Category: planning

JAPA session at #APA16 had a nice turn-out with tough questions asked…

Lisa Schweitzer

Ok, in full disclosure: everybody else on the panel was super: Rob Olshansky, Michael Holleran, Karl Kim, Jennifer Minner, and Sandi Rosenbloom were all awesome. I generally sucked and rambled about the special issue I have coming out (our target in Spring 2017), but one of my authors, Bonnie Johnson, did a stellar job of discussing her paper on city managers and urban planners.

We got some push-back from the audience, however, about how none of them can access the Journal of the American Planning Association unless they cough up another $50, and they are right. When I used to belong to JAPA regularly–years ago, I admit–the Journal and Planning magazine were available to members, or at least it was a significant discount. Multiple members of the audience said they would like to have the information in JAPA, but subscriptions were too high for them given that they weren’t interested in whole issues. Oh, wait, the fee for members, I just looked, is an addition $38 if you want digital, and $48 if you want print.

One gentleman made the point that I, and a zillion other academics, review for free, I provide content for free…it’s “part of my job” for sure, but Taylor & Francis and Elsevier do not pay me…USC pays me. And then USC has to pay for the journal I provide content for.

This is all by way of saying that people, particularly APA members, should be able to buy single articles for a nominal fee, like $5. Why not? What does it cost publisher, really, to do that once the material has been prepared?

I am not sure. I am largely ignorant of the business of academic publishing, but $30 per article seems pretty high to me, granted the APA is the organization that contracts for the journal in the first place.

A Timeline of the Chavez Ravine and Dodgers Stadium events for @USCPrice Rawjee Family Student Conversations

Lisa Schweitzer

Some quick and dirty notes for my Rawjee Family Student Conversations at USC Price with the students on Chavez Ravine, so that I can be useful to them. Please feel free to correct–it’s very sloppy as I am in hurry.

  • up to 1950’s Mexican families, facing discrimination in most of the Los Angeles housing market, create a sustained community–a “Poor Man Shangra-La” as it is called in multiple references. It was self-contained in many ways; residents had their own churches and many grew their own food. (There was also livestock kept). The area consisted of three general districts La Loma, Palo Verde, and Bishop.
  • WWII and post-WWII Los Angeles experience tremendous new population growth, and the City begins to look for places to build. The 300-acre site in the center of Los Angeles was, to outsiders, an obvious choice.
  • 1949 The Federal Housing Act of 1949 granted money to cities from the federal government to build public housing projects.
  • and Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher Bowron voted and approved a housing project containing 10,000 new units, with Chavez Ravine being a central part of the new development plans. Much of the housing was shanty construction, and housing authority planners viewed the construction as unsanitary and unsafe. City of Los Angeles housing authority representative Tom Wilkinson was a central actor in the Plan.
  • Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander develop a plan for infill development (Elysian Park Heights) to house 3,300 families in a sprawling complex of 24, 13-story towers and 163 two-story garden apartments, where the families of Chavez Ravine could be housed. The residents were supposed to have first choice among these units.
  • In July 1950, all residents of Chavez Ravine received letters from the city telling them that they would have to sell their homes in order to make the land available for the proposed Elysian Park Heights.
  • The city began buying property and using eminent domain to push families out. An coalition emerged in LA Politics between conservative private development interests and Mexican families furious at their displacement. Mike Davis reported in City of Quartz that the buy-outs were shady.
  • In 1952, Frank Wilkinson, the assistant director of the Los Angeles City Housing Authority was questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was sentenced to one year in jail for refusing to cooperate with the committee. Five other Housing Authority employees were fired.
  • By this time, virtually all of the families had been removed and their homes razed, though some hold-outs remained in what would be called “The Battle of Chavez Ravine The property would stay vacant for nearly 10 years.
  • 1953 The City Counsel tried to back out of its contract with the federal government to provide housing; it went to court, and LA lost.
  • Also in 1953 conservative Norris Poulson won the mayor’s office using the Chavez Ravine controversy as a platform; he promised to the vowing to stop the housing project and other examples of “un-American” spending.
  • With Norris’ intervention, the feds would relent and sell the land back to the city for a low price on the condition that the land be used for “public purpose.”
  • 1957 Mayor Norris Paulson, Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, and Councilwoman Rosalind Wyman put together an offer for the Dodgers on behalf of the City of Los Angeles, including what was a privately owned, 56,000-seat stadium at the confluence of several major freeways surrounded by 16,000 parking spaces. (from O’Malley Was Right) It’s a question to me if whether this sale actually
  • 1958 Taxpayers Committee for Yes on Baseball, which was approved by Los Angeles voters on June 3, 1958 that the Dodgers were able to acquire 352 acres (1.42 km²) of Chavez Ravine from the City of Los Angeles. (This, too, was an ugly political fight, with Poulson getting accused of taking bribes and making money off the deal.)
  • Dodgers Stadium would not open for a few years yet–the Dodgers played in the Coliseum until the field opened.

