Siddharth Sivakumar

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A Language is formed when there are two basic constituents – a Lexicon and a Syntax.  While the syntax of architectural design is well established through decades of professional practice in the post-war era, the vocabulary of design suffers from a plethora of choices magnified by the excesses accorded by the digital landscape. Clients and designers are motivated by personal tastes and compulsions which have in most cases engendered an incoherence in the urban landscape. For instance, A charming old pre-war neighborhood might find a neo-modernist structure in its midst that breaks the visual landscape. The appeal of several tourist destinations such as Savannah, Georgia, or Florence, Italy lies in their ability to project a unified visual image of the city. Redevelopment in the 60’s has regrettably rendered many such areas void. While it can be argued that greater choice in design choices supports creative expression and individualism, visual coherence in urban design language is an absolute necessity to prevent “placelessness” and deterioration of ‘neighborhood character”.  Design practice focused on equity must also consider the visual environment.  Codes and Zoning are evolving to address these issues, but this can come at the cost of an existing character. This essay seeks to explore a new method to understand what may converge and then subsequently diverge to form distinct identities.

Two streets are selected to understand how different neighborhood characters may evolve – 21^st Street in Midtown Sacramento, California (Figure.1) and Hirsch Street in Home Park, Midtown, Atlanta, Georgia (Figure.2). Several Buildings in each street are selected by conducting a walking audit and a deconstruction of their visual characteristics undertaken using standard architectural lexicon.

These are then used as rules in an architectural design exercise. To understand the potential of such an endeavor, the “Mid Journey” AI is used as an impartial objective judge in determining a conceptual output.

Mid Journey is a proprietary Artificial Intelligence program that creates visual outputs from textual prompts and descriptions and is currently in the open beta phase. As such it provides an excellent use case for considering the translation of visual zoning codes found usually in the form of textual descriptions into unbiased architectural design concepts mirroring the building design process.

The Atlanta buildings present the following selected elements – red brick, extended front porches, and white window trims amongst others. These were selected since they were uniquely different elements as compared to the Sacramento buildings. The Sacramento buildings in the style of classic suburban American homes present colored wood sidings, brown shingled sloped roofs, and white window trims amongst other elements.

Therefore, a Hypothetical New Development in Midtown Sacramento (Figure.5) differs significantly in output from a potential new development in Home Park, Midtown Atlanta (Figure.3) based on the selection of façade elements from existing buildings in the neighborhoods to create a diverging urban character. It is interesting to note that this hypothetical development closely mirrors the design language of the oldest preserved buildings in the adjoining Georgia Institute of Technology campus. The building highlighted below is the 1928 Crum & Forster Building (Figure 4) designed by the Architects who helped establish the Architectural Program at the school. It lends credence to the possibility of the architects of these buildings originally considering the historical Renaissance façade and urban character of the area during the construction of these houses.

The architectural combination that is subsequently produced is interesting and shows that existing neighborhood characteristics can be used to include “visual guidelines” in zoning and other unified development codes. We find further refinement with every subsequent redevelopment can assist in the creation of neighborhoods with a coherent and unified urban facade landscape and more importantly an identity. 

Jorge Antonio Losoya

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In Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures (2020), Sheldrake takes us into the world of fungi where planning scholars can expect refreshing perspectives from non-human organisms. Sheldrake’s storytelling proves to be a captivating lesson on fungal biology, detailing their intimate entanglements with the human world. Through each chapter, the author challenges us to think as fungi do. The book asks planning scholars to unsettle their human-centered concepts and engage with the more-than-human world. Entangled Life offers thoughtful insights through an exploration of fungi’s agency and resilient nature, which planners interested in social-environmental landscapes, placemaking, and interdisciplinary scholarship may find useful.

The author uses anecdotes from his time as a biologist to illustrate the ways fungi affect our thinking, feelings, and behavior. In the first chapter, he uses truffle hunting to frame fungi as active beings who interpret their environments, explaining how smell links the human world to the fungal one. Chapter 4 investigates psilocybin testing and fungi’s influence on the human and non–human mind. Some of the transformative and grassroots movements are explored in Chapter 7 through the author’s experience with radical mycologists. Each story mixes biological explanations with lessons for understanding our world.

Sheldrake’s telling of the dynamics of truffle hunting establishes fungi as agents of the landscape who utilize the lure of smell to influence animal and human behaviors in the hills of Bologna, Italy. In describing the sophisticated behaviors of fungi, Sheldrake asks us to rethink our attitude toward non-human organisms. Here Sheldrake poses an important question to readers that may lead us to broaden who we plan for and with:

Might we be able to expand some of our concepts, such that speaking might not always require a mouth, hearing might not always require ears, and interpreting might not always require a nervous system? (p.42)

With this question in mind, how can planners shift their thinking away from human-centered perspectives of the landscape they shape? What are other ways of participation? If planners are to grapple with fungi as collaborators, what could they learn from fungi? For Sheldrake, the possibilities of collaborating with fungi allow planners to imagine new meaningful ways to engage with the human and non-human world. Entangled Life thus asks planners to stretch their concepts and disciplinary boundaries to visualize a more complete and entangled space that includes both human and non–human participants.

In Chapter 2, Sheldrake introduces mycelium, which he describes as “a map of a fungus’s recent history and is a helpful reminder that all life – forms are in fact processes not things” (p. 53). Mycelium is further explored in chapters 5 and 6 where he describes its role in brokering relationships in ecosystems. For planners, then, mycelium may offer ways to conceptualize communities’ placemaking activities. For example, when considering the possibility of mycelium retaining a sense of memory (p. 47), one may then imagine a community’s mycelium as a hidden network inscribing memory on the landscape. Mycelium thus reminds planners that belonging is rooted deeply in the landscape, memory, and more–than–human relationships. And that community is a process, not a thing.

Sheldrake makes fungi’s persistence incredibly clear in Chapter 3 when he describes the extremophile lives of lichens and in Chapter 5 which details fungi’s long existence on Earth. What then can planners learn about this resiliency and persistence from fungi? They can learn from fungi’s restorative power in ecosystem remediation (p. 185) or from the fungal ability to catalyze radical transformation and partnerships from the ground up (p. 186). Planners may also learn from fungi’s capacity to thrive in disturbed landscapes, like truffles (p. 43) or matsutake (Tsing, 2015). As flexible, and collaborative organisms, fungi challenge planners to foster synergetic relationships across species and disciplines to imagine extravagant futures detached from systems of oppression.

While Sheldrake is not the first to recount our entanglements with fungi (Tsing, 2015; Hathaway, 2022), his book is a well-crafted introduction for planners unfamiliar with these curious organisms. Although imaginative, the author is also cautious in his arguments, reminding readers of the dangers of anthropomorphizing and romanticizing more-than-human relationships (p. 210). Readers should not expect grand solutions to planning challenges from the lives of fungi but instead, be led to sprouting new questions whose solutions lie outside their boundaries.

Entangled Life is a thought-provoking book for planning scholars interested in discussions on knowledge production, queer ecology, and non-human agency. Planners who want to understand the more-than-human relationships in the spaces they engage with or those looking for new metaphors for understanding the world should read Entangled Life. I recommend this reading for planners eager to wander beyond traditional planning limits to spaces that allow them to unmake and recreate new worlds as fungi do.

Book Citation

Sheldrake, M. (2020). Entangled life: how fungi make our worlds, change our minds & shape our futures. Random House.

References

Hathaway, M. J. (2022). What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make. Princeton University Press.

Tsing, A. L. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton University Press.

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About the Author:

Jorge Antonio Losoya was born and raised in Del Rio, Texas along the Texas – Mexico border. He holds a M.S. in Community and Regional Planning and M.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He currently works in state – led disaster recovery planning. His research interests surround disaster recovery, hazard mitigation, emotional landscapes, Latinx geographies, and artistic methodologies.

Keila Z. Pérez, Mathias Poulsen, Katherine A. Pérez-Quiñones

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This conversation emerges from desires of more democratic planning. Not in the sense of getting more people to show up and participate in a one-off engagement process but thinking about ways to sustain a culture of engagement with our everyday environment and places we inhabit.  Through their playful lens, two design scholars and play facilitators help me explore possibilities to rethink the formats through which people are engaged in order to “have a say” in issues that affect them and the planet. The following are some excerpts from our extended conversation:

Katherine: What are you two working on?

Keila: Right now, I’m in Jordan working on a project with the “Global Goals” initiative establishing an activist football (soccer) league. We have one hundred women playing and the ten teams carry out activist actions in their communities between each game day. After a match, the two teams go to a “play activist field” where I host them and we’re trying all kinds of play methods to exercise their role as activists. We practice partnering up, speaking up, and leading.

Mathias: I am in Canberra, Australia, as part of my PhD project where I’m trying to understand play as a mode of democratic participation. I’m drawing on the Danish tradition of junkyard playgrounds or Skrammellegepladsen, as a space and metaphor for democratic participation. I ask, what if our deliberation is not only rational, sitting around a table making really proper, coherent arguments about things… What if it’s also more experimental inquiries and ways of exploring some matters of mutual concern? If we have a space we want to explore, or an issue in the community that we want to deal with, what if that happens also, by playing and by building things and engaging with materials.

Katherine: You’re both trying to facilitate these experiences as ways to expand democracy, but in different ways. Mathias, maybe you’re experimenting more with the format itself in these playground experiments while Keila is using play to activate other areas of life?

Mathias: Yeah, at first, I wanted to understand a different format of participation. To say, okay, the human expression and being in the world can’t be captured in rational language only, so we also need embodied, playful ways of making inquiries, and of making our statements and arguments. But what I’m starting to also ask is, maybe by doing this I’m also finding a way to critique democracy itself in its current conception, something I’m realizing by being here and having a different context. Democracy is really built on very western Eurocentric values and principles of modernity and Enlightenment, in rational thought and the individual and all those things that we really take for granted in the Global North. And some of the things that I’m interested in the playground have to do with bodies playing a really big role, it’s the irrational, the sensorial. It’s the relations rather than what the individual can do. It’s distributed agency.

Katherine: No doubt there are important critiques to the disembodied way the deliberative model and communicative rationality have been theorized. And taking a cue from Johan Huizinga, one of the great things about play is that it can break from the “real”, it can even embrace the irrational or non-rational that you are naming. So, why should we mix play with messy political considerations?

Mathias: We know as designers, as people, that there are other creative ways of both getting to know the world and to express our opinions, on the world. So, that was it. I just felt like, okay, when we play, we do this as well. We say things about who we are and what we find to be important and how we like to be together with each other. We make a lot of these kinds of statements. I just wanted to bring that into a practice that is otherwise really sort of fairly rigid and formal and very language-based and very “rational”. So that’s sort of one way of countering that, of saying, if we are to go on with this democracy thing, then I think we need a broader repertoire of ways of participating.

Katherine: Keila, you worked with Danish politicians for one of your projects in your Master’s. Now you are working with women in Jordan. Both groups have quite different backgrounds from our own as Puerto Rican women. How do you think of this relationship between play and culture and what are your thoughts on facilitating for a multicultural group or for a group whose culture might be different from yours?

Keila: Yeah. So, one thing working with play is that it definitely has a universal language to it. No matter where I start to explore these topics and facilitate a play experience, there is something universal even if people don’t have the words or use the same language to describe it. We all know what it feels like to be in a state of play or in a state of playfulness.

Now, one of the main differences would be the way that play is valued, and its initial acceptance to it. Of course, being in a country like Denmark, where play holds a really high position, it almost feels like a luxury that you can sit down with a running political candidate in the middle of his campaign and have a playful discussion, sitting with tied coffee mugs, pulling each other’s cups, and playing with cakes while talking about really important political topics.[…] It feels like a privilege that I can do that in Denmark, whereas when you go into some other places, there’s more hesitation to engage in something that seems so frivolous at first sight. But as you go into the process, people start to see that there is something much more serious and much deeper to it. And that somehow you can extract a lot of sense and a lot of meaning from the process of engaging with playful experiences.

Mathias: Keila, I love this. But, I love how you hold onto this notion that while it feels like a privilege, while it feels like luxury, it is actually not. It’s something that’s much deeper than that and a part of our human nature probably.

Keila: Yeah. I think that’s where play has its potential. It’s a natural way of being in the world. Even if at some point we’ve kind of lost that and we’ve forgotten that, we’re here to try to insist that it’s actually a way that feels quite natural to explore and to negotiate our ways of being together as a society.

Katherine: Do any of you feel strongly about play having greater potential outside of institutional channels? Should we bring this type of thinking into a planning department, for example?

Keila: I think both are important and both have a different potential and a different role. There’s something for sure that can be valuable in putting play in institutions. You can use it for social innovation and there’s collectives like Play the City, I think from Holland, doing this particularly. But then, it becomes a lot of gamification processes of how you consult the citizen. And for me, it’s more interesting when we’re taking this grassroots approach and when we’re putting play at the hands of people at their everyday life situation.    

Mathias: I think, we often tend to equate democracy with the institutions and representative democracy. And it can be so much more than that. How can we shape a society together that’s meaningful for all of us ideally. And the institutions are a part of that, but they think they’re the biggest part of that. And a lot of people think that, but to me, they’re just a part alongside a lot of other components. I think there’s a need to raise the awareness of the capacity of democracy to also live outside of institutions. We should just accept the local enactment of life…it’s what matters. And then of course we need to be able to sort of talk to each other, but at least it puts more emphasis on the living of life rather than the institutionalizing. So maybe some better balance is needed between this general tendency to put everything into the institutions. It feels like we don’t really know how to move on and I think part of that might be because institutions are not that imaginative.

Mathias: However,within the urban planning field, there seems to be on the one hand, a celebration of the temporary and improvisation in public spaces. And on the other, there remains this ideal of making things look nice and feeling orderly and under control. Colleagues here in Melbourne are designing for play in public space and trying to see what happens when you bring play into the streets in different ways. And I’m also keen to explore and think more about how we can create these kinds of frictions between these ideas about improvisation and the institutional needs for control and predictability. What happens when we take play to the streets and we invite people to play and we honestly, sincerely don’t know what will happen? Because we can’t just pretend not to know. We actually, really have to let go of that control and desire to predict things. If we just pretend, then it’s not gonna get very interesting, it’s not gonna become real play that people are actually having a sense of ownership over.

Katherine: I think planning does not feel comfortable with that at all, maybe in part because this idea that we work for the public good has some of us thinking that we figured out what this looks like…

Keila: It’s not all designers that take that approach into finding out what are the actual problems that we wanna find solutions to. Are we asking the right questions or are we just in a cycle of creating the things that we think people need? I think it’s a shared dilemma with planning in some ways. And I think that’s also why play brings an interesting resistance to the material; a resistance to what may be an accepted aesthetic approach, an accepted material approach, or an accepted form. It might be because play can easily exist without us designing for it. But we can of course, also decide to enhance it or to create even better conditions for it to arise.

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About Authors:

Keila Zarí Pérez is a social–play designer and educator. Her current design practice is rooted in activism and participation in socio-politics through play and playfulness. She works with speculation and embodied ways of teaching in design education. Her work includes furniture design, playful methods, and process facilitation, as well as research and teaching at the LAB for Play in Designskolen Kolding, Denmark. She is now a Visiting Lecturer at the School of Design and Creative Technologies, UT.

Mathias Poulsen is a play activist and PhD student at Designskolen Kolding, Denmark. Currently working at the Lab for Social Design where he combines research on design, play and democracy to explore how we might design for new forms of democratic participation. His PhD project has emerged from years of working with grassroots communities, especially within play and education. He is also the founder of the international play festival Counter Play and the Danish Play Think Tank, cultivating communities for investigating play.

Katherine A. Pérez-Quiñones is a doctoral student in the Community and Regional Planning Program in UT-Austin. Born and raised in the west coast of Puerto Rico, she is passionate about health and environmental justice and believes in people’s right to stay and achieve wellbeing on their land.

Haijing Liu

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Abstract

This paper studies the clustering effect of innovation spaces and its social implications in Shanghai. Using two kinds of spatial density analysis methods, the study first identifies the hotspot of innovation spaces, and then uses a statistical model to study the mechanism behind the clustering. The model demonstrates that rental housing units, IT companies, universities, restaurants, bars, and coffee shops have a positive impact, while large housing developments and parks have a negative impact on the clustering. The rapid establishments of innovation spaces also present a shift of urban development models in Chinese cities. Unlike the extensive urban developments that happened in the last decade, people and business value the more fine-grained urban developments that tie the social aspect of urban life back. The existence of innovation spaces not only generates an innovation network that facilitates innovation and entrepreneurship but also social interactions and a collective lifestyle.

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1. Introduction

China responded to its economic deceleration, marked by an annual GDP growth rate dipping below 10% since 2011, with a national initiative promoting mass innovation and entrepreneurship. Scholars like Birch, (1981) and Baumol (2008) attribute significant job increases and successful urban growth to regions with the highest rates of innovation. They argue that entrepreneurship stimulates economic growth by applying innovative approaches in a competitive market.

Inspired by these insights, the Prime Minister launched a national initiative promoting “mass innovation and entrepreneurship” at the Summer 2014 Davos Forum. Soon afterward, during a State Council executive meeting in January 2015, the term “Collective Innovation Spaces” (CIS) emerged. CIS refers to physical platforms like coworking spaces, makerspaces, hackerspaces, and innovation centers, designed to support and facilitate innovation and entrepreneurial activities (Deng et al., 2020).

The central government’s policy suggestions in China significantly shape local governments’ decisions and the direction of the capital market. As a result, the number of CIS in China skyrocketed from just 50 before 2015, to 2300 in 2015, and further to 4000 in 2016 (Fig.1). This rapid growth has influenced many urban design projects and master plans, positioning CIS as a cornerstone of their design strategy.

Previous studies on CIS have mostly approached the topic from a business and management perspective, seldom connecting it to its urban environment. This study offers a fresh perspective by concentrating on the role of urban amenities in CIS development, aiming to inform neighborhood scale planning and design decisions. Through interviews, surveys, and statistical spatial modeling, this research uncovers the significance of a balanced mix of affordable housing, workspaces, and social spaces in CIS clustering in Shanghai.

The study finds that established IT firms are the strongest predictors of CIS clustering. Accessibility to social spaces such as bars, restaurants, and coffee shops takes the second spot. The availability of rental units, which offer a more affordable housing option in China, correlates positively with the clustering of CIS. On the other hand, the presence of parks correlates negatively with CIS clusters.

These statistical findings suggest a shift in urban development models in Chinese cities. Unlike the extensive urban developments of the past decade, current trends show individuals and businesses leaning towards dense and mixed-use urban developments. These developments weave the social aspect of urban life back into the urban environment. CIS does more than create a network facilitating social interactions, innovation, and entrepreneurship—it revives the collective working and living style prevalent before the open reform.

In the subsequent sections, this study will delve into the theoretical background and conceptual framework, the data and methods, and the results and discussion, before offering a conclusion.

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2. Literature Review

2.1. Why study CIS clusters?

New theories and ideas are increasingly examining the relationship between the characteristics of urban space and its impact on economic performance. In China, urban planning has frequently served as a tool for economic development. Spatial constructs such as science or high-tech parks, cultural districts, office parks, etc. have been framed as the spatial expression of the knowledge economy (Ali, 2013). CIS, as a rapidly growing market, not only offers physical infrastructure for local entrepreneurs, but also transforms the office landscape in the downtown area (Jamal, 2018).

The concept of the cluster originates from the field of economic geography, where Porter (1998) defined the clusters as “a critical mass” of collocated companies and institutions. In Porter’s theory, he identifies the locational competitive advantages fueling the clustering of industrial activities. Firms are inclined to seek proximity to an established industrial cluster to leverage the existing infrastructure, human capital, knowledge spillover, and input and output.  While Porter emphasizes that collocated industries should be from the same category, Jacobs (1969) believes that diversity and the interdisciplinary nature of different sectors stimulate the emergence of new industries, thereby promoting a sustainable economic environment.. Glaeser et al. (1992) examined these theories and argued that a diversity of industries, rather than a monopoly,  encourages knowledge spillover, expediting industry growth and employment increase. Although their industrial cluster analysis is at a regional scale, the clustering of CIS aligns with their theory at a smaller scale. CIS clusters can be seen as a mix of diversity and uniqueness. Few CIS has restrictions on the industry of the companies seeking entry, making these spaces a place for interdisciplinary knowledge exchange and collaboration.

 On the other hand, there is a general spatial pattern of the industries within a city. For example, in Shanghai, IT companies tend to locate outside the downtown area, where new urban development takes place; design and advertising companies tend to locate inside the downtown area, where there are historical architectures and rich contexts. Thus, from the theoretical perspective, CIS clusters enable industrial clusters with diversity.

Furthermore, the study of CIS clusters, rather than isolated CIS, is motivated by the social network factor. The existence and sense of community is the core of collective innovation spaces, with the value of these communities residing within social networks. Activities such as social events, lectures, and pitches unfold in areas such as the lounge or the common area inside CIS, serving as platform and hubs for social interactions, innovation, and entrepreneurship. These platforms and hubs become connection nodes in the innovation network, making spatial proximity critical for the network’s viability. The more spaces a CIS is proximal to, the larger the network it resides in, enhancing the potential for users in these spaces to excel and innovate. Therefore, we anticipate that CIS clusters will foster economic prosperity.

2.2. Why place matters?

CIS clusters can illuminate the location choices of emerging firms. Audretsch and Feldman (1996) determined that innovative industries have a shorter cluster radius. Many scholars emphasize the importance of face-to-face interactions in productivity, asserting that locations facilitating “close contact and exchanging ideas” generate economic growth and social values more efficiently (Feldman & Choi, 2015; Glaeser et al., 2010). These scholars focus on a more granular scale than traditional industrial cluster literature, centering on quality of life and urban ammenties that attract skilled workers rather than solely on the business interest of firms.

Florida (2008) argues that firms relocate with human capital, underscoring the importance of creating the desired quality of place that attract human capital. This argument inspired many scholars to outline a range of urban amenities that appeal to knowledge workers and the creative class (Chatterji et al., 2014; Florida, 2002).

However, the relationship between firms and individulas is complex. People might choose to move to a particular city primarily due to abundant job opportunities, with urban amenities serving as secondary incentives influencing their preferences for a specific location within the city (Darchen & Tremblay, 2010). Therefore, I designed this study to focus in one particular city, Shanghai, where the neighborhood scale provides a more suitable lens for examining how the quality of space and urban amenities influences the location choice of firms and individuals.

2.3. Theoretical Frameworks of Quality of Place

Extensive existing literature delves into how non-market public goods, such as affordable housing, transportation, healthcare, education, leisure facilities, retail, and natural amenities render certain places more attractive to the creative class and knowledge workers (Florida, 2002, 2008; Glaeser et al., 2001; Insch & Florek, 2008; Kunzmann, 2012; Yigitcanlar et al., 2007).

Although many scholars have emphasized the importance of specific urban amenities to the creative industry and entrepreneurship, few empirical studies have tested these theories in Chinese cities. Simultaneously, an increasing number of cities are adopting the concepts of innovation districts or knowledge-based urban development for urban redevelopment or new town planning projects. Without an accurate understanding of the mechanism underlying the innovation ecosystem, these concepts merely serve as buzzwords to attract the support of the central government and brand projects for mass media consumption. Thus, this paper is one of the first attempts to illuminate the design and planning of knowledge-based urban development in China.

Most literature is grounded in the context of the U.S. and other Western countries and CIS, specifically coworking spaces are argued to have a strong influence on downtown redevelopment (Jamal, 2018). Taking into account the cultural differences between China and Western countries, this paper revisits recent urban development models in China, which are tied closely to the nation’s economic and political agenda. The context provided by these recent three development models aids in constructing this paper’s analytical framework.

2.3.1. Danwei

The “danwei” represented the “basic unit of urban life” during the central planning period in socialist China. As Bray defines it (Bray, 2005), “danwei is a generic term denoting the Chinese socialist workplace and the specific range of practices that it embodies, which marks a common system shared by all urban Chinese workplaces.”  A typical danwei model is architecturally designed as a walled or fenced compound with controlled access points (gates). A danwei complex integrates three types of spaces: spaces for living, spaces for working and spaces for social services. While these spaces have distinct functions, they remain physically interconnected or juxtaposed (Fig. 2). 

In general, the danwei merges life, work and play within a singular city unit. Through spatial design, it fosters robust cohesion within the commune, seamlessly blending life and work into a unified existence.

2.3.2. High-tech Development Zone

Following the open door policy of 1978, China concentrated its efforts on revitalizing and reforming science and technology development. In 1988, the Torch Program was initiated to accelerate this sector’s development. Adhering to the theory of industrial agglomeration and taking inspiration from models like Silicon Valley and Route 128, high-tech development zones (HIDZs) were introduced in urban peripheries where large green land parcels were available. Its design prioritizes car usage, which are featured by large blocks and wide roads. Single-use zoning is employed to facilitate the agglomeration of high-tech research and production. Most of HIDZ were located on farmlands isolated from the urban center. Incubators, as an early form of CIS, were mainly located in HIDZ or industrial parks.

The spatial layout of HIDZ represents a radical departure from traditional Chinese city layouts or the danwei configuration. Streetscapes, once vibrant arenas for daily social interactions, lost their distinctive socializing characteristics. A clear segregation emerged between living spaces, workspaces, and public spaces, becoming the primary flaws of HIDZs. “Big-box” shopping malls were introduced as a substitute for social spaces. However, unlike danweis or traditional urban spaces-where an intimate building scale facilitates encounters and social interactions – the HIDZ’s built environment inhibits everyday social activities due to reduced foot traffic and difficult access to social spaces.

2.3.3. Knowledge-based Urban Development

Knowledge-based urban development (KBUD), also known as innovation districts, has emerged as a primary economic strategy for numerous city governments. While the Chinese government originally advocated for CIS rather than innovation districts, many recent master plans have emerged the buzzword “innovation and entrepreneurship”. Diverging from previous urban typologies, KBUD places a greater emphasis on characteristics centered around individuals. Two key elements are  the quality of urban life, and the availability of social spaces for interaction.

According to Katz and Wagner (Katz & Wagner, 2014), the critical elements of innovation districts include integration with their urban context, disruption of organizational hierarchies, fostering interactions and collaboration between industries and other knowledge communities, encouraging face-to-face interactions and ultimately promoting technological advancement.

As describes, “Knowledge community precincts in a city are not ivory towers in the urban jungle, nor communities gated against visitors and burglars. They are, ideally, catalytic locations for urban life. They are experimental life spaces for the next urban generation and laboratories for testing new forms of work-leisure-home lifestyles.”

From a design perspective, KBUD necessitates a compact spatial layout to increase density; integration with existing urban fabric; connectivity to public transportation; a diversity of programs and functions as well as a diverse population. Further, it needs to promote walkability and bikability, and provide public spaces and social areas for interaction, communication and collaboration (Katz & Wagner, 2014; Kunzmann, 2012; Yigitcanlar, 2010).

The concept of “third places”, coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg, refers to those locations where people spend time apart from home (first place) and work (second place). These areas, including cafes, parks, and communal spaces, provide settings for idea exchange, relationship-building, and broader creative interactions. As such, the advent of CIS developments in Chinese cities could reestablish the proximity between workspaces, living spaces, and these crucial third places featuring what  Yigitcanlar (2010) describes as “the new forms of work-leisure-home lifestyles”. Through the network constructed by CIS and other types of third places, spaces for social interactions and the sense of community will also resume in everyday life in Chinese cities.

To conclude, as we delve into the analysis of urban development models in China, it’s crucial to acknowledge that while many scholars have pointed out the importance of specific urban amenities to the creative industry and entrepreneurship, very few empirical studies have been conducted in Chinese cities to investigate these theories. This gap in research becomes all the more significant as more cities globally, including those in China, are adopting the concept of innovation districts or knowledge-based urban development for their urban redevelopment or new town planning projects.

However, without a precise understanding of the mechanisms underlying the innovation ecosystem, the popular terminologies associated with it often end up being used merely as titles to garner central government support and to brand projects to the mass media. This reality underscores the need for in-depth research into the subject.

To this end, this paper serves as one of the pioneering efforts to draw conclusions from both existing literature and current practices in CIS to illuminate the design and planning of knowledge-based urban development in China. Through the exploration of urban amenities that are crucial to CIS clusters, I seek to provide a more comprehensive perspective on the phenomenon and practical guidance for future developments.

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3. Data and Methodology

The data collection of this study consists of two parts. The first part of the data collection is interviews with CIS users and managers. The result of this part, along with the literature review helps to establish the conceptual framework of the statistical model that examines the relationship between urban amenities and CIS clusters. The second part of the data collection is to construct the statistical model, which relies on multiple online sources to obtain the location of CIS and urban amenities.

3.1. Interview

At the beginning of 2018, the author went for a site visit to several CIS. Interviews were conducted with 18 space users and 15 space managers. Space users claim restaurants and convenient stores are the most visited among CIS users. 72.2% of the users claim to be frequent visitors to convenient stores and restaurants. 50% of the users claim to be frequent visitors to coffee shops. 11 out of 17 users live in rental units, and their primary transportation method is by metro. Here (Figure 4) is a summary of the interview results, which will help construct the conceptual framework in the next chapter.

3.2. The Statistical Model

3.2.1. Data

Data for the statistical model was primarily sourced from multiple online sources. The primary dataset for CIS was scraped from Ctoutiao in 2018, comprising 716 entries with name and address. However, among these 716 entries, some were missing while some others did not meet the CIS definition utilized in this study. Consequently, the author initiated a four-step verification process to refine the dataset.

Firstly, entries such as high-tech development zones, tech-parks, creative industrial clusters, and office parks were removed because they do not conform to this paper’s definition of CIS. Secondly, the author  conducted site visits to confirm that locations listed as CIS on the website operate as CIS according to the central government’s definition. As such, observations that contradicted this were removed.

In the third step, the author noticed missing locations from specific CIS chain brands, like People Square and FT Town, among others. To fill these gaps, the author visited the respective brand websites and scraped all the location data to add to the list. Lastly, the list did not include entries from international coworking brands such as WeWork. These were subsequently added to the dataset. The final list consisted of 361 collective innovation spaces, complete with names, geolocations, and brand names.

The UDparty online data platform, which provides access to rental and POI data in Shanghai, was also utilized. The rental data includes street address, floor area and price. The POI data has address and categories.

3.2.2. Model Specification

In this model, the dependent variable measures the accessibility of a given CIS to other CIS within a walking distance. The higher the accessibility to other CIS within walking distance, the more likely that the CIS is located within a cluster that promotes regular face-to-face interactions crucial for stimulating innovation. Most literature regards 1000m as a standard threshold for walking distance.

The independent variables have been chosen following the theoretical framework of live, work and play. For living spaces, the indicators include accessibility to housing and rental units. The working spaces are gauged by accessibility to anchor companies (as per the POI dataset), IT companies, distance to the nearest university, and accessibility to research institutes. Social spaces are evaluated based on the accessibility to coffee shops, bars, parks, Chinese and exotic restaurants. Control variables include accessibility to restaurants, entertainment facilities, metro stations, retail and distance to the city center^[1].

The gravity index is used to measure accessibility.

represents a node i at a radius of r is defined as follow (Sevtsuk & Mekonnen, 2012):

     (2)

ℬ is the exponent that controls the effect of distance decay on each shortest path between i and j, d[i,j] is the distance between i and j. In this paper,  ℬ is set to be 0.002 following (Sevtsuk, 2017). W[j] is the weight of a specific destination j that is within the defined radius r from i. Due to data limitations, this paper will not consider any weights for the destinations.

[1] People Plaza as the city center.

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4. Results and Discussion

From Fig. 6, it’s evident that CIS clusters are primarily located in downtown areas, certain high tech parks, and some recently developed knowledge-base innovation districts. Although the map provides a broad spatial pattern of these places, the statistical model will offer a more in-depth understanding of the mechanisms underlying CIS clustering.

The dependent variable of table 2 is the gravity index of CIS, which indicates its degree of clustering. Table 2 presents four models: live, work, play and live-work-play. The live model only includes parameters associated with living spaces and control variables. The work model only includes parameters associated with workspaces and control variables. The play model only includes parameters associated with social spaces and control variables. The live-work-play model includes all parameters and control variables.

The adjusted r-square value in the first three models reveals that the work model consistently has the highest predictive power on CIS clusters. This result implies that industry influences CIS clusters more significantly than the other two factors. This finding is consistent with the literature (Darchen & Tremblay, 2010; Storper & Scott, 2009) that career choices among knowledge workers/ or the creative class have a greater influence than the quality of space. The adjusted r-square of the live-work-play model is higher than the work model. This indicates although industry foundation plays a vital role in the clustering of CIS, the quality of space also has a positive effect. The following section will examine each parameter in the model in more detail.

4.1. Industry Foundation & Agglomeration Effect – the Work Model

In terms of industry, two factors significantly contribute to the clustering of CIS. When accessibility to IT firms increases by one unit, the gravity index of the CIS increases by 0.162. When the distance to the nearest university decreases by one kilometer, the gravity index of the CIS increases by 0.4. These results indicate that CIS tend to cluster near IT companies and universities. While anchor companies and research institutions are often considered as important institutions for industrial clusters in literature, they do not have a notable impact on the clustering of CIS.

The effect of universities on innovation industries is well documented(Chatterji et al., 2014; Pittaway et al., 2020). A prevalent understanding is the potential for innovation spillover from universities. Being near a university means more cooperation with professors and research labs, expediting the commercialization of innovation. Another potential factor driving CIS clustering around universities comes from the policy side. The mass innovation and entrepreneurship initiative encourage college graduates to start their own companies. College students are potential users for CIS, and many CIS are jointly funded by universities and government, meaning universities are likely to provide space for CIS. Moreover, being near universities means affordability and accessibility to knowledge for CIS users. For instance, one CIS user stated the advantages of being close to universities include access to affordable meals in the university cafeteria the opportunity to attend lectures and talks hosted by the university, which are especially beneficial for early entrepreneurs and high-skilled workers.

Despite the influence of the IT industry being seldom documented in the literature, accessibility to IT companies remained strongly significant in all robutness checks, and had a relatively high coefficient. As in many news articles, The rapid expansion of the IT industry in China in recent years has been a phenomenon recorded (Wang & Loo, 2017). The IT industry’s growth rate surpasses other industries and has generated a large number of startups, such as platforms related to the shared economy, e-commerce, and also new media (The Economics, 2018). Therefore, IT startups are considered as the major users of CIS. CIS tend to cluster in an area where it has a high density of IT companies in order to gain access to a larger pool of potential users.

4.2. Affordable Living Options – the Live Model

Regarding living spaces, accessibility to rental units has a positive effect on the clustering of CIS. This statistical finding aligns with the interview data, which shows 64.7% CIS users are renters. Results from Table 2 suggest that when the gravity index between CIS and rental units increases by one, the gravity index of CIS will increase by 0.041. These empirical results suggest that CIS tend to cluster in places where there are more available rental units.

One explanation for this is that many CIS users are recent college who cannot afford to purchase housing units in Shanghai. Another explanation is that many entrepreneurs consider their time to be extremely valuable. Given the intense market competition, many entrepreneurs do not have regular working hours or weekends off. Consequently, entrepreneurs cannot afford long commuting hours and being able to live nearby is critically important.

It should be noted that there is a limitation in the data due to the lack of inclusion of the subway network in the calculation. As the interviews indicate that 70.6% of CIS users commute by metro, when calculating the gravity index between CIS and housing units, the subway network should ideally be included in the calculation. However, due to limitation in the subway network data, this paper only considers the accessible rental units within the 1000m walking radius.

4.3. Social Spaces

For social spaces, the accessibility to coffee shops, bars, and Chinese restaurants positively influences the clustering of CIS, while parks seem to have a negative effect. While findings for coffee shops and restaurants are in line with existing literature (Green, 2014; Jackson, 2017; van Oort et al., 2003), the impact of parks contradicts one paper by Yigitcanlar (Yigitcanlar et al., 2007). There are three potential explanations for this discrepancy.

First, Yigitcanlar’s study focused on Australian cities, where have a different cultural context. Second, many parks in Shanghai are large, often isolated by major infrastructures, such as highways, resulting in lowperceived accessibility. Lastly, office buildings near parks typically come at a higher cost. Startups or CIS users are less likely to pay a premium for proximity to parks or open spaces, leading to a  lack of CIS clustering around these areas.

In China, restaurants often serve as primary locations for meetings and business interactions, making them  important social space for entrepreneurs. Unlike parks, restaurants, bars and coffee shops are privately owned public spaces. Among these semi-public spaces, bars have the highest coeffient, suggesting they play a significant role in social interaction. Bars provide a less formal setting than resturants. In Chinese culture, dinning in a restaurant comes with many unspoken rules regarding seating and drinking, whereas bars do not typically have such rulesand are favoured by young people for their vibrant and relaxed atmosphere.

The model highlights the increasing importance of various types of social spaces. They offer the quality of space favoured by knowledge workers and the creative class. Therefore, CIS tend to cluster in places that strike a good balance between social space, work opportunities, and affordable housing.

4.4. Discussion

The previous section took a retrospective look at different urban development models across varying time points to understand the Chinese context for constructing the statistical model. Now, I want to revisit these urban development models with a different focus, especially on their planning process and social implications.

Urban development models aren’t merely tools for city growth and economic advancement. They are also social constructs that reflect society’s values, priorities, and aspirations. The planning process, as well as the resulting urban environment, can shape societal structures, cultural values, and quality of life.

The danwei system, as described above, can be seen as an intricate social and physical unit that includes both the residential and work elements. It’s a concept that integrates many facets of life – work, social interactions, and all aspects of living – within one structure. People in this system are colleagues, neighbors, and friends, creating a multifaceted network of relationships.

The structure of a danwei, as characterized by Bjorklund, is essentially multifunctional, where workspaces can morph into social spaces, and household events can spill over into common areas (Bjorklund, 1986). There’s no stark delineation between different types of activities; instead, all aspects of life seamlessly blend and interact with each other. This gives rise to a uniquely intertwined socio-spatial environment where social interactions often occur in transitional spaces such as roads, alleys, or hallways.

The danwei design also fosters a strong sense of community. Its intimate scale and gated complex create a shared identity and communal bond among its residents. However, this shared identity can also work as a double-edged sword, as the physical and administrative barriers of a danwei can isolate its community from the rest of the city, potentially limiting exposure to diverse social and cultural experiences.

Although the planning of HIDZ have guidelines for allotting public spaces such as parks, community centers, recreation centers, the accessibility of these spaces can often be a challenge. Planning regulations might stipulate a certain number of these public facilities per population count; however, this does not necessarily translate to their effective use. .

The issue of accessibility arises when these public spaces are situated on large parcels of land, often bounded by expansive road networks, which effectively means they serve a much larger catchment area. This leads to people residing in HIDZs often needing to drive considerable distances to access these spaces, which should ideally be close to their homes and easily accessible on foot or by public transit. This inaccessibility tends to inhibit regular use of these spaces, consequently stifling opportunities for social interactions and community-building.

In essence, the placement and distribution of public spaces in HIDZs can often result in spatial segregation, reducing the sense of community among residents. It also highlights a common urban planning challenge: how to design and implement public spaces that not only meet quantitative criteria, but are also readily accessible, encourage social interactions, and enhance community cohesion.

Historically, urban planning in China heavily relied on metrics, with the focus primarily on meeting the basic human needs of everyday life. More recent practices, however, have adopted more comprehensive and fine-grained approaches. CIS tend to cluster in areas where there is a comprehensive ecosystem in place. They can succeed in various ways through a sophisticated approach, as opposed to following a simple checklist.

One of the unique aspects of the CIS development model lies not only in its fine-grained scale, allowing for a more organic planning approach, but also in its nested social space that helps foster a sense of community among various groups of people. During my visits to several CIS in Shanghai, I observed that different spaces within the CIS serve different social functions. The lounge areas are generally accessible to the public and often host events such as pitches, demo days, and lunch lectures with entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. I noted during my weekday afternoon visits to People Squared and Kr space that the lounge area was bustling with people meeting in various groups. The unique design of the public space in places like Mixspace also attracts visitors. Moreover, many CIS provide not only lounge areas but also more private common areas exclusive to their users, offering a peaceful space for rest and reflection.

At the neighborhood scale, private domains such as restaurants, coffee shops, and bars complement the CIS, creating nested social spaces with varying levels of privacy and accessibility (See Fig.9). These nested social spaces foster community formation, adding another layer of vibrancy to these urban areas.

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5. Conclusion

This study explores the location preferences of CIS in Shanghai, focusing on how these decisions impact social spaces and urban living. The statistical model used in this research offers valuable insights into the decision-making process of CIS developers and their motivations for clustering in certain areas. Based on the theory that CIS developers select locations based on nearby amenities that appeal to their primary users—startups and young entrepreneurs—the model’s results largely corroborate the existing literature, confirming that factors like industrial heritage, social interaction spaces, and proximity to universities positively impact CIS clustering (Audretsch & Feldman, 1996; Florida, 2002; Glaeser et al., 2001).

However, the model also reveals some inconsistencies with existing theories. For instance, the negative correlation between the presence of parks and open spaces and CIS clustering contradicts Yigitcanlar’s argument about the importance of outdoor activities to young entrepreneurs (Yigitcanlar et al., 2007). This discrepancy opens a new avenue for further investigation.

Unique to Shanghai’s context, the model reveals a strong correlation between the presence of IT companies and CIS clustering. Additionally, the model shows that increased access to rental units positively impacts CIS clustering, offering a new insight into the locational preferences of CIS developments in Shanghai. Complementing the statistical model, this paper also incorporates data from interviews, surveys, observations, and mappings to more thoroughly understand the social implications of CIS clusters. The CIS model, integrated with ‘third places’ like coffee shops and restaurants, encourages a renewed sense of community and public engagement. It blends with the urban fabric, dissolves boundaries, fosters networks, and stimulates diversity and conversations among various social groups. This integrated, multidisciplinary approach, combining quantitative modelling with qualitative analysis, allows for a more nuanced understanding of how CIS developments influence social dynamics and urban living in Shanghai.

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About Author

Haijing Liu is a Ph.D. candidate in Community and Regional Planning at the University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation research employs a mixed-methods approach to unravel the dynamics of the U.S. green job market, focusing on its distribution and growth across metropolitan areas. Liu’s work sheds light on significant disparities within this sector, emphasizing the underrepresentation and wage inequities faced by African Americans, Latinos, and women. Her research, deeply rooted in the ‘three-E’ paradigm—environment, economy, and equity—provides valuable insights into the interplay between institutional capacities and local economic structures. This approach not only highlights disparities but also suggests pathways for more equitable and sustainable development. Beyond her dissertation, she is actively engaged in exploring wider economic development and sustainability issues, with a keen focus on addressing gender disparities in the green job market and examining the broader societal readiness for sustainability transitions.

Rahanat Ara Jafar, Farhana Hoque, Shahriar Sakib Chowdhury

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Abstract

In city planning, both infrastructure and landscape are inseparable parts. To make decisions on city planning, accountable authorities and users must participate equally. The lack of harmonious participation in the decision-making processes of both parties can lead to chaos or a state of conflict in urban life, which eventually turns into urban movements of general users to persuade the Government to reclaim their identity. The study introduces citizens’ rights to the City and the pivotal role of public participation in eliminating or slowing down unethical approaches in city planning when nature is interrupted. This research examines how the public, environmentalists, urban planners, and architects responded to the proposed construction of a 100-seat medical college, a nursing school, and a 500-bed hospital on six acres of property in the CRB (Central Railway Building) hill in Chattogram, Bangladesh. The CRB Hospital project will directly destroy the natural habitat for the 197 indigenous plant species in the CRB area, with at least nine endangered trees evolved over a hundred years and animals that are reliant on the resources that trees provide, which are labeled as ecocide and did not get the clearance of Environmental Impact Assessment(Rio-Declaration on Environment and Development). Besides, the residents of Chattogram voiced their displeasure, as CRB is not only a green landscape but also a place of nostalgia for the City’s cultural identity. Finally, the research would try to depict how a logical protest leads to receiving environmental clearance, as it would disrupt natural biodiversity.

Keywords: City Planning, Ecocide, Cultural Heritage, Urban Protest, Legal Rights.

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1. Introduction

In recent times, urban citizens have shown interest in the decision-making for city planning. It takes place as a result of a fresh wave of activism that is manifesting itself in cities all over the world(Domaradzka, 2018). When local activists engage in urban politics and influence decision-making by legal means and active participation, urban activism has become an increasingly significant component of urban governance processes. According to Purcell, it has increasingly gained recognition as one of the critical components of sustainable and democratic urban development (Purcell, 2003).

The paper’s aim is to describe the critical role that citizen involvement plays in preventing or reducing the use of unethical city planning techniques. To this aim, it depicts a situation in Chattogram where a proposed construction decision of a hospital in the CRB (Central Railway Building) area reclaims environmental clearance because of a logical protest.

The CRB area is a beautiful natural location in the city. A number of century-old trees may be found throughout the hills, valleys, and hillocks surrounding CRB. The region is known as Chattogram’s oxygen hub and serves as a natural habitat for various wild animals, plants, and birds. In the morning and evening, people in the region go running, and many others visit CRB to get some fresh air. There are other cultural celebrations. Concerned citizens protested against the idea and voiced their disapproval of the development, centering CRB (Star, 2021).

The research focuses on how urban protests for the CRB area change ecocide planning decisions. It also attempts to acknowledge the importance of conserving nature. Overall, the outcome of the study is acknowledging the fact that claiming citizens’ rights logically can influence decision-making while city planning—consequently, a short overview of the fact that citizens’ urban activism varies in different contexts.

2. Methodology

The research uses a literature review from two different perspectives to conduct this study. Firstly, this study has been done with secondary data, which unfolds the history of city planning in terms of public participation or public protest through the urban planning perspective. In the second part of the literature review, we have explored the legal side of public involvement or protest based on our study area. Adopting a multi-methodological approach, we tried to compare some case studies to determine the outcome of raising voices. The input data in this study are facts, laws, and interviews published in newspapers, and views from planners on the importance of public involvement during city planning.Some factors were analyzed here as key elements for research, i.e., City planning, Public participation in decision making, Right to the city ~ Urban protest. Ecocidal planning is also being discussed in the process of research. All the factors justify both the stated part of the literature review. The conceptual framework [Figure:01] is given below.

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3. Literature Review

3.1. City Planning

Throughout humankind’s history, the city has been the meeting place for people where humans from many cultures have come together in public spaces. Public space is an essential aspect of a good and well-functioning city. Old cities were constructed as people moved on their way to the limit of their eyesight utilizing the surrounding environment. First comes life, then the space around them, and lastly, the built environment; life, space, and development that’s the ultimate order for growth. In that manner, many great cities give rise to excellent infrastructure. City planning involves a whole interconnected system around humanity and focuses on the quality of life in cities, suburbs, towns, and villages. Many aspects including the environment, economy, culture and transportation, need to be addressed on people’s demands while planning a city. The city’s deficiencies need to be adapted and designed for the future from the perspective of empathy. Otherwise, city planning will become a nightmare for the city’s distant future.

3.2. Public Participation in Decision Making 

“A good city is like a good party – people stay longer than really necessary because they are enjoying themselves.” ― Jan Gehl

Across the developing world, cities are expanding in size and number, dramatically raising the demand for affordable, rapid food supply for their increased urban populations. These phenomena act as the catalysts of the construction of roads and other infrastructure, resulting in the slow demise of nature. The projected length of increased paved roads is 25 million kilometersglobally from 2010 to 2050, equal to the global rotation of more than 600 times(Laurance, 2014)..Numerous infrastructure-related decisions need to be reviewed or improved.For instance, the total area of wilderness is rapidly disappearing across the planet, 70% of the world’s forests are found within one kilometer of a forest edge(Haddad, 2015),the rate of tropical forest fragmentation is sharply rising, and only 10% of the original intact habitat exists in half of the world’s biodiversity hotspots(Sloan, 2014). Many animal species are declining as the human population grows, particularly in the tropics, and protected areas are becoming more isolated and at risk of poachers and unlawful encroachment.To establish plural power in the urban planning scene, two diverse parties, including both official and unofficial ones, must be able to communicate with one another.Arguments in support of greater public participation frequently highlight the advantages of the process and the belief that engaged individuals are preferable to idle ones; Some of India’s best-known and most powerful recent movements arise from local grassroots interests, including many movements that are against externally imposed industrialization and forced displacement. These include Singur and Nandigram in West Bengal, the Kalinganagar, anti-Posco and anti-Vedanta movements in Odisha, and the anti-nuclear power station movements in Jaitapur, Kudankulam, and most recently at Mithi Vridhi in Gujarat(Padel, 2012). These and many other movements have in common opposition to takeovers of land and resources by corporations, ruthlessly introduced to local areas as in the national interest, yet locally perceived as undermining the highly evolved livelihood systems of communities rooted on the land(Padel, 2012).

3.3. Urban Protest

“Cities are humans’ shoddy attempts at making ecosystems.”

― Elliot Connor,Human Nature: How To Be A Better Animal

Urban development brings about enormous social, economic, and environmental shifts. Urban areas are the only places where the emergence of socially destructive processes is more obvious than anywhere else. These negative impacts mostly satisfy a few percentages of privileged communities while suppressing disempowered poor or middle class communities. However, it shouldn’t be surprising that some of the most prominent social disputes today are related to urban concerns and frequently revolve around socio-spatial demands and rights. Cities are increasingly being shaped by a profit-oriented logic, making them less livable and less tailored to the demands of their inhabitants (Domaradzka, 2018).Unofficial parties may hold protests to persuade the government to reconsider its plans in order to fix the absence of public participation in planning and decision-making processes. Some argue that these movements paved the way for the emergence of distinct civil society actors, most notably urban social movements or urban protests, which, according to Castells, serve as catalysts for change in the urban system(Domaradzka, 2018). According to Prujit(Pruijt, 2004) ‘Urban movements are social movements that aspire to give urban dwellers some measure of control over their urban surroundings. The constructed environment, the urban social fabric, and the local political system make up the urban environment’

In order to gain social legitimacy, modern urban movements seek a “Right to the City” and establish democratic, solidarity-based places rooted in local cultures. Mumbai city witnessed a significant civil society protest against the planned metro car-shed project in Aarey, a densely forested city region, in the latter part of 2019(Staff, 2020). The Mumbai metropolitan region development authority (MMRDA) seized a substantial percentage of the aarey forest to construct this shed. The primary source of dispute was the MMRDA’s eradication of up to 2000 trees in a single day(Staff, 2020). In the era of climate change, removal of greenery made environmentally conscious urban citizens anxious but eventually it took the form of an “Urban Protest”. Though the destruction of the metropolis’ green lung has already been done, the project eventually got scrapped on the grounds of controversy. And this event awakens the citizens to appeal for their right to the city. 

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4. Study Profile Area

The second-largest city in Bangladesh is Chattogram. The city has seen significant physical changes due to urbanization as a result of overpopulation(Robiul Hussain et al., 2016). One of the changes due to overpopulation is the lack of open space for its citizens(Jafrin & Beza, 2018) The study area, Central Railway Building (CRB), is an open public space which is situated in the heart of Chattogram City, which is surrounded by a highly dense civic area.

4.1. Physiographic Study of The Site Area

The study area, locally known as which stands for Central Railway Building (CRB), is located in the coordinate of 22°20’35” N latitude and longitude. It is located under Ward no 15, and according to the Detail area plan, it is under DPZ (Department of Planning and Zoning)-03(CDA, 2009)The zone includes areas constructed under British administration. The Military and Bangladesh Railway are the primary landowners at the location. The majority of the zone is made up of hills. Topographically This zone is divided into hills and valleys [Figure:02]. The total site area is approximately 174 acres(CDA, Detail area Plan, 2009). According to the Detail Area Plan 2009, all of the city’s hills will be subject to special controls and continue to be designated as “strategic open space.” The site is a protected area for culture, heritage, and the environment.

4.1.1. Land Use Mapping of The Site

The existing land use map shows that the site area is composed of different land use patterns in the figure 03. As per the land use Plan, the whole CRB area infrastructures are divided into two main parts: Government Buildings (residential, office, health and services) and infrastructure for public recreation (restaurants, shops, open plaza, social club, and many others). For instance, Commercial buildings are mostly restaurants. Besides, there are many open spaces for public gatherings, specifically a public plaza known as Shirish Tola [Figure:03(b)].

Other Significant amenities are social clubs and community facilities are The Chattogram Club, the Ladies club, and the Institution of Engineers Bangladesh (IEB) [Figure:03(a)]. In contrast, few religious buildings and hospitals serve the community. Also, a Dhaka-Chattogram rail track leads to the railway station on this site. No Industrial development is found in this zone.

This location is significant historically. The Central Railway Building (CRB) is located in Chattogram’s picturesque hilly region. There are staff quarters, lodges, a rest house, and bungalows for railway officials. In addition, the CRB houses a Sonali Bank branch, a police station, a post office, and a public restroom.

The site also has many public gatherings space, namely MA Aziz stadium, the outer stadium, Shishu park, The Zia Smriti museum, Hotel Radisson Blu, and a few commercial buildings. Major playgrounds, Polo ground field where exposure happens every year.

4.1.2. Circulation and Road Networking

The city can easily be reached from the site. The Ispahani circle from the north-west side, the Circuit House circle from the north-east side, the Tigerpass circle from the south-west side, and the Kodomtoli circle from the east side are four different intersections with which it has connected [Figure:04]. On weekdays, there is no traffic congestion on the interior road. On conventionally significant days (Pohela-Boishakh), however, there are restrictions on vehicular accessibility. The site’s internal road network is utilized not just for access to the site but also for passing through other locations.

The internal tertiary road network develops and preserves the topography that is depicted in the current land use plan [Figure:03]. Some portions of government buildings have limited public access because they are restricted areas. However, there is a shortage of adequate street illumination because many of the site’s areas are used as public gathering places.

4.1.3. Zoning and Stakeholders Activity

In the study area different activities has occurred in different zone. The zoning boundaries are marked in the Figure 05. People are mostly congregating in the public open zone, public commercial zone, and public recreational zone.Additionally, the Circuit House node is the most often used node point to reach the CRB region and among all accessibility node, CRB node is the most crowded one.

This location is used differently by different age groups[Figure:06]. The activities vary according to the days as well. Weekends saw the most traffic in the CRB zone. Also, residents who live near the railroad and in nearby residential areas, frequent use the area for recreation on a daily basis.  On the other hand, the location transforms into a celebratory area during important occasions like Pohelaboishakh, Pohelafalgun, sports programs, and fair days.

4.2. Historical, Cultural and Traditional Value of the CRB

4.2.1. Historical Value

The British constructed several structures during their rule to aid in their administrative duties; one of the few structures still standing that chronicles Chattogram’s 200 years of British colonial control is the Central Railway Building (CRB). The location has the name of the structure. Before India was divided into two countries in 1947, the British seized the administration of Chattogram from Nawab Mir Qasim in 1760. CRB is one of the British-constructed structures to facilitate their administrative tasks during their rule. Recently, it has served as the general manager of Bangladesh Railway’s administrative headquarters. One of the earliest structures in the port city, the building was finished in 1872(CDA, Detail area Plan, 2009)(Star, The Daily Star, 2015).

From to railroad sources, the building was once a two-story construction with 34 rooms on the ground floor and 33 on the first. The southern half was expanded to a three-story building, while the eastern and northern portions were expanded to a four-story building in 1918. The structure is organized into various departments, including administration, engineering, estate, and audit, and it resembles a massive labyrinth with numerous rooms, halls, spiraling stairs, domes, and porticoes(Tribune, Dhaka Tribune, 2020).

During the Liberation War in 1971, the aerial bombing caused damage to a part of the building; nonetheless, it was restored using the original design. In the center of the old building’s south block is a two-story carriage porch with two gorgeous gothic arches. The inside of the building has a foyer with a hemispherical dome on top. Additionally, the previous structure contains a tower in the southwest corner with a spiral stairway and a tiny dome reminiscent of Mughal architecture. The structure displays Chattogram City’s scenic beauty and British colonial architecture(Star, The Daily Star, 2015).

The historian Shamshul Hossain, author of “Eternal Chattogram,” a book about the history of Chattogram, and former Chattogram University Museum curator said about the structure, “The historical building is not in good shape. Rainwater leaks through the roof in some places of the building. We should protect the building for the progeny”.However, the archeology department has not yet designated the historic structure as protected. The government may publish an official gazette designating any antiquity as protected following the Antiquities Act 1968 [amended in 1976] (Tribune, Dhaka Tribune, 2020).

4.2.2. Cultural And Traditional Value

The site has its own traditional and cultural values. Bengali people celebrated their traditional days (Victory Day, Pahela-Falgun; the first day of Spring, Independence Day, Pahela-Baishakh) here. Every year, Chattogram City’s Pahela-Baishakh celebrations take place in the nearby CRB Shirish Tala, which serves as a focus of celebration for festivals. On the event of the first day of the Bangla calendar, hundreds of people congregate here to watch the Bolikhela[wrestling match] (Tribune, Dhaka Tribune, 2020). For all those reasons, this area is the most vibrant in terms of culture.

Every day, especially in the afternoon, a large number of visitors are drawn to the old building due to its incredible architecture and serene atmosphere. The building is set against a beautiful backdrop of surrounding hills covered in various flowering trees(Tribune, Dhaka Tribune, 2020). In addition, on every vacation or religious festival day, the site is used as a recreational space for the public. Furthermore, finding sizeable open space in the middle of the city is hard. So, the space is considered a breathing space for every citizen. On the other hand, there is much green, especially plants that produce wood. The space is the hope for the city to hold heritage, cultural life, traditional value, and green.

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5. Protest and Triumph over Ecocidal Planning

A contract between Bangladesh Railway and United Enterprise Ltd for the construction of a five hundred beds multi-specialized hospitals and a Hundred seats medical colleges in Chatoogram’s CRB area, which is a heritage site recognized by the Chattogram Development Authority (CDA), was signed in March 2020 (Tribune, Dhaka Tribune, 2021).. The choice will be harmful to the ecosystem. Citizens of Chattogram, therefore, have a justification for protesting the coming ecocide (Star, The Daily Star, 2021).

The citizens of Chattogram protested against the ecocidal planning and raised their voices against it, eventually succeeding. Several groups, including the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association, the Bangladesh PoribeshAndolon and Association for Land Reform and Development, Nijera Kori, and the PoribeshBachaoAndolon, have sent legal notices to the responsible authorities and demand to declare CRB a “special biodiversity conservation area” following the law. Ecocide law is demanded by a Bangladeshi panel to safeguard the environment.The Chattogram divisional coordinator of Bangladesh Railway ShramikKarmachariSangram Parishad, SK Bari said, “We are not against building a hospital, but we are opposing the decision to build it at that location,” (Star, The Daily Star, 2021).

To make ecocide a crime under domestic law, the Ministry of Environment, Forests, and Climate Change suggested establishing a new legal framework. Saber Hossain Chowdhury, the committee chairman, said: “Just as genocide is treated as a crime, the destruction of an ecosystem also warrants the same treatment. This is because, without an ecosystem, none of us can survive”(bdnews24, 2021).

Dr. Mahafujur Rahman, the liberation warrior, and CRB RokkhaMoncha convener, said, “We are continuing the agitation to save CRB which is a heritage declared by Chittagong Development Authority.” (Express, 2021)

Teachers and former and current students of Chittagong University’s Fine Arts Institute protested the building of a hospital at the CRB by painting pictures. “People usually do not live without a functioning lung. CRB is exactly the place known as the lungs of the entire city’s fauna” (Tribune, Dhaka Tribune, 2021). 

Chief Engineer Kazi Hassan Bin Shams of the Chittagong Development Authority (CDA) stated: “CRB falls under the protected area category as a Heritage Zone. There are policies that do not allow any commercial establishments in the CRB area”  (Tribune, Dhaka Tribune, 2021).

. However, Kumira has been suggested as a replacement by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on the Ministry of Railways. Hearing the alternate site suggestion, Prof Anupam Sen, president of CRB Protection Movement and vice-chancellor of Premier University says, “This proposal is the result of a long-running movement”(Tribune, Dhaka Tribune, 2022).

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6. Verses of Legislation Vs Ignorance

6.1. Ecocide And Degrading Environmental Factors

Without healthy ecosystems, life on Earth cannot continue.The destruction of trees impacts the food chain necessary for human survival by reducing the biodiversity in the area.Natural disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, and heatwaves are becoming more frequent and severe due to global warming, damaging nearby cities and developing nations and mandating tremendous efforts to construct and sustain functional areas(Readfearn, 2022).

Ecocide is frequently committed to making places for urbanization or new industrial locations far less significant than forests, fertile soil, and clean water sources.Climate change and catastrophic events are already producing environmental emergencies, and ecocide exacerbates the effects of Mother Nature’s neglect. The industrialization and exponential development of the human population are to blame for this disregard.(Safdie, 2022).

6.2. EIA And Other Provisions

Before deciding to move forward, the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) evaluates the ecological implications of a plan, policy, program, or project. EIA is typically used to assess ongoing initiatives by people or businesses(Ekhlas Jasim Resen, 2023).

An assessment under EIA aims to ensure that decision-makers consider a project’s potential environmental impacts before deciding whether to move forward with it. Before making significant choices and commitments, the International Association for Impact Assessment (IAIA)((IAIA), International Association for Impact Assessment, 1999) describes EIA as detecting, anticipating, analyzing, and neutralizing the physical, social, and other relevant effects of development projects.(Viola M. Bruschi, 2018)Environmental impact assessment (EIA) standards for water-based growth initiatives were implemented throughout Bangladesh in 1992. In 1995 and 1997, respectively, the nation created its laws and regulations (Momtaz, 2002).All significant donor organizations with operations in Bangladesh have implemented strict EIA rules. However, supervision needs to be given more attention, and donor agency criteria play a significant role in effectively implementing EIAs. The framework to guarantee adequate EIA is also insufficient, and there needs to be more collaboration among the numerous entities engaged in environmental decision-making processes (Momtaz, Environmental impact assessment in Bangladesh: A critical review, 2002).

For any suggested operations expected to cause significant adverse effects on the natural environment, the national government ought to evaluate the environmental impact, according to the 17th principle of the 1992 Rio Declaration. As a result, EIA is a vital process that must be carried out before beginning any construction activities in ecologically vulnerable places, like Bangladesh’s Chattogram Hill Tracts. Bangladesh must adhere to this rule because it is a signatory to the Rio Declaration (Okwuchukwu, 2019).

According to Mufidul Alam, the director of the Department of the Environment ( DoE ) (Chattogram Division), the project’s environmental impact assessment request still needs to be submitted to the department (Najifa Farhat, 2021).Furthermore, after devoting much effort, they could not submit an EIA for the CRB project or a positive response from the relevant authority authorizing the project’s continuation.

6.3. Domestic Law Perspective

The people of Chattogram have always greeted blossoming endeavours by the State and co-operated wholeheartedly. Here the issue in question is not the undertaking but the area specified for the project enactment, i.e., CRB, which is metaphorically anointed the lung of Chattogram. The People of Chattogram have used their constitutional entitlements, particularly the freedom of assembly guaranteed by Article 37 of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh Constitution(Bangladesh, 1972). Under acceptable limits set by legislation for the betterment of public order or health, this provision permits citizens to congregate and participate in nonviolent public gatherings and processions.Because the CRB hospital project will harm the natural environment, the right of individuals to express their disapproval is fundamental and essential.

Notwithstanding worries about potential damage to the ecology and its very nature, the Bangladesh Railway has firmly endorsed the construction of a healthcare facility and medical institution at CRB, Chattogram(Shilpi, 2021).It additionally criticized the negative press coverage of the hospital’s construction. Nevertheless, it should be emphasized that the location has become an official national monument and was previously recognized by the CDA as a heritage or archaeological site. Therefore, any growth plans should not endanger the environment because they would have significantly less of an influence than they would on the ecosystem.

The safeguarding of all national monuments is guaranteed under Article 24 of the Bangladeshi Constitution(Bangladesh P. R., 2012), which also orders the State to take action to avoid their desecration, harm, or destruction. This clause applies to the CRB site in Chattogram, a national landmark and historical location. Hence, it has become the responsibility of the governing body to protect this area and stop the suggested construction project from destroying it.The proposed development has also infringed Articles 18A, 24, and 32 of the Bangladeshi Constitution(Bangladesh P. R., 2012). The residents of Chattogram consider the CRB, thanks to its luxuriant flora, to be a source of life and are opposed to the greed-driven, ecocidal construction proposal. Any plan to proceed with the project while ignoring these legal requirements would be unconstitutional.

6.3.1. The Wildlife (Conservation and Security) Act, 2012

The CDA has recognized the Chattogram Railway Building (CRB) Area as a site of heritage or historical significance that necessitates “protection and conservation for historical, architectural, environmental, or ecological point of view” and serves as an important symbol of the colonial era.The State must safeguard and preserve natural assets such as wetland areas, wildlife, forests, and ecological diversity for generations to come, as stated in Article 18A of the Bangladeshi Constitution (Bangladesh P. R., 2012), which relates to the preservation and enhancement of the natural environment and biodiversity. The declaration of a human right to specific ecological circumstances is an environmentalright(Ahmed, Conservation of ECAs, 2017).

The Government of Bangladesh passed the Wildlife (Conservation and Security) Act, 2012(Bangladesh P. R., 2012)to safeguard and preserve forests, wildlife, and biodiversity(Islam, 2022). The primary piece of legislation in Bangladesh for preserving nature and biodiversity has emerged as this Act. A Wildlife Advisory Board comprised of specialists in protecting the environment, forests, and wilderness may be created by the governing body under Section 3(1)(Ahmed, Revisiting the Wildlife Preservation and Security Act, 2012, 2018). The Board is tasked with evaluating the status of preserving biodiversity, nature, and forests and offering recommendations under section 3(2). While sections 7, 8, and 9 address the detection of fragile, threatened with extinction, and severely threatened species, the eradication of wild creatures, and the scattering of wild animals, section 6 forbids the acquisition of wild animals and plants.Under the rules in the Wildlife Act of 2012 (Bangladesh P. R., 2012)CRB is categorized as a region including forest, natural features, wildlife, threatened species, and animals.In addition, building a hospital project by destroying serenity violates several provisions of this Act.

6.4. International Law

Though no international legislation codified against ecocide, several nations accepted the initiative and began formulating stringent statutes against it. Vietnam was the only nation to codify a National Ecocide Law in 1990.

Additionally, nations including Georgia, Armenia, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Ecuador, and Tajikistan have made ecocide a crime. Making ecocide a global offense is a difficult but uncomplicated procedure. Any of the 123 member countries may submit a law-making proposal to the Assembly in December 2022 to change the Rome Statute (Hasan, 2022).

In the Republic of Bangladesh, a legislative board headed by Saber Hossain Chowdhury recommended that the government declare ecocide, comparable to genocide which is subject to the law (Hasan, 2022).Bangladesh has already started an anti-ecocide initiative, and development initiatives must now be more lush, inclusive, and resilient to climate change.By highlighting the need to stop the enormous environmental destruction, the crime of ecocide would raise the magnitude of ecological harm. Therefore, no one must ignore this massive act of environmental and climate catastrophe. The Rio Declaration’s Principle 3(Nations, 1992) stipulates that the nation-state shall equally implement the right to development to address the ecological and developmental demands of future generations. The principle suggests that every development initiative should be carried out after considering what will be left for the following generation instead of just the current one.The environment has already suffered from global warming, so we must exercise greater caution and adopt protective measures; otherwise, we would be engraving the graveyard for the future generation and violating another law.

According to the Rio Declaration’s 4th Principle (Nations, 1992), safeguarding the environment must be a crucial component of all developmental activities to achieve sustainable growth and cannot be addressed separately. Therefore, during any development project, the Government must protect the atmosphere or environment of that place from the start to the beginning at all times as a priority and not obliging it will violate this provision.

6.5. Awareness ~ Legal Rights

Socialization sets the stage for environmental protection and management.Along with publicizing environmental regulations, the government must put them into action through supervision and fines to raise industrial parties’ understanding of the need to abide by the law and for the general public to gain their legal rights to healthy environmental standards.The Supreme court should issue orders encouraging environmental education and awareness across the nation. It opens the door to introducing ecological/constitutional education, not just in the classroom but also at colleges(Johnson, 2020).Recently, the state and its citizens have been under the fundamental duty and responsibility of protecting and improving the environment, as we saw in the CRB incident at Chattogram. Everyone, including the Government, should be obligated to safeguard the flora and fauna while having a civic insight towards the climate. Bangladeshi democracy depends on the welfare of its people, and active participation must not lead to submission to monocracy, which will damage the environment and create ecological imbalance. Positive judicial and legal initiatives are required to revitalize the field of environmental law despite its adversarial problems(Johnson, 2020).

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7. Cases On Conflicts

Some cases from the past protests and conflicts are listed down on the above Table 1 to give a comparative view on how protests put pressure on imposed proposals which will harm the citizen’s wellbeing. But not all the cases are successful as the cases stated above. Incidents like Chernobyl showed the biggest nightmare in mankind’s history as people weren’t aware at the right moment about their legislative rights as they’re ignorant about the immeasurable effect of nuclear station. Selfish insensitive planning decisions and their aftermaths are evident in human history with the uncountable loss of human, wildlife and many more.Locals battling to safeguard wetlands in coastal Andhra Pradesh or those organized by the Bhoomi Sena in Maharashtra against the projected bullet train may not be driven by concerns about climate change but rather a desire to maintain control over their lands, other resources, and means of subsistence. However, their struggles both directly and indirectly address climate change(Adve, 2019).

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8. Discussion and Recommendation

Urban planning revolves around social, economic, political aspects of any city. Whenever any development is processed, it holds a promise too rarely or unequally fulfilled of real change for the better. We seem to accept that power play in developments is main key while it is leveled as corruption in decision making. Three aspects need to be checked while citizen’s demand is addressed by reevaluating any planning project in three steps that is to include Urban, Climate or relevant experts in decision making, then to open the floor for public trial, hence combining all the reports for feasibility of following projects. We need to put more focus on constitutional gadgets that enforce laws and legislations. If we delve deeper into the matter, we can see that there are restrictions on hill cutting, but the penalty fee or amount for violating the hill cutting laws is not justified. Due to the lack of proper scrutiny, beneficial stakeholders tend to find loopholes in the law. According to Bangladesh National Building Code 2008, approval and amendment fee for hill cutting is BDT 30,000/- per bigha. However, there are certain parties who are exploiting this regulation by fraudulently cutting hills and then seeking an amendment, thus allowing them to pay the penalty and repeat their illicit actions. Shockingly, the responsible authorities appear to be oblivious to these despicable acts, and this lack of action is only emboldening more individuals to partake in such nefarious activities. We have seen that protests do not always yield the expected results from the discussed cases. However, they serve as a potent reminder that the public is vigilant and will not tolerate any form of destruction. Moreover, the active involvement of citizens serves as a means to keep officials accountable for their actions, ensuring that they act in the best interests of the people they serve. Protest is always the last step of citizen’s anguish. As a concerned citizen, it is crucial to take action to prioritize the protection of the environment in reclaiming the city’s rights.This can be achieved through educating the public on sustainable practices and encouraging mindful actions. In addition, laws must be put in place to prevent harmful planning practices that damage the environment. Using unsustainable methods and chemicals in construction and development projects must be prohibited with proper scrutiny.Hefty fines and penalties should be imposed on individuals and companies that engage in activities that harm the environment. They should have some guidelines for protest if it’s inevitable, Protestors must have a concise message, maintain a peaceful approach, exercise discretion on social media, assemble a legal team, and demonstrate respect towards law enforcement. They must collaborate to guarantee that their protest is effective and secure.

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9. Conclusion

We have laws, legislations, but on most of the instances, we can see the ignorance of general people, as they are least aware about their own rights. Always law cannot save the humankind if it is unknown. Public participation does not justify the illogical demand, but it can always cut the litigation cost and increase probability of sustainable solutions as it creates accountability and belongingness among citizens.A well-known Indian case, MC Mehta v. Union of India 1987, AIR 1086, emphasized the importance of establishing initiatives such as developing human conduct in accordance with legal standards.Our government should take necessary steps to ensure that people understand how vital it is to conform their behavior to legal obligations.The judicial system might also mandate radio stations, websites, newspapers, and television stations to broadcast environmental awareness campaigns. The Supreme Court can also state that every district and the educational board should promote and facilitate environmental education.

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About the Authors

Rahanat Ara Jafar is a highly motivated individual who combines her passion for education, research, and social advocacy to create a harmonious blend of architecture and humanitarianism. Currently serving as an assistant professor in the Department of Architecture at the Chittagong University of Engineering and Technology, she is known for her research on the “Handloom Community of Bangladesh,” which earned her accolades during her B.Arch thesis. Rahanat’s commitment extends beyond academia as she actively engages in social projects and volunteers for slum children’s education. Rahanat is a dedicated member of the Bangladesh Youth Leadership Center and a Campus Ambassador for Campaign Red Works, which significantly impacts various domains. She’s studying for a Master’s in Architecture with a holistic approach at Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology. Rahanat’s publications range from urban protests to innovative homestead designs, demonstrating her commitment to reshaping societal narratives through architectural insights.

Farhana Hoque, an architecture graduate from Chittagong University of Engineering and Technology (CUET) is an academician whose fields of study have been linked to sustainable community development and urban design, particularly in the theme of waterscapes. At present, she is employed as a lecturer at Leading University, Sylhet, Bangladesh. However, apart from working as an academician, she is actively involved in social and volunteer work. In 2022, she received a grant from the British Council for her research work. She also participated as a speaker in a panel discussion session on the topic of “Women in Innovation and Technology” at the Women in Leadership Summit 2023. Farhana is an optimistic individual who believes that any function could be resolved by analysis and investigation, as depicted in her work.

Shahriar Sakib Chowdhury, a passionate advocate for positive change, embarked on a transformative journey from a young age. At 16, he collaborated with Better Future Bangladesh, witnessing the profound impact of collective efforts. Inspired by the visionary Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Shahriar joined the Bangladesh Student’s League, honing leadership skills and fostering connections. Active in various university clubs and organizations, including mooting, debating, and cultural clubs, he showcased a commitment to continuous learning. His leadership extends to advocacy for socialization and humanitarian efforts. Shahriar, a distinguished participant representing his country in the International Round and securing the 6th spot among the oralists in the national round of the Philips C Jessup International Moot Court Competition, authored profound Legal Research Papers, notably exploring Predatory Pricing Practices in Bangladesh. In his LLM journey, he weaves the threads of his life’s narrative into a canvas of experiences, continuously striving for excellence.

Wahida Rahman Nipun and Farhana Hoque

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Abstract

The foundations of human civilization have grown based on water bodies such as rivers, lakes, and canals. Almost all significant ancient civilizations, such as Mesopotamia, the Nile Valley, Mohenjo-Daro, and Harappa, had originated on river banks. As all living creatures require water and life cannot be sustained without it, modern urban areas are also developed using the same principles, with the source of water or catchment region being nearby. Urban water bodies serve a multi-functional role in the metropolis, alongside being a source of water for agriculture, irrigation, fishing, landscaping, and ecotourism, all of which have a positive social impact. It can also be utilized to prevent water logging and mitigate the heat island effects in order to improve urban microclimates. However, increased human interference and intervention in catchment areas have also accelerated the processes of siltation and sedimentation within these water bodies. Therefore, it is essential to give sufficient weight to the planning and retention processes. Otherwise, without proper management of urban water bodies, it can also affect the urban area. Shamasundori, a 16-kilometer-long artificial canal that runs through the Rangpur metropolis, is a more than 129-year-old traditional canal which is being hampered because of pollution and illegal occupancy. This study analyzes the Shamasundori canal’s impact on Rangpur city. The study aims to address the importance of retention of the canal. The paper evaluated the historical and current developments in the Shamasundori Canal using statistical analysis. Based on the field survey, existing canal information will be collected and with the help of the literature studies, urban water bodies planning strategies and restoration policies will be assembled. Finally, the paper will discuss the need to preserve the canal and a few environmental benefits which could happen through restoring the canal.

Keywords: Environmental benefits, Retention, Shamasundori Khal, Urban waterbodies.

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1. Introduction

Water, as one of the most vital natural resources for life, has always played a significant role in the establishment and formation of settlements in most parts of the world throughout the history of modern civilization. Before urban modernization, as rivers, streams, springs and groundwater were the only source of water, human settlements used to be formed around them (Kurochkina, 2020). Water creates magical and exciting environments that strengthen the settlements of the city’s cohesion and sustainability. Many modern cities are blessed to have inland water sources whereas some lack a comprehensive waterfront. Some cities often have urban waterways like rivers and canals however, others usually cut through their urban fabric to meet the need for water (Rahana.H, 2020). Many inland water sources are used to serve multiple purposes such as drainage, irrigation, water supply, hydroelectric power generation, and navigation. Although, the metabolization of water to serve urban consumption through drinking, agriculture, irrigation, fishing, wastewater, landscaping, ecotourism, and canals to prevent water logging or reduce heat island effects is a necessary but understudied aspect of urbanization in Bangladeshi cities. Owing to the fact that the constant negligence and lack of maintenance of rivers and canals, is now an emerging issue of urbanization in most of cities. Many rivers and canals now must be regulated and maintained to make them fully navigable, allowing vessels to move from one water level to another due to the lay of the topography and particularly changes in water levels. It is essential that we must shift our focus to urban blue spaces in order to maximize and accelerate their potential for urban growth.  Water as an asset in urban living can be reintroduced by integrating water systems with urban development. There are multiple tools and methods available for developing innovative integrated water systems (Davies, 2022).

The urban canal is one of the unique structures in the city that can provide ecological resources, economic benefits, and opportunities for socialization and recreation for city dwellers. Canals allowed cities to thrive, establishing well-known epicenters such as Venice, Suzhou, and Amsterdam. Waterways evolved into streets, complete with shops, restaurants, and residences. Canal architecture is inherently concerned with liminal situations. While canals can be built by damming, dredging, or modifying existing river paths, but these methods are typically associated with larger urban development (Baldwin, 2021).

Based on the most recent objective studies from fieldwork in Rangpur metropolitan city, the studied canal, Shamashundori, is basically a channel that connects two points of the Ghaghot river that flows through the city. The canal, Shamashundori, which was once excavated for the improvement of the town, is now in very poor condition, causing misery in the city. The canal flows naturally throughout the city. The canal has served the city for many years but has never been properly upgraded or preserved. Though, according to the Rangpur divisional town master plan 2010-2030, The primary land uses in waterfront regions are for leisure and commercial purposes. However, without understanding the quality of urban space, standards, the morphology of the area and guidelines for waterfront development, and urban design principles and technique, it is very challenging to implement the desired land use based on an outline zoning plan, which is more of a quantitative approach (Karmaker, 2022).

Thus, this study. which are both intimate and expansive in scale, are concluded through lively sections and hierarchical layouts of canal Shamasundori, as well as aims to identify a set of performance measurement indicators that will provide contextual findings for Rangpur and evaluate the existing canal system’s performance, because using indicators appropriate for cities in developed countries may not provide a realistic visualization for the city.  The research focuses on the potential solutions that celebrate the dynamics of modern canals and landscapes.

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2. Literature Review

2.1. Canal’s Evolution and Classification

The Old French term channel, which means “channel,” is where the word “canal” first appeared (Bhuiyan, n.d.). A manmade open waterway is a canal. It has a natural channel or perceptible depression with water flowing through it consistently or sporadically, or it serves as a connector between other bodies of water (Banglapedia, 2021).

In the past, canals were frequently employed to reduce the distance between two sites (Dutta & Sarkar, 2020). For example, the Rhine-Marne canal was built to connect two rivers. Besides, Canals were presumably initially designed for irrigation, but as technology advanced, they were also made for navigation. Ship travel distances have decreased because of canals, such as the Suez Canal (finished in 1869) and the Panama Canal (1914). The invention of modern technologies and creative design approaches have made it possible to build canals for both international trade and inland water transportation (Dutta & Sarkar, 2020).

Based on construction, there are two categories of canals, conveyance canals, and navigation canals. Conveyance canals are dug to transport water for agriculture, drainage, or power. Conveyance canals are often walled with earth, narrow, and capable of quickly moving large volumes of water. The most crucial factors in canal building are water availability, differences in land and water levels, slope. It is reported that the construction of irrigation canals in Bengal began more than 3,000 years ago. Since that time, building conveyance canals has become a common practice nationwide. Navigation Canal construction is done to aid navigation (Banglapedia, 2021).

The types of canals extend beyond their key functions. Some of the main functions of canals include carrying stormwater in the event of severe rains, safeguarding the nearby area from flooding, directly affecting the microclimate of the area, giving the public much-needed visual comfort, balancing the environment, and preventing pollution levels. Depending on certain criteria, these have been categorized into a variety of types (Dutta & Sarkar, 2020). Table 1 below lists them all.

Table 1. Classification of Canal based on different parameters. [Source: (Bhuiyan, n.d.), (Banglapedia, 2021)]

SL.NO	PARAMETER	CLASSIFICATIONS OF CANAL
1.	Based on Usage	Conveyance
		Navigation
2.	Based on Construction	Aqueducts
		Waterways
2.	Based on Discharge	Main canal
		Branch canal
		Major distributary
		Minor distributary
		Watercourse or field channel
3.	Based on Provider	Unlined canal
		Lined canal
4.	Based on Alignment	Contour canal
		Watershed canal
		Side slope canal

2.2. Canal-oriented Development

The city and the canal coexist peacefully according to multidimensional behavioral patterns that produce benefits for both parties. Both share a mutually beneficial existence that may be observed in terms of their physical and functional traits. Therefore, it is difficult to keep the city and the canal in constant equilibrium as they develop (Soumyadeep & Sanghamitra, 2020).

The goal of canal-oriented development (COD), a placemaking idea, is to build mixed-use communities along canal banks by utilizing the waterfront’s appeal and practicality as a natural magnet for societal and economic activity (Buckman, 2017).

The primary benefit of COD is that it gives developers the freedom to build on a large number of sites along the area it drains. Dependent on the feeling of place created by water sensitivity, there may be separate zones along the route based on activity and size. Neighborhood and public areas are constructed focusing on sustainability and functionally solved infrastructure (Soumyadeep & Sanghamitra, 2020).

COD can use as a redevelopment or design tool. The canals would use to encourage waterfront development, which is enlisted below:

-By promoting pedestrian activity on foot, 

-For leisure and recreational purposes, spaces could create in canal surroundings.

-When appropriate, offering the ideal calming backdrop for construction projects.

-Transit-oriented development (TOD) on inland waterways for the transportation of people and goods.

-Support the local economy for the neighborhood’s residents (Buckman, 2017).

-Keep the natural equilibrium intact (Bindu & Mohamed, 2016) .

-Ensure environmental safety of waterbody (Kurochkina, 2020).

2.3. Environmental Benefits of Water body

2.3.1. Mitigate water clogging

Flooding is a typical occurrence in Bangladesh during the monsoon season, although its frequency and severity have grown recently. Despite numerous factors, the area’s inactive and haphazard drainage system is one of the primary causes (Sabnam et al., 2021).

It is discovered from a case in Chennai that every lake there has a natural flood discharge route that drains the spillover. Water bodies mitigate water clogging and reduce flooding. However, building infrastructure over water bodies prevents water from flowing freely (Wan et al., 2020).

2.3.2. Reduce on heat island effect

The urban heat island effect, or the phenomenon in which cities are warmer than their rural environs, occurs in almost every metropolis. Cities retain more heat than open, unpaved areas due to their high building density and paved surfaces. Cities can experience temperature differences of 3 to 7 degrees at night and 1 to 3 degrees during the day, with temperatures rising even more in clear, calm weather. The energy requirements for heating and cooling as well as the local ecosystems can all be significantly impacted by the heat island effect. Understanding how the water cycle operates is crucial for reducing these risks (Climate, 2016).

Water bodies effectively absorb shortwaves via evaporation and have efficient emissivity. On the other hand, the water surface energy can also go through water bodies through conduction, convection, and advection. Investigative investigations revealed that 100-meter-long water bodies on a small scale can lower heat during the day (Kemarau & Eboy, 2020). Urban water basins that are commonly open and surrounded by trees provide cooling on hot days (Jacobs et al., 2020).

2.4. Water Policies of Bangladesh

The water policy was established in 1999, approximately 16 years back (Government of Bangladesh, 1999). Bangladesh’s most recent and significant water policy is the 2013 Water Act. It incorporates information from earlier water rules and supersedes all earlier water-related regulations (WARPO, n.d.). In addition, several other regulations cross over and relate to the canal, such as The Environment Conservation Act of 1995, the National Policy for Safe, Water Supply & Sanitation 1998, and the Integrated Small-Scale Irrigation Policy 2011.

The gap between water policy and practice illustrated the following: 

• The Water Act of 2013 is generally a solid policy. However, several areas, including water pollution and the provision of drinking water, are not effectively addressed, and there are some inconsistencies with prior water policies and other related policies.

• There are conflicts in scope where it is unclear which agency is in charge of carrying out specific operations. In addition, there are scope inconsistencies where it is unclear which agency is in charge of carrying out specific tasks.
• The requirements for implementing mechanisms could be improved in some ways, but overall, the mechanisms are adequate (Petrie et al., 2015).
• Another critical problem is that most people are not sufficiently aware of the importance of efficient water use, according to field observations (Kabir & Das, 2015).
• The integration of natural water bodies or channels into urban planning and design framework is not specified by any building construction regulations, building codes, planning regulations, or wetland acts in Bangladesh (Mowla, 2013).

2.5. Water Retention Measures

Natural water retention measures (NWRMs) serve a variety of purposes. By restoring or sustaining ecosystems as well as the natural features and qualities of water bodies through natural means and processes, it seeks to safeguard water resources and manage water-related concerns. Enhancing the retention capacity of aquifers, soil, and aquatic and water-dependent ecosystems is the principal objective of adopting NWRM to improve their state. The use of NWRM promotes green infrastructure, enhances the quantitative state of water bodies in general, and lessens a region’s susceptibility to floods and droughts (Zeleňáková et al., 2017).

Selected policy initiatives are shown in Figure 1(A). NWRM can contribute to Water Framework, Green infrastructure, Climate change adaptation strategy, and Flood Directives goals.(Zeleňáková et al., 2017) Aquifer recharge, large-scale floodplain and wetland restoration, small-scale ponds, and soil conservation techniques are a few examples of the diverse strategies that formulate NWRM. They can be categorized into four groups, as shown in Figure 1 (B) (Cis et al., 2014).

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3. Methodology

The study uses both quantitative and qualitative research methods. Different secondary data have been gathered from various sources for the quantitative analysis. On the other hand, primary data have been used in qualitative analysis. Besides, the full investigation was conducted from 1 June 2022 to 15 October 2022. The research framework provides a diagrammatic summary of the procedures followed during the research process and its results. See figure 2 below.

The research work has not made use of any theoretical assessment model. First, a discussion of related terms based on a survey of the literature will aid in understanding some definitions and contexts for this issue. The literature review has helped highlight the value of having water bodies in urban design and the advantages the canal Shamasundori offers for the environment. In order to analyze chronological changes, satellite photos were used to examine present condition of Shamasundori Canal. The analysis uses zoning map to provide information. Information about the existing canals will be gathered based on the field survey and with the assistance of the key interview informants. In addition, both primary and secondary data contribute to our understanding of the canal’s morphology. According to the site survey, a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) is performed here—these aids in the search for potential canal planning schemes and retention policies. In order to investigate various suggestions for urban water body design strategy, some case studies are also examined.  After that, some design strategies have applied comparing the existing canal area. Finally, future research possibilities have also discussed.  

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4. Study Area Profile

This study focuses on Rangpur’s canal network and morphological structures. Rangpur, one of Bangladesh’s newest city corporations, is endowed with natural resources such as open spaces, parks, and water bodies in the heart of the city. It is geographically located between 25°56′ North latitudes and 89°25′ East longitudes. RpCC [Rangpur City Corporation] covers an area of 203.63 square kilometers and has a population of 7,96,556 people divided into 33 wards. Rangpur is situated on the banks of the river Ghagat, a tributary of the Teesta.  The canal, Shamasundori, is a branch of the Ghaghat river that runs through the city [Figure 3].

 4.1. Historical Background of Shamasundori

Rangpur, one of the country’s oldest municipalities, was established as a District Seat (Zila Sadar) on December 16, 1769, and as a municipality in 1869. According to folklore, the canal, Shamasundoriwas excavated in 1890 under the supervision of Raja Janaki Ballav Sen as part of the development of the city area in memory of his mother, Queen Shyama Sundari. He was the son of Rangpur zamindar, Chaudhurani Shyam Sundari Devi (Devi Chaudhurani) and Raja Janaki vallabh Sen. He was the Chairman of Rangpur Municipality from 1892 to 1894 and later served as Honorary Magistrate, Chairman of the Local Board, and District Board Member. In 1891, he was crowned as king. According to the legend, Rangpur once had an outbreak of malaria, diarrhoea, cholera, and spring fever due to waterlogging as there was no proper sewage system in this area and many people are said to have died prematurely as a result of that. Throughout that outbreak, the queen bride of Dimla, Chaudhurani Shyama Sundari Devi had also died prematurely of malaria due to the bite of that mosquito which was fostered due to water logging of the city. (Apple, 21.03.2016) Soon afterward, Janaki Ballav Sen, her bereaved son, dug this canal in memory of his mother for eight years, from 1890 to 1898., to prevent the mosquito infestation in Rangpur city.(Huda, Jan 14, 2020) (Jalil, 2014).

4.2. Morphological Analysis of Study Area

Rangpur City Corporation is divided into 33 wards. The core city is divided into wards 12 to 30, with 16-28 wards holding majority of the population and residences (Sabnam et al., 2021). Shamasundori, a 16-kilometer-long artificial canal is a branch of the Ghaghat river in Rangpur, Bangladesh, was excavated for the improvement of the town, in 1890. The canal runs from the Kellaband Ghaghat river in the north-west through all of the city’s neighborhoods, including Pashari Para, Kerani Para, Munsi Para, Engineer Para, Gomsta Para, Sen Para, Mulatol, through Tentultala, Nurpur, Bairagipara to the Mahiganj Satmatha Railgate area, where it meets the KD Canal and rejoins the Khoksa Ghaghat river. Water from the Teesta used to flow into the Ghaghat river and that water flowed through the Shamasundoricanal before rejoining the Ghaghat. This river was once navigable. As a result, many commercial zones like Nawabganj and Mirganj, had been developed in Rangpur throughout that time period. However, the rivers changed its course as a result of the 1787 earthquake and this branch of the Ghaghat river had died at some point. Since the establishment of Rangpur City Corporation and division, the population has grown to over one million people. Large buildings, business establishments, restaurants, and houses have been constructed near the Shamasundori canal, occupying the canal space. According to legend, the canal was initially 40 to 120 feet wide, which has been now narrowed down into 8 to 10 feet width for negligence over the time.

Rangpur city corporations has no natural or man-made forests. However, there is ample cropland for farming. The main planted trees here are homestead forest and roadside trees. According to the land use map [Figure 4], planted trees and farm land are declining slowly, owing primarily to urbanization. This is a result of the transformation of farm lands into urban areas, as well as other development activities. According to the land use maps, all of these changes occurred in the city’s north-western suburbs. The majority of farmland is lying on the city’s southern and northern outskirts, with a rising residential zone in between [Figure 4].

4.3. Statistical Analysis of Waterlogging Problem of the Study Area

Rangpur is a major metropolitan city in northern Bangladesh with a population of around 16000000 people. Water logging is one of the major problems in the Rangpur City. Previously, this particular region of Bangladesh was known as a drought prone area due to a lack of rainfall. However, during the monsoon season from June to August, the study area receives medium to heavy rainfall. In recent years, there has been a rise in the intensity of rainfall. In September, 2020, the majority of the city has been submerged because of excessive rainfall in a short period of time during the monsoon season. By breaking a 60-year rainfall record, a 433 mm rainfall in 12 hours flooded the whole city for almost two days. The residents of the city experienced at least 2 foot or 3 foot water congestion throughout this. Figure 5 portrays the amount of average rainfall in millimeters from 2001 to 2020, indicating that rainfall in this area is gradually increasing.

The number of days with water logging has grown as rainfall has increased as shown in Table 2. This has been more apparent in recent years. Every year during the monsoon, Hanuman Tola, Islambagh, New Jummapara, Munshipara, Keranipara, Robertsonganj, Kotowali Thana region, Mahiganj, Haragachh, Shalban, Ganeshpur, Kamarpara, Mulatol, Masterpara, Bonanipara, and Lalbagh experience the most severe scenario.

Table 2.  Number of day’s water logging. [Source: (Sabnam et al., 2021)]

The primary causes of this crisis are the inactivity and deterioration of the Shamasundori canal, which runs through the city. The topographical condition, insufficient and inefficient drainage system, minimal maintenance, and lack of dredging has also worsened the situation. Geographically the central Rangpur City is lower in elevation compared to the surrounding areas, which eventually leads to water logging. Again, due to increased population, the number of open lands and ponds is decreasing, and a poor drainage system prevents rainwater from draining away, intensifying the severity of water logging. Here, Figure 6 depicts the spatial degree and extent of flood vulnerability in the Rangpur district as determined by spatial vulnerability mapping (Sabnam et al., 2021).

The Shamasundori canal connects to the Gaghat river, a branch of the Teesta which runs through the Gaibandha, Rangpur and Nilphamari. When the peak level of the Teesta rises during the monsoon, the peak level of the Ghaghat rises as well. If the flow of the Shamasundori canal remains uninterrupted, the likelihood of flooding in Rangpur district is reduced. Table 3 shows the peak water level of the Ghaghat river during the monsoon season from 1998 to 2007 and 2020, respectively.

Table 3. Comparison of Hydrograph on Ghagot at Gaibandha. [Source: (BWDB, 2020)]

4.4. Circulation & Accessibility of the Canal

The Shamasundori canal, a Ghaghat river brunch, runs from Baktarpur, CO bazar area (25°46’24.6″N 89°13’15.8″E) in the north-west through the city and rejoins the Khoksa Ghaghat river near Sekh para in the south-east (25°41’09.4″N 89°15’21.3″E). The canal traverses through all of the city’s neighborhoods, including residential, commercial and farmland area. Running through passing Pashari Para, Kerani Para, Munsi Para, Engineer Para, Gomsta Para, Sen Para, Mulatol, Tentultala, Nurpur, Bairagipara, Mahiganj Satmatha Railgate area, to Sekh para the canal never lost its connection as well as near Satmatha Rail gate area, it splits into two sections that eventually meet the Chikli lake and Ghaghat river accordingly. The city’s road network was built considering the flow of canal and bridge and box culverts were installed when required [Figure 7].

4.5. Existing Condition of the Canal

The Shamasundori canal, which once was an exhilarating source of natural beauty and clear water, has now become a source of misery for the city’s residents due to human activity. There are hardly any water flows through the canal right now, on the other hand, it has lost her beauty as a result of negligence over the years. Because of the canal’s black-colored polluted water and stench of garbage, it is now difficult to even walk along it. According to the locals, the 16-kilometer canal has been narrowed to eight to ten feet in many places, making it an extremely dirty place and a breeding ground for mosquitos and other diseases. Furthermore, it overflows and causes flooding and water-logging in the city whenever it rains. People concerned blamed the canal’s poor condition on widespread encroachment, waste dumping, and a lack of re-excavation. Nonetheless, some residents even had connected their home’s sewerage system to the canal.

Although the then chairman of Rangpur municipality, AKM Abdur Rauf Manik, took the initiative in February 2012 to renovate the 12 km Shamasundari canal, build and excavate a bridge over the canal, and call for a tender to the local government engineering department within a budget of Tk around 25crore, but the contracting firms disregarded the rules and billed without completing the work. According to a source in Nagar Bhavan, the tender called for boulders to be installed on both sides of the Shyamasundari Canal for 12 kilometers, footpaths to be built on both sides of the canal, and three bridges to be built over the canal. However, no work has been done on the three kilometers between the Sadar Hospital and the Grand Hotel Mor via Gomstapara, apart from the park adjacent to the Keramatiya Mosque in Kerani para road (Figure 8, image D), only place, where the boulders were placed on both sides of some parts of the canal, footpaths were built on both sides of the canal and three bridges were constructed without digging the canal at all (Sajjad Hossain Bappi, 11.02.2019) (Nazrul Islam Razu, 05.02.2022).

Incidentally, an embankment has been constructed at some point along the canal near Baktarpur, as the Cantonment is close by (Figure 8, image A). Other places, however, such as Satmatha (Figure 8, image G), Mahiganj (Figure 8, image H), and Tajhat (Figure 8, image I), have no development like this except for the existing culvert that connects both sides of the canal.  The canal, on the other hand, is treated as the back side of the residential zone in some areas, such as Pasari para (Figure 8, image B), Kotki para (Figure 8, image C), Honumantola (Figure 8, image E), and Kotowali thana (Figure 8, image F). Even though it is considered the backside of the house, a walking path exists on both sides of the canal in some areas such as Pasari para (Figure 8, image B) and Kotki para (Figure 8, image C).

The SWOT diagram in the study area has shown in Table 4.

Table 4. The SWOT Diagram of the study.

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5. Result and Discussion

To solve the existing problem strategic measure, need to be taken. The most damaged sites should be located first in order to address the water logging and pollution issues. According to their degree of vulnerability, such locations should likewise receive priority. The matter will be resolved by authorities after analysis of the field survey. With the rising population and home size, drainage facilities need to be improved and regulated.

The local population must be taken into account when designing the canal. There is adequate room along the canal in many places to build recreational areas for locals. This will provide canal connectivity to the inhabitants. The design development process can open to community members as well. Like this, they will have a sense of belongings for the canal. However, safety measures must also be properly considered as well.

The study offers several applications at the planning level based on the parameter discussion in the upper portion. The following section contains several conceptual design options for the Keranipara, the Kotki Para, and the Kotowali thana roads.

The Shamasundori runs through a variety of areas in Rangpur, including residential, business, and recreational areas. Both the site and the canal’s surroundings would be modified based on various land uses.

In the initial stage of planning, water recycling, excavation of the canal, and proper waste management will help to improve the living conditions of the surroundings. Then, the minimal intervention of nature will preserve the environment in its harmonious state.

 For public spaces like Keranipara Road, the placemaking concept could be applied where a connection could build up between the public and the place [Figure 9]. The design must be eco-friendly and sustainable also. People would stay in the region and create memories if there are more pedestrian walkways, rest areas, and activity areas. Since the area needs more recreational activities, food carts, kid-friendly areas, and cycling zone are suggested to draw more visitors.

The Kotki para road and the Kotowali thana road are residential areas. It is very important to consider the surroundings when designing because the surroundings are necessary element of the design. As neither residential area considered the canal to be its front, the area could be more vibrant with additional public activity. On the Kotki para road, there is less space on both sides of the existing canal. As a result, elevated decks are proposed in figure 10 as a recreational space that welcomes the canal water to flow naturally during the usual tidal flow and rainy season (Hoque & Sadia, 2018). Besides, fishing spots or boating excursions would increase the number of entertainment options for locals.

According to figure 11, cycling lanes, planter boxes, and pedestrian walkways are recommended designing for Kotowali thana Road. The aesthetic attractiveness of the area may be improved by placing street furniture around the planter box. Additionally, residents could use the walkway to exercise in the morning. Since the canal is narrow, the retaining wall construction technique would follow instead of embankment.

Overall, in order to provide protection, the railing should be used on both sides of the canal when designing around it. The installation of streetlights will also ensure safety. Apart from that, soft pavement would be preferred over hard pavement for walkways because it is pervious to manage stormwater in the walkable area.

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6. Conclusion

Waterbodies must be considered in city development since different types of water features play multiple functions for cities. Sometimes, the waterbodies carry include historical tales. Additionally, the presence of waterbodies contributes to the creation of a bond between the surrounding people and the place. So, it is crucial to protect those for both the environment and people.

The study examined that the Shamasundari canal, which was dug to keep the city clean, has now become a source of pollution. The canal functioning contexts are at risk. As a result, the area needs to be preserved for its historical and cultural significance. The study illustrates a few potential water-oriented development strategies and the advantages of conservation for the environment. Finally, the results of the study highlight how crucial it is to preserve the Shamasundari canal. The study has a limited timeline and did not explore pragmatic approach. Hence, there is scope for in depth study in the design and the planning level where community intervention of the design implication could be discussed.

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About the Authors

Wahida Rahman Nipun has recently completed her Bachelor of Architecture degree from Shahjalal University of Science & Technology, Sylhet, Bangladesh. She has worked as a research assistant on the subject of “An Architectural Research Addressing Post-COVID-19 Challenges in the Urban Environment of Sylhet and Chattogram, Bangladesh.” As a student of architecture, she aspires to use architecture as a tool for any social issue as well as to induce the community to engage with it. Her commitment intensified as she participated in a workshop on low-cost housing, where she witnessed the remarkable impact of community efforts organized by Habitat for Humanity International in 2016. Therefore, her academic and research interests include community-based architecture focusing on informal urbanism, the cultural significance of urban spaces, sustainability, and resilience.

Farhana Hoque, an architecture graduate from Chittagong University of Engineering and Technology (CUET) is an academician whose fields of study have been linked to sustainable community development and urban design, particularly in the theme of waterscapes. At present, she is employed as a lecturer at Leading University, Sylhet, Bangladesh. However, apart from working as an academician, she is actively involved in social and volunteer work. In 2022, she received a grant from the British Council for her research work. She has also participated as a speaker in a panel discussion session on the topic of “Women in Innovation and Technology” at the Women in Leadership Summit 2023. Farhana is an optimistic individual who believes that any function could be resolved by analysis and investigation, as depicted in her work.

Case of Jakarta’s relocation

Mennatullah Hendawy

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Introduction

Historically, the capital city of a nation has played a pivotal role in shaping its “image, representation, and identity” (Lazar, 2005). Several countries opt to relocate their capital cities for various reasons, such as in response to a revolution, post-independence, or to establish a new political agenda (de Vries WT, 2021). According to Jenkins (2012), capital relocations are undertaken for several reasons such as to achieve neutrality (e.g., Lagos to Abuja in 1991, Melbourne to Canberra in 1927, Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia in 1960), embrace a more ‘Western’ orientation (e.g., Moscow to St Petersburg in 1712), preserve national unity (e.g., Auckland to Wellington in 1865), alleviate urban congestion (e.g., Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya in 1999), ensure self-defense (e.g., Yangon to Naypyidaw in 2005), or as a measure for risk management (e.g., Jakarta to East Kalimantan, Borneo, planned in 2024?).

In certain instances, the relocation of the capital involves establishing a newly constructed site, and visualizations play a significant role in advocating for the transition to these new cities in the current era characterized by heightened visual communication. For this purpose, diverse media, computers, and digital tools are extensively employed to depict the envisioned city. It is noteworthy that contemporary digital tools utilized for visualizing new capital cities tend to accentuate and address only specific segments of the urban landscape, primarily targeting elite populations. This selective emphasis is likely employed to attract investment and portray newly planned cities in a more favorable light (see Hendawy et al., in press).

Sometimes, the visualizations of future cities promoted in public media, private design studios, universities, and public streets may not accurately reflect the everyday experiences or perceptions of the majority of their citizens regarding the future of their cities (Hendawy and Stollmann, 2020 Hendawy and Saeed, 2020; Hendawy, 2021a; Hendawy, 2021b; Hendawy, 2022). Instead, these visualizations often present a singular perspective that may be construed as an objective truth, as it is influenced by groups holding significant epistemological power (D’Ignazio and Klein, 2020). Within this context, it is not always easy to tell whose voices are represented in a visualization because they are not traditionally designed to provide much information about who made them, why they made them, how to use them, or how they came to be. Taking this perspective into account, these visualizations, while appearing to represent the experiences of the public, can contribute to marginalization, disempowerment, and socio-spatial injustices. Consequently, such effects may impede vulnerable groups from accessing essential services and infrastructure (Hendawy, 2021a; Hendawy, 2022).

In this article, I perceive the communicated images of new cities as a form of visualization. I also deal with visualization as a medium of communication used by diverse actors, such as urban planners and city officials, to communicate urban visions and designs.

Drawing on the case of the capital relocation from Jakarta to the new city in East Kalimantan, Borneo, as an illustrative example highlighting the necessity for an alternative approach to urban visualization for comprehensive communication of new planned cities, this article contends that integrating connected latent data into communicated urban visualizations—referred to as urban-visualization annotations—could render invisible information visible. This, in turn, has the potential to serve as an effective counter-strategy against exclusive and top-down urban visions, particularly if these annotations incorporate avenues for marginalized voices to dissent and actively participate in the discourse. The article subsequently provides insights into the Jakarta relocation and proposes the use of annotated urban visualizations for fostering inclusive planning.

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The reallocation of Jakarta to East Kalimantan

In 2019, President Joko Widodo of Indonesia announced the relocation of the current Indonesian administrative capital from Jakarta province on Java island to East Kalimantan province on Borneo island (BBC, 2019), with Jakarta remaining as the country’s economic hub (Irfan Gorbiano, 2019). This decision is unsurprising to some, given Java’s vulnerability to the impacts of climate change (Van de Vuurst and Escobar, 2020) and its infrastructural challenges, including issues related to sewage treatment (BBC, 2019).

In line with other large-scale national urban projects, visual communication, and visualization play a significant role in disseminating and endorsing the vision of the new Indonesian administrative capital. Many of the visualizations endorsed for the new capital are produced by commissioned architectural and urban offices, primarily to highlight the government’s vision. Employing various communication channels, 3D rendering computer programs are utilized to portray the proposed image of the new capital. These depictions often convey specific environmental and design narratives, emphasizing the incorporation of extensive greenery and water features yet frequently omitting human subjects. The ensuing images (Figures 1 and 2) showcase some of the promoted visualizations about Jakarta’s rellocation.

The visualizations of the new Indonesian capital are aesthetically appealing and may contribute to attracting investments for the project; however, they lack significant information. Notably, it is not apparent from these images who the designers are, which societal groups participated in conceptualizing the designs, whether they serve as formal plans or represent early-stage concepts, and what the realistic time frame or implementation costs entail. This concealed information is pivotal, as it influences viewers’ comprehension of the plans and their implications for the country’s future. Addressing this knowledge gap, communities can employ a method that can be referred to as ‘urban visualization annotations’, as elucidated in the following section.

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Annotated Urban Visualizations

The urban visions disseminated in the public sphere frequently originate from those in positions of power, in many cases obscuring the needs and aspirations of marginalized and vulnerable societal groups (see Hendawy, 2022). This pattern is prevalent worldwide, particularly in contexts marked by centralized decision-making and top-down urban planning. In the field of computer science, Burns et al. (2021) emphasize the importance of rendering the invisible visible through the disclosure of metadata in visualizations. According to Burns et al. (2021), visualization biographies consist of metadata, which comprises information not directly observable in visualization but elucidates the genesis of the visualization or its current functionality. These biographies are crafted to unveil the invisible, offering additional context to enhance the understanding of visualization.

Building on these thoughts, I propose the implementation of ‘urban visualization annotation’ within the urban development field, similar to the idea of data biographies in computer science. Urban visualization annotation can be defined as an added deeper layer of information about publicly communicated city and urban visions. It is an additional, more profound stratum of information on the publicly communicated visions. This supplementary layer aids the general public in comprehending the context of the visualization and facilitates the expression of their diverse perspectives. Crucially, these annotations provide an alternative aesthetic gateway to diverse urban visions.

Similar to meta-information about data and biographies written about people, urban visualization annotations can encompass various information. For instance, some of the information that may be incorporated into an urban visualization annotation includes details about the envisioned project, such as who was or was not consulted in the design process, or information about the publicly communicated visualizations, such as the creators of the visualization, its history, the motivations behind their creation and the timeline of its creation.  Additionally, an annotation layer might delve into how specific social groups, such as residents of slum areas, perceive, or do not perceive, themselves reflected in the project design and its visualization. The annotations are about communicating the information that may be clear to members of a specific society group but not others. As such, these annotations may incorporate maps, data, or photographs to present the perspectives of multiple societal groups.

Additionally, an urban visualization annotation could incorporate expert knowledge from within the community regarding features of the design and their potential impact, aspects that might be overlooked or disregarded by those in positions of authority. For instance, in the plans for the Indonesian capital, community members might observe that the plan fails to address the fate of individuals currently residing in the area, aligning with criticisms raised about the existing plan (Asia News Network, 2021). By collecting and disseminating such information, voices initially excluded from the process of envisioning the future gain a platform to identify, question, and “talk back” to those in power. Offering opportunities for dissent against power and data align with feminist theories of visualization (D’Ignazio and Klein, 2016).

Upon revisiting the visual imagery of the proposed Indonesian capital (Figures 1 and 2), various types of information are rendered invisible and lost. However, the potential benefits of making this information available through annotated urban visualizations become evident. Envisioning a scenario where individuals from the community can integrate their thoughts and questions directly into the image is crucial for a more inclusive representation.

In the image below, I abstractly show how a discussion may be ignited through an urban visualization annotation, intending to stimulate readers’ imaginations. The idea is to think about how images could be annotated to highlight information not inherently present in the images. This involves incorporating the perspectives of various societal groups to communicate information that may be evident to one community but not to another.

It is crucial to emphasize that the example in Figure 3 is not the sole or optimal method to achieve the objective of urban visualization annotations. I suggest considering urban visualizations as a medium of communication representing multiple actor perspectives. In this context, urban visualization annotations may ignite dialogue around urban projects. The objective of this article is to initiate a discussion on the importance of rendering invisible urban information visible by incorporating the often-hidden information about urban projects and the perspectives of various stakeholders in the urban visioning process of new cities. This inclusive approach aims to facilitate more informed decision-making in city development. Future research may use the urban visualization annotation to focus on what information can be communicated via them.

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Urban Visualization Annotations for Inclusive Planning

As a counter-strategy against top-down planning and against exclusive urban visualizations that prioritize elite populations, as urban visualization annotations make invisible information visible, they could offer communities a mechanism to gather and disseminate information about visualizations created by elite powers, surpassing the details provided by the creators themselves. By providing a (visual) medium for diverse community groups to express their visions and integrate their thoughts and knowledge into the visualization, annotated urban visualizations could serve as a means for society groups to engage in a dialogue with the visualizations generated by bodies in power and the entities that crafted them. As such, allowing a way to question and “talk back” to positions of authority (i.e. the creators of urban projects and the visualizations (usually governing bodies)).

There exist several unresolved questions on urban visualization annotations that I aim to pose and leave open for discussion, thereby broadening the discourse on the subject. These questions encompass: What information should be incorporated? Who should contribute to the biography? What format should the biography assume? The answers to these questions are inherently context-specific and contingent upon factors such as the characteristics of the community, the context in which the visualization is promoted, and the nature of what is being visualized. For instance, the inquiries addressed by urban visualization annotations for a single building may differ from those for an entire city plan. Moreover, communities with active internet or social media usage may prefer computer-generated or digital annotations, whereas those without digital access may opt for printed or handwritten annotations. At a fundamental level, urban visualization annotations should reflect the community aspirations in ways that top-down designs fail to do. They should actively coproduce and disseminate community-centric knowledge frequently excluded from one-way planning processes.

