urban planning

La Calle: Spatial Conflicts and Urban Renewal in a Southwest City

farhana — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 20:00:00 +0000

In her historical work La Calle, Otero focuses on the city of Tucson’s elimination of the Mexican cultural center known as “La Calle” in the late sixties. While this event may seem minor in the grand scheme of things, Otero successfully argues that the incident was in fact proof of a bias against Tuscon citizens of Mexican descent and representative of a far larger problem.

No other United States city has remained under Mexican control as long as Tucson, which was not fully acquired by the U.S. until 1856. As a result, the city retained both a people and a culture that reflected its prolonged ties to Mexico. While the Mexican flavor was initially used as a means to attract Caucasian tourists, the city later began a plan to “revitalize” the city by eliminating such centers of Mexican culture as La Calle, a downtown area populated by small locally owned boutiques, Latin flavored restaurants, and the Plaza movie theater, which showed films in Spanish. The city of Tucson chose to eliminate this popular downtown destination in favor of replacing the area’s attractions with chain stores and strip malls designed to attract suburban Caucasian visitors, believing such a change would mean a higher profit for the city.

The bias towards Mexican-Americans also went further with realtors not selling them homes to keep them out of Caucasian neighborhoods, and restrictive mortgage policies. Otero makes her case by culling local city records and utilizing the oral history from city residents who experienced firsthand the changes made to Tucson during the sixties. Otero’s evidence clearly points to a policy rooted in a belief that Mexican Americans were second class citizens and that historical monuments tying Tucson to its Mexican history were not worth saving.

As a whole the book does a good job at pointing to the larger issue of the political implications of city planning. Otero quotes feminist geographer Linda McDowell who stated “Places are made through power relations which construct the rules that define boundaries. These boundaries define who belongs to a place and who may be excluded, as well as the location or site of the experience.”

We may take for granted that the arrangement, boundaries, as well as what is deemed worth preserving, within the cities we reside in may most likely have been influenced by racism, classism, and sexism.

Written by: Adrienne Urbanski, February 21st 2011

Finding Delhi: Loss and Renewal in the Megacity

mandy — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Edited by Bharati Chaturvedi

Penguin India

New Delhi is a city that has undergone many incarnations in its lifespan. Just a century after the British built the city to be the capital of the crown jewel that was India, Delhi is racing towards becoming a world-class city. Published on the eve of the city’s hosting the October 2010 Commonwealth Games, which was supposed to serve as Delhi’s coming out party in the twenty-first century, the collection of essays in Finding Delhi explores what happens to the lives of its twenty million inhabitants as the city is re-engineered and re-imagined for the new millennium.

What happens to people who are driven out from the urban city centers, the places where they ply their trade, to live on the outskirts of town? What happens when public spaces are increasingly replaced with private malls and coffee shops, spaces that are no longer free to everyone? Who has the right to public spaces? Is it just the middle and upper classes, or do all inhabitants of a city possess this right?

Environmentalist and Delhi-based writer Bharati Chaturvedi attempts to answer such questions. The co-founder of Chintan, an NGO that works to increase environmental justice and reduce ecological footprints, Chaturvedi makes Finding Delhi unique by not assembling the usual cast of urban planners and educated intellectuals to discuss the city’s metamorphosis; she brings us the voices of fourteen full- and part-time residents, ranging from environmental activists to “urban-sector” workers, street vendors and other entrepreneurs who have contributed to Delhi’s vibrant formal and informal economy for centuries and risk being erased from the glittering new city streets and urban edifices that are being planned for New Delhi. Each chapter reflects the unique voice and opinion of these diverse individuals.

In her introduction Chaturvedi discusses how in the not-so-distant past it became fashionable to characterize what she terms “work on the greens” as being detached from the reality of the poor, but, as she aptly points out, the greening of the environment is also of importance to the working poor: “Lamenting the loss of tree cover in Delhi, an itinerant vendor remarked during a meandering conversation, ‘I miss all the trees now. I used to enjoy looking at the leaves and my mind used to become fresh even in the heat of summer.’” Chaturvedi notes that the idea of a green city came up over and over again in numerous conversations she had with residents who are considered the working poor of Delhi.

In the chapter “Remaindered Things and Remaindered Lives,” contributor Vinay Gidwani asks the reader to consider what happens to their discarded gym shoes and introduces us to Mundka, a township on the edge of West Delhi that Gidwani dubs a “site of reincarnation not just for Delhi’s detritus, but the entire world.” Gidwani describes a recycling industry that operates in an almost subterranean fashion, including the 150,000 to 200,000 ragpickers who make a living sorting and selling recyclables that are found in Delhi’s garbage. He points out that Delhi produces 7,500 tons of garbage daily. A large amount of this is recycled by the ragpickers, who are very poor and work in hazardous conditions.

