Category: feminism

#ReadUrbanandPlanningWomen2014 entry #7: Charisma Acey

Lisa Schweitzer

Charisma Acey is assistant professor of City & Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. She’s one of the folks who came to UCLA as I was leaving, so I’ve always known her to chat with (as she’s a lovely person), but I’ve not made time to read her work. This is one of those weeks where I am feeling exceptionally pleased with myself for coming up with this exercise because it got me to read some of Charisma’s work. I don’t know much about her research area, I learned a lot, and she’s a marvelous prose stylist. Newly minted fangirl here.

I selected a history paper:

Acey, C. 2012. Forbidden waters: colonial intervention and the evolution of water supply in Benin City, Nigeria. Water History
4(3):215-229

This paper follows up on earlier work Dr. Acey has done on Accra, and it examines the same themes tracing how colonial decisions about the land tenure, urban residential segregation, and water infrastructure investment created a path-dependent, lingering inequality in access to water within Benin. There is a strong dose of environmental history here along with urban history.

The manuscript begins with the pre-colonial history of the Benin City dynasty that transformed the city via engineering to bring the spread of malaria. The result was a thriving city and polity that remained independent until the 1800s, when the British began to pressure the Benin leadership for greater access to trade. Whenever I read histories and I encounter the word “trade” I’m always grumpy because of a pet peeve; the type of trade is not incidental to the subsequent history. If we don’t know what the trade is in, we don’t the motives or the geography of the incentives that people are responding to. I had to do some background research to figure out what the trade was in, and from what I can tell, Benin City was a lively slave trading kingdom as well as a supplier of tropical commodities like palm oil and pepper. But the apparent wealth of the Benin City kings appears have to flourished prior to European contact as they were an established empire who conquered neighboring tribes, so an existing slave economy makes sense given the the empire’s reliance on farming and agriculture to support the city (there are slave empires all over the ancient and medieval world.) This isn’t the main point of the manuscript, but it does suggest to me that, given agricultural dependency, the story about water has some interesting facets prior to the story that Dr. Acey develops here.

The British took over Benin City in 1897 after a series of tentative treaties broke down into violence, and British colonial water regulation began in 1910 with taking water from the Ogba River–a river that locals had usually allowed only grey water uses and not human consumption. Instead, local residents use the water from the Ikpoba River, with royal and elite families drawing from the more exclusive freshwater offshoots of the Ikpoba. The Ogba was selected because it was a cheaper infrastructure project for th British. Soon conflicts ensued over water levies and taxes. Eventually, the city went back to relying on the Ikpoba River in 1987, but it still has proven difficult to get an adequate supply of water for the entire city, with attempts at private supply and an emerging hybrid governance structure that still carries the imprint of colonization: disproportionate investment in European settlements with investment lagging in indigenous settlements.

In which I tell full proffies to learn to behave themselves on the internet

Lisa Schweitzer

I left PLANET, which is the planning educator’s listserv, after an incident that involved what I thought was a really interesting debate about Harvard students walking out on Greg Mankiw with Randy Crane from UCLA, who is also my former advisor. We’re both opinionated; we shoot from the hip sometimes (me more than him). I can be spicy, but I also think it was pretty clear throughout the course of the discussion that I think Randy is the shizzle with awesomesauce. I thought it was all in good fun until my inbox started flooding with “How DARE YOU?” and “You’re ruining your career, you stupid girl” emails. “Apologize immediately, or you’ll never be promoted or get another job, EVER!” from various and sundry full proffies. Randy, btw, never said boo. He tells me I’m wrong on a rather routine basis. I suspect he says this to others, as well. But the idea that I might intellectually disagree with him has never bothered him as far as I know, not even when I was a student. He has a first-rate mind and likes other people with stuff going on upstairs.

But I did as I was told. I groveled, publicly, as I was told, and also left. Because that? That’s just screwed up. I’m sure that these folks thought they were doing me a favor, but telling a full professor he’s wrong on the internet is not the same as taking pictures of you and your partner using your sex toy collection and posting it on LinkedIn.

By promulgating the belief that public disagreement is death in the academy, they perpetuate the practice that only full professors are allowed to speak with frankness, which the world doesn’t need. For the most part, the world already knows what full professors think. That’s how they got to be full professors; by making sure everybody knows what they think.