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References

• Asia News Network. The Phnom Penh Post.(2021, November 1). Indonesia Capital Bill  Draws Concerns about  Democracy. .https://www.phnompenhpost.com/international/indonesia-capital-bill-draws-concerns-about-democracy.
• BBC News. BBC.(2019, August 24). “Changing Places: Why Countries Decide to Move      Their Capitals”.  https://www.bbc.com/news/world-49406700.
• Burns, A., On, T., Lee, C., Shapiro, R., Xiong, C., & Mahyar, N. (2021). “Making the Invisible Visible: Risks and Benefits of Disclosing Metadata in Visualization.” To appear in the Proceedings of the 2021 Visualization for Social Good Workshop.
• D’Ignazio, C. &, F. Klein, L.(2016). “Feminist data visualization”. Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities (VIS4DH), Baltimore. IEEE.
• D’Ignazio, C. &, F. Klein, L.(2020). “Data feminism”. MIT Press.
• De Vries, WT. (2021). “Urban Greening for New Capital Cities. A Meta Review”. Front.
• Sustain. Cities 3:670807. doi:10.3389/frsc.2021.670807
• Hendawy, M., Riad, R., Elgredly, S. H., (in press) Visual politics of a mediatized urban age: Tracing what the press news makes visible about urban planning — Case of the new administrative capital city in Egypt. Nature Cities.
• Hendawy, M., 2022, Spatio-Visual Co-constructions: Communication and Digitalization of Urban planning in a mediatized world – Cairo as a glocal Case. Ph.D. Thesis, TU Berlin, defense date: 5 August 2021, Grade Summa Cum Laude.
• Hendawy, M.  2021a. “Imaging Power: Planning visualizations and the co-construction of spatio-visual injustice” [presentation].
• Hendawy, M. 2021b.  [In]visibilities: The Academic City versus Ordinary Cities – Mediatizing Planning Knowledge in Egyptian Universities. ARCHPLAN special issue with Prof. Patsy Healy as Guest Editor.
• Hendawy, M. & Stollmann, J., 2020 The Entanglement of Class, Marriage and Real Estate: The Visual Culture of Egypt’s Urbanisation, Urban Planning Journal.
• Hendawy, M. and Saeed,A. 2020, Beauty and the Beast: The Ordinary City versus the Media-tized City, Case of Cairo, Urbanisation journal
• Irfan Gorbiano, Marchio, Karina M. Tehusijarana, and N. Ardi. The Jakarta Post, August 27, 2019. “Jokowi Picks East Kalimantan”. The Jakarta Post.https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2019/08/27/jokowi-picks-east-kalimantan.html.
• Lazar, D. (2005). “Capital Cities, Cultural  Representation, And National Identities”. Berlin-Washington, 1800-2000: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Van de Vuurst, P. & E. Escobar, L. (2020). “Perspective: Climate Change and the Relocation of Indonesia’s Capital to Borneo.” Frontiers in Earth Science 8 (2020): 5.
• BBC News. BBC.(2019, August 24). “Changing Places: Why Countries Decide to Move      Their Capitals”.  https://www.bbc.com/news/world-49406700.
• Burns, A., On, T., Lee, C., Shapiro, R., Xiong, C., & Mahyar, N. (2021). “Making the Invisible Visible: Risks and Benefits of Disclosing Metadata in Visualization.” To appear in the Proceedings of the 2021 Visualization for Social Good Workshop.
• D’Ignazio, C. &, F. Klein, L.(2016). “Feminist data visualization”. Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities (VIS4DH), Baltimore. IEEE.
• D’Ignazio, C. &, F. Klein, L.(2020). “Data feminism”. MIT Press.
• De Vries, WT. (2021). “Urban Greening for New Capital Cities. A Meta Review”. Front. Sustain. Cities 3:670807. doi:10.3389/frsc.2021.670807
• Hendawy, M., Riad, R., Elgredly, S. H., (in press) Visual politics of a mediatized urban age: Tracing what the press news makes visible about urban planning — Case of the new administrative capital city in Egypt. Nature Cities.
• Hendawy, M., 2022, Spatio-Visual Co-constructions: Communication and Digitalization of Urban planning in a mediatized world – Cairo as a glocal Case. Ph.D. Thesis, TU Berlin, defense date: 5 August 2021, Grade Summa Cum Laude.
• Hendawy, M.  2021a. “Imaging Power: Planning visualizations and the co-construction of spatio-visual injustice” [presentation].
• Hendawy, M. 2021b.  [In]visibilities: The Academic City versus Ordinary Cities – Mediatizing Planning Knowledge in Egyptian Universities. ARCHPLAN special issue with Prof. Patsy Healy as Guest Editor.

Acknowledgment

• I would like to thank Tamara Al Masadeh for her assistance in formatting the article as a part of her internship at Impact Circles e.V. in Berlin.

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About the Author

Dr. Mennatullah Hendawy^1,2,3 is an interdisciplinary urban planner working on the intersections of cities, media, and technology toward equity and sustainability. She is an assistant professor at Ain Shams University in Cairo, Egypt. She is also affiliated with the University of California Santa Cruz in the USA, Impact Circles e.V., and the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) gGmbH in Germany. Hendawy received her Ph.D. in 2021 from the faculty of Planning Building Environment at TU Berlin in Germany, graded: summa cum laude. In her Ph.D., she explored the mediatization of urban development in Cairo as a local yet global case. In 2015, Hendawy completed an MSc. in Integrated Urbanism and Sustainable Design from Stuttgart University with a focus on urban policies. Hendawy holds a Bachelor of Science in Architectural Engineering from Ain Shams University in Cairo, Department of Urban Planning and Design (class of 2012).

1. Faculty of Engineering, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt
2. The Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS), UMass Amherst, MA, USA
3. Impact Circles e.V., Berlin, Germany

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Juan Antonio Sorto

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Governments in Latin America and Mexico have used different types of design and placemaking models to address systemic social inequities impacting urban and rural communities. For example, in 2016, the Government of Medellin, Colombia created the Medellin Model program, which uses modern architecture to create sustainable buildings in low-income communities and improve public transportation (Díaz, 2019). In 2018, the Mexico City government found partners within the architecture field willing to advance their Points of Innovation, Freedom, Art, Education, and Knowledge (PILARES) program to address inner city youth development by constructing buildings that were welcoming to the targeted audience  (Zatarain, 2022).

 In 2021, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele inaugurated several urban community spaces known as Centros Urbanos de Bienestar y Oportunidades (CUBO), which translates to Urban Wellness and Opportunities Centers. Following the same concept as Medellin and Mexico City, CUBOs were placed in areas known to have an elevated level of inequality through the lack of economic opportunities and education combined with highs level of crime. For the CUBO in San Miguel, El Salvador located inside the neighborhood of Colonia Milagro de La Paz, the building was designed and built using modern architectural features, including solar panels and ecofriendly materials to sustain the building. The building functions as a library, computer lab, kitchen, and a space to learn and practice other trades, which are designed to bring the community together. Images show the design and usage of CUBO San Miguel, El Salvador. All images were taken on February 11, 2022.

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2. Front of the Building

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3. Water tower next to a ramp designed for people with disability to access the second floor

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4. Two police officers using Wi-fi. There is a police station on site.

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5. Doors to the entrance of the building are operated by solar energy.

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6. Two patrons using the facility as a meeting place

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7. A large teddy bear next to a sign that reads Area De Lectura (Reading Zone)

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8. Two workers next to the book shelves and computer station

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9. Kid play zone with two large screens and video game consoles.

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10. Activity board highlighting past and future events inside CUBO

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References

Díaz, L. S. (2019). INFRASTRUCTURAL PROJECTS IN MEDELLIN’S INFORMAL SETTLEMENTS, COLOMBIA: Medellín Model: Infrastructural projects in informal settlements. Retrieved from Critical Perspectives on International Planning: https://sites.utexas.edu/internationalplanning/case-studies/infrastructural-projects-in-informal-settlements-medellin/

Zatarain, A. K. (2022, June 23). The PILARES Program Seeks to Bring Beautiful Design to Mexico City’s Neglected Neighborhoods. Retrieved from ArchDialy: https://www.archdaily.com/984135/the-pilares-program-seeks-to-bring-beautiful-design-to-mexico-citys-neglected-neighborhoods

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About the Author

Dr. Juan Antonio Sorto earned his PhD in Urban Planning and Environmental Policy from Texas Southern University. He is currently a Post Doctoral Research Fellow at the Bullard Center for Environmental Justice and Climate Change at Texas Southern University. His research interests are public participation, housing, environmental and climate justice, and policy. He is currently leading ethnographic research in El Salvador through the Bullard Center and Gerardo Barrios University in San Miguel, El Salvador to determine how public participation can lead to the creation of a capacity plan in an undeveloped nation that will allow the community to address environmental and climate issues.

Mahlaqa Fahami

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This photo essay is focused on an explorative experience in the Kreuzberg neighborhood from U Kottbuser Tor to Leigendamm, Berlin, Germany where the historical and contemporary elements are realized. According to UNESCO (2021), the term cultural heritage encompasses several categories of heritage such as, tangible and intangible. With this photo essay, we will briefly look through some of the tangible and intangible heritages of this neighborhood which have been playing an essential part in building its urban character. The presence of historic buildings, installations, and monuments represent the past of Berlin before and after the World War II. Most interestingly, the lives and cultures of different migrant communities, such as the Turkish immigrants have played an important part in creating such elements in this area. The arts, buildings, courtyards, and urban spaces have equal participation from the immigrants who have shared their culture in this part of then-West Berlin. Moreover, Internationale Bauausstellung (IBA) architects such as, Hardt-Waltherr Hämer, Heide Moldenhauer and many others – came forward with careful urban renewal strategies during 1984/87, to not disperse the residing migrant community from the neighborhood. Some of their works are still visible there. Lastly, the punk rock culture, the contemporary “multiculti” character of Kreuzberg is prevalent in the vicinity of this neighborhood. Urban renewal, as well as historic buildings and cultural diversity that symbolizes modern Kreuzberg to us, are noticed by the author of this essay, through the method known as “dérive: the exploration of a place or neighborhood by walking on one’s own or in small groups of two to three“ (Debord, 1958). The walking is influenced by the Serial Vision technique by Gordon Cullen (1961) where each image is taken and visualized and noted on the map. The even progression of the walking is noticed with surprising features and changes in the area with multi-cultural dominance. From the first gentrifying divider mixed-use building Neues Kreuzberger Zentrum (NKZ) to the Kunst Quartier Bethanien, the different layers of urban renewal and heritage are observed in this exploration to comprehend the relationship between regeneration and cultural diversity in Berlin.

01 The Figure Ground Map. The position of the walking through the figure ground map is noted by letters „a to t“ to better understand the author’s perspectives. The author has used the color “red” in the captured photos to focus the points of interest. This self-explorative walking with photos on specific points makes us realize the link between the past and the present in Urban Renewal and heritage-making at Kottbuser Tor, Kreuzberg, West Berlin.

»The even progress of travel is illuminated by a series of sudden contrasts and so an impact is made on the eye, bringing the plan to life (like nudging a man who is going to sleep in church)« 

Gordon Cullen, The Concise Townscape, 1961

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02 The Neues Kreuzberger Zentrum (NKZ). The walking journey starts from point a which is noted on the figure-ground map at Adalbertstrasse, Kottbuser Tor in front of the NKZ that was built as a „noise barrier“. This mixed-use development once was the first symbol of renewal in Kreuzberg with an intention to disperse the working population and welcome gentrification. The building changed from “an utopian beacon into a dystopian nightmare“ (Failed Architecture, 2021) over time. If one goes beyond this building, he/she can experience a different side of Berlin with multiculturalism. 

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03 Turkish Food Restaurant under NKZ at point a to b. The neighborhood is popular for its Turkish cuisine and grill houses. The present multiculturism at Kreuzberg is the result of the amalgamation of the migrant communities after their entry as labor workers in West Berlin during the 1960s. The way they have shared their cultural elements and created their own transnational identity – shows us that culture and heritage have immense power to establish a sense of belonging to a place. During city renewal, these cultural features play an important role to recognize a place’s urban character. 

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04 The SO36. The second turn is taken on points b to c at Oranienstrasse. Here the origin of punk rock music SO36 from the 1970s is experienced. The name has been taken from the postcode Südost (SO) 36 of the neighborhood. The presence of rock culture tradition with young population is prominent in this urban space.

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05 The “Am Haus”. Moving a bit forward at Oranienstrasse, the mural art of Turkish words on „Am Haus“by the Turkish female artist Ayse Erkmen (1949-) is found. It was installed in 1994 to represent the peculiarity of the language in the young generation of Turkish in Germany, who take German as their main language (amidst interpretation, 2012). 

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06 Graffiti on a residential building at Naunynstrasse

07 The mural art on 76/78 blocks by Hanefi Yeter at Adalberstrasse

»Yeter’s work is composed of humans made out of colorful three-dimensional tiles shown in everyday life scenes with a twist of unfamiliarity.« 

– Esra Akcan, Migration, Citizenship, and the Urban Renewal of Berlin-Kreuzberg by IBA-1984 / 87, pp. 236. 

From point c to f, courtyard spaces, typical housings with residents from different communities are observed on the walk. At the start of point h to i at Adalbertstrasse, the 76/78 blocks are observed where some major renovation works were conducted by IBA Altbau team with Hardt-Waltherr Hämer as the planning director in the 1980s. The blocks were renovated with the community‘s participation. Architect Moldenhauer initiated some extraordinary works such as murals, community hof spaces, and Kita, in this area. One such mural work was created by Turkish artist Hanefi Yeter at the request of Moldenhauer (Akcan, 2018). This mural is still prevalent on the renovated block at Adalbertstrasse (Figure 7). 

Kreuzberg is famous for its mural art and graffitis, and the introduction to the Turkish mural arts showcase the cultural diversity in the neighborhood. The neighborhood also has graffitis on the punk rock culture on the urban facade. One such example is observed during the walking on point-i at Naunynstrasse (Figure 6). 

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08 The cinema exhibition behind the Bethanien

09 The Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien (Exhibition space, movie screening, artists’ workspace)

When coming towards the Waldemarstrasse, the cinema exhibition is noticed by the author with a large stage and lighting. Going forward to the Mariannenplatz the Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien is found in point j-k on the map. Bethanien is one of the oldest buildings and hospitals in Kreuzberg built around 1846 (3schwestern, 2021). Now the building and its open spaces are used for cinema, music school, art exhibitions, and restaurants. The most interesting matter about this historic old building is – it has added a different perspective to the Kreuzberg neighborhood with the artistic character to the community people. 

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10 St. Michael’s Church. After crossing the l-o point on the map, at Legiendamm, the author was surprised by the view of the Engelbecken park and the vista of the St. Michael‘s Church, designed by architect August Soller. The water body within the park space and the view of a modern restaurant with the historic church as the backdrop provide one with an intriguing feeling of old and new. The current gentrification is somehow comprehensible on the scene with the new modern buildings alongside the waterbody. 

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11 The KinderHaus at Dresdener Strasse:

Coming to the end of the walking, on point q to r, at Dresdener Strasse, a parking garage turned into Kita-KinderHaus, was observed. This is designed during the IBA Altbau‘s careful renewal. This project is considered one of the most successful conversion projects in Berlin and bears the history of urban renewal after the fall of the Berlin wall at West Berlin (internationale-bauausstellungen.de, 2020). 

From point r-s-t, the journey brought us back to the Kottbuser Tor again. 

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12 A photo collage on the heritage and renewal at Kreuzberg, Berlin

This photo essay is a brief attempt to represent the multicultural heritage of this small neighborhood of Kreuzberg district in Berlin and how it has evolved throughout the urban renewal process. At the end of the walking exploration,the strong presence of immigrant communities‘ culture, punk rock heritage, music, art, murals, historic monuments are observed in every part of this neighborhood. However, the present trend of gentrification is hampering these cultural elements. Whereas, urban renewal should always respect the community, and their heritage that creates a sense of belonging to the place. In the case of Kreuzberg – the district also requires such a careful approach to the current urban development process that keeps the heritage making process alive and visible in the neighborhood. 

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References: 

Akcan, E. (2018). Open Architecture Migration, Citizenship and the Urban Renewal of BerlinKreuzberg by IBA 1984/87 (1st ed.). Walter de Gruyter GmbH. 

amidst interpretation. (2012). Am Haus. Amidst Interpretation. Retrieved 3 October 2022, from https://amidstinterpretation.wordpress.com/2012/04/04/am-haus/. 

Cullen, G. (1961). The Concise TOWNSCAPE (1st ed.). Routledge. 

Failed Architecture (2021). FA Workshop: Berlin’s Neues Kreuzberger Zentrum – Failed Architecture. Failed Architecture. Retrieved 6 October 2022, from https://failedarchitecture.com/events/fa-workshop-berlins-neues-kreuzberger-zentrum. 

internationale-bauausstellungen.de. (2020). Kindertagesstätte Dresdener Straße // Ein Parkhaus wird zum Kinderhaus | IBA. internationale-bauausstellungen.de. Retrieved 2 October 2022, from https://www.internationalebauausstellungen.de/geschichte/1979-1984-87-iba-berlin-die-innenstadt-alswohnort/kindertagesstaette-dresdener-strasse-ein-parkhaus-wird-zum-kinderhaus. 

UNESCO. (2022). Definition of the cultural heritage | United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.. UNESCO. Retrieved 8 October 2022, from http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/ themes/illicit-trafficking-of-cultural-property/unescodatabase-of-national-cultural-heritage-laws/frequently-asked-questions/definition-of-the-culturalheritage. 

Debord, G. (1958). Situationist International Online. Cddc.vt.edu. Retrieved 1 August 2022, from https:// www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html. 

3schwestern. (2022). Bethanien – 3 Schwestern. 3 Schwestern. Retrieved 1 October 2022, from https://www.3schwestern.com/bethanien.

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About the Author:

Mahlaqa Fahami, an aspiring architect living in Berlin, holds a Master’s Degree in Heritage Studies from Brandenburg University of Technology, Cottbus-Senftenberg. She has participated in several international design competitions and recently was awarded the 3. Diesing Preis in Architecture in the 169th annual AIV-Schinkel Competition in Germany. Currently contributing her skills as a full-time architect to a Berlin-based Landscape and Urban Design office, Mahlaqa’s works reflect her passion for public space design. Her academic pursuits have been focused on the intersection of cultural heritage and open-space planning, greatly influencing her recent research works.

Gabriel Espinoza

Abstract

This ethnographic research focuses on the trajectory of abandonment of a factory in the Franklin neighborhood of Santiago, Chile. It establishes a chronology of the post-industrial applications of the building, from informal to formal. Buildings can be understood as the object of processes; despite their immobility, their uses and meanings are in constant reconfiguration. This article analyses two dimensions to understand the trajectory of the property; time frames of occupation and recognition of the formality of these periods. This illustrates how the use of buildings, conceptualized here as ‘interim spaces,’ functions as a process of urban renewal. 

Keywords

Interim Spaces; Santiago; Buildings; Urban Studies; Urban Renewal

About the Author

Gabriel Espinoza Rivera (MSC, BA) is a sociologist and anthropologist currently enrolled in the Ph.D. program in Geography at West Virginia University. His work has a Cultural Geography emphasis addressing questions about late liberalism, value, and dispossession. His areas of study have been linked to Latinamerican Ruins (FONDECYT 1280352, Chile), and processes of recommodification and design in household economies (Fondart 581577, Chile).

Introduction

Franklin is known for being a working-class, commercial neighborhood in Santiago de Chile. I have been visiting this place since I was a child. However, my first interaction with the building occurred back in Spring 2015. I started visiting the Instituto Sánitas (the building’s name) my first interaction with the place on a lovely sunny and windy spring day in Santiago as my friend, an Airsoft enthusiast, invited me to see him play, harboring the hope that I would eventually engage with the game and develop a similar interest to be able to team up with him in upcoming matches. While I didn’t quite develop a passion for Airsoft, we did come back quite often in order to take photos of the place and to hang out with the building’s caretaker. 

In 2018, while doing my master’s in Anthropology, I was granted research funds for my dissertation in the subject of Urban Ruins and my first instinct was to study this abandoned factory. Built in the 1940s, in the midst of a modernization process led by the Chilean State under the Radical Governments, the Sanitas Institute had hopes of development by means of industrialization for Chile’s political elite. It was not only a place to produce drugs and medicine, but to enhance and deepen the national pharmaceutical discipline and knowledge. In the late 1990s, the building was left behind by the company and sold to a real estate agency. Today, 70 years later, this architectural body has been detached from its industrial genesis and uses, and left behind as a factory. However, to categorize it as a ruin or abandoned place would be a much too reductive take. 

The Construction of Abandonment 

The first impression I had of the building was an overwhelming atmosphere of abandonment. Andersson (2014) proposed that there might be some sort of abandonment ontology, hence a particular epistemology that helps understand the perception of emptiness. Although, the more time I spent in the place, the more my hypothesis of abandonment was challenged. I then completely eradicated the idea that this building was abandoned, and this was particularly because of the following three concepts: 

1. The first one is a reading on a relational environmental understanding (Ingold, 2002, 2013, 2018; DeSilvey, 2017). This theoretical proposal identifies abandonment as a mere concept that obliterates other ways of life and actions that shape, in an ongoing process, the surrounding environment. It also acknowledges that the world and the worldly experience are made by different beings and forces that produce, reproduce and allow life to happen. Thus, the environment, as well as the built environment, is understood as a set of agencies constantly becoming and producing place, space, materialities and providing life. This theoretical perspective eventually excludes abandonment as a total phenomenon and enlightens the anthropic biased perspective of such a concept. 

2. At the same time, this is not merely a biased approach only because of human action, but also because with categorizing spaces into occupied and abandoned, there is a ruinophobic gaze that imposes what should and should not dwell in the place. As Bennet (2017) puts it, there’s a certain way in which the idea of property defines territories and cities. This sets a particular scope of attributes that a building should have, which include both dwellers and their activities. Some sort of moralization takes place regarding what type of dwellers should use these places based on their moral values. Following Cresswel’sl (1996) and Matless’s (1994) approaches, there are some dwellers, material, materialities and practices allowed to be present at this building and in its public surroundings while others are not. 

3. The mere presence of the building implies multiple possibilities of use. A building is as much an idea as a material architectural body. The presence of the building in a particular territory, as Guggenheim (2009) describes, enacts a set of symbolic and practical relationships. Buildings are contested bodies that are never fully closed in their possibilities of use. Harman (2017), opposing Latour and Yaneva’s (2008) discussion, says that there might be moments when a building is an object rather than a process. The open possibilities of the building as something that is constantly mutating, remains. Guggenheim (2009) calls buildings mutable immobile, because their emplacement is constant but what they are, referring to their social production as an object, depends on the uses, material conditions and relationships with the surrounding environment. This includes human direct/indirect actions, as well as economic, material, or other types of emergent or stable relationships. 

Hence, my research shifted from abandonment and ruins to building as procedural objects; flexible architectural bodies and spatialities. My main question then became: for whom was the building abandoned or empty? While doing my field work, every single space inside the building was under occupation. These occupations were there, waiting, latent, but out of sync from each other. Every single occupation brought life and produced space by means of their specific activity. All of them worked and took place in different moments in time, but in a shared topographic space and place. While the building’s facade has been occupied for the last 20 years with different stores from barbershops, to restaurants or kitchen appliances stores, the interior was filled with activities that were more heterotopic. With a particular permit, to work inside the building for a limited time, a Ghost tour, an Airsoft-Field and a training spot for Lucha Libre, gave life to the building’s interior. But these activities did not last long. 

Boutiqization 

By the end of 2018, I was told by the building’s caretaker that the property would eventually be turned into a Boutique that would host a café, a shoemaker’s shop, a deli counter and others stores producing and offering handcrafts, as well as an Art gallery. The renovation of the building started in early 2019, and all the activities sheltered in the interior of the property were dismissed. This helped to accelerate a process of commercial gentrification, starting in 2012, with the inclusion of gourmet restaurants and stores oriented to middle and upper middle class consumers in the midst of Franklin, a traditional working class neighborhood (Espinoza, forthcoming). Also known as what Hubbard (2017) or Zukin et al. (2009) define as “boutiquization”: changes in the commercial scape of an urban area, that either discourages and shrinks the presence of lower income users to the area, or removes both the users and stores that buy and sell cheaper products than the newcomers. This then produces a symbolic and economic boundary that attracts a particular set of customers while excluding those that cannot afford neither the taste or the money to participate in these places. 

On August 5, 2019, the municipality of Santiago shared the following statement on its social network and website

“The future of the #Franklin neighborhood is in the hands of the productive and industrial soul that forms its history. Rescuing that spirit, the group “Franklin CoFactoring Arts and Crafts” is developing an innovative project in the old building of the Sanitas Institute, which was empty for 20 years. Now it will receive businesses of crafts, delicatessen, shoes, distillates, restaurants, furniture, etc. Mayor Felipe Alessandri visited the space, in Franklin 741. “This is a meeting point for what we are promoting in the municipality: to recover the life of the neighborhoods and their identity, together with the neighbors” (Ilustre Municipalidad de Santiago, 2019)

The idea of abandonment is constructed as a factual public reality through devices of political communication. There was mostly void, an absence of humanity, some sort of Terra Nullius2 in the middle of one of the most crowded cities in South America. Or, at least, that’s how the city council introduced and explained this renewal process. The building, in its procedural nature, is also the tragic present and the bright future that will inherit the neighborhood’s history, framed as a discursive device that will romanticize the past, not necessarily authentically embrace it. 

In 2019, the building was “recovered” by the Municipality and private investors who wanted to bring back the old-new life to Franklin. However, the civil unrest in Chile that took place from October 2019 to March 2020 followed by the Covid pandemic, delayed the inauguration of this Boutique-Art center until further notice. The new shops have been using and holding production activities rather than giving services to customers since 2019. In December 2020, the building opened for the first time to the public, but it was just for a couple of days. Then, Covid cases rose in the region and, once again, the building was closed to the public. Since January 2021, this situation has been similarly disruptive. All of the above seems like a bad joke. However, the destiny of the building seems to be in eternal waiting, even if the tale of recuperation from abandonment has already taken place in the property. 

Final Thoughts 

My initial approach to the building was led by curiosity and the will of understanding what a building is in anthropological terms, and if abandonment is a universal category, or just something mediated and biased by a series of limited perspectives of things and the environment. In spite of this, my early theoretical concerns allowed me to understand how buildings, and the conceptualization of abandonment, play a key role in the production of city value and the management of the voids. As Colomb (2017) and Andres (2013) explain, the idea of interim spaces has been deployed since the ‘90s – at least in Central Europe – in order to manage abandoned buildings left by processes of deindustrialization and the end of the Socialist Era. To manage the void implies to welcome a particular set of uses and users – desirable ones – that will keep on adding value through freezing urban spaces, and maybe deploying some cultural activities in order to produce value under the gaze of creative cities. The property owners are, therefore, waiting for a real estate project that will turn the abandoned into occupied, while avoiding squatting and undesirable occupations (See Martínez, 2020). 

In this case, the management of the abandonment, addressed in the building by the owners of the property and the Local Government, was proven useful in keeping the property un-squatted and allowing to replace with ease, those temporary users and uses for official ones. However, nothing can assure that temporality and abandonment will not come back sooner than expected to the building. Paraphrasing Marx, what once was thought as solid will melt into air. There is no guarantee that this new stability that covers and frames a building will overcome substantial or radical changes, financial issues, or some new urban political definition. There is not a thing in the world that can escape entropy – this includes the social life of a building as well as its material and materialities. Hence, the surest thing regarding the built environment is to wait for changes to come. As DeSilvey points out: “Our minds have a tendency to consolidate these [buildings] things as cultural objects, and it takes an extra effort to see them as provisional gatherings of matter, on their way to becoming something else” (DeSilvey, 2017, p. 19).

Acknowledgments 

This research has been funded by “Fondecyt 1180352 Urban Ruins. Replicas of Memory in Latin American Cities. Santiago, Quito and Bogota” 

References

Andersson, D. (2014). “No Man’s No Man’s Land: The Ontology of a Space Left Over.” En B. Olsen & Þ. Pétursdóttir (Eds.), In Ruin Memories: Materialities, Aesthetics and the Archaeology of the Recent Past (Routledge, pp. 287- 304). 

Andres, L. (2013). Differential Spaces, Power Hierarchy and Collaborative Planning: A Critique of the Role of Temporary Uses in Shaping and Making Places. Urban Studies, 50(4), 759-775. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098012455719 

Bennett, L. (2017). Forcing the Empties Back to Work? Ruinphobia and the Bluntness of Law and Policy. En J. Henneberry (Ed.), Transience and Permanence in Urban Development (pp. 17-29). John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. https://doi. org/10.1002/9781119055662.ch2 

Colomb, C. (2017). The Trajectory of Berlin’s ‘Interim Spaces’: Tensions and Conflicts 

in the Mobilisation of ‘Temporary Uses’ of Urban Space in Local Economic Development. En J. Henneberry (Ed.), Transience and Permanence in Urban Development (pp. 131-149). John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. https://doi. org/10.1002/9781119055662.ch9 

Espinoza, G. (Forthcoming). Informally Functional: Interim Spaces and Urban Renewal in Franklin, Santiago. AUS (Arquitectura/Urbanismo/Sustentabilidad), 29. 

Guggenheim, M. (2009). Building memory: Architecture, networks and users. Memory Studies, 2(1), 39-53. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698008097394 

Harman, G. (2017). Buildings are not Processes: A Disagreement with Latour and Yaneva. ARDETH, 1, 113-122. https://doi.org/10.17454/ARDETH01.09 

Hubbard, P. (2017). The battle for the High Street: Retail gentrification, class and disgust. Palgrave Macmillan. 

Ilustre Municipalidad de Santiago. (2019, agosto 5). Nuevo Emprendimiento en el Barrio Franklin (New development in Barrio Franklin.) [Institucional]. En terreno. https://www.munistgo.cl/nuevo-emprendimiento-en-el-barrio-franklin/ 

Ingold, T. (2002). The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (1.^a ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203466025 

Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Routledge. 

Ingold, T. (2018). La vida de las líneas (A. Stevenson, Trad.; 1era ed.). Universidad Alberto Hurtado. 

Latour, B., & Yaneva, A. (2008). Give me a Gun and I will Make All Buildings Move; An ANT’s View of Architecture. En R. Geiser (Ed.), Explorations in Architecture: Teaching, Design, Research (pp. 80-89). Birkhaüser. 

Martínez, M. A. (2020). Squatters in the capitalist city: Housing, justice, and urban politics. Routledge. 

Zukin, S., Kasinitz, P., & Chen, X. (Eds.). (2016). Global cities, local streets: Everyday diversity from New York to Shanghai (1 Edition). Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. 

Zukin, S., Trujillo, V., Frase, P., Jackson, D., Recuber, T., & Walker, A. (2009). New Retail Capital and Neighborhood Change: Boutiques and Gentrification in New York City. City & Community, 8(1), 47-64. https://doi.org/10.1111/ j.1540-6040.2009.01269.x

Mickey Edwards

Abstract

This paper examines twelve UberX rides completed over four hours in Cincinnati with the intent of comparing first-person evidence of ridehail travelers to a growing body of quantitative literature. Traveler data are based on observation and casual conversation between the author (driver) and the passenger. A typical Saturday morning was chosen beginning in Cincinnati’s Central Business District (CBD), and each subsequent trip was based on the location of the previous trip destination without intervention. This work attempts to tell the narrative of where each traveler was going, infer why they chose ridehailing, and explore the social relationship between riders and drivers. More specifically, it places these twelve travelers in the context of published ridehail literature. From the driver’s perspective, $68.32 was grossed after four hours of driving—including one tip, $2 tip on the twelfth ride. This small sample of ridehail passengers, and driver profits, conforms to findings published in the academic literature yet is not intended to be statistically significant. This work has implications for future research by presenting details about trips and passengers not before seen in the literature.

Keywords

Ridehail; Uber; Socioeconomics; Driver Earnings

About the Author

Mickey Edwards, PhD, is a Visiting Researcher at the University of Illinois Springfield where he studies motor vehicle crashes and their effect on pedestrians, cyclists, and communities. Other research interests include transportation and infrastructure equity. He has worked on policy in the U.S. Senate and taught several courses at the University of Cincinnati. Previous careers include several years in photojournalism and a stint as an engineer for a large consumer goods company.

Introduction

Most of what researchers know about who uses ridehailing and why they use it is based on large, aggregated data sets. These data sets are certainly useful in modeling ridehail use and travel behavior, but the nuances of an individual’s options and reasons for transport choices are commonly lost. This paper sets out to explore a qualitative gap in the ridehail literature by presenting first-person, casual, statistically insignificant observations and conversations experienced during twelve UberX rides over 4 hours on a brisk March Saturday morning in Cincinnati, Ohio. The aim here is not to dispute nor support previous ridehail research, but to supplement it with descriptions of human behavior—too messy to quantify or model. Behavioral decisions made by both drivers and passengers are seemingly often influenced by how they perceive it will affect their star rating. 

Ridehail companies depend upon user-facing performance ratings not only to monitor the behavior of their drivers, but also to monitor the behavior of their customers. Ratings for drivers and riders alike, though seemingly inconsequential at face value, can negatively affect either party when relatively low. Drivers face the threat of being de-platformed—essentially banned from driving for the company over a low average rating. Riders with a low average rating may face a relatively difficult time catching a ride—since some drivers are reluctant to pick up poorly rated passengers (Campbell, 2015). The social awkwardness that performance ratings sometimes hasten has not been lost on popular culture. Saturday Night Live has produced two sketches titled “Uber for Jen’’ and “Five Stars” (links provided in Reference section) with a combined YouTube audience of 14 million views satirizing the effect of star ratings on social behavior—specifically the social relationship between ridehail drivers and passengers. This research takes aim at that social relationship alongside glimpses into motivational factors for choosing ridehailing and the sociodemographic characteristics of riders. 

Related Literature

Though some researchers have driven for Lyft and Uber in an effort to collect data, none have published findings collected in the same manner as presented here. Despite this, related literature is reviewed to provide context for passenger encounters described below. 

Commonly Applied Methods and Sources 
Ridehail researchers have used a variety of methods and data sources to answer a variety of questions. Rayle et al. (2015) intercepted and surveyed users observed exiting a ridehail vehicle at popular San Francisco destinations in their exploratory and oft-cited study. Henao (2017) drove for Lyft and Uber in Denver to overcome a dearth of available data and directly accessed 311 passengers for surveying. Gehrke et al. (2018) recruited 10 ridehail drivers in Boston to implement a passenger survey, paying them $2 for each of the 944 completed responses. Clewlow and Mishra (2017) emailed surveys to 4,094 respondents in 7 major American metropolitan areas to study ridehail adoption and use. Dillahunt et al. (2017) interviewed 12 low-income Detroit residents to study how they interact with ridehailing technology. Lee et al. (2015) interviewed ridehail drivers to better understand how they use the technology. Leistner and Steiner (2017) studied a Gainesville initiative to subsidize 1,445 ridehailing trips over 9 months for low-income seniors. Brown (2018) used data obtained from Lyft to analyze 6.3 million trips made by 828,616 people in Los Angeles. Brown (2018) also recruited passengers in Los Angeles to audit ridehail service equity there. Ge et al. (2016) deployed passengers in Seattle and Boston to make 1,500 trips to audit ridehail service equity in those cities. Wang and Mu (2018) in Atlanta, Hughes and MacKenzie (2016) in Seattle, and Thebault-Spieker et al. (2017) in Chicago accessed Uber API data to examine variations in the spatial distribution of wait times. Deka and Fei (2019) used the 2017 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) to draw broad conclusions about the sociodemographics of ridehail adoption. Schaller (2018) also uses NHTS data combined with public utility and other data to study the typical ridehail user in 9 metropolitan areas. Finally, Alemi et al. (2018) used the 2015 California Millennials Dataset to study ridehail adoption and use. 

The most statistically robust ridehail research has relied on analyzing large, aggregated, and anonymized data sets typically provided by the TNC under study. The broadest, most generalizable, ridehail research is based on recently released NHTS findings (Deka and Fei, 2019; Schaller, 2018). Though the NHTS lumped ridehailing use in with taxi and limousine use in its survey questions (FHA, 2016), rendering the disaggregation of implications for ridehail use dubious. Many other researchers have sought to survey and interview people about if and why they use ridehailing, compiling sample sizes from a few hundred to several thousand respondents. 

Still, no research has presented findings from casually observing a small sample of individual ridehail passengers while comparing them to published literature. Yet similar observational methods have been applied in similar contexts. For example, Brown (2018) obtained ridehail driver age, gender, and race information as well as their working preferences through casual observation and volunteered information from a passenger’s perspective. 

Common Ridehail Trip Types 
Alcohol consumption is frequently cited as a strong motivating factor for ridehail use. Rayle et al. (2015) find 21% of ridehail users want to avoid drinking and driving. Henao (2017) finds that among those who drive, alcohol consumption and parking difficulties are top motivating factors; and among non-drivers, not having a car, poor transit, and time savings are top motivating factors for ridehail use. About a third of online survey respondents report to use ridehailing when avoiding drinking and driving, about the same share of those avoiding parking-related issues (Clewlow and Mishra, 2017). Gehrke et al. (2018) report the top 3 reasons for ridehail use are: because it is faster than transit, there is no car available, and to avoid parking hassles—in that order. 

Work commuting is also a popular application of ridehail use. Henao (2017) reports that “most” non-drivers use ridehailing to get to work and school; and “most” drivers use ridehailing for social trips, going to the airport, or traveling while out of town. In their online survey Clewlow and Mishra (2017) found that “bars and parties’’ and “restaurants and cafes” made up 62% of trips. Across 3 studies, between 16% to 30% of respondents have reported using ridehailing for work commuting in the last 3 months (Henao 2017; Rayle et al. 2015; SUMC 2016). In Boston, Gehrke (2018) reports work trips top all other types, and Schaller (2018) finds 18% of trips in the 9 metros studied were for work commuting. 

Ridehail Access and Equity 
As ridehail use proliferates across both geography and socioeconomic status, it fills a transport gap for residents of some communities. In Austin, low-income users are more likely to use ridehailing for “utilitarian” purposes like work or school, and higher-income users are more likely to make social or airport trips (Dias et al., 2018). Low-income Los Angelenos made 25% more ridehail trips than their wealthier regional peers (Brown, 2018). Schaller (2018) found that very low-income households earning under $15,000 made more ridehail trips than middle-income earners. Bostonian ridehail users earning about the regional median income or less account for most weekly ridehail users (Gehrke et al., 2018). And Deka and Fei (2019) conclude that non-Hispanic Whites have a greater adoption rate yet are not likely to use ridehailing very frequently. Clewlow and Mishra (2017) found that White survey respondents had the smallest share of adoption with 21% having tried ridehailing. Black respondents had the greatest share of ridehail adoption with 27% who have tried it, followed by Asians at 23%, and Hispanics at 22%.

Though low-income and minority individuals may use ridehailing more frequently, they may also face barriers to access. Ge et al. (2016) report ridehail users with Black-sounding names have a relatively more difficult time getting a car to show up compared to users with White-sounding names. Brown (2018) also audited ridehail service equity and concluded similar results: Black users faced slightly higher cancellation rates than White users. However, Hughes and MacKenzie (2016) find essentially no relationship between race/ ethnicity and wait times in Seattle. Wang and Mu (2018) also find no association between race, income, and unemployment rate and wait times in Atlanta. Yet, Thebault-Spieker et al. (2017) conclude low-income residents in low density areas are forced to wait longer and pay more for a ridehail trip. Still, drivers have been found to turn off the ridehailing app while driving nearby “bad neighborhoods’’ to avoid receiving trip requests and “bad situations” (Lee et al., 2015). Surge prices are meant to incent more drivers to go online to meet rider demand, yet higher prices may edge out those low-income riders who depend most on ridehailing (Harding et al. 2016). 

Getting Ready to Drive  

Prior to the observations documented here, I had been driving for two months across both the Lyft and Uber applications. Saturday morning was selected for its relatively low frequency of trips (Brown, 2018), which provided a lower propensity for surge pricing that may have prohibited some would-be passengers. Based on my experience and research cited above, there is also no obvious trip type dominating Saturday morning ridehail travel, which should render passengers and their trip purposes less uniform. For example, sociodemographic and trip purpose uniformity is likely common among ridehailing trips at 1:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning—younger consumers of alcohol as cited above. Observations for this study were made on a sunny yet mild morning in March of 2019, which likely reduced the influence of weather on mode choice. Indeed, on that morning, there were no clear causes for exogenous shocks in ridehail travel demand or behavior. 

Similar to how Servon (2017) researched the alternative banking industry by working as a payday-loan teller, I draw on first-hand casual observations and conversations with passengers from an Uber driver perspective. No other method allows for such a detailed study of how people and communities use and interact with ridehailing. 

UberX ride requests were accepted beginning at 6:45 a.m. in Cincinnati’s central business district (CBD). Each subsequent trip request, based on the destination of the previous trip, was accepted without interference. For each incoming trip request the image of a generic human bust, as seen in Figure 6.1, was prominently displayed on the screen along with a few prospective trip details to aid the driver in deciding whether to accept or decline: driving time to pickup location, distance to pickup in miles, and average star rating of the requesting passenger. Other information sometimes included with applicable trip requests included: surge rates, pickup premium, and scheduled ride information. Trip details were overlaid onto a map containing the user’s origin and driver’s current location connected by a blue line representing the recommended travel route. The Uber application permitted the driver approximately 5 seconds to view the information and decide whether to accept the ride before the request expired and then presumably moved on to the next closest available driver. Time permitted for driver acceptance was graphically presented as a thin, white, diminishing circle encompassing the would-be passenger’s bust (Figure 6.1). 

The information presented regarding gender, race/ethnicity, and age is based on my observation alone—they may not be correct. Trip purpose, reason for using Uber, and other details are based on observation and information volunteered by the passenger, rather than asking predetermined questions as one would in a survey or interview. Trip time, distance, and earnings were collected from the Uber driver application after the final ride was completed. Where appropriate and useful, I draw on previous experiences of completing more than 200 ridehail trips in Cincinnati as the driver. 

Uber Everywhere

The intent here is to make an interesting addition to the ridehail literature by providing a first-hand driver’s account of typical passengers encountered on a typical day. So much of the published research on passengers slices and dices them into social and demographic silos while assuming each is the embodiment of homo economicus—masters of utility maximization. But in reality humans are messy, we make mistakes, we don’t know if it’s more polite to sit up front with the Uber driver or in the back alone. We sometimes miss the bus and have no choice but to Uber to work—and even though the cost of the ride may exceed an hour’s wages, the cost of not showing up is far greater. We are sometimes poor judges of when to talk, and when to be silent. And we are often bad tippers. The following attempts to capture some of that which is not easily sussed out in a survey, or measured in a data set. It is a timeline and narrative of the trips completed on that brisk March morning in Cincinnati, including those messy human details. 

6:53 a.m.
After eight minutes of waiting for a trip request, the first one is a Black Millennial male waiting on a sidewalk in the CBD. He gets into the passenger side rear seat as most people do. He is in good spirits and explaining how rewarding it feels for him to be awake so early and on the move. It is not obvious whether he is a local—and where he was picked up from offered no clues. Neither does the purpose of his trip: across the CBD to a hotel restaurant to meet a friend for breakfast. He politely says thanks and de-cars. Time: 3 minutes 24 seconds. Distance: 0.62 miles. Driver’s take: $3.01. 

7:07 a.m.
It took another ten minutes or so of waiting before the next trip request came in. It came from a neighborhood colloquially known as uptown—which is up a hill and dominated by students of the University of Cincinnati. A White Millennial male emerges from a single family home and enters the passenger side front seat. This does not happen often, so when it does, it is a bit surprising. A passenger from the previous day once told me that she sits in the front seat because to do otherwise would be rude. She also hinted that she really likes getting five star ratings and sitting up front may help in that effort. But this particular passenger does not seem concerned about his rating. He smells of alcohol and appears to be dressed in the previous day’s clothing, remarking that a first date the night before went pretty well. Dropped off at fraternity house near the university. Time: 2 minutes 30 seconds. Distance: 0.65 miles. Surge of $2.50, driver’s take: $5.51. 

7:25 a.m.
There is often a lot of waiting around as a ridehail driver, well in Cincinnati on Saturday mornings there is anyway. Another fifteen minutes go by before another request comes in, this time from a rider in a neighborhood called Walnut Hills. A Black Millennial male emerges from an apartment building and enters the passenger side rear seat. He inquires about available employment because he dislikes his current job at an online shopping fulfillment center. Though right now he is making this trip to pick up a young girl of maybe 3 years old. After a short drive the first stop is another home in the same neighborhood. The passenger is in the home for about ten minutes while retrieving the child—any relation between the man, child, and this location would be speculation. Eventually, they both get in the car through the rear passenger door. He does not have a carseat for the child and neither does the driver, for the remainder of the trip the passengers do not use their seatbelts. On the drive back to where the ride began the young girl is scolded harshly for wetting herself. Both exit the car through the door they entered without comment. Time: 14 minutes 48 seconds. Distance: 2.34 miles. Driver’s take: $4.64. 

7:51 a.m.
The fourth ride request comes after another ten minutes of waiting, this time it is from a nearby neighborhood named Avondale. A Black female Generation-X’er emerges from a single family home and enters the passenger side rear seat. She is upbeat, in a good mood, and on her way to work at a local nonprofit organization. She reveals through casual conversation that she usually drives her own car to work, but that is no longer possible because of a spell of bad luck. She states that on a recent weekend she had left her car in her employer’s parking lot, upon returning on Monday she found her car to be stripped of parts and left on blocks. She sold what remained to a junkyard and is currently carless. Stories of this sort are somewhat regular, sometimes people slip in and out of car-lessness even when they do everything right. She gets dropped off at the employee entrance—just off of the mostly empty parking lot. Time: 4 minutes 53 seconds. Distance: 1.62 miles. Surge of $3.50, driver’s take: $6.51. 

8:05 a.m.
After another ten minute wait comes the fifth ride request, which was back in Uptown—the neighborhood generally surrounding the University of Cincinnati. A male international Millennial graduate student waiting on the sidewalk outside of a single family home enters the passenger side rear seat. Pleasantries are exchanged but the conversation remains somewhat superficial due to a language barrier. He states that usually he would walk, but today he awoke late and is in a hurry to get to campus. He gets dropped off at the university, and before exiting he shakes the driver’s hand. Time: 3 minutes 25 seconds. Distance: 1.03 miles. Driver’s take: $3.01. 

8:17 a.m.
Trip six is also in the general Uptown vicinity, which is nice since no deadheading is required. A female international Millennial college student emerges from an apartment building carved out of a steep hill, she enters the passenger side rear seat. Again, a language barrier prohibited a meaningful discussion, though it was clear she was heading to campus to study. The driver’s homebrewed coffee aroma wafting from an insulated mug must have filled the car. She comments how much she enjoys the coffee smell and asks questions about the brewing process. She is dropped off at the university. Time: 5 minutes 2 seconds. Distance: 1.44 miles. Driver’s take: $3.19. 

8:29 a.m.
Trip seven’s passenger was a White Millennial male waiting on the sidewalk among single family homes in that same neighborhood near the University of Cincinnati. He enters the car through the passenger side rear seat. He is heading home to the Hyde Park neighborhood on the city’s east side. He is quite friendly and talkative so conversation topics change quickly. Finally, one is settled on—he asks for an opinion on how to stop mass shootings. Takes are offered on what is believed to be at the core of the problem. Disagreement ensues. He is dropped off at an apartment building. Time: 11 minutes 30 seconds. Distance: 4.86 miles. Driver’s take: $8.36 

8:59 a.m.
Trip seven ended in the moderately affluent and popular Hyde Park neighborhood, and trip eight’s passenger was based there too. A White Millennial male vaping on the sidewalk outside of a long row of beige two story apartment buildings enters my car through the passenger side front seat. He’s friendly and easy to talk to, which might help to explain two things: 1) why he sat in the front, and 2) his occupation as a car salesman. As a car salesman he previously sold the type of car in which he was riding—a Subaru Legacy. He offers to reveal a secret that all Subaru salesmen know, that the Legacy is the classiest of all Subarus. The cars he sells now are not as easy to sell. He was dropped off at a car dealership for work. He never vaped in my car, a gesture for which I was thankful. Time: 10 minutes 0 seconds. Distance: 3.45 miles. Surge of $6.25, driver’s take: $10.76. 

9:10 a.m.
Trip nine came quickly after dropping off trip eight. A Black Generation-X female emerges from a single family home in a neighborhood near the car dealership, we are out of Hyde Park now. She enters my car through the passenger side rear seat. Conversation is light but friendly. She is on her way to work as a store manager at an indoor shopping mall— among the largest in the region. We talk about how she has a car and occasionally drives herself to work, but she has a “phobia” of driving so Uber is her preferred mode. She states that she tries to only treat herself to Uber when she “deserves it,” like after a long work week. She was dropped off at the mall entrance. Time: 6 minutes 30 seconds. Distance: 2.98 miles. Driver’s take: $3.65. 

9:52 a.m.
The next request took over 30 minutes to come in. This one was from the Oakley neighborhood—a younger, edgier version of Hyde Park. A White Millennial female walking down a sidewalk in an apartment complex enters the driver side rear seat—an atypical seating arrangement. She is dressed in St. Patrick’s Day garb and heading to a friend’s apartment before heading out to partake in holiday festivities. She expresses concern nobody else will be similarly dressed and that she will be embarrassed. Ultimately, however, she is not too worried due to a pending move out of town to take over her father’s business. She was dropped off at an apartment building. Time: 10 minutes 51 seconds. Distance: 2.87 miles. Surge of $5.25, driver’s take: $9.65. 

10:07 a.m.
Trip eleven is also on the east side of town, this time near the banks of the Ohio River from a newly built rowhouse designed to withstand rising waters. A White Millennial male emerges from a single family home and enters the passenger side rear seat. He is meeting family at a bar before engaging in St. Patrick Day festivities in Cincinnati’s CBD. He is friendly and jovial, in fact he even told a few “dad jokes.” He was dropped off at a downtown bar. Time: 10 minutes 52 seconds. Distance: 4.21 miles. Driver’s take: $5.11. 

10:24 a.m.
Trip eleven ended downtown, which is where trip twelve was located. A German Generation-X male waiting on the sidewalk outside of a hotel enters the passenger side rear seat. He is talkative and curious about the city he’s visiting for business purposes. He is especially curious about the nuances of driving on downtown streets. The motivation behind his curiosity is eventually revealed by his trip purpose— to pick up a rental car. He also reveals that he is quite nervous to drive in the States. He remarks that the driver is not like most “cabbies” he’s known. He was dropped off at a car rental office, and left a $2 tip in the app. Time: 7 minutes 18 seconds. Distance: 1.05 miles. In-app tip of $2, driver’s take (including tip): $5.01. 

Filling a Transport gap

For some passengers, ridehailing fills a critical gap in transport options, if only temporarily. Clewlow and Mishra (2017) find that 48% of ridehail and transit users do not personally own or lease a car. The example presented above of the woman whose car was stripped of parts is a particularly dramatic case of car-loss. More commonly, car-loss due to failed mechanics or the inability to afford the full cost of ownership (Chapple 2006) drive the carless to use ridehailing. Klein and Smart (2015) show that some residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods slip in and out of car ownership, affecting their ability to attain and maintain employment. 

For other passengers ridehailing is a reprieve from driving. At the end of a long week of working overnight shifts, some ridehail passengers prefer not to drive themselves home—a sort of treat or self-reward. A distaste or even fear of driving, as presented above, is a common motivating factor for passengers to take ridehailing, even though a reliable car is available at home. Indeed, published survey results reflect these motivations (Henao, 2017; Clewlow and Mishra, 2017). 

The case of a man picking up a child presented above provides an example of ridehail use that has extended beyond work commuting, to include other essential life tasks. Further, this case also presents a risk commonly borne by ridehail drivers: the decision of whether to terminate a trip (and loss of the fare) with either an unaccompanied minor, or accompanied minor without an appropriate car seat or restraints. 

The Influence of Alcohol

Three, and likely more, of the Uber passengers presented above reflect findings that suggest alcohol consumption is a common motivating factor for ridehail use, even during hours not traditionally associated with alcohol consumption. The prevalence of alcohol in influencing ridehail use also conforms to nearly all published research, as cited in the literature review. However, the relationship between alcohol consumption and ridehail use is not monolithic. Actually, in this driver’s experience, it can manifest in three distinct trip scenarios made at different hours of the day. 1) This is the scenario commonly associated with alcohol consumption and ridehailing: the passenger who plans ahead to consume alcohol and makes the round trip by ridehailing. 2) The passenger who drove themselves (or arrived by other means) to the location of consumption, who then makes a return ridehail trip home at the conclusion of over-consumption. 3) This scenario is frequently related to the second: the passenger who makes a return ridehail trip to pick up a vehicle, or to place of residence, previously left at the location of over-consumption. 

Driver’s Perspective

Demand for rides and the resulting revenue was unpredictable and seemingly random. Only one tip worth $2 on the twelfth and final ride was received, though tips are certainly more common in other service sectors. Additionally, four surge fares were scattered throughout the morning. Surges and the tip combined to make up nearly 30% of the $68.32 grossed over the four hours of driving. Without them less than $50 would have been earned, or a little more than $12 per hour, before deducting taxes and expenses. Many researchers have attempted to calculate the average hourly driver pay after accounting for all applicable costs, including: vehicle maintenance, depreciation, fuel, and insurance. Wildly different findings have been published, and earnings vary by region. Still, two papers studying Seattle driver earnings published just days apart report drivers average $23.52 per hour (Hyman et al. 2020) and $9.73 per hour (Parrott and Reich 2020)—both calculated to be after expenses are paid. 

At the time this research was conducted, ridehail drivers in Ohio did not receive additional training and were not required to obtain special license endorsements. Because of this, drivers may unwittingly assume undue risk by not being fully knowledgeable of applicable laws, sometimes between multiple states. The Cincinnati ridehail market covers most of Southwest Ohio, regions of Northern Kentucky, and regions of Southeastern Indiana. It seems reasonable to assume that a significant proportion of ridehail drivers are unfamiliar with the current state of regulatory affairs in each jurisdiction. Indeed, there often seems to be a disconnect between social norms and regulation. For example, many passengers presented failed to fasten their seatbelts for the duration of the trip, whether seated up front or in the back.

Discussion

This work aims to supplement quantitative ridehail research by presenting qualitative findings obtained through observation and casual conversation. The intent is to place examples of ridehail passengers and the transport decisions they make within the context of current academic knowledge. A fine point is added to each ride account by presenting small and sometimes quirky details about the trip. This is done to provide additional insights into the character of ridehail passengers, their reasons for using ridehailing, and the unique social relationship between ridehail drivers and passengers. 

Interestingly, the two passengers who sat up front with the driver were White Millennial males. This could be because I, too, am a White Millennial male. For female passengers, sitting within easy reach of the driver may be a safety concern leading them to sit directly behind the driver. It could also be a reflection of the varying role ridehailing plays in the lives of passengers. 

This work has implications for researchers and policymakers alike by presenting details about trips and passengers not seen before in the literature. For example, international college students have few options for commuting to school and may depend on ridehailing. For some, ridehailing may provide a preferred work commute experience over transit and driving while adding a layer of transport reliability. For social trips, alcohol consumption manifests in several different types of ridehail trips. For drivers, dependence on the extra revenue from tips and surges is unreliable and unpredictable yet necessary. Also, as the driver is presented trip origin, suggested route, star rating, and sometimes a photo of the passenger before accepting a ride, would-be riders remain vulnerable to biases and discrimination.

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Jason Syvixay | Sean Bohle

Abstract

The City of Edmonton’s Missing Middle Infill Design Competition sparked significant local, national, and international interest in the possibilities for the missing middle or medium-density housing design innovation. In their proposals for five parcels of land within a core Edmonton neighborhood, multidisciplinary teams consisting of architects, builders, and developers considered impacts to residents and the surrounding community, the competition’s design objectives, and financial viability. With the incentive for participation being the opportunity to build their winning design, teams prepared pro formas to articulate how they would proceed with their developments. This study seeks to explore the assumptions that applicant teams made when designing their missing middle housing proposals. As cities continue to contemplate the necessity for missing middle in their neighborhoods, lessons gleaned from this analysis may offer potential opportunities to address financial and regulatory challenges to development; in addition to understanding the industry’s perspectives on profit and risk with respect to medium-scale housing forms. Topical policy questions for urban planners and decision-makers might be the various factors hindering development, and the policy and regulatory improvements that may address them.

Keywords

Missing Middle; Infill; Housing; Pro Formas; Design

About the Authors:

Jason Syvixay (MCIP, RPP, MCP, BSc, BA) is an urban planner currently completing his PhD in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Alberta. He has worked as the managing director of the Downtown Winnipeg BIZ, a planner with HTFC Planning & Design, and more recently, has joined the City of Edmonton to support the implementation of its Infill Roadmap. He has a passion for people and places, and engages in city building that listens to the community, builds knowledge and capacity, and works towards equity in urban places. 

Sean Bohle is an urban planner at the City of Edmonton. He discovered a love for spreadsheets and financial models while completing graduate school at the University of British Columbia, and through subsequent consulting work on affordable housing development. At the City of Edmonton, Sean has worked on policies to provide affordable housing and community amenities from rezoning, and now leads the implementation of the Infill Roadmap.

Introduction

Cities across Canada are exploring the missing middle as opportunities to welcome more homes and people in their communities. The term missing middle refers to multi-unit housing that falls between single detached homes and tall apartment buildings. It includes row housing, triplexes/fourplexes, courtyard housing, and walk-up apartments. These housing forms are considered “missing” because they have been largely absent from urban streetscapes in Canada. In 2018, the City of Edmonton shifted its focus from low-density infill to medium-density infill, creating an Infill Roadmap to steer regulations, plans, and policies towards these types of developments and investments – even hosting a Missing Middle Infill Design Competition to explore how these housing typologies could be advanced in a well-designed yet financially feasible manner. 

The Infill Imperative

Over the last forty years, societal and economic challenges have driven people away from core and mature neighborhoods to settle on suburban fringes. This slow loss of people in central neighborhoods has cost Canadian cities billions in new infrastructure and servicing. However, this shift in population has also inspired many municipalities, including Edmonton, to develop strategies to curb sprawl and nurture a more compact urban form. 

In 2013, the City launched a project called Evolving Infill that engaged more than 3,000 Edmontonians. From this engagement, the City created its first Infill Roadmap (2014), comprising 23 actions that comprised the City’s work plan for advancing more infill development within close proximity to quality public transit, amenities and services. This plan undertook significant regulatory and policy changes to help enable and encourage more affordable, diverse, and well-designed housing in Edmonton’s older neighborhoods. 

In July 2018, the City adopted Infill Roadmap 2018, which contains a set of 25 more actions to welcome more people and new homes into Edmonton’s older neighborhoods. The Infill Roadmap 2018 takes a more strategic focus on the missing middle, multi-unit, medium-density housing such as row housing, courtyard housing, and low-rise apartments. The actions are envisioned to create new opportunities for medium-density development by managing population growth in a rational and contextual manner, responding to changing economic and cultural housing needs, reducing the city’s ecological footprint, maximizing existing and future infrastructure investments, and maintaining neighborhood vibrancy. Edmonton’s official plan, The City Plan, envisions a growth of an additional one million people, and was recently approved by council in December of 2020. Both the Infill Roadmap and The City Plan demonstrate Edmonton’s interest in increasing housing choices, particularly in the ‘missing middle’ housing range, but whether this development orientation aligns with industry and consumer demand remains a point of contention. 

Murtaza Haider and Stephen Moranis (2018) question whether households prefer mid-rise housing, and if builders see these housing typologies as more profitable than single-detached or high-rise residential buildings. If consumer demand does not favour housing within the missing middle range, is it reasonable to expect that builders and developers will build it? Haider and Moranis argue that “land prices are set higher because landowners believe the builders will be able to build at a higher density than what the land is originally zoned for.” If this is true, what density is preferred for a parcel of land, and should the land value differ depending on the final densities of the project? They further argue that the “economies of scale favour high-rise construction over mid-rise construction for a given parcel because in addition to fixed land and some construction costs, some ownership costs are also independent of the number of units.” With that said, then, if cities are to focus their attention on missing middle housing, challenges around land prices and demographics may need to be addressed. 

According to Johnson et al. (2018), infill redevelopment is more expensive than greenfield development because of demolition costs, in addition to construction and property acquisition. How might the public sector and municipalities address these imbalances? These questions were top of mind for the City of Edmonton, and were explored as part of the Missing Middle Infill Design Competition.

Finding the Missing Middle

Launched in 2019, Edmonton’s Missing Middle Infill Design Competition encouraged conversations around infill and helped the public and development community envision design possibilities. The competition solicited and reviewed design proposals that considered how the missing middle or medium-density housing might work on a site of five lots owned by the City of Edmonton. The winning team, adjudicated by a national jury of architects, would be given the opportunity to purchase the site and build their design – with the City of Edmonton supporting throughout the development processes. 

The competition sought to recognize the following:

• Contextual multi-unit, medium-density (‘missing middle’) designs for mature neighbourhoods in Edmonton
• Innovation and creativity in design
• Financial viability and buildability
• Design for livability for a range of users and abilities, including individuals, couples, single families with or without children, extended family groups and seniors
• Design for environmental, social and economic sustainability
• Climate resilient design

The five lots in Edmonton’s Spruce Avenue neighbourhood were chosen due to its sufficient size, location, proximity to transit and other services/amenities and developability – after reviewing and comparing it to thousands of City of Edmonton properties. It was deemed as surplus land by the City of Edmonton, is well-serviced, and was determined to be immediately sellable as-is by the City of Edmonton’s Real Estate Advisory Committee. While the market prospects, as predicted by the City of Edmonton, are indeed excellent (e.g. residential condo and townhome median assessed values have increased by more than 4% compared to the city-average, -2.8%), it is the existing community-at-large that have actively endorsed the Missing Middle Infill Design Competition, welcoming positive change and growth in their neighbourhood.

Nearly 100 renderings and 30 pro formas, representing more than half a million dollars of architectural design work, were received from Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, and Seattle, in addition to preliminary registrations from London (UK), Regina, Hamilton, Toronto, and Oklahoma City. 

Applicants to the Missing Middle Infill Design Competition were required to provide a pro forma. Creating a pro forma requires a lot of assumptions about what materials and labour will cost, how people want to live, and what they will pay for real estate. 

Pro formas offer a window into the financial assumptions of developers, including relative costs of project elements (e.g. land vs. building vs. permitting). This can help policy makers understand the financial impact of various policies that change costs and project timelines. Insofar as they are accurate and represent a real commitment to a project, they can also inform policy makers of the risks developers perceive with a given project. However, pro formas are seldom used as a tool to inform or test policies. In part, this is because policy makers typically do not have the required skills to produce test pro formas, and developers typically resist sharing the detailed financial information they contain. The pro formas submitted for this project have a number of limitations, discussed later in this report, but still offer some perspective on the financial reality of infill development. 

By reviewing the thirty pro formas submitted to our design competition, we sought to answer three questions as part of an analysis on the financial viability of missing middle housing. What do the pro formas from the Missing Middle Infill Design Competition tell us about the most financially-feasible low and medium infill forms? What do the estimated profit margins tell us about the risks applicants see with building infill? What funding sources and financing structures are typical for infill development and how do these differ from greenfield?

What the Numbers Say

With land value held constant across all projects, the average profit margin for an apartment and row house is identical (11% of revenues). To test the impact of land value reductions, the land value was reduced by 25% for row house and stacked row house projects. Cheaper land makes row housing more profitable than apartments (15% vs 11% profit), and typically land that is zoned for smaller scale development is less expensive. Based on the data available for this study, row housing can be competitive with small apartments. The following graphs shows larger revenues for larger buildings, but a similar range of profit margins across building sizes. 

Nine of the twenty-two projects evaluated proposed rental apartments. Three of these were among the most profitable developments (ranking first, second, and ninth). The remaining six rental projects were the least profitable of all projects. The average profit margin was lower for rental projects than for condominiums (7% vs 13%). However, maximum profit margin for rental projects was comparable to the maximum for condominiums (34% vs 32%). Overall, the financial data suggest that there is not currently a clear advantage for building rental or condominium projects in this market, and that considerations other than pure financial return influence developer’s choice. 

Every developer will set a minimum acceptable margin that depends on what investment options they have and the risks involved. The most common margin used by policy makers, however, is 15%. The average profit margin for this site was only 11%, meaning that for most developers, it is hard to put together a successful project. 

With profit margins so low, what can we say about project risk? We might assume it means that developers think infill is a slam dunk, and so they are willing to take a small return. However, when you look closely at project inputs like rent per square foot, construction costs, and condo sales timing in a slow Edmonton market, this does not seem reasonable. In fact, we found more evidence of aggressive targets (or wishful thinking) in the pro formas than conservative estimates. For example, capitalization rates were normalized across submissions for this analysis because a number of rental projects assumed unreasonably low rates or high rents. No condominium project accounted for long sales periods that are characteristic in the current market. 

over and over, and with little engagement cost or risk. High rise development is large enough to produce its own efficiencies through scale, and attract funds from pension funds. Missing middle infill development never gets the scale, the momentum, or the attention to make it an easy win. 

What the Industry Says

To accompany our pro forma analysis, we invited architects, builders, and developers to share their perspectives and assumptions around profit and risk for medium-density housing, and associated financial and regulatory barriers. 

Applicants to the design competition perceived their participation as a worthwhile venture and investment because of the opportunity to build their proposal. In fact, the ideas that developer-architect teams explored are, in many cases, being explored for other housing projects. The Missing Middle Infill Design Competition helped to expand our knowledge of what scale of density is preferred and reasonable for the missing middle in Edmonton. Participants noted how the design competition was an opportunity to test new design concepts, and to potentially challenge the City’s current regulations with new innovations. 

“But when you’re working with the developer, you can develop a proposal on a site like that is feasible. You can push the limits of what is possible, because the architect and developer can equally push each other to make sure the proposal meets technically, economically, and also achieves the design aesthetic.” (Developer)

Our interviews also revealed that members of the industry perceive land values as a challenge to making pro formas for medium-density housing viable. Municipal government affects land value primarily through the development rights (zoning) granted to each parcel. We typically expect that adding development rights will also increase the value of land. The land in the competition was priced at for low rise apartments, but some projects proposed lower density development, like row housing. These projects could expect to acquire land with less permitted density for lower cost in an open market, as long as upzoning is not expected. 

“Construction costs could not be changed. Materials cost the same, no matter what you are building. There is no flexibility, too, with architectural/design fees because of provincial recommendations. The only way to wiggle with the pro forma would have been to adjust the land cost. Infill is a niche market. Very few people can afford $800,000 duplexes.” (Developer)

Builders, architects, and developers cited how servicing requirements need to be made clear so that these costs can be appropriately factored into their pro formas. Some of these participants made assumptions that since the competition was put forward by the City of Edmonton, that there would be leniency on permitting timelines and additional incentives to support the winning team’s advancement through the land development process. 

The interviews illuminated how design features like amenity space and public space are potentially at odds with density requirements for developments to be profitable. While developers strive to include public space so that their housing projects can entice their intended user demographics, their pro formas did not perform well with them included. 

“We wanted more of a green wall. It just didn’t work economically. We were constantly reviewing the numbers while we were working with the design.” (Architect)

The provision of parking was also seen as a significant expense. The City of Edmonton is exploring the possibility of removing minimum parking requirements, with amendments to the Zoning Bylaw scheduled for public hearing in 2020. If these regulatory changes were factored into the design competition, would the number of parking spaces put forward by architect-developer teams be reduced, and by what measure? 

Given the nature of the design competition, all projects expected rezoning fee reductions or waivers, timely permits, and a positive neighbourhood response. While municipal fees were not a major project cost, interviewees indicated that the success of their proposal depended on minimizing delays and project uncertainty. Part of what made the competition desirable was that there was an assembled site, and the City of Edmonton was taking on much of the community engagement work, reducing uncertainty and timelines for proponents. 

Sharpening our Pencils

The development of new housing can be complex and costly in the best of circumstances. When it proposes a new form in an old neighbourhood, it can be very difficult to put together a project that can please neighbours, satisfy regulators, attract buyers or renters, and convince banks and investors to put their money in. 

So what lessons can we draw from the City of Edmonton’s Missing Middle Infill Design Competition?

We learned that developers and architects are creative and interested in innovating when there is support from regulators, like city planners, to do so. We learned that different infill designs are possible, and even competitive — rental apartments, condominium rowhouses, even modular, stacking, expandable co-op housing can be viable on paper. If cities want row housing, they need to zone land for row housing and use those zones as a commitment to communities and developers to prevent price creep from pricing out desirable projects. Cities can use their zoning tools, along with long range planning and engagement to set community expectations and reduce uncertainty for all involved. 

The pro formas tells us that most of the factors affecting real estate development are determined by the markets for labour, investment capital, and housing, which are outside of a municipality’s hands. However, interviews with developers reveal that supportive policies, regulations and proactive engagement can make the difference between a successful infill project, and a failure to launch. Cities seeking missing middle development will need to work with local developers to understand the challenges facing infill in order to find effective solutions. Cities, now more than ever, are eager to sharpen their pencils, and get moving on this type of work. We are excited for the possibilities.

References

City of Edmonton. (2018). “Planning Academy: Residential Infill 2018.”

Johnson, J., Frkonja, J., Todd, M., and Yee, D. (2018).
“Additional detail in aggregate integrated land-use models via stimulating
developer pro forma thinking.” Journal of Transport and Land Use, 11:1, pp. 405-418.

The Financial Post. (2018). “The ‘missing middle’ in real estate is missing for a reason:
No one wants to live in mid-rise housing.” Retrieved from https://business.
financialpost.com/real-estate/the-missing-middle-in-real-estate-is- missing-for-a-reason-no-one-wants-to-live-in-mid-rise-housing.

Garcia, D. (2019). “Making It Pencil: The Math Behind
Housing Development.” Terner Center for Housing Innovation. Retrieved
from: http://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/uploads/Making_It_Pencil_The_ Math_Behind_Housing_Development.pdf.

Planning Forum Volume 18

Missing Middle Math: Making ‘Missing Middle’ Housing Work

Jason Syvixay | Sean Bohle

Abstract

The City of Edmonton’s Missing Middle Infill Design Competition sparked significant local, national, and international interest in the possibilities for the missing middle or medium-density housing design innovation. In their proposals for five parcels of land within a core Edmonton neighborhood, multidisciplinary teams consisting of architects, builders, and developers considered impacts to residents and the surrounding community, the competition’s design objectives, and financial viability. With the incentive for participation being the opportunity to build their winning design, teams prepared pro formas to articulate how they would proceed with their developments. This study seeks to explore the assumptions that applicant teams made when designing their missing middle housing proposals. As cities continue to contemplate the necessity for missing middle in their neighborhoods, lessons gleaned from this analysis may offer potential opportunities to address financial and regulatory challenges to development; in addition to understanding the industry’s perspectives on profit and risk with respect to medium-scale housing forms. Topical policy questions for urban planners and decision-makers might be the various factors hindering development, and the policy and regulatory improvements that may address them.

Keywords

Missing Middle, Infill; Housing; Pro Formas; Design

Twelfth ride: A Saturday Morning Driving for Uber in Cincinnati

Mickey Edwards

Abstract

This paper examines twelve UberX rides completed over four hours in Cincinnati with the intent of comparing first-person evidence of ridehail travelers to a growing body of quantitative literature. Traveler data are based on observation and casual conversation between the author (driver) and the passenger. A typical Saturday morning was chosen beginning in Cincinnati’s Central Business District (CBD), and each subsequent trip was based on the location of the previous trip destination without intervention. This work attempts to tell the narrative of where each traveler was going, infer why they chose ridehailing, and explore the social relationship between riders and drivers. More specifically, it places these twelve travelers in the context of published ridehail literature. From the driver’s perspective, $68.32 was grossed after four hours of driving—including one tip, $2 tip on the twelfth ride. This small sample of ridehail passengers, and driver profits, conforms to findings published in the academic literature yet is not intended to be statistically significant. This work has implications for future research by presenting details about trips and passengers not before seen in the literature.

Keywords

Ridehail; Uber; Socioeconomics; Driver Earnings

The Invention of Abandonment and the Rescue of a Neighborhood: A Tiny Glance to Franklin’s Sanitas Building, in Santiago de Chile

Gabriel Espinoza

Abstract

This ethnographic research focuses on the trajectory of abandonment of a factory in the Franklin neighborhood of Santiago, Chile. It establishes a chronology of the post-industrial applications of the building, from informal to formal. Buildings can be understood as the object of processes; despite their immobility, their uses and meanings are in constant reconfiguration. This article analyses two dimensions to understand the trajectory of the property; time frames of occupation and recognition of the formality of these periods. This illustrates how the use of buildings, conceptualized here as ‘interim spaces,’ functions as a process of urban renewal. 

Keywords

Interim Spaces; Santiago; Buildings; Urban Studies; Urban Renewal

Nkeiru Hope Ezeadichie | Joy U. Ogbazi 

Abstract

Rapid urbanization in the Global South, and its accompanying challenges have heightened in African cities. One consequence of Africa’s urbanization that cuts across most of its nations is the high rate of urban unemployment which has led many urban poor residents to resort to seeking solace in informal employment opportunities. Africa’s most populous nation, Nigeria, has an escalated case of unemployment leading to the proliferation of informal economic activities in its cities, which are also predominantly home-based. The operation of informal economic activities in residential buildings is known as home-based enterprises (HBEs), which are attributed to low start-up capital, work-life balance and land use changes. This study focuses on the objective and empirical investigation of the effects of HBEs in cities of global South, using Enugu, a colonial, medium-sized administrative city in Nigeria as case study. The study projects the reasons why urban planners should acknowledge and maximize the potentials of this urbanization-driven phenomenon to meet some SDGs, while also controlling the negative impacts such as land use alterations to ensure sustainable cities. The objectives of the study are; i). To examine the dynamics of HBEs ii). to identify the Treasure in HBEs iii). to determine the Trauma of HBEs. iv). to recommend effective measures for managing HBEs for Sustainable development. It concludes by advocating that urban planners should consider the integration of HBEs into neighborhood schemes to maximize the potentials and effectively control the negative impacts thereby ensuring sustainable global South cities. 

Keywords

Treasure; Trauma; Informal; Home-Based Enterprises; Land use

About the Authors

Nkeiru Hope Ezeadichie is an Urban Planner and a Lecturer at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Nigeria, Enugu Campus. Her research interest includes informal economy, Pro-poor planning and urban/ rural studies. The publication is part of her PhD research work. 

Joy U. Ogbazi is a Professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Nigeria, Enugu Campus where she has also previously served two terms as head of the department. She holds a PhD from Enugu State University of Science and Technology, Nigeria and MSc from Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa. She is the co-editor of three books, author/co-author of over forty five journal articles, conference papers, books and book chapters. Her research focuses on planning theory, urban development, planning and environmental quality. Joy is a Fellow of the Nigerian Institute of Town Planners, a Fellow of the Nigerian Environmental Society and a Registered Town Planner in Nigeria. 

Introduction

There is substantial consideration of home-based enterprises (HBEs) by researchers in urban planning. This consideration has been attributed to the expansion of HBEs across developing countries generally, and especially in sub-Saharan Africa, ranging from its normal domain in informal settlements to formal high, medium and even low-density residential neighborhoods (Strassmann, 1986; Onyebueke, 2001; Okosun and Ezeadichie, 2006). Consequently, it has become a veritable source of livelihood for a considerable number of residents that urban planning cannot afford to ignore. Second, as an income generating exercise, HBEs come with benefits as well as drawbacks. Political economists argue that HBEs absorb people who would otherwise lack the requisite skills and capacity to gain employment in the formal public and private sector, contribute to gross domestic products and when properly monitored, can contribute to internally generated revenue (Olufemi, 2010). Some traditional urban planners see the growth in the preponderance of HBEs as a distortion of public space with increased waste and criminal activities in neighborhoods (Okeke, 2000). 

Many rural-urban migrants in African cities lack the requisite qualification for scarce formal employment and are trapped in the only alternative; informal employment. This has led to the rise in home-based enterprises as the fastest growing economic sub-sector of the informal economy, particularly in Nigeria – the seventh and most populous nation – globally, and in Africa, respectively. The growth of home-based enterprises (HBEs) is also attributed to low start-up capital, work-life balance (opting for and maintaining employment that is compatible with family values and responsibilities), neoliberalism, and a reduction of production cost by casualization of labor force (Walker, Wang and Redmond, 2008). Notwithstanding the positive effects of HBEs in African cities, urban planners still view these activities as land use distortion and are not favorably disposed towards them. According to Tomei (2000:1), “This situation is due to a large extent, to a lack of understanding and to confusion regarding what exactly constitutes homework.” A gap that this study attempts to fill. 

Therefore, this study investigates the nature and impacts of home-based enterprises to understand and present this phenomenon more comprehensively. Enugu, a colonial, medium-sized administrative city in Nigeria is used as a case study. The objectives of the study are: i). to examine the dynamics of HBEs ii). to identify the positive impacts of HBEs and iii). to determine the negative impacts of HBEs. The study answers two basic research questions: what are the dynamics of HBEs?; what are the positive and negative impacts of HBEs in the study area? The hypothesis (H0) advanced here is that the positive impacts of HBEs are not more significant than the negative impacts. In this study, the positive impacts are the treasures that are the benefits and advantages, and the negative impacts are the traumas, the adverse effects and disadvantages. 

The methodology entails the sampling of four neighborhoods; Obed Camp (informal settlement), Uwani (high density), New Haven (medium density) and Independence layout (low density) selected through stratified random sampling. Data was collected using two sets of structured questionnaires. 10% of the dwelling units; Obed camp 241, Uwani 750, New Haven 1,132 and Independence layout 2,360 are sampled. The residents’ rating of the impacts of HBEs are obtained and analyzed using principal component analysis (PCA) to reduce the components and ascertain the principal factors. Based on Eigenvalues of 36 selected variables identified as impacts from literature, the PCA extracted five major factors. Employment benefit is the major factor contributing 44.8% of the 66.4% total factors while the only negative factor (neighborhood distortion) contributed only 3.8% to the total factors. Implying that the negative impact has less significance to the residents than the positive impacts. The study is significant as it presents an objective rating of the impacts of HBEs by operators and non-operator residents using a high statistical tool (PCA). It concludes by advocating that urban planners integrate HBEs into neighborhood schemes to maximize the treasures and minimize the traumas thereby ensuring sustainable global South cities. The next section entails the review of literature on HBEs.

Literature Review

The shift of urbanization-focused research from global North to South is expedient given the rapid urbanization in the global South, especially African cities (Watson, 2009; Blanco, Alberti…..Watson, 2009). Urban population growth sources are mainly rural-urban migration and natural increases (Lucci, 2014). The growth of the world population has been from 2.6 Billion (1950) to 7.8 Billion (September, 2020). The world urbanization figures have been increasing; 0.75 Billion (1950) to 4.22 Billion (2018) and projected to 5.17 Billion (2030) and 6.68 Billion (2050) (UNDESA, 2018) with wide regional disparity and possible lower figures due to the 2019/2020 COVID-19 global pandemic. Africa remains the least urbanized continent with 43% urban residents (UNDESA, 2018). These population and urbanization figures have far reaching implications for the development of global South cities and even in the North. 

The challenges of global South urbanization are intensified in African cities because of their rapid rate and by the unpreparedness of African governments to meet the challenges of this process, exhibited in tackling the informal economy. The broad nature of the informal economic sector as it affects unemployment, demands sector-specific research to appropriately address definite peculiarities (Onyebueke, 2001). Unemployment is a continent-wide consequence of Africa’s urbanization that has resulted in many settling for informal employment. Africa’s most populous nation, Nigeria, has a high rate of unemployment and consequently an informal economy, which is predominantly home-based. Nigeria’s unemployment rate grew from 23.1% in the third quarter of 2018 to 27.1% in the second quarter of 2020 and then to 33.3% in the fourth quarter of 2020 (National Bureau of Statistics, 2020). The increase in unemployment results in an increase in the number of people in the informal economy. Nigeria’s informal economy is estimated at 80% of the workforce (Robert, 2011) and the main source of employment for rural-urban migrants (Onodugo et al, 2016). The categories of the Nigerian informal economy are the survivalist enterprise dominated by urban poor women and micro enterprises (Rogerson, 1996). Urban planners in Nigeria generally view the informal sector as “a public nuisance and misuse of public space” because of their use of temporary structures (Onodugo, et al, 2016:96; Okeke, 2000). Also, urban planners in Nigeria have been opined to practice with colonially bequeathed exclusionist-orientation (Ogbazi and Ezeadichie, 2014). The neighborhoods are predominantly low-income with recent expansions to medium and even high-income neighborhoods (Ezeadichie, 2012). 

Home-based enterprise is a trending global phenomenon; however, its nature of operation differs as seen in USA and UK regions. In the global North, many businesses are HBEs. In a recent study on the assessment of jobs that can be performed completely at home, it was found that 37% of jobs in the USA can be performed at home because of their high level of technological advancement (Dingel and Neiman, 2020) in contrast with the global South. This shows the distinction between HBEs in the two regions. Home-based enterprises in the global South are predominantly informal and survival-based (Lindell, 2010). The details of impacts of HBEs discussed in the next section also portray its characteristics in global South cities. 

Economic Impacts
The economic value of HBEs has its greatest positive impacts for urban residents. Strassmann in his study of Lima, Peru (1985) and Peru, Sri Lanka and Zambia (1986) noted that HBEs usually provide approximately 40% of household income for operators. He continued that HBEs save time, travel-cost, and production cost. This is because HBEs operate within the homes and neighborhood. Similarly, Gough, et al. (2003) affirmed the convenience for customers in purchase, proximity, extended service duration, opportunity to make purchases of small quantities of goods, and even purchasing goods on credit as more merits of HBEs. The fungibility of money, time and space as treasures of HBEs was emphasized by Kellet and Tipple (2000). The fungibility of money implies that available funds in the household can be used for both HBE (productive) and domestic (reproductive) activities. This interchange of resources is applicable to time and space in HBE-operating homes. This matters, especially to urban poor households, as they can utilize available resources to generate income (however small) which sustains them daily so as not to slip into absolute poverty or destitution. Again, the valid, irreplaceable contribution of HBEs in the textile industry during the industrial revolution despite the technological progress was emphasized by Tomei (2000). Also, HBEs fill the gap created by planning where some necessary amenities like shops are not adequately provided within the neighborhood (Abolade, et al, 2013). The far-reaching range of HBE output was acknowledged by Chen and Sinha (2016) noting that the products transcend domestic purpose to national and global markets especially in Asia. The renting of space for HBEs provides household savings. Although the low income from HBEs is a general characteristic, Tipple (2005) confirmed that it is an important contribution for poverty alleviation while Ezeadichie et al. (2018) corroborate this, stating that the income from HBEs saves many households from despondency. 

On the contrary, Strassmann (1986) emphasized that the low HBE income is problematic given the unfavorable work conditions such as inadequate workspace and lack of privacy in the home. In the same vein, the repression of women in HBEs during major decision-making by male partners is a notable trauma (Gondwe and Ayenagbo, 2013). Another area of HBE impact is the social realm, which is discussed in the next section. 

Social Impacts
The social impacts of HBEs, Strassmann (1985) noted include, the flexibility of work schedule, adequate time for childcare, sociability, dignity, and fulfillment of self-employment, as well as security. HBEs are valued as locations where ‘informal networks and bonds are developed’ (Onyebueke, 1997 c.f Onyebueke, 2001:420). HBEs have become an honorable income source for vulnerable women. (Walker and Webster, 2004; Walker, Wang, and Redmond, 2008; Ezeadichie, et al, 2018). In addition, HBEs are particularly important to women in Africa because it is believed that it is the woman’s responsibility to take care of the children, elderly, and sick members of the family. Hence, for women not to be totally dependent on the husband for income, opt for HBEs that enable them to fulfill both reproductive and productive responsibilities. The role of HBEs in the development of human capital and opportunities for training at much reduced cost was discussed by Omuta (1986). A better work-life balance has been mentioned as another positive impact of HBEs (Reuschke and Mason, 2020). 

Contrastingly, Gough et al. (2003) described the sale of alcoholic beverages by HBE operators within neighborhoods as a major cause of noise and social vices. The health hazards caused by HBEs are criticized (Onyebueke, 2001). Marginalization in contractual agreements is another negative impact of HBEs (Tomei, 2000). The challenge for including HBE operators in national statistics as workers is noted by Chen and Sinha (2016). Another negative impact of HBEs is inconsistency in business, since it is dependent on the operators’ convenience (Ezeadichie, et al, 2018). In the global South, and especially African and Asian context, women face many socio-cultural challenges. One common example is the belief that “the place of the woman is in the kitchen”, “women should only be seen and not heard”, etc. These statements about women depict the belief that women are not to be engaged in formal employment. With many formal job opportunities, preference is given to men, even when some women are more qualified than men are. Therefore, many women, rather than continue to search for formal jobs after multiple rejections based on their gender, opt to engage in HBEs. Some HBE operators, particularly those that are engaged in it due to constraints, feel that they are socially isolated and trapped and desire to opt out of it (Unni and Rani, 2004). The environmental/spatial impacts of HBEs is another area worth discussing, as noted below. 

Environmental/Spatial Impacts
HBEs have been opined to provide necessary income for better living standards and sizes of dwelling units (Strassmann, 1985). Urban poor households that operate HBEs are more likely to improve the standard and size of their unit to ensure improved business and comfort of the members of the home. Residential space alteration by urban poor for HBEs was viewed as a positive process, described as ‘invented spaces’, as they exhibit resourcefulness and creativity (Gondwe and Ayenagbo, 2013). 

In terms of the negative impacts, HBEs lead to sub-standard housing and environmental effects as well as reduce the residential quality (Okeke, 2000). However, this situation has been attributed to the government’s inability to provide any physical location for informally trained urban residents (Ezeadichie, 2012). The employment-creation characteristic of the sector has engendered many land use challenges such as incompatible land uses, building alterations, proliferation of temporary structures in planned residential areas, and open space changes (Okeke, 2000). In an assessment of waste-generation by HBE operators, it was discovered that the majority generate higher volumes of household waste while a minority generate hazardous waste (Tipple, 2005a). The indiscriminate use of any accessible space for HBEs has resulted in the defacing of planned residential neighborhoods in African cities (Abolade, Adigun, and Akande, 2013). However, this challenge has persisted because many urban planners in African cities refuse to acknowledge and plan in accordance with current urban realities. The next section examines the relationship between home-based enterprises and urban planning. 

Home-Based Enterprises And Urban Planning
The role of urban planners in supporting or suppressing HBE operators is an important issue. Many governments in global South nations consult urban planners when policies affecting home-based enterprises need to be made. Unfortunately, as Strassmann (1985), Simon, (1998) and Kamete, (2002) noted the policy makers usually work against urban designs that support HBEs. These oppositions are attributed to dogmatic land use theories that are discordant with current realities in the rapidly urbanizing global South cities. For instance, Strassman (1986) noted that HBE operators experience hostility from urban planners because of their philosophy that there should always be a clear separation of home and workplace. Potts (2007) reiterated the views of Strassman by stating that policies of government portray discouragement for the informal economy, (HBE inclusive). She affirmed that planners rarely approve of anything that concerns the informal economy as they distinctly alter the planned land uses. The non-consideration and inclusion of the working poor in urban planning has been noted to have an adverse effect on the survival of the urban poor in cities of the global South (Watson, 2011). Conclusively, the spread of HBEs from informal settlements to all densities of formal residential neighborhoods (Okosun and Ezeadichie, 2006) should send a critical signal to urban planners in the global South. Similarly, Watson and Agbola (2013) opined that a different approach needs to be adopted by African planners and professionals if rapid urban transformation is to be managed effectively. Therefore, basic, comprehensive knowledge on the dynamics and impacts of this urbanization-led phenomenon is indispensable. 

Methodology

The selected area used for this case study is the colonial Enugu city, the capital of Enugu State and the oldest capital city in the Southeast geopolitical zone of Nigeria. The choice of Enugu as the case study is due to the researchers’ knowledge and experience gained from numerous works done in the city during the past three decades. The Enugu State population is 3,267,837; the State and city unemployment rate, 9.6% and 14.5% respectively, and the city unemployment rate was 22.3% (NPC, 2006). These figures account for the proliferation of the informal economy and particularly home-based enterprises in the study area, hence the choice of Enugu city for the study. 

The data for the study were accessed through primary and secondary sources. The total number of buildings within the neighborhood constitute the study population. The study employed a descriptive survey method. The boundary coordinate points were input into Google Earth to define the location map of the study extent with a Google Earth satellite image as a backdrop. A Garmin GPSMAP 64 Handheld GPS device was used to pick the coordinates of the sampled buildings located within the neighborhoods during fieldwork, while ArcMap and ArcGIS 10.3 software were used for analysis. The data collection instrument was two sets of questionnaires. The first set was systematically administered among residents consisting of both HBE operators and non-operators in the residential buildings, who rated the positive and negative impacts of HBEs on a five-point Likert scale. The second set of questionnaires was administered among urban planners in planning authorities in charge of the selected neighborhoods. The 32 residential neighborhoods in Enugu were categorized into low, medium, high and informal densities and then one was randomly selected from each category to ensure a comprehensive, representative, and inclusive analysis (Kazimbaya- Senkwe, 2004). The selected neighborhoods based on the stratified random sampling are shown in Table 1. The total number of building footprints (sample frame) in the study neighborhoods was 4,483 from which 10% sample size involved 452 residents’ questionnaire administration in the study. Also, the second set of questionnaires were administered among seven Town Planners since there were not many registered town planners in each planning authority. The 10% sample among the residents was determined by systematic sampling of the 10th building in each street within each neighborhood. The key research question is: what are the positive and negative impacts of HBEs? The hypothesis (H0) states that the positive impacts of HBEs are not more significant than the negative impacts. 

Findings And Discussions

The Dynamics of Home-based Enterprises
The returned residents’ questionnaire was analyzed using descriptive statistics while the hypothesis was tested using principal component analysis (PCA) to reduce the factors. The set of collated questionnaires completed by the residents disclose that in terms of the dynamics of HBEs, there are more female than male respondents in the four neighborhoods. Also, most HBE operators are between 16 and 45 years, corroborating the facts in existing HBE literature (Onyebueke, 2013). The household size of most HBE operators has the highest frequency for 3-5 and 6-10. In terms of educational qualification of household heads for HBE operators, Senior Secondary School Certificate had the highest frequency in the four sampled neighborhoods (Obed Camp-55%, Uwani-50%, New Haven-31.7%, and Independence Layout-37.6%). This also agrees with existing literature (Onyebueke, 2013), indicating the relevance of HBEs for the educated as well. Data on the presence of HBEs in the study area indicate the following: Obed Camp-45%, Uwani-78.4%, New Haven-75.2%, and Independence Layout- 60.7%. Obed Camp, the informal settlement had the least figure due to the demolition of structures at the time of this survey in August 2018. The other three formal neighborhoods have HBEs of over 60%, reiterating the ‘informalization of formal settlements’ observed by Myers (2011: 73). 

Another important characteristic of HBEs is the categorization, this study revealed that the three main categories of HBEs; manufacturing, services, and commercial are present in the study area. The data from the study shows that in Enugu, there is 7.1% manufacturing, 30.5% services, and 62.4% commercial HBEs. In the four sampled neighborhoods, manufacturing remained the least significant, while commercial remains the highest frequency as shown in Figure 4.1 and is typical of African cities’ HBEs (Tipple, 2005). One of the dynamics of HBEs which urban planners regard as the major negative impact is the alteration of residential buildings to accommodate HBEs. This is evident in the sampled neighborhoods. The data shows that the front of the buildings was the chosen location with the highest frequency for the three formal neighborhoods. However, the street, right in front of the house was the choice location for Obed Camp (informal settlement) HBEs. The front of the house is usually chosen for easy access to customers and to avoid interference with domestic activities. Other parts of the building used for HBE including the whole room and part of a room were observed in other studies. Figure 4.2 shows the photograph of a typical home-based enterprise in Enugu city. 

The data on residents’ rating of the impacts of HBEs was used to test the hypothesis of this study, H0: the positive impacts of HBEs are not more significant than the negative impacts. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was used to test this hypothesis using the statistical package for social sciences to ensure an unbiased outcome. The choice of PCA is to employ a highly rated statistical tool for reduction of the impact factors to a manageable size and for a reliable result. The PCA was used to determine the cumulative percentage of the analyzed factors and the major components of the impacts of HBEs in the study area. Based on Eigenvalues of 36 selected variables from the literature, the PCA extracted five principal factors that had Eigenvalues of more than one, while the extraction loading cumulative is 66.5%. The five principal factors are employment benefits (44.87%), government revenue (10.58%), social improvement (4.35%), neighborhood distortion (3.84%) and economic improvement (2.81%). Out of the five principal factors from the PCA result, four are positive impacts and one is a negative impact. The positive impacts are employment benefits (44.87%), government revenue (10.58%), social improvement (4.35%) and economic improvement (2.81%), while the negative impact is neighborhood distortion (3.84%). These impacts are discussed under treasures and traumas of HBEs in the next section. 

The Treasures of Home-Based Enterprises

The treasures, which are the benefits of HBEs include the following;

Employment Benefits
The result of the data analysis reveals that 75% of sampled household heads are informally employed. The analysis further shows that 76.6% of the respondents are owner-operators, 13.5% are employees in HBEs while 9.9% are family members involved in HBEs. Data on the number of workers in HBEs disclose that 35.1% of the businesses had only one employee, 58.55% had two to four employees, 5.3% had five to seven employees and 1.1% had eight to ten employees. The implication of these figures is that these employees would have probably been unemployed without HBEs. The employment benefit of HBEs is the most significant positive impact for the residents in the study area based on the high rating and the high factor loading of 44.87%. 

Revenue Benefits
The provision of revenue to the government through HBEs implies that its positive impacts are not just for the operators and neighborhood residents but also extends to the government of the cities, yet these governments rarely have any plan or support programs for the operators. In Enugu, 50.7% of HBE operators that were sampled indicated that they pay the state waste management levy, while 49.3% indicated that they pay their local government levy for small businesses. The levies they pay range from a minimum of one hundred naira (N100, $0.27) to a maximum of twenty-five thousand naira (N 25,000, $69.4). In terms of the frequency of payment, 9.5% of the respondents paid monthly while 89.8% indicated that they paid annually. 

Social Improvements
These are major positive impacts of HBEs in the study area with a factor loading of 4.35%. Social improvements include intangible impacts of HBEs such as increase in self-confidence, improvement of skills, development of work culture and flexible work hours. These intangible impacts are highly rated by respondents in this study and are among the 36 variables found in the literature. The data shows that HBE operators usually get some start-up training. The following are the data on start-up skill acquisition; vocational 4.6%, apprentice 33.7%, formal 8.9%, and self-trained 52.8%. HBEs, apart from the provision of employment opportunities, help to increase self-confidence of the operators who were regarded as unemployed prior to their involvement in such an enterprise. This impact is particularly important to women who could not seek formal employment due to their reproductive responsibilities, did not have any source of income to meet some personal needs, and had to depend on their spouses or other family members. The engagement in HBE empowers women to claim that they are employed, while in their homes, and they can independently cater to personal and household needs at the same time. This increases self-confidence in the home and neighborhood. 

Economic Improvements
This is the fifth principle factor with a loading of 2.81%. HBEs bring about economic improvement at all levels; for individuals, households, and government agencies. Income generation through HBEs is a measurable way of assessing economic improvement. The data on monthly income from HBEs reveals that 17% of the HBE operators sampled earn less than N9,000 ($25)monthly, 41.5% earn between N9,000 ($25) and N20,000 ($55.5), 14.2% earn between N21,000 ($58.3) and N30,000 ($83.3) (N30,000 {$83.3} is the current minimum wage in Nigeria). Also, 6.7% earn between N31,000 ($86.1) and N40,000 ($111.1) and 20.6% earn above N40,000 ($111.1). These data vary across the four neighborhood densities that were sampled. This implies that 27.3% of HBE operators in the study area earn above the national minimum wage monthly, although more than half of the operators earn below the current minimum wage. The low income from HBEs is a characteristic of the phenomenon, however many factors contribute to this situation including lack of official acknowledgement and support. Data on other sources of income reveals that 59.6% have no other source of income, while only 9.7% had other sources that yielded income above N30,000 ($83.3) monthly. The remaining 30.7% of the respondents had income from other sources that were less than the minimum wage. With these figures, HBEs are real sources of economic improvement for the operators and their households. The payment of levy by the operators ranging between N100 ($0.27) and N25,000($69.4) is a source of economic improvement for the government. The implication of this finding is that HBEs are the sole source of income for almost 60% of the operators, and as such, any action by government agencies against their operations will render these households destitute. This finding is significant particularly for African urban planners who still insist on opposing HBEs. The negative impact of HBEs is discussed in the next section. 

The Traumas of Home-Based Enterprises
The traumas of HBEs are the adverse effects discussed below:  

Neighborhood Distortion
One negative impact of the five principal components from the PCA result is neighborhood distortion 3.844%. Neighborhood distortion refers to the use of spaces in neighborhoods for purposes that were not originally planned, and which are not compatible with other existing land uses. Most of the negative impacts of HBEs are spatial/ environmental-related. The prominent ones in the study area are traffic congestion, air pollution, fire hazards, noise pollution, lack of home security, and overcrowding. Traffic congestion is seen in front of some buildings with HBEs due to customers who wrongly park vehicles to make purchases – this is more visible in the formal neighborhoods; Uwani, New Haven, and Independence layout. Air pollution is a negative impact of HBEs caused by those that cook for sale in front of their houses. This is particular to informal settlements and high population density neighborhoods. Fire hazards occur in any neighborhood, it is not a common effect of HBEs but usually occurs due to the carelessness of the operators. Noise pollution is a predominant impact of HBEs particularly in informal and high-density neighborhoods and is also noted in the study area. Lack of home security is an impact of HBEs and more in cases where a room is designated for the business, or the customers must get to the backyard for purchases. The issue of home security is a major reason why most operators (34%-highest frequency) use the front of the buildings for business so that customers will have no reason to gain access into the residential buildings. Overcrowding is another major impact of HBEs, the use of a complete room or part of a room reduces the space available for domestic purposes in the home. In contrast to the residents’ rating of these spatial/environmental impacts, these impacts were very highly rated by urban planners in the second set of questionnaires. This outcome is not surprising as the planners’ actions are based on knowledge of the short-and long-term implications of these processes, notwithstanding the highly applauded economic impacts of HBEs. Other negative impacts include poor upbringing of children as they, in HBE households, are unduly exposed to all manner of people who come as customers. HBE locations are also possible meeting points for people of questionable character in the neighborhood which can promote social vices within the area. 

Summary of Findings
The residential space alteration by urban poor for HBEs was viewed from a positive perspective and described as ‘invented spaces’, with the argument that some pattern of building alteration for HBEs by urban poor exhibit resourcefulness and creativity (Gondwe and Ayenagbo, 2013). This is an attribute that urban planners should acknowledge and enhance for sustainable development rather than the usual outright condemnation and confrontation. The applauded role of HBEs in reducing the level of unemployment has been described as the bane of the sub-sector as long as urban planners are concerned. The use of spaces in front of the house limits the space for children to play and for sit outs in the evenings by family members, however, the rating by residents both HBE operators and their neighbors who are affected and who also patronize them show that this negative effect is not quite significant. Four out of the five principal factors from the PCA result are positive impacts (94%), while one factor has a negative impact (6%). This result implies that the positive impacts of HBEs in the study area are more significant than the negative impacts. Therefore, the hypothesis (H0) advanced here that the positive impacts of HBEs are not more significant than the negative impacts is rejected. 

Conclusion and Recommendations

The operation of informal economic activities in residential buildings; home-based enterprises (HBEs) is an important source of income and employment and yet adds to the urbanization challenges faced by urban planners in global South cities. The findings on the impacts of HBEs reveal that 52.8% of HBE operators are self-trained and shows the need for government support in this respect. The government can support operators by organizing formal training for them to further improve their skills and this will lead to harnessing the potential to achieve sustainable local economic development. The trending global recognition and relevance of HBEs (especially because of COVID-19) necessitates context-specific and empirical studies that can be applicable to similar contexts and provide knowledge-based data for informed decisions and management of HBEs. The study is significant in two ways; first the study provides a novel and digital method for determining the sample population for HBEs which has been a long-term challenge for researchers in this sub-sector especially those from global South cities (Sudarshan and Sinha, 2011:15). Second, the use of principal component analysis (PCA) for data reduction and to ascertain the major impacts is rare in HBE studies. These two unique approaches are the work’s contribution to both literature and methodology and are relevant for urban planners in terms of research and practice. 

HBEs are a veritable means of employment\livelihood. The traumas\ negative impacts are highlighted for amelioration through various means such as individuals, planners, and governments. A major challenge for HBE operators is the constant conflict with urban planners because of alteration of planned residential buildings for HBEs, this can be resolved by, first, a change of approach by planners from confrontation to collaboration. An example of the confrontational attitude of planners in Enugu is captured in Ezeadichie, et al (2018:85) “Available anecdotal evidence suggests that the non-inclusion of the HBEs in formal urban planning resulted in their operations being largely seen as illegal, and as such, various government actors subject them to multiple levies, outright extortion, occasional harassment, and the pulling down of their structures while denying them government support and security”. 

Second, participatory and inclusive planning approaches should be adopted by urban planners in order to accommodate HBE operators rather than the current top-down approach. Third, guided adjustment of buildings will ameliorate the negative impacts of alteration. The regulation of all HBE activities that contribute to neighborhood distortion is expedient to ensure reduced negative impacts and promote sustainable local economic development. 

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Rakibul Ahasan | Ahsanul Kabir 

Abstract

Performance evaluation of public transportation systems is an important prerequisite to making a rapidly growing city livable. Despite the presence of public transportation since the 1960s, few studies talk about the efficiency of transportation systems in cities. The objective of this research is to assess the performance of an existing system. Based on a set of performance measurements identified from the literature, we captured five categories: passengers’ and operators’ perspectives – service efficiency, system efficiency, cost efficiency, utilization efficiency, and network efficiency to evaluate public transit efficiency. The results indicated that the existing service quality in Dhaka is less satisfactory compared to other cities with system, network, and cost efficiency being below average. But utilization efficiency is better, which could result from the overuse of vehicles and workers being involved in operating them. Also, the most concerning issue with the existing transportation system is congestion. In terms of the strengths and weaknesses, we find that the implementation of metro rails, bus route restructuring, and a separate policy for the city’s public transportation system cast some hope in addressing some immediate problems in the rapidly growing city of Dhaka. 

Keywords

Public Transportation; Performance Evaluation; System Efficiency; Service Efficiency; Quality of Service; Dhaka; Bangladesh

About the Authors:

Rakibul Ahasan (MCRP, MSc) is an Urban Planner currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Geography at Texas A&M University, College Station. Before joining here, he worked as a GIS Analyst at Iowa State University GIS Facility. He was involved with the Comprehensive Plan update project for the city of Huxley, Iowa. His research interests encompass urban growth modeling, land-use land cover change analysis, urban growth, transportation interaction, and the impact of transportation infrastructure on urban land change.

Dr. Ahsanul Kabir is an urban planner by training. He has been teaching and researching physical planning, sustainable transport, public transport, and Geo-informatics for the last 25 years at Khulna University, Bangladesh. His research interests include exploring sustainable and effective spatial planning and policy formulation pathways that ensure sustainable interaction between activities. While working in the field of transport and urban planning, he often draws focus on governance, institutional issues, and coordination for development.

Introduction

Urban areas consist of a series of interconnected subsystems, and transportation is an integrated component of such areas, and a driver of urban growth (Berling-Wolff & Wu, 2004). An efficient transportation system is essential to accommodate a growing urban population that ensures mobility for users. Dhaka, one of the most densely populated and fastest-growing megacities, is no exception and requires a public transportation system to efficiently run the city functions and serve its inhabitants (Ahasan, 2018; DTCA & JICA, 2015). Previously, the city was designated as the “traffic capital of the world” for its congested streets (Hoque et al., 2009; Morshed, 2015). The city established its first transportation authority back in the 1960s and currently has a public transit system that is more than two decades old (DTCA & ALG, 2015). The current system cannot meet the ever-increasing demand efficiently (Ahasan et al., 2020; Hasnine, 2011), and is not suitable to accommodate standard bus services or adequately serve all areas (DTCA & JICA, 2015). Additionally, due to a shortage of budget, there weren’t enough efforts to evaluate the system’s performance or find an effective way to address the increased demand with satisfactory service quality (Ahasan et al., 2020). 

There were several structural improvement projects that aimed to resolve the transportation situation, but weren’t enough (e.g., Dhaka Urban Transport Network Development Study 2010; Dhaka Bus Network and Regulatory Reform Implementation Study 2015, etc.). Most of the earlier studies focused on capacity gaps and introduced new schemes to reduce congestion on the street on a short-term basis. However, there were no attempts to institutionalize the existing transportation system’s performance evaluation practice and improve it based on the results of the evaluation. 

To improve the system, it is first necessary to identify the current system’s deficiencies, which can be achieved through performance evaluation, which can explain how well the system is running and how well it supports the urban structure. The evaluation process includes measurement of performance in-network level, which eventually provides an idea of the continuity and coverage of existing routes, and how accessible those are from the major residential, commercial, and other activity hubs. It also identifies the areas by which the system is lagging from both passenger and operator points of view. Past studies reported that performance measurement techniques vary based on context, scale, and other socioeconomic factors. In general, the motivation behind these techniques is to evaluate the system’s efficiency and performance per the standards practiced (Abreha, 2007; Berhan et al., 2013; Cruz et al., 2012; Eboli & Mazzulla, 2012; Georgiadis et al., 2014; Niyonsenga, 2012; Ryus, 2010). However, most of them apply to developed countries’ cities, which differ in many ways from Dhaka. Even with the city’s rapidly growing nature, Dhaka differs from other megacities in spatial arrangements, economic structure, and socio-economic conditions. 

Thus, this study aims to find a set of performance measurement indicators that will provide contextual findings for Dhaka and evaluate the existing transportation system’s performance, because only using the indicators suitable to developed countries’ cities may not give a realistic visualization for the city. 

Literature Review

Studies have examined the importance of public transit, especially in the context of densely populated cities. These studies have focused on providing options to users while ensuring better mobility and accessibility. With rapid urban population growth, the demand for transportation services is also proliferating, and public transit can help meet this increased demand (Schmöcker et al., 2004; Berg & Ihlström, 2019). Public transportation options are also helpful in reducing congestion on streets by eliminating the need for single-occupancy vehicles (Hensher, 2018; Migliore & Ciccarelli, 2020). Therefore, it is instrumental in low-income countries with limited financial resources. Previous transportation-related studies and analysis also reported the importance of public transportation in the context of Dhaka, Bangladesh. One of the earliest initiatives was in the early 1990s – the Dhaka Urban Transportation Plan (DUTP) which proposed that the city required an efficient public transit system, and recommended the establishment of a coordination authority. The authority, the Dhaka Transport Coordination Authority (DTCA), has prepared policy documents over the years emphasizing the importance of mass transit in the city, and they are currently implementing six Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) and Metro Rail projects. 

Previous studies defined performance measurement as evaluating how well an organization utilizes resources by comparing the input and output (Eboli & Mazzulla, 2012). It is in the form of capital or logistics supply, i.e., vehicles and infrastructures. The measurement comprises collecting, evaluating, and reporting data related to how well the organization performs its functions and meets its goals and objectives. Performance measurement of the public transportation system helps achieve aims from different viewpoints: evaluating the public transportation system’s overall performance, evaluating management performance, and diagnosing problems. The problems can be inconsistency in expenditure regarding the maintenance of transit vehicles, resource allocation among competing institutions, providing a management control system for monitoring and improving transit services, and other legal and regulatory works (Eboli & Mazzulla, 2011). It also paves the way for techniques that translate into a constant effort to improve services to match standards (Dhingra, 2011). 

It is worth noting the variations in definition of transit performance measures (Bordagaray et al., 2014; Das & Pandit, 2013; Deb & Ahmed, 2018; Friman et al., 2020; Güner, 2018; Ojo, 2019; Park et al., 2020; Quddus et al., 2019). These perspectives guided evaluations on the passenger’s perception of the service, how transit agencies view the system from a business perspective, and the community’s view on the transit’s role in serving broader societal objectives. Several researchers stated three general dimensions of performance measurement of public transportation systems – resource efficiency, resource effectiveness, and service effectiveness (Cruz et al., 2012). However, there is evidence of opposing views among several other researchers regarding these aspects . For example, Cook & Lawrie, 2004; Castillo & Benitez, 2012 in Cruz et al., 2012, added that the measurement and indicators of service quality of the system is also relevant. This has also been agreed upon in other works (Bellizzi et al., 2020; Bordagaray et al., 2014; Cascetta & Cartenì, 2014; Das & Pandit, 2013; Deb & Ahmed, 2018; Friman et al., 2020; Güner, 2018; Ojo, 2019; Quddus et al., 2019). 

Notably, the work of performance evaluation usually varies based on the considered point of view (whose view to consider – user’s or agency’s). A group of researchers performed their work based on the operator’s point of view, while others counted the passengers or communities, while several others considered both (Eboli & Mazzulla, 2012). Performance evaluation can, therefore, provide information on the level of service of the system, the service quality (from the passenger’s point of view) along with the cost-efficiency of the system, and system efficiency and utilization efficiency (agency’s point of view) at the same time. However, it was evident in past works that transit service performance depends significantly upon perspective. From one perspective, some indicators could be considered a performance measure that may not reflect all the system’s stakeholders. Hence, it is important to consider the viewpoints of all the involved actors and past studies used this frequently (Eboli & Mazzulla, 2012; Ojo, 2019; Friman et al., 2020). Researchers consider the customer’s view as the most relevant for evaluating transit performance (Cruz et al., 2012; Friman et al., 2020).

On the other hand, to evaluate the operator’s perspective, past studies reported the use of productivity measures. These measures focus on evaluating the effectiveness of the system using a set of efficiency indicators. It usually considers cost-effectiveness and cost-efficiency. Studies differentiated among efficiency and effectiveness measures based on the input, for example, studies defined cost efficiency – the measure of service output compared to the unit of input; cost-effectiveness – the measure of outcome compared to the unit of input in terms of cost, and service effectiveness – a measure of outcome compared to a unit of input in terms of service. Indicators can help achieve involvement of all stakeholders. The importance of considering the infrastructure (i.e.road network) and vehicle modes (i.e. cost efficiency) was also prevalent in the literature. However, we also found that overlaps between different indicators and individual indicators could represent multiple perspectives. This overlap, and the importance of considering all perspectives in the evaluation process are visible in the framework that we developed based on our findings (Figure 3.1). We incorporated the final set of indicators and the related description in the following section.

Methodology 

We followed a two-step approach for this research, including a review part and a data collection part. We reviewed past studies to identify a set of performance measurement indicators. After the review, we finalized the indicators in consultation with professionals and experts working with the city’s transportation system. Following the indicator selection, we conducted a field survey to collect data from operators and users. We also collected transportation route and network-related data from DTCA. Both the field survey data and secondary data from the institutions were then analyzed using the selected indicators.

Performance Measurement Indicator Identification 
Based on the literature review, we selected indicators to evaluate the transportation service’s performance in Dhaka city considering their contextualization to the location. We also considered both passengers’ and operators’ perspectives. Hence, there are five categories: analyzing system efficiency, service efficiency, network efficiency, cost efficiency, and utilization efficiency of the existing transit system (Table 1). 