Additional resources:

KCRW’s Coverage of Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander’s plan for public housing

chavez ravine la historia de un pueblo fantasma en trinchera de palabras

The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism
By Dana Cuff (The MIT Press, 2002)

Chavez Ravine 1949 by Don Nomarck

PBS Independent Lens documentary Chavez Ravine

The Rawjee Family Student Conversations at USC Price
This conversation series provides undergraduate students the opportunity to interact with a variety of community leaders in the Los Angeles area. Students gain new perspectives on important social issues, cultivate new interests and passions, discover potential career opportunities, and create lasting friendships with their peers and mentors. Through these enrichment opportunities, undergraduate students have met with city managers, debated ballot initiatives, addressed health policy issues, and toured the Los Angeles River. Learn more here about what we are up to with undergraduates: here.

E.B. White, planning, and plotting the resurrection

Lisa Schweitzer

Because classes are soon to be upon us, I have reviews long overdue, my students are waiting for feedback, and the book is sitting there, waiting to be worked on, I have, of course, been reading about gardening. Katherine White’s Onward and Upwards in the Garden is a collection of her gardening columns for the New Yorker, and while many of them are charming, and she’s a good writer, I find her tastes and her assertions of her superior tastes oddly irritating. This is her on Peace roses: “Take, for example, the rose called Peace–the “rose of the century” on cataloguer terms it. Everybody knows this huge, rosy-yellow rose, and nearly everybody admires it and tries to grow it. In spite of its lovely colors, I don’t like Peace. Even a small vaseful of peace of Peace roses is grotesque.”

Now, I am 100 percent sure that anybody who thinks Peace roses–sweet, little Peace roses–are “grotesque” really, truly has no sense of what is actually grotesque.

All that said, I am still reading.

Most captivating is the description of Mrs. White from her husband, E.B. White, in the introduction in the way that she stubbornly continued to garden knowing full well she would not see the results:

Armed with a diagram and a clipboard, Katherine would get into a shabby old Brooks raincoat much too long for her, put on a little round wool hat, pull on a pair of overshoes, and proceed to the director’s chair–a folding canvas thing–that has been placed for her at the edge of the plot. There she would sit, hour after hour, in the wind and the weather, while Henry Allen produced dozens of brown paper packages of new bulbs and a basketful of old ones, ready for the intricate internment. As the years went by and age over took her, there was something comical yet touching in her bedraggled appearance on this awesome occasion–the small, hunched over figure, her studied absorption in the implausible notion that there wold be yet another spring, oblivious to the ending of her own days, which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting here with her detailed chart under those dark skies in the dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection.

I know an awful lot of urban planners who are gardeners. Some are gardeners for locavore reasons, and while laudable, I find locavore reasons for gardening to be unconvincing. I can taste no difference between my tomatoes and those from the farmer’s market. My lettuce is great but it’s so damn hot here you can only grow lettuce for a short time before it turns to shoe leather (my yard is brutally sunny).

Instead, those of us planner/gardeners who not motivated by instrumental reasons are constantly intervening to make something nice simply for its own sake. We are simply devoted to the future, knowing full well we don’t control it and yet we can influence it, a little, and that faith in the future is both decent and sustaining.

