committed activity in labor unions, people's organizations and progressive politics. In our privileged positions as planners in establishment offices, we can sometimes influence policies and pass on information useful to working-class organizations. The history of progressive planning has helped us learn the limitations of focusing on single and local issues. Today the horizons between local and global, and particular and general, grow increasingly blurred. Neighborhood struggles disconnected from the bigger working-class struggles yield limited good. Indeed, they often end in disorganization when City Hall dishes out a few favors or battles are lost. To expect local officials to heal the many ills of poor neighborhoods diverts people's attention away from the origins of their problems-ruling class national policies. Even the big gains some planners have achieved within rare reformminded city governments do not warrant belief in the would-be political powers of progressive planners. Reforms that are granted by the powers-that-be when they are hard-pressed in a crisis are soon withdrawn when the crisis is over. Only reforms wrested by sustained class struggle have proven lasting. We need a broad astute class approach in our work that illuminates the urban terrain, articulates people's needs and possibilities and debunks the cunning of officialdom and its accommodating media. We need to invent shrewd strategies and tactics. As an integrated part of the general class struggle we will find our own full strength. Some, viewing the present statically, may hesitate, saying that labor and popular movements do not foster a broad progressive coalition. Marxism, however, teaches us to see the undercurrent of changes going on, and to press for a reversal of the current retreat before the onslaught of reaction towards a counteroffensive for social progress. Witness the recent anti-war demonstrations that brought out millions of people. Capitalism appears to be reaching its zenith. It spread globally to exploit all it can and now has nowhere else to expand to survive. By the logic of its own system, it will stagnate and shrivel. The more brutally it tries to delay its doom, the greater the resistance it will incur. In these times we need to make the most we can while in retreat, honing our professional abilities, improving our organizational means and skills and seizing arising possibilities, emboldened by the sanity of Marxist ideological and political savvy. This article was originally published in the Summer 2003 issue of Progressive Planning Magazine. 251

Whose Right to What City By Kelly Anderson During the 1990s, after decades of disinvestment, white flight and suburbanization, American cities once again became sites of large-scale capital investment. The resulting waves of gentrification1 and displacement spurred the formation of new social movements, including many that considered themselves part of a US-based coalition The Right to the City (RTC). My own introduction to RTC was as the director of My Brooklyn, a documentary film I made with Allison Lirish Dean that documented the transformation of the Fulton Mall area of Downtown Brooklyn in the wake of a rezoning. RTC activists, including those affiliated with the organization Families United for Racial and Economic Equality (FUREE), were fighting to stop the displacement of small businesses and for a voice in the planning process. These goals were consonant with the way RTC described itself: Right to the City Alliance (RTC) emerged in 2007 as a unified response to gentrification and a call to halt the displacement of lowincome people, people of color, marginalized LGBTQ communities, and youths of color from their historic urban neighborhoods… Through shared principles and a common frame and theory of change, RTC is building a national movement for racial justice, urban justice, human rights, and democracy. By 2013, RTC consisted of 50 organizations in 19 American cities. These were, according to RTC Executive Director Rachel LaForest, mainly housing groups whose members were being displaced from their homes by gentrification. The key agent of displacement, according to LaForest, was “the development of posh and polished cosmopolitan cities that can be playgrounds or safe havens to the very wealthy.” The construction of these new enclaves was pushing poor urban residents to the margins of the city, limiting their access to education, health care, affordable housing and “the cultural and intellectual legacies that many of them have been building up for generations. In the US and internationally, RTC activism grew alongside RTC 1

“Gentrification” is a term with many definitions. In the 2015 study guide for the documentary My Brooklyn, Allison Lirish Dean defines it as “a process in which capital is reinvested in neighborhoods—usually those that have experienced a period of disinvestment—to create spaces that appeal to wealthier groups of people, often whites. Over time, lower-income groups are displaced” (Dean 21).