Data Collection
In this study, we collected data through a questionnaire survey and institutional survey between June 2015 and July 2017. We designed the user survey questionnaire to capture the quality of service, average travel time, accessibility, comfort, and other service and system-related issues. On the other hand, we collected operating costs, revenue, and resource utilization data from the operators. The institutional survey provided network data, bus stop locations, and other relevant data on public transport operations. 

Data Analysis
To evaluate the performance of the system, we applied calculations using the collected data. The following section reports the equations and techniques we employed in performing the analysis. 

System Efficiency
For this research, we calculated system efficiency by appraising the travel time, walking distance and time, waiting time to board on the bus, and travel cost. We also calculated the transportation affordability index to measure system efficiency. In this study, we defined transportation affordability as the percentage of income spent for travel purposes (equation 1). 

Here, X = Number of trips per month; P= Expense per trip; y= Monthly Income

Service Efficiency
We used service efficiency indicators to capture the users’ perspective and measure the performance of the system. Past studies reported the use of weighted delay index and schedule reliability index for this purpose (Camus et al., 2005). In this study, we defined the weighted delay index based on the comparison between transit-trip delay and the number of late trips due to transit service failure (equation 2). We used a scheduled headway to measure transit trip delay. In contrast, we calculated schedule reliability based on the user’s waiting times before boarding on the transit (equation 3). 

Here, H is the scheduled headway, k is the universal delay value in minutes (0 ≤ k ≤H), and p (k) is the observed probability of delay k. R is expected to take a value between 0 and 1, with a higher value indicating lower reliability. 

Utilization Efficiency
We used average vehicle utilization, passenger per vehicle per day (PPVPD), passenger-kilometer, and vehicle availability to measure how the system is utilizing available resources for measuring utilization efficiency. We calculated vehicle utilization efficiency using the ratio of average working hours to total working hours (equation 4). 

Vehicle availability indicates the percentage of the operational vehicles in revenue-generating works (equation 5). It reflects the effectiveness of the system’s maintenance arrangements. 

Passenger per vehicle per day (PPVPD) is the number of passengers carried by a vehicle divided by the total number of vehicles and the number of operating days (Iles, 2005) (equation 6). It is influenced by the vehicle capacity, average occupancy, route length, no. of trips, average distance traveled by the passenger, headways, and average travel time. 

Network Efficiency
We used the distance between bus stoppages and average network speed to measure the existing system’s netwWe used the distance between bus stops and average network speed to measure the existing system’s network efficiency (equation 7). 

Cost Efficiency
We found that one of the most frequently used cost-efficiency measuring techniques is to calculate the profitability index (equation 8). This helps to examine the operating cost and how well the system is returning the investment. 

Results

Existing Public Transportation Condition 
In public transit, bus services are the second most used mode (4.2% share) for vehicular transportation in Dhaka city after non-mechanized rickshaws (21.8% share) (DTCA, 2015). Private bus operators provide local bus service within the city and in the vicinity alongside the state-owned Bangladesh Road Transport Corporation (BRTC). A total of 304 Buses and 1,194 Minibuses were in operation on 8 Bus Routes and 19 Minibus routes, respectively, in Dhaka in 1992 (DTCA, 2015). In 1994, bus and minibus routes were merged, and the bus routes were restructured, which reduced the ceiling height of the vehicle allowed to operate on specific routes. Since the Dhaka Bus Route Regulatory Reform Implementation Study by DTCA in 2011, there have been no new route permits for minibus and human haulers. Only existing permit-holders for minibus and human haulers can renew. 

As per the Motor Vehicle Ordinance 1983, all motor vehicles need to be registered with the Bangladesh Road Transport Authority (BRTA). Additionally, vehicles to be used as public transportation need a permit issued for a fixed route with an origin and destination, and a fixed area or zone. Until 2000, there were 1,155 buses and 3,654 minibusses, which increased to 15,552 and 9,341 in 2009, respectively (Table 2). In recent years, the number of operating buses and minibusses has been increasing steadily. At present, the total number of buses operating on Dhaka’s roads is around 22,550, and the number of minibusses is 9,983 (BRTA, 2015). The number of buses under BRTC is not incorporated in the BRTA database as BRTC does not require route permits to conduct its operations. At present, BRTC has a fleet of 974 buses, out of which 125 are double-deckers, and these buses run through 11 routes in and around Dhaka city (BRTC, 2015). 

There is currently a minimum fare (for a distance less than 1 kilometers) of 7 Bangladeshi Taka (BDT) (~0.09 USD). An additional expense added per km is 0.36 BDT with this minimum fare. By offering a higher quality service, some operators charge higher fares in practice. Most bus companies follow the off-board ticketing process, which later transformed into onboard ticketing to prevent revenue loss and reduce the number of intermediaries. DMRTC, with representatives from bus operators, is responsible for determining the fares of the buses in Dhaka. Capital investments, salvage value, operation, maintenance cost, and profits are considered to fix fare. Additionally, some streets are suitable for smooth operation. According to the latest study by the transportation authority, 12.5% of the entire road network in the Dhaka Metropolitan Area (DMP) area is suitable for bus services (DTCA & JICA, 2015). 

Performance Evaluation of the Existing Public Transportation System 

System Efficiency
It is difficult to identify uniform measures to evaluate a public transportation system’s service quality due to the variation of perception from person to person. However, past studies found that service quality depends on average travel time, average waiting time, distances to the bus stops, travel speed, waiting time, and reliability. The majority of the respondents (56%) selected “moderate” as their opinion on the quality of the service (Figure 3.2a). In Dhaka, people do not prefer to walk when the walking distance is more than one kilometer or if the time taken exceeds 10-15 minutes. The average walking time to reach the bus stops is between 5 to10 minutes, and in most cases, walking distance is below 500 meters (around 70% of the responses). Still, one-third of the people have to make an ingress trip to use public transportation. Usually, the time taken during an ingress trip is between 10 to 30 minutes, with an average fare of BDT 10 to 15 (~0.14-0.20 USD). Almost two-thirds of the passengers (75%) have to wait at the bus stops before boarding the bus (Figure 3.2b). Waiting time varies between 2 to 10 minutes, with an average of 7-8 minutes. It may cross over 20 minutes during peak hours and under certain weather conditions. For Dhaka, the affordability index (equation 1) value has been found to be at 4.3% (assuming the average number of trips per month per person is 40 and the average fare per trip is BDT 22 (~0.23 USD). This value is within the standard accepted range and also within the affordable limit in comparison to other similar cities (e.g., South Africa 10%, India 10.2%, Pakistan 12%, Brazil 7%, Nigeria 15-20%, Cameroon 18%) (Carruthers et al., 2005). However, there are other modes like auto-rickshaws and taxi cabs in Dhaka. These modes cost more than buses (e.g., for a CNG trip, one has to pay BDT 40 for the first 2 kilometers and BDT 10 for subsequent kilometers). Nevertheless, that expense and cost are beyond the scope of this study. That is why the value found is probably not a representation of the real world. 

Service Efficiency
For a trip with a 6 km length, it should usually take less than 30 minutes (Armstrong-Wright & Thiriez, 1987). However, most trips exceed an hour of travel time in Dhaka. Almost half of the trips (43.75%) take more than an hour for a 6 km distance, and around one-third (31.25%) take 50 to 60 minutes (Figure 3.2c). For this research, the average speed of the vehicle and volume-capacity ratio were considered to measure reliability parameters. In the weighted delay index (equation 2), only one out of twenty-three operators showed a perfect score, whereas eight others scored less than 0.2, indicating seamless operation and maintenance. In the case of schedule reliability (equation 3), only four operators have a 50% reliability, whereas most operators have no reliability in maintaining the schedule. This indicates how disorderly the operation and maintenance of the public transport system is. Accidents and casualties caused by buses and minibuses have been lower compared to the total number. These modes accounted for only 72 out of 1,279 casualties and 432 out of 1,401 accidents between 2014 and 2017. In contrast, private vehicles, i.e., motorcycles, private cars/jeep, etc., are responsible for 150 casualties and 345 accidents, referring to the fact that public transport modes are comparatively less accident-prone and safer (Accident Research Institute, 2015). The average travel speed of buses fluctuates with the change in route, route length, the number of trips per day, and also the number of operators operating on that route. Dhaka’s average travel speed has been found to be around 10 Kmph, with a minimum value of 5 Kmph to a maximum of 22 Kmph (Figure 3.2d). The average speed varies based on the origin and destination of the routes. It is found to be higher during long routes which connect areas outside the city. Inside the city, traffic congestion is high, which reduces the vehicles’ speed on the routes that originate and end inside the city. 

Utilization Efficiency
Vehicle-kilometer depends on traffic congestion on the streets, operating speeds, hours of operations per day, and hours while the bus is in operation but not on the streets. For well-operated bus services, the average should be between 210 km to 270 km (Niyonsenga, 2012), although, in reality, the range lies between 150 km to 300 km (Abreha, 2007). In Dhaka city, the value is smaller for routes having both the origin and destination within the city, and high for the routes connecting areas outside the city. The maximum value has been found to be 195 kilometers per day, and the lowest is 53 kilometers resulting in an average of 79 kilometers. Using equation 4, the average utilization rate was found at 88.8%. On the other hand, vehicle availability is the ratio of the number of operational vehicles to the total vehicles, which for Dhaka was 84.85% (equation 5). A higher vehicle availability rate does not actually mean that all of the vehicles are operational. It can be higher due to the improper and overuse of available vehicles and falsified information provided to the regulatory authority. The problem with calculating vehicle availability and utilization in Dhaka is that the number of vehicles operating on the streets is much higher than listed on paper. Operators usually do not want their vehicles to be out of the streets for maintenance or stay idle, no matter whether they are fit for operations or not. There are also questions regarding the actual fleet size. 

Assuming 85% of the fleet are in operation (availability), the range for a bus with a capacity of 80-100 passengers on city services is between 1,000 and 2,000 PPVPD (equation 6). In Dhaka, the average capacity of vehicles is around 60, and PPVPD varies from route to route, with a minimum of 240 to a maximum of 775. Some of these values are close to the standards, but mostly the scenario is of underutilized extremes. Passenger kilometer in the case of Dhaka has been found to be 109,703 per day, the average trip length was found 10.1 km from the field survey, and the average total passenger volume was used for this calculation, which is 2155 passengers per day. 

Network Efficiency
In practice, buses stop everywhere they see passengers, though some defined bus stops are on every route. Average bus stops spacing should not cross 300-400 meters (Niyonsenga, 2012) for an efficient service operation. In the case of Dhaka,the stop spacing is around 1,200 meters (based on the stops recorded in the DMRTC database). On the other hand, the average network speed should be approximately 14-15 Kmph for an efficient operating transportation system, which is below 10 kilometers for Dhaka (equation 7). Both of these parameters indicate a low network quality on the available routes in the city. 

Cost Efficiency 
Operating Cost per Vehicle-Km and Revenue per Vehicle-Km were used to calculate profitability, which refers to cost-efficiency. Though both the revenue and profitability data were found too small and inadequate in amount, it should be mentioned here that the data from the operators regarding cost and revenue is not reliable in the transportation business. Using equation 8, the profitability was found to be around 17%. However, transportation business associates stated that there is always a more substantial profit in transportation services. Otherwise, the owner does not run their buses on the streets. 

In this study, Dhaka’s public transportation system’s overall performance was measured, including network, service, system, utilization, and network efficiency. In service efficiency, apart from vehicle availability and vehicle utilization rate, the rest of the parameters show that the performance is a poor one. Reliability, average bus stop spacing, and profitability also fall within the poor performance zone (Figure 3.2e). In system efficiency, the scenario is slightly better in Dhaka city with excellent performance regarding affordability and safety. However, what is essential to note here is the poor performance in travel time as it influences the overall performance of the system and other aspects of the measurement to a significant level as well. Low scores of vehicle-km and travel time represent the underutilization of a system’s capacity. Moreover, this causes the overall system efficiency to collapse from moderate to below moderate level. 

Discussion and Conclusion

This paper aims to evaluate the efficiency of the public transportation system of Dhaka city. Overall, the performance is lagging in components considered in this study. System efficiency showed a below-average score. Only utilization efficiency represents a good performance score. There are three indicators that fall well between the poor performance zone and the moderate performance zone (Figure 3.2e). Thus, a conclusion can be drawn that the existing system is not operating efficiently with bottlenecks in all components. The system is operating with severe problems in management (system and cost efficiency), operations (service and cost efficiency), and network-level (network efficiency). That is why an educated initiative can be taken for the planned development of Dhaka city’s public transportation. The initiative can vary from the implementation of different forms of mass transit modes, i.e., Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) suggested in the STP and RSTP, or it can be at the management level by introducing a separate policy for public transportation operations (Ahasan et al., 2020; Ahasan et al., 2020). 

Problems with the existing system can be categorized as infrastructure and management-related in general. Infrastructure-related issues include routes not being well distributed and connected. The absence of passenger shade, improper signaling also reinforces the problem. In the case of management factors, the legal and regulatory institutions are not aware of what is happening in practice. The operators reduce and modify the route lengths to suit their operations and for-profit maximization. For example, in the case of Route A-114, which on paper connects Mirpur Zoo to Sayedabaad, it does not operate beyond Motijheel. The operators do not cover the rest of the 3 km distance to avoid competition and congestion in that segment or serve passengers from the Motijheel commercial area (Figure 3.3). 

The empirical data analysis based on the identified criteria brings forward deficiencies within the existing system. Inadequate vehicles and infrastructure quality, as well as disintegrated enforcement authorities, are a few of the major issues. These are some of the most prominent deficient areas in the transportation sector of Bangladesh. All the problems with service efficiency were somehow related to traffic congestion on the streets. If this can be addressed, then the whole system’s efficiency might increase to a different level. The number of public transportation routes is high, but it is not well distributed; instead, the density is high in the central areas. The present scenario of Dhaka city’s transportation situation is not remarkable compared to other similar cities, Delhi (India), for example. Factors like vehicle utilization (84% in Delhi compared to Dhaka’s 88%), passenger trips, lower number of accidents indicated a better state in the case of Dhaka. However, what makes them different is the use of public transportation as the primary mode of transportation (80% in Kolkata, 60% in Mumbai, and around 40% in Delhi compared to 23% in Dhaka). Initiatives like the introduction of Metro rail and BRT, and the average fleet age (4.5 years in Delhi compared to around 15 years in Dhaka) also contributed to the differences in public transportation performance in these cities (Pucher et al. 2004, Dave, 2014). 

The assessment of the efficiency of the public transportation system of Dhaka city gives some unique information regarding how well the system is operating and the hindrances of the existing system. The current system is operating somewhat below the moderate service quality. Only a few indicators were found to be moderate, but the rest of the indicators appeared to be underperforming. To improve the existing performance, initiatives need to be enforced in these underperforming sectors specifically. Past studies reported that congestion does not have a significant relationship with economic growth. Instead, it has a positive correlation with per capita income (Marshall & Dumbaugh, 2020). However, these studies are yet to be replicated and tested in the context of the global south. Mobility is highly dependent on public transport in Dhaka, and single-occupancy vehicles are still less than five percent of total trips. That is why it requires further studies and evaluations, which will lead to a sustainable solution for congestion issues and other underperforming areas of the existing system. This can help the public transportation system of Dhaka to become an efficient one which would be worth using and sustainable in meeting the demand of the city’s present and future residents (Ahasan et al., 2020). The data used in this research is around two years old. However, the network and other institutional information did not change in the past years. At the same time, additional information is still representative of the city’s situation, given that no significant changes and initiatives were undertaken in this period. Future studies could also incorporate other modes of transportation to compare public transit and how different modes of transportation complement this system. Also, the operator’s and users’ survey was selective and limited due to the public’s time constraints and availability to respond to an extensive questionnaire and sensitive topic. Future studies could be better addressed by narrowing down the routes and using more strategic approaches with the survey.

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Evan Todtz

Abstract

Situated in the western hillsides of Medellín, the central stairway in Las Independencias (I) historically served as the primary neighborhood circulation route, but also acted as an invisible border delimiting conflicting spatial claims by disparate armed factions vying for territorial control. Decades of intense urban violence culminated in the early 2000s with a series of state-sponsored military interventions that left the community reeling. The emergent model of social urbanism in the mid-2000s sought to redress historic inequities in the city’s peripheries. Under this directive, the state executed a physical intervention in the community to de-territorialize the underlying geographies of violence by replacing the central stairway with a new public escalator system. While projects executed under social urbanism frequently attribute success to the project’s design merit and broad social impact, this mixed-methods design study completed along the public escalators shows that the primary driver of individual and neighborhood advancement in Las Independencias (I) has been the re-territorialization of these spaces through insurgent spatial practices by residents rather than the state’s physical intervention. Intimate insights into daily life along the public escalators reveal how women, in particular, emerge as critical actors in the re-territorialization of the escalators, despite persistent gender imbalances in public space and shifting geographies of violence encroaching into the domestic realm. Focusing on people rather than the state underscores how centering the narratives and perspectives of women allows these community ambassadors to plan for, create, and steward emancipatory spaces where individual and community autonomy reside. 

Keywords

Re-territorialization; Women in Planning; Insurgent Planning; Social Urbanism; Invisible Borders; Public Space Appropriation 

Introduction

Once one of the most violent places in the world, the district of San Javier in Medellín, Colombia, has emerged as a global model for urban transformation through equitable planning and urban design practice. Nowhere is this change more evident than in the neighborhood of Las Independencias (I), where an informally constructed stairway became the historic borderline between various armed groups fighting for territorial control throughout the late 1980s until the early 2000s. Following a series of violent military raids on the community, the mayoral administration of Sergio Fajardo in the mid-2000s instituted the Integrated Urban Project (PUI) in San Javier as part of a state planning strategy known as social urbanism. The plan sought to disrupt the existing geographies of violence, referred to by local residents as invisible borders (fronteras invisibles), while simultaneously creating new mobility infrastructures and public spaces to promote a culture of coexistence (convivencia) and civic culture (cultura ciudadana). In Las Independencias (I), this strategy materialized through the installation of a public escalator system along the former stairway in the heart of the community. While architects and planners have since critiqued social urbanism projects for their design merit and broad equity impacts, this article focuses on the public escalators and asks: What are the unintended day-to-day consequences of having constructed the public escalators and how have residents, particularly women, responded to the physical changes to their neighborhood? 

Scholars of Colombian planning and urban design practice often wholly attribute the observed advances in social and economic security under social urbanism to the emblematic public space and mobility megaprojects designed to de-territorialize existing geographies of violence, expand access to resources, and increase state visibility in historically marginalized communities. I argue in this article, however, that the primary driver of individual and neighborhood advancement is the re-territorialization of these spaces through insurgent spatial practices by residents rather than the state’s physical interventions (Souza, 2015). Employing Souza’s definition of territorialization as the act of embedding social meaning and power onto space, this article documents how these spatial practices manifest along the public escalators in the neighborhood of Las Independencias (I). Highlighting the insurgent nature of such spatial practices underscores the political intentionality and power struggles occurring in and associated with urban space. 

As a key scholar of public space in Colombia, Rachel Berney’s investigations on new public spaces in Bogotá expose the underlying contradictions between how spaces like “equalizing networks,” (2010) or linear circulation routes designed to enhance mobility and access, are intended to advance social equity while simultaneously enforcing desirable social behavior through surveillance and policing (2011, 2017). Though Berney’s work highlights how public spaces shape social behavior and further deepen certain socio-economic inequities, this study expands on how residents, in turn, shape public spaces and respond to inequities imposed by the state, particularly those related to gender. Similarly, Luisa Sotomayor (2017) investigates the policy strategies and physical interventions employed by the state in San Javier and their role in historically embedding and perpetuating socio-economic inequities in the district under constantly shifting spatial relationships. In so doing, Sotomayor centers her critique on the deterritorialization of San Javier on behalf of the state, whereas this article instead shifts the focus to the re-territorialization of the community by residents as evidenced through symbolic and deliberate acts along the public escalators. Orlando Alves dos Santos, Jr. (2014) reflects on the scholarship surrounding these persistent social and spatial tensions within urban common spaces, noting that through the careful study of the material and personal dimensions of these spaces, researchers are able to develop more heightened awareness towards acts of physical appropriation or re-territorialization. 

My field research along the public escalators of Las Independencias (I) documents some of these practices, demonstrating how residents use graffiti, performance art, and the physical appropriation of space through activities such as street vending and neighborhood tourism to generate local economic activity, collective healing, and to build community. At the same time, my study reveals that the installation of the public escalators did not eradicate networks of crime and violence, but instead dispersed these activities into different, less visible geographies in adjacent neighborhoods, side alleyways, private businesses, and the domestic sphere. Ultimately, my findings underscore the vital role of women in re-territorializing the public escalators, who, despite prevailing gender imbalances in public spaces and increased vulnerability to the shifting spatial networks of crime and violence, leverage their individual entrepreneurship and collective pride and sense of community to improve their economic and social welfare. 

Research Methodology

This article presents findings from a year-long study including a three-month field research effort in the summer of 2017 at the public escalators of Las Independencias (I) in the district of San Javier, Medellín. My research design draws inspiration from the critical design ethnography model defined by Barab et al. (2004) as a participatory design research method focusing on the empowerment of participants to create their own shared vision and knowledge through collective design thinking and action with the researcher. However, due to my limited prior exposure to the community of focus and relatively brief duration of field work, the study instead was classified as a mixed-methods research design leveraging quantitative and qualitative methods. These methods included site documentation and measurement, mapping, and spatial analysis, as well as ethnographic approaches including observations, field notes, informal and semi-formal interviews, and digital recordings of physical artifacts generated during or resulting from the research effort. In combination, these methods sought to mitigate the influence of the colonial, patriarchal, and positivist research paradigms traditionally associated with Western planning. 

As a foreign researcher embedded within a historically marginalized community, I continuously reflected upon and refined my research methods to prioritize situated knowledges, or the lived experiences, histories, and stories of local residents, over that of technical experts (i.e. architects, planners) to assemble a more deep-rooted context of the community (Haraway, 1988). As such, informal conversations, observations, and interactions with community members and leaders did not take place in spaces within the formal planning apparatus such as the town hall or community center, but rather in the invented spaces (Miraftab, 2004) of civic engagement and participation in the neighborhood, including the escalators, platforms, and back alleyways. Three continuous months of engagement within the modest communal spaces of the neighborhood between four to six days per week allowed me to compose a thick description (Geertz, 1973) of the community and to develop close relationships with the residents. 

Due to the lack of available digital geographic data for this informally settled sector of the city, my field research began with several weeks of preliminary site visits and documentation. Documentation consisted of physically measuring individual escalator segments, platforms, and connecting alleyways and taking photos and hand sketches of individual spaces and construction details. This data built the foundation on which to layer additional spatial information, observations, and notes onto maps of the public escalator system. Simultaneously, informal interviews based on casual, organic conversations with local residents on-site began occurring and continued throughout later phases of research including public space observations. Semi-structured interviews were scheduled and digitally recorded with government and private sector planners, architects, and urban designers early in the project, and as resident informants emerged from personal referrals and the site documentation and observation processes, additional interviews were conducted with neighborhood leaders, activists, and business owners. In total, 25 key informants contributed to the project through interviews. 

Additionally, local narratives and histories were documented through other artistic media reflecting the unique cultural practices and traditions of the residents of Las Independencias (I). These media included street art and graffiti murals, hip-hop dance performances, rap and song writing, as well as a cognitive map of the neighborhood provided by a local artist. These cultural artifacts complement the more formally-sourced documentation methods of this study, providing rich social and spatial commentary. Finally, I conducted public space observations over roughly two weeks towards the end of my fieldwork. Using a self-developed coding system comprised of letters, numbers, and symbols, I collected rapid spatial and demographic information reflecting the perceived gender, age range, ethnicity, and directional movement of individual users of a set of discrete public spaces. Between two to three times a day, I rotated sequentially between seven escalator platforms and two points along the adjacent viaduct over 15-minute time intervals, resulting in over 6,000 unique data entries upon completion of my observations. While this subjective coding system certainly introduced a degree of variance in the data, the large sample size and general alignment of findings with broader citywide demographics suggests the method demonstrates satisfactory reliability. Collectively, these methods produced a robust primary dataset which informed my assessment and research findings discussed later in the article. In the future, longitudinal research efforts would benefit this study to document the neighborhood’s evolution and to better inform planning in other neighborhoods in Medellín that are undergoing similar transitions. 

Colombian Cultural Paradigms

It is vital to first understand the cultural paradigms which shape historic and evolving planning values, beliefs, and practices in Colombia before critiquing social urbanism or emblematic projects like the public escalators. 

Convivencia and Cultura Ciudadana 
As a society marked by historic violence, convivencia, or coexistence, underpins the aspirations of contemporary Colombian urban life. Convivencia can be conceptualized as “the practice of [social] encounter” and the sense of safety that arises through community-building in urban common spaces (Graffiti Artist, personal communication, July 9, 2017). Complementary to this idea is cultura ciudadana, or civic culture. The concept emerged from the new Political Constitution of 1991 and the city plan of Bogotá, entitled Formar Ciudad, defined as “the set of shared customs, actions and minimum shared rules that generates a sense of belonging, facilitates urban coexistence, and leads to respect for common heritage and the recognition of citizens’ rights and duties” (Escobar, 2010). In Bogotá, mayors Antanas Mockus and Enrique Peñalosa first used public space as a key tool to promote cultura ciudadana. While Peñalosa focused on the physical construction and reclamation of public spaces (Peñalosa, 2005), Mockus viewed public space as “a privileged space to construct citizen culture… [and] to learn to self-regulate and mutually regulate one another” (2005) and, as such, developed a didactic system of signage and art within public spaces to re-socialize citizens under a shared moral code based on mutual respect, coexistence, and citizenship. Conversely, in Medellín, the prevailing cultural attitudes reflected a strong sense of self-determination, entrepreneurial spirit, and modernity that was best represented through the Cultura Metro, or Metro Culture, associated with the city’s rail line which opened in 1996 (Stienen, 2009). While the installation of the Metro line helped revive many of the city’s existing central public spaces, investment in new public spaces concentrated largely within self-built communities at the city’s peripheries to create and elevate civic culture and co-existence in areas classified as zones of violence (Echeverri & Orsini, 2011). 

Invasiones and Fronteras Invisibles 
The terms used to describe the settlement of informal hillside communities in Colombia vary by geographic region as well as the means of settlement, but often use language evoking notions of illeg-ality or violent action such as invasiones (invasions) or urbanizaciones piratas (pirate urbanizations). While the state’s historic absence and limited physical intervention in these gray spaces (Yiftachel, 2009) engendered and deepened socio-political marginalization, their topographic complexity and geographic isolation from the urban center eventually resulted in the co-optation of these communities by disparate armed factions who delineated fronteras invisibles, or invisible borders within the landscape to exert their territorial claims (Aricapa, 2005; López-López et al., 2014). These liminal spaces became sites of frequent encroachment, confrontation, and conflict leading residents to refer to these invisible borders as “the trenches” (Local Artist, personal communication, July 9, 2017; Samper, 2014). Under the auspices of social urbanism, public space recovery efforts in Medellín intentionally sought to disrupt fronteras invisibles and reclaim spatial control from armed groups, thereby enhancing the state’s ability to govern these remote regions (Duque Franco, 2014). This increasingly integral role of public space in Colombian planning policies, tools, and practices sets the stage for a critical assessment of the public escalators in subsequent sections. Next, this article explores the interrelationships and conflicts between historic views towards these ‘invasive’ settlements and fronteras invisibles and their perceived threats to popular notions of cultura ciudadana and convivencia. 

Evolution of Colombian Planning Practice 
The number and scale of self-built communities in Medellín surged during the rapid urbanization of the city beginning in the 1950s as accelerated rural-to-urban migration occurred due to the combined effects of land and economic reforms, territorial conflict, and political violence stemming from the country’s decade-long civil war, La Violencia (Giraldo and Martínez, 1997). In the 1970s, economic instability brought on by the global recession exacerbated the rate of rural displacement and heightened levels of violence between paramilitary and narcotrafficking operations vying for territorial control (Bellalta, 2020). Between the mid-1980s and the early 2000s, the Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES) estimated that over 2.9 million persons were displaced across Colombia (Escobar, 2010). In Medellín, this “massive expansion of urban precarity, informality, and poverty” ran virtually unchecked during this period, with “very limited and weak local institutions and democratic control” to address the growing socio-economic challenges facing vast proportions of the city’s growing population (Private Architect, personal communication, July 31, 2017). 

In response to this national crisis, a new Political Constitution was ratified in 1991 and equipped the state with new tools to address the mounting challenges unfolding. The document fundamentally redefined Colombia’s geographical and institutional governance structures including territorial decentralization, substantial fiscal restructuring, increased municipal autonomy, and the adoption of local and participatory planning practice (Castillo and Ferro, 2001; Private Architect, personal communication, July 31, 2017). At the same time, the President’s Advisory Council for Medellín was specially appointed to convene new public forums, elevate public participation, and collectively develop strategies specifically aimed at addressing the high levels of urban violence and poverty in the city’s peripheries (Moncada, 2016). In 1993, the group conceived of the Program for the Integral Improvement of Subnormal Neighborhoods (PRIMED) which posited that violence and social decline in informal settlements could be reversed through new neighborhood infrastructure and strong state presence; however, the technical decision-making and implementation of these projects lacked the social investment of neighborhood residents necessary to sustain community progress (Velásquez-Castañeda, 2013). 

In 1997, the Law of Territorial Organization (Law 388) formalized democratic participation in the planning process, identified public space as an effective spatial framework for planning, and introduced the Territorial Organization Plan (POT) as a systems-based planning approach designed to establish a more rational and equitable built environment (Castillo and Ferro, 2001). The adoption of the first POT in Medellín in 1999 also formulated the Urban Regularization and Legalization Plan (PRLU), a mechanism aimed specifically at planning in self-built communities. Following a similar logic to the POT, plans were organized around natural or built systems; however, the planning focus on the legalization of land tenure failed to gain political traction and left most PRLUs in the diagnostics phase with limited implementation (Velásquez-Castañeda, 2013). As recent history demonstrates, shifting attitudes towards informal or self-built communities manifested in distinct planning policy approaches, but all of the strategies fell short of improving the quality of life for the city’s most marginalized residents. 

In 2004, the incoming mayoral administration of Sergio Fajardo acknowledged the state’s historic disinvestment in these communities and renewed a commitment to reconciling this deficit by working collaboratively with the Empresa de Desarrollo Urbano (EDU) to formulate the Integrated Urban Project (PUI) as a tool to directly impact marginalized communities through targeted physical planning interventions (Echeverri and Orsini, 2011). Each PUI is structured around three components: a physical intervention in the built (or natural) environment such as new mobility infrastructure or high-quality public spaces, a socially engaged process to promote community cohesion, and the establishment of an institutional (state) presence (Sotomayor, 2015). Once the PUI’s framing organizational feature has been identified, a series of community workshops first highlight existing neighborhood challenges and then allow residents to envision potential solutions while building cultura ciudadana and a sense of shared ownership of the project and its implementation. Analyzing the input gathered from community engagement efforts, technical planners then translate findings into a final recommended intervention. To date, the PUI has achieved more success than its planning predecessors due to the dedicated economic funds available for implementation as well as the continuity of project management under the direction of the EDU rather than a particular mayoral administration (EDU Planner, personal communication, July 4, 2017). 

Critics of social urbanism and the PUI process often cite the inadequate attention to environmental factors in the analysis and implementation of new projects, the limited provision of new and secure housing in projects, the tension between the global marketability of high-profile design interventions and the ability of said projects to meet basic socioeconomic needs, and the lack of sustained investment in social programming and maintenance and operations as the most troublesome procedural shortfalls. Furthermore, the structural co-optation of the PUI model forced residents to concede the re-territorialization of their communities through physical displacement and embedded institutional presence in perpetuity to purportedly reconcile the state’s historic disinvestment (Souza, 2006). Equal and oppositely, desirable social outcomes are almost exclusively attributed to the PUI process and its built projects, with little to no consideration of the residents’ own response to these interventions. Some planners seek to elevate the role of residents by arguing that the participatory planning process is as important or greater than the built project because it builds the social cohesion necessary to sustain future neighborhood improvement; however, the PUI planning process still relies on the planner as a technical expert to make final recommendations and implement built projects (Private Architect, personal communication, July 31, 2017). This arrangement limits the potential to establish shared power structures or to shift decision-making control to neighborhood residents to assert community autonomy. In response, this article examines PUI San Javier, specifically the implementation of public escalators in Las Independencias (I) as a case study that documents resident responses to the project by highlighting some of the key spatial practices and community organizing efforts employed to generate improved socioeconomic outcomes. 

De-territorialization by the State in San Javier

Historic Growth Trajectory 
The district of San Javier, situated along the western foothills of the Aburrá Valley, epitomizes Medellín’s urban transformation as a region that overcame its reputation as one of the most violent districts of the city to arrive as a vibrant social and cultural hub today. However, the state’s planning strategies in San Javier have shifted significantly leading up to the present day. Sotomayor identifies three distinct periods of official state policy in San Javier: state absence from the 1970s to early 2000s, strong-arm intervention and (para) militarization in the early 2000s, and beginning in the late 2000s, a renewed focus on community participation, local governance, and physical infrastructure and public space as embodied through social urbanism (2017).

Occupied for over a century by working class families in mining and farming, the rapid urbanization of San Javier began in the 1970s in geographic isolation across a complex and insular topography resulting in decades of growth marked by limited state visibility and planning intervention. Initial petitions by the local women’s group to the Medellín Public Enterprise (EPM) in the 1980s to extend public services to Las Independencias (I) and other hillside neighborhoods in San Javier were dismissed because the state did not yet formally recognize their legitimacy and legality (Aricapa, 2005). The first documented state investment in this area was the introduction of public infrastructure systems during Phase 1 PRIMED implementation between 1993 – 1997 (Velásquez-Castañeda, 2013). Soon thereafter, a PRLU was formulated for San Javier, but the plan was never actualized. As evidenced, the state’s minimal and sporadic investment in San Javier resulted in high socio-economic precarity that partially contributed to the proliferation of armed, non-state groups who leveraged the desperate urban conditions to assert territorial control. 

By the early 2000s, the rate of violence ran unchecked in San Javier and the state determined that strong-arm military intervention was the only means of reclaiming territorial control over the region. A series of smaller, targeted military interventions culminated in October 2002 with a large-scale, state-sponsored raid known as Operación Orión that detained over 350 individuals, injured 38 and killed 10 civilians, and left four others missing (Amnesty International, 2005). While the violent intervention disrupted paramilitary and narcotrafficking operations, invisible borders and underlying networks of territorial control persisted. Residents claim that state armed forces remained in place to enforce strict systems of surveillance, such as daily curfews, which continued to expose residents to a heightened incidence of violence throughout the early 2000s. Residents recall navigating public spaces during this period by avoiding the “war trenches,” particular streets or alleys frequently occupied by paramilitary or other armed groups to maintain their personal safety (Graffiti Artist, personal communication, July 9, 2017). Deteriorating social conditions elevated the formulation of the PUI San Javier as a priority in the 2004 – 2007 Medellin Development Plan, codifying a planning process that began in 2006 and culminated in a series of projects executed between 2008 and 2011 (Bellalta, 2020). 

Conceptual Planning Framework for PUI San Javier Projects
The PUI San Javier, similar to other completed PUIs, articulated a series of projects each consisting of a physical, social, and institutional component; however, the historic context and distinct geography of each region informed how these components would ultimately manifest. Given that San Javier was most notorious for the high incidence of violence present, the primary goal of the PUI San Javier was to formulate projects that collectively help the state to reclaim territorial control in the region and to cease violence between urban gangs and the military police (EDU Planner, personal communication, July 4, 2017). At a regional level, the organizational framework for the proposed projects under the PUI San Javier was to introduce new “centralities,” or neighborhood activity nodes, dispersed throughout the district to deliver diverse public services including legal counsel, economic development offices, a police substation, a library-park, and other recreation facilities. New “equalizing networks” of public spaces including parks, greenways, and streets, created and strengthened linear connections between these nodes and worked to disrupt fronteras invisibles by re-integrating disparate communities once in-conflict, providing more “dignified and appropriate conditions” for residents, and connecting households to major transit stations (Berney, 2010; EDU Planner, personal communication, July 4, 2017). Additionally, public spaces along these corridors became vital community gathering places, providing the state an opportunity to further promote cultura ciudadana, superimpose more formal spatial organization, and exert territorial control (Private Urban Designer, personal communication, August 4, 2017; Velásquez-Castañeda, 2013). 

PUI Engagement Process in Las Independencias (I)
The state’s historic neighborhood delegitimization and disinvestment and recent military intervention in Las Independencias (I) had collectively bred a great distrust of the state by residents. This palpable tension led construction crews to request military police escorts to accompany them in the community while executing the PUI in 2010 (EDU Planner, personal communication, July 4, 2017). The planning process for the project was viewed not only as an opportunity to identify a built intervention and strategy to embed state presence, but also a means of “changing the ways of inhabiting these territories” (EDU Planner, personal communication, July 4, 2017). As such, the EDU began by distributing t-shirts and memorabilia to neighborhood youth who were appointed as “local EDU representatives” to help planners gain access to the community, socialize the planning goals, and promote the visioning workshops used to inform the final recommended project (EDU Planner, personal communication, July 4, 2017). The re-socialization of youth representatives by the state subsequently facilitated the re-education of neighborhood participants during the engagement process, but still did not give residents greater decision-making or implementation authority. For example, engagement highlighted many social inequities, but planners settled on addressing mobility and safety as the guiding directive for the PUI. As the only way in and out of Las Independencias (I), the central stairway functioned as a frontera invisible where conflicts frequently erupted between armed factions vying for territorial control (Neighborhood Resident, personal communication, July 13, 2017). In addition, fragmented sets of lateral alleyways and staircases prohibited open movement and, as such, had been “heavily appropriated by delinquent gangs” characterized by “criminal activities borrowing those hidden spaces” and allowing them to “direct these territories to their liking” (EDU Planner, personal communication, July 4, 2017). The delimitation of violence within the physical confines of these dense urban spaces restricted the ability of stairways and alleys to foster convivencia and intensified the social precarity of the residents (Graffiti Artist, personal communication, July 9, 2017).   

PUI Planning Strategy for Public Escalators in Las Independencias (I) 
Using these findings, technical planners generated the idea for public escalators: a strategic, linear mobility project to simultaneously disrupt invisible borders and recover space to introduce new, quality public spaces for residents to co-exist. A planner describes the role of the escalators and the intended connections to other projects conceived under the PUI San Javier: 

That is what we wanted for this project, to break down these invisible borders… We did two projects, more than just concentrating them in a node or park, we did linear projects like the public escalators, and we broke down those borders between those above and below. And in the upper half, we did the viaduct to break down Independencias (I) and Independencias (II) (EDU Planner, personal communication, July 4, 2017). 

The public escalators of Las Independencias (I) replaced a steep, narrow stairway of over 300 steps rising from the more traditionally developed neighborhood of 20 de Julio (Departamento Administrativo de Planeación, 2015). Through the de-territorialization of the historic central stairway, modest landings between escalator segments became new public spaces that were conceived not only as “platforms of encounter” between residents, but also as a foundational link between residents and the state (Private Urban Designer, personal communication, August 4, 2017). Additionally, the prominent and imposing design of the physical intervention asserts symbolic state presence and power, flanking the escalators uphill with a state-operated community center and a local education center sited at the base below (Kapferer, 2007). 

The violent history of Las Independencias (I), as evidenced most recently through Operación Orión, biased the state’s objectives for the PUI San Javier in Las Independencias (I) by prioritizing security and territorial control over other social support and resources through a lens of dispositional spatial rationality (Huxley, 2006) whereby the perceived social disorder and unruliness of the population was intrinsically tied to the lack of physical neighborhood organization and structure. It follows that the public escalators sought to de-territorialize the central stairway by inserting new public spaces and embedding institutional presence within the community while simultaneously failing to address other critical social needs articulated in the engagement process such as lack of employment opportunities and access to adequate housing. Furthermore, the physical disruption wrought by the state actually increased violence initially as fragmented groups sought to re-territorialize the new spaces, ultimately failing to eradicate the criminality and violence present along the central stairway. In fact, turf battles and drug operations have now shifted to less visible spaces like back alleyways, behind seemingly formal shop fronts, as well as the domestic sphere (Local Shopkeeper, personal communication, July 18, 2017). Sotomayor’s (2017) work further substantiates this claim, noting how local business owners and residents continue to experience regular threats of extortion by organized criminal actors. In short, by pushing violence into hidden geographies such as the domestic sphere and other private spaces traditionally occupied by women, the state disproportionately impacted women and their livelihoods and further deepened the social injustices it allegedly sought to redress through their interventions (Buckingham and Kulcur, 2009). The following section will expand on these findings by focusing on the day-to-day experiences of residents living within Las Independencias (I) and how the individual and community responses to the escalators have maximized socioeconomic benefits rather than as a result of the state’s intervention. 

Re-territorialization of the Public Escalators Through Insurgent Spatial Practices

Symbolic Occupation and Materiality
The historic settlement and growth patterns observed in Las Independencias (I) and the other hillside communities of San Javier present similar formal and material characteristics and degrees of socio-economic marginality as other informal settlements across Latin America (Davids, 2016). However, the persistent threat of deadly violence throughout much the history of Las Independencias (I) led spaces like the central stairway to function as critical mobility infrastructure devoid of the social, recreational, and commercial activities typically observed within these dynamic spatial voids in dense informal settlements (Brillembourg and Klumpner, 2010). Following the replacement of the stairway with the public escalators, residents were slow to embrace the new public spaces given the painful neighborhood memories and lack of established public space culture resulting from the legacy of invisible borders within the community. As such, individual households began to re-territorialize these spaces by casually placing household artifacts such as patio chairs, children’s toys, or clothes lines in public spaces that gently began to blur the domestic and public spheres. This quiet encroachment (Bayat, 2000) of the domestic became more commonplace as women started permanently placing their gardens and plantings along the stairs and alleyways. As one woman explains: because many residents originate from the countryside, they bring traditions closely tied to the earth and planting and, as such, gardens still hold vital importance to their histories and identity (Women’s Organization Leader, personal communication, July 20, 2017). Though less tangible than the physical artifacts described above, the blurring of the domestic and public realms continued to evolve as residents began redefining their relationships to these spaces and to one another. 

When discussing community public spaces, one neighborhood resident reflected on what he considered was the historic heart of Las Independencias (I). He recalled a small home goods store operating in the living room of a neighbor’s home at the intersection of the central stairway and the main alley, a safe space to socialize with others in the neighborhood while simultaneously preventing the added burden of risk to go down the hill to access the more formal markets and stores to purchase basic goods (Neighborhood Resident, personal communication, July 13, 2017). The design of the public escalators today hosts a modest platform (platform 3) at this intersection, but integrates a larger plaza (platform 4) with permanent street furniture one segment above. While the public escalators sought to de-territorialize invisible borders along the stairway and reintroduce new public spaces for residents, they unintentionally dissolved one of the only community spaces in the neighborhood in the process and effectively shifted the neighborhood’s center of gravity uphill even farther from the goods and services below. However, social connections to place appear to transcend material space, as observations revealed that nearly 90% of users who paused on the third platform were residents, compared to less than half of those occupying the fourth platform. Furthermore, platform 3 also was one of the most gender-balanced spaces recorded during observations, with many women re-territorializing the platform as a meeting point or space for informal conversation in passing at this historic community intersection. 

Expressing Culture, Identity, and Community Healing through Street and Performance Art 
Simultaneously, youth have been building community in Las Independencias (I) through artistic expression. While residents historically rooted artistic practice in graffiti and street art, influences from Afro-Colombian migrants predominantly from the Atlantic Coast have accelerated the cultural renaissance underway, with performances ranging from hip-hop to breakdancing to rap and song (Women’s Organization Leader, personal communication, July 20, 2017). The state’s perceived threat of loud music and ‘messy’ graffiti undermining convivencia within public spaces led the state to require artists to seek formal approval prior to commissioning a ‘legitimate’ work. This City-mandated permitting and approval process for messaging, designs, and performances essentially controls the expression of public culture (Kapferer, 2007). However, young artists re-territorialized the state-approved messaging by re-signifying their work using coded symbols that help to explore their own cultural identities, promote community healing by reflecting on historic neighborhood memories and traumas, and imagine new futures for themselves and their community (Graffiti Artist, personal communication, July 9, 2017). Today, graffiti covers almost every wall framing the escalator system, with daily performances typically occurring on platform 7 or along the mid-hill viaduct adjacent to the escalators due to the space’s ability to host a large number of spectators. In this sense, residents of Las Independencias (I) were able to re-territorialize the public escalators through the novel re-envisioning of mobility infrastructure to better reflect their own identities, culture, and neighborhood histories. This resignification of place (Souza, 2015) forms the foundation on which residents were able to generate local economic opportunities like tourism and street vending. 

Direct Occupation: Spatial Restructuring, Repurposing, and Generating Alternative Economies 
As the arts matured in the community and began to generate alternative economic potential, the re-territorialization of the public escalators became more deliberate and assertive on behalf of the residents. This potential translates into upwards of 400 – 500 tourists visiting the escalators each day during peak tourism season in late spring, with observations revealing that the total volume of tourists occupying several platforms exceeded half of the total recorded users (Tour Guide, personal communication, July 16, 2017). Members of a local hip-hop and graffiti troupe were among the first to organize and facilitate these tours as a means of extending their message of healing and community transformation to a broader audience, with several additional tour companies led by local young adults materializing in recent years (Graffiti Artist, personal communication, July 9, 2017). Today, tourism does not solely function as a local economic engine that re-affirms community pride and history, but it has also fostered a global network of artists sharing their message of solidarity in the struggle to inspire other communities across Latin America and the world to exercise individual and community autonomy to become their own agents of change (Graffiti Artist, personal communication, July 9, 2017). 

Residents re-territorialized the public escalators by repurposing them as a marketplace as well as a space for social encounter and recreation, diluting the state’s original intent for the project. However, the explosion in national and international tourism in the neighborhood accompanied rapid growth in the number of vendors situated along the escalators. Women increasingly began pursuing their own entrepreneurial goals outside the domestic realm by starting to sell handmade artisanal goods and other traditional foods catering predominantly towards this large influx of tourists (Women’s Organization Leader, personal communication, July 20, 2017). The state initially responded by prohibiting all vending in the name of preserving public health, free mobility, and proper public space etiquette, mirroring many of the arguments often presented to justify street vendor clearing efforts in Colombia (Donovan, 2008). The vendors, led by representatives from the local women’s group, the Red de Apoyo para Las Mujeres, swiftly organized and asserted: (1) private landowners with storefronts along the escalators would unfairly enjoy disproportional economic benefits from the system and, therefore, (2) all residents should have the right to occupy and sell goods within these common spaces (Women’s Organization Leader, personal communication, July 20, 2017). 

While vendors can be found throughout the escalator platforms, the majority of women vendors typically concentrate their sales to platform 7 and the adjacent viaduct given the amount of space and the high levels of local and tourist foot traffic present. Therefore, it is not surprising that observation findings confirm more gender parity in these spaces compared to others in the neighborhood. Here and throughout the neighborhood, vendors have adapted material space along the escalators to best fit their needs by introducing self-built kiosks featuring seating, storage, and shading structures to display and sell their goods. The flexible designs employed by vendors resist the rigidity of the material spaces imposed by the state, allowing for temporary physical occupation without major restructuring of public spaces and preserving modularity to allow for incremental improvement and expansion as operations scale up or down. While all from the neighborhood are welcome to sell, an informal, community-based code of ethics stipulates that vendors may only sell non-competitive goods on the same platform, though no rules govern whether vendors must cater to tourists or residents with their business (Escalator Vendor, personal communication, July 13, 2017). These kinds of occupations in public spaces exemplify the notion of coexistence and contestation (Low, 1996), whereby these women are advancing community autonomy through alternative economic channels while simultaneously contesting the state for their right to occupy and sell in these spaces. 

Enduring Occupation and Resistance 
From the historically empty streets whereby violence forced the exchange of basic goods to occur in private spaces within the home through a covert neighborhood network, the physical occupation of public spaces by vendors in Las Independencias (I) today originates from a strong tradition of resistance and perseverance by the community residents (Tour Guide, personal communication, July 16, 2017). As the commodification of the neighborhood has intensified, new private businesses catering to tourists such as restaurants, coffee shops, and hostels have established themselves in the neighborhood and, as a result, the level of neighborhood regulation and scrutiny by the state has increased. Along the public escalators, this manifests not only through the presence of state-owned facilities, but also through Escalator Ambassadors who, in an effort to promote convivencia, monitor what they deem as undesirable behaviors such as walking on the escalators or running in public spaces. Whereas perhaps six of these Ambassadors were traditionally in charge of monitoring these spaces, over one dozen can be found patrolling the system today (Tour Guide, personal communication, July 16, 2017). Berney’s (2011) work highlights how this trend of increased security, policing, and enforcement in new, equitable public spaces in Colombia disproportionately impacts marginalized and lower-class populations. For a local woman contracted with the City to serve as an Ambassador, these tensions embody feelings of joy for the opportunity to work close to her family and pride for helping to keep the neighborhood safe, but also dismay that crime persists in the neighborhood, explaining how a nearby household along an adjacent alleyway had recently been confronted for holding a utility lineman for ransom (personal communication, July 27, 2017). These findings highlight that the re-territorialization of Las Independencias (I) not only concerns itself with the neighborhood scale as it relates to criminality and invisible borders and the blurring of domestic and public spheres, but also at the scale of the body, with residents simultaneously exercising individual autonomy while acting as a security agent of the state. 

Summary of the Findings

Documenting the Unintended Consequences of De- Territorialization 
Despite the prevalence of other pressing social challenges in the district, the main objective of the PUI San Javier was to de-territorialize existing geographies of violence by introducing new public spaces and permanent state occupation through institutional fixtures and mobility infrastructure. In the case of the public escalators in Las Independencias (I), the disruption of invisible borders along the central stairway did not eradicate criminality and violence, but, rather, shifted it into less visible and hidden geographies like the domestic sphere where women are disproportionately affected. Furthermore, this de-territorialization also eroded what minimal community networks existed by restructuring the public realm and relationships between private households and the new escalator platforms as well as to the larger markets and shops at the base of the hillside by assuming a sense of public space culture in the neighborhood which was not historically present due to violence. 

Documenting Residents’ Spatial acts of Re-Territorialization 
Residents of Las Independencias (I) initially, and perhaps unintentionally, approached the re-territorialization of the public escalators through subtle physical encroachments from the domestic realm. As residents continued to interpret the new public spaces, they re-attributed their histories and memory to the platforms first through casual socialization and later through the tradition of rich, visual storytelling through graffiti, street art, as well as dance, rap, and musical performances to promote a sense of pride, community identity, and collective healing which, in turn, generated opportunities for creating alternative local economic streams. This led to the rise of tourism and street vending along the escalators, effectively repurposing spaces originally intended exclusively for socialization and recreation into spaces of commerce and artistic expression as well. Street vendors, graffiti artists, and other performers restructured spatial relationships within these new public spaces through temporary and flexible physical artifacts including shade structures, storage and display carts, and other moveable furniture to facilitate commerce. Finally, the role of women throughout this process of re-territorialization cannot be understated. The legacy of advocacy and ingenuity by local women continues in spite of marginalization across dimensions of class, ethnicity, gender, and geography. These virtues manifest through entrepreneurial endeavors such as street vending and tour operations as well as the extension of subtle symbols of the domestic sphere into new public spaces such as plantings and seating to demonstrate implicit sense of pride, ownership, history, and memory of place. Ultimately, it was through the re-territorialization of the public escalators by residents rather than the state’s physical intervention that has driven community change and improvement, and while social issues and criminality persist, the collective and individual autonomy demonstrated through this process will be essential to maintaining the positive trajectory of Las Independencias (I) moving forward.

Research Conclusions 
This study centers around the stories, actions, and day-to-day lived experiences of residents, particularly women, in Las Independencias (I) in response to the creation of new common spaces along the public escalators. In particular, it demonstrates that residents’ acts of subtle physical occupation, graffiti, street and performance art, and street vending and tourism subverted state intentions for the public escalators and facilitated the community’s re-territorialization of these spaces to best meet their needs. Through personal narratives like that of the Escalator Ambassador, this research extends a gendered dimension to the paradoxical relationship articulated by Berney (2011) regarding new, equitable public spaces and the enforcement of desirable societal principles within these spaces. Additionally, by employing a ‘quasi’ design ethnography, my findings complement Sotomayor’s (2017) insights on the spatial conflicts and inequities perpetuated by the state in San Javier while redirecting the focus of this conflict to the re-territorialization of these spaces through insurgent spatial practices by the residents of Las Independencias (I). Future studies of interest could re-visit these practices as part of a broader longitudinal study, or could be contrasted with a similar study in the adjacent community of Las Independencias (II) which lacks the same degree of physical intervention and significantly higher Afro- Colombian population than their neighbors in Las Independencias (I). 

By shifting the focus of this research inquiry to the people rather than the state, new understandings begin to emerge regarding how and where planning occurs and who is ultimately responsible for leading planning efforts and upholding commitments to the community. Despite the participatory nature of the PUI engagement process, this ‘progressive’ model still presents procedural deficiencies that risk structural co-optation (Souza, 2006) of local community organizations and neighborhood leaders by gathering their input and ideas without providing decision-making authority or financial resources to implement or steward physical interventions in the neighborhood. Though disproportionately impacted by planning matters and under-represented in existing power and decision-making structures, the planning contributions of women in Las Independencias (I) span decades of persistent occupation and resistance. To reconcile these historic transgressions, planning practice must radically re-envision its process, beginning by intentionally centering the narratives and perspectives of women to understand their needs and aspirations, elevating their leadership and decision-making power, and continuing to allow these community ambassadors to create and steward emancipatory spaces where individual and community autonomy reside.

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Gideon Abagna Azunre | Richard Azerigyik | Pearl Puwurayire

Abstract

For years informal urbanization by the urban poor and its spatial outcomes—i.e., slums—have become ubiquitous in Global South cities, particularly Africa. Consequently, authorities are engineering strategies that could arrest and slow down its proliferation in the quest for resilient and sustainable cities. Within the complex discourse of informal urbanization, one very crucial piece of evidence that appears to be unclear pertains to its driving factors. Using Ghana—particularly rapidly urbanizing southern Ghanaian cities—as an empirical case, this paper untangles the complex and multidimensional drivers of slum growth beyond the traditional population-heavy approaches. Using the push-pull theory as a conceptual and analytical prism, analyses reveal that poorly designed housing policies, the informal economy, weak urban planning, political interferences and political clientelism accelerates slum growth. The article argues that coping with unplanned urbanization by the urban poor may be extremely tenuous if these complex factors are not well-understood and seriously considered in policy circles. The findings of the article also lend credence to arguments that call for a shift from population-heavy readings of urban challenges in Africa to more institutional, political, and historical perspectives. The paper concludes by recommending that states and city authorities ought to recognize and address their institutional culpabilities in contributing to slum growth. A critical starting point could be the re-examination of draconian policies and the adoption of inclusive, pro-poor, and proactive urban strategies.

Keywords

Informal urbanization; Slums; Push-Pull theory; Sustainable City Development; Ghana

About Authors

Gideon Abagna Azunre recently completed a Master of Science degree in Urban Planning and Policy Design at the School of Architecture Urban Planning Construction Engineering, Politecnico di Milano. He also holds a Master of Philosophy degree in Planning and a Bachelor of Science degree in Development Planning from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST, Ghana). His academic and research interests are transdisciplinary in nature and sits at the intersections of informal urbanism, sustainability, and resilience. 

Richard Azerigyik holds an MPhil degree in planning from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST, Ghana). He is currently a PhD student in the same department, and his research interests lie in urban poverty reduction, urban housing, and water resource management. He is currently working on a project titled “Land Use Planning as a Tool for Managing Transhumance-Associated Conflicts in Ghana”. The project seeks to navigate the complex relationship between competing land users and sustainable conflict management. 

Pearl Puwurayire (MPhil, BSc) is an Assistant Lecturer at the Department of Planning and Sustainability at the University of Energy and Natural Resources in Ghana. She is a development planning practitioner who has worked with the Development Planning Unit of the Local Government. She is currently a co-founder of a Non-Governmental Organization which is focused on Girl-Child Education. Pearl’s research interest is in urbanization and urban development, urban informal economy, urban environmental health and management and urban disaster and risk reduction. 

Introduction

Urbanization is traditionally presumed to be a catalyst of productivity, industrialization, and socioeconomic transition (Cobbinah et al., 2015b). Despite a recent study (Vollset et al., 2020) pointing out fluctuations in the world’s projected population, the consensus remains that the global urban population will continue increasing. As of 2015, 54% of the world’s population lives in urban areas and is projected to reach 70% by 2050 (UNDESA/PD, 2012). The majority of this growth will occur in Africa, with nearly a quarter (1.3 billion) of the world’s urban population by 2050. While some developing countries like China reap the benefits of urbanization (Cohen, 2006), it seems to rather disrupt urban functionality and stall socio-economic development in most African countries (Cobbinah et al., 2015a). This underlies the long-held pathological-indeed Malthusian-view that overurbanization is the prime cause of urban development problems in African cities (Boateng, 2020a). One of these critical urban challenges is unplanned urbanization—also called informal urbanization. For the purposes of this paper, our central focus is on the spatial by-product of informal urbanization by the urban poor— that is, slums. 

According to recent estimates, there has been a reduction in the proportion of urban slum dwellers from 28% in 2000 to 20% in 2014. However, the absolute number of slum dwellers has increased from 792 million in 2000 to 880 million in 2014 (UN-Habitat, 2016a). Recent statistics have painted a dire picture, suggesting that about 1 billion people currently live in slum settlements. Households living in such settlements constantly face harsh conditions such as inadequate access to clean water, sanitation, and durable housing. This informal urbanization trajectory is a valid paradigm of several countries in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly Ghana (Amoako & Boamah, 2017; Amoako & Inkoom, 2018; Poku-Boansi et al., 2020). Available statistics show that Ghana’s cities are rapidly urbanizing and unauthorized development is gradually becoming a norm. It is, therefore, no surprise that two out of five Ghanaian urban dwellers (37.9%) live in settlements that can be classified as slum (UN, 2017). 

Given its current scale and future contours, informal urbanization by the poor has garnered enormous international attention. One principal medium through which this global interest has been crystallized is with international goals and accords. The overarching aim of these commitments is to improve slum livelihoods and bring decent living conditions to such neighborhoods. For instance, the ‘cities without slums’ agenda advanced in the year 2000 echoed the international ambitions to reduce the proliferation of slums in cities. Similarly, the current Sustainable Development Goals (Goal No. 11, Target 11.1) anticipate that by 2030 all slums will be upgraded, and all urban residents will have adequate, safe, and affordable housing. In the quest to achieve these goals, city authorities strategically implement promising urban policies and programs such as participatory slum upgrading and large-scale affordable housing schemes. Remarkably, these efforts have slowed the pace of informal urbanization and have enhanced the living conditions of slum dwellers. 

The global aspiration to arrest informal urbanization or slum growth has also fueled numerous academic studies, prominent among those are the works of scholars such as Hernando de Soto and Ananya Roy. All these serve as fodder for the intellectual mill aimed at addressing informal urbanization among the urban poor. However, a critical question that still lingers is: what are the complex drivers of this seemingly untenable phenomenon? Answers to this seem to be cursory in the informal urbanization discourse. In fact, available studies have done little to move beyond the population-heavy diagnosis of informal urbanization which implicitly suggests that slum settlers are solely to blame for the situation. Also, little to no studies untangle how the complex factors act in ‘push’ and ‘pull’ scenarios. Therefore, the aims of this study are twofold: 1) to determine the multi-dimensional drivers of informal urbanization beyond population-heavy factors, and 2) to assess the interconnected nature of the factors using the prism of the ‘push and pull theory’. Our study adds to the already rich and extensive body of literature from a sub-Saharan African context, Ghana. 

In what follows, we review relevant literature on informal urbanization (‘Section 2: Informal urbanization: a literature outlook’). Section 3 captures the methodology adopted to perform the analysis while Section 4 thematically presents the results. Section 5 covers the discussion of key findings and lessons learned. The final remarks of the study are presented in Section 6. 

Informal Urbanization: A Literature Outlook

Conceptualizing Informal Urbanization and its Spatial Outcome 
Informal urbanization is defined as a systematic “dwelling process” through which settlements and housing are ‘‘constructed individually and incrementally, using locally available materials” in an informal manner that reflects the socio-economic status of owners (McFarlane, 2011b, p. 664, 2011a, p. 216). This complex urban phenomenon involves very different classes of households who utilize urban lands by generally violating land-use and spatial regulations. The outcome of these incremental informal processes could be viewed from a two-pronged perspective: economic and spatial (Rigon et al., 2020). The spatial outcomes and by-products of informal urbanization have been a contentious subject in the conventional literature. On one hand, it is argued that informal urbanization produces informal settlements while on the other it is argued that it generates slums. Some commentators even go further to use both terminologies synonymously. Before going on, these need to be clarified. 

In our view, the terms ‘slums’ and ‘informal settlements’ can be designated to a settlement depending on the types of households involved, the legal status, and the services or infrastructure present. According to UN-Habitat (2016a), slums are contiguous settlements that lack one or more of the following: 1) access to clean and potable water; 2) access to improved sanitation; 3) sufficient living area that is not overcrowded; 4) durable housing; 5) security of tenure. On the other hand, settlements are defined as informal when they reflect the primary criteria of informality: that is, tenure insecurity and violation of planning regulations (e.g., land use plans, zoning guidelines). Premised on the foregone definitions, some informal settlements can be defined as slums if they further lack essential services such as water and sanitation. Contrarily, some informal settlements or developments are not slums: for example, those produced by middle- and high-class households. This process is gaining ground in the literature, with several scholars (Banks et al., 2020; Roy, 2011) elevating the term ‘elite informalities’ to refer to informalities transcending the urban poor (see Section 3.1 for examples in Ghana). According to Roy (2011), elite informalities are mostly valorized due to the economic and political power such actors wield while subaltern informalities (those by the poor) are criminalized. 

Additionally, some slums cannot be strictly defined as informal settlements if they are legitimized or recognized by authorities. For instance, in India, some slums are notified under the Slum Areas Act of 1956 which makes them legal in the eyes of local and national authorities. However, because they are produced by poor households, they still lack crucial social services. In short, it is maintained that slums and informal settlements are not completely synonymous. This study, thus, elects to use slums as the by-product of informal urbanization since the focus is on the urban poor. We are aware of the growing critiques on the nomenclature of the terms “slum” and “slum dwellers” because it is implicitly derogatory and stereotypical, and it downgrades the value and agency of such settlements (see: Butola, 2019; Mayne, 2017; Roy, 2011). However, we deem it appropriate in the present study for two main reasons. 

First, international commitments such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have adopted the term “slums” in setting global targets. For instance, target 11.1 under SDG 11 aims to reduce the proportion of “slum dwellers” by 2030. This study is thus consistent with the global trend. Secondly, as would be made more explicit shortly, statistical estimates and research on the drivers of informal urbanization have generally been reported on slums. Focusing our analysis on slums is therefore a good way to obtain reliable information to clearly understand informal urbanization beyond population factors. The present study, strongly supported elsewhere (Azunre et al., 2021), is also rooted in the idea that there is enormous value in some of the activities of households in such settlements. Therefore, it is important to understand the drivers of such a dynamic and complex urban phenomenon for the purpose of both policy and planning. 

From Population-Heavy to Historical-Institutional Drivers of Slum Growth 
The literature is replete with variegated factors that drive informal urbanization and slum growth in the Global South. Rapid urbanization and population growth seem to be the most consistent underlying factors across the literature—so-called population-heavy diagnosis. According to these arguments, the continued rural-urban gap has caused several rural dwellers to seek economic success, livelihood opportunities, and access to social services and infrastructure in urban areas (Tacoli et al., 2014). This migration pattern fuels the rapid urbanization trend in most parts of the Global South today. The world’s population is expected to reach about 9.8 billion in 2050 with about 66.4 percent (two-thirds) of those living in urban areas (UN-DESA, 2014). The surge in urban population has coincided with several sustainable development challenges. Premised on the foregoing, population-heavy theorists conclude that urbanization in the Global South, and Africa in particular, is ‘parasitic’ because it negatively correlates with socio-economic development. 

However, some urban scholars (Boateng, 2020b, 2020a; Njoh, 2003) have criticized population-heavy readings of urban problems in Africa and raised arguments to incorporate the interplay of several other local and external factors—particularly historical-institutional. This appears to be a valid point of view for understanding informal urbanization by the poor. City authorities in many parts of the Global South lack the capacity (i.e., financial resources, logistics, and human resources) to plan and provide affordable housing and social infrastructure for the urban poor. This phenomenon is evident in Asia and Africa—touted as the fastest urbanizing regions. With limited budgets, city authorities are unable to finance new housing production to alleviate the housing deficit (Ooi & Phua, 2007; United Nations, 2014). The demand for land for new development in urban areas has aggravated the situation. Since the supply of land is fixed, competition has been increasing from various interest groups. The increasing demand for land among competing land users has made land, irrespective of its quality, relevant in the urban space (Zhang, 2016). This ongoing land crisis has priced out the urban poor thus making them encroachers and creators of substandard housing and unsanitary settlements and neighborhoods. Also, high poverty levels, the informal sector, poor urban governance, weak institutions to ensure compliance, and outmoded land laws and regulations, have contributed immensely to the growth of slums in city centers (see: Azerigyik et al., 2018; Lau & Chiu, 2013; Mishra, 2011; Ooi & Phua, 2007).  

Furthermore, slums continue to swell up due to the inherent socio-political and economic opportunities they present to the urban poor. Many slums across the globe are close-knit and near Central Business Districts (CBD) because of the available economic and employment opportunities. According to Lau & Chiu (2013), slum dwellers live and explore livelihood opportunities in close-knit ways to reduce or avoid the cost of transportation. Also, due to the high social network and family ties exhibited by slum dwellers, slums have become attractive for migrants. The population, social network, and high sense of solidarity exhibited by slums have made them influential in policies, political discourses, and elections (Jha et al., 2011). 

To sum up, the preceding underscores how pervasive unplanned urbanization is and its attendant driving factors. Most population-heavy assessments seem to relate slum growth directly to the influx of people in urban areas with little to no recognition of the economic, institutional, political, and cultural factors which shape the phenomenon. These studies also implicitly suggest that settlers are the sole protagonists of the informal urbanization situation. However, the central argument of this article is that this is not necessarily the case. A complex assemblage of factors such as the failures of the government or state to respond to the basic needs of the growing urban poor class, distributional and investment inequalities, political factors, among others drives slum growth. This study looks to unpack these other factors using Ghana as a case study. 

Materials and Methods

Case Study in Perspective
The Republic of Ghana (simply known as Ghana) is a West African country located on the Atlantic Ocean and shares borders with Togo, Côte d’Ivoire, and Burkina Faso (see Figure 1.1). Ghana is one of several Anglophone countries in the sub-Saharan region because of its colonial affiliation to Great Britain (Lassou et al., 2019). Similar to the state of Texas in the United States of America, Ghana has a population of about 30 million (Ghana Statistical Service, 2019; United States Census Bureau, 2019). This population is unevenly distributed across the country, with regions in the southern part being the most populous in comparison to those in the northern part. Currently, the country is administratively divided into 16 regions after a recent constitutional instrument created six new regions. Ghana’s international recognition arises from its prominent role in the mass exportation of raw materials such as gold, cocoa, and timber. 

Ghana is an interesting case in point to untangle the determinants of informal urbanization because the country has been rapidly urbanizing since 2010 when for the first time over half of the population lived in urban areas (Ghana Statistical Service, 2014b). The national capital, Accra, currently boasts of being the most urbanized followed closely by Kumasi (Cobbinah, 2021, p. 3). Other cities in the northern part of Ghana such as Bolgatanga and Wa have gradually urbanized at a pace closer to that of the southern cities. The urbanization trajectory of several Ghanaian cities has brought informal urbanization to the forefront of policy and academic discourses. The population-heavy assessments are also visibly seen across the literature in Ghana, with urban population growth touted as the main cause of informal urbanization. 

However, it is worth highlighting that informal urbanization in Ghana touches various classes or groups from low-income to high-income. Informal urbanization by middle to high-income households has been extensively reported by several scholars (Asante & Sasu, 2018; Boateng, 2020b, 2020a) among property developers. In fact, Boamah, Gyimah, & Bediako Nelson (2012) found that 10% of households in a high-class residential area in the Wa Municipality did not apply for building permits. Some of these housing developers try to circumvent building regulations or permitting processes which have caused several buildings to collapse across major cities in Ghana. Some examples are a six-story Melcom shopping complex in Achimota Accra which collapsed on November 7, 2012, and an uncompleted five-story hotel building in Tarkwa which collapsed in 2010 (see Asante & Sasu, 2018; Boateng, 2020b for in-depth discussions and examples of these). 

Despite these, informal urbanization in Ghana is much more prevalent among low-income households. This is evident, first and foremost, from the class distribution of new urban migrants who are mostly from rural communities (see Table 1.1). Rural communities in Ghana are characterized by high poverty levels. Thus, in an attempt to escape poverty, a significant proportion of rural dwellers migrate into cities in search of greener pastures (Ghana Statistical Service, 2014b). Due to the generally low income or economic standings, these rural-urban migrants encroach unoccupied urban lands, squat, or live in slums that offer affordable housing. For example, several studies (Adamtey et al., 2021; Adusei et al., 2017; Azerigyik et al., 2018) reveal that most slum communities in Ghana (such as Old Tulaku, Old Fadama, Agbogbloshie, Dagomba Line, Avenor) are predominant recipients of migrants from rural areas and/or poor communities in Northern Ghana. 

Another evidence of informal urbanization’s rapidity and strong correlation to the poor is the growth of slums across most major Ghanaian cities. Estimates suggest that two out of five urban dwellers in Ghana (37.9%) live in slum settlements (UN, 2017). Accra and Kumasi are the two cities in which slums are rife (see Figure 1.2). From the maps, it can be observed that slums in Accra and Kumasi, and by extension Ghana, have strong centrality in relation to the Central Business District (CBD) where jobs and economic opportunities are available for the urban poor. The foregoing justifies the focus of the present article on informal urbanization by the poor, and more particularly on their spatial outcomes which are slum settlements. 

Before going on, it is crucial to first underscore the types of “slums” in Ghana. Ghanaian slums are sometimes difficult to distinctly classify, but a study by Paller (2015) introduced a comprehensive categorization with which we adopt for the current study. First, extra-legal slums in Ghana are settlements viewed as illegitimate and not officially recognized by local and national authorities, which are mostly labeled as squatter settlements. Secondly, indigenous slums are those settlements that have a traditional connotation and gradually become slum settlements due to poor planning and neglect by authorities. Finally, purchased slums are legal in nature, in that all formal land purchasing and customary processes have been followed by owners; however, they have become slums because they lack essential services such as water and sanitation. Among these three slum typologies, extra-legal slums are the most politically vulnerable and they constantly face threats of evictions. A well-documented example in the Ghanaian literature is in Old Fadama, Accra—the largest slum in the country (Afenah, 2012; Farouk & Owusu, 2012; Housing the Masses, 2010). 

Empirical Methodology
The current study is based on a systematic review of the literature. The review was applied under the case study research design. The case study design provides the opportunity to gain concrete, contextual, in-depth knowledge about the intricate web of factors that engender slum growth (Bryman, 2012; Yin, 2013). Specifically, the study focused on Ghana to help systematically synthesize secondary data. Secondary data is used in this study to refer to data collected by some researchers but manipulated by others to achieve research objectives different from the original collector (Hox & Boeije, 2005; Vartanian, 2011). Secondary data mainly comprised peer-reviewed journal articles, institutional documents (e.g., census records from Ghana Statistical Service [GSS]), and gray literature (e.g., online news posts). 

To search for literature, a thematic approach was adopted. Four themes were developed: 1) Ineffectual housing policies, 2) Informal economy, 3) Politics and distributional/investment inequalities, and 4) Weak urban planning and land tenure issues. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) approach (Moher et al., 2009) was employed to extract literature under each of the four themes. Additionally, the Boolean search method was adopted to develop search strings by pairing keywords (e.g., “slums”, “slum growth”, “housing policies in Ghana”, “politics”, “urban planning in Ghana”, etc.) and their synonyms with Boolean operators (e.g., “AND”, “OR”). A combination of these keywords generated phrases that were run in search engines such as Google, Google Scholar, and Mendeley literature search. This facilitated the swift access of scholarly works from online repositories such as JSTOR, Elsevier, SAGE, and Taylor and Francis. 

Furthermore, content and thematic analytical tools were employed to analyze the literature obtained. The aim of the analysis was to build an argumentative narrative on the driving factors of informal urbanization and slum growth beyond population-heavy diagnosis. Also, the analysis was guided by a specific theoretical framework (i.e., the push-pull theory) to help unpack how the driving factors attract or force households into slum settlements. The theoretical framework of the study is discussed in Section 3.2.1 below. It is worth noting that the researchers have a fair understanding of the research context and case study. Therefore, this tacit knowledge was fused with the secondary data to enrich the analysis and discussion. At the end of the search and analysis, 70 articles/reports/websites were used (see Table 1.2).

Theoretical Framework: Push-Pull Theory
Theories of migration have rapidly evolved since the notable works of Ernst Ravenstein on the “Laws of Migration” in the mid to late twentieth century. Ravenstein was the first to theoretically frame the phenomenon of migration and how it emerges. Following this, other works mushroomed to disentangle the phenomenon of migration and the drivers of international or national mobility. For the purposes of this study, Lee’s (1966) theory of migration is considered comprehensive enough to unpack the diverse factors of spatial mobility at both a macro and micro scale. Lee identified four main categories of factors in the act of migration: (i) factors associated with the place of origin, (ii) factors associated with the place of destination, (iii) intervening obstacles, and (iv) personal factors. As presented in Figure 1.3, each origin and destination point have a set of positive and negative factors that attract or repel people. Consequently, the push factors are those situations that give one reason to be dissatisfied with one’s present locale (Dorigo & Tobler, 1983). People are then forced to leave the origin to the destination, not because of the attractive nature of the destination but because migrating is the best available option. By contrast, pull factors are the attractive elements in the destination that appeals to individuals 

The push-pull theory grounds this paper and allows for a more structured exploration of the factors that lead to informal urbanization by the poor. The destination points in this regard are slums and the origin points are other neighborhoods in the city, peri-urban areas, or rural areas. It is worth mentioning that we do not intend to exhaustively apply the model to the informal urbanization phenomenon. It is beyond the capacity of any brief article because informal urbanization involves complex individual decisions (i.e., personal factors) that would require rigorous primary data to disentangle clearly. Nevertheless, the model presents a remarkable opportunity to systematically explain the more general factors and trends that engenders informal urbanization and how households (particularly the poor) are pushed or pulled to live in slums. The push-pull theory also allows for an in-depth exploration of the historical-institutional factors which condition the actions of low-income households towards slums.

Furthermore, the literature overview in Section 2.2 shows that a plethora of studies have investigated informal urbanization and conceptualized some of its causal factors. However, none of the studies reflected on the factors from a push-pull scenario nor did they clearly discuss how these factors interrelate in a rapidly urbanizing sub-Saharan African city like Ghana. These are but a few gaps the current study will help plug. 

Results: Drivers of Informal Urbanization by the Poor in Ghana 

The drivers of informal urbanization in Ghana are analyzed under four (4) themes. The analysis under each theme will tease out the “push or pull” dynamics of the causal factors. 

Ineffectual housing policies, 

Informal economy, 

Politics and distributional/investment inequalities, and 

Weak urban planning and land tenure issues. 

Ineffectual Housing Policies in Delivering Low-Income Housing 

Public policies are the most important instruments used by city authorities to redress the ills facing various sectors of the economy, including the housing sector. In the Global South, it has been extensively documented that housing policies are generally poorly developed, inefficiently implemented, and fail to benefit the worst off (Monkkonen, 2018; Rojas, 2019; Scheba & Turok, 2020). This has been the case in Ghana for the past few decades. The problems facing housing policies and their attendant effects on informal urbanization can best be disentangled from a path-dependency perspective. The path-dependency theory, which emerged from economics, posits the situation where historical events have the possibility of creating “lock-in” structures that define pathways of development (Arthur, 1988; David, 1985, 1988). Consequently, some scholars (e.g., Kay, 2005; Poku-Boansi, 2020) assert that path dependency is an essential mechanism for understanding public policy development. As such, the problems that Ghana’s housing sector and policies are facing today with respect to low-income housing are a consequence of previous historical happenings. 

Generally, Ghana’s housing policies have been deeply politicized with policy ambitions and aims changing with every successive government (Boamah, 2014). During the colonial era, housing was mainly directed at expatriate and senior indigenous staff members holding positions in the colonial public service (Hornsby-Odoi & Glover-Akpey, 1988). The most important low-income housing scheme during the colonial era came in 1924 after an outbreak of cholera in Kumasi and other parts of Ghana. This health crisis required the mass clearance of slums and the construction of housing projects to re-house the displaced (Agyapong, 1990; Songsore, 2003; Songsore et al., 2004). However, during this period, housing access by low-income groups was hampered by some restrictive rules such as the town and country planning laws (Konadu-Agyeman, 2001). 

From 1951, housing policies began to explicitly focus on low- and middle-income groups. Two mid-term development plans from 1951-1964 were rooted in a socialist philosophy and primarily aimed at providing adequate and subsidized housing for low-income households (Ansah & Ametepey, 2013). The highlight of the plans was the formation of housing-related institutions such as: i) First Ghana Building Society, ii) Tema Development Corporation (TDC), and iii) Ghana Housing Corporation (now known as the State Housing Company) (Bank of Ghana, 2007; Konadu-Agyeman, 2001). Specifically, TDC helped develop eight new housing Communities in Tema by constructing about 2,255 units (Ansah & Ametepey, 2013). Also, the Roof and Wall Loan Scheme which was started in 1955 advanced the aided self-help housing idea (Addo, 2014). The government provided materials, loans, and serviced sites at moderate rents to low-income households.

Nevertheless, governmental changes in 1966 to the National Liberation Council (NLC), in 1969 to the Progress Party (PP), in 1972 to the military leadership of the National Redemption Council, and in 1979 to the military rule of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) led to housing policy agendas slipping and sliding from direct housing construction for the urban poor to complete neglect. 

A watershed in Ghana’s housing policy landscape occurred in the 1980s when the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) and Economic Recovery Program (ERP) were developed under the conditionalities of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Neo-liberal and ‘enabling environment’ approaches were advanced; this facilitated housing provision by the private sector and avoided interventionist provision of public housing by the state (Harris, 2003; UN-Habitat, 2005). The government significantly retreated from direct housing production and lost grips of the housing market. According to several scholars (e.g., Addo, 2014; Songsore et al., 2004), this period kickstarted the substantial housing deficits faced in the country (see Table 1.3). 

To alleviate the housing deficit, the government developed a comprehensive National Housing Policy in 2015 that “…envisions a country in which everyone is able to access safe, secure, decent and affordable housing either owned or rented.” (Ministry of Water Resources Works and Housing, 2015). Consequently, investments have been placed in large-scale affordable housing projects such as OAS affordable housing program in Saglemi, Borteyman affordable housing, Asokore Mampong affordable housing project, among others. However, these projects are failing for two main reasons: firstly, they are highly politicized and causing implementational delays and/or abandonment; and secondly, the prices quoted for completed units are only affordable for middle- and high-income households.

To sum up, the slow rate in producing houses in Ghana, particularly for the poor, is strongly attributable to how ineffective previous housing policies have been. The formal housing sector (i.e., formal public and formal private sector) seems to be targeting middle- and high-income households at the expense of low-income groups. Urban poor households are having to contend with higher rents and land prices which affects their ability to participate in the formal market. They are thus “pushed” and “pulled” to slums where affordable housing is provided (Addo, 2014; Takyi et al., 2020). As Grant (2006, p. 13) writes: 

“[Slum dwellers’] position exposes the G[overnment] o[f] G[hana]’s failure to address the housing situation of the poor… [P]eople squat because there are no alternatives…”.

From the foregoing, it is right to argue that Ghana’s unproductive housing policies profoundly influence informal urbanization by poor households.

Informal Economy

The first scholar to thematize economic informality was Keith Hart with his research that focused on Accra, Ghana. Hart (1973, p. 68) introduced the term ‘informal sector (IS)’ and described it as a “world of economic activities outside the organized labor force.” Similarly, Feige (1989) defined the IS as all unregistered economic activities that contribute to the officially calculated gross national product. However, debates following the earlier conceptualization of the informal sector prompted the introduction of a new concept: ‘informal economy (IE)’. The International Labor Organization defines the IE as “[…] all economic activities by workers and economic units that are – in law or in practice – not covered or insufficiently covered by formal arrangements” (ILO, 2002, p. 5). Precisely, the informal economy is much broader and can be split into two: 1) informal sector, which comprises production and employment in unincorporated or unregistered enterprises (ILO, 1993); and 2) informal employment which is work without labor-based protection in informal enterprises, formal firms, and households (Basu & Chau, 2015; Chen, 2007, 2012). 

Given that the “informal sector” was originally thematicized based on a study of Ghana, there is no surprise as to how conspicuous it is in Ghana’s urban landscape and its implications on informal urbanization by the poor. Data shows that the private informal economy engages about two out of every five (41.9%) of the currently employed persons 15 years and older: 47.8% of females and 35.5% of males (Ghana Statistical Service, 2014c). Also, three-fifths (61.5%) of the employed urban population are engaged informally whereas less than one-quarter (23.3%) of their rural counterparts are informally employed. Irrespective of the locality of residence, more females than males are usually engaged in the informal economy. Some examples of urban informal activities in Ghana are hawking, food vending, scrap metal collection, hair-dressing, shopkeeping, security services, and door-to-door waste collection (Agyei et al., 2016; Asibey et al., 2019). 

Generally, slums are hubs for most of the aforementioned activities which low-income households primarily depend on. For instance, e-waste activities in slums such as Agbogbloshie, Accra—the world’s largest e-waste dumpsite—and Aboabo, Kumasi creates income-generating prospects for several households (Asibey et al., 2020; Oteng-Ababio, 2012). The implication, therefore, is that slums turn to attract the urban poor acting as a “pull” factor towards informal urbanization. The Todaro paradox, developed by Todaro (1976), similarly captures the attractive and magnetic power of slums for poor households, especially rural migrants in search of greener pastures. In another vein, because of the centrality of slums within Ghanaian cities, they have become attractive locations to live and pursue informal economic opportunities in other parts of the city. Azerigyik et al. (2018) assert that this helps to reduce the cost of commuting to the CBD. As indicated in Section 4.1, the affordable housing provided in slums also makes it economically logical for households to live and work in the city. 

In short, the quest for employment opportunities by the urban poor and rural migrants, which is mainly offered through the informal economy, serves as a critical driver of informal urbanization in Ghana.

Politics and Distributional/Investment Inequalities 
Informal urbanization in Ghana has always been politically shaped. The existence of slums can be partly attributed to the politics played by traditional leaders, community leaders, city authorities, and government. The case of Old Fadama which is the largest extra-legal slum in Ghana is especially emblematic. Old Fadama occupies 31 hectares of government-owned land beside the Odaw River and near the Korle Lagoon (Farouk & Owusu, 2012). As shown in Figure 1.4, it is situated across one of Accra’s most important markets, the Agbogbloshie market, on land that was largely a lagoon. Much of this land has been reclaimed from the lagoon and river and has slowly been filled up by residents using temporary materials, including sawdust from the timber market across the road. According to Yeboah and Obeng-Odoom (2010, p. 88) and Afenah (2012, p. 537), this settlement has persisted because it assumed a political tussle between both local and central political actors which crippled any action on that settlement. Several evictions since 2002 failed because residents have been able to collaborate with several organizations such as Shack Dwellers International, a global network of community-based organizations of urban poor. Also, the creation of the NGO ‘People’s Dialogue on Human Settlement’ in 2003 and the Ghana Federation of the Urban Poor (GHAFUP) all curtailed eviction attempts. 

Within the first three years of inception, People’s Dialogue and GHAFUP realized a number of political achievements for those living in Old Fadama (Afenah, 2012). Also, because of the vast population living in Old Fadama (about 100,000), politicians have identified it as a strategic source of electoral votes. Therefore, they make promises to residents which may run counter to sustainable urban plans that aim at slowing down informal urbanization. All these decisions have resulted in the abandonment of some much-needed long-term slum treatments in favor of more short-term politically friendly initiatives. This phenomenon is widely known across the literature as political clientelism. A “patron-client” relationship exists in slum communities which has created a scenario where political patrons have a huge stake in these communities and are better served if they remain as they are and are not formalized or fully developed. A vicious cycle is generated where due to continued dependence and vulnerabilities, slum communities rely on political patrons for their survival and are willing to pay for the patrons’ help with political allegiance. Several scholars (Paller, 2015; Schildkrout, 1970, 1978) have reported this scenario in Ghanaian Zongos—strangers’ quarters, where migrants to African cities settle. Formal public services to these informal neighborhoods are generally mediated by political entrepreneurs or brokers with high levels of power. The political status of brokers allow them to lobby for services; however, they do not seek universal provision so as not to lose their power. 

It is worth noting that the political tussles described above cut across several slum communities in Ghana. This has propelled informal urbanization and has guaranteed its presence in cities. Also, several political twists have affected the integration of some settlements into socio-economic and infrastructural plans. Sadly, officialdom tends to limit investment in communities that are viewed as illegal: that is, extra-legal slums (Paller, 2015). According to city authorities, investing in these communities is a validation of their legitimacy. Some authors (e.g., Amoako, 2016; Amoako et al., 2019) have extensively documented this complex phenomenon with regard to flood management regimes in urban Ghana. In short, the political position of slum communities restricts and constructs responses to informal urbanization serving as an important determinant of its continued proliferation in Ghana. 

Weak Urban planning and a Complex Land Tenure System 

There is a general notion that urban governance and spatial planning in Ghana are quite weak and ineffective. Urban planning in Ghana dates back to European colonization which largely focused on health and sanitation emergencies such as the outbreak of diseases (Gocking, 2005; Quarcoopome, 1993). Nationwide planning became much consolidated after the passing of the Town and Country Planning Ordinance of 1945 (Cap 84) which established the Town and Country Planning Department (TCPD), now the Land Use and Spatial Planning Authority (LUSPA) (Cobbinah & Niminga- Beka, 2017; Fuseini & Kemp, 2015; Poku-boansi, 2021). Following the adoption of a decentralized system of planning in 1988, several normative and legislative frameworks such as the Local Government Act of 1993 (Act 462) – now Local Governance Act of 2016 (Act 936), National Development Planning Systems Act of 1994 (Act 480), and the Land Use and Spatial Planning Act 2016 (Act 925), was introduced to condition urban planning and governance. 

Despite this rich normative environment, several scholars (Boadi et al., 2005; Yeboah & Obeng-Odoom, 2010b) note that urban and land use planning in Ghana has been exclusionary and has failed to address the sustainability challenges from urbanization. As discussed in Section 4.3, this is partly attributable to political interferences that shape urban planning’s operations. Some scholars (Boamah et al., 2012; Yeboah & Obeng-Odoom, 2010b) also associate poor planning with authorities’ limited capacities to enforce rules and guarantee compliance. On the contrary, others (Ayambire et al., 2019; Cobbinah, 2021; Cobbinah et al., 2020; Poku-boansi, 2021; Siiba et al., 2018; Yeboah & Shaw, 2013) strongly relate weak urban planning to the counter-productive institutional roles played by traditional authorities. 

The complex land tenure system in Ghana demands explicit emphasis given its enormous role in rendering urban land use and spatial plans ineffective. In Ghana, customary land holding institutions control about 80% of the lands. These lands are communally owned, typically by kingdoms, tribes, clans, or families who hold the lands in the trust of the people (Yeboah & Shaw, 2013). Aside from the ownership of lands, these traditional institutions play administrative roles which sometimes go contrary to zoning and land use plans (Cobbinah et al., 2020). The land-use decisions are mostly made through contracted surveyors who have very little knowledge of formal planning procedures. This process has been largely welcomed by locals because of the bureaucracies and corruption of formal planning institutions. Due to this weak urban planning system, urban poor households sometimes find it easy to squat on lands that are idle or not policed thereby exerting their squatters’ rights and rights to the city. Also, poor households are sometimes given the de facto right to settle by traditional authorities through the informal sale or lease of lands. 

To sum up, it is logical to argue that weak urban planning has made uncontrolled urbanization and squatting desirable to several urbanites, especially the urban poor acting as a “pull” effect. However, it should be noted that this attractiveness must not be isolated from the numerous “push” factors such as inadequate access to the formal housing and land market that frames their need to obtain housing informally. Also, it is worth noting that customary land ownership is not the sole contributor to informal urbanization by the poor. Some studies (e.g., Ubink, 2007) have shown significant haphazard development even on state-owned lands that are administered directly by formal agencies. 

Discussion and Lessons Learned

The results of the current study reveal that informal urbanization by the poor is driven by a complex interplay of factors which has been given less attention in the conventional literature. More generally, studies tend to emphasize population dynamics as the main driver of this phenomenon. This implicitly suggests that those living in such communities are solely to blame for informal urbanization, diverting away from the other crucial actors and institutions that may have conditioned the actions of the poor. To fill the existing knowledge gap, the present study focused on Ghana as a case study. Findings show that the informal economy, politics, ineffectual policies, and weak urban planning and governance systems are critical in generating slum growth. With respect to housing policies, it is observed that historical policies have engendered the present-day housing deficits faced in Ghanaian cities. Consequently, low-income households are being excluded from formal housing provisions. As a result, slums offer low-income individuals the best option for affordable housing within cities. These slums are also acting as economic hubs and are attracting poor households. Literature reveals that the urban poor, in their quest to obtain employment in cities (particularly within the informal economy), have to rely on slums for housing. The slum modernization theory (Frankenhoff, 1967; Turner, 1969) validates this finding and demonstrates the pull effect of slums. 

Furthermore, political interferences and weak urban planning have framed and constructed the way and manner in which strategies are deployed to slow down informal urbanization. Instead of adopting pragmatic and scientifically feasible policies, authorities have to relegate strategies to the political arena. Some politicians, under the guise of settlements being illegal, are limiting investments in slums, making it difficult for them to improve. The emergence of political clientelism and patrons who have ulterior motives (e.g., continued neighborhood degradation) has further hindered the development of slum communities (Deuskar, 2019). Also, poor urban planning has quietly exacerbated informal urbanization in its inability to enforce the rich and fertile planning rules that exist. The customary land tenure system in Ghana has further compounded the challenges faced by urban planning in dealing with uncontrolled urbanization. Boateng (2020b, p. 6) notes that for a long time, “most post-colonial developing societies’ so-called ‘modern’ planning and building systems/regulations, to all intents and purposes, are postcolonial – i.e. they are still structurally embedded in colonial standards and requirements.” This postcolonial attribute of Ghana’s urban planning is highlighted in this article as a crucial driver of informal urbanization by the poor. Renewed efforts to transform planning through a National Urban Policy Framework (NUPF) and a Land Use and Spatial Planning Bill (LUSPB) are very laudable approaches to move away from the obsolete 1945 colonial planning ordinance that underlain Ghana’s planning system (Fuseini & Kemp, 2015; Poku-boansi, 2021). These policies would help in Ghana’s quest for sustainable development and also address some of the systemic challenges that have driven informal urbanization among the urban poor for decades. 

Overall, the results point to several “push” and “pull” scenarios that drive informal urbanization and the “unavoidable” movement of poor households to slum communities. The study findings also support criticisms raised against the population-heavy diagnosis of urban problems in Africa and the need to adopt more historical-institutional perspectives (see e.g., Boateng, 2020a, 2020b). A few lessons can be drawn from the above systematic review. 

First, slum growth in the Global South is likely to continue increasing given the challenges faced by governments and city authorities to address the needs of its ever-growing population. If this persists as projected, the economic, social, and environmental sustainability of cities could be under serious threat. This partly underpins the global commitments such as Sustainable Development Goal 11 (Target No. 11.1) and national plans aimed at dealing with informal urbanization. However, it is imperative to constructively design current and future policies by taking cognizance of the multidimensional drivers of informal urbanization. The results in this study clearly depict various ways that the invasion and succession of lands by the urban poor are involuntary and sometimes conditioned on external push drivers. Sadly, some current urban management policies fail to embrace these intricacies and would therefore need to be critically re-examined. For instance, draconian policies that solely focus on slum eviction and clearance without resettlement or resettlement to fringe locations must be abandoned as some poor households are caught up in “do or die” situations leading to their habitation in slums. On the contrary, inclusive, pro-poor, and proactive policies should be favored by city authorities. Policies should also exclusively target the “push” drivers such as the housing inequalities generated by inadequate low-income housing supply. There is great promise in the sites and services approach which was swiftly deserted in the late 1990s. A recent evaluation (see: Owens et al., 2018) shows this could be an incredible opportunity to adopt John Turner’s “freedom to build” and “aided self-help” philosophy to tackle informal urbanization and provide decent housing to the urban poor. 

Discussion and Lessons Learned

Informal urbanization by the urban poor has become the lived reality for several cities in Africa, especially Ghana. In this article, we deciphered the complex web of informal urbanization drivers among Ghana’s urban poor by discussing how the factors act as “push” and “pull” agents. The underlying logic behind this review was that, without disentangling these intricacies, it may be next to impossible to address informal urbanization. Four broad drivers were examined: housing policies, informal economy, politics, and weak urban planning. Our findings argumentatively support critiques against population-heavy pathological readings of urban problems in Africa (Boateng, 2020a). 

Overall, the paper offers important entry points to manage and slow down unplanned urbanization in Ghana and guarantee cities are sustainable and resilient. This study, though geographically limited to Ghana, presents valuable lessons for countries and cities in Africa and the Global South that are facing informal urbanization and are determined to manage their cities sustainably. This paper has not been exhaustive of all the drivers of informal urbanization among the poor; however, it should feed directly into future studies aiming to examine its nature, processes, effects, and impacts. Particularly, it is recommended that further studies employ rigorous empirical data to try and unpack the drivers of informal urbanization in a more in-depth fashion. The “push and pull” scenarios must not be lost in future studies as it has profound implications on understanding more generally what frames the actions of the poor and more specifically the kind of policies and strategies that may be proffered to deal with the root causes of informal urbanization. 

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Planning Forum Volume 18

Deciphering the Drivers of Informal Urbanization by Ghana’s Urban Poor Through the Lens of the Push-Pull Theory

Gideon Abagna Azunre | Richard Azerigyik | Pearl Puwurayire

Abstract:

For years informal urbanization by the urban poor and its spatial outcomes—i.e., slums—have become ubiquitous in Global South cities, particularly Africa. Consequently, authorities are engineering strategies that could arrest and slow down its proliferation in the quest for resilient and sustainable cities. Within the complex discourse of informal urbanization, one very crucial piece of evidence that appears to be unclear pertains to its driving factors. Using Ghana—particularly rapidly urbanizing southern Ghanaian cities—as an empirical case, this paper untangles the complex and multidimensional drivers of slum growth beyond the traditional population-heavy approaches. Using the push-pull theory as a conceptual and analytical prism, analyses reveal that poorly designed housing policies, the informal economy, weak urban planning, political interferences and political clientelism accelerates slum growth. The article argues that coping with unplanned urbanization by the urban poor may be extremely tenuous if these complex factors are not well-understood and seriously considered in policy circles. The findings of the article also lend credence to arguments that call for a shift from population-heavy readings of urban challenges in Africa to more institutional, political, and historical perspectives. The paper concludes by recommending that states and city authorities ought to recognize and address their institutional culpabilities in contributing to slum growth. A critical starting point could be the re-examination of draconian policies and the adoption of inclusive, pro-poor, and proactive urban strategies.

Keywords:

Informal urbanization; Slums; Push-Pull theory; Sustainable City Development; Ghana

‘Planning Ambassadors’ as Insurgent Spatial Actors: Women and the Re-Territorialization of the Public Escalators in Medellín, Colombia

Evan Todtz

Abstract

Situated in the western hillsides of Medellín, the central stairway in Las Independencias (I) historically served as the primary neighborhood circulation route, but also acted as an invisible border delimiting conflicting spatial claims by disparate armed factions vying for territorial control. Decades of intense urban violence culminated in the early 2000s with a series of state-sponsored military interventions that left the community reeling. The emergent model of social urbanism in the mid-2000s sought to redress historic inequities in the city’s peripheries. Under this directive, the state executed a physical intervention in the community to de-territorialize the underlying geographies of violence by replacing the central stairway with a new public escalator system. While projects executed under social urbanism frequently attribute success to the project’s design merit and broad social impact, this mixed-methods design study completed along the public escalators shows that the primary driver of individual and neighborhood advancement in Las Independencias (I) has been the re-territorialization of these spaces through insurgent spatial practices by residents rather than the state’s physical intervention. Intimate insights into daily life along the public escalators reveal how women, in particular, emerge as critical actors in the re-territorialization of the escalators, despite persistent gender imbalances in public space and shifting geographies of violence encroaching into the domestic realm. Focusing on people rather than the state underscores how centering the narratives and perspectives of women allows these community ambassadors to plan for, create, and steward emancipatory spaces where individual and community autonomy reside. 

Keywords

Re-territorialization; Women in Planning; Insurgent Planning; Social Urbanism; Invisible Borders; Public Space Appropriation 

Performance Evaluation of A Public Transportation System: Analyzing the Case of Dhaka, Bangladesh

Rakibul Ahasan | Ahsanul Kabir 

Abstract

Performance evaluation of public transportation systems is an important prerequisite to making a rapidly growing city livable. Despite the presence of public transportation since the 1960s, few studies talk about the efficiency of transportation systems in cities. The objective of this research is to assess the performance of an existing system. Based on a set of performance measurements identified from the literature, we captured five categories: passengers’ and operators’ perspectives – service efficiency, system efficiency, cost efficiency, utilization efficiency, and network efficiency to evaluate public transit efficiency. The results indicated that the existing service quality in Dhaka is less satisfactory compared to other cities with system, network, and cost efficiency being below average. But utilization efficiency is better, which could result from the overuse of vehicles and workers being involved in operating them. Also, the most concerning issue with the existing transportation system is congestion. In terms of the strengths and weaknesses, we find that the implementation of metro rails, bus route restructuring, and a separate policy for the city’s public transportation system cast some hope in addressing some immediate problems in the rapidly growing city of Dhaka. 

Keywords

Public Transportation; Performance Evaluation; System Efficiency; Service Efficiency; Quality of Service; Dhaka; Bangladesh

Starring The Treasures and Trauma in Home-Based Enterprises: Towards A Rethink by Urban Planners

Nkeiru Ezeadichie | Joy U. Ogbazi 

Abstract

Rapid urbanization in the Global South, and its accompanying challenges have heightened in African cities. One consequence of Africa’s urbanization that cuts across most of its nations is the high rate of urban unemployment which has led many urban poor residents to resort to seeking solace in informal employment opportunities. Africa’s most populous nation, Nigeria, has an escalated case of unemployment leading to the proliferation of informal economic activities in its cities, which are also predominantly home-based. The operation of informal economic activities in residential buildings is known as home-based enterprises (HBEs), which are attributed to low start-up capital, work-life balance and land use changes. This study focuses on the objective and empirical investigation of the effects of HBEs in cities of global South, using Enugu, a colonial, medium-sized administrative city in Nigeria as case study. The study projects the reasons why urban planners should acknowledge and maximize the potentials of this urbanization-driven phenomenon to meet some SDGs, while also controlling the negative impacts such as land use alterations to ensure sustainable cities. The objectives of the study are; i). To examine the dynamics of HBEs ii). to identify the Treasure in HBEs iii). to determine the Trauma of HBEs. iv). to recommend effective measures for managing HBEs for Sustainable development. It concludes by advocating that urban planners should consider the integration of HBEs into neighborhood schemes to maximize the potentials and effectively control the negative impacts thereby ensuring sustainable global South cities. 

Keywords

Treasure; Trauma; Informal; Home-Based Enterprises; Land use

by Adam Ogusky

Abstract

Using the lens of political economy, this textual analysis of Austin’s comprehensive plan reveals it to be a deeply postmodern document, focusing on diversity and inclusivity of points of view to the detriment of normative vision. The plan consists primarily of discussions related to identity, culture, and other non-material attributes of the city, paying scant attention to material concerns such as conditions of life and labor, distribution and accumulation of capital, and labor as the source of economic value. The marginalization of such political-economic concerns prevents the plan from addressing its professed ambitions for community progress and justice.

Keywords: Planning; political economy; postmodernism; Austin; comprehensive plan

On June 15, 2012, the Austin City Council adopted the city’s first new comprehensive plan in over 30 years. The preceding plan, Austin Tomorrow, was first adopted in 1977. To say that Austin in 1977 was very different than the Austin of today is understatement in the extreme. In the intervening decades, Austin grew from a sleepy regional city of 322,000 whose economy depended largely on the university and state government into a global city of 824,000 (City of Austin, TX, 2014) with a reputation for fantastic growth and a strong technology-based economy, and as a progressive and vibrant raft in a sea of conservative Texas. The city had long outgrown its comprehensive plan; the last effort at an updated one ran aground of divisive and changing politics in the mid-eighties and after several years of work it failed to be passed by City Council (Gregor, 2010). And now that the excitement has somewhat abated—almost three years after the ImagineAustin comprehensive plan’s adoption—it seems the time to return to the document with a critical eye. What has the modern, much-admired city of Austin written in its new plan?

A little comprehensive plan exegesis is not merely a literary frivolous pursuit. A plan conceals within it not only what its authors—and, by extension, city’s residents—think about their city but how they think about cities more generally. A plan contains buried modes of urban thought, inchoate urban theories. Throgmorton (1996, 2003) has argued for a conception of planning as future-oriented storytelling and plans themselves as persuasive stories. If ImagineAustin is a persuasive story, what are its arguments? What does a close reading of the plan reveal about how its authors think about Austin and its future? About cities and urban processes? If a plan is a story then such questions can be answered through a textual analysis of the plan itself, which is the aim of this paper.

This paper will argue that ImagineAustin is a predominantly postmodern plan written for a postmodern era both in planning and in society more broadly. The bedrock of postmodern theory is the rejection of universal metanarratives in favor of a proliferation of fragmented discourses. Such fragmentation leads to a persistent focus on the value of diversity and an allergy to normative judgment. Instead, the postmodern plan favors multiple discourses, narratives, and points of view, all equally valid. These multiple discourses tend to be divided along cultural lines following the construction of meaning derived from cultural understandings of diversity. Groups and individuals in the plan are considered primarily in cultural terms rather than in economic or class terms. Difference and diversity as ideals are celebrated, always highlighting identity and values. In the postmodern plan, identity and spirit stand before consideration of the metanarrative of structural economic drivers, crowding out consideration of material conditions in the city.

Such postmodern preoccupations of identity, cultural difference, and the concern for a multiplicity of points of view are not unimportant, but they are also not the whole story. As Harvey (1992) points out, “If we accept that fragmented discourses are the only authentic discourses and that no unified discourse is possible, then there is no way to challenge the overall qualities of a system” (p. 594). Likewise, if the ImagineAustin plan is to make positive progressive change in its community it must do more than celebrate diversity and multiplicity.

A Marxist political economic framework can illuminate both the shortcomings in ImagineAustin and suggest how it might have done better. In constructing such a framework I identify three crucial Marxian lessons against which I read the plan: (1) sites of production and material conditions of life and labor are crucial determinants of the shape and functioning of society; (2) close attention must be paid to the distribution and accumulation of capital in communities; and (3) labor is the source of value. Crucially, all three points deal explicitly with material conditions in the city, a mode of inquiry that stands in stark contrast to the postmodern organization of ImagineAustin. Using this political economic framework will reveal the plan’s avoidance of material considerations, as well as its failure to take strong normative positions which would further the progressive goals it espouses. Reading ImagineAustin through the lens of political economy reveals the weaknesses and contradictions in the plan while at the same time suggesting an outline for a better plan, one that considers the material conditions of Austinites, speaks with a strong normative voice, and one that, ultimately, might bend the arc of planning in Austin more steeply towards progress and justice.

The Postmodern Plan

ImagineAustin is aptly named: it spends a great deal of its time day-dreaming, describing the city in non-material terms. It often seems that the plan is more about the Platonic ideal of Austin rather than the actual concrete, steel and limestone city. This is, of course, one of the important functions of any plan. They are aspirational documents, after all, but they must also be material documents which deal in material causes, means, and ends. The question here is to what extent the plan concerns itself with the immaterial world of values and identity to the exclusion of material questions of political economy.

Reading through the plan immediately reveals the pronounced importance of values and identity, while a Marxist critique will reveal the insufficiency of many of the plan’s material concerns. But first, what precisely is wrong with a postmodern concern with values and identity? The problem is two-fold. First, such concerns do not get at the structural drivers of material conditions and inequality in the city. It is not merely values and beliefs which shape the city; material conditions of production must be taken into account. Second, the postmodern rejection of metanarratives leads to a persistent focus on the value of diversity. There develops a certain equalization of different points of view and narratives, which begins to preclude the making of strong normative claims. Diversity, however, is not an end in itself, just as merely hearing points of view different from one’s own is not an end in itself. It is, rather, the beginning of discussion, debate and adjudication which may lead, ultimately, to positive change.

As a first effort to tease out the mix of the postmodern and the material in ImagineAustin we can begin, as the plan does, with the vision statement: As it approaches its 200th anniversary, Austin is a beacon of sustainability, social equity, and economic opportunity; where diversity and creativity are celebrated; where community needs and values are recognized; where leadership comes from its citizens and where the necessities of life are affordable and accessible to all. Austin’s greatest asset is its people: passionate about our city, committed to its improvement, and determined to see this vision become a reality (City of Austin, TX, 2012, p. 2).

It appears to be a promising start. The statement leads with sustainability, equity and economic opportunity—all potentially within the material political economic camp—before moving into the postmodern with diversity, creativity, and community values. The pendulum swings back with affordability and comes to rest on a somewhat curious note about the city as its people, though with the people not as workers, homeowners or renters, but as a repository of passion and commitment, a theme that continues throughout the plan. This short version of the vision statement is, then, a mix of economy and values. Thus, the plan begins on strong footing, though as it progresses the stress on values will continue while the economic factors listed above, when viewed through a critical political economic lens, prove to be significantly less material and progressive than they seem.

In an early indication of what is to come, the plan expounds on its purpose: “Only a comprehensive plan fully considers how the whole community’s values, needs, people, and places are interrelated and interdependent” (City of Austin, TX, 2012, p. 4). It is no coincidence that values is listed first in this list of comprehensive plan considerations. And though needs, people, and places can certainly be viewed through a materialist, political economic lens, the plan will often view them in terms of values. Such talk of the city’s values is foregrounded, particularly in the early pages of the plan, where it is mentioned explicitly six times in the first 12 pages. “By being unified in vision” through the plan, we Austinites can “carry forward our values” (City of Austin, TX, 2012, p. 6) or, a few pages later, the plan will positively shape Austin by being “grounded in community values” (p. 12). And if not values, then it is identity which precedes material or economic planning concerns: “Considering Austin as a whole means seeing all of its different pieces and identities and how they all fit together” (p. 13). Austin as a whole is given a fuller explanation further down the page:

This comprehensive plan is holistic in its consideration of big themes like livability, sustainability, and complete communities. In addition to planning for land use, trans- portation, and other physical issues, it considers the pro- vision of services, economic development, cultural needs, public health, resource efficiency, and equity. It provides a framework for how the physical, economic, and social pieces of the city and the region interconnect (p. 13).

Though perhaps didactic and certainly passé, it remains useful to point out that an orthodox Marxist interpretation would view this explanation of holistic planning as almost wholly tinkering with the superstructure while the base of economic production remains unmentioned. This is not to argue for a strict Marxist base-superstructure framework where relations of production determine all other social and political relations; rigid economic deterministic interpretations of Marx are long out of fashion. But the basic idea that economic conditions have enormous influence on society, creating divisions along economic and social lines, remains an insight too powerful to be discarded. In short: class still matters, and though class may not be structured quite as Marx described in the industrializing world of early capitalism, it remains a pervasive social fact— one which, moreover, remains shaped largely by conditions of economic production. This is all to say that it is not completely anachronistic to point out that the ImagineAustin’s vision of holistic planning deals almost exclusively with superstructural aspects of society, because such a fact leads us to question the lack of consideration of material conditions of labor. The above references to economic development and equity might in theory deal with such conditions, but they are not made explicit.

That said, the plan does express its ambition to speak of its residents, declaring “Austin is its people” (City of Austin, TX, 2012, p. 87). And what are Austinites? They are “engaged, compassionate, creative, and independent thinking people, where diversity is a source of strength, and where we have the opportunity to fully participate and fulfill our potential” (p. 87). In other words, Austinites are defined primarily through their character and identity, not by what they do in any sort of economic sense. And if Austin is its people, then Austin appears to be driven primarily by a sense of character and identity.

Language of this sort is found all throughout the plan, including the “We are a Unique Community” section: “Our progressive spirit, environmental ideals, and innovative character distinguish us from other metropolitan areas in Texas” (City of Austin, TX, 2012, p. 19). The plan could not be clearer: What sets Austin apart is its spirit, ideals and character, all decidedly abstract and immaterial qualities. A sidebar on that same page expounds on “The Austin Spirit” which “animates Austin’s people and special places” and concludes, somewhat disturbingly, that “while no City program is ever going to be responsible for this spirit, nurturing it in whatever forms it takes in the future is as important to Austin’s success as anything else in this plan” (p. 19). A political economic view must rebut: nurturing the spirit of Austin is not a particularly worthy goal of a planning exercise, let alone one as important as anything else a plan might attempt. Political economy maintains, rather, that a plan should focus on material economic conditions which, in turn, powerfully structure society. But the plan makes completely clear here that this is not its prime concern. I would argue further that by claiming the goal of nurturing the spirit of Austin to be equal in importance to any other planning concerns, ImagineAustin strikes a rather defeatist tone, absolving itself of both the responsibility and hope for effecting broader structural change for its city.

Besides the focus on values and spirit, the other prime weakness of this postmodern plan is its near constant blandishment of diversity, the obsessive inclusion of all points of view. Throughout the plan, all groups, all opinions and points of view, all forms of the good are equally valid, equally valuable, and given seemingly equal weight in the plan. No single group is singled out for particular privation or unjust abundance.

This equalization of narratives, needs, and goals leads to a lack of normative direction, dulling the progressive agenda the plan claims for itself. Paradigmatic of this approach is the plan’s selection of sustainability as its central policy direction and organizing principle. Probably the most familiar definition of sustainability to the planner comes from Campbell’s (1996) sustainability triangle, where the three competing goals of economy, environment, and equity must be continually balanced against one another. ImagineAustin transforms this coherent idea of sustainability into a conceptual grab-bag by arbitrarily expanding the category of equity. Thus, for the plan, “sustainability means finding a balance among three sets of goals: (1) prosperity and jobs, (2) conservation and the environment, and (3) community health, equity, and cultural vitality” (City of Austin, TX, 2012, p. 7). So equity becomes, rather than one of three cogent points in the triangle, a confused mix with health and cultural vitality. There is no explanation for this move and no hint at what these concepts have to do with one another, if anything.

