Megan Saltzman presented her new book–Public Everyday Space: Cultural Politics in Neoliberal Barcelona–which explores how everyday practices in public space (sitting, playing, walking, etc.) challenge the increase of top-down control in the global city. Public Everyday Space focuses on post-Olympic Barcelona—a time of unprecedented levels of gentrification, branding, mass tourism, and immigration. Drawing from examples observed in public spaces (streets, plazas, sidewalks, and empty lots), as well as in cultural representation (film, photography, literature), this book exposes the quiet agency of those excluded from urban decision-making but who nonetheless find ways to carve out spatial autonomy for themselves. Absent from the map or postcard, the quicksilver spatial phenomena documented in this book can make us rethink our definitions of culture, politics, inclusion, legality, architecture, urban planning, and public space.

About the speaker

Megan Saltzman (PhD, University of Michigan) is a teaching professor at Mount Holyoke College in the department of Spanish, Latin American, and Latinx Studies, where she also contributes to the Five Colleges of Massachusetts Architectural Studies Program. Her research focuses on contemporary urban culture of Spanish cities with a transnational and ethnographic approach. Her 2024 book, Public Everyday Space: Cultural Politics in Neoliberal Barcelona combines literary and visual arts with fieldwork to expose how everyday practices in public space (sitting, playing, street selling) not only challenge the city’s policed image but also serve to carve out autonomy from below. Megan has published on urban cultural themes in Spain related to gentrification, spatial in/exclusion, immigration, nostalgia, recycling, urban furniture design, grassroots cultural centers and “artivism.” Most recently Megan has been teaching courses that revolve around three themes: (1) urban studies, (2) material and non-human culture, and (3) ethnically hybrid identities. Besides teaching at Mount Holyoke, Megan has enjoyed teaching at a variety of colleges, including the University of Otago (New Zealand), Grinnell College, the University of Michigan, Amherst College, West Chester University, and this coming fall at Sophia University in Tokyo.

Video of Public Everyday Space: Cultural Politics in Neoliberal Barcelona with Megan Saltzman

Transcript of Public Everyday Space: Cultural Politics in Neoliberal Barcelona with Megan Saltzman

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.

0:00:41.4 Julian Agyeman: Welcome to our final Cities@Tufts virtual colloquium this semester. 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 recognizes 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. Megan Saltzman. Megan teaches at Mount Holyoke College. Her research combines literary and visual arts with ethnographic fieldwork to expose how everyday public practices, carve out autonomy and resistance from below. Megan has published on urban culture in Spain related to gentrification, spatial inclusion and exclusion, immigration, waste, urban furniture, grassroots cultural center, and artivism. These themes come together in Megan’s most recent publication, her book Public Everyday Space: The Cultural Politics in Neoliberal Barcelona. And that is the name of her talk today. Megan, a Zoom-tastic welcome to Cities@Tufts.

0:02:04.5 Megan Saltzman: Okay, thank you very much, Julian. Thank you for the invitation and also thank you, Tom, for all the tech assistance. And also I want to thank Mount Holyoke College in general for the support in the process of writing and finishing this book project. Okay. Well, I’ll start by saying that free, accessible, open public space is not what it appears to be. In fact, it’s often, especially in the city, the opposite of what it appears to be. Nevertheless, we read the city as a truthful or objective text absorbing knowledge, ideas, norms, and feelings from our public surroundings. Today’s public spaces are designed in a way that very carefully regulates what we can see, what we can do, and what we can know in it. For example, its design prioritizes a limited number of activities such as facilitating formal work or consumption, buying stuff, and also transit, moving individuals, human individuals, quickly from point A to point B. And so today’s public space is designed in such a way to make us think, again, that it’s free, open, and accessible to all. Urban anthropologist Manuel Delgado points out two cities that are coexisting. We have the planned and conceptualized city on a powerful scale, like architectural plans, institutional policies, these top-down initiatives, and imposed normative use of public space.

0:03:43.2 Megan Saltzman: And then we also have what he calls the ciudad practicada. It’s how it’s actually used in daily life, on the ground, everyday practices. It’s something that’s not totally controllable or predictable or quantifiable. It’s mobile, fluid, and it often ignores barriers or lines. So one of the goals of my book is to expose what’s being intentionally limited from view, what the ciudad concebida is limiting from our view and from our possibilities, as well as expose the potential of public space, of the ciudad practicada, that everyday city buzz in the background that circumvents being controlled and quantified. So my book’s main focus is on the small everyday practices that resist the neoliberalization of the city. And for those of you who may be new to these concepts, I understand that this might be very condensed or packed. So let me unpack these concepts, starting with the neoliberalization of Barcelona. By that, I’m referring to the rapid and destructive changes that were undemocratically imposed in the last four decades in Spain and in most Spanish cities to create and maintain this ciudad concebida. And this, in Barcelona especially, dramatically rebuilt central areas of the city, making it unrecognizable for many and economically exclusive for the majority of locals.

0:05:20.4 Megan Saltzman: So what specifically contributed to the neoliberalization of Barcelona? Well, there’s the privatization of public space of the last couple of decades. And I wanted to point out, ’cause I imagine a lot of you are tuning in from Boston, I think these characteristics of neoliberalism that I’m about to name will definitely resonate with those in Boston and in many global cities and major US Cities. But I want to point out that in the case of Spain and Spanish cities, a lot of these neoliberal characteristics or aspects and initiatives are still not normalized. It’s still relatively new. Things that started to happen in the 1990s, for example. So a step behind the neoliberalization of public space, I would say, in the United States and in US Cities. So yeah, the privatization of public space and also the construction of a tourist image of the city, a very narrow, profitable visual definition of the city, equating the city to a brand, the city branding. And in the case of Barcelona, city branding is very strong. You can just stick the word Barcelona into Google Images and you’ll see a billion pictures of Gaudi architecture and the Sagrada Familia, a very monumental architectural definition of the city.

0:06:47.6 Megan Saltzman: And I wanted to show here, since I’m coming more from cultural studies, from arts and film and literature, that culture, the arts, the humanities, which often are underfunded and defunded and not paid much attention to, were actually an important component of these changes in Barcelona, the neoliberalization of the city, the gentrification going on in the city. And here we have an example of the Woody Allen film Vicky Christina Barcelona, one of many films that helped disseminate this global architectural image of the city. And Woody Allen was paid several, one and a half million euros in public funding to showcase Barcelona’s architecture in public spaces. And also I include this image of the Olympics because most of these initial transformations started in preparation for the 1992 Olympics. And again, in the background, you can see this monumental view of the monument. Yeah, the arts are part of this neoliberalization of the city. And also another important aspect has been the creation and maintenance of a wide control apparatus to protect the tourist industry, to protect this new global economy. And part of this control apparatus has been an increase in surveillance, all types of surveillance, more video cameras in public space, more police presence, security guards.

0:08:16.9 Megan Saltzman: And also, for example, in 2006, the city hall, city council came out with a very long document, something like 80 or 90 pages of civic rules of how people need to behave in public space. And this is a city that was not used to having so many rules in public space. But to give you an example of some things that were suddenly in 2006 illegal, unless some kind of previous permission was granted, for example, no sleeping in public space, no drinking alcohol in public space, no begging, no distributing food, no peddling, no throwing up, no painting, no skating, no sex work, no hanging objects, objects from balconies, no hanging posters or banners in the plazas or streets, no taking anything out of the trash, no playing music. And the list goes on and on. And again, perhaps from a US point of view, this could for many seem normalized. But in the case of Spain and a long history, which I think is true in many Mediterranean cities, of a certain informality and organicness in the public spaces, even in times of dictatorship, this was really a shock. And the book is looking at the pushback against this kind of regulation of behavior and appearance of public space.

0:09:50.1 Megan Saltzman: So here I can show you, for example, this is just ironic that in the Plaza de George Orwell, you can see a sign that there’s a video camera there. And here’s some photos that I took of also the implementation of anti-social urban furniture in the public space to, again, control and nudge and mold what we do and who can be, who can rest, who cannot rest. And this idea of moving along public space merely for transit, merely for work and consumption. Okay. This one… This was a particularly interesting type of construction where it was like an inverted slide. So if you tried to sit on this, you would just plop off. Okay. So yeah, another part of the neoliberal was the anti-social urban furniture, which we’re seeing popping up all over cities. Following what urbanist Don Mitchell calls the landscapes of pleasure, these controls have ended up eliminating, displacing, or pushing to the periphery everything that does not fit the tourist image, which means everything that’s not profitable or for maintaining the ciudad concebida. So what has been pushed out of view or destroyed?

0:11:18.9 Megan Saltzman: Well, hundreds of historical working-class buildings, many of them from the 18th and 19th Centuries, and with those buildings, much of their history also disappears. Small businesses, the communities. In many of these Mediterranean cities, we’re talking about very dense space, long-term communities. These central downtown communities have been fragmented. Also, they have tried to push poverty or anything that could be associated with poverty out of view. Spontaneity has for the most part decreased. A lot of the benches, in terms of urban furniture benches, especially the traditional long bench, has decreased in central areas. Informal markets and informal economies, which have a long history in Barcelona, have been cracked down on. And places that look dirty or smell bad have also been eliminated or pushed out of view. And I have… I found this like little zine that illustrates an idea. In doing a lot of the interviews for this project, when I spoke with elderly people specifically, they often spoke of a sense of disorientation resulting from these changes, of not knowing where they were within their own neighborhood because the buildings had transformed so quickly. And so in this zine in Spanish, I have it here down in English. It says, the neighborhood has suffered from gentrification and Mrs. Amalia, after living there for 42 years, has to move because she can’t afford the rent.

0:13:06.4 Megan Saltzman: Can you help her find the exit to the periphery? So this is one of many examples of the cultural responses that I have in my book related to these changes. And also I know some of you all are studying about sustainability in contemporary cities. There’s the whole ecological factor to consider. Barcelona is a small city, compact historical city, and they’re receiving 16 million tourists a year. So it doesn’t have the infrastructure to sustainably welcome or deal with this level of tourism and the amount of water and waste and air pollution that it creates. And also just in these last couple of weeks, there’s been massive protests in Barcelona because all of these processes, the gentrification processes, have skyrocketed the rent and the price renting a home or buying a home, especially in terms of Airbnb and tourist apartments. Going back to this goal, small everyday practices that resist the neoliberalization of the city. So small everyday practices, what I’m referring to with this is a type of small resistance that receives little attention and often goes unnoticed.

