On Saturday, Dr. Pop was one of the lucky many, many thousands who attended Comic Con in San Diego, the mothers of all comic book conventions, now celebrated and berated for going all Hollywood.

I hadn’t had the honor since the 80s, when Gary and I were probably dating, he was maybe the only black guy there and one of the few who wasn’t sporting pointy ears. (No offense! Vulcans are cool.)

So if I sound like any kind of former hater, please accept my apology and evangelism. Comic Con ROCKS! Thanks for the pass, comrade husband and friendly comic company!

Getting there was half the fun….

I had a grand time, which started with the train ride from L.A. to San Diego, packed mostly with Comic-Con-ians. Lots of pleasant energy.

I rode down with a nice guy from an advertising firm and his charming-beyond-her-years 13 year old daughter. When I happened to mention that I was working on a board game, a gamer-type sitting across the aisle, offered, “The Battle for North Africa. No one has ever finished it.”  As I was taking that info in, he referred me to the guy sitting in back of me, and said to him,”Tom Baker, you’re Tom Baker, right?”  I had to look it up later to find out that Tom Baker was one of the various actors who played Dr. Who, and apparently this guy was doing a good job at the costume, colorful scarf and all.  (I’m soooo glad, I didn’t call the man Tom.)

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When I mention that I’m working on a game about urban planning, the first reaction I get is often “oh, you mean like SimCity?”

Not exactly. SimCity is the most well-known city planning game/toy of all time. It teaches a particular brand of city-planning knowledge. You, as the planner, allocate resources across a grid in a technocratic (possibly totalitarian) exercise. Evaluating SimCity as rhetoric, it is probably one of the more persuasive pieces of media on urban planning ever designed (how many people have learned biases about siting toxic facilities by playing this game?).

But what exactly is learned by playing Sim City?

Succeeding at Sim City (just like any other game) involves learning and mastering the rules of a system.

The rules in this case, happen to be models of how a real city might work. SimCity insofar as it is a winnable “game” is a series of interrelated hidden assumptions for the player to discover through trial and error. Does building more police precincts reduce crime and civil unrest? Yes, according to SimCity. Is a low-tax base critical to popular support, also yes!

Paul Starr has a great article about the Congressional Budget Office and the Simcitification of actual government here.

One amusing demonstration of SimCity’s assumptions taken to their logical extremes Magnasanti, the project of architecture student Vincent Ocasla.

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Dr. Pop’s first event! In Chicago, a truly great city.

About 75 really diverse (and smart) people showed up at Decima Musa (a great old-school place in Pilsen) to see the inspiring documentary Bogotá Change and talk about the “fun theory” that:

1. takes a real thorny problem

2. applies collective creativity

3. makes problem-solving fun

Bogotá Change is about how two very different progressive mayors, Antanas Mockus, who recently pushed the presidential election into a run-off, and Enrique Peñalosa, who has become an international planners’ planner; and how they changed the social and physical dynamics of a city that, as a result of their intense commitment and effort, evolved from one of the more violent and dysfunctional places on the planet, to one that is held up as a model by urban planners around the world.

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This week I read in the paper that the Los Angeles City Council was awarding $18 million to finish a project that has been a redevelopment site in my neighborhood for years. The goal? To build a Costco. Then to build a Costco with a Home Depot on top. Then when both of those pulled out, to build a Lowe’s home improvement store, which is a lot like a Home Depot.

And that same week I received an email from the Los Angeles Public Library (News You Can Use) with their new schedule consisting of shorter hours and no longer being open on Sundays and Mondays.

Libraries in my mind, are the last of the great public sector products. They are safe spaces for children, for homeless, for women, for families, and for the curious of all stripes — not to mention they are full of books. And they are free. You can stay there as long as you like. All day if you want. They are peaceful.

And as the public sector has crumbled around them, many libraries have stepped up to fill the gap. Last year I read a headline that was something like “Head Librarian Bans Shushing,” for an article about Chicago, I believe, where the head librarian acknowledged their last-public-sector-standing-role and explained “We are the last community centers. People need to talk. We can’t tell them to be quiet any more.”

Although I don’t generally follow architecture awards, which tend to favor the male divas of that profession, I am excited to see that this year’s European Prize for Urban Public Space, is shared, with one of the two winners being the inventive Open Air Library in Magdeburg, Germany that was created by the residents themselves, built out of the debris of a demolished building, and is open 24/7 for people to enjoy the space and borrow books.

The partner winner is an Opera/Ballet house in Oslo, Norway that includes a ramp up to the roof which serves as a public plaza.

It is still not too late.  Maybe our neighborhood Lowe’s can support a public plaza on its roof (instead of parking) or a public library at its base.  Or something else that engages the idea of a public in exchange for our hard-pressed public investment.  Something of value besides shopping.

Community space!

As I stumbled back home late one Friday night after many hours of travel to get from a tiny town in Southern France to London’s own Tower Hamlets, people busy painting a line along the pavement and doing various other things made it hard to get my roller bag past them. I was not pleased, but I woke up to this:

The London Festival of Architecture brought the University of Innsbruck’s Walk the Line project, and the weekend was full of activities, games, food (I suppose it was too much to hope for it as a Johnny Cash reference). The statue of Gladstone in front of the old church looked happier with his blue scarf.

None of that was for me sadly, I was exhausted and had one hell of a deadline coming up. But the idea was interesting, changing how people use public spaces and form community with the simple use of some paint and some props.

I think, however, that the aftermath was even more interesting, because for a few days the props were left, the hosts were absent, and my neighbors were left to do with the space and the props as they would. Of course, I was still on deadline, so I just saw it as I walked to and fro work and school. But this was after all just a student project, a taste of what this space could be with just a tiny bit of investment.

They took everything away, and my own pictures came just a few days late to capture the small magic – so I have borrowed some photos from Loopzilla, who has made them available for just this purpose.  And you can read a short story about the effort on Diamond Geezer.

But let’s take the Seating Furniture for example:

They had made innovative little tables out of plywood with holes in the middle to fit down over the bollards, and painted tree stumps blue for people to use as seats.  And all kinds of different people used them, from big burly guys to the guys who worked in the little shops to families to teenagers. The same way they used the “dinner at eight” station with a more traditional table and chairs. It made me happy to see a whole family sitting down there on a warm summer evening eating a meal.

Now I have no idea what this was supposed to be exactly, it’s the wrong shape and size for hopscotch…

And I don’t think anyone is much celebrating the olympics around here, but kids seem to like to play on it. They play in the “official” games area as well, with balls and stones where the tic-tac-toe board was painted (noughts and crosses anyone?) that once had x’s and o’s. And loads of different people used the “theatre” (just another bunch of blue tree stumps) as another place to sit and chat in the shade. These things very visually created more opportunity for my neighbors to come together in ways they wouldn’t usually do, and spend time in an otherwise rather unwelcoming space that most just travel through, apart from the hordes of teenage boys in the afternoons and evenings, and the chatty crowd in front of the bookies.