It is no surprise, then, that the concept of equity not only fails to organize the plan, but fails also to have a strong rhetorical or normative thrust. The goal is always to benefit all Austinites, as if all Austinites require the special beneficence of the city. This begins with the vision statement—“where the necessities of life are affordable and accessible to all” (City of Austin, TX, 2012, p. 2)—and continues throughout the plan. Such relentless focus on diversity and the benefit of all serves to deflect the deep inequalities that exist in the real Austin. It obscures the systematic accumulation by the few that proceeds on the backs of the many. In the end, the goal of providing benefit for all acts as a powerful distraction from what would be a normatively stronger focus on the pervasive unequal distribution of social goods and capital in society. Perhaps this argument is naïve, however. A plan is, after all, a politically contingent document, one which must serve many masters and offend none. But a plan that speaks of such lofty ideals in a city where the “progressive spirit” permeates the populace ought to do better.

The Political Economy Plan

How, then, might ImagineAustin have done better? One way would have been to organize the plan around the concerns of political economy, which makes three primary arguments. The first is that we must pay attention to sites of production and the material conditions of life and labor. If economic production is the engine driving society then conditions of production must be made central to the plan. And if the reproduction of the worker is crucial to economic production, as it most certainly is, then the material conditions of the worker are key. Second, Marxist political economy is concerned with the accumulation of capital to the capitalist and away from the worker. Though class today is not a simple laborcapitalist binary, the relative distribution of social goods and its structural causes remain crucial to any political economy. Third, political economy beginning with Adam Smith (1776/2003), and progressing through Ricardo (1817/2004), Marx (1867/1990), and onward holds as its central tenet that labor is the source of value. If we take this claim as truth, we must consider its implications in a reading of ImagineAustin as well as in planning more broadly.

Sites of production and material conditions of life and labor

The plan starts off strong on material conditions of life and labor with an early focus on affordability in the vision statement. Just two pages later the issue is highlighted as a central challenge for the city with the plan remarking that housing in central Austin “is increasingly unaffordable for low-wage jobs that lag behind Austin’s cost of living” (City of Austin, TX, 2012, p. 4). The problem is given deeper treatment later on when the increasing gap between median income and median housing price is noted (p. 28) along with the displacement by affluent newcomers of long-time residents in eastern and southern neighborhoods (p. 30). In the “Housing and Neighborhoods” section one of the key goals is unambiguously stated as “encouraging the preservation of affordable housing in neighborhoods across the city and in activity centers and corridors” (p. 136). The plan even specifically notes the need to preserve existing affordable housing “for very low-income persons” (p. 137), a victory from a progressive standpoint.

The lack of specific and measurable goals and policy recommendations dampens optimism regarding affordable housing, however. The need for “new and innovative funding mechanisms, such as public/private partnerships” (City of Austin, TX, 2012, p. 137) is both uninspiring and vague. Community land trusts are noted in a sidebar as a best practice (p. 137), but it is unclear whether this is an official recommendation or how, when, or by whom a land trust might be accomplished. The recommendations also continue the theme of promoting a variety of diverse housing for Austin’s diverse population—notwithstanding the one recommendation already noted which targets low-income persons—as if the city need be concerned with providing more high end housing. Again, a focus on access for all is chosen over a focus on housing access for low- and middle-income residents. And just in case the lack of specificity on recommended housing market interventions left any doubt as to the appropriate responsible parties, the plan states: demand for market-rate housing can and should be met by the private sector. The City of Austin can work with private developers, non-profits, the state and federal governments, Travis County, and other local governments to help those individuals and families not able to afford market-rate housing, including seniors on a fixed income, people with disabilities, and low-wage workers (p. 201).

What is left out here is the answer to what happens when the market-rate housing leaves increasing numbers of residents on the outside of the housing market looking in. As the market fails an increasing portion of the populace, the problem becomes much larger than seniors, disabled people, and low-wage workers. Will the Austin housing market serve low- and middle-income residents? And, if it does not, who will address such market failure?

Finally, even here in housing affordability—that most economic of issues—strange mentions of character crop up in the plan. The plan calls for “Maintaining the unique and diverse character of Austin’s neighborhoods while meeting the market demands for close-in housing” and “maintaining the essential character” of low-income neighborhoods undergoing redevelopment (City of Austin, TX, 2012, p. 126). The reader is left to guess at what is meant here by essential character. Perhaps it is a coded reference to existing single-family density? Architectural character maybe? The plan makes this reference clear with the following policy recommendation: “Protect neighborhood character by providing opportunities for existing residents who are struggling with rising housing costs to continue living in their existing neighborhoods” (p. 138). Essential character, then, refers to low-income residents. Thus we see the postmodern identity-obsessed plan transform a straightforward economc-justice issue into a mash-up of economy and identity. In reality, however, people are not neighborhood character; they are residents with essential needs, including affordable housing.

The replacement of economics or sites of production by a concern with character and identity continues in the plan’s land use and transportation recommendations, most of which focus on urban design aesthetics, compactness for quality of life improvements, and creating people-friendly places. This latter section imagines the city primarily as a site of consumption: whether it is sidewalk cafes or the city experience being consumed, the goal is to create people-friendly places that are “active, inviting places with unique Austin flavor and character—fun to visit and welcoming for all” (p. 133). The essential point is that discussions of compact, people-friendly places—which become “more desirable, with enhanced value” (p. 133)—have largely replaced discussions of the city as a site of production. Labor, laborers, and the city as a site of economic production are given scant attention in the land use and transportation section.

What about the plan’s sections on the economy? This ought to be where we find the most discussion of sites of production and material conditions of labor and this turns out to be the case. But these same sections also follow the pattern of the rest of the plan, returning repeatedly to issues of municipal spirit and identity. The section begins, typically, in mixed fashion: “We have a thriving economy, resilient due to its diversity and entrepreneurial spirit; however, we need to prepare our workforce to adapt to emerging employment sectors and technological changes” (City of Austin, TX, 2012, p. 45). The concrete need for workforce development here shares the sentence with an underspecified reference to diversity (industry mix? social?) and a claim of entrepreneurial spirit rather than any more concrete explanation for the actual process of entrepreneurship. The section continues to see-saw in like fashion, with the important recognition of a correlation between low education attainment and unemployment followed by praise for Austin’s creative sector as a “driver of innovation and a significant consumer of urban amenities” (p. 45) rather than as a site of production and economic activity in and of itself. Just as low-income residents are not neighborhood character, artists are not urban amenities. They are, rather, laborers engaged in relations of economic production.

The plan does note the limited access to professional and skilled service jobs for those with low educational attainment and many minorities (City of Austin, TX, 2012, p. 48). Such consideration of what sorts of jobs are being created and for whom ought to be one of the pillars of the plan’s economy section, and, perhaps of the plan more broadly. In what may be the biggest victory from a political economic standpoint, the plan notes that most regional job growth is in lower-wage positions resulting directly from population growth, such as service industry and hospitality services jobs (p. 75). It is curious, however, that these remarks are found in the “Developing a Regional Perspective” section rather than in the above discussion on the economy.

As for economic history, the plan does a good job of recounting the birth and growth of the high-tech industry cluster in Austin and its important early links to higher education (City of Austin, TX, 2012, pp. 20-21). Such economic histories help to describe both how industrial development drives urban development and how existing material assets—such as a well-supported research university and an educated workforce— can attract and support industry. As elsewhere, however, this economic history is followed immediately by the claim that it is not such material resources and sites of production that propel the city forward. Rather, it is that “the spirit of creativity and acceptance has created a place where people want to be and has set the stage for our current and future economic success” (p. 22). Again, it is Austin’s spirit, personality, and identity that matter and that cause material success and growth. In the expanded vision statement the plan uses even stronger language, claiming: “Creativity is the engine of Austin’s prosperity” (p. 85). Here, as elsewhere, the plan compulsively cites creativity as the explanation for Austin’s strong economy, ignoring sites and conditions of production while at the same time failing to give any substantive explanation for what, precisely, is meant by creativity, how it functions, or how it supports economic prosperity.

The plan’s economic recommendations, however, are a marked improvement. Several of the key challenges listed deal with concrete issues of production and labor, including calls for expanded job training in areas linked to local industry and community needs, the creation of well-paid jobs in the burgeoning green energy and building sectors and increasing well-paying jobs more generally, encouraging and sustaining homegrown businesses, and expanding the economic base through the development of a medical center (City of Austin, TX, 2012, p. 141).

A close look at the related section of the Action Matrix reveals a more mixed picture, however. A Priority Action to help support the creative industries calls for a series of programs including incubators, business accelerators, financial assistance, and technical assistance, though nothing is said about what transpires in such creative industries and what sorts of jobs they provide (City of Austin, TX, 2012, p. 241). This recommendation, however, stands out among others in the Action Matrix by listing specific programs and who will be responsible. Another promising recommendation calls for promoting the formation of worker- and community-owned businesses (p. 243), making a clear statement about worker conditions, though offering no specifics on how and by whom this will be accomplished. Similarly, recommendations for workforce training make no mention of who will be responsible, nor of targeting specific jobs, employers, or industries for desirable labor conditions. Equally bereft of detail is the recommendation to promote the employment of historically underemployed populations. Drifting away from the realm of material labor conditions now, the Action Matrix recommends strategic incentives and investments for particular industries and business districts while omitting any mention of targeting for desirable employment characteristics (p. 240) and elsewhere calls for an increase in marketing for and investment in Austin as a tourist destination (p. 241)—contributing to the vision of the city as a site of consumption rather than production. By and large, the economic planning recommendations are vague on who does what, when, and how. They are not focused on what transpires at sites of production or conditions of labor in Austin. Much like the section on housing noted above, the plan leaves such issues in the hands of the market.

Over all, then, ImagineAustin’s treatment of sites of production and the material conditions of life and labor is inconsistent at best. The plan does a reasonable job of recognizing the challenges facing the city, including serious threats to affordability for increasing numbers of residents and disparate access to work which pays decent wages. But the plan, after recognizing these problems, fails to substantively deal with them. Potential solutions are obscured by talk of values and identity on the one hand and, on the other, are given in such broad terms that they fail to be solutions in any specific sense.

Distribution of social goods and structural causes

To the extent that the ImagineAustin plan speaks about the distribution of social goods, it tends to call for benefits for everybody. From the beginning of the Economy section: “Austin must harness its strong economy to expand opportunity and social equity to all residents” (City of Austin, TX, 2012, p. 141). Language like this pervades the plan, leaving the Marxist reader feeling uneasy as the cumulative effect of the many calls for (insert your preferred social good here) for all Austinites serves to obscure the needs of those who are left out of Austin’s strong economy. It is, in fact, the very opposite of focusing on the distribution of social goods, one of the most important Marxist imperatives. This is because a focus on distribution leads to the recognition of structural inequality and, ultimately, to such inequality’s social drivers, whereas calls for improvement for all do the opposite, diverting attention from inequality and even, implicitly, endorsing a sort of trickle-down model of economic growth: improvement for all makes all better. Such a belief dismisses that other crucial Marxist point that the accumulation of social goods occurs all too often at the expense of others, and these very same losers in the game of capital tend to lose repeatedly. Real equity and justice demands that we answer to those people, not to all people.

Avoidance of issues of distribution continues throughout the plan, in discussions of city parks and facilities, schools, healthcare and elsewhere. For instance, while the plan notes the large number of parks and the high proportion of park acreage per 1,000 residents in comparison to peer cities (City of Austin, TX, 2012, p. 57), there is no discussion of where parks are and where they are not. Though the plan does acknowledge in rather anodyne fashion that “many areas of the city are not adequately served by the park system” (p. 61), it fails to question where these facilities are, who lives in places that have relatively greater or lesser access, or whether these are linked to historical conditions of deprivation for particular groups or areas of the city. Moreover, no remedy to unequal park access is offered.

Rather than question such issues of distribution, the plan chooses to speak about accessibility, though almost always in a general sense. Hence, from the extended vision statement: “Austin is accessible” regarding transportation (City of Austin, TX, 2012, p. 86); “Equitable opportunities are accessible to all” (p. 87); “We enjoy an accessible, well-maintained network of parks” (p. 85), and so on. Such language elides questions of access for whom and why particular groups or areas continue to have less access than others. At the outset ImagineAustin argues that this comprehensive plan challenges us “to remember and protect those who lack a voice, money, and power” (p. 13). Again, the plan aims high in aspirational, value-laden language, though it falls short in its specific choice of focus and language.

The exception is in the “Society” section where a number of the key challenges focus on those most in need. The plan recognizes that “there are populations and parts of the city that lag behind in education” and that educational opportunities, including job training, must be provided to them (City of Austin, TX, 2012, p. 170). On that same page the plan argues for the need to provide health care “for all residents, including the economically disadvantaged, uninsured, and underinsured” (p. 170). Such specific targeting of the neediest Austinites is a welcome change from the otherwise relentless calls for improved accessibility and benefits for all. Several recommendations in the “Society” section follow suit, including one to “Improve educational opportunities for marginalized populations and provide better services for at-risk segments of our community” (p. 172). However, as elsewhere, the plan remains vague on the specifics of these recommendations, who will be responsible, and how they will be accomplished.

Overall, then, the plan largely avoids discussing issues of distribution, preferring instead a vocabulary of inclusiveness an accessibility. Where the plan does deal with distribution, it fails to provide detail and specific solutions, particularly in economic terms, to deal with the problem.

If labor is the source of value, then…

The final lesson from political economy is that labor is the source of value. What does it mean to consider this insight with regard to planning? How do we evaluate ImagineAustin on the basis of such a claim? The plan obviously does not discuss economic theory or give its opinion on the somewhat arcane question of the source of economic value. It does,

however, imply agreement with the neoclassical argument that economic value derives from the process of exchange. As such, value is immaterial and mutable; it is merely what one will pay for something at a point in time. ImagineAustin sees the value of the city as deriving from the immaterial as well—from its values, its identity, its creativity. In either case value seems to precipitate out of the ether through processes of exchange, either in a market sense or through the exchange ideas, spirit, or words and creativity.

A labor theory of value, on the other hand, reminds us that value comes from material sources, from toil by human beings. Going back to the very beginning of the plan, ImagineAustin claims that the city’s greatest asset is its people, but what kind of people are these and what are they doing? Are Austinites valued and creating value through their character, spirit, and creativity or through their labor? By now the answer to this question ought to be obvious. Moreover, this is not an esoteric distinction. Rather, these two ways of viewing value creation have different planning and policy implications. What would a plan look like that took as its guiding principle the labor theory of value?

It would have to begin with the basic tenet that because labor creates value, labor must reap value. This is both just and reasonable. In practice, it would mean that good housing be available to all, particularly those who work at the bottom of the wage scale. The value workers bring into being through their labor must be returned to them in material form, enabling them to, at a bare minimum, reproduce their own labor and support a family in good health and comfort. In order to accomplish this, jobs which provide a good wage must be available to all workers, allowing labor to remain in the same community for which it produces value.

If we keep in mind, as a rhetorical device, the axiom that labor is the source of value then we will be mindful of targeting social goods to those who labor but do not benefit from the social values subsequently produced. And for those who remain outside of the workforce and without access to good jobs, the labor theory of value instructs us to do whatever is necessary to bring them into the workforce in a meaningful fashion. Finally, the labor theory of value reminds us constantly to focus on the concrete and material conditions of life and labor. It reminds us that value—all sorts of value, beyond the mere economic—are created through what people do. When a laborer tightens a bolt on an assembly line, they create economic value. When a musician plays a set in a club on Red River, they create social and aesthetic value. Such value does not come into being merely through our character, spirit or identity, but through our actions, through our labor. And if we recognize this, we also recognize the necessity of supporting the material conditions that make such labor possible in our city.

Conclusion

The ImagineAustin plan is an aspirational document. It envisions a better Austin—one which is affordable, more just, and retains much of what makes the city special to its residents. If we consider ImagineAustin in Throgmorton’s terms as a persuasive story, this is the future Austin for which the plan argues. However, the plan argues that the way to get there is through a celebration of and focus on the city’s identity, culture, and diversity. It reveals a mode of urban thinking that sees the drivers of the city as largely immaterial. Its deeply postmodern character—revealed through its recurrent considerations of diversity and inclusivity, character and identity—diverts attention from the material considerations of political economy. This postmodern story will not realize ImagineAustin’s vision for the city’s future.

On planning as storytelling, Throgmorton (2003) wrote, “I believe that contemporary planning stories must be inspired by a normative vision” (p. 136). This is precisely what is left out of the story that ImagineAustin weaves. The postmodern imperative to diversity and inclusion rather than normative claims dilutes its progressive aims, diverting attention from the acute material needs of Austinites who are left out of its remarkable growth and progress. Taking a political economic viewpoint, in this and other plans, might help retain our focus on such material needs and outcomes, setting us on the path to real progress and equity in the city.

References

Campbell, S. (1996). Green cities, growing cities, just cities?: Urban planning and the contradictions of sustainable development. Journal of the American Planning Association, 296-312.

City of Austin, TX. (2014). City of Austin Population History 1840-2014.

Retrieved March 26, 2015, from City of Austin: http://www.austintexas.gov/sites/default/files/files/Planning/Demographics/population_histo- ry_pub.pdf

City of Austin, TX. (2012). ImagineAustin Comprehensive Plan. City of Austin.

Gregor, K. (2010). Austin Comp Planning: A Brief History. Retrieved January 18, 2015 from The Austin Chronicle: http://www. austinchronicle.com/ news/2010-02-05/953471

Harvey, D. (1992). Social justice, postmodernism and the city. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 588-601.

Marx, K. (1990). Capital, Volume 1. London: Penguin.

Ricardo, D. (2004). The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. Mineoloa, NY: Dover Publications.

Smith, A. (2003). The Wealth of Nations. New York: Bantam Dell.

Throgmorton, J. (2003). Planning as persuasive storytelling in a global-scale web of relations. Planning Theory, 2 (2), 125-151.

Throgmorton, J. (1996). Planning as Persuasive Storytelling: The Rhetorical Construction of Chicago’s Electric Future. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Sara Pierce

In her book Road, River, and Ol’ Boy Politics, Linda Scarbrough explores the controversies and political maneuvering that accompanied two federal engineering experiments that transformed Williamson County, Texas, from an agricultural empire with a diverse and democratic population into one of the fastest-growing conservative counties in the nation. Scarbrough tells the story of Austin’s northern neighbor by dividing its history into two parts, The River and The Road. In the first section, she tracks the controversies and political maneuvering that accompanied a fifty-year dispute resulting in the construction of two dams along the San Gabriel River. The region was drastically reconfirmed gured by a new agenda of flood control set in 1921, in the wake of mass destruction caused by one of the greatest of all continental U.S. rainstorms. Although federally funded dams and highway projects were typically geared toward the support of agrarian economies, the recipients of these projects often shifted toward massive suburban development; Williamson County was no exception. Although water wasn’t everything, it was pivotal in the early 1970s, when Round Rock began a trend of recruiting blue chip companies. The population grew 500 percent during that decade in response to the city’s pursuit of postindustrial technology.

Scarbrough suggests that only a handful of people suspected the real impact that U.S. Interstate Highway 35 would have when combined with a new source of surface water. The second part of the book follows the implementation of Interstate 35 through Round Rock from its first proposed route in 1917. The fifteen-mile difference between where the highway was built and the original proposed route that ran east near Taylor had the consequence of overturning the economic and political power structure in the county. Scarbrough reveals the underlying influence of local forces that impacted federal policy and ultimately redefined national agendas to more suitably fi t their needs. She believes that academics often misinterpret infrastructure projects happening to a powerless public in the sole name of state interest. She uses the term “gilded democratic action” to describe the pressure politics led by unusually forceful, politically talented individuals who challenged established powers. The characters that shaped Williamson County by altering road and river projects were each motivated by their own personal and public vision. Scarbrough credits these rural leaders with “anticipat[ing] the future far more accurately, and with more panache, than did the professional planners.”

Scarbrough regrets that despite efforts that will provide minimal preservation, much of Williamson County has lost its sense of place. The interstate highway culture that defines America’s growth has led to a homogenization of form that subsumes local and regional contexts. Scarbrough’s account serves as a testament to the need for consideration of how large-scale public work projects will affect both the physical and cultural environment on a local level. By thoroughly detailing the social, environmental, economic, and political circumstances surrounding the construction of these federally funded infrastructural works, Scarbrough unravels the complexities and unintended consequences of a pattern of fast-track development being replicated across America’s Dry Sun Belt.

SARA PIERCE is pursuing her master’s degree in Landscape Architecture at the University of Texas. She recently completed a MA in anthropology and holds a BA in geography with an emphasis on landscape ecology.  Her educational background and professional experience working in planning and design at the City of Austin Parks Department inspired her to research the relationship between water, urban infrastructure, and Austin’s rapid growth.

Erica Huddleston

A “large park” as defined in Large Parks as 500 acres or greater, sited in an urban environment. The assonant title has no subheading, but rather flings open debate for the seven essays within to converse among themselves. Each essay included by editors Julia Czerniak and George Hargreaves in Large Parks elaborates ideas first voiced at a Harvard Graduate School of Design conference in 2003. To read through the book is an engrossing dissection of large-scale landscape architecture’s current theories. 

A defining assumption among the authors is that the designed landscape as park is not static, but a complex dynamic process. As Elizabeth K. Meyer writes in her essay, “there has been a shift from spatial to temporal preoccupation in landscape architecture theory and practice since the late 1980s.” In his foreword, James Corner of Field Operations and the University of Pennsylvania writes that “the designer of large parks can only ever set out a highly specified physical base from which more open-ended processes and formations take root; . . . the trick is to design a large park framework that is sufficiently robust to lend structure and identity while also having sufficient pliancy and give to adapt to changing demands and ecologies over time.” Corner conceptualizes parks as frameworks and systems, with emphasis on the practice of more extensive site analysis than existed in the past to develop landscape designs. He writes that a site is best inscribed with design when it is considered as a vast swirling flow of epoch processes acting on one another with ingrained flexibility for future change. He challenges designers to design with this construct in mind while not allowing the built to be dehumanized out of people scale—or even worse, diluted by politics, programming, and cost when large parks are planned. Using the theme of parks as systems, Nina-Marie Lister discusses new ties of ecology and landscape, Anita Berrizbeitia writes on strategies of creating park design, George Hargreaves titles his essay “A Designer’s Perspective,” Linda Pollak discusses the matrix as tool for park analysis, and John Beardsley writes of large-scale park management and funding practices. The distinct ideas layer and overlap with each other in interesting ways, spurring the reader to think of new threads and connections.

The dialogue among essays also is a wonderful study of aging urban infrastructures and the choices made when cleaning them up. Large parks in the twenty-first century will be formed increasingly from “disturbed” sites within cities—industrial landfills, brownfields, old airports, and decommissioned military bases—and the authors believe that new large parks will continue to be created because every U.S. city has a piece of disturbed land in its limits that can be redeveloped. Three parks on reclaimed sites—Downsview Park in Toronto, Ontario; Fresh Kills in New York City; and Landschaftspark in Duisburg, Germany—are mentioned repeatedly throughout the essays as examples of recent international design competitions that encouraged interdisciplinary teams and exemplify process flexibility in their winning designs. Graphics from the finalist team entries to these competitions are included and are extraordinary examples of design representation. Students will gain many ideas from Corner’s Field Operations’ winning entry renderings for Fresh Kills.

Large Parks encompasses old, new, far, and near urban parks that are “large.” The editors based this parameter on Andrew Jackson Downing’s suggestion in nineteenth-century New York that “five hundred acres is the smallest area that should be reserved for the future wants of a city.” With this land acreage as its starting point (as defended in Julia Czerniak’s “Speculating on Size” essay), the book provides access to the recent reflections of famous design critics, historians, and fi eld practitioners. It would be helpful if an index were included for research, since the authors reference the same parks scattered throughout while making different points. Also, it would be thought-provoking if there were one essay in Large

Parks applying the tenants expressed for these grand-scale parks to small parks. How do the concepts of flexibility and process apply to the small park? Are they exclusive to the needs of large swaths of land? As a theory manual, Large Parks gives nuanced thoughts of how large parks are conceptualized, designed, built, and then managed. Any architect, planner, geographer, or landscape architect will benefit from thinking about the reuse of aged land for parkland and the rhetoric of “process = park” embodied theatrically in a large park.

ERIKA HUDDLESTON is completing her master’s degree in Landscape Architecture.  She received a BA in Art History from Vanderbilt University and a Certificate in Interior Design from Parsons School of Design.  She has worked in textile design in New York and for the Trinity River Waterfront Project in Dallas with Wallace, Roberts, and Todd Landscape Architects.  She is interested in grottos and rocaille in landscape and the history of landscape architecture education.

Martin K. Thomen

In his recent book, Planet of Slums, Mike Davis takes the reader into a place where no human should ever have to venture, but one that is home to many: the slums of the world. Unfortunately, slum life is the daily reality for millions around the world, and the numbers are growing.

Davis, a professor of history at UC-Irvine and an editor of New Left Review, introduces the reader to the prevalence and growth of slums in the first two chapters. Taking the reader on what sometimes seems like a worldwide tour from hell to places like Ajegunle, Dadaad, and Campos Eliseos, Davis stuns the reader with a roll call of growth and demographic facts. He seeks to establish the fact that slums are widespread, growing rapidly, and expected to grow more.

In the following chapters the author seeks to delve deeper into the issue by debunking widely held myths about slum proliferation. His third chapter, “Treason of the State,” focuses on his contention that the rally cry of capitalism around the globe to ease restrictions and create an environment acutely attuned to business growth has served to undermine state structures that formerly mitigated the worst causes and effects of slums. For instance, the housing crisis in inner cities fueled by migration or population growth was formerly absorbed by public housing, but today public housing is the exception rather than the rule in most countries.

Davis later outlines the fact that squatters’ settlements originally occupied lands at no financial cost, but that this is not the case in slums today. Today, slum housing is a very highly controlled sector and is usually a profi t-making venture for many upper-class citizens who own the land, gangs who control it, or corrupt officials who illegally rent out public land. Instead of romanticized “built from the ground up” or “community building” ideas of slum construction, traditional landlord/lessee relationships are the norm. Far from freeloading off the land, slum dwellers pay a relatively high price for their housing, in addition to high transportation costs because of the peripheral location of many slums. Davis punctuates these disgraceful facts by describing the horrible conditions in which the residents must live.

Chapter 6, “Slum Ecology,” describes how slum dwellers face floods, gas explosions, raw sewage, and air pollution in addition to poor housing conditions. Davis explores transportation issues much more deeply in this chapter. The vicious cycle of less government funding for public transportation, poorer transportation service, and increased congestion caused by more private cars does not only mean a longer commute and higher prices for slum dwellers; for many, it is a deadly situation. Because these settlements are not “developed areas” in a legal sense, they are frequently the first to experience public transit service cuts and are seen by many in power as ideal sites to build new superhighways to whisk the car owners from the suburbs into the city center. This creates a dangerous situation where pedestrians seeking to board transit or walk to their destination must cross multilane superhighways and other infrastructure which, while benefiting the wealthier classes, is a lethal obstacle course for those who will never benefit from them. The author cites high-profile incidents to underscore his point like a gas explosion in Mexico City that killed over two thousand people and the infamous Union Carbide poisoning an estimated twenty-five thousand people in Bhopal.

In the following chapter, smartly called “SAPing the Third World,” Davis returns to myth-busting mode and studies the role that international organizations and the Washington Consensus play in slum growth. SAP is the International Monetary Fund’s acronym for its Structural Adjustment Programs. Using debt and political pressure from Washington and its allies, the IMF and World Bank have used SAPs to restructure the economies of debtowing countries. This restructuring usually comes in the form of deregulation, selling off of valuable state assets, and an unweaving of the social safety net in the name of government efficiency. While SAPs may benefit wealthier countries that wish to collect debt, they spell doom for debtor countries and especially slum dwellers, who rely on the social safety net and state help that are undermined by “structural adjustment.” Davis points out that those areas where slum growth is fastest are also where SAPs have had the most devastating effects. He writes that urban Africa and Latin America have been hit with artifi cial depression, characterized by falling wages, increased unemployment, regressive taxation, and collapsing public health structures caused by SAPs. Furthermore, many autocrats supported by the West, like General Pinochet of Chile, not only commit egregious human rights abuses against their political enemies, but also promote neoliberal policies favored by Washington that leave millions of citizens resorting to slum living.

Davis’s last chapter, which asks the question, “A Surplus of Humanity?,” does not leave the reader with a rosy picture of a happily ending story. He uses these pages to denounce the rise of the informal work sector, which provides grim jobs for slum dwellers. This work—which includes rag picking, petty labor, and scavenging—never creates opportunities for the “up-by-the-bootstrap promotion” embraced by neoliberal theorists. Davis also explores the sociocultural effects of slum life as he enumerates mental and spiritual survival tactics such as sorcery, witchcraft, and evangelism that have spread throughout slum areas, sometimes with negative consequences.

As he does throughout the book, Davis ends the chapter with a blunt truth-and-consequences commentary aimed squarely at the neoliberal capitalism that has defined world politics and urban policies for the past fi fty years. His epilogue, “Down Vietnam Street,” quotes Western sources such as the CIA and RAND Corporation as proof that even Western institutions are aware of the pending crisis caused by the broken promises to the slum dwellers and lower classes of the world. He points out that the “homeland versus evildoers” paradigm is ill-equipped to handle the demographic and ecological realities that must be faced in the decades to come as millions who have been handed a raw deal by neoliberal capitalism may overwhelm those who choose to defend the Orwellian status quo.

Overall, Planet of Slums is an embracing, if at times dispiriting, and truthful exposé of the urban world today and emerging trends for the future. The author does not seek to paint an optimistic view of the future, but he surely presents a wicked challenge and some paths to solutions for those who seek to create a more promising future for all humans, especially those millions who are crowded together and living in terrible conditions.

MARTIN THOMEN is a recent CRP graduate (May 2008). He earned a master’s degree in CRP with a transportation planning specialization and also has a BA and BS from UT Austin. He currently works as a transportation planner.

Chang Yi

Urban sprawl is a ubiquitous form of our built environment in metropolitan America, which planners as well as the public have recognized as being a product of household choices vis-à-vis land use and transportation. Local zoning regimes have been perceived as the guardians of such “market outcomes,” translating preferences for suburban living into their corresponding realities. In light of this perception, advocates for compact developments cast their arguments for planning transit- and pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods in terms of the negative consequences of sprawl versus travel behavior benefits of the proposed alternative developments (e.g., reduced automobile use). In Zoned Out, Levine takes a critical stance toward such a framework, pointing out that it is groundless and inadequate. The author claims that the negative consequences of sprawl are not an outcome of market failure, but rather of planning failure, pronounced in exclusive zoning that prohibits high-density and mixed-use developments. Levine states, “Despite its pervasiveness and academic pedigree, the reinterpretation of municipal land-use regulation as a kind of market force is unwarranted.” The tendency to equate zoning with market preferences dates back to the 1920s. Since the Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty case established the constitutionality of zoning, Levine argues, the legal community has granted zoning a special exemption from judicial scrutiny with regard to its public purposes. Although zoning was based on police power state regulation of land use, judges have accepted the notion that zoning is a collective property right inherent to municipalities. This reasoning, prevalent in the judicial community, has resulted in the favorable treatment of zoning and in municipal governments being granted prerogative on local land use matters. “Viewing land-use regulation as a property right held by the municipality serves to legitimate parochial ends as long as these are the preferences of the locals.”

When zoning is interpreted in this way, urban sprawl is seen as a natural outcome of unrestrained household choices driven by real estate markets, and the promotion of compact developments becomes equivalent to a planning intervention that acts as a restraint on the market process. In such a case, establishing the transportation benefits of compact developments is assumed to be a necessary condition to legitimize governmental intervention (e.g., the subsidizing of compact developments). Zoned Out offers an alternative perspective: Levine argues that sprawl is not a market outcome, but rather a consequence of municipal zoning favorable to low-density built environments. Planning for dense urban forms, therefore, is not an intervention; instead, it rather diversifies choice sets in the housing market by allowing such development options. Thus, Levine argues, there is no burden of proof necessary to justify such a widening of the market horizon; “the first order of business is the elimination of regulatory obstacles to compact development, a search for the travel behavior benefits that would justify governmental intervention is poorly matched with the policy task at hand.”

In Zoned Out, Levine supports this idea with empirical evidence drawn from his research in Atlanta and Boston. His study indicates that Atlanta households with preferences for transit- and pedestrian-oriented developments are less likely to be able to satisfy their desires than Boston households. On the other hand, given the diverse sorts of neighborhoods found in Boston, Bostonian households have greater opportunities to act on their transportation and land use preferences. That is, the supply of alternative developments is not meeting the demand in Atlanta’s sprawled metropolitan area. In essence, the study contends that zoning is not an instrument for ensuring market efficiency, but rather is a form of regulation that distorts market forces, since it prevents households from matching their preferences to actual choices. Then, Levine’s argument to “eliminate regulatory obstacles” is justified.

These findings shed new light on the problem of selection bias in transportation research. For more than two decades, in transportation research circles, isolating the pure effects of urban forms on travel from self-selection has been a difficult issue for researchers. For instance, to determine whether a transit-oriented neighborhood elicits greater transit ridership, researchers seek to separate the impact on travel behavior of average individuals from individuals who moved to the area because of their preference for taking public transit. Levine suggests that “the view that self-selection is inherently a source of bias to be measured and eliminated presupposes that these market preferences for transit- and pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods have already been satisfied.” As Levine finds in the study on Atlanta and Boston, this is not the case. He claims that the bias is, in fact, an evidence of the travel benefits of dense and mixed-use urban forms, since that bias (households moving into transit-oriented neighborhoods to satisfy their travel preferences) represents a fulfillment of the previously unmet demands of residential choices. To land use and transportation research communities, this discussion provides new provoking arguments and insights.

Overall, Levine offers a critical understanding of the nature of zoning, in particular the ways in which it prevents alternative developments, and presents a new perspective for future research. Yet, the book raises some questions. Implicitly, Levine makes the fundamental assumption that expanding market choices for individuals does not require proving travel behavior benefits. Nonetheless, proving such benefits still matters when encouraging scarce development forms whose societal impact is still not clearly identified. What if an unconstrained creation of high-density and mixed land use developments generates negative by-products? In the last chapter of his book, Levine describes the state planning mandate in Oregon as an exemplary solution for fostering alternative developments. However, Oregon’s statewide growth management scheme drove up Portland’s housing prices as well as population density within its urban growth boundary. Though research on this issue is inconclusive, it would appear that due to the lack of affordable housing in the central city, low-income households have been displaced to more peripheral areas with lower land prices. This may have resulted in longer commutes to the city center, while causing heavier traffic congestion within the inner city. At this juncture, when the impact of high-density and mixed-use developments is uncertain, research efforts to establish the travel behavior benefits of alternative developments are indeed meaningful.

Notwithstanding this criticism, Zoned Out, taken as a whole, successfully challenges the commonly accepted belief regarding the role of zoning in shaping metropolitan America. The implications for future research are substantial. By reading Levine’s work, transportation planners and researchers will be exposed to a new and intelligent perspective with which to form strong arguments for justifying smart growth

Olivia Starr

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s New Source Review (NSR) program is ripe for change. Since the late 1970s, when the United States began regulating air quality, NSR has been one of the EPA’s key tools to enforce emission standards. It requires new or significantly upgraded stationary sources, a fixed-site producer of pollution, such as a factory, to adhere to stricter emission standards than existing stationary sources. At the inception of the program, policy makers argued that NSR was the most cost-effective method of imposing air quality regulations; significant long-term air quality improvements would come due to the “inevitable” retirement of old polluters (Edison Electric Institute, 2001).

These policy makers did not account for the fact that NSR increases economic incentives to delay upgrading technology and to extend the use of old stationary polluters beyond their expected life span. These new economic incentives are implicated in other problems with NSR: vague defi nitions of which upgrades trigger stricter emissions standards, delayed application processing times, and inconsistent permitting practices. In nonattainment areas, geographic regions defined by the EPA that do not comply with national ambient air quality standards (Callan and Thomas, 2007), NSR enforces lower technology standards (Edison Electric Institute, 2001). During the Bush administration, new rules created even more loopholes allowing polluters to avoid NSR, sparking a legal battle between multiple states and the EPA (Chemical Week, 2009).

Although many critics of NSR would like to see a move toward a national cap and trade market–based system, such as the Acid Rain Program, some powerful states and regions are pushing for individual trading programs for a variety of reasons. Some state regulators are not convinced the federal government will go far enough in restricting emissions; others insist that the revenue from pollution permits go straight into the states’ coffers. For a variety of reasons, we cannot expect widespread support for a national trading program in the near future. What is critical is that the EPA embrace immediate changes to NSR that will serve to dramatically improve the quality of life for the more than 150 million Americans currently living in nonattainment areas (U.S. EPA, 2008).

To make an immediate improvement to NSR, the EPA can provide local and state officials a larger role in determining community-based approaches to mitigating the environmental impacts of stationary polluters, especially in nonattainment areas. By incorporating best practices from the “Smart Growth” program into an emissions review process, states and local governments could come up with environmental improvement plans; NSR would become part of a holistic program that does not include simply technology, but other mitigation techniques such as creating “green” jobs, providing employees with free passes for public transportation, and dedicating open space. Cities and states could sign off on a fi rm’s mitigation plan before NSR even begins.

If the package of technology, mitigation techniques, and emission standards for NSR were more fl exible, this would encourage fi rms to fi le for NSR more readily (if fi rms also have faith in the consistency and timeliness of the permitting process). This policy would help states and cities that are struggling to reach air quality attainment standards to work with fi rms and find mutually beneficial solutions that are less costly than higher technology standards. Firms would be motivated to participate in the creation of these mitigation plans not only for permitting, but also to reap the public relations benefits at a relatively low cost. Moreover, states are less likely to begin lawsuits over NSR if the states themselves have signed off on the emission mitigation plan.

How good ideas became bad policy

As part of the 1977 Clean Air Act Amendments, Congress first established the federal NSR program as an administrative mechanism to regulate emission of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, particulate matter, and sulfur dioxide. The premise of the program is that it is more cost-effective to phase in stricter emission standards by starting with new or significantly upgraded stationary sources rather than existing stationary sources. To implement the higher standards, EPA reviews proposals for construction and approves plans that employ certain technology. Technological thresholds are not constant for all permits; a proposal for a new or modified source located in an attainment area must meet the highest standards (Best Available Control Technology) to get a Prevention of Serious Deterioration permit, while in a nonattainment area, a new or modified source must use technology that results in lowest achievable emission rate, as defined by the State Implementation Plan (SIP) to get a nonattainment NSR permit (U.S. EPA, 2007; Callan and Thomas, 2007).

The reason NSR has survived now more than thirty years is not that the program has proven to be a clear success. The logic of NSR efficiency  reducing pollution is intuitively appealing—and some proponents claim that it is a market-based approach—but the program only holds up if one makes the following assumptions: 1) existing polluters will have the same economic life span that they have had in the absence of NSR; 2) the permitting process does not create inordinate barriers to entry or disincentives to upgrade existing technology; and 3) there is an objective, straightforward process for determining what modifi cations require NSR. Unfortunately, as evidenced by the slew of legal challenges to NSR, these assumptions do not hold true. The permitting process is inconsistent, time-consuming, and costly. It has created substantial barriers to entry and disincentives to upgrade currently in-use technology, while at the same time creating substantial incentives to extend the useful lives of existing polluters (Stavins, 2004).

The true advantage of NSR is its political viability. By enforcing more lenient standards on existing polluters, federal legislators avoid upsetting potential campaign supporters. Another important aspect of the program is the degree of control left to the states. If the EPA decided to implement a nationwide cap and trade program for emissions, individual states would have little say in how the program was enforced. But with NSR, states have been some of the key litigants in cases against companies that have violated NSR, such as in the recent American Electric Power settlement that resulted in the utility paying a $15 million penalty and spending $4.6 billion upgrading pollution controls in its plants (Cusick, 2007). In February 2009, New Jersey sued the EPA because of a perceived lack of oversight in its new federal reporting monitoring requirements (Boyle, 2008). States are clearly determined to maintain their power in emission regulatory enforcement.

Why planners should get involved with NSR

Since NSR has not been an effective or efficiency cient method of emission regulation, despite numerous legal cases and revisions to the rules, it is time to rehaul the system. The lessons learned from NSR are that: 1) vintage-differentiated regulations—regulations that consider age as a primary criterion for eligibility—distort the “regulatory market”; 2) legislation needs to create specific guidelines for administrative decisions, such as precise criteria, timetables, and methods for administrative adjudication to avoid costly lawsuits; and 3) states need to have a degree of regulatory control. Although we now have a major shift in Washington’s political climate that can create momentum for the massive restructuring that needs to occur, the following discussion focuses on short-term solutions that broadly fit within the existing NSR structure and offers some reforms that boost local and state control in enforcement strategies.

First, there needs to be a reversal of the more lenient regulatory policies in nonattainment areas. The logic of applying less-burdensome standards to nonattainment areas is that it would be more costly for those areas to live up to the same standards as areas of attainment—similar to the logic of vintage differentiation. What makes the nonattainment distinction more worrisome is that there are no grounds for assuming that more high rates of emissions will naturally fall out of use. According to the EPA’s Web site, there are 150,861,931 people currently living in nonattainment areas throughout the United States. In 1997, that number was approximately 113 million, even though the number of nonattainment areas has actually decreased nationwide (U.S. EPA, 2008). More analysis of demographic trends in nonattainment areas is needed, but from these numbers one could assume that even as less space is designated nonattainment, the population density within these areas is increasing. Planners should work with policy makers to formulate a more aggressive approach to emissions regulation in nonattainment areas to protect these at-risk populations.

Stationary sources are not necessarily the most significant contributors to emissions in all nonattainment areas, but providing stationary sources in these areas with incentives for mitigating the impacts of their emissions will create greater short- and long-term benefits. This is also an opportunity to strengthen the role of state and local governments in setting and enforcing pollution regulations. Currently, if the EPA designates an area as nonattainment, the state must do an inventory of the excessive pollutant(s) in the area and integrate the findings into transportation plans, maintenance plans, and NSR regulations. The state must also submit reports to the EPA to demonstrate plans for reaching attainment. The penalties for prolonged periods of nonattainment can include denying the state its highway funding and higher standards for NSR; the federal government, in effect, punishes state and local governments, with little to no direct impact on the polluters themselves (U.S. EPA, 2007). 

What is missing from the current model is the ability for state and local governments to incentivize environmental controls rather than simply suing the firms that do not meet nationally set emission standards, which is a reaction to the EPA’s determination of an area’s nonattainment. There are a few examples of local governments setting environmental criteria for granting tax breaks in economic development projects, which may help pass NSR, but this is not standard practice nationwide and does not provide comprehensive regulation. 

If the EPA incorporates some of the best practices from its “Smart Growth” program into a more flexible review process involving state and local governments, the federal government could make NSR part of a more holistic program that targets the pollution sources directly. For example, new and existing stationary sources located within a nonattainment area could be required to submit mitigation plans to local or state authorities before submitting construction plans for NSR. Firms would determine the content of the mitigation plans based upon a locally determined set of preferred offsets detailed in an environmental improvement plan. These offsets would improve environmental standards for surrounding communities without significantly adding to the firm’s implementations costs. Offsets could be installing green roofs on facilities, providing transit passes for all of its employees, investing in stormwater retention pools, funding community gardens in low-income neighborhoods, locating new facilities in a vacant industrial complex, training inner-city residents for “green-collar” jobs, reducing chemical waste, et cetera.

It is naive to suggest that increasing requirements for cooperation between polluting firms, planners, and the EPA is a comprehensive or long-term solution to improving air quality, but it is crucial that planners assume a more proactive role in national policy-making; planning is not only a defensive or coping mechanism for local and state authorities, but an integrative tool that allows communities to improve overall quality of life. This must be done in cooperation with the lowest and highest levels of government.

OLIVIA STARR is completing her Master’s degrees in Community and Regional Planning and Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin. She has a B.A. in European History from Northwestern University. Her research interests include property rights and security.

Works Cited

Boyle, Katherine. N.J. Sues EPA Over Reporting Rule for Factories, Coal Plants. Greenwire. 20 February 2008. <http://www.eenews. net/Greenwire/nsr/2008/02/20/3> (26 March 2008).

Callan, Scott J., and Janet M. Thomas. Environmental Economics & Management. 4th ed.Mason, Ohio: Thomson South-Western, 2007.

Cusick, Daniel. AEP Settlement Ends Long Battle Over Power Plant Upgrades. Greenwire. 9 October 2007. <http://www. eenews.net/Greenwire/nsr/2007/10/09/1> (26 March 2008).

New Source Review: A History. Edison Electric Institute. July 2001. <www.eei.org> (26 March 2008).

EPA Changes New Source Review Rules. Chemical Week. 19 Jan 2009.<http://www.chemweek.com/envirotech/regulatory/16489.html> (26 March 2009).

Stavins, Robert N. Experience with Market-Based Environmental Policy Instruments. Vol. I, in Handbook of Environmental Economics, by Karl-Göran Mäler and Jeffrey Vincent, edited by Karl-Göran Mäler and Jeffrey Vincent, 355-435. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 2003.

Stavins, Robert N. Vintage-Differentiated Environmental Regulation. Resources. Nov 2005. <www.rff.org> (26 March 2008).

New Source Review: Basic Information. U.S. EPA. 11 May 2007. <http://www.epa.gov/NSR/info.html> (26 March 2008).

Number of People Living in Areas Designated ‘Nonattainment’ by State. U.S. EPA. 12 March 2008.<http://www.epa.gov/airprogm/ oar/oaqps/greenbk/stpop.html> (26 March 2008).

Fadillah Putra

In public administration or in the public policy realm, crisis management is given little attention either in the academic or in the professional worlds (Schneider, 1995). Traditional public administration focuses only on planned and programmed activities, meaning those passed through long public policy making phases and procedures. This process creates the general perception of public administration as a science in which organizational and bureaucratic routines become the main concern. However, the most challenging role of government is not to control these routines, but rather to perform well when tested by crisis (Farazmand, 2007). There are many stories that relate government’s failures to cope with crises. At the same time, victims rely heavily on government actions during crisis, because they always think that government is the most responsible institution to handle a crisis (Boin, 2005). However, the literature on crisis management in the public sector is very limited.

This essay explores some strategic topics of crisis management that are relevant to the development of public administration science. Those topics are: (1) the basic understanding of crisis management in public affairs; (2) the role of government in a crisis situation at both national and local levels; (3) the role of international organizations; and (4) the media and civil society involvement in crisis management. Comparative case studies (Hurricane Katrina in the U.S. and the Lapindo Mud Explosion in Indonesia) will be provided in order to give real-world perspective to these four aspects.

Understanding a crisis situation

As commonly understood in much of the literature on the topic, including the U.N. standard, there are two contexts of crises: natural and man-made (Samal, 2005; Schneider, 1995; Nudell, 1988). However, some crisis management scholars are not satisfied with this categorization. Ali Farazmand (2001) argues that there are four contexts of crisis: political, economic, leadership, and environmental. This categorization is very descriptive and provides more details about man-made crises (political, economic, and leadership). The environmental context is still ambiguous because environmental crises could be man-made (such as the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in Alaska in 1989) or natural (the Asian Tsunami in 2004 or Hurricane Katrina the year after).

On the other hand, Schoff (2004) differentiates crises into three contexts: natural, incidents, and accidents. Through this categorization, he explains the dimensions of man-made crisis, which he defines as accidents (unintentional man-made crises, such as the Three Mile Island case in Pennsylvania in 1979, and Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986) and incident (intentional man-made crises, such as terrorist attacks or war). These different contexts of crisis are crucial in shaping and evaluating government response.

A further important distinction is the differentiation of incidents when a true crisis situation is present or incidents in which events are in the normal parameters of public sector activity. First of all, a crisis situation relates to a particular situation when government capacity is inadequate to handle a situation using its own resources (Ozerdem, 2006). For example, if a bus accident happens and kills seven people, it is not a crisis, because the police and hospital can handle it with their own resources. But if the bus contains a bomb and explodes right in the middle of downtown, it injures thousands of people, the police aren’t able to handle the panic, and the hospitals don’t have enough space for victims, then that is a crisis. Other characteristics of a crisis are: severe threat (Farazmand, 2001; Rosenthal, 2001); threat to the basic structure (physical and nonphysical) and values (such as security, welfare, or health) of society (Boin, 2004; Farazmand, 2007); the inconceivability and unexpected nature of an event (Dror in Rosenthal, 2001); and an event that generates extreme psychological stress (Schneider, 1995). With this complex explanation of the term “crisis,” the best way to understand it is not to perceive it as the particular calamity moments themselves, but how the event relates to an organization’s capacity to respond to the situation (Smith, 2006). There are many types of crisis situations. In general, we can differentiate crisis into two types: sudden crisis (such as tsunami, terrorist attack, or nuclear reactor explosion) and creeping crisis (such as

spreading of a virus or the global warming threat) (Farazmand, 2001). More details of this typology of crisis can be seen in fi gure 1.

Obviously, the hardest crisis to cope with is a fast-developing one, because the degree of preparedness of the government to handle it is very low. On the other hand, in a slow-developing crisis, such as a cathartic or creeping crisis, if the awareness of the government to the crisis is low, it could create long-term and possibly irreversible damages.

Along with the negative face of a crisis, some crisis events may yield positive outcomes. A crisis could become a triggering opportunity for improvement of the system (Farazmand, 2001; Nudell, 1988; Rosenthal, 2001). A postcrisis reconstruction process could yield outcomes that are better than the precrisis situation, and the government also is afforded the opportunity to learn about its own weaknesses and thus improve upon its substantial ability to respond to future crisis events.

Good crisis management

There are at least three domains in which crisis management is systematically analyzed by scholars: business, international politics, and public affairs. Business is a discipline in which crisis management is a prominent subject of discussion. In this area, crisis management relates to how to make the corporation survive after a crisis, meaning how to “avoid suffering financial losses after the crisis” (Laye, 2002). The study of crisis management is also commonly found in international relation studies, most commonly related to potential war between countries. The main goal of crisis management is ensuring that the tensions between countries do not turn into war, and that good diplomacy will be the main strategy of crisis management in this sense (Winham, 1988, Schoff, 2004). The last discipline that is concerned with crisis management, though not as much as the previous two, is in public affairs/administration. In this domain, crisis management relates to how government can prevent, react to, and rehabilitate after a crisis. This essay will only focus on the discussion of crisis and response from the perspective of public sector intervention and management of domestic crises. Public sector crisis management in general can be defined as the implementation of management principles (such as planning, organizing, decision making, coordinating, and controlling) in a crisis or emergency situation (Samal, 2005; Nudel, 1988; Rosenthal, 2001).

However, crisis management is not merely applying basic management principles into a crisis context. Uriel Rosenthal (2001), for instance, explained that the crucial phases of crisis management are prevention, planning, response, and aftermath actions. The last phase (aftermath action) is not a part of the traditional public management discussion. Indeed, there are some specific phases in crisis management that are not part of traditional management principles.

There are three specific phases of public sector crisis management. The first is the preventive aspect; some scholars describe this aspect using different terms, such as planning, preparedness, and/or mitigation. The second is the rehabilitation aspect; some scholars call this aspect relief, recovery, response, or aftermath actions. This aspect is also the key aspect of crisis management (Ozerdem, 2006; Drennan, 2007; Samal 2005). The third one is coordination; this aspect is not specific to a crisis management context, but “coordination” between institutions in a rapidly changing situation has been emphasized by many scholars. Since an “in-crisis” government may not seek to limit incoming resources (Farazmand, 2007), many organizations may intervene to provide help or goods. Therefore, during or after a calamity, there are often many organizations, institutions, and elements coming into the crisis location. Coordinating those organizations so that the distribution of goods and the activities of each institution will not confl ict or overlap is a major challenge for government (Nudel, 1988).

The next step in analyzing public sector crisis management is evaluating the effectiveness of crisis management in practice. Boin (2008) raises three important requirements for good crisis management, which are: sense making, how to understand the situation quickly; meaning making, how to create solid information for media and the public; and learning, how government can learn from the crisis to improve its capacity. Additionally, Ali Farazmand (2007) emphasizes “creative and agile leadership” as the most important requirement for good crisis management.

There are also some specific crisis management requirements that apply to urban areas. First, local governments need to have their own strong crisis management systems, which will allow them not to rely heavily on central government when the crisis occurs (Rosenthal, 2001). The cases of the 9/11 terrorist attack in New York City in 2001, 11/3 in Madrid in 2004, and the Mexico City earthquake in 1985 showed how important it is for cities to have their own crisis management system. Cities should have their own crisis management system because of the density of inhabitants and because they are the centers of business and government networks. Yet, Kartez and Lindell (in Sylves, 1990) said that while “80 percent of the U.S. local governments have a formal disaster plan and system, their leaders continue to be surprised when the crisis occurs.” Therefore, the existence of a strong system is no longer the issue, but rather how to familiarize relevant agencies and responsible leaders with the system in order for them to use it with efficiency.

The second important requirement for urban area crisis management is multiethnic awareness. Obviously, urban areas have had urbanization and immigration for a long time. Urban areas are the melting pot of many cultures and ethnicities. Every ethnic group has its own standard norms and values; therefore, if the crisis leaders are not sensitive to this aspect, misunderstandings between government and the people could interrupt the process of crisis responses and relief (Rosenthal, 2001). Both ethnic differences of the urban social aspect could disrupt the rehabilitation process and economic gaps. Poor communities (which in some senses are also related to certain ethnic groups) are the most vulnerable groups during a crisis: In New Orleans [during the Katrina crisis], local

government did not provide transportation for the citizens without their own vehicles to evacuate. As it turns out, most of them were in predominately black neighborhoods. Racial and economic demographics in disaster-prone zone has bee shown to be common adjoining hazardous material sties. . . . In July 2005, monsoon rains flooded the Indian city of Mumbai (Bombay) and eight million of India’s poorest were the victims. (Pinkowski 2008, 12)

Good crisis management also strongly depends on decision-making strategies. Figure 2 emphasizes how decision making can achieve maximum accuracy when the decision maker working in a crisis situation makes good decisions rapidly, despite risk and time pressures. The first and the most important step in this method is situation assessment, which involves attending to a selection of the available cues, assembling them into a pattern, and searching long-term memory to recognize the problem (Flin, Youngson, and Yule, 2006).

The second step is choosing decision-making strategies based on the types of crisis (fi gure 1). If the type of crisis is “fast burning,” crisis leaders might choose recognition-primed/intuitive because this method is good for quick action to prevent a rapid cascade to a catastrophic adverse outcome. If the type of crisis is “cathartic crisis,” the leader should use rule-based strategy because he/she has enough time to consult with the procedures manual/checklist to find the given responses. If the type of crisis is “long shadow,” the leader may use analytical strategy because he/she has more time to recall a number of possible courses of action and compares them simultaneously to determine which one best fits the needs of the situation. Lastly, if the type of crisis is “slow burning,” a crisis leader could use creative strategy because there is plenty of time for him/her to try any innovative solutions to solve the problem. However, one still has to keep in mind that evacuating and aiding victims is the first priority regardless of which strategy is chosen.

Ultimately, the fundamental concept of good crisis management is determined by the “gap between bureaucratic norm and emergent norm” (Schneider, 1995). The more government can shrink the gap, the better the crisis management will be. Bureaucratic norms always value regularities, procedures, and blueprints. Public officers are required to follow the procedures and blueprints tightly in order to precede their jobs. However, in emergent norms, the situation is the opposite. Crisis situations change very fast and most of the time are unpredictable. Therefore, instead of following the bureaucratic procedures, emergent norms requires crisis officers to be adaptive to the situation. As there are no regularities in crisis situations, emergent norms require public officers to instead come up with strategies to handle the problem rather than simply use blueprints and regulations. The bureaucratic procedures and the emergent norms contradict each other, posing a big challenge for public management of crises.

In a crisis situation, government needs to be more adaptive (emergent norm). On the other hand, it also has to ensure the legal accountability (bureaucratic norm) of each decision it takes. Dealing with these two norms, of course, is not an easy task. In so doing, governments need to adjust their bureaucratic norms to the realities and needs that exist on the ground during the crisis situation. This is crucially important for public sector leaders when they are facing a crisis situation. Of course, in “long shadow” and “slow burning” types of crisis, government could impose its bureaucratic norm, but not in a “fast burning” crisis.

In sum, there are four main criteria to measure the performance of public sector crisis management. First, the question is whether or not the government has a crisis management system within its organization. The tasks of the system are preventive, rehabilitation, and coordination measures. Second is the question of the sensitivity of government to multi-identities (including ethnic, class, age, and gender) while rescuing the victims. The third criteria is related to decision-making strategy in a crisis situation. And the fourth is the question of how successfully the government can adjust its bureaucratic norms with emergent norms in the crisis situation.

Role of government

Most governments do not pay too much attention to crisis management because they think that a crisis is an unusual and unpredictable situation, so well-planned and organizational actions from government are not needed. Yet, governments have to be the most prepared institutions, because people (especially victims) always expect that governments will play central roles during crises (Drennan, 2007; Boin, 2008). Moreover, the failure of a government to cope with a crisis is not tolerated politically; failure to effectively respond to a crisis situation could destroy the political legitimacy of a regime (Boin, 2005). Crisis, hence, must be seen as a test for government (Farazmand, 2007).

Arjen Boin described four aspects of government that are impacted by crisis. Among them are “effects on key political officeholders, strength of leadership, political institutions and policy changes” (Boin, 2008, 292). Moreover, government is sometimes held responsible in a crisis, especially if it fails to take adequate preventive efforts. For example, when government fails to educate people or to implement important standards about building safer housing for earthquakes (like the tsunami) more people may be killed because of this lack of action (Samal, 2005; Ozerdem, 2006). Indeed, the main idea of crisis management is not to stop the occurrence of calamities, especially from natural crises, but the most critical objective in any crisis is “to contain damages as much as possible and prevent the loss of life and property” (Kalantari in Farazmand, 2004, 619). This is basic criteria to evaluate governments’ core role in the overall crisis management system.

Why do some governments succeed while others fail in handling a crisis? Saundra K. Schneider (1995) reminds us to be careful when judging a government’s success or failure in terms of crisis management, because judgments are usually based on public opinion (media) rather than based on objective evaluation. Of course public opinion is important, but it is not the only instrument of judgment that should be taken into consideration. The other complication of judging the failures of government is to decide if government actions are too slow or if public demand is unrealistic. Therefore, Schneider ended up measuring the gap between the bureaucratic norm and the emergent norm as the main tool to evaluate the quality of a government’s crisis management.

In terms of quality of crisis management, there is an interesting and important argument that claims that the weatlth of a country does not affect the quality of crisis management. A study conducted by Ozerdem (2006) in Japan, Turkey, and India serves as an example for this argument. Japan, as one of the wealthiest countries in the world, has a lack of volunteerism (which is extremely important during a crisis), due to its modern individualized society. In India, on the other hand, there was no lack of volunteerism, but the country does have problems in infrastructure because of economic reasons.

This argument is important because no countries’ leaders should be overconfirmed dent or underestimate themselves regarding crisis preparedness. All countries have the same chance of being successful or failing. The capacity of government to cope with crisis depends on how seriously the government thinks about this particular issue.

Quality crisis management is not only related to fewer numbers of victims, but also to how much government can learn, and then make progressive changes from the crisis. In the case of Japan, there were policy and administrative changes; in Turkey they had bureaucratic paradigmatic shifts after the Marmara earthquake; but in India there were not so many changes after the crises (Ozerdem, 2006; Boin, 2008). Therefore, the point of crisis as an opportunity does not always happen. Sometimes a crisis does not affect anything or even makes the status quo stronger.

The concrete actions that governments can take in crisis management fall into three categories. First are preventive actions. In the cases of slow-developing crises, governments can implement long-term measures, while in cases of fast-developing crises governments can have a high-level preparedness system to minimize victims when a crisis occurs (Samal, 2005). This sort of action calls for rigorous contingency planning, which consists of defining roles of responsibilities and the line of command guidance in a crisis event (Drennan, 2007). Second, during the crisis governments have to create a clear, organized command structure, which can coordinate and control the situation (Kalatari in Farazmand, 2004). Third, after a crisis, management is related to how governments can encourage people to overcome their own problems with government assistance (Samal, 2005).

Some countries already have a good government crisis response system. The U.S., for instance, has a crisis response system that puts community and local government at the forefront. The system also includes coordination at state and federal levels, and it decides when to send FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) to the location after presidential declaration. However, there are some problems, such as overlap of responsibilities within government institutions, public officials who are unable to coordinate all elements, due to the budget constraint, that make the system not work perfectly (Schneider, 1995). In London, responsibilities among local departments for handling crisis situations is stated clearly, and specific job distribution includes what police, hospitals, fi refi ghters, and others should do when a crisis occurs (Drennan, 2007, 131). We can find a good example of a government crisis management system in Iran through a council (NETF/National Emergency Task Force) that has the three main duties of “prevention, relief and reconstruction which are constitutionally stated in article number 5-2” (Kalatari in Farazmand, 2004, 621). From these examples, we can see that in regard to a good crisis management model, the content of intergovernment relations shape the response system.

The relationship between local and central governments is the central issue in the discussion of the government’s role in crisis management. First of all, the capacity of local government has to be clarifi ed. In terms of crisis management, the meaning of capacity is linked with fi nances (how much money should be allocated to maintain the system), authority (how much discretion it has in making decisions), skill (how many experts it has), and administration capacity (how good is the credibility of organization and infrastructure). Some scholars, such as Settle, Cigler, and Vittes, argue that besides these internal aspects (local government capacity) coordination problems between local and central governments have also led to failures of crisis coping elsewhere (Sylves, 1990).

Local governments need to have their own crisis management institutions, especially for big cities (Pinkowski, 2008, 158; Rosenthal, 1994). Therefore, decentralization is important in crisis management. Decentralization in this sense is not only meant to empower local governments so that they have discretion in their decision making, but also provides more money and other resources. In the case of a large-scale crisis, the central government needs to do coordination of interstate borders and aid victims without sacrifi cing local autonomy by government impact (Pinkowski, 2008).

Lastly, governments ought to treat crises and disasters like they treat any other policy sectors such as transportation, education, health, or agriculture. The treatment of crisis implies not only creating specific institutions and organizations to handle them, but also creating a good planning strategy, implementation strategy, and evaluation system regarding crisis management (Schneider, 1995).

The role of media

The role of the media is emphasized in the literature on crisis management. This fact shows the significant part that media plays in the whole context of crisis management study. There are three aspects to present in this section: the basic understanding of the media, the position of media in a crisis situation, and how government should handle media in crisis management.

The media is a news business and they live from selling news. News is always related to unique and unusual events (Nudell, 1988, Rosenthal, 2001); there is massive violence, destruction, and acute human or company culpability in particular accidents (Nudell, 1988, 64; Boin, 2005, 72). Normal and regular events are not considered news in the media’s perspective. Thousands of airplanes landing safely every day is not news, but one failed landing is news. Therefore, disaster and crisis situations always become news, the commodity that media always wants to sell. Network news organizations, along with print journalists, want to report items that will appeal to the widest possible audience. Stories about unmanageable disaster conditions, bureaucratic indifference to human suffering, and the sheer human chaos produced by natural catastrophes are attractive scenarios from a journalistic perspective. (Schneider, 1995, 164–165)

However, the media have been playing a very significant role, especially in providing information to the public. The media does not only provide information about the situation during and after a crisis, but also information regarding preparedness for the crisis. In addition, the media should ensure that they tell a good story and make government look good. The media are crucial for alerts, warnings, and accurate and useful evacuation information.

In general, there are two kinds of media, print (newspaper and magazine) and electronic media (television and radio). These two categories are fundamentally different: electronic media focus on time (the faster the better), while printed media pay more attention to the completeness of the story. On the other hand, there are some similarities between them. First, they always want to get a clear explanation of the events. This nature makes the media always want to find more sources of information, especially when the official sources do not satisfy them. Second, the media has a certain duration for publishing one particular topic, and after several stories they will change the topic. No matter whether the crisis is already resolved or not, the media tend to find another issue if their audience is getting bored with the topic (Nudell, 1988).

In a crisis situation, the media could determine the outcome of government efforts, create the postevent perception, disseminate ideas of what actually happened, assess the authority performance, and promote or squash rumors (Rosenthal, 2001). Therefore, government needs to provide very good and proper information to the media. Yet, the media are usually more interested in getting the information from victims or their families or friends as sources rather than government officials (Nudell, 1988). Indeed, victims and people around them are naturally absorbed with their problem, sadness, and suffering. Then, they usually demand more from the government than it offers. This sort of phenomenon is usually picked up by journalists. On some level, when journalists write this story, they will make the officers work under pressure (Rosenthal, 2001). This is the biggest challenge for government in managing crisis. If government mismanages the media in crisis, the gap between bureaucratic and emergence norms could become larger (Schneider, 1995) or even worse. This also could speed the transformation from crisis to chaos (Farazmand, 2007).

The power of media and yet the media’s tendency to show the negative effects of events are the reasons why, sometimes, government regards the media as an enemy. This is not a good attitude because the media is central to delivering important information to the public, to warning people about the possible dangers, to squashing rumors, and to telling people about how to access government assistance. Government still needs media. It is important for government to find the balance between the negative and positive aspects of media in a crisis situation. Hence the emerging views of the role of media during disasters and crises is a more paradoxical one: yes, they can cause a lot of trouble and consume a lot of attention; but yes, they can also be tremendously helpful to communicate with the public.(Rosenthal, 2001, 127–128)

This point leads us to the question of how the government should handle the media. The most important thing for a government to do is not to avoid the media. If the government fears the media, journalists will think that the government is hiding something, and then they will go to find other sources that government cannot control (Nudell, 1988; Rosenthal, 2001, 103). Therefore, providing systematic, coordinated, and controlled information to the media is extremely important.

In order to provide systematic and controlled information to the media, highly skilled and experienced spokespersons are needed. The main requirement of the spokesperson is a very good understanding of both the outside (rumors and public opinions) and inside (what’s going on in the government response system) situations. Ideally, there is only one spokesperson to avoid inconsistent information (Nudell, 1988). However, in some places this duty is handled by multiple parties. In the Netherlands, for instance, in the 1992 Biljmer disaster, the spokesmen were known as the “triumvirate,” which included the mayor, head of the police department and head of the fi re department (Rosenthal, 1994). The other important thing regarding the control of information to the public is the content of the statement that the spokesperson makes. The statement has to be well prepared, easily understood (does not cause multiple interpretations), comprehensive, and responsible, and the most important thing is the message has to be honest. As Nudell points out:

Honesty is really the best policy in crisis management, if only because of the dangers of being found out. You don’t have to tell the media everything you know, but what do you say should be accurate. This applies not only to the literal accuracy of the facts, but to overall impression you give as well. Don’t try to mislead reporters; tell them what you can and don’t talk about what you can’t. It won’t always be easy, but it will do the most good and the least damage in the long run. (Nudell, 1988, 78).

A press conference should be held every day, at least twice a day, morning and evening (Rosenthal, 2001). By doing so, it will satisfy the journalists’ deadlines and the response of the newest progress of government works will also be announced earlier. By using all of these strategies, the government places the media as an integral part of the crisis management.

Role of civil society

Civil society in this essay means institutionalized and organized private and nonprofit institutions. This could mean the difference between grassroots organizations (GROs) or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) (Uphoff, 1994), or the more detailed categorization from Kaldor (2003) of social movement, NGOs, social organizations (similar to GROs), and nationalist/religious groups. Therefore, the focus of the role of civil society in crisis management is on the role of these formal organizations, commonly called civil society organizations (CSOs).

There are two main reasons why the involvement of CSOs in governmental crisis management is important. First, CSOs, especially at local and community levels, can think and react more rationally and contextually during the crisis than government because they feel the disaster directly (Boin, 2004, 75). In the case of the supercyclone at Orissa, India, in 1999, CSOs came to the location earlier than government did (Samal, 2005). Moreover, CSOs also can provide experts, basic necessities, and volunteer forces more quickly and with less bureaucratic involvement than government does (Ozerdem, 2006). In some case studies we can see that CSOs played a very important role during Katrina.

The second reason is political and organizational. Public and/ or civil society is the most important stakeholder of public sector organizations (PSOs); therefore, PSOs have a responsibility to public or civil society. This point leads us to the conclusion that governmental response systems have to have public accountability (Schneider, 1995), and also social responsibility. This implies not only answering the public’s questions, but also giving them input and advice, and allowing them to evaluate the whole process of crisis management (Drennan, 2007).

To understand the real action that CSOs could take in a crisis situation is important. As already stated at the beginning of the paper, the key concept of crisis is an unusual and extraordinary situation that attacks the basic structure and values of a society (Boin, 2008). Therefore, the process of reconstruction not only comprises the physical aspect, but also psychological and social aspects. This is the basic argument of “community redevelopment concept” in which citizen participation is emphasized in order “to bring the community back to exactly where it was before disaster” (Sears in Pinkowski, 2008). In order to do so, there are many real actions that CSOs could perform, such as rebuilding the social networks, providing leadership, and recovering people’s psychology. For physical rehabilitation, the real actions could be mobilizing volunteers, providing public goods (foods, shelter, health services, etc.), and providing experts (Samal, 2005; Ozerdem, 2006).

A new model of CSO’s involvement in crisis management has been developed and is gaining support. Alka Dhameja (in Pinkowski, 2008) came up with the community-based disaster management (CBDM) concept, which is a community-based approach. This model emphasizes the involvement of CSOs in crisis management to enable civil society to become directly involved in the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of crisis public policy. Through putting the focus on local community CSOs, Samal (2005) argued that local communities have to be the most prepared element because they are the first element that is directly touched by a crisis and its effects. This is the basic argument of community contingency planning (CCP) that is developed at a village and community level. In India, these small organizations have an umbrella organization at the state level called ODMM. This organization guarantees the ongoing involvement of civil society in an overall government crisis management system (Samal, 2005). This kind of organization is also helpful for government in that it makes coordination easier.

Role of international institutions

Globalization has been widely discussed in the public administration realm. International actors and elements that were not taken into account in governance studies now have become the important elements (Farazmand, 2004). Also in crisis management, the role of these international institutions has become increasingly important. However, there are still some issues regarding their role across countries.

Large-scale calamities inevitably attract world attention. The disaster at Sichuan, China, that caused 69,000 people to be killed is one example, as are the billions of U.S. dollars spent in the Asian tsunami in 2004, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the South Asia earthquake in 2005 (Coppola, 2006, 530). Many international institutions were present to give help. However, that is not always the case. No matter how big the disaster is, if there is no permission from the country, it is hard for international institutions to enter the country. The disaster cyclone at Nargis Burma in early May 2008, for instance, also attracted world attention, but no international donors intervened because the domestic political aspect in Burma did not allow it.

International aid for disaster across countries began to increase in the 1970s. That trend was specifically caused by some big disasters happening at the time. The drought in Ethiopia in 1975 and the Tangshan earthquake in China in 1976 that killed over 290,000 people expanded the role of international donors in crisis situations. International institutions were also present to help with man-made crises. For example, aid for Cambodian refugees because of cruelty of the Khmer Rouge regime, or, in the same year and in a similar case, Afghanistan’s refugees because of war in 1979. These disasters are events that promoted the emergence of the “international disaster management” idea (Rosenthal, 2001).

Much like the CSOs, the role of international donors has also been criticized about its narrow relief-oriented approach. Instead of just giving aid for the postdisaster situation, such as food, water, shelter, or health care, now international institutions have started to have a more strategic approach to crisis management: The emphasis given to preparedness measures in operational considerations, the expansion of disaster management into prevention and mitigation issues, as well as the recognition of inherent linkages between disaster and development issues were further reflected in a number of disaster management manual issued during mid-1980s. UNICEF, UNHCR, The World Food Program, as well as larger global NGOs such as CARE, OXFAM, and Save the Children published emergency management manual. Organizations such as The International Committee of the Red Cross, and some bilateral emergency assistance organizations did the likewise during the same period. (Rosenthal, 2001, 318)

Since the 1980s, the importance of international disaster management has evolved. In 1980, International City Management Association (ICMA) conducted a survey about cities’ preparedness for disaster around the world. This survey motivated cities surveyed to improve the quality of their crisis management system (Kartez in Sylves, 1990). The more concrete and significant action was taken when The International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR) institution was founded in 1989, and then became a formal part of the U.N. (Ozerdem, 2006). Besides coordinating many international disaster donors, IDNDR also has important duties including “reduc[ing] risk of calamities, promotion to apply scientific, technical and other professional abilities to disaster prevention efforts” (Coppola, 2006; Rosenthal, 2001). These international institutions have played a very significant role. The supercyclone at Orissa, India, in 1999 was an accurate example (Samal, 2005).

However, there are still some problems with the role of international donors in crisis, especially for developing countries. First, there is the relationship between international donors and the government where the disaster happened. Sometimes there are “confl icts of interest between government and international institutions” (Coppola; 2006, 531; Rosenthal 2001). The Nargis Cyclone of 2008 case is an example: because of the political tension between Burma’s government and the international community, the government refused aid. This kind of problem needs a high level of political reconciliation. The bottom line is good cooperation and relationships between international institutions and domestic government, which is extremely important. The second problem is related to the dependency of the people who receive aid from these international donors. To avoid this problem, international institutions need to use the more sustainable approaches rather than a charity approach when providing aid (Samal, 2005). By using an empowerment approach, international institutions eventually increase the capacity of community and local institutions, which, at the end of the day, will reduce the dependency of local elements.

Case studies

This section will describe how the four elements (government, media, civil society, and international institutions) play their roles in the real world. The first case study is Hurricane Katrina in 2005 in the United States, and the second is the Lapindo hot mud spurt from 2006 to the present in Indonesia. The reason I have chosen Hurricane Katrina is that there are so many studies about this crisis event, so the validity of the findings is stronger. The Lapindo mud is the opposite: qualifi ed reports and publications on this disaster have been hard to find. Hopefully, this article could attract wider attention from international communities and researchers to the crisis. The other reason I have chosen this disaster is not only because of the uniqueness of the disaster, but also the process of mitigation and response is still going on, so this paper could inspire the actors in the fi eld for better actions. Therefore, this case study is not an attempt to compare those two events, but rather to see how the role of four elements actually works in those two places.

Hurricane Katrina This calamity happened on August 29, 2005, in the Gulf Coast area. It struck three states, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. This disaster killed around fifteen hundred people and caused 1.2 million residents to migrate to another places. Fifteen to twenty feet of floodwater covered 80 percent of New Orleans and caused total economic losses of more than one hundred billion dollars, not to mention the amount of infrastructure, houses, and buildings that were destroyed (Johnson, 2006; Gerber in Pinkowski, 2008).

One of the crucial questions is whether the crisis gave opportunity to a better situation after reconstruction. A group of scientists raised an important argument a couple months after Katrina, which emphasized that the trajectory of reconstruction should turn New Orleans into a safer and better city. In order to make the city safer, the reconstruction program should rebuild the new levees, a make limited effort to make buildings flood and wind resistant, and prepare a new evacuation plan. In order to make the city better, reconstruction trajectory should provide new and better schools, parks, houses, ports, infrastructure, tourism, economy, and investments (Kates et al, 2006).

However, three years after the disaster the accomplishments of the program still fell far short of the ideal plan. The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation released its survey about the evaluation three years after reconstruction. This survey found that 40 percent of the respondents said their lives were still disrupted, and more than 70 percent said there had been little or no progress in making housing affordable or in controlling crime, which they view as the city’s top problem. The survey also showed majorities saw little or no progress in making medical services available, strengthening public schools, attracting jobs, or rebuilding neighborhoods. The results of this survey are largely consistent with an index of progress compiled by the Brookings Institution and the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. Their third-year report found that the greater New Orleans area has recovered, but that recovery trends slowed during 2008. Tens of thousands of blighted properties, a lack of affordable housing, and thin public services continue to plague the city. Rents are 46 percent higher than before the storm (New York Times, 2008).

The performance of the government’s role in Katrina was generally bad, especially during the crisis. Government did have the crisis management system (FEMA), but the system did not work as it should have. One of the failures of the system was related to preparedness. The federal government did not build proper levees for a level 5 hurricane, while many people had warned about the possibility of that level of hurricane happening in the area (Farazmand, 2007; Sylvester, 2007). The failure of the system can also be found in the inconsistency of the response system and poor planning.

According to national standards, the scale of this hurricane was categorized as an incident of national significance (INS) that should have automatically gotten a federal-level response. In fact, victims had to wait five days to get a federal government response (Farazmand, 2007; Gerber in Pinkowski, 2008). In this case, government failed to balance its bureaucratic norm with emergent norm. The situation required government to react quickly, as the victims could not wait for a long and bureaucratic federal government’s decision-making process. In this situation, federal government should have used a recognition-primed strategy both in making the decision of sending aid to New Orleans and in reacting to the actual problem on the ground. In so doing, sending leaders who have a strong exposure to such a situation is more important than just sending those who have a good political relationship to the central power.

In general, the breakdown of the decision-making system at all levels was because FEMA was politicized. FEMA had been politicized by the federal government and by President Bush by “putting his close colleague as the leader without thoroughly considering the capacity” (Greber in Pinkowski, 2008, 71). The impact of this decision was that the capability of leadership of this institution became very poor. Following this weakness, FEMA also proved to have failed to manage the balance between the bureaucratic norm and emergent norm. The fact that federal assistance came five days after the disaster was proof that there was a sense of a lack of urgency. The White House took too much time to decide whether or not a federal government intervention was needed. The impact was the government’s failure to speed relief to thousands of victims at the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans, or to rescue residents (Washington Post, 2005).

The role of international donors, however, had a better result in this disaster. It’s true that there was poor coordination among them, but that was more likely due to government nonintervention. Total aid from international donors was around U.S. one billion dollars, not to mention in-kind help (Richard in Ferris, 2008; Coppola, 2006).

The role of CSOs was quite interesting because there were some contradictions. The CSOs, such as NGOs or church groups, performed well because they addressed basic needs. The government relied on these CSOs, especially in immediate service delivery to the victims (Richard in Ferris, 2008). However, in the areas that have stronger local CSOs, the process of rehabilitation went more slowly than in areas that have weaker ones. Providing shelter was the most important thing in rehabilitation; the research found that it was easier to put shelters in the areas in which local communities were weaker. On the other hand, it was more difficult to put shelters in the stronger local community areas.

“You can’t rebuild a community if you are taking sacred parts of that community and destroying it” (quoted in Varney and Carr, 2005). New Orleans Councilman Jay Batt put up campaign posters with an image of a temporary FEMA trailer crossed out by a red circle with a line through it next to the heading, “He protected the integrity of neighbourhoods in district A by not allowing trailers to be placed in parks and playgrounds where our children play” (Batt in Aldrich, 2006, 380).

Media had a very important role during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. ABC’s Good Morning America on September 1, 2005, for instance, aired a statement from President Bush that said that nobody anticipated the breach of the levees. After that statement, the program showed the old news from the Times-Picayune Special Report on June 23, 2002, which said that the levees in New Orleans were not strong enough to handle category 4 or category 5 hurricanes. The other big media, NBC, also had concerns about the levees long before the calamity happened (Sylvester, 2007; Gerber in Pinkowski, 2008). The interesting part of the role of media was the different perspectives between the local and national levels of media. Local media, since they were also victims, tell the story about the suffering and survival of the people, while national media, such as the New York Times or Dallas Morning, “publish a regional and national perspective and were instrumental in keeping the country interested in displaced people from the Gulf Coast” (Sylvester, 2007).

Lapindo mud Since May 29, 2006, hot mud has been spurting at up to 150,000 cubic meters per day at Sidoarjo, East Java, Indonesia (Normile, 2007). The hot mud has covered four villages, killed thirteen people, and displaced fi fty thousand inhabitants in the villages (Daily News, 2008). The location of the mud explosion is right in the center of the main transportation route of the East Java province. This disaster has disrupted the connection of the southern part and the eastern part of the province to the northern part. Therefore, the victims of the disaster are not only people who live in the location of disaster, but also people who live in the south and east part of the province. For example, from Surabaya (the capital of the province) to Malang (the second-largest city in the province), before the disaster it only took 1.5 hours driving, but now it could take more than four hours. “The disaster has been happening for two years, but the transportation problem is still the same, the hot mud still spurting, more sadly, thousands of people still live in tents” (Normile, 2008).

For the Lapindo mud explosion in East Java, Indonesia, there are two things that made this disaster unique. The first is this kind of disaster is very rare—volcanic mud spurting from the ground without any clear explanation. Second, regarding the unclear explanation of the cause, since the beginning there has been no agreement whether it is a natural or man-made disaster. Therefore, the policy actions and crisis management have been controversial.

Geologists all around the world have not yet clearly figured out the cause of this disaster. Richard Davies from Durham University said that a gas well from Lapindo Brantas Inc. is the cause. Some Indonesian scientists argued that it was caused by a magnitude 6.3 earthquake at Yogyakarta (280 km from the location) two days before the spurting started. This theory is refuted by Michael Manga, a geologist from Berkeley University, who said that the earthquake was too far and too small to cause this sort of phenomenon. On the other hand, Adriano Mazzini, a geologist from Oslo University, criticizes the scientists (Davies and Manga) who have never gone to the location. Mazzini said that either the earthquake (natural) or Lapindo Inc.’s mistakes (man-made) are still possibilities. Finally, James Mori, a seismologist from Tokyo University, says researchers cannot determine whether the volcano would have formed without drilling (Normile, 2008). However, an Indonesian court has ruled that this disaster is a natural disaster not caused by Lapindo Inc.’s mining activity. This decision has raised controversy since the majority shareholder of the company is Aburizal Bakrie, who is also the minister of welfare of Indonesia and a very influential elite of the Golkar Party, which is one of the largest political parties in the country.

The answer to the question of whether or not the crisis could become a triggering opportunity for improvement of the system is obviously no. The neighborhood has already been buried with mud, and there is no way to bring back the people to their houses and rebuild the area. It is already hard for government to control the stream of the mud flood, not to mention to drain the five meters of frozen mud from the villages. Moreover, as mentioned earlier, three years after the disaster started, thousands of victims still live in tents.

The role of government in this case is actually quite problematic. It is unclear whether or not to declare that the disaster is Lapindo Inc.’s responsibility or declare it a national natural disaster (so the government is held accountable). This position became more complicated when many people tried to connect this problem with political issues. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) in the early part of 2007 had ordered Lapindo Inc. to pay $420 million. From that order, it seemed that President SBY was quite sure that the cause of the disaster was the gas well of Lapindo Inc. But then the Indonesian court ruled that it is a natural disaster. All aspects of the disaster came under the government’s responsibility with this move.

The central government formed a national body called “Badan Penanggulangan Lumpur Sidoarjo” (BPLS) on September 8, 2007, whose main duty is to handle all impacts of this volcanic mud spurt (Petroleum Watch, 2008). Along this line, the provincial-level government made a plan to actually deal with crisis. There are three actions that the provincial government will focus on, which are stemming the fl ow, minimizing social impact, and reducing environmental destruction. All of the details of these main goals were also well explained in the action plan document (UNDAC, 2006).

It is difficult to categorize this disaster into crises’ typology, for there are no such typologies that it can be fi t into because the beginning of the volcanic mud spurting was fast, but the explosion is still going on more than two years later (150,000 cubic meters per day). However, regardless of the many aspects that make this disaster unique, it seems that “slow burning” is the closest type to the crisis. Therefore, government actually have had quite enough time to rule based on analytical decision-making strategy in terms of coping with this crisis. Though, it does not mean that government has to spend three years only to give compensation to the victims. By April 2009, government still could not find the agreement of compensation between BPLS, Lapindo Inc., and the victims (Kompas, 2009). As a result, thousands of people will still live in tents for quite a while without clear certainty of the future.

The role of CSOs in this crisis can be categorized in several ways. An Indonesian NGO that engages in environmental issues, WALHI, fi led a suit against Lapindo Inc., demanding that the company take responsibility (Normile, 2008). Mass organizations and people around the area help the victims by providing food and nonfood necessities (UNDAC, 2006). Local communities and the victims, with some help from outsider activists, organize themselves, especially to push government and the company to give them compensation. This showed how significant a role the civil society played, although there are not yet positive results of this effort.

The media also did not help much in this crisis management. In fact, the biggest local media, Jawa Pos, and the largest national-level media, Kompas, do not publish articles about this disaster intensively anymore. The public seems to have forgotten about the disaster already. Apparently, there are still thousands of people who suffer every single day, and have been for more than two years. The media acts only based on market demand, so after a while their audience gets bored and they have to find another issue to write about. The absence of this media consistency does not help for crisis recovery, especially for the victims who are asking for justice.

The role of international donors has only been by experts, those who have done research about the cause of the disaster, and technical assistance from the U.N. On June 20, 2008, the Indonesian Ministry of Environment made a request for technical assistance to the United Nations Office of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), and then OCHA deployed a United Nations Disaster Assessment and Coordination (UNDAC) team from June 25 to July 6, 2006. The governments of Switzerland and the Netherlands provided the experts for this follow-up mission. Besides those institutions, there are no international institutions at all that help victims and provide basic needs. “No international organizations have been involved in the response activities of this disaster” (UNDAC, 2006).

Conclusion

These two cases (Katrina and Lapindo mud) prove that it is true that crises challenge basic structures and values of society. Hurricane Katrina displaced 1.2 million people, while Lapindo mud caused fi fty thousand people to lose their land and properties. Both cases have taken a long time to move toward the precrisis situations and recover. This poor management of crisis occurred in the first case in a very wealthy country, and in the second in a developing country. Therefore, practitioners need to improve their skills to cope with crises, especially in public administration. The need to study crisis management more deeply is clear.

In the sense of typology of crisis, Hurricane Katrina fell into “long shadow” disaster typology because the speed of crisis development was fast and the speed of crisis termination has been slow. It is difficult to categorize the Lapindo mud case into any crisis type, but “slow-burning” seems to be the closest one. By this categorization, it seems that government has had plenty of time to react, because none of them fall into “fast-burning” crisis. However, it does not mean that the crises were easier to cope with. The cases studies provide very good examples of failures of crisis management even though the nature of the crisis did not give both governments severe time pressure.

Government has played an important role in both cases. In the Katrina case, FEMA had been politicized, and it affected the bad performance of the institution during the crisis. In the Lapindo mud case, political nuance appeared because Aburizal Bakrie, as majority shareholder of the company, is one of the most influential political leaders in the country. Another aspect of crisis politicization results from the fact that the crisis is very politically attractive, as it gets a great deal of attention from the public. Politicization of the crises only resulted from the bad learning process of the two governments, as shown by the slow rehabilitation process, which after more than two years has not allowed recovery to precrisis condition. Therefore, in the future government has to avoid politicization of a crisis, no matter how attractive the crisis is for lifting up the political popularity of certain parties.

The role of media is quite different in both cases. In the Lapindo mud case, the media only perceives the disaster like regular news—after the audience got bored with the issue, the media stopped publishing this news even though the problem is not solved yet. In the Katrina case, the media gave good contributions, not only motivating a better recovery process, but also the media were actively giving warning long before the crisis happened. In this context, the Katrina case is the best practice that media should follow.

The role of CSOs in the Katrina case was interesting because there was a variation of contributions among some kinds of CSOs. NGOs and religious groups contributed very well in providing basic needs to the victims, while local communities, the stronger ones, tended to be resistant to certain crisis response programs. Nevertheless, in both cases, there was no good community-based disaster management (CBDM) implemented. In the future, the involvement of CSOs in crisis management should enable local communities to become directly involved in the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of crisis public policy.

As reported by UNDAC (2006), there has been no aid at all from international institutions in the Lapindo mud case, which is very different from the Hurricane Katrina case, where there was much aid from international institutions (more than one billion dollars) even though government (FEMA) failed in coordinating them. It might be true that in man-made crises (such as in the Lapindo mud case) the parties who cause the crises should be held accountable, so international institutions do not need to take part. However, completely ignoring the case is not the right decision to make. The very limited attention of international institutions in crisis, such as what has been happening in the Lapindo mud case, should not happen in the future.

FADILLAH PUTRA earned his second master’s degree in Local Government and Economic Development at LBJ School of Public Affairs The University of Texas at Austin, in August 2009. In January 2001, he earned a Master’s of Public Administration degree at the Post Graduate School of Brawijaya University in Indonesia and also received a Bachelor of Public Administration degree at the same university in September 1998. He has written six books on the topics of public administration, public policy, and local government in Indonesia. Since 2000, he has been actively engaged in NGO activities related to local government capacity building, poverty reduction, and democratization. He was awarded a grant from International Fellowship Program (IFP) of the Ford Foundation in August 2006.

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Jessica Doyle

“It is now widely recognized,” began a 2000 book, “that transport in Europe is unsustainable, and that the trend-based path of continuous and continuing growth is unacceptable” (Banister et al., 2000). From an American perspective, European transport growth seems considerably less unsustainable and unacceptable than similar growth in the United States. In 2004, the European Union’s (hereafter EU) current and prospective members had a population of 451 million, to the United States’s 286 million, but just 212 million cars to 205 million cars in the United States (Schade et al., 2006). Cities such as London, Paris, Madrid, and Prague are known for their extensive public transit systems, while other cities, most notably Amsterdam, are famous for their hospitality to bicyclists. Europe’s rail network is far more extensive than Amtrak, the American counterpart. Although air travel in Europe has increased considerably in the last decade, the majority of journeys of six hours or less, and business journeys of four hours or less, within Europe are made by rail (The Economist, 2007b). Not surprisingly, American planners sometimes look to European urban areas as potential role models for encouraging nonautomotive modes of transport.

Nevertheless, the harmful environmental impacts of transport remain a concern in Europe. As of December 2007, only eleven of the twenty-seven current members of the EU were expected to meet emission ceilings for four pollutants by 2010 (European Environment Agency, 2007a). In 1998, an estimated 28 percent of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from Europe were transport based; four-fi fths of those emissions came from road transport (European Commission, 2001). The environmental costs of transport are estimated at 1.1 percent of the combined GDP of all EU members (CEC, 2006). Sixty-seven million Europeans are believed to be exposed to harmful noise levels related to transport (EEA, 2009). Between 1990 and 2006, greenhouse gas emissions from thirty-two European countries actually declined in most sectors, including industry, but grew by 26 percent from domestic transport (European Environment Agency, 2009).

Even more worrisome, from a purely environmental standpoint, is the growth in road transport, both passenger and freight, in the twelve countries that have joined the EU since 2004 (the EU-12 ¹). With Soviet-era rail networks decaying and standards of living rising, the residents of the EU-12, primarily in eastern Europe, are increasingly buying, and relying on, cars.²  Thus, as in the United States, there is concern in Europe about the environmental costs of growing use of transport.

Responses to such concerns, however, are complicated by the way transport planning is handled in Europe. Although the 1957 Treaty of Rome, which founded what is now known as the EU, called for a common transport policy, transport planning has largely been handled on a national level. The largest change in European transport planning since the early 1990s has been the EU taking on the job of preparing and recommending a common transport policy, which it has done in the form of the Trans-European Transport Networks (TENs-T). One of the primary goals of the TENs-T has been to allow for growth in transport use while reducing the potential harms to the natural environment. More recently, the EU has introduced the Marco Polo program, which also aims to reduce environmental harms by encouraging shifts to less harmful transport modes. 

This paper will examine how the European Union has incorporated concern over harmful environmental impacts into region-wide transport planning. It will examine the TENs-T projects and the Marco Polo program in light of how they help to advance EU environmental goals of reducing environmental harms caused by transport. It will then examine public critiques, focusing on environmental impacts, of EU transport planning efforts. Finally, it will examine what lessons there may be for regional transport planning in the United States.

Environmental impacts of European transport

Literature on the environmental impacts of European transport, including official reports from the European Union, have been relatively wide-ranging in their scope, concerned not only with GHG emissions or air pollution but with a broader number of potential threats to quality of life. In the 2001 report “A Sustainable Europe for a Better World” (CEC, 2001), the European Commission identified the main threats to sustainable development as GHG emissions from human activity, poverty, the aging of the population, antibioticresistant strains of diseases, threats to food safety, the loss of biodiversity, and transport congestion. The 2006 Renewed EU Sustainable Development Strategy (SDS) grouped climate change; threats to public health, poverty, and social exclusion; demographic pressure and aging; the disappearance of natural resources and biodiversity; and changes in land use and transport as threats to future sustainable development (CEU, 2006). The 2006 midterm report on sustainable mobility (CEC, 2006) named CO2 emissions, air quality, noise pollution, and land use as primary environmental concerns. Air pollution, in the form of particulate matter, is blamed for an estimated 350,000 annual premature deaths in Europe (CEC, 2006).

In European transport literature, the primary environmental concern is CO2 emissions. With road freight transport expected to grow by an estimated annual 20.5 billion t-km (tons per kilometer) in the EU-25 between 2007 and 2013 (Millán de la Lastra, 2007), increasing CO2 emissions will likely continue to be the most-discussed environmental impact of European transport movements. The 2006 SDS names reducing greenhouse-gas emissions from transport as an operational objective, to be fulfilled by holding new car fl eets to higher emissions standards, shifting transport from road to more environmentally friendly modes, and developing an EU fuel strategy (CEU, 2006).

The EU and its member states are signers to the Kyoto Protocol (UNFCCC, 2007). The target for the EU-15 is an 8 percent reduction in CO2 emissions, compared to 1990 levels, by 2008-2012 (CEU, 2006). In March 2007 the EU announced plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions even further, to 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. We can reasonably expect, then, that reducing CO2 emissions will remain an EU-level policy goal over the next decade.

But meeting such targets will be difficult. Many member states are expected to meet those targets by buying credits in emission-reductions programs in developing countries (The Economist, 2007a). Furthermore, some European leaders have pointed to potential tension between economic development strategies and environmental protection regulations, particularly in the context of a Europe-wide recession. In January 2008 Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president, argued in a letter to José Manuel

Barroso, president of the European Commission, that industry would shift to countries with less stringent environmental standards, costing France jobs (Hollinger et al., 2008). In February 2009, Günter Verheugen, a German politician serving as the EU’s Commissioner for Enterprise and Industry, stated publicly, “We should do everything possible now to stimulate the economy . . . anything else has to wait,” and criticized recent EU environmental legislation: “We have made the European car much more expensive” (Der Spiegel, 2009). Transport will be affected if the EU is to meet its greenhouse gas emission-reduction goals. Hickman and Banister (2007) conducted a series of “backcasting” scenarios to determine what policy measures Britain would need to meet its 2030 CO2 emission-reduction goals. Their analysis predicted that technological innovation on its own would not be enough to offset increased emissions from additional population and travel growth; travel behavior would also have to change. At an EU level, Rodenburg, Ubbels, and Nijkamp (2002) tested three hypothetical EU transport policy scenarios, one aimed at enhancing mobility, one at minimizing environmental damage, and one at improving social and economic quality of life. Not surprisingly, the package of policies aimed at minimizing environmental damage produced a decrease in CO2 emissions, while the mobility package saw the largest increase. The quality-of-life package also lessened emissions, although not as much as the environmental package. They concluded cautiously that, while reducing emissions yet allowing for economic growth presented “formidable policy challenges,” making changes in policy and transport systems “might offer possibilities to make a step forward in a more sustainable direction.”

Despite concerns voiced at the national level, the EU seems to have embraced the idea that it must create policy to influence travel and transport decision making. The TENs-T initiative is one of the largest initiatives; the Marco Polo program, while less ambitious, is also significant for its emphasis on freight transport.

EU transport policy initiatives: the TENs-T and MARCO POLO

Transport planning at the EU level is not a new concept. The 1957 Treaty of Rome called for the establishment of “trans-European networks” in transport, telecommunications, and energy. It made the interoperability of national networks and called for what was then called the European Economic Community to “. . . take account in particular of the need to link island, landlocked and peripheral regions with the central regions of the Community” (EEC, 1957). Yet for years the EEC, which would become the European Community and later the EU, was unwilling to move toward a common transport policy (European Commission, 2001). The member states have traditionally handled transport policy as a national concern. Given that transport policy is by definition more spatially grounded than, say, monetary policy (the power over which many members, Britain and Denmark among them, still refuse to grant the EU), it is not surprising that transport planning has by and large been determined within national borders.

Beginning in the early 1990s, however, the EU began to assert the need for a common transport policy. This was in part due to the growing awareness of the disproportionate environmental harms of certain transport modes. When the 2001 white paper was written, road transport accounted for 44 percent of the EU’s goods transport market and 79 percent of its passenger transport market (European Commission, 2001). By 2007, after enlargement, the latter fi gure had risen to 81 percent (EUROPA, 2007). The commission now looks to add environmental awareness into all its policies (Faludi and Waterhout, 2002), including transport planning. The 2001 white paper on European transport policy describes sustainable development as a “lever” toward a common transport policy (European Commission, 2001).

The EU regards transport policy, economic growth, and sustainability as interlinked: more growth will mean more demands on transport infrastructure, which could in turn mean more environmental harm if the environment is not taken into consideration well in advance of growth. Thus, concerns about environmental impacts have led the EU toward regionwide transport planning.

TENs-T So far the most ambitious EU initiative toward a common transport policy has been the Trans-European Transport Networks (TENs-T). The TENs-T are a series of transport infrastructure projects, mostly multinational, proposed by the EU to facilitate the movement of people and goods within the entire EU. The TENs-T are considered a crucial factor in enhancing the growth and economic competitiveness within Europe (European Commission, 2005). Moreover, the TENs-T are expected to help “ensure sustainable transport” (European Commission, 2005) by increasing options within the transport network, decreasing congestion, and shifting both passenger and freight traffic from road to other environmentally friendly modes. More than half of the proposed projects are solely, or primarily, structured around new or upgraded light rail systems.

The TENs-T proposals currently consist of thirty projects (in Figure 1), of which two have been completed. The total cost of completing all thirty projects was estimated in 2008 to be Ð397 billion (European Commission, 2008).

Ross (1998) described the TENs-T initiative as “groundbreaking,” not only in terms of its scope, but in terms of the EU’s ambitions, in funding transport initiatives directly and in doing transport planning across borders. Both aspects have made it difficult for the EU to move forward on the TENs-T. The EU, which is financed by tax collections from member states, can use a portion of its funds to finance TENs-T projects in less wealthy member states; a total of Ð6.7 billion was committed thus in 2004–06 (European Commission, 2005). But the EU cannot bear the total cost: Ð224 billion roughly equals its entire budget for two years.

In presenting the TENs-T in 2005, Jacques Barrot, then–vice president of the European Commission with responsibility for transport, complained that member states had decreased their transport infrastructure spending, in many cases to less than 1 percent of national GDP (European Commission, 2005).

Similarly, van Exel et al. (2002) describe an “investment inertia” that occurs when the benefits of the TENs-T occur at a European-wide level; national transportation departments find these benefits hard to quantify, and thus the TENs-T become less of a funding priority at the national level. In short, the EU may have difficulty building the TENsT, given the discrepancy between the funding sources and the recipients of potential benefits. A 2008 report pushed back the potential completion dates of nine of the thirty projects to 2020 and one, a railway axis from Lyon, France, to the Ukrainian border, to 2025 (European Commission, 2008).

The EU positions the TENs-T as creating less environmentally harmful connections for both passenger and freight travel on a European scale. However, the evidence that the TENs-T will reduce CO2 emissions and other negative environmental impacts is not unambiguous. The 2003 TEN-STAC scenario findings (NEA Transport Research and Training BV, 2003) suggest that emissions will be cut in some of the larger Western European countries, but continue to rise in several of the fast-growing EU-12 states (see Figure 2). Meanwhile, Banister et al. (2000) point out two difficulties with high-speed rail, which is the primary mode in more than half of the planned TENs-T projects. One is that, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from road transport, light rail must draw would-be drivers from the road. If rail passenger transport grows while road passenger transport stays constant, the EU will have cut some of the future CO2 emission growth, but the rail built by TENs-T projects will not have been as effective in curbing emissions as if there were a decrease in road passenger traffic. The other difficulty is that in encouraging travel by long distances (the completion of the Rail Baltica project, for example, would allow passenger travel along high-speed rail from London to Tailinn), the TENs-T rail projects may, in the long run, stimulate demand for air travel.

Marco Polo A newer EU-level program is Marco Polo, which was first proposed in 2002 and adopted in 2003. The primary goal of the Marco Polo program is to shift freight transport from roads to modes considered more environmentally friendly—short sea shipping, inland waterways, and rail—while improving intermodal freight operations (Horn and Nemoto, 2005). During the 2007–13 budgetary period, Marco Polo³ has roughly €450 million ($588 million) to provide for eligible projects (DG TREN, 2006). Table 1, below, shows the differences in focus between the larger TENs-T program and the Marco Polo program.

The chief difference between the two programs is that Marco Polo focuses exclusively on freight transport. The EU has singled out freight movements for two reasons: because freight growth has shown steady increases and because so much of freight transport is moved by roads, considered the most environmentally harmful mode of transport (in terms of air pollution and GHG emissions). The total volume of freight transported in the EU, measured by ton-kilometers, increased by 35 percent between 1996 and 2006 (European Environment Agency, 2009). In the EU-15, road freight transport grew by 35 percent, while short sea shipping grew by 31 percent, inland waterway freight activity by 9 percent, and rail freight transport by 6 percent (Millán de la Lastra, 2006). By 2020, 45 percent of freight within the EU-25 (the EU save Romania and

Bulgaria) is expected to be carried by road (Millán de la Lastra, 2006). Thus EU policy makers believe that achieving modal shift on freight transport will lead directly to benefits in the form of lower CO2 emissions. Projects, or “actions,” financed by Marco Polo fall into five categories. One, “modal shift” actions, have been described as “robust, but not innovative” (Millán de la Lastra, 2007). They are projects drawing on prior knowledge and research to shift freight transport away from roads. “Catalyst” actions are expected to be more technologically innovative, while “common learning” actions are to help member states share best practices as to intermodal freight movement. In 2005, Marco Polo also began fi nancing initiatives related to the “motorways of the sea” project, to promote inland shipping, and “traffic avoidance” actions, meant to, among other goals, reduce the number of empty runs by freight vehicles. Table 2 shows the differences in funding allowances for the three types of actions.

Public Critiques of EU Transport Policy

With nearly 400 million people affected by EU policy decisions, it would be naive to expect that such large-scale projects as the TENs-T would go uncriticized. What may be of interest to American transport and environmental planners is that, even as they have been framed in the context of greater environmental concern and efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on the EU’s part, the TENs-T and other infrastructure projects have been criticized not only on economic or transport planning grounds, but on environmental grounds.

One example of heavy debate between the EU and environmental groups is the arguments over the Betuwe Line, TEN-T Priority Axis #5 (see Figure 3). Consisting largely of upgrades of existing track, the project was primarily intended to create a 160-km (99.4-mi) rail link between the port of Rotterdam and the German-Dutch border. Doing so, argued the EU, would enhance Rotterdam’s status as a European transport and distribution hub, and provide a nonroad option for transport into and out of the port (European Commission, 2005). The 2005 TEN-T report predicts that “the shift from road to rail will be particularly significant along the route of the A15 line” (European Commission, 2005), which runs from Rotterdam to Nijmegen, a city near the border. Thus the EU could argue, and has argued, that the conception and construction of the Betuwe line is an example of a top-down strategy of promoting modal shifts to reduce harmful environmental impacts.

However, the Betuwe line, which opened in June 2007, has been strongly criticized by environmental nongovernmental organizations and activist groups since plans were first announced in 1991 (van der Heijden, 2006). Early criticisms were led by VLOB⁴, an association formed by twenty-one different residents’ organizations in neighborhoods scheduled to be affected by the line’s creation. The environmental activist group SNM⁵, a branch of the larger nongovernmental organization European Federation for Transport and the Environment (T&E), initially cautiously welcomed the switch from road to rail transport, but later turned against the project, arguing that the Dutch and European governments were not doing enough to make rail freight transport competitive and abate noise pollution (van der Heijden, 2006).

In June 2007 T&E published an editorial by Willem-Jan von Grondelle, a representative on SNM, summarizing the group’s arguments against the Betuwe line: The government had always made it sound so good: a freight rail link as a means of relieving the environmental impact of growing road transport. But by the early 1990s a variety of studies had demonstrated that in reality things would pan out rather differently. By providing a new track back to the German hinterland, what the Betuwe line would achieve most was improved competitiveness for the Port of Rotterdam. . . . Apart from anything else, a green transport option from Rotterdam to the hinterland already existed: river barges along the Rhine. . . . Although it now has a number of tunnels and other measures to reduce noise and ecological and landscape impacts (to some extent), there has been no effort to provide the sustainability-oriented freight transport policy the Netherlands so badly needs. . . . It is not what one would call a showcase environmental project. (European Federation for Transport and Environment, 2007b)

These criticisms of the Betuwe line have taken place within the context of broader critiques of the TENs-T and of European transport policy in general. As van der Heijden (2006) writes, “By linking TENs to climate politics, habitat conservation, the preferred kind of economic growth and the very grounds for mobility, these groups [such as T&E] have opened up the discussion on the desirability of individual TENs.”

Such clashes can also be seen over the expansion of European ports and the development of the “motorways of the sea” included in the TENs-T. The EU, through the TENs-T and MARCO POLO, has promoted shifting cargo from road to sea as a way of decreasing environmental damage. But Psaraftis (2005) points out that it will be difficult to expand and maintain European ports in the face of high environmental and security standards. The creation of a potential container terminal in Dibden Bay, United Kingdom, was dropped in 2004 on environmental grounds, following a yearlong public inquiry (Psaraftis, 2005). A shipping-consulting fi rm has estimated that the average European port expansion delay because of environmental concerns is four years (Miller, 2007). In Belgium, an expansion of the Port of Antwerp had been delayed by three years, as of 2007, because of a group of activists fi ghting the destruction of Doel, a seventeenth-century village (Miller, 2007).

The arguments over ports, like the arguments over the Betuwe line, show how the EU and its critics frame the environmental impacts of transport projects differently. The EU, trying to combine environmental concerns with economic expansion, argues for the creation of more transport infrastructure, albeit less environmentally harmful infrastructure. European environmental activists, however, decry the need for both the infrastructure and the economic growth. A Dutch representative of Friends of the Earth, an environmental activism group, stated in regard to ports that “Europe just needs to buy less from Asia” (Miller, 2007). If environmental stewardship in the EU becomes seen as not simply  redirecting growth but halting or reversing it, then the EU will find it difficult to convince its citizens that it incorporates environmental concerns into its transport policies.

Another line of criticism is not directed specifically at any one project, but at the goals of EU transport policy in general: namely, that it attempts to accomplish three mutually exclusive goals, in promoting economic growth, slowing or reducing harmful environmental impacts, and promoting “cohesion,” which is to say decreasing economic disparities within Europe. The last has been promoted as a goal ever since Spain and Portugal, then considerably poorer than the average EU member, joined the EU in 1986, and has increased since the admission of ten new countries in 2004 and two more in 2007. But reducing economic disparities, while maybe having social and economic benefits for Europeans, will not necessarily lead to reduced environmental impacts. Walz, Schade, and Doll summarize the confl ict neatly:

Cohesion policies are imperative to combat regional disparities. If successful, these policies result in a greater dispersion of economic activities within Europe, and counteract the centralization of activities. This gives rise to additional transportation needs, and transportation policies must accommodate these additional needs—resulting in additional CO2 emissions. (Walz, Schade, and Doll, 2007, 92)

They conclude that if the EU is to reconcile its economic and environmental goals, it should focus less on infrastructure building and more on promoting “green” transport innovations (Walz, Schade, and Doll, 2007).

The existence of the cohesion goal means that in the EU, growth in transport demand is linked not only to economic growth in the EU as a whole, but in areas lagging economically. Table 3 lists the thirty TENs-T projects, the countries in which they are set, and the funding awarded by the EU in November 2007. Those countries with an annual GDP of less than 90 percent of the EU average, and thus receiving EU funds meant to promote economic cohesion—the EU-12, plus Greece and Portugal⁶—are highlighted in bold.

Table 3 shows that, while nearly half of the funding went to projects involving cohesion countries, so much of the TEN-T activity is concentrated in southwest Europe that the percentage drops to under 30 percent if Portugal is removed. Indeed, a T&E press release on the 2007 funding pointed specifically to the lack of money awarded to two motorway projects largely in cohesion countries, Projects #7 and #25 (European Federation for Transport and Environment, 2007a). As we have noted, one of the largest environmental concerns at the EU level is the growth in road transport in the EU-12. It would not be surprising if the fi nancing trends of 2007 continue in the near future, with rail projects given higher priority over road projects. The question would be, then, whether such prioritizing would lead to less investment going to the less wealthy new members, undermining the EU’s “cohesion” goal.

Meanwhile, only four of the EU-12 countries—Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, and Romania—were involved in the fi fteen projects selected for funding under the 2006 round of Marco Polo selections (Millán de la Lastra, 2006). In the near future, Marco Polo funding will likely continue to be skewed toward the original fi fteen EU members, since there is greater freight activity in the wealthier member states. Again, however, the EU may find it politically difficult to balance its goals of enhancing the economic growth of its less-developed member states and of reducing the environmental harms caused by transport.

Finally, the 2006 ECORYS report, which looked at transport investment priorities and funds to promote economic and social cohesion, suggests that the twin goals of environmental sustainability and decreasing regional disparities may not be as compatible as EU policy makers would like. Comparing two different scenarios, one with maximum investment in road projects identified in the EU-12 plus Spain, Portugal, and Greece, and one with maximum investment in rail projects, some of the EU-12 would see greater increases in GDP per capita from the former. The results are summarized in Table 4.

The ECORYS analysis also suggests that the EU-12 will need sufficient funding to maintain their road networks (ECORYS, 2006). Such efforts would, again, run contrary to the EU’s efforts to promote modal shift. Improving the road network in the EU-12, even if it helps with economic growth in the short term, runs the risk of further entrenching the car as a mode of transport in those countries— and the resulting emissions. And yet refusing to fund road projects, if it is not combined with careful management of rail investment, risks stunting economic growth in the poorest part of the EU.

Conclusions

With federal transportation funding up for reauthorization in 2011, the United States will again see a debate as to optimal funding of transportation projects. This debate will likely be conducted in a context of concern about climate change and the harmful effects of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Given the European Union’s having been more willing than the United States to factor climate change concerns into planning and policy making, some American policy makers and commentators will look to the EU as a potential model. This paper has examined the ways in which the EU has incorporated concerns about environmental impacts, specifically CO2 emissions, into transport policy, specifically with the TENs-T and Marco Polo projects. It has also discussed how these policy projects have been received in the EU, and why environmental activists have not necessarily applauded the EU for its stated commitment to decrease the growth of CO2 emissions.