I often hear that planning is not a “coherent” field, but if I had to lay my bet on what glue ties planners to each other, it is this faith, and perhaps that is enough.

#ReadUrbanandPlanningWomen2014 entry #11: Lucie Laurian

Lisa Schweitzer1 Comment

Lucie Laurian is associate professor at my MPL alma, the University of Iowa. She always does really interesting work, but I just recently discovered that she is interested in Athenian democracy! Whoohoo!! A fellow nerd! Now we have something really cool to talk about when I see her at ACSP!

Here’s the manuscript:

Laurian, L. (2012). This is what direct democracy looks like: How Athens in the 5th century BC resolved the question of power. Town Planning Review, 83(4), v-xii. doi:10.3828/tpr.2012.2

The goal is to describe how direct democracy functioned in Athens. In planning, we are supposedly big on the idea of citizen participation and governance. I say supposedly not because I believe the soggy, line, which must be 40 years old now, of tired planning theory that “planners aren’t technocratic experts handing decisions down to communities” etc etc. I view that line of thinking in planning as a bit ahistorical; when the state has power, planners who work for the state have it. When state power and legitimacy erodes, so it does for planners who work there. It’s citizen movements, their potential, and the laws they’ve gotten passed, see Manuel Castells, that have ensured that planners, regardless of whether they can produce a decent ‘technocratic’ analysis or not, have to play nice with communities.

Even so, planners allow for representative decision-making even in citizen participation. We don’t gather and incorporate the reflections of everybody; even in well-intended, genuine attempts at inclusion, we gather the viewpoints of those who show up, and we often take what they say as speaking for ‘the community’ although it is now technologically feasible to subject just about every detail of a project to a direct vote. Yes, not everybody has access to online, but you could have tools where people without computers come in a library to vote if they choose. You could get a lot closer than what we do.

Laurian’s point is that Athens managed to do quite a bit of direct democracy using pottery shards for 5,000 people. No, not everybody got to participate, we know that, but the level of direct democracy in Athens, sustained over the course of ~300 years, is pretty impressive. Its methods and tools could readily adapt to neighborhood level decision-making about specific issues and not just votes on representatives. Laurian highlights four major facets to Athenian democracy:

(1) a combination of decentralized and centralized legislative power, emphasizing governance by all citizens at the central Assembly for major decisions;
(2) absolute freedom of speech and transparency;
(3) effective strategies to avoid power accumulation and corruption; and
(4) regime flexibility.

#3 and #4 are probably the most interesting. In order to challenge power accumulation, Athens reconstituted the representative components of its office-holding leadership every year; people held the job for one year, and they were not allowed to have more than office. Generals were exempted, which makes sense. That means the entire civil administration was recomposed every year. Can you imagine? Now, we are talking about a society not troubled with many managerial issues we have today: we don’t necessarily want Joe Citizen, for example, overseeing the nuclear regulatory commission. But it does make for a really interesting, if not terribly practical, idea that we rotate the job among nuclear physicists. Nonetheless, for planning, the idea holds some merit. If we ever got serious about the idea that planners hold no ‘special’ technical expertise, planning jobs could readily rotate from citizen to citizen. The idea that how planners have no ‘special’ expertise is a pretty devastating assumption for the conception of a profession, let alone the ethics of being a theorist teaching in a planning program charging tuition to train professionals.

Ostracism was another tool that allowed everybody else to kick you out if they felt you were getting too grabby with power. Like historian Donald Kagan, Laurian treats ostracism as a pretty handy tool. It was a bloodless way of shutting down domineering types. It also moved them so that they didn’t wind up as permanent democratic discontents. It was possible to vote to un-ostracize somebody if they seemed sincerely over their bug. I need to learn more about it. I’m less convinced it wasn’t a mechanism for hosing your political enemies. Certainly better than killing them off, though, and since it seems like many of them wound up living in their family estates on the ocean somewhere, hardly a major hardship other than thwarted ambition.