So now that it’s gone, what are the lessons learned?

• You can do an immense amount of good with very little money. Stroudley Walk could clearly become a vibrant enjoyable place, and I applaud the student’s imagination and effort. You’d think planners would have figured this out by now.

• DO set up seating areas. Do NOT set up seating areas without providing bins. Or trash cans. Depending which continent you’re in. Or people will no longer like the seating areas.

• It’s always good know a bit more about the community when planning. If they’d spent much time here they surely would have thought of painting a football (soccer) pitch where the boys are always playing. And maybe had some better games? Like chess boards? A giant backgammon board? How cool would that have been? Maybe added some Bangladeshi artwork and made people’s smiles even bigger?

• It’s a bit crap to come into a community and do a project like this, and then take most of it away though I’m sure the Council didn’t want to have to deal with it. But the next bright-eyed students with an idea will wonder why the residents are a bit jaded and blame them for not being open and participatory. These projects should always be connected to the actual and real, as there are currently what seem to be rather terribly generic plans to redevelop the walk. This would have been an amazing way to test out things before they became permanent, and I could not think of a better way to start people thinking creatively about what they want from their neighborhood plaza and how they could actually use it. If the Council cared to ask them in a way that actually invited creativity and enjoyable participation.

Everyone agrees that Chicago Public Schools have to change. Yet there are fierce disagreements over what kinds of changes must be made, who should lead that change, and how it should be administered. At the helm of the warring parties are Karen Lewis, the new president of the Chicago Teacher’s Union, and Ron Huberman, the CEO of CPS installed by Chicago’s Mayor Daley.

These two opposing leaders are fighting a serious battle, one that will determine the extent to which public schools remain publicly owned and operated. It is a fight with tremendous implications, ranging from the future of charter schools in the City of Chicago, to how success is defined and evaluated.

In the backdrop of this battle, there is another struggle going on in Chicago Public Schools. This is the fight to protect the life of Chicago Public School students. As a recent New York Times article identified, 218 CPS students were shot in the last school year, and 258 the year before. The article, provocatively titled “Graduation Is the Goal, Staying Alive Is the Prize,” highlights efforts to improve the safety of simply attending public school. They focus on an unfolding intervention strategy which targets the most “at-risk” students and connects them with adult mentors and support services. Created by CEO Huberman, a former police officer, this $60 million intervention is also geared to strengthening communications between the police and school administrators. While this intervention brings in deeply needed resources, the police dimension of the program strengthens a disciplinary approach that relies heavily on law enforcement to run daily operations at schools.

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No doubt I’m the last cat who should be writing about public space.  I mean here at home in Los Angeles I rarely think about public space and congregating in same.  That is, I do congregate occasionally, I just don’t go out of my way to do it.  Because mostly I’m in my car going to and fro – and when I get to my destination, it’s rarely to a park.  I have nothing against open spaces, I like open spaces and certainly L.A., particularly our urban areas of the city, that are green poor – though this is not the only way in which gathering spaces are manifested in this city.

Lord knows people have meetings, write screenplays or work on the Great American Novel on their laptops (or playing World of Warcraft with who knows who all else online) at many a Starbuck’s or Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in this considerable town.  Maybe somebody has tracked this, but I’ve yet to see or hear about a sinewy barrista kicking somebody out for staying too long in their coffee shop.  But then, it seems these folks now and then buy a coffee, frappachino and/or bottle of water to keep the static down.

My gym, which the lovely and talented Dr. Pop pays for – as one has to have perks in this line of work – is an L.A. Fitness housed in a former Montgomery Ward department store in a mall on La Cienega near the 10 Freeway.  Okay, so already it’s not a public space, but bear with me a moment.  Given this is ethnically rich L.A. and the geography of where the gym is (located in between several distinct neighborhoods), this facility gets a cross section of its inhabitants from young sleek-muscled tatted ballers wearing just the right shoes for their hops to, what I presume to be, orthodox Jewish woman in sweat gear that includes long stretch skirts, sweat pants under that and coverings for their head.  Admittedly, you don’t generally find representatives of these two groups awaiting their respective turns at the preacher curl machine, gabbing about the latest episode of Rookie Blue.

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More than any other city I’ve been to, Berlin is the closest thing in my mind to what a city “built for the people” looks like.

East Berlin, that is. The ex-West Berlin is completely different, more typical of big western capitals with imposing, super-symmetrical, grey buildings standing starkly next to hyper-modern architecture, big monuments and chain stores strewn about large avenues that take hours to traverse – with many cars on the road and few people on the streets. The whole thing feels a bit cold and impersonal and during working hours, a bit like a giant German ghost town.

The East on the other hand is living. Its chaotic.  There is graffiti absolutely everywhere, everywhere everywhere. Paint chips off of buildings, plants grow off ledges of buildings, people whiz by on bikes and smoke in cafes, a constant stream of people occupy the streets:  talking, lounging, cooking food, playing football.

The wall might as well still be there – many, in fact would like it to be.

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Every Sunday and holiday, about 80 miles of the main streets of Bogota are blocked off from cars for most of the day so that bicyclists, runners, skaters, and pedestrians can take over the streets.  The ciclovias are used by about 2 million people – about 30% of the population and are surrounded by other events on park stages – concerts, yoga and aerobic instructions, and other performances.

And now, Los Angeles, the least likely suspect, whose endless concrete and streets have been the butt of urban critique for devoting most of the public space in the city to cars instead of people is on the verge of launching its own – CicLAvia – an event to be held on September 12 if all goes as planned.

“L.A. doesn’t have enough public space…of the largest cities in the U.S., L.A. is the most park-poor,” says Aaron Paley, CicLAvia advocate, in a video on Kickstarter, the social entrepreneur venture capital network. (What could be more Do-It-Together?  Venture capital from anyone who can give $1 a more).

“But we do have these fantastic streets.  And the streets already belong to us.  And by turning the streets over to the people on a Sunday we create temporary parks overnight without any large investment.”

Aaron is a professional animator of public spaces and runs a company that is, ironically, called CARS (Community Arts Resources).  He makes festivals, events, and turns concrete in L.A. into places where people dance, and, sing and play together.  He’s a friend and we were Stanton Fellows together (a great program that helps social entrepreneurs create their own project – sorry, only in L.A.).  He was researching and investigating and noodling about a new idea for public space, ended up in Bogota, and came back as a ciclovia evangelist.