As we have seen, the EU has, much more explicitly than the United States, addressed goals of reducing CO2 emissions in its transport planning and policy. However, it is not clear that the EU can use the TENs-T to promote its three main goals—reducing environmental harms of transport, encouraging economic growth, and promoting socioeconomic cohesion—simultaneously. Banister et al. (2000) and the white paper (2001) both called for the “decoupling” of transport growth and economic growth, but so far the EU has not been able to make much progress in this area, and the “decoupling” goal was largely dropped from the 2006 Mid-term Review (European Environment Agency, 2007b). Moreover, a critique often voiced in European environmental discussions sees environmental preservation and economic growth as directly opposed to each other. Future infrastructure projects, even if the EU presents them as the least harmful of several alternatives, may be rejected by a polity worried that any contributions to growth can only result in further environmental damage. The TENs-T, although formulated at the EU level, are funded at the national level, and thus may be defeated by member states concerned that the EU, for all its leadership, does not place a high enough priority on the environment as opposed to economic growth. Is there a way out of this dilemma? New technologies, such as zero-emission vehicles or cleaner light rail locomotives, may help. Horn and Nemoto (2005) express a cautious optimism that the Marco Polo program, aimed at the private sector, may be able to promote and fund technological advances in intermodal freight transport. Meanwhile, Walz, Schade, and Doll (2007) suggest that the EU can establish a global competitive advantage in the development of green technological innovations. But Marco Polo has been controversial within the European Parliament (Psaraftis, 2005) and is a fairly small amount of funding to bear the burden of stimulating technological development. A suggestion more frequently heard (e.g., Banister et al., 2000) is to externalize the costs of road transport in the form of road pricing. Road pricing was originally meant as the source of funding for many of the TENs-T projects (Ross, 1998), but to date has not been implemented at the EU level or at the national level in any EU member state. The 2006 Mid-term Review called for the European Commission to create a model for calculating external costs for future infrastructure pricing projects by mid-June 2008 (CEC, 2006).

The final question is what lessons American transportation and environmental planners can learn from the EU’s example. One apparent obstacle faced by the EU but not by the United States is the former’s historical lack of a designated federal role in transportation planning. Unlike the EU, whose members are still national governments asserting national priorities, the United States Department of Transportation still controls federal transportation spending, which it can use to promote or discourage certain transportation policies at the state level. As with the European countries, so the American states will find it difficult to coordinate on projects where benefits within state borders are not immediately apparent, but there is precedent for a coordinated, federally led transport policy initiative—the creation of the interstate highway system in the 1950s. The EU’s difficulty in coordinating its own environmental regulations with the differing goals of its members suggests that the United States, if it were to adopt a similar approach, would need to assert and enforce such a policy at the federal level, with federal dollars.

The antigrowth critique is currently less politically powerful in the United States than in the EU, particularly in the face of an economic downturn. However, American transport planners and infrastructure designers can learn from the EU’s need to balance competing goals. It will be difficult, even for American planners, to justify new infrastructure projects on environmental grounds, as new projects (as Banister et al. predicted with new European rail networks) may induce greater transport demand; recall that Hickman and Banister (2007) forecast transport demand as overwhelming any emissions savings from technological innovation in the United Kingdom. In creating new infrastructure projects with potential environmental harms in mind, planning for modal shift may not be enough to meet desired goals, especially if the goals are reduction in greenhouse gases. Both American and European transport planners will have to expand their arsenal of potential strategies if they are to continue to supply adequate transport infrastructure while working to minimize short- and long-term environmental damage.

JESSICA L. H. DOYLE is a doctoral student in City and Regional Planning at the Georgia Institute of Technology and will be awarded a master’s degree in City and Regional Planning in August 2009.  She works as a research assistant at the Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development, focusing on the relationship between infrastructure investment and regional economic growth. Before entering graduate school Ms. Doyle worked as an editor for Economist. com, the online edition of The Economist magazine.  She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Notes

1. Hereafter this paper will refer to the ten countries that have joined since May 2004 (Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia) as the EU-12. The EU members who joined prior to 2004 will be referred to as the EU-15.
2. The relationship between increasing economic prosperity and increased car buying can be illustrated by the significant decline in car sales in multiple European countries, including the EU-12, in early 2009. The European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association reported that in February 2009, 18.3 percent fewer new cars were registered in Europe compared to February 2008. The drop was 30.3 percent in the EU-12 (excluding Cyprus and Malta), including a 76.2 percent decline in Latvia, a 66.5 percent decline in Romania, and a 21.8 percent decline in Slovenia, generally considered one of the most stable and prosperous of the new member states (ACEA, 2009).
3. Officially the Marco Polo program can be divided into Marco Polo I, which ran between 2003 and 2006, and MARCO POLO II, which received formal funding from the EU’s 2007–13 budget. There is no substantive difference between the two in terms of aims, and so I will refer to both as Marco Polo.
4. Vereniging Landelijk Overleg Betuwelijn, or Association for National Deliberation of the Betuwe Line (van der Heijden, 2006).
5. Stichting Natuur en Milieu, or Foundation for Nature and the Environment (van der Heijden, 2006).
6. The original four “cohesion” countries, when the Cohesion Funds assistance program began in 1993, were Greece, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal. Countries are ruled ineligible for such EU assistance after their annual GDP per capita increases to 100 percent of the EU average. Ireland became ineligible for cohesion funds in 2004; Spain is currently being phased out. All of the EU-12 became eligible for cohesion funds upon joining the EU.

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Marissa Ferrari Ballas

Santiago de Chile serves as a model for other large Latin American cities as a result of Chile’s consistent macroeconomic policies and strong economic growth. The city’s metropolitan region accounts for more than 39 percent of Chile’s gross domestic product (GDP). The country’s economic development has linked Santiago to the world economy in terms of its new economic sectors. It has become a headquarters for the main service activities of the finance sector and global innovations and products as well as a popular destination for travel and living (de Mattos, 1996). People from all over the world choose to live in Santiago as a result of its modernity, convenient transportation system, and stable, ever-strengthening economy. The city also appeals to Chilean residents, with a high concentration of capital and income and a reputation of a high quality of life. As a result, approximately 35.6 percent of the country’s population lives in Greater Santiago, at a density of 7683.1 persons per square kilometer (Schiappacasse, 1998).

This upsurge in popularity and economic success has resulted in an increasing amount of research on Chile’s development policies and their implications. A number of projects have found that the Chilean housing and urban development process in Santiago has generated social and environmental conditions that result in unequal access to urban amenities for different groups of its population. While this research identifi es the existence of inequality, little actually delves into the relation of residential segregation and transportation issues for vulnerable populations. The research that does explore this relation lacks a gendered focus of the various elements that play a role in the transportation situation of low-income women who live in the urban periphery. Such research on the most vulnerable population with the most need for reliable, affordable, and safe transportation is necessary in providing a gendered perspective to the widely implemented Chilean/Santiago model.

The research project, titled “The Transportation Barriers of the Women of Pudahuel, Santiago,” was implemented in 2006 to identify the current transportation barriers faced by female residents in lowincome social housing districts located in Santiago’s urban periphery. This article first presents a historical account of urban expansion and transportation in such low-income, peripheral locations of Santiago, providing a contextual basis for the project. It then discusses the research project and its findings, suggesting further areas of research and policy improvements.

Social and Residential Segregation in Santiago, Chile

At the end of the 1960s, a number of people settled on Santiago’s urban periphery in the form of squatter settlements. These were the campamentos, a term used to describe self-provided housing established through land invasions. During the 1970s, more than four hundred thousand people settled in campamentos on Santiago’s periphery (Fadda and Ducci, 1993).

This process ended abruptly when the public housing market was privatized in order to reduce the housing defi cit by the 1973–1989 coup-established military government. As a result, the housing construction rate increased by approximately one hundred thousand units per year, which continued through the late 1990s (Fadda, 2000). To further limit precarious settlements, land regularization and slum eradication programs were initiated in the 1979 Urban Development Policy. These programs were developed to

“promote the harmonious growth of the city and peripheral housing development” (Fada, 2000). They were directed at encouraging families to move from illegal settlements to multifamily, low-income housing districts. Between 1980 and 1987, 53,322 public housing units were constructed and designed to relocate approximately 150,000 families away from the wealthier northeast sector of the city toward the peripheral neighborhoods.

Due to the strengthening economy and social housing policies, Santiago’s urban area expanded from 35,000 to 65,000 hectares between 1979 and 1995. During this period, the population also increased by 20 percent from approximately 4 million to 4.8 million inhabitants (Fada, 2000). After the military-established government relinquished power, talks began about coordinating housing policies with the planning system, but little was actually done. While the new democratic governments increased the social housing construction rate to one hundred thousand units per year, all developments were located on the urban periphery, furthering the social and residential segregation of lower classes from the rest of the population. Currently, there are few initiatives to reduce the process of urban expansion, though resulting social and infrastructure costs are increasing at a rapid rate. For example, social housing developments on the urban periphery have caused problems for the local authority, especially in terms of extra amenities, infrastructure, and facilities. They have also added a significant burden to the residents looking to access amenities, such as work and health care, that typically exist in the central area of Santiago. This process also worsened the sociospatial segregation of the city by increasing the distance between rich and poor neighborhoods (Jiron, 1995).

Transportation Barriers for Women in Low-Income Social Housing Districts

In 1990, Chilean authorities introduced new urban transportation policies that would prioritize and modernize the existing transportation systems. Its main goals were to avoid the economic and technical collapse of the transportation system, to eventually expand routes and maintain stability in the future, and to enact licitación de recorridos. The concept of licitación de recorridos is a technical and legal tool that permits administrative authority the power to determine what types of vehicles or public transport services and their routes can be on the road during high pollution times, natural disasters, and city emergencies. Through this tool, the authority can regulate the city’s public transport when it is necessary for “public good.” It also allows the city to correct the distortions of the free market in public transport, avoid the intervention of the state when it is not needed, and still take advantage of private incentives. Through this process, Santiago has reduced the use of vehicular parking, increased the quality of service of the public transportation system, reduced pollution rates, and formalized the bus operators’ jobs (Cruz Lorenz, 2001).

These improvements to the public transportation system are evident throughout central downtown Santiago. The city’s Metro system is one of the most efficiency cient subway systems in the world. The Metro runs every minute during peak times and every minute and a half during off-peak times. The routes are efficiency  planned, and connections are simple and easy to understand. Yet the Metro is more expensive than the bus system and does not extend into the majority of social housing districts located in the urban periphery. Therefore, in order to access the Metro from these distant locations, residents are forced to take a bus closer into the city center, doubling the cost of transportation each way. For the majority of women who live in these areas, this multimodal method of transportation is not an option due to increased costs. As a result, they are forced to use the much slower and less secure bus system, or if possible, walk.

“The Transportation Barriers of the Women of Pudahuel, Santiago”

This research project was initiated in 2006 to identify the transportation barriers of female residents of Pudahuel, a social housing district on Santiago’s urban periphery, while accessing work and health care. Given the influx of women in the Chilean workforce, coupled with existing gender expectations of females to continue to rear the children, female residents are in need of an efficiency cient, affordable, and safe transportation system.

Methodology The project consisted of 130 surveys distributed to female residents of Pudahuel at local bus stops and community health centers throughout the area. Two focus groups were also implemented, as well as two individual interviews. All methodology was utilized to assess existing safety and affordability barriers of the Santiago transportation system. It also aimed to identify individual variables that heightened these barriers, including income level, number of children, distance from home to work and to health care facilities, and mode of transportation.

Pudahuel, the research focus area, is the third-poorest district of Santiago and 17th out of 134 districts for drug use and crime. Between 1989 and 1994, 17,000 new public housing units were built; today, 32.1 percent of residents live below the poverty line (Zegras, 2005). The following segment of the article presents research findings and addresses four critical needs of the females surveyed.

Findings

• 50.5 percent of participants were married, 33.1 percent were single, and 11.4 percent were separated.
• 33.8 percent worked a formal job for income, 15.4 percent were currently looking for a job, 34.5 percent identified themselves as “stay-at-home moms,” 5.4 percent were students, and 10.9 percent worked informal jobs or were living off of a pension.
• 60.3 percent worked the normal day shift, 4.1 percent worked the night shift, 15.1 percent worked only during the morning, 6.8 percent worked only during the afternoon, and 13.7 percent worked a combination of shifts.

Child-friendly transportation services While the range of ages of women surveyed was broad, the majority of women fell between the ages of thirty and forty-five. Many of those surveyed and interviewed in this age group identified a need for more child-friendly public transportation systems. Among the needs listed were increased stroller accessibility, modes of transportation, and policies that accommodate and give preferential seating room to mothers with young children, and safety issues. The majority of women living in Pudahuel use the bus more than the child-friendly Metro to access work and medical centers. Seventy-four percent of the women surveyed use the bus to access work, while 38 percent use the bus to access health care. Buses present certain difficulties for females accompanied by young passengers, especially during peak hours, when the bus is overcrowded and the majority of passengers are forced to stand. The limits of carrying and watching children on the bus are exacerbated when there is more than one child. Eighty-five percent of the women who were surveyed had more than one child, and 18 percent had more than four.

While “unofficial” bus policy is for people to give up their seats to women with young children, this usually does not occur. Therefore, many women are forced to carry their children and groceries, be aware of others and “pickpocketing,” and steady their balance while traveling for long periods of time. Some form of official policy must exist that designates “child-friendly” seating, especially during peak hours, which would make the journey much more comfortable and safe for women traveling with young children.

Reduced fares for low-income families Seventy-eight percent of the women surveyed had between three and six people living in the same household, all supported by the same income. The majority of women, 53 percent, had a monthly familial income under 39,678 pesos ($79.00), while 26.5 percent had a monthly familial income between 39.678 and 67.658 pesos (between $79.00 and $135.00). These findings indicate a demand for transportation policy that allows discounts for those who can identify need based on a monthly income. As stated above, findings indicate that the majority of women would prefer to use a multimodal transportation system but are unable due to increased costs of the Metro. They are forced to take the much slower, less safe, and less reliable bus system. For example, 65 percent of the women surveyed used the bus to travel to work, 9 percent walked, 3 percent biked, and no women reported using the Metro. To access medical centers, 53.1 percent walked, 37.7 percent took the bus, 4.6 percent drove, and no women reported using the Metro. During the focus groups, the women stated that even the bus becomes very expensive without any form of discount for low-income families. In one case, almost 30 percent of a participant’s income went to travel-related expenses to and from work every week. With these situations, women surveyed were unable to save extra money and, in many cases, provide for their families. Research findings indicate a dire need for reduced fares for low-income families in order to access work and health care.

Extension of the METRO to Pudahuel and economic development

Of the women surveyed, 22.1 percent spent one hour traveling to work, 33.8 percent spent one to two hours, and 25 percent spent more than two hours. In terms of accessing medical centers, 49 percent of the women spent less than 20 minutes, 36 percent spent 20 to 40 minutes, 11.5 percent spent 40 to 60 minutes, and 4 percent spent over an hour. (It must be noted that the women were surveyed in medical centers around Pudahuel, which is probably why the majority of women spent less time accessing medical centers than accessing work.)

The extension of the Trans Santiago Metro into Pudahuel would decrease the majority of women’s time spent traveling to work. As stated above, due to the inaccessibility of the Metro, the majority of women are forced to use the bus system, which poses longer trip times due to the number of informal stops and reduced speed capability. While the Metro was extended into other urban peripheral comunas, such as Florida to the south and Las Condes to the north, these comunas generate higher familial incomes and are undergoing more economic changes than Pudahuel. Malls,  restaurants, and business offices abound in these locations, while they are still relatively absent from Pudahuel. As a result, the projected majority of users of the Metro in Pudahuel are its residents. Because a large number of residents would not be able to afford a ticket without reduced fares, the private transportation system would not generate enough revenue. This scenario reduces any likelihood that the Metro will be extended until a variety of land uses and increased economic appear in and around Pudahuel.

Improved safety features The main emphasis of this research project was to determine the perceived level of safety of female residents of Pudahuel when accessing work and medical centers. “Safety” was categorized into two areas, one in regard to delinquency (described as robbery and assault), the other in regard to traffic accidents (described as drivers’ capability and attention to the road). In terms of delinquency, 47.1 percent of women felt very unsafe when they traveled to work, 35.7 percent felt unsafe, 12.9 percent felt safe, and 4.3 percent felt very safe. When accessing medical centers, 38 percent felt very unsafe, 37 percent felt unsafe, 23.1 percent felt safe, and 2 percent felt very safe.

This data shows low levels of perceived safety by women when using the transportation systems. Many of the women who were interviewed in the focus groups and personal interviews had encountered some sort of violent experience while using the bus system or walking to and from the bus stop, or knew someone who had experienced violence. Such experiences were described as harassment, assault, and rape. Improved lighting around the stops, increased patrol watch, and more formal and centralized stops would provide for a safer environment while the women waited for the bus.

In terms of traffic accidents, 45.7 percent felt unsafe while traveling to work, 37.1 percent felt very unsafe, 10 percent felt safe, and 7.1 percent felt very safe. While accessing medical centers, 42.3 percent felt unsafe, 28 percent felt very unsafe, 27 percent felt safe, and 2 percent felt very safe. Many of the women interviewed expressed concern with the operators collecting money while they drove, swerving around cars, not paying attention to the road, and driving at higher speeds than the posted limit. Policy must be aimed at improving operators’ abilities to concentrate while driving and at enforcing bus compliance with speed limits. Strict fi nes should be imposed on bus operators who exceed the legal speed limit and who disobey traffic laws. In order to improve concentration, money collection systems should be set up in order for the operator to have the sole responsibility of paying attention to the road.

Conclusion

The transportation system throughout Santiago is undergoing significant changes as a result of an increasing population and economic development improvements. Residents who live in and around the city in wealthier comunas, such as Las Condes, have the opportunity to utilize the newly improved bus and efficiency cient Metro subway systems. As a result, they can enjoy shorter rides and waiting times, safer and cleaner environments while traveling, and increased accessibility throughout the city. As the city and private market strive to improve the bus systems to encourage multimodal transportation, Santiago’s transportation system is serving as a model for other international developing cities. Yet what is neither depicted nor explored are the transportation and day-to-day experiences of residents who cannot afford to live near the Metro lines and whose bus systems have not been improved as a result of their distance from the city center. The paradox with this relationship is that these are the residents who need affordable, safe, and efficiency cient transportation the most. They are the ones traveling the farthest distances in the poorest areas. Furthermore, little research has been conducted regarding these inefficiency ciencies of the peripheral transportation system. The majority of existing research concentrates on the transportation problems and improvements related to the downtown center and Metro lines.

In order to improve the transportation systems in areas that exist along the urban periphery, more interdisciplinary research must occur regarding the residents who live in these areas, the land use and development that is occurring in these areas, and the creation of transportation/land use models that will benefit both the residents and economy. Only then will the improvement process begin for decreasing transportation costs and trip times, and increasing safety and accessibility measures for the women who live in these areas, such as Pudahuel.

MARISA FERRARI BALLAS entered the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 2001 and completed her degrees in English and Spanish literature. During her undergraduate education, Marisa was employed at a brownfield redevelopment consulting firm in Detroit, Michigan. In 2005, Marisa entered the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her M.S. in Community and Regional Planning in the spring of 2007. During her graduate career, she traveled to Santiago, Chile, to perform research on transportation and environmental design to examine safety issues for low-income residents of peripheral communities.

Works Cited

Cruz, Carlos. Transporte urbano para un Nuevo Santiago. Santiago, Chile: Ministerio de Obras Públicas, Transporte y Telecomunicaciones, 2002.

De la Puente, Lafoy P., E. Torres, and P. Munoz. Satisfaccion residencial en soluciones habitacionales de radicacion y erradicacion para sectores pobres de Santiago. Revista EURE XVI(49) (1990): 7–22.

De Mattos, C. Avances de la globalizacion y nueva dinamica metropolitana: Santiago de Chile, 1975–1995. Revista EURE XXII(65) (1996): 39–63.

Fadda, G., and M. E. Ducci. Politicas de desarrollo urbano y vivienda en Chile: Interrelaciones y efectos, in Chile: 50 años de vivienda social. 1943–1993. Valparaiso: Universidad de Valparaiso, 1993.

Fadda, G., P. Jiron, and Allen, A. Views from the Urban Fringe: Habitat, Quality of Life and Gender in Santiago, Chile. In Compact Cities: Sustainable Urban Forms for Developing Countries. London: Spon Press, 2000: 167–182.

Jiron, P. Progressive Housing in Chile? An Evaluation of the Chilean Housing Policy and its Capacity to Reach the Allegados.” Master of Science Dissertation, Development Planning Unit, London, 1995.

Schiappacasse, P. Diferenciacion del espacio social interurbano en el Gran Santiago. Un analisis a nivel distrital. Tesis para optar al grado de Magister en Geografi a, Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, 1998.

Zegras, Christopher Pericles. Sustainable Urban Mobility: Exploring the Role of the Built Environment. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2005.

Martin K. Thomen and Shawn Strange

Introduction

In spring semester 2008, students in CRP 386: Applied Geographic Information Systems (GIS) conducted a participatory study of risk and vulnerability associated with flooding in an informal housing settlement in Santo Domingo Norte, Dominican Republic. The course was part of a new research and service learning relationship between the city of Santo Domingo Norte, the School of Architecture, and the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo that was initiated in summer 2007 by Dr. Kent Butler. There was also collaboration between University of Texas at Austin faculty in the School of Public Policy, Geography, Anthropology, and Latin American Studies. The intent of the ongoing partnership is to provide technical assistance to planning institutions in Santo Domingo and to create opportunities for fi eld research to students concerned with development planning in Latin America.

Following a series of meetings with the Dominican National Council on Urban Issues (CONAU), nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the Dominican Republic, and community leaders in Los Platanitos, Dr. Bjorn Sletto developed a pilot project to document risk and vulnerability of people living in the community of Los Platanitos, an informal housing settlement located on a low-lying former landfill in the municipality of Santo Domingo Norte. The project focused on the social and health implications of the defining geographical feature of Los Platanitos, a large drainage ditch, also known as a cañada, which runs through the community. The cañada was at one time a natural creek, but in recent years it has been lined with concrete and, in places, covered with a cement cap. Because of inadequate sewage and solid waste management, the former creek is now severely contaminated with garbage and blackwater. When it rains, water laced with sewage and chemicals floods the houses that line the cañada, leading to high levels of gastrointestinal disorders and respiratory diseases.

The ten students enrolled in CRP 386 began their study of Los Platanitos in the winter of 2007 in classrooms at UT. They then traveled to the community to conduct field work in early 2008 and returned to UT for more class-based analysis. They later returned to Santo Domingo to present their preliminary work and get feedback from the residents of Los Platanitos and government planning officials. This entire interactive process was of key importance to the project and allowed the students to engage in an ongoing dialogue with community members and planning officials in Santo Domingo.

The research team used a mixed-methods approach that incorporated both quantitative and qualitative analyses. Mixed-method research transcends the traditional “qualitative-quantitative” divide and also combines multiscalar analyses and perspectives. A mixed-method approach is the hallmark of the Rapid Rural Assessment (RRA) design of this project. RRA is a commonly used approach for conducting quick assessments of the social and environmental issues facing marginalized communities. Rapid risk assessment, which draws on the principles of RRA, attempts to identify the nature and level of environmental risks (such as flooding) in a given area and to determine what individuals or groups are more vulnerable to these risks. Time constraints require that RRA practitioners efficiency and effectively identify major risk factors within a very limited period of time, and rapidly develop methods to study the impacts of these risks on different social groups and individuals. In this way, this approach is quite radical in that it goes against the rigid divisions of knowledge production found in academic institutions. Additionally, because RRA practitioners often have limited knowledge about local conditions, a mixed-method approach allows researchers on the RRA team to share information and data and critically evaluate each others’ work. A theoretical framework based on the precepts of social justice, critical development, and the application of mixed methods offers a more comprehensive and integral approach to the study of development and poverty. As such, this type of research moves beyond simply a technical evaluation of the physical conditions of a community. Instead, a mixed-methods approach helped the researchers better understand the various environmental, historical, social, economic, and political factors that may be contributing—in different ways—to the everyday realities of informal settlements in Santo Domingo by integrating the community’s local knowledge and experience.

The project drew on the theoretical framework of political ecology and developed a blend of research methods, including participatory mapping, architectural surveys, and ethnography, to document the flooding problem in Los Platanitos. In order to maximize time in the fi eld, the students were organized into three teams—physical survey, geographic information systems (GIS) and mapping, and social documentation—each working at a different scale and with different types of data in order to develop a comprehensive analysis of the challenges confronting the community. This article will explore the ways in which GIS was used to represent the local knowledge gathered in the fi eld and to meet the theoretical and practical goals of the research team.

GIS and Mapping

Mapping and GIS are essential tools in RRA, helping facilitate participatory fi eld research and comprehensive analysis and dissemination of spatial data. GIS can be used to conduct preliminary analysis of the study area, and also to document local knowledge of neighborhood boundaries, locations of hazards and economic activity, and distribution of social characteristics at different scales. Information on buildings and infrastructure can be incorporated in GIS and analyzed to assess structural quality and spatial relationships. This allows local communities and governments to make better-informed policy decisions. The goal of utilizing GIS technology in this study was to document the local knowledge of the community of Los Platanitos and utilize it when creating maps, documents, and analyses of geographic and social characteristics. This information could then be taken to local governing and planning bodies to help inform the decision-making process on projects that may alleviate some of the risk and vulnerability faced by the community of Los Platanitos.

Like all parts of this project, the GIS-based analysis started before any of the students had visited Los Platanitos. The first step of the GIS analysis was a data-gathering process that involved the compilation of spatial data from various sources in Santo Domingo, in particular GIS shapefiles produced by CONAU. These fi les gave the research team an initial understanding of the geographical and demographic makeup of Santo Domingo, but they were of limited use due to the variances in scale between city data and the local community. To produce larger-scale spatial data on Los Platanitos, the team captured aerial images from Google Earth before traveling to Santo Domingo. These aerial images were added to the GIS program ESRI ArcGIS 9.2 and georeferenced to match (overlay) the data fi les provided by CONAU. After this, a grid was superimposed on top of the medium-scale image, which allowed the team to disassemble the larger image into grid sections and reproduce these in a map book. The primary reasons for creating the map book were to help student researchers orient themselves in the fi eld and to correctly mark locations of important points, which would later be digitized and used to create the final maps.

Once the small-scale map books were created, a series of large maps (forty inches by sixty inches) were printed from the georeferenced images. They were printed at various scales: a larger, regional map, a medium-scale map encompassing the Los Platanitos neighborhood and the surrounding area, and a more detailed map of the neighborhood itself. A variety of map types were created so that the different research teams, working at different scales in the analysis, would have a choice in which maps to use. The GIS team would use the book to record hydrographic data, footprints of buildings, public spaces, important locations, and other data. The map books would also allow each team member to record significant locations and locations where photos were taken. Worksheets were designed to facilitate data management and correspondence between locations on the maps and the data.

The GIS mapping team worked on the largest (regional) scale of all the teams to better understand the context of the flooding and solid waste problem as well as other conditions of the community. Before leaving for Santo Domingo the GIS team had georeferenced aerial photography of the area into the GIS program. The team also formulated a list of features in the community that they wished to identify with community members once they were in the fi eld. These included locations that are important for everyday life in the community, such as businesses, residences, and public places, and also features relevant to the flooding problem, such as the locations of storm drains or the various branches and other features of the cañada.

Field Work

Once in Los Platanitos, GIS team members utilized the various maps for different aspects of their fi eld work. The first step was a participatory mapping exercise where community members drew boundaries of the Los Platanitos neighborhood to help define the study area. Community members distinguished the community of Los Platanitos from the surrounding neighborhoods. These boundaries were also essential for the social documentation team, which performed a community survey based on a random sampling of households in the study area. After this, students developed, with community participants, methods and techniques that would assist in identifying important community resources by way of these images. This participatory action method was essential in building the framework of the GIS mapping project and built teamwork between students and the community. The goal was to have the local residents “own” the maps and actively participate in compiling data that were relevant to the community’s needs.

The next task was working with community members to trace the roads and the footprints of buildings, and to mark important nonresidential locations, which we categorized as either commercial or public spaces. The methodology in the fi eld was straightforward. The student GIS team members walked around Los Platanitos with community members who helped identify the important locations and features of the neighborhood. Most streets and alleys of the neighborhood were marked on the aerial photos, as were stores, churches, and public areas. Each entry’s information, such as ownership, purpose, and condition of the structure, was recorded on the worksheets. The data recorded on the worksheets helped build the GIS shapefile attribute tables once the students returned to UT.

Important hydrological features in the watershed upstream and downstream from the cañada, along with areas of impermeable surfaces around the community, were documented. Specifically, lagoons, rivers, areas of water accumulation, and points where water entered the cañada were recorded. Additionally, community members were consulted in the recording of the highest flood level they remembered, specifically in the aftermath of Hurricane George in 1998. These data helped determine the floodplain in the area. Dates of flooding were recorded to distinguish between catastrophic floods and common, annual floods that occur during the rainy season. Community participants also helped the research team understand the flows and accumulations of water that lead to heavy flooding, and at which areas the cañada is inundated with trash that impedes the fl ow of water.

Back at UT

After returning from the fi eld, the GIS team compiled data from what they had gathered, as well as data from the other two research teams, and transferred them to GIS using various methods. While the GIS team was mapping important community features and the floodplain, the environmental survey team was working in a smaller scale by documenting, measuring, and drawing the cañada and its immediate surroundings as well as assessing the quality of the structures of the houses. The physical survey team focused on the material and cultural landscape of the one-kilometer-long cañada itself. The social documentation team performed a community survey questionnaire based in part on the official census of the Dominican Republic throughout Los Platanitos. Their goal was to collect data on the social reality of community members, in particular focusing on the impact of the flooding on the living conditions of the people they surveyed. All three of the teams’ data were incorporated into the GIS platform once the teams had returned to UT.

Boundaries and roads drawn by community members and the qualitative research team were digitized over the georeferenced images. Meticulously documented features of the physical environment, including measuring the channel depth and width and all the buildings lining the channel and photographed taken by the physical survey team were georeferenced. Excel spreadsheets with data from the household survey were joined with the shapefile of survey boundaries, and also with shapefiles of the upper and lower regions of Los Platanitos. This allowed the team to produce maps showing spatial distributions of social characteristics. Building footprints were digitized and information was added to that shapefile’s attribute table to distinguish between different land uses and displayed the names of buildings and their structural quality. The worksheets filled out for each recorded feature contained the pertinent information that was included in the attribute tables. Initial maps of the road network, maximum flood levels, the regional hydrography, and points of water entry and fl ow from the area were produced to bring back to the community for their feedback.

Back to Los Platanitos

All of the maps and representations of the data gathered during the fieldwork were compiled for the community when the research team returned to Los Platanitos in the spring of 2008. The entire research team was well aware of the profound effects that mapping and representations of place can have on the relationships between people and their lands. The points, lines, and areas on maps can suggest a finality and a legitimacy to land tenure issues that may, in fact, be in considerable flux and contention. The symbols and text can imply, in the selection of shapes and language, the importance of one culture over another. The fact that these maps were the first maps ever produced of Los Platanitos made the return trip an important and crucial step in the development process of this research.

With preliminary findings in hand, the students returned to Santo Domingo to present maps, posters, and an initial report to the residents of Los Platanitos, representatives of the municipality, scholars from the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo (UASD), and NGOs engaged in the project. Additional fieldwork was conducted to fi ne-tune and further develop initial research. A roundtable discussion was held with the various actors to foster an open dialogue about the problems facing the cañada.

The physical survey team drawings that had been transferred into maps and diagrams using AutoCAD, ArcGIS, and PhotoShop were used in participatory workshops where community members identified areas of solid waste buildup and flooding, places where children play, and unsafe locations. Maps created with data gathered during the fieldwork were essential during the second field trip, when students walked with a hydraulic engineer and community members to gather further regional and water flow data. The students also worked with community members to field check all the maps, including the building footprints and important nonresidential locations, and to confirmed rm the quality of the roads and alleyways in detail.

More importantly, the students and community members held a roundtable discussion and presentation of the research findings with city officials and NGO representatives at the CONAU. This dialogue was a vital step in integrating the research findings, community concerns, and perspectives of the municipality and NGOs into a cohesive framework that could be applied to conduct further risk and vulnerability assessments in Los Platanitos and other cañadas. The GIS-based maps were used in a powerful way to convey local knowledge about the causes and effects of the flooding and sanitary and solid waste issues present in the community of Los Platanitos. The open, unprecedented dialogue between residents of Los Platanitos, city officials, and NGO representatives was one of most important achievements of the class project. The roundtable discussion during this follow-up trip provided a crucial opportunity for community members, students, municipal and university officials, and nonprofit representatives to discuss the future of the project in Los Platanitos as a whole. In conjunction with the roundtable discussion, students facilitated a community visioning workshop to develop a community-based plan for social and environmental improvements in Los Platanitos.

The visioning process was chosen as a way of widening the lens with which both the researchers and the residents were approaching the problems facing the cañada. The deliberations were informed by an important question posed by a community leader during the roundtable discussion: “So, now what?” Whereas the other facets of our mixed-methods approach had been used primarily to collect data on existing conditions within the community, the visioning process was aimed at uncovering the future possibilities imagined by the residents and placing them before the collective.

The model was comprised of three core components, which were conducted in sequence:

• developing the community’s vision of the ideal neighborhood environment;
• identifying the existing resources within the community that were available at different scales; and
• creating an action plan that combines the components of the vision identified in step one with the resources identified in step two.

All activities were facilitated over the course of two days within a local church in order to accommodate seating for the participants. Residents who took part in the activity were notified through word of mouth by the researchers and the project community partners, and were generally representative of the demographic makeup identified through the household survey. Several of the participants had not taken part in any of the previous project-related activities, and therefore provided perspectives that were potentially less biased by project parameters. Since residents had responded favorably to the use of images to represent ideas in the initial January focus groups, one of the students in the qualitative research team drew graphic representations of community responses.

The visioning process was an open-ended activity where residents were asked to disregard any perceived financial, political, or logistical constraints and instead imagine what their ideal community would be like. The task was initiated with a minute of silence, when participants closed their eyes to envision the community they would like to live in. After completing the moment of silence and opening their eyes, participants were asked to look at a blank sheet of white poster paper on the wall in front of them and share their visions with the group so that they could be added to the poster.

Ideas began to pour forward, and each one was noted in words and graphics as it was presented to the group. Community members did not hesitate to propose specific components of an ideal community, and clearly justified the significance of each factor. As each proposal was presented, the group was given time to consider the relationships between the different factors and to discuss their roles and significance in the overall vision. This method proved useful for facilitating the discussion of local needs on a larger scale, both in spatial and social senses.

After residents were satisfied with the vision components, they were asked to consider the resources (both capital and social) that existed within the community. Key goals of this activity were to consider and identify resources in order to create the action plan in the third step of the process, and to widen the scope of the community’s area of reference when developing their planning strategy. Residents were asked to list local resources first, then municipal, national, and international resources, respectively. The final phase of the visioning process consisted of the drafting of a planning framework. Participants were guided to consider who would be in charge of leading the actions for each objective, what the specific action would be, and when they would achieve it. A comprehensive strategic plan was not attempted; however, residents worked through several goal-specific plans with an emphasis on becoming familiar with the model in order to replicate it for a variety of community development needs.

Further GIS Work

The mixed methods and public participation used by the research team allowed the community participants’ local knowledge and desires for their community be represented in a powerful way to local officials and representatives of various groups. The second trip to Los Platanitos was essential for fi ne-tuning the data collected and analyzed by the team during the first trip. It also allowed the students and community members to connect the local knowledge with policy makers. Upon return to UT, parts of the GIS shapesfi les and spatial analysis were adjusted based on community feedback received during the second trip. Finally, the GIS team attempted to construct a 3-D representation of the community using ArcScene. Physical attribute and structural information collected by the physical survey team about each building was joined to the shapefile containing the buildings in the community. ArcScene was used to interpolate a digital elevation model of Santo Domingo provided by CONAU, which allowed the team to “drape” all of the shapefiles over the resulting 3-D surface. The building heights were then “extruded” from the building footprint layer and the physical survey drawings for 3-D display. 3-D modeling allowed the team to better visualize the elevation differences between the upper and lower regions of the neighborhood, and to more effectively represent water flows and areas at greater risk of flooding. This representation, combined with the other data collected, informed the research team’s final report. The report provided detailed steps that could be taken by policy makers to asses and lessen the risk and vulnerability posed by flooding and other issues to the community of Los Platanitos and others in the region. GIS allowed the team to locate and analyze Los Platanitos in several layers of analysis, including within the larger watershed and floodplain, in a social context, and with details about the built environment of the community. The final class products included 2-D and 3-D GIS maps, architectural drawings of the cañada and the built environment, posters, photography, and life stories, which combined to paint a profound picture of the social and environmental conditions in Los Platanitos.

The students also created a model for rapid assessment of cañadas that is being implemented throughout Santo Domingo. The city of Santo Domingo Norte is developing infrastructure projects to address the serious conditions in Los Platanitos. However, the project was more than a technical exercise: it was also an opportunity to demonstrate the enthusiasm and talent of the CRP program in a real-world setting while also illuminating ways in which GIS-based analysis can assist in risk and vulnerability assessments in informal settlements. Students were also able to participate in efforts to resolve a complicated planning issue and witness the very real ramifi cations of environmental risk. Developing and implementing multidisciplinary research methods in a limited time frame was an invaluable learning experience for the students. It also proved a beneficial experience to be able to incorporate the local knowledge of the Los Platanitos community in the search for effective solutions to decrease the risk and vulnerability of the people living there.

This project was made possible through a Mebane Grant provided by the School of Architecture, with additional funding from the Department of Geography, the LBJ School of Public Policy, and the Institute for Latin American Studies. The students included David Baumann, master’s student in public affairs; Monica Bosquez, master’s student in Community and Regional Planning, and Latin American studies; Meredith Bossin, master’s student in Community and Regional Planning, and Latin American studies; Erin

E. Daley, master’s student in public affairs and Latin American studies; Rosa E. Donoso, master’s student in Community and Regional Planning; Maritza Kelley, master’s student in public affairs and Latin American studies; Solange Muñoz, doctoral student in geography; Dana Stovall, master’s student in Community and Regional Planning and Latin American studies; Shawn M. Strange, master’s student in Community and Regional Planning; and Martin Thomen, master’s student in Community and Regional Planning. The project was led by Professor Dr. Bjørn Sletto of the graduate program of Community and Regional Planning at the University of Texas at Austin.

MARTIN THOMEN is a recent Community and Regional Planning graduate (May 2008). He earned a masters in CRP with a transportation planning specialization and also has a BA and BS from UT Austin. He currently works as a transportation planner.

SHAWN M. STRANGE is studying for a Master of Science degree in Community and Regional Planning at The University of Texas at Austin’s School of Architecture. He is engaged in economic development research at both the national and international level. His interests are sustainable development in transitioning economies and the integration of informal economies into rapidly urbanizing regions. He is also focused on social equity by way of transportation accessibility. Prior to graduate study, he worked as a Corporate Relations Associate for the Council of the Americas and as a Program Specialist for the 2005 Texas Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Strike Force. He earned a BBA in International Business/ Spanish and is the Co-Founder and Career Development Chair of the Society for International Planning and Public Policy (SIPPP) at UT Austin.   

Suzanne Russo, Mariana Montoya and Monica Bosquez

Community-university partnerships for environmental justice are becoming increasingly prominent in many American cities in which universities and low-income communities have historically experienced a contentious relationship. This article focuses upon a specific university-community partnership that drew on the perceptions of elementary school students to isolate and interpret environmental hazards in the neighborhood surrounding their school and homes. The aim is to highlight the institutional and social barriers that must be addressed to achieve some measure of success in these collaborative efforts. This case also emphasizes a specific challenge in community-based efforts—the inclusion of various age and socioeconomic groups found within a community, especially children and young adults. The inclusion of youth as research partners in environmental justice efforts is an important element in understanding how environmental issues affect an entire community, and for teaching our future leaders to think critically about their environment and ability to effect change.

In the spring semester of 2007, an applied GIS course led by Professor Bjorn Sletto in the Community and Regional Planning program at the University of Texas at Austin undertook an environmental justice project in partnership with People Organized in Defense of the Earth and Her Resources (PODER), an East Austin advocacy organization, and Zavala Elementary School, located in the heart of historic East Austin. The basic goal of the project was to assess the environmental hazards children attending Zavala are exposed to on their routes to and from school and to better understand and document their perceptions of environmental hazards. Recognizing the “untapped potential within the relationship between the university and its local community,” Dr. Sletto designed a course based upon service learning in East Austin (Brown, 2006, 2). Community-university partnerships built on service learning can offer students, at various educational levels, invaluable experience to develop the kind of ‘think-on-your-feet’ skills necessary for success in the real world, and an opportunity to put their class lessons into a real-life context. These partnerships offer community organizations labor, technical skills, and financial resources that otherwise might not be available while lending the university’s legitimacy and quality assurance to the project.

The class’s overall goal for the first semester of the East Austin Environmental Justice Project was three-pronged: (1) establish solid relationships with our community partners; (2) develop a model for data collection and analysis with youth as research partners; and (3) build a community information system that can be utilized by our community partners to educate residents and influence policy makers regarding environmental hazards in East Austin. At the beginning of the semester, the class refrained from creating a specific mission statement or establishing anticipated findings so that research tasks and goals could be developed in coordination with our community partners. To ensure the diverse research needs were accomplished, the class was divided into three teams, each responsible for coordination of materials development on research on their specific topic: volunteer and fi eld coordination, GIS, and design and media. During the first set of meetings with

PODER, a limited set of specific goals were established to guide the three teams in their work: develop a research project with teachers and students at Zavala Elementary School to document fi fth and sixth graders’ routes to school and their perception of the environment surrounding their school; develop a geographic information system that incorporates students’ travel routes and perceptions of the urban environment; develop a set of products that would  combine to form a model community information system, including interactive GIS, a poster, and papers, all incorporated in a user-friendly web site; and develop a research manual for other community-university partnerships investigating children’s perceptions of the urban environment.

This paper provides an analysis of the class’s experience with community engagement and outreach. Provided here is a critical examination of community-university partnerships, focusing on the challenges and best practices of engaging community-based organizations and youth as research partners. We conclude with a discussion of the challenges we faced and an analysis of lessons learned in order to better facilitate future community-university partnerships in Austin and other communities.

Community-University Partnerships for Environmental Justice

One common method for involving communities in environmental justice (EJ) research and planning exercises is through community-university partnerships. These partnerships have great potential for both faculty and university students and the community, contributing to important community objectives as well as mending sometimes poor relationships between the university and its local community. However, significant challenges and obstacles often prevent these partnerships from coming to fruition or achieving their goals. Several challenges have been identified and examined at length within the academic community, including the perceived and actual power differential between a community organization and the university, differences in discourse and methodological approaches to research, academic/semester calendars that may impede sustained dialogue about needs or completion of ongoing projects, and faulty expectations about time commitments and material resources (Reardon, 1999; Holland, 2001; Williams et al, 2005).

Often the first major obstacle from universities’ point of view is the challenge of collaborating within a context of distinct power differentials, where the community perceives the university as a powerful, wealthy, and somewhat alien institution with little connection to their needs or aspirations. Some techniques are available to address this barrier. First, it is important to establish a positive relationship based upon a deep understanding that all collaborators are working to achieve a common goal. Second, open and transparent knowledge exchange is crucial to diminishing the power differential and building trust between partners (Holland, 2001). Third, all collaborators must have equal voice in establishing project goals, methodological approaches, and expected outcomes or deliverables (Reardon, 2005).

Universities often choose to target low-income, minority communities near university campuses for a partnership. In some cases the same community will be approached for numerous research projects and service learning courses sponsored by different departments over a number of years. While these projects might provide valuable research material for the university, the risk is that few, if any, concrete results or benefits are seen for the community. Community members and community-based organizations do not want to serve as a laboratory for university study and are skeptical of contributing their limited time toward a university partnership (Reardon, 1999; Green and Mercer, 2001). These realities can be overcome only by establishing a shared goal, clearly delineating a high degree of citizen participation in establishing the research goals and methods, maintaining transparency and communication, and spending time cultivating personal relationships and trust (Reardon, 1999).

Once the partnership and mutually developed goals are established, additional obstacles in the research process commonly arise. The reality that “community dynamics rarely share the methodical approach to research design and implementation that characterizes university-led studies” is the root of many of these obstacles (Williams et al, 2005, 294). To produce research results that will embody standards of objectivity and scientifi c rigor, which is important if project results aim to influence policy makers, the university team must often take the lead on research design and methodology. To accomplish this without controlling the project, the university team needs to exercise patience in establishing relationships of trust, and in “drawing limits around the research terrain itself” (Williams et al, 2005, 295) while allowing the community partners to direct the goals of the research.

An important method for continuing the dialogue over university-community partnerships on a meta scale is to produce reports and critiques written for a community audience, not only an academic audience, thus enabling the community to engage in dialogue and action along with academics (Hart and Wolff, 2006). On a micro scale, dialogue should be cultivated throughout the project with assessments serving as specific points of feedback from the community partners. Each collaborator “holds different goals and expectations for the project; arrives with different experiences, assets, and fears; and operates from a different sense of power and control” (Holland, 2001, 53). Regular assessments provide clarity on expectations and attitudes toward progress, and demonstrate a commitment to the needs and opinions of the community partner (Holland, 2001).

It is especially important to have a close dialogue and assessment process with community partners to clarify what products, services, or activities will be delivered, and over what time frame. A common problem with community-university partnerships is that students present their fi nal work (often an exploratory or interim project) at the end of a semester, then move on to other courses or activities, leaving the community behind with unmet expectations. Since the circadian rhythm of the university is based upon semesters or terms, community members and university participants need to delineate clear work objectives that can be completed in these limited time frames and develop a fi rm understanding of the commitment of faculty or students to continue or follow up once a course term is fi nished.

The term “community-university partnership” may be contentious since it implies participation by the entire, or at least a representative group from, the community. Working with a community-accountable organization, such as one with a board of directors elected by the community, is recommended to ensure the research produced is not skewed toward a special interest. Incorporating youth as research partners is important to gaining an understanding of the effects of environmental hazards on an entire community, since youth often are effected differently by and possess different perceptions of environmental agents than adults.

Giving Youth a Voice in Environmental Planning

Children have the right to a healthy and safe environment, education, recreation, and decision-making processes that address their needs (Varney and Vliet, 2005). However, children are rarely recognized as visible, individual subjects who can contribute to decision-making processes. As a result, few proper systems are available for children and young adults to communicate their needs and opinions in political and judicial decisions. Around the world a shift in this paradigm is occurring. Organizations and communities are recognizing that children have a right to inclusion in decisions that affect them (Kruger and Chawla, 2005), and that their input is valuable in understanding how policies will affect a community. As a result, these groups are developing models to allow children’s voices to be heard in the decision-making arena. Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted on November 20, 1989, by the United Nations, states that all children have the right to express themselves freely in all matters affecting them, and that they have the right to be heard in judicial and administrative processes that directly affect the child (Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2007). Cities such as Johannesburg, South Africa (Kruger and Chawla, 2005), Sathyanager, South India (Driskell, Bannerjee, and Chawla, 2001), and organizations like Growing Up in Cities (Chawla, 2002) are putting this declaration into action by designing formal systems for children’s participation in environmental research, urban planning, and other administrative decisions.

One major challenge for EJ researchers and planning practitioners who want to include youth’s ideas, perceptions, and opinions in their research is the different perceptions youth have of the world around them. These differences in perception occur between youth and adults, and also within groups of youth whose emotional and mental development can greatly vary. Therefore, “consideration must be given to the ways in which states and adults view children and gain a proper understanding of their opinions, as well as ways in which adults can facilitate their participation” (Skivenes and Stranbu, 2006, 11). Research methodologies and opportunities for participation must be designed specifically to address the unique needs and attributes of younger community members. As Joy Carlson (2005) states, “children are not little adults. They interact with their environment differently” (225), and, therefore, experience different environmental effects and have different perceptions of the environment than adults.

Chao and Long (2004) speak of the necessity of involving youth in EJ research, since children and teens are among the most affected by environmental and public health decisions, and can help bring a fuller understanding of how environmental problems affect an entire community. However, working with youth can be very challenging, and it requires researchers to think about their methodology on a new level. Researchers may perceive youth as an easy window to a community rather than valuing what they can offer as active participants in the research. A few suggestions are offered for working successfully with teens on an EJ research project:

• Develop a methodology that is understandable and appealing to youth
• Maintain good communication throughout the entire project
• Ensure that the youth participants understand how their work fits into the different stages of the project
• Make the youth feel like an important part of the project—affirm that their inputs valuable (Chao and Long, 2004).

Matthew Goldwasser (2004) authored A Guide to Facilitating Action Research for Youth, in which he encourages teachers and activists to engage students in experiential learning, or service learning, through activist research. He suggests the use of three primary questions to organize the research and develop an action plan: what?, so what?, and now what? The “what” question examines what we want to accomplish through our research. This step seeks clearly laid-out goals and an analysis of the best ways to collect information to meet these goals. “So what” is asked after the research has been collected. This step analyzes what findings have been made and what these findings mean. “Now what” pushes participants to apply these findings to the situation, challenging the researchers to consider what comes next.

The challenges and benefits of involving youth researchers in university-community partnerships were demonstrated in the East Austin Environmental Justice Project. The importance of youth participation in this project was established early on, allowing all partners to coordinate schedules and develop appropriate research materials. The university class and PODER remained dedicated to youth participation in the research throughout the course of the semester, even though challenges were experienced in gaining participation and in collecting data that met PODER’s expectations. PODER’s experience working with youth and the class’s efforts to research and implement best practices enabled us to work effectively with the fifth-grade class at Zavala and the high school interns at PODER. The major challenges faced were coordination of schedules between PODER, Zavala, and UT students and gaining participation from students and teachers at Zavala. Our greatest success was the development of research and evaluation materials for use in storyboarding, mental mapping, and community mapping workshops that can be replicated in future years and in other environmental justice research projects.

Case Study: the East Austin Environmental Justice Project

The East Austin Environmental Justice Project is a multiyear community-university partnership between PODER and the Community and Regional Planning Program (CRP). The first stage of the project involved a collaboration between the applied GIS course taught by Assistant Professor Bjorn Sletto in the spring semester of 2007 and East Austin community partners PODER and Zavala Elementary School.

PODER was founded in 1991 by a group of Chicana/o East Austin activists with a mission to “redefine environmental issues as social and economic justice issues, and collectively setting our own agenda to address these concerns as basic human rights. We seek to empower our communities through education, advocacy, and action. Our aim is to increase the participation of communities of color in corporate and government decision making related to toxic pollution, economic development, and their impact on our neighborhoods” (PODER, 2007).

Since their founding, PODER has successfully rid East Austin of a gas tank farm and a Browning Ferris Industries (BFI) recycling center, and helped gain a stronger voice for East Austin residents within the political sphere. Currently, Susana Almanza and Erika González codirect PODER, while Sylvia Herrera, a founding member of PODER, serves as the health coordinator. Ms. Almanza is a former planning commissioner for the city of Austin, former member of the City of Austin Environmental Board, and current cochair of the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice. Ms. González coordinates all of PODER’s youth activities, including the Young Scholars for Justice internship program that “is dedicated to the development of youth and young adults of color to address education, environmental, economic, and social justice issues affecting them and ensure gender, racial, and resource equity. The project promotes youth and young adult integration in all areas of PODER’s program work” (PODER, 2007, 1).

PODER was selected as the ideal community partner because of their experience with and strong belief in working with young adults, their dedication to environmental justice in East Austin, and their strong reputation and trust within the East Austin community. From PODER’s perspective, a partnership with UT was desirable because of the personnel and technological resources that could be brought to the project, as well as the university’s reputation within the city government. Their hope was that information regarding hazards in East Austin might be more powerful to city officials if the data and reports were cocollected and coproduced by UT rather than by PODER alone.

The first semester of the partnership in the spring of 2007 had the central goal of collecting information on children’s perceptions of environmental hazards near their schools and homes in East Austin, and packaging this information in a format that PODER would be able to use to persuade policy makers that environmental hazards in their community need to be addressed by the city. Relationship-building between the university class and the East Austin community was the central factor in our ability to successfully devise and implement an appropriate methodology, and create a product useful to PODER.

The framework for our project was determined by Dr. Sletto and Susana Almanza prior to the beginning of the semester. In the fall of 2006, Dr. Sletto approached PODER as the principal community organization ideal for collaboration with the university due to their record of local environmental justice activism. During the initial discussions regarding the purpose and shape of the collaborative project, Ms. Almanza indicated that local parents were concerned about their children’s exposure to environmental hazards. Together she and Dr. Sletto drafted the initial framework of the project, specifically the goal of working with children through mapping in order to better understand their perceptions of and interactions with the environment.

During the semester several recurring challenges were pondered and addressed by all participants. These challenges included the ethics of representing children’s voices, prioritization of education or data collection, logistics of working with children of various ages, and coordinating multiple community partners. CRP students discussed at length the complexities of community-university partnerships, the approaches regarding best practices to foster relationships with local residents, and how to ensure that the community would be speaking for itself. We also aimed to balance theory with practice through a service learning framework.

Methodology

A three-phase experiential learning through action research project with students and teachers at Zavala Elementary School was developed based upon Matthew Goldwasser’s (2004) three-question framework of “what?, so what?, and now what?” The first experiential learning phase employed was storyboarding and mental mapping activities during class time at Zavala. These exercises addressed the concepts of environmental justice and environmental hazards while providing students an opportunity to express with their own drawings and words the places they consider to be hazardous and those they consider safe

within their neighborhood. The second phase of the research project was the mental mapping workshops that were intended to produce quantifi able information about students’ ability to isolate and document environmental hazards in their neighborhood. The third phase is development of a community information system (CIS) and is not yet complete. The CIS is based upon data gathered in the workshops and will allow PODER, Zavala Elementary students, and the East Austin community to create maps and share information about their environmental justice efforts.

UT students developed the storyboarding activity based on literature reviews, discussions in the classroom, and conversations with PODER and teachers from Zavala. Insights from Zavala fi fth grade teacher Mr. Guillermo Barrera were crucial to the development of an age-appropriate methodology. Mr. Barrera also assisted in developing the forms used for this activity, encouraged other teachers to participate, and integrated the mapping project into his curriculum. Participants at the workshops collaborated with UT students and PODER interns to map environmental hazards, called points of interest, within a specifi ed grid and collect sensory information on each point of interest. Our class spent several weeks creating and refi ning the methodology to collect this information from the Zavala students.

Two storyboarding activities were held on March 1 and March 21, 2007, with students from the fi fth and sixth grades of Zavala Elementary. Members of PODER participated in both events, presenting the main goals of the project, the importance of children’s perceptions in EJ research, and a discussion of environmental hazards in the neighborhood. A community mapping workshop followed each storyboarding activity, with workshops held on March 4 and March 24.

During the first storyboarding event, UT students, Mr. Barrera, and a sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Gabriel Estrada, instructed their classes to draw “places I like” and “places I do not like.” UT students also provided each child with a large-scale map of the neighborhood and asked them to draw their routes from home to school. For the second storyboarding activity, involving only sixth-graders, Mr. Estrada suggested a change in the methodology. Instead of completing storyboards, the children drew a mental map of their route from home to school, documenting the “places they liked” or places they “did not like” along these routes and the reasons why. This more sophisticated exercise was thought to be a better learning exercise for the sixth-grade class. The storyboarding and mental mapping exercises yielded information about Zavala students’ perceptions of their physical environment—the place they liked and didn’t like—and of their spatial understanding. The exercises also provided us with an opportunity to introduce the topic of environmental justice to these students in preparation for their role as researchers at the community mapping workshops. The purpose of the workshops was to gain detailed, quantifi able information about youth perceptions of specific places, and their exposure to environmental hazards near their school and home.

Each workshop began with a registration table where students turned in their permission forms and provided their address. The area around Zavala was divided into grids of eight to ten blocks. Students were placed within the grid closest to or encompassing their home—it was assumed that students would be more interested in or have more comments about the area most familiar to them. Workshop participants were put into teams of two to four students with at least two adults in each team for the mapping exercise.

After the first workshop, debrief meetings were held with PODER and the university class to get feedback on the methodology and data. While comments from the university students related to technical aspects of data collection and the challenges of working with children, comments from PODER were focused on equity in our process, consciousness of gender and race relations, and dissatisfaction with the UT students’ hands-off approach to identifying the points of interest. PODER viewed the workshops as an opportunity to educate students about the environmental hazards surrounding Zavala, and thereby influenced which places students selected as points of interest. UT students had a scientific obligation to allow Zavala students to select the points of interest without interference from adults or other youth in the workshop. The Zavala partners thought the data collected was valuable because it showed the strengths and limitations of their students’ knowledge about the environment, thereby facilitating the development of an appropriate environmental education program.

The debrief meetings led to important conversations about working with community partners, including harmonizing the goals of education with a scientific research methodology, understanding how the university’s history in East Austin affects our partnership, and clarifying PODER’s goals for this project. The debrief meetings also led to refinement of the research methodology, both for the second workshop and for future semesters. Comments from PODER made it apparent that we needed to provide specific roles for each person so that everyone would understand their responsibilities and to ensure that each participant had a meaningful opportunity to contribute. The newly established roles were workshop coordinator, team leader, team support, and process documenter. We also realized that more time and effort needed to be focused on educating students about environmental hazards in the classroom to avoid education in the fi eld that might influence what the students document as their own perceptions, thereby unethically biasing the data. We were not able to put this lesson into action during the first semester, but it will be an important element in the future. 

During the semester, university students spent time establishing trust with one another other and with PODER. In addition to time built into the class syllabus intended specifically to build trust between PODER and Dr. Sletto’s class, project goals were discussed in depth throughout the semester, leading to continual development and refinement of our research methodologies. A number of issues were grappled with in the classroom while analyzing the project goals, including: establishing the role of UT students, particularly whether students would be working as partners or client/patrons with PODER; how to harmonize academic and activist goals; and whether the purpose of the project would be to provide a service to one particular organization or the community at large. Negotiating positionality as nonresidents of the service area and perceived “gentrifi ers” of East Austin also factored into the initial organizational and trust-building process. These concerns continued to guide class efforts to be transparent, inclusive, and respectful of stylistic differences in developing the methodology. Respecting and learning from PODER’s extensive on-the-ground experience was also a class ambition.

As the project progressed, a dynamic web of relationships was created, leading to new partnerships and successes as well as to logistical and communicative challenges. In addition to the twelve students in the applied GIS course were three American Youth Works Computer Corps volunteers, two PODER interns, and faculty members at Zavala Elementary School. From a pedagogical perspective, much of the responsibility for coordinating workshops, reviewing project progress, and communicating goals, ideas, and concerns was transferred from Dr. Sletto to the planning students. This enabled students to have ownership of the project and fully participate in the community-university partnership.

UT students experienced the fl uid nature and malleable end goals that resulted from the highly participatory nature of the project. The GIS team reassessed how best to design and burnish research tools to meet goals in light of feedback from PODER, class discussions, and logistical realities. For example, because of its active schedule, PODER was only able to participate in one of the two weekend activities. The UT students also became the de facto liaisons with Zavala teachers, who became critical partners in the data collection process. Students had not anticipated working directly with Zavala due to their initial efforts to defer to PODER as the primary liaison; however, it became necessary as the semester-based time frame of the project placed pressure on scheduling options and deadlines for the UT and Zavala partners. The necessary compression of semester-based projects was an issue that had been considered by the class (Esnard, Gelobter, and Morales, 2004), but not experienced firsthand.

Interclass dynamics evolved as each of the three teams worked through creative differences. The GIS team faced the difficult task of organizing and representing data gathered through the mapping exercises in a way that best represented the overall goals of the community colleagues. The design team struggled to visually represent the project while considering the need to speak to a diverse audience including the academic community, city officials, and local partners. The fieldwork team strove to maintain meaningful learning opportunities for the Computer Corps volunteers, maintain communication with PODER and Zavala Elementary, and coordinate efforts between class members.

Research Process and Results

Storyboarding Storyboarding was selected as a method to facilitate children’s participation in the identifi cation of environmental hazards in East Austin because it is a form of storytelling that allows children to represent their observations and impressions of the world around them through a visual medium. By organizing different events and experiences, stories can help children to construct their own world and to arrive at a better understanding of it (Lake, 2003). The storyboarding exercise in this project allowed children to illustrate, with words and pictures, places in their community that they liked or disliked, and to prepare them for the workshop that was aimed at gathering more data about perceptions of environmental hazards in East Austin.

While some children noted perceptions of environmental hazards, most of the children from both grades did not include commonly recognized environmental hazards in their drawings or maps. Only 13 percent of the drawings included the most significant environmental hazards near the elementary school. Most of the sites children disliked were viewed as threatening and unsafe, such as parks with drug dealers, streets with excessive traffic, and abandoned houses. Most of the children chose to draw the playground at Zavala Elementary as their favorite place. These findings can be interpreted in different ways. It may be possible that children did not include hazardous places because they do not know what they are: children have limited knowledge about officially recognized hazardous materials sites. On the other hand, children may know about these hazards and the potential harm they may cause, yet their familiarity with these sites may make them indifferent. In future research, we would like to discuss the drawings with the kids and with their teachers to get a better understanding of why they chose to include or exclude specific locations.

A significant problem with the sixth-grade participants was that many of their mental maps were missing “important places,” in part because of lack of instruction by the teacher and UT students. But it is important to recognize that this activity was not part of the sixth-grade curriculum, which meant it was “something else” they needed to do instead of other planned activities. In addition, the sixth graders had completed a storyboard before, so they might have been confused about redrawing these same places again on their mental map.

The storyboards and mental maps provided valuable information about Zavala students’ perceptions of their environment. Most importantly, these perceptions were expressed by the students themselves through their own drawings and descriptions. Creative self-expression enables students to explore their own ideas and understanding of their physical environment, associations they have with particular places, and how they feel about specific places and why.

This type of personal exploration provides youth with an opportunity to internalize environmental justice. However, to expand on the information collected through mental mapping and storyboarding, we needed quantifi able, scientific data that could be integrated into a GIS system. Therefore, we followed up the in-class exercises with Saturday community mapping workshops intended to gather sensory data on places youth deemed to be environmental hazards, and to evaluate each block within the Zavala Elementary School feeder district.

Community mapping workshops The community mapping workshops allowed the Zavala students to serve as researchers, journalists, and cartographers, while also providing an opportunity to teach these young students how to critically analyze their environment, and to collect data on their perceptions of environmental hazards. For the organizers of these workshops, the greatest challenge was recruiting students to attend—getting participation at community events is notoriously difficult. The most influential factor in how many students attended the workshops was support of key faculty members at Zavala. Mr. Guillermo Barrera (Mr. B), a fifth-grade teacher, served as our primary contact at Zavala and was highly supportive of our efforts to map environmental hazards in Austin; he worked with our class to develop the research methodology, devoted his class time to teaching mapping and environmental hazards, and required his students to attend the Saturday workshop. Mr. Estrada, a sixth-grade teacher, allowed us to work with his class to collect mental maps of the neighborhood from his students and discuss environmental hazards. However, Mr. Estrada was not as involved in the project as Mr. Barrera, and only one of Mr. Estrada’s students attended our second workshop. Despite this, the support of these teachers granted us access to a group of young people with unique knowledge about the areas around Zavala.

The second factor in the success of the workshops was creating a methodology to collect information on environmental hazards that the children were able to understand and respond to. This meant wording our questions and providing a form for collecting the children’s perceptions in terminology that they would comprehend. With Mr. Barrera’s help we chose a set of six aspects of locations, smell, sound, look, cleanliness, fun, and safety, with a gradient of fifth grade–appropriate terminology, that workshop participants could use to rate their perceptions of each site they chose to record as a “point of interest” (see figure 1). It was important that we maintained an age-appropriate approach to the entire workshop. This included games at the beginning of the event, a playful attitude, appropriate language on the data collection forms, and an appropriate length of time spent in the field. We learned in the second workshop that even a one-year grade difference can change whether our forms and our questions were age-appropriate, though within grades mental maturity and scientific sophistication can vary greatly as well.

Though designing our methodology was the most time-consuming aspect of the workshops, gaining the support of the teachers turned out to be the biggest challenge. We learned that without the engagement of teachers, we had very little chance of gaining strong interest and participation from students. Engaging parents in the project was also challenging. We originally anticipated that parents would accompany their children on the mapping walks, providing an opportunity to capture parents’ perspectives as well. However, only one parent attended either of the workshops. Lack of parent engagement in school activities is an ongoing problem.

A major lesson of the project was the difference between how our class and our community project partner, PODER, measured success. From our academic perspective, success meant that we were able to implement our devised methodology and gather accurate data. PODER wanted to gather data that showed there were environmental hazards affecting children in the neighborhood while educating the community about these hazards. While we shared the desire to make a case for redress of these environmental justice issues in East Austin, as academics we were reluctant to take a more activist approach in the data-gathering process. Since one of our initial aims was to serve as a facilitator of PODER’s goals, we needed to keep our priorities and goals aligned with those of PODER.

Though we constantly questioned our approach and critiqued our methodologies to account for PODER’s goals, tensions did arise between our responsibility to maintain an ethically pure research project and PODER’s responsibility to gather persuasive information about hazards to children in East Austin. While we did not consider our data biased, the debate over our role as academics or facilitators for PODER’s agenda should be considered in greater depth for future projects. Communication between the university and the community partner on this subject prior to implementation of the methodology should be considered of paramount importance.

All collaborators were pleased with the materials, data management, and maps created through the course of the semester. However, as previously discussed, when asked to map environmental hazards, children recorded sites they felt threatened by, such as abandoned houses, parks occupied by drug dealers, bars, and mean dogs. Therefore, our results did not meet PODER’s expectations of gathering data on children’s perceptions of environmental hazards such as metal processing plants and other businesses that emit toxic fumes. When we began processing the data, it appeared our maps would be of little use to PODER. However, as PODER discussed the project’s findings with the community and policy makers, the maps of children’s perceptions have proven to be powerful in bringing attention to the pollution and safety hazards faced by children in East Austin.

In June of 2007, Susana Almanza and Erika Gonzalez invited our class to present the findings of our research to the City Council in an effort to persuade the city of Austin that the area surrounding Zavala needs to be rezoned to rid the neighborhood of industrial uses. Two council members responded positively to the presentation and vowed to work with the community to address the environmental hazards.

Despite the frustrations and disappointments felt by all parties at some point during our partnership, the process of undertaking this project helped establish a working relationship between PODER and the university. This portends future partnerships between these two groups, building upon these past experiences to create greater change in the years to come. As such, this exercise demonstrated the promise of more long-term community-university partnerships.

Community-university partnerships are essential in an age when universities have increasingly deep impacts on the communities surrounding them. The array of resources available to public universities places upon them an obligation to work toward the betterment of the communities of which they are a part. The constant tension in these partnerships over the struggle to negotiate course goals and academic ethics with the immediate needs of a community partner and its activist goals should serve as a valuable learning experience for both groups. In our experience, PODER would have gotten results closer to their expectations if we had prompted children on the walks to comment on what we consider environmental hazards rather than allowing the children to self-select the points they consider to be environmental hazards. The latter type of data, and analysis of why points were or were not considered environmental hazards to children, is valuable for discussions of theory and in identifying potential unsafe areas in the neighborhood, but it appeared not to serve the immediate interests of PODER.

Conclusion

While participants in this community-university partnership had different expectations and different opinions regarding the data produced, everyone considered the project a success with the awareness that improvements would be made in future semesters. Through the mental mapping, storyboarding exercises, and two community mapping workshops we collected valuable data on children’s perceptions of their environment. Over the course of the semester, a methodology was developed that can be replicated in future years; a framework for a community information system was built; partnerships between the university, the East Austin community, and Zavala Elementary School were deepened; and a clear plan for improving participation and data collection in the future was developed.

Although the storyboarding activity needs refinement, it helped illustrate the difference between children’s and expert perceptions of “environmental hazards” and safety. It also showed that children have limited knowledge about local environmental hazards. They have extensive spatial knowledge about their neighborhood, and this knowledge was reflected in their mental maps. This contradiction and lack of environmental awareness should be discussed with teachers and perhaps addressed through educational interventions in the future. It is important to plan storyboarding activities in close cooperation with teachers so they can include them as part of their class curricula. The more related these activities are to their classwork, the more the teachers can be committed to this type of project.

Upon completion of the initial project and the semester, the UT students had learned that the dynamic nature of community-university partnerships demands fl exibility, patience, and the ability to release ownership of a joint effort when many partners are involved. The goal of serving the community through a community-university partnership has led to much additional time reviewing the vision of the project, maintaining open channels of communication, and refi ning research methodologies. The confl icting expectations and approaches between partners became “learning opportunities,” as one student put it, opportunities for dialogue and a deepened understanding of our partners. The learning experience in itself became as rewarding as the findings produced by the act of collaboration.

The ultimate success and impact of this project will depend on sustaining and further building the relationship between the three groups across academic years and semesters. This experience shows that building trust and relationships, understanding the real terrain of specific communities, and developing information and findings useful to a community can rarely be accomplished in a four-month class period. Future semesters will serve to refine the data collection methodology, expand the community information system, and bring the city of Austin into our project as a partner in developing solutions for the environmental hazards in East Austin.

MARIANA MONTOYA is a doctoral student in the University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Geography and the Environment. Building upon her undergraduate studies in biology at the Universidad Nacional Agraria La Molina in Peru and master’s in science in ecosystem management at the Universidad Autonoma de Baja California, Mexico, Mariana’s current research is focused on political ecology and environmental integrity in the Peruvian Amazon (2007).

SUZANNE RUSSO achieved a bachelor’s of arts in Humanities from the University of Texas at Austin in 2004, focusing on integrated rural development in Africa. After a semester at American University’s graduate program in sustainable development, Suzanne completed a master’s of science in Community and Regional Planning at the University of Texas. During her time in Austin, Suzanne worked with a variety of organizations to secure affordable housing, sustainable food systems, and walkable cities (2007).

MONICA BOSQUEZ is pursuing her master’s in Latin American Studies and is employed as a development specialist with the Texas Office of Rural Community Affairs, where she works on self-help water and wastewater projects throughout the state. As a returned environmental conservation volunteer for the Peace Corps in Panama, she maintains close ties with coffee producers, artisans, and community groups in that region. Monica recently completed a Ford Fellows consultancy in central Mexico and is looking to incorporate the experience into her research interests in multilevel partnerships and community development in rural areas (2007).

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Elizabeth J. Mueller and Tommi L. Ferguson

Introduction

State governments shape the priority placed locally on meeting affordable housing needs through the resources they provide to cities and through the laws guiding local planning that they enact. State law provides a central legal framework for urban planning that can facilitate or constrain local efforts to address affordable housing needs and enact local solutions. State comprehensive planning laws that mandate local housing needs assessments, concordance between needs and zoning practices, or laws that require communities to shoulder their “fair share” of affordable housing all provide a strong basis for local advocacy.¹ Local advocates can rely on the reporting requirements that come with such mandates for information on housing needs and agency performance.² Conversely, states lacking such requirements, or legally barring the use of specifi c housing remedies, give local advocates little to work with. Local advocates in such states will need to compile their own information on needs and how local policies respond to them to push for creation of local goals in the absence of statewide ones. Yet only fi ve states require housing plans as part of a broader comprehensive planning requirement (Pendall, 2006).

More common is the experience of states like Texas, where no state planning mandates exist, and signifi cant impediments to planning for affordable housing are found in state law. The state lacks any growth management or land development program at the state level (Parmenter and Oden, 2004). In terms of specifi c tools often used in housing policy, the overall picture is especially bleak. The Texas legislature is well known for intervening on behalf of developers to overturn local ordinances regulating development or acting to preempt progressive local initiatives. In the last regular legislative session, in response merely to early discussions of policy changes in the city of Austin, a law was enacted that effectively prohibited mandatory inclusionary zoning.³ Advocates have been most successful in creating pilot programs for use in one city, in the hopes that they can build on evidence of success in future, broader legislation. To date, such pilot programs have included a land bank in Dallas (successfully implemented and later replicated in Houston), and a “homestead preservation district” designed for Austin.

This specific planning framework leads us to ask how local housing advocates can effectively operate. How will they institutionalize progress absent state requirements for housing planning? In this article we examine one strategy for action in the absence of state mandates for housing planning. We chronicle the progress of a participatory action research project⁴ aimed at providing local advocates with information on housing needs and tracking progress on measures linked to underlying theories about points of leverage in local housing politics.  Texas City Housing Report Cards were designed to do what comprehensive planning mandates do elsewhere—provide information on citywide housing needs and focus attention on city policy and progress. We begin with a discussion of what we know about local politics, particularly the factors that have facilitated the rise of local housing movements in cities around the country. Drawing upon the lessons of these past experiences, we present our starting hypotheses about housing politics in Texas cities and the role that report cards might play in facilitating public discussion of housing needs and strategies. Finally, we describe the political context for housing policy and our experience partnering with local housing advocates in San Antonio and Dallas.

The Problem: Building Support for affordable housing at the City Level

Urban political theories Contemporary urban political theorists have focused on explaining the dominance of specific groups within the local political arena, why particular coalitions or regimes remain dominant for long periods of time and on the different paths to influence across cities (Logan and Molotch, 1987; Stone, 1989; Ferman, 1996; Stone, Orr, and Imbroscio, 1991). To a lesser extent, theorists have focused on examining cases where progressive coalitions, with interests counter to the dominant regime, are able to take power and pursue an alternative agenda (Ferman, 1996; Turner, 1992). In this section, we outline the main lessons of this literature for local housing politics, consider the rise of housing movements in two cities in light of this literature, and present our own approach to stimulating housing movements in Texas cities.

Emphasis on identifying the particular interests of different groups within cities builds on observations made by sociologist Harvey Molotch in his seminal article “The City as a Growth Machine,” on the central role of growth as a motivator for local politics: I speculate that the political and economic essence of virtually any given locality, in the present American context, is growth. I further argue that the desire for growth provides the key operative motivation toward consensus for members of politically mobilized local elites, however split they might be on other issues, and that a common interest in growth is the overriding commonality among important people in a given locale—at least insofar as they have any important local goals at all. Further, this growth imperative is the most important constraint upon available options for local initiative in social and economic reform. It is thus that I argue that the very essence of a locality is its operation as a growth machine. (Molotch, 1976, 309–310)

In Urban Fortunes, Molotch and coauthor John Logan develop this into a fuller argument, emphasizing the central role of local actors whose interests are tied to local land prices. The growth machine includes within it developers, real estate interests, builders, bankers, and organized labor (particularly the building trades). Backing them up were auxiliary actors, with interests tied to place but less directly to particular places within cities: politicians, local media, utilities, local universities, sports teams, and local cultural institutions (Logan and Molotch, 1987).

Building and expanding upon Logan and Molotch’s framework, the dominant approach to describing and explaining urban politics for the past twenty-five years has been “regime” theory. Clarence Stone, whose work on Atlanta pioneered the concept of regimes, defined a regime as “an informal yet relatively stable group with access to institutional resources that enable it to have a sustained role in making governing decisions” (Stone, 1989, 4). Regimes bridge the public and private realms, bringing together formal and informal actors and groups in order to build or maintain support for a specific policy agenda. Neither governmental institutions nor private business interests have the ability to carry out major policy objectives alone, thus “regimes” are necessary to assemble the support and resources necessary to accomplish change. This means that groups without either organized constituents or valued resources will find it difficult to be included in governing regimes. Case study research on regimes has emphasized the power of development interests and other business organizations in local politics (Logan, Whaley, and Crowder, 1997). In a few cases, groups interested in redistributive policies have been able to gain control of decision making for periods, enabling them to follow very different local agendas (Orr, 1992; Stoker, 1987; Turner, 1992). Typically, however, these groups do not solidify into “regimes” as defined in the literature, as they are not able to maintain their agenda across elections.

How regimes are formed and remain influential is tied to the structure and culture of local politics. Barbara Ferman’s concept of political “arenas” provides a framework for thinking about how and where decisions are made and how those outside the regime might achieve influence. Arenas are “spheres of activity that are distinguished by particular institutional frameworks and underlying political cultures” (Ferman, 1996, 4). They shape the relationships that develop, the form of political mobilization and organization, the types of conflicts that get aired, opportunities for leadership, and the range of likely policy options. Arenas have internal logics, institutional frameworks, and political cultures that create/deny opportunities for participation. Strategies for action will vary according to the main arena where politics takes place: in electoral arenas, the key link between citizens and government is institutions interested in political power, such as ward organizations, political clubs, interest groups, reform organizations. In civic arenas, private, nonprofit institutions, voluntary organizations, and informal clubs dominate, producing an associational politics based on the density of local networks. Civic organizations tend to cluster by function, ethnicity, and geography and are strongly influenced by philanthropic organizations that distribute resources to groups and foster cooperative culture. Business arenas tend to be dominated by a handful of powerful businesses that benefit from cooperation in large projects. They are linked to government through campaign contributions, major development and service contracts, land use decisions, and board appointments. They will vary according to the strength and diversity of local businesses. Intergovernmental arenas are dominated by bureaucrats, with vertical lines of authority based on regulations. For example, under devolution, ties between state and local governments may strengthen and those between federal and local organizations may decline.

According to Ferman, for neighborhoods and others interested in quality of life or distributional issues, the most viable arenas for action and influence are civic and electoral. Business arenas tend to be closed to neighborhoods, and intergovernmental arenas distance them from participation. Political cultures most favorable to quality of life or equity concerns emphasize communalism, collective enterprise, trust, reciprocity, and social networking. Those working against it emphasize cynicism, mistrust, competitiveness, and strong individualism (Ferman, 1996). This framework provides a useful starting point for discussion of local housing politics.

Local housing politics Pushing for local housing goals means entering the local political fray. Despite the general tendency of those with a direct interest in land development to influence local government priorities, case study research in several cities has documented periods when a local “regime” focused on redistributive policies was able to take hold (Krumholz and Forrester, 1990). Research conducted in the 1980s and early 1990s documented the rise of local housing movements in several cities in response to cuts in federal funding for housing (Goetz, 1993; Yin, 1998). As housing affordability problems creep upward into the middle classes, the politics of general residential development and affordable housing development increasingly intersect. In this context, making the case for the ongoing needs of extremely low-income households is likely to become even more challenging. An external (e.g., state) mandate to address specific housing needs provides advocates a foot in the door to the discussion. Conversely, where mandates are absent, advocates must build local support for housing as a priority issue, in the context of local development-dominated politics.

Scholars have chronicled the rise of local housing movements in cities around the country, arguing that contrary to expectations, these movements were able to counteract the decline in federal funds by pushing for local support. We review two cases from this literature here with particular attention to how these local efforts initially formed. Specifi cally, our research questions included: Was there a catalyzing event? What allowed them to consolidate their gains over time? How do conditions in Dallas and San Antonio, our study cities, differ from those described below, which were able to promote successful organizing for housing?

Los Angeles In 1980, the city of Los Angeles did not have a coherent local housing policy. There were no explicit programs in place to address affordability, no effective organized advocacy coalition, and “no local resources devoted to affordable housing except for a state-mandated tax increment set- aside” (Goetz, 1993, 161). Within little more than a decade, housing advocacy groups became organized and vocal, the mayor created key policy positions focused on housing, and an ambitious dedicated trust fund was created.

Goetz (1993) attributes the almost complete turnaround to several factors, but one stands out as catalytic in his account: the redevelopment of Bunker Hill. This one project resulted in the displacement of 6,000 people and elimination of more than 2,200 single room occupancy (SRO) units, thereby exacerbating the city’s homeless problem. This came on top of the growth of low-wage employment and helped drive public awareness of housing issues and mobilize local housing advocates. Subsequently, the mayor became more responsive to Housing LA, the umbrella organization formed to push forward the advocates’ agenda.

Also important was the election of new council members, willing to push the mayor on new priorities. The mayor responded to pressures by appointing a longtime advocate as “housing coordinator” and formed a panel to study and make recommendations for local housing policy. Subsequent debates over proposed policy solutions solidifi ed the position of the housing coalition as the forum for discussion among advocates. Advocates were able to push for creation of a separate housing agency, further strengthening their position. The culmination of their work was the formation of a hundred-million-dollar local housing trust fund (Briedenbach, 2002).

Cleveland The Cleveland story, as told by Yin, is quite different. In this case, in the context of long-term population and economic decline, civic elites saw an overlap between their interests in bringing middle-class residents back to the city and the housing and neighborhood improvement work of community development corporations (CDCs). A dramatic increase in support and funding for CDCs, and the creation of a “community development industry system” has resulted from this partnership (Yin, 1998). Yet that support has also arguably meant a shift in direction for CDCs, away from advocacy and from serving primarily low-income residents.

Under Mayor George Voinovich, elected in 1979 with support from a business coalition attracted by his focus on downtown redevelopment and “a new image for the city,” corporate interests became increasingly involved in CDC housing activity, primarily as funders, and the housing efforts of Cleveland CDCs began to shift (Yin, 1998, 141). Made possible by changes in federal tax law in 1986, Cleveland’s British Petroleum “developed the groundwork for an innovative tax syndication program” using tax credits as an investment for housing development through nonprofi ts (Yin, 1998, 143). During the mid- to late 1980s, the use of corporate tax credits resulted in greatly increased production numbers, to the tune of four hundred housing units rehabilitated in roughly a fi ve-year period.

Success built upon itself, as national community development intermediaries Local Initiatives Support Coalition and the Enterprise Foundation established local branch offices and began work to “facilitate the increasing productivity of the city’s CDCs” (Yin, 1998, 143). By the mid-1980s, national foundations5 had become major funders of the Cleveland Neighborhood Partnership Program. Funders’ development interests were focused on commercial and market-rate housing activity as a “strategy . . . to enhance the city’s image as a place for the location of business firms, attract middle-class households to live in the city in hopes of enhancing the city’s income and property tax bases, and stimulate consumer expenditures within the city” (Yin, 1998, 144).

Increasingly, Cleveland CDCs were encouraged to take on a more professionalized structure and market-oriented approach to housing activity. Funders institutionalized their goals through the creation of a new organization, Neighborhood Progress Incorporated, which oversaw “corporate efforts directed toward neighborhood development” (Yin, 1998, 144). While the city’s well-known Cleveland Housing Partnership, originator of the lease-purchase home ownership model for low-income households, continues to receive support, the balance has shifted away from advocacy on behalf of low-income residents and neighborhoods. Increased funding for CDCs has come at the cost of a weakened voice for low-income residents.

From the two cases outlined above, we draw several lessons. First, as the LA story shows, it is possible to overcome an apparently weak position and move forward. Advocates were able to capitalize on a series of events and a change in the political fortunes, or a change of mayor, to push for real changes and get them institutionalized. Once opportunities arose, they were able to overcome their own internal divisions to work together to set priorities and affi x policy goals to them. In contrast, Cleveland shows us the trade-offs associated with joining forces with civic elites. Where goals are well aligned, it is a win-win situation. Where they diverge, community coalitions are poorly positioned to push back. The challenge becomes building a coalition with enough strength to command attention and access, while maintaining enough autonomy to uphold community priorities. The two cases also show the importance of the arena driving local politics. LA’s electoral focus gave advocates a venue to push for change. Cleveland’s more civic business–driven politics kept advocates out of the center of discussions.

Coalition building Herbert Rubin draws several lessons regarding the ability of community development organizations to infl uence policy from his extensive multiyear study (Rubin, 2000). First, he describes the way in which community-based development organizations (CBDOs) can work through umbrella organizations or coalitions to advocate, despite their individual ties to city coffers. Such coalitions, he argues, can be effective vehicles for building a social movement around community development goals. Second, he emphasizes the many dimensions that go into building the fabric of effective coalitions and movements. His description sounds a lot like Ferman’s description of civic arenas—with overlapping memberships, personnel, dense social networks, and relationships solidifying ties and trust among members. Finally, he describes the elements of a successful movement, emphasizing the importance of developing a shared framework across coalition/movement members based on a common diagnosis of problems, prognoses for how to respond, and a rationale for action.

The process he describes for achieving this common vision and thus laying the foundation for a local social movement involves refl ecting on the work of CBDOs, drawing lessons regarding what works, and developing a way to talk about this, a story to tell. Such stories become common across movement leaders and become the way that the whole community development “industry” (e.g., funders, trade associations, CBDOs, etc.) talks about its work and larger goals. Gradually, these ideas become part of the collective memory of the broader group.

Strategy: Housing Report Cards for Texas Cities

Our approach: telling a new story about housing in Texas cities In the current context, Texas cities are pushed to address their affordable housing needs neither by state law nor by proactive federal oversight of planning requirements that come with block grant funds. Instead, housing advocates must push for attention to housing in the context of the local political arena. In most cases, the context is heavily weighted toward the concerns of the real estate and development community. In some cases, broader economic interests are also a part of the governing regime (Parmenter and Oden, 2004; Elkin, 1987). In this context, we developed an approach for stimulating local discussion of affordable housing in Texas cities. In this paper, in order to contrast different political contexts, we focus on our experience in Dallas and San Antonio.

The strategy developed was to produce a “housing report card” in each city, aimed at presenting easily understood information on housing needs, city priorities, and local progress toward meeting needs. We developed our approach based on a few operating assumptions, consistent with our understanding of urban politics. First, we assumed that public awareness of housing as an issue was shaped by local politics and thus interest would likely be skewed toward workforce housing (i.e., housing for households approaching median income), thus de-emphasizing the needs of the poor. This would be consistent with local politics dominated by development concerns since it would allow for more general discussion of impediments facing local residential developers. Second, we assumed that leadership needed to come from civic elites, broadly defined, not agency heads or even elected officials. This would be consistent with our understanding of Texas city politics and with our assessment of the structural position of housing agency heads, who have to serve both federal and local masters, often by cooperating with local housing developers. Affordable housing production is more often done by private developers in Texas than elsewhere, making local agencies particularly sensitive to developers’ concerns. Third, we assumed that local advocates were organized into the sort of coalitions described by Rubin, where a larger vision for the city was the focus of advocacy. We knew that both San Antonio and Dallas had been successful in securing at least one progressive policy and assumed this was, in part, the result of the work of these coalitions. (Dallas had passed bonds to support a homeless housing project downtown, and San Antonio had created a housing trust fund).

Development of framework We developed our framework for the report cards based on a review of three other models. These three models—the San Francisco Bay Area Housing Crisis Report Card, the Greater Boston Housing Report Card, and the Toronto Report Card on Housing and Homelessness—took very different approaches to their task. Through a review of their reports and discussions with some of the authors, we assessed how their report cards were used, the data requirements involved in preparing them, and the audiences they were addressing. Drawing on their experience, we developed an approach that relies on existing data and grading standards that fit Texas.⁶

We identified six key areas to focus on: leadership, resources, production, targeting, fair housing, and transparency. For each area, we identifi ed a set of underlying principles that we wanted to incorporate into a set of measures.

 We put together lists of possible measures for each category and discussed these measures with experts and advocates. In order to make the process as replicable and fair as possible, three criteria were used to select measures. First, we sought to document each item from data that is already reported to or required by HUD or other state or federal agencies or reported publicly on a regular basis. Second, to the extent possible, measures avoided judging the quality or degree of compliance of particular items. Where unavoidable, such qualitative measures followed standards developed and in use elsewhere. Deciding what constituted an A or an F again required discussion with stakeholders. Grading follows traditional standards, where a C is average, an A is exceptional, and an F is utter failure to seriously address the issue at hand. We found it most diffi cult to hold to these rules in judging “leadership.” This made our process of vetting our fi ndings (described in the next section) all the more important.

Politics and Housing in San Antonio and Dallas

While we developed report cards for four cities in Texas, we focus here on Dallas and San Antonio. Both are large cities, with council-manager forms of government and a history of corporatist governance, dominated by white businessmen, where minority representation improved only in the late twentieth century following struggles made possible by passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The contrast between them resides in the strength of their economies, the magnitude of social problems, their different racial and ethnic makeup, and, fi nally, in their political cultures. These differences are in part an outcome of very different histories. In both cities minorities struggled to gain representation and access to power in ways relevant to housing politics. In this section, we briefl y describe our experience presenting our report card work in each city, then step back and review each city’s political culture, emphasizing the access of minority groups to political power, the impact of the voting rights act on local politics, the legacy left by urban renewal, and the dominant arena for political infl uence. We then discuss the historical context for addressing social equity concerns in each city, and whether housing ever made the list. We end with our assessment of the prospects for moving the local housing agenda forward.

Dallas, Texas Our Dallas report card assessed the city’s progress harshly, particularly in terms of matching resources to needs and in ramping up the scale of production to put it on a trajectory likely to lessen the number of households paying half their gross income for housing. We found that resources were overwhelmingly dedicated to home ownership efforts, with virtually no support for the low- to moderate-income renters that their own analysis showed to have the greatest need for assistance. The share of the city’s federal HOME block grant funds allocated to extremely and very low-income renters fell below national averages. Finally, following a controversy over use of federal low-income housing tax credits, the mayor and council imposed severe limitations on the use of this important resource, making it even less likely that renter needs would be addressed. We found particular resistance to any discussion of scattering housing opportunities more broadly throughout the community. When we raised the issue of better economic integration of affordable housing in various venues, invariably discussion shifted, never to return to our question. Overall, we found efforts to be concentrated on revitalization of South Dallas, focused on home ownership and resistant to any discussion of broadening the focus to the city at large.

The groups most directly interested in affordable housing were essentially trade organizations representing, in one case, local nonprofits producing housing in low-income communities and, in the other, a regional network of housing developers and funders. We spoke with leaders of both groups about our findings and both expressed interest and agreement with many of our findings. But neither saw it in their interest to become directly involved in using the report to push for greater attention to housing issues. In essence, they would not oppose such a push, but it would not be in their immediate interest to publicly challenge current priorities. Comments about the role played by council members in projects piqued our interest in understanding the role that the council played in setting the agenda for housing.

We also presented our findings to the city manager and head of the city’s housing department to offer them a chance to correct any misperceptions on our part and engage them in a discussion of our findings. The meeting confirmed our perceptions of the culture of city government, developed as we struggled to collect the information needed for our report card. To our surprise, neither was at all concerned about the city’s poor marks on indicators of “transparency.” In the view of city and housing agency leaders, time spent on ensuring the public could find out how their funds were being spent was time taken away from other, more important tasks. Nor was the housing director troubled by the apparent disconnect between the severe need for affordable rental identified in their HUD-required analysis and their focus on home ownership initiatives. Indeed, the sense we got was of an agency focused on broader housing needs, rather than those of low-income households. Both assured us that no one in the housing community would dare approach them with our findings.

Following these meetings, we wondered what shaped the climate for these priorities. In particular, how did the city council and other civic leaders define city priorities and how high did the affordable housing needs of low-income residents rank in these priorities?

History, political culture Dallas, the second-largest city in the state, TABLE 2: report card finding – Dallas has a well-developed official mythology about itself and its history. It is presented as a “can-do” place, a city with “no reason to exist,” that invented itself through sheer will and determination (Schutze, 1986). Its business-dominated ruling regime is well documented (Elkin, 1987). Its political culture is focused on efficiency and was embodied for years in the form of its shadow government, the Citizens Council, which effectively ruled the city until the 1960s. This top-down, business-oriented civic elite left little space for direct citizen involvement. As described by political journalist Jim Schutze in his book The Accommodation:

The fact was that by 1950, a system had evolved in Dallas where the political activities of ordinary people were almost automatically suspect and somehow never fully legitimate. Politics itself was suspect, according to this doctrine. The only truly virtuous public activity was civic, not political, and the meaning extended beyond the mere absence of formal partisan labels. The business leaders who sat around the table of the Citizens Council had become the city’s all-powerful unelected board of directors, its true legislature, executive branch and high court . . . there was none of this business of calling up your city councilman and telling him you were going to have his job if he didn’t get your streetlight fixed . . . he wasn’t your city councilman, and he didn’t especially need your vote. He was the Citizens Council’s city councilman, and he needed their vote. (Schutze, 1986, 69)

The idea that a handful of civic elites, businessmen all, were best able to think for the “city as a whole” would prove remarkably resilient (Fairbanks, 1993). In fact, several authors argue it remains the modus operandi for forming the city’s economic development priorities (Morgan, 2004; Hanson, 2003). Nonetheless, the formal dominance of the council by the candidates and agenda of this elite, as represented by the Citizens Council, would change once the city’s at-large system of governance was challenged in 1975, ten years after passage of the Voting Rights Act. Under the at-large system, minority residents were represented through formation of political organizations that allied themselves with the dominant regime party and became a reliable voting block. Yet the city remained highly segregated, a pattern reinforced through the city’s 1948 plan. Limited, token desegregation efforts were carefully controlled by city elites (Graff, 2008).

Finally, a 1975 court order shook up the city’s at-large electoral system. The new system replaced this system with eight councilors elected from fixed geographic districts, along with three elected at-large (Graff, 2008). A 1989 referendum created ten council districts, plus four that each covered one-quarter of the city. Eventually, this plan would also fall to legal challenge, as its districts were too large to enable the election of minority councilors. At the time of its challenge, in 1991, only two of the council’s eleven members were black and none were Hispanic, though the two groups together made up 50 percent of the population (Morgan, 2004, table 6.2, 181; Associated Press, 1990). Subsequently, the city moved to a 14-1 system, where all council members are elected by district, with the mayor elected at large.

The results of the shift to single-member districts for addressing the needs of low-income residents and neighborhoods have been mixed. Morgan argues, in her study of the impact of the Voting Rights Act on Dallas, that the result has been greater attention to the allocation of funds across districts but little attention to whether this results in serving the needs of low-income residents. Rather, she finds evidence that funds controlled by council members are sometimes used for patronage (Morgan, 2004). Similarly, journalist Schutze, in a study of the use of Community Development Block Grant funds, found that $22 million had gone to a series of questionable pork-barrel projects recommended by council appointees to the city’s Community Development Commission. Most troublingly, five hundred thousand dollars in CDBG funds that had been designated for use for housing needs had been siphoned off into council members’ pet projects (Schutze, 1999).

In recent years, high-profi le reports on the city’s future prospects have pointed attention to the importance of addressing racial and economic inequities (DiMambo cited in Graff, 2008; Booz Allen Hamilton, 2004). One result has been increased discussion of strategies for jump-starting development in the long-neglected “southern sector”—a collection of minority, mostly low-income neighborhoods that have presumably been the focus of federal block grant spending for years. The city’s new plan, Forward Dallas!, provides a vision for development in southern neighborhoods. However, realization of this vision will depend on the council backing up these goals through use of the city’s budget, bond funds, and federal resources. This takes us back to the council again. Yet in true Dallas tradition, one of the most high-profi le efforts to focus attention on housing concerns and strategies for addressing them has been led by J. McDonald Williams, former CEO of development company Trammel Crow. Williams has formed his own institute to study the issue and a nonprofit to redevelop a low-income neighborhood.

The picture painted by various authors and commentators is of a city deeply divided by race and income, yet lacking in either public or community institutions capable of competently addressing the needs of low-income and minority communities. While the perceived reasons for inaction vary by race in recent polls, there is general agreement that not much is being done to improve conditions. Finally, battles over public housing redevelopment and environmental conditions in West Dallas and, more recently, a scandal involving a council member and a high-profile affordable housing developer have undermined public confirmed dence in proposed solutions. In this context, it is hard to find an untainted champion for the housing needs of the low-income residents of minority neighborhoods. Despite a high-profile 2007 series on housing needs in the Dallas Morning News, including coverage of our findings, the issue has gotten little traction (Tarrant and Dillon, 2007).

San Antonio, Texas Our review of San Antonio’s affordable housing efforts also revealed major challenges. Economic development has led the city’s agenda for some time. Not surprisingly, community efforts have focused on raising attention to job quality and education in the city’s economic development efforts. Housing problems have not made San Antonio’s list of top priorities. Neither the current nor the previous mayor championed housing issues, and housing organizations and advocates have had a hard time bringing attention to the issue. Lack of commitment has undermined the allocation of resources necessary to confront housing problems. The city has not consistently put its own funds toward housing production, nor has it used bonds to raise revenue in order to counter declines in federal housing resources. While it has a handful of effective nonprofit affordable housing producers, their capacity is limited. Thus, in a high-growth, relatively poor city, housing resources and production are lagging far behind the levels needed to address existing needs. City spending priorities are generally in line with housing needs, but more attention needs to be placed on dispersing housing opportunities for low-income households throughout the region. The city’s current fair housing plan, required by HUD, provides no serious assessment of either barriers or solutions. Given the city’s current focus on expansion to the south to accommodate the construction of a heavily wooed Toyota production facility, this represents a lost opportunity. Overall, our findings indicate that the city faces a serious challenge ahead of it—one that will only be met with strong leadership, which is so critical to the development of the bigger pool of resources needed to address the challenge.

As in Dallas, a small group was directly concerned with housing issues. With support from the local office of the Enterprise Foundation (now Enterprise Community Partners), the most successful local affordable housing producers had begun meeting to discuss strategies for increasing local production of affordable housing. This group provided us with valuable feedback as we developed grading criteria and measures. But again, they were reluctant to use our findings to engage city management or council in discussion of housing priorities. They did not disagree with key findings, but they encouraged us to present them ourselves to the council.

Our next step was to meet with the city’s assistant city manager overseeing housing programs. Again, this meeting solidified our perception of the city’s political culture. Following our detailed presentation of findings, the assistant city manager was neither surprised by our findings nor very upset by them. She arranged for a subsequent meeting where we went over findings with the heads of the two departments overseeing various aspects of the city’s housing and community development programs. Both men provided us with additional information to correct errors in our draft and also made changes to their Web site in order to improve their score on “transparency.” Our overall sense was that they saw the issues we raised as ones they could focus on internally, through improved communication with the local housing producers and internal review of past reports to assess progress on ongoing areas of concern. They correctly perceived that there was little danger of local advocates going to the council with our findings. Our most damning critique was of the lack of leadership on housing issues by elected officials in the city.

Again we wondered why there was no sense of urgency attached to housing issues and what role the council might play in responding. History and framework of local politics San Antonio, the nation’s ninth-largest city and the third-largest in Texas, has long lagged behind the nation and the state in indicators of economic development and well-being. It is a poor city relative to TABLE 3: report card finding – San Antonio national norms: in 2000, close to half of city households (46.6 percent) had incomes below $34,000—placing them in the bottom 40 percent of households nationwide (Brookings, 2003, 56). Though a plurality of the city’s population, San Antonio’s Hispanic citizens have historically been underrepresented in local politics and, therefore, lacked the political clout to affect sustained change (Munoz, 1994). A white political machine, reliant on patronage, ran the city until the 1940s. As with blacks in Dallas, Mexican-Americans participated in this system by voting for the machine in exchange for low-paying jobs (Munoz, 1994, 107). Henry Cisneros was only the second mayor in 150 years with a Spanish surname (Rosales, 2000). Only one Hispanic—Ed Garza—has been elected mayor since Cisneros left office in 1989.

Until the 1970s, the city’s agenda was controlled by the Good Government League (GGL). The GGL was a “nonpartisan party” formed in 1954 by a group of conservative, mostly Anglo businessmen that recruited and elected candidates to city council. Between 1955 and 1972, the league ran and elected seventy-five of eighty-one members (Sanders, 1997, 38). For decades there was tacit acceptance of a system holding one council seat for a West Side Hispanic and one for an East Side African-American, while the GGL engineered continuing control of the other seven seats and maintained Anglo overrepresentation. Among the results of the group’s influence were two major elements of the city’s economic development strategy for the period: the development of the convention center for Hemisfair ’68 downtown through urban renewal and the state’s decision to locate a branch of the University of Texas Medical School in San Antonio (Wolff, 1997, 4–5).

As in Dallas, minority representation did not advance until well after passage of the Voting Rights Act. San Antonio’s at-large city council election scheme came under scrutiny when the Justice Department retroactively reviewed the 1972 annexation of sixty-six square miles and 51,400 (predominantly Anglo) people; the annexation was ruled to have “diluted minority voting strength” (Wolff, 1977, 9). San Antonio was left with the choice of undoing the annexation or adopting single-member districts for electing city council members. In 1977, the city passed the charter amendment altering the council structure to eleven seats: ten single-member districts and the mayor (still elected at-large). Unlike in Dallas, change was swift: in the May 1977 election, Anglos lost majority control of the council, retaining just four seats and the mayor’s. “For the fi rst time since 1837, the year after Texas won independence from Mexico, Mexican-Americans held real power on the council” (Wolff, 1997, 9).

In 1973, the dominance of the GGL was challenged from several quarters. Charles Becker, a prodevelopment businessman, defi ed his GGL colleagues by running for Place 2 (the seat tacitly reserved for the next mayor) without the GGL’s endorsement (Wolff, 1997, 3–5). He won. That same year, Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) formed. Under the leadership of Ernie Cortes Jr., COPS began as a group composed of primarily Central West Side

Hispanics advocating for equity in the city’s provision and maintenance of infrastructure-related projects. It drew its membership from a network of Catholic parishes in central-west and south side neighborhoods. As Wolff (1997) notes, the COPS “agenda did not include civil rights or social welfare issues. Members wanted hard goods delivered to their neighborhoods in the form of streets, drainage and good city services” (p. 8). They were successful in shifting priorities for use of Community Development Block Grant funds toward these goals. COPS was also instrumental in helping secure ten million dollars from the sale of the city-owned cable station to establish the city’s Housing Trust Fund in 1989. Yet no additional funding has been added to this fund since its establishment twenty years ago. During the 1990s, COPS and partner Metro Alliance increasingly focused on the creation and funding of Project QUEST, an effort focused on job development, training, and preparedness.

In 1990, shortly after the creation of the Housing Trust Fund brought the prospect of significant local support for housing, the power of electoral politics as a vehicle for advancing housing needs was undermined when term limits were passed by referendum. Under the new limits (the most restrictive in the country), the mayor and city council members were limited to no more than two two-year terms. Voter participation rates fell steadily, from a high of 43 percent in 1981, to a nadir of 7 percent in 1999. Drop-off was highest in inner-city, heavily minority council districts (Vega and Bretting, 2002). Even as groups made inroads with elected officials or advanced their own policy champions to positions of political influence, they were often unable to sustain or achieve any continuity of support strong enough to produce significant change. In our interviews, this was the main issue raised by local housing stakeholders.

However, recent elections and changes in term limits suggest that opportunities for advancement of housing issues may have better prospects in the future. In November 2008, San Antonio passed a ballot measure to extend term limits from two two-year terms to a maximum of four two-year terms (Idell Hamilton and Allen, 2008).⁷ Mayor Phil Hardberger spearheaded the initiative, which was supported by COPS and Metro Alliance. In addition, at least four current council members profess support for housing and community development activities (San Antonio City Council, 2009). The combination of longer tenure for city council members and a group of potentially more sympathetic elected officials could create opportunities for advocates to garner support for affordable housing and sustain that support long enough to affect real change. Yet in the context of the city’s ongoing struggle for economic development, the prospects for moving housing needs higher on the list of priorities remain daunting. Advocates have been unable to effectively link housing to broader economic development concerns. As Wilson et al. predicted in 1997, the future success of community-based housing advocates will be “dependent on constant political involvement and bargaining, with few certainties” (p. 31).

Lessons: Getting Housing on the Agenda

In the absence of state policies requiring attention to local affordable housing needs, all progress is dependent on local politics. As we conducted our research and began discussing our work with local housing advocates, we came up against a number of challenges that made us reflect on our initial assumptions about the nature of politics in the cities and the role of housing in local politics. On the whole, we found that housing coalitions were extremely weak, if present at all. For the most part, they were narrow in membership, more trade association than coalition, with most member organizations dependent on the city in some way and thus reluctant to be publicly associated with direct criticisms of city policy. Yet we also saw differences between the two cities, differences that seemed rooted in the different arenas driving their politics and the way that housing advocates are able to work in these arenas.

As discussed earlier, the dominant arena for action in local politics effectively defines the strategies that are likely to be most effective in provoking change. In both cities, minority residents have historically faced significant constraints to their participation in local electoral politics. But the power of electoral politics differs in the two cities. Arguably, despite significant changes in the electoral representation of minority communities in Dallas, effective strategies must still work through civic elites. Changing the agenda from below would require tremendous community mobilization. In Dallas, district elections and weak, fragmented community organizations appear to undermine chances for success in effective organizing around housing concerns. The city government’s closed political culture, where requests for information about the use of public funds were treated as highly unusual and suspect, continues to be most compatible with elite-led efforts on behalf of the poor.

In contrast, efforts to respond to the needs of low-income and minority neighborhoods in San Antonio have been successfully tied to electoral politics since the fall of the GGL. COPS was able to demand attention to the needs of poor neighborhoods in the 1970s and 1980s. But the imposition of term limits severely undermined the power of electoral politics as a vehicle for the representation of inner city, minority neighborhoods. In addition, COPS has increasingly focused its attention on improving the quality of jobs resulting from local economic development efforts. Nonetheless, the potential still exists for a return to such a strategy, particularly as term limits are relaxed.

The goals of civic elites backing local planning in Dallas are similar to those pursued in Cleveland: in both instances, elites wish to bring middle-class residents back into the city to build its tax base. Yet in Dallas, local housing groups are not viewed as potential partners in this process. They are not seen as having much capacity or competence. As the city shifts focus toward the poorer neighborhoods in its “southern sector,” local housing advocates are virtually voiceless. Instead, a local businessman who has played a leading role in fostering public discussion of affordable housing has initiated and begun implementing a redevelopment plan for a low-income neighborhood, leading to some tensions as he pushes for broader use of eminent domain to further his project. Those advocating for the housing needs of low-income residents and neighborhoods have virtually no leverage.

In other cities, advocates have been able to take advantage of moments of crisis to push for important changes. Both Dallas and San Antonio are pursuing major initiatives that might present an opportunity to advocates. The Dallas city plan, mentioned above, includes a housing element whose goals are being made real as district plans are developed. Yet in an elite-driven system, where local housing organizations typically avoid advocacy, this opportunity is being lost. In San Antonio, the change in term limits presents a real opportunity to engage elected officials. Yet the attention of the strongest community advocates, COPS and Metro Alliance, remains focused on ensuring that the city’s major economic development initiative produces jobs for low-income city residents. Advocates must connect housing and economic development in order to benefit from recent changes in the city’s term limits.

The challenge facing advocates in both cities is the need to build local coalitions with enough strength to commend attention and access, while maintaining enough autonomy to uphold community priorities. Rubin argues that community-based development organizations can work through umbrella organizations or coalitions to advocate, despite their individual ties to city coffers. The basic elements necessary for successful coalition-building are within reach in San Antonio: a community of advocates that trust each other and share common goals. To move to the next step, they need to broaden their networks and work collectively to frame public discussions of the city’s housing needs. The story told by our report card, while regarded as useful, has not yet been translated into local terms, converted into a local story about the housing needs of residents and local priorities and larger goals.

For the many cities where rule by business organizations or civic elites is the dominant arena, advancing distributional issues such as access to affordable housing will be quite difficult. Absent electoral access to agenda-setting, putting the needs of low-income, minority people and neighborhoods on the agenda will require mass mobilization, supported by a network of community-based organizations. In Dallas, such a network is not in place and will be hard to create. In San Antonio, the coalition has the potential to push for greater attention to housing needs, linked to their efforts to improve access to good jobs for residents of low-income communities.

ELIZABETH MUELLER is an Assistant Professor of Community and Regional Planning in the School of Architecture at UT Austin. She also holds a faculty appointment in the School of Social Work. She holds masters and doctoral degrees in city and regional planning from the University of California, Berkeley. She is primarily interested in questions of social equity in cities and regions. She teaches courses on city planning history and planning theory, affordable housing policy, community development, urban politics, qualitative research methods, and research design. Prior to coming to U.T., Dr. Mueller was Assistant Professor of Urban Policy at the Milano Graduate School at New School University where she was also a Senior Research Associate in the Community Development Research Center. In addition to her teaching responsibilities, Dr. Mueller is an active researcher. Her work focuses on community development and affordable housing. She is co-author of From Neighborhood to Community: Evidence on the Social Effects of Community Development, the first study to systematically consider residents’ views of the work of community development corporations. Her work has been published in Economic Development Quarterly, Policy Studies Journal, The Journal of Migration and Ethnicity, Berkeley Planning Journal and Planning Forum. She is also active in state and local affordable housing policy and advocacy, producing research aimed at advancing the state of current discussions. She is a member of the Texas Housing Forum, a statewide group bringing together stakeholders from a wide range of interests and perspectives to make affordable housing a priority for Texas. She serves on the boards of the Texas Low Income Housing Information Service and of LiveableCity and is active in housing issues in Austin. She co-authored the 1999 report Through the Roof: A Report on Affordable Homes, on the barriers to affordable housing in Austin, published by the Community Action Network’s Affordable Housing Task Force.

Notes

1. While cities receiving federal community development block grants and other funds aimed at affordable housing needs are required to assess local needs and prioritize the use of these funds, these efforts are not typically linked to local policy tools such as zoning.
2. For example, the Bay Area Housing Crisis Report Card tracks progress on housing through information reported under the state’s comprehensive planning law, which requires cities to include a housing element with specific information in their comprehensive plan.
3. House Bill 2266, passed in 2005, amends the Local Government Code to prohibit a municipality from adopting a requirement that establishes a maximum sales price for a privately produced housing unit or a residential building lot. The bill did not include rental housing since inclusionary zoning for rental housing is akin to rent control, which is already virtually impossible to enact under state law.
4. In participatory action research, researchers engage in research as active participants in the subject under study, with the goal of contributing to the outcomes sought by the community under study. In this case, the principal investigator was part of a coalition that was working to make attention to affordable housing needs a priority at both the state and local levels in Texas.
5. Funders included the Ford Foundation, Cleveland Foundation, Gund Foundation, British Petroleum, and the city of Cleveland.
6. The Bay Area report card was able to rely on state reporting requirements; Boston aimed at a more academic audience in context of state fair share mandates; Toronto’s housing agency prepared report cards internally for use in raising public understanding of the need for return to production of social housing, especially for the homeless. Data access and requirements were different in each case, and intended audience and purposes were also different. In all three cases, cities had a ready audience of advocates able to use the information to advance their own work and push for policy changes or accountability to make past victories meaningful.
7. The new term limits do not apply to council members in office November of 2008 when the initiative passed.

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Meghan McCarthy

The Federal Urban Renewal program was supposed to deliver a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American. However, the biggest critique of urban renewal is how it actually displaced millions of people nationwide and failed to rehouse them. In Cities of Tomorrow, Peter Hall documents several instances: in New York City, projects in Manhattan and the Bronx displaced one hundred thousand low-income people, 40 percent of them black and Hispanic, and displaced fi ve thousand businesses, mainly mom-and-pop stores; in New Haven, Connecticut, a major, increasingly black slum area was demolished to build downtown offi ces, partially funded by federal highway dollars to build a distributor; in Pittsburgh, 5,400 low-income, principally black families were displaced by offi ces; and the director of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, Justin Herman, “stood for the sanitation of these areas, meaning the removal of their inhabitants” (Hall, 2002, 250–252). According to Hall, by “the end of 1965 renewal would evict one million people, most of whom paid very low rents” (253).

Very little is documented on urban renewal in Texas. In most major Texas cities, including Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston, there was a “fear of creeping socialism along with protecting the rights of individuals,” and urban renewal was rejected, seen as a tool of an expanding federal government to take away individual property rights (Fairbanks, 2002, 187). The conservative reluctance to give the government power was predominant in the Lone Star State. San Antonio, however, which was deeply aware of its slum problem and how it threatened the city’s health and social welfare, was an exception to the Texas standard. The city embraced urban renewal immediately after national legislation was passed and encouraged state-enabling legislation for urban renewal in Texas. And, like in other parts of the country, urban renewal in San Antonio suffered an abundance of criticism for focusing on economic development more than attaining its goal of a decent home and suitable living environment. It illustrates a classic example of urban renewal, resulting in displaced poor residents for new office buildings and commercial establishments while failing to rehouse those displaced. However, urban renewal was not a complete failure in San Antonio, as the reaction to urban renewal resulted in a political reform of San Antonio to be more inclusive of the low-income and minority population. Response to urban renewal by the San Antonio Conservation Society also resulted in a shift from renewal to commercial and residential revitalization, leading to an architecturally and culturally preserved society. This report examines the urban renewal experience in San Antonio, how it broke away from the Texas norm, paralleled that of the national experience, evolved into a useful historic preservation tool in San Antonio, and ultimately brought about a society more inclusive of minorities and low-income residents.

