Thursday, March 31, 2011
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
A Planner's reality: Segregation in America
Salon.com recently posted a great slideshow of the most segregated cities in America. The post had a map of the racial breakdown of each city as well as an explanation of the history of segregation in each city. Check out the slideshow in this link.
What's interesting is that even in some of the most segregated cities, there is a new trend of young affluent white suburbanites moving into back into the core of cities and working class and middle class city black populations moving into inner-rung suburbs. While this new trend is causing some existing places to become more diverse as one population slides into a new neighborhood as the group is leaving, what's fascinating is that the new trend is still reinforcing the old trend of segregation. The shifts in population among races are not quite coexisting with each other as they are displacing one another.
And this displacement is causing a lot of ugly fights between new and existing populations throughout urban America. In Philadelphia and Washington D.C., historically black neighborhoods are trying to protect their community's identity from white and now black gentrifiers and in suburban Detroit, elite black suburbs or worried about the waves of working class blacks from inner-city Detroit moving into their communities.
These new tensions are now issues that planners now have to listen to and address. These tensions are no longer just a sensitive issue for the inner-city but now affect suburban planners as well. In my jurisdiction, my office worked on an historic black community (historic in culture but not in the building preservation sense) that began as a segregated community and had faced decades of discrimination. Their struggles in overcoming these obstacles helped cement the community's identity and it was very important that we preserve and honor that community's history. But from a strictly planning sense, none of their history of segregation was going to greatly affect how we planned and designed their future housing developments and open spaces. We could not ignore their history but we could not plan around their history either without a historical landmark or building. There was a disconnect between the community and the planners. To the community, their history was the number one concern. For the planners, designing safe spaces was our number one concern.
This disconnect between preserving the people's history in a community over the preservation of buildings is one of city planning's biggest challenges and up to now one of it's biggest failures. As a whole, city planners do not know how to at least help a community on the wrong side of gentrification. As city planners we almost always side with the gentrifiers because our number one goal is to create better designed spaces and buildings. The influx of gentrification helps remove and redevelop empty debris filled lots, rehabilitates vacant buildings and brings commercial vitality back into neighborhoods. Who wouldn't want that?
Newcomers into gentrified inner-city neighborhoods are often dismayed when they find out that it is the existing long term residents who do not want the positive changes of gentrification. The standard answer for newcomers to existing long-term residents is that they should be thanking them for improving their neighborhoods. The issue for long-term residents is not that they want to live in sub-standard conditions but they are seeking a permanent stake in their community in which they felt they established. Whether that neighborhood is an affluent community or a poor community, long term residents feel that it is their neighborhood in large part because of the history of segregation. A lot of older black inner-city neighborhoods were purposefully segregated and became the only neighborhoods blacks could live in within a metropolitan region.
Despite their struggles these older black communities formed identities that were important not only to the psyche of blacks that lived in that community but to urban black America as a whole...for that time. Over time, these communities have often lost their identities as segregation slowly ended and middle class blacks moved out, leaving some of the working class blacks who couldn't afford to leave feel abandoned. But even with all that said there is still some high reverence for some of these communities no matter how poverty stricken or crime riddled they have become. While saying you are from Harlem or the Southside of Chicago or the 9th Ward of New Orleans may be looked down upon by some, for some in urban black America it is still a source of pride.
And this source of pride, which is wrapped around decades of segregation, self-empowerment, decline and then decades of poverty is what gentrification threatens to end. These communities have seen the life cycles of the black community within those cities and while they may be dying, those that still live in those communities do not want to see it end. So how do we as planners preserve that sense of pride? We all know that cities and neighborhoods go through changes, death and rebirth. Do we interfere with the natural life cycle of neighborhoods? Or is it important to maintain the cultural identity of a place like Harlem from becoming just another nice gentrified neighborhood?
What are your thoughts? Thanks for reading!
What's interesting is that even in some of the most segregated cities, there is a new trend of young affluent white suburbanites moving into back into the core of cities and working class and middle class city black populations moving into inner-rung suburbs. While this new trend is causing some existing places to become more diverse as one population slides into a new neighborhood as the group is leaving, what's fascinating is that the new trend is still reinforcing the old trend of segregation. The shifts in population among races are not quite coexisting with each other as they are displacing one another.
And this displacement is causing a lot of ugly fights between new and existing populations throughout urban America. In Philadelphia and Washington D.C., historically black neighborhoods are trying to protect their community's identity from white and now black gentrifiers and in suburban Detroit, elite black suburbs or worried about the waves of working class blacks from inner-city Detroit moving into their communities.
