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[grace-in-the-city]

the "formal city"

In this week's discussions of Latin American cities and, in particular, the idea of a "formal city," I have been thinking a lot about the intentionality of urban planning, and how the informal city or settlement is in a relationship of explicit antagonism with the formal city. I have grappled with questions like Can the two exist without friction? Should we formalize all cities? What makes something formal vs informal? Who gets to live in the formal city? Who gets to call their city formal?

Some of these questions are addressed in Fabian Dejtiar's interview of María Cristina Cravino: she says "Informal settlements are the ultimate expression of a lack of access to urban land and adequate housing. What needs to be discussed more thoroughly is our understanding of urban integration. For some people it's simply a matter of painting walls pretty colors and inserting architectural landmarks; however, the most extensive needs are related to adequate housing, access to services, transportation, and high quality public spaces." This speaks to the performative nature of urban redevelopment, but it also speaks to the perceived power of 'beautification' and visual improvements to space. The inverse of this can be related back to Wilson and Kelling's broken windows theory, in which a broken window is theorized to encourage crime—in other words, a space that is not taken care of reflects a community that does not care about its neighborhood. However, this is not the end of the story. Yes, maintenance of physical infrastructure is vital for the health and improvement of an area, but as Cravino points out, there are much more uncomfortable topics that need to be discussed. It is not a matter of "painting walls pretty colors" but a matter of gross inequality of quality of life and access to public services. These problems need to be addressed from an urban planning, governmental, and grassroots perspectives.

However, this is coming at the informal city as a problem, indicating the inherent friction between formal and informal. The informal city is not just a place of rampant destruction and lack of control. In fact, in many informal areas, there is intense economic activity that cannot exist outside of the informal environment. Take for example Mumbai's Dharavi. The massive informal settlement is estimated to produce over 1 billion USD of economic activity per year. Working outside of the confines of formal urban settlement, informal settlements can come up with creative ways to survive that cannot be underestimated. This is not to say that informal settlements are not in dire need of public (and private) investment and that these services are a civic right.

[grace-in-the-city]

covid and huge educational setbacks

This week, when we talked about COVID and cities, there was a lot of focus on what happened during the pandemic, and not as much on what continues to happen as we come out of the pandemic. I'd like to reflect on the huge educational effects of the pandemic. As the oldest of four children, and the daughter of a school administrator, I am able to personally see a small selection of the devastating symptoms that are plaguing post-pandemic education. I was a junior in high school when we first went into lockdown, and though my college process was disturbingly unpredictable, I was old enough that I had already developed academic self-sufficiency and was not in need of the social education that school provides. My younger brother, in sixth grade at the time, did not have the benefits of these developments and has subsequently struggled to return to pre-pandemic levels of academic achievement. My family is privileged: the K-12 private school we attended and that my mother worked at was able to pivot to online learning quite quickly, and we had access to reliable technology and wifi. As we looked at in class, reading and math achievement levels dropped significantly and, with certain exceptions, are recovering extremely slowly. Though it's difficult to measure quantitatively, I think a more long-lasting detriment of the pandemic is the social education that kids missed out on. These effects are likely more and more obvious the younger the child was in 2020, but can be seen across all age groups. An argument could be made in favor of the elasticity and resilience of children, who can pick up social and informal knowledge remarkably quickly, and thereby making it more difficult to recover the two years of missed tangible knowledge in such measurable areas as math and reading. I don't think that this argument is completely without merit, but I find it lacking in conviction. How can a child be expected to learn math if they are unable to focus? Or unable to make friends? I cannot possibly provide answers, and there are plenty more questions to pose. This is simply a selection of the thoughts that have been swimming in my mind.

It all brings up more questions for me about the future of work and school. With the assumed continued use of remote work, where social isolation is a given, it seems that today's children are destined for a life that doesn't require the social skills of 2019's world. However, I cannot make that statement without also touching on the widened gap of inequality as a result of the pandemic. Students who were already behind fell even further, and if we keep pushing and pushing, I fear this gap will persist into adult life, and prove irreversible.