History of Urban Renewal From Slum Clearance to Housing Acts

While the urban renewal program began with the 1949 Housing Act, the history of urban renewal extends prior to that. Prior to and during the Great Depression, many slums were built: areas that were predominantly dilapidated housing lacking basic utilities such as plumbing and electricity. Following the Great Depression, the Roosevelt administration passed a number of housing acts to assist the low-income population in obtaining a home, either through low-income mortgage programs or federal assistance to public housing authorities to provide low-income housing.

The Wagner-Steagall Act was passed in 1937 to address public housing and initiate slum clearance. The primary factor of this act was that it required that for every slum dwelling that was demolished, a low-income housing unit would be provided. In addition, it set incomes to very low levels to assure that this housing would be reserved for the lowest-income families and provided fi nancial assistance for housing. However, powerful interest groups who were against public housing, such as the National Association of Real Estate Boards and the Urban Land Institute, lobbied against public housing and for commercial redevelopment of blighted areas, resulting in the 1949 and 1954 Housing Acts.

The Housing Act of 1949 actually created the Urban Renewal Program, which promised a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American. According to Robert Lang and Rebecca Sohmer of the Fannie Mae Foundation, the 1949 Housing Act specified three titles that would help achieve this goal: “Title I financed slum clearance under urban redevelopment (later renewal) programs. Title II increased authorization for Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgage insurance. Title III committed the federal government to building 810,000 new public housing units” (Lang and Sohmer, 2000, 291). Title I also granted the power of eminent domain to cities for slum clearance.

The subsequent Housing Act of 1954 established certain requirements that cities had to meet in order to qualify for funds for urban renewal, called a “workable program.” The workable program required:

• evidence of building codes and ordinances to prevent future blight;
• a comprehensive plan that could integrate urban renewal into the master plan;
• evidence of neighborhood analyses that located and determined seriousness of the slums; (4) formation of an administrative organization for urban renewal;
• proof of financial capacity to bear its share of the net project cost;
• plans and administrative machinery to relocate families from project areas in decent and safe dwellings at prices they could afford to pay; (7) evidence that urban renewal would be supported by groups and individuals and that the program would involve active citizen participation (Flack, 1964, 14–15).

In addition to ensuring the prevention of future slum and blight, the workable program criteria were “designed to assure sound city planning and prevention of future blight and deterioration” (Flack, 1964, 14).

Urban renewal in TexasTexas did not immediately embrace urban renewal after national legislation passed in 1949. In fact, it was not until 1957 that Texas fi nally passed enabling legislation to allow cities to receive federal assistance for urban renewal. Three attempts were made between 1951 and 1955 to pass enabling legislation, and three times it was blocked, most likely due to the “conservative nature of rural legislatures (who often chaired important committees) along with powerful infl uence of wealthy lobby groups” (Fairbanks, 2006). The fi rst effort was thwarted by the Lumberman’s Association of Texas, then in 1953 by the Texas Real Estate Board, and in 1955 by the Texas Association of Home Builders. Despite enactment, the state enabling act included barriers that could further hinder or even prevent urban renewal in Texas cities, including a requirement of a public hearing on proposals, citywide referendum before embarking on urban renewal, and forbiddance of public housing in the urban renewal area (Fairbanks, 2002, 189).

Despite early interests in urban renewal across the state, there was a growing opposition to urban renewal “due in part to a changing political discourse that emphasized the rights of the individual over the needs of the city” (Fairbanks, 2006).

The delay would have dire consequences for many Texas cities since it halted implementation of the program in the state and allowed opponents of urban renewal to organize an effective lobby” (Fairbanks, 2002, 186).

In Dallas, Congressman Bruce Alger, who led the assault on urban renewal, “assailed the growing power of the federal government” and “targeted the . . . urban redevelopment program as an example of encroaching big government” (Fairbanks, 2006, 3). Houston failed to meet the Workable Program requirements since voters rejected zoning and housing code ordinances. Citizens in other cities, such as Corpus Christi, Fort Worth, and Wichita Falls, defeated urban renewal in referenda (Fairbanks, 2002, 182). Generally, across the state there was a “perceived threat of the federal government’s assault on individual freedoms” and, therefore, a reluctance to empower the local government (Fairbanks, 2006).

Texas law created further frustrations to urban renewal in the state and its ability to replace destroyed housing in urban renewal areas. In addition to prohibiting public housing in urban renewal project areas, the Texas Urban Renewal Law mandated that “all reconstruction resulting from the program of Urban Renewal will be done by private enterprise” (Flack, 12). Moreover, Texas law allowed “opponents of public housing to demand a referendum on public housing if they secured enough signatures on their petitions” (Fairbanks, 2002, 192).

In spite of opposition across the state of Texas and legislation that frustrated efforts to ensure affordable housing for those displaced by urban renewal, San Antonio embraced urban renewal and implemented several projects under the urban renewal program.

San Antonio’s fight for urban renewal San Antonio was quite aware of its slum problem well before the Housing Act of 1949. The city had a significant amount of slum and blighted area, predominantly black and Hispanic. In 1937, the Texas Planning Board conducted a survey of low-income housing in San Antonio and found “extremely insanitary conditions prevailing in respect to the housing of Mexican and Negro families” (Wyatt and Terrell, 1937). Moreover, according to Heywood Sanders in Urban Texas, “of the 725 miles of city streets in 1933, only 298 miles were paved. The residential areas west of the downtown housed a largely Hispanic population in some of the worst physical conditions to be found in the United States. . . . The housing conditions of the Hispanic west side were paralleled in the predominantly black east side, although (at least, by 1939) that area possessed a much higher level of infrastructure and public facilities” (Sanders, 1990, 156).

Under the Wagner-Steagall Act, San Antonio completed fi ve public housing projects: Alazan Courts, Apache Courts, Victoria Courts, Wheatley Courts, and Lincoln Height Courts. In all fi ve endeavors, large slum areas were demolished and replaced with new low-income housing, which replaced all, if not more, than the slums that were removed. Table 1 shows the number of slum units removed and the number of new public housing units added for each of the public housing projects.

Unlike other Texas cities, San Antonio embraced urban renewal. Immediately following the passage of the Housing Act of 1949, “the city requested that the Housing and Home Finance Agency (HFFA) reserve federal funds of $2.25 million for urban redevelopment” (Fairbanks, 2002, 183). Prior to state enabling legislation, San Antonians were busy preparing for urban renewal in the city, starting with an update of the master plan to meet the requirement of the 1949 Housing Act that it incorporates urban renewal into the comprehensive plan. The 1951 Master Plan, completed by Walter Lilly, included a “fifty-one-page chapter on slum clearance and urban redevelopment [that] identified nineteen suggested projects to be funded by federal urban development money” (Fairbanks, 2002, 185). The plan also prompted the city commission to authorize its first official planning commission. Additionally, in 1957 the City of San Antonio’s Department of City Planning published a report on

slums and blighted areas to gain support for urban renewal. The report was based on a housing survey conducted in 1956 that found that a majority of a city’s “ills” (i.e., tuberculosis cases and deaths,

fires, police calls, assaults, homicide, and venereal deaths) occurred in slum and blighted areas. It created the analogy that blight and slum were like a disease in the city, spreading and costing the taxpayers money: “our slum and blighted areas cost $500,000 a year more to service than standard areas even though the substandard areas have fewer dwellings” (City of San Antonio Department of City Planning, 1957, 29). By 1956, San Antonio met all the federal requirements for urban renewal and was waiting for state legislation to allow the city to proceed. Following many years of effort to secure federal funds for slum clearance and seven months after state-enabling legislation permitted urban renewal to happen, the citizens of San Antonio approved the city’s participation in the urban renewal program by a margin of 2,645 to 663 (Fairbanks, 2002, 183).

Much of the success in passing urban renewal in San Antonio is owed to political reform. After the Wagner-Steagall Act, the city’s leaders were eager to secure federal dollars for urban renewal projects; however, they had a local opponent to urban renewal: the white middle class and business elite residing on the urban fringe. Prior to 1954, the local government was controlled by “a succession of politicos who arranged individual support with segments of the black and Hispanic communities” and “notably excluded the more affl uent Anglo areas to the north of the core” (Sanders, 156). Between 1930 and 1935, several bond packages that sought to improve the street and drainage system in the urban core were thwarted by the white middle class residing north of the city core who did not want their tax dollars spent on improving conditions in the city center. Proponents of urban renewal realized it was this group’s vote that was necessary to approve urban renewal in San Antonio.

Frustrated with the city’s inability to implement the much-needed infrastructure and services, the Good Government League (GGL) was formed in 1954 and established control of the City Council in 1955. This group, headed up by local businesses and supported by the white, middle-class residents, eventually won urban renewal for San Antonio. The GGL, who “saw urban renewal as an important tool in its quest for a bigger and better San Antonio” rallied a wealth of support for urban renewal, emphasizing the needs of the city and the social and economic costs of the slums (Fairbanks, 2002, 188). Support eventually came from all directions, including the city’s newspapers; civic, religious, and business organizations; chamber of commerce; home building industry; and real estate board (Fairbanks, 2002, 183). While other Texas cities experienced triumphant opposition to urban renewal, the election in San Antonio was characterized by the San Antonio Express (as reported by Fairbanks) as an “‘extremely quiet election’ with ‘the apparent lack of any significant opposition’” (2002, 183).

Citizens Duped: Urban Renewal and Public Housing

The perceived understanding of urban renewal was that housing for low-income families (which was slums) would be improved through urban renewal. Citizens did not expect urban renewal to displace low-income families. Nonetheless, urban renewal became the tool by which city governments could wipe out slums and blighted areas and replace those areas with whatever the city saw fit, usually commercial development since it improved the economy of the city.

The 1949 Housing Act did not provide the necessary housing tools to replace housing for those who were displaced by slum clearance. Still, public housing proponents “went along with the idea of urban renewal in the hope that it too could achieve its objectives”; however, when urban renewal was put in the hands of the Housing and Home Finance Agency, “they promptly worked to discourage low-rent housing and to encourage commercial redevelopment” (Hall, 248). In urban renewal project areas across the nation, the alternative housing for those displaced never materialized. This trend carried into the local defi nition of urban renewal as the Texas Urban Renewal Law prohibits the government from constructing public housing in the urban renewal project areas.

Additionally, a series of amendments and laws was passed over the years that changed the focus of urban renewal. In 2002, Mark Yessian gave a speech to the Alliance of Boston Neighborhoods on the life of the Federal Urban Renewal Program. Yessian is the regional inspector general for evaluation and inspections in the Office of Inspector General’s Boston office, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. According to Yessian, two more goals were added: “one for uplifting the economic position of cities, and the other of assembling land for public and semipublic uses”

(Yessian, 2002). He also said that as the program evolved, there was great pressure to accommodate institutional expansion of hospitals and universities, museums, new city halls, etc., and renewal became a vehicle for accommodating those interests. . . . [T]here was a series of laws that incrementally changed the focus from housing to this kind of development. The proportion of expenditure required for housing, for example, dropped from 90 percent to 65 percent. There were changes in the rules by which localities had to meet their local noncash contribution requirements, changes that facilitated more nonresidential uses. (Yessian, 2002)

Texas lawmakers did not make things any easier. As mentioned earlier, Texas law allowed opponents of public housing to demand a referendum on public housing. In 1959 opponents to public housing forced a referendum to block fi fteen thousand proposed public housing units. The passage of the referendum “frustrated efforts to move those slum dwellers scheduled for clearance to better quarters and resulted in patterns associated with other cities—new problems of overcrowding and new slums engendered, in part, by urban renewal” (Fairbanks, 2002, 193). Urban renewal continued in San Antonio; however, efforts became more focused on rehabilitation and preservation, as discussed later.

Moreover, the GGL seemed to have aided this trend. The organization has been praised for being a “more coherent and focused civic leadership . . . that emphasized the importance of supporting urban improvement programs for the benefi t of the city as a whole (Fairbanks, 2002, 185). However, it has also been criticized for “mobilizing the Anglo middle-class voters in election after election, effectively limiting the voting power of Hispanics and African Americans” (Wilson, Wong, and Sanders, 28). Because many of the supporters of the GGL did not support public housing, the issue was mute among the political leaders.

Through implementation of urban renewal projects, urban renewal’s true colors began to show, and it became apparent that all levels of government set the stage for the reality of urban renewal: “the aim was not cheap housing, but commercial redevelopment of blighted areas at the edge of downtown” (Hall, 248). These realities did not bode well for public housing supporters, minority and low-income groups that supported urban renewal.

Evolution of urban renewal in San Antonio What was originally called the Urban Renewal Agency in San Antonio is now called the San Antonio Development Agency (SADA). The role of SADA is to coordinate urban renewal projects in San Antonio. According to their Web site, there have been ten major urban renewal projects and studies, including the Civic Center Project, HemisFair ’68, San Antonio River extension, South

Alamo Street and Durango Boulevard reconstruction, La Villita reconstruction, Market Square, and Neighborhood Development Program. Over time, urban renewal in San Antonio captured the attention of historic preservationists, and today historic preservation is an important tool utilized by SADA in its redevelopment efforts.

Discussed below are two of the early urban renewal projects undertaken by San Antonio: the Central West Area and HemisFair ’68. These illustrate how urban renewal focused its efforts on commercial and economic redevelopment and failed to rehouse those displaced in the process. Additionally, the HemisFair ’68 plan was extremely controversial on the historic preservation front, and it represents a transition in San Antonio urban renewal to incorporate historic preservation.

Central West Area 1 & 2The Central West Area Project 1 was the first urban renewal project the city undertook. The sixty-eight-acre site is located immediately west of the central business district of downtown San Antonio. According to the Urban Renewal Agency, approximately 92 percent of the structures were substandard and not rehabitable; the project relocated 274 families, 223 individuals, and 131 businesses, and all but four structures were demolished. Redevelopment plans called for infrastructure improvements, and because the project was located at the edge of the business district and had access to a highway, development was restricted to commercial and light industrial (City of San Antonio Urban Renewal Agency, 1970,

1). Buildings erected in the Government Center Project, as it became known, included a city-county jail, police department building, and corporation court building. Immediately northwest and adjacent to Project Area 1 are the Rosa Verde and Vista Verde project areas (Project Area 2). Rosa Verde is an eighty-two-acre site that was home to Santa Rosa Hospital, Market Square, and seventy acres of slum area. The project relocated 230 families, 114 individuals, and 281 businesses, and original plans called for reconstruction and expansion of Market Square, expansion of the hospital, construction of medical office buildings and care facilities, construction of high-rise housing and housing for the elderly, and rehabilitation of older commercial districts.

This urban renewal project exemplifies what Mark Yessian accuses urban renewal of doing: accommodating interests of institutional expansion. The plans called for housing, which was successfully built, but neither apartment complex, Towne Center and Soap Works Apartments, offer affordable or elderly housing. The 158 acres that make up Vista Verde are located on the west side of U.S. Interstate 35/10, immediately west of Rosa Verde. The project relocated 488 families, 343 individuals, and 154 businesses. Redevelopment plans included complete redevelopment of the residential areas, rehabilitation of commercial areas, expansion of industrial areas, expansion of a school and construction of another, and expansion of medical facilities. In Vista Verde, several rental complexes were constructed, two of which were affordable, of which one was elderly housing.

HemisFair ’68 World’s Fair One of the most commonly known urban renewal projects in San Antonio is the HemisFair ’68 World’s Fair urban renewal project. It introduced another challenge to the program other than the issue of public housing: that of historic preservation. Often local governments used urban renewal to remove “blighted” communities that often included buildings of historic value. Not only did neither the housing acts nor the urban renewal program address historic preservation, but the National Historic Preservation Act was not passed until 1966, nearly twenty years after urban renewal’s launch.

In San Antonio, the preservation watchdog is the San Antonio Conservation Society (SACS). Formed in 1924 when flooding and the city’s government threatened to cover up the San Antonio River, the Conservation Society has been very active in urban renewal and how it affects historic preservation. San Antonio’s first urban renewal projects concerned the Conservation Society very little. However, consistent failure to salvage historic buildings eventually captured the attention of SACS; things came to a head between the city and the Conservation Society with the urban renewal project of HemisFair. Their involvement has influenced the way San Antonio’s urban renewal focuses on revitalization rather than slum clearance.

Even before the HemisFair site was picked, SACS “stressed the importance of having the fair’s buildings reflect San Antonio’s traditions” (Fisher, 298). Discussions of the fair began in 1959 by “local business leaders to celebrate the cultural heritage shared by San Antonio and its neighbor nations of Latin America” (COSA Planning Dept., 2004, 11). The theme was “The Confl uence of Civilizations in the Americas” and was to be held in 1968 for the 250th anniversary of the founding of San Antonio. It would be the fi rst fair to be held in the southern United States (Fisher, 1996, 297).

The appeal of this 147-acre site was its location immediately south of downtown and in proximity to the Riverwalk. It also had the potential of acquiring urban renewal funds, with which the city could build its “badly needed modern convention center” (Fisher, 1996, 297). Talk of the project created a ripple effect of discussions among neighboring areas regarding revitalization and “renewal” of their area. The prospect of the project gave the Chamber of Commerce reason to revitalize the Riverwalk, which had not been as successful as they anticipated since its completion in 1941, and they hired a consultant, Marco Engineering Co., to study the Riverwalk as a potential tourist attraction. In addition, the HemisFair urban renewal area abutted the La Villita area, and would “enable La Villita to expand and fi ll the remainder of the block south to Nueva Street after the fair” (Fisher, 1996, 298). Of the whole 147-acre site, only 92 acres were for the fair itself.

The project qualified for the Urban Renewal Program, and funds were secured. According to the HemisFair Park Area Master Plan 2004, the area, like most areas around the urban core, had deteriorated over time. During the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the area was predominantly German, yet was also inhabited by people of Polish, Mexican, and African American ethnicities. When the site was selected, the Conservation Society was “quick to declare that incorporating historic structures into the fairgrounds would give HemisFair uniqueness heretofore unmatched among world’s fairs” (Fisher, 299). According to Fisher, the urban renewal project of the whole site (147 acres) would

. . . force some 1,600 people to move away. Also affected would be manufacturing plants, shops, stores, warehouses, two schools, two parks, the Rodfei Sholom synagogue and four churches. Those included . . . the 1933 Gothic-style St. Michael’s Catholic Church, its congregation established in 1866 by Polish immigrants. (298)

As a result of increased historic preservation awareness, several buildings in and surrounding the HemisFair urban renewal area were restored. On the HemisFair World’s Fair site itself, twenty-four historical structures survived (although the architect O’Neil Ford suggested preservation of 129), which included several houses and a few “commercial-style” buildings that were housed by various expositions during the World’s Fair. Nearby historical structures preserved included the German-English School and St. Mary’s University School of Law building.

Many buildings that were added to the site were built with the intention of creating a civic center and were oriented toward institutional uses, including the convention center, Tower of Americas, UTSA Institute of Texan Cultures building, and a federal courthouse. The HemisFair urban renewal project also saw the construction of a monorail for transportation of visitors to the fair.

It is questionable whether HemisFair can be deemed a success. The project actually lost money and cost the taxpayers $7.5 million (Duane, 2001). While it did attract 6.3 million visitors from around the world, that number was 800,000 below projections. However, the fair brought national and even international attention to San Antonio, and it was reported that “HemisFair was ‘the most important travel stimulant’ in the nation in 1968” by the National Association of Travel Organizations (Fisher, 1996, 314). It encouraged revitalization and renewal of the downtown area and stimulated the tourism that San Antonio’s economy thrives off of today.

Response to Urban Renewal:

The death and legacy of urban renewal

While urban renewal developments continued to ignore housing needs among the people the program was displacing, attempts were made to put the focus back on housing. In 1965, under President Johnson, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) was formed. The goals of HUD focused on housing, including increasing home ownership, supporting community development, and increasing access to affordable housing (HUD, 2003). Moreover, several acts were passed under Johnson to improve living standards among low-income families: 1966 saw the creation of the Model Cities program that tried to encourage public participation in community development, as well as emphasized low-income and minority communities in cities; in 1968 a new housing act called for twenty-six million subsidized housing units, hoping that oversaturating the housing market would drive prices down (Yessian, 2002); Ginnie Mae was established in 1968 to expand mortgage funds for moderate-income families.

Ultimately, President Nixon, with a movement toward a decentralized government, did away with the Urban Renewal Program by putting a moratorium on funds for urban renewal projects in 1973. However, the 1974 Housing Act established the Community Development Block Grant program (CDBG) under President Ford, a more fl exible federal program that had the broad goal of “provid(ing) communities with resources to address a wide range of unique community development needs” (HUD). It allowed local governments the freedom of “choosing projects, spending priorities, and geographic distribution” that were limited under earlier federal renewal project grant programs.

San Antonio communities react In San Antonio, the most blatant and strongest response among communities against urban renewal and to have their needs addressed by the local government was by Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS). In 1973 COPS was established initially to “organize and mobilize San Antonio’s West Side community” (Sanders, 1997, 40). The community-based organization has been successful in obtaining federal community development aid for low-income and minority communities in San Antonio. The GGL, as discussed earlier, “limited Hispanic participation and skewed public investment to non-minority neighborhoods” (Wilson, 4). COPS, however, captured public attention by “confronting public offi cials with unmet promises, packing city council meetings, and mobilizing community residents” (Wilson, 4). COPS is the success story of an organization advocating for minority groups and organizing low-income, minority neighborhoods to effectuate equal representation in the local government.

The organization has also had a particularly strong impact on the success of CDBG spending in San Antonio. While the rest of the country witnessed an abuse by local governments of this money, the city of San Antonio was held accountable for the distribution of CDBG funds. Early planning efforts of the CDBG program in San Antonio showed very little public involvement by COPS or any other community groups. Although the 1974 Housing Act required public involvement, the city was unclear how involved the public should be. To make things more complicated, a community development committee was formed to decide how to allocate the funds. The committee was made up of various department heads, each of whom had their own interests and agenda. The fi rst proposed program included a botanical garden, nature trails, three new parks, a historic preservation project, and a parking garage downtown (Sanders, 1997, 43). COPS brought a different budget to the table: “a list of projects totaling some $125 million dominated by almost $75 million in drainage projects” (Sanders, 1997, 43). This is just one example of many instances where COPS pressured the local government in order to have their needs addressed. In addition, COPS was successful in getting voters to the polls. Table 2 shows how the number of votes increased in predominantly Hispanic precincts to eventually trump predominantly Anglo precincts. Eventually, minority precincts/districts were represented by council members in the local government, giving them a stronger voice. This translated over time to more federal community development funds allocated to COPS districts in order to improve low-income neighborhoods.

In addition to COPS, many community development corporations (CDCs) were formed in San Antonio in the 1960s and 1970s to address the needs of those crowded into central city minority neighborhoods, whose conditions were ignored by urban renewal.

Conclusion

Urban renewal has certainly influenced planning in the city of San Antonio, primarily in terms of public participation. The rise and fall of urban renewal opened the public’s eyes to planning. Urban renewal not only threatened the property rights of some (particularly those who suffered displacement because of slum clearance), it also made apparent issues of equality in planning among minority and low-income populations. It is an unfortunate truth that dilapidated and blighted areas are usually inhabited by minorities and low-income families. Urban renewal therefore ended up targeting and affecting this demographic in a negative way. A few projects in San Antonio exemplified this inequality; in both the Central West Area Project and HemisFair, blighted areas inhabited by low-income families were cleared and “renewed” with economically enhancing developments, all without the clear tools of replacement housing for those displaced. Matters were further complicated by the large degree of resistance toward public housing and the fact that Texas law prohibited public housing in urban renewal project areas.

Many problems with urban renewal arose because of a lack of representation among minorities and low-income families. COPS successfully mobilized these groups and is continuing to work toward improved opportunities for low-income housing, public housing, and equal representation in the local government. Moreover, preservationists have influenced urban renewal practices in San Antonio to include more revitalization of existing structures rather than slum clearance. The fight against urban renewal by preservationists has succeeded in that CDBG considers revitalization an appropriate activity for federal community development aid, which has helped alleviate slum clearance issues in low-income neighborhoods. Together these groups have shaped urban renewal practices in a way that preserves the history of the city and the Hispanic culture of its citizens.

MEGHAN MCCARTHY is a student at the University of Texas at Austin working toward a master’s degree in Community and Regional Planning. She also obtained a B.A. in English from the University of Texas at Austin. For three years Meghan worked as a market analyst and GIS specialist for a real estate development consulting firm in Austin, where her interest in planning grew. She is currently interning with the city of Georgetown Texas Planning and Development Department, and aspires for a career in land use planning (2007).

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Barbara Brown Wilson

Since the first known human settlements in Mesopotamia, building regulations have been enacted to protect the citizenry from potentially deleterious effects of the built environment. As crises arise and cultural practices change, regulatory institutions create new or amend old codes to reflect these societal shifts. The interests of the market, the state, and the collective will of citizens are rarely in healthy balance in a democratic society, but regulatory codes can serve to provide a voice for the public will in contrast to the louder and more seductive cries of market and government forces. Of the many institutions that impose regulations on a democratic community (the state, the market, the media, and others), our societal norms are the hardest to decipher. Stories allow us to climb in those crawl spaces, to see those partial perspectives that clear up the blind spots in our effort to “objectively” evaluate and contribute to community. These border spaces are where the regenerative change or balance in a community often occurs, and thus these stories are pivotal to an understanding of any healthy community and the ways in which it can be sustained, nourished, and improved.

A social movement, whose power then becomes harnessed and institutionalized in some sort of societal code, often marks or provokes these code-making paradigm shifts. Using social movements as a framework, this project considers codes and their relationships with social values to approach the question, “How does innovative change occur in the built environment?” Investigating a series of social movement case studies where the built environment was fundamentally altered as a result, and triangulating these cases with literature from science and technology studies and that of sustainable architecture, this project will test the boundaries of the relationship between regulation and social change. The case studies represent a spectrum of different societal concerns and related regulatory impulses—each one radically altering the way urban space was conceived. The public health movement’s institutionalization of urban infrastructure exemplifies the emerging relationship between urban and human change at the dawn of the industrial era; the American disabilities movement used rights-based protest to gain equal access to physical spaces in the revolutionary fever coming out of the 1960s; and the creation and wide reception of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification system redesigned the association between the most recent strain of the environmental movement and the building industry in the past decade. While these cases are admittedly myopic slices of temporal experience in American society, their comparison reveals a societal metanarrative produced through the evolution of codes for the built environment.

An Imbalanced Society: Theories of Civic Tension

“It appears increasingly likely that man is not going to make it. He has done too much that is self-destructive and too little to save himself. Although it is hardly consoling, there will be a certain justice in his extinction if it results from his thoughts and choices. But it would be an unpardonable irony if he were to destroy himself not because of what he thought, but because he thought what he thought made no difference.” (Barber, 1971, 13)

If the interactions of regulatory bodies are intended to maintain a balance that sustains healthy communities, we must look further into the nature of these institutions and their relationships with each other. For physicist Fritjof Capra, these subsystems are the “processes of communication, which generate shared meaning, and rules of behavior (the network’s culture), as well as a shared body of knowledge” (Capra, 2002, 91). But this is a bit too abstract. Geographer Richard Peet defines development as “improvement in a complex of linked natural, economic, social, cultural, and political conditions” (Peet, 1999, 1). Also turning to biology for his understanding of communities, Peet understands the functions of “the institutional subsystems of society” in accordance with those of any other organism (Peet, 14). Peet is disillusioned with democracy. Discussing the ways in which the subsystems of democracy exclude portions of its cellular citizenry from the balance process, Peet claims “the main problem with democracy is that it has never been achieved” (Peet, 197). Yet, Peet never explicitly describes these subsystems of democracy, or how they fail to properly regenerate.

Amartya Sen, in Development as Freedom, more clearly dissects the institutions that create the subsystems of democracy. Sen sees government, market and nonmarket organizations, civic and political entities, educational systems, and “opportunities for dialogue and debate” (including the media) as the driving institutions of society (Sen, 2000, 9). He sees freedom as the essence of democracy, and postulates that any society can be evaluated by its constituents’ access to “substantive freedoms,” or freedoms that, when withheld, prevent community members from making their own choices and inhibit their ability to maintain their part in the community’s balance (Sen, 18). Without access to these substantive freedoms (health, education, safety, etc.), the cellular makeup of a democratic community cannot sustain itself. And what of this democratic community? Have we become Max Weber’s vision of the society without a soul? Political scientist Alan Wolfe argues that until the United States acknowledges freedom as an interdependent condition of modern society, we will remain unable to achieve the health to which we aspire (Wolfe, 1989, 2). Society is constantly searching for ethical codes to dictate its behavior, but “modernity displaces moral discourse into new—one is tempted to say modern—forms” (Wolfe, 6). For Wolfe, the three institutions that traditionally guided society were the market, the state, and civil society. Modernization distances the citizen from the effect her actions have on civil society. The system of accountability is no longer functional. The market and the state were never meant to operate without the balancing of the regulatory force of civil society (Wolfe, 19).

The built environment is an enormous petri dish on which we can observe the manifestations of these regulatory tensions. Maintaining a balance of the market, state, and societal interests is no small feat, although planners attempt to successfully pull off this magic trick everyday. In Scott Campbell’s influential article “Green Cities, Growing Cities, Just Cities,” he graphs out the tensions at play in the creation of the built environment in a model he calls the planner’s triangle. Campbell’s triangle graphs out what he sees as the three main priorities in the built environment—equity, environmental protection, and economic development—and the three dynamics produced through their juxtapositions with one another: the development conflict, the resource conflict, and the property conflict. Yet, Campbell goes on to show how interrelated all of these concepts are with one another, asserting that inequity and the ensuing lack of political power are often central motivating forces in conflicts manifest as primarily economic or environmental issues. Social equity is at the heart of disputes over the built environment more often than is recognized. This fact is especially disconcerting when understood in context of Wolfe’s assertion that modernization makes the values of civil society irrelevant, if not nonexistent, in political decision making.

So how do we reinstitutionalize the values of civil society into the built environment and ensure that these freedoms are properly provided to community members? The more common discourses surrounding this issue discuss it in terms of economics—access to varying sorts of capital that allow the provision of these resources. Obviously, this is not enough if large portions of the country continue to feel unheard and even alienated by conventional building practices. Using the more abstract terminology of development and economy, we can become distracted from our original goal of social equity. Capra cites neurophenomenology, the combination of complexity theory and first-person experience, as an approach to understanding the role civic consciousness plays in the creation of healthy social systems (Capra, 45–48). If we tell stories about lived experiences, while also understanding their connection to the ever-evolving network of organisms that constitute society, we can more clearly begin to see how a shift in cultural cognition might occur. But in a country so diverse, how do we get a sense of our collective consciousness? When do our societal values gain enough force in modern times to overpower the market and the state?

Civil Society Speaks: Social Movements as an Expression of Societal Values

I swear to the Lord; I still can’t see; Why democracy means; Everyone but me. (Hughes, 1943)

There have been critical moments in society when the people rose up and spoke for what they believed was right, moments where their values became more important than the money they might make, or than keeping the status quo. Societal uprisings such as the civil rights movement and the public health movement have redesigned our modes of regulation—both conceptual and physical. Sociotechnological theorists use a hybrid of historical and sociocultural approaches to argue for the revisioning of regulation systems through moral codes of civil society. For instance, Andrew Feenberg uses powerful examples, such as the eradication of the mid-nineteenth-century proclivity for child labor through a change in regulation heavily influenced by the emerging moral imperatives against such practices, charting the triumphs of ethical concerns over those of the market (Feenberg, 1992, 2). Feenberg’s article argues for more democratic inclinations in all of our societal institutions that allow all processes of production to emerge from a larger societal perspective. But the task of engaging the people is an arduous one. Here is where we must ask the question, when has this been done before, and how?

 “Differences arise on the margins of the homogenized realm, either in the form of resistances or in the form of externalities. . . . What is different is, to begin with, what is excluded: the edges of the city, shanty towns, the spaces of forbidden games, of guerilla war, of war. Sooner or later, however, the existing center and the forces of homogenization must seek to absorb all such differences, and they will succeed if these retain a defensive posture and no counterattack is mounted from their side. In the latter event, centrality and normality will be tested to the limits of their power to integrate, to recuperate, or to destroy whatever has transgressed” (Lefebvre, 1991, 373).

These margins that geographer/theorist Henri Lefebvre discusses in the quote above can be powerful places for change. Civil rights organizer Robert Moses refers to these places of difference as “crawl spaces,” or seemingly insignificant, tiny nooks in the political, spatial, or social realms where transformation can occur (Moses, 2001, 92). Peet uses Donna Haraway’s concept of “situated knowledges” to capture this notion in development discourse (Peet, 175). He finds value in this concept of the partial perspective as a mode to truly see something objectively, or at least to break down the illusion of objectivity to allow for more relevant versions of reality to coexist. If, as Haraway claims, “objectivity is not about disengagement, but about mutual and usually unequal structuring, about taking risks in a world where ‘we’ are permanently mortal, that is not in final control,” then the knowledge seeker must always acknowledge these inequalities and seek out those “situated knowledges” that provide rare and sometimes richer insights into that which they are trying to understand (Haraway, 1995, 190).

If the stories of social movements allow us to climb in those crawl spaces, to see those partial perspectives that perpetuate regenerative change or balance in a community, they might unlock one door onto the mysteries of modern cultural change. But before we get to these stories of societal uprising, we must understand the nature of “codes” and their power to institutionalize societal values into the built environment.

Regulatory Systems and Social Values: A Review of the Literature

Coding systems are as deeply embedded in our culture as the building processes they regulate. Many cite Article 229 of the Code of Hammurabi (Mesopotamia, 2250–1780 BCE) as the first building code, stating that “if a builder builds a house for someone, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built falls in and kills its owner, then that builder shall be put to death” (Moore, 2005, 1). Theorists discussing this cultural scaffolding system argue that since the initiation of regulation, codes respond to shifts in a society’s ethical framework (see Feenberg, 1995; Winner, 1995).

Architect and theorist Francis Ventre claims that only three major successes for cultural values can be found within the architecture world: historic preservation, ecological design, and zoning (Ventre, 1990, 57). He reconnects architectural regulation to value systems in his article “Regulation: A Realization of Social Ethics,” asserting that “societies, usually acting through governments, preempt entire classes of design decisions, restricting and sometimes totally removing areas of design freedom, reserving those decisions to society as a whole, acting through regulatory institutions” (Ventre, 56). He challenges architects to consider social ethics’ relationship to architecture and to reshape our built environment in the expression of the public’s collective interest.

Yet some critics want to abolish regulation all together. William McDonough claims to have the keys to the “next industrial revolution,” and his proposed system involves the abolition of restrictive regulatory codes in exchange for inherently superior design (McDonough and Braungart, 1998, 85). Their term, eco-effectiveness, which “leads to human energy that is regenerative rather than depletive,” was coined by the architect/chemist partnership to express their reorganization of material production in a manner that removes the need for regulations with innovation-suppressing standards through superior design. McDonough’s system:

• removes the emission of hazardous materials into the environment;
• measures prosperity in terms of natural capital produced;
• evaluates efficiency in terms of employment rates; (4) eradicates building codes to liberate innovation; and (5) encourages diversity.

Based on the regenerative nature of the tree, this system was applied to a Swiss fabric manufacturer to create an award-winning new type of fabric that reuses the scraps from previous fabric production. McDonough’s value-driven system of production would not work in our current system, he argues, because regulation creates a system of mediocrity with low, obscure standards perpetuated by the market. For McDonough, certification systems lack specificity, fl exibility, and thus contextual application. However, these systems of coding are still the regulatory backbone of our culture’s building practices. McDonough never explicitly describes how this eco-effective ethic of superior design will be implemented, what would happen to the sorts of ills currently regulated for the protection of humankind, or what it might entail for the society that forces its industries to adopt it.

Alternatively, proposals exist for new sorts of society-driven coding systems. Michael Sorkin’s Local Code: The Constitution of a City at 42 Degrees N Latitude is an influential example of this sort of work. Written in a codelike format, Sorkin organizes this essay into a bill of rights, principles, and elements of design. Based in induction, Sorkin attempts to make a point about the reductive nature of codes through a focus on “the particular” (Sorkin, 1993, 11). Proclaiming broad statements like, “every Hab (meaning home) shall have a view of the moon,” Sorkin makes the point that regulation should not limit the nature of a community, but rather enhance it through a thoughtful, responsive, and locally based code (Sorkin, 30). This push for regulatory revision implies a large-scale dissatisfaction with the current system. 

Looking outside of the fi eld of architecture, we find more promising proposals for revisioning regulation. Environmental philosopher Andrew Light proposes a political restructuring of the community to encourage what he calls “urban ecological citizenship” (Light, 2003, 1). Light claims that cities are inherently more sustainable because of their potential for shared energy consumption,

transportation, etc.; he argues that, if organized in the proper manner, cities can be the ideal place to reconnect communities and empower them toward social action. Light’s system of urban ecological citizenship entails the organization of communities into poleis, or small, locally centered groups of citizenry that become empowered by the authority over their own area. In these poleis, not only do the city dwellers become more civically inclined to maintain their streetscapes through this newfound authority, but also they restore a sense of community and place to the area through their collective discussions concerning public good. This concept of participatory regulation is a way of institutionalizing social values into our systems of governance more holistically, instead of waiting for society to rise up against more powerful forces in response to great need. However, the mode in which these new patterns of societal regulation would be implemented and maintained is never made clear in his work—Light never leaves the philosophical realm to discuss grounded, pragmatic application.

Technological philosophers like Langdon Winner also see civic engagement as its own ethical imperative. In his article “Citizen Virtues in a Technological Order,” Winner asserts that “the lack of any coherent identity for the ‘public’ or of well-organized, legitimate channels for public participation contributes to two distinctive features of contemporary policy debates about technology: 1) futile rituals of expert advice and 2) interminable disagreements about which choices are morally justified” (Winner, 1995, 75). The gap between the technical and the political has grown so vast that our culture lacks methods of regulation that express concern for the common good.

Social Movements: Theories and/or Histories

“The crisis of democracy is, then, a crisis of faith that—however well rooted in the real erosion of democracy’s pluralistic prerequisites—has convinced the majority that it has nothing to fear from majoritarian tyranny and the minority that it has nothing to lose in making a revolution.” (Barber, 1971, 108)

When political shifts do represent societal values, these shifts have often been associated with social movements. Political scientist Andrew McFarland inextricably links political processes with social movements and the values they embody, noting the power that the environmental and Christian movements have had over the liberal consensus through calls for the refinement of government regulation (McFarland, 1998).

Similarly, Sidney Tarrow notes the exceptionally strong connection between American social movements and the institutions they are critiquing; tracing the parallel development of social movements with the political institutions they sought to affect in Early America (Tarrow, 1998). Tarrow cites the temperance movement as setting the path for many following American social movements with “a cyclical trajectory of activism and quietism, responding to favorable opportunities with greater activism and to the pressure of broader issues by lying low (e.g., we seldom hear of temperance activity during the Civil War years)” (Tarrow, 31). From these antebellum examples, Tarrow traces this increasing association between American social movements and the political groups they critique to modern quasi-institutionalized activist organizations (like Greenpeace) that fuse protests, lobbying, and educational activities to influence policy. The connections between social movements and the political processes they encounter are certainly instructive in the search for an understanding of how values are institutionalized in the United States. These moments of civil disobedience seem to be the only examples of participatory or civic regulation. In the interest of understanding how this sort of change has occurred, this project will now look to three pivotal case studies where social movements initiated new social codes in order to decipher some sort of pattern from these tales of resistance.

Resistant Geographies: Battles Between Space and Its Citizenry

“You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.” (Chesterton, 1917, 20)

Before recounting successful tales of the institutionalization of social movements in the realm of the built environment, I must mention an important caveat. Social movements have not always led to spatial and political emancipation. For example, although tiny victories within the spatially related aspects of the student protests of the 1960s can be noted, the major physically oriented outcome of those activities was the implementation of physical barriers to prevent large-scale assembly in the main congregational areas of most campuses in the United States.

Most university campuses across the country have a relic of this phenomenon—a public space originally created for larger-scale congregation that was redesigned in the mid- to late 1960s to prevent massive student assembly. Frank Erwin commissioned the relandscaping of the University of Texas at Austin’s West Mall during this period to include large planters and a fountain, while also limiting space for demonstrations (figures 1 and 2). In The Right to the City, Don Mitchell tells the story of the uprisings in UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza in the fall of 1964 that precipitated this widespread change in spatial control. After months of student protests against university regulations limiting their freedom of speech, the university’s academic senate voted to allow political speech and advocacy on campus, while maintaining the university’s rights to regulate the time, place, and manner of the speech (Mitchell, 2003). Yet, this small local victory for UC Berkeley students’ place on campus arguably brought on the preemptive physical restriction of public spaces on other campuses across the United States.

Stories of Past Social Movements: The Public Health, the Environmental, and the Disability Rights Movements

When looking at the history of architectural regulation and its intersection with social movements, one must first acknowledge that any case study is highly context-specific. These case studies were chosen to represent pivotal moments in varying periods of the American industrial age when broad cognitive shifts perpetuated widespread spatial reorganization. And, although the recent institutionalization of LEED certification into the building industry is the most pure marriage between a social movement and relevant building codes, it only represents one very specific form of this association. However, when paired with more deeply embedded systems such as the public health movement’s influence on U.S. urban infrastructure, and the more recent yet still influential disability rights movement, a pattern begins to emerge.

The public health movement The extensive water, wastewater, and solid waste disposal systems we now assume to be germane to our existence were not always accepted as essential to American cities. The expensive problem of public infrastructure had to reach a critical mass before institutionalization was possible. Beginning with the deeply rooted fear of disease, the problems of health precipitated by the massive waves of immigration in the late 1700s, and the growing European concern for sanitation, codes of public health emerged clearly from growing societal concerns instead of market- or state-related value systems. Physician and public health scholar George Rosen traces the roots of public health to the French and American revolutions of the late eighteenth century (Rosen, 1958, 131). He argues that the Industrial Revolution, in tandem with these major political revolutions, created more open systems of political discourse—change was happening so rapidly that even those in power were receptive to proposals for radical structural revision. Architect and technological historian Steven Moore cites the succession of citywide fires and the typhus, yellow fever, and smallpox epidemics plaguing communities across the globe for the paradigm shift (Moore, 2005, 51). Historian Martin Melosi argues that Nuisance Law had been slowly developing around these issues for a century previously, and in response to these legal codifications, the first forms of such infrastructure began to develop with these coding systems. Nonetheless, it was not until Edwin Chadwick turned the issue of public health into a movement that the concept really became institutionalized.

In 1842 Chadwick completed his “Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain” and revealed that the unsanitary conditions of the poor, instead of the will of God, were the cause of their health concerns. The report was widely disseminated and lead to the incorporation of the Sanitary Act of 1848 in England, although Melosi argues that the “true consummation of the work of the sanitary movement was the Public Health Act of 1875” (Melosi, 49). These legislative acts are then tied to the development of several professions meant to inform this issue in the United States. Instead of radical demonstrations, it was the fear of widespread sickness that rallied the masses behind such a cause, once professionals in the field properly informed the middle- and upper-class citizenry of the ways in which they might also be affected.

The most important collective epiphany to motivate actual reform came decades after Chadwick’s report, when Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch discovered the connection between fi lth and disease in the mid-1880s. Germ theory dispelled the old misconception that class ordained disease and liberated the poor from being relegated to indecent living quarters. Other players were influential as well. Dr. John Griscom, a New York City inspector, transported Chadwick’s theories to the United States through a report entitled “The Sanitary Condition in 1842.” Lemuel Shattuck conducted the first comprehensive urban census in 1845, further connecting disease to contagion in Boston (Melosi, 63). The Civil War did serve to disseminate these ideas further, while also diverting attention from the pure cause of public health reform. The first comprehensive U.S. public health code was ratifi ed by New York City in 1866, many years after public health began taking precedence as a societal value in American society (Melosi, 21). A year later, the American Society of Civil Engineers incorporated and the institutionalization of public infrastructure began. Ground was unearthed, pipes laid, and health improved at a grand scale (figure 3).

Additionally, a Tenement House Commission estimated in 1894 that three-fifths of New York City’s population lived in unsuitable housing (Hall, 1988, 35). In the interest of controlling/ improving both the poverty-stricken masses and the space these masses shared with those in power, the field of city planning emerged. Reform efforts existed as early in American history as the Civil War’s United States Sanitary Commission, the first secretary-general of which was Frederick Law Olmsted, who later became a major figure in city planning (Boyer, 1983, 19). Nonetheless, legislation did not consecrate such spatial sensibilities until the New York State Tenement Law of 1901, which served as the model for subsequent states. This law moved the supervisory duties of tenement conditions from the Public Health Department to the Building Department, a symbolic change signifying the spatial shift taken by those considering these sorts of social issues to separate the previously amalgamated fields of planning and public health (Boyer, 1983, 30). The first National Conference on City Planning was held in Washington in 1909, where Germany exposed American civic leaders to the possibilities of mapping land use and building height into city zones, a tool that would forever change the face of the American city (Hall, 1988, 58). Innovative change came in fits and starts; guided by key thinkers and practitioners, the trajectory of the public health movement slowly left the realm of discourse to materialize into the sanitation systems we now consider to be hegemonic.

The Disability Rights MovementAcknowledging that people with disabilities were oppressed in a myriad of ways that denied them inalienable rights, the disability rights movement coalesced in order to make the issues public and regain these citizens’ inviolable privileges as human beings. Historian Douglas Baynton argues that Americans have inherently discriminated against people with disabilities since the country’s inception. Not only were people with disabilities treated unfairly, but labeling groups as “disabled” was also used as a tactic to discriminate against other minorities. Rights were held from women and African Americans under the guise of their perceived disabilities (Baynton, 2001, 37). Disabled people were kept out of public schools, out of the job markets, and in some cases even out of public spaces in general.

As early as 1907, war veterans were arguing for their rights in the political realm. These men incurred disabilities while fighting for the United States, and thus arguing for their worth as citizens was natural based on their allegiance to their country (Scotch, 2001, 376). However, the public health movement brought with it the rise of asylums and other forms of oppressive institutionalization for those born with disabilities. Because of the condition’s close relationship to the other tenets of the civil rights movement, some successes can be recognized within the civil rights legislation of the 1960s—certainly the foundation for later legislation was laid in this period of political progress. However, the first real victory for the movement was the federal Architectural Barriers Act (ABA) of 1968 (Longmore and Umansky, 2001, 10). ABA requires that buildings built with federal funds be accessible to persons with disabilities, but this only dealt with facility accessibility, not necessarily programmatic accessibility (Cannon, 1989, 10). Often, there was no way to regulate these buildings or provide their designers with assistance to ensure proper application of the act’s requirements. Thus, in 1973, the legislature passed the Rehabilitation Act to fill in much of the ABA’s gaps, including the creation of an Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board to ensure proper application of the myriad of laws regulating and equalizing space for the disabled.

But the issue of disability rights was still seen as a medical concern instead of a problem of rights. In response, New York activist Larry Allison and others began a group called the 504 Democratic Club in 1980, with the intention of engaging presidential candidates through political discourse about disabled people’s rights. This group would hold disability forums where discussions of the problems and their pervasive nature would lead to jargon the political candidate could use as a platform in his race. At the height of the group’s success, they won Jimmy Carter as a major political ally just before his presidential election (Allison, 2001).

Other associations developed across the country, each with a slightly different agenda. For instance, the Association for Retarded Citizens organized to fight for deinstitutionalization and public education, and many of the leaders of organizations such as this one were finally appointed to the new presidential advisory board, the National Council on Disability. In contrast, more militant groups such as ADAPT (American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit) took a more radical approach to the issues. In the 1980s, frustrated with the lack of accessibility of public transport, the group slid out of their wheelchairs to block buses in an act of civil disobedience that served to redesign the traditional city bus (Longmore and Umansky, 11).

So many groups emerged to participate in this movement that the critical mass of voters supporting these ideals gained power. By 1990, the movement gained enough momentum to pass major legislation under the conservative government of President George H. W. Bush. The Americans with Disabilities Act “prohibits discrimination in private employment, public accommodation, and telecommunications,” and was considered a watershed political action at its inception (Scotch, 384). The landscape of many cities has been drastically affected by this legislation, as programs to develop and maintain design standards such as curb ramps and sidewalks are now required in most public spaces (figure 4). Nonetheless, poor enforcement and limiting judicial decisions lessened its impacts. The movement still advocates for disability rights through both political lobbying and civic education to perpetuate the movement’s resistance to forces of normative prejudice.

The environmental movement(s) The environmental movement’s history can be thought of as many movements coalesced through time, beginning with the interest in land conservation (mostly for sport) and growing to include notions of environmental justice as the movement fused with tenets of the public health movement. Political scientists W. Douglas Costain and James P. Lester note the transitions in eco-political discourse from an elite democracy to a participatory one, and from a national to a local focus of government. They divide the movement into four periods: “the conservation-efficiency movement,” stretching from 1890–1920; “the conservation-preservation movement, from 1920 to 1960; “the environmental movement” from 1960–1980; and finally, “the contemporary period of participatory environmentalism,” observing the movement’s evolution from an environmental science focus in the late 1800s to one of environmental ethics in the 1990s (Costain and Lester, 1998, 185).

The first movement was significant for its scientific proclivity, finding strong ties to the public health movement, as both were responding to industrialism and the emerging revelations in germ theory previously mentioned. The second movement developed out of desires for leisure by the rich—instead of fights over the industries and agriculture, this movement was characterized by elites such as Rockefeller fighting to preserve the land around his massive hotel. Conservation was privatized and localized. Additionally, the New Deal found places for environmentalism in job creation legislation and other less likely modes of ecological protection.

The third wave of the movement was the fi rst time that public values, instead of purely elite expert culture, lead the cause. This iteration fused the prior two movements from a grassroots perspective that was characterized by its breadth. Its expansive support caught the interests of entrepreneurial politicians, which affected the true power of the legislation enacted—as so many supposed supporters were only really interested in the political clout associated with the cause.

Major political successes were the adoption of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, a federal statute establishing the fi rst national policy for the environment, and the Council on Environmental Quality, and Agenda 21 in 1992, a global action plan set forth by the United Nations. But broad political actions do not always remedy the environmental problems they are meant to address, and often serve to placate activists more than protect the environment. Robert Brulle argues that the breadth of this version of the environmental movement was in some ways its downfall. The hundreds of groups forming to fight specific environmental battles found themselves battling against one another in order to gain political clout for their tiny version of environmental protection instead of joining forces for the larger cause (Brulle, 2000). These ineffective binaries have lead current revisionists to adopt the now popular phrase “think globally, act locally.”

Political theorists argue that we have either moved into a “postenvironmentalism” characterized by a philosophical and environmental ethic that supports pollution prevention instead of abatement, or a phase of “participatory democracy” reminiscent of Light’s civic environmentalism. This postenvironmentalism could be associated with William McDonough’s eco-effective approach to sustainable design. However, participatory democracy has also caught the interests of citizens in communities around the country. Either version of the movement could take precedence over the others, but these factions should find ways to work in tandem to strengthen the project of the environmental movement.

The most influential outcome of these strands of environmentalism in the built environment is the rise of certification systems meant to encourage “green design.” Most are green building rating systems, such as LEED, that were created as “market driven stateg[ies] to accelerate the adoption of green building practices” (Gowri, 2004, 57). In 1990, the British Research Establishment developed LEED’s predecessor, BREEAM (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method). But by 2000 the U.S. Green Building Council’s (USGBC) second version of LEED achieved widespread popularity and began to dominate the building industry. Originally created to regulate new commercial construction, LEED has expanded its system to account for existing buildings, commercial interiors, and even residential structures. All the green building rating systems revolve around five main categories—site, water, energy, materials, and indoor environment—making some aspects of design prerequisites for certification (Gowri, 2004, 58). Postoccupancy performance is part of the LEED certification process, and there are roughly four thousand buildings working with the USGBC currently to achieve a LEED rating (figure 5). But many argue that this system has become too abstracted. Growing out of localized green building programs, LEED has become an international industry, asking buildings all over the world to conform to the same basic stipulations. These certification systems are best used as a basic ecological checklist, while one would imagine that to be truly responsive to the Earth, a more site-specific, performative evaluation system might better address the needs of each locale.

Lessons from the Margins: Finding Patterns in Stories of Change

“The future of justice, if it has a future, lies with and not against the majority. The revolution will be made democratically or not at all. America is beyond the ministrations of Superman. Its fate, for good or ill, rests with the common men.” (Barber, 1971, 125)

The modes in which societal values balance the market and the state are varied and complex. Institutionalization of public concerns must come at once in physical, political, and cultural forms to equalize these predominant and opposing forces. The strongest forms of institutionalization, such as LEED’s infl uence in the environmental movement, come when societal change fuses with market and/or government forces to truly drive innovation. Yet, these previously radical innovations, once institutionalized, must be constantly revisited and localized in order to ensure their effi cacy in addressing the pertinent issues in practice. And, as the public health movement illustrated, the most important tool a polis can use to make this sort of system of accountability is its citizenry. The fusion of expert and local knowledge can lead to new ways of thinking that bring about positive change. People know more about the needs of their community than any regulation-producing expert, and can often better inform the place-making process in its local dimensions. Societal transformation is a slow and arduous process, but when enough political force is put behind certain ideals, ethical standards can supersede the interests of the market and the state.

Politicians may not be as interested in the cause as they are in their own reelections. As a result, citizens must claim their power to affect positive change. And furthermore, this power, so rooted in the American citizenry, hinges on its capacity to mobilize, unite, and identify common goals. The disability rights movement has done a wonderful job of coalescing through networks of organizations working together on collective concerns. By doing so, they have literally redesigned the way space is produced and connected across the country. It is critical that emerging change-agents consider the power of joining forces as opposed to partitioning themselves from one another. Also critical is the importance of remaining active and receptive to new ideas, even as initial victories come to pass. Society must remain vigilant in the declaration and preservation of its principles—we are our greatest allies.

BARBARA BROWN WILSON is a Ph.D. student in the Community and Regional Planning Program at the University of Texas at Austin. Equipped with a background in architectural history, Barbara is investigating the relationship between social equity and the built environment and its institutional manifestations, using the emerging SEED (social/economic/environmental/design) Network as the analytical focal point for her doctoral research. As the fi rst Luce Fellow associated with the Center for Sustainable Development at UT, she is working to foster relationships among the School of Architecture’s service initiatives, local communities, and the budding Austin Community Design Center, while also engaging in the social architecture movement through her active participation in SEED.

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McFarland, Andrew. Theories of American Politics. In Social Movements and American Political Institutions. Oxford, England: Rowan and Littfi eld Publishers, 1998: 7–19.

Melosi, Martin. The Sanitary City. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.

Mitchell, Don. The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. New York: Guildford Press, 2003.

Julienne Bautista, Catherine Jaramillo and Meng Qi

This year, our Point/Counterpoint looks at the role of infrastructure in American urbanism and the effects our physical networks have on the more complex social fabric.  The seemingly innocuous issue of infrastructure has continually struck chords of resentment and resistance in this country.  This has been especially true during times of economic recession, which makes this topic especially relevant today. We asked our respondents, who come from differing backgrounds and hold widely differing perspectives, to discuss this relevance for planners.  The editors thank the respondents for their insightful contributions.

Posed and answered before the electoral victory of Barack Obama, who raised public concern for the state of our national technological and transportation infrastructure during his presidential campaign, these questions were inspired by the controversial and tragic examples of infrastructural failure in New Orleans (August 2005) and Minneapolis (August 2007).

INTERVIEW

What are some of your thoughts for the main reasons behind the recent infrastructural failures (i.e., the bridge collapse in Minneapolis, the steam pipe explosion in NYC, overall deterioration of national highways) that have been taking place? How should we as planners go about finding solutions to these problems? O’TOOLE

The Minneapolis bridge collapse was apparently due to a design flaw, not poor maintenance. In general, the “infrastructure crisis” is overblown by government officials seeking larger budgets and special interest groups seeking government handouts. While there are problems, most of those problems can be solved by funding infrastructure out of user fees and letting managers use those fees in the ways they think best. There is no need to spend tax dollars on most infrastructure.

KARVONEN Infrastructure networks are frequently heralded as the epitome of societal progress. The great era of infrastructure development in the U.S., from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1960s, serves as a testament to the ingenuity and drive of humankind. But today, the triumph of these networks fails to resonate with the general public and they tend to serve as background elements to the urban condition, except when they fail spectacularly, as in the recent examples of Minneapolis, New York City, and New Orleans. Given our heavy reliance on these antiquated networks, some of which are over a hundred years old, I find it amazing that we haven’t experienced more catastrophic failures.

The contemporary infrastructure crisis is often understood as a seemingly insurmountable governmental challenge and an enormous economic burden. But it can also be seen as an opportunity for planners and other practitioners of the built environment to update the public realm to reflect current (and future) conditions. Scholars are increasingly calling for the abandonment of single-use infrastructures in favor of multifaceted designs, as characterized by the transdisciplinary work of Frederick Law Olmsted in nineteenth-century landscape architecture and urban planning practice. Multifunctional infrastructure networks of the twenty-first century can simultaneously address economic development, environmental protection, and social equality, fulfilling the aspirations of sustainable development advocates. Furthermore, there is a trend toward conceiving of infrastructure not as permanent physical networks but as constantly evolving ribbons of connection between humans and their surroundings.

Planners have a particular role to play in the rebuilding of infrastructure networks, not only in providing design expertise and professional management, but also in engaging the public in the design, governance, and maintenance of these networks. The development of new infrastructure networks has the potential to bridge the physical and communicative planning approaches through collaboration on local infrastructure revitalization projects founded on strongly democratic principles.

Wireless communication is now increasingly identifi ed as an infrastructural necessity. In what ways should urban designers and planners consider this trend and accommodate this necessity when planning for the urban form?

O’TOOLE Planners should get out of the way and let the market work. Some cities have subsidized the installation of wireless Internet communications. This has almost always been a failure. The most government should do is impose design standards on cell towers in residential areas.

KARVONEN Wireless communication technologies exude an aura of progress, suggesting that infrastructure services can be unshackled from the limits of material distribution networks. And the ubiquitous nature of wireless communication is interpreted to be inherently democratic and freely available to all. But beyond the popular rhetoric, these networks have more in common with conventional infrastructure than typically acknowledged. Wireless technologies continue to be tied to physical distribution lines and can perpetuate or even create new forms of uneven service by providing limited access to specifi c populations. Furthermore, the wireless character of these services can lead to unanticipated problems, such as the rise in traffi c accidents due to the use of cellular telephones by drivers.

The emergence of wireless communication technologies highlights the need for more democratic modes of technological development that can identify the advantages and pitfalls of new technologies before they are adopted by the public at large. Rather than blindly rolling out these technologies and then scrambling to develop legislation to limit their undesirable consequences, we need to develop new modes of public technology assessment to proactively address the potential positive and negative aspects of these technologies. And such an approach goes beyond wireless communications to address all novel and emerging forms of technology, such as genetically modified organisms, nanotechnology, human cloning, and nuclear energy.

Who should provide for infrastructural needs and other public services? Should it be publicly funded or be put into the control of private entities? Or should it be a combination of these two?

O’TOOLE Infrastructure should either be private or be provided by government agencies that are funded out of the revenues from that infrastructure. Government highway departments, sewer offices, and water bureaus can work reasonably well when they are funded out of user fees. When they are funded out of tax dollars, the way most transit agencies are, they quickly succumb to the pork-barreling demands to build megaprojects that often cost too much and do too little.

KARVONEN In the U.S., infrastructure provision continues to be a largely public endeavor, despite significant reductions in federal funding since the 1970s and the emergence of new forms of privatized services such as toll roads, gated communities, cable television, satellite radio, and telephone service. As a whole, these activities suggest that the boundary between public goods and private commodities are continually being negotiated, with varying results. I see the rise of public-private partnerships as one of the most interesting current trends in infrastructure service provision. Participation of private entities is not an inherently negative or threatening trend, as some have argued, but requires judicious forethought so the public good is not sacrificed for private profit. From my perspective, the most successful partnerships are those that maintain public ownership of the network while allowing for private management under strict government oversight. This allows for public control of these networks while taking advantage of the management efficiencies in the private sector.

How do you predict that federal fi scal policies will change in relation to new infrastructural needs? Do you think federal subsidies are crucial to the potential solution? If not, what are some fi nancing strategies that planners can use?

O’TOOLE I don’t think federal subsidies are a part of the solution, but it currently appears that this is the direction we are going. Many members of Congress seem intent on authorizing massive infrastructure subsidies so they can report to their constituents that they delivered pork-barrel projects to their states and districts. This is not going to solve the infrastructure problem; if anything, it will make it worse, as Congress has a history of preferring new construction over maintenance, so the projects they deliver are more likely to add to future infrastructure needs than to solve existing problems.

KARVONEN Federal investment will always be central to infrastructure development, due to the enormous costs associated with building and maintaining these systems as well as the widespread public benefits from robust and comprehensive networks. There is increasing discussion about the need for an updated New Deal to address the current economic crisis through domestic infrastructure development. With respect to energy, it is increasingly acknowledged that our reliance on fossil fuels has had unintended consequences such as climate change, international terrorism, and a rising national debt. Resolving these problems simultaneously will require a massive federal program to reinvent our energy infrastructure to be based on renewable sources. However, such an endeavor will face the wrath of fiscally conservative voters and politicians who advocate for smaller government. Personally, I don’t see how we can make any appreciable changes to existing infrastructure services without an expanded role for the federal government in financing both innovation and construction. While political, cultural, and economic conditions differ today from the Great Depression, the challenges we are facing require a similar level of commitment that can only be provided by a strong federal government.

How do infrastructural issues relate to social inequality? How can reconfiguring infrastructure be used as a tool to combat this inequality? O’TOOLE

Government action is often promoted as a way to reduce social inequality. Yet the sad truth is that the political power of the wealthy is disproportionate to their economic power. So when programs are devised to reduce social inequality, too often they end up primarily benefiting the wealthy. The best way to help low-income people is to rely on user fees.

KARVONEN The history of Austin’s development provides vivid illustrations of how infrastructure services can be used to exacerbate social inequality. For example, the 1928 city plan called for the concentration of minority populations in East Austin to avoid the duplication of municipal services for white and black populations throughout the city. Municipal policy has changed dramatically in the ensuing years, but uneven infrastructure provision continues to exist in low-income areas of the city. And correcting the unevenness of these networks is often tied to economic redevelopment, resulting in relocation of low-income populations to other areas of substandard infrastructure service.

The challenge is to find ways to distribute a limited amount of government funds in an equitable manner, prioritizing projects that will provide the greatest public good rather than the greatest return on investment through property and sales tax revenue. Thus, there is a tension between managing a city as a business endeavor (the current mode of governance in Austin) versus an expansive perspective that supports and fosters an equitable public realm. This is not a call for socialist forms of governance but rather a suggestion to acknowledge that infrastructure provision has multiple consequences that cannot be addressed solely by applying the tenets of neoliberal capitalism.

How can planners help shift public policies that treat open space and urban green space as an optional amenity rather than a necessity for healthy public spaces?

O’TOOLE Why should they? The U.S. is 95 percent open space. Most urban areas have lots of parks. The stampede to protect open space has driven up housing prices, increased traffi c congestion, and taken people’s property rights without compensation.

In general, planners need to learn more economics so they can understand concepts such as cost effi ciency, supply and demand, and marginal utility. Most planners don’t realize—or claim they don’t believe—that when you reduce the availability of land for housing, housing prices go up. So they go to great efforts to preserve an abundant resource—open space—and end up making housing unaffordable for low- and moderate-income families. KARVONEN Planners and other practitioners of the built environment face signifi cant challenges with respect to open space and green space due to a widespread embrace of a Cartesian understanding of the built environment. The city is divvied up among increasingly specialized experts with building design relegated to architects, streets to transportation engineers, parks to landscape architects, and so on. This segmented view of the landscape fails to acknowledge the connections that bind the city into a whole.

Landscape architects have much to offer by identifying design opportunities that relate the common elements of the city, particularly with respect to parks and open space. Rather than interpreting these spaces as nonurban and unbuilt landscapes, we can see them as providing recreation, transportation, commercial, aesthetic, and ecological services. However, this requires collaborative planning efforts that involve built environment experts (architects, urban designers, planners, and landscape architects) as well as the users of these spaces.

CONTRIBUTORS

RANDALL O’TOOLE is a Cato Institute Senior Fellow working on urban growth, public land, and transportation issues. O’Toole’s research on national forest management, culminating in his 1988 book, Reforming the Forest Service, has had a major influence on Forest Service policy and on-the-ground management. His analysis of urban land-use and transportation issues, brought together in his 2001 book, The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths, has influenced decisions in cities across the country. In his most recent book, The Best-Laid Plans, O’Toole calls for repealing federal, state, and local planning laws and proposes reforms that can help solve social and environmental problems without heavy-handed government regulation. An Oregon native, O’Toole was educated in forestry at Oregon State University and in economics at the University of Oregon.

ANDY KARVONEN is a post-doctoral researcher at the Manchester Architecture Research Centre at the University of Manchester (UK) where he studies the relationships between humans, nature, and technology in urban contexts. He earned a PhD in Community and Regional Planning from the University of Texas at Austin and his dissertation research was on the politics of urban drainage in Austin and Seattle. In addition, he has over a decade of consulting experience in environmental engineering and sustainable building and is a licensed engineer in the state of Washington.

Peter Almlie and Omar Nasser

As the world population continues to increase, pressures on our natural resources have reached levels of demand never seen before. The very pillars upon which we depend for survival are quickly eroding before our eyes. As scholars and practitioners in community planning and regional development, we must develop interdisciplinary, sustainable approaches to maintain these vital natural resources.

One of the principal challenges we face today in a growing market economy is fi nding a balance between environmental conservation goals and economic growth. To address these challenges, it is necessary to devise well-defi ned, equitable, and long-term plans and guidelines for creating sustainable and healthy planning policies. These policies must integrate both micro- and macro-level approaches to these serious issues facing humankind.

In hopes of moving toward such a coherent vision, our staff has enlisted two esteemed planning professionals from the Texas region to provide insights into the topic of sustainable energy policy in the wake of global climate change and increased demand on our natural resources. We want to thank these respondents for their thoughtful and insightful contributions to Planning Forum, and we hope that our readers enjoy their responses to this year’s Point/Counterpoint.

INTERVIEW

How do you envision public policy and city planning responding to global climate change?

BRIAN It’s a little cliché, but the axiom of “think globally but act locally” really holds true, I believe, in regards to public policy and city planning. Local municipalities and regional governing bodies [council of governments] are where the most direct impact is made through policy, regulations, and city planning efforts. It takes forward-thinking and visionary local planners, urban designers, and elected officials to think beyond their immediate needs or short-term demands to “look out for” the future generations and the larger global context in implementing sustainable policies and goals. Luckily, it seems the pendulum of change has started to swing and people do care about their greater environment and their children’s future.

JAMES Thus far we are responding too slowly and gradually. I envision this as a growing priority that we may see as a driving force behind transit-oriented design and new urbanism. The pace may be picking up as more of our leading-edge jurisdictions incorporate energy conservation as a strategic planning objective.

The developments of technologies that bring alternative energy to a mass scale are important in reducing our dependence on petroleum. What role does/should the government play in developing and implementing these technologies?

BRIAN See above answers—of course “government” plays a huge role. Companies are stepping forward and need to do more— but sometimes the only entity that can implement such large, overwhelming changes and projects is a government body. JAMES The government’s role here is once again twofold, with a regulatory “push” side and an economic “pull” side. In city planning, our regulatory side is just starting to show positive results, but promises to grow exponentially. We should be reminded that the average European walks about one hundred times as far as the average American, on a daily basis. Is it any wonder that their cities look and feel so different from ours? There is a “pull” side in city planning too, as economic incentives are integrated into the new urban model.

How does your work incorporate the values of a sustainable energy policy?

BRIAN My urban planning studio’s work is centered around mixed-use redevelopments, transit oriented developments [TOD], and as a strategy/overarching philosophy of creating through whole community design. Our urban design work involves connecting people to their greater community: linking with transit, creating special places that have an enduring value and quality of life for people. Almost all our work involves some kind of brownfield redevelopment or infilling with strategically placed density that fundamentally encourages uses, residents, and activities closer to the cities’ cores, thereby reducing traffic, emissions, infrastructure needs, etc. By encouraging/designing denser communities [appropriately placed density—remember “density” is not a four-letter word], our work promotes housing options/affordability, expands transit options, promotes “walkable” communities, protects the environment, and ultimately encourages/supports sustainable energy policies. JAMES My work incorporates these values on a theoretical level, hopefully guiding my efforts in a positive direction. I am not presently employed in any capacity that normally includes active lobbying for better urban design policy, or energy policy, but I will defi nitely go to bat for these causes any time they are issues affecting my daily work.

CONTRIBUTORS

JAMES NIETO received his MBA from St. Edward’s University in 1989 and currently serves as the asset manager in the Portfolio Management Division at the Texas General Land Office in Austin, Texas. Prior to this position, James served as a planner in both the City of Austin Planning Department’s Office of Land Development Services and the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Division of Emergency Management. In addition to serving Texas’s public agencies, James was elected to public office as the Southland Oaks Municipal Utility District’s treasurer from 1995 to 1998.

W. BRIAN KEITH, AICP, AIA is the director of urban design and planning at James, Harwick & Partners in Dallas, Texas. A North Carolina native, Brian has practiced urban design, planning, and architecture in Texas for the past eleven years. His professional experience is centered on creating livable communities/neighborhoods through the integration of a variety of housing typologies and community uses. Brian’s planning and design experience includes a wide range of project types, including residential and low-income housing, multifamily housing, mixed-use, retail, government, and institutional projects. In 1989 Brian graduated magna cum laude from North Carolina State University with a bachelor’s of environmental design in architecture, and received his master’s of architecture from the University of Texas at Austin in 1995.

PETER ALMLIE completed his BA in Latin American studies at San Diego State University, where he focused on housing issues in Mixtec communities in Oaxaca, Mexico. After extensive travels throughout Latin America, he worked for a nonprofi t agency that focused on providing housing in the peripheral colonias of Tijuana. Seeking a greater understanding of the built environment, Peter entered the dual degree program at UT Austin, where he continues to study issues related to housing and development in Latin America. Upon completing his dual degree, Peter would like to continue his work in Latin American communities, either in Southern California or in Mexico.

OMAR NASSER is currently seeking his master’s degree in city planning at the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture. Focusing on land development and environmental issues, he hopes to pursue a career in planning for land development in ecologically sensitive areas.

Zoned Out: Regulation, Markets, and Choices in Transportation and Metropolitan Land-Use

Jonathan Levine – Reviewed by: Chang Yi

Planet of Slums

Mike Davis – Reviewed by: Martin K. Thomen

Large Parks

Julia Czerniak & George Hargreaves – Reviewed by: Erica Huddleston

Road, River and Ol’ Boy Politics: A Texas County’s Path from Farm to Supersuburb

Linda Scarbrough – Reviewed by: Sara Pierce

Bloomingdale Trail: A Journey in Photographs

Sarah Morton

Scattered throughout Chicago are dozens of elevated train tracks, the legacy of a formerly vibrant form of transportation. One of these abandoned lines stretches for three miles across Chicago, through gentrified neighborhoods on the east, and communities that are struggling economically and socially on the west. Presently, the trail is crumbling and overgrown and is a magnet for gang activity. The embankment also serves as a canvas for vibrant murals and spontaneous works of art. A group called Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail is working with the city and community members to create an elevated, multiuse park and trail that will connect these varied neighborhoods and create much-needed open space. But this dream is still many years and millions of dollars away. All photos taken in 2006.

Crisis Management in Public Administration

Fadillah Putra

Planning for Pollution: How Planner’s Could Play a Role in Reforming the EPA’s New Source Review Program

Olivia Starr

Coding Social Values into the Built Environment

Barbara Brown Wilson

A History of Urban Renewal in San Antonio

Meghan McCarthy

Access to the Agenda: Local housing politics in a weak state context

Elizabeth J. Mueller & Tommi L. Ferguson

Service Learning Through a Community-University Partnership

Suzanne Russo, Mariana Montoya & Monica Bosquez

GIS Technology & Community and Public Participation: Using GIS in community development work in Santo Domingo

Martin K. Thomen & Shawn Strange

Transportation Barriers of the Women of Pudahuel, Santiago

Marissa Ferrari Ballas

Large-Scale Transport Planning and Environmental Impacts: Lessons from the European Union

Jessica Doyle

Sustainable Communities and Energy Policy in America

Omar Nasser & Peter Almlie

Infrastructure in the U.S.

Julienne Bautista, Catherine Jaramillo & Meng Qi

Kurt Kraler

The Las Vegas Valley, a region where the population has doubled every decade since its settlement in 1911, continues to experience tremendous urban transformation and growth while political and financial forces sustain its economic center, the infamous Las Vegas Strip. As its population balloons beyond 2 million inhabitants, tourism remains the area’s dominant industry, employing nearly half of its residents while boasting the nation’s highest proportion of undocumented labor (Pew Research Center, 2012). This explosive growth has thrust the Las Vegas metropolitan area into a process of rapid urbanization, most of which occurs out-side of the city limits in unincorporated townships with minimal master planning and zoning restrictions—appealing to powerful developers and private interests. The Las Vegas region as an urban and economic model emerged following the widespread loss of manufacturing jobs beginning in the 1980s; such losses introduced a service economy largely dependent on gaming venues as seen in Detroit, Atlantic City, and Joliet, Illinois.

The development of the Las Vegas Strip and its recognition as an urban and economic business model can be understood as a product of capital culture as detailed by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle (1967, 1994). Debord warns of the influence of commodities increasing to the point at which the image prevails through the subsequent downgrading of having into merely appearing, where social relationships between people are mediated by images. In Las Vegas, the dominance of the image grew as roadside signs surpassed the significance of the building itself in attracting potential customers arriving by car. The roadside sign came to form entire atmospheres and buildings under the guise of themed spaces; the spectacle enfolded the physical realm of architecture, as documented by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown, and Steven Ize-nour in Learning from Las Vegas (1972).

The historical development of Las Vegas can be shown to satisfy the two foundational conditions of Debord’s concept of the spectacle, as identified by Anselm Jappe: “incessant technological renewal and the integration of the State and economy” (1999). The rapid pace of development and renovation has become a symbol of progress for the Strip, establishing a constant renewal and continuing to attract the attention of tourists from around the world. Images and signs can be easily replaced in the rebranding of entire buildings, further increasing revenue and discarding the old in favor of the new.

More intriguing, however, is the integration of State and economy in the development of the region through the prevalence of unincorporated townships. Such integration privileged greater private control over the provision of non-essential services, in addition to more relaxed land-use and zoning regulations. Unincorporated townships are a designation “originally authorized to assist in the conveyance of land and are commonly thought of as a rural form of government with limited power” (Clark & Sharp, 2008), a clause that the Las Vegas region has come to define.

It is no coincidence that the vast majority of what has become the Las Vegas Strip sits outside of Las Vegas city limits in an unincorporated community known as Paradise. Paradise was established in 1951 in response to several annexation efforts by the City of Las Vegas. The City claimed that the growing popularity of the Strip directly benefited from the tourist draw of the city’s downtown Fremont Street, the key tourist destination at the time, and should be expected to support the street’s maintenance and expansion. Strip casino owners convinced local residents, many of whom were also casino employees, that higher taxes would be imposed upon annexation, cementing support for the area’s unincorporated status.

Paradise has since grown to become the most populated unincorporated township in the United States, maintaining its continued status as an informal city (US Census, 2010). As documented by Jill Clark and Jeff Sharp in City & Community, “unincorporated townships have grown so large that they are functional equivalents of cities, providing a broad range of services beyond their original ‘rural’ responsibilities” (2008). The unincorporated township, once a state of economic and political exception, has since become an acceptable form of city-building with essential services offloaded to the county. Several adjacent communities in Nevada have been formed under a similar guise to that of Paradise in an effort to maintain unincorporated status. The trend further restricts the expansion of the City of Las Vegas given residents’ preference for reduced property taxes in exchange for the absence of a municipal government.

These seemingly contradictory political interests bore the liberalization of the leisure economy in Nevada. By the 1950s and 1960s the state’s history of legalized gambling and prostitution in rural areas had fostered a reputation of hedonism, a reputation that proved increasingly attractive to tourists of the time. Economic and social liberalization flourished from the strategic un-incorporation of Paradise and the de-regulation of the labor force.

Though the city had been unionized labor stronghold harkening back to its roots in the railroad industry, the liberalization of labor laws in the 1950s, specifically with the introduction of right-to-work state legislation, threatened the union grasp on the region. After the passing of the federal Taft-Hartley Act of 19491 came the unpopular dispute by the Culinary Union, fueling anti-labor sentiment. The impact of this legislation would be later exploited in the 1990s with the opening of the MGM Grand, Aladdin, the Venetian resorts, and others that employed entirely non-unionized labor forces.

The de-regulation of labor and the dependence on a tourist-based service economy engenders the increased exploitation of migrant workers who may accept labor-intensive work in exchange for low pay. Alarmingly, 10.2% of the working population in Nevada is classified as unauthorized immigrants, forming the highest proportion in the United States (Pew Research Center, 2012). This leisure illusion proliferated by the manu- factured fantasy of the spectacle society forces labor to the sidelines and minimizes its presence in a city focused solely on the provision of leisure.

Debord states that “everything life lacks is to be found within the spectacle,” allowing it to thrive despite the degradation of life and the continued separation of the laborer from the product of their labor (Jappe, 1999). One only need consider the inability of the low-paid service worker to access the activities they provide to tourists to understand that such separation exists in Las Vegas. The Las Vegas Strip operates as the spec-tacularization of the city, possessing what all others lack: on a superficial level, it is a city seemingly free of labor in its strict devotion to the provision of leisure. Critical to its success is maintaining a certain leisure illusion, one that requires service staff to don ridiculous costumes, casting them as actors against an all-encompassing thematized backdrop. The intensification of this system of leisure demands and supports a labor class through increasingly exploitative means.

The combination of economic integration and the production of a spec-tacularized urban form have profoundly shaped the Las Vegas region. The influence of the labor force on the urban development of the region was particularly felt during in the sub-prime mortgage crisis of the late 2000s. Las Vegas was routinely ranked as having some of the highest rates of homeowner vacancies in the United States during that time, as reported by the US Census Bureau (2005-present). Additionally, the relative absence of municipal planning bodies for the region’s unincorporated townships has resulted in urban sprawl largely dispersing the population beyond ever-expanding clusters of abandoned homes. This has meant further separation of laborers from each other, a key urban development Debord highlights as critical to the production of the spectacle society. Perhaps we have identified the great paradox of the spec-tacularized city: the production of a region that only appears to prosper while withering in the desert.

1             The authority of individual states to restrict the ability of unions to impose membership on employers and all of their employees.

References

Clark, J.S., & Sharp, J.K. (2008). “Between the country and the concrete: Rediscovering the rural-urban fringe.” City & Community, 7(1), 61-79.

Debord, G. (1994). The Society of the Spectacle. (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). New York, NY: Zone Books. (Original work published 1967).

Gottdiener, M., Collins, C. C., & Dickens, D. R. (1999). Las Vegas: The Social Production of an All-American City. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Hess, A. (1993). Viva Las Vegas: After-Hours Architecture. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.

Jappe, A. (1999). Guy Debord. Berkeley, Calif.; London: University of California Press.

Moehring, E. P., & Green, M. S. (2005). Las Vegas a Centennial History. M. S. Green (Ed.). Reno: University of Nevada Press.

Pew Research Center: Unauthorized Immigrants in the U.S., 2012. (2012). Retrieved from http://www.pewhispanic.org/interactives/unauthorized-immigrants-2012/.

US Census Bureau. “Homeowner vacancy rates for the 75 largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas: 2005-Present.” Housing Vacancies and homeownership (CPS/HVS) Table 7. Retrieved from http://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/ann14ind.html (accessed April 6, 2015).

Venturi, R. (1972). Learning from Las Vegas, Scott Brown D., Izenour, S., and Dendy, W. (eds.). Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Gibrán Lule-Hurtado

Mexico’s Pueblos Mágicos (Magical Villages) Program was launched by the nation’s Secretariat of Tourism (SECTUR) in 2001. It continues to operate under this agency, primarily as a program to promote tourism through the preservation and promotion of noteworthy natural and built environments in towns and small cities identified as having valuable cultural resources and an intangible unique element, or magic. The guidelines of the Program describe its intention to promote sustainable economic development and tourism through the protection and economic activation of historic, environmental, and cultural resources for the benefit of the residents of the magical villages. Mixed results have led to the restructuring of the program, and further analysis of these effects can inform this and other programs on effective planning for preservation.

Criteria and Goals

Mexico’s most comprehensive preservation legislation at the national level is the 1972 Federal Monuments and Archaeological Sites Law, which is executed and administered through the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH). SECTUR consulted with this and other federal agencies in determining their guidelines for inclusion for Pueblos Mágicos (Pueblos Mágicos de México, 2005). The Program allows localities not recognized under the 1972 law to apply for inscription and access preservation funds, provided they adopt measures for preserving the cataloged character of the locality, promote tourism, and create an administrative committee formed by elected officials and community representatives. These measures must be in place at the site by the time of the application for inscription is submitted—a great achievement of the Program, as it leads to documentation and regulatory protection of the towns’ built heritage. By calling for the formation of a government-resident committee to consider, apply, and administer the town’s participation in the Program, SECTUR further promotes public awareness of preservation government (Pueblos Mágicos, 2014).

The Program—identified by the Tourism Secretariat as one of its most successful—provides funds for preservation, infrastructure investments, aesthetic improvements, and publicity. Inscription in the Program also spurs public investment in the form of infrastructure improvements and state fund allocations to participating municipalities (Destinan 221 mdp, 2011; La ambición por los Pueblos Mágicos, 2014; Martínez Rascón, 2013).

While the funds allocated to each village and to each component of the program are not publicly available, news articles confirm that funding for the Program has increased over the last five years, and a congressional bulletin states that, as of 2014, the Program will receive special funding separate from the Tourism Secretariat. In this same year, federal funding for Pueblos Mágicos more than doubled from $13.9 million USD to $34.9 million USD, as shown in Figure 1 (on opposing page) (Destinan 221 mdp, 2011; Presupuesto para Pueblos Mágicos, 2014; Programa Pueblos Mágicos, 2014; Boletín N° 4583, 2014).

Results and Criticism

While no comprehensive analysis of the Program’s effects has been conducted, the Financiero and Valdez Muñoz have found that the economies of smaller, more isolated towns have not greatly benefited from inscription, while larger towns near-source markets have. The most widespread benefit of the Program is the funding that it directly provides and attracts to “restoring historic centers, monuments, and churches” (SECTUR som-eterá a revisión a los Pueblos Mágicos, 2014; Valdez Muñoz, 2014). This makes the program an important instrument in historic preservation in Mexico. Its success and visibility have called attention to the importance and potential benefits of historic preservation, including in small towns which might remain unreached by federal protection and funds under the 1972 Monuments and Archaeological Sites Law. Funds provided by the program have been used for the preservation of significant structures including churches, bridges, and marketplaces. In addition to this awareness and funding, the Program has incited rewriting of local preservation codes and state laws, as well as the cataloging of historic sites (Martínez Rascón, 2013; Sólo tres de 83 Pueblos Mágicos, 2014).

Despite some preservation success stories, the program has been criticized for lacking stringent standards with respect to the rehabilitation of historic structures. While the guidelines stress the importance of preserving character through preservation of significant buildings, the lack of rehabilitation standards has led some recipients to invest preservation funds in projects that focus on appealing to tourists by earlying up structures—modifying them to make them appear older—or making them more grandiose than they were originally. While this might further the Program’s mission to increase tourism, it goes against its stated purpose to do so through preserving a town’s built environment and overall character (Rojo Quintero, 2009; Rodríguez Chumillas, 2013).

Another criticism arising from this is that the Program shifts the narrative and focus of historic preservation from measures taken as a result of civic pride to calculated actions undertaken with the end goal of reaping financial rewards. This is of concern as it transforms the goal of conservation into maximization of the profitability of these spaces, possibly forsaking sound preservation practices by emphasizing appearance rather than adhering to authenticity (Pueblos Mágicos de México, 2005; Valdez Muñoz, 2014). Inadequate monitoring of inscribed villages’ participation in the Program and adherence to its guidelines is a major concern. However, according to a 2014 report, only three of the eighty-three villages continue to meet ninety percent or more of guidelines for inscription; only three have lost Pueblo Mágico status: Mexcaltitlán, Papantla, and Tepoztlán, all in 2009. Of these three, only one—Mexcaltitlán—has failed to regain recognition (Pueblos Mágicos, 2014).

As the end goal is to spur economic development through initial investments in places that will appeal to tourists, funds tend to be spent in central areas of the towns, meaning historic structures that are not located in the heart of town and are not tourist attractions in their own right are unlikely to be allocated funds for preservation. Churches, especially, are said to absorb a large amount of rehabilitation funds which could otherwise be distributed to rehabilitate various smaller structures (Sólo tres de 83 Pueblos Mágicos, 2014; SECTUR someterá, 2014).

Although the program sets clear criteria for inscription, mismanagement—and possibly politically motivated inscriptions—by the Secretary of Tourism who served from 2011 to 2012 caused the number of participating villages to more than double from 38 to 83 in those two years (Figure 2, see page 106), while funding for the program decreased (Figure 1, see page 106).

Restructuring

Following the increased rate of inscriptions in 2011 and 2012, SECTUR paused inscriptions and reviewed the program guidelines. As of 2013, the program has been capped at one hundred magical villages, with seventy towns vying for the coveted seventeen remaining spots.

In September of 2014, SECTUR conducted an investigation reassessing the eligibility of the eighty-three towns currently inscribed as Pueblos Mágicos. It found that an alarming seventy percent of the villages do not meet inscription criteria and acknowledged that mis-administration of the program in 2011 and 2012 led to the addition of towns that may not have been ready for the Program. Inadequate monitoring of these villages and those previously inscribed also contributed to this poor rate of compliance. As a result, SECTUR created new policies for inscription and criteria to be met in order to remain in the Program. Participating villages will be reevaluated to ensure they meet inscription criteria and be subject to yearly reviews to ensure continued adherence to guidelines (Sólo tres de 83 Pueblos Mágicos, 2014).

Recommendations

What SECTUR has accomplished through the Pueblos Mágicos Program is in some respects laudable: awareness of historic buildings as cultural riches and of the power of preservation to generate economic development has increased. Furthermore, funds have been provided to towns with significant historic buildings that might have been unable to otherwise secure funding for historic preservation.

With no clear standards for preservation, however, there is a risk—one which has already manifested in some of these localities—of funds intended for preservation being spent on renovation that is unfaithful to the original character or even era of a building. The Program’s vision acknowledges the value of not only colonial or independence-era buildings but also twentieth century constructions. As such, it should discourage the addition of inauthentic elements and adopt rehabilitation standards to protect the character of all older buildings, colonial or post-Porfirian, grandiose or modest.

In order to ensure that funds for preservation are in fact used for preservation, SECTUR can strengthen the power of the government-resident committees as oversight and steering bodies. This would also result in greater supervision of funds by community members and property owners, potentially reducing the incidence of corrupt practices.

To prevent the Program from becoming a promoter of the commodification of heritage, preservation training and certification should be offered for committee members and required for those administering the funds allocated to a town. The Program should once again collaborate with the INAH or another preservation organization to establish and impart this training. Public meetings, already a requirement, should emphasize the importance of a town’s unique character and authenticity.

The Pueblos Mágicos Program presents a powerful instrument to express the importance and value of preserving built heritage. Program funds have been used to rehabilitate aging structures in areas where other private or public funding is unavailable due to stagnant economies and lack of access to state and federal preservation monies. Other Latin American countries, including Chile, Peru, El Salvador, Colombia, and Ecuador, have replicated or expressed interest in replicating the program. Should the program steadfastly incorporate the preservation of character it touts as its mainstay into its conditions for continued inscription, it could have a much greater, perhaps nearly magical effect on preservation in the country.

References

Boletín N° 4583. (2014, November 6). Diario Cámara de Diputados. Destinan 221 mdp al Programa de Pueblos Mágicos. (2011, December 22). Diario Intolerancia.

La ambición por los Pueblos Mágicos. (2014, October 1). El Financiero.

Martínez Rascón, C. (2013, December 21). Pueblos mágicos y nuevas ruralidades. El caso de Álamos, Sonora. Diálogos Latinoamericanos.

Nuevos Lineamientos para incorporación y permanencia al Programa Pueblos Mágicos. (2014, September 26). Diario Congresional Oficial.

Paz Arellano, Pedro. (2005). Conservación de la Autenticidad. Revista INAH.

Presupuesto para Pueblos Mágicos será de más de 500 mdp. (2014, September 26). El Economista.

Programa Pueblos Mágicos. (2014). Retrieved November 29, 2014, from http://www.sectur.gob.mx/pueblos-magicos/Pueblos Mágicos. (2014, September 26). Secretaría de Turismo Diario Oficial.

Pueblos Mágicos de México. (2005). Revista Archipiélago, 47.

Replicarán programa de Pueblos Mágicos en el extranjero. (2012, September 26). El Economista.

Rodríguez Chumillas, I. (2013). Desafío y dilema en la política pública del “pueb lo mágico” mexicano. Revista de Arquitectura, Urbanismo y Cie cias So- ciales, 4(3).

Rojo Quintero, S. (2009, April). Patrimonio y turismo: el caso del Programa Pueb los Mágicos. Revista de Arquitectura, Urbanismo y Ciencias Sociales, 1(3).

SECTUR someterá a revisión a los Pueblos Mágicos. (2014, February 12). El Financiero.

Sólo tres de 83 Pueblos Mágicos cumplen con 90 o 100% de reglas. (2014, September 1). Milenio Noticias.

Valdez Muñoz, R. (2014). Funcionamiento de los programas del turismo cultural en México: algunas observaciones críticas. Patrimonio Cultural y Turismo.

Vivek Shastry

The importance of energy access, or the provision of clean, reliable sources of cooking fuels and electricity for rural development, cannot be over-stated; it can be a livelihood enabler, unlocking opportunities for better health, education, economic development, and so forth. Despite advances, we still live in a world where one in six people lack access to energy. An overwhelming 85 percent of that population live in rural areas, and 87 percent of them in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. This includes over 300 million people in India alone (Figure 1). Why has progress been so slow?

Researchers worldwide have focused on two important dimensions of energy access: measurement and delivery mechanism. The former deals with how to quantify the nature and level of access in a region, while the latter addresses the different institutional processes that facilitate the delivery of energy services. In the summer of 2014, I set out to find the relevant indicators used to understand energy access in India. Specifically, I wanted to learn how such indicators could help understand regional disparities in energy access, and further help prioritize the implementation of various schemes designed to address this. Before long, I learned not only was there no understanding of regional disparities and opportunities but there was no institutional process to recognize and make use of this information.

My focus then shifted to understanding the nature of energy policy-making in India—a distinctly state-driven top-down approach. In the past decade or so, a number of entrepreneurs have successfully pioneered energy delivery processes to facilitate access to the rural poor. The knowledge that they accrue from working on the ground, what I will henceforth refer to as local knowledge, plays an important role in complex processes like energy access delivery. Drawing from theoretical precedents, historical context, and empirical evidence, I argue that such useful local knowledge does not find a place in the current top-down decision-making environment. Instead, I propose a regional energy planning process to bring this knowledge to the forefront, and identify the key elements of that framework. But first, why have the top-down approaches seen limited success?

Limited Success of Top-Down Approaches

The history of electrification in India has been shaped by the social and political context. Political scientist Sunila Kale (2014) explores the reasons behind India’s limited success in the electrification project, despite it being central to the conceptualization of Indian modernity by early nationalists and planners. The initial conduit for electricity into rural India was for its productive impact in agro-industries and for irrigation; household access only followed. The expansion of the national electric grid, deciding which customers should be served, which sectors should be subsidized, and so forth were all decisions that rested with the state. Following this history it is apparent how energy access delivery has been a top-down process in India—an approach that has had only limited success

A number of policies have been enacted in the last decade to achieve goals of universal access. For example, the National Electricity Policy (2005), National Rural Electrification Policy (2006), Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojaja (2005), and Remote Village Electrification Program (2006) have all envisioned complete energy access but have missed several deadlines (Nathan, 2014). As of 2011, over 45% of rural households still did not have access to electricity in India (Planning Commission, 2013). Even among those that have connections, the supply is usually inadequate and unreliable.

The reasons often cited for these failures include the disconnect between public and private agencies in policy discourse, untested and sometimes unnecessary subsidy schemes, and a general lack of institutional frame-work for strategizing policy implementation (Balachandra, 2011). The only avenue for stakeholders to be involved in policy-making is a consultation process at the top, which has a tendency to only focus on the big picture, while missing the regional differences. As Indian economist Prabhat Patnaik observes, “the proliferation of ‘centrally sponsored schemes’ handed down to the states where they have to contribute a certain share, which is itself arbitrarily fixed by the center, has further taken away the freedom of state governments to make their own state plans” (2014). State governments tend to take a similar catch-all approach, often blinded to local knowledge and regional opportunities. The next question is: what is local knowledge, and why is it important?

Complexity and the Role of Local Knowledge

Several different actors and actions are involved in the delivery of energy access, as summarized by Bellanca, Bloomfield, and Rai (2013). They can be broadly categorized under energy market chain, enabling environments, and supporting services. Figure 2 (see page 102) shows an example of the different activities involved in the process. Additionally, a number of small energy providers, micro-financers and village level entrepreneurs play a vital role in the delivery of energy access in rural areas. These entrepreneurs possess a certain kind of local knowledge that is context-dependent and evolves over years of groundwork and learning by doing.

Consider, for example, actors’ understanding of how the potential spending on energy needs would fit into a rural household’s monthly budget, as compared to spending on other needs like food, water, and education. Many households are not able to afford the upfront cost of energy services that is required under some of the current policies. Understanding the local expenditure patterns can result in structuring payment mechanisms that reduce the financial burden on rural households. For almost every reason cited for the slow progress of electrification, one can find examples of such local knowledge that is useful, but not recognized.

Theoretically, these actors, their location, context, and local knowledge are characteristic of complex systems (Antonelli, 2009). Two key characteristics of the system that are of most interest in this context are the notions of local knowledge and feedbacks. The translation of local knowledge into replicable, codified knowledge (i.e. policies) occurs through systematic local interactions (Polyani, 1969), resulting in feedback loops that reinforce the system’s performance (Odum and Odum, 2001). When there is no institutional capacity to facilitate these interactions, local knowledge would rarely get incorporated into policies.

This leads to my central argument that the challenge of delivering complete energy access in India does not lie in a silver bullet policy or grand institutional framework. Rather, it lies in a regional energy planning process that values the local knowledge and synthesizes the regional data and local institutional practices to advocate for locally relevant policies. Now, what would that planning entail?

Toward Regional Energy Planning

A quick theoretical and historical example demonstrates why a top-down approach to energy access delivery does not and cannot incorporate useful local knowledge. On the other hand, several policy research institutions have begun looking at ways to involve local stakeholders, though there is no clear consensus on how these agencies can take the leadership in regional energy planning. At least two important questions arise from this discussion. First, what would be the key components and functions of a regional energy planning framework? Second, what regional data and indicators can aid strategic policy formulation and implementation?

A stakeholder focus group organized in Bangalore, India, recognized these challenges and offered several suggestions. Participants included state regulators, government officials, policy researchers, entrepreneurs, and training institutions. Based on this theoretical, historical, and empirical discussion, three key components emerged to be important in a regional energy planning framework (Table 1). It is important to note that policy research agencies already work on bits and pieces of this planning process. Conceptualizing these activities under an energy planning framework can help agencies to codify this approach. This in turn would make it possible to repeat the process in other regions and states, and thereby co-construct context-based policies that give importance to local knowledge

Table 1: Key components and functions of a regional energy planning framework. Source: Author

Data Management	Establish and coordinate a state-level energy-related database that would act as a node for various stakeholders to pool in and update data. Even prior to this, it is to establish what data is important, who possesses this data, and what gaps need to be filled.
Stakeholder Coordination	Create a forum for all relevant stakeholders to have regular deliberations on current issues. Reach out to groups that are not present at the table. Facilitating this dialogue can resolve miscommunication between stakeholders, help the state understand how it needs to structure its policies, and bring locally relevant knowledge to the forefront.
Policy Research and Advocacy	Synthesize the data to determine which business models are most suitable for which regions within the state and issue policy guidance to scale up existing models effectively. Actively advocate on behalf of the regions still lacking access to reliable energy access in order to maintain the government’s focus on this issue.

In conclusion, priorities, capabilities, and resources to achieve energy access goals will vary between states and regions within nations. An over-arching directive imposed from the top will no longer be enough to attain complete energy access and sustain the growing demand. A participatory approach that involves local stakeholders and incorporates local knowledge is necessary to co-construct policies relevant to local contexts. The hope, then, is to move from a top-down, subsidy-based, supply-driven approach towards a more bottom-up, capacity-based, demand-driven approach to realize the goals of universal access to energy.

Acknowledgment

I wish to thank SELCO Foundation, Bangalore, for being a partner in this study, and the William H. Emis III Traveling Scholarship at University of Texas at Austin for facilitating my research travel to India.

References

Antonelli, C. (2009). The economics of innovation: From the classical legacies to the economics of complexity. Economics of Innovation and New Technology, 18(7), 611–646.

Balachandra, P. (2011). Modern energy access to all in rural India: An integrated implementation strategy. Energy Policy, 39(12), 7803.

Bellanca, R., Bloomfield, E., & Rai, K. (2013). Delivering Energy for Development. Practical Action Publishing.

Nathan, H. S. K. (2014). Solar energy for rural electricity in India. Economic and Political Weekly, 49(50), 60–67.

Odum, H. T., & Odum, E. C. (2001). A Prosperous Way Down: Principles and Policies. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado.

Patnaik, P. (2015). From the planning commission to the NITI Aayog. Economic and Political Weekly, 50(4), 10–12.

Planning Commission, Government of India. (2013). Twelfth Five Year Plan (2012- 2017). New Delhi: SAGE Publications.

Polanyi, M. (1969). Knowing and Being: Essays. London: Routledge & K. Paul.

Maria Alexandrescu

Drumul Taberei is a neighborhood in Bucharest, Romania, constructed from 1966 through 1974. With 60,000 dwelling units, it currently stands as one of the city’s densest areas. Drumul Taberei was planned to include many green spaces between buildings, integral transportation networks, and a large park. From a satellite image, one can pick out right away the u-curve of the street after which it is named, as well as the dark green color among its building slabs. It is one of Bucharest’s greenest neighborhoods.

Around the collective housing blocks are collective yards, though it is unclear how these semi-public, in-between spaces are managed; indeed, many of the trees and plants were brought there by the residents—a number of whom had been displaced from villages following forced collectivization and urbanization of rural areas.

Prior to the fall of the Communist regime in 1989, these green spaces belonged to the people, in accordance with party ideology. But to whom do they belong now? Many of the areas were claimed by residents of the ground floors who saw it as an opportunity to reconnect with pre-socialist relations to the land. And so the fences went up, and behind them lawns, rose gardens, small vegetable plots. The fences are perhaps only a small part of the spontaneous interventions that dot the former collective space, though they are also the most visible. But apart from the fences, there are benches in front of buildings, shaded tables used for drinking and board games—areas for gathering and spending time.

Apart my grandparents moved to Drumul Taberei in 1970, I would spend my summers playing and exploring its park. In 2013, the park was closed for renovation. Among the trees there appeared large, heavy steel frames, and artificial hills. Until then, I had to find another place to walk. Rather than walk through the neighborhood only to get to the park, I made the neighborhood itself the destination of my walks. Between the buildings, the yards had about as many trees, as many areas of vegetation, as many benches as the park. Of course, since the neighborhood was large, there were also a number of smaller parks within, as well as churchyards, schoolyards, and barren lots. But, when considered with the interventions in the former collective in-between spaces, was the difference between the neighborhood and the park really that great?

Aditi Ohri

This paper describes the research process leading up to an intervention orchestrated in a historically working-class neighborhood in Montreal, Quebec. Pointe-Saint-Charles, also known as the Point, has been experiencing rapid gentrification following condominium developments along the nearby Lachine Canal in the early 2000s. My intervention took place within the context of a graduate course in the Art History department at Concordia University, titled “Industrialization and the Build Environment,” led by Dr. Cynthia Hammond. As a class, we immersed ourselves in the neighborhood through an anti-poverty not-for-profit organization, Share the Warmth, which has been working in the Point since 1989. We sought to examine and understand various components of the built environment in the region through oral history, film, and architectural and spatial theory. I was interested in Megan Boler’s feminist pedagogy of discomfort (1999) and work by the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS) at Concordia as well. Intending to highlight the invisible aspects of lived experience that produce the built environment of a given place, I conducted interviews with long-term residents of the region with the intention to collaborate and produce an artwork that would enable an audience to empathize with the embodied experiences of my interviewee. The outcome was a walking tour of the Point through the experiences of Steven Wells, a resident of the area since 1999. I led my peers through the neighborhood, stopping at places Steven described in our interview, and prompting participants to read excerpts from his transcript out loud. My initial goal was to attempt what Erica Lehrer (2011) calls an “imperfect attempt to bear witness.” My process was grounded in observations about the built environment of Pointe- Saint-Charles at the intersections of spatial theory and social justice.

The Point

Montreal was founded as a colonial hub of the French and, later, British empires. By 1830, Montreal’s La-chine Canal, directly north of Pointe-Saint-Charles, was bringing tons of goods in and out of the city to and from distant metropoles and colonies. Throughout the 19th century, Montreal was a very important trading port, generating the majority of Canadian wealth. The canal’s factories employed thousands of workers who settled in Montreal’s southwest neighborhoods. The population in the Point was predominantly Irish, French-Canadian, English, and Scottish. In the 20th century, Portuguese and Italian immigrants settled in the neighborhood, and today, immigrants from South and East Asia also live in the Point. Following the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959 and the subsequent closure of the Lachine Canal in 1970, factories shut down in large numbers, leaving many residents of the Point in search of work elsewhere. Between 1961 and 1991, almost half of the district’s population left the Point. Those who remained forged grassroots alliances to fight the city’s sudden unwillingness to maintain the district in the wake of deindustrialization. The city began to shut down parks, neglected to maintain infrastructure such as streetlights, and even planned to construct a major thoroughfare in the area that would displace hundreds of households in the 1960s. Community organizers fought against this proposed development and worked to create amenities such as community gardens, a health clinic, women’s shelters, and food banks.

In the past two years, Pointe-Saint-Charles has become home to 2,000 new households, the majority of which are middle to upper class. The tensions of economic inequality are palpable in present day Pointe- Saint-Charles. Walking along Rue de Coleraine in September 2014, I stopped at an alleyway to read an aggressive question spray-painted onto a fence. “Pourquoi cette palissade?” the black letters glared at an adjacent condo, clearly indicating the direction of the question’s gaze (Photo 1, see page 89). This intervention in the landscape of an otherwise peaceful alleyway ties social tensions to physical space. My perspective suddenly became informed by an awareness of the abruptness of gentrification in the Point, and the subsequent vulnerability and anger it provokes in those whom it threatens to displace. Walking further south down the alleyway, I saw a second intervention in black spray paint, likely done by the same hand: “t’as quoi à cacher?” marked on a fence (Photo 2, see opposing page). This act reveals the fence as a signifier of separation, built to resist interaction with a surrounding community. The alleyway seemed generally well maintained compared to most residential streets in the southern part of the Point. The question “what do you have to hide?” addresses the privilege inherent in the construction and renovation of private spaces. The question connotes a tone of exasperated dispossession, accusing those living inside the fence of hoarding wealth.

Inspired by these emotional responses, I wanted to explore the intersecting boundary between the identity of an individual and the identity of a place (Davidson, 2007). As former factory buildings along the canal are redeveloped as condominiums, the Point is branded as an up-and-coming neighborhood. In formulating my project, I wondered whose interests are validated and whose lives are erased in this real estate narrative? I wanted to bring attention to the stories of people whom gentrification renders invisible and threatens to displace. Although the highest concentration of Montreal’s subsidized housing can currently be found in Pointe-Saint-Charles, many co-operatives will lose their government funding in the next five years due to austerity measures, forcing rents to increase exponentially. Meanwhile, not a single condo development in the Point integrates middle and low-income units into its building designs. My intention was to destabilize a viewer’s dominant narrative about the Point by having them step beyond their comfort zone and experience the neighborhood from an underrepresented perspective.

Steven Wells

I first met Steven Wells at Share the Warmth on October 6, 2014. We met for two interviews in November (Photo 3, see page 90). We talked at length about a variety of topics that ranged in emotional intensity. He spoke of voter registration, racist vandalism in the Point, police harassment in Little Burgundy (an adjacent Montreal neighborhood), the potential closure of his co-op in five years, and feeling uncomfortable walking hand-in-hand with his partner in public. We also discussed the history of Montreal’s gay village, a largely unknown legacy that we both agreed would be beneficial for gay youth to learn about. Steven illuminated a perspective that I did not often see reflected in discussions of gentrification in Montreal, and felt it important to me that a larger audience witness his story.

In Pedagogy of Discomfort, Megan Boler (1999) describes the process of witnessing as a mode of receptivity to knowledge that engenders empathy and a sense of responsibility to reflect on one’s actions and privileges. Boler constructs the act of witnessing in contrast to spectating, wherein the viewer is not obligated to critically reflect on their value systems. Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (1979, 1993) and audio-walks such as Walking the Post-Industrial Canal, produced by the COHDS, inspired me to use the format of the walking tour. In theatre of the oppressed, one person recounts an experience of marginalization and fellow participants re-enact the situation with an alternative conclusion that empowers the storyteller. Although I did not alter Ste- ven’s words for the walking tour, it was my intention to empower his perspective and validate the political importance of his experiences of

race, sexuality, and class in the built environment of the Point. Our conversations reminded me that people who are different from what society deems normal often move through public spaces in a way that is guided by feelings of exclusion and avoidance. This reality is not usually perceptible to those who move through the same spaces with the privilege of feeling safe from physical danger, and it is exactly this privilege that I sought to illuminate.

Conclusion

On November 13, 2014, readers were performing Steven’s words in public spaces throughout the Point (Photo 4). My aim was to facilitate the dissolution of distance between the reader’s and Steven’s experiences (Boler, 1999). In recounting stories on harassment and uncomfortable realizations about his sexual orientation, I saw my peers experiencing Steven’s perspective of the Point. They were not mere spectators to his narrative. In conversations following the walk, one participant reported that they felt as if they had an “out-of-body experience” and another stated that they came away from the intervention with a deepened understanding of their white privilege. It is impossible to state that all participants reflected on privilege in the same way, but it is encouraging to know that this strategy has the potential to succeed.

Although Steven did not attend the walking tour, he met my colleagues at Share the Warmth shortly afterward. He reported feeling shy but very curious. He told me that he knows people who would be willing to share their stories if I were interested in doing this again. We met again in January 2015 and he let me know that this project pushed him to consider more of his life’s events, to think critically about what it means to be a Black person in Canada, and to have more difficult conversations with family members. He mentioned that he now aspires to write an autobiography that connects his life story with the history of gay culture and racism in Canada.

Steven was initially surprised by my idea but approved and encouraged me to execute the intervention in this way. I feel this was an effective way to invite participants to meditate on lived experiences of racism and homophobia and negotiate their personal relationships to these issues. These marginalized narratives have only recently begun to be discussed in public fora, but they are at present underrepresented in the media and largely absent in discussions about Canadian social policy. This absence points to the urgency for stories such as Steven’s to be told in a context that allows listeners to become witnesses and agents for positive social change.

References

Boal, A. (1993, 1979). Theatre of the Oppressed. New York: Theatre Communications Group.

Boler, M. (1999). A pedagogy of discomfort: Witnessing and the politics of anger and fear. In Feeling Power: Emotions and Education. New York, NY: Routledge. 175-202.

Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (2015). Post-Industrial Montreal. Retrieved from http://postindustrialmontreal.ca/

Davidson, J., Bondi, L. & Smith, M. (2007). Introduction: Geography’s ‘emotional turn.’ In Davidson, J., Bondi, L. & Smith, M. (Eds.), Emotion- al Geographies. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 15-32.

Lehrer, E. & Milton, C. E. Introduction: Witnesses to witnessing. In Milton & Lehrer (Eds.), Curating Difficult Knowledge. Basintoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. 1-19.

Elizabeth Walsh

Dear fellow planners,

I write to you today as a white woman completing her doctorate in Community and Regional Planning at the University of Texas at Austin this spring, 2015. I am also a gentrifier and a neighborhood activist who moved from Boston to the Holly Neighborhood of East Austin1 in 2006. Like many other planners committed to sustainability, I strive to keep the often forgotten E of Equity at the table, along with Economy and Environment (Oden, 2010). Yet I confess that when I talk about equity, I am tempted to talk about it exclusively from an analytical and economic perspective. That is to say, I am tempted to leave two dreaded four-letter words out of the conversation: race and love. I am writing to you in the hopes that you might join me as I strive to bring them to personal and professional conversations about the future of our communities. To open the conversation, I offer my reflections on this challenge, from my particular position at this particular point in time.

Spring in Austin: new life is emerging everywhere. Each day new leaves unfurl along tree-lined streets. New development is just as abundant—each day new building permits appear along thoroughfares and neighborhoods with fertile ground for re-development. An estimated 110 new people move to Austin every day, and many are flocking to centrally located neighborhoods such as mine in the 78702 ZIP Code, just east of downtown (Hawkins & Novak, 2014).

The bees and the press are buzzing over the flowering opportunities. Earlier this spring, for instance, the AAA magazine Texas Journey featured a cover story on Reinventing East Austin that celebrated how “the once derelict neighborhood is evolving into an epicenter of creativity and panache.” The story showcases East Austin as a great example of “urban renewal on a human scale.” (Oko, 2015).

Creativity, renewal, growth—they are the hallmarks of spring and the grand prize for economic development planners whose growth strategy rests on attracting urbanites belonging to the creative class (Florida, 2014). With bright ideas, outside capital, and disposable incomes, these new residents are often credited with the revitalization of previously neglected neighborhoods.

While there are undeniable advantages of this rebirth and renewal, this year it is much more difficult to ignore the darker underbelly of this pattern of growth. The crises of Ferguson, MO, in the preceding summer and fall have drawn our attention to how many people are excluded from the promise of urban regeneration. These crises and the emergent Black Lives Matter movement have interrupted our national consciousness and directed it to the brutality of collectively-perpetuated racism and unexamined white privilege throughout the U.S. Personally, while I might have been content to talk about equity without talking about race in the past, this year I cannot help but see the unconsciously reproduced patterns of racism in my neighborhood, city, and nation.