These new tensions are now issues that planners now have to listen to and address. These tensions are no longer just a sensitive issue for the inner-city but now affect suburban planners as well. In my jurisdiction, my office worked on an historic black community (historic in culture but not in the building preservation sense) that began as a segregated community and had faced decades of discrimination. Their struggles in overcoming these obstacles helped cement the community's identity and it was very important that we preserve and honor that community's history. But from a strictly planning sense, none of their history of segregation was going to greatly affect how we planned and designed their future housing developments and open spaces. We could not ignore their history but we could not plan around their history either without a historical landmark or building. There was a disconnect between the community and the planners. To the community, their history was the number one concern. For the planners, designing safe spaces was our number one concern.
This disconnect between preserving the people's history in a community over the preservation of buildings is one of city planning's biggest challenges and up to now one of it's biggest failures. As a whole, city planners do not know how to at least help a community on the wrong side of gentrification. As city planners we almost always side with the gentrifiers because our number one goal is to create better designed spaces and buildings. The influx of gentrification helps remove and redevelop empty debris filled lots, rehabilitates vacant buildings and brings commercial vitality back into neighborhoods. Who wouldn't want that?
Newcomers into gentrified inner-city neighborhoods are often dismayed when they find out that it is the existing long term residents who do not want the positive changes of gentrification. The standard answer for newcomers to existing long-term residents is that they should be thanking them for improving their neighborhoods. The issue for long-term residents is not that they want to live in sub-standard conditions but they are seeking a permanent stake in their community in which they felt they established. Whether that neighborhood is an affluent community or a poor community, long term residents feel that it is their neighborhood in large part because of the history of segregation. A lot of older black inner-city neighborhoods were purposefully segregated and became the only neighborhoods blacks could live in within a metropolitan region.
Despite their struggles these older black communities formed identities that were important not only to the psyche of blacks that lived in that community but to urban black America as a whole...for that time. Over time, these communities have often lost their identities as segregation slowly ended and middle class blacks moved out, leaving some of the working class blacks who couldn't afford to leave feel abandoned. But even with all that said there is still some high reverence for some of these communities no matter how poverty stricken or crime riddled they have become. While saying you are from Harlem or the Southside of Chicago or the 9th Ward of New Orleans may be looked down upon by some, for some in urban black America it is still a source of pride.
And this source of pride, which is wrapped around decades of segregation, self-empowerment, decline and then decades of poverty is what gentrification threatens to end. These communities have seen the life cycles of the black community within those cities and while they may be dying, those that still live in those communities do not want to see it end. So how do we as planners preserve that sense of pride? We all know that cities and neighborhoods go through changes, death and rebirth. Do we interfere with the natural life cycle of neighborhoods? Or is it important to maintain the cultural identity of a place like Harlem from becoming just another nice gentrified neighborhood?
What are your thoughts? Thanks for reading!
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Monday, February 28, 2011
Because you can’t plan everything
The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry © John Steinbeck
A few works ago, I was working with several planners in trying to draft a new zoning process for a particular area. This new zoning process detailed everything from building heights, pavements widths, awning size, the minimum distance between building entrances and other very small but important design features. We proposed general ranges of design requirements so that this new zoning process did not become too stringent. But one of the planners wanted the building and lot requirements to become more and more precise without any flexibility for the new design standards for proposed buildings.
Now, I understand that no matter how great a zoning process we come up with there are always going to be changes through variances, special councils, legislation or because the higher ups just felt like doing something different. So when this zoning process was becoming more and more rigid and inflexible on every single building detail, I blurted out, “we can’t plan everything.”
My co-worker retorted back:
“Sure we can, that’s what the zoning code is there for.”
Oh, if only our current zoning code were a sporting stat. I would have gladly shown my co-worker that on any given day, we are 6-16 from the field in protecting the standards of our mighty zoning code. We planners, are the Pittsburgh Pirates of the zoning code. We are understaffed and the organization barely funds team equipment and half of us don’t know how we up ended up here. But we play hard against our developer opponents who are the New York Yankees, whose players more than triple our salaries. We play the Yankees really tough but they always manage to pull out ahead of us in the end.
Planners have to compromise in order to move their vision forward. And the compromises may not always relate to money or influence. We make compromises and changes in our plans from everything historical landmarks, ornately designed buildings and cultural institutions that define neighborhoods, all of which may alter the grand scheme of our plans. And that’s ok. That’s what makes cities real.