0:14:28.9 Megan Saltzman: When we think about political resistance, for example, we tend to think of larger phenomena like protests or social movements or activists, I mean, in terms of people, activists or well-known intellectuals or certain politicians. And that’s good. That’s important. In Barcelona’s case, those types of forms of resistance have already been well documented with books and analytical studies. And so I didn’t feel that I had too much to offer along those lines. So I wanted to focus on a less discussed type of resistance and agency, this type that we can find in everyday practices. And this type of small resistance emerges from lesser known spaces in the city, the everyday spaces like streets, plazas, street corners or abandoned lots. And I found that many of the examples of this type of small resistance are non-confrontational, they’re non-violent, they at times can be joyful or leisurely, they’re often anonymous and very accessible, something that anybody can do. And also I noticed that this type of resistance in Barcelona, we could call it, so to say, weak or weaker because it’s temporary and it’s not loud or eye-catching, it’s quite fragile. But nonetheless, it does challenge and provide nuance to the dominant destructive tourist image and objectives of today’s urbanism in Barcelona because it exposes a difference.

0:16:15.6 Megan Saltzman: And so in doing the research for this book, I think the closest theoretical description that I could find was Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphor of the rhizome. I’m not sure if some of you are familiar with that, but to sum it up, a rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines or on a new line or on new lines. And these lines always tie back to one another. So this idea of this small resistance that’s temporary, it’s flexible, it’s regenerational, mobile, elusive, like a worm or an octopus, if it gets squashed or eliminated, it can return or it can regrow its parts. So the practices can return if they’re pushed to the periphery. They can return maybe in a different place or at a different time, but they’re able to continue. And so I found that a focus on everyday practices opens up a whole other level of coexisting realities in the city, a place where we can still find some spontaneity, creativity, community, and democratic practices. We can find people carving out space and autonomy for themselves in difficult circumstances where they might not be able to have a voice or have communication with politics with the capital P, institutional level of politics.

0:17:45.5 Megan Saltzman: And also that these everyday practices allow us to see the flexibility and the potential of our urban materials beyond just a singular conventional use of, for example, a bench or a curb. So with the remaining minutes, I will quickly summarize the rest of the chapters, which again, all focus on different types of small everyday rhizomatic practices that go against the grain of what philosopher Jacques Eancière calls the order of things, the order… The normal order of things in the city. Okay, so the next chapter and also the book cover image is this one here, which is actually two superimposed photos on top of each other, one that I took and another a friend took one year later. One day I was just wandering around the central area, the neighborhood called the Raval, and I noticed a group of men, what I assumed to be men, playing volleyball within an abandoned lot. And I was curious as to how they got in there because it was completely fenced off and there’s also these cement blocks around the abandoned lot. And I found this hole, I don’t know, about like 12 inches by 12 inches.

0:19:13.7 Megan Saltzman: And so I thought, ah, okay, so they must have put their bodies through this hole and the volleyball net, the ball through this hole. And I had been reading a lot about Michel de Certeau and his book, The Practice of Everyday Life, and his idea about spatial tactics and how we can repurpose things, in this case, repurposing urban materials and giving them a different function, some unplanned function. And so I decided that many of these practices, small practices of resistance that I was seeing in Barcelona fit under this category of spatial tactics, of repurposing one’s urban material surroundings, having to re-adapt to the destruction in one’s neighborhood and the privatization and the hyper-regulation of one’s urban surroundings. So I found a lot of examples like this. I remember, for example, with the economic crisis of 2007, 2008, it hit Spain very hard. Unemployment, for example, for youth was… For younger people, was over 50%. And there was much more poverty in the city. And with that poverty, I started to see more and more spatial tactics like those ATM bank rooms where you have to swipe a card to get in.

0:20:37.1 Megan Saltzman: I noticed at night that people would go into these ATM rooms and convert them into bedrooms for sleeping at night. Or another example was in Spanish cities, you have these very large trash dumps that are on the sidewalk. And I noticed that next to these big trash dumps, people would carefully leave piles of things that other people might want to use or have or recycle. What else? Also with the elimination of benches, I saw people using all sorts of things in the city, material things in the city to create places to sit. As you can see here, these people have turned a big plant pot into a sitting place, as well as here, this kind of shop ledges turned into benches. Or this example here, it was a person who had created some kind of exercise equipment out of what? Out of these poles to stop cars from coming onto the sidewalk. Okay. And also in this chapter, I focused on a film, which I highly recommend. It’s called En Construcción. And in this film, we can see a wide variety of spatial tactics and not only from human beings, but also in animals and how they all try to adapt to these rapid material changes in the city.

0:22:10.3 Megan Saltzman: Okay. And then the next chapter is about collectives or groups and self-managed spaces that emerged after this economic crisis, the recession. It takes a look at groups that have taken it into their own hands to create their own public spaces independently and the impact that these have had locally and abroad. So these were the ones… What I saw was a boom in around 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013. There was a boom of these self-managed, in Spanish, the word is easier, it’s autogestionado, which is a common word for some… It’s a bit like DIY, do it yourself. If the government is not going to pay attention to our needs, then we are gonna act on our own needs and create our own public spaces. So there was a boom of these spaces popping up all over the city in abandoned, again, abandoned lots or plots of land. Like you see here, this is… It’s hard to find words for these type of spaces. I get… In Spanish, sometimes they’re called… Would roughly translate to independent self-manage social space or cultural space. These spaces often had urban gardens and were managed openly, voluntarily by people in the neighborhood.

0:23:40.9 Megan Saltzman: And yeah, they were open. So anybody can come in and help or take food or other resources if necessary. Here’s another example. This sign reads more peppers and less cement. Again, referring to the ongoing gentrification, there was one group I was able to participate in on several occasions called fem placa, which means we make the plaza. And here in Catalan it says, we recover public space as a place of coexistence. And their goal was to intervene in certain plazas where there was mass tourism and where a lot of buildings had been torn down and simply carry out everyday activities. Really simple activities like just standing there or just standing and talking or being together as a group, maybe eating, maybe drinking something, singing or dancing or talking about history. There was always one historian at these events who would read the history, the disappeared history of these plazas.

0:24:57.0 Megan Saltzman: And one day every month there would be one of these fem placa interventions and they carried out these activities without getting permission. So technically what they were doing legislatively is not legal. The police did approach at least twice when I was there and they asked what was going on and then walked away. There is this other element of which perhaps you all have thought about in your classes where, when the resistance looks cool, it can be so to say… So to speak, approved or co-opted by the ciudad concebida. So for example, this could be something that could actually attract more gentrifiers or more gentrification projects. I had another example up here where there were these critical spaces that I was seeing a lot in 2005, 2006 in Spanish, they’re called medianeras, where the buildings have been cut in half and you can see all of their interior private spaces just exposed to the public, to the passerby, people who are walking by. And on one hand, these are very historically triggering, right? You see this and your history questions are immediately mobilized. What happened here? Something happened here in the past. And I also came across some kind of artistic installation, something similar. They had replaced the sink and a shower head and what other bathroom features in this medianera. And then the next year I came across a postcard of this same artistic installation.

0:26:51.6 Megan Saltzman: So there is this tricky line of where does the critical art begin or where does the authorities end up creating it or co-opting it into something that can be commodified or sold. So yeah, here’s another example of the fem placa group. And one of the things they did in one of these interventions was to count all of the private seats in a plaza versus public seats. For example, this is… In this plaza, 61% of the places where you could sit were private. They were mostly cafes and restaurants. So they were highlighting this problem of the privatization of a public space. If I have time, I can go through more of the ways that these self-managed public spaces were operating. Yeah, I can go into that later if we have more time. How they were operating and how they were sharing their resources. Okay, and then the last chapter deals with immigration. Spanish cities not only experienced a boom of gentrification in the ’90s and the early 2000s, but also an immigration boom. So there’s the crux or intersection of these two major social phenomena. And Barcelona has been the Spanish city with the largest population of foreigners and undocumented people. So contrary to the dominant discourses on immigration, which tends to reduce immigrants to numbers or often negative narratives, this chapter seeks to understand these realities more holistically and with eyes on the creative spatial agency of this group of people.

0:28:42.8 Megan Saltzman: And for this chapter, I mainly analyzed two documentaries, Si Nos Dejan by Ana Torres and Raval, Raval by Antoni Verdaguer. And I also include my own ethnographic research on the phenomenon of informal street vending. And so from these resources, from these sources, sorry, I was able to get a better understanding of barriers in public space, specifically physical barriers, racial barriers, and legislative barriers. And also, I was able to see a certain type of mobility, a frequent zigzagging mobile itineraries across Barcelona and also across from city to city transnationally. And I think this is important because we still have very dominant national frameworks for doing the type of research we do and the type of thinking we do about time and space. In these documentaries and in the research, Barcelona is not this glamorous location, but simply a labor stopover within a network of European cities, especially downtowns, centers of these European cities that increasingly need and depend on cheap multilingual service labor, but they don’t offer ways to do so legally or humanely with housing. So that was another conclusion I got from this research. And then also through these films, the ethnographic research, I also saw a lot of solidarity and what I call neighborhood citizenship, referring to social bonds between strangers at the neighborhood level within a dense heterogeneous urban space.

0:30:36.5 Megan Saltzman: And this might be something more Mediterranean. I’m not certain because I’ve primarily done research in Spanish cities, but yeah, within the density of compactness of the Barcelona city, I was seeing this neighborhood citizenship, which was facilitating a more accessible and flexible notion of belonging and upholding networks of care. Again, although temporary and in the face of both gentrification and deportation, and I should add that everything that I have shown you, all of these small resistances, all of these here… Oh, with the exception of this one, they don’t exist anymore. So these urban gardens, these are all new buildings now. Fem placa does not practice anymore. This one, it’s called Germanetes, it does still continue. It was able to secure some legal and financial support from the city hall, which has allowed it to continue. Also this volleyball court, these are all apartment buildings now. That is a reality of this type of small resistance that I’m talking about. I have a lot of other images I could talk about, but this past January, I was able to share my book in Barcelona. And again, the issue of housing was very visible. Here you can see like this means, in Catalan, tourist flat. So you could see the type of graffiti. Also another example of this ephemeral resistance. Okay. So I guess I will end there. And if there’s certain questions, I can show you more of the images that I have. So that’s all for now.

0:32:33.9 Julian Agyeman: Well, thank you very much, Megan. This is a fascinating presentation. And we’ve got several questions, but I wanna open it up because I remember in the early days when we were talking about this, you said, but I’m from cultural studies. You people are in urban planning. It doesn’t matter. What you’re describing here is what we call pop-up urbanism. The small practices of everyday urbanism, pop-up urbanism, and it can be anything from a mural to seed bombing, like throwing seeds over a piece of vacant land. So this is exactly in our domain. And what’s quite refreshing actually is to hear a non-urban planner coming from a different discipline, obviously talking about this. So with that said, we’ve got a lot of questions and I’ve got a lot of questions of my own because I know a lot of people at the Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice, and they’ve been doing some fantastic work. Isabelle Anguelovski and her team. I don’t know whether you got to meet them, but Marvin says, I thought Barcelona is a walkable city and a sterling urban community model.

