Survival Bloc is a BIPOC-led network of leaders, movement organizations, and grassroots groups building power and community alternatives to survive the extinction era.

Survival Bloc recently released a new free guidebook, How to Build a Survival Program, filled with “insights, tools and practices for communities to build their own survival programs and other strategies for climate resilience.”

Daisy Carter (she/they) is a queer multi-disciplinary artist, yogi and climate justice organizer working at the intersections of grassroots leadership development, disaster resiliency, and mutual aid infrastructure. They work to implement strategies for self-determination, cultural revival, and alternative care that aim to protect frontline, ВІРОС (black, brown, and people of color) communities who are most vulnerable to climate disaster and political violence. As a movement consultant, they have trained over 500+ leaders in power-building strategies across the country, and worked for organizations such as CODEPINK, The Poor People’s Campaign, The Climate Mobilization Project, and more. Born in New Orleans, LA, they are currently based in Louisville, KY. Daisy is a co-founder of Survival Bloc and works as Network Organizer.

Aracely Jimenez-Hudis (she/they) is a queer community organizer and facilitator born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. Over the years, they have led strategic communications + grassroots mobilizations for major movement organizations and campaigns, including The Sunrise Movement and Los Angeles Tenants Union. As a certified yogi with a background in sociology, they are mostly interested in how to build up marginalized communities capacities for intergenerational healing, processing systemic and disaster related traumas, and cultivating resilience within the body. Aracely is also a co-founder of Survival Bloc, and holds down Communications Support.

Resources:

• Survival Bloc 
• Survival Bloc Network Member Application – for folks interested in joining the network, cross-movement collaborations, or building their own survival program
• Free Zine: How To Build a Survival Program 
• Mutual Aid 101 Toolkit from Shareable
• Support The Response: https://www.shareable.net/donate/ 

Episode credits:

• Hosted and executive produced by Tom Llewellyn
• Produced and edited by Paige Kelly
• Theme Music by Cultivate Beats

Follow The Response on Twitter and Instagram for updates, memes, and more. Our entire catalog of documentaries and interviews can be found at theresponsepodcast.org — or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Response is an award-winning podcast series produced by Shareable exploring how communities respond to disaster — from hurricanes to wildfires to reactionary politics and more.

Want to help spread the word? Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify — it makes a huge difference in reaching new people who may otherwise not hear about this show.

Available anywhere you get your podcasts, including:

The post Organizing in the Extinction Era with Survival Bloc appeared first on Shareable.

Between the war in Sudan, the serious threat of ethnic cleansing in Palestine across Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem by the US and Israel, the continued rise of far-right governments around the world, the government-sanctioned theft by the billionaire class, and the attempted erasure of non-conforming genders and bodily autonomy oh and the mass deportation of our friends and neighbors, the criminalization of dissent, and so much more, it’s hard not to just curl up and pretend like it’s not happening.

As Dean Spade put it, it’s no coincidence that we’re experiencing the golden age of television as the world burns…

And yet, as David Byrne and his brethren would say, there are still reasons to be cheerful.

For me, it’s learning about the myriad ways that people are stepping up to care for each other, resist the onslaught that is coming at them, and build the social and physical infrastructure necessary to protect, sustain, and grow their communities.

What is even more encouraging is the sheer number of new people who are showing up and showing out.

Last week, we were blown away by the 2,200 people who registered for our new Mutual Aid 101 Series!

We were fortunate to have Dean Spade, organizer, teacher, and the author of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the Next)” and “Love in a Fucked Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell, Together” lead the first session.

Dean dropped some serious knowledge for nearly 90 minutes straight. All the while, the Zoom chat was on fire while a new learning community was being formed.

The series continues tomorrow, Wednesday, February 26th, with Julian Rose from the New Economy Coalition and Endstate ATL and Stephanie Rearick from Human’s United in Mutual Aid Networks, a previous guest on The Response. They’ll focus on how to build and sustain mutual aid projects without burning out.

The first phase of this series runs through the end of March, and several more trainings are scheduled throughout the rest of the year.

There’s also the Mutual Aid 101 Community Canvas, where we post recordings, resources, and session updates.

There are links to everything mentioned in the show notes below.

Throughout this season of The Response, we’ll share a mix of original interviews, dispatches from the front lines of disasters, and excerpts from Mutual Aid 101 (like this one).

In this episode of The Response, we’re sharing the full recording of Dean’s training. We’ve shared the transcript, slides, links for the chat, and more in the resources section below.

Resources:

• Mutual Aid 101 Learning Series
• Mutual Aid 101 Community Canvas
• Mutual Aid 101 w/ Dean Spade (Video)
• Mutual Aid 101 w/ Dean Spade (Transcript)
• Mutual Aid 101 w/ Dean Spade (Slides)
• Mutual Aid 101 w/ Dean Spade (Links from Dean + chat)
• Dean’s Books
• Donate to The Response

Episode credits:

• Hosted and executive produced by Tom Llewellyn
• Produced and edited by Paige Kelly
• Theme Music by Cultivate Beats

Follow The Response on Twitter and Instagram for updates, memes, and more. Our entire catalog of documentaries and interviews can be found at theresponsepodcast.org — or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Response is an award-winning podcast series produced by Shareable exploring how communities respond to disaster — from hurricanes to wildfires to reactionary politics and more.

Want to help spread the word? Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify — it makes a huge difference in reaching new people who may otherwise not hear about this show.

Available anywhere you get your podcasts, including:

The post Mutual aid for survival and resistance with Dean Spade appeared first on Shareable.

In 2018, after we finished our first set of audio documentaries for The Response, it was clear that the personal stories shared with us by those on the front lines of climate, political, and social disasters should also be brought to the stage.

And so, in homage, we have called these live performances, Voices of The Response. 

We’re still developing the full performance, but we were invited to workshop excerpts at the Oregon Country Fair last year. With the support of Eric Brahman, we worked with local spoken word artists to perform unique pieces each day of the festival during the Storytelling Smorgasbord.

Today you’ll hear the recordings from that event, including stories related to previous California wildfires.

Resources:

• Mutual Aid Los Angeles Network
• Mutual Aid 101 Learning Series
• Audio documentaries:
  • “The impact of Northern California fires on the undocumented community“
  • “Radical approaches to disaster relief in New York“
  • “Reimagining Paradise in an Age of climate disruption“
• Donate to The Response

Episode credits:

• Hosted and executive produced by Tom Llewellyn
• Produced and edited by Paige Kelly
• Stories in this week’s episode written by Robert Raymond
• Stories in this episode were read by Shachar Efrati, Jen Hernandez, Tom Llewellyn, Jeany Snider, David Snider, Eric Brahman, and Shachar Efrati.
• A special thanks to Tzula for playing the harp during the performances
• Theme Music by Cultivate Beats

Follow The Response on Twitter and Instagram for updates, memes, and more. Our entire catalog of documentaries and interviews can be found at theresponsepodcast.org — or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Response is an award-winning podcast series produced by Shareable exploring how communities respond to disaster — from hurricanes to wildfires to reactionary politics and more.

Want to help spread the word? Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify — it makes a huge difference in reaching new people who may otherwise not hear about this show.

Available anywhere you get your podcasts, including:

The post Voices of The Response: Live at the Oregon Country Fair 2024 appeared first on Shareable.

We believe a more just and joyful world is not only possible but it’s constantly being realized in communities all across the globe. That vital work of regular people, often in the face of incredible hardship, continually inspires us.

Here’s a glimpse in 10 stories:

1. Modern-day colonialism and the tragic fate of an indigenous water and land protector

This story by Allen Myers shares insights from his 2022 trip to Brumadinho, Brazil, where he witnessed the enduring scars left by a 2019 dam collapse and the fight for justice that followed.

2. Life-Saving lending library: Union supplies Palestinian journalists with safety gear amid ongoing Israeli genocide

This story by Arvind Dilawar focuses on the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate’s efforts to supply Palestinian journalists with safety gear amid Israel’s genocide in Palestine.

3. The transformative power of Urban Recipe’s Atlanta food co-op model

Urban Recipe is an Atlanta-based food co-op dedicated to “food with dignity.” Shareable is partnering with Urban Recipe for our Food Assistance Co-op pilot project!

4. From reform to what works: Moving from the limits of institutions to a culture powered by neighbors

In the final piece written by the co-creator of the Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) model, John McKnight tells the stories of thirteen communities that replaced the institutional and recovered associational functions by assuming authority for much of their well-being.

5. A Shareable Explainer: What is the Solidarity Economy?

The Solidarity Economy exists all around us, from worker co-ops to community land trusts. This explainer dives into what exactly the Solidarity Economy is, examples in the US and internationally, and much more.

6. Cities@Tufts Podcast: Urban Environmental Marronage – Connecting Black Ecologies with Charisma Acey

This episode explores how marginalized communities in coastal Nigeria and the American South draw upon historical practices of marronage to create autonomous spaces and combat environmental degradation within cities.

7. The Response Podcast: Surveillance and reproductive justice with Rafa Kidvai

Rafa Kidvai from Repro Legal Defense Fund joined us to discuss interconnected struggles, the challenges of surveillance, and the power of community in the fight for reproductive justice.

8. New toolkit from Shareable will help you start (and grow) a Library of Things in YOUR community

Learn more about our comprehensive Library of Things Toolkit, designed to help people like you plan, start, and grow Libraries of Things in your community.

9. How to not pay taxes

Shareable is in the process of updating 50 of our 300+ how-to guides. We updated one of our most popular guides, which explains legal (and illegal) ways not to pay federal taxes. This guide is all too relevant to the United States’ annual military budget, which exceeds $916 billion.

10. “Power to the People: The Story of Rural Electric Cooperatives”

“The journey of rural electrification is a testament to community resilience and innovation. With the inception of Rural Electric Cooperatives (RECs) in the early 20th century, spurred by the 1936 Rural Electrification Act, rural America, quite literally, lit up.” This article features the animated short film “Power to the People: The Story of Rural Electric Cooperatives.”

While storytelling is at the root of everything we do, our work at Shareable only starts with articles like these. In 2024, we also:

• Directly supported nine Library of Things fellows; researched and released the State of Libraries of Things 2024 report; hosted a 12-week Library of Things Co-Lab; helped incubate the new Tool Library Alliance in the US; and released the comprehensive Library of Things Toolkit.
• Continued our partnership with Rural Power Coalition to support a just energy transition to the largest co-op sector in the US. In partnership with The Story of Stuff Project, we released explainer videos on the history of rural electric cooperatives, virtual power plants, and agrivoltaics.
• Supported the development of community backup power systems with our Emergency Battery Toolkit, launched a Food Assistance Co-op pilot project in partnership with Urban Recipe, and co-hosted the Social Co-op Academy with the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center.
• Updated and republished 24 how-to guides covering topics from worker co-ops to participatory budgeting to mutual aid to making music with friends and more!
• Co-hosted 13 public Cities@Tufts lectures in partnership with the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University (including Reimagining Urban Planning with Jose Richard Aviles, How to fight a mega-jail with Maya Singhal, and Here There Be Dragons with Jess Myers), released five episodes of The Response (including indigenous disaster response, Facing the heat: Disaster management in the age of climate crisis with Samantha Montano, and journalists in Palestine), and worked with spoken word artists in Oregon to perform “Voices of The Response” (our live version of The Response).

That’s a LOT of content and resources to help you imagine and build cooperative sharing projects in your local community!

And there’s even more planned for 2025. We’ve got big plans to provide resources to launch new mutual aid projects, scale Libraries of Things across universities and affordable housing developments, start new food assistance co-ops, train rural electric co-op member-owners, and so much more.

But we need your support to make it happen.

If you’re able, please make a contribution so we can continue building on this momentum and co-create a world where sharing is daily practice and communities thrive.

The post Best of Shareable 2024 | Reader’s Digest appeared first on Shareable.

The episode features a compelling conversation with journalist, filmmaker, and community organizer Allen Myers, whose recent article for Shareable, Modern Day Colonialism and the Disastrous Fate of an Indigenous Water and Land Protector, offers a chilling look at the ongoing struggles in the region. Myers shares insights from his 2022 trip to Brumadinho, Brazil, where he witnessed the enduring scars left by a 2019 dam collapse and the fight for justice that followed.

In January 2019, a toxic dam operated by Vale in the State of Minas Gerais failed catastrophically, releasing 12 million cubic meters of sludge into the surrounding environment. The disaster claimed 272 lives and decimated the livelihoods of countless others. This was not an isolated incident—just four years earlier, the Mariana dam collapse, also operated by Vale, caused Brazil’s worst environmental catastrophe. Despite warnings and inspections highlighting structural vulnerabilities, Vale failed to act, prioritizing profits over safety.

For the Indigenous Kamakã Mongoió, the collapse was not just a distant tragedy but a direct assault on their way of life. Chief Merong, a prominent leader of the tribe, emerged as a steadfast protector of his community’s land and water, standing against the encroachments of Vale. He and other Kamakã Mongoió have faced threats, harassment, violence, and even death for their resistance, a chilling manifestation of what Myers calls “modern-day colonialism.”

While the subject matter of this episode of The Response is tragic, it’s also a call to action. Myers draws parallels between the disasters in Brazil and the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California, highlighting the universal dangers of corporate negligence and environmental exploitation. Both of these stories serve as stark reminders that disasters exacerbated by greed are not inevitable but preventable.

Editor’s note: Allen’s trip to Brazil was captured on film. The original project included producing a sequel to our award-winning documentary, “The Response: How Puerto Ricans are Restoring Power to the People,” but we have had to put it on the back burner for some time due to a lack of funding. Please contact theresponse@shareable.net if you would like to support bringing this story to the screen.

Resources:

• Survivors for Peace
• www.allen-myers.com
• Donate to The Response

Indigenous Disaster Response episode credits:

• Hosted and executive produced by Tom Llewellyn
• Produced and edited by Paige Kelly
• Theme Music by Cultivate Beats

Follow The Response on Twitter and Instagram for updates, memes, and more. Our entire catalog of documentaries and interviews can be found at theresponsepodcast.org — or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Response is an award-winning podcast series produced by Shareable exploring how communities respond to disaster — from hurricanes to wildfires to reactionary politics and more.

Want to help spread the word? Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify — it makes a huge difference in reaching new people who may otherwise not hear about this show.

Available anywhere you get your podcasts, including:

The post Indigenous disaster response: The fight against a mining giant in Brazil with Allen Myers appeared first on Shareable.

In the heart of Brazil, in the state of Minas Gerais, the lush green canopy veils both the stunning beauty of nature and the shadowy depths of exploitation. Here, an age-old conflict persists between those committed to protecting the land and water and those who profit from its destruction.

Chief Merong, a respected leader of the Kamakã Mongoió tribe, stood steadfast as a guardian of his territory against the encroachments of Vale, a multinational mining corporation notorious for its environmental destruction. Vale’s relentless pursuit of profit clashed with Chief Merong’s commitment to safeguarding the sacred springs and forests that sustained his people.

Talles, my interpreter and local fixer, and I journeyed into the verdant hills and dense foliage that surrounded Brumadinho. Along the border of fenced-off land claimed by the mining giant Vale, I encountered a stark juxtaposition: guarded and private land stripped of its life to bare red soil alongside open, teeming canopies of flourishing jungle.