As one prime example of the clear presence of racism operating in my neighborhood, a few days before Valentine, just blocks from my house, I witnessed the demolition of the Jumpolin piñata store by two young, white, male entrepreneurs who acquired the property in fall 2014. They were in such a hurry to level the building to put up a parking lot in time for South by Southwest that they sent the bulldozers in before the Mexican-American business owners could clear out their merchandise and personal belongings. As the developers attempted to justify their act, they compared their displaced tenants to roaches, using explicitly racist language to suggest that forcible eviction and demolition was a necessary act (Seale, 2015). As one social critic astutely noted, “the Latino community was left violated through their symbol of festivity trampled by that of their colonizers” (Ward, 2015).

The story that gentrification is a function of market forces independent of racism is untenable. As long as we can use race or ethnicity to deem some people more or less entitled to respect, dignity, and opportunity than others, racism will continue to shape our economic interactions and mask our own complicity in injustice. Ironically, the traditional seven-pointed piñata is itself a symbol of the seven deadly sins of envy, sloth, gluttony, greed, lust, wrath, and pride. The piñata stick, a symbol of love, is used to break through the sins and release the abundance contained within (San Benito Historical Society, n.d.). If there is a lesson here, perhaps it is that we have a responsibility to notice our greed, gluttony, pride, and complicity in systems of oppression, and use the force of our love to break through them. When our economic interactions become free of racism and guided instead by an invisible hand of love, we may very well discover regenerative forms of development.

Should this happen, it will start with the conversations we hold today. For me, it begins with a pledge to bring love and race to the table, both personally and professionally. In my neighborhood, that means standing in solidarity with my neighbors to hold new development accountable to community values. In my field, it means standing up and inviting uncomfortable conversations. Thankfully, I am learning more by stepping into the discomfort. I am sharing my experiences in the hopes that you might share your experiences as well.

My first real experiment in bringing love and race to a professional setting was at the national South By Southwest Eco conference (SXSW Eco) in October 2014. SXSW Eco is an annual conference for innovative environmental leadership held in Austin. I attended with other colleagues who had recently participated in Huston-Tillotson University’s First Annual Building Green Justice Forum, held in late September. Dr. Robert Bullard, the father of environmental justice scholarship, gave the opening keynote address titled “Climate Change and Vulnerability.” He argued that climate change is the number one environmental justice issue, and that when we talk about building resilience, we must consider the most vulnerable first, and we must consider how race shapes vulnerability. Dr. Bullard made a powerful call for a Southern Region Climate and Community Resilience Initiative led by a research network of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) like Huston-Tillotson. In previous years I attended, social justice concerns were generally missing at SXSW Eco. Dr. Bullard’s presence seemed to suggest that mainstream environmentalists were more willing to engage questions of race, class, gender, and power in conversations about environmental sustainability.

Given this powerful kickoff, I was excited about the workshop to be held on the last day: urban renewal and resilient design. Urban renewal and resilient design sound similar, but I imagined this panel would juxtapose the two. On the one hand, we have the top-down urban renewal programs that devastated minority communities during the era of highway construction and white flight to suburbs from the 1950s through 1970s (Hays, 2012). On the other hand, there has been growing interest in bottom-up approaches to resilient design and development to advance climate justice for the most vulnerable, as called for by Dr. Bullard.2

To my surprise, the panel did not develop this contrast. The all-white panel used urban renewal interchangeably with resilient design before the almost exclusively white audience. One of the panelists shared a historic narrative about how we built Atlanta’s highway system and suburbs in the 1950s. Without defining who was included in we, he noted that eventually we realized single family suburban development was a recipe for social isolation, and that car-dependency eroded our health and quality of life. Now, he explained, we are beginning to return to the city, transforming abandoned urban land into vibrant, healthy community spaces.

I was stunned. This story and others presented by the panelists were inspiring and innovative in many ways. Yet at no point did any panelist mention race, racism, poverty, or social inequality. The historical critique of suburbanization neglected to mention white flight or urban disinvestment. The discussion of current revitalization neglected to name gentrification or the suburbanization of poverty. As I sat there, a keen awareness settled in: if we do not talk about racism when we talk about resilience, then we are likely perpetuating it. Resilience is essentially a property of a system that can recover in the face of disruption or shock. I realized that racism and capitalism are two exceptionally resilient systems, and they have been mutually reinforcing each other for at least 400 years. As much as I loved the ideas presented by the panelists, suddenly they appeared to amount to little more than the greenwashing of an economic machine that damages people and the environment.

I was speechless. But, having recently resolved to muster the courage to speak up about racism from a place of love, I stood up and found myself at the microphone, asking the first question. I thanked them each for their efforts to advance environmental resilience, and thanked the panelist from Atlanta for giving us some historical context. I expressed my surprise that, though the panel included urban renewal in its title, there was no mention of the historic federal housing policies, let alone a discussion of their impact on low-income communities and people of color. I noted my concern about the characterization of urban land as abandoned when there were still people, usually people of color, living there. I asked them what they have done to prevent environmental gentrification, the process by which environmental improvements lead to increased costs of living and replacement of low-income communities (usually of color) with wealthier (and more white) residents (Banzhaf & McCormick, 2006).

Having spoken, I breathed in relief. I honored my word to include racism in conversations when it was missing, despite the discomfort. I spoke from my love, for the panelists and for the possibility of just, flourishing communities. I brought race and love to the table. I sat down and listened for the responses.

Interestingly, the panelist from Atlanta indicated that the Atlanta Land Trust Collaborative (ALTC) was created to maintain affordability in neighborhoods at risk of gentrification as a result of the developments discussed. He was well aware of the histories of racial segregation and Urban Renewal. It was not that he was ignorant of these issues; he chose not to bring them up. Just like I nearly did, and have done before. Later he explained to me that one can only fit so much into a talk, and one must tailor it to the audience. We were at SXSW Eco, and his audience was (mostly white) environmentalists. Does this mean that mainstream (white) environmentalists generally find discussion of vulnerable people, structural racism, and equitable development to be either off-limits or not germane to conversations about resilience and sustainability?

In truth, that is a weak question. A more powerful one going forward is: Are we, as professionals committed to the design and planning of just and resilient cities, willing to lovingly and courageously open conversations that address and dismantle racism with our colleagues and in the public?

My personal answer is yes.

What is yours? What small beginnings or bold actions are you taking to bring your love and willingness to engage the challenges of racism in the planning of our communities? What practices enable you to listen more compassionately, love more boldly, and look more critically at the systems of which we are part? Where do you find yourself stopped? How can we more powerfully challenge and support each other as we engage in these difficult dialogues? Going forward, we must work together to create thriving, resilient communities where all might flourish.

Respectfully, Elizabeth Walsh

1. This historically working class Hispanic neighborhood just north of Lady Bird Lake has experi- enced a disproportionate share of environmental burdens in the past and is currently experiencing rapid investment, expansion of amenities, and demographic change. To be more specific, from 2000 to 2010, my ZIP code experienced the second highest increase in the white share of population out of all others in the United States (Petrilli, 2012).
2. The growing literature on resilience emphasizes the importance of strong social net- works and social capital in the adaptive capacity of coupled social and ecological systems (Folke et al., 2002; Folke, Hahn, Olsson, & Norberg, 2005).

References

Banzhaf, H. S., & McCormick, E. (2006). Moving beyond cleanup: Identifying the crucibles of environmental gentrification. SSRN eLibrary. Retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=990074

Florida, R. (2014). The Rise of the Creative Class—Revisited: Revised and Expanded. Basic Books.

Folke, C., Carpenter, S., Elmqvist, T., Gunderson, L., Holling, C., & Walker, B. (2002). Resilience and sustainable development: Building adaptive capacity in a world of transformations. Ambio, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 31(5). Retrieved from http://www.era-mx.org/biblio/Resilience.pdf

Folke, C., Hahn, T., Olsson, P., & Norberg, J. (2005). Adaptive governance of social-ecological systems. Annual Review of Environment and Re- sources, 30(1), 441–473. Retrieved from http://doi.org/10.1146/annurev. energy.30.050504.144511

Hawkins, L., & Novak, S. (2014, November 1). Tear-down trend transforming Central Austin neighborhoods. Austin American-Statesman. Austin, TX. Retrieved from http://www.mystatesman.com/news/business/tear- down-trend transforming-central-austin-neighb/nhxt2/

Hays, R. A. (2012). The Federal Government and Urban Housing, Third Edition.

Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Oden, M. (2010). Equity: The forgotten E in sustainable development. In S. A. Moore (Ed.), Pragmatic Sustainability: Theoretical and Practical Tools. London: Routledge.

Oko, D. (2015). Reinventing East Austin. Texas Journey: The Magazine for AAA Members, (January/February).

Petrilli, M. (2012, June 14). 50 ZIP codes with greatest white population increases.   Retrieved   from                   http://edexcellence.net/commentary/education-gadfly-daily/flypaper/2012/the-50-zip-codes-with-the-largest- growth-in-white-population-share.html

San Benito Historical Society. (n.d.). Pinatas. Retrieved April 4, 2015, from http://www.sanbenitohistory.com/projects/Language_Arts/Pinatas%20%231.html#Symbols

Seale, S. (2015, February 15). Conflicting stories surround controversial demolition of East Austin piñata store. Retrieved from http://austin.culturemap.com/news/city-life/02-15-15-east-austin-pinata-store-jum- polin-demolition-property-owner/

Ward, T. (2015, February 23). Dale, dale, dale, no pierdas el tino! Retrieved from http://equilibrionorte.org/2015/02/23/23684/

Sara McTarnaghan

Abstract

This paper analyzes the scale and character of home demolitions in East Austin since 2007 from a built environment approach. A documentation and analysis of home demolitions, construction, and resale in East Austin contextualizes the narrative of gentrification and reveals how that process is complicated through the mechanics of speculative development, real estate messaging and aesthetics. In this moment of sociocultural displacement and loss, new norms are inscribed in the built environment. This new landscape is strongly embedded in the discourse and aesthetic of environmental sustainability, which threatens to overpower conversations about equity and urban development in a highly contested space of the city.

Keywords: Gentrification; real estate development; exclusion; Austin

After years of neglect, with little to no public or private investment or development activity, Central East Austin is in the midst of a real estate boom, characterized by a surge in single-family home demolitions and redevelopment. The neighborhoods near downtown Austin, directly to the east of Interstate 35 (see Figure 1), have a storied history of planning action and inaction that has caused concentrations of low-income minority groups—both African American and Latino—to establish communities there over time. The co-location of industrial or commercial land uses and segregated facilities for African Americans per Austin’s 1928 comprehensive plan, paired with exclusionary lending practices, created difficult living conditions for East Austin residents. Today, processes of gentrification have reversed historical demographic trends; East Austin has experienced a sharp increase in higher-income white residents. Once again, this demographic shift is tied to planning action, with a renewed focus on the areas near downtown through Smart Growth and environmental sustainability measures, and inaction, based on a market-driven model with few provisions for affordable housing. In this changing landscape, one-story bungalows from the early-mid 20th century are torn down and replaced by super-modern condos and new single-family homes.

Gentrification is often studied from an equity perspective in terms of the political economy of real estate without examining the changing form of the built environment and what it reveals about the gentrification process for individuals, families, and communities. Ruth Glass coined the term gentrification in 1964 to refer to the class dimensions of neighborhood change, specifically the influx of middle-class people and displacement of working class residents in London. Since then, scholars from the fields of urban studies, geography and sociology have wrestled to understand and define the phenomenon, often placing the consumption preferences of arriving middle

class residents at the center of narratives and analysis. Ley, for example, who defines gentrification as “the transition of inner-city neighbourhoods from a status of relative poverty and limited property investment to a state of commodification and reinvestment” (2002, p. 2527), was interested in the role of artists in processes of neighborhood change in Toronto. More recently, however, some urban scholars have argued that gentrification scholarship must be re-connected to urban policy and critical perspectives on the displacement of the working classes. In the introduction to a special issue on gentrification in Urban Studies, Slater, Curran and Lees challenge the trajectory of gentrification studies:

Academic inquiry into neighbourhood change has looked at the role of urban policy in harnessing the aspirations of middle-class professionals at the expense of looking at the role of urban policy in causing immense hardship for people with nowhere else to go in booming property markets reshaped by neoliberal regulatory regimes (2004, p. 1142).

Similar to major urban centers such as New York or London, which have been at the center of gentrification scholarship to date, Austin’s rapid growth and population change fuel contentious debates about neighborhood change in a city that still grapples with its history of racial segregation.

From a built environment approach based in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) analysis, photography and historical property data, this article explores the scale and character of home demolitions in the 78702 ZIP code from 2007 to 2014. A documentation and analysis of home demolitions, construction, and resale in East Austin contextualizes the narrative of gentrification and reveals how that process is complicated through the mechanics of speculative development, real estate messaging and aesthetics. In this moment of sociocultural displacement and loss, new social and cultural norms are inscribed in the built environment through building façades, fences, and streetscapes. This new landscape is strongly embedded in the discourse and aesthetic of environmental sustainability, which threatens to overpower conversations about equity and urban development in a highly contested space of the city. This article is organized in three sections: (1) an overview of the structural forces which created East Austin’s socio-spatial landscape; (2) spatial and visual analysis of home demolitions in 78702; and (3) discussion of the trends and implications of this pattern of redevelopment and displacement.

Austin’s Socio-Spatial Residential Landscape

City planners and private developers drove the consolidation of low-in-come African American and Latino residents into a segregated East Austin enclave through systemic mechanisms of exclusion. One of the earliest mechanisms for exclusion in Austin was the use of racially restrictive covenants on private property, severely limiting mobility and household choice for people of color. Covenants are restrictions on land or property that are written into property deeds and applicable in perpetuity. Racially based use of covenants started in the late 19th century and was common in Southern cities in order to “exclude and subjugate less powerful social groups deemed to be dangerous to property values” (Tretter, 2012, p. 24). In Austin, the use and spatial distribution of racially restrictive covenants effectively drafted the patterns of housing discrimination observed throughout the 20th century and, to a slightly lesser degree, today.

Developed in 1928 by Koch and Fowlers Engineers, Austin’s first comprehensive plan institutionalized many mechanisms of segregation already operating in the city. Although the US Supreme Court declared race-based zoning unconstitutional in the 1917 Buchanan v. Warley decision, the 1928 plan offered a method for segregating races that could be upheld under law. In the plan, the City created a “Negro district,” concentrating all facilities and services for black families in the area east of I-35, to incentivize African American families (who were residing all over the city at the time) to move there. Tretter argues that the 1928 plan and associated municipal zoning “largely locked in the exclusions that had already been laid down by private racial covenants beginning in 1893” (ibid., p. 30). In addition to consolidating residential segregation, the 1928 plan placed most of the city’s industrial and heavy commercial zones adjacent to residential areas reserved for people of color, making these neighborhoods inhospitable places to raise families and accumulate wealth through property ownership.

The legacy of institutionalized segregation from the 1928 plan continued to shape land-use planning and financing in Austin into the 1930s and 1940s. The postwar period was characterized by the increased participation of the federal government in housing and neighborhood affairs. The Housing and Loan Corporation (HOLC) set federal guidelines for lending and underwriting for home finance. Through the HOLC guidelines and Federal Housing Administration (FHA) lending, the federal government furthered the racial segregation in housing where “areas with African Americans, as well as those with older housing and poorer households, were consistently given a fourth grade, or ‘hazardous,’ rating and colored red” (ibid., p. 13). These limitations on federal home lending led to further disinvestment in areas deemed hazardous, all while loans for home purchasing or repair were made unavailable. Federal public housing policy was also influential in furthering segregation in the coming decades. In Austin, one-third of the city’s entire stock of public housing would be located in Central East Austin, specifically in the 78702 ZIP code. The construction of I-35 in the 1960s reinforced the pre-existing racial boundary, creating a physical barrier between East Austin and the rest of the city.

Each of these mechanisms of segregation and exclusion inform Austin’s landscape today; as community organizer Susana Almanza states, the “image of Austin as a progressive city is challenged by historical race relations and land use planning issues” (2007, p. 62). Tretter’s demographic analysis from the 2000 census clearly illustrates the results of a century of private and public actions that produced residential segregation; African American and Latino families split the East Side, while the rest of the city is predominantly Anglo. However, just ten years later, the 2010 census results clearly reflect the rapid change of the neighborhood as processes of gentrification have accelerated in Austin. The data show the major flight of African American households out of East Austin (Tretter, 2012). While some of this migration may reflect greater economic mobility and housing choice for these families, it has also been connected to rising property values, rents, cost of living and a higher incidence of foreclosure more suggestive of economic coercion than choice.

Growing development pressure in the creative city

Just as residential segregation and the formation of East Austin were historically tied to both planning and private development, today’s sustainability planning, population growth and economic boom are reshaping the historic residential and demographic patterns across the city. For the last two decades, Austin has experienced rapid population and economic growth. During this period, Austin emerged as part of a nationwide imaginary of successful cities, frequently ranking high on lists of green cities, as well as serving as a model of the much-lauded creative city. Within this paradigm there is a tendency to “connect specific ideals of urban ‘livability’ with urban economic development policies that cater to the whims of Richard Florida’s ‘Creative Class’” (McCann, 2008, p. 2). As creativity is coupled with livability, the narrative goes that the city must be “reshaped and repackaged as a consumption and lifestyle space that attracts the creative class” to be economically competitive (ibid., p. 4).

This period of boom was accompanied by the adoption of a new planning paradigm, Smart Growth, which sought to connect land use issues to the environment and transportation. The main impetus for this change was the Save our Springs (SOS) Alliance, and the movement to reduce development on the sensitive Edwards Aquifer in West Austin. Spatially, the ordinance pushed development activity to areas outside of the aquifer such as East Austin. As Tretter notes, this moment in planning represents an odd point of collaboration between pro-growth and environmental (often characterized as being anti-growth) groups about the future planning trajectory of the city (2012). Despite this unusual consensus, some groups immediately questioned this new sustainable path forward. The proposed plans were particularly alarming for traditionally marginalized communities on the East Side whose relatively central land became ripe for redevelopment. On this contradiction, Almanza asserts:

In Texas, when they talked about ‘smart growth’ they said it would limit suburban sprawl but it was just gentrification. Sprawl hasn’t stopped. As they began to develop downtown, they pretended there were no people of color downtown. Those people who were supposed to be our allies are running us out of our communities (2007, p. 62).

Zoning and land use designations, the same planning instruments which limited residential opportunity for Blacks and Latinos to the east side in the 20th century, now threaten to displace them in the 21st. While some counter this argument by eagerly citing new affordable housing built in East Austin, even in cases where supposed affordable housing becomes part of the Smart Growth equation, this is part and parcel of the displacement process due to the relatively modest affordability targets (reaching households earning 60 to 80 percent of median family income) that would exclude many current residents living at 30 to 50 percent MFI (ibid., p. 64). Under these conditions, the ability for a long-standing East Austin family to stay in place becomes increasingly difficult and unlikely.

The new desirability or livability of East Austin is in part due to overall development pressure in Austin, further intensified spatially by Smart Growth in tandem with a focus on the urban core. That said, such desirability cannot be separated from the successes of the grassroots environmental justice movement led by PODER and other organizations in the 1990s to shut down industries that were polluting their neighborhoods. The environmental justice movement in Austin was primarily led by people of color who began to challenge the siting of hazardous industries in their neighborhoods—dating back to Austin’s 1928 plan. In her account

of the movement, Almanza notes the conflict between the environmental justice movement and larger planning trends in Austin:

As we rid our communities of industrial and certain types of commercial zoning, which had allowed hazardous facilities, pawnshops and liquor stores in our neighborhoods, the Smart Growth movement was inventing new zoning categories. Just to name a few, the new zoning included Commercial Mixed-use, Mixed-Use Urban Center, Vertical Mixed-Use, and Neighborhood Mixed-Use. None of these zonings secured housing for the poor or working poor (2007, p. 62).

With increasing development attention in East Austin it became more and more likely that the same communities that were striving to create healthier neighborhoods for their families would soon be pushed out. In the absence of inclusionary zoning and other, more progressive planning instruments, it is difficult for the City of Austin to secure affordable housing needs while encouraging growth and development. Though this tension exists across the entire city, it is most acute in East Austin due to the legacy of exclusion and segregation that shapes both the real estate dynamics and the cultural history of the neighborhood.

Such tensions exist across the country and world as urban development focuses once again on the center city—the response to both environmental concerns associated with sprawl and shifting consumption preferences of middle-to-high income individuals. Through her research on homelessness in Seattle and transportation planning in Austin, Sarah Dooling provides a useful theoretical frame: ecological gentrification. By acknowledging and understanding the visible tensions in urban development today, ecological gentrification delineates the “uneven distribution of benefits associated with a planning effort driven by ecological agendas or environmental ethics” (Dooling, 2012, p. 104). The term, she claims, is intentionally provocative:

It seeks to associate the displacement of people (a process typically associated with economic development and neighborhood change) with environmental changes stemming from formalized planning efforts, where the changes are assumed to be and referred to as universally beneficial (ibid.).

Dooling further establishes how urban vulnerabilities are produced (and reproduced in this case) through the “collisions of environmental and economic agendas that fail to address existing conditions of vulnerable people who are stigmatized and vilified in the popular media” (ibid., p. 103). The frame of ecological gentrification begs a more nuanced under- standing of the impacts of environmental agendas—relevant to Austin’s redevelopment under Smart Growth.

Gentrification and the Built Environment: Single Family Home Demolitions

In this context, questions of displacement, neighborhood change, and speculative development are important, as current economic growth and planning trajectories cannot be divorced from the local context and history of urban development. Focusing on Central East Austin, this article explores how the history of residential segregation in the 20th century and the experience of rapid economic growth and demographic change in the first years of the 21st century express themselves in the local built environment. Specifically, the analysis that follows will consider how the remaking of neighborhoods through demolition and redevelopment influences displacement.

This project takes a mixed-methods approach grounded in study of the built environment, including: mapping, site visits and photography, historical data, press coverage in the Austin American-Statesman, and online real estate resources such as Zillow. The City of Austin Growth-Watch dataset aggregates building permits, which facilitated analysis of single-family home demolition permitting between 2007 and 2014, both spatially and temporally. Google Maps Street View includes recent historical data that provides rich documentation of neighborhood change. Within 78702, the majority of streets have high-quality parcel-by-parcel imagery from at least five occasions during the study period, providing snapshots of properties at telling stages, including: pre-demolition, vacancy, construction, finished homes, and early occupation. Mobilizing these unique data sources, the findings presented provide finegrain evidence of the material changes occurring in East Austin today, but further qualitative research is required to better understand the explicit role of different private and public actors involved in these processes, as well as the lived experience of residents (old and new) in this changing landscape.

The historic socio-spatial construction of East Austin through planning and private development makes it particularly important to study today. As such, the 78702 ZIP code is perhaps most representative of both the historic neighborhood fabric and contemporary development pressures.

The 78702 ZIP code is immediately adjacent to downtown Austin, delineated by Martin Luther King Boulevard to the north, I-35 to the west, Lady Bird Lake to the south, and Airport Boulevard to the east. It contains important civic, religious, and cultural sites, representative of the large African American and Hispanic populations, as well as two of the East Side’s historic core business districts—East 12th Street and East Cesar Chavez Boulevard.

Demographic data from 2009 to 2013 American Community Survey (ACS) five-year estimates provide an important and up-to-date depiction of the area. In regards to income, 78702 remains majority low-income; the income per capita is $19,715, roughly 60 percent of the city-wide average. Nearly one-third (31.2 percent) of individuals are living below the poverty line, significantly higher than the citywide poverty rate of 19.1 percent. While poverty rates have not changed drastically from 2000 to 2013 in the 78702 ZIP code, the per capita income nearly doubled since the 2000 Census. The persistence of higher-than-average poverty amidst rapid redevelopment and neighborhood change may be partially attributed to the large stock of public housing units within the ZIP code. In regards to the housing stock, there are 8,895 units, a slight majority of which are renter occupied (54%). Data on the occupancy of homes within the district reveal intense neighborhood change and redevelopment: an estimated 70.9% of households had moved in between 2000 and 2013. Despite significantly below-average incomes, the median value of owner-occupied housing units is $188,00, about $40,000 less than the City’s average (US Census Bureau, 2013).

Development trends in East Austin have not gone unnoticed by the larger Austin community or media. There have been numerous articles in the Austin American-Statesman about growth, demographic change, and real estate in Central East Austin over the past decade. For example, in February 2012 the Statesman published an article entitled “Rosewood area a hidden gem near downtown,” in which the authors quote Lonny Stern, a newcomer to the neighborhood: “the influx of new restaurants and shops is improving quality of life here, he [Stern] said: ‘every time something new comes around, it keeps getting better and better. This area is ripe for dense development. We feel like it’s an undiscovered gem” (Austin American-Statesman, 2/26/2012). While terms like “untapped potential” or “hidden gem” are still the rhetoric driving real estate investment and gentrification in East Austin today, property speculation within the district began appearing in local press as early as the 1990s. In a 1998 Statesman article, Darrell Piece, president of Snap Management Group, called East Austin the “key gateway to Austin”, claiming, “the people who take advantage of that now will truly be the pioneers and the settlers, and they will be pleased by their choice” (Austin American-Statesman, 6/2/1998). Sixteen years later, it appears Piece’s estimate of the return on investment was as accurate as the development booms.

While most media attention has celebrated the potential of real estate development in 78702, recent coverage has begun to address the gentrification and displacement that is occurring across East Austin. In November 2014, the Statesman published an article entitled “Houses go, and so does city past,” addressing noticeable patterns of neighborhood change through home demolition and redevelopment. In the article, Thomas Brown, owner of Paradisa Homes, challenged accusations of speculative development levied at his and other firms: “a lot of people think we are coming in trying to make a quick dollar, but some of these houses are in severe disrepair, with deferred maintenance. We feel we are improving the neighborhood” (Austin American-Statesman, 11/2/2014). The claims of Brown and other developers about improving the neighborhood are, understandably, not always well received by long-standing residents. Of the teardowns and neighborhood redevelopment, 30-year East Austin resident Mark Rogers claimed, “it’s kind of like losing memory through the loss of structures” (ibid.). For other residents it’s the demographic change that is most alarming: “there is a sense that people are gutting the neighborhood, not blending with it or becoming part of it. You want people to move here because they want to join in your neighborhood, not because they want to reinvent it” (ibid.). This article and similar media coverage only begin to address the tensions of neighborhood change oc- curring in 78702.

Turning the analysis to evidence of change and displacement in the built environment, Figure 2 (see opposing page) illustrates the scale and dis- tribution of home demolitions in 78702 over the past seven years. Trends for Austin show a decrease in demolition permits during the recession in 2008 as well as a steady annual rise from 2009 to today. While 78702 has only 2.55 percent of Austin’s roughly 350,000 housing units, the area has received 16.1 percent of all single-family home demolition permits since 2007. Home demolitions were up 25 percent for the city in the first three quarters of 2014 compared to the whole year of 2007—even more acute in 78702, where permits are up 36 percent. During the seven-year period of analysis there was a total of 408 home demolition permits issued in 78702, excluding demolition permits for garages, decks and other small- er projects.

To further explore the mechanics of demolition and redevelopment at the block scale, I conducted two case studies of sub-districts within the 78702 ZIP code, focusing on the areas with the highest concentration of

development activity: the Holly Street and East 13th Street Corridors. Using Google imagery and site visits, I conducted a housing inventory for all homes that received a demolition permit between 2007 and 2014 in the case study areas. The results of this inventory reveal interesting trends in redevelopment, specifically the unique aesthetics, scale of community change, and the integral role of private development actors. Additionally, the photography survey suggests a growing tension between old and new residents, expressed through built environment features such as fortified fences and “No trespassing” or private security signage.

The Holly Street Corridor is in the southernmost edge of the 78702 ZIP code, located between East Cesar Chavez Boulevard and the Colorado River. It is a predominantly single-family residential area with a few schools, churches, and other civic facilities. Throughout the second half of the 20th century this area was consolidated as a predominately Mexican-American district, and remains majority Latino today. Holly Street has a particularly strong sense of place given that the Holly Power Plant was the center of PODER’s battle for environmental justice. The closure of the Holly Power Plant in 2007 represented a major victory for the local community, which had long suffered health complications due to toxic emissions from the plant. Today, Holly Street and the surrounding blocks are one of the most visible areas of neighborhood change within 78702. There is a high density of demolition permits and a striking difference between the one-story bungalows from the 1940s and the multi-story new condos and single-family homes built today. Development pressure could be greater in this area due to the amenities of the neighborhood, such as proximity to Lady Bird Lake and downtown. The City approved twenty-five demolition permits in the roughly four-by-four block area since 2007. To date, roughly half of the properties (12) have been fully redeveloped, an additional three units are currently under construction, seven are currently vacant lots, and three have not been demolished, though they appear to have been remodeled.

Similar to Holly Street, the neighborhood around East 13th Street has experienced intense redevelopment pressure over the last several years. Located just a mile and a half north of Holly Street, this area was historically the core of the African American community in East Austin. Recognizing the trends of displacement of African-American households, businesses, and cultural spaces from Central East Austin, the African American Cultural Heritage District was created by activists and com

munity members in 2009 to “formally preserve areas where there is a concentration of existing African American landmarks” (aachd.org). The Protect our Assets Program is working towards preservation of the area’s cultural assets in the built environment. The work of the AACHD is happening simultaneously with the City of Austin’s renewed interest in E 11th Street and E 12th Street and the City’s strategic planning efforts to redevelop these blighted areas since 2011 (Economic & Planning Systems, Inc., et al, 2012). Here, trends of demolition and redevelopment are quite similar to Holly Street, though the clustering of redevelopment is even more pronounced. For example, on East 13th Street, between Poquito and Alamo, five out of ten properties on the block were demolished during this short seven-year period. The City issued 27 single-family home demolition permits in between 2007 and 2014, with a huge peak in 2011. Of these 27 properties, fourteen have been fully rebuilt, three are currently under construction, eight are vacant (many of them for three or more years) and two have not yet been demolished.

Discussion

The spatial analysis and housing inventory reveal several interesting details about the scope and nature of residential redevelopment and gentrification in 78702. Block-by-block across Central East Austin home demolitions and new construction are drastically changing the aesthetics and scale of the residential neighborhood. Material evidence of the changing residential landscape reveals the character of this displacement, and provides important context for any attempts to preserve affordability for long-term residents as the neighborhoods that constitute 78702 continue to experience redevelopment pressure.

The role of private developers in driving these processes of neighborhood change cannot be underestimated. Locally, a few niche firms appear to hold a large share of the residential redevelopment market. Unlike some of the coordinated City-led commercial revitalization efforts, the changing residential landscape in 78702 is unplanned, uncoordinated, and led by private developers. One company active in residential real estate in 78702 describes their process as bridging “the gap between high design and affordability, to marry style conscious and budget conscious, to make modern accessible. The goal is simple: attainable modern living” (habitatmodern.com). In this process, modest homes are torn down in favor of super-sized houses with promises of so-called modern living. These changes do not reflect a planned effort or community vision, but rather an opportunity to cash in on the rising property values and greater desirability (i.e. marketability) of the areas near downtown.

In this process, developers buy cheap properties, foreclosed homes, or even approach existing residents with offers, then demolish properties to rebuild. New construction varies from a highly customized design-build approach to quite similar cookie-cutter modern designs.

The sight of old, vacant, and new properties with developer signage out front is a common feature of the East Austin landscape today, reflecting the pervasive scale of development. Further research is required to fully detail the mechanics of flipping1 to understand the interactions between the range of actors involved in this process, including: real estate agents, demolition companies, design firms, private homeowners, and city government.

One developer, Austin Newcastle Homes, appeared frequently in both the Holly Street and 13th Street areas. Figure 3 (see page 58) maps all properties that have been redeveloped by Newcastle Homes in 78702, based on their online portfolio. Austin Newcastle’s property holdings, from the data available from the Travis County Appraisal District (TCAD), show an increase in the annual holdings since 2009, with a current portfolio of about 10 properties. Their descriptions of the redeveloped properties often highlight sustainable construction techniques, proximity to downtown, and the investment potential to lure new buyers. For example, one Newcastle property was listed as: Coveted GREEN, MODERN, URBAN   LIFESTYLE

from NEWCASTLE HOMES, East Austin’s premier design-build team. Often copied, never equaled: superior design from top local architectural talent, unparalleled quality from truly local family biz, EnergyStar-certified sustainable green performance, unmatched investment value, & the unique ATX urban lifestyle, all moments to downtown, UT, Manor Rd, East 11th, East 6th & 7th (Zillow.com).

Housing construction in East Austin today is targeting an entirely new market and income bracket than those who have historically resided there, and this new housing stock is facilitating dramatic demographic changes. The first round of flipped properties from the early 2000s are slightly more modest and simpler in design than the luxurious remodels

1 Flipping is a real estate practice defined as: “buying a home and then turning around and reselling it for a profit” (Redfin). Property flipping emerged as a common practice during the real estate boom of the early 2000s, often involving only small cosmetic changes to a property to prime it for immediate resale. The practice of demolition and rebuilding by private developers in East Austin documented in this paper fits within the definition of flipping, although the scope of the work represents a larger investment and profit potential.

happening today, likely reflecting the degree to which property values have continued to rise. New homes, such as the one featured in Photo 1, are modern luxury properties that stand out from the existing housing stock.

The language used to describe these new properties is deeply connected to discourses of sustainability and green building that (when linking back to the Smart Growth movement) were some of the initial drivers of development in East Austin. However, the degree to which this new housing stock is truly representative of a sustainable path forward is worth questioning. One of the key tools for sustainability planning in Austin was to increase density in centrally located areas and thus reduce trip lengths and emissions. However, analysis of the redeveloped properties reveals more square footage per housing unit rather than a drastic increase in number of housing units, suggesting a material rather than demographic densification. On some redeveloped lots, two units replaced one home, but the majority of cases are simply bigger single-family homes, undermining the rhetoric of Smart Growth, densification, and environmentally sustainable development.

The absence of a demographic densification through this process of redevelopment is supported by decennial census data. Between 2000 and 2010, the population of 78702 dropped slightly from 22,534 to 21,334 people, despite an increase in housing units from 7,725 to 9,032 units (US Census Bureau 2000 & 2010). More recent estimates from the American Community Survey support this trend; the 2013 population of 78702

calculated 21,655 residents (US Census Bureau, 2013). The degree to which green infrastructure and building techniques used in these new units can mitigate the impacts of larger homes with greater impervious cover requires further research.

Another interesting phenomenon that is occurring in the residential redevelopment of Central East Austin

is the clustering of flipped households. Analysis of permitting dates and the imagery available from Google reveals multiple cases in which a neighboring home (or two or three) redevelop within a year or two of the first demolition on any given block (Photos 2 & 3, see previous page). It is perhaps relevant to

think of this process as a form of reverse block-busting, where as one property flips the vulnerability of displacement for neighboring families’ increases. Historically, blockbusting was a real-estate practice that supported white flight to racially homogenous suburbs as urban areas such as New York and Chicago became more racially mixed during the Great Migration, purportedly jeopardizing high home values. Ironically, 60 years later, the reverse can be observed, where the arrival of one or two wealthier, often Anglo, homeowners can trigger an increase in property values while reversing historical demographics, reverberates across blocks and neighborhoods.

Signs of the clash between long-standing residents and new arrivals are quite visible in the built environment, as predominantly one-story bungalows are being doubled or tripled in both square footage and property value. Despite the often open, airy architectural designs and large street-facing windows featured in new homes, physical markers of separation have fortified over time. Photographs of redeveloped properties reveal an increased use in fences and of other demarcations, such as “no trespassing” signs, to separate the private and neighborhood spheres in the years following initial occupation of the home (Photo 4, see opposing page).

This process of gentrification and redevelopment, of course, has not gone uncontested by long-standing residents. PODER and other groups who were active in the environmental and urban justice movements have begun to organize their communities, collecting information and making proposals such as a community land trusts to City Council on the crisis facing affordable housing in their neighborhoods. Evidence in the built environment of this resistance is less obvious, although graffiti such as “Coming Never” spray-painted on the banner for a new development on Chicon is indicative of this tension (Photo 5, see opposing page). This housing development is one of very few affordable housing projects slated for the area, and yet construction has been stalled for several years.

Despite increasing awareness of the housing affordability crisis there is no consensus on how to improve the neighborhood and preserve its residents. In other words, the question of how to pursue sustainability planning, remove industrial hazards, or increase densities without triggering displacements remains unanswered. This tension is especially acute in a restricted planning environment such as Austin, where tools such as inclusionary zoning are illegal. The material changes documented in East Austin today reveal that the sustainability rhetoric has masked standard exclusionary real estate development projects under the marketable guise of ecological sustainability.

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank Dr. Sarah Lopez for introducing me to cultural landscapes and research methodologies rooted in study of the built environment and for her helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

References

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Maxwell Hartt

Abstract

Population shrinkage, demographic aging, and economic restructuring are leaving many cities in a state of decline. This paper examines the curricula of 94 accredited North American academic planning programs to gauge whether courses specific to these processes are being offered. Findings reveal that only 1% of institutions offer a course in aging communities and only 2% offered courses in decline and urban shrinkage. Trends in economic decline, aging, and population loss do not guarantee a permanent shift from abundance to scarcity; however, accessible tools and guidance regarding these challenges are increasingly important to the education of future planners.

Keywords: Planning education; shrinking cities; economic transformation; aging

Like many professions, planning has dedicated, accredited university and college programs. Planning certification can be achieved through a combination of experience and non-planning education. However, “the preferred, normal route to membership is through successful completion of a university degree in planning from a program formally accredited by the planning profession” (Professional Standards Board, 2014). A Masters-level graduate degree is now considered to be the standard for planning practitioners and a requirement for many planning positions (American Planning Association, 2015). Although there are over 130 universities and colleges that offer planning programs in North America, only 94 of these are recognized by regional and national certification and accreditation boards. Many of these institutions offer programs at the Undergraduate-, Masters- and Doctoral- levels. However, Masters programs are the most common.

National and regional accreditation bodies preserve and enhance the consistency, transparency, and modernity of professional planning programs (Planning Accreditation Board, 2014). Accreditation bodies, such as the Planning Accreditation Board (PAB) in the United States and the Professional Standards Board (PSB) in Canada, dictate program and curriculum guidelines to best prepare students for public and private planning professions. By setting pedagogical standards across the profession, consistent baseline knowledge and training are assured, preparing planners for successful careers and mobilizing knowledge across the public and private realms (Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, 2009; Planning Accreditation Board, 2014; Professional Standards Board, 2014).

Accredited planning programs are regularly reviewed to ensure high-quality education for future planners (Planning Accreditation Board, 2014). Early career planners graduating from accredited programs have been found to be proficient with growth-related planning functions. However, they struggle to deal with decline-related challenges (Greenlee, Ed- wards, & Anthony, 2015). Issues related to decline and its symptoms were found to be further afield from the formal training and education received by early career planners (ibid.). With that said, are planning schools adjusting and adapting curricula and courses to best prepare students for emergent, unprecedented challenges facing the modern planner? This paper explores the role of post-secondary education in preparing planners for urban shrinkage, economic decline, and aging populations through a review of accredited planning curricula across North America.

Growth and Shrinkage

Population shrinkage is becoming progressively more commonplace as low birth rates and the continued selective migration to growing large urban areas drain the populations of smaller, mid-sized, and post-industrial cities (Beauregard, 2014). The demographic aging of populations is significantly changing the makeup of the labor force and the demand for social services (Jessen, 2012). Although immigration can offset the aging of population to some extent, the proportion of the population over age 65 is still expected to pass 20% in the United States (Wiener & Tilly, 2002) and 25% in Canada (Statistics Canada, 2009) by 2050. Global economic restructuring has led to the uneven distribution of financial, knowledge and human capital, with the majority of resources congregating in a small number of large cities—leaving many other cities and towns in a state of perpetual economic decline (Martinez-Fernandez, Audirac, Fol, & Cunningham-Sabot, 2012). Population loss and economic transformations are not new processes. However, research has demonstrated that the multidimensional phenomenon of recent urban shrinkage is distinctive from historical population decline; it is a socio-spatial manifestation of globalization as seen through the advancement of international production systems and global networks (Martinez-Fernandez, Audirac, et al., 2012; Pallagst, Wiechmann, & Martinez-Fernandez, 2013).

Many cities and their planning departments will be challenged by longterm demographic and economic trajectories leading to decline and shrinkage—processes often characterized by housing vacancies, underused infrastructure, and many other physical and social impacts (Wiechmann & Pallagst, 2012). In recent years the academic discourse surrounding shrinking cities has grown considerably; however, there remains a significant lag in North American planning practice as discussions, publications, and tools remain largely focused on growth-related planning functions (Pallagst, 2010).

Traditionally, local policy and planning officials’ only response to depopulation has been public redevelopment (Hollander, 2010a). Although these attempts to improve overall economic conditions can work, exogenous factors often limit public redevelopment impact on macro demographic and economic forces.

The hesitance for education, discussion, and action by politicians and planners may very well be that such acknowledgment would necessitate a fundamental review of the underlying core urban policy principles of the planning profession (Wiechmann & Pallagst, 2012). There is a deeply rooted growth paradigm in North American politics and development

(Wolfe, 1981), wherein population growth is often viewed as a measure of success. It can be argued that the growth bias is politically-driven, yet Hummel (2014) views the growth paradigm as being so ingrained in planning practice that growth-focused strategies are solely relied upon until it becomes unequivocally clear that they will not work. This is despite evidence that population growth has not been shown to be an indicator of economic prosperity (Gottlieb, 2002). Researchers are beginning to question whether growth-oriented policies are useful, sustainable, or even achievable in all cities (Audirac, Fol, & Martinez-Fernandez, 2010). Perhaps planning, as an overarching discipline, cannot presuppose urban growth. Pallagst (2010) advocates that a paradigm shift towards other metrics and tools is overdue, as it has been shown that planners, generally, do not recognize the prevalence and significant challenges of population loss. This presents a unique chance for planners to reframe decline as opportunity, to reassess planning processes, and reimagine the future of shrinking cities.

Trends in Urban Demographics and Economics

Nearly half of America’s largest cities (27 of 64) have lost population, on average, every decade since 1950 (Hollander, 2011). Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh and St. Louis have lost half of their respective populations, and Baltimore and Philadelphia have lost nearly a third (Hol- lander et al., 2009). The shift to a service economy following the collapse of the manufacturing industry in the Rustbelt region has seen a steady decline in jobs and population for decades (Beauregard, 2014). Many of these cities are shrinking within a growing wider metropolitan region, causing a doughnut effect, or hollowing out, around the city center (Hall, 2006). The redistribution of populations, and their tax dollars, to sur- rounding suburban communities leaves a myriad of challenges for the local government in their wake. These trends of persistent population loss are well known; the phenomenon has been studied at length, and yet these same cities continue to project population growth and promote growth-oriented policy.

Less widely recognized is that severe population loss is not limited to the Northeast and Midwest regions—Birmingham, Memphis, Norfolk, Richmond and New Orleans have also lost large proportions of their populations. Recent trends in the Sunbelt states, from California to Florida have shown housing abandonment and population loss (Hollander, 2011). This is in large part due to the real estate market crash, where subprime mortgage lending, rapidly rising home prices, and a relentless building boom forced many families out of their homes and, in many instances, out of their cities (ibid.).

In Canada, population loss in major cities has not been as severe. The majority of large Canadian cities have seen consistent growth over the last three census periods (Statistics Canada, 2013). However, smaller and mid-sized cities, especially in more remote locations, continue to witness an exodus of young, educated citizens (Schatz, Leadbeater, Martinez-Fernandez, & Weyman, 2013). Coupled with an aging workforce and low birth rates, substantial demographic change is occurring in Canadian cities across the nation as tax revenues shrink and demand for social services rise. Aging populations make for a smaller and less adaptable workforce, and in turn intensify the structural rigidity of the economic production process (Tabah, 1988). Furthermore, demographic aging places additional strain and limits to the future financial feasibility of pension systems.

The economic struggles of Western cities since the Great Recession and real estate market collapse in 2006 have been widely documented and studied through lenses varying from labor to climate change (Elsby, Hobijn, & Sahin, 2010; Scruggs & Benegal, 2012). Similarly, the aging population and increasing dependency ratio of almost all Canadian cities and many American regions has been the focal point of many research programs across North America. Yet the North American academic discussion on urban shrinkage lags behind its European counterparts as it continues to concentrate almost exclusively on either managing urban growth or fragmented redevelopment (Wiechmann & Pallagst, 2012).

Although progress bridging the academic literature and professional practice gap has advanced in recent years as the topic has reached a wider audience, planners remain unprepared and ill equipped to deal with the challenges being presented (Martinez-Fernandez, Pallagst, & Wiechmann, 2014; Rieniets, 2006). Professional practice workshops and consultants can offer assistance, but more must be done to effect change at a fundamental level. Cities need planners to grasp the unique opportunity to explore nontraditional approaches to redevelopment and revitalization that do not presuppose growth (Hollander et al., 2009). This begs the question of whether accredited North American university and college planning programs are in tune with either the widely recognized (economic decline, aging) or emerging (urban shrinkage) changes that are reshaping the urban system.

Methodology

In order to determine whether planning programs address economic decline, urban shrinkage or aging populations, the author examined the

2013-2014 course offerings of every accredited North American program. Curricula from all 94 accredited North American planning programs, accessed via their websites, were included in the analysis. The author examined the course offerings using content analysis in order to assess their integration of coursework pertaining to the three major trends highlighted above (decline, population loss and aging). All course titles and descriptions were fully read, rather than performing a keyword search, so as to be certain to capture both apparent and embedded mentions of urban shrinkage, economic decline or aging populations. If a course title or description included any explicit or implicit reference to shrinkage, decline, population loss, or aging it was highlighted in the analysis. The search criteria also included courses pertaining to redevelopment and revitalization. This method proved to be time-intensive, but ensured comprehensiveness and consistency. Although it is possible that course offerings may have touched on decline, population loss, or aging without explicit or implicit mention in the course title or description, the author felt that emergent trends of this magnitude should be notable enough to warrant being a central theme in a course. The goal of this paper is not to devalue planning education, but rather to start an important discussion about emerging challenges facing future planners. It must be noted that most programs offer Special Topics and Reading courses, for which the details usually were not available, so this analysis contains only clearly stated offerings.

Results

Of the 94 accredited North American planning programs, only Wayne State University offers a course (UP6680 Neighborhood Decline and Revitalization) specifically focused on decline. At the University of Buffalo, SUNY, graduate students can choose to specialize in Declining Cities and Distressed Urban Communities, however no specific coursework is offered. In the description for PLAN8002 Regional Theory at the University of Cincinnati both growth and decline are explicitly emphasized, but no course solely focused on decline is available. The University of Toronto did offer Planning in the Face of Economic Decline as a Special Topics course in 2012, but it has not been offered again since.

The University of Maryland at College Park was the sole institution to offer a course, URSP289A Livable Communities: Planning for an Aging Society, explicitly focused on planning for aging communities.

Only the Pratt Institute’s Shrinking Cities (Plan 764) and the Spring 2013 Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s offering of Urban Design Studio: Shrinking Cities (11.338) focused specifically on the phenomenon

of urban shrinkage. Although not necessarily focused on shrinking cities, it is interesting to note that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is currently offering un(Dead) Geographies: The Afterlife of Failed Urban Plans (11.S944)—the sole course to focus explicitly on the management and planning response to failed policy.

Although focused on regrowth rather than managing and optimizing population loss, it is noteworthy that there were 19 separate courses (at 18 institutions, since Jackson State University offers revitalization courses at both the Masters and PhD level) focused on redevelopment and/or revitalization. Additionally, redevelopment and revitalization were recognized as key words in the descriptions of several other courses.

Discussion

Many cities across North America are losing population (Beauregard, 2014). Selective migration, due in large part to economic decline from smaller and mid-sized cities to their larger counterparts is reinforcing economic downturns as shrinking and poorly educated workforces impede municipalities’ ability to attract new businesses and industries. Concurrently, employment opportunities in manufacturing and resource-based industries have continued to shift overseas or disappear completely as cheap labor, increasingly stringent environmental policies, and the exhaustion of finite resources encourage transnational corporations to relocate employment bases (Leadbeater, 2009). These processes are leaving many communities in economic despair, and the selective out-migration of younger, educated citizens is leaving behind an aging population. Planners and other decision makers have to manage growing social, infrastructural, and economic challenges—all with a dwindling tax base. Although daunting and seemingly pessimistic, the depth of such challenges in fact offers possibilities for innovative strategies, such as urban farming, that use existing infrastructure and ample inexpensive land. Additionally, entrepreneurs can implement novel ideas with significantly less risk than in other growing cities. These shrinking cities offer an opportunity to navigate away from traditional approaches to purposefully imagine a new, different kind of city with less density, but also less blight. Such challenges may prove to be an opportunity to imagine a city where people would want to live, a city with safe neighborhoods, ample green space, and innovative design and community development.

This set of challenges and opportunities, faced by communities such as Camden, NJ, differs greatly from those of large growing cities, such as Toronto, ON, where the management of urban growth is the primary concern. Furthermore, an entirely declining region differs significantly

from a declining city within a growing metropolitan area. A range of tools and adaptable approaches are needed to approach the many contextual realities of shrinking cities. As planning schools across North America continue to graduate increasing numbers of students, it is clear that not all of the graduates will find employment in large, growing metropolitan areas.

The analysis of the 94 accredited North American planning programs found that only 1% of institutions offered a course in aging communities. Only 2% offered a course in either decline or urban shrinkage. Not surprisingly, the decline and urban shrinkage courses were offered at universities located in Northeast and Midwestern United States (University of Cincinnati; Pratt Institute, Brooklyn; SUNY, Buffalo; Wayne State University, Detroit). However, as the discussion above detailed, economic and population decline are not limited to only one region or belt of the continent. Most regions in Northern and Eastern Canada have decades-long histories of population loss and economic decline, yet the planning programs at their local universities do not reflect those trends in their coursework.

19% of institutions offered a course explicitly focused on redevelopment or revitalization. This echoes the current accepted understanding in the shrinking cities literature, which indicates that North American planners have a pessimistic, unhealthy acceptance of decline stemming from the wider growth-oriented culture (Hollander et al., 2009). An inability to accept or proactively approach population loss or economic decline,

without relying on growth-oriented strategies, can be attributed to the dearth of strategies and best practices in the planning toolbox (Hollander & Németh, 2011). Based on the analysis above, planners working in shrinking, aging or declining urban areas have had little to no opportunity for formal university training on how to manage the symptoms of population shrinkage and economic decline.

Conclusion

As cities continue to be affected by economic decline, population loss, and demographic aging, a new planning paradigm needs to be recognized. The use of traditional growth strategies in shrinking cities has been socially counterproductive and economically ineffective (Audirac et al., 2010). According to Bernt et al. (2014) there is a broad consensus among researchers and practitioners that planning, as it currently exists, is ill-prepared to manage urban shrinkage. Though the provision of tools, best practices, and guidelines is important, we must also look to the next generation of planners to reconsider how to manage urban shrinkage. Guidance outside of formal university education may be available, but considering the degree of the aforementioned demographic and economic trends, post-secondary planning education needs to play a stronger role. Newly graduated planners entering the workforce must be exposed to, familiar with, and have a clear understanding of the challenges and opportunities present in these communities, as well as the different approaches and techniques that are implementable. Familiarity with successful practices in European shrinking cities, along with the potential transferability of policy and recommendations from North American researchers such as Margaret Dewar (with Thomas, 2013) and Sujata Shetty (2013, 2014), need to be taken into account.

Increasing numbers of cities are projected to shrink in population; municipal dependency ratios will continue to rise as demographic aging becomes more widespread (Martinez-Fernandez, Kubo, Noya, & Weyman, 2012); and the economic decline in older industrial cities and resourced-based towns is expected to continue (Schatz et al., 2013). Will some cities manage to reverse these processes through the attraction of industry or talent? Certainly. But many others will waste already limited resources on tax breaks, incentives, and inflated consultant fees without altering the trajectory of their municipality.

Planning schools need to educate their students more on these topics or, at the very least, make the option available as an elective. The national accreditation boards exist to “ensure high quality education for future urban planners” (Planning Accreditation Board, 2014) and to provide

the planning profession with well-versed, resourceful, and equipped early-career planners. These accreditation boards have a unique opportunity to impact hundreds of shrinking, aging, and declining cities across North America. Although this study cannot conclusively state that urban shrinkage, economic decline, and aging populations are not covered in the examined curricula, it is clear that they are not priorities or central themes in almost any course.

Afflicted communities are not necessarily following an inevitable arc from abundance to scarcity. The future of the many cities experiencing severe and persistent decline is uncertain. Planners have the opportunity to impact change through the exploration of alternatives to help stabilize these cities and neighborhoods. With the proper education and preparation, decline, shrinkage and aging do not have to be negative processes; they can be seen as opportunities to reframe and re-envision cities and their evolution.

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Dr. Cynthia A. Lintz and Lauren Bulka

Abstract

In 1963, Skopje, the capital city of the Republic of Macedonia, suffered an earthquake that destroyed 80% of the building stock. Since then, the national government has worked to (re)develop and promote its national identity through the built environment of its capital city. This paper explores the effective-ness of the Republic of Macedonia in these efforts. The authors examine shifts in planning and devel-opment practices in the capital city and the subse-quent impacts on governmental effectiveness orga-nized around three time periods: post-earthquake, post-Iron Curtain, and present day, beginning with the development of the city’s latest master plan, Skopje 2014.

Keywords: Skopje, Macedonia; master planning; di-saster resilience; European history

On July 26, 1963, Skopje, the capital of the Republic of Macedonia in Yugoslavia was struck by an earthquake. Registering at 6.9 on the Richter scale, the quake destroyed 80 percent of the building stock, killed approximately 2,000 people and injured another 3,300, left 100,000 homeless, and, eventually, led to a near complete reconstruction of the flattened city (Home, 2007; Ladinski, n.d.). The United Nations General Assembly took the lead in efforts to rebuild the city and illustrate international solidarity, one of the first efforts of its kind (Mills, 1967). In total, over 80 countries helped with the reconstruction by providing temporary shelters, rebuilding public buildings, schools, and permanent housing (Bouzarovski, 2011). Both the United States and Russia sent aid, despite the ongoing Cold War.
After the initial recovery, the Yugoslav government had three options: Move the city; rebuild the city and keep it small; or rebuild the city and plan for growth (Fisher 1964, Ladinski, n.d.). In the 1960s, the government chose to remain small in the city scale, become earthquake resilient, and develop a unique, modern international capital based on brutalist architecture of the time.
In the early 1990s, at the same time as the world witnessed the dismantling of the Iron Curtain, Macedonia also broke away from the Yugoslav Federation to become an independent Republic. This event set Skopje on a different trajectory than post-earthquake recovery, which permitted the free market and capitalism to play a major unforeseen role in the city’s urban planning. Throughout the 1990s, Macedonia, as well as most other post-Socialist countries, experienced a backlash against the old Socialist planning system. Sonia Hirt describes these transformative years to Western democracy as a period of privatism: “the widespread disbelief in a benevolent public realm and the widespread sense that to appropriate the public may be the best way to thrive in private” (2012). Public rules and regulations were discarded in favor of individual capitalistic opportunities. Individuals used the opportunity to build private homes and businesses on the once public land. Coinciding with these shifts, Skopje became home to refugees fleeing the Bosnian War, the Kosovo War, and its own insurgency between the Macedonian Slavic and Albanian populations during the 1990s to 2000s. This increased the density of Skopje while leading to a rapid expansion of the urban landscape into newly formed suburbs.

Now in 2015, Skopje’s skyline is filled with cranes, new buildings, and public spaces. Western-style capitalism has firmly taken root, the polit-ical and economic changes have largely stabilized, and development is more controlled. In power since 2007, the current government recently established a new course for the capital city’s development under the Skopje 2014 comprehensive plan. The plan aims to strengthen the coun-ty’s international recognition from its neighbors in hopes that this will lead to its acceptance into the European Union (EU) and North Atlan-tic Treaty Organization (NATO). The new comprehensive plan, however, “glorif[ies] a single, straightforward, and unapologetically nationalist narrative in marble and bronze, at a scale meant to eliminate any and all doubt” about the nation’s history and identity (Rosen, 2013). This has led to outcries from Macedonia’s minority population and neighboring countries who want recognition of a shared regional past (ibid.).

Over the past fifty years, Skopje’s (re)construction has traveled three courses. The first began in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake; the second was the post-Socialist era during the nation’s transition from socialism to democracy; and its third path launched when planning ef-forts began on Skopje 2014 in 2010. Given the three approaches to re-construction since the earthquake in 1963, how effective has Macedonia been in developing a national identity through the capital city’s built environment?

This paper reviews historical documents and recent literature to discuss Skopje’s primary development periods as a way to understand wheth-er the city can practically withstand another major change, such as an earthquake; its own ability to develop an internally cohesive identity to maintain political stability; and the ability to obtain international rec-ognition. The article is divided into three parts. The first examines the theory behind developing a national identity through the built environ-ment. The second section is a historical review of Skopje after the earth-quake, post-Socialism, and in the present day. The third section draws some general conclusions from the strengths and weaknesses of each of the approach taken to developing Macedonia’s current national identity.

Building National Identity Brick by Brick

Modern nation-building started approximately two hundred years ago. From the earliest days of nationalism, a country’s capital has been con-sidered not only the seat of government, but also the symbolic focus of the country (Vale, 2008). This means that the built environment should reflect the values, culture, and history not only of the city, but the en-tire nation. For ancient cities like London, Paris, or Athens, this built environment has been in place for many centuries and reflects the peri-od(s) of great grandeur (ibid.). While capitals were usually sited due to “the presence of a shrine, a defensible fortress, or a trade route; in the modern age, new capitals are most often sited to favor political factions” (ibid, p. 17). “In states emerging from control by an external power, [the capital] is also required to serve as the focus of efforts to promote a sense of national identity” (ibid, p. 16).

National identity can be developed or strengthened by the built envi-ronment. People tend to anchor their personality in objects and places (Tuan, 1977). The height and space between buildings, the architecture, and general overall formation within a city contributes to memories one has about living in the place (Houshangi, 2013). Within the city, “various places from urban landscapes extricate memories from a mutual past” that can unify a population and become their collective identity (ibid, p. 19). Rebuilding or replacing the buildings may, therefore, create, alter or destroy forms of national identity.

Since many large cities, including national capitals, attract diverse populations this can sometimes pose problems in unifying multicultural centers. However, in other instances, “architecture and urban planning can play a pivotal role in a city’s symbolic renewal, sometimes by the consolidation of an image, sometimes by the polarization of debate. [Cit-ies’] symbolic recall of earlier golden ages, whether through works of architecture that make use of highly charged precedents or through the re-claiming of hallowed or strategic sites as capitals, has occurred through history and remains powerful” (ibid., p. 31). This can unify a diverse city.

Skopje 1963 to 2014
Resilience immediately following the earthquake

So great was the reconstruction momentum that in the late 1960s, when “Skopje school children were asked to write an essay on ‘A major event in the life of my town,’ 80% chose to write about the master plan (for reconstruction) rather than the earthquake” itself (Home, 2007, p 4). The successful reconstruction efforts could partly be due to the five clear post-earthquake phases, and documentation showing this effort as the largest international relief operation to date in 1963 (Ladinski, n.d.). The first phase included the immediate international and national reception and dispersal of aid from more than 82 countries. “The inter-national help given to Skopje during the first stage of reconstruction was very valuable, not only from the material point of view, but especially because of its social and morale-boosting consequences,” reported UNESCO (Mills, 1967, p. 20). The second phase evacuated women and children to the countryside to prevent the spread of disease, and to allow for the reconstruction process to begin. Evacuation culminated in the shrinkage of the city’s population from 180,000 to 60,000 inhabitants (Music, n.d.; Ladinski, n.d.). The third phase examined the remaining structures to determine those that needed to be completely demolished. During this time, everything that could be recovered and reused was removed.

by low-impact machinery or by hand (Ladinski, n.d.). The fourth phase included drafting a new master plan, while the fifth phase was the physical construction of the new city. We will detail the last two phases, the master plan, and the physical construction below.

The United Nations (U.N.) was one of the main catalysts in drafting a new master plan. The U.N. provided technical assistance by initiating the Skopje Urban Plan Project, a collaborative effort by Professor Adolf Ciborowski (known for rebuilding War-saw after the Second World War), Skopje’s Institute for Town Planning and Architecture (ITPA), and the City’s Planning Department (CPD)

(Ladinski, n.d.). The team ex-amined documents related to impacts from previous seismic activities on the city in years 518, 1555, and 1921 C.E. and ran initial soils tests. The re-sulting 1965 Skopje Master Plan presented three options for the future of Skopje: (1) Move the city (which was not possible due to seismic condi-tions throughout the country); (2) rebuild the city, but keep the population under 150,000 people (in this plan the Roma, Turkish and Albanian ethnic minority populations would be transferred to other ar-eas within Macedonia); or (3) rebuild the city and plan for growth (Fisher, 1964; Ladins-ki, n.d.). The government chose to remain small, strengthen earthquake policies, and plan for future disasters

In 1965, the United Nations and Yugoslavia invited four for-eign firms and four Yugoslav firms to participate in a mas-ter plan competition (Ladinski, n.d.; Lovanovska, 2012). While the jury announced no clear winner, they divided the re-sponsibility between two firms. Kenzo Tange, known for the development of the reconstruc-tion plan for Hiroshima, Japan, produced a plan that focused on the city center. Tange’s plan had two components: the City Gate (also known as the trans-portation center) and the City Wall, an imposing belt of apartment complexes, to metaphorically “protect’ Skopje from future disasters and to provide it with a new internationally recognizable symbol” (Tolic, 2010, p. 30). Tange’s plan was regarded as utopic and too idealistic.

The second winners were architects and planners from the Croatian Town Planning Institute, lead by Radovan Miščević and Fedor Wenzler, in Zagreb, who developed a more modest plan (ibid.). By July 1966, the two winners had produced a combined plan, the 1965 Master Plan, largely based on Tange’s ideas. The final plan set the stage for bold expressions of artistic creativity, using the built urban landscape and brutalist architecture as ways to bring about modernity and enforce the image of an internationally rebuilt city (ibid.).

The central government played a major role in orchestrating the redevelopment. University students conducted a social survey of 4,000 families, though in reality prompted the people to accept a more international or Western image (Home, 2007). The focus was on shifting people’s attitudes to accept high-rise and medium-rise housing, in an attempt to clear the 13,000 single-story slum dwellings (ibid.). The pre-earthquake single-story homes often had garden plots, where the occupants raised their own food. Planners felt that this continued a more rural mentality, and they attempted to apply a more urban social attitude (ibid.). “The new housing was also designed to accommodate nuclear rather than extended families, and the ‘doubling-up’ of families with in-laws was actively discouraged, even though this might override ‘cultural practices’” (ibid., p. 18). The end result was a population reluctantly forced to move into the new houses provided to them, destroying their old community fabric. “The social survey team, however, recommended against interfering with minority cultures until they could be re-educated (or relocated)… The Roma, for example, rather than being forced straight into high-rise apartments, were relocated to the edge of town in an ‘unplanned, do-it-yourself community’ in Suto Orisari” (ibid., p. 19).

The ultimate 1965 Master Plan aimed to implement neat, well laid-out blocks of housing with standard utilities by moving industry to the ur-ban fringe, creating new traffic corridors, and moving estates outside the urban core (Bouzarovski, 2011; Fisher, 1964). “Planning orthodoxy followed prevailing international principles of the day: dispersed settle-ment in neighborhood units; separation of land uses; priority to indus-try and the motor vehicle; preservation limited to some public buildings rather than area conservation; large-scale slum clearance for high densi-ty housing; and hierarchies of service centers” (Home, 2007, p. 20).

The plan demarcated three hundred acres to the new city center (ibid.). The Vardar River, which ran through the city and frequently flooded, was channeled and reserved for recreational uses including paths, parks, and a sports stadium (ibid.). With the Vardar River as a point of reference, the left bank was reserved for cultural institutions such as the national theater, a television building, courts and part of the university (ibid.). The right bank was designated for administration, commerce, shopping, and entertainment. A third of the total area was zoned as housing for 30,000 people; however, the Tange’s proposed City Wall plan was scaled back due to seismic precautions (ibid.).

Outside the city center, the 1965 Master Plan proposed expanding the eastern industrial zone to include industrial operations previously lo-cated in the city center (ibid.). Planned residential neighborhood units called for a standard population of 6,000 residents, based upon the op-timal size of primary schools, and 400 meters as the maximum walking distance to the nearest bus stop (ibid.). The intention of the plan was to create a modern, almost futuristic, international city. For example, the facades of many public buildings used brutalist geometrical shapes (Photo 1, see page 23). As noted previously, community fabrics were torn apart and families were placed in blocks rather than in single-family houses as a way to build up an urban density. All this is to say that the aim was to build an internationally recognized city, keeping the city small (300 acres), and erecting modern buildings within a landscape of broad, densely inhabited streets.

After the fall of Socialism

The planners of the 1965 Master Plan could not have foreseen the col-lapse of the Iron Curtain, the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the end of cen-tral planning. The transition period from Socialism to free-market radi-cally changed Macedonian cities with “the return of market mechanisms and the re-commoditization of space, change of ownership patterns, a shift of control from state to local levels, a sharp increase in the number of actors participating in city-building, and a fundamentally changed role for planning” (Hirt, 2012, p. 43). The changes were seen in not only building renovations and additions, but in the development of whole neighborhoods.

This new market capitalism, coupled with the Kosovo and Bosnian wars and a brief internal conflict, brought masses of refugees to Skopje. The refugees from these wars were predominately Albanian and Bosniaks (Muslim minorities) who settled in the urban fringe of Skopje within previously abandoned villages. Many Slav Macedonians (Orthodox majority) felt threatened by the change of the religious makeup of the city, marked by the new construction of minarets on the outskirts of town. In 2003, a huge cross was constructed on the mountain peak above the city to celebrate 2,000 years of Christianity, symbolically conveying the dominant religion of the country (Dragićević Šešić, 2011).

The flood of refugees, when taken with the unfettered development, radically transformed the city into a larger-than-envisioned national capital losing all sense of its previously focused post-earthquake identity. Hirt points out that the effects of the post-socialist urban change included:

“(1) The end of compact spatial form; (2) a decrease in the scale of civic and residential spaces (including a shift to-ward individual dwellings); (3) a tilting of the land-use balance away from public (and industrial) and toward commercial uses; (4) an emergence of stark social con-trasts, informality and marginality; and (5) the end of vi-sual uniformity and the advent of a free mixing of styles” (ibid., p. 47).

The bureaucratic chaos led to an estimated 32,000 illegal housing units as of 2004 (Sudiorum, 2004). Most of the houses were built on municipal-ly owned land, thereby complicating the process for land tenure status (ibid., p. 14). This rule-breaking also had an effect on the standards of building. An analysis in 1991 showed that only 20% of the homes com-plied with the 1981 anti-seismic code (the most updated code at the time), 41% complied with an earlier outdated version, 10% did not incorporate any earthquake protection measures, and others built before 1963 were excluded entirely from these requirements (Home, 2007).

The 2002 Master Plan seemingly legitimized the trend towards concentrated development, specifically mandating a “densification of all inner-city quarters” (ibid., p. 271). It was thought that the consolidation of residential development would allow for a more concerted effort on the restructuring of the transportation infrastructure by infilling vacant land untouched by post-earthquake reconstruction. Despite the plan’s foresight, the development pace in some areas of the city far exceeded the municipality’s capacity to enforce urban development policies. This resulted in a host of newly constructed buildings that met few standards and were arranged with little coherence. “The streets in these areas of-ten end in unplanned dead-ends, with some of the developments’ win-dows and balconies facing dark and narrow chasms created by the cha-otic nature of the construction” (ibid., p. 272). Moreover, the city not only lacked the ability to regulate private development, they lagged behind in

The bureaucratic chaos led to an estimated 32,000 illegal housing units as of 2004 (Sudiorum, 2004). Most of the houses were built on municipal-ly owned land, thereby complicating the process for land tenure status (ibid., p. 14). This rule-breaking also had an effect on the standards of building. An analysis in 1991 showed that only 20% of the homes com-plied with the 1981 anti-seismic code (the most updated code at the time), 41% complied with an earlier outdated version, 10% did not incorporate any earthquake protection measures, and others built before 1963 were excluded entirely from these requirements (Home, 2007).
The 2002 Master Plan seemingly legitimized the trend towards concen-trated development, specifically mandating a “densification of all inner city quarters” (ibid., p. 271). It was thought that the consolidation of residential development would allow for a more concerted effort on the restructuring of the transportation infrastructure by infilling vacant land untouched by post-earthquake reconstruction. Despite the plan’s foresight, the development pace in some areas of the city far exceeded the municipality’s capacity to enforce urban development policies. This resulted in a host of newly constructed buildings that met few standards and were arranged with little coherence. “The streets in these areas of-ten end in unplanned dead-ends, with some of the developments’ win-dows and balconies facing dark and narrow chasms created by the cha-otic nature of the construction” (ibid., p. 272). Moreover, the city not only lacked the ability to regulate private development, they lagged behind in

The bureaucratic chaos led to an estimated 32,000 illegal housing units as of 2004 (Sudiorum, 2004). Most of the houses were built on municipal-ly owned land, thereby complicating the process for land tenure status (ibid., p. 14). This rule-breaking also had an effect on the standards of building. An analysis in 1991 showed that only 20% of the homes com-plied with the 1981 anti-seismic code (the most updated code at the time), 41% complied with an earlier outdated version, 10% did not incorporate any earthquake protection measures, and others built before 1963 were excluded entirely from these requirements (Home, 2007).
The 2002 Master Plan seemingly legitimized the trend towards concentrated development, specifically mandating a “densification of all inner city quarters” (ibid., p. 271). It was thought that the consolidation of residential development would allow for a more concerted effort on the restructuring of the transportation infrastructure by infilling vacant land untouched by post-earthquake reconstruction. Despite the plan’s foresight, the development pace in some areas of the city far exceeded the municipality’s capacity to enforce urban development policies. This resulted in a host of newly constructed buildings that met few standards and were arranged with little coherence. “The streets in these areas of-ten end in unplanned dead-ends, with some of the developments’ win-dows and balconies facing dark and narrow chasms created by the cha-otic nature of the construction” (ibid., p. 272). Moreover, the city not only lacked the ability to regulate private development, they lagged behind in providing necessary services and basic infrastructural maintenance. The end result of the densification and development encouraged by the 2002 Master Plan was a reversion back to the predominant strategy guiding development prior to the 1963 earthquake

Skopje 2014

“As Macedonia scrambled for its identity in the wake of Yugoslavia’s disintegrations, a group of historians, architects and politicians decided that the country should remind itself—and the world—of a proud past” (De Laurney, 2014). These efforts came together in 2007 when the right-wing political party VMRO took office after winning the election. VMRO brought the renewed promise of transforming Macedonia into a modern, cosmopolitan, Western nation as a means of improving the country’s international image from its war-torn and socialist past (Graan, 2010). This political strategy of modernization was effectively a call for Macedonians to redevelop their public image to be more accepted by the international community, and in particular Europe. The ultimate intention of this promise was to gain acceptance into the European Union.

As a means of creating and promoting Macedonian pride and asserting its new identity as a European capital, the government prioritized the construction of a number of large public buildings and monuments in a plan called Skopje 2014. The plan is not actually a plan, but rather a YouTube video called Macedonia Timeless Capital Skopje 2014, or Skopje 2014 for short. It has been the main guidelines for future development (YouTube, n.d.). Skopje 2014 provides the justification for constructing new public buildings, such as the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle, Constitutional Court, State Achieves, and the nation-al theater. The buildings themselves have been deliberately placed in the city center and built at a grandiose scale, with historic-style domes and large pedestals to resemble many other European capitals. Many of these monumental buildings are recreations of pre-earthquake and even pre-World War II buildings (Bouzarovski, 2011). The Ministry of Culture also commissioned 30 large pieces of public art in public spaces, which incorporate a wide range of styles and sizes (ibid.).

This large earmarking of public funds and the prioritization of rebuilding the capital has come with considerable controversy, both within and among the neighboring nations. Internally, Macedonia has seen much debate over the large expenditure of public funds dedicated to the construction of imposing public buildings, as well as with the contained focus of those funds on the capital. Both conditions do little to address the issues plaguing the rest of the nation, which include high unemployment and failing infrastructure. The other controversy stems from the singular promotion of the Macedonian Slav ethnicity, while the nation maintains a large constituency of minorities, primarily Albanians. It appears that the ethnic struggles from the violent 2001 conflict be-tween Macedonians and Albanians continue to play out in provocation in the built arena. One primary example is the plan to build a church in the main city square in which the bell tower will be 50 meters larger than any surrounding buildings (Bouzarovski, 2011). In response the Albanians erected a monument to Skenderbeg, a 15th century Albanian hero, depicted on horseback in the Albanian quarter (Photo 2, see page 24). This monument is modest in size compared to many of the newer Slav-featured statues. However, Skopje’s mayor, when asked about the Skenderbeg monument, said that to him “this object is just illegitimate construction” (ibid., p. 40).

Externally, Macedonia must overcome an even larger obstacle. It has yet to be fully and equally recognized by the neighboring nations: Serbi-ans do not accept the autonomy of the Macedonian Church; Bulgarians dispute the language, and the Greeks have blocked European Union ac-cession due to its name. Additionally, all three nations dispute claims to its exclusive history. In addition, to qualms over Macedonia’s name, contention with Greece has escalated as numerous monuments to Philip and Alexander the Great have been constructed throughout the nation (Dragićević Šešić, 2011, p. 40) (Photo 3, see page 24). Bulgaria often disputes the display of Bulgarian historic figures, such as Tsar Samuil,1 in today’s Macedonia (Novinvite, 2011). With such deep-rooted and pervasive controversies, it has been difficult for the nation to build its individual identity as a new Republic.

Despite this, not all recent disputes over Macedonia’s national identity originate from neighboring nations. In 2009, the city erupted in dissent over the ill-designed memorial home dedicated to Mother Teresa (Bou-zarovski, 2011). The Ministry of Culture opened an international competition, won by Portuguese architect Jorgan Marum, but the government overruled the decision; the project went to Macedonian architect Vangel Bozinovski instead (ibid.). Despite the abrupt change in architects, the final materialization of the project failed to adequately memorialize the modest lifestyle of the woman receiving tribute. As a project contained within Skopje 2014 this memorial also signifies the decision of local authorities to use architecture as the vehicle for generating their vision of national identity.

Conclusion

The questions set in this article are: How likely can modern Skopje with-stand another disaster; develop internal cohesiveness; and obtain inter-national recognition to develop a national identity in the built environment?

In viewing the post-earthquake reconstruction of Skopje, the series of plans that guided this process give incredible insight into the outcome and current state of the city. In both the 1965 Master Plan and Skopje 2014 the primary mission and policies focused on modernizing the city for an international audience. Through this international-style development and modernization the city believed that it would form a new national identity. The 1965 plan sought to achieve modernity through innovative architectural design and spatial layouts from leading international planners, but kept its small footprint as a way to contain disas-ter from future earthquakes. Within Skopje 2014 are policies departing significantly from the 1965 plan. Skopje 2014 promotes and prioritizes the re-creation of previously grandiose public buildings (pre-1963 earth-quake) intended to transform the city into a historic European capital. While Skopje solicited international competitions and advice, in the end they were largely ignored in order to emphasize an ethnic Macedonian Slav identity.

The piecemeal and often contradictory reconstruction plans have led to an urban development pattern that is different from what it was prior to the 1963 earthquake. “With over 80% of the building stock in noncompliance with seismic regulations, the city is just as unprepared for another major earthquake as in pre-1963 times” (Ladenski, n.d.). Additionally, continued ethnic and national struggles, both internally and externally, will unfavorably impact the built environment, detracting from the creation a unified internationally-recognized identity.

The nation tends to be in a constant reactionary role in terms of long-term planning, desperately looking for an external international identity instead of truly cultivating a multicultural Macedonian identity from within. Considering the blank slate provided by the earthquake with the international energy in supporting reconstruction, it is discouraging to realize that the government is not taking the precautions necessary to prevent another disaster nor capitalize on a truly innovative and mod-ern Macedonian image.

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Dr. Patricia Wilson

Abstract

Participatory practice in community development is process- and relationship-oriented. Yet many community development practitioners focus on technical problem solving, service delivery, or information provision. How might these practitioners respond to participatory practice? Using narrative analysis, this case study examines the response of 24 community development practitioners from government and education to a two week field workshop in participatory practice in two peri-urban communities outside Mexico City. Accustomed to technical or procedural practice and unfamiliar with participatory approaches, the 24 practitioners from government and education quickly faced the vulnerability and uncertainty of participatory practice. By the end of the workshop, however, most of the practitioners had changed their attitudes and assumptions about themselves, their work, and the community. Six month follow-up interviews evidence the continued integration of some of these changes into their own practice. The results indicate the importance of the engaged practitioner’s attitudes and assumptions in mediating state/civil society relationships.

Keywords: Participatory community development; practitioner experience; participatory action research; peri-urban Mexico

Participatory community development practice is built upon the relational and process capabilities of the practitioner. The practitioner becomes a facilitator and catalyst, holding in abeyance his or her potential roles as expert, planner, problem solver, and implementer until such time as those roles can be skillfully utilized by the community. Rather than privileging expert diagnosis and prescription or following a managerial approach that objectifies the client or community, the participatory practitioner opens spaces for generative dialogue, collective action, and mutual learning through a relational, organic, and contextualized practice. The objective is to build community, create solidarity and pro[1]mote agency (Bhattacharyya, 2004, pp. 10-11). The participatory practitioner introduces the kind of horizontal relationships and collaborative inquiry that are the building blocks of participatory democracy (Wilson & Lowery, 2003).

The participatory practitioner facilitates the community’s discovery of its own path forward (Botes & van Rensburg, 2000):

Being a facilitator that promotes participatory development implies first understanding a community’s questions, assisting them to articulate them better and then helping the community to search for solutions. Facilitators should never come with ready-made solutions or tell the people what to do. They must rather encourage and assist people to think about their problems in their own way. (pp. 54-55)

The following case study examines an attempt to introduce participatory practices to community development practitioners who were accustomed to technical, managerial, and procedural practices. A two-week field-based workshop in participatory community development was con[1]ducted in an ecologically fragile river basin northwest of Mexico City. Hosted by the Guadalupe Dam River Basin Commission (CCPG) and the Universidad Albert Einstein (UAE), the workshop involved 24 Mexican community development practitioners, 19 from local, state, and federal agencies working in the river basin, and 5 from local universities in[1]volved in sustainable development. Eight graduate students from a University of Texas practicum course in participatory action research (offered by the Graduate Program in Community and Regional Planning) also participated in the workshop alongside the Mexican professionals. The two-week field-based workshop itself was designed and facilitated by the author.

The unfolding response of the practitioners to the participatory practices used in the workshop and in the field became as fascinating as the field[1]work itself. Those responses were documented in narrative interviews facilitated by UAE on the closing day, a written survey using open-ended questions conducted by the CCPG, and follow-up interviews six months later conducted by a UT graduate research assistant.

The results illustrate how community development professionals accustomed to technical, managerial, or procedural practice respond to the uncertainty and vulnerability of the unscripted and unpredictable situations that characterize participatory practice. The narrative analysis indicates a closer and more respectful relationship with community members, an enhanced experience of teamwork, personal change in attitudes and assumptions, and an increased ability to be confident outside of more customary professional roles. The findings contribute to the limited empirical literature on the felt experience of the community development practitioner engaged in participatory practice

Few articles or books with empirical referents investigate the community development practitioner’s subjective or felt experience of practice. Ingamells, Lathouras, Wiseman, Westoby, and Caniglia (2010) offer a collection of reflective essays by volunteers who took part in a participatory action research (PAR) project. Vidyarthi and Wilson (2008) relate practitioner experiences following a values-oriented training in participatory development in rural India, highlighting the importance of love and self-discipline. See also Westoby and van Blerk (2012); Fenge, Fannin, Armstrong, Hicks, and Taylor (2009); Green (2012); and Brookfield and Holst (2011).

Case Study

Context

As in many parts of the urbanizing world, water and waste have become critical issues in Mexico, especially in the Valley of Mexico where Mexico City’s metropolitan population approaches 25 million inhabitants. Its footprint spreads across the valley floor into the surrounding mountains where once rural river basins are now contaminated by urbanization. The main source of contamination is the growth of informal peri-urban communities that lack adequate access to water and waste services (Ar[1]reguin, Martinez & Trueba, 2004).

In the case of the Guadalupe Dam river basin on the northwestern edge of the metropolitan area, the peri-urban challenge had become clear to Ing. Blanca Cinthya Garfias Galván, the operations director of the Gua-8 dalupe Dam River Basin Commission (Comisión de la Cuenca Presa de Guadalupe, CCPG). The commission’s outreach and public awareness campaigns had not succeeded in reducing the yearly flow of fifteen million cubic meters of black and gray water into the now unusable Guadalupe Dam Lake (CCPG, 2014).

After conversations with two local universities and the University of Texas, Ing. Garfias decided to host a field workshop that would use a participatory approach to engage two peri-urban communities on issues of water and waste. She saw the workshop as an opportunity to intro[1]duce the local, state, and government professionals who worked in the communities of her river basin to participatory community development, while at the same time form working relationships among them for future collaborations.

Through municipal government officials in Nicolás Romero, the most rapidly urbanizing of the five municipalities in the river basin, Ing. Garfias met the local leaders of two informal communities. Each leader was the president of the Citizen Participation Committee (COPACI), the sanctioned body for interfacing with the community. The more consolidated of the two communities selected, El Tráfico, had grown from a series of informal settlements on rural ejido land starting 25 years ago. Now with nearly 15 thousand residents, it is integrated into the urbanized area of Nicolás Romero. About 80 percent of the residents are served by a municipal water system that distributes piped water twice a month. Wastewater goes directly into the ravines as does much solid waste.

Higher up the slope from El Tráfico is Llano Grande, a less densely settled community of five hundred to seven hundred people on the outskirts of Nicolás Romero. Formed by periodic arrivals of settlers through questionable land sales over the last ten to fifteen years, Llano Grande lacks basic water and sanitation infrastructure altogether. The community is served sporadically by private and public water trucks and private garbage haulers.

Higher up the slope from El Tráfico is Llano Grande, a less densely settled community of five hundred to seven hundred people on the outskirts of Nicolás Romero. Formed by periodic arrivals of settlers through questionable land sales over the last ten to fifteen years, Llano Grande lacks basic water and sanitation infrastructure altogether. The community is served sporadically by private and public water trucks and private garbage haulers.

The workshop

Held in August, 2013, the resulting workshop had 24 Mexican professionals, 19 from government agencies and five from local universities, all involved in community water and waste issues in the Guadalupe Dam river basin. The public sector professionals came from the Nation[1]al Water Commission (CONAGUA), the State of Mexico Department of the Environment (Office of Prevention and Control of Soil and Water Contamination), and four of the five municipalities that comprise the Guadalupe Dam river basin, including Nicolás Romero, site of the two peri-urban communities where the field work would take place. The participants’ functions included resource conservation outreach and training, community relations and conflict management, cultural affairs and youth programming, extension services, and the planning, construction, and management of community parks and infrastructure projects. In terms of professional backgrounds, the participants represented engineering, architecture, planning, social work, law, agronomy, communications, and media.

The author, who facilitated the workshop, chose a participatory action research (PAR) method of action learning (Reason & Bradbury, 2008), based on rapid cycles of action and reflection, which were applied in the field work with the communities as well as with the practitioners in the workshop. After an overview of participatory community development and team building exercises with the practitioners on the first day, daily rounds of fieldwork in the two communities in the mornings were followed in the afternoons by lunch, reflection, planning and preparation for the next day’s field work at the nearby campus of the UTFV.

The two teams, one working in El Tráfico, the other in Llano Grande, met separately most afternoons, each working through the challenges of a situation to which the team members were not accustomed—not knowing each other, having no one officially in charge, having no predefined objective nor strict protocol, and learning as they went. As one participant said in the final debriefing, “we were as naked and vulnerable as the residents themselves… .” “I was actually afraid at the beginning, it was very difficult,” said another. “I really doubted that we would accomplish anything,” said a third. But each morning they stepped foot back into the community not knowing what was awaiting them. All they could do was be present and alert to what was unfolding in the moment—exactly what the participatory practitioner is called upon to do.

As insecurity and frustration rose during the first week due to the un[1]certainty of how to proceed in the field, a few plenary sessions were con-10 vened in the afternoons to address the discomfort. The UT facilitator led the professionals in dialogic inquiry, using the two teams’ unfolding experiences to reflect on collectively and “become uncertain together” (Philippson, 2009, p. 29). At one point, when morale was lowest, when their best laid plans seemed not to pan out in the field, the UT facilitator introduced participatory theater for each of the two teams to act out their experience, thereby gaining perspective, insight, and levity. The UT facilitator refrained from using her authority to fix or solve the problems they raised, instead engaging them in mutual inquiry, reflection, and learning.

The field experience

Compared to the first day when Señora E, the longtime community lead[1]er and party representative in El Tráfico, lined up rows of chairs for the community and introduced the workshop team at the head table as the experts, much had changed by the end of the two weeks. The community members had identified their own priorities, and the women had decided to turn discarded plastic bags into a resource. These 16 women from different parts of the community now knew each other. They had learned to make thread from recycled plastic bags and use it to knit and crochet. On the last day they sat in a circle talking while they made purses, shawls, and earrings from the plastic thread. They were joined by several new women and teenaged girls from the community who wanted to learn from them.

As the women sewed, the facilitators asked them to recap all they had accomplished in the past two weeks and what it meant to them and to their community. Not only had they removed hundreds of plastic bags from the waste stream and turned them into beautiful and useful creations, they had involved the men in re-using discarded tires for building retention walls. Used tires had disappeared from the waste stream (and soon would have a market value). Most important of all, the women had decided to continue to meet every week to sew, talk, and take action together.

There were smiles on the women’s faces and warmth in their voices as they asked the team to be sure to come again. One year later the women’s group was still gathering every Friday. They had taught many women in El Tráfico and some in other communities how to make thread from plastic bags, and were selling their wares commercially.

In Llano Grande, where workshop participants had discovered a tense division in the community upon their arrival and had been met with hostility by one faction, the situation was also very different by the last day. When workshop participants and residents met for a final encuentro to recap and celebrate the work from the two weeks, members of both factions were present. For the first time they had worked together: they had created a plan for a community park in the empty field in front of the church. Residents and team members alike expressed their delight with the strides made in just two weeks toward a more unified community and a greater sense of possibility. Eight months later the park was a reality, a colorful source of community pride and cohesion.

The following day the closing session for the practitioners was a chance to come back together and share their responses to the experience. A faculty member from UAE moderated the session, arranging the chairs in a large circle for more than two dozen people and introducing a pine[1]cone from Llano Grande as a talking stick. He asked them to share aha moments and describe what had been most important to them, professionally or personally. The results follow.

Analysis and Findings

The 13 oral responses that were recorded at the final session with the participating practitioners, along with the 13 written evaluations of the workshop completed the day before, provided rich narrative from 19 of the professional participants. Six months after the workshop semi-structured follow-up interviews were conducted with 15 of the professional participants, 12 in person and three in writing, bringing the total narrative responses to 41, which covered all 24 professional participants. The narrative data from the responses to the workshop were coded, clustered, and themed.

Three of the 24 participating community development practitioners indicated the workshop had had little or no impact on them. The majority, 19, of the practitioners responded by describing a felt experience that had changed them. These changes clustered into three themes: relationship with the team, relationship with the community, and personal change.

Relationship with the team

The relationship with fellow practitioners was one of the three main themes to emerge: navigating together the chaos and uncertainty of not knowing each other, nor having a clear idea of expectations, nor hav[1]ing someone in charge to tell them what to do; figuring out how best to 12 contribute to the team effort; realizing one’s own capacity to contribute and be respected; learning from each other and respecting each other; being lifted up by the strength of the team to keep coming back each day; learning from experience and moving forward; enjoying the satisfaction of teamwork; and making new colleagues and friends. Five of the respondents cited teamwork as the most important impact on them. The following quotes from the practitioners illustrate the impact of the team experience:

• “I learned that it’s possible to build good teamwork with other professionals without someone in charge.”
• “I experienced the power of uniting as a team and collab[1]orating.”
• “The most important thing was learning how a team can pull through, be successful, and have a real impact.”
• “I learned I could be a real contributor to the team effort.”
• “For me, it was making new friends and colleagues across different agencies.”

Relationship with the community

A more frequently mentioned theme was the experience of a deep[1]er connection with the community—valuing the opportunity to listen to community members, learn from them, work shoulder to shoulder with them, respect and appreciate them, earn their respect, and connect with them in a heartfelt way. As one participant expressed, amid his tears, “I could see my own niece and nephew in the eyes of the children.” Their take-aways included the following:

• “I realize the importance of listening to the people in the community and learning from them.”
• “I learned to respect them and not look down on them.”
• “As a public servant, I now know my responsibility to listen up close to the needs of the community and to each person in it.”
• “I realized my own capacity to connect personally with people I thought were very different from me.”

Seven of the respondents considered their relationship with the community to be the most important impact on them and highlighted the following:

• “…the experience of working with the community and 13 learning along with them,”
• “…being accepted and respected by them,”
• “…feeling their warmth toward us,”
• “… being honest with them from the beginning, earning their trust,”

Personal change

The most frequently mentioned theme was personal change: learning to see their own assumptions about, and prejudices towards, the community residents; learning to trust process, to be open to what is unfolding in the present moment; and becoming comfortable with not knowing, not being in control, not having a clear game plan or procedures to follow; and not needing to play the role of the expert or technician. Seven of the respondents considered their personal change to be the most important impact of the workshop for them.

• “[The workshop] helped me recognize my patterned responses and agendas,”
• “Really the main thing was learning about my own attitude of superiority and disdain toward community people.”
• “I learned to shut up and listen.”
• “I had to trust and try not to control, and it worked out.”
• “I learned to be more spacious and in the moment, to allow things to unfold.”
• “[The big change for me was] letting go of my need to solve, fix, or teach,”
• “Being more flexible in the way I think and to set aside pre-conceived ideas [were huge]”

A felt experience

In sum, the experience of the government and university practitioners indicates that the practice of participatory community development goes far beyond the use of tools, techniques, and procedures. It is a felt experience involving both heart and head that generates awareness of group process and relationship. Most of the practitioners had experienced the undefended openness to possibility in the moment that characterizes participatory practice. The two week experience in participatory community development had touched them at the level of values, attitudes, and feelings. 14 At the end of the workshop in the closing ceremony Ing. Garfias, the operations director for the river basin commission and the force behind the workshop, struggled to find the words to describe the vulnerability, depth, and meaning of what the professionals had learned through the two week experience. She could not hide her tears as she said,

My aha moment is right now here with you, my colleagues in different governmental agencies and universities, hearing that you each took in deeply the importance of working with people in this collaborative horizontal way, alongside and for the people. This work is so difficult to understand and explain. It’s not an imposition of authority by government agencies. It’s a response to the social and environmental context of each community. The work of river basin planning must be this way. It’s not just about planting trees and water quality. I ask you all to transmit the special nature of this work and what we’ve learned here, including the emotions and feelings, to your agencies. This is so important!

Follow-up

Six months after the workshop, follow-up interviews were conducted with 15 of the participating practitioners. Eleven reported a change in how they related to the communities where they did their work, as the following quotes illustrate:

• “[I know now] we don’t have to tell the community what they need!… . We have redefined ourselves as supporting them and their projects, the projects that they define. …I am doing my work with love, like in Llano Grande.”
• “We did the same as in the workshop: we listened to people, showed respect for their values, their family life… It was great to see their smiles…!”
• “Perhaps it’s a water filtration plant we want to do; perhaps they want it located further up the stream. …I get them to come up with a plan they can all agree upon, just as we did in Llano Grande.”

Seven of those interviewed also described relating to their co-workers and employees with more acceptance, respect, conviviality, openness, and/or caring, resulting in better teamwork and morale.

None of the public sector practitioners noted any change beyond their immediate circles of influence. Referring to co-workers outside his own team, one manager said, “there are so many demands on their time and they are wedded to their patterns—just doing what is required and nothing extra.” However, the educators reported that both of the universities involved and the one high school had made significant institutional changes to strengthen student involvement in local communities.

A surprising dividend was the impact of the workshop on the educators’ pedagogy. Three of the five educators reported significant changes in their teaching towards more empowering relationships with students.

• “The workshop definitely changed my way of teaching— transformed it literally. I now do inquiry, action, and re[1]flection with my students to rediscover the environment in which they live. What I experienced in the workshop I’m doing with them, inside and outside the classroom. …The head of the school is amazed!”
• “The university where I studied is very traditional—all about imparting information and not letting go of control or authority. Now I know I don’t have to tell my students exactly what to do and how. I can give them options and encourage their own research.”
• “I used to give talks in the communities about environ[1]mental awareness and what people could do, but they didn’t have much impact. What I discovered [from the workshop] is … you don’t have to convince them. You work with them. … I have used this experience with my students.”

Summary and Conclusions

By the end of the field-based workshop almost all of the participating professionals had experienced a felt sense of participatory practice: They had learned to seek and value what was emergent in the moment, rather than follow a scripted procedure or pre-defined technical solution. They had let go of the safety of their professional identities and the need to demonstrate their technical expertise. They had engaged in a horizontal relationship with each other and with the community that made them “as naked and vulnerable as the community members themselves.”

Most of the participating professionals had learned to listen to the community residents; to respect their knowledge, experience, and aspirations; to work beside them, and discover along with them. As a result of the workshop, professional participants could experience a new kind of relationship with the community members, one based on respect, acceptance, and trust.

By allowing the action to unfold at the initiative of the community members, the practitioners were able to experience the satisfaction of seeing results much greater than they had expected and more useful than they could have planned. One community was breaking the tradition of paternalism while turning plastic bags and discarded tires into valuable resources. The other community was healing a long-standing division in the community while creating a community park and learning to compost and germinate seeds. In both cases, new patterns of democratic engagement were introduced, among the community development practitioners, among the community members, and between them. In the process, the Guadalupe Dam river basin became a little healthier–not because these peri-urban communities were finally doing what they were told, but because they were doing what they themselves had decided to do. Six months later the majority of the workshop participants interviewed had begun to relate with more respect and sensitivity to the communities where their agencies worked. Some had changed their way of relating to their employees and their colleagues, in and across agencies. The majority of the educators had incorporated participatory inquiry and action into their teaching, and at both local universities institutional changes had been made to relate more actively to local communities.

New patterns of emergent change are visible: a division between two community factions that begins to heal, a calcifying relationship of clientelism that begins to crumble, a new awareness of refuse as resource, a dent in authoritarian pedagogy, a glimpse of the humanity and heart of the other, a practice of listening. These are the patterns of an emergent post-modern world of participatory engagement that is calling for the naked practitioner—the one who is strong enough to be vulnerable and wise enough to listen, learn, and love.

This case study illustrates how the engaged practitioner has an opportunity to choose the kind of relationship he or she builds with the community: one of superiority, condescension, control, expediency, and objectification, or one or respect, openness, caring, and collaboration. While structural and systemic relations of power between the state and civil society are ever present, the participatory practitioner finds a space of choice. It is this space, and these choices, which make the participatory practitioner an agent of emergent change in the relationship between state and civil society.

References

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Jimenez & L. Marin (Eds.), El agua en Mex[1]ico vista desde la academia. Mexico: Academia Mexicana de Cien[1]cias, 251-270.

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Brookfield, S., & Holst, J. D. (2011). Radicalizing learning: Adult education for a just world. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley.

Comisión de Cuenca Presa Guadalupe (CCPG). (2014). “Bienvenidos.” Comisión de Cuenca Presa Guadalupe. Retrieved from http://cuencapresagua[1]dalupe.org/

Fenge, L., Fannin, A., Armstrong, A., Hicks, C., & Taylor, V. (2009). “Lifting the lid on sexuality and ageing: The experiences of volunteer researchers.” Qualitative Social Work, 8(4), 509-524.

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‘developers’. Development in Practice, 22(8),1109-1121.

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practice: Stories, method and meaning. Australia: Common Ground.

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organization in South Africa. Planning Forum, 9, 47-64

Author Biographies

Maria Alexandrescu

Maria Alexandrescu is currently a Master of Landscape Architecture student in graduation year at Technische Universiteit Delft. Their research takes the process of framing as starting point for the understanding of built and unbuilt landscapes.

Lauren Bulka

Lauren Bulka, MURP, is a graduate from Virginia Tech’s Masters of Urban and Regional Planning program. Much of her recent work focuses community and economic development, place-making, and innovation in economically distressed regions across the United States.

Maxwell Hartt

Maxwell Hartt is a third-year PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo’s School of Planning. His research focuses on shrinking cities, demographic evolution, and the planning response.

Kurt Kraler

Kurt Kraler is currently completing his M.Arch. degree at the University of Waterloo, focusing on the political and economic production of themed spaces and their social implications. He recently presented his thesis work at the 2015 Intersections/Cross-Sections Graduate Conference in Toronto, and has exhibited at the Design at Riverside Gallery (Cambridge, Ontario), Xpace Cultural Centre and PULP (Toronto), Lunds Universitet (Sweden), and the University of Waterloo Rome Studio (Italy).

Dr. Cynthia A. Lintz

Dr. Cynthia Lintz, AICP, is a recent graduate from Virginia Tech’s Planning, Governance and Globalization program. Her dissertation on place-making in the Balkans won Virginia Tech’s Outstanding Dissertation Award for 2015.

Gibrán Lule-Hurtado

Gibrán Lule-Hurtado is a graduate student in Community and Regional Planning at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include disaster resilience and historic preservation in Latin America and the United States.

Sara McTarnaghan

Sara McTarnaghan is currently finishing a dual-degree Masters program in Community and Regional Planning and Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in International Affairs from George Washington University.

Adam Ogusky

Adam Ogusky is a first year PhD student in Community and Regional Planning at The University of Texas at Austin. He works to transcend mediocrity and create meaning in an absurd world.

Aditi Ohri

Aditi Ohri is an MA candidate in the department of Art History at Concordia University in Montreal. Her research focuses on race, decolonization and Indigenous-settler relations in Canada.

Vivek Shastry

Vivek is a native of Bangalore, India. He draws from his interdisciplinary background in engineering and planning to study topics in building energy, energy policy, and low carbon growth. He is a J. N. Tata Scholar and the current recipient of Joy & Morin Scott/Sally & John Byram Graduate Fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin.

Dr. Patricia A. Wilson

Dr. Wilson is Professor of Community and Regional Planning at the University of Texas at Austin where she teaches participatory planning, dialogue and deliberation, and international sustainable social development. Her current projects include peace education and sustainability in Mexico, and neighborhood resilience planning in Austin.

Elizabeth Walsh

Elizabeth Walsh is a Doctoral candidate in the Community and Regional Planning Program at the University of Texas at Austin whose research focuses on environmental justice and regenerative design and development. She is a co-founder of the Festival Beach Food Forest in Austin.

Acknowledgements

Financial Sponsor

Mike Hogg Endowment for Urban Governance

Advisors

Dr. Michael Oden

Dr. Sandra Rosenbloom

Thank you to our financial sponsor, the Mike Hogg Endowment for Urban Governance. Without the generous funding provided, Planning Forum would not exist. Thank you to Dr. Michael Oden and Dr. Sandra Rosenbloom, who helped guide the revival of Planning Forum from day one, assisted in the development of our direction and standards, and supported our ambitions. Thank you to Dr. Jake Wegmann and Dr. Patricia Wilson for championing Planning Forum early on. Thank you to all of our faculty reviewers who provided stellar feedback for all our submissions. Thank you everyone who submitted, for Planning Forum is nothing without the talent on the pages.

Piñata Power: Reflections on Race, Love, and Planning

Elizabeth Walsh

A Reflection on Exploratory Research in Pointe-Saint-Charles

Aditi Ohri

The Neighborhood and the Park: Drumul Taberei, Bucharest by Maria Alexandrescu

Maria Alexandrescu

A Case for Regional Planning in Energy Access Delivery

Vivek Shastry

Marketing Magic: The Tourism Ministry’s Pueblos Mágicos Program and Historical Preservation in Mexico

Gibrán Lule-Hurtado

The Spectacularization of Urban Development on the Las Vegas Strip

Kurt Kraler

Planning Forum Volume 16

The Naked Practitioner: Participatory Community Development in Peri-Urban Mexico

Dr. Patricia Wilson

Abstract:

Participatory practice in community development is process- and relationship-oriented. Yet many community development practitioners focus on technical problem solving, service delivery, or information provision. How might these practitioners respond to participatory practice? Using narrative analysis, this case study examines the response of 24 community development practitioners from government and education to a two-week field workshop in participatory practice in two peri-urban communities outside Mexico City. Accustomed to technical or procedural practice and unfamiliar with participatory approaches, the 24 practitioners from government and education quickly faced the vulnerability and uncertainty of participatory practice. By the end of the workshop, however, most of the practitioners had changed their attitudes and assumptions about themselves, their work, and the community. Six-month follow-up interviews evidence the continued integration of some of these changes into their own practice. The results indicate the importance of the engaged practitioner’s attitudes and assumptions in mediating state/civil society relationships.

Keywords:

Participatory community development; practitioner experience; participatory action research; peri-urban Mexico

Skopje, Macedonia, 1965 to 2014: In Search of a Modern European Capital

Dr. Cynthia A. Lintz and Lauren Bulka

Abstract

 In 1963, Skopje, the capital city of the Republic of Macedonia, suffered an earthquake that destroyed 80% of the building stock. Since then, the national government has worked to (re)develop and promote its national identity through the built environment of its capital city. This paper explores the effectiveness of the Republic of Macedonia in these efforts. The authors examine shifts in planning and development practices in the capital city and the subsequent impacts on governmental effectiveness organized around three time periods: post-earthquake, post-Iron Curtain, and present day, beginning with the development of the city’s latest master plan, Skopje 2014.

Keywords

 Skopje, Macedonia; master planning; disaster resilience; European history

Preparing Planners for Economic Decline and Population Loss: An Assessment of North American Planning Curricula

Maxwell Hartt

Abstract

 Population shrinkage, demographic aging, and eco[1]nomic restructuring are leaving many cities in a state of decline. This paper examines the curricula of 94 accredited North American academic planning programs to gauge whether courses specific to these processes are being offered. Findings re[1]veal that only 1% of institutions offer a course in aging communities, and only 2% offered courses in decline and urban shrinkage. Trends in economic decline, aging, and population loss do not guaran[1]tee a permanent shift from abundance to scarcity; however, accessible tools and guidance regarding these challenges are increasingly important to the education of future planners.

Keywords

Planning education; shrinking cities; economic transformation; aging

Development and Displacement: Single Family Home Demolitions in Central East Austin, 2007 to 2014

Sara McTarnaghan

Abstract

This paper analyzes the scale and character of home demolitions in East Austin since 2007 from a built environment approach. A documentation and analysis of home demolitions, construction, and re[1]sale in East Austin contextualizes the narrative of gentrification and reveals how that process is com[1]plicated through the mechanics of speculative de[1]velopment, real estate messaging and aesthetics. In this moment of sociocultural displacement and loss, new norms are inscribed in the built environ[1]ment. This new landscape is strongly embedded in the discourse and aesthetic of environmental sus[1]tainability, which threatens to overpower conver[1]sations about equity and urban development in a highly contested space of the city.

Keywords

Gentrification; real estate development; exclusion; Austin

What if our traditional urban planning practices were overtaken and overturned, introducing a whole new set of problems, tools, and future possibilities?

Such might be the case with the smart city, “a city activated at millions of points” (p. 13) and made intelligent “in the sense of the ability to learn, understand, and reason” (p. 28) through the proliferation of information and communication technology (ICT) across not just our urban world, but physical space in general. First coined in 2005 and increasingly occupying the minds of academics, urban enthusiasts, and corporations, the smart city movement has grown into a $39.5 billion industry in just a few short years (p. 32). And it will continue to grow, with 50 billion connected devices currently linked to the Internet and providing data on our homes, our cities, and even our own bodies (p. 33).

If you are in the urban planning field at all and have not yet heard of the smart city movement, then you should quickly brush up: It will come to occupy every nook and cranny of our discipline. Indeed, since 2012 the smart city has been the most frequently cited concept in the academic literature on urban sustainability, ending sustainable city’s 16-year run (de Jong, Joss, Schraven, Zhan, & Weijnen, 2015). And in practice, many are advocating the smart city movement at dozens of entrepreneurial conferences, at city trade shows, in master’s programs at prestigious universities, and even in a recent Department of Transportation $40 million grant challenge. But what is the smart city? In short, it is the addition of another “layer” to our understanding of the city. Geography, meteorology and hydrology, ecology, and then socioeconomics, demographics, history and prejudice: Each of these lenses chronologically occupies the minds of urban planners who seek to understand the city in all its dimensions. Today we can understand the city through terabytes of data that superficially read as ones and zeros but, with the right algorithms, tell a story about practically every facet of urban space. From smart metering and road congestion pricing to smartphone apps that guide you along local residents’ favorite secret hikes, this layer of data upon a city has drastically altered urban space and will continue to do so.

Antoine Picon’s book is the most recent monograph on smart cities, and perhaps the most important since Anthony Townsend’s Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia (2013). Claiming that “our cities are on the verge of a radical transformation, a revolution in intelligence comparable in scale to the one that, in its time, brought about industrialization” (p. 9), Picon devotes his book to resolving the primary conflict of the smart city movement to date: The supposed tension between the inherent technocracy of some smart city innovations and the empowering individualism enabled through digital technologies and platforms (the smartphone, Twitter, Wikipedia). This debate has been smoldering for years in various journals, on online forums, and at conferences, leaving us to wonder which smart city strategy leads to the best city: “neocybernetic inspiration with technocratic overtones, or new perspectives of democratization linked to the spread of information and communications technology?” (p. 11). Indeed, Townsend commented in a MIT Technology Review interview that smart city tech can either make our cities top-down, centralized, authoritative command centers, or it could decentralize power, create redundant infrastructure, increase social interaction, increase sustainable behavior, and incite creative energy (Berg, 2015, p. 63). Several smart city critics have referenced the cultural geographers Edward Soja, David Harvey, and Neil Brenner, worrying that smart cities, as peddled by the likes of Cisco, IBM, Siemens, and Hitachi, are actually neoliberal Trojan horses, disguised as urban “saviors” but actually there to privatize public services and spaces.

If the differences between the two seem unclear, then consider some clarifying examples. To understand the neocybernetic smart city, we could look to the IBM Rio de Janeiro Operations Center, an undeniably Orwellian “control room” that, with its ubiquitous sensors and cameras throughout the metropolis, enables a “rational” response to any digitally-recorded events (p. 75). On the other hand, scholars and activists, most notably among them Townsend, have promoted the smart city as an inherent decentralizing force, one that breaks down bureaucratic and centralized systems of control and response. Both Picon and Townsend point to smart phones as the material means of this democratic force. Picon finds promise in the “smart mobs” (p. 84) enabled by social media, who can quickly move to protest injustices and inequities perpetuated by governments. And Townsend sees smartphones enabling an open-source approach to urban planning that solicits the creative intelligence of the people who actually live there, as opposed to the wholesale standardization of smart cities through the global sales teams of a few corporations (Townsend, 2014).

Picon argues that cities need both. Indeed, centralized tech directives issued from municipalities or corporations and citizen-driven initiatives appear to be mutually supportive of each other. If smart cities are to reinvent the energy grid, whereby ICT can automatically adjust a household’s thermostat to decrease peak demand, or transit systems, which stand to be completely remade through ride-sharing and autonomous vehicle technologies, then some degree of centralized, sophisticated coordination is necessary. Picon encourages his readers to realize that “there are some fields, albeit limited in number, where a neocybernetic type of management seems preferable to citizen engagement” (p. 90). Ironically, however, it is only through such centrally controlled systems that “the desires and experiences of spontaneity and collaboration” can then flourish (p. 84). Ultimately, Picon proposes that scholars and practitioners need to conceive “a form of city intelligence” that is “both widespread and focused,” diffuse among all urban inhabitants and their tools of collaboration and participation, and yet also concentrated in control rooms and command posts that keep a city functioning materially (p. 100).

Picon’s last chapter turns towards a more theoretical exploration of how digital technologies might change the urban experience in the 21st century. In particular, he foresees augmented reality (AR), geolocation, and 3D modeling technologies adding new dimensions to an individual’s relationship to space. While in the past, scholars and practitioners may have referred to these digital technologies as virtual, Picon believes such terminology is now obsolete, given the growing “association between the physical and the digital world, or between atoms and data bits (p. 106). While I do not find this concluding chapter to be quite relevant to the primary conversations of the smart city movement, it nevertheless tangentially relates to how ICT technologies might alter urban planning and the public participation process. Indeed, with AR and 3D modeling, one can surely imagine a future where urban planners ask community participants to put on their AR goggles to visualize proposed developments. Picon’s book is an integral contribution to the smart city movement. In addition to proposing a framework that I believe resolves the tension seen thus far in smart cities (cybernetic technocratic control versus democratic, technological empowerment of individuals and communities), Picon simply orients the reader to what the smart city actually is. No longer an abstract possibility, the smart city actually exists. A diverse collection of distributed events, processes, and centralized transformations, the smart city movement is certainly under way in cities across the world. Picon’s clear writing and seamless reference to many examples, along with complementary images and graphics, creates a highly informative reading experience, and will leave you wondering what smart city changes are already under way in your own city. To quote Picon’s last words, maybe we should all look a bit more closely at this smart city ideal and process: After all, it’s a “different future” that invariably will come, and, with a little help on our end, it might even be a future “rich in promise” (p. 156).

About the Author

Patrick Russell studied Literature & Environment (MA) at the University of Nevada, Reno, and holds two BA degrees in Philosophy and English from the University of Central Arkansas. He will soon complete a Masters of Science in Community and Regional Planning at the University of Texas, and is currently writing his thesis on the development of smart cities. You can follow his blog City Smarts at Medium.com.

References

de Jong, M., Joss, S. Schraven, D., Zhan, C., & Weijnen, M. (2015) Sustainable— smart—resilient—low carbon—eco—knowledge cities: Making sense of a multitude of concepts promoting sustainable urbanization. Journal of Cleaner Production, 1(14), Web. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ article/pii/S0959652615001080

Townsend, A. M. (2014). Smart cities: Big data, civic hackers, and the quest for a new utopia. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Berg, N. (2015). Smart cities will take many forms. MIT Technology Review, 118(1), 63–64.

The United States (and global) economy has been moving into a period of economic stagnation for the past few decades (Magdoff & Foster, 2014). As a small number of large corporations dominate a greater share of sectors in the U.S. and global economies, business investment has slowed and wages are increasingly static (Foster, 2009). Although the economy has been on this trajectory for quite some time, a series of financial bubbles has obscured the trend. The most recent burst triggered the Great Recession of 2007–2008 and laid bare this overall trend in the macroeconomy to such a degree that even mainstream economists such as Larry Summers openly recognize “secular stagnation” as the economy’s dominant course (Bernanke, 2011; Hall, 2011).

The immediate attributes of a stagnating economy are a general decline in business investment, static or deteriorating wage levels, and deficit spending by the federal government in its attempt to reignite sustained growth. The result is that in the wake of each burst bubble, the economy “recovers” from each setback weakly, without returning to its earlier strengths (NPR, 2015). Thus, over time, although specific sectors may experience some growth, the overall economy continues to slow in terms of investment, jobs creation, and wage increases and display increasing fragility in each of these spheres.

