A New Urban Environmentalism?

I'm not sure if there's anything left to say about Van Jones, the Obama administration's special adviser on green jobs. An article by Elizabeth Kolbert details his efforts to address urban poverty and global warming by putting people to work on green infrastructure projects. Jones explains his plans in a recent NPR interview. His work has captured the imagination of many, but does it represent a promising new form of urban environmentalism?

Jones is a political star. After graduating from Yale Law School in 1993, he moved to the Bay Area and began advocating for human rights in urban communities. He fought effectively to keep people out of jail, in gainful employment, and safe from police brutality. Jones traces his environmental interest to a talk by Julia Butterfly Hill, explaining that he admired and identified with her efforts to save a redwood tree. The two found common ground in helping people and things considered disposable.

At a meeting with Nancy Pelosi in 2007, Jones brought up the need for a Clean Energy Jobs Bill. The idea caught on and was included in the Energy Independence and Security Act less than a year later. He has since published a book called The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems. In today's political climate of economic crisis and recovery, this concept makes environmental concern more politically viable. It has rallied unions, corporations, politicians, and local activists behind alternative energy as an agent for job creation.

Still, there is skepticism about the merits of combined solutions to global warming and poverty. Some see a lack of environmental concern among less affluent communities as a major impediment. Others point out that environmental conservation places disproportionate strain on people living in poverty. Some policy experts see the two problems as too distinct to be addressed with a joint solution. Jones responds by explaining the benefits of a holistic approach that encourages combined efforts. He considers poverty alleviation without environmental consideration a short-term fix, resulting in greater problems down the road. He adds that people living in poverty will support environmental causes that address their most pressing needs.

Jones looks for points of agreement and makes the most of them. He peppers his speech with clear and memorable phrases that express shared interests, often playing with different meanings of the word green. At the same time, he's not shy about applying pressure against powerful opponents (skills sharpened fighting police brutality in the 1990s). Of course, it will take more than consensus and coercion for his current efforts to succeed. The jobs will have to be efficient and provide better sources of energy. A certain amount of financial loss is acceptable in return for long-term gains, but the gains have to materialize. Given the widespread support for these ideas, the timing is right to make them work.

So, is Jones at the forefront of a new urban environmentalism? His work is different from environmental justice movements that have fought to improve ecological conditions in marginalized communities. Jones adopts the discourse of sustainable development, with a focus on poverty alleviation. He aims for consensus around human needs, rather than proposing a radical alternative to current forms of environmental management. As far as labels go, his ideas integrate three potentially conflicting -isms: social, capital, and environmental. His emphasis is clearly on the social, but only in the sense of prioritizing human concerns. If this renders him a socialist, then even Milton Friedman would be socialist. In reference to the urban, now that Jones is advising on green jobs for the entire country, his focus will have to expand to include suburban and rural communities. He has successfully articulated a vision that links inclusive economic prosperity with long-term environmental care. While this isn't new urban environmentalism, it is something more comprehensive and very worth pursuing.

(Credits: Photo of Van Jones from Green for All; Photo of Julia Butterfly Hill from Earthfirst; Photo of smoke stacks from the Hunter College Department of Geography; Photo of Milton Friedman from In Defense of Liberty)

Q&A with the “Mayor” of Opportunity City

MILWAUKEE, March 32, 2010 (IP*) – Ronald Dykes is executive director of Opportunity City, a non-profit organization dedicated to fighting poverty in Milwaukee. Housed in what was once a sprawling steel fabrication plant in the heart of one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, the organization is generating lots of buzz in policy and academic circles across the country for its innovative initiatives.

Q. Opportunity City isn’t a city; it’s a non-profit group. Everyone calls you “mayor,” but your title is executive director. What’s up with the city shtick?

A. We are like a city. Inside this old factory space, we house staff for the 27 different anti-poverty programs that we run. A few are big programs; many are small. About 475 people work here, and we get about the same number of clients and visitors coming through every day. There’s a lot of human bustle in here. The office cubicles are arranged in blocks like a street grid. There’s a big thoroughfare we call Main Street, and there’s Coffee Alley and an area we call The Park where we have big staff meetings. And…


Q. So, you’re like a city because you’ve arranged your cubicles a certain way? That’s a pretty shallow metaphor isn’t it?

A. Well, if you’d let me finish…We don’t just look like a city; we act like one in some important ways. We intentionally created Opportunity City to try to capture the agglomeration effects that flow from the concentration of resources and functions in cities. Everyday, there are lots of low-income people here. Everyday, there are lots of people in here helping them directly or indirectly. In house, we’ve got people working on solving child care, transportation, housing, food and health care problems for individuals. We’ve got labor market analysts, administrators and support staff, employment recruiters, job trainers and representatives from apprenticeship programs working with individuals and on policy-level changes. There are also policy designers, grant writers, program evaluators and various academic interlopers. They’re all here, everyday. In close proximity. Trouble-shooting problems. Bouncing ideas off each other. Able to shout over the cubicle wall to get help. Coordinated complexity happening in close quarters is not a bad description of what a city is, and it’s what we are doing at Opportunity City.


Q. Agglomeration effects. Coordinated complexity. Fancy talk. Please tell us in plain English what the hell you’re talking about.

A. It’s simple, really. It’s just what I said a second ago: if you can get a lot of people working closely together on a set of related problems, you can be more effective at solving problems, at being productive. Density and proximity make it easier, more likely for people to problem-solve effectively in real-time. That’s the essence of these concepts. They’ve been at the heart of understanding why people and firms locate in cities.