We followed a narrow and winding road as instructed by our contact until it ended abruptly into a wall of vines and trees, an impassable berm. We parked, and there, peering through the green shadows, spear in hand and a small headdress, was our guide to the village. As we walked, he pointed out edible and medicinal plants and shared with excitement about the wild boar they hunt and the fish from the pools of fresh water they harvest. It was as if he was introducing us to members of his family. It was clear: this land was a part of him.

The path began to ascend. At the top of the hill, we could look west across a small ravine and see the scars left by Vale: barren land, naked red soil, and the ominous distant roar of lifeless machines with an endless appetite. From where we stood, paths continued in different directions, a patch of land open to the sky where rows of seedlings sprouted among taller coffee and corn plants. We had arrived at the Kamakã Mongoió Village, a humble bastion of resilience amidst the encroaching threat of exploitation. A simple banner reading “Territory of the Kamakã Mongoió” marked the border of the tribe’s claimed land. There waiting for us was Chief Merong.

Legacy of ecocide

Vale’s history in Brazil is marked by catastrophic failures and enduring environmental destruction. In 2015, the Vale-operated Mariana Dam collapsed, unleashing 60 million cubic meters of iron ore waste, creating a toxic mudflow that devastated communities, killed 19 people, and polluted the Doce River, affecting hundreds of thousands of residents. This disaster was not only the worst environmental catastrophe in Brazil’s history but also a stark warning of the risks associated with lax safety standards in large-scale mining operations. Just last week, a Brazilian court did not find Vale and mining giant BHP “legally” responsible for the damn collapse. Despite the ruling, over 620,000 complainants, including many Indigenous communities, continue to seek over $45 billion in damages from Vale.

Despite this avoidable tragic event, necessary reforms and safety measures remained unimplemented. Just four years later, in 2019, history repeated itself when the Brumadinho Dam, also operated by Vale, catastrophically failed. Ignoring prior warnings and expert reports of imminent risk, the dam’s collapse released 12 million cubic meters of toxic tailings, which swept through the area’s infrastructure, including a busy cafeteria and several villages, and claimed 272 lives. The surrounding community of Brumadinho was devastated by the loss of life, environmental destruction, and erosion of trust with the region’s largest employer.

As we recount the devastations wrought by Vale, it’s crucial to recognize the demand driving such destruction. The iron ore extracted from these mines, a cornerstone for the steel used in buildings and vehicles across the developed world, ties global consumers directly to the ecocide in Brazil. Each ton of steel in our cities’ skylines to the appliances in our kitchens starts with ore mined at great environmental and human cost—facilitated by a global market system that prizes low costs over ecological or social impacts.

Listen: “Indigenous disaster response: The fight against a mining giant in Brazil with Allen Myers”

In Brumadinho, the relationship between the residents and Vale is fraught with contradictions. On one hand, Vale is seen as a benefactor that has brought economic prosperity to the region. Jobs provided by Vale are often well-paying compared to local alternatives, bringing a level of economic stability previously unattainable for many families. Schools, healthcare, and infrastructure have all seen improvements directly or indirectly due to the presence of mining operations.

However, this financial dependency is a double-edged sword. The economic benefits come with a high cost. The environmental degradation caused by Vale’s activities has not only scarred the landscape but also undermined the community’s long-term sustainability. Fishing and agriculture, once staples of local subsistence, are now compromised by pollution and land use changes.

Interviews with local residents reveal a spectrum of emotions—from gratitude for the economic opportunities Vale provides to a profound sense of loss and betrayal after the dam disaster. Geraldo Oliveira Silva, a resident of Brumadinho and employee of Vale lost his brother in the 2019 dam collapse. He expressed his dilemma this way: “What are we to do? We need jobs and yet, these jobs could cost us our lives.”

While many in Brumadinho feel economically tied to Vale, they live under the shadow of a grim statistic: according to data from Global Witness, Brazil is the second deadliest country in the world for environmental and land protectors, with hundreds killed over recent years. This underscores the high stakes of any opposition to the mining giant.

The sentiment of being trapped in an “abusive relationship” with Vale is echoed throughout the community. Many express anger and frustration over the disasters, recognizing the preventable nature of these tragedies if Vale had prioritized safety and environmental concerns over profits. Yet, the fear of losing their primary source of income keeps many from voicing their concerns too loudly.

Community division on the issue strains the social fabric. Talles shared, “Many people have been paid lots of money for the disaster, they feel grateful to the company, while others have received nothing. There is inequality in the community based on how close you are with the mining companies.”

The story of Brumadinho is a microcosm of a global issue where local communities are caught in the web of corporate influence and malpractice, dependent on the very forces that threaten their way of life and environment. The tragic irony is not lost on the residents, who continue to grapple with their realities, hoping for change yet wary of the consequences.

For the Kamakã Mongoió, who are not employed by Vale, who live simply on land claimed by the company, Vale’s role in the story is much more straightforward: They are a villain, unceremoniously exploiting land and water for profit, land and water they hold to be sacred, the dam collapse in their eyes is an unsurprising continuation of disastrous behavior.

Learning from disaster: A personal connection

As I embarked on my journey to Brazil, my initial intent was to glean insights from communities grappling with the aftermath of catastrophe. I’m from Paradise, California, a community intimate with major disasters. The 2018 Camp Fire reduced the mountain town of 28,000 to rubble and ashes in a single day. The inferno claimed 85 lives and laid waste to 14,000 homes, including my parents’ home.

Like the tragedy unfolding in Brazil, our own disaster bore the fingerprints of corporate greed. Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), entrusted with maintaining our vital electric infrastructure, had long ignored the warning signs of impending danger.

On November 8th, 2018, as unrelenting winds, accelerated by the effects of the man-made climate crisis, swept through our parched landscape. An outdated transmission line broke free, sending a shower of sparks into the tinder-dry brush below. These sparks fanned by unseasonably high winds whipped up a wildfire of unprecedented magnitude. By year’s end, the Camp Fire stood as the most costly disaster in the world in 2018, another grim testament to the perils of corporate negligence, climate change, and poor forest management.

Exploring Post-Disaster Recovery: A Journey to Brumadinho, Brazil

Armed with a keen sense of inquiry and a commitment to understanding the intricate dynamics of post-disaster recovery, I embarked on a journey to Brumadinho, Brazil. There, amidst the wreckage left by the dam collapse, I sought to unravel the complexities of community resilience and response to disaster in a cultural context.

I connected with survivors, dedicated search and rescue workers, community organizers, and journalists who tirelessly chronicled the aftermath. While much of the focus was understandably on immediate relief efforts and survivor support, I was compelled to delve deeper, probing into the vital work of prevention and regeneration. This led me to the Kamakã Mongoió tribe.

The Kamakã Mongoiós are a family of the Pataxó-hã-hã-hãe people, whose mother village is located on the southern coast of Bahia state, Brazil. Chief Merong, as prompted by spirits in the dream world, relocated to Menias Gerisis with a mission to heal the land from the destruction of Vale. “I was called by the Earth to be here,” he shared with me.

Indigenous wisdom

We settled into the Kamakã Mongoiós’ communal gathering space, a maloca made from logs from the forest and thatch from its fronds. Chief Merong greeted us and broke into song and dance with members of his tribe; they moved in unison, weaving a rich tapestry of harmonious sound in a circular dance. What transpired before me was far more than merely settling in for an interview, it was a revered and vital ritual for welcoming outsiders and commencing a conversation. It felt, for lack of a better word, holy.

I posed questions that weighed heavy on my mind: How can communities organize after disaster to address the underlying conditions that led to catastrophe? How can they rebuild in a manner that meets the diverse needs and aspirations of all members? And, crucially, how can future disasters be mitigated through informed decision-making and collective action?

Chief Merong, a young man of 35, wore an exquisite headdress of Macaw feathers. Adidas flip-flops protected his feet, and tattered board shorts hung from his hips. His resolute gaze matched the clarity and directness of his words. “Our connection to this land and water is not merely about survival—it’s a profound relationship with all beings,” he explained. “Being good stewards of this earth is an ancestral duty, deeply ingrained in our way of life. The examples of destruction we see are because they are hurting the Earth. This is just the Earth reacting, balancing. The company [Vale] does not care about the Earth. We are here to defend the land and water.”

The land settled by the Kamakã Mongoió was in contention: Vale believed the land was theirs to expand their iron ore extraction. The Kamakã Mongoió believed their duty was to restore and protect the land and water. Courts sided with Vale, but the Kamakã Mongoió remained on the land. The stage was set for conflict.

Chief Merong recounted chilling encounters with modern threats: unidentified men appearing without notice that issued stark ultimatums to vacate their land, drones that buzzed overhead as symbols of surveillance and intimidation. “These aren’t just intrusions; they’re direct assaults on our sovereignty and well-being,” Merong stated. The cold mechanical whirring of drones— celebrated technologies in the global north—became harbingers of fear in the otherwise tranquil village.

After some time in conversation, with children playing nearby and chickens pecking at some sweet morsel, Merong wanted to show us the sacred spring and offer another song. We walked past simple structures made of local materials. Coffee, taro, and other edible plants lined the path to a modest pool of water shaded by the thick canopy of the jungle. There, Chief Merong and other tribal members recited another song. There was reciprocity in all of his interactions with the environment; the water wasn’t merely there for his taking but something to be worshiped.

Tragedy strikes

On March 4, 2024, I received a text from Talles notifying me that the Chief was found lifeless and hung from a tree. As the days unfolded, news reports emerged that cast his death in stark terms: murder. His death sent shockwaves not only through the Indigenous community but the residents of Brumadinho, who all the more starkly felt the internal conflict of loyalty to a company that provides them with jobs and victimization by a corporate power that values profit over life.

According to data from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) published on Tuesday, March 5th (a day after Chief Merong was found dead), at least 126 human rights and environmental defenders were murdered in Latin America in 2023. That’s a murder every 3 days in Latin America alone. Chief Merong’s death fits into a larger, menacing trend. According to Global Witness, five percent of the world’s population are Indigenous peoples, yet they make up 40 percent of the murdered land and water defenders. They are the frontline communities seeking to protect that which we all depend upon and yet are at the greatest risk for reprisal.

Despite knowing his life was under constant threat, Chief Merong bravely stood his ground and ultimately sacrificed his life for the sacred lands he cherished.

Colonialism is alive and well. It operates as it has for hundreds of years by exploiting and extracting resources to the benefit of the few. It hides behind the innovation of “free markets,” presenting an incomplete story devoid of cause and effect. In the global north, we are encouraged to seek personal opportunity and indulge without limitations. We reap the benefits of environmental exploitation and are shielded from the consequences of our appetite for consumption.

As we mourn the loss of Chief Merong, we are compelled to confront the stark realities of our world—a world where Indigenous voices are silenced, where the pursuit of profit can trump even the sanctity of human life, and where the legacy of colonialism continues to build systems of exploitation in the present. In honoring Chief Merong’s memory, we must redouble our efforts to dismantle the structures of oppression that continue to plague our world.

Yet amidst our resolve, a troubling reality looms large: the pervasive influence of the very systems we seek to dismantle. Indeed, we find ourselves entangled within a web of exploitation as both victims and unwitting accomplices. It is only through collective awareness and concerted action that we can hope to break free from the grip of the “company” and forge a future rooted in justice and equity, where we are all water and land protectors.

Editor’s note: Allen’s interviews on this trip were captured on film with the help of a local fixer who also served as a translator. The original project was intended to produce a film as a follow-up to our award-winning documentary, “The Response: How Puerto Ricans are Restoring Power to the People,” but have had to put it on the back burner for some time due to a lack of funding. Please contact theresponse@shareable.net if you would like to support bringing this story to the screen.

The post Modern-day colonialism and the tragic fate of an indigenous water and land protector appeared first on Shareable.

This talk explores how marginalized communities in coastal Nigeria and the American South draw upon historical practices of marronage to create autonomous spaces and combat environmental degradation within cities.

Marronage refers to the practices of enslaved Africans who escaped to form free communities in inaccessible terrains. By connecting Black ecologies from Lagos and the Niger Delta to New Orleans and South Carolina, this presentation examines how communities adapt to environmental challenges, preserve cultural heritage, and develop alternative socio-ecological systems as forms of political and ecological empowerment.

These contemporary case studies of resistance and resilience reflect the enduring legacies of maroon societies across the Black Atlantic, offering new insights into global struggles for human rights and environmental justice.

About the speaker

Charisma Acey is Associate Professor and Arcus Chair in Social Justice and the Built Environment in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley.

Her research focuses on environmental justice, urban sustainability, and equitable access to basic services in cities. Dr. Acey’s work spans the Americas and Africa, addressing issues such as climate vulnerability, access to clean water and safe sanitation, women’s empowerment, and urban agroecology.

She currently leads projects on air quality and food justice in California, employing participatory action research to identify inequitable policies impacting vulnerable communities. As Faculty Director of the Berkeley Food Institute and co-founder of the Dellums Clinic to Dismantle Structural Racism at the Institute for Urban and Regional Development, she champions interdisciplinary approaches to urban planning and environmental governance.

Dr. Acey holds a Ph.D. in Urban Planning and a Master’s in Public Policy from UCLA. She is a UW-Madison Health Equity Leadership Institute Scholar. Her work has been recognized with awards for excellence in community-based scholarship. Dr. Acey’s publications appear in journals such as World Development, Landscape and Urban Planning, and The Lancet Global Health.

Listen to the Cities@Tufts Podcast (or on the app of your choice):

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Watch the video

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Transcript

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0:00:08.8 Tom Llewellyn: Welcome to another episode of Cities@Tufts lectures, where we explore the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities designed for greater equity and justice. This season is brought to you by Shareable and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University, with support from the Barr Foundation. In addition to this podcast, the video, transcript, and graphic recordings are available on our website Shareable.net. Just click the link in the show notes. And now, here’s the host of Cities@Tufts, Professor Julian Agyeman.

0:00:43.4 Julian Agyeman: Welcome to our Cities@Tufts virtual colloquium. I’m Professor Julian Agyeman. And together with my research assistants, Amelia Morton and Grant Perry, and our partners Shareable and the Barr Foundation, we organize Cities@Tufts as a cross-disciplinary academic initiative, which recognises Tufts University as a leader in urban studies, urban planning and sustainability issues. We’d like to acknowledge that Tufts University’s Medford campus is located on colonized Wampanoag and Massachusetts traditional territory. Today, we’re delighted to host Dr. Charisma Acey. Charisma is Associate Professor and Arcus Chair in Social Justice and the Built Environment in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on environmental justice, urban sustainability, and equitable access to basic services in cities. Dr. Acey’s work spans the Americas and Africa, addressing issues such as climate vulnerability, access to clean water and safe sanitation, women’s empowerment and urban agroecology.

0:01:48.6 Julian Agyeman: Dr. Acey holds a PhD in urban planning and a master’s in public policy from UCLA. She’s a UW Madison Health Equity Leadership Institute scholar, and her work’s been recognised with awards for excellence in community-based scholarship. Dr. Acey’s publications appear in journals such as World Development, Landscape and Urban Planning, and The Lancet Global Health. Charisma’s talk today is Urban Environmental Marronage, Connecting Black Ecologies from Coastal Nigeria to the American South. Charisma, a Zoomtastic welcome to Cities@Tufts.

0:02:27.7 Charisma Acey: Thank you so, so much, Julian, for that wonderful introduction. And I wish I could be with you all today. I understand there’s a watch party where there’s some good food. Please eat and drink for me. But I’m really excited to be with you all today to talk about the research that I’ve been doing in Nigeria, and some of my new thinking connecting it to an emerging scholarship in the field of Black geographies called Black Ecologies. And within that, a focus on marronage, which I’m gonna get into what is this term, marronage.

