A cartoonist draws while radical geographer David Harvey explains the current crisis in capitalism at the RSA and asks us to come up with a system that is just, responsible and humane.

David Harvey’s full lecture at the RSA.

Rosten Woo is a designer, planner, and popular educator who recently moved to L.A. from N.Y. after several years as Director of the Center for Urban Pedagogy. He has partnered with Gilda to design an urban planning game that introduces people to the purpose and politics of zoning—the invisible rules that make cities look the way they do. What follows is the first in a series of Rosten’s thoughts on the experience of making the game.

Games as political education?

We started this project with the goal of making an on-line encapsulation of some of the popular education work that Gilda had been producing here in Los Angeles (which was wonderfully parallel with some of my last work with the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP).

As Gilda has chronicled earlier, our research process took a (rather extended) detour from a digital space to a board game. Workshopping ideas in a board-game format allows us to test out interaction ideas in a live setting (with real people) with pretty low costs (snacks, ink cartridges, and paper) and quick turnaround times. Though the eventual on-line learning environment we create will probably be pretty dramatically different from the boardgames we are testing, we’re learning quite a lot – and at the end of the process we’ll have a board game, too.

Bonus!

There are a lot of reasons that making a board game about land use issues seems like a no-brainer fit:

1. The format is inherently spatial, many of the most popular boardgames deal with territory and real estate (Risk, Monopoly, Settlers of Catan).

2. Games provide a set structure for interaction and engagement that people are familiar with and enjoy. Games encourage social learning and (can) generate laughter, personal connections. Ideal for popular education workshops.

3. Games can give players access to roles and points of view that may be different than their own.  This is a critical part of thinking about planning, land use, and zoning in particular.

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At nearly 139 square miles in size, Detroit is larger than Boston, Manhattan and San Francisco combined.  Home to some two million at one point, the population has shrunk to less than half at 800,000 and decreasing.  Motown, the once Motor City U.S.A., has seen hard times since either one of those appellations applied to a city that’s been struck with what my Uncle Norman would have called, “buzzard’s luck.”

Detroit has been riding a rough road for a long time.  Mayor Bing and wonks like Data Driven Detroit controversially seek to physically downsize the city. This past May, seven-year-old Aiyana Jones was killed by a policeman’s bullet in a tragic incident arising from a botched police raid.  Also in May, Kwame Kilpatrick, who once billed himself as the nation’s first hip-hop mayor of Detroit, was  sentenced from 18 months to five years for violating probation.  You might recall when in office the married Kilpatrick was busted for sexting the woman he was having an affair with, his chief of staff Christine Beatty.  Kilpatrick, whose administration was plagued by several scandals and charges of corruption, and who once had a license to practice law, was initially convicted of two counts of perjury.

Kilpatrick was sent to the former Jackson prison, which is now called the Charles Egler Reception and Guidance Center.  Jackson was once home to another Detroit native, the former pimp and junkie Donald Goines.  In 1969, being re- incarcerated at Jackson, Goines started reading the paperback original novels of another pimp and hustler, Robert Beck aka Iceberg Slim.  This and his mother bringing him a manual typewriter while in the joint inspired Goines to write and eventually publish such books as Never Die Alone (filmed in 2004 with rapper DMX as the criminal protagonist) and arguably his best book, Daddy Cool.

But it’s Detroit in the era of Goines and hit songs like “Only the Strong Survive and “It’s Your Thing,” where the city and places like Hamtramck and even Flint, 66 miles away, were on the boom due in no small measure to the car industry.  Ford, General Motors and Chrysler, were turning out cars and trucks like there was no tomorrow — where at the point of production, peoples’ lives changed materially and politically.

Recently Dr. Pop and I attended a screening (a fundraiser to help send young activists and organizers to the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit next week) at the Community Coalition in South L.A. of a 55-minute black and white documentary originally released in 1970 called Finally Got the News.  Made by Stewart Bird, Rene Lichtman and Peter Gessner, Finally dynamically captures a period in time when the League of Revolutionary Black Workers was on the move.  This was a group who arose from the shop floor of Detroit’s automakers who sought to not only confront the racism and unequal treatment inside the plants, but the complacency and cozy relationship of their union, the United Auto Workers, with management and the police. Read More…

While the economic crisis has hit all of us, and hit us hard, Greece is a country riding the edges of bankruptcy, even after the intervention of the IMF and the European Union.

