Thoughts on “Urban Planning: Art and the City 1967 – 2017,” an exhibit at CAM STL

In one scene a pair of female dancers, one black and one white, stand sideways ready to begin choreography. Costumes—black shorts and sleeveless black tops—suggest this piece as hip and abstract. As they begin to dance, so does the position of each of their arms, angular in front and bent at the elbow as if to engage in a sort of cooperative, artistic combat. As the dancers continue, they often twin their iterative movements in both angular and lyrical motions, with encircled arms and bent knees and twisted torsos, positions in tension with how their legs often stay planted in a stationary place.

Image from Liquor Store Theatre

What distinguishes this choreography are not just these movements but also the location. Staged in front a liquor store in Detroit, MI, this dance is from Liquor Store Theatre. Conceived of by Detroit native Maya Stovall (who performs in much of the choreography) Liquor Store Theatre, is according to her website, “a four-volume, thirty-plus episode meditation on city life in Detroit … a four-years-running series of documented performances and conversations with people in the streets, sidewalks, and parking lots surrounding Detroit liquor stores.” The work includes both video of the choreography (set to atmospheric, rhythmic music) and videos of interviews with residents inside or in front of the liquor store. Some residents talk about changes in Detroit: tearing down abandoned residential buildings and development to existing abandoned commercial structures. When I watched the video, one interviewee, a young black man, talked about how tourists often likely mis-perceive him and his friends as up to no good when they are in fact just hanging out and spending time together.

I learned of Liquor Store Theatre at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis as part of the museum’s “Urban Planning: Art and the City 1967-2017” a group exhibition with work by 24 artists; the exhibit opened earlier this month and runs through August 13, 2017. This past weekend I visited, watched Liquor Store Theatre, and engaged with the exhibition’s other works. (Earlier in May, the museum hosted Critical Spatial Practice St. Louis (CSPSTL). I attended “Performance and the City,” a panel with Maya Stovall, other exhibition artists Abigale Deville and David Hartt, and the curator Kelly Shindler.)

Literature for the exhibit thematizes much of the work as either “photography as a tool to document a rapidly changing nation,” sculpture, or “several moving image works.” In my interaction, I thought of three more takeaways.

First, although other cities are referenced, most works consider one of three cities: New York, Detroit, or St. Louis. It is useful to pause and ask why the focus on these three cities, especially in the last 40 years? Planning and development in New York City—from the 1916 Zoning Resolution, to the late 20^th century and early 21st century loft laws that legalized illegal occupation of artists in commericial buildings, to the 2005 Greenpoint-Williamsburg Land Use and Waterfront Plan that transformed the neighborhoods’ skyline and displaced many residents with market-rate high rise buildings and scant affordable housing options—not only changed the function of buildings and skyline in the city, but also set rubrics for other local and national conversations and policies on density, zoning, gentrification, displacement, and “renewal,” and the racial impact of these urban planning efforts.

I particularly thought about zoning and race in Glenn Ligon’s Housing in New York (2007), which curator Shindler describes as “expos[ing] gentrification as an assault on African-American neighborhoods.” In the series of five silkscreens, Ligon narrates the story of each place he has lived throughout his life all in New York City. Ligon’s story is one of growing up in housing projects in the Bronx; living in brownstones with no-heat and flooded ceilings in Brooklyn and Manhattan; and later, as he became a more established artist, living in converted lofts in Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Glenn Ligon, Housing in New York (2007)

Ligon, Housing in New York (2007), Frame 1

Ligon, Housing in New York (2007), Frame 2

Ligon, Housing in New York (2007), Frame 3

Ligon, Housing in New York (2007), Frame 4

Ligon, Housing in New York, Frame 5

As of 2010 New York City had a population of more than 8 million that was about 25% black (with Harlem no longer majority black); St. Louis City had a population of 319,000 that was about 49% black; and Detroit had a population of 713,000 that was about 82% black. Detroit and St. Louis are also the cities with the two largest shrinking populations (2015 estimates situate the population of St. Louis at 315,000 and of Detroit at 677,000).

But some art revealed the sociality and life beyond this “decline” and beyond how black urban areas are often demarcated in policy and discourse as in ruin. There was a through line of liquor and inebriation in much of the art, such as Martha Rosler’s The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems, 1974-75.