Q. For a non-profit, you seem very well funded indeed. Where does all the money come from?

A. We’ve been blessed with very extravagant donations from a few wealthy benefactors in town. Our policy innovations have attracted grants from national foundations. And, of course, we’ve been fortunate to get funding from the new federal block grant programs for workforce development and affordable housing.

Q. You sound excited. Knowing the history of anti-poverty efforts, aren’t you setting yourself up for disappointment?

A. First, hold on a minute. Anti-poverty efforts often get a bad rap they don’t deserve. Social Security keeps lots of elderly folks out of poverty. If that’s a failure, give me more. The Earned Income Tax Credit has helped millions of low-income working families make work pay enough to afford housing and groceries. That’s a success story in my book, and so is the fact that many low-income folks have gotten good jobs through some of the better job training and placement programs. So, no, I don’t think we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment. In fact, this is one of the most exciting times in American history to be involved in the fight against poverty. Thanks to the new national health care program, every American now has affordable health insurance. This is a huge boost to low-income people. And there’s the new Skill Net program. Under this program, every American worker gets financial help to keep their job skills up-to-date and, when a job is lost, gets decent wage insurance payments to bridge over periods of unemployment without having to plunge into poverty to qualify for help. For struggling low-income workers, this new program will help keep them attached to jobs and prevent them from cycling in and out of poverty and low wage work.

Q. You like what the Obama administration has done to help fight poverty. Understood. But what are you doing locally at Opportunity City?

A. What the feds are doing is really important to our efforts. Because federal efforts will help keep many low-income families and workers from falling back into poverty so easily, at the local level we can focus on harder problems like helping people with few skills and little-to-no job experience get jobs and rebuilding distressed neighborhoods. That’s what we’re doing at Opportunity City.

Q. Nice generalities. Any specifics?

A. Sure. We’ve just launched an experimental program called Project Search and Employ. Basically, the program aims to create a group of companies with a strong profit incentive to recruit poor people with few job skills and successfully place them in real jobs with good wages and benefits. It works like this. There’s a big pot of money—all from a very generous private donor—controlled by a team of investors. The investors are a bunch of experts—experts in things like training workers, analyzing businesses, understanding industry sectors and supply chains, poverty policy, mentoring and coaching, and program evaluation. What they do is invest in proposals to create what we call search and employ companies or SECs. The SECs—each using different strategies, but all working within the same set of very high poverty census tracks—go out and find poor people who don’t have much work history, but are able to work, and hire them for a job with the SEC that involves them being trained for a real job. The SEC job is real enough, too. The recruits get paid a decent wage and benefits, and pay taxes and can be fired at the will of the employer. Anyway, if and when the SEC gets the recruit a real job—not with the SEC—then, our investors pay the SEC a big bonus. And if the recruit stays employed long enough, they get an even bigger bonus. If the SECs don’t get people good jobs for long enough, they’ll fail as businesses. Even though a program like this will work best when the labor market improves, we’re excited to get started on it because it not only gives a lot of poor people jobs right away—the SEC training jobs—but it also incentivizes lots of creative thinking about how to turn low-skilled people into stable employees.

Q. Profit from poverty. Isn’t that morally yucky?

A. Don’t try to be cute. The profits come from increasing employment and reducing poverty.


Q. Fair enough. What else are you doing?

A. Running programs is not all we do. We also try to push larger systems—like schools, chambers of commerce and city governments—to do things that help fight poverty. For example, we’re trying to create a fairly dense walkable low-income neighborhood where there are currently lots of boarded-up houses and very few businesses. To do this, is going to require help from everybody. We’ll need good schools. Grocery stores and other businesses willing to look with fresh eyes on the economic prospects in low-income neighborhoods. New zoning ordinances allowing for mixed use. And more.


Q. Now, it’s your turn to hold on a minute. Isn’t “walkability” code for gentrification?

A. It can be, sure. But first you need to understand that walkable neighborhoods can really help make life much easier and more affordable for low-income people. Think of the transportation costs and life-hassles you can avoid if child care, schools, grocery stores, places of employment, government offices, parks and transit stops are located within walking distance. The gentrification concern comes in because more and more of what we used to call yuppies like this stuff too and are willing to pay a premium to live in such places and drive up costs for everybody. But our plan is keep these neighborhoods affordable for the people who already live there. And we’re doing that with a range of programs including generous low income housing tax credits, land trusts, and value-latching which taps into any rise in property values to pay for programs that keep housing affordable. We’ve structured all this so that, over time, property values will be able to return to their real market values but only as long as the neighborhood maintains enough affordable housing capacity, too.

Q. You’re smiling. How is that possible with all the misery, all the failure of the American Dream you see every day?

A. Yes, poverty is terrible. And, yes, it’s heartbreaking to see what it does to people. But as I said before, this is a very promising moment for America. There’s a new sense that we’re all in this together, and a new willingness to work for the common good. For me, in the context of the fight against poverty, it’s especially wonderful to see Americans rediscover the natural strengths of cities, to see cities once more as the engines of growth and opportunity they are.

Interview confabulated, condensed and edited by Dan Lorentz.

*IP is an acronym for Imaginary Press, a wire service providing factually dubious news and feature stories to credulous media outlets worldwide.

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Note: This will be my last post as a regular Where contributor. My experience here has inspired me to continue to blog about city issues, except that now I want to concentrate on a more local project. In mid-April, I hope to launch My Athens, a blog about my new hometown, Athens, Georgia. [Note: This note and the note it’s embedded in are true, unlike most of the fiction that precedes it.]

