urban planning
annyzyl123
YilingZhang-FinalAssignment-dueDec11-2017.odtess
USP 2 FINAL ASSIGNMENT
Reflecting on your experiential learning fieldwork and course content
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Three Tasks |
Due Date |
% Grade |
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November 4, 11, 18 or December 2, 2017 |
5% |
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Monday, Dec. 11, 2017 before 11:59pm. |
10% |
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Monday, Dec. 11, 2017 before 11:59pm. |
10% |
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Total |
25% |
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Detailed Instructions for All Three Tasks of this Final Assignment
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Site visit and participation at either the Ocean View Growing Grounds (Neighborhood Environmental Research and Learning Center) or Normal Heights (Alleyway Assessment Project) (5%). GRADING CRITERIA: You will get full credit for this part of the assignment if you showed up and participated.
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Reflect on your experiential learning in the form of: (2.1) a written statement between 350-500 words, or (2.2) a 2-3 minute video of you answering a series of questions about your experiential learning (must be willing to make it publically available for educational purposes). (10%). GRADING CRITERIA. To earn the full credit for this part of your assignment you must, in your brief reflection (in essay or video format), demonstrate a level of analysis of the field based learning experience. Providing analysis means that you have thought about the experience and demonstrated how you’ve integrated it into you knowledge base. In other words, you have gone beyond just describing your experience by adding an analysis that speaks to concepts covered in USP 2. You have two ways you can complete this task.
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Option A: Written statement between 350-500 words. Address the following questions about your participation at either the Ocean View Growing Grounds (Neighborhood Environmental Research and Learning Center) or Normal Heights (Alleyway Assessment Project). Don’t answer the questions in a running list one at a time. Instead, respond in a brief self-reflecting story format that uses whatever ordering of the questions listed below that you deem best. Include a bibliography for all citations you make. Upload to Google Classroom.
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What was your experience, what did you do? (e.g. work in the garden, base building, alley assessment)
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What did you take away from the experience? Relate this to USP 2 course content.
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What about it impressed you most, why? How so?
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Did it create any kind of lasting impression, or any shift in how you think about your own life, the life of others, your career plans, course content covered in USP 2?
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Did it give you any particular insight re how we organize our selves collectively as a society to meet our basic needs (e.g., for food, access to nature, secure attachments)?
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Option B: Produce a 3 minute video (give or take 30 seconds) of you answering the same questions outlined in 2.1 above:
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What was your experience, what did you do? (e.g. work in the garden, base building, alley assessment)
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What did you take away from the experience? Relate this to USP 2 course content.
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What about it impressed you most, why? How so?
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Did it create any kind of lasting impression, or any shift in how you think about your own life, the life of others, your career plans, course content covered in USP 2?
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Did it give you any particular insight re how we organize our selves collectively as a society to meet our basic needs (e.g., for food, access to nature, secure attachments)?
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If you choose this option you must be willing to allow the instructor to make the video publically available for educational purposes. We recommend that you ask a fellow student to ask you the questions in an order you prefer, and have the same person video record your answers for you. Upload onto Google Classroom a one-page doc that provides a link to the video on YouTube along with a title of the video and two or three sentence description capturing the video’s overarching sentiment. Also include on the one-pager a list of the references you make to academic literature or other major sources.
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Reflection on Harvey or Friedmann’s work. Respond to Prompt A or B created for this task. Include in your response some current event as a way to flesh out (i.e., add substance and color to) your particular perspective. You have two options to select from to complete this task: (3.1) a written essay of 1500-2000 words, which can include images, or (3.2) a video that creatively accomplishes the same task in 3 minutes (give or take 30 seconds). Your essay or video should concentrate on just one of the Prompts. Feel free, however, to weave into your essay a comparative perspective of Harvey/Friedmann as part of your informed views of the matter. But let me make it clear: adding a comparative perspective in this way is not expected or required, doing so would be very hard and beyond what we expect. GRADING CRITERIA for this part of the assignment is indicated in the Prompts.
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Option A: Respond to what is called for in Prompt A or B (see below) in the form of a 1500-2000 word essay. Include in your response some current event as a way to flesh out (i.e., add substance and color to) your particular perspective. Include a bibliography listing the references you make to academic literature or other major sources.