0:03:00.4 Charisma Acey: So today, we’ll be exploring that concept of Urban Environmental Marronage and Connecting Black Ecologies from Coastal Nigeria to the American South. We’ll examine how Marginalized communities create spaces of autonomy and resistance within cities, and adapt to environmental challenges, and drawing parallels between historic maroon communities and their practices and contemporary urban struggles. Okay, so I’m just gonna quickly go over what we’ll cover today. So I wanna get into a little bit more of the term, the conceptual grounding in this term, marronage, and specifically Urban Environmental Marronage, and then talk about what are the transnational connections that I see? Why do this? Why put Nigeria and the American South into context or into conversation, and then go into depth with some case studies from coastal cities in Nigeria, from Badagry, a former slave port, where we’ll look at cultural preservation as a resilient strategy to Lagos, Nigeria, where you have, at the same time, a mega city kind of the size of Manhattan being built off the coast, where they’re doing a lot of land reclamation from the ocean, and building a city for the elite versus massive informal settlements and people living, building their own housing because of neglect by the state.

0:04:27.2 Charisma Acey: And then we’ll go to the Niger Delta, where the very region of the country that drives the economy, the oil producing region is one of the most impoverished, and how environmental justice struggles there and alternative Socioecological practices form part of contemporary marronage strategies there. And then we’ll put those three cases in conversation with marronage and maroon ecologies in the American South, and then conclude with some remarks on what are the implications for urban and environmental practice. All right, so let’s talk about what is marronage. So the term maroons, which you’ll hear in the literature, refers to enslaved Africans who escaped slavery in the New World to create independent groups and communities on the outskirts of slave societies. So historically, it refers to this creation of autonomous communities who escaped bondage. And they often formed independent settlements in remote, very difficult to access terrains like mountainous regions or dense forests, very swampy areas.

0:05:42.3 Charisma Acey: And the existence of maroon societies challenged the social, political, and economic structures of colonial powers. And you had some communities that existed for a few years, and others persisted for centuries. In some countries, and especially in South America, for example, in Brazil, Colombia, you have descendants of maroons that still live in semi autonomous societies, although they’re increasingly under siege. You find marronage that the practice of people escaping plantations escaping enslavement happening all across the Atlantic, all across the Americas, from the Great Dismal Swamp, here in the United States, which covers Virginia and North Carolina, across the Carolinas, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, to South America, already mentioned Brazil, Colombia, Suriname to the Caribbean, Jamaica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic. And what I’m… Part of what I’m trying to do in this talk and in work that I’m gonna build off of this talk is to bring more of the experience of marronage on the African continent into this scholarship. So there’s not much scholarship on the practice of marronage in Africa, although it did happen people were held in captivity, awaiting transport across the Atlantic, and often did escape, we and sometimes to the hinterlands, sometimes integrating into the cities and towns around slave ports.

0:07:18.5 Charisma Acey: So I wanna bring that conversation into that larger, this larger scholarship on marronage. But there’s been a traditional focus on rural communities, and their escape from plantations. But increasingly, people are using marronage to look at other forms of resistance. And that’s what we’re gonna focus on today. And so some of how the scholarship has evolved is that shift in looking at marronage, or escape and resistance from rural to what does that look like in urban settings. Also, the scholarship has evolved to focus on modern day implications of marronage insisted in cities rather, and then connecting black geographies to ecological resistance. Over time, the scholarship on marronage has expanded beyond rural areas to consider urban settings. And researchers are now exploring the tactics of resistance and autonomy that are employed by communities both in the past, in the present, and especially in response to exclusionary policies and environmental challenges.

0:08:25.5 Charisma Acey: And so some key concepts we’re gonna be looking at are how marronage intersects with black geographies, which are frameworks that focus on how marginalized communities resist and adapt, using ecological knowledge to survive in hostile environments. Scholars like James Scott, and others have connected maroon strategies of retreat to out of the way places like swamps, forests and mountainous regions, to contemporary practices of oppressed groups who flee state tyranny, and surveillance and control, and flee to what Jamal White calls unruly environments, but which offer alternative spaces for creating community and safety. So let’s talk about the transnational connections and why putting Nigeria and the US into context. So two of the reasons are right on the screen.

0:09:21.8 Charisma Acey: As I mentioned, marronage in the African context and trying to understand how ecological knowledge has been preserved across regions, we know that key to the survival of maroon societies was being able to live in the forest in the swamps. And so relying on the knowledge of livelihoods from Africa, and being able to use that in the new world, while also adapting to new survivors, new surroundings, as well as the shared histories of displacement, and resistance that continue to this day in a context in a global context of anti blackness. So the cases today are gonna focus on those transnational connections between what we see in Nigeria, and what can be found in the American South, and historic swamps, say around New Orleans, or in the environmental justice struggles of Cancer Alley.

0:10:10.0 Charisma Acey: And by examining those shared histories of displacement and resistance, we can bridge gaps in black geographies and ecologies with the context of marronage on the African continent. And the whole idea is, for this comparison is to understand how these different strategies evolve in different places. And what are the similarities and what might be some of the differences, and the implications of those. So why urban environmental marronage? So urban marronage, as I mentioned, extends the historical concept into contemporary urban settings. So how, so going from creating resist fleeing the plantation fleeing bondage, to live in remote areas that were hard to reach? How does that what is the parallel of that today in creating autonomous spaces of resistance within cities, often in response to exclusionary urban policies and development practices.

0:11:12.5 Charisma Acey: And then environmental marronage is around those survival mechanisms in hostile environments that require ecological adaptation, as well as cultural preservation, both of which are crucial for environmental justice for communities. I wanna just pause for a minute to talk about marronage as both method and practice where we bridge theory and action. And so I’m drawing on four different approaches that are used in the literature and scholarship on marronage. So abolition geography, and ecology. So if we think about it, marronage as a method involves decolonizing the way we understand resistance, and even the way we approach and understand the archive. When it comes to abolition, geography, Ruthie Gilmore defines it by starting with a spatial understanding of social justice, and the idea that freedom is a place, and talking about people, the bonds among us and how we organize, as well as use resources to shape our environments. And then Nick Hainan and Hardin extend this concept, using political ecology to critically think about land in that equation.

0:12:29.2 Charisma Acey: Then we talk about decolonizing the archive is a really important part of marronage scholarship, because a lot of in the American South, for example, they didn’t even wanna use the term maroons, there was a lot people knew by way of how news trend spread across the Americas that you had these large maroon societies in the Caribbean and South America, and plantation owners in the South didn’t want that same kind of mythos developing in the US South. And so a lot of maroon society is obscured in the archive. And it relies on the passage down of oral history and traditions and a lot of ethnographic work, as well as the using clues from what is in the archive, what is in maps to fill in the blanks.

0:13:16.1 Charisma Acey: Even archaeology comes into play here, there are teams of archaeologists who are going now into the dismal swamp, and uncovering and digging up artifacts from maroon societies that once lived there. I have an image here on this slide of one of my dear colleagues, who’s a professor of history at UC Riverside, Adelusi, and her work involves restoring Lagosians to the colonial archive. So if you look at maps of old Lagos, they’re the only visible parts of the maps are what’s relevant to the colonizers to the it’s the ports, right and their buildings and their structures, and the 10s of thousands of people who live there and all the communities and the residents and the daily life, all of that is invisible and missing from old maps from and from the archive.

0:14:07.6 Charisma Acey: And so what she does is use present day, artifacts, GIS, and what is available in the archive, as well as what’s been passed down with oral history and in poetry to reconstruct maps that put people back into history. And so that’s a really powerful method in marronage research. So really, capturing lived experience of communities and then speculative black geographies is important for providing a framework for imagining futures free of oppression and environmental exponent.

0:14:39.6 Charisma Acey: And that’s that connects to Moulton and Salo’s framing of black geographies as insurgent eco criticism. So we can use the past to inform present day ecological and urban struggles, bridging scholarship with activism. And the piece feeling thinking the archive participatory mapping marronage scholar Ana Laura Zavala Guillen notes that Latin American territories have been politically constructed as white mestizo spaces erasing the presence of Afro descendant and indigenous people and their legacies.

0:15:14.6 Charisma Acey: In Columbia, these racialized groups are known as the other Columbia. And so in her work, she uses a decolonial participatory method to map the geography of descendants of fugitives from slavery, combining the existing archives and extensive oral history of maroon descendants. And she says, “Feeling thinking about dispossession and resistance, while counter using the colonial archive to reclaim Afro descendant history is a subversive undertaking, one that is ingrained in the legacy of maroon resistance.” And so even doing maroon scholarship embodies the spirit and the legacy of marronage. Okay, so today, I’ll mostly focus on maroon ecologies in Nigeria, as I mentioned, with reference to the Americas and focusing on how distinct regions have developed strategies to resist ecological and spatial oppression. I do wanna acknowledge that the idea for connecting the scholarship I’ve been doing in Nigeria with the concept of marronage was really inspired by travel this past summer where I had the good fortune to participate in the black ecology summer field school in New Orleans, Louisiana with my colleague Justin Hosbey, who co organizes it with JT Roane, who’s at Rutgers, and the field school focused on themes of educational infrastructure in the post Katrina context, historical and contemporary forms of marronage water scapes and carceral ecologies.

0:16:46.6 Charisma Acey: We were able to meet with community partners in the lower Ninth Ward, Algiers, Plaquemines Parish, and as well as tour maroon sites on New Orleans West Bank. And we learned, for example, how older houses constructed with mangroves were able to withstand a lot of the damage from Hurricane Katrina, and a lot of that knowledge and practice of how to work with mangroves, which is a direct knowledge transferred from the African context to the Americas has been lost. But there is the story in the community of how these much older houses actually were able to fare better with the flooding. Judith Carney and talking about that kind of place based knowledge that transfers from one region to another, specifically talking about mangrove swamplands, which were marginal to European territorialization during the colonial period, versus African and Afro descendant placemaking. So on both sides of the Atlantic, the environment that Europeans feared provided Africans with food, basic necessities, as well as refuge from slavery. And Justin and JT have written about this idea of maroon ecologies and their work on the dual histories of racial slavery and environmental degradation in the Tidewater region of Virginia and the Mississippi Delta. Their work a totally different form of living on the legacies of displacement and marronage as black ecologies.

0:18:15.5 Charisma Acey: They argue that during slavery, swamps, bayous, rivers and wetlands were geographies in which a fleeing black commons could be sustained and hidden away from the violence of the plantation. The problem is at the same time, those same ecologies are now under extreme duress, whether it’s coastal subsidence, whether it’s toxics from the petrochemical industry, climate change, or the pressures of displacement. Those ecologies that once provided refuge are now under attack. And so their project is to chart cultural, spiritual, intellectual, and practical insights from black southern communities to understand alternative ecological practice that come out of the kind of imaginaries around marronage.

0:19:01.0 Charisma Acey: And so in that spirit, I’m engaging in this today. So I wanted to, I’ll start my, the first two places we’ll go to today are Badagry, as I mentioned, the former Slave Port and Lagos, which has it’s current name, used to be called Eko by the Indigenous Yoruba, but was named, Lagos by the Portuguese for Lakes. And today is popularly known as Lagos among the people of Nigeria. And so you see that on the map here. So they’re near each other. And technically Badagry is part of the larger urban agglomeration that is Lagos. And this, and both sites are part of the huge urban corridor that is West Africa, that’s home to 70 million people, and is a kind of continuous expanse that goes from Lagos all the way to Abidjan in, Cote d’Ivoire. So let’s go into our first case.

0:19:55.4 Charisma Acey: So let’s talk about Badagry. So I’ve written about Badagry, and it’s a beautiful place in Nigeria. It’s not as well known among the former slave ports as say, sites in Ghana or like Elmina Castle or Gorée Island in Senegal. There’s a kind of undeveloped feel to it. That is the first time I went. It was quite emotional because it almost, you could almost feel as if you were taken back in time. But what’s remarkable about Badagry is that this is a town where people who, families that used to be involved in the slave trade illegally kept some of the artifacts, the chains, all the metals, the leg braces, the irons, all the things that were used to enslave Africans and have over time have turned those into a thriving tourism industry that mostly Nigerians from other parts of Nigeria come to.

0:20:57.8 Charisma Acey: There’s not as much of an international tourism destination in Badagry, although it’s starting to become known and people do visit Evander Holyfield, has been there, and other, well-known Americans have been there as well. And they’re actively trying to build partnerships with African Americans as well. But they’ve preserved a kinda homegrown cultural tourism. Local youth will take you on canoes and you can even follow and walk for hours the same route that formerly enslaved Africans had to walk in the journey from capture from the Barcos to the ships. What’s happening now though, although that they’ve developed this thriving kind of cultural tourism based on this preservation of heritage, the state is moving in. Now Badagry is seen as a site for redevelopment. There’s plans for a Badagry Marina and bringing lots of boats and recreation and no discussion or mention of the indigenous community that has protected and preserved this history that holds festivals that, pass passes down world tradition.

0:22:05.6 Charisma Acey: And in fact, the state has built their own museum. And when you, when I took my students there last in 2019, and anybody who goes there, there’s actually a very spirited competition in terms of who is gonna take a given group on the tour and to see and to follow the, go to the point of no return and do the walk and go on the boats and see the artifacts. I always take my students to the Mobee Slave Relics Museum, which is one of the families that have kept their relics in that are now, they’re now part of an abolition movement and but also a part of preserving cultural heritage. So the interesting thing is that the redevelopment in Badagry is being done in the name of climate change and protecting the coast, and it’s about protecting the land, but not necessarily the people.

0:22:54.7 Charisma Acey: So in Badagry we see a modern form of marronage where local communities assert control over their historical narratives and as well as cultural heritage. And this, I feel, reflects how maroon communities historically develop their own cultures and systems of governance, and that these preservation efforts represent a form of cultural marronage and maintaining autonomy and resisting kind of external appropriation of history. So I just wanna take you through a few slides just so you can see. This is a monument with that you can find. And once you complete the voyage of the walk of no return, and you stop at these different stations where there’s wells where the enslaved were drugged, keep them docile to load them onto ships at the end. Now there’s this large monument, the Iron of Liberty at Gberefu Beach, at Badagry, and this spot served as the official marker of where large slave ships waited on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean centuries earlier to lead millions from life in the West African interior to the Americans.

0:23:57.6 Charisma Acey: And as I mentioned, this was, this site was also a contested site where conflicts, hostilities broke out between representatives from the Lagos State Badagry Heritage Museum, who had, who claimed to organize the official tour and descendants of the local slave trading family, who felt that the state had usurped their rightful role. And at stake was who is going to tell the story, the real story of Badagry. And so embedded in that small moment that happened with my students was a conflict over meaning and the goals of heritage preservation and high stakes with climate change impacting the coast. And these plans for coastal adaptation. This is just a picture inside the Mobee Slave Relics Museum. And you can see down below in the image are some of the actual changes on display that were used. And they let, they actually let you hold them. You can feel how heavy they were. It’s a very visceral experience.