0:33:46.8 Megan Saltzman: Okay. Yeah, thank you, Marvin, for your comment/question. Yeah, so that is definitely part of the image and reputation that Barcelona has, especially around the… In the 1990s with the Olympics and right after the Olympics, there was the creation of… Or maybe not the creation, but there was this concept called the Barcelona model. And I think it’s quite well known in architectural studies of like you say, a city that has prioritized its inhabitants, walkability, democracy, green spaces. But upon researching this, that it wasn’t fully true and that all that I described at the beginning of the presentation about… Sorry, I had to turn something off. About the neoliberal effects and the population of the downtown decreasing and it becoming an increasingly exclusive city, at least economically, that those were aspects that were not included in this Barcelona model. So yeah, I mean there are definitely positive aspects and realities and truths in that Barcelona model. And Barcelona has many positive aspects today as well, especially if you compare it to other cities. But when you speak to the locals, when you speak to those who don’t have much of a voice, like people who are being pushed to the periphery or who are outside the institutions, then you do see that it’s much more nuanced and that a large, perhaps even the majority of the population has been excluded from the decision making process in terms of urban planning in the last couple of decades.

0:35:36.1 Julian Agyeman: Great, thanks, Megan. We have a question from Shmuel who says, I’m a social activist from Israel and I have a question how authorities of Barcelona are trying to ensure accessibility of poor and low socioeconomic groups of the local population to public spaces in the city?

0:35:53.3 Megan Saltzman: Thank you for your question and comment there. It’s a little tricky to respond to this question because it also depends a lot on what political party is in the city council. So from around 2008 to 2015, there was political party that came from a lot of the protests. If you all recall, Occupy Wall Street in Spain, this was much larger, it was called the 15-M or quince-m. And this… It was a massive grassroots movement all across the country, especially in cities. And one of these leaders of that movement became the first woman mayor, Ada Colau. And so under her mayorship, there were a lot of initiatives taken in the city to try to make sure, for example, that poor, what you name here, poor and low social economic groups and also people with disabilities or mobility issues, elderly people, women. There was a long list of different demographics that they tried to include in the decision making process and also in the material construction and renovation of the city. In the last couple of years there has been less of that. But there are the basics, I don’t know the words for them, but like different textures on the sidewalks for blind people or different sounds for… You’ll have to help me with these words. The different sounds of like for when to cross the street and stuff for blind people. But that’s as much as I can say about that, that it really depended on who was… What political party was in the seat of the city council at the time.

0:37:48.9 Julian Agyeman: Thanks. Sticking with that, the city council idea, we’ve got a question and it’s two part. Is there a way that the spatial tactics of a ciudad practicada can be institutionalized or does that stultify or co-opt the nature of the organic cultural movement? And then second, how did the government of Ada Colau, she’s a socialist, and the Guanyem movement push back against or follow neoliberal policies?

0:38:16.8 Megan Saltzman: Yeah, Mika, thank you for this question. And I talk about this in my book. In my book I say that a lot of these spatial tactics, if you look at… If you say you look at 20 of them, you’re going to see a pattern which is that they’re responding to something that could be some kind of need and these needs could be picked up by the city council. Perhaps we need more exercise equipment in the city, or perhaps we need a volleyball court in the, sorry, in the city. Or perhaps we need more benches if everybody is sitting wherever. So that is something that could be picked up and in some cases it has been picked up and worked on. However, as I mentioned in the book, the creativity, human or mammal creativity of spatial tactics, of being able to constantly adapt and re-adapt, it would continue. So I think that even if the city council did pick up on these and try to improve them, or if they picked up on them and improved them and then commodified them, which I could talk about some examples where that has happened, especially in terms of sustainability and green initiatives.

0:39:31.4 Megan Saltzman: Either way, at the grassroots level, there will continue to be this creativity of circumventing whatever is there or whatever is not there. Let me see the second part of the question. Yeah, that’s a very big question about how the Ada Colau government pushed back because they did so many things. I can send you my book chapter if you like. So many things. I suppose the initiative that they were most internationally famous for is what’s been called… I’ll put it in the chat, it’s in Catalan or I think in English, they’ve been called translated to superblocks. And that is where they take a group of nine blocks and they make all the streets within those blocks for only pedestrians. And their political party, Barcelona en Comú, they created several of these super block conglomerations across the city of Barcelona. And yeah, you can see online on one hand they have become more sustainable, greener areas and for the most part they’re used. You can see people walking around, sitting, playing a wide variety of activities. On the other hand there have been complaints because there is always that population that wants to drive or that want to take their motorcycle.

0:40:56.9 Megan Saltzman: And so this pushes traffic and creates traffic jams in other parts of the city or pushes the pollution to other streets. And perhaps the unintentional effect of these superblocks was that the housing around the superblocks skyrocketed. So now everybody wants to live on a superblock and it has ended up pushing out lower and middle income residents. And yeah, this is in the news like right now, the last couple of weeks there’s been all the… A lot of talks and protest about the housing in these neighborhoods. Let me go back to your question. Where there… Where do there… Supposedly people find the policy, on the spectrum. Yeah, you had written about the superblocks. Well, the superblocks does fall on the spectrum. The progressive political party or if you wanna call it the left wing or whatever, but it fell within the spectrum or the part of the party that’s called Barcelona en Comú and there’s a lot of other examples of trying to… In Spanish they use the word pacificar which is like to make pleasant or to make peaceful, the public spaces for more pedestrians and areas where no cars would be allowed.

0:42:17.7 Megan Saltzman: For example, they also, on Sundays they have blocked off a lot of streets where cars can’t go through. They have also, you might have heard of something called bicibús, which is… If you Google it or look on YouTube you can see videos of it. They in the morning and in the afternoon when kids are going to school and when they’re coming home from school, they’re blocking off certain streets where all the kids can go together on their bikes. So that was another project. They also did try to… I have this chapter about these kind of independent public spaces/cultural centers. They did try to financially support several of them but again it was… It would be… It’s also temporary. It would be like financial support or permission for one year or two years and then when that party gets voted out, then they lose their support. It’s a big question. If you email me, I’ll send you my chapter and then you can get more of the specifics.

0:43:25.0 Julian Agyeman: Thanks Megan, for that. I’m going to ask a question of my own. Those of us in the sort of sustainable communities, sustainable urban planning field, Barcelona is often held up as being one of the key models. What do you think we should take from that? And what should we not take from Barcelona as being held up as one of these models? A socialist mayor, the superblocks, action on Airbnb, tourists go home, refugees welcome. This is a heady mix of progressive policies. What do we take and what do we leave?

0:44:01.0 Megan Saltzman: Yeah, yeah, that’s a good question. Well, I think you have to be constantly critical and you have to… In the book I talk about what happens when we start comparing cities and when we start to compare cities, like, oh, well, Barcelona is so much better than Philadelphia or for example, then we are disregarding the suffering that’s going down in Barcelona, for example, or we are ignoring the people who are not being included in these decision making or these initiatives or projects. So I would say sure, take the good, take the positive from whatever model and also whatever non-model and also take a nuanced view. What’s being left out, who’s not being included in this and ask a lot of questions. In the research for this book, it was just all about asking questions and asking questions. I’m not from Barcelona. I spent a long time living there. But I needed to ask questions not from just institutional people, but from absolutely anybody who is willing to speak with me. So, yeah, sure, again, take the positives, take the good parts, but also be critical. Know that there’s most likely something that’s not being talked about or most likely somebody who’s not being included. Yeah, yeah, just take a more nuanced view of… Yeah, I don’t doubt that Barcelona has positive things that I wish we could incorporate and repeat in Boston or elsewhere, but you have to get as holistic a view as possible of what that model…

0:45:38.8 Julian Agyeman: Another good example, Amsterdam and Barcelona are two of the only cities with sort of protection of people’s digital rights on the Internet. Some very progressive things coming out of Barcelona in that sense. Final question, and this is a real quick one and hopefully you can answer it pretty quickly. Would you be able to talk any more about those examples you referred to where cultural and social spatial practices have been commodified and the results? So just give us one example, maybe.

0:46:09.2 Megan Saltzman: Have been commodified and the results. Oh, probably one of the most popular ones, which I think is not getting so much attention nowadays, but about 15 years ago was the Barcelona graffiti. If you again put into Google images Barcelona Graffiti, you’ll see a massive database of very creative graffiti examples from all over the city. And this really increase tourism to the city. And so this was something also that the city council promoted as this… Barcelona as the city of creativity, the city of art, of informal art. And I would say probably something like 90% of those graffiti artworks are gone because they have destroyed the buildings to create new hotels and new tourist apartments. And I would say right now the biggest case is what’s going on with the superblocks.

0:47:08.8 Julian Agyeman: Great, Megan. I could ask many more questions and there’s many more questions just keep coming up in the chat. But what a fitting end to this semester of Cities@Tufts. Megan Saltzman, Mount Holyoke thank you so much. Can we give a warm round of applause, a warm Cities@Tufts round of applause to Megan Saltzman. Thank you Megan. Thank you so much. As I said, this is the last for this semester. Hope to see many of you back in September for a whole new raft of fantastic presentations.

0:47:41.2 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 Amelia Morton and Grant Perry. Light Without Dark by Cultivate Beats is our theme song and the graphic recording was created by Jess Milner. 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.

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Appropriating the planet

In a fragment by Jorge Luis Borges, successive generations of cartographers create increasingly exacting maps of China. Their maps grow steadily larger to incorporate more and more minute details until “the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it,” for the only map that could communicate every detail of China would be a map on the scale of the country itself. Today, the Chinese maps are even larger than the empire.

The commanding heights of the gentrification economy are tech and biotech firms that collect, systematize, privatize, and commodify inputs such as genetic data, personal information, and behavioral profiles at levels far beyond that accessible through first-person experience: the stuff of ever-growing maps, new material for market exchange. The more perfect these maps, whether of a user’s consumer proclivities or genome, the more profits may be wrung. These inputs are not initially purchased from another party. Instead, as Shoshana Zuboff explains, “Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data.”

For Marx, capitalism is necessarily based in primitive accumulation, the “conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force” necessary for one class to acquire capital and for another to be dispossessed to the degree that it must sell its labor to survive. Marx placed this initial violent accumulation in the late 15th and 16th centuries, when English peasants were forced off feudal lands and Indigenous American and African peoples were enslaved.

Peter Kropotkin was quick to critique Marx’s “erroneous division between the primary accumulation of capital and its present-day formation.” Later Marxists likewise found that primitive accumulation was not a bounded historical event but an ongoing process. Silvia Federici cites World Bank structural adjustment programs which, under the guise of making poor countries “competitive,” uproot the “last vestiges of communal property and community relations” and “force more and more people into wage labor” as one example and the exploitation of women’s unpaid domestic labor another. The social, biological, and psychological data now closed off and privatized by capital are a new frontier of such accumulation.