I recently had more full proffies on my ass on Fboo because honestly, the you-mustn’t-mustn’t-say-that police in the academy are everywhere.

It’s Facebook. It’s supposed to be fun, you fools. Yeah, I’m irreverent. So? Is that really such a crime? Will every grumpy quip result in the end of my career? Really? In general, I live my life well within the bounds of propriety. Lighten up. Yeah, future potential employers are going to know that I’m crazy and vulnerable and oversensitive and I rescue dogs and–gasp!–I’m not always right or that favorite word of already-dead people everywhere: “appropriate.”

So how should full proffies behave on the internet/seminars/job talks/etc?

Stop basically threatening people for having ideas, being real, and having emotions. Stop losing your shit if somebody junior is a little messy. You’re probably no picnic, either, sunshine; the rest of us just have to pretend that you are. Stop puffing about hierarchies. Trust us, all of us who aren’t you know full well you outrank us and can hurt us if you choose to do that. We don’t need reminding every 10 minutes. Stop trying to take the risk and fun out of life. Recognize that some of us are in this for the adventure, and if you can’t unbend enough to join us, then at least don’t stamp out our little campfires, tell us it’s past our bedtime, and then take all the s’mores for yourselves. Show us that wonder of discovery never stops being so gratifying by being more interested in the endeavor than you are in defending your field advantage. There’s plenty of time to discipline ideas, approaches, etc for lack of rigor. You can still protect people if they have voice. Save your cautions and admonitions over stuff that really matters.

#ReadUrbanandPlanningWomen2014 entry #6 Gen Giuliano

Lisa Schweitzer

So this an unabashed fangirl post about one of my favorite people, Gen Giuliano, who is a dear friend and the Margaret and John Ferraro Chair in Effective Local Government here at USC. The summary statistics on Dr. Giulano make the case: she has over 100 peer- reviewed articles on various aspects of transportation research. Her total citation count is over 1,000. She has been the principal investigator on over $21 million in external research and funding on transportation, particularly on the analysis of the freight policy and planning. She was selected to give the Thomas B. Deen Distinguished Lectureship by the Transportation Research Board in 2007. In 2006, she was awarded the W.N. Car Distinguished Service Award, coming off her term as the head of the Transportation Research Board.

As accomplished as she is, it is a bit strange to begin the discussion with her dissertation, but I am going to. With her dissertation, Giuliano set out to establish the important features of public transit as an industry by answering a key question: are there measurable economies of scale in transit provision by mode? The answer from the dissertation suggests that bus service, in particular, does not exhibit economies of scale or scope for the organization running services. While at the route level, larger vehicles can provide cost savings to organizations, additional routes, additional vehicles, and additional service types can serve to raise the cost per passenger served. This dissertation, written over two decades ago, presaged some of the most pressing issues in the transit industry today as operators grapple with their operating costs vis-à-vis service demand. She began her research career addressing the most important questions in her field, and she has continued to do so.

In addition to questions of finance and industrial organization in transit, Professor Giuliano’s other significant contributions illuminated the fields of mode choice and travel demand. Her most oft-cited contribution, which appeared in Regional Science and Urban Economics in 1991, demonstrated the role that employment subcenters have on shaping travel demand in US regions. Perhaps more importantly, the same research shows that, while rigorously defining employment clusters in the urban geography can explain employment destination for commute travel, nearly a third of all employment occurred in places outside of the major job centers their analysis. She wrote this piece with the wonderful Ken Small at UC Irvine.

Variously called “job sprawl” research or “polycentricity” research, Professor Giuliano’s contribution here disproved the jobs-housing assumptions that transportation researchers made—and it significantly challenged monocentric city models in urban economics at the same time. No wonder this manuscript, and its follow up in Urban Studies, have been cited in total over 700 times. Her most recent work is focused on using cutting-edge methods such as electronic data collection to begin getting real-time information on origins, destinations, and modes.