The whole functioning unit had many volunteers: 6,000 according to Laurian. By relying on large numbers, the system disallowed graft and promoted transparency. You couldn’t bribe 1500 jurors, for example. It’s hard to keep a cabal going if you’ve got to get through hundreds and hundreds of people.

My one wish for this manuscript is that Laurian apply her ideas more to democratic theory to planning, and she doesn’t do it. I’ve done more extrapolating here than she does. (But then, I’m freer as a blogger than she is, with reviewers standing on her neck). I would like to know what she thinks about how the volunteerism and institutions in Athens might be mirrored or learned from now, and where the possibilities for direct democracy reside in planning given that we do have the possibility for direct voting. We don’t have the ethic of voting, certainly, or the ethic of service, that Athenians appear to have had, if our sources are proper indicators.

#ReadUrbanandPlanningWomen2014 entry #10: Petra Doan

Lisa Schweitzer

I first met Petra in 2002 or 2003, I’m not sure, when I was in gradual school at UCLA and my advisor convinced me to go on a field trip on Columbia, Maryland, led by the brilliant Ann Forsyth. The year ACSP was in Baltimore. Yeah. 100 years ago.

Anyway, the US was racing into Iraq, and I was in my typical mindset of waffling angst: hating unilateral military invasion unsupported by allies, deploring Saddam Hussein at the same time, and not at all sure what to think. Petra was on the tour, as well, and she was wearing a button that said “I love the Iraqi people.” It was such a thoroughly apt reflection of the one thing that I did understand about the whole situation that I immediately became a fangirl of Petra’s, and I have followed her writing and leadership at ACSP on LGBT issues ever since.

I am particularly fond of this paper:

Doan, . L., & Higgins, H. (2011). The demise of queer space? Resurgent gentrification and the assimilation of LGBT neighborhoods. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 31(1), 6-25. doi:10.1177/0739456X1039126

This manuscript examines outcomes for LGBT communities in Atlanta, using a case study and interview method. There’s a lot of material here that is interesting, and I am somewhat pressed for time here to really do it justice, but the basic premise of the article is to examine how planning disrupts and commodifies LGBT communities in metro Atlanta. They examine nine communities: five for both lesbian and gay residents, and one community, Virginia Highlands, served both groups. Gay enclaves included N. Druid Hills (best name ever), Midtown, N. Atlanta, and Midtown. Lesbian enclaves included S.Columbia-Forest Hills, Candler Park/Lake Claire, Glenwood Estates, and Decatur-downtown.

Doan and Higgs discuss how LGBT groups inhabited older suburbs abandoned by affluent whites during post-war suburbanization. There, small LGBT businesses developed and thrived. As Atlanta attempted to shake off its “poster child for sprawl” image, planning began to treat these neighborhoods as possible places for infill and change. The best part of this manuscript, for me, is the content analysis of the plans for these neighborhoods, along with the critique of the zoning decisions. In plan after plan, agencies just couldn’t deal with the LGBT residents of those communities even in a discussion of the demographics of the area. It’s not as though we need anybody to arrive a at some essential “well, gay people live here so we have to plan gay” moment; just the fact that the plans would not mention the possibility that difference existed in these neighborhoods, let alone that LGBT men and women central to the identity of a place, demonstrates that planning wasn’t ready to talk about LGBT places as places. Another, particularly sad example includes zoning decisions that threatened landmark LGBT businesses, including Outwrite Books and Charis Books, through zoning for big box stores to serve new, affluent, hetero residents.

(Outwrite books closed for good in 2012, which is a pretty long time to hold out, but still sad. And even sadder knowing that it was forced out of its original location. Charis books lives on.