The material limit of appropriation of land is the amount of existing acreage, just as the material limit of the appropriation of iron ore is the quantity found in a certain mine. The gentrification economy is based on the modeling and mapping of the world; its material limit is the representation of the world down to the atomic level. So long as this endeavor remains profitable and requires a small caste of educated technicians, the gentrification economy and the struggles against displacement may only be expected to continue.

User, subject, worker, resident

There are at least three lines of popular political critique of the tech economy aside from resistance to community displacement. One critique of tech companies concerns their management of platforms that serve as a semi-public space. The prohibition or promotion of certain content or communities is criticized from the perspective of users. There is also a line of critique from the perspective of those subjected to new forms of power: quantified, mapped, and modeled. And warehouse workers, rideshare drivers, and software engineers alike criticize their tech industry employers from the perspective of workers. The struggle against gentrification is a critique of a fourth type. In addition to the user, the subject, and the worker, there is the resident. The Block Sidewalk campaign in Toronto joined an anti-gentrification fight to concerns about surveillance technology and U.S. corporate encroachment: resistance on the terms of the subject as well as that of the resident. The fight to kill Amazon’s New York campus highlighted both how housing costs would rise and how few local residents would get high-paying jobs: the resident and worker. The fight against Google Berlin pulled together opposition “from the displacement of the neighborhood, through data abuse of Google, to criticism of power and technology,” the synthesis of such critiques “made possible by a shared intensification of a social conflict.”

From the perspective of the ruling class, existing residents are residual, remainders, leftovers. “Join the dance of those left over,” goes the Los Prisioneros song, an anthem of the movement against Pinochet that found new life during Chile’s 2019 Estallido Social. “The games ended for others with laurels and futures. They left my friends kicking stones.”

Common sense militancy

It is hard to imagine a demand more modest than the maintenance of one’s home, community, and life. And yet to stop displacement would demand, housing activist Vasudha told me, “a reimagining of the current socio-economic system, because as it currently exists, gentrification is incentivized and encouraged until every cent of profit is milked out. The last 200 years of housing policy and how the ‘market’ works is encouraging and incentivizing gentrification. To stop it will require masses of people to really come together and pitch in and make sacrifices to a larger movement to restructure the socio-economic system as it currently exists.” The reasonable demand for universal housing in an economic system based on private land ownership is a “non-reformist reform” in the original sense outlined by André Gorz: not an especially progressive reforms to demand of the capitalist state, as the democratic socialists would have it, but an apparent reform that in fact could only be instituted by a “fundamental political and economic change” created through the “autonomous power” of the dispossessed.

We must unfortunately still contend with those whose superficial concern for the oppressed is outweighed by a greater fear of the oppressed developing just such an autonomous power. Neither the benevolence of corporate charity nor the “proper channels” offered by local representative democracy have proven, in any city in the world, sufficient to halt economic gentrification. Yet the partisans of propriety and moralists of reform continue to insist that those facing displacement and death restrict themselves to permissible tactics proven to fail. And so homes continue to be destroyed and our neighbors continue to expire on the streets. The hands of the self-declared pacifists drip with blood as their throats fill with empty platitudes. Those who demand decorum and reasonableness in resistance are accessories to the most indefensible outrages.

“I don’t know that we can challenge gentrification on political terms,” says Daniel González of San José. “It’s going to require a lot of militancy. Not just militancy, because you need a multi-faceted approach to enable greater participation. But you do need to have a very real and material threat to the stakeholders, to the city, to the investors. It needs to go beyond the arena of representative politics.”

Andrew Lee is the author of Defying Displacement: Urban Recomposition and Social War. Lee has supported grassroots social movements for more than 15 years and his work has been published in outlets including Teen Vogue, Yes! Magazine, and The New Inquiry. He writes at In Struggle and is a board member of the Institute for Anarchist Studies.

The post Cross-pollinating resistance to the tech economy – an excerpt from Defying Displacement appeared first on Shareable.

Holiday in the sun

The politics of place and displacement follow gentrifiers on holiday. Depending on the balance of class interests and power, the unique character of a place can attract gentrification as much as it can be wielded as a weapon against it. Charming Barcelona’s tourist-centered redevelopment started in earnest during preparation for the 1992 Olympics and intensified when the Convergència I Unió party rezoned swathes of the city to attract international capital in the depths of the Great Recession. Today, Barcelona has reached an “acute” state of gentrification thanks to the appeal of its “historical heritage, cultural dynamism, business economy,” and beaches. “The neighbors are disappearing,” reported one resident, saying rents had increased 200 Euros in recent years. “They are leaving.” But tourism is now a “fundamental industry,” per the managing partner of a hospitality consulting firm. “Many directly or indirectly connected industries would suffer greatly without it.”

With Airbnb, landlords around the world can easily replace tenants with tourists, multiplying the amount of money they receive each month. A San Francisco landlord evicted a tenant paying $1,840 a month to charge tourists twice as much. Airbnb rentals are estimated to have raised average rents in New York City by $400 a year. The platform has faced pushback in cities from Amsterdam to Venice as housing units are reserved for globe-trotting tourists.

The international vacation destination ought to be foreign and exceptional — nothing less justifies the airfare. But it must also make sense to the vacationer. There must be appealing hotels easily booked, attractions advertised in an understandable way, staff who speak their language, restaurants with menus that fit their tastes. As Guy Debord pointed out, tourism is “the opportunity to go and see what has been banalized,” commodified, made legible and essentially equivalent to any other vacation destination one might choose.

This tourism gentrification, which carves up working-class neighborhoods to attract vacationers’ dollars with hotels, resorts, restaurants, and shopping districts, is less frequently discussed in the United States, perhaps because the nation’s intellectuals and academics find themselves partaking in the practice on holiday. This is unfortunate, since tourism gentrification has come home to roost in devastating ways. The 1996 Olympics provided Atlanta elites with the opportunity to clear poor people from central areas, decimate public housing, and brand the city for global consumption, paving the way for today’s rampant gentrification. The 2028 Games in Los Angeles are already creating a “housing disaster” years in advance. The Philadelphia city council voted 12-5 to approve a downtown basketball arena threatening to destroy the local Chinatown, against the wishes of 69% of residents and after arresting dozens.

Homeland or death

The fully engineered tourist district attracts huge amounts of foreign capital that can anchor the economy of an entire region or nation. Land was legally bought and sold in post-revolutionary Cuba for the first time in 2011. Though non-Cubans are formally excluded from the market, it is reported that many property sales are funded with remittances from Cuban American relatives or conducted by Cuban citizens operating at the behest of foreign buyers.

Almost two decades before the establishment of a real estate market, the Cuban state began emphasizing tourism as a way to attract foreign capital. In the early 1980s, several buildings in Old Havana were recognized as UNESCO World Cultural Heritage sites—a designation supposed to recognize the objective importance and international legibility of a place while facilitating economic and technical assistance for historic restoration. During the economic devastation of the post-Soviet “Special Period,” when petroleum imports to the island virtually ceased, the state developed public institutions to promote tourism while dilapidated colonial buildings were transformed from residential units into restaurants and luxury hotels. Former residents were directly displaced to the city’s outskirts. Even while the ban on real estate speculation remained, the increased valuation of Old Havana real estate was expressed in the informal market. Remaining tenants began renting out rooms or running small businesses that benefited from easy access to the tourist market. (Access to foreign currency is so significant that Cuban taxi drivers can make more than surgeons.) In 2001, 40% of residences were free tenements; by 2019, it was only 12%, with 75% of residences in touristified Old Havana now private property. If privatization and tourism-oriented redevelopment is the priority of a state whose foundational narrative is the revolutionary expropriation of private property, it should be no surprise when US state elites find economic incentives more convincing than purported liberal commitments to “inclusion,” “diversity,” or “the community.” 

Andrew Lee is the author of Defying Displacement: Urban Recomposition and Social War. Lee has supported grassroots social movements for more than 15 years and his work has been published in outlets including Teen Vogue, Yes! Magazine, and The New Inquiry. He writes at In Struggle and is a board member of the Institute for Anarchist Studies. 

The post How tourism kills communities – an excerpt from Defying Displacement appeared first on Shareable.

Universities as gentrifiers

“These super-men and world-mastering demi-gods listened, however, to no low tongues of ours, even when we pointed silently to their feet of clay.” —W.E.B. Du Bois

The workers and capitalists who profit most from the gentrification economy are often blessed by familial wealth and almost always with advanced degrees. College-educated workers received a full 97% of “good jobs” created after the Great Recession as the labor market polarized between low-paying jobs and those requiring post-secondary education. If it is highly-educated workers who are the crux of production in the wealthy imperial core, and if achieving such jobs is necessary for workers to achieve not only luxury but a minimally dignified life, it is no wonder that the gentrification economy increases the power and influence of organizations such as the Silicon Valley’s largest landowner: not Apple, Amazon, or Google, but Stanford University.

Not only Silicon Valley’s largest owner of both commercial land and single-family homes, Stanford University controls a domain including a research park, a shopping mall, a hospital, and professor housing. 61% of the university’s 8,180 acres are undeveloped entirely, a green oasis of wealth amid a housing crisis.

“People think of Stanford as a university with a football team and two basketball teams, I guess,” explains Lenny Seigal, former mayor of neighboring Mountain View. “But it’s a corporation with enormous land ownership, and it functions in its relationship to the surrounding communities as a corporation.”

And an enormously successful corporation, at that. With a $37.8 billion endowment in 2021, the university has invested billions in income-generating properties. Though it received its land holdings from its founder, robber baron Leland Stanford, the university reaps enormous wealth from a long enmeshment with the tech industry. The relationship dates back to 1937, when two Stanford students founded Hewlett-Packard. Millionaire faculty members invest in students’ startups. Venture capitalists teach classes. When graduates—whose median family income is $167,500 to begin with—donate the proceeds of high-paying tech jobs to their alma mater, the endowment grows.

But alumni generosity isn’t the only benefit Stanford gets from the industry. The Office of Technology Licensing asserts ownership rights over technology developed at Stanford. Companies like Google, Yahoo, Netflix, VMWare, and Sun Microsystems were all started by Stanford affiliates or using Stanford technology. Cisco’s first router was based on the Stanford University computer network. The Office of Technology Licensing received $336 million when it sold its Google stock in 2005. As of 2012, the office had netted Stanford $1.3 billion in royalty payments.

Classes and class

For the privileged children of the Valley, pressure to secure an elite institution’s diploma is immense. Parents pad out their children’s resumes by dropping thousands of dollars to send them on charitable service trips to Mongolia. Palo Alto paid over a million dollars to install sensors along the commuter rail line to detect attempted suicides when admissions decisions roll in. The city’s high school students kill themselves at several times the national rate.