#ReadUrbanandPlanningWomen2014 entry #5: Jenny Schuetz and transit-oriented commercial development

Lisa Schweitzer

Professor Jenny Schuetz is one of my favorite colleagues here at USC. She’s in the real estate group, and her work focuses on urban economic geography. She gave a seminar Wednesday for Metrans on work she has done on the commercial real estate effects of transit investment. You can see a draft of her paper, entitled Do Rail Stations Encourage Neighborhood Retail Activity, here. Jenny’s contributions to the literature are careful empirical analyses of urban economic theories of location. Her contributions stand out because she works incredibly hard to get the detailed data that she needs in order to answer questions well. Data on the commercial real estate sector can be hard to get, and planners tend to pin pretty high hopes on transit’s transformative power while not systematically testing their claims.

The question tested here are straightforward: Does new transit investment prompt more retail activity within a buffer of the station area?

But just because it’s a straightforward question does not mean getting a good answer is easy. Why not? Because like just about all aspects of urban research where we’d like to see cause and effect, there are many possible explanations for why we might see an effect if we do, in fact, see an effect. If I do a great job with route planning, for example, it’s likely that I’m targeting places that are already growing. So investment there may simply be a continuation of the existing trend. We need to see some change in the trajectory, and that’s hard. For places in decline, we have to show that, post-investment, there’s some slower decline or turnaround. And that’s hard to show when you are just looking at data at one point in time and noting that land values are higher near rail stations. That’s good, but it’s not the sort of evidence we need to be able to say that the investment was a game changer.

Jenny contends with this problem by looking at the conditions from 1992 to 2009 both case and control areas surrounding train stations in four California cities: San Francisco/San Jose, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and San Diego. Her controls are tracks outside the normally accepted walking area around stations. If trains are really making a difference in retail, you should see higher performance in the tracks within the station capture area than for those outside. Granted, this is an arbitrary boundary, but the research shows that the capture area commonly used around transit stations is pretty sound. There are so many weirdos like me who will walk 2 miles to a station. (What else am I going to do for exercise? A nightclub?)

Anyway, the resulting model includes some information about the station characteristics, locational metrics (station density, proximity to highway, distance to CBD (a combo of variables I very much like)), and some local population statistics we would normally associate retail attraction. (Retailers like areas with moneyed folk in them.) Her dependent variable is retail employees per square mile and she’s got about 500 station areas in the study.

She finds no statistical difference between rail-accessible land compared to the controls in San Francisco and San Diego; in Los Angeles and Sacramento, she does a find a significant difference, but negative: that is, rail-accessible areas lost retail employment compared to controls, save for suburban station areas. Rail development seems to offering suburban locations a chance to get more retail in two of the cities.

I do have some questions, since this is a draft paper. One question just concerns the dependent variable as a measure; retail employment. I’ve been skylarking (skylarking = thinking unencumbered by either theory or data) about changes in the retail sector over that time period, and its possible that there is something going on with the type of retailer that gets attracted to station-areas. Planners have great faith in local small businesses, and I’m sure that, when aggregated, they create a lot of employment. But it’s entirely possible that you might see new small businesses start of up in a station area (whee!) but on the whole, those employ fewer people in the retail sector than a big box located off a highway. Or there might be something technological going on, where employment in the retail sector is systematically declining, and those places without investment have what retail they have and those linger for awhile, but those new opportunities for retail don’t really blossom particularly fast around new commercial land supply around train stations.

#ReadUrbanandPlanningWomen2014 entry #4: Faranak Miraftab

Lisa Schweitzer

Faranak Miraftab is a full professor in the Department of Urban & Regional Planning at the University of Illinois. I do not know if I have had the pleasure of meeting of Dr. Miraftab; I do not think so. But I have always very much enjoyed her work, and today I am going to be talking about a recent entry into her very fine record of scholarship found here. I am reading:

Miraftab, F. “Colonial Present: Legacies of the Past in Contemporary Urban Practices in Cape Town, South Africa.” Journal of Planning History. 11(4) 283-307.

The assumption guiding most western understandings of South Africa and its apartheid and post-apartheid regimes concern this idea that neoliberal urban strategies originated in the global north and became applied everywhere else, including post-Apartheid South Africa. Miraftab challenges this idea in Cape Town, where the roots of neoliberal forms of urban development are much deeper. Colonial forms of urban exclusion and control, developed much earlier, created a convenient spatial, zonal logic upon which subsequent waves of power and control become applied to Cape Town’s settlement patterns.