(Photos--in the order they appear--from Flickr users craigallyn, opendemocracy, Matthew Shelley. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

Best We Can

Nothing gets people talking like a shared grievance. Misery, as everyone knows, loves company, and anyone who has ever been laid off or evicted, or even had to cut back on groceries has found quick solace in the similar complaints of their friends and neighbors. Stories of the run-down neighborhood that rose from the ashes when residents banded together to fight crime, or repair abandoned homes for resale, or convert empty lots into gardens are far from uncommon. Indeed, the hard-knock neighborhood lifting itself up through a communal sharing of the burden is an archetype of urban development.

There's a lot to be worried about these days. There's a lot to complain about. But we can believe that things are going to get better; in fact, it's doubtful that they can until we do.

The Project for Public Spaces published an article on their most recent newsletter entitled How Your Community Can Thrive-- Even in Tough Times, that made the blunt but wisely-worded case that cities, now more than ever, have to use what they've got. As financial markets collapse and leave perpetually cash-strapped city governments scraping by or knee-deep in red ink, expensive programs, high-profile redevelopments, and frivolous policies can no longer be relied upon to distract any attention from the most deeply-seated problems that face their communities. "What They've Got," for cities, is suddenly much less than it was.

Jonah Lehrer, speaking recently about the late Studs Terkel's book Hard Times, made this important point: "While a depression or steep recession is a terrible thing, it does lead to a few less Rolexes. And if the Terkel interviews are any indication, it was that diminished sense of disparity - the fact that everyone was going without - that made the time bearable." One thing that cities have got, today, is an economic mess on their hands; luckily, just about anything can be seen as an opportunity in the right light, and Lehrer's comments suggest a critical urban asset that should not be overlooked in these hard times: shared struggle.

A note to all those people who have been worrying about the collapse of traditional community structure in urban neighborhoods: now is your chance to change the course. It is somewhat rare that an economic crisis hits so hard that even the relatively wealthy are genuinely hurting; at the risk of sounding overly opportunistic, it is the depth of this recession that could provide a rare chance to get neighbors talking to neighbors, and sharing the burden of hard times in the community. As stated at the outset of this post, nothing gets people talking like a shared grievance. If awkwardness or ignorance have ever been reasons for avoiding a chat with the folks next door or down the hall, everyone now has something to talk about, to share, and to help each other with.

The effect that the current crash (we can call it that, right?) is having on our economic system will undoubtedly be extreme. The fundamental building blocks of our society will change, whether we like it or not. But if you're smart, you'll make what you can of hard times, and get to know what's going on in the lives of the people around you. When something shatters The Way Things Work like we're seeing them shattered today, there are small but invaluable shards of opportunity scattered all around. To some, it might look like a mess; to the wise, it is the start of a newer Way that will be stronger than what came before it.

(Photos from Wooster Collective and Flickr user Scott Haefner. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

Cooper-Hewitt Features Tulou Affordable Housing Design

The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum is currently showing an exhibition on Tulou, an affordable-housing prototype designed by Chinese architecture firm Urbanus for the city of Guangzhou, China. The Tulou prototype includes 245 apartments, an inn, exercise facilities, a library, storefronts, and varied public space. The exhibition will feature two bedrooms at actual size, as well as images, models, and project information. It runs from October 3, 2008 to April 5, 2009 at 2 East 91st Street in New York.

In a recent review, New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff praises Tulou as a thoughtfully designed solution to the urgent need for low-income housing in China's rapidly growing cities. Tulou, which means “little kingdom,” is a centuries-old term for structures once used to protect villagers from invaders in the Fujian Province. Dwellings were centered around an interior courtyard and surrounded by walls of mud. Urbanus has adapted this idea for contemporary use in urban settings. Ouroussoff notes a symbolic connection between original Tulous and the new models, which “suggest fortifications against a contemporary marauder: speculators who have so often forced the poor out of urban neighborhoods to make way for new development.” Urbanus maintains a sense of openness by arranging stores around the base and allowing entry portals, courtyards, restaurants, inns, and housing units to break the continuity of the exterior walls.

While Ouroussoff praises Urbanus's “graceful balancing act between historical and contemporary values,” some of his terms (such as monks' cells, Le Corbusier, and Communist-era housing projects) call to mind inhospitable housing schemes of the past. It is not clear how the recently completed Tulou in Guangzhou has altered the existing urban fabric, how it has been received by residents, or how the architects have learned from housing projects that failed in other settings. It seems the design might create islands of poverty instead of integrating residents into mixed-income neighborhoods. Low-income housing requires more than graceful adaptations of historical building types. It must provide a healthy environment that allows people to meet their daily needs and escape cycles of poverty. With hope, the Tulou design will contribute to a renaissance in affordable housing that improves living conditions for China's urban poor.

(Photos of the new Tulou plan are from the Urbanus website. The original full-sized versions can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

(The photo of the traditional Tulou is from Kit's Hakka Earthen Houses (Tulou) album on Picasa. The original full-sized version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

Gender and Economic Access

Walking through my Chicago Loop-based office building, I am often struck by the simultaneous layers of experience that exist in one geographical space. There are executives who have never stepped foot on public transit and service staff who commute hours to work each day on increasingly faulty Chicago buses. They eat different food, communicate with different technology and in my building, even use separate elevators. (Higher floors, which have their own elevators, house the more prestigious offices.) They occupy the same physical space, yet their experiences rarely overlap.

In a city with a history of entrenched inequality, this separation is often exacerbated by factors of race, education, etc., but it generally boils down to a matter of access granted by economic means. Money affords, among other things, certain clothes (which confer a sense of belonging in a workplace) and the ability to eat out (a center of socialization). Your geography of access is limited by your economic reality.