0:24:56.6 Charisma Acey: So over time, the effort to memorialize the endurance of enslaved Africans in the town itself has become a strategy of resilience as the local community has embraced heritage tourism for economic development. At the same time that local sustainability is threatened by both the lack of infrastructure and services and coastal erosion that the state is trying to address with this plan, which is, this is a rendering of what the redevelopment of the Badagry Marina would look like when it’s completed. And this is another image of it. And what’s striking to people in Badagry is how little of it reflects the heritage of slavery, or that memory is very much geared towards high-end tourism and recreation. And so this is an ongoing struggle. And, before we leave Badagry, just wanted to share a quote from the chief, one of the chiefs of the area. And bale is another word for chief, who is complaining about discrimination despite the fact that they’re taxpayers.

0:26:00.6 Charisma Acey: And he says, when you, when he is, when he was interviewed, he says, if you go around the community, you’ll see that my people have developed distrust for the government. Every tax imposed on people living on the mainland is also applicable to us. And we’ve been paying to both the state and the local government. It is like they’re waiting for us all to die. And he goes on to describe how far people must travel for healthcare, for water from government boreholes that barely function, the lack of electricity, the lack of teachers, and so forth. And so he’s describing the dire circumstances faced by the community. And so there really, this, the economy around preservation of culture and this history of the slave trade is really one of survival that is under threat, paradoxically by this strategy of protecting the coast that the state is leading.

0:26:51.9 Charisma Acey: Next, I wanna take you, and I’m sorry, I wanna take you to all these places in Nigeria. We’re going very quickly, but hopefully we’ll have more time during the Q&A and discussion and have future opportunities to talk. So each of these cases is really rich and so much more could be shared. So I wanna go to Lagos in terms of the metropolitan area, the center of Lagos, which was once in a war Europe, a fishing village of 5,000 people, the largest cities in Nigeria, pre-colonial, where in the interior along rivers like Ibadan. It only with, it was only with the slave trade and with the extraction of Nigeria’s natural resources that the coasts and the ports became important. And now you have a city, in Lagos that is a mega city pushing 20 million people, one of the largest cities in the world, very strained in terms of being able to provide clean water, sanitation energy to such a massive population. And amid all of this in Lagos, you have a massive amount of what are called informal settlements.

0:27:58.2 Charisma Acey: And I know that term is problematic because when governments tend to talk about informal settlements they took, they tend to focus on the informality of the poor and not the informality of the wealthy who are building, say, without permits in ways that make areas more prone to flood and actually can cause more problems for people with less secure and sturdy housing. But I am talking about the informality of the poor in terms of looking at marronage in the Lagosian context. And we’re also gonna talk about Eko Atlantic, which introduces another wrinkle in this context. And we’ll, I wanna show some pictures of, of Eko Atlantic. Like I said, it’s this massive development where they’re reclaiming land off the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Victoria Island, about three quarters the size of Manhattan, and plans for it to be fully electrified water flowing, 24 a day.

0:28:53.7 Charisma Acey: High-rise in Chevron was the first to buy a plot. It’s building slowly but surely. So the last time I took my students there, about six of the high-rises had been built. But they are going up and the development has like a 200 year lease on the land. And so it is being built. The question is, the pressure that development is being, is putting on the waterfront communities and causing massive displacement, which is being enforced by the state government in violent ways. When I talk about Lagos and Nigeria in general, I do have to bring up Fela Kuti who was an amazing, not just an artist on an Afrobeat pioneer, not the current Afrobeats of that. Everybody that’s very popular right now with Burna Boy and Davido and all of that, which is wonderful music. But this is the original Afrobeat music and one of my favorite songs, ‘Water No Get Enemy’. Cause my, the focus of my dissertation was on clean water and access to water. And Fela was one to bring the struggles of the people into his music. And in fact, his mother was also an activist and was killed by the military dictatorship. So Fela was very militant and his music inspired millions of Nigerians. Oh, I think it was gonna, okay, there’s a little piece of it.

0:30:15.2 Charisma Acey: Okay, I don’t have time to listen, but hopefully a little piece, encourages you to go look up fellows, music for yourself. So usually when you see Lagos, you’ll see images like this. This is from a BBC article. The Lagoon, metropolis and Lagos is notorious for the growing population, the infrastructure challenges, and as well as the practices of state distinction. Land capture, particularly from waterfront communities who engage in fishing livelihoods, sand dredging, all kinds of and contribute to the society are productive members of the, of Lagos society. But they live on land that’s highly coveted, and the government is in the business of forcibly evicting, illegally evicting according to the courts, people off the land, even though they have traditional rights and have lived there for centuries, many of the people that live in the waterfront community are actually immigrants from other parts of West Africa who’ve settled and negotiated land tenure with traditional authorities.

0:31:14.0 Charisma Acey: And those rights have been upheld by courts, but not respected by the Lagos government. So you have that happening. So land is, it’s the largest, most populated state, but the land is the smallest of Nigeria states. And so the state is in this business of taking land from people. This is from a poetry by, I’m sorry, a visual artwork by Wura-Natasha Ogunji, a well-known Nigerian artist. And this was part of a studio that me and a colleague, Ivy Mills from History of Art took students to in 2019, where we were looking at both the role of art and planning the green city from below.

0:31:58.7 Charisma Acey: And in Lagos, visual representation plays a central role in struggles over land and competing visions of Lagos future, visions that impact planning practice and people’s livelihoods in concrete ways. On one hand, you have the state investing in public art as part of the mega city project that’s like Eko Atlantic, that’s supposed to bring foreign investment and it’s top down development and critics describe it as Eco-gentrification on a grand scale. And then you have more grassroots artists that are more about protest and pushing back on the condition. So in this piece where Natasha Ogunji is commenting on the struggle of women having to collect water, because essentially women are the, they are the pipes of the city. When the city doesn’t care enough to invest in providing clean water to everyone and investing in the infrastructure for that, it’s women who actually have to carry water through the city to their homes and to their families.

0:33:01.4 Charisma Acey: This is an image of, one of the waterfront communities after their homes had been bulldozed by the government. And the New York Times called the people in the photo homeless, but they’re not homeless, their homes are being destroyed, and they were illegally evicted. So contrast that with Eko Atlantic. So on the left, this is a rendering of the Marina district, which is the central plan development of Eko Atlantic. And then I have a series of satellite images. So you can see how that massive infilling that’s happening off the coast of Nigeria, this project won a Clinton Global Initiative award, again, done in the name of addressing climate change and coastal erosion, but a very elite driven development. There are plans for 24/7 infrastructure. Nowhere else in is this being planned in the city. And this, so this whole project is being conceived as a futuristic city, the financial epicenter of West Africa being built on this reclaimed land that’s supposed to be land that used to be part of Lagos.

0:34:03.4 Charisma Acey: So it used to be public land. And then the reality on the ground is are these waterfront communities. Here you see some of the communities that are engaged in logging along the waterfront, that are under threat because of developments like Eko Atlantic and the scarcity of land. And so it’s really a tale of two cities, the luxury development and a focus on elite on the other hand, and the struggles of people. This is on the left is a photo I took in body of Lagos, one of the areas that are considered blighted, that’s the word used in Lagos for what the UN would call slums areas without adequate water, sanitation, durable housing, and where tenure is insecure. And about 70% of people in Lagos are living on less than, $2 a day. And so in past, I’ve talked about this as part of infrastructural violence, which we can talk about in more detail.

0:34:55.7 Charisma Acey: And this image is showing, this was one of the communities, waterfront communities we visited and they showed a, they told, we visited the area that was now all luxury mansions and infill, and it used to be a waterfront, and it used to be a community of thousands of fishing villages that lived on the water. And the community is a total Gabame. And there’s a movement in Lagos called hashtag Save the Waterfronts. And what happened here was really tragic. On the morning of April 9th, 2017, the community was awoken by armed police who fired guns and tear gas, set fire to homes, forced children, women elderly to flee many into the lagoon where they drowned. And 5,000 people were forced to leave their possessions behind. And even though they’ve won court battle, they’ve not been able to return. And so you have groups like the Nigerian Slum Settlement Federation, working with justice and empowerment initiatives, fighting back, fighting to reclaim this land and this territory and resettling.

0:36:05.8 Charisma Acey: So they, what is remarkable is the amount of community and the kind of, black commons that’s created in this process. So rather than people being displaced, and then just whether it’s going back to other parts of Nigeria or to other countries, other community, other waterfront communities have taken in everyone who’s been displaced and each time another community is displaced, another waterfront community will take them in even though they have very little resources themselves. So that was very powerful to see when we were able to visit Makoko with justice and empowerment initiatives. And these are, this is one of my favorite photos taken by a former student who is part of the studio of women who engage in what they call profiling.

0:36:49.7 Charisma Acey: Profiling is a positive thing in the Nigerian context, where it’s all about putting your community on the map. And so they use satellite imagery and then go to door and literally map each house and each community and who lives there and do they go to school and their economy and use that to advocate for land and for tenure and for rights. I don’t have much time to go into the Niger Delta, but I do wanna talk, about it because it is an important site of environmental marronage and environmental justice in the Nigerian context. So here we see environmental marronage manifested through in several ways through multi-stakeholder governance, where there are new models that are emerging after decades of not only protest, but militant action, kidnappings violence against oil companies. Oil companies have conceded to this new form of government called setting up global memorandums of understanding with different communities in the Niger Delta, and I should mention the Niger Delta is a region of nine states of tens of millions of people.

0:37:56.4 Charisma Acey: So it crosses nine states, tens of millions of people living in the, not in, some in urban areas, but traditionally living in the creeks and the swamps, the delta, because that’s where they engaged in traditional livelihood. But as oil production and done in the worst and most irresponsible and reckless way, abed in many ways by the government, people’s water, the forest have been polluted, have been destroyed. And so more people have been living in cities as a result. But you do have some elements of resistance, which I’m gonna talk about shortly. So you see environmental justice activism as marronage in the Niger Delta.

0:38:36.0 Charisma Acey: And as part of this, our strategies of self-governance, collective resource management on this, negotiating with the oil companies directly. The government is very little involved. It’s really directly between communities and the delta, and the oil companies. And they’ve been able to, negotiate to get money to pay for infrastructure and things like that. Women have been a critical part of mobilizing in the Niger Delta, and they’ve been a key part of bringing more, creating more peace for it, not to just be violence and kidnapping, but really protesting and securing gains in terms of representation and governance and things like that. And the transformative role of women in the Delta really aligns with narratives of women in Maroon societies who play crucial roles in community resilience, in creating, communities of care, which themselves are radical politics of resistance and underscores the importance of gender.

0:39:36.0 Charisma Acey: Also in looking at strategies of Marronage in both the historic and contemporary context. And the last image I wanna leave you with of the Niger Delta is just to talk about alternative sociological ecological systems. Right now, when people talk about the delta, a big focus is on, oil bunkering, which is where militant groups will steal, will siphon oil from the massive oil pipes that crisscross the region and set up kind of their own alternative refineries. And the government is really interested in Shell and Chevron and all the other companies are interested in stamping out this activity. But another way to see it is as a way of securing their own livelihoods, their own autonomy, and stealing fuel from these large multinational oil companies and engaging in bunkering directly and getting money. And that you even have other countries that come off the coast of Nigeria and you have communities trading directly with other countries to get foreign currency, which they, which then filter into the communities.

0:40:39.2 Charisma Acey: They get more from this activity than they ever get from the state government. So these kinds of alternative socio-ecological practices. On one lens, it’s cracked down just in the same way that during the time of slavery, Marronage, escaped slaves and was seen as something illegal and to crack down on. And they were always trying to destroy these Maroon societies and Maroon communities, although some were able to withstand those tactics and actually engage in trade and build some kind of normal relationship with the surrounding societies. But in general, the state wanted to crack down. Plantation owners wanted to crack down. And so again, we see this kind of parallels in the kind of illegal or elicit activity in strategies of survival. So with the last few slides, I just wanna talk about the legacies of Marronage and Maroon society in the Americas.

0:41:38.8 Charisma Acey: And so by comparing ecological and spatial resistance strategies across Nigeria and Americans, we can gain insight into how these legacies influence contemporary environmental justice movements. And so Marronage and the study of it has evolved, but it seems really relevant to understanding today’s urban struggles and offering kind of new frameworks for thinking about resilience and resistance. I can’t do justice to this topic fully here. And that’s what the larger project is looking one, to look more at how the instances of Marronage in the African context and bring that into the scholarship, as well as bring different practices to really do comparative analysis to bring different practices of Marronage, both historically and contemporary across the continent and the diaspora. But there’s some concepts here that I wanna leave you with, which Marronage is resistance, not just physical resistance. So traditionally that’s what it meant, right? 

0:42:38.8 Charisma Acey: Flight from slavery, flight from the plantation, but it’s also metaphorical or ideological escape from various forms of repression. Another key concept that comes from thinking about Marronage in the Americas that I’m eager to look at in the African context is are the geographies of Marronage. And this idea of geographic refuse, which is all about making a way out of no way or transforming spaces that are undesirable or inaccessible by dominant society, into sites of freedom and self-determination. And I even see that in my work currently. Especially since the pandemic I’ve been doing more work in California on environmental justice and most recently working in East Oakland, California, which used to have be a large side of the African American community in Oakland. But people are being displaced and pushed out. And there’s a lot of, the way East Oakland is characterized in terms of dangerous or all kinds of things, negative characterizations.

0:43:41.9 Charisma Acey: But when you talk to people who live there, it’s vibrant, it’s culture, it’s home. And in a way that narrative, that larger narrative in some ways serves to protect people and people who are able to make space and create their own space in that larger context. So I’m even seeing parallel in that. Fugitive infrastructures and the Black Commons. So fugitive infrastructures is about understanding how black communities create and maintain their own systems of care, governance and resource management. We see that in Lagos where informal settlements have to provide their own water, their own electricity, their own services, but also in the Niger Delta where people are engaging in their own oil refining illegally and black cooperative placemaking as well is part of this. And then lastly, strategic entanglement. So Marronage is not only about fleeing or escaping, it’s also about strategically engaging with the dominant society.

0:44:39.6 Charisma Acey: Much as groups today have to think about how do we engage with the larger society and still keep our place to say, how do we demand more from our government to clean up our environment? Say for environmental justice without getting pushed out of our community. So strategic entanglement. So these are concepts that can be put into conversation. I won’t go into, there’s lots of implications for urban theory that Marronage speaks to by bringing Maroon ecologies, black ecologies into urban studies and environmental studies as well. I wanna leave you with two images. So one, this is an image by Olalekan Jeyifous, Shanty Mega-Structures. He’s commonly known as Lek, he’s a Nigerian born visual artist out of Brooklyn, New York, and he’s known for works like this, which transform shanty dwellings into sleek high rise towers.

0:45:30.3 Charisma Acey: And so in this image, the dispossessed are given prominence and visibility through these large towers made of patchwork materials. And it, to me, this image really symbolizes the idea of Marronage and he created it to highlight the deep divide and socioeconomic inequality. But it also provokes a series of questions that have guided, my work in Lagos and some studios that I’ve, had in the past taking students there. Where to question the common sense understanding of urban informality in the African context. To look for infrastructure not only in roads and water, but in people social relations and popular urban aesthetics, to listen to the voices of community members who are re-imagining a future for African cities that doesn’t impose an outside bourgeois vision or what a well-planned green city should look like. And to ask how might the future city look if the beautiful green city is imagined and planned from below.

0:46:26.9 Charisma Acey: So I’ll leave it there. Idea of transatlantic black ecologies, there’s both continuity in looking at the past, but also transformation of this concept as we look at how it continues to evolve over time. And so I would say that today’s exploration shows how marginalized communities can create autonomy and resist environmental challenges in cities, by connecting black ecologies from the coast of Nigeria to the American South. We can see how those Marronage strategies continue to evolve in contemporary social and environmental justice movements and really highlighting opportunities for solidarity across the black Atlantic. Thank you very much.