Her history begins roughy at 1840, two years after slavery was abolished the city. The queen paid slave owners for property loss with the decision to abolish the practice, and flush with cash, those large landowners contributed to the fast development of Cape Town’s historic core, and that this historic core remained the focal point for higher levels of services. The second boom comes in 1869 with the discovery of diamonds, which prompted big infrastructure developments, including the port and inland roadways, that positioned Cape Town to benefit from the diamond trade and its supporting industries.

With the increase in wealth and controversies over controlling Cape Town, landowners set themselves up with a sweetheart voting rights law: they allocated votes according to the value of their property: If you had land valued in excess of 1,000 pounds, you got three votes rather than one or two. This strategy predictably created a lock on municipal resources, so that members of the three-vote set were able to add value to their land by adding amenities on the public dime.

Municipal Commissioners during this period looked to Europe for models of urbanization, and those were dominated by narratives around sanitation and hygiene. In Cape Town, those came with a twist. The “Clean Party” was a group of predominately merchant class business owners with UK backgrounds; the “Dirty Party” were landlords and other landed proprietors, mostly Afrikaners and Malay. The creation of sanitation dialogues connected the mercantile class to global capital in ways that didn’t favor the other groups as those became fodder for improvements implemented by large construction firms. The other groups didn’t oppose districting for sanitation; they simply wanted the districts to cover more of Cape Town outside of the mercantile areas. But the assignment of “clean” and “dirty” to particular ethnicities, with UK colonial on top, and what spatial zones they may occupy, continued through racial segregation of Apartheid. Narratives of dirt and disease framed itinerant and often impoverished African and Chinese laborers as health risks, and provided the intellectual rationale for segregating by race.

The clever part of this paper is the comparison across time. Miraftab stops at when Apartheid begins to loom, and then takes up the history again after the regime changes. After Apartheid, urban commercial interests again moved to create special districts; this time out, they are Commercial Investment Districts. Boom! More concentrated public investment, more millions to be made by selected real estate elites…and more exclusionary behavior enacted via securitization of those districts. Race and class structures of exclusion, all enacted without the legal support of the Apartheid rules. There is nothing new under the sun, as my beloved colleague, Martin Krieger, notes.

#ReadUrbanandPlanningWomen2014 entry #3: Smita Srinivas

Lisa Schweitzer

Smita Srinivas is an assistant (for now, I think) professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia. My topic today is her wonderful book, which I believe was her dissertation project, Market Menagerie.

The motivating question for the book concerns how nations like India, which have flourished economically by moving into new health services and pharmaceutical markets, can move some of that growth into greater health access among impoverished local residents. The research is meticulous, and the subject matter is important to social welfare and social justice. By the end, Srinivas manages to connect the market and institutional themes to urban and regional planning in ways that help enlighten a new approach that guides health and development away from the silos of western planning.

The first chapters of the manuscript start the reader off by helping us understand development as occurring within the complex interplay between markets, states, and institutions. This backdrop then enables a discussion about the evolution of health systems from local health services delivery systems to one in which the nation-state becomes an important player, but only along selected dimensions. The chapters covering the period from 1950 to 1970 discuss federal social policy evolution after independence; the subsequent chapters on the 1970s through the 1980s highlight the private industrial contributions to modernizing medicine within the country. Subsequent to these changes, political upheaval in India allowed for the re-emergence of nonmarket institutions, such as unions, in trying to capture more of the benefits of economic growth for a broader based of Indians.

The late 1980s saw a shift towards globalization. Srinivas refers to this time period as the “second market” environment, where India’s pharma industries began to respond to trade liberalism and regulatory harmonization by entering into global markets. That shift meant an expansion of industrial capacity into markets intended almost exclusively for export.. As Srinivas notes in a key chapter relating the history surrounding vaccines, the result was “health for some” as vaccine manufacturers in India lost out to other producers in the global market, and Indian venture capital found ready markets for other innovations, largely focused on exports that yielded greater returns even as Indian children went without vaccination.