The desire to bring affluent, middle-class families back to downtown and interior suburbs (I’m not sure it makes sense to talk about ‘rings’ for Atlanta any more than it does for LA) subsequently has dispersed LGBT residents throughout the region, with the impression, for some, that these enclaves became less supportive environments. Nonetheless, interviewees still long for shared life and community; it’s not as though “everybody is so tolerant you can live anywhere” and that’s why LGBT residents are dispersing. Instead, it’s that many, particularly young LGBT renters can’t afford to live in these neighborhoods anymore. When unable to afford the longstanding LGBT enclaves, respondents discuss their desire for diverse environments and affordability–a preference that leads them to African American and mixed neighborhoods where racial tensions arise where some of the hardest hit are people of color priced out of those markets as well.

A key point for me in this manuscript was how central LGBT businesses are to possible preservation efforts. I know very little about historic preservation, so perhaps this point is less impactful than I think, but it was eye-opening to me to see just how pivotal these businesses were.

Go read, go read, go read, my friends.

#ReadUrbanandPlanningWomen2014 entry #8: Kaisa Schmidt-Thome

Lisa Schweitzer

(not terribly well proofed as I want to get jump-started on my reading and writing again)

So for this week’s entry (actually last week’s, but I am behind, and I’ve decided not to sweat it. I’ve had my own papers to finish last week), I selected:

Schmidt-Thome, K., & Mantysalo, R. (2014). Interplay of power and learning in planning processes: A dynamic view. Planning Theory, 13(2), 115-135. doi:10.1177/147309521349030

I do not know Dr. Schmidt-Thome or Dr. Manytsalo at all. Here is Dr. Schmidt-Thome’s Academia.edu page, where she is listed as faculty at Aalto University. I just happened upon this manuscript when I was catching up on reading Planning Theory, and I liked the paper a great deal. There’s a copy available for download on her Academia.edu page.

So one of the persistent problems we have had in planning theory (and everywhere else) is dealing with power. One take, which thinks about “empowering” communities or individuals, tends to underplay the role that structural differences in power plays in maintaining existing practices. A lot like my problems with Sandberg’s Lean In–well, women would do better in the world if they just asserted themselves. Yes, but they would also do better if people stopped expecting them to do all the work all the time and rewarding men simply for being male. Power taken up from the structural direction causes us problems, too, unless you are of the “we’re doomed” mindset: structural theories of power and how it works often do not help us see how to function within those structures with any real level of agency. Planners can be stooges of big institutions, or failed revolutionaries, and little more in hard structural approaches.

This manuscript helps us out of that problem by examining two, complementary ways of thinking about power. One comes from Lukes’ Power: A Radical View and the other from Bateson Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Lukes developed a “third dimension” of power that describes the capacity of individuals within structures to exert influence in key ways; Bateson develops a similar concept to the “Third dimension” of individuals within ecology, where power moves throughout a system, back and forth, and to and fro. From there, Schmidt-Thome and Mantysalo draw on the work in planing theory from Patsy Healey to develop a model of learning that reflects ways to crack into “power over” represented in structures. It’s a three-level concept: learning I is what they refer to as “trial-and-error” learning undertaken so that individuals within contexts begin to suss through what is true about the situation. This type of learning changes power over situations as it enables individuals to move to Learning II whereby they change the system simply via understanding it and, thus, changing the capacity of institutions to set the terms of the discussion unchecked. Level III is where the action is: it occurs when the practices embodied in I and II lead to understandings that can’t be reconciled within those levels and require a transformation in conception among learners about selves and systems.

Schmidt-Thome and Mantysalo then illustrate their understanding of learning via looking at the agonistic planning around the high speed rail station in Stuttgart, GR. There has been quite a bit written about this case study from one of my colleagues, Deike Peters, and it’s nice to see people writing about that case from multiple perspectives. Here, the authors trace the social learning aspects of the opposition in such a way that you can see how power shifts via learning across the three levels they discuss. A useful contribution, indeed.

Eric Jaffe shows the yearly financials on transit, and it’s ugly

Lisa Schweitzer

So people like Gen Giuliano and I have been saying this for years, but Jaffe is a man, and ostensibly a transit ally (unlike people like me, who wish to destroy it all by noting it costs money and suggesting we should plan for that problem), and since men are the only people who could ever ever understand transit, maybe the transit fanboys will listen this time out.

