MeghanIsMe

A 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:

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.

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).

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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.

This "dorms for grownups" project is in my city of Syracuse! I think I'd really enjoy giving this kind of living situation a shot; it appeals to me in the same way that living in a co-op does. I also feel that we need to experiment as a society with approaches to small-space living in urban areas. Unfortunately, at around $700 a month, this would increase my rent by nearly 50%. Otherwise, I'd think very seriously about moving if it opened before my time here is over.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/coliving/414531/

Ok urban studies, history, or general academic and research folks. Just who is Lewis Mumford and what made him an expert on cities? I've read his Wikipedia page and it feels like he was a kind of amateur architectural historian who made good and wrote a door-stop of a tome about the history of cities (which many academics and other folks now cite), starting with pre-historic cultures that I suspect he didn't actually know a whole lot about.

I'm willing to be disabused of my potentially unfair and ill-informed conception of Lewis Mumford. Can anybody do the disabusing?

In the meantime, I'm getting a little guilty pleasure out of choosing a passage from his "The City in History" as a problematic piece of writing to offer a revision of for a weekly writing assignment.

Here's a summary of a recent literature review on issues of urban gentrification that I'm going to read when I have time. In case you're interested:

http://www.citylab.com/housing/2015/09/the-complicated-link-between-gentrification-and-displacement/404161/?utm_source=SFFB

It loos like the review itself is open-access too!

http://www.frbsf.org/community-development/publications/working-papers/2015/august/gentrification-displacement-role-of-public-investment/

I just read a piece by U of Chicago Sociologist Saskia Sassen (The Global City: Introducing a Concept - The Brown Journal of World Affairs: Vol 11 Issue 2, 2005). She's conceptualizing global cities, as opposed to world cities, as places where the practices and processes of globalization are tied to space and place. This is great for me, for whom bridges between the more local urban issues that concern me and global neoliberal forces I oppose are a welcome area for better understanding.

"The emphasis on the transnational and hypermobile character of capital has contributed to a sense of powerlessness among local actors...But an analysis that emphasizes place suggestst that the new global grid of strategic sites is a terrain for politics and engagement."

She suggests a research agenda informed by issues of local inequalities, urban space becoming "de-nationalized" and transforming into part of extra-state economic networks, and awareness of groups like immigrants and service workers who are huge, and often overlooked, parts of the system that enables globalization.

A couple interesting pieces of writing on being a pedestrian.

First, a short history of how 'jaywalking' became a crime. Can you imagine what moving through a city or town was like when cars were that which was out of place on a street? When it was a motorist's responsibility to avoid pedestrians? From Vox Magainze, "The forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of "jaywalking"
http://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history

Second, an interesting piece of science-fiction that I found when looking through UW-Parkside's collection of vintage sci-fi pulp magazines. In Amazing Stories, I found this oddly relevant tale of a world where being a pedestrian is illegal. The author writes of the far future, when certain roads had actually been made illegal for pedestrian use, and where people seem to be perpetually driving just to go somewhere, anywhere. Where those who walk are seen as throwbacks to a primitive past.

David Keller's "Revolt of the Pedestrians" was written back in 1928, when automobiles were becoming more and more a part of everyday life. Right in the middle, in fact, of the campaign being waged by auto-makers against pedestrians that the Vox article describes. It begins on page 1048 (the pages were sequentially numbered between issues) of the magazine.
https://archive.org/details/AmazingStoriesVolume02Number11

One of the things that fascinates me about this is the political views that inform these feelings about cars. Wikipedia tells me that Keller is known is a conservative writer. In the present day, this kind of anti-car attitude might be seen as radically progressive. In 1928 though, it would probably have characterized as conservative, and even reactionary. A new paradigm of movement through the city was rising to replace an old one, and Keller was railing against it with his imagined world where motorists run down and kill pedestrians with impunity.

It's amazing how the same political position can mean very different things, and be related to a very different set of *other* political positions, depending on the time and place it occupies.