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Last month I wrote a post about Iceland’s economic (and political) meltdown which resulted from swapping out a successful fishing economy with a short-lived reign as the Wall Street of Western Europe – complete with U.S.-style excess and exploding financial bubble.

And now there’s something new.

Last month, Jon Gnarr, Iceland’s most popular comedian’s, and his Best Party won 34.7 per cent of the Reykjavik municipal election, and along with that, six of the 15 city council seats.

Gnarr is now the Mayor of Reykjavik, where two-thirds of Iceland’s population of about 300,000 reside.

The Best Party, whose leaders largely consist of punk rockers who promote an “anarcho- surreal” politics, was initially created as a satire.

But the people of Reykjavik voted for the the parody over business-as-usual as one way to vent their anger against Iceland’s ruling elite just two months after an official report accused the government and regulators of “extreme negligence” in the run-up to the crisis.

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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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This Mothers’ Day I would like to pay special tribute to (you Mom, of course), but also to the women known as Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

In March 1976, then-President of Argentina Isabel Perón was deposed by a military coup. This marked the beginning of a military dictatorship known as the “Dirty War” which would last until 1983. During that time, an estimated 30,000 people “disappeared”, mostly young women and men struggling for the return of constitutional rule, for the freedom of their country from its subjugation to U.S. interests, and for the respect of the U.N.’s Declaration of Human Rights. It was later discovered that most of these young “desaparecidos” had been abducted, tortured and killed for allegedly “corrupting Christian and Western values.”

“Que Digan Donde Estan” – Pictures of those who disappeared during the “Dirty War”

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James Rojas is an urban planner who devotes a lot of his time to translating the impenetrable maps and language of land use planning into a activities that are visual, tactile, and playful — the language of how we actually experience the world.

James’ basic goal is to create environments that elicit ordinary people’s ideas and solutions to urban problems.

“I’m always amazed by people’s ideas and solutions — its mind-boggling how many creative ideas people have.”

To James, ideas are the golden currency of city-building.

Imagine that.

Here’s a 3-minute video that runs you through the process and its party spirit.  A more detailed explanation follows as the article continues below.

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Gilda’s Gaming Adventure continues…

Metropolis is another “German” game (see last week’s post which explains what German games are all about),  that was released in 1984 by Ravensburger, a 125-year-old German company (actually based in Ravensburg).

The game was designed, however, by the very American Sid Sackson (1920-2002) a well-known game maker, collector, and writer.  Board Game Geek offers a quote from Sackson, that nicely sums up what people like about “German” or “designer” games:

(A good game) should be easy to learn yet have infinite strategic possibilities, give you the chance to make choices, create interaction among players and take a maximum of one and a half hours to play.

Metropolis has all those characteristics.  I bought it because it contains some urban planning ideas, the primary one being that the value of buildings goes up or down depending on what’s near them:  Home values go down when a factory moves next door, or go up when a school is added to the neighborhood or if the building has a view of the park.   The game includes some abstractions of zoning and land assembly.  The game dynamics involve choosing cards that have the same number on them as squares on the board, claiming property with colored game pieces, and rules that limit what you can do on  blocks where another player has assembled a lot of land.

There are a lot of opportunities for trading, dealing, and joining forces to get things done.  And therein lies the strategy and the fun.  I also got some good ideas about game mechanics for our zoning game (which was my goal) from playing the game.  And I’m starting to enjoy this whole board game experience beyond that investigation.

Metropolis is out of print.  I got my version from a trader on the Board Game Geek Marketplace, which is in German, Italian, and French.  My seller included several versions of English translations of the instructions.  Probably the most versions or translations of instructions I’ve every seen.  Definitely got my money’s worth there.

The more I experience great board games, the more I realize that game design is truly and art and the more interested I become in learning about the designers themselves.  If you share that interest,  The Great Games of Sid Sackson is a nice little website that features an overview of Sackson’s work, descriptions of his games, a list of his books, and an interview.

Next week: Smog (yes, its a board game)

Gilda’s Gaming Adventure continues…

This game has nothing to do with the Havana of Che, Fidel, or the Buena Vista Social Club.  “The revolution in Cuba is over. Now, many magnificent buildings are being built in the capital city Havana to make it gleam in renewed splendor,” explains the game.  And that’s the story.

In the game, players collect building material, workers and pesos in an effort to produce the most valuable collection of buildings.  At the outset of the game, each player receives an identical set of 13 (cool-looking) action cards, which they can only play two at a time to get the resources (material, workers, and pesos) they need to acquire buildings.

Each card, however, has a different value.  More powerful cards have higher values.  Whoever starts out with the least valuable cards gets to go first and thus has the first shot at the buildings.

After each round, more money and material are put out, and a new round begins with each player replacing one of the two cards, discarding the other, and then the turn order is determined again.

I like this game, Havana.  It is really pretty.  The game pieces have a nice look and feel. Even the box has a great look and feel.  The game designer’s name is on the box (Credit where credit is due. I’m for that).

The game has simple rules, but it isn’t boring.  It is engaging and involves strategic thinking.  You need to figure out what the other players are going to do.

These all work for my non-gamer, easily distracted self.

It turns out that all of these things that I like are decided and deliberate characteristics of what is known in the world of board games (and the world in general) as German games.

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Gilda’s Gaming Adventure continues…

Monopoly City is yet another variation of the classic Monopoly game, and it continues the time-honored tradition for winning:   whoever ends with the most money and buildings wins.  But there are some urban  twists, which are:

Game board: The center of the game board is where you build your stuff — buildings, apartments and office buildings, etc.  One unique building is a stadium, which requires some land assembly, but in the end makes you wealthier in general (stadium owners get more money when they pass Go).  Sounds like real life.  The gizmo in the middle of the game board does two things — it lets you know how many lots you can build on during your turn (between one and three) and it times (60 seconds) your negotiations with other players.

Hazards: The rent from your housing is devalued (eliminated, actually) if another player builds a hazard (power station, a sewage plant, a prison, and a rubbish dump) in one of your “districts.”  Say it isn’t so!  Even Monopoly recognizes that all development isn’t necessarily all good.

Conversely Bonus buildings protect your “districts” from anyone sabotaging them by putting a hazard on your stuff.  Bonus buildings are good things like schools, wind farms, water towers, and parks.

Otherwise….very much in the spirit of the monopoly game.  If you like playing monopoly, you will enjoy this game. My daughter, Chelsea loves playing monopoly, loved playing this game, and as usual, beat my socks off.  It must have been the tiny addition of social value that did it.

Opinions, gamers? Game suggestions?