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Option B: Respond to what is called for in Prompt A or B (see below) in the form of a video. Include in your response some current event as a way to flesh out (i.e., add substance and color to) your particular perspective. The video should be 3 minutes long give or take 30 seconds. If you choose this video option you must upload to Google Classroom a one page study guide to go with the video to help future students understand the points you cover; and you must be willing to make the video and study guide publically available for educational purposes). Include a link to the video on YouTube on your one page study guide, along with a bibliographic list of the academic literature or other major sources you cite in the video.
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TWO PROMPTS (pick A or B)
You must choose (use) one of two prompts (A or B) spelled out below to complete your final assignment. Please read the prompts carefully. Raise any questions you may have about these prompts during our special panel/roundtable in class on Nov. 28th, in section, during office hours, and/or on our Google Classroom Discussion Board.
(PROMPT A). David Harvey (2013), in his book Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution argues that loss of common space for public use in cities is a result of a rising tide of privatizations, enclosures, spatial controls, policing, and surveillance. This dynamic (i.e., an “urban process influenced if not dominated by capitalist class interests”) impacts the qualities of urban life now while also undermining the capacity to build new commons spaces within the urban arena (chap. 3. p. 67). In this light Harvey argues that “it vital to step back and think about what can and must be done, and who is going to do it where.” He places his hope on the constructive role (countervailing power) of urban-based social movements to bring about more equitable, just and healthy relations among humans and the natural systems upon which humans and other life forms depend. But the challenges involved are complex. Harvey argues that place-based (urban) solutions, formulations, organizational forms, and political agendas must provide answers to three crucial questions: To what extent and how can localized place-based efforts address: (1) rising levels of inequality and impoverishment; (2) out-of-control environmental degradation and unsustainable ecosystem exploitation/disruptions—not only as a material concern but also as a spiritual and moral question of changing the human sense of nature; and (3) a pervasive, globalizing economic development model taking hold worldwide (i.e., capitalism in diverse forms) that depends on escalating growth (like compounding interest in a bank account) as a requirement to keep the economy going (see Harvey pp. 127-128).
Harvey’s book is a kind of radical manifesto. He aims to provide insights, actionable theory and strategies that progressives can use to conceptualize and address the three questions/problems he raises. He organizes his effort to do so around this foundational question: “Can urban-based social movements play a constructive role and make their mark in the anti-capitalist struggle across these three dimensions?” (chap. 5, p. 128) –which leads him to pose this strategic political question: “To what degree should anti-capitalist struggles explicitly focus and organize on the broad terrain of the city and the urban? And if they should do so, then how and exactly why?” (chap. 5, p. 115).
If you choose Prompt A, we want you to weigh in on Harvey’s foundational question noted above plus his follow on strategic political question; while weaving in a case example you deem useful as a way of getting your informed view of across. Specifically, structure your response to this prompt to include the following elements in this order:
[The distribution of point value per Prompt A’s sections, 100 points total, is noted in parentheses at the end of each section as x/100 pts. These values will be used for grading purposes, so apply your effort accordingly]
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Succinctly summarize, in your own words (supported with quotes from Harvey if you like), the answers that Harvey offers in response to this foundational question: “Can urban-based social movements play a constructive role and make their mark in the anti-capitalist struggle across these three dimensions?” (p. 128). (Counts for 20/100 pts)
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Building on what you say in point #1, summarize in your own words (supported with quotes from Harvey if you like), Harvey’s answer to this strategic political question: “To what degree should anti-capitalist struggles explicitly focus and organize on the broad terrain of the city and the urban? And if they should do so, then how and exactly why?” (p. 115). (Counts for 20/100 pts.).
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[Put the bulk of your effort into this last, 3rd part of Prompt A]. Building on content you provide in components 1 and 2 above, which you should put in your own words quickly and succinctly, move on quickly to gauge the merit/hopefulness of Harvey’s ideas in your own critical way by referencing a case study (example of your choosing). Put your case before our minds eye –give us enough info to visualize it, appreciate its significance. Then tell us to what extent your case embodies (or does not embody) a way of addressing one or more of the three crucial questions Harvey raises (see Harvey pp. 127-128). For instance, does your local case address out-of-control environmental degradation and unsustainable ecosystem exploitation/disruptions—not only as a material concern but also as a spiritual and moral question of changing the human sense of nature? Addressing just one of the three questions is perfectly ok; but if you want to give a more comprehensive response and address two or all three of them in a more cursory fashion that is ok too. In USP 2 we introduced bioregionism as a place-based territorial framework to grapple with such questions –including the concept of healthy cities, green infrastructure and bioregional justice. (Counts for 60/100 pts.)