Closeup of Martha Rosler’s The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems, 1974-75

But other works revealed a rich sociality to where alcohol gets bought and consumed as a way to tell the story of those often ignored by urban planners. In Maya Stovall’s Liquor Store Theatre, for example, the commercial place to buy liquor becomes a backdrop for residents–mostly black–to tell stories about their home.

Second, some works articulated the role of the rural in the making of the urban. Images from Juan William Chávez‘s Pruitt-Igoe Bee Sanctuary (2010) situated an imaginary of turning the land in the Pruitt-Igoe forest in St. Louis City into a bee sanctuary.

Images from Juan William Chávez’s Pruitt-Igoe Bee Sanctuary (2010 and 2011)

In Agnes Denes’s Wheatfield–A Confrontation, the artist documents the wheatfield she and others planted at the Battery Park landfill in May 1982; in August 1982 she and others harvested more than 1000 pounds of wheat delivered to 28 cities. As Denes wrote in her artist statement: “Planting and harvesting a field of wheat on land worth $4.5 billion created a powerful paradox. Wheatfield was a symbol, a universal concept; it represented food, energy, commerce, world trade, and economics. It referred to mismanagement, waste, world hunger and ecological concerns. It called attention to our misplaced priorities.”

Agnes Denes, Wheatfield–A Confrontation (1982)

Third, the exhibition particularized attention to art about urban space and planning, rather than art (such as public sculpture) that exists within urban space. There is much overlap between the two categories and the exhibit attuned to how art about urban space often focuses on urban aesthetics and imaginaries. Mark Bradford’s Untitled (2012) “create[d]” according to the curator “ghostly etchings, a palimpsest of merchant posters sourced around Los Angeles that refract the area’s crucial informal economies.” Note how his articulation situates the sparse and novice-esque aesthetics of the block letters alongside messages of “Homeless Prevention Program” and “We Buy Houses Cash.”

Closeup on Mark Bradford’s Untitled (2012)

Another closeup on Mark Bradford’s Untitled (2012)

Ultimately and collectively the works in this exhibit re-orient how we might study, document, and analyze urban space by situating the aesthetics, narratives, and sociality of, and imaginations for, the city.

“Urban Planning: Art and the City 1967-2017” runs at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis until August 13, 2017.

Building Cycling Infrastructure in Cities

An increasingly important focus in cities around the world is how to improve quality of life in terms of sustainable travel and associated health benefits. Cycling is a big part of these endeavours. Much has been written on the different ways to improve cycling and increase the uptake in cyclists. For example, there are a number of different ‘schools’ to follow (Danish, Dutch, or somewhere in between). But, there are many issues for getting different groups interested in cycling and for developing cycling in cities where cycling is either a low priority or little prevalence.

The first is an issue in big diverse cities with populations from all corners of the globe. For women, ethnic minority groups, and children cycling can be perceived to be dangerous and the city unwelcoming for the practice. Colleagues at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine have examined such issues with regards to encouraging a wider uptake in cycling for short trips or commuting within under-represented groups (Steinbeck et al, 2011). This is a complex problem that involves many different things from learning new skills, cultural norms, costs, and perceptions of what cycling involves.

The second is a problem that is associated with how to integrate new or sustainable infrastructure in cities that are envisioned as the preserve of the private motor vehicle. Ageing infrastructure is a growing problem in most cities. The case for infrastructure maintenance and renovation is a key theme in Amin and Thrift’s recently published “Seeing Like a City” (2017). But, there are many problems when it comes to actually trying to build new infrastructure like cycling paths where one doesn’t already exist. In Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria is a prime example of a city with low but growing cycling rates and cycling infrastructure that is best described as patchy (with good and bad elements – Barnfield and Plyushteva, 2016). Recently the municipal authorities have outlined ambitious plans to include a cycle path in the renovations of Dondukov Boulevard in central Sofia (the road surface requires repairing and the renovations will include a cycle path).

The photo below shows the current situation, with sparse current cycling facilities. The addition of a cycle path will be a big change: materially, spatially, and culturally. In the plans set out by the municipality in their cycling programme 2016-2019 (Програмата за развитие на велосипедния транспорт на територията на Столична община за периода 2016 – 2019) the exact finalised provision hasn’t been settled. Local advocacy groups are concerned by the lack of detail with work due to commence in June 2016. The decision whether to include two one-way cycle paths or a two-way single path is still unresolved (See the images below on the visualisation of one of the potential options). The challenges faced by Sofia and other cities in the region on how to integrate sustainable travel within existing and new infrastructure will be part of efforts to shape urban space and cultures for many years to come.