0:47:08.3 Julian Agyeman: Thank you so much. Charisma. That’s particularly poignant for me when you mentioned the slave castles, I visited Elmina Castle in my father’s country of Ghana and it’s a kind of bucket list experience in many ways, but it is one of the most moving things. I think when you see the gates of no return and you can feel centuries of souls, uneasy souls, it…

0:47:34.3 Charisma Acey: Absolutely.

0:47:36.9 Julian Agyeman: Anybody who wants to experience the worst side of humanity, I think going to these slave castles, but there’s an uplift to them as well. We’ve got a bounce in it. And I wanna bring in Bobby Jones. Bobby is, lives in Georgia and he says, listening from Georgia, I would love to hear Charisma’s thoughts on the Gullah Geechee Culture, and how it is part of or distinct from the larger context history of Marronage, particularly with the recent disaster on Sapelo Island.

0:48:03.9 Charisma Acey: Yeah, I really have to first of all just acknowledge the tragedy that just happened and all of us in our prayers to all of the people impacted and the survivors and yeah, the Gullah Geechee are a part of this project that I plan to continue to explore. But they’re a remarkable community that has really preserved a lot of the, actively preserve the culture and even the dialect and way of speaking of the West African context and actively preserved and maintain those traditions. And yet those, just like in other parts of the south, those terror, their land is under siege.

0:48:43.5 Charisma Acey: There’s a lot of effort currently underway to push people off the land similar to the way people are, black people are being and vulnerable people are being pushed off of land and other places all around the world. This is happening to the Gullah Geechee. And so while we’ve done this remarkable, amazing job of preserving culture and tradition and heritage, it is under threat and it’s been a process that’s been ongoing. And so I think there’s a lot to learn from the strategies. And that’s, I think that’s some implications for practice, right? How do we support communities and see that as part of planning practice, say in terms of preserving heritage and preserving culture as a political act.

0:49:26.8 Julian Agyeman: Great. Charisma. Can we all give a Cities@Tufts, warm thank you to Dr. Charisma Acey from Berkeley. Fantastic presentation Charisma.

0:49:37.3 Charisma Acey: Thank you so much, Julian. Sorry I didn’t leave more time for questions. [laughter]

0:49:41.1 Julian Agyeman: Well, I suspect you’re gonna get some emails and, Charisma tells me a lot of this is coming out in a book over the next year or so. So keep an eye out for Charisma’s work. Thank you.

0:49:53.1 Tom Llewellyn: We hope you enjoyed this week’s presentation. Click the link in the show notes to access the video transcript and graphic recording, or to register for an upcoming lecture. Cities@Tufts is produced by the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University in shareable, with support from the Barr Foundation, shareable donors and listeners like you. Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry. Light Without Dark By Cultivate Beats is our theme song and the graph recording was created by Anke Dregnat. Paige Kelly is our co-producer, audio editor, and communications manager. Additional operations, funding, marketing and outreach support are provided by Alison Huff, Bobby Jones, and Candice Spivey. And the series is Co-produced and presented by me, Tom Llewellyn. Please hit subscribe, leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and share with others. So this knowledge will reach people outside of our collective bubbles. That’s it for this week’s show.

The post Urban Environmental Marronage: Connecting Black Ecologies with Charisma Acey appeared first on Shareable.

In the U.S., herbal clinics and self-care stations may be the only form of healthcare some people can access; in the UK and Ireland, conventional healthcare is free at the point of contact, but generally does not include herbal medicine. In all of these countries, the most vulnerable people face barriers in accessing any healthcare.

Although free herbal medicine clinics exist — often associated with herbal medicine schools — the advantage of a mobile apothecary is in reaching vulnerable populations where they are. In addition to providing care, these projects also provide education about herbal medicine, increasing people’s capacity to care for themselves, their families and their communities.

Beyond herbal medicine

The impetus for community herbal projects is the provision for some form of healthcare for those less able to access it, but there is much more to these projects than herbal remedies. Greater valuing of local plants — many of which are often considered weeds or invasive plants — raises awareness about more regenerative land practices. It also strengthens people’s relationships with the plants, soil and nature that they are a part of, improving mental and physical health. 

This is also crucial because as interest in herbal medicine has exploded, unsustainable harvesting of medicinal plants has also increased, causing exploitation of people and land globally and locally. When people learn about local, abundant, nutrient-rich plants, they can mindfully harvest and use these vitamin- and mineral-rich plants as supplements, reducing the amount of packaging and energy-intensive recycling or waste associated with supplements purchased off the shelf, which are often less potent and less bioavailable.

In Washington state, Canoe Journey Herbalists (CJH) — a project which grew after its inception as a medic bus which provided care for Water Protectors at Standing Rock Reservation — is also looking to decolonize herbalism and cultivate indigenous-led herbal care (and wider care) for intertribal people on their lands and waterways, according to founder, Rhonda Lee Grantham.

For two weeks in July, the Intertribal Canoe Journey, the largest intertribal gathering of indigenous people in the U.S., paddle cedar canoes down the ocean together, stopping along the way to be hosted by each tribe for an evening.

Although the bus itself serves as the clinic where more in-depth assessments take place, provision of other types of care enables CJH to serve the approximately 15,000 paddlers, as well as allowing for intergenerational connection. Indigenous healing circles and ceremonies, herbal foot baths that younger generations give to elders, and provision of tea, salves and sunburn sprays, are some of the different ways that non-clinician indigenous people participate in care-giving.

While non-indigenous people may now be far removed from their ancestors’ harmonious relations with plants and the natural world, community herbal projects serve as an anodyne for this disconnection, helping heal the isolation associated with atomized living prevalent in western societies.

1. Clarify your objective:

• Who are you trying to serve? 
• Where do they hang out? 
• What kinds of issues do they face that simple herbal remedies can help?

Answers will undoubtedly evolve over time, but it’s useful to have a focus.

2. Find a few partners for your mobile apothecary:

• It’s easier to go down this path with one or more people committed to actualizing a community herbal project. 
• If you don’t already have a few potential people, reach out once you are fairly clear about your objective. 

3. Do a resource audit and reach out:

Think about assets that already exist in your community. Some community assets to consider are community gardens, private gardens, and local farms.

Those who can supply herbs and medicinal foods: 

• Make sure to source sustainably grown herbs or wild herbs growing in clean, pollution-free areas that are harvested responsibly. 
• Herbalista has established a Grow a Row scheme where local growers can set aside some land to grow specific herbs for the community herb projects. 

Venues:

• For medicine-making sessions if you plan to hold them to make remedies for your stock
• For storing preparations
  • This may be in someone’s home, the mobile unit (bus, cargo bike, etc.), or in a locked drawer in a collaborating organization. 
  • Security, access, and convenience in terms of loading up and transporting around are important considerations.

4. Form strategic community collaborations:

Collaboration can help with the financial side of receiving donations, as well as for hosting the herb station, harvesting or medicine-making sessions, or for storage. Homeless shelters or support organizations, women’s shelters, and refugee- or immigrant-advocacy organizations are all possible collaborators. These organizations may also provide useful information on what kinds of health issues are prevalent and guide what products you provide in your project. 

Below are some community collaborations to consider.

Suppliers:

• Those who can provide dried herbs, supplements such as vitamin C, vinegar, honey, sugar, bottles, jars, beeswax or vegan alternatives. Much of this depends on your particular project.

Herbalists:

• Those who can lead medicine-making sessions. It is not necessary for people to have years of training and qualifications to be skilled in herbal medicine-making and able to lead such sessions. Canoe Journey Herbalists has started an ‘Adopt a Remedy’ scheme where a community organization can take on the production of a particular herbal remedy with detailed instructions and supplies provided by CJH.
• Schools, community groups, or individuals can support the project by volunteering to grow a particular plant needed by the project throughout the year. The donations of plants and products according to their specification enables the indigenous people driving the project to focus their efforts on the intertribal canoe journey, while ensuring a degree of quality control.

Various health and social work professionals:

• When working with vulnerable populations, it can help to have people skilled in mental health and social services involved or available to consult.

Translation and graphics support:

• Depending on who you’re trying to reach, it may be important to have signage and labels in languages besides English; in some cases, using universally recognized images may also be useful. For herbal care in informal refugee camps in France, where Herbalists Without Borders London provides support, labels are prepared in Farsi, Arabic, Pashtu, French, and Kurdish because of the diversity of people served.

Funding sources:

• Identify local grants, ethical business sponsors, and other creative fundraising possibilities. Ask around in your networks, too. There may be people who work or volunteer at places and can advocate for the project to access resources.

5. Decide on the location for your mobile apothecary

• Even though your setup might be mobile, it’s good to decide on a regular, fixed location for a period of time. This allows you hone your procedures and processes, and get to know and establish relationships with the people in that area. It takes time for people to find out about new projects and to feel comfortable enough to try something new. The location will also inform the needs of your project. For example, if you locate outside without any heat or electricity supply, you’ll want to consider if serving hot tea is feasible as this will require transporting large flasks.
• Mauney-Brodek of Herbalista recommends initially setting up a self-care station with safe herbal preparations and teas (ones that do not interact with medicines people may be taking and are safe for folks who may be pregnant). In Dublin, the system of community herbal projects that she helped start began with a self-care station at an occupation of Apollo House, an empty office building taken over by housing activists in the midst of a homelessness crisis. Later, the Dublin Herb Bike was developed, which moves between a few locations. Self-care stations located inside an appropriate venue do not need to be staffed and can easily be built upon as capacity increases. Herbalista has shared guidance on setting up a self-care station here.
• The Mobile Apothecary in London has set up alongside of Refugee Community Kitchen (RCK), which serves free, hot meals outside of an underground station every Sunday. RCK already had a presence there which helped people engage with the Mobile Apothecary. While the Mobile Apothecary operates out of a cargo bike, and may in the future set up at more than one location, it has been running monthly sessions next to RCK. As a staffed project providing a small range of safe products, the Mobile Apothecary is a step above a self-care station, as people can speak to an herbalist or team members. Often, it’s the human connection that transmits the most potent medicine, so this is a really valuable service to provide, even if the capacity to run a full clinic is not there.

6. Organize a team

There are many hands involved in even the most basic of projects. 

• Find people who are interested and have the capacity to help in ongoing roles. 
• Have enough people in your team to rotate staffing or cover absences, and if you plan to run longer sessions, to allow individuals to take breaks. 

Some of the responsibilities may include: 

• Organizing publicity; 
• Creating labels; 
• Organizing medicine-making sessions; 
• Organizing donations of materials/fundraising; 
• Keeping track of stock; 
• Keeping track of budget; 
• Organizing harvests; setting up and taking down the station; 
• Staffing the station; 
• Washing up cups (if reusing); and 
• Documenting feedback

7. Develop a plan

Based on the above, come up with a plan that is feasible to implement with your initial resources and capacity.

• For many projects starting up, it may be more sustainable to run sessions monthly with a small range of products.
• Consider how you will have enough products to set up a station consistently over a period of time and if outdoors, how you will operate in different weather situations.
• The project in Dublin only started distributing herbal remedies after several community medicine-making sessions had generated a good amount of stock.

You’ll also need to consider how to generate funding as even with donated supplies and ingredients, there will inevitably be some expenses.

• Many projects running medicine-making sessions follow the pay-it-forward scheme developed by Herbalista, in which people pay on a sliding scale basis for learning about medicine-making at the session. The money helps to support the project, in addition to other material and in-kind donations.
• Some projects hold periodic fundraising events or sell a resource. For example, Bristol Herbalists Without Borders sells a calendar featuring botanical art and recipes.
• Local grants can also help.
• Although these projects are heavily dependent on volunteers, some projects compensate for a portion of the labor involved. In Atlanta, people leading educational activities are paid for contact time; however, it has taken years to get to the point of paying educators.
• The Mobile Apothecary project in London started with the help of a grant to acquire a cargo bike and another small grant to help cover other costs.

Ensure that the related issues of hygiene and safety issues are addressed in the setup, both for the people staffing the station (if applicable) and for those the project serves. Safety is another reason it is useful to set up with another organization.

• For example, the Mobile Apothecary project in London currently runs in a very busy area that has a pub and street homeless, and sometimes tensions flare up.
• Having people from the Refugee Community Kitchen alongside makes it easier to mutually support each other at these pop-up stations.

Be sure that any prepared medicines are labeled clearly, including the date of production, and are stored appropriately.

• If setting up an unstaffed self-care station, signage and information sheets are especially important.

Consider what’s appropriate for the climate and season.

• Hot teas are simple and really nurturing, but are not so appropriate in a sweltering situation.
• It’s good to plan ahead for the year and create or obtain stock accordingly.

8. Implement and evaluate

Start small—but do start! Lessons will be learned and your project will continually improve.

• Collect feedback and document which products are more popular at which times, what kinds of issues people seek support for, and what additional support the project may need to combat challenges.

• Periodic review and reassessment will help improve your service. As more people become interested, the capacity to scale up with stock, frequency of sessions, multiple locations, or integrating reuse/refill will also grow.

Community herbal projects provide immensely rewarding and nourishing ways to do solidarity work by bringing people together and cultivating deeper connections for them with plants and nature around them. Medicine created by many hands provides healing not only to the recipients, but to all the people involved in the project.

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This article is part of our series on disaster collectivism. Download our free series ebook here. It was originally published on September 18, 2019 and was updated on May 23, 2024.

The post How to set up a mobile mutual aid herbal apothecary appeared first on Shareable.

Prof. Esther Charlesworth’s talk focused on her nomadic design journey across the last three decades. In trying to move from just theorizing about disaster architecture to designing and delivering projects for at-risk communities globally, Esther started both Architects Without Frontiers (Australia) and ASF (International); an umbrella coalition of 41 other architect groups across Europe, Asia and Africa. Architects Without Frontiers asks, how do we go from just pontificating about the multiple and intractable challenges of our fragile planet, to actually acting on them?

About the speaker

Professor Esther Charlesworth works in the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University, where in 2016 she founded the Master of Disaster, Design, and Development degree [MoDDD] and the Humanitarian Architecture Research Bureau [HARB]. MoDDD is one of the few degrees globally, enabling mid-career designers to transition their careers into the international development, disaster and urban resilience sectors.

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About the series

Shareable is partnering with Tufts University on this special series hosted by Professor Julian Agyeman (Co-chair of Shareable’s Board) and Cities@Tufts. Initially designed for Tufts students, faculty, and alumni, the colloquium has been opened up to the public with the support of Shareable and Barr Foundation.

Cities@Tufts Lectures explores the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities to design for greater equity and justice.

Register to participate in future Cities@Tufts events here.

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Listen to the Cities@Tufts Podcast (or on the app of your choice):

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Watch the video

Transcript

[music]

0:00:08.3 Esther Charlesworth: Why are the disasters of our time, war, extreme poverty, sea level rise, relevant to design? I argue because if we distance our spatial practices from the big global challenges of our time with the line, “I’m just an architect,” “I’m just an urban planner,” “I’m just a landscape architect,” we become part of the problem. Deep ethical agency in design reaches a point of saying, “I want this to come into the world and will bring this about.”