Next week: Havana (the game)

When thinking about urban environmental repair, there is perhaps no better place to start than in what may seem to be the most unlikely of places: Detroit, MI.  Yes, the ex-capital of the auto-industry is rewriting the rules of urban regeneration as we know them and Detroit residents are creating a whole new way of thinking city-life.

As Rebecca Solnit says, Detroit’s best-known recent history is one of urban apocalypse characterized by “deindustrialization, depopulation, and resource depletion”

One third of the population lives beneath the poverty line and local officials estimate unemployment to be near 50% (the official figure is 30%).

Since the mid 1950s, the population has gone from nearly 2 million people to less than 900,000. Thirty percent of Detroit’s land is currently vacant – roughly the size of San Francisco in square miles. On top of this, the entire city of Detroit has become a  “food desert” — there is not one produce-carrying supermarket in the City. The endless rows of abandoned buildings and houses of what was once Motor City offer an eerie glimpse into a “post-American” future.

Flickr/tronics

Flickr/bobjagendorf

But out of this land, another story is emerging, in which the people of Detroit are re-inventing their city as the urban agriculture center of the country.

I recently met Asenath Andrews, the principal of the Catherine Ferguson Academy, a high school for young mothers and pregnant teens who raise animals and organic fruits and vegetables.  The school also offers classes on beekeeping and more to the community..

The conversation opened a window for me upon Detroit Green.

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poster Seth Tobocman

While health insurance and bank lobbies vie for the comic-book-villain-of-the-year award, there is nothing more insidious than the invisible health threats that attack us daily without our consent or knowledge — through our water, our food, and our air.

For parents, the very notion that the homes in which our children play, eat, and sleep might be silently poisoning them, gradually causing nerve and brain damage to developing bodies, is a very hard pill to swallow. Yet for tenants who are trapped by high housing costs in slum housing, this is often the case.  The cause is chipping and peeling lead paint, and the uber-villians are the slumlords who profit, often hugely, from dangerous, unhealthy housing conditions.

Although lead paint has been banned from the U.S. since 1978, existing lead paint that chips and peels in neglected homes flake into dust that contaminates the air that children breathe indoors and the soil where they play outside.  (intact paint is not a hazard).

In Los Angeles, it is estimated that 48,000 families are living in extreme slum conditions and getting sick as a result, from exposure to lead and other hazards in their homes.  In New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina washed chips of lead paint from the homes into the soil, where it remains as a constant threat to children’s health.

The ecological principle that “diversity ensures resilience” applies to the business of solving intractable urban problems.  It is not simply a matter of how many eyes and brains are brought to bear on difficult problems, but rather,it is  the diversity of those eyes and brains that lead to the best solutions.  In the case of childhood lead-poisoning, the solutions are available, but hampered by lack of political will, commitment, alignment, and intelligent resource allocation.

What follows are stories about two efforts, the Healthy Neighborhoods, Same Neighbors Collaborative in Los Angeles and the New Orleans-based Fundred Dollar Bill Project that employ diverse methods and thinking to transforming homes and neighborhoods from sources of poison to healthy sanctuaries for our nation’s children.

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Over the past few months, Rosten Woo and I have teamed up with Esperanza to create an online (and off-line) game to help familiarize people with zoning as a fundamental planning tool.

The reason for creating a game is to make  sure that the learning is interactive and fun.  (As opposed to boring and dull, which, with all due respect to my chosen profession, is what comes to mind for most people when you say the word “zoning.”)

We needed to test our game ideas before we got too deeply into the time-consuming  production work that online games require.

So we decided to start with a game that people can play face-to-face in a room.  A board game.

After some back-and-forth experimentation we came up with a rough prototype and then play-tested it with a stalwart crew of smart, activist health promoters from Esperanza.

The results of that are best captured in the following conversation:

Rosten: So let me get this straight. You didn’t have any fun at all? Ever?
Gabby: No.

Enough said.  So it was back to the proverbial drawing board. Or in this case — game board.

Unlike Rosten (and my daughter Chelsea, who beats me at any and all games) I am not a gamer. I like games like charades and scrabble because I like drama and words. So I clearly needed to get up to speed.

I read a book that Rosten turned me on to by Jesse Schell called the Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses.  Its a kind of applied philosophy of games, written very conversationally. Read More…

Here’s another little Havana/L.A. mashup about art and redevelopment.

One of my other favorite places in Havana is the Callejón de Hamel, a small alley near the University of Havana that is an explosion of color, afro-cuban imagery, and sculpture — produced by Cuban artist Salvador Gonzales Escalona.

Salvador started making murals and sculptures in the street in 1990, using scrap objects and whatever paint was available, including car enamel (good paint is in short supply in Havana).. Inspired by the support of local residents and visitors, he continued painting and sculpting and the street is now a jewel of a place that also serves as an active Afro-Cuban center. Children can take painting workshops there, and every Sunday Rumba musicians and dancers perform (it has become a tourist attraction, hence the nickname “rumba alley”).

The street is still Salvador’s artistic headquarters. Here is a lovely Havana Cultura video interview with the artist (sorry its just in Spanish, but even for people who don’t know the language, it is visually engaging, and gives you a sense of his personality):

I didn’t have to go far to see what L.A. has to offer along the lines of Callejon de Hamel.  I live a stones throw from St. Elmo’s Village, which is now celebrating its 40th anniversary year as a live/work space for artists and as a community arts center.

The Village, as its residents call it, was founded by artists Roderick and Rozell Sykes and is run today as a non-profit by Roderick and his wife Jacqueline Alexander-Sykes.

City Mask by Roderick Sykes

Like Callejon de Hamel, St. Elmo’s offers art classes for children, and also hosts a weekly open house, frequent tours for local schools, and hosts the Poetry in Motion festival each fall.

I recently received a kick-ass comment from a friend of mine named Stuart Murphy. He had some insight to share on the development of the London Olympics and how it’s affecting community here. Thought I’d give him a little shout-out and repost his comment here. Thanks Stu!

From what I can gather through working on an employment project across Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Newham (3 of the 5 host boroughs) over the last few years very few local people seem to be benefiting even from the short term construction boom. To my mind, those construction jobs aren’t being done by local people to the extent thats been promised. And thats not meant in the Nationalistic ‘they’re all Polish immigrants’ sense.

Anecdotally it seems that contractors have bussed people in from wherever, to the extent of even giving them fake local addresses in order to skew the stats and not get too much heat from the Olympic Delivery Authority for not employing locals. Not that there would be too much heat, as the targets for employing locals appear only to be aspirational. Its unclear that Section 106 Agreements (see link for definition: http://www.idea.gov.uk/idk/core/page.do?pageId=71631) are in place or being enforced, so there’s basically no accountability, and therefore no real incentive to hire local.

For instance only in the last week it has emerged that there are only 150 apprentices working on the site, and only 1 from Hackney. Its a 500 acre site, and covered in construction workers.