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theorization, which experienced a boom in the social sciences journals during the first decade of the 21st century. The text most evoked by RTC activists and intellectuals is Henri Lefebvre’s 1968 essay “The Right to the City.” Lefebvre’s text is a complex weave of philosophy and politics, at once a critique of rationalized urban planning and a claim that cities are the spaces most suited to emancipated and creative human development. Lefebvre refers to the human needs not generally considered by urban planners, including “the need for creative activity, for the oeuvre (not only of products and consumable material goods), of the need for information, symbolism, the imaginary and play.” The RTC’s “appeal is intuitive, its meaning elastic,” David Adler writes in Jacobin. This flexibility allows for a broad-based coalition whose participants can find common ground. But as Marcelo Lopes de Souza has argued, there are also dangers posed by an overly broad interpretation of the RTC: Many behave as if it should be clear to everybody what the “right to the city” means (more or less like “sustainability” and other umbrella-expressions and phrases). However, “the right to the city” should be regarded (at least by emancipatory social movements and radical intellectuals) as a kind of “contested territory,” since the danger of a vulgarisation and domestication of Lefebvre’s phrase by status-quoconform institutions and forces is a real one.

In “What Kind of Right Is the Right to the City?” CUNY Urban Studies professor Kafui Attoh argues convincingly that “rights within the literature on the right to the city remain a black box.… Is the right to the city a socio-economic right or a liberty right, a legal right or a moral right, a prima facie right or an absolute right?”2 For a movement called “The Right to the City,” it does seem that there has been surprisingly little discussion about what concepts of “rights” are being evoked, not only by those writing about RTC, but also by the thousands of activists globally who are working to secure some version of this “right.” During the production and distribution of My Brooklyn, provocative questions emerged, such as: What does the right to the city entail? Where does this right come from, and who adjudicates it? Why does one group's right to the city matter more than 2

Kafui A. Attoh. “What Kind of Right Is the Right to the City?” Progress in Human Geography, 35:5, (2011), 669–85.

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another’s? Is it just a matter of who has been here longer, or is there something more fundamental at stake? To answer these questions, we must first investigate the many meanings of rights.

The Emergence of “Rights” and the “Right of Man” The idea of “rights” so permeates contemporary political life that it can be startling to realize the concept is only a few hundred years old. Though earlier discussions of rights could be found in Britain (in particular John Locke’s definition of rights to “life, liberty and property”), many argue that Rousseau launched the idea of universal rights into the public sphere with his 1762 Social Contract, in which he wrote that “men, who may be unequal in strength or intelligence, become every one equal by convention and legal right.”3 Intellectual historian Jonathan Israel argues that Enlightenment ideas prior to 1750 were largely characterized by philosophical debates about science and religion, but “by 1789, radical thought and its social and legal goals had indeed come to form a powerful rival ‘package logic’—equality, democracy, freedom of the individual, freedom of thought and expression, and a comprehensive religious toleration—that could be proclaimed as a clearly formulated package of basic human rights.”4 With the notion of rights came questions: Who had rights? Which rights should be protected? Which should be guaranteed? How? The lists of rights drawn up by various factions of the French Revolution in 1789 included liberty of the press, some freedom of religion, equal taxation, equal treatment under the law, and protection from arbitrary arrest. The French philosopher the Marquis de Condorcet classified them as 1) personal security and liberty 2) security of, and freedom to own, property, and 3) equality.