[grace-in-the-city]

architecture of the ghetto

Last year, I took a writing seminar entitled "Cosmopolitan and Colonial Encounters in Mumbai." While it's flashy title was enough to lure me in, I did learn a great deal from the class. Most relevantly, I wrote my White Paper about Mumbai's chawls and the government's plans for slum clearance and redevelopment. In it, I discussed the current sanitary, criminal, and familial environments of ‘slums’ and low-income neighborhoods and delineated how harmful they are towards residents’ health and wellbeing. The chawls offer unique economic opportunities that redevelopment housing does not.

After the Industrial Revolution took hold in Mumbai, there was a massive influx of migrant workers following promises of opulent futures. Out of necessity, urban housing arrangements arose in these dense neighborhoods. These informal dwellings, known as slums and chawls, are a result of the exponential increase in Mumbai’s population during the 19th-century surge in the industrial economy and job market.  Due to inefficient and insufficient housing for the migrant working population, the British-ruled government sponsored the construction of chawls. A chawl refers to a type of tenement housing: a single, continuous building with either a linear or a courtyard formation. Historically, they include two to six vertically stacked, identical floors with a series of single rooms along a corridor. Residents share common toilets, washing areas, staircases, etc. Each single-room unit, originally intended for migrant male workers, is generally eight by eight feet in dimension with nine foot ceilings. Affordable housing in Mumbai has evolved into three major archetypes of low-income settlements: i) traditional slums, ii) chawls built either by government agencies or by private initiatives and iii) slum rehabilitated housing (SRH) built with private initiatives.

I researched the redevelopment schemes and came to understand the extend to which green space, public space, and economic activity is important in a healthy community. In Mumbai, the poor space has led to inefficient space design and poor planning, operation and monitoring during development-induced and forced internal displacement. This poor design and execution has advertently caused socio-spatial injustice leading to degenerated spatialization and impoverishment and disruption of social fabric among marginalized groups.

This past week, I've been thinking a lot about the urban renewal projects that have ultimately failed as well as the issues with internal displacement that many low-income residents suffer as a result of gentrification. Pruitt-Igoe was lauded as having many of the necessary aspects of a 'good' living environment but it failed as the elements outside of the home were not supported (healthy economy, proficient schools, etc) and the maintenance of the project fell apart. As we move toward a future of building up rather than out, I certainly don't have the answers but I think that it is important to take into consideration the successes and failures of other housing projects around the world.

How can we build public housing that doesn't further concentrate poverty and exacerbate neighborhood effects? How can we recreate and, more importantly, maintain the glory days that early residents of Pruitt-Igoe remember? How can we utilise space in an efficient manner, balancing the needs of humanity and of the planet? How can we change public perception of public housing and create a culture of support, not one that views public housing as a scary thing?

[grace-in-the-city]

the artificial city vs the edge city

This week, I want to write about possible relationships between the artificial city that Massey and Denton mention in the first chapter of American Apartheid. They present "the artificial city" as a product of the progressive and debilitating (though at sometimes empowering) isolation of Black communities/neighborhoods. They write at length about the deleterious neighborhood conditions [that] are built into the structure of the Black community." These conditions are the set of mutually reinforcing spirals of decline that are built into Black neighborhoods as a result of segregation's resulting concentration of poverty. The isolation of these communities is geographic, social, political and economic. In their use of (or coining of?) the term "the artificial city," I was reminded of our earlier discussions of edge cities and the isolation that seems to run parallel to that of Black ghettos. As Massey/Denton write, "The dark ghetto’s invisible walls have been erected by the white society, by those who have power, both to confine those who have no power and to perpetuate their powerlessness. The dark ghettos are social, political, educational, and—above all—economic colonies. Their inhabitants are subject peoples, victims of the greed, cruelty, insensitivity, guilt, and fear of their masters.” This seems at stark contrast with the willful and intentional isolation of edge cities, whose inhabitants (whether that is family duplexes or Fortune 500 headquarters) create or perpetuate norms of life that benefit from this isolation. Where Black neighborhoods are made into islands of poverty shut off from external resources and aid, and create a different kind of world (culturally, as well as visually) within its' redlined borders, edge cities siphon resources and are (or are not) governed by a body that does not contribute to the resources being used. Black neighborhoods are overpoliced and treated with more violence than is necessary, useful, and warranted. Edge cities are able to skirt city governance by moving outside of the designated city limits. The difference between the two groups lies in both the intention of the space and the ability to make a choice to live or work there. Black neighborhoods have been acted upon, whereas edge cities arise largely of their own volition. Black neighborhoods are also underresourced, as a result of the concentration of poverty and the racial discrimination encouraging the cruel perpetuation of the poverty cycle. Inhabitants of edge cities are often wealthier and more secure in their ability to weather change.