The longer-term implications of an economy caught in stagnation are quite serious. As the situation continues to worsen, there is tremendous pressure, both from the business community and the general public, to somehow stimulate the economy again at a rapid pace. Politically this pressure has yielded two possible—and very separate—paths. The first is a sharp turn to the right, which we have witnessed in this country as well as elsewhere. This tendency eschews democracy as too weak and inefficient to come to grips with the problem, and embraces an elitist, chauvinist, conservative attitude as the priorities of growth overwhelm any other social goal. The other possibility is a shift to a more progressive politics based upon solidarity, community, and innovation. This position sees community building and social solidarity as core elements in remaking the economy in a new light.

As noted, one of the attributes of stagnation is increasingly static wages (in real terms) among the majority of the population. In addition to this plateau or decline in the growth of wages is increasing decline in overall job security as flexible employment, temporary work, informal labor, and short-term contracting replace steady, full-time, family-wage work.

The stagnation of real wages combined with job insecurity is transforming the workforce into the “precariate” (a portmanteau of “precarious” and “proletariat”): people who do not have the job security of the previous generation. The precariate is not simply the underclass but often people with job experience, education, and some assets who are often working several part-time positions to make ends meet.

With the economy faltering, the question then is how to organize politically and economically to restore—and perhaps even establish greater—equity, fairness, and democracy to this economy? And how is this to be done in the face of an increasingly globalized, monopolistic economy and a fragmented, precarious workforce? With the relative size of the U.S. unionized workforce in decline for decades, where should we look for ideas that could offer effective strategies for organizing the unemployed and underskilled in the face of the growing monopolistic economic power of corporations?

Perhaps one of the best places to look is in the earlier labor history of the United States. Before the establishment of the National Labor Relations Board, sanctioned collective bargaining, and other pro-union legislation, the situation at the turn of the twentieth century was oddly similar to that in play today. Corporations were growing exponentially in political and economic strength. Workers were largely unorganized, especially workers without specific high-end skills. While some skilled workers were organized, they represented a small fraction of the workforce. Unorganized workers often had to work on short contracts or with no job security at all, a tableau not unlike the conditions facing many workers today.

Into this highly precarious economic condition stepped the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), whose history and experience offer insight into how to grapple with these problems today. Founded in Chicago in 1905 by a veritable “who’s who” of the leading, militant labor organizers of the 20th century, including Mother Jones, Eugene Debs, and “Big Bill” Haywood, the IWW sought to organize and build “One Big Union” as a counterforce to emerging monopoly capitalism. The key to this strategy was to organize industrially as opposed to the then-contemporary practice of organizing workers on the basis of specific crafts as promoted by the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The IWW (or Wobblies, as they became known) saw the self-defeating nature of this craft-based strategy. When workers were organized in separate crafts under separate contracts, employers frequently pitted one group of workers against another. To make matters more difficult, the AFL activists sought only to organize skilled workers, leaving unskilled workers, the vast majority of the workforce, out of the equation.

True to their vision of building “One Big Union of all the workers,” the Wobblies set out to organize any and all members of the working class, skilled as well as unskilled, manufacturing as well as service workers, Black, Mexican, and Ethnic as well as White and Protestant, and women as well as men. To accomplish this task, IWW activists lit out across the country (and eventually around the world) to organize workers wherever the job was. From logging and mining operations in the Pacific Northwest and Great Basin, to the dock yards along the Coasts, and the auto industry, wheat fields, and orchards in the Midwest, the Wobblies began agitating for higher wages, safer and more dignified working conditions, and, ultimately, industrial democracy.

The documentary film The Wobblies, by Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer, and the book The Industrial Workers of the World: Its First Hundred Years, by Fred Thompson and Jon Bekken, offer an excellent introduction and exploration of the IWW’s origins, great battles, strategies, and continued agitation and survival into the 21st century. Bird and Schaffer’s film, released in 1979, covers the union’s early, “heroic” period. The film’s perhaps greatest asset includes numerous interviews with IWW organizers from the 1910s and 1920s, veterans of the epic strikes in the textile mills of Lawrence (MA) and Paterson (NJ), and the original timber wars of the Pacific Northwest. Although many of the storytellers are old, in their 70s and 80s, their fire and whimsy is still evident when recounting their times on the picket line, in the lumber camps, or riding the rails. Known as the “singing union,” from the Wobblies’ proclivity for breaking into song, several of the oldtimers launch into choruses of “Hold the Fort” or “Halleluiah, I’m a Bum,” or other standards of the IWW’s Little Red Songbook.

Although the historic film clips and first-person narratives of Bird and Schaffer’s Wobblies are irreplaceable gems, the film suffers from a general lack of context. Without at least a passing knowledge of the IWW and the labor struggles of the early 20th century, some of the film’s more subtle points are lost. An example, especially relevant in today’s globalized workforce, is the very effective Wobbly strategy of bringing together workers across language and ethnic lines to join together in solidarity. While this gains passing reference in one interview with an old IWW hand, the film’s narrators leave this largely unexplained and unexplored. In addition, the severe and at times murderous repression the Wobblies faced is underplayed. The one exception in this latter case is the massacre of Wobbly members on the docks at Everett (WA) in 1916.

Another place where Bird and Schaffer’s treatment is too subtle is in the explanation of IWW tactics for “getting the goods” in workplace concessions from the bosses. While one Wobbly veteran makes a case for the union’s innovation of “striking on the job” and several others briefly comment on the power of sabotage, the film only hints at the tactical and strategic value of these shop-floor means of direct action. (For a fuller treatment of Wobbly theory and practice on nonviolent direct action, see Flynn, Smith, & Trautmann, 2014). Similarly, the IWW’s overall vision of establishing a “Commonwealth of Labor” organized around industrial democracy makes only the most minor appearance in the film. Still, despite these shortcomings, Bird and Schaffer’s film gives voice to the first generation of Wobblies, and it is a voice that still speaks with strength and determination for social equity.

Thompson and Bekkes’ The Industrial Workers of the World: Its First Hundred Years, 1905–2005 fills in many of the details hinted at in Wobblies. Fred Thompson, long-time editor of the IWW newspaper The Industrial Worker, writes the book’s first half covering the union’s growth and ultimate repression and near disappearance during its first 50 years between 1905 and 1955. Covering the actions of the union’s campaigns in detail, Thompson describes the events, strategy, tactics, and occasionally theory of the IWW’s powerful and tumultuous first half-century.

Particularly strong is Thompson’s relating of the large number of industries targeted by IWW organizers during this period. Thompson details campaigns across job sites and economic sectors around the country (and occasionally around the world). Although Thompson impressively recounts the tremendous breadth of the Wobblies’ energy and activism, the narrative often suffers from his decidedly nonacademic and nearly staccato news headline style that moves as restlessly and swiftly from one IWW organizing campaign to another as the rail-riding Wobbly organizers themselves.

The book makes up for this weakness in its second part, written mainly by Bekke, who joined the IWW in 1978 and later became its General Secretary-Treasurer. In a smoother, more recognizable style, Bekke covers the Wobblies’ recovery after the marked repression of the Palmer Raids and the Red Scare of the 1920s. Like a tough old lumber worker in the primeval forest, the Industrial Workers of the World, though battered, outlawed, ignored, and isolated both by the owning classes and the more mainstream elements of the American labor movement, refused to disappear.

Bekke details the union’s stubborn refusal to “go gently into that good night” of historical irrelevance. Instead, it is found organizing workers in small shop manufacturing firms in the Ohio Valley, grocery workers in the west, and bicycle messengers in the skyscraper canyons of New York City. The IWW makes inroads into the receptive world of consumer co-ops spawned in the 1970s and appears doing solidarity work in nonintervention struggles fighting the new imperialism. While still too weak to make efforts at organizing the types of “commanding heights” industries the Wobblies took on in the past such as auto, timber, and mining, Bekke outlines the union’s return to its roots of organizing the unskilled, in the form of today’s precariate, in the proliferation of low-wage, low-security service industries. The contemporary IWW also finds friends and new members in rank-and-file workers abandoned or fed up with the declining remnants of the bureaucratic, old-line unions.

In telling this story, Bekke shows the promise and the difficulties of forging new paths in organizing workers in the fragmented, global labor market. Though many of the contemporary Wobbly campaigns end in defeat (as do those of most other contemporary unions), their efforts are revealing. Of particular note in this regard is the union’s growing return to shop[1]floor organizing built around addressing workers’ immediate concerns rather than the elusive pursuit of gaining recognition from the largely compromised National Labor Relations Board.

It is here that the future promise and past relevance of the IWW is the strongest. Born as an uncompromising union dedicated to solidarity and establishing a new economy in which the workers “take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the earth,” the Wobblies struck fear in the established powers of both monopoly capitalism and elitist unionism (IWW, 2016). The root of this fear was—and still is—that unskilled, transient laborers (representing the majority of the U.S. and global workforce), upon which systems of exploitation were and still are dependent, might organize and find a voice.

During its initial heyday, the Wobblies were the vehicle through which this voice was found. Planners should take a particular interest in this history and its contemporary possibilities for two reasons. First, as the global and national economies continue to become more unstable and less able to “deliver the goods” for a growing percentage of working people and their families (a category that now includes large portions of the middle class as well as traditional working class), planners will increasingly be called upon to address these issues. Our response cannot be to offer more of the same half-measures of market solutions or “public–private partnerships” that have proven ineffective in staving off this condition. Only a sense of the history of previous struggles and their relevance for the present and future can provide the type of grist that generating new strategies for economic justice require.

Second, the IWW sought, as its ultimate goal, to establish a far more equitable society where all people regardless of race, gender, skill level, or ethnicity could share in the fruits of production that are the domain of no single person or class. Planners are fundamental to finding the way forward to such a society. The IWW’s idealism and committed struggle provide a “north star” by which we can begin to chart our course. Their history is groundwork for the future planners will have to help build as we face the challenges of the present day.

As the global economy becomes increasingly unstable, undermining job security and the dignity of work, the IWW’s pioneering tactics and perhaps even the union itself may again be the means through which working people of all walks secure “the good things in life” while building “a new society within the shell of the old.” For planners, organizers, and humane persons interested in making that change, Wobblies and The Industrial Workers of the World: Its First Hundred Years are a fine means of learning how to jump on that train.

About the Author

Dr. Robert F. Young works as an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the fields of urban planning, sustainable economic development, and urban ecology. His research centers on the planning, governance, and financing of metropolitan green infrastructure and on economic development initiatives for sustainable cities and regions. Dr. Young’s most recent academic publications include articles in the Journal of the American Planning Association, Landscape and Urban Planning, Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, Urban Ecosystems, and a chapter in the book Garden Cities to Green Cities published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

References

Bernanke, B. (2011, August 26). The near-and longer-term prospects for the U.S. economy. Speech given at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Economic Symposium, Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Retrieved from http:// www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bernanke20110826a.htm

Flynn, E., Smith, W. C., & Trautmann, W. E. (2014). Direct action and sabotage: Three classic IWW pamphlets from the 1910s. Oakland, CA: PM Press.

Foster, J. (2009). The great financial crisis: Causes and consequences. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Hall, R. (2011). The long slump. American Economic Review, 101(2), 431–469.

Horsley, S. (NPR, May 26). (2015). “Despite an economy on the rise, American paychecks remain stuck.” It’s All Politics. National Public Radio. Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/sections/ itsallpolitics/2015/05/26/408555544/despite-economic-climb[1]american-paychecks-remain-stuck

Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). (2016). Preamble to the constitution of the industrial workers of the world. Retrieved from http://www.iww.org/ culture/official/preamble.shtml

Magdoff, F., & Foster, J. (2014). Stagnation and financialization: The nature of the contradiction. Monthly Review, 66(1), 1–24.

It is the wager of Planning for a Material World (2015), a collection of essays edited by Lauren Lieto and Robert Beauregard, that new materialism provides planners with a “path-breaking” theoretical approach “tightly connected to the material world they hope to change” (p. 2). The new materialism, as derived here from the actor-network theory (ANT) of Bruno Latour and assemblage thinking of Gilles Deleuze, considers the ways both humans and non-humans act in concert to produce the built and natural environment. Such a perspective requires extending our understanding of what constitutes an actor in the world to include all material things. Acknowledging the agency of material things, the authors argue, means planning solely for humans is no longer adequate; planners must also account for the materiality, the interrelation between humans and non-humans, of social practices. This perspective challenges traditional conceptions of neighborhoods, cities, nature, and society, positing instead a more open-ended understanding of how these concepts are merely processes of interactions between people and material things.

This “methodological symmetry” (p. 3) offers planning thought a new, pragmatic line of inquiry into the social and natural world while undermining long-held assumptions. New materialist approaches do not consider the social a preexisting entity, but rather a constantly changing assemblage of both human and non-human actor-networks. These assemblages restlessly form and combine due to the intensity of the association. More intense networks of assemblages draw more actors, while lesser ones dissolve. Key to these processes is the ways non-human things act to bind humans together to actually enable social life. Material things are not just the “passive background” (p. 2) of human life; they are active agents that make it possible. Therefore, both humans and non-humans are capable of exercising agency to form assemblages. Such a perspective considers the materiality of the home itself in the formation of the family, with the home an actor in the family assemblage as much as the family members because of its capacity to shelter. By extending agency beyond humans to include the entire physical world, Lieto and Beauregard argue that “planning with and for humans alone is unacceptable; in the unfolding of urban processes, non-human things cannot be ignored” (p. 1).

Compiled from six conference papers and four original contributions, Planning for a Material World serves as an introduction to new materialism, ANT, and assemblage thinking as well as a guide to their deployment in planning practice, social science research, and policy studies. The book is organized into three parts: a short introduction and coda framing new materialist approaches, four theoretical essays examining its potential effects on planning research, and six applied case studies. Proceeding from an assumption that the world is inherently unstable, contributors “focus on how provisional spatial orderings preserve in the midst of heterogeneity and fluidity” (p. 3). Broadly speaking, each essay aims to demonstrate places in research and practice where privileging human and non-human actors symmetrically uncovers new paths of inquiry. These insights are structured by challenging three “traditional incommensurabilities” (p. 3): change and stability, formal and informal, and nature and culture.

Consideration of the conceptual divide between change and stability takes up five chapters and represents the majority of the book. Topics as diverse as the rise of congestion pricing in the United States; the (in)stability of meeting minutes in development processes in the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Slovenia; and the normative potential of assemblage thinking challenge the divide at a variety of spatial scales and conceptual levels. In general, the authors posit stability (of ideas, built form, etc.) as a requirement for change, not a hindrance to it, because forces of change constantly undermine so-called stability. Each essay attempts to break inquiry into these concepts out of stereotypes that celebrate change as progressive, but stability as reactionary. Instead, the authors argue that material things, concepts, structures, and human relationships must be considered within constant processes of becoming, gaining more or less stability over time depending on the strength and quality of their assemblage.

The impact of this approach on planning is best demonstrated in Beauregard’s contribution “Planning and the politics of resistance.” This essay offers the strongest explanation of a new materialist approach to the processes of change and its implications for planning theory. For Beauregard, planning is about effecting change, and thus, successful planning initiatives must do more than just propose: they must be adopted and implemented. These initiatives inevitably run into opposition, requiring planners to be persuasive, not just to offer expertise. Planners are accustomed to encountering human resistance, but tend to miss the way material actors also serve as obstacles to change. Accounting for this material resistance, and overcoming it, Beauregard calls the “politics of things.”

To overcome the politics of things (and people), “planners have to attach themselves and other influential actors to assemblages that serve their purpose” (p. 11). At the same time, they must identify assemblages that have formed in opposition. This requires a deep understanding of the various ways stakeholders, community members, and non-human actors are interrelated. For Beauregard, “unpacking and rearranging these interdependencies is the planners’ main task” (p. 11). To be persuasive then requires forming and/or weakening assemblages not just with other humans, but with material things as well. As a result, and against communicative approaches, “being consequential involves more than just talk” (p. 10).

The conception of politics as something both humans and non-humans are capable of allows Beauregard to offer a new materialist critique of Foucauldian-inspired discourse analysis. Restaging Flyvbjerg’s (1998) well-known case study of the Aalborg Project in Denmark, Beauregard demonstrates the ways this approach, by privileging only political relations between human actors, marginalizes the very material spaces and places at stake in the project. Missing from this discursive approach to power is an understanding of the intensity of binding assemblages that formed in opposition to the plan, an opposition arising from proposed changes to the material space of a commercial street. Without taking into account how these assemblages of human and non-human actors led to the defeat of the plan—which Flyvbjerg famously characterized as the defeat of rationality by power—we are left with an interpretation of events that disregards the politics of things: the material resistance embedded in the streets, parking spaces, and automobiles that faced reduction if the project was adopted. Beauregard argues that Flyvbjerg’s interpretation specifically, and discourse analysis in general, is necessarily incomplete unless it symmetrically analyzes the capacity and agency of both human and material things to resist and support initiatives.

The essay concludes by showing how a symmetrical analysis of human and material things also helps planners identify, alternatively, instances where human agents have been marginalized. Examining the City of Detroit’s efforts to combat blight through a massive demolition program, Beauregard demonstrates how the basic assumption of the program—that blight is caused by abandoned and unsafe buildings and properties—is flawed. Overlooking the fundamental ways humans act with material things in the cycle of disinvestment, Beauregard argues, led to delays in the initiative caused by avoidable problems. For example, the program quickly exhausted basic resources like gravel to fill in basements and enough trained personnel to safely remove structures. Further slowing progress were “scavengers stealing the metal stakes that held up the fencing used to clear sites” (p. 18). Considering blight as a social and material process, not a stable thing to be removed, a new materialist approach would have instead identified the existing assemblages that support property disinvestment and worked to form opposition alliances with similarly minded neighbors, nonprofits, and other private investors. In this way, problems that prevented the program from reaching its potential might have been avoided or overcome. By giving careful consideration to the ways that “planners never act alone but always with [humans and] material things” (p.10), this essay is a powerful reflection on the kind of thinking that new materialism offers planning.

Three chapters are devoted to addressing the way formality and informality are typically considered within planning. Agreeing with many postcolonial theorists that formal and informal practices are enmeshed, the contributors nevertheless proceed differently from this understanding. In “Things, rules, and politics,” Lieto argues that—despite rhetoric to the contrary— informality and formality are studied separately, at separate scales, and using separate methods (e.g., local ethnography versus national policy analysis). ANT and assemblage thinking blur the boundaries between these concepts by assigning them equal importance, but without reducing one to the other or subsuming them under an umbrella concept. Lieto explains how even though the city of Naples (Italy) has formal parking space size requirements, they can be inappropriate given space constraints. Residents in central Naples use household items (chairs, drying racks) to delineate “micro-spaces” on semipublic property. Police and municipal agencies look the other way, neither enforcing the law nor sanctioning its circumvention. This mixing of formal rules with informal practices facilitates social cohesion by filing in the gaps where abstract policy meets concrete situations. Other examples, including chapters on informal waste removal practices by migrants and Roma in Naples and the World Bank’s attempt to formalize microfinance into a global poverty–alleviation policy, further blur the informal/formal divide. By offering a symmetrical perspective to this (now less clear) division, the authors make the case hat neither planning researchers nor practitioners can afford to operate solely on one side.

Finally, two chapters are dedicated to showing how new materialism problematizes current understandings of the nature and culture divide. The case studies, both in greater Naples, focus on an attempted pedestrianization of a seaside roadway and the potential of ecological urbanism to revitalize a deindustrialized area. These essays are perhaps the weakest in the collection, if only because they do not convincingly elaborate what exactly is new here for researchers or practitioners. In many ways, existing ecological planning approaches take account of both humans and non-humans as a rule (stereotyped in the basic “Three E’s” of sustainability model). This is unfortunate, because it leaves unrealized the promise for planning theory found in Bruno Latour’s challenge to this divide in We Have Never Been Modern (1993). Clearer elaboration of the differences between existing ecological approaches and ANT/assemblage thinking would have made these chapters more helpful.

Some additional questions remain. The authors claim new materialist approaches represent an advance over existing planning theories and methodologies. This claim rests on the practicality and ubiquity offered by ANT and assemblage thinking. Both these advantages are the result of the importance new materialism gives to material things: Investigations are grounded, literally at times, on the concrete things that make up the world, and because material things exist everywhere in the physical world, this approach is similarly ubiquitous. As a result, the authors here demonstrate the importance of an impressive range of material actors, including trash, paper, rainwater, even “particulate matter” (p. 16) to go along with buildings, streets, and institutions. But ubiquity and practicality do not always go hand in hand. The analytic boundaries between which material things are to be considered and which can be ignored are undefined; even if such boundaries were to be set, is it unclear what would prevent them from being arbitrary given that the entire “material world is…capable of acting and making a difference” (p. 2). Thus, the onus to account for the various assemblages of people and material things amid the “indeterminacy, becoming, fluidity, and heterogeneity of urban processes” (p. 3) would seem to quickly become overwhelming. This is not to diminish the imperative of ANT and assemblage thinking to open-ended interrogation; merely to point out that its claims to practicality are not so clear-cut.

Which material actors do—and do not—merit description raises a deeper political question, especially considering one of the text’s major claims is the existence of a “politics of things” (pp. 7, 11) or, more strongly, that “things have politics” (p. 27). However, material things do not actually have “values or hold moral responsibility…rather they do things on their own” (pp. 38–39); any value assigned to their actions or capabilities is the result of humans. This means that the “politics of things” is the politics that humans have assigned to them, not something independently conceived by things themselves. The politics of things is thus a value-free politics, which is to say not a politics at all. This would seem to disclose an asymmetrical power relation, between actors who “produce effects” (p. 2), and those who assign value or meaning to those effects. This imbalance indicates a social and material divide wherever one finds language, politics, and history, which is to say almost everywhere. The “politics of things” seems to be a strategy by the authors to correct this asymmetry, but it is not entirely evident how a merely rhetorical politics squares with new materialism’s “socio-material relationalist ontology” (p. 136).

Regardless of these concerns, Planning for a Material World calls planning’s attention to the deep significance of material things for human practices. Once this perspective is considered seriously, it is difficult to view cities, planning research, or practice in the same way. In extending new materialist approaches to planning, the text represents an important achievement. Hopefully it will spark a much-needed renewal of interest in the ability of planning theory to provide a framework for researchers and practitioners to better understand and act in (and with) the material world.

About Author

Stephen Zigmund is a doctoral student in Community and Regional Planning at the University of Texas at Austin. Address: University of Texas, School of Architecture, 1 University Station, B7500, Austin, TX 78712, USA. Email: stephen. zigmund@utexas.edu

References

Flyvbjerg, B. (1998). Rationality and power: Democracy in practice. (S. Sampson, Trans.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. (C. Porter, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Abstract

In the face of a severe and deepening affordable rental housing shortage in the United States, subsidized rental housing, though comprising a small portion of the housing stock, is a critical resource. In this study, we synthesize and summarize secondary research and opinions from eight leading experts on the broad currents of subsidized rental housing policy in the United States. We present the resulting lessons across three themes: the persistence of segregation; the disappointment of poverty deconcentration; and the elusiveness of access to opportunity. We seek to identify consensus on what is known, and point to what needs to be learned via future research.

Keywords: Housing policy; subsidized rental housing; housing segregation; poverty deconcentration; access to opportunity

Introduction

A recent analysis shows that in the United States as of 2014, only 31 rental housing units affordable to and available to households earning 30% or less of the median income in their region exists for every 100 such households (National Low Income Housing Coalition, 2016). In only two states—sparsely populated North Dakota and West Virginia—did this ratio equal or exceed 50% (National Low Income Housing Coalition, 2016). For low-income renters across the nation, and increasingly even for reasonably well-off renters in a small but growing subset of metropolitan regions, a lack of affordable, safe, and well-located rental housing is a formidable impediment to a better life (Glaeser, Gyourko & Saks, 2005, 2006).

And yet there is ample reason to believe that the problem will likely get worse, not better, in coming decades. At root there is the seemingly inescapable trend, now decades long, toward greater levels of income inequality (Piketty & Saez, 2014). More short-term factors, above all the ongoing fallout from the Great Recession nearly a decade after it first began, have sharply increased the number of renter households competing for housing. The fiscal consequences of the long recovery from economic depression have resulted in a drastic reduction in federal rental housing subsidies at just the moment when they are most needed (Joint Center for Housing Studies, 2014). The pressure is likely to increase still further; when the Cityscape journal recently asked four groups of housing experts to project homeownership rates to the year 2050, only one forecast that homeownership would eventually increase to just shy of the pre–Great Recession level of 69% (Haurin, 2016). The remaining three projected middle-of-the-road scenarios with homeownership rates ranging from approximately 53% to 58% in 2050, all considerably reduced from the 63% of today (Acolin, Goodman & Wachter, 2016; Myers & Lee, 2016; Nelson, 2016).

This trend in homeownership is aggravated by a traditionally weak policy response from the federal government. For all of the sound and fury in public discourse over subsidized rental housing dating back to 1937—the year the federal government began permanently funding rental housing— and continuing unabated to the present day, such units represent only 5% of the total housing stock in the United States, compared with 17% in France and 20% in the United Kingdom (European Union, 2013). At the time of this writing, during a vigorously contested presidential election cycle with no mention of rental housing from candidates of either major political party, it seems difficult to imagine that a policy response equal to the deepening rental housing crisis will emerge anytime soon.

However, it is not impossible to imagine that these trends will cause rental housing to rise among the ranks of prominent policy issues in the United States. If and when this happens, it will be important to be able to answer fundamental questions about subsidized rental housing: What do we already know? And what do we need to learn? While we cannot definitively answer these questions, in this study we endeavor to take the first steps on a long road to doing so.

Defining Subsidized Rental Housing

Basic nomenclature is a seemingly trivial but real barrier to discourse, whether popular or academic, on low-cost housing in the United States. Affordable housing is a term that, although widely used, often obscures more than it clarifies because it inevitably raises the question: “Affordable for whom?” We opt here to instead use the straightforward, descriptive term subsidized rental housing to refer to rental housing units in which both tenants’ incomes and rents are legally restricted by virtue of federal governmental subsidies granted to their developers or tenants. In our usage, this term includes dwellings occupied by renters who receive tenant-based subsidies such as Housing Choice Vouchers.

While we recognize that the term “subsidized” in conjunction with rental housing has at times served as a signpost for a long history of ideologically driven hostility toward publicly assisted rental housing (Radford, 1996), we nevertheless maintain that it is accurate and intend it in a straightforwardly descriptive, neutral manner. In any event, honest commentators recognize the indisputable fact that U.S. homeowners, above all those with high incomes, receive federal taxpayer subsidies that dwarf those directed toward rental housing (Downs, 2008).

Plan for the Article

In this study we synthesize the state of knowledge on subsidized rental housing in the United States according to three themes, and seek to identify gaps in knowledge connected to each one. The first of these is racial segregation, a deeply embedded and stubbornly persistent feature of both life in the United States in general and its subsidized rental housing in particular. The second is poverty deconcentration, an overarching policy goal that has animated American housing policy for decades but that housing scholars are increasingly questioning. The third, access to opportunity, is a relatively unfamiliar, though emergent, research and housing policy frontier in the United States.

We explore the state of knowledge across these three themes on two tracks. First, we review existing literature, seeking to identify points of consensus where they exist. Second, we report results of our interviews with eight expert interviewees (Table 1). We asked each of them, “What do we need to learn about subsidized rental housing in the United States?” The three themes we present here emerged from both the literature review and the expert interviews.

Following our literature review for each of the three themes, we report the most notable responses that emerged from the expert interviewees. Finally, we close with a brief summary and synthesis of our findings, also noting progress in addressing chronic homelessness, for decades a seemingly immovable phenomenon in the United States, via supportive housing. We view supportive housing as a positive example of a productive policy shift informed by research that could point the way towards eventual headway on the overall shortage of rental housing, especially for low-income households, that at the present moment seems equally intractable.

Racial Segregation: Stubbornly Persistent Despite Subsidized Rental Housing Programs

There is a vast academic scholarship on racial segregation in the United States. Massey and Denton (1993) provide the definitive account of the harm done to people of color, particularly to African Americans, by longstanding, ongoing housing discrimination. While some evidence shows that segregation diminished even as overall racial and ethnic diversity sharply increased, housing discrimination persists and African Americans continue to disproportionately bear its brunt (Alba & Denton, 2004). For many households of color, discrimination constrains housing options, reduces access to their top-choice neighborhoods, and increases housing costs over what they otherwise would be.

Differential outcomes according to tenants’ race continue within housing subsidy programs, and not just in the unsubsidized rental housing market. Even the federal Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program, the leading rental housing subsidy in the United States and one its proponents envisioned as a means of empowering its participants to move to opportunity-rich neighborhoods, appears to fit this pattern. After controlling for mobility, rent, and other factors, Basolo and Nguyen (2005) find that voucher holders of color in diverse Orange County (CA) were more likely than non-Hispanic White households to live in poorer neighborhoods.2 Galvez’s (2010) findings mirror those of Basolo and Nguyen: African Americans using vouchers live in poorer neighborhoods than their White counterparts, although African Americans with vouchers live in less poor neighborhoods than those without, while Whites with vouchers live in poorer neighborhoods than those without.

Meanwhile, scholars are heeding Galvez’s (2010) call for more research to distinguish whether the voucher program’s racially disparate outcomes are intrinsic to the program itself or to the populations it serves. Rosen’s (2014) ethnographic study in Baltimore (MD) reveals that many landlords steer the most disadvantaged voucher holders into units in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods.3 Taking the tenants’ viewpoint, a longitudinal study of 100 low-income African-American households in Mobile (AL) has found that “the administration and implementation of the voucher program make it difficult for [these] low-income households to overcome the existing structural and discriminatory barriers to geographic mobility” (DeLuca, Garboden & Rosenblatt, 2013, p. 276). The barriers in the voucher program’s implementation include the short time periods allotted for tenants to search for units, and pressure from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) on local housing authorities to maintain short lease-up times for the vouchers they issue.

Expert Interviewees on Research Frontiers on Racial Segregation and Subsidized Rental Housing

Our expert interviewees identified two main areas in which research on the interaction between racial segregation and subsidized rental housing is needed. The first concerns the need to identify specific program-related barriers, particularly with HCVs, that prevent households of color from accessing less-segregated housing. The studies by Rosen (2014) and DeLuca, Garboden, and Rosenblatt (2013) are promising, but far more research along these lines is needed.

The other major theme that arose is the need to understand disparate impacts of the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program, the most important site-based subsidy for subsidized rental housing, on tenant populations on the basis of race and ethnicity. In their pioneering work, Cummings and DiPasquale (1999) find that much LIHTC housing is sited in relatively racially homogeneous areas. In inner cities, most neighborhoods with LIHTC developments have populations of at least 80% people of color. However, even now very little is known about the roughly 2.6 million households living in LIHTC housing, including their race and ethnicity compared with residents of the surrounding neighborhoods.

It is therefore apparent that the two most important subsidized rental housing programs in the United States are failing to help overcome—or are even actively exacerbating—the longstanding racial discrimination in housing that has plagued the United States for at least a century. Finding out exactly how and why needs to be a top priority for research.

Poverty Deconcentration: A Longstanding Housing Policy Imperative Under Attack

For the better part of a half-century, poverty deconcentration, or the geographic dispersion of low-income households away from neighborhoods in which they predominate, has been an overarching federal policy priority, even as the specific means to do so have changed dramatically over the decades. The seminal poverty deconcentration program, Gautreaux, stemmed from a mandate emerging from a 1976 U.S. Supreme Court subsidizing the relocation of residents of segregated and distressed Chicago public housing to predominantly White city neighborhoods and nearby suburbs. Gautreaux inspired a similar federal initiative, Moving To Opportunity (MTO), rolled out in five cities in 1992. MTO stands alone among worldwide poverty deconcentration programs in that its random selection of participants has allowed researchers to evaluate its results with statistical rigor (Cheshire, 2006).

Most recently, Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI), the signature urban policy of President Bill Clinton, replaced dozens of public housing developments with mixed-income housing and vouchers issued to residents of the redeveloped public housing sites. These three influential initiatives have been supplemented by dozens of smaller-scale programs throughout the nation using counseling, search and relocation assistance, and vouchers, as well as the Welfare-to-Work demonstration program and initiatives to “voucher out” non-public subsidized rental housing developments with expiring subsidies.4 Thus, poverty deconcentration has been consistent housing policy in the United States from 1976 to the present, with the Obama Administration continuing the essence of HOPE VI under its Choice Neighborhoods initiative.

The long history of poverty deconcentration initiatives, particularly MTO and HOPE VI, has yielded a trove of evaluations and academic studies. To paraphrase Goetz and Chapple’s (2010) review of this literature, the results are in, and they are unimpressive. High-poverty-area residents often “move to another high-poverty, racially concentrated neighborhood that offers little improvement over their previous communities” (Goetz & Chapple, 2010, p. 9). They do find that relocated households feel safer, and there is some evidence that they experience improved mental health. However, they find no evidence of improvements in employment, income, welfare dependency, or physical wellbeing. Worst of all, relocations sever the rich, location-specific social networks that low-income households rely upon more heavily than do affluent families.

In an overview of literature examining outcomes for low-income residents of mixed-income communities, Joseph, Chaskin, and Webber’s (2007) conclusions are strikingly similar. Of the four claims in favor of mixed[1]income communities that they evaluate, the only one supported by empirical evidence is that low-income residents of mixed-income communities gain greater informal social control and access to better services. Meanwhile, there is little evidence of socioeconomic benefits through place-based social networks ostensibly enabled by mixed-income communities.

Why has poverty deconcentration proved disappointing? Goetz and Chapple (2010) assert that the “neighborhood effects” literature that originally justified poverty deconcentration overemphasizes harm from concentrated social distress, called the “contagion effects of place.” Meanwhile, these early studies undervalue local social networks. This would help explain the repeated finding that residents are surprisingly attached to their original, although distressed, communities, and are reluctant to move far away. Overgeneralizing the singularly deplorable conditions in Chicago public housing and the benefits of Gautreaux may have spurred a nationwide adoption of dispersion policy. Accordingly, the critique of place-based housing and community development underpinning poverty deconcentration deserves reconsideration.

Another critique of poverty deconcentration asserts that neighborhood effects proponents have misread economic upgrading processes in some communities that appear dysfunctional according to census data. Instead, at least some high-poverty communities are places where newcomers, often immigrants, find cheap housing, save money, begin to upgrade their skills, and then eventually move on to higher-status communities. Viewed this way, such communities, though by no means lacking in social problems, are successfully fostering upward socioeconomic mobility, even if poverty rates and other measures of social distress within them appear to be high at particular points in time.

In a journalistic account, Saunders (2011) proposes the West Adams district of South Los Angeles as a successful “arrival city.” But little quantitative research has systematically identified U.S. “arrival cities” and distinguished them from high-poverty neighborhoods in which residents are unable to escape poverty.

Ironically, RAD’s full-throated embrace of a quasi-privatization of public housing is used, unlike HOPE VI and its successor programs, in a serious effort to allow existing residents to remain in place (Smith, 2015). The swift rollout of the program has taken housing scholars by surprise, and its implications are as yet unclear (Smith, 2015). Monitoring the effects of RAD will be an important task for researchers in the near future.

Expert Interviewees on Research Frontiers on Poverty Deconcentration and Subsidized Rental Housing

Two of our expert interviewees independently mention an additional critique of poverty deconcentration, namely the poorly understood effects of transportation costs on residents who are relocated away from impoverished, but centrally located, neighborhoods. In recent years the Housing + Transportation, or “H+T,” Affordability Index, has begun to draw attention to this set of issues. The index quantifies affordability burdens not simply as the ratio of housing costs to income, but housing costs and transportation costs to income.5 Using this more comprehensive measure, suburban neighborhoods distant from jobs, services, and public transportation are less affordable when compared with high-density, mixed-use urban locations than they initially appear.

Alternatively stated, the H + T Affordability Index shows that low[1]income households must own one or more automobiles to function adequately in automobile-oriented settings. This financial burden would explain Glaeser, Kahn, and Rappaport’s (2000) finding that low[1]income households actively seek out urban areas to be closer to public transportation and jobs. Although not all low-poverty neighborhoods are suburban, and not all suburban neighborhoods are low poverty, the association between poverty deconcentration and suburban destinations for dispersed households remains strong. Thus, research on how drastic changes in transportation accessibility affect low-income households will be paramount in evaluating the benefits—or lack thereof—of moves away from impoverished neighborhoods.

Another expert interviewee emphasizes the lack of consensus on the beneficial destination neighborhoods for low-income households seeking to flee neighborhoods that are “poverty traps”: what Coulton, Theodos, and Turner (2009) refer to as “isolating communities.” Undoubtedly the transportation issues noted above would form a major component of such a determination, but not the only one. Related to this, another expert interviewee notes that it would be important to study whether the trend of building affordable housing in peripheral locations within metropolitan regions is causally linked to the trend of “suburbanization of poverty” now well under way in the United States (Kneebone & Berube, 2013).

Finally, an expert interviewee notes the rich data that exists, but remains largely unanalyzed, on the length of residency and subsequent life outcomes of residents living in subsidized rental housing operated by nonprofits. Such information would aid in comparing the merits of long[1]term residency in such housing to those of moving to a neighborhood that is low poverty but lacks on-site services.

Access to Opportunity: An Alternative to Poverty Deconcentration, But an Elusive One

Although moving low-income households into “geographies of opportunity” (Galster & Killen, 1995) through site-based subsidized rental housing or vouchers may seem to be the other side of the poverty deconcentration coin, on closer inspection, it is something distinct. Poverty deconcentration policies tend to ensure that residents in areas of concentrated poverty leave those areas, but, as noted earlier, they rarely assure that these households subsequently arrive in neighborhoods with low poverty. The placement of housing affordable to low-income renters into truly low-poverty areas, with safe streets, high-performing schools, and typically high homeownership rates—something that arguably fosters access to opportunity—has proven to be a tough nut to crack (Calavita & Mallach, 2010).6 Unlike poverty deconcentration, few housing scholars question the benefits of more access to opportunity, which might best be considered wealth dilution.7 Less is known about access to opportunity in the United States than about poverty deconcentration, partly because less has been accomplished. Below we survey what is known, and what remains to be learned.

Little access to opportunity seems to occur through established U.S. federal programs. For instance, Basolo and Nguyen (2005) find little evidence that voucher holders in Santa Ana (CA) had used them to move to higher-income neighborhoods. Kirk McClure (2006), one of our expert interviewees, finds in a nationwide study that LIHTC-funded units tend to be located in somewhat less impoverished neighborhoods than the units inhabited by voucher-assisted families, although they also tend to serve somewhat higher-income families. Worse, in a follow-up national study, he finds that LIHTC housing generally is not built in areas with a shortage of affordable rental housing (McClure, 2010). Cummings and DiPasquale (1999) similarly find that few LIHTC developments are built in high-income neighborhoods.

Reviewing the HCV literature, Galvez (2010) finds a similar lack of access to opportunity. She states that more needs to be learned about the quality of life where voucher holders live (measured via criteria more comprehensive than simply the poverty rate), the experiences of households interacting with the regional housing market while using a voucher, and the causes of diverging outcomes for different racial and ethnic groups.

While combining vouchers and LIHTC housing offers the potential to afford low-income families access to higher-income areas, Galvez (2010) points out that relatively little research has been done on this nexus. A rare exception by Williamson, Smith, and Strambi-Kramer (2009) counterintuitively finds that voucher holders occupying LIHTC-funded apartments in Florida live disproportionately in high-poverty locations.

While federal rental housing programs have achieved disappointing results in furthering access to opportunity, another set of efforts, termed fair share policies, has operated at the regional level for decades with mixed results in a few states. Beginning with public concern over the mid- to late 1960s urban riots, such policies attempted to coerce exclusionary suburbs into approving subsidized housing (Lewis, 2005). Some recent efforts to implement regional fair share housing have been achieved by a political coalition between central cities and older, inner-ring suburbs in regions such as Minnesota’s Twin Cities (Orfield, 2002).

These coalitions have often been hampered by internal mutual distrust, partly exacerbated by racial divisions. When, as in the case of the Twin Cities, they have succeeded in effecting policy reforms, such as empowering a regional authority to disburse federal housing funds and to require local cities to plan for subsidized housing, notable results have been achieved. But the political will for such reforms and the reforms themselves have been fragile and quickly reversible (Goetz, Chapple & Lukermann, 2005).

Lewis (2005) examines statewide affordable housing review mechanisms in four states, including Oregon, which has a state-level regime that applies only to the Portland region. Massachusetts and New Jersey employ what he terms retrospective systems. In these systems the state reviews local production levels of subsidized housing against their fair share obligation to their host regions. Calavita, Grimes, and Mallach (1997) show New Jersey’s success, for example, in spurring local inclusionary zoning ordinances.

By contrast, California has a prospective statewide requirement that local governments plan for future subsidized housing, but does not hold them accountable for achieving actual production targets. Lewis (2005) finds no detectable correlation between state-approved local housing plans and local levels of housing production. He points to California’s weak enforcement mechanisms, which consist only of legal challenges brought by nongovernmental entities and the (rare) withholding of certain federal funds, but no direct state enforcement.

Thus, fair share housing policies have at least the potential to achieve real progress in promoting access to opportunity, particularly when backed by effective enforcement mechanisms. However in the relatively few states where they exist at all, fair share systems are difficult to enact and sustain. What other approaches could help bring increase access to opportunity for low-income renters, and what do we know about them?

Most efforts to achieve access to opportunity beyond fair share regimes seek to attack exclusionary land use policies of the sort documented by Levine (2005). In low-poverty, high-homeownership areas, NIMBY sentiment limits the potential of modifications of LIHTC and other federal housing programs for expanding access to opportunity (Joint Center for Housing Studies, 2010). More empirical research is needed that punctures the myths used to justify land use policies that have the effect (acknowledged or not) of excluding subsidized rental housing from high-opportunity jurisdictions and neighborhoods.

One NIMBY myth is that subsidized rental housing depresses property values of nearby owner-occupied houses. A study of Boston (MA) suburbs finds no evidence that such developments reduce the value of adjacent single-family properties (Pollakowski, Ritchay & Weinrobe, 2005). An earlier study of the effects of six subsidized rental housing developments on single-family house sales prices in the San Francisco Bay Area reaches a similar conclusion (Cummings & Landis, 1993). A more recent Santa Clara County (CA) study by one of the expert interviewees finds that LIHTC developments mostly had positive impacts on the property values of nearby single-family houses, whether they were developed by for-profit entities, housing nonprofits, or local housing authorities (Deng, 2011).

Another NIMBY myth is that onerous local land use regulations such as excessive off-street parking, which increases multifamily housing costs, including affordable rental housing, are needed to protect local quality of life. McDonnell, Madar, and Been (2011) find that New York City’s off-street parking requirements are forcing developers building residential projects near subway stations to provide more off-street parking than the buildings’ residents actually use, thus unnecessarily driving up costs.

Expert Interviewees Discuss Research Frontiers on Access to Opportunity and Subsidized Rental Housing

While the literature cited above describes rigorous quantitative analysis of locational patterns of HCV holders, two of our expert interviewees call for qualitative research on the specific experiences of the households. They advocate for particular emphasis on large households and/or those navigating the tightest housing markets, especially the experiences of those facing the greatest structural obstacles to using HCVs to obtain suitable housing. Another expert calls for research on the nexus between HCV holders and LIHTC housing, examining why this intersection does not happen more often, and why housing nonprofits generally are not pursuing new projects combining LIHTCs and vouchers in low-poverty areas.

One of the experts notes that while the broad contours of the effects of exclusionary land use policies are well known, as noted earlier, much more needs to be learned about such effects in specific geographical areas. Finally, echoing an argument made by Scally and Koenig (2012), still another expert interviewee notes that more research is needed on outcomes stemming from housing with “the whole package” of amenities, including quality schools and access to jobs.

Recommendations for a Subsidized Rental Housing Research Agenda

Our study of these three themes, the research consensus on them, and the gaps in knowledge that still exist among them yields valuable takeaways that should inform the selection of research programs in the near future. First, segregation by race has a long and difficult history in the United States, and is remarkably resistant to well-meaning housing policy. Experience suggests that an intensive focus on the micro-details of subsidized rental housing programs from the standpoint of the residents themselves is essential to combating segregation.

Second, recent history in the United States suggests that a policy focus on poverty deconcentration may lead to disappointing results for affected residents. Existing social networks, the time and monetary costs of transportation, and the role of particular communities as “arrival cities” or “launch pads” for immigrants deserve particular attention from those considering deconcentration policies.

Third, the elusiveness of access to opportunity for low-income renters in the United States implies that a great deal of work needs to be done in this area. The most important tools for attaining these goals in the United States, fair share housing systems, work best when they evaluate past performance by local jurisdictions and impose substantial remedies when targets are not met. In addition, the claims used by local residents to help argue against subsidized rental housing developments in high[1]opportunity locations need to be tested and countered by careful research.

A recent major shift in federal housing policy aimed at addressing chronic homelessness shows that when a political consensus on a sound course of action emerges, informed by convincing results from empirical studies, it is possible for real change to occur. This is the transition from the “Continuum of Care” delivery model (in which individuals emerging from homelessness must demonstrate their readiness to live independently before receiving housing places in subsidized housing) to “Housing First” (in which individuals are given housing regardless of their ongoing substance abuse or mental health issues). For this shift to occur, and for policy makers of both political parties to be convinced that it was a good idea, research first had to demonstrate results in terms of both outcomes and monetary savings. This is indeed what happened (Culhane, Metraux & Hadley, 2002; Hannigan, Samuels & Baker, 2000; Larimer et al., 2009; Lipton, Siegel, Tsemberis, et al., 2004).

Today, a similar policy shift concomitant with the deepening urgency of the lack of affordable rental housing likely is not in the cards. But experience with supportive housing and many other past episodes suggests that those seeking changes should be prepared for moments of opportunity. In the meantime, there is ample scope for researchers to redouble their efforts to learn all we can about subsidized rental housing in the United States.

References

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Abstract

Communities are important intangible assets for regional development, yet current literature either overemphasizes local institutions and localized social networks or focuses on transnational Communities. In this study, I propose a transregional perspective on this issue and try to reveal how the transregional community is a facilitating mechanism for regional economic development. Based on the empirical case of the Chaoshan region in China, I find that transregional communities help a region construct relational proximity with other localities by building distant clusters, sustaining transregional transaction, creating transregional buzz, and initiating transregional start-ups. As a result, regions are able to obtain nonlocal assets to enhance their competitiveness in both domestic and global markets.

Keywords: Transregional communities; regional economic development; small and medium enterprises (SMEs); China

Introduction

Many local governments encourage industrial clusters in the belief that an agglomeration economy would enhance regional competitiveness. Communities are considered essential intangible assets in successful clusters. As Rodriguez-Pose and Storper (2006) point out, communities have beneficial effects by generating trust, reducing transaction costs between economic agents, limiting moral hazards and “free-riding,” mitigating information asymmetries, and enabling the matching of individuals to aggregate interests. Local communities thus are important to support regional collaboration and innovation.

At the same time, some researchers point out the crucial role of transnational communities for regional upgrading in the era of globalization. Transnational communities facilitate ongoing transnational inter-/intrafirm communication and transfer skills and tacit knowledge to developing regions (Yeung, 2009). Indeed, communities are not confined by regional boundaries, but current studies either overemphasize a local level or are trapped in a local/global dichotomy. Hence, I propose in this study the concept of a transregional community, referring to a large group of people sharing a common identity and maintaining social, cultural, economic, and/or political connections although dispersed throughout more than one region. A transregional community at a national scale may also help regional actors access nonlocal assets and promote regional economy.

In this study I attempt to reveal how transregional communities contribute to regional economic development. Empirical studies of the Chaoshan region in China demonstrate that local manufacturing firms, especially small and medium enterprises (SMEs), cooperate with distributors in distant specialized markets through transregional communities to enter and respond to external markets rapidly. The Chaoshan region is the primary settlement area for the Teochews, a subethnic Chinese group. Teochews migrate to different cities in China and abroad while maintaining Teochew identity along with social and economic connections to their hometown. Teochew networks in Southeast Asia, as a prominent example of a transnational community, contribute to transnational business transaction and cooperation (Redding, 1990; Yeung, 2000). Manufacturing firms in Chaoshan also use transnational and transregional Teochew social ties to develop global and domestic markets, respectively. Admittedly, transregional communities are not a necessary condition for regional development. Nevertheless, these social and cultural networks are significant for those regions that lack efficient channels to approach external markets. Transregional communities offer opportunities to strengthen regional competitiveness by using nonlocal resources such as capital, information, and so on.

I present the findings of my research here in six sections. In the next section I offer a literature review and theoretical framework, followed by an empirical background overview and explanation of the methodology. In the fourth section I describe the development of the toy and ceramic industries in Chaoshan, which serve as the case for this study. In the fifth section I discuss how transregional communities contribute to these two industries’ domestic marketing by connecting Chaoshan with distant, specialized markets. In the final section I summarize findings and briefly discuss implications and future research agendas.

Communities and Regional Economic Development

Since the 1970s the mass production of standardized products has been unable to meet rapidly growing consumer demand for specialized and differentiated goods. A flexible production regime has increasingly replaced Fordism (Piore & Sabel, 1984). Regions that successfully adapted to flexible specialization were usually made up of a number of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) connected by specialized transaction linkages and coordinated by social networks (Sforzi, 2003). The sustainable success also depended on “the local culture, the shared understandings and practices that unify a community and define everything from labor market behavior to attitudes toward risk-taking” (Saxenian, 1994, p. 7). Local communities thus were important because this new production regime requires rapid information exchange for speedy response to markets together with in-depth communication for collective learning and regional innovation (Cooke & Morgan, 1998; Storper, 1997).

Meanwhile, transnational communities emerged from the enhanced global mobility and connectivity of those who shared common norms or purposes across the world. In East Asia, transnational communities have long been considered a key factor for regional development. Ethnic Chinese transnational business networks promote foreign investments, shape transnational economic transactions, and facilitate the rise of high[1]tech industrial clusters (Dicken & Hassler, 2000; Hsing, 1996; Saxenian & Sabel, 2008; Yang & Hsia, 2007; Yeung, 2000). Transnational communities provide “a direct mechanism for transferring the skills and tacit knowledge that can dramatically accelerate industrial upgrading in their developing countries” (Saxenian, 2002, p. 186). They coordinate transnational firm relationships particularly when firms are based in regions with different languages and business cultures.

Accordingly, geographical boundaries do not confine the impact of communities on economic activities. Communities facilitate interactions between regional and nonregional actors by providing common social space for dispersed members to overcome geographical distances, no matter whether members are located transnationally or not. Firms and extraregional partners within a country may benefit from the integration of social and economic relations if they are embedded in the same community. The following scenario explains the geography of a transregional community’s impact on a region. One region as well as parts of other regions is embedded in the same transregional community. Firms in these places are able to maintain business transactions with the help of transregional communities. This transregional community also sustains the agglomeration of firms in the regions external to the first region. In other words, the cluster in the first region has social linkages with clusters in other regions.

Because the first region is situated in a transregional community, it obtains exogenous assets from the other regions. A transregional community offers a facilitating mechanism for local firms’ transregional economic activities in four aspects. First, local firms benefit from various channels of communication with their nonlocal counterparts such as casual social visits, collective events organized by community organizations, and so on. Second, common language and cultural background within a community enhance mutual understanding of transregional actors and hence improve the efficiency of communication, particularly in tacit knowledge.

Third, local firms are likely to build mutual trust with extraregional business partners within a transregional community. Transregional actors share the cultural foundation to construct trust on the basis of certain sets of conventions and social norms, while social networks consisting of community members reduce information asymmetry and foster trust. Finally, rules and conventions within a community may support the transregional transactions of its members. With rules and conventions, firms are able to cooperate with nonlocal partners within the community in more flexible and effective ways than in their collaborations with outsiders.

In short, the existence of transregional communities means that regional firms can benefit from additional channels of interregional information exchange, smooth and effective communication, mutual trust, and supportive conventions and rules. Relational proximity is created as an alternative to geographical proximity. Local firms take advantage of transregional knowledge and information flows as well as trust building and thus enhance competitiveness.

Empirical Background and Methodology

The Chaoshan region is located in Guangdong Province and includes three municipalities: Shantou, Chaozhou, and Jieyang. Along with the Pearl River Delta, Chaoshan is characterized by a significant agglomeration of industrial clusters in Guangdong (Figure 1). A Special Economic Zone was set up in Chaoshan in the early 1980s mainly because of its famous transnational business networks of overseas Teochews. As Figure 2 shows, Chaoshan’s economy has taken off since then, especially as a result of the rapid growth in manufacturing sectors (secondary industries).

In the late 1990s, Chaoshan experienced a major downturn in its regional economy due to the severe impact of the Asian financial crisis on exports. The annual growth rates of gross domestic product (GDP) slowed from 19.6% in 1997 to 7% in 2000 (Statistical Bureau of Guangdong Province, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2001). Nevertheless, Chaoshan started another period of economic growth in the 2000s, together with a change from an export[1]oriented economy to a hybrid of both exports and domestic sales.

In 1993 there were only 1,046 enterprises without foreign investment that had an annual output value of more than 5 million yuan in the Chaoshan region. This number increased to 1,618 in 1998, and dramatically reached 4,763 in 2008 (Statistical Bureau of Guangdong Province, 1994, 1999, 2009). At the same time, the region’s economic development is no longer highly dependent on exports. The share of exports in GDP in the 2000s was always less than 35%, compared with more than 50% for most of the 1990s (Figure 3). This index fell from an average of 51.8% in 1990s to 26.4% in the 2000s, even though the annual export value has exceeded the historical peak since 2007 (Statistical Bureau of Guangdong Province, 1992–2011). In other words, domestic sales began to lead regional economic growth.

The change in the economic growth pattern in Chaoshan has been associated with the boom of specialized markets in China since 2000. As for markets with an annual turnover greater than 100 million yuan in China, specialized markets contributed to 70.77% of the national total in 2006 (Lu & Wang, 2010, p. 75). Distributors for Chaoshan firms are usually located in specialized markets. Domestic sales, which occur mainly between Chaoshan firms and distributors located in distant specialized markets in China, have driven the Chaoshan economy since 2000. Teochews within China play a significant role in sustaining the transregional economic interaction between Chaoshan and these specialized markets.

In this study I use the toy and ceramic sanitary ware industries in Chaoshan and corresponding specialized markets in Yiwu and Foshan as a case study. Toy and ceramic industrial clusters are critical for the Chaoshan economy: The China National Light Industry Council calls Chaozhou the “China Ceramic Capital” and Shantou the “China Toy City.” Both industries experienced a change from a highly export-oriented pattern to a hybrid of exports and domestic sales. Chaoshan has a long history of making ceramic products, while the toy industry emerged in Chaoshan in the late 1980s. Yiwu and Foshan have the largest specialized markets of toys and ceramic sanitary ware in China, respectively. Therefore, the toy and ceramic industries are representative of the Chaoshan economy and can be used to understand how Teochew transregional communities facilitate domestic marketing networks among Chaoshan firms.

In this study I use qualitative methods, mainly because qualitative research is a useful tool to produce empirically rich accounts of concrete and socially situated economic processes (Peck, 2005). I conducted 11 months of fieldwork in Chaoshan, Yiwu, and Foshan, collecting data from written documents, observation, surveys, and interviews. I conducted a total of 82 semistructured, in-depth interviews that serve as the primary data

set for this research, including interviews with Chaoshan manufacturing firms and distributors of Chaoshan products in Yiwu and Foshan, Teochew associations, local industrial associations, and government officials. I base the selection of interviewees on purposeful sampling because qualitative research depends on information-rich cases rather than large, randomly selected samples. My interviewees consist of manufacturing firms with different sizes and various types of nonlocal partners. Among the Chaoshan firms I interviewed, 22% employ more than 100 people and 17% employ fewer than 20 people, covering a range from large firms to SMEs. Distributors in specialized markets include independent trading companies, wholesalers, exclusive trading agents, and sales branches of Chaoshan firms. In addition to background information, in the interviews I focus on how Chaoshan firms and distributors conduct their transregional transactions and how Teochew social networks affect this process. Questions include those on the partner-searching process, the management of transregional relations, and transregional activities in terms of economic transactions, financial flows, transfer of knowledge, technology, market information, interpersonal communication, and others, as well as different collaborative patterns between Teochew partners and non-Teochew partners. Each interview lasted between 45 to 90 minutes.

I conducted two sets of surveys in the toy industry as a supplement to the interviews, with 40 samples for each set: distributors in a specialized market in Yiwu (with a response rate of 87.5%) and local manufacturing firms in an exhibition in Chaoshan (with a response rate of 85%). The questions for distributors cover the reasons for starting a business, transregional business relations, financial transactions, communications with Chaoshan suppliers, and the interactions with other Teochews in Yiwu as well as the impact on their business. For Chaoshan manufacturing firms, I gathered information on the percentage of Teochew buyers in their exports and domestic sales, respectively, the approaches to attract domestic buyers, transregional business relations, financial flows, and the transregional communication with their distributors/buyers.

In addition, I participated in a biannual meeting of Teochew associations, attended dinners with Teochew business people, and made casual visits to Teochew distributors in specialized markets for observation. Statistical yearbooks, newspaper reports, and government documents offered secondhand data to supplement the research materials. Based on qualitative and quantitative data, I find that transregional Teochew communities contribute to the Chaoshan economy by constructing relational clusters in specialized markets.

Toy And Ceramic Industries: From Overseas To Domestic

Teochews living overseas directly influenced the emergence of the toy industry in Chaoshan. In the 1980s, Hong Kong experienced an industrial restructuring process that led to the relocation of manufacturing industries, including the toy industry (Chiu, Ho, & Lui, 1997). Sometime in the 1980s, Teochews operated one of the biggest toy companies in Hong Kong, Playmates Holdings, and moved its manufacturing lines to a local collective[1]owned enterprise in Chaoshan after Chaoshan officials visited the Teochew entrepreneurs during Chinese New Year. Building on the experience of this firm, an increasing number of local firms joined in producing toys with the help of their relatives or friends in Hong Kong who had related resources in the toy industry (Chen & Chu, 2008). The ceramic industry, in contrast, has existed in Chaoshan for hundreds of years because of the china clay reserves in this region. As soon as economic reform began in China in the 1980s, the ceramic industry attracted foreign investment, most of which came from overseas Teochews (Du & Huang, 1996, p. 191). Foreign investments in ceramic companies drove the development of local ceramic firms by outsourcing. In addition to foreign investment, overseas Teochews connected Chaoshan firms with international buyers. Nearly half (48%) of export-oriented firms founded before 1997 that I interviewed gained their first international orders directly from overseas Teochews.

China’s reform in enterprise ownership has stimulated a boom of private firms in Chaoshan since the 1990s, and thus catalyzed the development of industrial clusters. Many firms joined these two industries not only in manufacturing but also through producing plastics and dye, offering packaging materials and services, serving as raw material suppliers or traders, and so forth. An agglomeration economy emerged in the Chaoshan region, characterized by back-and-forth interlinkages of firms, large labor pools to provide skillful workers, and localized relational assets for information exchange, cooperation, and innovation (Scott and Storper, 2003). Local firms benefited from such an industrial environment and grew rapidly.

In the 1980s and 1990s, both the ceramic and toy industries were highly export oriented, but in the late 1990s sale patterns changed. On the one hand, the role of Teochew traders in linking Chaoshan and the global market became increasingly less important. None of the firms founded since 1997 that I interviewed depended on overseas Teochew traders for their first international orders. As the industry began to agglomerate, international buyers came to Chaoshan directly for purchasing. Chaoshan firms now also bypass Teochew traders and find international buyers through trade fairs and online business. On the other hand, Chaoshan firms expanded domestic markets dramatically; 87.5% of toy firms and 70% ceramic firms I interviewed have both exports and domestic sales today. Chaoshan firms depend on extralocal distributors for their domestic sales rather than facing end customers directly. These distributors promote both domestic markets and global markets because they also may bring international orders.

Teochew transregional communities in China became important resources for Chaoshan firms’ domestic marketing. According to my survey on toy manufacturing firms, 75.8% of Chaoshan firms use Teochew distributors for their domestic sales. All local firms I interviewed use Teochews— who might be family members or relatives, friends, previous employees, or others who had social relations with the firm—as distributors to enter a new market. As opposed to overseas Teochew traders who usually migrated abroad earlier, the emergence of domestic distributors is associated with the development of Chaoshan industries. Because of greater mobility and easier access within a country than in global markets, it is easy for Chaoshan firms to acquire a qualified distributor through their Teochew social networks, and Teochews are likely to find a firm that needs a distributor and move to another city in China to serve as the firm’s distributor. Most (80%) of the manufacturing firms I surveyed consider “referred by Teochews” as an important or very important reason to use a Teochew distributor for domestic sales. In other words, the development of toy and ceramic industries in Chaoshan reinforces the growth of Teochew distributors within China, which is unlikely to happen in the case of exports.

Specialized markets, in particular, attract these distributors because of the agglomeration effect for offering a large pool of buyers nationally and globally. Yiwu, in Zhejiang Province, has the world’s largest small commodity wholesale market (Lu & Wang, 2010, p. xviii) and has an annual turnover of more than 4 billion yuan in toys. More than 60% of toys sold in Yiwu come from a toy-specialized industrial town in Chaoshan (Fang & Zhang, 2008). Foshan, Guangdong Province, is the largest ceramic tile production base in China and has specialized markets of ceramic tiles and sanitary wares (Shen & Wei, 2011). It attracts a large number of distributors of Chaoshan ceramic sanitary ware; most are Teochews. A ceramic distributor working in Foshan for decades estimates that at least 70% of ceramic sanitary wares in Foshan are made in Chaoshan and distributed by Teochews (interview in Foshan, 31 August 2010a). The agglomeration of Teochew distributors creates proximity between Chaoshan and the specialized markets relationally rather than spatially, which I discuss in the following section.

Building Relational Proximity With Distant Clusters

Teochew distributors cluster in distant specialized markets and serve as business partners for Chaoshan firms. These distributors are exposed to domestic and foreign buyers more than the Chaoshan firms because of their location. At the same time, they are still socially embedded in Chaoshan because their families, parents, relatives, and friends are living there, and are still maintaining dense social interactions in Chaoshan. These social interactions offer Chaoshan firms and their distant Teochew distributors additional avenues for communication and collaboration than an arm’s-length transaction. In fact, transregional cooperation generates more than just the sum of local and nonlocal assets. Collective learning occurs during the transregional integration of economic and social activities, and hence strengthens the competiveness of Chaoshan firms. Through the Teochew communities, Chaoshan firms share a relational proximity with distant specialized markets and integrate exogenous assets into regional competitiveness. In this study I uncover four mechanisms by which the Chaoshan economy takes advantage of transregional Teochew communities: by building distant clusters, sustaining transactions, creating transregional buzz, and initiating start-ups.

Supporting Teochew Clusters In Specialized Markets

The agglomeration of Teochew distributors is attributed to economic externality and sociocultural similarity. Due to their familiarity with Chaoshan and Chaoshan products, Teochew business people serve as distributors for Chaoshan firms. Specialized markets attract domestic and global buyers for certain types of commodities, such as toys and ceramics in this case. By clustering in specialized markets, Teochew distributors gain a larger pool of buyers than elsewhere. At the same time, Teochew communities help maintain relational proximity between the clusters of Teochew distributors and the Chaoshan region.

Teochew distributors in specialized markets have developed a pattern of “product exchange” among themselves: Because Chaoshan products are relatively homogeneous, distributors can potentially repackage one product to substitute for another. When distributors have to deliver products immediately but lack enough storage, or have to show a buyer certain samples that are out of stock, they usually can find substitutes from other Teochew distributors nearby. They purchase at the price that they directly buy from Chaoshan manufacturers and then change the packages. The Teochew distributors I interviewed all admitted that they had done this with other Teochew distributors, whereas none had done this with non-Teochew distributors. With the help of product exchange, Teochew distributors in distant specialized markets benefit from rapid product fulfillment at low costs.

Teochew communities also sustain cooperation across different industries within the agglomeration of Teochews in specialized markets. For example, in the Chenghai Commercial Association of Yiwu, 55.7% of 135 members are in the toy business in Yiwu: 5.3% in trading and 1.5% in logistics. Teochews within these related industries tend to cooperate closely. A total of 82.4% of the distributors I interviewed have Teochew collaborators in the market for their business. As one interviewee said, he cooperates with Teochews because he is familiar with those who share dense social networks with him. The “fluent and natural conversation” in the Teochew dialect makes him less worried about the cooperation. He believes that Teochew partners “put their heart and soul into taking care of my commodities” because “we (Teochews) are a unit, to compete with the others” (interview in Yiwu, 04 October 2010). A Teochew manager of a logistics company also describes different ways of doing business with Teochews and non-Teochews:

“If customers are non-Teochews, we have to clarify every item of the contracts very explicitly. But if they are Teochews, we can communicate more easily. We understand and trust each other. If some incidents happen, we can cooperate to deal with the incidents first, rather than clarifying who have the responsibility first [as when doing business with non-Teochews] (interview in Yiwu, 09 April 2010).”

This demonstrates that smooth communication and mutual trust among Teochews in Yiwu facilitate interindustry cooperation, and even lead to collective action to cope with incidents. It reflects Zhou’s (2000) discussion of Chinese service industries targeting Chinese firms in the United States, but furthers this argument in light of subethnicity within a country rather than at a global scale. In the case of transregional communities, a group of people collaborates in a place where they are not socially and culturally embedded to compete against others. In fact, Teochew communities facilitate not only economic cooperation but also knowledge sharing and collective learning, which I discuss in terms of transregional buzz later.

Sustaining Transregional Transaction

My fieldwork uncovers a high degree of Teochew involvement in Chaoshan firms’ domestic sales. Most (75.8%) toy manufacturing firms surveyed have Teochews engaging in their domestic sales. More than a third (37%) of local firms with domestic sales interviewed claim that Teochews make up the majority of domestic buyers. More than half (63%) argue that Teochew buyers are more helpful for their business than non-Teochews, including seven firms whose main buyers are non-Teochews.

My fieldwork uncovers a high degree of Teochew involvement in Chaoshan firms’ domestic sales. Most (75.8%) toy manufacturing firms surveyed have Teochews engaging in their domestic sales. More than a third (37%) of local firms with domestic sales interviewed claim that Teochews make up the majority of domestic buyers. More than half (63%) argue that Teochew buyers are more helpful for their business than non-Teochews, including seven firms whose main buyers are non-Teochews.

Chaoshan firms and Teochew distributors usually adopt flexible ways of payment and cooperation. All Teochew distributors I interviewed note that they delayed payment to their suppliers in Chaoshan. A local entrepreneur describes the “mutual help” between him and his Teochew distributors in terms of finance:

“If they [Teochew distributors] have some difficulties in capital flows, I often allow them to pay me later. But they also help me. For example, in 2008, my exports shrunk. They [domestic Teochew distributors] kept regular purchase and even paid me in advance in order to help me obtain enough capital to sustain the basic production (interview in Chenghai, 30 September 2010).”

This kind of mutual help results from long-term cooperative relationships, and yet should be interpreted from the perspective of transregional communities. As a ceramic exclusive distributor explains:

“How dare a Teochew distributor cheat a local firm? Unless he/she doesn’t want to come back home anymore. But even so, his/her parents would be in trouble…. We [Teochew distributors and Chaoshan producers] know each other well. It’s not easy to treat each other rigidly… (interview in Foshan, 31 August 2010b).”

In short, Teochew transregional networks provide an informal monitoring mechanism for local producers and nonlocal distributors due to the low levels of information asymmetry within a community and both parties’ social embeddedness in Chaoshan. Hence, producers and distributors can accept flexible payment without written contracts.

In addition, Teochew distributors in specialized markets sometimes act as informal branches of Chaoshan firms to satisfy customers’ demands, while Chaoshan firms may respond and deliver to a distributor’s buyer directly under the name of that distributor. Mr. Li’s story shows how Teochews use their transregional social networks to enhance the competitiveness of Chaoshan products. Mr. Li was a trading agent in Yiwu. When he received orders for Chenghai toys, he directly passed the orders to his friends in Chenghai, who may be toy manufacturers or local traders. His friends arranged the production and delivered the products directly to the buyers under Mr. Li’s name. In this way, Mr. Li was able to offer low prices and speedy response to his buyers, and hence his competitiveness was strengthened. Similarly, for buyers who directly go to Chaoshan for locally made commodities, they may also attempt to purchase certain complementary commodities, such as cabinets for sanitary ware purchase, or a small number of plush toys for electronic toy purchases. Teochews in related specialized markets, such as Mr. Li, take charge of this part of the order and serve as a nonlocal branch of local firms in name. Nearly 30% of distributors I interviewed act as branches of Chaoshan firms though they are independent from those firms, while 25.9% of manufacturing firms have sold products under their distributors’ names. Certainly the transregional “buzz” is vital for local firms to exchange information in time and choose trustworthy cooperators at a distance. This flexible collaborative form effectively speeds Chaoshan firms’ responses to the market.

Constructing Transregional Buzz

Geographers use the term “buzz” to refer to the information and communication created by face-to-face contacts, co-presence, and co[1]location of people and firms within the same industry and region. This buzz consists of “specific information and continuous updates of this information, intended and unanticipated learning processes in organized and accidental meetings, the application of the same interpretative schemes and mutual understanding of new knowledge and technologies, as well as shared cultural traditions and habits within a particular technology field, which stimulate the establishment of conventions and other institutional arrangements” (Bathelt, Malmberg, & Maskell, 2004, p. 38). Many studies reveal that local buzz is essential to sustaining regional innovation systems and is primarily based on localized social and cultural networks. In this study I argue that buzz can be transregional and support transregional economic transactions and learning processes.

My fieldwork in both Yiwu and Foshan uncovers transregional buzz generated through frequent daily communication among Teochew business people. All Teochew distributors admit that they spend much more time in social interaction with other Teochews rather than non-Teochews in specialized markets. They describe it as “natural” and “inevitable” because of the co-location and similar cultural background (interview in Foshan, 31 August 2010a). The buzz comprises abundant information related to their business such as market trends, experiences of some distributors and Chaoshan producers, and so on (interviews in Foshan and Yiwu from August to October, 2010).

For example, my survey of Teochew distributors in Yiwu reveals that the most important reason to open a store is a suggestion from local friends who operate a similar store in the area (Table 1). In Foshan, a distributor took me to visit another distributor; when we walked through a specialized market, he said hello to many Teochew distributors and stopped for small talk. When I was interviewing a distributor in his store in the evening, several Teochew distributors dropped by to chat. They talked about a Teochew distributor who just closed his business in Foshan, and analyzed the reasons for his failure. Later, a distributor considered renting the failed distributor’s warehouse and asked for others’ references. They also discussed best locations for a warehouse. Both the survey and observation indicate that Teochew distributors exchange business information and perform collective learning in management through daily communication.

This buzz in specialized markets is also transmitted to Chaoshan. Frequent visits to Chaoshan offer face-to-face communication opportunities for Teochew distributors and local producers. In my survey, 58.8% of respondents said they communicate “often” or “very often” with Chaoshan manufacturing firms. There must be more transregional communication happening than this number shows, because some respondents may consider their communication with Chaoshan partners to be personal interactions with “friends” rather than business interactions. In fact, all distributors I interviewed agree that they share product and market information with their suppliers during their home visits. Nearly half (47.1%) of the distributors I surveyed note that they frequently communicate with Chaoshan firms about new product development, while 20.6% say their communication focuses on market trends. Three-quarters of respondents get this information mainly from buyers’ feedback, and 70.8% from their observation of other stores in specialized markets. Thus, in learning from this knowledge generated in specialized markets, Chaoshan firms are able to adapt to changes in domestic and global markets rapidly.

Transregional communication is primarily based on social ties rather than economic relations. Most (80.9%) respondents point out personal relationships as “very important” or “important” factor in determining the frequency of transregional communication. More than three-quarters (78.6%) of Chaoshan manufacturers I interviewed agree that transregional buzz helps their business, but many of them consider discussions about specialized markets casual conversation with friends rather than business activities. In other words, the buzz results from the integration of economic and social relations; the transregional transfer of information and knowledge happens during this face-to-face social communication.

Teochew communities in Chaoshan develop pipelines differently than that described in Bathelt et al. (2004) and others’ research (Bathelt & Schuldt, 2008, 2010; Trippl, Todtling, & Lengauer, 2009). This literature focuses on joint action frames and projects that are organizational, such as international trade fairs, research and development (R&D) partnerships, and so on. In fact, the buzz-and-pipeline model can occur in an informal way, such as in the casual visits in Chaoshan. Transregional communities transfer extralocal buzz to a region. Furthermore, transregional communities create new buzz about Teochews in a distant locality, and finally help two regions share common buzz, which helps Chaoshan firms develop their domestic marketing (and global markets) in specialized markets. Thus, local firms in Chaoshan share the buzz with Teochews in specialized markets and join in a transregional collective learning process, which is important to enhance regional openness and innovation.

Initiating Start-Ups

Existing social ties with specialized markets help people in Chaoshan set up manufacturing firms in corresponding industries. Bresnahan, Gambardella, and Saxenian (2001) argue that the success of entrepreneurs largely depends on their ability to access major markets outside the cluster in their early stages; thus, the openness of cluster relations and the active search for large, external markets is crucial in understanding the rise of successful clusters.

As for the Chaoshan region, this openness is achieved through transregional communities. In my interviews, almost one-third of the local toy and ceramic entrepreneurs were corresponding distributors in specialized markets before they established manufacturing firms in Chaoshan. More than a quarter (27.8%) of Teochew distributors I interviewed set up corresponding factories in Chaoshan after they became distributors (which were normally operated by their family members). In addition, within specialized markets, dense social networks and frequent interactions within Teochew communities also create “buzz” to stimulate Teochew start-ups (Table 1).

This reveals a deep-seated and culturally embedded desire for self[1]ownership and the autonomy of Chinese entrepreneurship (Redding, 1990). Previous working experience in specialized markets helps these Teochews establish new firms in Chaoshan and gives them access to domestic markets. Existing social ties with specialized markets motivate people in Chaoshan to set up manufacturing firms in corresponding industries because they have access to markets. Therefore, local assets alone fail to explain the growth of local private firms in Chaoshan since 2000. These empirical findings indicate that transregional Teochew ties also cultivate the growth of local firms.

In short, with transregional Teochew communities, Chaoshan firms establish relational proximity with distant specialized markets and access nonlocal assets. Therefore, the Chaoshan region benefits from competitive nonlocal business partners, additional information channels, flexible and effective transregional cooperation, information sharing and knowledge creation, and enhanced entrepreneurships.

Conclusion

The empirical case of Chaoshan reveals that communities facilitate regional economies transregionally rather than at a local/global level only. Based on data gathered from transregional communities, I find that a region benefits from nonlocal assets, including distant but connected clusters promoting local firms’ marketing abilities; additional channels for information exchange, knowledge sharing, and collective learning; flexible forms of transregional business corporation; and enhanced transregional entrepreneurships that in turn promote regional openness. With the help of transregional Teochew communities, Chaoshan SMEs can compete at national and global scales because they are not constrained by limited local resources.

In this era of globalization, the key issues for many developing regions are how to attract foreign investment (Oman, 2000) and how to enhance exports (Scott & Garofoli, 2007). My findings from this study indicate another regional development trajectory: the cultivation of transregional economic interactions. For regions endowed with a large domestic market, it is particularly important for local firms to pay attention to resources within their own country and for local governments to promote domestic sales and interregional collaboration to enter global markets. The case of Chaoshan shows how Teochew distributors facilitate Chaoshan firms’ domestic sales. More important, the relational proximity with specialized markets allows Chaoshan SMEs to gain information at not only a national but also a global scale because global buyers often cluster in these specialized markets, and their information flows to Chaoshan rapidly through transregional Teochew communities as well.

Chaoshan is not a wholly unique case within transregional communities in a social and cultural sense. For example, Wenzhou, another region in China, also has developed this type of transregional subethnic communities. Fewsmith (2008) examines the Wenzhou trade associations’ rapid geographical expansion throughout China, and shows that these trade associations collaborate to protect the interests of Wenzhou manufacturing firms in global markets. Moreover, alumni networks can serve as another kind of transregional community that helps a region with well-established educational institutions to access nonlocal assets. Saxenian (2002) finds that alumni associations from the Indian Institutes of Technology help establish the links between Silicon Valley and Bangalore, which are important for upgrading the Indian information technology (IT) sector. Similar stories could happen within national boundaries.

Chaoshan is not a wholly unique case within transregional communities in a social and cultural sense. For example, Wenzhou, another region in China, also has developed this type of transregional subethnic communities. Fewsmith (2008) examines the Wenzhou trade associations’ rapid geographical expansion throughout China, and shows that these trade associations collaborate to protect the interests of Wenzhou manufacturing firms in global markets. Moreover, alumni networks can serve as another kind of transregional community that helps a region with well-established educational institutions to access nonlocal assets. Saxenian (2002) finds that alumni associations from the Indian Institutes of Technology help establish the links between Silicon Valley and Bangalore, which are important for upgrading the Indian information technology (IT) sector. Similar stories could happen within national boundaries.

In this study I draw on my research on Chaoshan’s toy and ceramic industries to demonstrate that the positive role of communities in regional development goes beyond the local/global dichotomy. Within particular historical and institutional contexts, transregional communities may play a significant role in helping developing regions achieve economic success by offering opportunities to access nonlocal resources. However, further research is required to unravel the complex mechanisms of transregional communities in regional development. Studies on the dark side of Teochew communities, including the lock-in effect of relying on Teochews for domestic marketing and the negative impact of some flexible transitional forms (e.g., “product exchange”) on regional product branding, would provide more comprehensive understanding of this topic. More important, it is necessary to generalize the finding of this study through comparison research between different subethnic groups (e.g., Teochew versus Wenzhou), various types of communities (e.g., ethnic groups versus technology communities), and diverse industries (e.g., low value-added manufacturing versus high-tech sectors). In sum, regional development is dependent on both economic and sociocultural as well as local and nonlocal assets, and understanding this process requires not only a local/ global angle but also a transregional perspective.

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ISSN 1934-1148

University of Texas School of Architecture
Sutton Hall 2.130
310 Inner Campus Drive, B7500
Austin, TX, 78712

planningforum@austin.utexas.edu
http://sites.utexas.edu/planningforum/

Abstract

 I examine whether housing developers in Texas are claiming points for community revitalization in the state’s annual Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) allocation process and whether the plans they submit constitute a meaningful revitalization effort in distressed neighborhoods. From 2012 to 2015, Texas successively adopted more robust standards for community revitalization in its LIHTC Qualified Allocation Plan (QAP), and saw an accompanying decline in applications seeking points on this provision. A content analysis of revitalization plans submitted in 2015, however, finds a discrepancy between the standard of comprehensiveness upheld in the literature on community revitalization and the revitalization strategies contained in the plans. I find that plans rely heavily on improvements to physical infrastructure, while neglecting the soft pillars of revitalization such as education and community capacity building. Additional revisions to the revitalization provision in the QAP may be necessary to ensure meaningful revitalization efforts in high-poverty communities selected for LIHTC housing in Texas.

Introduction

The Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program has provided millions of units of rental housing to low-income persons since its inception in 1986. It has also, however, contributed to poverty concentration and racial segregation as a result of program regulations that incentivize development in high-poverty neighborhoods. In recent years, policy makers have attempted to stem the program’s tendency toward segregation by establishing standards for neighborhood revitalization in high-poverty areas selected for LIHTC housing. In this study I examine whether housing developers in Texas are claiming points for community revitalization during the state’s annual LIHTC allocation process, and whether the plans they submit constitute a meaningful revitalization effort in distressed neighborhoods. I begin with an introduction to the literature on LIHTC, poverty concentration, and community revitalization, then provide data on revitalization claims in the Texas LIHTC program from 2012 to 2015, and finally present findings from a content analysis of 2015 community revitalization plans.

The LIHTC Program and Poverty Concentration

According to the peer-reviewed and gray literature, LIHTC developments are primarily concentrated in high-poverty communities of color (Buron, Nolden, Heintzi, & Stewart, 2000; Ellen, Yorn, Kuai, Pazuniak, & Williams, 2015; Kawitzky, Freiberg, Houk, & Hankins, 2013). LIHTC siting standards, promulgated through federal program regulations and state Qualified Allocation Plans (QAPs), have contributed to this concentration over time. Early federal program regulations established in 1989 instruct states to give an advantage to developments located in high-poverty census tracts (referred to as Qualified Census Tracts, or QCTs), with the intent of providing affordable housing in areas with a high level of need (Williamson, Smith, & Strambi-Kramer, 2009). This original QCT allocation preference has been a strong driver of poverty concentration among LIHTC properties (Khadduri, 2013), along with project cost factors that increase the expense of developing in more affluent neighborhoods, such as prohibitive land costs and neighborhood opposition to subsidized (California Department of Housing and Community Development, 2014, p. 41; PolicyLink, Kirwan Institute, & National Housing Trust, 2014, p. 4; Williams, 2015). The same U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) regulations that provide an allocation preference to QCTs also grant an incentive for projects in “Difficult Development Areas,” defined as areas with high land or development costs relative to the median income (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 1997).

Academics and advocates have also criticized federal guidelines on state LIHTC siting standards for being ill defined and contradictory (Khadduri, 2013; Kawitzky et al., 2013; Roisman, 1997). In his legal analysis of the program, Myron Orfield (2005) concludes that LIHTC program regulations actively contradict fair housing standards, and posits that vague federal guidelines encourage states to actively subvert fair housing standards through their QAPs. Monique Johnson’s (2014) content analysis of state QAPs supports this narrative, demonstrating that QAPs rarely contain federal poverty deconcentration goals in their LIHTC siting standards. Evidence exists to show that changes to the state QAP have a statistically significant effect on LIHTC siting patterns (Ellen et al., 2015), but many state QAPs continue to contribute to poverty concentration by giving preferences to developments in high-poverty neighborhoods.

The Role of Community Revitalization

The community revitalization provision is one component of federal and state LIHTC program regulations with the potential to reduce poverty concentration among LIHTC properties. In 2002, the federal government added a provision to the 1989 LIHTC program rules instructing states to grant an incentive to projects in QCTs only if the project is accompanied by a “concerted community revitalization plan” (Tegeler, Korman, Reece, & Haberle, 2011). This revision represents an attempt to address the concentration of subsidized housing in areas experiencing chronic and comprehensive disinvestment.

Despite the well-intentioned attempt to stem the concentration of subsidized housing in areas lacking other forms of community investment, legal and policy scholars have critiqued the federal community revitalization provision as nonbinding in practice. The federal guidelines neither define the term “community revitalization” nor outline any uniform standards that states should consider when evaluating and granting incentives for revitalization plans. Orfield (2005) concludes that for the community revitalization provision to actually advance fair housing goals, states must take additional steps to give substance to the provision, given how poorly defined it is within federal regulation. Absent substantive federal revision, or additional proactive interpretation through state QAPs, he argues, the LIHTC program will remain in conflict with its mandate to affirmatively further fair housing.

In 2013, Khadduri conducted a content analysis of 36 state QAPs, finding that most do not incorporate the federal community revitalization provision into their siting standards. Moreover, the 2013 QAPs that do acknowledge the requirement fail to define the term “revitalization.” With no federal guidelines on what constitutes community revitalization, the lack of state guidance effectively makes the provision a nonbinding, nominal requirement. In 2015, Oppenheimer conducted an updated analysis of 49 state QAPs, finding that only 15 of those QAPs clearly define and state what must be included in a revitalization plan. This body of literature concludes that the community revitalization provision, both at the federal level and as operationalized in state QAPs, has historically lacked sufficient definition to act as a tool for housing desegregation in most states.

The Texas QAP and Community Revitalization

The Texas QAP defines the competitive process by which the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs (TDHCA) awards 9% housing tax credits to specific affordable housing projects. If a developer wishes to finance an affordable housing project with LIHTC, it submits an application to TDHCA during the annual LIHTC allocation process. The agency then scores its application according to criteria defined in the QAP. Limited funds are available to finance LIHTC housing, and therefore not all projects receive awards. In fact, many projects do not score high enough in the initial self-score application round to even warrant additional agency review. The state determines funding according to regional and categorical set-asides, selecting the highest scoring applications within each region or category to receive awards. Awards are therefore determined competitively in relation to one another, rather than by predetermined raw scoring threshold.

The Texas QAP has evolved iteratively since TDHCA began to address poverty concentration among LIHTC properties in 2012. Since 2013, Texas’s QAP has outperformed other states with regard to opportunity[1]siting standards and the strength of the community revitalization provision (Khadduri, 2013; Oppenheimer, 2015). The current strength of Texas’ QAP is largely attributable to the 2012 Inclusive Communities Project, Inc. v. Texas Department of Housing & Community Affairs federal summary judgment, which concluded that Texas’ QAP had produced systematic, disparate impact on minority communities, thus violating the Fair Housing Act. The Inclusive Communities Project initiated this fair housing lawsuit against the state in 2008, and the summary judgment compelled Texas to revise problematic provisions in the state QAP (Semuels, 2015). The federal circuit court ordered TDHCA to adopt a five-year remedial plan outlining how it plans to bring the state’s LIHTC allocation process and QAP into compliance with the Fair Housing Act.

Since adopting the remedial plan in 2012, TDHCA has revised the QAP to better conform to fair housing standards and to encourage LIHTC siting in high-opportunity neighborhoods. Prior to adopting the remedial plan, the community revitalization provision in the Texas QAP was weak and ill defined. In 2012, the community revitalization plan was worth only 1 point out of 226 in the applicant’s raw score, and the QAP did not define “revitalization.” Moreover, for documentation, TDHCA requested only a letter from the local governing body affirming that the LIHTC site was located within an area targeted for revitalization. THDCA neither required a copy of the plan nor evaluated the quality of the revitalization efforts or level of financial commitment from the city.

Following adoption of the remedial plan, however, Texas undertook a series of iterative revisions to its revitalization provision to make it more rigorous. Beginning in 2013, TDHCA raised the provision’s point value to a maximum of 6 raw points out of a total of 160. This point increase transformed the revitalization provision from a minor section of the QAP into a significant component of the scoring system. The LIHTC program is highly competitive, and six points is a considerable number when applications can be rendered noncompetitive simply for a loss of even one or two points. In 2013, TDHCA also began to require a budget (at specific funding levels) along with evidence that funding for the plan had commenced. Last, in 2013 TDHCA began to require that developers submit the actual revitalization plan for TDHCA to review and established loose standards for plan content. As of 2015, Texas revitalization plans were worth 6 out of 179 total points and expected to include an assessment of at least five of eight community factors:

• Adverse environmental conditions
• Presence of blighted structures
• Presence of inadequate transportation
• Lack of public facilities
• Presence of significant crime
• Presence, condition, and performance of public education
• Presence of local businesses providing employment opportunities
• Lack of efforts to address diversity

In 2015, TDHCA required that plans “as a whole” be reasonably expected to address the community factors identified in the assessment of need. While the 2015 QAP standards operationalize criteria for the needs assessment more clearly than actual activities and interventions undertaken in the plan, this revision represented TDHCA’s first step toward upholding the tenet of comprehensiveness in its revitalization plan standards. Table 1 and Table 2 present a full description of community revitalization standards in the Texas QAP for urban and rural projects, respectively, from 2012 to 2015.

Defining Meaningful Revitalization

One reason for the persistent lack of federal and state guidelines on community revitalization may be the complexity of defining standards for meaningful revitalization. Many factors contribute to successful neighborhood revitalization, and it is difficult to define a generalizable model across communities with different needs. One trend in the literature on revitalization, however, is clear: Investment in subsidized housing alone is insufficient to transform a neighborhood, and comprehensive efforts are necessary to produce sustainable neighborhood change. Orfield (2005), for example, showcases HUD research demonstrating that LIHTC development alone fails to produce revitalization. Therefore, community revitalization plan standards should contain elements beyond housing.

Tatian, Kingsley, Parilla, and Pendall (2012) provide an overview of the literature on neighborhood revitalization and identify several successful national models. They find that although research is needed to better define revitalization, some basic elements should be present in any revitalization effort. They identify comprehensiveness, community self-direction, and strategic community selection as key elements of successful revitalization. Drawing heavily from Galster’s (2010) work, they identify the following community revitalization strategies:

• Institutional and service mechanisms (e.g., child care and healthcare facilities, anchor institutions, grocery stores, schools and school quality, coordinated human and social service delivery)
• Social interactive mechanisms (e.g., collective efficacy, social capital and networks, neighborhood organizing)
• Environmental mechanisms (e.g., crime, safety, built environment, density, and walkability)
• Geographical mechanisms (e.g., metro and city-level trends, marginalization, access to jobs, disinvestment in neighborhoods due to segregation and sprawl)
• Residential mobility (e.g., household instability, churning movers, homelessness prevention)

Taking these facets of community development into account may help form a comprehensive best practices framework for community revitalization. Tatian and colleagues also identify several national programs that may serve as models for future efforts, though many are still undergoing empirical evaluation: Choice Neighborhoods, Promise Neighborhoods, the Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative, Neighborhoods in Bloom, and Building Sustainable Communities.

In her analysis of state QAPs, Khadduri (2013) also suggests foundational criteria for establishing more comprehensive revitalization plan standards, including “an assessment of the current condition of the neighborhood; a description of the plans for overcoming the neighborhood’s problems; [and] a description of the resources that are being or will be devoted to the revitalization effort (other than local government financial support for the LIHTC property itself)” (2013, p. 11). She identifies Indiana, Nebraska, Kentucky, Ohio, and Pennsylvania as states with robust revitalization provisions in their QAPs. Khadduri’s work suggests that level of detail, specificity of standards, and funding are important.

In this study I use the Building Sustainable Communities (BSC) initiative as a benchmark model in its content analysis of Texas revitalization plans. BSC is a project of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) that has operated since 2007 and is supported by a variety of foundation funders (LISC, 2016). While the literature shows that there are a number of possible benchmarks and models against which to compare Texas’s revitalization standards, the BSC program is prolific (operating in 106 neighborhood sites as of 2012) and has demonstrated preliminary empirical success in its most recent program evaluations (Walker, Rankin, & Winston, 2010; Walker & Winston, 2014). The model also offers a number of clearly defined elements that are amenable to a content analysis framework. The model is comprehensive and emphasizes the following five program goals (LISC, 2015):

1. Expanditing investment in housing and other real estate
2. Increasing family income and wealth
3. Stimulating economic development
4. Improving access to quality education
5. Supporting healthy environments and lifestyles

Moreover, the BSC model emphasizes these five goals within the framework of building community capacity through investment in community partnerships and organizing. The importance of community capacity building is supported by the literature (for example, in Tatian et al. [2012] and Galster’s “social interactive mechanisms” strategy [2010]). Moreover, BSC’s emphasis on capacity is predated by long-term capacity building efforts such as the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Rebuilding Communities Initiative (1994–2002; Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2002). The Casey Foundation’s initiative produced findings that “resident empowerment must be at the core of community rebuilding efforts,” and that “the need for capacity building is critical and continual” (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2002, p. 7).

Claudia J. Coulton, who has worked with the Casey Foundation and conducted extensive research on social work and service provision in low[1]income communities, has found that to sustain employment opportunities in low-income communities (especially in an era of decreased federal welfare spending), “the primary intent must be community change…[and] much of this change has to occur by building the capacity of communities to support opportunity” (Coulton, 1996, p. 517). The body of scholarly and gray literature on revitalization acknowledges that it is a difficult concept to operationalize. However, there is consensus about the value of comprehensiveness and a growing body of evidence that community capacity building must be a core component of any successful revitalization effort. The comprehensiveness and capacity-building standards inform my analysis of community revitalization in Texas.

Methodology

In this study I analyze Texas LIHTC award and applicant data between 2012 and 2015 from TDHCA and provide findings from an original content analysis of 2015 Texas community revitalization plans. I present data on the number of applications requesting community revitalization points, the number receiving points, and the total number of LIHTC applications. I obtained complete application and award data for the 2012–2015 LIHTC application cycles, as well as individually imaged LIHTC applications, from the public TDHCA website. I obtained community revitalization application and scoring data by public information request to TDHCA in November of 2015.

In the content analysis portion of this study I compare the revitalization plans submitted to TDHCA during the state’s 2015 LIHTC application process with standards for revitalization outlined in the 2015 Texas QAP and the BSC model. I first evaluate the plans against the QAP to better understand whether plans are truly meeting the more robust plan content standards adopted by the state in recent years. I next evaluate against the BSC model because the initiative has demonstrated empirical success in moving the needle on poverty for a number of distressed neighborhoods nationwide, and because it is reflective of national best practices in comprehensiveness (taking into account some issue areas not addressed in the QAP).

To elucidate specific areas of revitalization that are supported or neglected by the plans, I also break down the QAP and BSC themes into subthemes based on language in the QAP and a coding system used by a recent BSC program evaluation, respectively. Table 3 presents a list of themes and subthemes addressed by each set of revitalization benchmarks.

Coding and Standards of Review

I established a coding framework and awarded plans a point within a specific theme or subtheme if at least one word, phrase, sentence, or paragraph in the plan met the coding criteria. I reviewed plans in their entirety where feasible. Where plan materials were very lengthy (more than several hundred pages), I used keyword searches and judicious review of key sections. Since LIHTC applicants often submitted a bundle of materials as evidence of meeting QAP revitalization standards, I considered all materials provided under the community revitalization section of the application, as well as citations to external planning documents, as a bundled package.

In private interviews with me and public comment to TDHCA, Texas housing advocates have expressed concern not only with revitalization plans’ substance and level of comprehensiveness, but also with plan implementation (Texas Appleseed and Texas Low Income Housing and Information Service, 2015). In particular, advocates worry that funding will not be deployed to address the issue areas identified in the revitalization plans, and that many plans merely pay lip service to the idea of revitalization rather than represent a material commitment to the community. The 2015 QAP acknowledges the importance of establishing funding objectives, requesting that plans provide a budget detailing the source of all planned expenditures as well as an attestation from local officials that funding for the plan has commenced. This emphasis on funding is consistent with recommendations from Khadduri (2013), who emphasizes that revitalization standards should include funding commitments.

I took these additional concerns into account when creating the content analysis framework for this study, applying a more rigorous standard for funding demonstration than TDHCA actually seeks from its applicants. As I discuss in the Introduction, 2015 Texas QAP standards operationalize the assessment of community need by requiring that an assessment address at least five of eight neighborhood factors. However, TDHCA asks only for an overall budget and that the plan “as a whole” be expected to effectively address the factors identified. This is in contrast to the BSC model, which concentrates on specific plan goals and includes a focus on the activities undertaken in the plan. For this content analysis I adopt an evaluation standard closer to the BSC framework, and look for specified levels of funding for each intervention in each of the identified community issue areas. I use the following criteria to award points to a plan.

• The unit of observation must be an intervention that specifically seeks to address one of the core themes or subthemes in either the QAP or BSC initiative. Identifying a challenge area, or area of need, without proposing an accompanying intervention is not sufficient to receive a point.
• A funding source and amount, whether dedicated or already expended, must be identified.
• The intervention must be local to the neighborhood, or a small handful of revitalization neighborhoods, and not reflect a citywide initiative.

Plans receive only one point per thematic category (i.e., multiple interventions in the same category do not equate to multiple points). Moreover, although this methodology does produce a point tally for each plan, study results focus on the presence or absence of points within each respective thematic category and not on plan totals. Table 4 displays the maximum points possible per plan and thematic category.

Where an intervention could reasonably be expected to address more than one theme or subtheme, it received a point in both categories. I did not design the coding categories to be mutually exclusive; some interventions may produce benefits for multiple revitalization categories. I exercised subjective discretion and applied a judicious standard when granting multiple points for interventions that applicants claimed in multiple categories.

Limitations

The content analysis is at least partially dependent on my subjective discretion when assigning points. I attempt to control for the inherent subjectivity of this process by adhering to a consistent coding framework for each plan and keeping meticulous notes containing plan citations and the justification for point decisions.

In addition, to assess the quality of the applicant pool for revitalization points, as well as to collect a sufficient number of data points for evaluation, I analyzed all 2015 applications requesting revitalization points, including those that did not receive the points requested or undergo full review by the agency. The analysis also includes rural and disaster recovery applications, even though these plans are not held to the same revitalization standards as urban applications. There were 4 rural and disaster recovery applications out of a total of 25 applications. Although these applicants are held to different standards in the application process, I include them in the analysis because the quality of the proposed plans when compared with accepted revitalization benchmarks is still relevant in assessing whether they constitute meaningful revitalization efforts.

I make claims about the community revitalization applicant pool to infer conclusions about the quality of QAP revitalization standards, yet the applicant pool is not necessarily reflective of the award pool. For applications that were not competitive enough to undergo full review, TDHCA did not have the opportunity to apply the QAP standards to those applications. It is possible that applicants with a “no review” status would not have received revitalization points from TDHCA, perhaps mitigating criticism of the current QAP standard. Moreover, it is difficult to assess trends in revitalization quality using a single year of analysis. Future research should attempt an analysis of years prior to 2012.

Findings on Revitalization Trends in Texas

In the last three years, since implementing the changes to the QAP required by the Inclusive Communities summary judgment, the number and characteristics of applications claiming revitalization points has changed. Revisions to the community revitalization provision in the Texas QAP appear to be producing a smaller pool of applicants, with the potential to affect both the number of LIHTC awards in high-poverty areas as well as the quality of revitalization efforts undertaken in these neighborhoods.

The pool of LIHTC applications requesting community revitalization points has changed dramatically since 2012, suggesting that modifications to the revitalization provision in the QAP have effectively altered this narrow segment of the LIHTC allocation landscape. Most notably, the percentage of applications requesting revitalization points has decreased significantly since 2012. Of the 173 LIHTC applications submitted to TDHCA during the 2015 cycle, only 25 (14%) asked for revitalization points. This represents a significant decline from 2012, prior to the state’s implementation of the remedial plan, when 62% of applications requested the single point available for revitalization efforts (see Figure 1).

While raising the maximum point value of revitalization from one to six points in the LIHTC scoring system might intuitively be expected to produce an influx of additional applicants, the concurrent introduction of more rigorous plan evaluation standards appears to have had the intended effect of reducing the total number of revitalization applicants. As outlined by the remedial plan, more rigorous standards are intended to produce the beneficial effect of reducing the number of applicants attempting to receive credit for nominal revitalization efforts. It is likely that reducing the number of revitalization applicants from 101 to 25 has successfully eliminated many applicants unable to offer proof of robust community revitalization efforts. The introduction of more rigorous standards also brings the number of applicants down to a number feasible for TDHCA to review with a heightened and more time-intensive level of rigor.

Recent changes to the revitalization provision in the QAP, and trends in the number of revitalization applications, point toward an increasingly substantive interpretation of the revitalization standard in Texas. I discuss whether these trends will be accompanied by a shift in the quality of revitalization plans themselves in the content analysis portion of this study. Data show that, while fewer applicants are requesting revitalization points, most still receive the full amount of points they request from TDHCA. In 2012, 56% of revitalization applications received the full amount of revitalization points requested from TDHCA, and only 2% were docked or denied points (the remaining 46% were not competitive enough to warrant review from TDHCA; see Figure 2). This is compared with data from 2015, where 64% of applications received the full revitalization points requested, and only 12% (or three applications) were denied points.

Part of the high approval rate for community revitalization points is likely due to self-selection of more serious applicants into the revitalization pool. Whereas in 2012 applications only had to meet a simple attestation standard from the local public governing body, revitalization applicants in 2015 had to meet a set of more rigorous quality standards and undergo review by senior TDHCA staff. I performed an additional content analysis on plans submitted to TDHCA for review and find patterns in how local communities are defining revitalization.

Findings on the Quality and Characteristics of Revitalization Plans

In a review of 2015 revitalization plans I find that developers submit a diverse range of documents to TDHCA as evidence of community revitalization. Formal neighborhood plans were the most common form of plan documentation in 2015. Nearly half (44%) of the plans submitted can be classified as neighborhood plans. However, they were not the only form of plan submitted. Documents that developers submitted ran the gamut from the city’s Annual Action Plan (a citywide housing document required to receive HUD funding), to the city’s comprehensive plan, to Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone resolutions, for example.

Moreover, a plurality of plans (44%) was enacted in 2015, suggesting that many municipalities pass revitalization plans for the express purpose of helping a specific LIHTC housing development obtain revitalization points. This is in contrast to an alternative order of action in which a city first identifies an area for revitalization, and only then lends its support to LIHTC housing as one way to achieve the plan objectives. Most plans were enacted prior to 2015, with the earliest enacted in 2005. However, several of the plans enacted in prior years were originally adopted for the purpose of obtaining LIHTC housing, and were simply resubmitted in 2015 after the development failed to receive an award in previous years.

The diversity in plan documentation is related to one problematic pattern in the 2015 application data: developers submitting citywide plans as documentation for neighborhood revitalization. In the 2015 applications, this sometimes takes the form of cities adopting a “neighborhood plan” which is in actuality a synthesis of excerpts from citywide planning documents (such as the comprehensive plan, or Capital Improvement Plan, etc.). Eight (32%) of the 25 revitalization plans relied heavily or exclusively on content from citywide documents as evidence of neighborhood revitalization. Whereas this might be justifiable in a rural city where the small population renders neighborhood distinctions inapplicable, none of the eight plans with a heavy reliance on citywide documentation were for projects in rural cities (by TDHCA standards). The QAP, while requiring less comprehensive revitalization efforts from rural projects, explicitly requires infrastructure investments for rural projects to be located within a certain distance of the proposed site. Therefore, citywide documentation appears to be a more significant issue among non-rural jurisdictions.

An additional area of deficiency for many plans was the lack of a clear budget. While most plans did not outline specific funding for each proposed intervention, many did a reasonable job of offering evidence of funding for at least some of the proposed initiatives in the plan. However, some plans lacked budgets or evidence of funding entirely, and it is unclear how these plans passed the budgetary requirement outlined in the 2015 QAP. Nine (36%) out of 25 plans lacked a clear budget for a significant number of proposed interventions.

A content analysis of plans, moreover, reveals a discrepancy between the ideal of comprehensiveness upheld in the literature and the approach to revitalization taken by many Texas municipalities and LIHTC developers. Plans in Texas are heavily reliant on physical redevelopment and improvements to the built environment, and tend to be less concerned with “soft” revitalization components such as services, education, or public health, for example. In the following sections I explore how Texas plans compare to the QAP and BSC revitalization benchmarks, respectively.

Texas Plans and the 2015 QAP Standard

A content analysis of the revitalization plans submitted to TDHCA in 2015 reveals that transportation and other infrastructure improvements comprise the largest percentage of funded interventions (see Table 5). This category includes improvements such as sewer and water lines, road maintenance or other arterial improvements, transit stations, etc. Next, in order of frequency, are interventions addressing lack of access to public facilities (which includes law enforcement, health care, or recreational facilities and parks) and adverse environmental conditions (including flooding, industrial land uses, dangerous traffic thoroughfares, etc.). It is important to note that only three applications contain funded interventions designed to address crime and safety (despite a large number of applications identifying crime as a problem for the targeted area); only four applications contain initiatives to promote diversity (defined by TDHCA as either multigenerational or economic); and only nine include interventions dedicated to school facilities or quality.

In this study my intention is to better understand the detailed content of revitalization plans and whether they are contributing to meaningful revitalization efforts. Therefore, in this analysis I use a narrower and more rigorous standard than that required of TDHCA in the QAP (namely in regard to funding and specificity of interventions). It is revealing that, under the standards of this content analysis, most 2015 plans submitted to TDHCA do not meet the requirement to address at least five of the eight community factors in a material way. Thirteen (52%) of the 25 plans propose funded interventions for less than five of the eight community factors. Several plans propose zero funded interventions (a score that is largely a byproduct of failing to disclose sufficient funding details to receive a point in the scoring framework), and several plans propose only infrastructure interventions.

Of the 13 plans addressing fewer than five community factors, nine received full community revitalization points from TDHCA. This is not meant to suggest that TDHCA is evaluating plans improperly, but rather that the current QAP standards do not effectively operationalize revitalization interventions. TDHCA, by nature of its role as an administrative agency, is not empowered to impose discretionary standards onto developers when assessing revitalization efforts. As I discuss earlier in this study, in recent years the Texas QAP has moved toward a more substantive and subjective review process for the revitalization provision. The post-2012, revised QAPs equip TDHCA with a more robust toolbox to reject plans that fail clear tests of rigor. However, the discrepancy between the number of applications approved and the number that fail to materially address the minimum number of community factors illustrates the gap between the current operational definition of revitalization and the efforts necessary to achieve real results in distressed communities.

For the purposes of consistency in coding plan interventions, and to add an additional layer to the analysis, I break down the eight community factors into more specific subfactors (using language taken directly from the QAP). When parsing the plans according to these sub-factors, the presence of inadequate transportation or other infrastructure remains the most common factor addressed by the plans (see Figure 3). This is, in part, because this straightforward factor does not contain any subcomponents outlined specifically in the QAP. However, the subfactor analysis also reveals that, for factors such as “adverse environmental conditions,” there are entire challenges within categories that go routinely unaddressed. For example, toxic emissions, hazardous waste sites, and industrial land uses are included within the category of “adverse environmental conditions,” but are addressed by few plans. The item that appears to push adverse environmental conditions high in the ordinal ranking in Table 2 is flooding, for which 10 plans include funded interventions (e.g., drainage improvements; Figure 3).

Part of the heavy reliance on physical infrastructure is likely due to TDHCA’s standard that the plan “in whole” be expected to address challenging community factors identified in the QAP. Many of the plans cite infrastructure improvements as a panacea for several different neighborhood challenges and community factors. For example, one city submitted a successful application for revitalization points claiming that investments in a sewer line would contribute to the quality of public education in the target area. In this analysis, cross-cutting interventions were identified judiciously, and points were not awarded for unreasonably broad statements (e.g., heavy infrastructure contributing to the quality of public education).

Texas Plans and the BSC Standard

Evaluating 2015 plans on the BSC standard yields similar results to that of the QAP standard analysis. Most plans propose interventions under the “healthy and safe communities” goal, with housing and economic activity following. Again, fewer plans address education, and only three address the income and asset-building goal (see Table 6).

Also notable is the lack of attention to community capacity-building. Building community capacity is a cornerstone of the BSC model, which maintains that sustainable revitalization and neighborhood transformation are driven by local buy-in and engagement. BSC promotes capacity building by investing in partnerships, community organizing, and in identifying a local community agency to lead revitalization efforts. Texas’s 2015 QAP, by comparison, only requires that the revitalization plan be adopted with opportunity for community input. It does not make any demands with regard to investing in ongoing, local community capacity building. In fact, many cities’ formal participatory processes would not qualify as capacity building under BSC standards, since they primarily involve holding a formal public meeting or hearing without necessarily soliciting representative community input.

Most plans submitted in 2015 do not acknowledge the role or presence of local community groups. This reality may pose a problem for the ongoing success of these plans. Participation and capacity building are increasingly accepted as important components of successful long-term revitalization, and these elements are conspicuously absent from most Texas plans. A small minority of plans does mention capacity building or community partnership initiatives, but fail to identify specific funding for these proposals. As per the analytic framework of my evaluation, these unfunded proposals are not granted points in this analysis. This is important to acknowledge, since it appears that capacity-building initiatives, along with other “soft” revitalization efforts, are systemically deprived of line item funding status. However, the literature on revitalization increasingly emphasizes the importance of revitalization efforts being comprehensive and addressing those soft factors. These “soft” initiatives are as worthy of hard, line item funding status as sewer plants or highway improvements

I also break down the five BSC goals into subgoals based on a coding system used in a recent BSC program evaluation. Because the BSC goals are fewer and encompass more subcategories than the QAP factors, disaggregating them is illuminating. Table 7 contains a color-coded list of the BSC goals and subgoals for cross-referencing with Figure 4.

Nineteen (76%) of the 25 plans contain funded interventions to improve the built environment, including basic infrastructure (sewer and water lines, road improvements, etc.) as well as sidewalk improvements, hike and bike trails, transit infrastructure, and other non-housing, non-commercial investments into physical redevelopment (see Figure 4). The next four most common areas of investment are community facilities (actual physical facilities such as a recreation centers), other investments to support business development, and housing construction and renovation (separate from the proposed LIHTC housing development).

Areas that receive comparatively little investment, again, include the “soft” components of revitalization such as youth development opportunities, child care, crime and safety, food access, and financial counseling. As I discuss earlier in this study, one of the key components of the BSC initiative is to identify a neighborhood organization (such as a Community Development Corporation) to lead the revitalization efforts. No plans in the 2015 applicant pool identify a local organization as a revitalization coordinator or lead. Some plans identify a local organization for key areas of intervention, or specific projects, which is approximating the BSC standard but not replicating it. Most plans do not meet standards for comprehensiveness or capacity building as outlined in the BSC model.

Conclusion

Following a thorough review of the history and current status of the “community revitalization” provision in the Texas QAP, I find that standards have improved significantly since the Inclusive Communities summary judgment in 2012. Texas is increasingly incorporating comprehensiveness into its QAP revitalization plan standards, and is moreover requiring evidence of meaningful investment in the low-income communities selected for LIHTC housing. The number of applications requesting points on revitalization in low-income communities has decreased substantially since standards were made more robust in 2013.

Despite these encouraging findings, a content analysis of the 2015 revitalization plans illustrates a strong departure from the standard of comprehensiveness embodied both in the nationally recognized BSC model and in the Texas QAP itself. In fact, most plans, when evaluated under a tighter standard emphasizing funding and specificity of proposed interventions, would not meet the standards established in the Texas QAP itself. Moreover, most of these plans received full revitalization points from TDHCA during the LIHTC application review process. Texas revitalization plans are heavily reliant on infrastructure, and do not contain significant investment in soft revitalization pillars such as education, safety, or community services. They also fail to invest in community capacity building, which is increasingly recognized as a vital component of successful revitalization efforts

These findings indicate that additional standards or review processes may be necessary to close the gap between best practices for revitalization nationally and what is currently interpreted as revitalization by Texas cities and developers. Moreover, findings are consistent with prior research on Texas housing policy, such as Peter Ward’s work on Texas’ informal housing settlements, known as colonias. Following fieldwork and comparative policy research on Texas colonias, housing scholar Peter Ward (1999) criticizes Texas’ tendency to address colonias narrowly as an issue of physical infrastructure, rather than of structural economic underdevelopment. He expresses skepticism regarding the state’s “Band[1]Aid solution” focusing on physical infrastructure improvements when colonias in fact represent “a structural problem compounded by” a number of factors, including “weak administrative capacity, inadequate laws, and enfeebled social organization and local leadership” (Ward, 1999, p. 260). In this study I provide additional evidence that Texas habitually approaches community development with too narrow a lens, paying insufficient attention to wider structural challenges that affect the housing and community development landscape at the local level.

These findings will hopefully provide a foundation for further analysis and exploration of policy alternatives to address deficiencies in current revitalization standards. Future research may decide to focus on specific QAP revisions that will help hold cities and developers accountable to more meaningful revitalization standards in Texas, as well as the quality of plan implementation at the local level (including the identification of practical metrics to demonstrate plan success over time). Moreover, because Texas has become a focal point for national discourse on fair housing since the Supreme Court heard the Inclusive Communities case in 2015, the efficacy of Texas’s revisions to its QAP should be of interest to other states making efforts to desegregate their LIHTC housing.

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