Freedom vs. Equality From the outset, rights were not just a question of individual liberty; they were also bound up with the issue of social and economic equality. Rousseau himself believed extreme inequality was a threat to the social order, being that it was the cause “of mutual hatred among the citizens, of indifference to the common cause, of the corruption of the people, and of the weakening of all the spring of government.” But how much inequality was dangerous? Could too much equality conflict 3

Jean Jacques Rousseau. The Social Contract. 1762. Jonathan Israel. Democratic Enlightenment. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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with people’s individual rights? This was hotly debated among the bourgeois intellectuals of the French Revolution; equality and freedom jockeyed for dominance in the various Charters on the Rights of Man. During the 19th and 20th centuries, socialists were the political and intellectual force most interested in achieving economic equality (or at least subsistence) for the poor, but their support for rights (especially those besides labor rights) was weak. As Samuel Moyn, author of the recent book Not Enough, writes, “If the rights of man were primarily those of free enterprise and sacrosanct property, many thought it best to oppose the whole notion of rights rather than supplement the list” by including rights to subsistence.5 Marx, who figures prominently in much of the intellectual work around the RTC, was unsympathetic to rights-based politics. In her book Inventing Human Rights, Lynn Hunt summarizes Marx’s criticism as follows: “Rights of man guaranteed religious freedom when what man needed was freedom from religion; they confirmed the right to own property when what was needed was freedom from property; they included the right to engage in business when what was needed was liberation from business….”6 This tension persisted well into the 20th century, and continues today. Willie Baptist, a formerly homeless community organizer, states the problem compellingly: “What good is it to be able to go into a restaurant now since they’ve taken down the ‘whites only’ sign if you can’t afford a hamburger?”

Human Rights and “Generational” Rights According to legal scholar Jeremy Waldron, the socialist concern that a focus on rights necessarily means deprioritizing economic needs has largely been resolved. Some clarity on the question was achieved through a distinction drawn between “first generation” and “second generation” rights. According to Waldron, “first generation” rights include individual rights like free speech, religious liberty, and due process. “Second generation” rights are those that guarantee relief from material poverty and inequality. A key document in the advancement of second generation rights is the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As Moyn articulates, this ambitious declaration of rights “consecrated the democratic welfare state that had emerged 5

Samuel Moyn. Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World. (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2018). 6 Lynn Hunt. Inventing Human Rights. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008).

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victorious from World War II.” For RTC activists, the key provision is Article 25, which states that “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care.” Also relevant to some RTC demands are third generation rights, which protect communal goods like “language, culture and tradition.” Many RTC organizations use the 1948 declaration as part of their theory of change. The National Economic and Social Rights Initiative (NESRI), a RTC affiliate, describes the relationship of human rights to their work: “Based on the principle that fundamental human needs create human rights obligations on the part of the government and private sector, NESRI advocates for public policies that guarantee the universal and equitable fulfillment of these rights in the United States.” NESRI critiques neoliberal policies, which prioritize growth through generous subsidies to the private sector with the assumption that the benefits will “trickle down,” and asserts that it is “community” that holds the rights to development, and that any proposed project must meet five criteria: Equity, Universality, Participation, Transparency and Accountability. Despite its widespread use in advocacy and social change around the world, however, the human rights framework has its critics. Some question the entire concept of second generation rights. These detractors often come from the more conservative end of the political spectrum, but they raise important questions. What if the resources required to meet these needs are already owned by private individuals or corporations? Where does one individual’s right to make money through property ownership and development conflict with another’s right to housing, to community, to the right to roots or to remain in place? In Not Enough, Moyn mounts a different kind of argument about the viability of using human rights to combat inequality. For Moyn, human rights discourses march in lockstep with the economic system of an era, and our current hyper-inequality reflects the triumph of neoliberalism over the social welfare state, which, “shot through with exclusion though it was, constrained material inequality more than any other political arrangements that modern humanity has learned to bring about.” He argues that “The age of human rights has not been kind to full-fledged distributive justice, because it is also an age of the victory of the rich” in which people “invest their hopes (and money) in human rights, looking the other way when vast inequality

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soars.” If there is any hope for human rights in advancing equality, Moyn argues, the movement will have to refocus its efforts and promote labor and other social rights that help foster collective empowerment and counter market fundamentalism.