Gender plays a fundamental role in determining the geographies of economic access within Chicago. The phenomenon known as the "feminization of poverty" is not only an international issue (see the Millennium Development Goal #3), but also surfaces in Chicago. Americans already have a tendency to picture young mothers on welfare when they think about poverty, and in Chicago unfortunately that is an accurate picture, with women comprising almost 60% of all those under the poverty line.

Chicago Foundation of Women Executive Director Hannah Rosenthal notes in an NPR interview that a leading cause of women in poverty is the burden of single-parenthood: a third of all women-headed households in Chicago are in poverty. A quick look at the Boys and Girls Club membership demographics reveals that 48% of all members are from families living well below the poverty line, while an overwhelming 72% live with their mother's only.

While this equation (women in poverty=single parent families in poverty) may seem obvious, the solution is certainly not; financing families (often single-parent) in poverty is a much more complex problem requiring a much larger sum. There are additional access challenges- access to safe schools and affordable childcare options are two that readily come to mind. A favorite development blogger of mine, Niti Bahn, writes about how much harder it is to be poor in the US than in the developing world; without common developing world features, such as a large extended family for childcare, raising a family alone in the US is no exception.


In Chicago, the cause of financing availability is led by ShoreBank, an institution famous for its successful focus on community revitalization. Based on the Southside of Chicago, ShoreBank provides banking services to its surrounding community, despite a median family income of only $20,000. (They also, incidentally, provided Yunus and his fledgling Grameen Bank startup advice in the eighties for him to export back to his native Bangladesh. How's that for microfinance street cred? I could go on and on about this company- visit their website and read about them. Now! They are a triple bottom-line company, as well as being minority- and women- led. But I digress...)

Last year, Shore Bank launched a program to refinance subprime mortgages, saving many Chicago families (including many single-parent families) from foreclosure. Often, their community development loans go to small, female-owned businesses allowing them to escape from potential failure. Their community development credits often focus on lending to “credit-challenged” women who would be ignored by other commercial banks.

In the interview referenced above, Hannah Rosenthal laments that few studies of poverty use a gender lens in their analysis. This underscores the importance of smart institutions such as Shore Bank, who work to bring attention to gendered poverty and to alleviate the resulting limited access to resources.

Let’s hope in this unfavorable banking climate that Shore Bank is able to continue its work to transform Chicago’s economic landscape!

Note: I was deliberately focusing on gender in this post, though certainly many of the factors pointed out as problems of gender have racial roots as well.

(Photo from Flickr user hanneorla)
(Photo from Flickr user Edu-Tourist)

Poor Little (Formerly) Rich Us

Whether or not we’re actually on the brink of collapse, as newspaper headlines suggest, it’s pretty clear that—for our generation, at least—the days of dizzy abundance are done for. Even before the financial debacle's culmination in the past few weeks, very obvious warning signs had been piling up for quite some time, particularly in cities. Consider the sordid impasse of authorities faced with post-industrial, post-conflict, and post-disaster displacements; the thoughtless oohs and ahs sputtered at the urban fireworks extravaganzas of Dubai, olympic Beijing and other undemocratic, environmentally reckless city-building enterprises; the debunking of the creative city, the downtown renaissance or countless other urbanity-as-lifestyle jingles; the proliferation of substandard living conditions in the global slums rivaled by the proliferation of paranoid securitization measures in the global capitals; the spurious urbanisms of the Third-meets-First world crash sites; the brand new urban wastelands of foreclosed properties, ghost resort towns, or the aborted new economy's boomed and busted office clusters.

All of these factors add up to an eerily coherent landscape of failure, a probable breeding ground for a new urban—or afterurban—culture of poverty. Before getting into the details of what this actually means, we should recognize that we're not talking about the heavily mediatized, teary-eyed, dried-snot, food-stamp, dollar-a-day, We-Are-the-World concept of poverty, a sentimental and distorted view that considers destitution an exotic and rectifiable predicament. We need to see ourselves as part of the flaw. Failure isn’t always unintentional or accidental, and doesn’t necessarily call for immediate, direct or self-evident “corrective” measures.

We have to overcome our inability to cultivate, maintain, and/or deploy the collective intelligence that cities are supposed to encourage. What are we really learning from cities? Trading planning for packaging and reducing policy to product placement? Taking to heart the Jenny-from-the-Block motto of "used to have a little and now have (or want to have) a lot"? Pushing a pop chart urbanism of annual top whatevers? We’re so concerned with making our cities “successful” that we forget how to make them smart.

It wouldn’t hurt to realize that many places usually considered urban mishaps are in fact closer to premature paradigms. These afterurban extremities have given us—for years, or decades even—a hint of things to come, of the obstacles and opportunities we’re only beginning to face and assume elsewhere. We have to refocus on contexts of shortage and conflict and understand how they work. A different kind of inventiveness is required here, one that faced with the worst makes the most out of the least. We should start taking cues from failed urbanisms, considering they're nothing more than a crude and intensified reflection of our own contradictory standards.

Soon enough we might be absorbed into a new culture of precariousness: one of raw self-preservation, struggle for access, and profound instability. If we do manage to revert from consumer society’s holy trinity of speed, excess, and waste (says Zygmunt Bauman) into a time of pause, scarcity, and smart reuse; understanding poverty as vital urban failure—a situation that reveals something about ourselves as opposed to something we can and should “resolve”—could be our best chance to identify and attack the overwhelming restrictions and challenges of these circumstances. Poverty usually goes hand in hand with realism, it disenchants, it brings forth the dirty workings of things. Failure is a sort of active reminder and hopefully—at the risk of sounding like some sort of perverted Pangloss here—a potent drive for change.

Is Urban Poverty An Acquired Taste?