Here’s a link or two:

• Article about low numbers of apprentices: http://www.hackneycitizen.co.uk/2010/03/10/only-one-hackney-apprentice-on-olympics-site/




• Link to a report by the snappily titled All Party Urban Development Group about regeneration projects creating local jobs: http://www.centreforcities.org/assets/files/APUDG-BuildingLocalJobsFINAL.pdf




• Also, awareness raising network on issues relating to the London Olympics. Its billed as a network of individuals (which it may be) but there’s fairly strong themes, politically, running through the articles: http://www.gamesmonitor.org.uk/

London Olympic Park construction equipment, by renaissancechambara (via Flickr).

Last month I had the privilege and rare opportunity to visit Cuba, traveling along with the FourStory crew, friends, and family.  A dozen or so people –  mostly writers, a few academics, artists, an architect, a developer, a high school teacher, a graduate student, and a lady barber.  Good traveling companions.

I confess to tourist status.  What I appreciated most from my short visit was the art, the music, and, of course, the people.  As is often the case, one benefit of the trip was returning with a new lens that lets me  appreciate some things at home with new eyes.

So here is one of my favorite Havana places, with a trackback to home.

Fuster

This is a photo of our team entering the amazing home of José Fuster, a disneyland of colorful tile and whimsical comfort.  It is also a deeply political location, in terms of the owner-builder’s idea and practice of art-as-redevelopment in the Jaimanitas neighborhood of Havana.

Read More…

This month Dr. Pop is all about sports and politics, about the ways that the love of the game gets mixed up with the love of money and power. Celine examines the “rules of the games” in the upcoming London Olympics, Gary comments on a recent drive for professional football in LA spearheaded by a local power broker, and Andrea turns her eye to the collateral consequences of the 2010 African Cup of Nations. Each story deals with the tension between sports for the sake of enjoyment, and sports for the sake of enhancing market values or securing political futures. They address the ways that athletic competitions have become a key fixture in the contemporary global political economy.

This unique mixture, between the politics of sports and the economic game of politics, comes into play every time a city faces a decision about building a new stadium or a country attempts to host a mega-event like the FIFA World Cup.  At stake in these decisions is the deployment of scarce public dollars and vital urban lands. As the future of these resource get decided, a broad collection of stakeholders must debate:  What kinds of benefits might an expanded sports infrastructure bring to our city?  Who will get to enjoy these benefits and for how long? And because these are tough questions, these debates can set off fierce competitions between opposing groups, competitions which make many championship games seem like little-league. To read more about how these questions are being answered in South Africa, check out this recent NY Times article: “Cost of Stadium Reveals Tensions in South Africa.”

At the heart of these debates is the issue of who has the right to access and to enjoy the city. This often becomes a clash between the use value and the exchange value of urban space, between the ways that city dwellers make the most of city lands and the ways these same lands are controlled by outside investors, as well as commercial and government interests.  The 2008 Beijing Olympics offer a clear example of what happens when the concern with building a new sports infrastructure becomes more important than the human rights of urban dwellers. In addition to the seven gold medals won by swimmer Michael Phelps, the Beijing Olympics also featured the displacement of roughly 1.5. million people from their homes.

Read More…

Plan for London Olympics 2012 Village Photo: ecofriend.org

In 2012, London will be hosting the Summer Olympics, “the greenest games to date” according to the Olympic Delivery Authority chief executive, David Higgins.

London authorities are gearing up to win the gold in sustainability, with claims of cutting carbon emissions, lighting a carbon neutral Olympic Flame, using recycled materials and cleaning up the brownfield upon which athletes will compete. But that’s not the only legacy the city hopes to accomplish. London is also looking to implement a robust social agenda to accompany the physical regeneration projects. As the Strategic Regeneration Framework report hopefully proposes:

The true legacy of 2012 is that within 20 years the communities who host the 2012 Games will have the same social and economic chances as their neighbours across London.

London Olympics Photo: gadiss.com

Read More…

For a general introduction to the theory and practice of restorative justice, check out:
Restorative Justice online.

I sat next to an astrophysicist on the flight to South Africa, one who was on a mission to observe the first stars as they formed. How does one look back millions of years to the moments when stars were first coming into being? Well, apparently you just need a very sophisticated radiotelescope in an area with very little interference. My neighbor in the aisle seat, a scientist and professor at Berkeley, was taking advantage of a much larger project called the Square Kilometer Array. By tuning into certain frequencies, this man and his colleagues would be able to gain key insights not just on how stars form, but on the dawn of the universe itself.

In order to understand this project at all, I had to change the way I understand time and space. Here is the thought exercise I was given on that flight: Think of the universe as a balloon. As more air goes into the balloon, it expands. What we experience as time is the expansion of the balloon, moving everything outwards as it goes. Earlier moments in history, like when stars first formed, are really just points that are further out on the balloon. By looking outwards towards those points scientists can capture information that has taken millions of years to travel back to us. This information can then be analyzed, put into equations, and used to fill out our contemporary understanding of the expanding universe, its origins, and perhaps even its future directions.

The balloon metaphor is an imperfect one, but it’s a start. I like it because it challenges me to think about my travels, and my life, in a totally different way. I am not growing older. Time, at least in the traditional sense, is not passing by me. Rather I am moving outwards, with a first-class seat in an expanding universe. Of course, none of us is on this journey alone. All of existence is in it together, at different phases and stages of becoming. Once I landed in Johannesburg I began to enter a new phase in my own unfolding life, one marked by political education and peer learning, by the fruits of other people’s struggles and by my own bonds with a group of trouble makers who call Chicago home.

I was heading to South Africa as part of a restorative justice delegation from the Windy City. Our group brought with it a diverse history of activism, action, and hustling for change. Some of the delegates were working to transform the disciplinary culture of the public school system, others were community leaders deeply rooted in neighborhood life, several had been working for decades to reform the ways our society responds to domestic violence, and many in the group had dedicated their lives to working with young people to shift power in their communities. All of us were practitioners of conflict resolution methods like peace circles, and all of us shared a basic belief in the power of groups to come together to address difficult issues, to deal with the conflicting forces in our lives.

For 2 weeks we meet with like-minded folks in Capetown and Johannesburg, interacting with an incredible array of people, places and projects. We connected with students, principals, teachers turned into police, preachers turned into organizers, community groups, and a whole host of amazing folks. We were there for the 20th anniversary of the release of political prisoners during apartheid (February, 2nd 1990). We were there as South African cities scrambled to ready themselves for the FIFA World Cup. We were there as much of the world heard about the marital and extra-marital exploits of the current ANC leader. We were there to listen to the Soweto Youth Choir, and to hear Hugh Masekela and Sibongele Khumalo perform together live at the Market Theater. But mostly we were just there, riding the balloon together, taking things one van ride and one conversation at a time. Read More…

As mentioned in my previous post – back to the future of dystopia – with an emphasis on re-zoning sci-fi style.