“We are not teenagers. We are lifeless bodies in a system that breeds competition [and] hatred,” wrote one Palo Alto High School student in an op-ed entitled “The Sorrows of Young Palo Altans.” “If you’re not into [science, tech, engineering, and math],” said another, “you feel that you are not going to succeed.” The horror that pushes teenagers onto the CalTrain tracks is not of being a worker instead of an owner. It is of falling from the circle of workers who do well in the new economy into those who do not, from able to gentrify to those only ever displaced.

When universities expand campuses to attract more elite students, they become not only the facilitators and beneficiaries of gentrification, but its agents as well. In Orlando, a $1 billion, 68-acre mixed-use development around UCF Valencia called the Creative Village caused housing prices to double before construction even began. Wayne State University’s private police force enforces security across the gentrified core of post-industrial Detroit. In Philadelphia’s so-called University City, historically the Black Bottom, university development has caused housing prices to more than double and the Black population to be cut in half. Universities are now the largest employers in most large cities in the US. “The department store is closed, the newspaper is bankrupt, the local bank is no longer local, and the manufacturing is gone,” says Lewis & Clark College president Wim Wiewel. The universities endure, and they have “enthusiastically seized more economic and urban development responsibilities.”  

On violence

And though the right wing claims that colleges are laboratories for the identification of fictitious violence where hoodwinked undergraduates are indoctrinated into believing in the false danger of stereotypes and of slurs, the actual violence of university-facilitated displacement gets scant mention in lecture halls. There are no mandatory freshman courses on the people the new dorm building forced out. Breitbart is not writing outraged screeds about how some mistreated child was “called out” for their techie parents.

Some of the most pernicious and pervasive forms of violence are those not acknowledged as violence at all. Displacement is called rejuvenation, development, revitalization—all biological terms. Such language allows gentrification’s proponents to portray themselves as agents of an inevitable natural force, not the instigators of mass dispossession by force, and to react with feigned horror when communal banishment is resisted by force, as well.

All things being equal, people generally find the preservation and self-determination of community and home preferable to the opposite. To convince someone of the futility of such a preference requires an ideological infrastructure of considerable sophistication.

It also requires a certain quantity of loaded guns.

Andrew Lee is the author of Defying Displacement: Urban Recomposition and Social War. Lee has supported grassroots social movements for more than 15 years and his work has been published in outlets including Teen Vogue, Yes! Magazine, and The New Inquiry. He writes at In Struggle and is a board member of the Institute for Anarchist Studies. 

The post The school of gentrification – an excerpt from Defying Displacement appeared first on Shareable.

Defining displacement

Gentrification is commonly understood as consumption: who chooses to rent or purchase which housing unit. From this perspective we can ask many questions: why white people wish to live in “gritty” neighborhoods, or why they have the opposite attitudes of their parents and grandparents whose white flight bankrupted the cities they abandoned for segregated suburbs. We can debate whether the true villains in the story of neighborhood displacement are the punks and artists, or the yuppies, or the coffee shop patrons, or all white people who move into neighborhoods of color, or any people at all who move into neighborhoods where rents are on the rise. We might wonder at the confluence of factors which make a specific neighborhood appealing for different suspects at different times. And we can play the parlor game of deciding to what degree someone is or is not a gentrifier based on complex tabulations of identities, oppressions, and experiences.

What we cannot do is move beyond the liberal middle-class sport of achieving moral righteousness through carefully curated consumption: the ethical consumerism which pretends to change the world through the thoughtful selection of the correct can from the grocery store shelves. Analyzing gentrification exclusively through the critique of individual consumer preferences elides the socio-economic and political structures within which these preferences prevail. The scope of the anti-gentrification struggle is reduced to the moral turpitude within a new resident’s soul. And all the while, business districts are planned, tax abatements unveiled, redevelopment schemes dreamed up, corporate and university campuses expanded, neighborhoods transformed, and communities destroyed.

Producing poverty

Far from being an automatic or inevitable process, gentrification is “purposeful and produced.” In the mid-twentieth century, the US government began a concerted project of racial displacement from urban areas. “Our categorical imperative is action to clear the slums,” said Robert Moses, the hugely influential urban planner who masterminded public works projects in New York City for decades. Described by a biographer as “the most racist human being I had ever really encountered,” the New York City Planning Commissioner and chairman of the Slum Clearance Committee would continue: “We can’t let minorities dictate that this century-old chore will be put off another generation or finally abandoned.”

Deindustrialization and white flight drained municipal coffers as elites invested in a repressive War on Drugs. Ryan Lugalia-Hollon and Daniel Cooper point out that this might more accurately be described as a War on Neighborhoods, with working-class Black urban communities framed by politicians as particular dangers to be subdued. After withdrawing services and protection to attack urban neighborhoods of color, cities now court professional workers and their employers to build out their tax bases. The further elimination or privatization of social services goes hand-in-hand with increased investment in policing and infrastructure to smooth the process of displacement and attract capital for “redevelopment.” The residents who ultimately benefit from neighborhood change are not the first wave of white punks or artists but the professionals who inhabit the fully gentrified neighborhood.

“When Microsoft, Boeing, and other large corporations started to build in Seattle, they wanted to move their mostly white employees into these areas. They worked with banks and politicians to essentially pressure people into selling,” Dezmond Goff of Seattle’s Black Frontline Movement told me. “You have a lot of people who lost homes through both predatory loans and harassment but also people who now can’t participate because they have been incarcerated.”

New directions

By itself, the fact that financial institutions have become the predominant players in the neoliberal housing market isn’t enough to explain why gentrification takes place in modern cities. In the settler colonial imperial heartland, the construction, movement, and survival of oppressed communities has always been contingent on their utility to capitalist interests. The communities displaced today have been subjected to double or triple displacements long before: from the horrors of the Middle Passage to the killing fields of the US-sponsored Dirty Wars to the fatal nighttime cold of the Sonoran Desert. The history of the United States could be written as the story of colonial dispossession and relocation for profit, but what is emerging today is a new pattern of urban dispersal. Hedge funds or institutional landlords concerned only with their own wealth could choose to invest in vast slums or modest homes for the lower-middle class. In the gentrifying city, what they find most profitable is to bet on slum clearance and invest in condominiums for the rich. The patterns of impoverishment and displacement are old, the directionality of urban displacement is new. “So to answer the question of why gentrification happens,” writes P.E. Moskowitz, “we have to answer the question of why the city became profitable to gentrify.”

For comparison, I might harbor a deep-seated desire to own a Beverly Hills mansion. Books could be written about how I acquired such an inclination, about the social structures that induce such desires, or about what this preference says about me or the society in which I live. They would remain hypothetical texts since my desire to live in such a mansion would not change my inability to purchase one. It is a consumption preference I will never fulfill.

Only the complete transformation of a poor neighborhood creates the living standards, amenities, and neighbors that professional-class newcomers desire. Unlike my hypothetical mansion aspirations, these are desires they do fulfill, not only one-by-one but in cities across the world. Regardless of any person’s desire to live in an expensive condominium at a certain address, there is the matter of being paid enough to afford it. What has shifted over the years is not simply the living preferences of white Americans but the relative economic centrality of two class fractions: one segment paid enough to gentrify, another paid so little that they are priced out. A highly educated, largely white segment of working people are now paid astronomical wages while the remains of the urban industrial working class, previously crucial to capitalist profits, are now of so little importance that the utter destruction of their communities is a lucrative venture. To understand this process in rich nations’ richest cities, to situate it within the context of a broad economic transition in global capitalism, and to grasp how thoroughly this change must unsettle our inherited strategies of how to uproot this world, we must look at gentrification not only from the perspective of consumption but production, as well. The struggles around urban displacement are some of the clearest fractures emerging from what has been called the New Economy, the Knowledge Economy, or the Fourth Industrial Revolution, an economic arrangement within contemporary capitalism that we might as easily name the Gentrification Economy.


Andrew Lee is the author of Defying Displacement: Urban Recomposition and Social War. Lee has supported grassroots social movements for more than 15 years and his work has been published in outlets including Teen Vogue, Yes! Magazine, and The New Inquiry. He writes at In Struggle and is a board member of the Institute for Anarchist Studies.

Andrew also appeared on a recent episode of The Response Podcast, “Resisting gentrification and displacement.”

The post Housing justice beyond consumerism – an excerpt from Defying Displacement appeared first on Shareable.

Editor’s note: In honor of John’s original words for his “40th anniversary monograph,” we have chosen not to edit it. As a result, you will occasionally encounter grammar that is uncharacteristic of most Shareable articles.

Thirteen stories of how neighborhood people created a transforming experience

In 1831, a young French Count named Alexis de Tocqueville took a tour of the United States. When he returned to France, he wrote a book about what he had seen and learned. The book became world famous and was called Democracy in America.

The manifestation of democracy that impressed Tocqueville most was not the power to vote. It was, instead, the basic method people used to be productive and solve problems. He had a name for these people who came together in all kinds of groups: ASSOCIATIONS. It was these associations that he believed made a unique American democracy because people of all kinds were not just delegating authority with their votes. They were acting authoritatively as they produced the new America. He called the people acting in these groups “citizens” and thought that they were more significant for democracy than the power to vote.

For Tocqueville, being a citizen meant that you voted and came together in associations to create a new society. Tocqueville thought that these associations were the heart of American democracy. In his book he writes:

Nothing, in my opinion, is more deserving of our attention than the intellectual and moral associations of America. … If we discover them, we understand them imperfectly because we have hardly ever seen anything of the kind. … In democratic countries the science of association is the mother of science; the progress of all the rest depends upon the progress it has made (emphasis added).

In the nearly 200 years since Tocqueville wrote his book, a new society emerged that was not based on associational work. Instead, America became a modern, industrialized, professional society. The work once done by citizens in association was taken over by machines and newer technologies as well by institutions of paid workers. Instead of associational production being the central means of democratic creation, that citizen function was greatly diminished so that most

Americans became consumers rather than citizens. As the result of this transfer of functions, Americans lost much of the power to be a citizen-centered society.

As the result of this transfer of functions, Americans lost much of the productive capacity that they once held. Instead of understanding associational citizenship as a powerful means for doing the work of community and democracy, most local residents came to believe that democracy was based solely upon voting, and they delegated the functions they had once performed in association to newly formed institutions of paid workers.

Having largely lost their ability as citizens to be basic producers of the community, associational life began to atrophy – see Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam. This atrophy resulted in a local malaise and residential isolation. The result is that the functions of associated neighbors began to fade away. Many were transferred to institutions that were not designed to fulfill the functions for which associations were initially responsible.