 

Photo of current streetscape on бул. Княз Александър Дондуков (Courtesy of Old Sofia Blog)

Visualisation of proposed two-way cycle path on бул. Княз Александър Дондуков (Courtesy of Monitor BG)

Visualisation of current streetscape бул. Княз Александър Дондуков (Courtesy of Sofia News)

 

 

Amin, A., & Thrift, N. (2017). Seeing like a city. John Wiley & Sons.

Barnfield, A., & Plyushteva, A. (2016). Cycling in the post-socialist city: On travelling by bicycle in Sofia, Bulgaria. Urban Studies, 53(9), 1822-1835.

Steinbach, R., Green, J., Datta, J., & Edwards, P. (2011). Cycling and the city: a case study of how gendered, ethnic and class identities can shape healthy transport choices. Social Science & Medicine, 72(7), 1123-1130.

‘Angels’, and the myth of the ‘New South’

Jason Luger

 

Figure 1: Still from Broadway revival of ‘Angels in America’, 2017.

Fallen Angels in the Queen City 

Twenty – one years ago, the Charlotte Repertory Theater staged Tony Kushner’s award-winning play, ‘Angels in America: a Gay Fantasia on National Themes’. Known as the ‘Queen City’, Charlotte was named for King George III’s German wife, Charlotte Sophia of Mecklenburg -Strelitz: her buxom statue greets travelers as they arrive at Douglas International Airport. This fact is not lost on area drag queens.

Charlotte, then just emerging as a major national banking and transportation center, gained international headlines when ‘Angels’ – which is about AIDS, politics and gay life in 1980s New York – was forcibly closed after the city cut funding to the Repertory Theater. There had been an angry backlash from the city’s influential evangelical community (including local celebrity the Reverend Billy Graham) about the show’s themes – in particular, the fact that city funding was supporting a play focusing on the homosexual experience. Charlotte, ever conscious of its reputation vis ‘the New South’ and imbued with the civic boosterism so common in Southeast boomtowns, found itself engulfed in a cultural war which pitted cosmopolitans against hometown Bible Belt values. As seen in the Economist (below), and the New York Times (‘Play Displays a Growing City’s Cultural Tensions’, 22 March 1996), Charlotte’s episode became a national conversation about the arts, the public, and the city. The play had, by this time, opened and toured in a number of cities across the country, but few had seen the type of controversy and feverish public discourse that Charlotte witnessed (Nielsen, 2008; Tepper, 2011).

No gays, please, we’re Carolinian

 Apr 24th 1997 | CHARLOTTE

Home to Fortune-500 companies like NationsBank (now Bank of America) and Wachovia (now Wells Fargo), with a new NFL team (Panthers) and major hub airport (US Airways, now American Airlines), Charlotte’s ‘New South’ identity was suddenly paralyzed.

This would not be the city’s last cultural war, and it certainly wasn’t the first.

The ‘New South’ Myth 

Figure 2: Life under Jim Crow in North Carolina (1940s).

If Atlanta was ‘the city too busy to hate’, as civic boosters claimed during the precarious years of desegregation, Charlotte (in some ways, Atlanta’s little sister), was the city where making deals trumped everything. Born out of textile looms and convenient road and rail intersections, Charlotte had established itself by the mid – 20th century as the Carolina’s largest metropolitan area and a growing financial center. Race relations, Charlotte leaders claimed, took a back seat to the city’s overall progress. In 1971, Charlotte became a national test-case for mandatory busing to desegregate public schools as a result of the landmark case ‘Swann vs the Mecklenburg Board of Education’, which upheld busing as a Constitutional, and indeed necessary, antidote to the legacy of Jim Crow.

In the 1980s, Harvey Gantt, an African-American businessman, became mayor, and Charlotte was seen as a model of desegregation compared to other Southern peers, with a meritocratic leadership structure and democratic civil society. By the 1990s, Charlotte was shaking off the dust of its humble, pious, yeoman Scotch-Irish origins. A flood of newcomers to the region – many from the Midwest and Northeast – had changed the demographics considerably: Charlotteans were just as likely to be from Pittsburgh or Cleveland as they were from the rural South. Embarrassing scandals had seen the downfall of televangelist celebrities like Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, and local business leaders like Hugh McColl – the CEO of NationsBank, and later Bank of America – had aspirations that went not heavenward, but with an eye to competing with major financial centers for talent and commercial prestige.