I can’t cite the direct literary root (or route), though this idea of a walled-off or secret city separate from hostile environs has threaded its way through various science fiction and fantasy novels and films over the years. Tarzan searched for and protected the Lost City of Opar in a few of his adventures. In Robert Heinlein’s novel, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, an entire planetoid, our moon, is populated with underground colonies containing, among others, criminals and political exiles.

Pissed off with their lot, some of these disparate forces band together for freedom against Earth rule and stage a revolt. Marvel Comics’ Black Panther is the super-hero, warrior king of the scientifically advanced hidden African kingdom of Wakanda. For centuries the one who wears the mantle of the panther has led the people to fight off everything from European colonizers to Dr. Doom.

The notion of the jewel of a city protected from the predatory outsiders is turned on its head in John Carpenter’s 1981 film Escape from New York. In this flick, due to runaway crime in the near future, Manhattan Island has been walled off and turned into a maximum security prison. Black helicopters patrol from the air, making sure no scofflaw climbs out.

Inside a kind of Lord of the Flies meets Clockwork Orange tableau has played out as various sub-cultures exist bumping up against each other amid the trash, crumbling buildings and warring gangs and tribes. It’s World War III between us, the Soviet Union and China, and the President of the United States’ plane is hijacked by revolutionaries, and crash lands in the prison-city. Ex-hero soldier turned bank robber Snake Plissken is sent in and has 24 hours to find the prez. The Duke of New York, leader of the latest gang, the Gypsies, is also on the hunt for the world leader. But the Duke lacks vision, he’s not out to unite the prisoners and fight for their freedom and sovereignty, he merely wants to use the president as a shield for an escape across one of the mined bridges. Read More…

I saw Jane Wills of Queen Mary University of London speak last night on the battle for a living wage in the UK, a great talk and fascinating in its comparisons to the US…though the comparisons are all my own!

I think graphs always speak so much louder than words, so just a quick snapshot in the most comparable format I could find of growing inequalities in the two countries.

On inequality in the UK from The Guardian:

On inequality in the US from Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez (via The New York Times)

The US retains its role as a world leader… as of 2005, the top 1% in the US held 21.8% of the wealth, and it is perhaps more frightening to look at the other lines. But many of us aren’t so happy about this, as it means we’re generally fighting each other for the little that is left. So what is being done?

In the UK, as in the US, there has been a growing movement for a living wage. It is only a very small step towards the truly just world that I believe possible on alternate Wednesdays, but I will never say that such small steps do not require a most inhuman amount of work by an admirable and massive number of people.

Essentially the minimum wage (only introduced in the UK in 1999, upon which 2.1 million people received a raise averaging 10%!) is the maximum salary that the market says it can afford to pay people. The living wage is the minimum salary that people actually need to live. A bit simplified I know, but they reduce nicely to moral foundations.

The UK living wage campaign (inspired by the US living wage campaign, begun in Baltimore in 1994) is spearheaded by a non-profit called London Citizens, a group closely based on the organizing model of the Industrial Areas Foundation, working to create a broad and powerful coalition of those already involved in churches, mosques, schools, unions and community groups.

The victories have primarily been won in London. One of the main problems has been identified as the widespread, almost ubiquitous, practice of employers outsourcing every job possible (see the brilliant new book co-authored by Jane, Global Cities at Work). This forces contractors to compete amongst themselves and underbid each other in a mad rush to the bottom. So a huge push of the campaign has been to negotiate with large employers (hospitals, office buildings, the Olympic contractors) to only outsource to businesses providing a living wage.

This reminded me a great deal of SEIU 1877′s strategy in the Justice for Janitors campaign. So I asked, and indeed! They were here at the beginning, working with one of the unions involved in the struggle. Governmental authority works a bit differently here in London and so there hasn’t been a push for anything like a city-wide ordinance, but there are talks of a campaign to get any organization receiving Government funding to ensure the living wage.

It’s a small world, and hopeful to know that some of the lessons of struggle are crossing the Atlantic (and Pacific). May that continue and grow.

So to end not a cliche, but on John Cleese (because I’m smitten with him), here is a final graphic from The Guardian. Of course, it’s a load of doom in pretty colors really. The only bright light is the success of civil partnerships. I haven’t anything as pretty from the US, I just know (in my gut) everything is worse…

Five months ago, Brixton, one of the coolest areas of London, adopted its own currency, shown on the right below – the Brixton pound.   (scroll down for photos and videos).

The idea behind it? Helping to maintain a tight and sustainable community by promoting local businesses. The logo says it all: “Money that sticks to Brixton”.

This is how it works:  You exchange your regular British pounds for Brixton pounds at an exchange rate of 1:1 to spend in local businesses who accept the currency. While Bank-of-England-issued money is still accepted in local shops, some businesses incentivize their customers to buy their products in Brixton pounds by offering perks and discounts – more bang for their Brixton buck, so to speak. Brixton pounds can then be converted back just as easily.

By creating a more limited space in which money can be spent, local currencies gain “velocity” (i.e.: “The speed with which money whizzes around the economy, or, put another way, the number of times it changes hands” (definition by The Economistt) as they circulate in the local economy, acting as a powerful tool of reinvestment. According to a study done by the New Economics Foundation, money spent in this type of localized economy actually circulates three times as much as it would if spent in national chains! That means, you are essentially “voting with your wallet”. You decide where your money goes.

Brixton Market

For local businesses, this represents a huge plus as the profit they make stays in the community – as opposed to moving out of the community, up the ladder to high corporate executives of big national chain. This not only creates stronger ties of solidarity within the community, but it also adds value to the services and products sold in the local economy while building a strong local infrastructure.

Brixton shop

In this way then, mom and pop shops are sheltered from the tough competition of chains – who can sell their products at very low prices – jobs are protected in the area, and the community’s sustainability (and survival in these recessionary times!) is assured.

Rosie's Cafe

On top of all of that, Brixton’s local currency is helping keep the uniqueness of the neighborhood alive. About ¼ of Brixton’s community is of African or Caribbean descent. Reggae music blasts through the bustling open air market, as you wander along the stands sporting yucca root, sweet potatoes and plantains all interspersed between Halal butchers, Afro-euro beauty parlors and Vietnamese supermarkets.

fruit and vegetable vendor

It is not the first local currency of its kind. Communities from all over the world have created their own – from Australia, to China, Germany and Argentina. Here are some pictures of what some other international local currencies look like.

