Rahimullah waits. In order to get picked for a day’s work, it’s best to get started early. He’s said his morning prayers. Had breakfast. Eggs, bread, and tea. He’s walked for 40 minutes to find a good spot on one of the busiest roads in the city. Rahimullah will likely be picked for a day’s work to fix plants on the sidewalk of a suburban housing area. Peshawar, a city of 4 million people in the northwest of Pakistan, seems sleepy right now, but that will soon change.

Cities, they say, have souls. They emit a mythology from their buildings and infrastructure, from their layers of history and anonymous crowds. But it is also the people who make its soul. Pakistan’s daily wage laborers, including Afghan nationals such as Rahimullah, are makers of Peshawar and other cities across Pakistan.

Rahimullah has, literally, transformed Peshawar with his own hands. Roads, sewage lines, buildings, planting flowers, planting crops—you name them, he’s worked them all. Within his neighborhood, a small informal housing area—or slums, as they’re often called—he’s built homes, made footpaths, bridges, and more.

Then you have women like Qayinat, also Afghan. Her hands are hardened from detergent and water and covered in calluses. Every day she walks from her informal house on the outskirts of the city to get to upper-middle-class homes where she washes clothes and cleans for a day’s pay of around 550 Pakistani rupees (around 2.50 U.S. dollars).

You won’t hear much about Rahimullah or Qayinat though. Daily wage laborers are not venerated in the official and, increasingly, even popular, imagination. Refugees and undocumented migrants are often reduced to tropes and discussed only through the prism of geopolitics, situated outside of the discourse on cities or mentioned only in passing, assumed simply to be waiting to return home.

The Afghans in urban Pakistan that I spoke to for my book project claimed the city as their own, not because they saw themselves as “contributors to the economy,” but because they knew their labor underpinned its very functioning.

Pakistan has the fastest rate of urbanization in South Asia. For years, policymakers have boasted they are building “world-class” cities. Much of their inspiration (and funding) comes from their modernization crush, the Gulf Arab states (read: gated communities, securitized high-rises, shopping malls, and Sunni mosques).

Yet, as the late, great Mike Davis told us, urbanization in the Global South is riddled with inequalities, driven by colonial legacies of spatial segregation, the rampant restructuring of postcolonial economies by international financial institutions, and the middle-class domination over the state.

The same is true in Pakistan. There’s no oil-rich economy as in the Gulf Arab countries, industrialization is non-existent, the country’s main exports are textiles and agricultural produce, and the dependency on IMF loans and World Bank projects are debilitating.

Urbanization in Pakistan is driven by forced migration from internal and regional wars, climate disaster, and botched development projects. Alongside Afghans, you also have Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, Sri Lankans, Yemenis, and more. Yet Pakistan’s Afghans are the labor that allows capitalist development projects and aspirations to middle-class urbanism.

Millions of Afghans have lived in Pakistan over the past 40 years—at least 8 million persons at its peak and around 3 million today. The Pakistani establishment, and international actors—states, NGOs, and liberal commentators—like to celebrate the country’s “hospitality” toward Afghan refugees.

This is disingenuous.

Most of Pakistan’s Afghans have come from low-income backgrounds. The majority have been unable to become citizens. While constitutionally anyone born in the country is eligible for citizenship, successive governments have blocked this.

In recent years millions of Afghans have been coerced to leave Pakistan, often with the complicity of the international humanitarian regime. Since the mid-2000s, millions of Afghans have left Pakistan. Some returned to Afghanistan, but since war never stopped in the country, many moved elsewhere—Europe, Iran, Turkey—lived transnational lives, or, simply, stayed in Pakistan.

When, in 2021 the Taliban recaptured power in Afghanistan and Afghan nationals sought refuge, medical treatment, transit, or reunification with family already in Pakistan, they found land borders difficult to cross, beatings and extortion rampant, and visas nearly impossible to get. Pakistan’s hostile borders have been emboldened by the violent, racist, and exclusionary border regimes of richer nations that have consistently been hostile to Afghans.

The Pakistani state also shoulders sizeable responsibility for the protracted conflicts in Afghanistan, especially from the 1990s onward, when it has contributed to elongating conflict in Afghanistan, most notably through its support of the Taliban. It also supported the disastrous U.S.-led military intervention in Afghanistan, marked by massive civilian casualties.

The nation is jingoistic and exclusionary. Anti-poor urban planning, the shuttering of refugee camps, and displaced persons being told to “move on” from relief camps means many can’t get access to the basics (housing, electricity, sanitation), so they find other ways to do so. Despite the increasingly hostile attitudes of those in power at the national level, the city accommodates different ethnicities, nationalities, sexualities, and classes within a single space—albeit subject to hierarchical, uneven divisions. Afghans and Pakistanis live and work side by side with each other in shared daily struggles, forming community and companionship as they do so.

They literally expand the city—not through the skyline of malls, mosques, and high-rises policymakers would have you believe, but, through the katchi abadi, the informal housing area, which is the true and more complex face of urbanity in the country.

In sympathetic policy circles or polite middle-class living room conversation, when it comes to Pakistan’s low-income Afghans, you might hear how they are economically useful, They’ve contributed a lot to our economy. At other times its, Afghans know how to manage hardship, or, They’re so resilient.

But should one’s humanity be contingent on economic productivity? “Love us… when we’re wretched, suicidal, naked, contributing nothing,” British Muslim poet Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan teaches us.