"The whole idea of de-concentrating poverty was supposed to be that you would pick up middle-class values. But all it's doing is urbanizing the suburbs." [Emphasis added.]

That's what a suburban activist said about Section 8, a major U.S. government rent subsidy program for low-income people. The quote comes from a Cincinnati Enquirer article about how the program is creating clusters of low-income housing in the suburbs as poor people from Cincinnati's inner city move there.

My first reaction—a knee-jerk urbanist reaction—to the quote was: "Good! Suburbs are fake; cities are real. A shot of poverty will make the suburbs more real."

But then I realized I had accepted a questionable assumption: that poverty is somehow inextricably linked to and emblematic of urban life.

Do I actually believe that?

In America, poverty is more concentrated in urban areas. Still, there's lots of rural poverty in America and elsewhere. In European cities the poor tend to live in the suburbs, while the well-off inhabit the central city. And I know, of course, that cities are engines of economic growth. So, while the urban/poverty association does make some sense, it's also clear cities don't have a monopoly on poverty.

There's something else right about the linkage. I think it's this: Unlike some suburbs and gated communities, it's not as easy for cities to exclude undesirable things like poverty. And it is this vulnerability to what's in the world—including poverty—that gives cities more authenticity.

Cities—with their layers of old and new, their sediments of success and failure, their grime and glitter, their wealth and poverty—are real places par excellence. This authenticity is a meaningful part of why I like living in a city. Poverty is a sign you're living in a real place.

But where this idea could lead freaked me out.

Does appreciating the authenticity of cities entail liking failure, grime and poverty? If we eliminated poverty would cities bore us? Do city-lovers love cities because they're difficult to love? Because they enable the flexing of snob muscles?

The idea that savoring city life might mean acquiring a taste for poverty—because that's one of the spices required for the full flavor of authenticity—is revolting.

Thankfully, I don't think anybody has to buy this noxious idea.

Here's why not: There's nothing wrong with the desire to live in the real world—even a world that includes poverty and failure. Just as you can love your family even when it includes your depressed, grouchy sister and not have to love depression, you can take pride in cities even when that pride is partly based on an authenticity that includes poverty (something you don't have to feel proud about.)

Nor does being proud about city life mean you're obligated to regard poverty as an eternal feature of the human condition. We can—and should—fight poverty even though it's a tenacious and complex problem. Like your sister's depression, poverty might be preventable—and, at the very least, is certainly worth controlling and ameliorating.

For the record, I bet that people not distracted by the misery of poverty will contribute more excitement to cities, not less.

Let's return to what the suburban activist said. While there is evidence that moving out of poor city neighborhoods into middle-class suburban neighborhoods does benefit some poor people, the activist is right that poverty's problems won't just blow away in the fresh suburban air. Still, the claim that poverty is for cities not suburbs strikes my urban-biased mind as a very suburban attitude. Which is to say, fearful and irresponsible—and definitely not something to be proud about.

Blog Action Day 2008: Poverty

The big bloggy day with the unfortunate acronym is fast approaching, and Where will be participating again this year. On October 15th, 2008, thousands of bloggers around the world will post on the subject of poverty in an effort to raise awareness and, as the BAD website says, "change the conversation." Where has a bit of a surprise planned, so if you haven't already, make sure to add this blog to your feed reader of choice!


Blog Action Day 2008 Poverty from Blog Action Day on Vimeo.

Joie de Vivre Urbaine

"...And joie de vivre [joy of living] may be seen as a joy of everything, a comprehensive joy, a philosophy of life..."

Long ago, writers disparaged cities like London, New York, and Paris, labeling them as hives of disease and destitution. But over time, industrialization and economic growth powered by these urban centers lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, creating a prosperous and secure middle class like the world had never seen. Over the past few decades, we have seen this happen again in China and India. With the rise of ideas like common wealth and the urban planet, it seems less naive each day to believe that this trend could continue moving upward, creating a globalized standard of living (not to be confused with a singular global culture, which would be intensely boring).

But the current model of urban living, with its sprawl, auto-dependancy, and tokenization of nature, is unsustainable at best. If economic development in developing world-cities is to diminish poverty at any notable rate, everyone -- in worlds both "first" and "third" -- must work to bring about the evolution of their cities into healthy, green, globally-minded places. The City As Solution to Climate Change and Globalization Pains has been a popular topic of conversation of late. But how can people in developed countries be persuaded to agree?

As we step into this new Urban Age, those of us arguing for the City As Solution must focus on the joie de vivre urbaine. For cities to reach their full potential as engines for change, the urban chorus will need to grow louder and brighter. The masses should be reminded of the joys and conveniences of living in vibrant, eqitable urban neighborhoods, not guilt-tripped out of their McMansions and driven into gentrifying neighborhoods to exacerbate socioeconomic inequality. Only when a person believes that they will enjoy something -- and that they deserve to -- will they make a real effort to change their way of life.

This week, as Where wraps up its first year in the urblogosphere, each day will feature a post that celebrates the excitement, promise, and possibility of the urban environment. It's Urbanism For Fun (but no profit). A preview:

Monday: EXPLORE
We'll start off by looking at how Google Earth and online mapping sites are making urban places more exciting by helping urbanites develop a better understanding of their cities, and how this type of technology could affect urban culture and society in the future.

Tuesday: PLAY
Taking another look at mixed-reality gaming, Where will consider this emerging form of entertainment as a possible catalyst for economic development in the near future.

Wednesday: IMAGINE
If you could rethink how cities are built, how would you do it? It's a question many of history's most famous architects have taken on with relish. In a guest post by SOM design associate Ella Peinovich, who participated in an architecture studio that took on this very daunting challenge, we'll learn more about what it's like to go through the process of radically reimagining the urban form.
(This has been edited to reflect a change in content).