0:00:38.6 Tom Llewellyn: Welcome to another episode of Cities@Tufts Lectures where we explore the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities designed for greater equity and justice. This season is brought to you by Shareable and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University with support from the Barr Foundation. In addition to this podcast, the video, transcript, and graphic recordings are available on our website, shareable.net. Just click the link in the show notes. And now, here’s the host of Cities@Tufts, Professor Julian Agyeman.

0:01:12.0 Julian Agyeman: Welcome to our joint Cities@Tufts Boston Urban Salon hybrid colloquium. This is a first for us. I’m Professor Julian Agyeman, and together with my research assistants, Deandra Boyle and Grant Perry, and our partners, Shareable and the Barr Foundation, we organize Cities@Tufts as a cross-disciplinary academic initiative which recognizes Tufts University as a leader in urban studies, urban planning, and sustainability issues. Boston Urban Salon is an urban seminar series co-organized by urban experts from different Boston universities and colleges, and we have representatives here from Harvard, Northeastern, from Boston University, and myself from Tufts as members of the Boston Urban Salon seminar committee. We’d like to acknowledge that we’re on the Medford Campus of Tufts University, which is located on colonized Wampanoag and Massachusetts territory. Tonight, we’re delighted to host Professor Esther Charlesworth.

0:02:13.5 Julian Agyeman: She’s a professor in the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, where she founded the Master of Disaster Design and Development degree. She’s also the Founding Director of Architects Without Frontiers and also one of the founders of Architecture Sans Frontières International. She’s worked in the public and private sectors in architecture and urban design in Melbourne, Sydney, New York, Boston, and Beirut since graduating with a master’s in Architecture and Urban Design from Harvard in 1995. In 2004, she was awarded her PhD from the University of York in England, and she’s published eight books on the theme of social justice and architecture, including, Divided Cities, 2011, Humanitarian Architecture, 2014, Sustainable Housing Reconstruction, 2015, and Design for Fragility, 2022. Esther’s talk today is Architects Without Frontiers; A Journey from Divided Cities to Zones of Fragility.

0:03:19.6 Esther Charlesworth: Thank you, and I’ll say g’day for those who know where I come from.

0:03:27.3 Speaker 4: It’s undeniable that poverty, conflict, social marginalization, and climate change are all powerful forces affecting people’s lives in the world today. Whilst there’s many responses to such challenges, architects and designers are uniquely equipped to assist those affected through seeing design, not just as a product, but as a process. For more than a decade, Architects Without Frontiers has been designing and delivering health and education projects that radically improve the social and physical infrastructure of vulnerable communities right across the Asia Pacific region. We design with local communities to create solutions that are environmentally sustainable and closely integrated with the culture of the region.

0:04:20.5 Speaker 4: We combine local knowledge, local materials, and local building techniques to create long-term projects that are owned by the people and communities they benefit, projects that produce much more than just a roof overhead as they help to rebuild lives and livelihoods. As a key player in the global design and development community, we’ve proven that good design can have a huge impact on the effectiveness, value for money and lifespan of development projects. Since 2005, Architects Without Frontiers has worked with the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Red Cross, the City of Melbourne, RMIT University, Arup, the Planet Wheeler Foundation, and other prominent Australian organizations. Between them, we have delivered 39 health and education projects in 14 countries across the globe.

0:05:19.3 Speaker 4: We’ve partnered with 60 architects in delivering pro bono design services while collaborating with 70 communities to improve their social and physical infrastructure. We have also trained over 80 Australian architects and project managers to work in the humanitarian sector. Whether it’s a financial supporter, individual architect, or large design firm applying their expertise, our members are united by the desire to contribute their skills, time, and resources to working with communities that can’t normally afford to pay for design themselves. By the year 2020, our vision is to make innovative design accessible to vulnerable communities globally. We also hope to mobilize 100 Australian design and development professionals to work with us and to deliver another 50 health and education projects for those who need them most. We need your involvement now to help transform lives through design.

0:06:23.6 Esther Charlesworth: So thank you to Julian for the invitation. And it’s really a strategic moment to reflect on my long journey that actually began here in Boston from Divided Cities to Architects Without Frontiers, which has led me to believe that architecture and planning can indeed have few frontiers, but perhaps greater moral agency in dealing with disaster, war, poverty, food and water security, indigenous sovereignty, and sea level rise. But how do we bridge the insidious gap between the 95% or 98% of the global population, I would argue, who are in most need of design, but who have least access to it? Tonight, I’ll be walking through these five platforms and I hope to offer a roadmap beyond the jargon and the cascading crises towards stories of hope where architects, urban planners, and landscape architects have addressed and often transcended the big challenges of our time, from Alabama to Afghanistan through what I call as their tools of spatial diplomacy.

0:07:31.5 Esther Charlesworth: But before I begin on these five platforms, I’m just going to sort of put up four questions or provocations up there. So in design and planning, I guess we’re all talking about these words, shock, resilience, resilencing, and the tools to deal with them from building back better to the SDGs. And in many ways, they’re the topics du jour, but might they merely translate as another form of disaster capitalism, as Western White bourgeois and colonialist sentiments. And for example, as one critic has noted, that the real post Hurricane Katrina story is not a story of resilience at all, but has been rather celebration of disavowal and resilencing. Onto the second question, the cult of the trauma glam architect. So here we have what we call in Australia, FIFO, fly in, fly out. There is a modality amongst architects who fly in, Norman, Sir Lord Norman Foster, sorry, I gotta get the acronyms right there, wouldn’t wanna offend anyone, was known to, he’s got his own private plane, flew into Kharkiv three years ago and said, “We will rebuild.”

0:08:48.0 Esther Charlesworth: However, it’s all very reminiscent of what happened after the Marshall Plan after World War II, and in fact, the zeal to rebuild at no cost in a way like Cobbs v Regio scheme. But I’ll be coming back to Norman and this cult of the trauma glam later in my talk. Now, the next point is that we are simply deluged by data and so-called wicked problems, the analysis, the paralysis, the data overload. We all know the problems, the poor, sad, homeless bears, submerged Venice, the couple just trying to get married in the ruin of their city, Aleppo, and to the threat of our AI, where one colleague has said to me that probably 50% of architecture and design jobs will be gone in the next three years. And all of these challenges might in fact overwhelm us to act. And Peter Singer calls, an Australian philosopher, calls this the diffusion of responsibility. That is, that the more people affected by a scenario, in fact, the less likely we are to act. And I’ll be coming back to this later on.

0:10:01.7 Esther Charlesworth: Are you already depressed? There are some good stories at the end, so please hang on. So tonight, I’m gonna take you through these five platforms, Divided Cities, where my journey first began, Humanitarian Architecture and the strong demand now for architecture, urban planners and landscape architects beyond mainstream practice models, Architects Without Frontiers, which is now the largest design, not-for-profit in the Asia Pacific region, Designed for Fragility, my last book, and the Master of Disaster Design and Development. And because there are students in the audience, really what that degree has been about. But moving on to Divided Cities. So nearly three decades ago, while studying at the GSD, I had an internship lined up at IM Pei’s office in New York, and I thought I was headed for the pyramid structure of architecturaldom. And somebody said, “Look, the Aga Khan program at MIT is needing volunteers to go to Mostar this summer, would you be interested?” I really didn’t know much about the Balkan Wars, I definitely didn’t know where Mostar was.

0:11:08.7 Esther Charlesworth: However, I ended up there that summer as part of an international team of architects working on the reconstruction of the city after the Balkan Wars. The famous Neretva River, Mostar had this fantastic diving competition. It was very much this city that was a bridge between East and West until it got shattered in 1993. This all for me created a kind of existential crisis. Surely architects are involved in peace and stability and what lawyers and logisticians do, we seem to, as a field, blow up buildings in the late 1970s, we captivated by postmodernism and structuralism in the late ’80s and the ’90s were, we were immersed in deconstruction, not war. That was somebody… Not peace, not rebuilding, that was somebody else’s business. What I was seeing while we were doing our fancy design schemes on Yellowtrace was the local people had no roof overhead, no running water, and no electricity, while we were coming in with our sort of fancy schemes about where we would rebuild and how, and really focusing on the architectonic nature of the problem.

0:12:21.5 Esther Charlesworth: That all then led to a 10-year project and a book, Divided Cities, that was funded by the MacArthur Foundation. And how that came about is that after the Mostar experience, myself and a colleague from Columbia, really came to understand what other cities had done after war. How they had rebuilt, through what strategies and what were the opinions of people from the snipers in Beirut to people who’d been leading the reconstruction about that. So that’s a journey that was really enabled as I said, by that MacArthur grant. Also led me to, I went to Beirut for three months and I ended up there for three years, which is the story of my life. I go somewhere for a month and then I’m there for a decade. So is anyone familiar with Beirut here? So you might know of the scheme to rebuild Beirut, which is basically, this is the downtown area. It was a laissez sort of urban planning scheme funded by the former Prime Minister of Lebanon, Rafic Hariri.

0:13:26.1 Esther Charlesworth: But what was the problem, apartments on the right say cost about a million American dollars. This is two decades ago. On the left is an image of what Beirut was like before the war, but the average income of a Lebanese person is $10,000 US a year. So there’s this huge discrepancy about designing and planning for people of the super elite that I guess we’re still dealing with. All of this reminded of a no man’s land, a continuum of urban segregation, so that we could never see 20 years ago the number of walls that have been erected since. And that in fact, all cities could be sort of somehow plotted on this line between urban’s perfect integration and perfect segregation, if that, and beacons of a larger urban class. And in fact, two years after our book, we see the separation wall dividing parts of Jerusalem’s Eastern Palestinian towns from the old town of Jerusalem or on the bottom slide there, the Great Wall of Calais, locking out Libyan asylum seekers who’ve arrived by boats.

0:14:36.1 Esther Charlesworth: So these walls, I mean, they’re everywhere and we could have added 80 more cities now onto our Divided Cities project, but that just got us started. Onto the next platform, humanitarian architecture. So humanitarian architecture, I argue, is not an antithesis to traditional design practice. Rather, it serves to broaden architecture’s public reach to the global 90%, who I said at the start of my talk, who are in the most critical need of design, but who have generally least access to it. However, it’s far from always been a noble cause where tragic events are awfully swiftly turned into design experiments. So on the right is a project done by the Future Shack, a very well-known Melbourne architect called Sean Godsell. Sean seriously thought that 40,000 of these units would be put up by the UNHCR. The problem is they had no fire retardant. They were destined for Sri Lanka, where they would have fallen apart. It was so successful, it had its own exhibition at MoMA, but not one Future Shack was actually ever built because it was a disaster. It was a utopia.

0:15:45.9 Esther Charlesworth: On the left, Renzo Piano’s scheme, again for Sri Lanka, would have just imploded by the time it got to Sri Lanka with the human condition. We could do a whole lecture on design experiments, but I won’t. Just give me a bit of time. So you all know the Make It Right housing in New Orleans that then Jolie-Pitt Foundation got up. Again, most of this housing was built two years too late, triple the cost, and for example, totally inappropriate. The red house on the left was for a disabled couple. The disasters continue from what I saw in Port-au-Prince. On the top left, an igloo scheme designed for housing by an American building company wanting to get into the business of disaster. It was 42 degrees inside, and in fact, the only people they put in there were the Haitian Red Cross staff. On the bottom left, a beautiful image. It’s almost like a kind of a Mondrian painting. However, this is where they parked 300,000 residents with no running water, no electricity, and no access to their place of work. And the best scheme of all is in Christmas Island in Australia.

0:16:54.7 Esther Charlesworth: This is a motel where we like to put our refugees, asylum seekers on boats in Australia. I won’t go there, but this is a scheme done by an architect, which is obscene. So it’s a cliff. It’s somehow where the poor asylum seekers land and then get jettisoned off. All of this leads to what I call the triple disaster cycle, where we have the political disaster that we saw in Beirut, Haiti, Sri Lanka, preceding the natural or the unnatural disaster of the cyclone, the tsunami. But the architectural disaster is the one that could be avoided, and that is the whole issue here. This all then led me to doing this book to try to locate these architects I was finding along my pathway who weren’t just doing this as isolated projects, they were actually making a living out of it. And some of them you know, Michael Murphy, Shigeru Ban, and the late Paul Pholeros. And also what this book was about, that these aren’t sort of… Humanitarian architecture is not something that you do when you’re looking for a day job.

0:18:06.1 Esther Charlesworth: You’re not sitting underneath a tree in Africa singing Kumbaya and it’s all furry and green, that’s what it’s about. No, there is a global demand for built environment professionals in the humanitarian sector right now, and I’ll come back to that at the end of my talk. Now, here we see, this is from Shigeru Ban’s own book on humanitarian architecture. Aren’t they beautiful images? Housing in Onagawa after the Great East Japan earthquake. So again, the FIFO architect, fly in, fly out, came in a helicopter, I was told by the residents, I haven’t verified it, got out the Yellowtrace, said, how’s it going? So I’ve seen time and time again the fancy photographs, but actually what hits the ground is something far more tragic and inappropriate. Now, most of you would have heard of the MASS Design Group here, hands up. Those who haven’t, they’re sort of a legendary architects who came out of the GSD, and I’m not going to talk about their work so much as their model of practice, as it was originally set up by the two founders.

0:19:12.9 Esther Charlesworth: In that, there were four quadrants, design, research, training, and advocacy, so that the for-profit work could underwrite the pro bono work, because that’s the problem. If you get too involved in pro bono work, as what’s happened with Architects Without Frontiers, it’s not sustainable financially. So now onto my own practice. And after 30 years, or no, probably 20 years by this stage of theorizing about architects’ roles after conflict, doing my PhD, I felt it was time to sort of build on all that theory, and how could I make this happen? I hadn’t met any architects working in this field, I’d met an engineer working for RedR, Engineers for Relief. The mission of AWF is to improve the social and economic capacity of vulnerable communities through the design and construction of health and education projects. In fact, this is updated since the last video, but we’ve now completed about 70 projects across 12 countries.

0:20:16.3 Esther Charlesworth: While I’d like to say our remit is the Asia Pacific region, we’ve done a lot of projects in East Africa and as far away as Afghanistan and Belize and a lot of projects in Australia. Now, the important thing is how are we funded. All of these things are great ideas, but we know from Architecture For Humanity went down with something like $3 million in debt. Emergency Architects in Australia, the great ideas, but how do you fund them? So we have 12 corporate donors, six of the top architecture firms in the country, engineers, a quantity surveyor who each fund us with $20,000 a year, which underwrites two paid staff. That’s how the work is done. And then those organizations give their time for free to schematic design. And we believe that in any project, we generally need the services of an architect, a landscape architect. And if we can’t cost it with a quantity surveyor, then it’s not good. We are not fundraisers, people come to us with a project they’ve already got the funds.

0:21:21.4 Esther Charlesworth: We have three main impacts, gender, health, education and livelihoods, climate change and building of resilience and indigenous community structure. And I’ll be talking about some of the projects up there and three main programs of activity, design, build, training and education. One of the first projects we did is in Ahmedabad, in a slum there, building these [inaudible] out of refuse material. Australian volunteers go for six months and before this, the kids, preschool kids just, there was nowhere to go. Now, when I returned to Australia after being in Beirut, RMIT is the largest foreign university in Vietnam. I was sick and tired as both a student or as a staff member. I’ve taken students into vulnerable communities in a design studio, and this year we’ll go to Ecuador. Next year, we’ll go to Belfast. Next year, we’ll go to Sri Lanka with the promise that we were gonna do something, but nothing actually got delivered. So when I went to Vietnam, I really took three years. There’s a lot of Australian not-for-profits working there to sort of understand what we could do.

