#spatial justice

Transformative Planning: Radical alternatives to neoliberal urbanism edited by Tom Angotti (2019)

Book launch on 11/20 at CUNY.

Though modern urban planning is only a century old, it appears to be facing extinction. Historically, urban planning has been narrowly conceived, ignoring gaping inequalities of race, class, and gender while promoting unbridled growth and environmental injustices. In Transformative Planning, Tom Angotti argues that unless planning is radically transformed and develops serious alternatives to neoliberal urbanism and disaster capitalism it will be irrelevant in this century. This book emerges from decades of urban planners and activists contesting inequalities of class, race, and gender in cities around the world. It compiles the discussions and debates that appeared in the publications of Planners Network, a North American urban planners’ association. Original contributions have been added to the collection so that it serves as both a reflection of past theory and practice and a challenge for a new generation of activists and planners.

Climate Change from the Streets: How Conflict and Collaboration Strengthen the Environmental Justice Movement by Michael Mendez (2020)

If you have some pocket money to spare, these are two organizations on two different coasts to support. I learned about Picture the Homeless over ten years ago, and the simple fact that it is a homeless-led organization was so radical.

Picture the Homeless in New York City is in dire need of emergency funds Rebuild Campaign for Picture the Homeless 

long-standing advocacy organization led for and by homeless people, is raising money to keep the doors to its East 126th street office open

The organization has fought for homeless rights and served as a place for homeless individuals to organize since its inception in 2003.

It is unique in being founded and led by homeless individuals.

“We self-organize,” says Burnett. “Because of that our members tend to see things a little differently than say a coalition of social workers.”

“Picture the Homeless is a space where homeless people themselves get to be heard and move change around what homeless people themselves recognize as the root causes of homelessness,” he says.

The organization has organized campaigns around development of affordable housing for homeless people, over policing and police reform, community land trusts, rights of homeless individuals and the “Shelter Industrial Complex“. (Source: City Limits July 2019)

I have been a renter my entire adult life. I just joined my first tenants union, the Los Angeles Tenants Union. The article excerpted below is a great intro on LATU

101 Notes on the LA Tenants Union  (Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal, Commune Mag, July 2019)

LATU started in 2015, and has “since expanded to ten local chapters, which meet twice a month across the city, and have now organized dozens of tenants’ associations, some with hundreds of members. LATU is a member-funded union. We are not a non-profit. We receive no funding except from dues, which average five dollars a month. 

30. But we didn’t just want to analyze gentrification, we wanted to stop it.

31. We recognized that the solidarity amongst gentrification’s beneficiaries—the police, landlords, developers, government representatives of the real estate state—meant we needed to build equal solidarity for ourselves.

...

50. When you call this crisis a housing crisis, you misunderstand the problem as one of production—the so-called “shortage”—and not of distribution. There are two vacant investor-owned homes for every houseless person in the country; cities overbuild luxury housing to appease investors, and the rents for working people do not decline despite that glut.

51. But you have heard it a million times and will hear it a million more: there is a housing crisis, and we will build our way out of it. 

52. From Gavin Newsom’s “Marshall Plan” to Ben Carson’s embrace of deregulation, this supply-side, build-baby-build strategy follows what gets promoted as economic common sense. 

53. But we understand supply-side policy as an attempt to govern housing without governance, to get people out of politics. To benefit the people who profit from housing, not the people who live in it. 

...

76. The Hillside Villa Tenants Association focused citywide attention on the expiration of “Affordable Housing” covenants. “Affordable Housing,” the city, state, and county’s preferred policy solution to the crisis, uses incentives or subsidies as a trade-off for rent limits, which have an expiration date. Across LA, their expiration now threatens to displace thousands of residents. 77. Calling for the eminent domain of their building subsized with zero interest loans, Hillside Villa’s regular actions exposed the scam of public investment for private gain and the lie of affordability itself. 78. The East Second Street Tenants Association in Boyle Heights, determined to meet weekly and act together, continued a rent strike for almost twelve months, inspired campouts at their landlord’s house, received more national press than we can count, and eventually won LATU’s first collective-bargaining agreement, which controls rent increases and secures the right to renegotiate.

There’s a great part about the narrative of the public in A Perilous Path: Talking Race, Inequality, and the Law, a book adapted from four-person conversation between Sherrilyn Ifill, Loretta Lynch, Bryan Stevenson, and Anthony C. Thompson, or as the Bustle reviewer put it: “What happens when you put the President of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, a former U.S. Attorney General, a famous social justice activist, and the founder of the NYU Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law in a room together?”