The Persistent Problem of Property The issue of property rights continues to present a particularly thorny area for RTC groups. On the one hand, organizations often fall back on individual property rights to fight the seizure of property under Eminent Domain law, as was common practice under Urban Renewal (often renamed “Negro Removal”) in the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s. Opposition to eminent domain continues to flare up, especially since the 2005 Kelo vs. The City of New London Supreme Court decision expanded the permissible uses of eminent domain to include private projects that would contribute to “economic development.” From other corners of the RTC movement, however, a critique of individual property rights resounds loudly and clearly. Squatters have always claimed that property ownership rights can be trumped by a moral right to occupy land. At a less radical end of the spectrum, many activists and even city officials are talking seriously about expanding the use of community land trusts to take property off the speculative market and collectivize its ownership. In What a City Is For, Vancouver-based Matt Hern asks provocative questions about the right to the city as it relates to property rights and ethical claims: Considering displacement is to ask who deserves access to land and why, and those answers, or at least those questions strike me as right at the heart of what a city should be for. Cities should be setting us free, and in many ways and for many of us, they do. But all cities are built on colonial plunder, and most, certainly those in my part of the world, have been built on the backs of racist dominations and unearned privilege.

Hern questions the assumption that people should automatically have a right to stay where they are, solely because they have resided in a particular area for a given amount of time, and the “us” versus “them” politics that emerge from those assumptions. After all, every wave of newcomers since the indigenous inhabitants of our lands has displaced someone. Instead, Hern argues that we need a deeper, non-property 257

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based way of thinking, and that a solution to displacement can only be theorized in a “decolonized politics of land, ownership and sovereignty.” Hern advocates for models of land tenancy that take new approaches to questions of ownership: community land trusts, cooperative housing and squatting. “The City is a collective achievement,” he writes, “but so many of us are entirely acclimated to believing that differential and preferential access to the benefits is justified. How unimaginative is that?” Imagination, perhaps, is the thread that leads us back to Lefebvre, via David Harvey. In his essay The Right to the City, Harvey interprets LeFebvre as saying that the right to the city is more than an individual—or even collective— right to resources.7 It is, Harvey writes “a right to change ourselves by changing the city.” We need to imagine ourselves outside of the choices capitalism has constructed for us, to ask “what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire.” We answer these questions not in the abstract, but by participating in urban life, making abstract rights (to education, work, culture, rest, health, housing) real by joining with others in political and other types of action. “The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is,” according to Harvey, “one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.” How do we exercise this right? Harvey theorizes that cities grow through a geographical and social accumulation of capital. Capitalist logic dictates that profit created through real estate development must be reinvested, creating the need for endless redevelopment. For Harvey, the right to the city is very specifically the right to control the way surplus capital created in this manner is reinvested.

Rights in Action The question of rights is not simply an abstract intellectual debate. Each notion of rights is embedded with assumptions, which, when activated, result in widely different political forms. Having spent a decade involved in anti-gentrification and anti-displacement politics in New York City, I believe one way people could reclaim their right to the city is by fighting for a more participatory and democratic land use review process. Right now, decisions on critical issues like zoning and subsidies are made largely behind closed doors, and then ratified through a highly circumscribed public hearing process where the public has very 7

David Harvey. “The Right to the City,” New Left Review. September/October 2008. https://newleftreview.org/II/53/david-harvey-the-right-to-the-city.

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little impact and the state is subject to minimal accountability. We need to force open the process to make it more transparent and allow meaningful participation by the public. One way to begin this process would be by amending the city’s charter to make community boards elected, not appointed, and then giving them a binding (not advisory) vote on rezoning and other land use actions. In the case of Downtown Brooklyn, Allison and I came to realize that the displacement of the African-American and Caribbean businesses from Downtown Brooklyn wasn’t unfair or unjust simply because they had been there a long time, or because city policy created hardship for individual business owners (though of course that was true). What made their displacement a deeply moral and political affront was that these business owners had survived in Brooklyn through redlining and disinvestment, crises caused not just by racism but by the use of racial categorization to make money for white developers and landowners. As historian Craig Wilder says in the film, We took millions of people across the United States, and we basically imprisoned them in small sections of cities, and we set public policy that destroyed many of their lives. And now 40 years later, we’ve decided that those neighborhoods have value and so we’re in the process of distributing them and disbursing them again for the convenience of someone else.