0:22:32.5 Esther Charlesworth: And then I led this studio, building the community studio and architects, landscape architects, multimedia and design students from RMIT Vietnam in HộI An in Vietnam, between Ho Chi Min City in the South and Hanoi in the North. Some of the student sketches, but then it got built. Somebody very senior in the organization when I ran a workshop pulled me aside and said, “Esther, how much would it actually cost to build this project?” I’d had it funded, said about $250,000 US. And he said, “I’ve got that surplus in my budget.” And I was like, crikey, ’cause this wasn’t a capital works project. So I quickly got the deeds drawn up before somebody changed their minds and this project was built. What this project is about, this area of HộI An has the largest incidence of Agent Orange after the American Vietnam War of the rest of Vietnam. So there’s an incredible amount of physical and intellectual disability in generations of families. So kids like here have no future. They’re in the kitchen or they’re in the bathroom. They have no future for education.

0:23:44.7 Esther Charlesworth: So what this is about is not just the building, which was a simple vernacular building. The materials were procured by the people’s party in Da Nang, is that it gave 100 kids, 120 kids there now who go a life back and opportunities, but it meant that a parent could go back to work and a grandparent. So it’s had an impact on more like about 3000 people. So I guess AWF is about rebuilding the hardware of the building, but also the software of people’s livelihoods that’s critical. In the same line after the Boxing Day tsunami, we were asked to do by the mayor of Galle, two mobile libraries in Galle and Hambantota. We bought two Leyland Lanka buses, fitted them out and they hit the ground. Again, not fancy buses, but there was no internet, people had no access to reading in their villages or no news. It was about employing the driver, the assistant driver, the librarian, and the assistant librarian that really mattered on these projects. One of the biggest projects we’ve done that represents this design brokerage model is a women’s cultural and social enterprise hub for our department of Homelands or our Department of Foreign Affairs.

0:25:00.9 Esther Charlesworth: This area of Fiji has the largest incidence of domestic violence in the South Pacific. So people won’t go to police stations to report this. And this is for women who come from all of the remaining Islands to both share their stories but also to trade craft. So this is a view, not too shabby. On the top is an image, obviously it was modeled on the traditional bure in Fiji, nothing fancy. What’s more striking about this project is that 58 business development courses have been run for women there that has enabled them to gain a livelihood. So again, it’s just not about the building, it’s about the livelihoods that come about throughout that, that perhaps far more lasting. We’re now doing the second stage of that project, the information hub. I’m gonna show a few other projects, Maningrida, right up at the top end where we’ve done an arts and culture precinct. Now, to give you an idea, who in the room has been to Australia? Some of you need to get traveling, please. Diane, Loretta, come on, we gotta get you Down Under.

0:26:07.2 Esther Charlesworth: So to give you an idea, I live down here in, this is about the same land mass as North America, from East to West. Maningrida is where I’ve been working, the top end. The closest city is Denpasar, where you would fly into if you want to go to Bali or Indonesia. This is a map of indigenous groups and languages in Australia, so just to show the complexity. In this area, I could go from Melbourne to Paris, it would take me the same time as going to Melbourne to Maningrida, seriously. Very interesting group of twin 12 multi-language or skin groups that we worked on this arts and culture precinct with. And generally, this is what we do. Pull together a schematic design, get it funded and hand it back to the client. The Northern Territory government now is looking at funding this project. This area is also very famous for rock art. Now, a project we’re doing right now is in Ramingining, just to the East of where I showed. Now, indigenous housing in Australia, remote indigenous housing is a disaster, and I’ll quickly tell you why and I am getting to the end of my talk.

0:27:21.1 Esther Charlesworth: Now, these are the kind of landscapes in Australia. For most of our middle, there’s no Wyoming, there’s no Minnesota, there’s nothing. Remote indigenous housing provided by the government is a spectacular disaster because it’s framed on the nuclear family model, that there is a mum, dad, and two or three kids. In fact, there is not a nuclear family in remote indigenous kinship structures. Generally, the grandmother will bring up the kids and there are a lot of avoidance issues when it comes to designer housing. So the one house fits all is generally a disaster, but what it keeps being built. And then these images appear in the news and then people say, “Oh, these people can’t look after their houses.” They’re built by crook contractors, the slabs are laid really badly. I probably wouldn’t live there either and probably bash up my wall as well. A house is not a home there. It can be a place for storage as we know in a Western way. And then this is just a bit of a sad image of what is currently being produced on the right.

0:28:28.9 Esther Charlesworth: Now, this is, again, to the East of where I was talking about where I’ll be in a couple of weeks time in Ramingining, where we’ve been asked to do a pilot indigenous house that could be scaled up to 10 houses in the region. And what we’ve been looking at is design exemplars. What are light, off the ground? This is a coastal area. Most indigenous communities are living outside. This is the kind of environment that they want. So we’ll be visiting a lot of these exemplar projects to understand what are the best forms of housing because we’ve got a great client who’s also the donor for the project. Moving on, just to show the range of our project before I get to the end here, top end. But we’re also doing a series of domestic violence shelters for women two kilometers from where I live in Melbourne, in Preston. And no, there’s nothing very significant about a bunch of toilets, is there? Except before we got involved, 30 women and kids were sharing one bathroom. And through this project and through the funding, women got their dignity back together again.

0:29:37.4 Esther Charlesworth: They’re only in this transitional housing for two weeks. It is their right to have some dignity, to have a shower and their kids in peace. And this stuff mightn’t be award-winning, but it’s transformational. Afghanistan, an embroidery workshop and just in terms of some of the impacts of the project, a place where women learn textile skills to enable them to safely earn a living. What’s extraordinary about this project, it was built under the fall of the Taliban, and it was actually a women’s group who got it up. And I’m just gonna finish off here with some other projects we’re currently doing. Most of our projects are health and education, they’re not housing. Gambia, a cancer clinic there. So we are pulling together these schemes, getting them costed, handing them back to the client. And more recently, as you might know, the South Pacific, half the islands are very prone to sea level rise and a third of them are already underwater. So these are for climate change resilience centers that will be containers for disaster materials but also for training in terms of community resilience.

0:30:44.4 Esther Charlesworth: The land has already been found in Tonga and the first one of these will be built next year, another village relocation project. And just any of, before I sort of end up with the MAUD story, is to say disasters happen with Architects Without Frontiers as well. So this was a project that I felt was going really well. It was in Dar es Salaam outside Tanzania, a project for victims of sexual violence, teenage girls. However, the architect I think was thinking of the Apple headquarters in Cupertino when they came up with this remarkable scheme, which looked great and probably would’ve won an award in Architecture Australia. But the cost per square meter in Tanzania is $700 per square meter. This took it up to $8,000 a square meter. So we actually had to intervene. So occasionally we see totally inappropriate buildings like this that will just further promulgate the violence of already traumatized communities. Onto the second last, my book Design For Fragility, this tried to go a bit deeper than humanitarian architecture in terms of not only interviewing the 13 architects, but interviewing the beneficiaries of the projects.

0:32:00.0 Esther Charlesworth: What did they think? What did the local project manager think? What did the midwife think? To go a bit deeper. I’m just gonna show these are the architects. It was framed in four main typologies, housing, justice, health, and children. This is a project demand done by Urko Sanchez, and I guess most of these architects represent a sort of a Robinhood architect. Urko Sanchez is running a very fancy practice in Madrid doing houses in Majorca, but also on the Horn of Africa in Djibouti. And this is what the local project manager had to say about what the project meant for his part of the world, what it meant for them. Then a lot of the MASS design group. What was interesting about this project are the interviews that were undertaken with the midwives, their view that women were walking for two days to these rural villages, that this was saving lives. And you can’t often say that architecture saves lives, but this project did and has set a precedent for other healthcare centers in the region.

0:33:09.1 Esther Charlesworth: Anna Heringer, some of you might know. Again, spectacular building, it’s won an Arch-Con Award but Anna has also set up an NGO for the disabled women here who are creating textiles and who can gain a livelihood throughout that. The last project here is done by Local Works in Uganda. It was built with the migratory tribe people formerly known as the Pygmies and when their land was dispossessed by the forces of guerrilla tourism which is now a really big deal in that part of the world and it was declared a national park and all of these people were moved out. So what’s interesting about this project, it’s very simple but what I love, if you can see the aerial image here of the village, it’s actually a heart shape. And they’re actually twigs and sticks that the local women put around their village to protect their chickens from the marauding tigers outside. And so I think that was particularly beautiful. So the emerging themes of this book, and I guess getting towards the end here, the zones of fragility. Again, the increasing mandate for architects and built environment professionals to work in zones of fragility.

0:34:24.8 Esther Charlesworth: We see doctors, engineers, economists, lawyers at the forefront of addressing these sources of fragility but architects are largely missing in action. The rise and rise of humanitarian architecture. Despite the demand for architects and landscape architects to have skills in urban resilience, climate modelling, design thinking, where are the dedicated design programs? In the USA, throughout most of Asia, we’ve got one in Australia. They simply don’t exist. People will do a one-off studio but it’s not seen as core business. Poverty does not exclude aesthetics. Most of these projects won design awards. This is not a game of aesthetics, you can be doing both. Thirdly, if you don’t measure it, how much do you know? Architects aren’t great on how do we know what we know on doing post-occupancy evaluations, but four of these projects did. And the last point, trauma glam. Working in disasters has become the theme du jour for many architects with what I call deprivation irrelevance syndrome. And according to a psychiatrist friend of mine, it’s actually a real term.

0:35:34.8 Esther Charlesworth: As we were completing this book, again, Foster was in Ukraine to discuss the reconstruction of Kharkiv, proposing a master plan to be developed by the best minds in the world, best planning, architectural design and engineering skills in the world. And yet from Gaza to Kiev, these sites of despair, I argue, are not laboratories for design experiments. On to the final part of my talk and in wrapping up. So I set up the Master of Disaster Design and Development at RMIT because I felt in my journey there was nothing like this. We were doing these design studios, but there was nothing giving me the skills that I needed to do to work in this sector. We set up the course from scratch. It was the first online degree in the School of Architecture. It’s run, we have students from all around the world. We actually have three from America because there’s nowhere to go in the States to do this kind of degree, and they can enroll online. The 101 courses, design, disaster and development, shelter and settlement, and then students enroll in a number of electives from post-disaster project management, humanity architecture, communication for social change, etcetera, etcetera. Some of their voices before I wrap up.

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0:36:57.2 Speaker 5: The Master of Disaster Design and Development is in some ways the encapsulation of the concerns that exist within the School of Architecture and Urban Design at RMIT.

0:37:12.4 Speaker 6: It had a long gestation, maybe four or five years, out of a lot of discussions through the International Federation of the Red Cross, RMIT Europe, the Australian Red Cross, World Vision. People across the world who are really interested in putting together a degree in the Asia-Pacific region to train the next generation of humanitarians.

0:37:33.8 Speaker 7: There are going to be increasing disasters around the world. The toll on humankind is going to be very great. If we have a group of people who already have some skills, from a bachelor’s degree, from service, in other disciplines, they bring a lot to a degree like this where you’re adding on a new component, dealing with disasters, both before, after, and during.

0:38:01.4 Speaker 6: As a graduate student, I had the incredible opportunity to get involved in a project to rebuild Mostar, and it really got me thinking about these issues and the capacity of design to deal with the complexity of social justice, the role of spatial thinking in dealing with these really complex issues of peace, war, disaster and division.

0:38:24.5 Speaker 8: I chose to do the MAUD degree as it was like a solidifying of almost of the experience that I’ve been on, of working out or developing that past experience in the humanitarian sector through study. During the time as an architect, I did a bit of work with Architects Without Frontiers. I’ve been across the board a number of times, been working in that sector a little bit, even though I was only through community development work, but I really wanted to get in there and study. When the MAUD degree came available, I was like, “Yeah, I’ve got to do this.” MAUD has enabled me to transition into the disaster relief sector by opening up of opportunities in terms of deployment by RedR as an expert on a mission to work with UNHCR in Nepal, undertaking site planning for consolidation of the remaining refugee settlements into a single refugee settlement and working with their temporary shelters to be more robust.

0:39:14.0 Speaker 7: MAUD is the only degree in the world that I know of that really is transformative. It doesn’t just give you a skill on how to build a building or how to work with people because they have trauma. It gives you those skills so you can manage all those disciplines and really bring to bear the kinds of skills necessary to run the entire operation, like a Katrina or after a tsunami. Not just to be there, not just to be a helper, but to help manage the thing to the future.

0:39:48.4 Speaker 6: MAUD is engaging, compelling.

0:39:53.4 Speaker 5: Eye-opening.

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0:39:53.4 Esther Charlesworth: Just some final words. So 28 years or so after my first immersion into Mostar and Cities Divided by Conflict, why are the disasters of our time, war, extreme poverty, sea level rise relevant to design? I argue because if we distance our spatial practices from the big global challenges of our time, like we’ve done with project management or outsource ethics to others with a line, “I’m just an architect,” “I’m just an urban planner,” “I’m just a landscape architect,” we become part of the problem.

0:40:28.8 Esther Charlesworth: Deep ethical agency in design reaches a point of saying, “I want this to come into the world and will bring this about.” Bridging just pontificating about our fragile planet as we are very good at doing as academics and acting within it. A quote from my friend Erik Kessels, design remains the most powerful tool we have for confronting humanity’s most serious challenges. It has the potential to heal us from any past crises and ameliorate or fully eliminate the effects of forthcoming ones. Design is a Swiss army knife of cognition. So social infrastructure, what were the other words there? Human centered architecture.

0:41:15.7 Julian Agyeman: Yeah, yeah.

0:41:16.4 Esther Charlesworth: And infrastructure. Yeah, I think we are basically talking about exactly the same things, but perhaps with different words. That it is very much about the words you’re using, human centered architecture and infrastructure. And the only difference I would say is if you’re not rebuilding livelihoods, you’ve got to ask what you are doing. We’re very good at rebuilding things and rebuilding objects, but if we’re not creating livelihoods and education through doing that, then I think we have to ask what we are doing in any of these zones of fragility. We had the highest employability of any degree in the school because we accepted non-design cognate. So people came in from business, as long as they had an undergraduate degree or the, whatever was the equivalent in terms of practice.

0:42:09.1 Esther Charlesworth: Generally people who come in, they would need career. There are similar degrees. Carmen Mendoza, a friend of mine runs one at UIC in Barcelona, an emergency architecture degree, but they’re generally just graduates. My advice to anyone who wants to get in this sector, you really need to have 15 or 20 years of work. You need to know yourself, you need to have some technical skills. Getting into the international development work is as tough as getting into Shigeru Ban’s office. So this isn’t, and you get, will get paid less if you work in the not-for-profit sector. I’m open to, not open to office, but I live a long way away, but it’s a very ideological thing because the model of my school now is based on STAR Architecture, is based on award-winning buildings.

0:42:58.7 Esther Charlesworth: If I get told one more time, “Esther, you’re in such a niche or bespoke area,” I think I will scream. We are reading the news, I’m reading the New York Times last night about a cyclone and earthquake somewhere else. I was just somewhere else that had about three days ago, somewhere in a seismic zone. I felt the earthquake tremors. I mean, are you joking? Is this niche? Is this bespoke? One of my students who ran a very successful architecture firm who graduated in first class and he said, “Esther, I would’ve been a much better architect if I’d done these subjects in my undergraduate degree. Almost now, it’s too late.” There is time, but again, it’s the disciplinary chauvinism of the professions…

0:43:45.4 Julian Agyeman: The second online question, do you collaborate with any academics and architects worldwide? 