The third market environment for India is one where the industries become both adaptable and flexible in responding to developing niche markets, and where the state has played a tremendous role in providing opportunities for innovation via learning and research.

The final chapters of the book place the ideas in a global, comparative context. I disagree a bit with Srinivas’ read of Polyani in these chapters, but that is a minor point. The latter chapters bridge policy across global, national, and community scales of health services in multiple contexts. I will use the chapter “Health Technologies in Comparative Global Perspective” in my graduate classes in Urban Social Policy and Planning. There are some problems with cohesion in this chapter, but it contains so many interesting and useful points that I think its problems come down to simply having a lot of ideas. I wish more books had this problem.

In particular, there is a comment that made me run out of my office to share it with my colleagues:

An analyst of today’ s mixed economies has no excuse for minimizing the state’s roles by pointing to past errors of centralized socialism. (p. 183)

Indeed!

The final chapter contains another nice contribution, one that I will likely assign in my planning theory class, on cities as mediating sites for health, health access, and health services, and the role of practical utopians in trying to forge a theory of healthy development within international cities.

Go read.

#ReadUrbanandPlanningWomen2014 entry #2: Daphne Spain

Lisa Schweitzer1 Comment

Daphne Spain is the James M. Page Professor in the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia, so it’s fair to say that, as this week’s entry into #ReadUrbanandPlanningWomen2014, Dr. Spain has a big audience already. She is, in general, an urban historian of considerable renown. How Women Saved the City, from 2001, is a major work that highlights how women have contributed to urban development and politics from just after the onset of industrialization to the Progressive Era. It’s been awhile since I read that book (egads, it’s been close to 12 years), but I remember when I finished it, I said: I want to write a book this good someday.

I haven’t but, well, I’m trying.

She has contributed research on segregation, gentrification, and many other urban topics, and she’s a fine writer. But just about every major scholar has a piece of work that really didn’t get the attention it deserves, and for Dr. Spain, she’s got a sleeper of an article named:

Spain, D. “What Happened to Gender Relations on the Way from Chicago to Los Angeles?” City and Community 1 (June 2002):155-167.

It isn’t cited nearly as much as it should be, and the reason is perhaps that all these attempts to name different urban theory into place-based schools has gone out of fashion a bit, which is unfortunate, because it was all jolly fun with the Chicago School social ecology folks and some of the best minds in Los Angeles squaring off. City & Community published Michael Dear’s original essay , which contrasted the concentric, center-oriented model of the city, where, as Dear put it, the center arranges the hinterlands, with the postmodernists in LA who noted that in the polycentric modes of urban development in regions like Los Angeles, the periphery organized the center.

This is a delightful essay which generated a number of wonderful responses from the thinkers like Harvey Molotch (whose response is a like, boom!). The fact that Spain stepped straight into the “my-school-rules-ur-school-drools” academic boys town of urban theory here makes me smile, and her contribution to the discussion deserves to be read. The Chicago School helped us understand the walking city of early industrial American cities; the Los Angeles School epitomized the post-WWII metropolis of cars and urbanizing jobs. Spain notes that the idealized version of white womanhood within the domestic sphere isolated many women; while the constrained status of immigrant and African American women isolated them within the larger workforces. The stand-outs among higher status women in the settlement house movement, Spain notes, get pretty short shrift from Park and Burgess, an influence that they were wrong to overlook. Immigrant women working from Hull House demanded (successfully) better urban services for impoverished communities, organized ethnic festivals, and helped immigrants find housing and educational opportunities. That’s the real work of city making, and it’s not less real just because it falls beneath notice.

As urban models changed, Steven Flusty, Michael Dear, Ed Soja, Manuel Castells, and David Harvey developed their own models and metaphors for urbanism while still overlooking the influence on the city that women had during those decades. In particular, the Los Angeles school ignored the work undertaken by women in Los Angeles, such as Dolores Hayden’s work with HOMES–Homemakers Organization for a More Egalitarian Society–reorganizing single-family spaces in to much more flexible, shared housing and mixed uses. And she also highlights the work of Jacqueline Leavitt at UCLA in examining how women in public housing in LA–some of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the US–altered their home places to protect their families.