People and communities arrive in the present with different histories of privilege, inclusion, exclusion and even violence. Before we can begin to balance whose right to the city may trump someone else's, we will need to take a hard look at how we got to this point. Seen in this light, the most important right in the RTC may be the right to resist having the results of collective labor be taken away by land owners, investors and their political agents. Making this right real would force us to reimagine the relationship between people, labor and land. Yes, the RTC is aspirational. It’s not something we have, but it’s something worth fighting for. This article was originally published on Progressive City on July 2, 2018.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS Kelly Anderson is a documentary filmmaker whose films include My Brooklyn, about the hidden forces driving gentrification, and Every Mot er’s Son (with Tami Gold), about mothers whose children were killed by police officers and who became advocates for police reform. She is the recipient of the George Stoney Award for Outstanding Documentary and an audience award from the Tribeca Film Festival, and her work has aired on PBS. She currently chairs the Department of Film and Media Studies at Hunter College (CUNY). Tom Angotti is Professor Emeritus of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York. He joined Planners Network in 1975, was co-editor of Progressive Planning Magazine and is now an editor of Progressive City. Petra Doan is Professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at Florida State University. She has edited two books: Queerying Planning: Challenging Heteronormative Assumptions and Reframing Planning Practice (Ashgate, 2011) and Planning and LGBTQ Communities: the Need for Inclusive Queer Space (Routledge, 2015) Her numerous articles have been published in Gender, Place, and Culture, City and Community, the Journal of Lesbian Studies, Wo en’s Studies Quarterly, Environment and Planning A, the Journal of Planning Education and Research, Progressive Planning, and the International Review of Urban and Regional Research. Kanishka Goonewardena was trained as an architect in Sri Lanka and now writes about urban studies and critical theory, teaching since 1999 in the Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto. William Harris, Sr. is Adjunct Professor at Georgia Regents University, and former Professor and Chair of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at Jackson State University. Hasan Kwame Jeffries is an associate professor of History at The Ohio State University. His book Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alaba a’s Black Belt was published in 2009 by NYU Press. Marie Kennedy is Professor Emerita of Community Planning at the College of Public and Community Service, University of Massachusetts Boston. In addition to working as a planner and architect in various ca260

About the Authors

pacities, she has written and developed curriculum around community participation, urban politics, social movements, and planning pedagogy. Annette Koh teaches urban planning at Cal Poly Pomona. She coorganized the first and second Decolonizing Cities symposia at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa and is continuing to learn about how to decolonize urban planning. Allison Lirish Dean is a writer and media maker based in Portland, Oregon. She hosts and produces Ear to the Pavement, a podcast about progressive urban planning in association with Progressive City. Allison researched and produced the award-winning documentary film My Brooklyn (2012), which has been used as an organizing tool by anti-gentrification activists around the world, and has covered the arts, gender, and urban planning and policy issues for outlets such as Studio 360, Next City, HuffPost, The Brooklyn Rail, and Gotham Gazette. Jeffrey Lowe is an Associate Professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Environmental Policy at Texas Southern University and a Progressive City Editorial Board member. He wrote Rebuilding Communities the Public Trust Way: Community Foundation Assistance to CDCs, 1980-2000 (Lexington Press) He is a founding member of the Planners of Color Interest Group of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP), and immediate-past chair of ACSP's Committee on Diversity. Peter Marcuse, F.A.I.C.P, a lawyer and planner, taught urban planning at Columbia University in New York City for over 30 years. He is past President of the Los Angeles City Planning Commission, former chair of Community Board 9’s Housing Committee in Manhattan, and long active in Planners Network. He is now retired, and living in Santa Barbara, California. Heather McClean is a former community planner, Heather McLean and an Economic and Social Research Council Future Research Leader based at the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Glasgow. Sylvia Morse received her Master of Urban Planning degree from CUNY Hunter College, where she focused on housing and participatory planning. She is a lifelong New Yorker who has worked with community-based and non-profit organizations dedicated to affordable 261