These uniquely associational functions include health, safety, the environment, economic life, food production, child raising, care, storytelling, and spiritual life. These are functions that must be performed wholly or in part by associations because many of the institutions were not designed to perform them. Local residents, having failed to perform the functions that are uniquely theirs, began to distrust institutional surrogates. They would complain, as consumers, that the institutions were failing them. In reality, citizens were failing to perform their responsibilities as creative and powerful members of associations. They began to become consumer advocates trying to buy what only they and their collective neighbors could themselves produce.

There have begun to appear citizen innovations that recover the responsibilities of local people becoming productive problem-solving innovators. This happens when local residents act like citizens with their powerful tools of association. This recovery process has occurred when local residents become citizens and fulfill many functions lost to institutions. These citizens understand the power of associational functions as the means for renewing and redefining democracy.

The following pages tell the story of thirteen communities that replaced the institutional and recovered associational functions by assuming authority for much of their well-being. Sometimes the authority was transferred from institutions back to democratic citizen associations. In other cases, the failed efforts of institutional services led to the creation of new citizen associational functions.

The first set of stories shows how institutional leaders have led local citizens to take responsibility for new functions. These leaders serve as precipitators of action rather than acting as traditional leaders. They facilitate bringing groups together, but they do not define what the groups should focus on or how they should do their work. Their role is simply to convene citizens in order that these citizens might decide what needs to be done and who needs to do it.

The second set of stories shows how local residents took their own initiative to perform community functions with democratic local associations. Like the institutional leaders, these residents functioned as precipitators, leading by convening and giving focus to associational effort.

Institutional Leaders Precipitating Associational Recovery

One | Over the Wall

Jerry Miller was a professor of social work at Ohio State University. He was a reformer when he was recruited to become director of juvenile protection, which is the reformatory system for the state of Massachusetts. When he got there, he immediately began to institute a major set of reforms of the system. The measure of the effectiveness of his reforms was to be the recidivism rate. After two years, his data showed that in spite of all the reforms, the recidivism rate was about the same as when he arrived.

His reforms had not been successful in reforming. One night he thought over what other he reforms might try and decided that there were no more reforms that would work; he had to do something that would positively affect his juvenile wards. He concluded then that there was no place worse than his reformatories if you wanted to reform young people. Therefore, he decided to close down all of his facilities and let the kids out. He placed them with all kinds of people and institutions in the community who responded to his call for “adopting” his kids.

One example was the local university where many of his older young people were placed in dorm rooms and under the jurisdiction of the students.

The result of this community response was to greatly lower the recidivism rate. He wrote a book that describes this process called Last One Over the Wall.

Two | Citizen Priests

Tom Ray was appointed the Episcopal bishop of northern Michigan. When he got there, he found that there were half as many priests as there were parishes.

Therefore, his predecessor had assigned each priest to two parishes, which meant they shuttled back and forth and were not deeply engaged in the lives of the local people.

Bishop Ray thought the system was so ineffective that he decided to give the power of the priesthood to the local parishes. Within the Episcopal Church there was space to transfer priestly powers to local parishioners so that they became the ordained clergy of their parish. Each parish chose two or three people to be ordained as deacons and they were trained at a weekend school with a seminary- like curriculum to perform the functions of priests. As a result, the parishes were transformed from institutionally controlled bodies to parishes controlled and managed by the parishioners.

This shift in authority activated and brought to life the parishes that were once run by priests. After this transformation the bishop had eight priests who really had no functions. Bishop Ray decided that they would become the historians of the faith and visit the parishes to keep that faith and its history alive.

As the church transformation in northern Michigan became known, more and more dioceses around the world sent delegations to see what the parishioners had done. Finally, so many dioceses said that they were in short supply of priests and wanted to visit Northern Michigan that the visitors began to become disruptive of the work of the local parishes. Therefore, the Michigan parishes set up two weeks a year in which other dioceses could come and learn to transformed their own parishes.

Three | Goodness at Work

Mike Butler became the police chief of Longmont, Colorado, a city of about 100,000 people near Denver. His previous experience was with traditional police departments and their standard reform methods. However, he knew how ineffective these reforms had been. Therefore, he began a process in which he affirmed that the purpose of a police department should be to magnify the “goodness” in the community, his police officers, and the people they investigated and arrested.

He began by opening up the police department to anyone who wanted to come into the building and attend any meeting the department was having, including meetings to select new police officers. Then he assigned to each neighborhood a police officer whose job it was to become a part of the neighborhood and magnify its goodness. To emphasize the importance of this police role in goodness, he paid these neighborhood officers more than the other officers.

Then, he began to look at the kinds of interventions his department was called on to do. They included detaining people who were labeled homeless, mentally ill, addicted, and abusive. In each of these problems it was obvious that a police officer’s intervention didn’t change anything much. Therefore, he began to work with local communities, community groups, and local neighborhoods to see how they could help deal with these “deviant” people. He transferred police intervention to the local neighborhood and its organizations, as well as to some agencies that seemed to be effective. As a result of his transferring police functions to neighborhoods and their institutions, he reduced calls to the police from seventy to five a day.

This freed up time for police officers to work with neighborhood organizations in taking more and more responsibility for the chronic issues that usually consume most of police time. Finally, when the neighborhood police officers were involved in an annual review, they had to bring with them representatives of the local community who could describe how the officer had provided assistance and implemented a policy based on the goodness of local neighborhoods, the officers, and the “offenders.”

Four | Outsiders Become Insiders

In the Northern Canadian city of Prince Albert, a service agency ran a program for people who were labeled “mentally ill.” The men’s program involved them coming to a building where they played cards, drank coffee, and smoked. One day, a new social worker was assigned to administer the “program.” He felt that he was just watching the men waste their lives. Therefore, he thought it would be helpful if the men had something constructive to do, rather than merely pass the time. He decided that the men could form a club and offer their abilities and capacities to the city.

He got the group to meet with the mayor whom they asked what they could do to improve the city. The astonished mayor thought of several city improvement projects the men could undertake, for example, building and installing park benches. Each city project improved the city, and the men’s lives, and the men charged nothing for their work.

After they had completed the city improvements, the men decided that they could start a business together, and so they bought a lot of pink plastic flamingos. Then, they rented the flamingos to appear at night as a surprise in the front yards of people who had just had babies. They also offered this service to newly married people.

This was the beginning of their unusual enterprises, for which they became well-known in Prince Albert for the novel services they provided. This never would have happened had it not been for a creative social worker who let his “wards” be seen as productive and respected neighbors rather than people who were being serviced.

Five | How a Failed King Discovered the Power of Citizens

Henry Moore was the assistant city manager in Savannah, Georgia. He administered the federal block grant programs designed to enhance and engage neighborhood improvement initiatives.

Henry had spent several million public dollars on neighborhood improvement programs and concluded that his effort was largely a failure. Therefore, he decided that he ought to try something else rather than continue his failed activities. He decided to work in the lowest-income quarter of the city, where he had been unable to activate residents to take on many renewal activities.

Therefore, he sent a letter to each household in the area.

In the letter, he noted his failure and said that he had small grants that could be used by local residents who had an idea about improving their block. He asked the recipients of the letter to describe an improvement idea they had and identify two other residents, or a local association, that were prepared to join him/her in carrying out their program. They were asked to submit their proposal on no more than one page. Henry noted that he had up to $100 to implement each block proposal. He received about eighty proposals.

He named this program The Grants for Blocks Program and became the administrator of the new idea.

These grants were given over the summer, and an incredible amount of work was done by each of the awardees. They started a daily play program for the children on the block and began planting trees and shrubbery on the parkway to beautify and cool the neighborhood.

At the end of the first year, Henry sponsored a dinner at the best hotel in town for all the people who had been involved in creating ideas and implementing them on behalf of an improved block. Before the dinner, Henry had encouraged each block to put up a display in the lobby so that everybody who had received a grant could see what other people had created and done. This stimulated a whole new set of proposals for the next year.

At the dinner, Henry said that when he had all the money and made all the decisions, he had thought of himself as King Henry. At the dinner, he said that all the people who were there were the new kings of the neighborhood. Later he observed that the real leaders who could make real change were the people in the room, and it was his job to support them to take on ever more responsibility.

Almost all the first round of proposals had been funded for less than $100 each, making the total initiative cost less than $8,000. Henry got more change at the neighborhood level that summer than had occurred when he spent millions of federal block grant dollars.

Six | How an “Idea Slam” Created a Method to Activate Citizens

There is a neighborhood in the city of Vancouver, Canada, with a community center and a small staff that were creating and administering programs for the local residents. They tried several approaches to get local people activated in the development of their neighborhood, but none were really successful. Their ideas just didn’t inspire the local residents to act.

One day, the director of the center had a revelation that the people living in the neighborhood might have good improvement ideas and be willing to carry them out if they could be stimulated effectively. The director created a process that came to be known as “Idea Slam.” Through their networks the staff let the local residents know that they were going to initiate an “Idea Slam.” The ideas would be created by the local residents and be carried out by the residents themselves.

On the “Slam Day,” a neighbor could come to the Community Center, but the price of admission was that they had to have an idea about what people in the neighborhood could do to make it a better place. Therefore, everybody in the room had an idea about doing or producing something. This energized the gathering. Each person with an idea was then asked to present their idea to the other Slammers. Once everybody had heard the ideas, the floor was opened for people to begin to gather around those Slammers whose idea they liked best and were willing to work on.

In only one morning neighbors coalesced around the ideas they had and would be willing to work on to make real. As a result of “Slammer-created” neighborhood initiatives, the neighborhood came alive as a place owned by residents rather than authoritative programmers. What had been a neighborhood desert became a community garden of new relationships.

Neighborhood Local Associations Taking Authority and Responsibility for Community Well-being

Seven | An Association of Drug Users

There was an area of the city of Vancouver in Canada where many drug users were located. The response of the government was either treatment or incarceration. These two systems had almost no effect on the drug use in the neighborhood where many drug users lived on the streets. A local woman named Anne Livingston, and her colleague, Bud Osborn, began to recognize that most of the drug users were always viewed as people who needed to be reformed and the reforms weren’t working.

Ann had some experience in organizing and so she thought it would be a good idea to organize drug users rather than try to reform them. Therefore, she and Bud worked with local drug users to form an organization called the East Vancouver Drug Users Association, later called the Vancouver Network of Drug Users (VANDU). This empowered the members to have a voice in decisions about their lives. They used their organization to create a policy framework called “Harm Reduction.” This allowed them to create a world defined by their capacities rather than deficiencies. Their organization gave a voice to the voiceless, creating a pride among the members. Their policy depended not on incarceration or treatment but on their organization’s ability to show other ways of dealing with their lives.

Eight | An Invitation to Citizenship

Prince George is a city of 100,000 in the northern part of British Columbia. There, the “disability agency” carried on a typical set of institutional programs designed to manage the disabled people under their care. This management created a series of programs that surrounded a disabled person with services but isolated them from connection with the community where they lived.