This intervention has come at a high price, requiring Greece to slash its national debt at a brutal cost to its own citizens.

To find out more about the impact of the crisis on the lives of people and how they are responding, I recently spoke to Antonis, who is from Greece and is a fellow graduate student at the London School of Economics.

ANDREA: Tell us a little about yourself.

ANTONIS: My name is Antonis. I’m a student here in London and I’ve lived here for quite a few years. But I’m originally from Greece. Since the revolt of 2008, together with some friends, we’ve been covering what’s been happening in Greece in a blog, the Occupied London blog. We were also running a journal, an anarchist journal, called Voices of Resistance from Occupied London. But I think our project was one where the blog completely overtook the journal itself, so that’s what we’re focusing on at the moment.

ANDREA: Would you just say a few things about how concretely the crisis has affected Greece, and how it is affecting people in their everyday lives?

ANTONIS: Obviously it’s had a massive effect on every single level — the political, the social and the everyday — all around. And it’s happened very rapidly.  Its very hard to explain in a few words how big the change is because its something we are still assessing. People are still trying to grasp what has actually happened.

But to see the difference in the everyday reality in the country and in people’s mentality, even from December (which was the second to last time I visited) to March this year (which was the last time I was there) is tremendous.  To put it quickly, pretty much everyone, or at least most people I know who work in the public sector (and the public sector is huge), are facing the same sort of decrease in their wages — about 20 to 30 % of their total wages, anywhere between the two roughly.  And they probably are faced with even higher cuts in their pensions —  if you ever get to get a pension, the way things are going.

The private sector is about to go through the same kind of process and the cost of life overall has increased tremendously. Just to bring one example out of many: the cost of gas, from August 2009 to what they predict it’s going to be in a couple of months (in August 2010) has gone up by about 150%.

ANDREA: So how are people reacting to this? I know there was a general strike just a few weeks ago…

ANTONIS: Four weeks ago… There’s been a few general strikes actually; the one on May 5^th was the fourth in 2010 if I’m not mistaken. Which is not that much, by Greek standards, you would usually have at least a couple of general strikes in a year anyway.

ANDREA: And so when you say general strike, is it really everything that shuts down?

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A few weeks ago, Aiyana Stanley Jones was killed by the Detroit police, who raided her home while she was sleeping.  The incident passed the national media’s “if it bleeds it leads” rule and was even more tragic because Aiyana was only 7 years old.

Five days later, 20-year-old Damion Gayles was shot and wounded by the police only a few blocks away.  The community was outraged and the media picked up that outrage as well.

But what is less known about Detroit is how the people in this city that has been under economic, political, and police siege for so long, have been gradually building an infrastructure for peace and promise from the grassroots.

When violent crime and police brutality spiked in the 90s, the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality was formed to document acts of policy brutality and misconduct, to create greater accountability and justice from law enforcement, and to advocate for a police force that is more racially diverse, more respectful, and more adept at dealing with and serving people of different backgrounds and abilities.

One of the Coalition’s core organizing strategies is to form “Peace Zones for Life” across the city in which mediators are called in to arbitrate conflicts between neighbors and families rather than the police.  Their idea is to “put the neighbor back in the hood” and to transform tragic events into community-building efforts for safer futures.

The killing of Aiyana and shooting of Damion have sparked the creation of new Peace Zones  across the City.  The shootings are tragic, but the innovation and tenacity of the Peace Zones deserve celebration.

Another kind of peace zone are the spaces and places being made where youth can participate in change-making and thrive.  Central to such efforts are veteran activist Grace Lee Boggs (who will be 95 in July) and the Boggs Center, which was established in 1995 by friends and associates to honor and continue the revolutionary legacy of theory and practice of Grace Lee and her husband, James Boggs, now deceased. Read More…