For point 3 above pick and use a case you deem interesting, controversial, promising, and/or problematic that has been covered in the news recently, or covered by some organization through social media, anywhere around the world. Your example (case) should put the spotlight on a localized urban struggle that is trying to improve the health and wellbeing of people in a particular place, especially people living in distressed, vulnerable, disadvantaged communities. There are many relevant current events/struggles happening around the world, including in our own back yard, from which to choose (e.g., struggles for food justice, environmental justice, economic justice, affordable housing, alleyway vitalization, some combination of these).
Harvey publication to cite: Harvey, David. Rebel Cities : From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. New York: Verso, 2012.
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(PROMPT B): John Friedmann (2010) argues that inter-city competition to attract footloose capital circulating worldwide is not sustainable or equitable. Increasingly, the type of business incentives made by cities to attract global capital, and the types of private corporate investments being made in the built environment are shaping cities in ways that undermine people’s attachment to local places, it de-humanizes the urban, it alienates people from one another and their life place. Friedmann (2010) argues that the small spaces of the city, the self-defined neighborhoods of urban life –i.e., spaces people gather in and engage one another, such as parks, community gardens, street corners--- are lost when planning and corporate development favors “functional structures that, geared to profits, lack soul” (p. 161). Market forces undervalue the kinds of micro-spaces that communities develop and use in ways that give rise to conviviality, mutual aid, and communitarianism (important for growing and sustaining healthy human relationships). Friedmann argues that people, working together, “can re-humanize the urban by focusing on and reviving urban neighborhoods (p. 152).
[The distribution of point value per Prompt B’s sections, 100 points total, is noted in parentheses at the end of each section as x/100 pts. These values will be used for grading purposes, so apply your effort accordingly]
If you choose Prompt B, we want you to weigh in on Friedmann’s argument (hope) that we can “re-humanize the urban by focusing on and reviving urban neighborhoods”? Specifically, provide your informed view of this argument (i.e., Friedmann’s hope) with reference to these elements, in this order:
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Outline how Friedmann defines the concept of “Place.” Explain how his definition of place encompasses both a “physical/built environment at the neighborhood scale and the subjective feelings its inhabitants harbor towards each other as an emplaced community.” (Counts for 10/100 pts.)
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Explain how the branding of cities and the advanced infrastructure required by global capital have displaced millions of neighborhoods residents “as speed, movement, and power have been valued more than the fragile social infrastructure of place-based communities.” (Counts for 10/100 pts.)
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Explain what Friedmann means when he says equitable place-making in the face of globalization is everyone’s job, local residents as well as official planners, and that city spaces can be reclaimed “taken back” neighborhood by neighborhood, through collaborative people-centered planning. (Counts for 10/100 pts.)
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[Put the bulk of your effort into this last 4th part of Prompt B]. Building on Friedmann’s ideas in points 1-3, which you should put in your own words quickly and succinctly, move on quickly to gauge the merit/hopefulness of Friedmann’s ideas in your own critical way referencing a case study (an illustration of your choosing). In other words, pick a current event and use said event as a touchstone/anchor to give us your take on Friedmann’s ideas/arguments. Briefly describe your chosen case, and then describe in what ways you think the case does and/or does not constitute the kind of people-centered planning and action Friedmann hopes to see much more of as a form of equitable placemaking around the world. Be sure to mention at lease one of Friedmann’s four criteria he deems important to the formation of good places. (Counts for 70/100 pts.)
For point 4 above pick and use a case you deem interesting, controversial, promising, and/or problematic that has been covered in the news recently, or covered by some organization through social media, anywhere around the world. Your example (case) should put the spotlight on a localized urban struggle that is trying to improve the health and wellbeing of people in a particular place, especially people living in distressed, vulnerable, disadvantaged communities. There are many relevant current events/struggles happening around the world, including in our own back yard, from which to choose (e.g., struggles for food justice, environmental justice, economic justice, affordable housing, alleyway vitalization, some combination of these). Feel free to reference efforts underway at the Ocean View Growing Grounds (OVGG) in Southeastern San Diego, which has been referred to in diverse media outlets. Citing the OVGG or a similar case, your response to Prompt B could focus, for instance, on urban agriculture as a way to promote food security, food justice and environmental public health at a neighborhood scale. But there are many other cases you can use too: for instance, efforts to value and improve alleyways, and diverse types of tactical urbanism.