Daphne’s major contribution notes that Chicago and Los Angeles have more in common than just urban theorists who fail to notice that women affect the city and that women also produce urban scholarship. The cities, though at different time periods, were major destinations for immigrants and for African American migration. They were the locales of violent social protests from African Americans furious at poor treatment of urban institutions, and that those popular protests have become ingrained in the popular imaginary about race and violence. One key difference, however, concerns the status of women at the different times, and that difference is important.

Two key differences led to changing the domestic sphere and dispersing its responsibilities across wider parts of metro regions: widely available birth control and entering the workforce. Here is missed opportunity in the manuscript. Spain notes the effect that domestic labor changes had on households, but as higher status, white and middle-class women left home to find work–changing the geographic logic of where residential households should locate–they also changed the geography for household service work that supported white women’s entry into the workforce, pulling and dispersing their jobs in ways that were likely farther from their own homes and families. Spain doesn’t bring this up, and I wish she would because I think she’d have some insights. As it is, sociologists like Pierrette Hongagnue-Soleto have filled in where Spain didn’t.

In any case, Spain reconstructs some possibilities for urban theory in the last part of her manuscript. First, safety and security–from Mike Davis’s “fortress” metaphor onward–are not gender-neutral ideas in the city. And second, caregiving and family life, though changing, still calls on women’s time and work more heavily than for their male counterparts. Understanding that gender factors in strongly in both the shaping and navigation of urban form leads to better theory.

We do not owe Woody Allen the presumption of innocence

Lisa Schweitzer2 Comments

Attention conservation notice: We owe both Mr. Allen and Ms. Farrow quite a bit, but none of it involves protecting him the way we are legally obligated to protect the rights of the accused in courts.

The interwebs predictably went into a long discussion over Dylan Farrow’s allegation that Woody Allen molested her, right after he obtained a lifetime achievement award from the Golden Globes. One feminist writer had the nerve-the nerve!–to point out that by staunchly arguing that we should “presume innocence” we, by default, presume Dylan Farrow is lying.

This has inspired lots of shouty ethics posts about what we “owe” Mr. Allen, how ‘we don’t know’ what happened, how women can and do lie about abuse claims, and how sinister psychologists and ex-wives plant memories and yada yada yada freakin’ yada. Yeah, women lie sometimes. Know what? Men do, too. False memories? Sure! I can barely remember what I did yesterday. Sometimes there are even truth-y looking statistics about how often women are lying liar liarpants. But, alas, those don’t help us here now, unless you like to indulge in ecological fallacy.

We have courts for precisely this reason. Because people lie. Because we can’t know about whether an individual actually did something just because other individuals in the group he or she belongs to do that thing sometimes. Courts. They are nifty.

1. Mr. Allen got to post his own (incoherent) rebuttal in the New York Freaking Times. I’d say the power differential between him and Ms. Farrow is well-proved by now, and I’d also say that we’ve heard puh-lenty of his side of the story. One member of this dance is the darling of the movie-going world, the other is merely a fame-adjacent adopted daughter who has inconvenienced us by reminding us of her childhood victimization when we’d rather she shut up so we can enjoy his funny movies with beautiful people and beautiful settings guilt-free.

I know which one I’d rather be.

2. We are not in a criminal court. Did I mention that? I repeat: we are not in a criminal court. We can blather on about the “presumption of innocence” all we want to here, but all we will do is repeat oodles of (extremely good) legal theory that really is not relevant here since we are not in a court. Mr. Allen is not on trial, nor is he likely going to be on trial. No government has taken any action against Mr. Allen as a result of these claims.

He still has his rights to due process (to the extent that the post-911 federal government has left any of us those). He is walking around. In fact, the only thing that appears to have happened is that her allegations rained on his Golden Globe parade, an honor he didn’t even care enough about to show up and pick up his own statue. When I am encumbered on a jury or sworn in as a judge, then I shall owe Mr. Allen what the law requires, and what my duty in those roles requires. Until then, I don’t owe it to him to suspend my personal judgment of his conduct as a member of the society I live in.

If he’s sad he’s not in a court, he can try to sue Farrow (again) for the allegations and probably lose (again). He hasn’t done that because he’s such a swell guy and he loves her so much, according to his NYT piece. Or because he’s tired of paying for Farrow’s legal fees and his very smart lawyers are telling him to just let it ride and go out and make another movie, which is my guess.