Brixton is the fourth community in the UK to print their own money, and there are talks that the city of Amsterdam might take it on as well!

For more information on the Brixton pound, you can visit their website at www.brixtonpound.org

And here are two cool videos from www.debateyourplate.com and the BBC’s Politics Show.

If you sit very still and stare at downtown L.A. from the window of the Bonaventure Hotel’s cocktail lounge, this is what you will see:

The slowly revolving floor shifts the gorgeous view before your eyes. But apart from saving up for the drinks, how do you get here?

It’s public of course, but that does not make it easy to find. There are three entrances to the Bonventure, but none of them are your traditional grand salon entrance. And two of them are from those secret sky bridges of LA, the one we took joins the hotel to Hope Street past the YMCA. You enter what feels like a back door onto the fifth floor of a dark and massive tower with spiraling stairs and pillars, and street signs to direct you to where you want to go:

Not all elevators go to the top you see, neither do the escalators. In fact, I don’t think there were any escalators on this floor. You have to find the red elevator, the red one! (The vertiginous ride in the glass elevator up the outside of the building for 35 floors and all of Central LA laid out beneath you? Highly recommended.) Any other colour and you will be lost in this vast echoing space.

It has its own stores, its own running water far far down below, it even has its own track and exercise machines where you can sweat in full view.

Built by John Portman and opened in 1976, it is an iconic building. And wandering through it, I couldn’t help but think of Frederic Jameson’s comments in an essay called Postmodernism and Consumer Society. He writes that the Bonventure has no main entry because it does not wish to be part of the city, it wishes to replace it. That it puts you into such a vast space so full of stuff you can no longer get a measure of just how big it is, you lose just how much emptiness is enclosed by these enormous walls of glass. The building toys with your perspective.

He writes that this is a space that takes vengeance on those walking through it, one that forces you to lose your bearings. It transcends us as human beings, and makes it impossible for us to find ourselves within such a context.

Me? I thought it an incredible building, but it did make me feel very small, very lost, very much in desire of a nice drink. So I set off in search of the red elevator, and thought about architecture and its impacts on how we live and see ourselves in the world. And this one almost cathedral-like in how it humbles you, God replaced by wealth, retail, and facilities for showing off while working out…

In US cities today, our public safety officials typically respond to violence by locking people up, by moving the offender far away from their families and their communities. This process of removal is almost always handled by the police, the only government officials that many US residents will ever see. And whether the people involved in the incident are youth or adults, the official response is roughly the same.

Alternatively, there may be no real response to violence at all. This is especially common in cases where weapons are not involved. Neither of these two extremes –police-led removal and inaction – does anything to address the underlying causes of violence. Neither accounts for the pain, neglect, or stress that can drive people to harm one another. Moreover, neither extreme deals with the hurt caused to others by an act of violence, the survivors, victims, witnesses, and loved one whose lives are forever changed by the event .

This begs the question, what is so public about public safety? Is it just that criminal justice employees are paid with tax payer dollars? Can real public safety be achieved without meaningful public involvement? Restorative justice is a philosophy that emphasizes the critical importance of involving parents, brothers, sisters, lovers, friends, children and other community members in the peacemaking process following a violent incident. It focuses on repairing the harm caused by crime and conflict, healing broken relationships, and addressing the underlying reasons for any offense.

A common saying in restorative justice circles is that “hurt people, hurt people.” This phrase suggests that healing is, in and of itself, an act of violence prevention.  Like a wild fire that can only spread when surrounded by dry conditions, violence can only thrive when hurts go unhealed. Extending this belief, restorative justice supporters argue that our streets can be made safer simply by creating community spaces to lovingly confront past pains. For restorative justice folks, healing is prevention.

It was precisely this understanding that guided Chicago’s first “Day of Healing” on December 8^th of 2009. Called by the Community Justice for Youth Institute, the day was initiated as a response to the more than 50 youth killings that happened between January and November of 2009 (see map below).  Thanks to the work of over 30 community organizations and schools, the day was organized in a matter of weeks. All across the city, from the South Side to the Wild West to the North Pole, these groups brought together youth and adults whose lives have been seriously impacted by violence.

Map by Andrew Greenlee

More than 40 peace circles  were successfully organized on that day, each one providing a safe space where people volunteered to sit down with one another and to share whatever was in their heart. Some circles explored the root causes of school fights, some provided a safe place for people returning from prison to share about their personal journey, while others brought together community leaders to reflect on the peacemaking work they’ve been doing for years.  Since that day, all of the circle organizers have met again and are planning to coordinate similar days of healing on a regular basis throughout 2010.

Chicago’s “Day of Healing” model offers a prime example of what peace and safety can look like when neighborhood leaders take charge. Whether you are a high school student, a teacher, a grandparent, or a non-profit worker, you have the ability to organize and facilitate peacemaking circles. You have the power to change the culture of justice at your school, on your block, and in your neighborhood. It is not enough to outsource safety to the police, or to simply ignore violence when it occurs. Real public safety requires the regular involvement of the real public. And that means us.

To learn more about peacemaking circles, restorative justice, and Chicago’s “Day of Healing,” go to:

http://cjyi.org/

http://healingchicago.wordpress.com/

http://www.livingjusticepress.org/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-koehler/power-with-power-over_b_312935.html

As of December 15, these necessary demands are not doing too well at COP 15.  Check out Gopal Dayaneni’s video blog from the Right to the City Alliance, which lays out the issues in a clear and concise way.

From Copenhagen:

What makes mathematicians good mayors?

They solve problems!

People using too much water? Taxi drivers taking folks to the wrong locations? Too many men acting violent at night? Frustrated drivers unable to communicate with each other? Urban dwellers crossing the street in dangerous ways?

In this videoblog urban planners from Colombia tell the story of two creative independent mayors who found new ways to address old urban issues. The mayors – Antanas Mockus from Bogota and Sergio Fajardo from Medellin – worked to change the way that residents relate to one another and to public space. With the help of mimes, super hero costumes, and artistic interventions, they helped to create a ‘culture of citizenship’ in their respective cities.

As you listen to Catalina Ortiz and Diego Silva tell the story of these two mayors, you’ll learn how former mathematicians became some of the most innovative politicians in Colombia’s recent history. And their efforts are far from over. Amidst Colombia’s unfolding presidential race, Mockus and Fajardo are both trying to bring their alternative messages to the national stage. While Fajardo’s campaign has been gaining steam in the mainstream, Mockus is focused on fueling a new grassroots movement built on trust between informed citizens. What is his campaign slogan amidst the violence plaguing the country today? “Life is Sacred.”