The arts, leaders like McColl believed, were crucial to this effort to attract talent and cement Charlotte’s reputation as a worthy home of some of the nation’s largest banks. NationsBank built a monumental new headquarters in 1992, at the time one of the tallest buildings in the country, and attached to the lobby was a new performing arts center.

Figure 3: Charlotte city skyline, 2016.

But like the mythological financial instruments traded in these glassy, neo-gothic towers (such as the ‘Collateralized Debt Obligations’ that went ‘poof!’ in 2008-2009), the ‘New South’ shimmered / shimmers like a desert mirage, a Potemkin village, a fable. Just as ‘the South’ was a construction based on the necessity of racial and class subjugation, the ‘New South’ emerged as a necessary snake oil, a smoke and mirror act, to hasten the neoliberal remaking of the southern textile town and quickly sweep racial scars and ‘fire and brimstone’ tent revivals under the proverbial rug.

In 1996, the ‘Angels’ controversy erupted. By this time, scholars such as Kuklinski et al., (1997) had already begun to debunk the ‘New South’ myth and the fallacy of a post-racial Sunbelt. Indeed, it just so happened that many of the newcomers from other places reinforced, rather than challenged, extant southern racial attitudes and prejudices. After all, Henry Grady, the Atlantan who had coined the term ‘New South’ in 1890 – had not foreseen a region of class or race equity, but rather a resurgent South of industry and modernism. The birth of the New South, and its roads, textile mills and country clubs – coincided with a re-affirmation of white supremacy and the legislative encoding of racial apartheid (as seen in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896).

In 1997, a local white parent sued the county over the forced school busing, and won his case. In 2000, a Federal appeals court upheld the decision, and race-based busing ended. Charlotte schools began a rapid re-segregation.

In 2008, Wachovia went bankrupt, and was purchased in a fire sale by San Francisco-based Wells Fargo.

Then came the Bathroom controversy.

Figure 4: National press for North Carolina’s House Bill 2 controversy, 2016.

The 2000s had been good to the ‘Queen City’. Bank mergers and financial services growth, along with the steady expansion of US Airways’ Charlotte hub, had propelled Charlotte into the top 20 American cities, with a metro population topping 2 million by 2010. Superbowl appearances by the Panthers had also helped with national, and international name recognition – culminating in the city’s hosting of the 2012 Democratic National Convention, widely lauded as a success. In 2014, Charlotte’s CAST theater group, based in the now-trendy ‘NoDa’ arts district – staged ‘Angels in America’, to positive critical reception and this time, no public outcry.

But the election of Barack Obama in 2008, combined with decades of neoliberal economic policy resulting in the 2008-2009 financial crash and great recession, had awakened all of the South’s skeletons from their (brief) slumber. The myth of the ‘New South’ came crashing down with the stock market. The ‘Tea Party’ was born, and made North Carolina one of its command centers, backed by fantastic policy and financial support from nationwide groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the billionaire Koch brothers.  In 2010, conservative republicans took control of North Carolina’s General Assembly, forming a veto-proof majority that effectively neutralized the Democrat Governor, Beverly Perdue. In 2012, former Charlotte mayor Pat McCrory, a republican, won the governorship. With all three branches of government under control (and significant reach into the courts as well), North Carolina’s general assembly went to work dis-assembling the fragile frame of the ‘New South’, the politically-moderate costume North Carolina had donned for a generation.

Issue after issue, North Carolina gained national headlines – strict ID rules for voters, with the effect of disenfranchising African-Americans and liberal college students; spending cuts to social programs, and perhaps most strikingly, a vicious attack on LGBTQ rights. In 2012, ‘Amendment One’ passed in a state referendum, making gay marriage a violation of state law (later repealed by a Supreme Court Decision). The ‘Moral Mondays’ protests at the General Assembly, led by local NAACP leader Rev. William Barber, gained international press.

General Assembly Police Lt. Martin Brock, right directs Rev. William Barber, President of the N.C. chapter of the NAACP to step down during “Moral Monday” demonstrations at the General Assembly in Raleigh, N.C., Monday, July 8, 2013. Nearly 700 people, led by the North Carolina Chapter of the NAACP, have been arrested over the past 10 weeks of the legislative session while protesting against policies being enacted by the North Carolina General Assembly. (AP Photo/Gerry Broome)

Figure 5: Rev. William Barber at a ‘Moral Mondays’ Protest, North Carolina General Assembly, 2016.