About the Authors

housing, community-based planning and racial and economic justice. Dick Platkin is a retired city planner with 30 plus years of experience in the public sector (Seattle and Los Angeles), and the private and nonprofit sectors in Los Angeles. Since retiring from the LA City Planning Department, he taught planning classes at the University of Southern California and California State University-Northridge, consulted with community groups in Los Angeles, and joined the boards of United Neighborhoods for Los Angeles (UN4LA) and the Planners Network. He writes a weekly CityWatchLA. John A. Powell is the founding director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Gregory H. Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the Mortiz College of Law at the Ohio State University. Edwin R. Quiles-Rodriguez is an Architect and Planner who works mostly in participatory community design projects. He is founder of the University of Puerto Rico Community Design Workshop and author of the books San Juan tras la fachada, una mirada desde sus espacios ocultos (1508-1900), La ciudad de los balcones, and El haitiano que hablaba inglés: la escuela primaria que construimos en Haití. Barbara Rahder is Professor Emerita and former Dean of the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto, a Fellow of the Canadian Institute of Planners, and a member of Planners Network since 1978. Norma Rantisi is a Professor in the Department of Geography, Planning & Environment at Concordia University in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal, Quebec, Canada. She is trained in planning and economic geography and currently serves as Co-Chair of Planners Network and a founder and editor of the online magazine, Progressive City: Radical Alternatives. Silky Shah is the Executive Director of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power to abolish immigration detention in the US. She has worked as an organizer on issues related to immigration detention, mass incarceration, and racial and migrant justice for over 15 years. Sheryl-Ann Simpson is Assistant Professor in Geography and Environ262

About the Authors

mental Studies at Carleton University. Her research and teaching are informed by an interest in the ways in which states and communities interact in place. Samuel Stein is a geography PhD candidate at the City University of New York Graduate Center. His work focuses on the politics of urban planning, with an emphasis on housing, real estate, labor, and gentrification in New York City. In 2019, Verso published his first book, Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State. Henry Louis Taylor, Jr. is an internationally recognized scholar for his work on distressed urban neighborhood and social isolation among people of color. His research focuses on a historical and contemporary analysis of distressed urban neighborhoods, social isolation and race and class issues among people of color, especially African Americans and Latinos. Taylor’s research also focuses on these issues in Cuba, the Caribbean Islands and Latin America. Taylor is concerned with the redevelopment of shrinking cities and metropolitan cities, with a focus on social, economic and racial justice. Chris Tilly is Professor of Urban Planning and Sociology at the University of California Los Angeles. He conducts US and global research on bad jobs and how to make them better and on social movements. His recent books include Are Bad Jobs Inevitable? and Where Bad Jobs Are Better: Retail Jobs across Countries and Companies. Natalie Bump Vena is an assistant professor in the Urban Studies Department at Queens College-CUNY. She specializes in the environmental law and policy of U.S. cities. Theresa Williamson, PhD, is a city planner and founding executive director of Catalytic Communities (Cat/Comm), an NGO working to support Rio de Janeiro’s favelas through asset-based community development. Theresa is also Editor-in-Chief of Rio on Watch, CatComm’s internationally recognized hyperlocal-to-global watchdog news site and favela news service. Editor’s Note: We have included biographies for all authors whose contributions were originally published after 2014 in Progressive Planning Magazine and two Progressive Planning Readers. 263

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