Friedmann publication(s) to cite (cite the first one for sure, second one is optional), both on class websie
Friedmann, John. 2010. "Place and Place-Making in Cities: A Global Perspective." Planning Theory & Practice 11(2):149 - 65.
Friedmann, J. 2015. “Neighborhood by Neighborhood: Reclaiming Our Cities.” School of Community and Regional Planning, University of British Columbia, Vancouver.
The excerpts below from Harvey and Friedmann have direct bearing on the two prompts. You may find these useful as you do this assignment
HARVEY
Harvey, David. 2013. Rebel Cities : From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. New York: Verso.
CHAPTER THREE: The Creation of the Urban Commons
The city is the site where people of all sorts and classes mingle, however reluctantly and agonistically, to produce a common if perpetually changing and transitory life. The commonality of that life has long been a matter of commentary by urbanists of all stripes, and the compelling subject of a wide range of evocative writings and representations {in novels, films, painting, videos, and the like) that attempt to pin down the character of that life (or the particular character of life in a particular city in a given place and time) and its deeper meanings. And in the long history of urban utopianism, we have a record of all manner of human aspirations to make the city in a different image, more "after our heart's desire" as Park would put it. The recent revival of emphasis upon the supposed loss of urban commonalities reflects the seemingly profound impacts of the recent wave of privatizations, enclosures, spatial controls, policing, and surveillance upon the qualities of urban life in general, and in particular upon the potentiality to build or inhibit new forms of social relations (a new commons) within an urban process influenced if not dominated by capitalist class interests. When Hardt and Negri, for example, argue that we should view "the metropolis as a factory for the production of the common," they suggest this as an entry point for anti-capitalist critique and political activism. Like the right to the city, the idea sounds catchy and intriguing, but what could it possibly mean? And how does this relate to the long history of arguments and debates concerning the creation and utilization of common property resources? (p. 67-68).
ALTERNATIVES RECLAIMING THE CITY FOR ANTI-CAPITALIST STRUGGLE (chap. 5: 127-128)
If a viable anti-capitalist movement is to emerge, then past and current anti-capitalist strategies have to be re-evaluated. Not only is it vital to step back and think about what can and must be done, and who is going to do it where. It is also vital to match preferred organizational principles and practices with the nature of the political, social, and technical battles that have to be fought and won. Whatever solutions, formulations, organizational forms, and political agendas are proposed must provide answers to three compelling questions:
l) The first is that of crushing material impoverishment for much of the world's population, along with the concomitant frustration of the potential for the full development of human capacities and creative powers. Marx was above all a pre-eminent philosopher of human flourishing, but he recognized that this was possible only in "that realm of freedom which begins when the realm of necessity is left behind.” The problems of the global accumulation of poverty cannot be confronted, it should be obvious, without confronting the obscene global accumulation of wealth. Anti-poverty organizations need to commit to an anti-wealth politics and to the construction of alternative social relations to those that dominate within capitalism.
2 ) The second question derives from the clear and imminent dangers of out-of-control environmental degradations and ecological transformations. This, too, is not only a material but also a spiritual and moral question of changing the human sense of nature, as well as the material relation to it. There is no purely technological fix to this question. There have to be significant lifestyle changes (such as rolling back the political, economic, and environmental impacts of the last seventy years of suburbanization) as well as major shifts in consumerism, productivism, and institutional arrangements.
3) The third set of questions, which underpins the first two, derives from a historical and theoretical understanding of the inevitable trajectory of capitalist growth. For a variety of reasons, compounding growth is an absolute condition for the continuous accumulation and reproduction of capital. This is the socially constructed and historically specific law of endless capital accumulation that has to be challenged and eventually abolished. Compound growth (say, at a minimum of 3 percent forever) is a sheer impossibility. Capital has now arrived at an inflection point (which is different from an impasse) in its long history, where this immanent impossibility is beginning to be realized. Any anti-capitalist alternative has to abolish the power of the capitalist law of value to regulate the world market. This requires the abolition of the dominant class relation that underpins and mandates the perpetual expansion of surplus value production and realization. And it is this class relation that produces the increasingly lopsided distributions of wealth and power, along with the perpetual growth syndrome that exerts such enormous destructive pressure on global social relations and ecosystems.