Charlotte, the state’s largest city, again found itself front and center in the battle between cosmopolitan and conservative forces. The battlefield, as it turned out, wasn’t a play on gay themes this time, but the everyday life of transgender people. In 2016, the Charlotte City Council passed an ordinance that protected LGBTQ residents from discrimination and, notoriously, that mandated that both public and private businesses allow transgender persons to use the bathroom facility where they feel most comfortable. This was similar to non-discrimination ordinances passed in a number of other cities, including Columbia, South Carolina. And a firestorm was unleashed.

Fallen Angels, Redux 

20 years after Tony Kushner’s ‘Angels’ had fallen on the Queen City, the boomtown found its social fabric torn apart.

The city, with some of the South’s wealthiest zip codes, had become known for some of the lowest social mobility in the country, with huge gaps in social and economic indicators between white and non-white sections of town. Racial tension erupted into rioting in October 2016, when police officers killed an African-American man in Northeast Charlotte, one of the city’s poorest areas.

Figure 6:Race  Riots in Charlotte, Oct. 2016

The riots exposed the myth of the ‘New South’ for what it was: a marketing ploy, and window dressing on long entrenched, deep structural problems that Charlotte – and many American cities face. These problems are especially stark in sprawling Southern cities like Charlotte where decades of re-segregation, poor public transit and uneven economic growth have resulted in a neoliberal cityscape in which quality of life has fallen for many even as affluence has increased for many others.

Meanwhile, another battle had erupted between the city of Charlotte’s (white) progressive community and the (white) state legislators, who in March 2016 passed House Bill 2 – known as ‘the Bathroom Bill’ – in the middle of the night, with no debate or public discussion. House Bill 2 (or HB2) rescinded Charlotte’s non-discrimination ordinance, and went much further: it banned any municipality from passing similar nondiscrimination ordinances, prevented cities and towns from increasing their minimum wage, and, most nefariously, mandated that transgender persons use the bathroom corresponding to the sex on their birth certificate. This was, far and away, the most draconian and far-reaching recent anti LGBTQ legislation in the country.

This blog post will not recount the specifics of the long back and forth between the General Assembly and the City, the business community, the NBA, Bank of America, the national and international press, and the efforts of the LGBTQ community or various civil rights organizations; the boycotts and travel bans; the nasty rhetoric and name calling and overall ugliness exposed in what sociologist Elijah Anderson (2011) might call a ‘tear’ in the precarious ‘cosmopolitan canopy of civility’ that was the illusion of a progressive North Carolina. Or the half-hearted (non) repeal of House Bill 2 that leaves many of its worst, and most discriminatory pieces intact and leaves LGBTQ North Carolinians without basic legal protections.

But I will conclude by suggesting that the ‘New South’, just like the ‘Old South’, just like ‘manifest destiny’ or John Winthrop’s ‘Shining City Upon the Hill’ – are conceptual rather than tangible; dreams rather than realities; phantoms rather than fact. As Faulkner himself mused, ‘the past is never dead. It’s not even past (1951).’ At the time of this writing, Confederate monuments are being taken down in cities from New Orleans to Richmond. What will rise in their place, or fall from the sky, is yet unknown.

***

References

Anderson, E. (2011) The Cosmopolitan canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life. New York:  WW Norton & Company.

Faulkner, W. (1951) Requiem for a Nun.

Grady, H.W. and Dyer, O. (1890) The New South. Atlanta: Robert Bonner’s Sons.

Kuklinski, J.H., Cobb, M.D. and Gilens, M. (1997) Racial attitudes and the” New South”. The Journal of Politics, 59(2), pp.323-349.

Nielsen, K. (2008) Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. New York; A&C Black.

Tepper, S.J. (2011) Not Here, Not Now, Not That!: Protest Over Art and Culture in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

The Economist, 24 April 1997, ‘No gays please: we’re Carolinian.’

The New York Times, 22 March 1996, ‘Play displays a growing city’s cultural tensions’. By Kevin Sack.

 

CFP/Conference — Black Geographies: Insurgent Knowledge, Spatial Poetics, and the Politics of Blackness

UPDATED 16 JUN 2017:

The date of the symposium has been moved up to October 11-13.