In either case, Jaffe from Atlantic Cities combs through this report and boils it down for his readers. I’m sort of excited about this entry into the discussion because 1) the DOT seems actually to have taken President Obama’s evidence-based decision-making to heart with things like this report, which is very good and 2) Jaffe does a terrific job of hitting the high points, so I can, in turn, be a fangirl in his general direction.

Except…the “blame labor” question is a big one because I thought the reason we were running around pouring money into trains was to take advantage of economies of scale and save on labor costs. The commenters are circling around the issue, which is higher management salaries do not translate to lower operating costs on the ground. So all those contract managers we have floating around transit agencies are probably expensive relative to what they are producing in terms of revenue.

It’s a lot more than a salary story. First, energy costs are problem for transit agencies as well as motorists (as energy costs are an issue for every industry) so the prices for fuel creeping upwards hits transit agencies right along with everybody else, even if they are using “alternative” fuels, which also probably have a petroleum base. Energy prices tend to move together.

During the time period Jaffe is talking about (00 to 10), there has been a lot of capital investment. Capital budgeting is done separately, but that’s a bad idea. Capital expenditures become debt service, and expanding the system means an increase in both operating costs and revenues in different proportions. In private management decisions, it would be clear: with operating deficits of this magnitude, you shut down. Immediately. You’re losing money every time you send a bus out of the barn. On the rail side, you don’t invest billions of dollars to lose 40 cents on every dollar you spend to operate. Public management requires a more subjective nexus. Is a 50 percent subsidy adequate? Unacceptably high? We have to think about transit a lot like we think about public schools. It’s the same debate, really.

I haven’t gone through and looked at anything rigorously yet, but it’s entirely possible that new expansions are pulling down cost recovery ratios even more because the investment decisions are poor upfront–that is, without the expansion, the existing system gets about 40 percent, but the new service gets 25 percent. And that might be common enough to pull down those numbers as well. The response is always “Those new lines take awhile to build ridership” but then…Metrolink.

There are a couple of key graphics in Jaffe’s discussion that should worry us. The one that really really worries me is this puppy:

Dot chart 3

Wuuuuuuuuuuuut? Yeah, nothing really surprises me here, except the bus and light rail entries. WUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUT? And people wonder why I am always in such a bad mood. One of the reasons we are supposedly pouring all this money in light rail is that, while it’s more costly upfront to build, it has lower operating costs. This graphic does not suggest that, at all. Now, there are other arguments for light rail (it’s jolly! It’s sweet and wonderful and provides a better ride! Woohoo!) But damn it. The fact that there are no apparent scale economies here suggest that all that public investment in trolleys could be kicking some agencies straight in the financial groin. You spend more to get the same return, and to the degree that there are amenity benefits to the investment, those go to land owners who may or (in California’s case) may not be paying in via local land taxes.

(PS I’m sorry, Atlantic Cities, for lifting your graphic but if you label your figures with numbers I could just refer it rather than lifting it.)

Finally, inevitably, somebody in the comments started in about subsidies to drivers, to which I responded:

I have never understood the transit advocates’ belief that, somehow, operating subsidies to private vehicles are germane to how much operating subsidy transit requires. Is it a fairness or public interest argument? I agree that motorists should pay their full marginal costs, but they already pay via gas taxes, they provide a good deal of their own labor and capital costs privately (owning the car (horrendously expensive), operating it, fueling it, insuring it, etc etc). Buses, bikes, streetcars, and trucks use roads, too, so acting like those are all on car owners is also a bit off. But it’s not like places that charge very high petrol taxes, which for all practical purposes serve as a green tax*, don’t also have to grapple with how much operating subsidy to provide. At some point, there is a basic public management problem here: How much of the operating deficit is a “subsidy” that goes to benefitting patrons, and how much of it is just poor public management, where we really ought to start saying “no” to various add-ons (like new buildings with marble floors, etc, ala the LA Metro building) and expansions that simply put agencies on the hook for operating service they can’t afford to operate.

*I know it’s probably third-best, but see the work of Ken Small and Ian Parry.

#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.

#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.