Thursday: LEARN
Thursday will feature Where's full review of the buzz-heavy book The Endless City, compliments of Phaidon.

Friday: CREATE
March 21st marks the 365th day since Where's first post. To celebrate this blog's "birthday," a special edition of Weekend Reading will look back on the top ten posts of the past year.

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DON'T FORGET
The Blogedanken game will be open to entries through 11:59pm CST, this Saturday, March 22nd. Go play and submit your favorite results for your chance to win a copy of PA Press' Hyperborder.

(Photo from Flickr user Shimrit&Yaar. The original full-color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)


Links:
Joie de vivre (Wikipedia)

Hyperborder (Princeton Architectural Press)

WEEKEND READING: March 1-7, 2008

Let's shake things up a bit this week. Instead of summaries of the seven Weekend Reading items, how about some teaser quotes?

ITEM ONE: "It's interesting to see the major changes in our urbanism - as well as to see the fact that the inherent nature of place is difficult if not impossible to erase."

ITEM TWO: "Now that the George W. Bush era is almost over, the world needs a place to archive the legacy of the 43rd president...If you felt your vote didn't count in 2000, it will certainly count here." (Photo credit)

ITEM THREE: "As February gives way to March, Brand Avenue begins its third year online! A few highlights and/or personal favorites from the last year."

ITEM FOUR: "The New City YMCA, where Jeremy played sports for free after school, has come down, and the basketball courts—the great equalizer, where rival factions of the Gangster Disciples would come together to play—have been replaced with a Blockbuster, two Starbucks and a grocery store that has its own sushi station. 'Those courts brought the community together,' says Jason. 'All of this thrown out for condos.'"

ITEM FIVE: "Eventscape's Kapsel is a multisensory functional space that can be set up anywhere in a busy office or elsewhere to create an oasis of relaxation and calm. Based on a lightweight tubular frame, the space can be skinned in any material, with no restrictions on size or form."

ITEM SIX: "Is there an architectural paranoia? And, if so, what would the treatment be – walking tours of all the unmarked buildings downtown? Nights spent alone with your psychoanalyst in empty suburban houses?"

ITEM SEVEN: "Active Social Plastic takes on cultural ephemera, turning its lens to architecture, urbanism, design, interaction, landscape, music and literature, among other leanings."

Have a great weekend!

Brackets

(Photo from The New York Times. The full-size version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

WEEKEND READING: January 5-11, 2008

While you were proposing the tackiest building ever designed, Detroit, one of these articles was having the BEST WEEK EVER!!

ITEM ONE: Some interesting speculative fiction on the politically autonomous future of North American citystates over at All About Cities.

ITEM TWO: AHI's 2008 list 'o predictions, hot off the presses!

ITEM THREE: A funky video from GOOD Magazine that explores the etymology of conflict-prone caital cities around the world.

ITEM FOUR: Built Chicago points to a provacative new book about the drug trade in the Robert Taylor Homes here in Chicago. (Also: Apartment Therapy Chicago on Cabrini Green, and TNAC on the last season of The Wire).

ITEM FIVE: Colorful photogasm of Dharavi's "13 Compound" neighborhood.

ITEM SIX: Baltimore sues Wells Fargo for predatory lending. This is going to be interesting...

ITEM SEVEN: A guide to web tools for eating locally for all of you New Years Resolutionists. (Via Very Spatial)

Adios, compadres. Hope you have the best weekend ever. ;-) Don't forget to sound off on the Conscious Urbanism Game, if you get the chance.

(Photo from Flickr user ChicagoEye. The original full-color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

Welcome to Lagos...

I'm cheating tonight and throwing up a video. It's a good one, though. Enjoy!

WEEKEND READING: November 10-November 16, 2007 (Guest Post by Colin Kloecker)

Hi, I'm Colin and I usually cover the intersection of humanitarian issues, sustainability, and the built environment over at Blog Like You Give A Damn. But this month you'll find me here, curating Where's Weekend Reading segment. Five Items of interest for you this week.

ITEM ONE: I've been saying it for years: Skyways suck the vitality out of our city streets, "we should tear them all down". Living in Minneapolis/St. Paul I often get blank or bewildered stares when I tell people this (which I probably do far too often), but I feel my argument has been bolstered now that top urban designers Jan Gehl and Gil Penalosa have come out and expressed a similar sentiment.

ITEM TWO: Time-travel ALL the way back to September 29th, 2007 when nearly 100 teams from 70 different cities around the world participated in "Snap-Shot-City" and photographed a day in the life of their urban environs. Billed as an "urban photographic treasure hunt", the resulting photos are a wonderful celebration of city life. The CityDwellers team from London gets credit for the photo this week.

ITEM THREE: Is Jean Nouvel designing the most exciting Skyscraper to hit New York City since the early 20th century? This blogger thinks so. Straight out of a Hugh Ferris painting, 53W53rd is a thing of beauty. NYT article here.

ITEM FOUR: The Dharavi district (an urban mega-slum with over 1 million inhabitants) of Mumbai, India is getting "rehabilitated". So how much space will current inhabitants get out of the deal? Each of the 57,000 families are allotted a meager 225 square feet, no more and no less. Social Design Practice Blog has more, including an interesting memo from Matias Echanove suggesting that the city use Tokyo's revitalization after WWII as an alternative development model - see airoots for more on that. (Thanks Matias!)