0:43:51.4 Esther Charlesworth: First of all, Architects Without Frontiers only go where we are invited. So all the time people will say to me, oh, we’ve had a lot of floods in Australia and obviously bush fires. And people say, “Will you go up to the Northern rivers, Esther?” No, we had no remit to work there. Australia, we do have a big government. We do have people who will step in disasters, local versions of FEMA. We have to ask someone to come in. We are not flying people who are gonna solve a problem. We have a European group of like-minded schools from Belleville in Paris to Venice to Darmstadt to UIC Barcelona that we have brought… RMIT have a campus in Barcelona, that we are brought together. We were gonna put together, we did a big European grant. So I do work with consortias of other universities, mostly in Europe because the headquarters is in Geneva for a lot of these organizations.

0:44:50.1 Esther Charlesworth: And I think the UK is ahead of the curve in terms of some of this work. There’s Architects Without Frontiers UK who are really big. So this sort of work is far less foreign in that world. As I go back to it, we do not have the remit to work with refugees. My friend, Brett Moore, who was a Loeb fellow, until recently he was the head of Shelter and Settlement for UNHCR, we have to be very careful that we don’t go in… There’s a very well known architect who set up Architecture for Humanity and I saw him yesterday on social media, guess where he is? Gaza. Of course he’s there ’cause he was in Ukraine last week. And I think it’s pretty dicey because you do become this sort of ambulance chaser, dare I say. We are not invited to do those projects and nor would we because we don’t have the remit to work within them. In terms of political ethics, I think the project I showed in Dar es Salaam, architects want to win awards. They don’t want to listen quite often.

0:46:00.7 Esther Charlesworth: They want their projects built overnight and they’re not willing to compromise. We’ve got a 2030 strategy at the moment where we’re turning that around because we’ve got two staff, we actually need eight, and we need a full-time CEO. So, I think all the time they’re in ethical conundrums and one of the projects we’ve got two architects, indigenous housing is the theme du jour, saying, I can do this better than you ’cause we’ve got an indigenous architect on staff and it’s already getting messy before the project began. So, it’s a great question. The issues of refugees is an intractable one, having lived in Beirut and volunteered at the Palestinian camps most weekends, I can attest to that. I’ve been to al Za’atari in Jordan to understand how that project is working and a number of other camps. But it’s because of the land tenure and the lack of legal status, it’s a much bigger issue beyond my remit. But great question.

0:47:00.4 Jim: My quick question is the cultural and vernacular expertise needed to fly into these countries, you’re not flying in like Sir Norman on your private jet, but you are flying into a country where you may not be prepared to know the local building techniques, the culture. How do you bridge that and make things culturally and locally, you get it.

0:47:18.7 Esther Charlesworth: Great question, Jim. I wish I had a private jet, I wish. First of all, we always have a local project architect. We try to avoid liability by not building, but where we have in Vietnam and Fiji, all of the procurement of the materials is all done by local project management firms. So we might go over to scope the project initially. If it’s not built by locals and involves architects, some countries don’t have architects where we work, then we wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole. So every project is completely different. We’ve done sort of another 20 projects I didn’t show here, one in Chiang Mai for the Asian Indigenous Peoples Pact Coalition. They had a Thai architect, but he had no experience in sustainable construction or rammed earth that was being used. And we had a lot of expertise in that in a way, because if you just start exporting what I think is a good prefab technique in Australia, it might be totally the wrong solution on your island. But great question, Jim.

0:48:25.4 Loretta: I did some work recently on community architects in London, and obviously, they’re also architects who deal with kind of social engagement, bottom up grassroots architecture. I was interested in how both your research and your master’s module utilizes concepts from other architectural movements that are socially and community engaged and what they are.

0:48:45.8 Esther Charlesworth: Look, we are drawing on the giants of people like Jeremy Till and his book on spatial agency. And I know Jeremy well. Obviously, people like Cynthia Smith, who designed for the other 95%, this isn’t new stuff. There’s another book done by Maria Colino, who teaches in Paris on shelter and settlements. So I think the community architecture movement is an interesting one. I don’t know if you know Yasmeen Lari’s work? She’s in the book. So Yasmeen is the first female architect in Pakistan, who ran a corporate practice until the late ’70s, until the earthquakes in the late 1990s. She just said, “Then what am I doing? I’ve got to sort of give back.” So, Yasmeen has started off a movement called the Barefoot Social Architecture Movement. She’s got people building large bamboo structures and building their own houses. She’s very anti-foreign aid, that the locals should be doing it themselves.

0:49:48.9 Esther Charlesworth: So I think, it’s hard to say community architecture per se, ’cause I think we have to look at the countries in which they’re being built. But Yasmeen is a great case study in this. Yasmeen got the Royal Institute of British Architects gold medal two years ago. She’s a complete legend and I’m interviewing her for the Australian Institute’s conference next week. And she came as a visitor to the MAUD degree and had all of our students building bamboo structures all day. I think the grassroots community architecture is incredibly important, but I wouldn’t put a box around it. Because once you start to put a box around what is social architecture and what is community architecture, we might run into a few problems ’cause some people would say, that’s exactly what we’re doing. Norman Foster might say that’s what he’s doing. I don’t think he is, but great question, Loretta, and I’d love to read your book.

0:50:47.4 Speaker 11: I found that point that you made about hard design and soft design, physical design and people’s needs design, really thought provoking. And so that made me think of, is there work that Architects Without Frontiers is doing related to the ownership of the structures? And I can imagine that can be very ambitious and difficult thinking of who has the ownership of these buildings. But I’m wondering if that’s anything that y’all consider in the design.

0:51:13.4 Esther Charlesworth: Yeah. Great question. The issue of tenure is a really thorny one. Now, I should just say on our website, people fill in a project request form. Do you have funding? Do you have land tenure? So we do not resolve funding. If people don’t have legit tenure over their land, we would not take on board the project. We have to be very careful what is the remit of our organization, what do we do and what we don’t do. And by a former Foreign Minister of Australia, Gareth Evans, an incredible figure who also ran the International Crisis Group for 20 years in Brussels when, he’s one of the ambassadors for Architects Without Frontiers and he said, is to be very careful to be very limited in what is the remit of your organization. So no, we’re not dealing issues with land tenure. We then do a whole lot of our workers in the return or the reverse brief. Is this project needed? Are we dealing with a right wing Christian organization? 

0:52:15.2 Esther Charlesworth: No, we don’t wanna do the project. Are we dealing with nuclear arms? Are we dealing with some sort of psycho whatever? I don’t know how you’re all gonna work out that one. But we do, a lot of our work goes into the due diligence because otherwise, it’s a waste of that person’s time. We wanna build these projects. These aren’t just sketches. And that’s why on the smell of an oily rag, until two years ago, we had one paid staff. Now we’ve got 2.5, hopefully with philanthropic funding, which is a completely different structure in Australia, we don’t have tax breaks. It’s very hard to get funding because it’s assumed the government will give you funding. So we don’t deal with tenure because it has to be sorted out before we take on board a project.

0:53:08.4 Speaker 12: Esther, this was an amazing presentation and I so much value the organization, your answer to some of these questions about the due diligence as an organization. So I wanna ask a slightly different question. It’s not a critique at all of the organization, but what I’m… I wanna speculate a little bit more about where this kind of work could be taken and redeveloped in urban studies more generally. And before I ask the question, let me just say that I used to run a track at the GSD called Risk and Resilience, which our dean got rid of too, which was looking at the same thing. So we’ll have to have an offline conversation about the ways in which the discipline of architecture is not willing to enter into the social urbanism space. So I think that’s a part of the issue that you’re probably dealing with, but that’s exactly what I wanted to ask you about though. Are there lessons to be learned from the work that you’ve done that move us into the social urbanism space? So one of the limitations of architecture historically, and I would say in, especially in the global South and a lot of these places, looking at it on the US, is the kind of obsession with the house, the building itself and not the neighborhood.

0:54:30.4 Speaker 12: Maybe picking up on what Loretta was talking about, community design. And I guess my question is what can we learn? How can you share the knowledge you have of these spaces to take the field work and the knowing how to work with communities and turn the product into something larger and bigger with more impact, maybe sustainable impact than the house itself. So pulling you into, back into the urban design realm in architecture, going beyond just the building to urban design. And the second question builds, again, that I thought of Loretta’s question about community, I was thinking about, or was conversation about ethics. I’m wondering whether we should be following these models in American cities, and what do I mean by that? Part of the problem of disaster inequality, kind of inability for families to be resilient has to do with the way property markets work and architecture builds those markets, right? 

0:55:35.6 Speaker 12: And what is striking about your work and with Architects Without Frontiers is the small scale. So I’m maybe sound like I’m contradicting myself, the focus on the house, but the idea that you can innovate in a relationship with a consumer of that piece of architecture based on what they need, having aesthetics and local vernacular things, but not falling into the trap of mass produced big housing, which just reinforces, you know, pushes people out and inequality, et cetera. So I guess, do you have some thoughts about how this work that could be easily, I don’t wanna say easily ghettoized as like othered, as in big disasters and in the developing world we could learn about that and bring that back to cities like Boston or New York or London or the global North, so to speak. And could the staff that you work with, could you share knowledge that we could use in kind of the everyday crisis of urbanism and not just a disaster? 

0:56:52.6 Esther Charlesworth: I’d like to hear a lecture on this, what a question. I’d like to say that we’re designing a system, not always a project. Architects are de facto psychiatrists. People quite often don’t know what they want. Now, I don’t know how people come to us. It must be an algorithm. Architects without money because why are people coming in from East Africa or wherever, quite often groups from America and asking us to do projects. So the second point is we don’t do residential because we simply haven’t been asked. And so that’s why we largely avoid this sort of tenure system. In terms of the social urbanism, the landscape, the small scale, I’ll get onto that. So the project I spoke about, the new indigenous housing project up in Ramingining, the first thing I did was bring on board a landscape architect with a great knowledge of the ecology of that coastal soil because one of the big problems is, is houses, is they’re plunked on the ground with no understanding of the coastal environment and the erosion.

0:58:03.2 Esther Charlesworth: So our offices actually in Melbourne which is the largest landscape architect in Australasia, I wish I’d done MLAUD maybe rather than MAUD. In urban design, the best urban designers I met are the landscape architects. I’m not saying that there aren’t egos in that profession, but that they’re a lot less. So that is one thing, designing a system. We are not generally doing houses, but involving landscape architects from the outset. In terms of how we take this and sharing knowledge, maybe that’s the next part of the journey. For us, the critical thing is now looking at the impacts for the projects. How do we quantify the impacts? We know if you work in health, that your metric is infant mortality or maternal mortality. If you’re in education, it might be truancy. In design, on an existential level, how do we know what we know and according to whom? And while there are, particularly in the UK, Loretta, there’s some interesting stuff coming up about design impact. The funding thing completely changes.

0:59:11.6 Esther Charlesworth: And this is what Brett Moore was dealing with UNHCR with the Better Shelter Project, which is the largest mass shelter project in the world funded by the IKEA Foundation because they’re on version 12 of it now. So I think it’s a sort of an iterative thing. And I, as Julian pointed out, I’m on the board and one of the founding groups of Architecture Sans Frontières International, which is an umbrella group of 43 organizations. There is no American group, there’s ASF Quebec. And I guess because Architecture for Humanity took up all that airspace and then went down in flames and they were membership-based organizations. So in a way, organizations like that, Engineers Without Borders have been great because they’re membership-based organizations, they’re in the universities. I think once, for me that the next stage, perhaps academically but also project wise is to be able to say of our 62 projects, these have been the quantifiable impacts because then you are speaking a different language to the funding agency.

1:00:20.4 Esther Charlesworth: If you can say that this kind of housing design will reduce the incidents of, we can’t say school leaving but of disease as we know through the MASS Design’s Group work in East Africa, then you attract a different kind of audience. So I think that is my big challenge. And I think it’s just small by small. We don’t aim to get really big and it’s an ethical decision as I said, do we just talk about things, so blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, or do we do things? And in the last, not some, in the last stages of my career, but at this point of your career, there is a sort of a reckoning. You can’t do everything and where are you gonna be most effective? And I think we all feel the pressure of that in academe. It’s a great question.

1:01:08.8 Julian Agyeman: And this was our first Cities@Tufts Boston Urban Salon event. I’m hoping we’re gonna have more. And again, Esther, this has been wonderful. We haven’t had an architect actually talking in the Cities@Tufts program, so you brought a whole new set of perspectives. And again, thanks very much.

1:01:27.4 Tom Llewellyn: We hope you enjoyed this week’s presentation. Click the link in the show notes to access the video, transcript, and graphic recording, or to register for an upcoming lecture. Cities@Tufts is produced by the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University and Shareable, with support from the Barr Foundation, Shareable donors and listeners like you. Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants, Deandra Boyle and Grant Perry. Light Without Dark by Cultivate Beats is our theme song and the graph recording was created by Anke Dregnat.

1:02:00.9 Tom Llewellyn: Paige Kelly is our co-producer, audio editor, and communications manager. Additional operations, funding, marketing, and outreach support are provided by Allison Hoff, Bobby Jones, and Candice Spivey. And the series is co-produced and presented by me, Tom Llewellyn. Please hit subscribe, leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and share it with others so this knowledge will reach people outside of our collective bubbles. That’s it for this week’s show. Here’s a final thought.

1:02:28.4 Esther Charlesworth: Poverty does not exclude aesthetics. Most of these projects won design awards. This is not a game of aesthetics, you can be doing both.

[music]

The post Architects without frontiers: A journey from divided cities to zones of fragility with professor Esther Charlesworth appeared first on Shareable.

His articles, interviews, and essays on everything from the spacesuits of the future to love in the time of visas have appeared in The New York Times, Time Magazine, The Daily Beast, and elsewhere. He was also formerly a columnist at Pacific Standard.

In the following conversation, Arvind illuminates the dire situation in Gaza and the challenges journalists face amid the turmoil. Arvind reports back on his conversations with journalists on the ground in the West Bank and shares the story of the protective equipment library that has been set up by the Palestinian Journalist Syndicate (PJS) to provide journalists with the essential tools they need.

Arvind also highlights how journalists face increasing repression for covering Palestine, both in the US and abroad, and the impact of media censorship and biased narratives on the perception of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, particularly among Western outlets. Join us as we uncover the crucial role of independent journalism in times of crisis and how we can collectively support those documenting the reality of the frontlines.

Resources:

• Life-Saving lending library: Union supplies Palestinian journalists with safety gear amid ongoing Israeli genocide
• If you would like to support journalists in Gaza so that they can continue their work, please make a contribution to the IFJ’s International Safety Fund with the comment “For the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate.”

Episode credits:

• Co-hosted and executive produced by Tom Llewellyn
• Co-hosted, produced, and edited by Paige Kelly
• Theme Music by Cultivate Beats

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The Response is an award-winning podcast series produced by Shareable exploring how communities respond to disaster — from hurricanes to wildfires to reactionary politics and more.

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The Response is an award-winning podcast series produced by Shareable exploring how communities respond to disaster — from hurricanes to wildfires to reactionary politics and more.

The post Covering Palestine: The impact on journalists on the frontlines and abroad with Arvind Dilawar appeared first on Shareable.