[grace-in-the-city]

broken windows

In the world of academic articles, there is (in my very limited experience) little overlap with engaging, enjoyable writing. Robert Sampson's article that literally takes a walk through Chicago's variant neighborhoods exists in the intersection of this Venn diagram. I think that this article appealed to me because, as a function of its writing style as well as content, I was able to place myself inside of the world he described. The walk reminded me of a photo walk, of which i have taken many, in that Sampson walked a relatively short distance within each paragraph, but took note of minute details that all built the image that he (and we readers) now hold of the particular neighborhood. I was particularly struck by the notion of 'broken windows' as a metaphor for neighborhood disrepair and urban neglect. I have seen this on photo walks around Philadelphia, and in homes not far from my own. After a quick Google search, the term was rendered with more negative implications than I previously thought. Instead of a metaphorical dimension, Wikipedia (O mighty Wiki!) says that "The theory suggests that policing methods that target minor crimes such as vandalism, loitering, public drinking, jaywalking, and fare evasion help to create an atmosphere of order and lawfulness." While I do understand (or at least think I understand) this reading of the theory, I can see how it has been used to promote the utilization of harmful policing practices such as stop-and-frisk. If neighborhoods and their spatiality are innately tied to such characteristics as increased crime rates, and obviously neighborhoods are also tied to racial and class segregation that has been legally and culturally enforced through various channels, it becomes very easy to police neighborhoods under the banner of targeting minor crimes when in actuality it is the policing of minorities.

This feels very pertinent given Penn's location in West Philly and the over-policing of certain neighborhoods in Philadelphia, West being one of them. The misuse of the broken windows theory has been written about by Wilson and Kelling, who have said should that it not be used to sanction the use of zero tolerance policies, but to instead promote aspects of policing in accordance with community policing, such as requirements of "careful training, guidelines, and supervision" as well as a positive relationship with communities.

Learning about this theory and its (mis)use in actionable ways was awesome for me from an intellectual perspective (wow! theory being put into action! real life applications of knowledge! my urban studies degree could actually make a difference outside of a classroom!) but somewhat disheartening from a human rights perspective. However, it has empowered me to think more critically about the theories that we learn about in class and how they can be applied in contradictory ways. Thus is the nature of this class and why I decided to be an Urbs major, but it was empowering nonetheless. I hope that I will come back to this post later in the semester and talk about another theory that struck me in a similar manner.

[grace-in-the-city]

(in)visibility and location

In class on Thursday, Professor Gershberg directed us to observe ourselves and our peers, walking through campus with heads bent toward phones, and ask the question: "where are they, really?"

I've been thinking a lot about this question and the relationship between physical and mental place. The virtual world is designed to distract us from our surroundings and our devices are intended to suck us in. We find solace in the comfort of a world designed for us; one with a path clearly laid out. We seek the comfort of inanity, or at least distance in this literally taken 'virtual reality.' The so-called real world and this one are not as separate as one may hope: the fact that technology is not only always there but is a safety net, an escape, from whatever may be in our physical world, renders this technological existence not parallel to our physical existence but intertwined within it. It's clear that the physical world affects the digital but it is less acknowledged how the digital affects the physical. Castells describes this as "simultaneous spatial concentrations and decentralizations," a phrase that seems to capture the experience that we have forced ourselves into.

These effects are somewhat new to our lives (though of course new dimensions to life are adopted with innumerable things, and with every technology that is integrated into society) but they are of colossal importance as we navigate an uncertain future. I find myself wondering how this "decentralization" of space will manifest itself in the upcoming workforce and culture of people who have never known a different way. In my own life, I find myself struggling to find or create boundaries between work, personal life, and other areas. In the digital world, there is hardly a pixel separating these different spheres of your life: a scroll through ones Twitter homepage can give you information on the latest stock shares, your cousin's new baby, the latest meme, and the latest environmental crisis.