ITEM FIVE: 250 Million Urban Planners! Planetizen reports that the $200 XO-1 laptop (the first model designed for the One Laptop Per Child program) will come packaged with Will Wright's 1989 classic planning game Sim City. OLPC plans on getting the laptop into the hands of 250 million poor children around the world by 2012. Want one too? You only have 11 more days.

Until next week, Happy Friday!

WEEKEND READING: September 19-October 5, 2007

Lots of good stuff over the past few days. Here at Weekend Reading, it's an eight-item week!

ITEM ONE: A great story -- from the BBC of all places -- on the relationship between the American military base at GTMO and the city of Guantanamo, Cuba.

ITEM TWO: A disturbing letter from a freedom of speech/human rights activist in South Africa over at Squatter City.

ITEM THREE: Speaking of South Africa, the Lincoln Institute's new newsletter is out, and it contains a really fantastic overview of the current situation in Johannesburg.

ITEM FOUR: Another CEOs for Cities national meeting has come and gone, and their blog features this great list of the ideas that were bouncing around last week.

ITEM FIVE: A new economic pact to connect South American cities could potentially lead to "widespread deforestation and the eventual loss of the Amazon jungle within three or four decades."

ITEM SIX: Richard Rogers on public space, Pompidou, and how he almost became a cab driver.

ITEM SEVEN: Project for Public Spaces founder Fred Kent analyzes four of New York's most visible public spaces for the NY Times.

ITEM EIGHT: Lets wrap up with some imagery. This week saw the work of photographer David Schalliol (covered in one of Where's very first posts) featured on things magazine and Archinect. (Photo credit)

If you enjoyed that really comprensive profile of São Paulo a few weeks back, don't miss Item Three. Comprehensive profiles are kind of awesome, as a rule. This is no exception.

A Beautiful Day in the Eco-Hood

There has been a good deal of babble recently on Where about eco-cities: Dongtan on Chongming Island outside of Shanghai; Foster's and Koolhaas' dueling megaprojects in the UAE; Treasure Island in San Francisco. These are great, high-profile examples of the beginning of this new fad. Mayor Livingstone has also recently proposed an eco-hood for London, to be built in the Thames Gateway. This project was brought to my attention by a recent article at Globe-Net that asserts the importance of eco-cities in the fight against climate change. The author beats the dead horse about how more than half of humanity is living in cities for the first time, but highlights the important point about most of the urban growth occuring in the slums of metropoli in developing nations.

While the UAE proposals are out in the desert, Treasure Island and the Thames Gateway project will both be built within the existing urban fabric of their cities (albeit at relatively remote locations). While it's too early to say what the number will be in London, San Francisco's eco-hood will designate a full 30% of its housing units as below market rate. Granted, "below market rate" is a warped term in the Bay Area, but this gesture sets an important precedent. Eco-cities like those listed above have the potential to start a movement, but if they are to gain any real legitimacy as a way of fighting climate change, they must consider more than just the natural environment. If slums represent the largest growth sector in urban areas, eco-cities must address the socioeconomic environment of the cities in which they are built.

It would be lovely if developers all over the world took a stand and developed eco-cities for their own moral or ethical reasons. That, of course, is not going to happen. The plans in the works right now exist because there is a growing demand for such developments. The onus for mandating economic diversity in these new developments falls on those creating that demand. The desire to move to such a place may, for some, be rooted in self-inflating or trendhopping impulses. But for most, I'd be willing to bet, there is a real desire to do their part to "save the world."

Eventually, eco-city dwellers have to ask themselves: what kind of world are we trying to save? If the answer is that it's just their own tiny bubble world, eco-cities are doomed to be obnoxiously superfulous tokens of an upper class so completely self-absorbed that it literally managed to forget the existence of the world around it. "So what?" you might ask. And rightfully so; reinvestment in central cities by the upper and middle classes was supposed to save our cities. What happened, instead, was gentrification. The poor were pushed out as the rich moved back in, and now the GAP, Citibank, and Starbucks alternate street corners in Manhattan while the city's homeless shelters overflow. "Big deal, life sucks, that's how it goes."

But that is not a world-changing attitude.

It's hopelessly idealistic to think that we can provide safe and affordable housing and create livable urban areas for people across the economic spectrum in the First World, much less the Third. Back in 2005, UN-HABITAT warned that "governments will have to take the lead in building some 96,150 housing units per day if the world hopes to avert a massive urban crisis in the near future" (emphasis added). But is it any less idealistic to think that, through our own ingenuity and some hefty innovation, we can change the course of the natural process of climate change? One could argue that we know that we can change the climate since the problem exists because we created it. To that I say: we created the slums, too.

There are no fingers to point now -- poverty has been around as long as human society. But if efforts to fight climate change have reached the level where we are preparing to change the way that we build (architecture is the slowest of the arts, after all), we have to take a good, hard look at our motivation. At it's heart, the green movement isn't really about trees, floods, or solar rays. It's about people recognizing the fact that they are part of a larger ecosystem (in a very natural, non-kumbaya way) and learning how to stop working against that system -- and working against themselves. Cities are the greatest achievements of mankind, so there is great potential for them to be the solution to the environmental challenges that face us today. We just have to remember that everyone around us is part of that environment.

(Photo from Foster + Partners.)


Links:
Eco-Cities – Building Better Cities for the 21st Century (Globe-Net)

Two Billion Slum Dwellers (Forbes)

World Faces Prospect of Teeming Mega-Slums (Common Dreams)

"A World of Refugees"

Video found via NewsTrust

WEEKEND READING: June 9-15, 2007

It's been a slow week here at Where, I know. I've been fighting a massive case of writer's block. But there will always, always be weekend reading!