How, then, can progressive forces organize to solve these problems, and how can the hitherto evasive dialectic between the dual imperatives of localized worker control and global coordinations be managed? It is in this context that I want to return to the foundational question of this inquiry: Can urban-based social movements play a constructive role and make their mark in the anti-capitalist struggle across these three dimensions? The answer depends in part upon some foundational reconceptualizations of the nature of class, and on the redefinition of the terrain of class struggles.
The conception of worker control that has hitherto dominated alternative left political thinking is problematic. The focus of struggle has been on the workshop and the factory as a privileged site of production of surplus value. The industrial working class has traditionally been privileged as the vanguard of the proletariat, its main revolutionary agent. But it was not factory workers who produced the Paris Commune. There is, for this reason, a dissident and influential view of the Commune that says it was not a proletarian uprising or a class-based movement at all, but an urban social movement that was reclaiming citizenship rights and the right to the city. It was not, therefore, anti-capitalist.
I see no reason why it should not be construed as both a class struggle and a struggle for citizenship rights in the place where working people lived. To begin with, the dynamics of class exploitation are not confined to the workplace. Whole economies of dispossession and of predatory practices, of the sort described in Chapter 2 with respect to housing markets, are a case in point. These secondary forms of exploitation are primarily organized by merchants, landlords, and the financiers; and their effects are primarily felt in the living space, not in the factory. These forms of exploitation are and always have been vital to the overall dynamics of capital accumulation and the perpetuation of class power. Wage concessions to workers can, for example, be stolen back and recuperated for the capitalist class as a whole by merchant capitalists and landlords and, in contemporary conditions, even more viciously by the credit-mongers, the bankers, and the financiers. Practices of accumulation by dispossession, rental appropriations, by money- and profit-gouging, lie at the heart of many of the discontents that attach to the qualities of daily life for the mass of the population. Urban social movements typically mobilize around such questions, and they derive from the way in which the perpetuation of class power is organized around living as well as around working. Urban social movements therefore always have a class content even when they are primarily articulated in terms of rights, citizenship, and the travails of social reproduction.
The fact that these discontents relate to the commodity and monetary rather than the production circuit of capital matters not one wit: indeed, it is a big theoretical advantage to reconceptualize matters thus, because it focuses attention on those aspects of capital circulation that so frequently play the nemesis to attempts at worker control in production. Since it is capital circulation as a whole that matters (rather than merely what happens in the productive circuit) , what does it matter to the capitalist class as a whole whether value is extracted from the commodity and money circuits rather than from the productive circuit directly? The gap between where surplus value is produced and where it is realized is as crucial theoretically as it is practically. Value created in production may be recaptured for the capitalist class from the workers by landlords charging high rents on housing.
Secondly, urbanization is itself produced. Thousands of workers are engaged in its production, and their work is productive of value and of surplus value. Why not focus, therefore, on the city rather than the factory as the prime site of surplus value production? The Paris Commune can then be reconceptualized as a struggle of that proletariat which produced the city to claim back the right to have and control that which they had produced. This is (and in the Paris Commune case was) a very different kind of proletariat to that which much of the left has typically cast in a vanguard role. It is characterized by insecurity, by episodic, temporary, and spatially diffuse employment, and is very difficult to organize on a workplace basis. But at this point in the history of those parts of the world characterized as advanced capitalism, the conventional factory proletariat has been radically diminished. So we now have a choice: mourn the passing of the possibility of revolution because that proletariat has disappeared, or change our conception of the proletariat to include the hordes of unorganized urbanization producers (of the sort that mobilized in the immigrant rights marches) , and explore their distinctive revolutionary capacities and powers. ….(p. 130).
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Organizing the neighborhoods has been just as important in prosecuting labor struggles, as has organizing the workplace. One of the strengths of the factory occupations in Argentina that followed on the collapse of 2001 is that the cooperatively managed factories also turned themselves into neighborhood cultural and educational centers. They built bridges between the community and the workplace. When past owners try to evict the workers or seize back the machinery, the whole populace typically turns out in solidarity with the workers to prevent such action. When UNITE H E R E sought to mobilize rank-and-file hotel workers around LAX airport in Los Angeles, they relied heavily "on extensive outreach to political, religious and other community allies, building a coalition" that could counter the employers' repressive strategies.20 But there is, in this, also a cautionary tale: in the British miners' strikes of the 1 9 70s and 1 980s, the miners who lived in diffuse urbanized areas such as Nottingham were the first to cave in, while those in Northumbria, where workplace and living- place politics converged, maintained their solidarity to the end. The problem posed by circumstances of this sort will be taken up later. To the degree that conventional workplaces are disappearing in many parts of the so-called advanced capitalist world (though not, of course, in China or Bangladesh), organizing around not only work but also around conditions in the living space, while building bridges between the two, becomes even more crucial.