And yes, his reputation is at stake, but you know what: Ms. Farrow’s reputation is at stake here as well. We can’t separate these reputations into distinct little boxes now. Yes, it is a terrible thing to have one’s reputation sullied, particularly unjustly. Innuendo is awful. But both accuser and accused have reputations at stake, and innuendo affects both. Yes, he has a wife, children, and friends who will suffer seeing him called a child molester. Still, the Farrow family also has endured quite a bit of name-calling directed at them, as well, and none of it pleasant or easy for young people involved. I’m sure Dylan Farrow could have lived the rest of her life without being a called a deluded liar.

Because we are not in a court with clearly assigned roles, Mr. Allen is owed what is owed via the general social contract. Given that I haven’t picked up my gun to go vigilante on him, nor organized a mob to string him up, I think I’ve done my duty by Mr. Allen and no, I do not presume him innocent. I’ve read a lot of the material. Heck, I watched the credit roll on What’s Up Tiger Lily 35 years ago or so and concluded: ew. But with all the various and sundry evidence out there, I’ve concluded, in my personal opinion, the guy is a skeev at best. Does that make him a child molester? I really don’t know what happened with Dylan Farrow, but I don’t have to. I’m not obligated to base my assessments on criminal legal standards of proof.

Why not?

3. Neither Mr. Allen nor Ms. Farrow are members of any community I belong to, or my family. If they were, I would have obligations to BOTH him AND her that differ from those of a juror or court officer where the presumption of innocence is clearly owed due to our laws, imperfect as they are. However, he’s an artist and a media persona to the vast majority of people weighing in here….and so? Fellow human traveler he may be, and he may also be a celebrity, but we don’t know him, and he doesn’t know us. He is still simply a fellow American who gets lots of press time but whose rights, as far as I can see, have not been violated by either Ms. Farrow or any government acting under my authority. It’s a shame the press is on his fanny, but he wasn’t objecting to that when it got people to buy tickets to his movies. Double-edged sword, fame.

The only real question in front of us as his audience, which is what we are, is whether the allegations will prompt us to avoid his movies, since he and I are not invited to same cocktail parties, and I’m pretty sure he’s not feeling bad he’s not been invited to my place or that if I see him in the grocery store, I shan’t speak to him. He’s made a great deal of money off his art, and he’s been free to make that art during the 10 years since the original allegations, and he continues to be free to make art that his fans will undoubted keep buying as they did even after he took off with another teenaged daughter of Mia Farrow’s, which is where I personally drew the line despite being shouted at by various Team Allen partisans. Legal-yep. Yucky? More than a little. I’m pretty sure that my desire never to give him another penny of my money will not result in his needing food stamps* even if my personal assessment turns out to have been unjust.

4. Mia Farrow bashing, OMG. Yeah, yeah, I know, we’re all supposed to believe that Farrow has coached and duped Dylan into doing this because she is burning–BURNING–with jealousy and rage because she no longer enjoys the big manly love of Woody Allen. Because it’s so much easier to believe in a bitter old harpy still using her innocent daughter as a pawn during an acrimonious separation that happened a decade ago than to think that a dude might have groped and frightened a little girl who has grown up into a young woman who wants to speak out about it.

Mia Farrow is this young woman’s mother. She’s supporting her daughter as that daughter steps into a shitstorm, no matter how it turns out. Is that really that difficult to understand? Unlike the “she’s using Dylan to get at her ex” narrative, my explanation doesn’t make the dude the most important person in the story, but…a mother supporting a daughter during a difficult time strikes me as pretty easy to believe. Actually much easier to believe than the idea that Ma Farrow still gives a rip about exacting revenge on Allen anymore.

We don’t owe Mr. Allen anything that we don’t also owe either mother or daughter Farrow. Mr. Allen has been tremendously privileged throughout the entire process, and that is unlikely to change even if those nasty feminists get their way and get us to stop pretending that there is a neutral point of view here that requires we extend him grace until something is “proven” to criminal court standards. There isn’t a neutral point of view. Real life requires we deal with the messy interconnections among people, not artificial construct of the legally constructed world of a courtroom. In this context, presuming Mr. Allen innocent sides with the person who, by far, has the most power in the conflict, one who is facing no consequence except that others think poorly of him.