Emphases added (and I reordered the following paragraphs, the first two actually come after the third in the book)

So, one of the narratives I hope we’ll begin to attend to is to reclaim the word “public.” And the reason I think it’s a piece of what you’re talking about, Bryan, is because the word public only became dirty when it became associated with being black. Public housing was built for white people initially. There was nothing about public transportation that was considered black. Public schools—when you think public schools, we know what we’re talking about—right?

So we took these things that were pillars of public life and American life, and we racialized them. And then once we racialized them, we could demonize them, and we could starve them of funds. And so now, in Maryland, you can get lots of money to build a highway, but the governor cancels the plan to build a subway in Baltimore that’s going to take people to their jobs, because that’s public transportation. And when you say in a speech in Maryland that you’re giving your tax dollars for public transportation in Baltimore, they know what you mean. So reclaiming that narrative about public and private and detaching it from this demonized and racialized context, I think, is one of the most important narrative engagements.

...

And one of the narratives that has been successfully advanced over the last thirty years is the privatization of almost everything in public life. Whether it’s prisons, universities, K–12 schools, everybody wants to sit in their car and drive—it’s all taking us away from public life. And public life is the only way that you can keep a strong middle class, the only way that people move from lower socioeconomic conditions into the middle class. The only way you maintain stability is if you have public institutions, public infrastructure, public services that are there to support your life and family.

Ifill talks about the racialized impacts of the cancelled Baltimore public transportation project 

Trespass is self-managed, open access, and unfunded. It is multidisciplinary and publishes work in different languages. There have been 3 issues so far, (one, two, three) covering squatting and other unauthorized reappropriations of space all across Europe, including Poland and Sweden, as well as the more well known hubs of squatting such as the Netherlands. They have a lot of timely info on ongoing squatters activism, including evictions. 

I am especially excited about their book reviews, given how academics who study activism and social movements often publish material that is not useful to the activists, or substantially distorts the lived experiences of the activists. 

For example, NN’s review of The Autonomous Life? Paradoxes of hierarchy and authority in the squatters movement in Amsterdam is informed by their decade of squatting in Amsterdam. 

“I am amazed at David Graeber’s glowing review because it’s not much more than gossip and finishing scores, with some clunky academic analysis of late night conversations.” 

And I am thinking deeply about their unvarnished opinion of an anthropology Ph.D. student “who judges European squatters because they do not comply with their rhetoric of nonhierarchy” but did not inform the people she volunteered with “that they were research subjects and that she would repeat midnight conversations in a PhD.”

Mapping the Movement: Producing maps of squatted social centres in Western Europe

The website at maps.squat.net at present features finished city maps from Amsterdam, Barcelona, Brighton, London, Madrid, Potsdam and Rotterdam. Information for other cities such as Copenhagen, Hamburg, Leiden, Oslo, Paris and Seville is still being added. The first mentioned maps are considered finished in that the researcher(s) have completed the input of data.

Inspired by the 2013 project to: 

Doreen Massey, “Geographies of Responsibility” introduction to 2004 special issue of Geografiska Annaler, 86 B (1): 5–18.

Several of my favorite ACSPers, including Lisa Bates and Anna Brand, spent the first half of the week at the Black Geographies conference. Now I need a time machine in addition to a teleportation device. But the conference organizers were fabulous and have already posted the videos from the conference.  

BLACK GEOGRAPHIES: INSURGENT KNOWLEDGE, SPATIAL POETICS, AND THE POLITICS OF BLACKNESS

Keynote by Katherine McKittrick & Concluding Remarks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9u7fsUPFbM

Session 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGAfDgUZoIU&feature=youtu.be

Sessions 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4a2brnbuJhw

Sessions 2, 3 & Concluding Remarks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abNDXg0f5UI

Introduction and Panel 1, "Black Matters are Spatial Matters": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2806Fts1Auc

Black liberation movements around the world, from the streets of Oakland and Ferguson to the shores of southern Europe, have focused international conversations among activists, academics, and artists on the importance of blackness to the geographical imagination. Importantly, this dialogue has elucidated the possibilities of blackness not only as a tool for understanding inequality, whiteness, non-being, and social/physical death, but also as a radical framework for envisioning liberation, social justice, and reconstruction.

Excited to be interviewed on Sense of Place tomorrow about “Placemaking When Black Lives Matter.” Their recent episode on Race and Architecture seems right up my alley

Bottom line is that racism fundamentally shapes architectural and urban spaces- from the parks, we play in, to the streets we drive through, to the sidewalks we walk on daily. The lives of people of colour have been irrevocably altered through land dispossession, ongoing processes of home ownership exclusion and of course, the appalling process of redlining.

What impact does this have on their experience of place?