A group of citizens in influential positions came together to see if they could open the door for the service institutions and introduce the gifts of disabled people to individuals and organizations in the community.

At the start there were five people in the self-forming group, including the best- known television commentator in the town, the head of the symphony orchestra, and a leader in the large Ukrainian community. When these people gathered, they each had large networks of relationships and friends with whom the isolated disabled people could be connected. They met with many labeled people, discovered their gifts, and connected them to people or groups or institutions where those gifts could be recognized and used.

This process multiplied so that many people in the community were connected with isolated people. Prince George became a community that could say, as William Butler Yeats said, “There are no strangers here, just friends we haven’t met.”

Nine | The Power of Associated Mothers

Mrs. Lane lived on Chicago’s West Side. Her daughter became a teenager and spent most of her time with the teen girl next door. Mrs. Lane noticed that they began to take “the wrong path,” and she felt she should do something about that. So, she met with the mother of the girl who lived next door, and both of them agreed that these girls needed to do something that was constructive. They began to think up local activities that would interest the girls. When they had a lot of ideas, they arranged a meeting with six other block mothers and agreed that it would be a good idea to get all their daughters into constructive initiatives.

First, they identified all the people in the neighborhood they knew who had artistic talents. Then they arranged for the girls to meet with the artists and spend at least a day learning how to engage in various artistic activities. As a result, several of the girls began to meet regularly with a local artist and some ended by making art their career.

Second, they thought it would be useful to help the girls learn about business opportunities. In the neighborhood, there were many small businesses, and the mothers persuaded those businesspeople to meet with all the girls and show them what they did in their businesses. Several of the girls were attracted by the work and began to become helpers in local businesses which led to their becoming entrepreneurs and making their own money.

Third, they agreed that they would make a flag for each household in the neighborhood. The girls went door to door and got symbols from each house that represented the family. Then, working with a local seamstress, the girls made a flag for each household on the block. One Saturday, all the households gathered and talked about their story and their families’ histories. To this day, all the households have flags. Whenever a new member moves in, the girls make a flag for them.

Finally, Mrs. Lane said, “We have broken the line between the mothers. We have broken the line between the girls. We have broken the line between the mothers and the girls, and we are a real community now.”

It is especially significant to note that all the resources used by that local community were already present. It only took connecting what they had to create a transformed community.

Ten | We Have the Right to Clean Our Streets

In a Dutch city, it was the tradition for householders to clean the streets in front of their houses every morning. This historic activity was not just street cleaning. It was the time when, over the years, the residents all got to know each other personally.

The city government bought some street sweepers and began to sweep the streets weekly. When the street sweeper came to the neighborhood that had cleaned its own streets, the neighbors were outraged. They “marched” on City Hall and demanded that the city stop taking over their functions of creating clean streets and enabling good friendships. After some resistance, the city decided to exempt this one neighborhood from having its streets cleaned by large machines driven by paid people. And the neighbors on that block continued to fulfill their functions as friendly street-cleaning residents.

Unfortunately, more and more neighborhoods accepted the machine that took community functions away from neighbors. In many of these neighborhoods, instead of cleaning their own street, the neighbors’ function was to become “complainers” who were upset about the quality of machine cleaning.

Nonetheless, in that one small neighborhood they continued to be citizen-friendly actors with real functions in the city and a group of community friends.

Eleven | Every Block a Village

In a neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago, the city attempted to sponsor block clubs. This effort was not very successful. Therefore, the people in the neighborhood created their own organization, called Every Block a Village. This was a unique organization where local residents took responsibility for each other’s care.

The neighbors created their own productive activities, such as repairing local housing, nurturing the sick, creating and tending to gardens, and being responsible for the local children and their care. Instead of being a program, it was a community that took responsibility for its well-being. It was these functions that were manifested by care rather than programs. It is this care that creates a community rather than a structure that provides programs, for example a safety program which has a structure and is powered by the structure.

Care is personal and says, “We take care of those who are ill on the block.” What an institution is, is a structure for service versus what we’re talking about here: a community of care that is personal. That’s what the difference is between Every Block a Village and an institutional program.

If I get so close to you that I am feeding you meals, that’s different from an institutionalized Meals on Wheels program. If I take responsibility for a part of the education of the children on the block, that’s different from operating a school.

There’s a difference between a school, which is a structure, and a village that raises its children.

Twelve | Residents Discover Their Problems are Assets

A neighborhood leader on the West Side of Chicago saw how the city wasn’t solving their problems. For starters, they had a lot of brownfields, abandoned industrial blocks.

The second thing was they had a lot of seniors who received very little care and were in great need.

The third was trash, paper, waste material all over the neighborhood.

But the neighborhood leader looked at these three problems, three unsolved city problems, and saw each of them as assets. So, she gathered her neighbors from the area, and they looked at how they might deal with the “problems” as neighbors.

First, they contacted a company that cleaned up brownfields and got them to train local unemployed residents to be effective brownfield cleaners. Second, as they became experts about brownfields, they also learned about the trash recycling business. So, they decided to create a recycling business of their own and trained people to process and sell trash. This activity resulted in conservation and economic development. Third, there were many older people in the neighborhood who were acting as caregivers and there were many seniors needing care. There was in the neighborhood a church that was closing down and had an apartment building that it owned. Therefore, the neighbors created a new elder home that provided jobs for many who were able to provide care rather than service.

The key was that the neighbors saw their area as a resource to be developed.

The city had seen the area as a broken-down, high-cost dilemma. Because neighbors could see what the city could not, neighbors were able to transform their neighborhood into a caring, conserving, productive place. Where the city saw a costly deficit, the neighbors saw that they were surrounded by wonderful opportunities for transformation.

None of this would have happened except for one woman in the neighborhood and their neighborhood organization. But this woman saw all those possibilities, all of those opportunities and assets.

Thirteen | Growing Vegetables Creates a Neighborhood Organization

In a suburb of Washington, D.C., a local resident was a woman who was a retired teacher. Her house was on a hill above the local elementary school, and she wanted to be connected with the school. She had an idea. Between her house and the school was quite a bit of vacant land. She was a gardener and thought it would be a good idea to teach the kids how to become gardeners.

There are quite a few schools that create a community garden where the kids can watch, learn, and sometimes participate. The schoolteacher had the notion that the school could teach people all over the neighborhood how to become gardeners, rather than just creating a space for gardening.

To achieve this end, the schoolteacher bought a lot of packs of lettuce seeds. Then she got the school to agree that she could use a part of their land to teach their students how to grow lettuce. After the students had learned about lettuce growing, she gave every one of the students a pack of lettuce seeds to take home and teach their parents how to grow lettuce. As a result, almost every household had lettuce because of the incentives the kids had to show off their new skills at home.

When the gardener was asked why she used lettuce to introduce the kids to gardening, she said, “Because it’s so easy. I can teach somebody how to grow lettuce in 10 minutes. And now we have everyone growing lettuce.”

By the end of the spring, almost every household had lots of lettuce. Therefore, the neighborhood gardeners arranged at the school to have a salad party. Each family was encouraged to bring lettuce from their garden for a party featuring mixed salads. A local chef joined them in developing a dressing that would make the salads especially good. Most of the people attending the salad party were meeting each other for the first time and were very grateful to meet their neighbors personally.

The next year, the neighborhood gardeners taught all the children at the school how to grow carrots. Then the students taught their parents how to grow carrots, and the salad for the second year’s salad party was even more magnificent.

Because people had begun to meet each other on salad day, a small group decided they could start a neighborhood organization that would be especially focused on what a neighborhood could do to teach children how to produce their own food.

So, the retired schoolteacher created gardens in almost every household and that led to people coming together to learn from their children and create a neighborhood organization.

A lot of neighborhoods are big on the idea of having a community garden, a place, but these programs usually don’t grow throughout the neighborhood and grow salads as well as a community. But what the retired teacher did was introduce neighbors to neighbors and got their kids to be productive and become teachers for their parents. Then they created a neighborhood organization.

Conclusion

As noted in the beginning of this exploration, we have come a long way from the associational strength that Tocqueville observed when he visited the U.S. We live in a time when the functions of associated neighbors have faded away. Many of those functions have been transferred to institutions which, well-meaning and focused as they might be, are not designed to fulfill the functions described in the stories told here. They are not designed to nurture citizens in fulfilling what only citizens can deliver. Most of these examples deal with problems beyond the reach of institutions: like youth offenders, churches without priests, safety of vulnerable neighborhoods, addicts in an urban park, fragile teenage girls, and vacant lots full of trash.

In many of these stories the transformed community was precipitated by institutional leaders. The leaders were people who acted to connect citizens but did not prescribe the purpose of the newly formed group and did not take part in the action of the group. Many other efforts were initiated by local community people without institutional initiation.

No matter where the effort began, the transformation in each of the stories is about relocating functions to the local citizen sphere from the managerial sphere.

All of these stories are about democracy in action to and within the capacity of citizens to solve problems and implement new creations.

The post From reform to what works: Moving from the limits of institutions to a culture powered by neighbors 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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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 that sense, the resulting displacement of people from their homes and communities is, in essence, a planned disaster. Andrew brings a nuanced perspective to this issue, drawing from his work and experiences in neighborhoods facing rapid economic transformation. 

Gentrification, as he sees it, is not just about rising rents or new developments but about the displacement of people, histories, and cultures that have shaped these communities for generations.

Much like our previous episodes—whether discussing mutual aid in disaster-hit regions or grassroots movements reclaiming public space—this conversation reminds us that collective action is a powerful tool. Andrew shares stories of resistance: how communities are organizing to protect their homes, create alternative housing models, and ensure that development serves the people already rooted in these spaces.

We’re back after an unanticipated summer break. We love making this show, but have a small team at Shareable, and often have to redirect our efforts to other parts of our work. But we’ve got new monthly episodes scheduled for the rest of the year. Please email TheResponse@shareable.net with feedback about the show or if you have suggestions for people you want to hear us interview. 

Resources:

• Defying Displacement by Andrew Lee
• In Struggle substack by Andrew Lee
• Follow Andrew on Instagram and TikTok
• Andrew’s website
• Shareable zoning series
• Free ebook: How racism shaped the housing crisis & what we can do about it today
• Donate to The Response

Episode credits:

• Co-hosted and executive produced by Tom Llewellyn
• Co-hosted, 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 Resisting gentrification and displacement with Andrew Lee 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.

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

This is the final part in a three-part series on intentional communities and capitalism by Sky Blue. Read the first and second parts.

We have lots of completely legitimate needs, but the options capitalism gives us to meet them mostly revolve around individual financial independence. Some of our needs related to economics are autonomy, privacy, and security. These are not antithetical to community, but how we meet them can be.

If we are clear about the underlying needs, as well as our ideals and principles, while recognizing where we may need to compromise, particularly in the short term, we can work creatively with the models and resources available to meet our needs while undermining the dominance of and dependence on capitalism.