Black Geographies: Insurgent Knowledge, Spatial Poetics, and the Politics of Blackness

the date of the symposium has been moved up to October 11-13.A symposium hosted by the Geography Department at the
University of California, Berkeley
Organizers: Dr. Jovan Lewis, Dr. Sharad Chari, Camilla Hawthorne, Kaily Heitz
October 11-13, 2017, UC Berkeley
CFP Deadline: June 16, 2017

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 whiteness, non-being, and social/physical death, but also as a radical framework for envisioning liberation, social justice, and reconstruction. We invite our colleagues to Black Geographies to discuss the possibilities of interdisciplinary work oriented on black geographic thought. This symposium offers geography in general, and black geographies specifically, as capacious fields of inquiry that invite historical, political economic, sociological, and artistic perspectives–as well as a range of “established” and alternative methodologies.

The double valence of our use of “black geographies” refers both to the ways that geography can be used to understand the complex, overlapping spatialities of black life and the stretching of geographical knowledge that takes place when scholars consciously center questions of race and blackness. Katherine McKittrick’s important interventions, for instance, employ the concept of “poetics” to describe those landscapes and places that have been narratively and counter-conceptually created with blackness as their source.

More here.

City of Terror

Sheet

Mark Beyer’s “City of Terror” trading cards, printed by Françoise Mouly and hand-assembled (with bubble gum acquired through Topps) for RAW Magazine, Issue 2.

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Lees on Gentrification: ‘It’s Displacement’.

Professor Loretta Lees appeared on talk show ‘Renegade, Inc.’ to discuss the impacts of gentrification – which she defines as resulting in displacement against one’s will. And critiques the more recent turn toward ‘regeneration’ as a more palatable form of social cleansing. https://www.rt.com/shows/renegade-inc/387555-gentrification-alternative-socially-cleansed/

 

 

The relationship between universities and the cities where they are located

Steven J. Diner discusses his new book, Universities and Their Cities: Urban Higher Education in America, in a recent interview with Inside Higher Ed. Read the interview here: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/05/04/author-discusses-new-book-relationships-including-tensions-over-race-and-economics?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=a5c8c771da-DNU20170504&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-a5c8c771da-197367501&mc_cid=a5c8c771da&mc_eid=8edda0c773

 

Upcoming Talk at Center for Metropolitan Studies

Prof. Dr. Andrew Lees (Rutgers University) will give a talk entitled “Cities and Urban Society, 1914-1918” on Thursday, May 11 at 6 pm. For details, consult http://www.kwhistu.tu-berlin.de/fachgebiet_neuere_geschichte/menue/home/

 

Urban Protests, Housing Evictions, and Neighborhoods Dismembered: A Shared Collective Experience in the 15M

by Juliana Luna Freire

“15Mpedia, para que todo el mundo pueda contar <>” [15Mpedia, so that everyone can tell one’s 15M] is the description of a creative commons platform, within a larger idealized project called 15Mcc (15M Creative Commons), created to catalogue narratives, data, maps, articles, among other items related to the social movement originated in Spain in 2011 from the financial crisis that hit the whole continent. The platform attempts to convene sources about a social protest that reverberated over five years ago, as an ongoing example of “rhyzomatic revolution” happening in networked societies (Castells 2012, Merrifield 2014). We could argue that it generated a non-unified movement of multiple collective groups making impact in contemporary Spanish politics by precisely engaging virtual and physical use of space (Merrifield 2014).

Indignados and 15M, as political projects, can be interpreted as responses to the 2008 financial crisis in Spain. From the subdivision of these movements, two specific projects were created to focus solely on housing: the Platform for those Affected by Mortgages (PAH) and the Movement for the Right of Housing. Some of these visual material on independent productions of camping protests in the city of Barcelona and the appearance of manifests and protests anti-eviction (#nomásdesahucios) indicate how specific cultural projects appropriate the collective experience of housing/eviction and a loss of sense of commune in their virtual and physical platforms to question capitalist use of urban space.

The photo above displays the following sentence: “Queremos ser libres, no presos de los bancos / porque la utopia es posible” [We want to be free, not jailed by the banks. Because utopia is possible]. The process of combined images of eviction and political protest counterbalance the lack of hope and disbelief in the process of seeing the human fabric that constitutes neighborhoods dismembered: in a move of the people against the system (Ressel 2011), of the acampadas against neoliberalism (Harvey 2012), and of the citizens of the city against the economic forces that govern it.

