Working on Finishing up this Paper
Dec. 13th, 2015 10:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogA quote from Ken Jackson, publisher of local news site Urban CNY, that's going in near the end of my paper about social justice and highway removal. After saying that the loudest voices for removal belong to those who portray the highway as a physical barrier dividing the city, he writes:
Which I think gets at a certain underlying spatial utopian thinking in all these plans. I think it's great to get rid of these highways. They promote unsustainable transportation methods, they blight their surroundings, and they're ugly. But as David Harvey expresses in Possible Urban Worlds, spatial form doesn't magically fix broken social processes. The two produce each other, and addressing one in isolation will always fall short. And sadly, a completely reimagined spatial form is still going to possess the flaws inculcated into it by the flawed social processes that imagine and implement it.
Working through this has led me to think that, in some ways, talking specifically about highway removal is missing the point. (Though that would be equally true for discussions of any particular kind of reimagining of urban forms.) Instead, these issues of justice are dependent on, and symptomatic of, unjust social processes that regressively redistribute wealth away from the poor by disconnecting use value from exchange value. I come back to Harvey's argument in his early 1970s essay on ghetto formation; the only way to really eliminate conditions of inequality is make the conditions that give rise to it no longer pertain. And he (and others) been working on that for 40 years, yet here we are.
I wasn't sure where I was actually going when I started this paper. It's not the happiest place to end up. But it makes sense I suppose. I do think there's some real potential for making the urban environment better for a lot of people. But some of those people are the currently wealthy and privileged, and its hard to say how many of them are the marginalized and disadvantaged that, under most concepts of justice, ought to be receiving the greatest level of benefit.
The city is not divided by a highway, Syracuse is divided by poverty. You can take down the highway, replace it with a yellow brick road, mount a white Unicorn and add a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Syracuse’s staggering poverty levels are still here."
Which I think gets at a certain underlying spatial utopian thinking in all these plans. I think it's great to get rid of these highways. They promote unsustainable transportation methods, they blight their surroundings, and they're ugly. But as David Harvey expresses in Possible Urban Worlds, spatial form doesn't magically fix broken social processes. The two produce each other, and addressing one in isolation will always fall short. And sadly, a completely reimagined spatial form is still going to possess the flaws inculcated into it by the flawed social processes that imagine and implement it.
Working through this has led me to think that, in some ways, talking specifically about highway removal is missing the point. (Though that would be equally true for discussions of any particular kind of reimagining of urban forms.) Instead, these issues of justice are dependent on, and symptomatic of, unjust social processes that regressively redistribute wealth away from the poor by disconnecting use value from exchange value. I come back to Harvey's argument in his early 1970s essay on ghetto formation; the only way to really eliminate conditions of inequality is make the conditions that give rise to it no longer pertain. And he (and others) been working on that for 40 years, yet here we are.
I wasn't sure where I was actually going when I started this paper. It's not the happiest place to end up. But it makes sense I suppose. I do think there's some real potential for making the urban environment better for a lot of people. But some of those people are the currently wealthy and privileged, and its hard to say how many of them are the marginalized and disadvantaged that, under most concepts of justice, ought to be receiving the greatest level of benefit.