I’ve been to many urban communities that were full of high-rises that were meticulously planned for blocks with storefronts on the first level, garage parking tucked away and perfect spacing between ornate streetlights and street trees. And you know what, those places didn’t feel real. Were the communities densely populated and efficiently ran? Yes. But did they feel like a real community or a city? No. I’ve also been to gentrified city neighborhoods were 80% of the neighborhood was perfectly redesigned but the other 20% stuck out like a sore thumb. But you know what, that 20% felt like the most important buildings in the neighborhood because those places were the old burger shop, the historic theater, the church, and old apartment building that’s now an architectural relic. They became the placemakers of how people remembered that specific twenty years ago and how they will remember the neighborhood twenty years from now.
You can’t plan everything. You have to allow freedom of expression through design and reinterpretation of design. The great Frank Lloyd Wright was such an eccentric about his designs that he also designed the furniture of the house he designed along with the clothes he thought people should wear while in their own home. He would come back to these houses and if you moved the furniture to your own liking, he would move the furniture back. So what’s the limit supposed to be? As a planner I see requests from individual owners to modify their houses all the time. If the modifications are acceptable should I allow the changes or should I fight for the protection of the zoning code and yell out, “We Must Protect This House!”
So if our best plans get laid to waste, does this mean we should make up stuff to defend on the fly? *coughs* it feels like it sometimes *cough* *cough* Well the answer to that is like the answer a city planning professor once told me when asked about his greatest accomplishment as a planner. He said, “I stopped a lot of bad plans from happening.”
So while the best laid plans can go awry, we can still prevent a lot of bad plans from happening. Thanks for reading!
A few works ago, I was working with several planners in trying to draft a new zoning process for a particular area. This new zoning process detailed everything from building heights, pavements widths, awning size, the minimum distance between building entrances and other very small but important design features. We proposed general ranges of design requirements so that this new zoning process did not become too stringent. But one of the planners wanted the building and lot requirements to become more and more precise without any flexibility for the new design standards for proposed buildings.
Now, I understand that no matter how great a zoning process we come up with there are always going to be changes through variances, special councils, legislation or because the higher ups just felt like doing something different. So when this zoning process was becoming more and more rigid and inflexible on every single building detail, I blurted out, “we can’t plan everything.”
My co-worker retorted back:
“Sure we can, that’s what the zoning code is there for.”
Oh, if only our current zoning code were a sporting stat. I would have gladly shown my co-worker that on any given day, we are 6-16 from the field in protecting the standards of our mighty zoning code. We planners, are the Pittsburgh Pirates of the zoning code. We are understaffed and the organization barely funds team equipment and half of us don’t know how we up ended up here. But we play hard against our developer opponents who are the New York Yankees, whose players more than triple our salaries. We play the Yankees really tough but they always manage to pull out ahead of us in the end.
Planners have to compromise in order to move their vision forward. And the compromises may not always relate to money or influence. We make compromises and changes in our plans from everything historical landmarks, ornately designed buildings and cultural institutions that define neighborhoods, all of which may alter the grand scheme of our plans. And that’s ok. That’s what makes cities real.
I’ve been to many urban communities that were full of high-rises that were meticulously planned for blocks with storefronts on the first level, garage parking tucked away and perfect spacing between ornate streetlights and street trees. And you know what, those places didn’t feel real. Were the communities densely populated and efficiently ran? Yes. But did they feel like a real community or a city? No. I’ve also been to gentrified city neighborhoods were 80% of the neighborhood was perfectly redesigned but the other 20% stuck out like a sore thumb. But you know what, that 20% felt like the most important buildings in the neighborhood because those places were the old burger shop, the historic theater, the church, and old apartment building that’s now an architectural relic. They became the placemakers of how people remembered that specific twenty years ago and how they will remember the neighborhood twenty years from now.
You can’t plan everything. You have to allow freedom of expression through design and reinterpretation of design. The great Frank Lloyd Wright was such an eccentric about his designs that he also designed the furniture of the house he designed along with the clothes he thought people should wear while in their own home. He would come back to these houses and if you moved the furniture to your own liking, he would move the furniture back. So what’s the limit supposed to be? As a planner I see requests from individual owners to modify their houses all the time. If the modifications are acceptable should I allow the changes or should I fight for the protection of the zoning code and yell out, “We Must Protect This House!”
So if our best plans get laid to waste, does this mean we should make up stuff to defend on the fly? *coughs* it feels like it sometimes *cough* *cough* Well the answer to that is like the answer a city planning professor once told me when asked about his greatest accomplishment as a planner. He said, “I stopped a lot of bad plans from happening.”
So while the best laid plans can go awry, we can still prevent a lot of bad plans from happening. Thanks for reading!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)