It is possible to notice that there was a combination of a series of economic factors that lead to high numbers of evictions. One of them, the cláusula suelo, a common financial practice followed by a later court decision on how the loan interest for housing were using abusive practices that protected instead bank institutions. Many lost their housing due to the implementation of those practices. Another complicating factor was the sale of public housing to banks, which subsequently lead to more removals: https://pahparla.blogspot.com.es/2017/01/comunnicado-encasa-cibeles.html?m=1.

One particular project that provides a collective experience of the neighborhoods being dismembered is “Poner rostro a las víctimas” [Put a face on the victims], photographing and distributing brief biographic information on the families being evicted .

Anti-eviction platform and protest were, then, fighting also the eviction of ill, disabled, elderly included, previous to the change of the law that protected that kind of eviction. A legal resolution from 1 de Julio de 2009 which determined protection in terms of electricity cuts for a series of individuals considered “colectivos vulnerables” [vulnerable groups], called “bono social” [social benefit]. Using the hashtag #Pobrezaenergéticamata [energy poverty kills], it tells stories such as the one of Rosa, an elderly lady in Reus, Tarragona (Nov. 2016). Because her gas supply was removed, she started using candles and ended up dead due to a fire.  What this indicates is also other forms of housing removal other than just displacement.

Occupation increased in urban areas during and after the crisis, and took different forms of activities and political ideas. For more information on the phenomenon of Okupas in Spain, please refer to Stephen Villaseca’s work (2013), offering a thorough reading on the ongoing movement before the 15M, and the protest of different groups against capitalist speculation, okuppying abandoned city spaces and creating new, communitarian uses for them.

Works Cited

Castells, Manuel.Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity, 2012.

Fominaya, Cristina. “Spain is different”: Podemos and the 15-M. 29 May 2014. Open Democracy.net. 10 Mar. 2017.

Harvey, David. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. New York: Verso, 2012.

Merrifield, Andy. The New Urban Question. New York: PlutoPress, 2014.

Ressel, Stéphane. ¡Indignaos! Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 2011.

Snyder, Jonathan. Poetics of Opposition in Contemporary Spain: Politics and the Work of Urban Culture. London: Palgrave, 2015.

Villaseca, Stephen. Barcelonan Okupas: Squatter Power! Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson, 2013.

Emplacing Materiality

What are the materials of urban space and urban life? The dense forest full of volunteer trees and plants. The beveled, dark grey and somewhat translucent fence that surrounds 100-acres of land newly seized by eminent domain. The hoops and nets of a circular basketball court situated within the green of a vertical park. The aged red bricks of a three-story home. The calm pond in the middle of a calm park full of exercise activity stations. What are the materials of urban space and urban life?

Pruitt-Igoe forest

Last weekend, I considered this question as I visited three sites in North St. Louis City.

The first: Pruitt-Igoe/NGA. That moniker, as Heidi Kolk (mentioned below) has explained, is an amalgamation of two very different sites nevertheless linked due to proximity as they are across the street from each other. Pruitt-Igoe was the massive concrete public housing project first occupied in 1954, and demolished in the early 1970s. Although the complex began with the Pruitt tower for blacks and the Igoe for whites, Pruitt-Igoe soon became all-black and during its peak had 15,000 residents. Lee Rainwater’s famed 1970 ethnography, Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Families in a Federal Slum, described residents’ lives. After Pruitt-Igoe’s demolition in the early 1970s, the land slowly become a burly forest. Today, urbanists often venture to the forest, which is now private property: in 2016, developer Paul McKee bought the land from the city for a little more than $1 million. Across the street from Pruitt-Igoe will be the NGA or National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; in 2016, the NGA bought a 100-acre plot within the St. Louis Place neighborhood. Eminent domain recently forced that area’s mostly black 200 residents and businesses to move. Both Pruitt-Igoe’s dismantling and NGA’s development, then, have displaced black residents.

Church within land seized by eminent domain for future NGA site (photo credit: Morgan Brooks)

The second site: a basketball court in St. Louis place. The third site: Fairground Park, site of the 1949 race riot that erupted after whites began to attack blacks near and within the park’s newly integrated swimming pool.