So what do we do? We change the focus. We focus on what we owe Ms. Farrow. I know, I know, once again, focusing on a woman instead of a man–it’s horrible, but just listen. We owe it to her to listen. We owe it to her not to shout over the top of her or call her names. We owe it to her–at least–to step back and think about Allen and what he may have done. We don’t owe it to her to presume him guilty. But we do owe it to her to take her experiences, perceptions, and feelings seriously. He has plenty of opportunity to go forward from here and show that if he ever was that guy, he’s not that guy now and we don’t need to worry about him hurting young women. That should be the discourse–not how we should protect him from having to deal with reputational loss.

* Which is good because apparently we’ve decided that poor children are better off without food, a much bigger problem than whether Mr. Allen is going to end his career on a high note.

#ReadUrbanandPlanningWomen2014 entry #1: Ana-Christina Ramon and Mignon Moore

Lisa Schweitzer

Black Los Angeles is a terrific book edited by UCLA’s Darnell Hunt and Ana-Christina Ramon. The entire edited volume is worth reading, but there are two selections I want to focus on. The first:

Hunt, D. and A-C Ramon: “Killing “Killer King”: The Los Angeles Times and a “Troubled” Hospital in the ‘Hood”

and

Moore, M. “Black and Gay in LA: The Relationships Black Lesbians and Gay Men Have to Their Racial and Religious Communities.”

I’m starting off with some urban sociology because I needed to re-read the “Killer King” piece for a media effects paper I’ve been writing.

Hunt and RamÓn (2010) describe how the Los Angeles Times succeeded in drawing on the stereotypes of pathology surrounding south central Los Angeles and its black and Latino residents to run one sensationalistic story after another condemning King Hospital as poorly managed, corrupt, and itself pathological. The result was the decision to close down one of the few accessible critical care facilities in that part of the region in 2007, leaving local residents much farther from emergency and critical care services than when King operated. After a long political battle, Los Angeles County plans to reopen King, but not until 2015 at the earliest. What effects media has on policy can go any number of ways. Narratives of decay and decline might, on the one hand, increase public awareness of the need to invest. But, as the authors of this piece argue, the narratives of hopelessness about south central and its residents (poverty, crime, ill-health, education, etc) and the narrative of the hopelessly mismanaged King Hospital combined to create a political consensus among voters and elites that reform and reinvestment were hopeless as well.

Moore’s entry provides insights into the ways in which LGBT men and women navigate their different socio-spatial networks in Los Angeles, sorting through the need to code switch both vis-a-vis white culture and religious beliefs about homosexuals within their home communities. Being black and gay in LA is not easy, particularly if one is from the region. The places that have developed as gay and lesbian enclaves—places intended to be safe for LGBT relationships–allow men and women of color from outside the region to move into those enclaves with less stigma or outing than for those who grew up in LA where those neighborhoods are known, and often reviled, within their local communities. These complex relationships get played out against the geography of Los Angeles which distances the two sources of community from each other.

Go out and read some urban and planning women!

#ReadUrbanAndPlanningWomen 2014, riffing on #ReadWomen2014

Lisa Schweitzer

I’m not sure who came up with it, but #ReadWomen2014 is the idea that readers in 2014 should consciously dedicate some of their time to reading the ideas put down by women. Woo! As I note, you are not educated until you get off your fanny and start to see the world from perspectives other than your own.

So I’ve decided to decided to spend a goodly portion of this year reading and rereading the works that have come to us from female planning scholars. I’m going to try to get as many of women of color as I can, but both planning and urban studies scholars and the media that covers them don’t support and promote the work of women or people of color the way we should.

(If you are a white male urban scholar, your every dribble will be celebrated with glitter and star shine, particularly if you have restated something that a black or female scholar wrote 15 years ago and that everybody ignored, because, well.) (Did I say that out loud? I wouldn’t want anybody to second-guess how they got where they are, except I am mean and its payback for the several hundred of times I have been told that I “only won X” or “got X” “because I am a woman.”) Enjoy!!