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FRIEDMANN
Friedmann, John. 2010. "Place and Place-Making in Cities: A Global Perspective." Planning Theory & Practice 11(2):149 - 65.
Friedmann, J. 2015. “Neighborhood by Neighborhood: Reclaiming Our Cities.” School of Community and Regional Planning, University of British Columbia, Vancouver.
For Alleyway students, you may also want to reference:
Martin, Michael. "Back-Alley as Community Landscape." Landscape Journal 15, no. 2 (September 21, 1996 1996): 138-53.
"John Friedmann has been an insurgent force in the field of urban and regional planning, transforming it from its traditional state-centered concern for establishing social and spatial order into a radical domain of collaborative action between state and civil society for creating ‘the good society’ in the present and future. By opening it up to theoretical engagement with a wide range of disciplines, Friedmann’s contributions have revolutionized planning as a transdisciplinary space of critical thinking, social learning, and reflective practice." (source). In Reflections on John Friedmann's Contributions to Planning Theory and Practice.(New York: Routledge, 2017).
Friedmann’s contributions as a planning practitioner, scholar and theorist over a 60 year period is dedicated to bringing about the “good society.” He argues that we need new ways to enable normative reflection, dialogue and visioning among people, face-to-face, at a small (human) scale. This aspect of Friedmann’s work highlights radical planning methods that integrate critical pedagogy (education and social learning) with struggles for democracy. Friedmann defines planning as the linkage of knowledge to action for creating the good society, and in so doing he brings into critical perspective multiple types of competing knowledges relevant to planning practice. For instance, community knowledge, Friedmann argues, is a distinct type of knowledge (as compared to technical knowledge held by the state). Local residents inhabiting disadvantaged communities gain through their lived experience and social learning a distinct and potentially very useful understanding of, and knowledge about, poverty, environmental stressors, neighborhood activity, assets, liabilities, etc. At the same time, Friedmann recognizes that yes, community knowledge matters, but it is often suppressed, undervalued, or difficult to access. The public spaces and resources needed to engender, inform and sustain this kind of civic engagement that Friedmann and many others think is vital to creating the “good society” are far and few between. This creates a problem for planning practice aimed at enabling meaningful community engagement and authentic dialogue for bring about the “good society.”
Excerpts from
Friedmann, John. "Place and Place-Making in Cities: A Global Perspective." Planning Theory & Practice 11, no. 2 (2010): 149 - 165.
“I believe that we can re-humanize the urban by focusing on and reviving urban neighborhoods.” (p. 152)
Making Places is Everyone’s Job
Contrary to command planning, which globally speaking is still the dominant form, I would argue that planners need directly to engage those who reside in neighborhoods, and that this engagement means to establish a moral relation that from the start acknowledges people’s “right to the city” which is to say their right to local citizenship (Lefebvre, 1996).13
From the beginnings of urban history 5,000 years ago, there have been neighborhoods. Some were planned by designers, developers, the government, but most probably were not. They happened in all sorts of physical settings, a result of being lived in by people who came there, stayed, perhaps eventually moved on, and who dealt with each other on a daily basis. Each neighborhood has a unique social profile. Over time, it acquires a character of its own, perhaps also a name, but whereas names are sometimes retained, a neighborhood’s character inevitably changes, its name is a legacy to the future. The point is that the very act of inhabiting a neighborhood will shape its character, its daily and seasonal rituals, and the recurrent socio-spatial patterns that imprint themselves on its memory. (p. 159)
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Speaking globally, and fixated as they often are on globalization, planners in the newly industrializing countries but elsewhere as well seem to have forgotten about the small spaces of the city, the self-defined neighborhoods of urban life. These days, everything we dream about is “mega”, those functional structures that, geared to profits, lack soul. Except when state and capital need the land on which ordinary people are living, they and their stake in the city are largely forgotten. Without ado, they are displaced, given inadequate compensation, and with luck, rehoused in the outer reaches of the urban. None of this, of course, enters the national income accounts, as though ordinary people and their livelihood are redundant. I have tried to muster arguments against this view and the related ideas of some geographers that place no longer matters, that in the age of nano- technology, we can earn good money without living anywhere at all, in what some of them call an “in-between” world. According to this perspective, the city is reduced to a functional assembly of interchangeable parts, a kind of hotel, where all of one’s needs are provided for at the push of a button.16 (p. 162)