Because Delhi’s focus is on the formal-sector economy, city officials view these workers as unskilled and not contributing to the retail economy, but Gidwani contends that the informal sector workers provide an array of services that enable formal sector workers to continue their privileged lifestyle—from vegetable vendors to cycle cart pullers who deliver appliances, or grocers who deliver bulk orders to households. He contends that Delhi today is inhabited by two “eco-classes.” He notes, “On the one side, a way of life that churns out growing quantities of waste; on the other, lives that live off this commodity detritus.” Gidwani asks the reader to consider what a different city Delhi would look like if the ruling elite actually learned to recognize and value the important contributions that these marginalized people and places make to their daily lives.

In “Women Reimagining the City,” Kalpana Viswanath discusses the harassment and violence that women encounter on a daily basis in the city; she writes that “being a woman in Delhi is often an intimidating, frightening, worrisome and, at the least, uncomfortable experience.” She points out that although Western cities were historically viewed as male spaces (hence the term streetwalker to describe women who walked the streets alone at night), developing urban areas also provided female friendly spaces in the form of department stores, tea rooms, and promenades. Viswanath notes that class plays a significant role in a woman’s experience in Delhi.

Delhi does not fare well when it comes to gender equity indicators; only seven percent of the Delhi police force are women, and according to recent crime data, Delhi accounts for thirty percent of reported rapes in India’s largest cities. Taking public transportation in the city exposes women to potential harassment and abuse, and Viswanath indicates that no women are immune to gender-based violence by highlighting the highly publicized murders of young women of privilege. She closes by writing, “The big challenge will be to transform people’s attitudes towards women as citizens with equal rights.”

I found Finding Delhi to be one of the most thought provoking books I’ve read in a long time. Some books have a profound effect on how one thinks about their world and this is one of those books. The topics and issues discussed are not unique to Delhi; cities across the globe are increasingly having to balance the need for economic and industrial growth without losing the sense of humanity and culture that gives a city its soul. It is a delicate balancing act and one that can benefit from each person playing an active role in re-imagining their cities and interconnected destinies.

Written by: Gita Tewari, January 15th 2011

Common Ground in a Liquid City: Essays in Defense of an Urban Future

admin — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Matt Hern

AK Press

First off, let me say I am not a big fan of urban planning. Even the kindly Jane Jacobs got it wrong with her advocacy of new building along side streets—infill. The condo craze that damages communities from Brooklyn, where I live, to Vancouver, the focus of Common Ground in a Liquid City, can proceed very well along side streets to gentrification and displacement. Author Matt Hern put all my defenses on alert by his proposition early on that continuing urbanization is a given and that greater urban density is essential on a planet of diminishing resources.

Through disarming chunks of personal narrative, Hern manages to craft an argument that soothed me, a victim twice-over of mainstream urban planning, sufficiently enough to win me over. Perhaps city-dwellers can rationally and emotionally work toward a better urban future for all. Patiently, he turns up the dial on radical analysis to indict our metastasizing capitalist “growth” and help us hear its attendant liquid slosh of cash, careers, and mobility.

In both his thoughtful travelogues and his arguments, he gives the concept of place, real dirt and actual location, its rightful, well, place in society and the economy. (He acknowledges the argument that modern communities can also be based on common social and professional interests, but does not refute it here.) For Hern, place is the foundation of community, even though he travels as far as the Kurdish city of Diyarbakir to make his points. He always comes back to his neighborhood in East Vancouver.

I particularly enjoyed his account of his quick get-away from New York City in the face of his partner’s unplanned pregnancy. Not “making it” in New York is a cliched B-movie plot; it is also more often than not a rational and strategic retreat from self-destruction. His is bittersweet, and distance may allow him better to take down the Rudy Giuliani style over policing that doesn’t prevent stabbings on the subway but does drain the city budget.

A few words about the artful structure of the book: each chapter compares Vancouver with another city or town and focuses on making a point. I particularly like how he pinpoints the similarities between Vancouver and Las Vegas, puncturing the self-righteous image of his “green” hometown. Along with his geographic travels, Hern hits practically all the right notes, advocating farmers markets, bicycles and public transportation, and urban agriculture; and dissing tax abatements for stadiums, development that prices out lower-paid workers, competition among cities for the Olympics, and urban branding to attract tourists and capital.

Okay, there is nothing new in the writer being part of the story. Sunday supplement feature writers and neoliberal apologist Tom Friedman have all been doing this for years, but Hern adds one essential ingredient: an authentic commitment to structural change, not from a do-gooder platform, but also for himself, his friends, his family, and all of us. Special message to those going into “urban planning” thinking they will change the world: agitate to get this well-researched but non-stuffy book on the syllabus.

Written by: Frances Chapman, April 18th 2010