Tactical urbanism, bicycle rebellion, Right to the City.

Public Space Is Fundamental to Democracy, No Wonder It’s Under Attack

A true public space is overtly political in that it is a democratized space. That is, there is no regular programming which dictates the goings on within such a space. Instead, the day to day happenings are largely decided by those who use the place. City government or other municipalities can manage or maintain public space, but cannot impose additional restrictive rules or regulations if the park or plaza is to remain truly democratic.

To enjoy such a space involves trusting strangers, and in all relationships of trust, there is risk. In the midst of food carts and outdoor chess there is also crime, and even the rare act of terrorism.

As the Project for Public Space has written in the past: “With mounting public anxiety, and the fact that the distinction between public and private space is becoming increasingly blurred, there is greater likelihood that places will be more intensely monitored, surveyed, even militarized, in order to evoke a sense of safety.”

This is certainly true in Detroit’s rebounding downtown. Once a bustling capital of midwest industry, Detroit’s city center was hollowed out by freeways and parking lots. Only recently have big money billionaires like Quicken Loan czar Dan Gilbert reinvested in downtown.

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Detroit’s Arson Crisis: ‘We Don’t Need No Water, Let the Motherfucker Burn’

In Flint, you can’t drink the water. In Detroit, you can’t turn on the water.

Thousands of Detroiters have had their tap water cut by the city for late bills in what the United Nations considers a humanitarian crime. At the same time as water won’t flow from the tap, hundreds – if not thousands – of the city’s fire hydrants no longer function.

Arsonists know this. They also know barely any of the of fires set each year get investigated. How many fires are we talking here? Motor City Muckraker recently tallied the total.

10,000 fires in just three years. That’s how fast Detroit is burning. Like so many stories of collapse in Michigan, you have to ask: how the fuck did it get this bad?

Since the riots in the early 1940’s and late 1960’s, fire has been a common tool of the discontented, the outraged, the hopeless, and the pyromaniacs of Detroit. Devil’s Night (on the eve of Halloween each year) became a legendary evening of arson for the city, with one single night in the 80’s claiming hundreds of buildings.

Today, 4th of July has replaced Devil’s Night as the new date of mass conflagration. Last summer on July 4th the Detroit Fire Department responded to over sixty calls in 24 hours.

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The Sound and Fury of Portland on November 29th 2014

It took over a year for Portland’s Citizen Review Commission to issue a ruling regarding the police action of November 29, 2014. In January of this year, the panel came to a 5-3 decision stating that orders issued by the Portland Police Bureau to hundreds of Black Lives Matter protesters were in fact unlawful.

CRC’s investigation was the result of some 40 complaints filed with the city auditor’s office the Monday morning following a weekend of unrest in the wake of a grand jury decision to not indict Darren Wilson, who shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson earlier that summer.

The Oregonian reported on the night of Nov 29, 2014 hours after a rally attended by Rev. Jesse Jackson, over a hundred protesters were kettled by police and told they were under arrest. The entire crowd was held for almost an hour along with members of the media, while just 10 protesters were taken into custody for booking on disorderly conduct charges.

During the CRC’s hearing, one member asked how the 10 were chosen to be placed in custody. “That I can’t speak to, how the 10 were chosen,” Capt. Bryan Parman of the PPB replied.

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The Radical Urban Agenda of Bernie Sanders

Urbanists are always complaining presidents and other federal officials don’t focus enough on urban issues. They’re right to. National politics is framed around the Heartland of America, not dense urban centers where most of us actually live.

That could soon change. Bernie Sanders is currently waging an insurgent campaign for president inside the other corporate militaristic party, much to the shock of the Democratic establishment. And I was wrong. Other writers were too. We predicted Sanders would be a sheepdog who’d herd the Left to the doorstep of Hillary’s Starkiller Base, drop out, and promptly endorse her.

Instead we have the tie in Iowa, the record 3.5 million individual donations, the 84% youth vote.

And Sanders accomplished this by having two things Hillary can’t buy: authenticity and likability.

The other rare qualification Sanders has is being a former mayor. The only president in US history to ever have that in their resume was man-walrus Grover Cleveland.

Why does this matter? Because as a mayor, you’re far more engaged (hopefully) with the complexities of human nature and need, and likely less partisan or ideological. Liberal and conservative might be opposites in rural Ohio, but in cities such labels become meaningless. This might be why his proposed climate action plan includes increasing funding for transportation by a staggering 250%.

Screen Shot 2016-02-07 at 5.55.51 PMWhen you realize the guy feeding pigeons in his sandals might become president of America.

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Gov. Snyder Delivers State of the State Surrounded by Thousands Demanding His Arrest

When urban geographer David Harvey published Rebel Cities in 2012 he proposed, “The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city, [to] exercise collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization.”

Today, groups like the Right to the City Coalition focus mainly on housing justice and access to social services. More broadly, Right to the City as a movement includes living wages, food security, access to the collective commons, and other environmental justice matters.

Less often do the most basic of necessities like breathable air and drinkable water get included. Right now in Flint Michigan, that rare struggle has become a matter of life and death.