Economies of scale

Living in an intentional community (IC) should be cheaper than in mainstream situations with a comparable standard of living. If it isn’t, it is probably because you’re not sharing enough. And more intensive resource sharing is more practical in larger groups.

A problem with many ICs is similar to a problem with many small businesses. They’re too small. This isn’t necessarily a problem in itself. It’s because capitalism, beyond its focus on the individual, rewards scale because scale maximizes profit.

Food, transportation, and renewable energy are important parts of our lives that cost a lot but get cheaper at scale. Scale can also mitigate the inconveniences of sharing. For example, it’s much easier for 25 people to share five cars than it is for five people to share one car, and bulk food purchasing and community makes it cheaper and more efficient to meet a diversity of dietary needs.

It may not be practical for an IC to expand its population, but in many cases, it is possible to extend resource-sharing systems beyond the people who live on the property. While it’s up to each group to decide what’s right for them, it’s also important to remember that the interconnected set of social, economic, and ecological benefits are greater the more you share.

Privacy and control

People frequently say, “I want to live in community, but I want my own place.” This isn’t necessarily bad. Regardless of the reason, some people just need to have a living situation where they can eat, sleep, and go to the bathroom without needing to interact or negotiate with others if they’re going to live well in community. People also tend to have different needs at different points in their lives. Families in particular often need different living spaces than single people. But the attachment to having our own place makes us gloss over an analysis of how well our designs align with our values or the culture we want.

Tiny houses certainly have their place, but the enthusiasm for tiny houses, which has evolved into its own small movement, seems suspiciously like a green-washed version of American hyper-individualism. In general, five free-standing, one-person structures are going to cost more to build and maintain, and use more energy, than one five-person structure. Individual dwellings, particularly if they are individually owned, are the obvious way to meet our needs for privacy and autonomy. But they are less financially accessible, ecologically friendly, or conducive to connection

For many, the need for privacy can be met by designing larger residences with rooms or apartments that have outside entrances and really good sound insulation. And while privacy is important, the more we replicate the isolation of mainstream architecture, the less opportunity we give ourselves to develop our comfort in being close.

There is also an assumption that I need to own my home to have control over what I can do with it and who comes into it. This isn’t necessarily true.

For example, in a housing cooperative, you don’t own your residence, even in co-ops where the residences are apartments, townhouses, or even free-standing. Rather, you own a member share, the value of which may or may not be based on the value of the residence. Owning a member share grants exclusive use of your residence within certain membership and use agreements.

Privacy often tends to be more of a cultural question anyway. Some people are happy to have their friends walk into their homes unannounced regardless of whether they own or rent. And even in a typical Homeowners Association (HOA), where people own their homes, there are still limits to what people can do to its exterior.

In other words, ownership is not required for privacy and control. An IC is free to make whatever agreements it wants.

Equity and decision-making power

Models with multiple owners revolve around making investments that confer equity: A proportional share of ownership, the value of which goes up or down depending on the value of the property. This is core to the concept of private property ownership that drives the speculative real estate market, which is a core driver of capitalism. It carries an assumption that the property could be sold at some point and dictates how any profit would be divided.

This is based on a view of land as a commodity, and usually translates into benefits regarding profit generated on the land and decision-making power. It is focused on maximizing benefit and minimizing risk for the individual, and inclines us to focus on our individual perspectives. Interpersonally and culturally, this has real implications for how we relate to each other, to the community, and to the land. Governance, or decision-making power, in an IC can be based on other things, like the degree of responsibility and accountability a person is willing to take on, regardless of their financial investment.

From a justice perspective, individual ownership of property is a privilege that fewer and fewer have access to. If buying-in is a requirement for an IC, it favors people with more privilege. Even if it isn’t, but being an owner confers certain decision-making powers, that also favors people with privilege and is likely to lead to power dynamics that create tension and alienation. Ownership as a strategy for wealth building within the speculative real estate market is also a major driver of the lack of affordable housing.

Mobility and long-term care

We have a need to feel reasonably confident that we will be cared for when we can’t care for ourselves, particularly at the end of our lives. Whether or not there is an inherent need for mobility related to our need for autonomy, mainstream culture instills a very strong desire for it.

The main options available to meet these needs in capitalism are personal retirement savings and property ownership. Owning property has arguably been the best place for people to park their money so that it will increase in value (though that is less of a guarantee these days), and if you own it you can sell it and move somewhere else if you want to.

But attaining this level of financial security in capitalism is an illusion for most people. The amount of money needed to comfortably retire is upwards of $1.5M. The average person approaching retirement age has about $400K in savings. If you’re fortunate to have even that much, as long as you have enough passive income from a pension or social security, you might be able to get by as long as you remain relatively healthy until you die and die quickly.

And yet, even with little hope of actually achieving this level of individual security, we will still try and set things up to allow for it. This is largely because we are afraid of being stuck in a particular place with particular people, or perceive the risks associated with collective security to be too great.

The benefits of collective ownership

There are models for community property ownership where investment does not need to confer individual ownership, and that remove property from the speculative real estate market, allowing for collective stewardship for community benefit in perpetuity. Instead of creating an equity stake, investments in property (either upfront or to make improvements) can be treated as repayable loans, managed with capital accounts. If the IC can generate enough income, something like a profit-sharing agreement can be added to this.

This can support people in being able to leave if they want to, help them generate a nest egg, and support them in dealing with situations outside of the community, like caring for an aging parent. If the IC owns itself, it can have more flexibility in setting its financial requirements for membership and is more conducive to democratic decision-making that focuses on the good of the entire community.

For those considering different models, it’s worth noting that you can still have home ownership in ICs where the land is owned by the community. Creating an internal housing market addresses some of the problems of being embedded in the mainstream real estate market, but it can also recreate some of those problems and should be approached thoughtfully.

Purpose and relationships

Most ICs are based on individual ownership models and do not have community businesses. Individuals are required to have their own income sources or be independently wealthy, in order to live there. For those with easy access to income or wealth, this is certainly the less risky way to go. Many people with the resources to help start or buy into ICs also want to maintain their own careers, in part to maintain individual security.

I’m in no way saying all ICs should have community businesses and no one should work outside of them. That is neither practical nor desirable in many cases. But the more focused the members are on their own spaces, their own financial situations, and other individual strategies to get their needs met, the less time and money will be available for community endeavors, and the less opportunity there is for solidarity and mutual aid.

Lots of groups make lofty vision and mission statements and talk about wanting to be a model to impact society. Even for less idealistic groups, creating an IC is usually driven by a desire for greater closeness. However, most groups don’t design their economic systems such that there is enough capacity to fulfill this, which can lead to conflict. Many find that there is not as much of a sense of community as they wanted. And trying to do even relatively simple things together, like putting solar panels on the common house or carpooling, let alone more complicated things, like creating affordable housing and increasing diversity, are virtually impossible.

Intertwined with all of this is how we relate to each other. Privacy is core to capitalism, which it perpetuates to keep us isolated so that we don’t organize in a way that would challenge it. We struggle in capitalism, but we think it’s our own fault, we keep to ourselves, and don’t talk about what’s really going on for us. We don’t trust each other, we’re scared of commitment, and we keep relying on capitalist solutions.

When we withhold from sharing about the challenges we’re experiencing, including our challenges with each other, it perpetuates isolation and leaves us with a scarcity of economic and emotional resources. This keeps us from learning how to relate to each other and creating systems that would get us out of that trap.

By being vulnerable with each other, being there for each other, and being willing to say and hear hard things, we’re challenging the socialization that keeps us from becoming more economically intertwined. By being more involved in each other’s lives, we create more opportunities for us to work things out and learn how to get along. But the more we continue to avoid intimacy and conflict, as well as economic involvement, the more the social side will feel hollow, the economic side will be more fraught, and we will fall back to capitalist practices and culture.

I’m not saying it’s easy. There’s usually a major hump a group needs to get over to effect meaningful change, and it can be challenging to stay motivated. Exploring and experiencing existing models is key. We need to believe that things can be different to feel like it’s worth putting the work in.

Beyond the property line

Even if they aren’t based on individual property ownership, ICs tend to become insular. The state of the world is calling us to do something different.

Global warming, climate change, natural disasters, and mass extinction are going to increase. Large-scale, particularly global, economic systems will become less and less tenable. People will be increasingly reliant on local and regional systems. But at this point, most do not have the capacity to accommodate that shift. As is already happening, people will come together for mutual aid. But this is mostly happening on very small scales that would be overwhelmed and fail in the event of significant systems collapse.

ICs by themselves, as we currently conceive of them based on existing models, are too small to be sustainable. We need scales of human organization that allow all people in a region to meet their basic needs equitably, maintain a degree of comfort afforded by modern technology, and sustainably integrate human habitat and activity into the natural world.

ICs can play a role in that, but we need to be thoughtful about what that is. People talk about making a “totally self-sufficient community” or “growing 100% of our own food.” This is not realistic, and even if possible, it would mean a degree of isolation that can be dangerous.

The ability of local and regional systems to respond effectively for the mutual benefit of all people and the ecosystems they live in will depend on their governance, economics, and culture being cooperative, equitable, and regenerative. And this is what needs to happen even if things don’t get much worse because things already suck for a lot of people.

Through direct participation with and support of other kinds of cooperative groups as well as local government, ICs can be an active player in helping their local communities move in this direction.

Risk and sacrifice

Being part of a community that we can count on to care for us may be our ideal, but can seem impractical or unattainable, and feel terrifying. What if I end up hating it and want to leave? What if I get kicked out? What if things fall apart and I lose everything?

Being part of any IC is going to involve some level of risk and sacrifice. This is part of sharing, which is where the benefits of living in ICs come from. The more you’re willing to risk and sacrifice, the more you’re willing to prioritize collective solutions to meet individual needs, and the more potential for benefit you’ll have.

The design of a community is strongly influenced by the priorities of the individuals involved. Capitalism socializes us to prioritize ourselves and, sometimes, our families. We can see living in an IC as expanding our notion of family, or the set of people with whom we choose to engage in mutual aid. This can happen within an IC, and can also happen between ICs and beyond.

Prioritizing collective solutions does not necessarily mean sacrificing individual needs. If a group of people hold their individual needs as collective needs, because the individuals are integral to the collective, then the question becomes how to reasonably meet individual needs within the context of collective solutions that support the larger goals of the IC.

ICs are places where we can support each other as we inquire into our choices and practices, see the discomfort as being worth it, and nudge ourselves towards greater sharing. Key to this is having courageous and vulnerable conversations about our backgrounds, beliefs, experiences, and ideologies, as well as being transparent about our financial situations and addressing tensions that will come up around any wealth disparities that exist in the community. We need to be willing to work together to uncover what drives us and generate the empathy and compassion necessary to explore collective alternatives.

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