I have focused on the small and ordinary because small and ordinary are mostly invisible to those who wield power, unless, when stepped upon, they cry out. But genuine places at the neighborhood scale have order, structure, and identity, all of which are created, wittingly or not, by the people living there. The order is civil, the structure is centered, and the identity (Feuchtwang’s “interiority”) is constantly being made and remade, because neighborhood places are dynamic, and every snapshot is nothing more than a moment in the flow of life. Michael Meyer insists on this point when he writes:
Outsiders often called the hutong neighborhoods slums, but the neighborhood did not cause pathologies or problematic behavior. Our neighborhood was not a pit of despair; you heard laughter and lively talk and occasionally, tears and arguments, just like everywhere else. People treated each other with something I missed the minute I set foot outside the hutong: civility. Residents recognized each other, so there was no cursing or name-calling directed at anonymous faces, without repercussions. Cars could not blare the horn, cut you off, and motor away. In the lanes, belligerence was not a virtue, tolerance was. Strangers knew they were guests, not authorities. (Meyer, 2009, p. 162)
A successful neighborhood is cherished by its inhabitants, even when housing is ill- maintained and the infrastructure inadequate. But housing can be renewed, new infrastructure can be emplaced. The neighborhood is cherished for very different reasons: because it has places of encounter where people reaffirm each other as who they are, or comment on the day’s events; because life has a certain rhythm with which all are familiar and to which all expectantly look forward; because there are places that are “sacred” to the people; and because there are special places of gathering where events important to the community transpire. It is this rhythm, these repetitive cadences that are always the same and yet a bit different as well, like a seasonal festival, that is a measure of a neighborhood’s vitality.
Ordinary neighborhoods, I would argue, need to be brought back into view, so that planners and local citizens can engage in a joint search for genuine betterment in the physical conditions of neighborhood life. This is a challenge for both parties who, for the most part, are inexperienced in what is, in effect, a moral engagement from which both have something to gain. Official planners represent the state and power, but local people don’t speak that language. …. An engagement with agents of the state must thus be undertaken in good faith. The ground on which both parties stand must be leveled so that an authentic dialogue can ensue.
Excerpts from Friedmann, J. 2015. “Neighborhood by Neighborhood: Reclaiming Our Cities.
A good neighborhood has a sense of itself in people’s minds, is part of the intimate sphere of their lives. This cherished identity doesn’t make it into history books. It is part of the unremarked history of every city, one of its many unremarked histories that are secretly stored away in people’s memories. ….
…..five criteria of a good neighborhood, and these can initially be used to assess a neighborhood on a continuum from “very bad” to “very good.” In summary, we can say that a good neighborhood should:
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be vibrant and alive.
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be centered on one or more places of gathering and encounter.
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have a sense of collective identity.
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have a physical environment conducive to sociality and civility.
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be cherished by those who partake in its daily life.
With a little effort, these general criteria can be made operational. But charting neighborhoods and ranking them on a scale of relative “goodness” is only a start. The real work begins now, and it involves two steps: the first is to find out what human capacities, skills, and resources exist in the neighborhood that might be drawn upon in a collaborative effort at neighborhood improvement. The second involves the identification and prioritizing of collective needs in the physical environment such as basic infrastructure, public services, internal circulation, access to public transit, health conditions, sanitation, community gardens, sport facilities, and so on…down a long list of what may be needed, with some indication of relative urgency and an expression of willingness to contribute to such local improvements with labor and other voluntary efforts in partnership with the state and NGOs.
A document outlining these needs, both short-term and in the longer view, can be called a neighborhood plan. It is a plan drawn up by the very people who are living in the neighborhood, and for whom the neighborhood is home. So conceived, neighborhood planning is a continuing process that goes on year after year, and if projects succeed in being implemented, if the process leads to the actual betterment of collective life, we can say that both the city and its neighborhoods are moving forward towards the ultimate goal of social sustainability.