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For more on Mockus and Fajardo check out the links below:

Mockus in Bogota:

http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/03.11/01-mockus.html

http://www.neohouston.com/2009/03/antanas-mockus-and-a-multi-regulated-society/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antanas_Mockus

http://povblog.wordpress.com/2008/05/23/participaction-notions-on-cultural-agency-and-antanas-mockus/

Fajardo in Medellin:

http://colombiapassport.com/2009/09/30/sergio-fajardo-still-on-the-move/

http://latintrade.com/2009/06/sergio-fajardo-the-mathematical-answer/

http://www.newsweek.com/id/69623http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpPZ6EgYZ0w

Here are some other reports on the event:

Chicago Renters Spending More of Their Paychecks On Shelter (Chicago Tribune)

Renters Caught in the Housing Collapse (Chicago Public Radio)

A Renters Nightmare (The Chicago Reporter)

Rent Key to Chicago Economy (Chicago Tribune, letter-to-editor)

State of Renters Here: Insecure (Chicago LISC)

Downtown Chicago is all planes and angles, contrasts in brick and stone, glass and steel. It is full of amazing reflections in glass.

You see it at one level from the street, and another entirely from the El train, and from both it is visually spectacular. Your fingers itch for your camera, every step brings a shift in the lines, and changes the seen and the unseen.

I had half a day on Monday after a morning meeting, so I thought I’d do the Architectural Boat Tour, 90 minutes along the river and almost all the pictures a lustful heart could ask for…as the river goes round the loop and not through it.

But I confess my extreme love for these great buildings piled one on top of the other sits miserably with my love of social and environmental justice. They are contradictions impossible to overcome. I wonder if perhaps I love them (and hate them) for their colossal and unbelievable arrogance, because it is combined with such extraordinary technical and engineering skill. I love the fact that we have figured out how to build such things, hurling metal and glass up to the sky. I suppose we never stopped to ask whether we should. And the wealth required to build such buildings…where does it come from? Chicago is as much a city of immense poverty as it is a city of beauty. And that is where you find the answer. My question is whether we could build such things without exploitation, and in a way that sits happily on the earth. Read More…

The National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty and the National Coalition for the Homeless named Los Angeles the No. 1 “Meanest City” out of 273 nationwide in a recent report. L.A. owes this dubious distinction to the controversial “Safer Cities Initiative” that puts policing over housing, criminalizing thousands of the city’s unfortunates.

The City can place this new negative accolade on its mantel next to earlier awards by academic researchers as the most economically unequal city in the country and the homeless capital of the nation.

Inequality, it seems, is a key condition that makes legislating “meanness” possible because the farther apart people are on the economic ladder, the more difficult it is for those on the top ladder to identify with those on the bottom.

Here is a link to a great NY Times article about this travesty by Barbara Ehrenreich, “Is It a Crime to be Poor?” and another from the L.A. Daily News, “L.A. Criticized as ‘Meanest City’ in America.”

What’s behind a neighborhood? What’s going on beyond?

In those corridors of power where they birth all the new dawns?

Whose making these decisions about resources on my block?

Whose fixing all these potholes and setting all the clocks?

Chicago is a beautiful beast that breaths with the wind!

But pours more money into Buckingham Fountain,

than health clinics on its South End,

So while there’s much to celebrate, there’s also much to mourn,

For every pot of gold that builds downtown

There’s babies being born who’ll never make it to see the lake,

Because this crazy City is torn— Read More…

Here is a short video of Cecil Corbin-Mark speaking at People’s Planning School: about working with planning professionals, the link between planning and health, and the importance of taking control of the land. (Los Angeles, SAJE, 2007)

And here is the transcript of his remarks, for those of you who want to know more about his experience:

My name is Cecil Corbin-Mark. I come from an organization called WEACT for Environmental Justice. Our organization has been around, next year, for 20 years, working primarily at the start on issues of environmentally polluting facilities and their siting in our communities. We started out that way as an organization being very reactive to the primary polluter in our community — that being the City and the State. And we were always waking up and finding out about a new facility.

And over the years we came to realize that there was a power that we weren’t using. And that was the power to engage in planning for the future of our neighborhoods. As our cities have grown up, one of the things that we have found has been that people in this country are completely more and more disconnected from what actually happens on the ground in their neighborhoods, with respect to the introduction of new facilities or stores or whatever it is. And we decided a long time ago that we needed to work on a model of being more proactive. Read More…

On March 30, 2007, SAJE kicked off its People’s Planning School by gathering people from other cities who were facing the same problems of gentrification, redevelopment, and expulsive zoning and who had already taken up the challenge to plan for themselves, claiming their history and rightful standing.

Here is a transcript of Terri Baltimore’s presentation along with some of the images that she showed us.  It is longer than most posts, but well worth it — it is full of history, a people’s planning process, and Terri’s love for her neighborhood:

Before I start, I just want to apologize, because I have an awful lot of slides. And I’m going to try to get through them quickly, but a lot of people don’t know the Hill District very well, and I wanted to make sure that you understood the place where I work and the place that I love so much.

And before I get started, I just also need to say how honored I am to be here. But I couldn’t be here today without the elders in the community.

Pittsburgh is a really strange place. Most people kind of stay in the neighborhood where they grew up. And I grew up in an Eastern neighborhood of Pittsburgh called “‘Sliberty.” And for those of you who speak English well, that’s East Liberty. And so growing up I never spent a long time in the Hill District. And in 1992 I got a job there. And I was terrible. I didn’t know the neighborhood at all. And the reason that I was able to get inside the neighborhood, stay there, and learn to love it is was because elders taught me their stories. They taught me about places that weren’t there any more. They taught me about living through urban renewal and losing their homes. So they shared their lives with me. And what they did in the process was help me love the place that they loved. So I need to say, “Thank you,” to Miss Edna. Thank you to Miss Stella. And thanks to all the elders. Because without them I couldn’t tell you anything about ‘Sliberty.

The Hill District is a really rich neighborhood. And in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, if you wanted to listen to jazz, this was the place to be. And if you were a Black musician and played downtown, you came up to the Hill and played at clubs after hours. If you were a White musician and played downtown you came up here to the Hill and played after hours. So there is a rich cultural heritage in this neighborhood, and in addition to the music (Art Blakely, Lena Horne, Ahmad Jamal, Stanley Turrentine, George Benson), we also had August Wilson and the Pittsburgh Crawfords. Also, the Freedom House Ambulance Service. For a lot of people who don’t know, the whole paramedics movement started in The Hill with a really progressive funder and unemployed Black men and women who responded to a need in the neighborhood at a time when ambulances didn’t come.

The next few slides I’m going to show you were taken by who was a Pittsburgh photographer who took at least a hundred thousand pictures of Black life in Pittsburgh.

Read More…