Writing....

Some people participate in NaNoWriMo. I'm the single contestant in VeLoPaWriWe (Very Local Paper Writing Week.) Word count: 831(ish) / 5000! The plot includes capitalist processes moving problems around in space instead of solving them, and mid-century urban renewal as "negro removal" (quoting social critic James Baldwin).

---

You know there's a good candidate for least enjoyable reading this semester when, to support a point you're making in your writing, you think "God-dammit, I have to pick up that piece of crap by Lefebvre again." At least I didn't throw it into Lake Onondaga after that part of the course like I fantasized about.

Writing Progressing

I feel like I may gain ten pounds in the process since I'm just eating whatever I feel like whenever I want to as I write, but the writing is getting done. Yay!

I've got several pieces here --a couple of journal articles, an MIT master's thesis-- that talk about highway removal as a way to 'heal old wounds' incurred by their construction. The destruction of neighborhoods and displacement of low-income people. But they're oddly vague about just how that might be accomplished, other than to talk about developing retail, green space, housing (no word on whether it's affordable housing), and other amenities that feel to me like they're targeted at making cities more attractive places for increasingly mobile global capital to settle in and invest in high-class place-making. It reminds me of some of the criticism that's out there about bicycle infrastructure being co-opted by capital development into a property amenity instead of a functioning piece of infrastructure.

(Word count: 2,172ish / 5,000)