Basketball hoop in St. Louis Place Park (photo credit: Morgan Brooks)

We visited these sites as part Material World of Modern Segregation. A symposium convened by Iver Bernstein and Heidi Kolk, both of Washington University in St. Louis, the event brought together an interdisciplinary group of 20+ scholars (including historians, anthropologists, sociologists, film-makers, and urbanists) researching sites of modern segregation in St. Louis city and county. The symposium offered a chance for scholars to share research conducted thus far, and workshop ideas within and themes across the works. On the second day, Bernstein and Kolk split scholars into four groups, each headed to a region of St. Louis: 1) East St. Louis; 2) St. Louis University/Midtown/Mill Creek Valley (Mill Creek Valley was the thriving mostly black neighborhood of 20,000 demolished in the 1950s); 3) “Delmar Divide”; and 4) North St. Louis (my group).

I thought of geographer Katherine McKittrick throughout the symposium. In her 2011 article, “On plantations, prisons, and a black sense of place,” she defines a black sense of place as “as the process of materially and imaginatively situating historical and contemporary struggles against practices of domination and the difficult entanglements of racial encounter” (949). Crucially for this symposium McKittrick also writes: “[a] black sense of place draws attention to the longstanding links between blackness and geography. It brings into focus the ways in which racial violences (concrete and epistemic actions and structural patterns intended harm, kill, or coerce a particular grouping of people) shape, but do not wholly define, black worlds” (947) Her attention frames the processes that shape the materialites and geographies of black life, such as displacement of black residents and neighborhoods.

I also thought of ethnographer Sarah Pink as we experienced the site visits. In her 2008 article “An urban tour: The sensory sociality of ethnographic place-making,” Sarah Pink details her experience in Mold, Wales, UK. A Cittàslow (or Slow Cities) member town, Mold aims towards, what as Pink writes, “an attentiveness and mindfulness that stresses the quality of experience” (192). Pink describes taking a tour of Mold that emphasized that Slow City status; in the tour she walks with, eats with, talks with, explores with, photographs with, and experiences the city with residents. Her experience is not just one of being with residents; consciousness of the experience in the town also comes when Pink leaves the tour. She writes:

Most striking was perhaps not the process by which, through consuming my half-milk coffee, falling into step with my guides and trying to imagine the futures they mediated, I became attuned to their world. Rather, it was that once walking hurriedly to my car I felt more deeply how my way of both being in and knowing the town shifted as I was disengaged from my hosts and (without my mediators) returned in ‘transport’ (Ingold, 2007) mode to my car. (192)

Two of Pink’s ideas, I find, are crucial. First, she details how emplacement frames ethnographic approaches. She writes, “we should think not only about how the subjects of ethnographic research are emplaced … [r]ather, it invokes the additional question of how researchers themselves are emplaced in ethnographic contexts” (179). Second, she positions the tour as “a case study of an embodied and reflexive engagement with the discourses, materiality, sociality and sensoriality of a particular way of being in a town” (192). We make sense of urban spaces through discourses, materials, social experiences, and sensorial awareness; we also make sense of space by being conscious of how others and ourselves are emplaced. Critically, for the symposium, this approach situates sites and materiality as only given meaning by being emplaced to capture the often under-studied emplaced histories and practices of segregation that pervade St. Louis.

The mesh fence that now surrounds the future NGA was put up in the last few weeks. Within the fenced area still are churches and homes recently abandoned as residents have been forced out. The churches and homes no longer act as spaces for worship and residence; framed by the fence, they are now marked for destruction. At one moment during our visit, as we looked at the fence and through the fence, a security guard driving in a car approached us and added unease to our observations.

Security guard driving towards us within newly fenced area slated for NGA (photo credit: Morgan Brooks)

When we were in the Pruitt-Igoe forest, John Early (a member of our group) mentioned that when he often walks through the forest he feels under his feet a dismantled curb or another remnant of the apartment complex demolished more than 40 years ago. That day, we saw what appeared as a large rock spray-painted in a bright pink color. Also, when within the forest although surrounded by seemingly calm green plants, I felt not ease but anxiety as I was technically trespassing on private property.

We played basketball in the court in St. Louis Place Park Basketball court and then walked by several homes in the neighborhood, including a “new” one. Charlesetta Taylor, one resident of the NGA eminent domain area, was able to have the city pay to move her home a mile away in the northern part of the neighborhood. (Other residents have not had her fate).

Charlesetta Taylor’s newly moved home (photo credit: Morgan Brooks)

As we walked by her recently moved home–which aesthetically seemed to fit into its new block–new meaning was made of the bricks that held together parts of the home, and continued to give strength and resilience in the new location. When we consider the materials of urban life, we make fuller sense of these materials by considering how they engage with our (and more importantly) with residents’ emplacement.