Last Thursday, hundreds of Flint and Lansing residents occupied the capitol building on the first day of Michigan’s legislative session to loudly demand the resignation of Governor Rick Snyder for his role in causing and covering up the lead poisoning crisis in Genesee county.

Since last week, Snyder requested federal disaster aid relief from the federal government. This request was partially granted, but fell short of gaining ongoing aid a natural disaster would’ve triggered. Snyder also moved to restore full authority to Flint’s newly elected mayor now that his Emergency Manager scheme has been proved a toxic mistake.

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Flint Water Warriors Occupy Capitol to Demand Gov. Snyder Resign

The people of Flint are pissed off, and they have every reason to be. What dithered for over a year as a local story has finally hit prime time thanks to talking heads like Rachel Maddow and Michael Moore‘s campaign to #ArrestGovSnyder, which gathered 85,000 signatures in just days.

For anyone unfamiliar, Governor Rick Snyder’s appointed ’emergency manager’ to Flint (who’s authority overrides elected council) switched the drinking water supply from Detroit/Lake Huron to the Flint river.

The river is highly polluted, but that’s not the worst of it.

The river is high in saline, which corrodes existing lead pipes. An anti-corrisive agent could have been added to the water to prevent lead from leaching into the water for as little as $100 a month. But this wasn’t done, as the stated purpose of Snyder’s ’emergency managers’ was trimming essential social services where ever possible.

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Modernizing Chicagoland: City of Necessity

This year marks the 53rd anniversary of the Robert Newman film portrait of urban progress and class in Chicago titled ‘City of Necessity‘ produced by the National Council of Protestant Episcopal Churches. In narration and audio clips, Newman presents a stark divide between political public relations of the time and the daily lived realities of Chicago’s laborers and poorer residents.

In one clip, then mayor Richard J. Daley says of his city, “we have no ghettos in Chicago at all, we have no negro ghetto.” Cut to a small girl swinging from a rope hung in a doorway that’s swaying with her, about to collapse. In another clip, the narrator sardonically references Chicago’s ‘culture’ while the camera hangs on a dismal 3-lane surface highway where a woman scurries to avoid an onslaught of deafening traffic.

The film’s contrasts and contradictions illuminate the segregation common in 1960s urban life. Periodically the film celebrates the city more like a promotional tourist film, but does do only to return to sobering realities of inequity. As you might imagine, half a century later, little has changed in that regard for Chicago.

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There Won’t Be Resilient Coastal Cities in the 22nd Century

In the lexicon of urbanist jargon, the term ‘sustainability’ has become virtually meaningless. We know cities will never be sustainable, not in their energy use, their food production, or their ability to afford economic or housing stability to large numbers of their populations. This is, of course, largely by design. Cities are epicenters of global trade and finance. A few community gardens aside, few will ever grow the majority of their food within a metropolis.

The new buzzword floating about forums and lecture circuits is ‘resiliency’. Resilient cities in theory will collapse less under the crushing effects of capitalism and climate change.

This acceptance was hauntingly apparent in the so-called Cop21 climate agreement lauded by politicians this month. All the corporate sponsors had to do was Tweet out the word ‘historic’ next to the word ‘agreement’ and everyone started jumping up and down. Finally our world leaders were taking climate change seriously!

But of course, they weren’t. The agreement was a sham.

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Street Name Sexism is the New Confederate Statue

New Orleans made national news last week when its city council voted 6-1 to remove four statues honoring Confederate president Jefferson Davis, General P.G.T. Beauregard, the Battle of Liberty Place, and even General Robert E. Lee whose likeness sits atop a massive column at the center of a plaza that shares his name.

While the decision would be a no-brainer on the East or West coasts, in the deep American south the move was controversial, as many cling to these symbols as representing Southern Heritage, not racism. While some are more open about their racism than others, most using the heritage jargon do so purely to mask their true malcontent.

Like the Confederate flag, most advocates for their removal state they don’t wish the sculptures to be destroyed, or for what they represent to be forgotten, but instead such relics belong in museums, not as objects to honor in our public commons.

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Bicycling, Brandalism, and Black Bloc at the Paris Climate Talks

It’s that time of year again, when world leaders and masses of activists convene to grapple with a dying Earth. Largely indifferent to the effects of climate change, overpopulation, and ecological collapse, this year we’ve seen a slight intensifying of rhetoric from Barack Obama and Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel. Even notorious climate denier Vladimir Putin made a few sympathetic retorts.

Credit the Pope for laying down the hammer this fall on his US trip when he called inaction on climate change “suicide”, and in his 190 page encyclical published this spring. The document is a rousing moral wake up call about the dangers of capitalism, the ways we build cities to divide each another by class, and of how we’ve devastated vast swaths of our natural world.

While 2015 has seen some significant victories like Shell’s failed arctic drilling ambitions and TransCanada’s failed KXL tar sands pipeline, it seems still there are few willing to challenge capital’s roll in creating the climate crisis or to alter their own consumption habits.

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