ITEM ONE: This past week, I came across a great Toronto-based blog called Spacing Wire. Follow the link to read their post about a community planning initiative, then check out the archives.

ITEM TWO: Greg Smithsimon talks about segregation masquerading as diversity in the Big Apple at Interchange.

ITEM THREE: Kiplinger's takes those frivolous city lists to a new (and rather epic) level, beating several dead horses in the process.

ITEM FOUR: Some great tips for building a modern community over at CoolTown Studios.

ITEM FIVE: A thorough examination of poverty and efforts to combat it over at Urban Planning Blog.

ITEM SIX: Inhabitat shows off what might be the coolest fence ever created. (Pictured above.)

ITEM SEVEN: Eikongraphia returns after a brief hiatus with not one, but two posts about Vienna. (Read #2 here.)

WEEKEND READING: May 19-25, 2007 (The Conscious Urbanism Edition)

It's been a hectic week for this blogger, hence the low post count. News in the Conscious Urbanism realm, however, has been pretty solidly frequent. So this weekend, take a gander at different projects going on around the world that are creating a more socially aware urban citizenship.

I've said before that I believe the places where you can find the most severe examples of a problem are the places with the highest potential for finding a solution. In that spirit, we'll start this post off with a story from Detroit, one of the hardest-hit cities in America's Rustbelt region. Apparently, residents on the troubled city's southwest side are taking matters into their own hands and redeveloping their neighborhood. "In southwest Detroit we don't wait for help from anyone," one resident says. "If we want something changed, we do it ourselves. It says a lot about who we are."

For our next item we travel...well, not that far, really. Just to Chicago, where Art Institute students have been surveying several neighborhoods a year to create intensely comprehensive maps of local pollution sources and green resources. These maps are great resources for residents looking to live sustainably or activists hoping to create change at the local level. (Today's photo is of the Uptown map.)

Up north a ways, in Toronto, Mayor David Miller's administration is taking advantage of new large-scale carbon footprint-measuring technology to calculate the footprint of the 50,000 city employees. The project, dubbed Zerofootprint Toronto is described on its website as "the first ever community-wide initiative aimed at engaging all citizens to fight climate change on a massive scale."

We hop the pond and head south a ways to Cape Town, where the city government has just announced that they will be providing basic services (water, sanitation, lighting) to the thousands of residents living in the South African metropolis' 222 informal settlements as part of an effort to crack down on "land invasions."

Back on the other side of the Southern Hemisphere, the NY Times Magazine this week has a fantastic article about the Brazilian city of Curitiba's evolution into one of the ecological and progressive planning capitals of the world. Curitiba, probably most famous for its groundbreaking Bus Rapid Transit system, has been ahead of the curve for a long time...I was shocked to see how early they put some policies into place.

Finally, PerfectCity has new poll up asking readers to help define what makes up "Social Structure," which came out as the top factor in their earlier poll about what is most important for creating livable cities. Place 'yer bets.

Enjoy the weekend. See you bright and early on Monday. Well, probably more like late Monday night.

The Fall of the Fearsome Ghetto

The ugly, flip side of the Glamourous City coin is, of course, the Fearsome Ghetto. A glamorous reputation almost guarantees that a city is home to neighborhoods that are as broken and ravaged as the attractive parts of town are...well...attractive. If not moreso. Glamourous Cities require these desolate places to serve as counterpoints; they offer contrast and add a note of danger to the mix. And, if nothing else is, a little bit of danger is very glamorous. As Tom Wolfe's brilliant Bonfire of the Vanities illustrated, the Upper East Side of Manhattan would not (could not) look so impossibly plush if not for the existence, a mere three miles away, of the ruined South Bronx. Literary allusions aside, Paris -- the ultimate Glamorous City -- saw its Fearsome Ghettos exposed to the world during the riots that plagued its impoverished suburbs in the fall of 2005.

My recent trip to Atlanta was due to a training/orientation program for the Americorps VISTA program. VISTA (Volunteers In Service To America) is a branch of Americorps that deals exclusively with fighting poverty. Thus, one day of our training was devoted to discussing the causes of and our own personal perspectives on poverty in America. The following passage from Donna Beegle's book Poverty...Be the Difference! was used in our training materials, and was one of the more powerful things I read during my time there:

"The current fragmented reactionary approach to addressing the challenges of poverty [in America] does not work. It falls short of helping people move out of poverty and will keep our society from getting to the point of addressing and eradicating the causes of poverty.

A comprehensive approach is needed to truly move people forward. This comprehensive approach to addressing poverty can only be achieved through partnership [Americorps' emphasis] between organizations that currently serve and interact with people in poverty: educational, social service, judiciary, law enforcement, health care workers, etc."

I know that it's a bit odd to cite a criticism of American policy right after using a French city to illustrate the breakdown of the Glamorous City/Fearsome Ghetto social balance, but the point, here, is universal: economic and social integration are the result of strong community networks. These networks require a restructuring of the way that we think about cities; for people to put the effort (and strong social networks take a lot of hard work) into their communities that is necessary to create inclusive neighborhoods, they have to have roots there. The Glamorous City actively discourages roots and, by extention, strong communities. These specialized areas cater to niche crowds -- yuppies, hipsters, DINKs -- and float along the currents of fad, leaving neighborhoods vulnerable to deterioration once the consensus of these groups changes.

Cities are constantly changing, demographics shifting like the sands. While change itself is a constant, the course for this change can be set -- for better or for worse. Neighborhoods and cities change for the better when people form strong community networks. To eliminate the Fearsome Ghetto, we must first deconstruct our notions of the Glamorous City. The two cannot be separated; when one falls, so shall the other. But not until.

(Photo from Flickr user brian4116.)