Tropes of resilience distract from the more insidious reasons as to why people need to be resilient in the first place—and not everyone can be.

Most of the people I interviewed were unequivocal: Their lives are hard because of failings of the state, elites, international humanitarian agencies, and repeated military interventions in Afghanistan—including Pakistan’s own repeated interference in its neighboring country and those of imperialist persuasions (Soviet, American, European). Perhaps, then, as anthropologist Anila Daulatzai, urges us, we should be thinking about the reparations Pakistan owes Afghan people, which must include Pakistan’s own Afghan population.

So, if we choose to reflect, as you pass through Pakistan’s cities, Bertolt Brecht’s compassionate recognition of workers across civilizations will echo in your ears. So too will the region’s own Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s ode to those who live in the broken roads of slum dwellings. Stop in Hayatabad, a township celebrated as Peshawar’s architectural jewel-in-the-crown, and ask any local, Afghan or Pakistani, and they’ll tell you: It was Afghan laborers who built it.

The post Afghans Built This City appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Infrastructure is a double-edged sword. For every case in which it is desperately needed, there is another case in which it enables the rapid proliferation of urban expansion and its domino effect of deleterious land use practices.

One project in Ecuador, with which I’ve been involved over the past decade, allowed me to consider how to stem the detrimental effects of sprawl by decommissioning existing infrastructure rather than investing in more of it. Another, in Haiti, led to a rethinking of how public services might be delivered in a measured, more tactical manner that encourages consolidated, not expansive, growth. One might call it min-frastructure.

Such thinking reflects a historic shift in how infrastructure connects to urbanization. Just a century ago, long before the advent of so-called “smart cities,” infrastructure went hand in hand with urbanization. As cities grew, the infrastructure servicing them grew at the same pace.

In recent decades however, the desire for more planned and efficient development (from flows of water to waste and power systems) has meant that infrastructure often comes first, in order to create the market for urbanization. In this way, it increases the value of land to make development possible—thereby becoming a tool of real estate speculation. The unintended consequences of this infrastructure-first approach can be huge. After infrastructure and a first generation, planned development are put in place, an “echo” effect of uncontrolled growth often follows, eventually exceeding the capacity of those original services.

The infrastructure-first model has also proven increasingly difficult and risky to implement. Onerous processes of appropriations, approvals, bidding, and oversight have made the public sector incapable of delivering projects without embarrassing scheduling and cost overruns. (Think of California’s high-speed rail.) In response, government overseers have resorted to piecemeal or pay-as-you-go methods of execution—a symptom not simply of mounting government deficits, but of taxpayer distrust.

New housing development, northeastern Haiti (Inter-American Development Bank, 2015). Photo courtesy of Roger Sherman.

The effect has been to lessen the appetite for investment in public works, and to raise doubt about the efficacy of the idea of infrastructure as an extensive, world-building instrument. Rising in its place is a new model, more localized in scale and reach. Instead of the massive service network designed to irrigate expansion, this new approach is geared toward treating specific needs.

I first came across the idea of a measured, “battery-powered” infrastructure in Providencia, a new town designated for development by the Ecuadorian government in the Amazon. It’s in a spot where eco-logic dictates there shouldn’t be a town at all: along the Napo River across from Yasuni National Park, one of the most bio-diverse patches of the planet. But Providencia is being planned in association with a newly-completed port: part of a new, South American-financed river-transport axis to speed the export of resources extracted in the Amazon from Manaus, Brazil in the east (upriver and across the Andes) to the Pacific port of Manta (and then onto Asia).

The new town is located amid indigenous communities, colonist farmer cooperatives and multi-national oil drilling concessions. The region, called Yamanuka, has been steadily deforested over the last three decades, beginning with the clearing of service roads to drilling sites. Those roads in turn opened the door to the unplanned branching, or “fishboning,” of new, unpaved streets by colonists seeking to reap profits through land speculation related to the imagined success of the port. During the long and slow completion of the latter, those speculators bided their time with subsistence farming, absent access to the most basic of utilities and social infrastructure.

The plan for Providencia is designed to reverse this trend. Instead of building infrastructure first, it starts with identifying where not to build. Existing forest is declared off limits, its edge establishing a natural barrier and shape for the town. This not only protects the forest, but reverses the previous pattern of development. It also engenders desirability, creating an interest in Providencia among those who previously colonized and deforested the hinterlands. Infrastructure is deployed tactically, offering a fuller range of services within a more confined area—a “luxury” for those living in the town. Access to utilities (clean water, sewerage, electricity, gas, and wifi/cellular reception) is complemented by a social infrastructure that includes a regionally-scaled market (a larger sales platform); an eco-hotel offering higher-quality jobs, education, and recreation facilities (including daycare for the many woman-owned cooperatives that populate the area); and access to quality healthcare.

To accomplish all of this, the planning team (of which I was a part) employed a soft form of infrastructure known as Transfer of Development Rights (TDR). Normally used only in areas of high land cost and density, TDR is a land-use gambit that enables a swap of ownership and rights to property. A push to the pull of Providencia’s desirable scarcity, TDR enables owners of outlying properties (or fincas) to forfeit their claims in the forest in exchange for the right to move into Providencia and enjoy its access to superior municipal services and a growing eco-tourist market.

The fincas are then sold back to the State and returned to public control, where they are reconsolidated into larger tracts. This in turn enables the land to be collectively farmed—now according to principles of agroforestry, a form of reforestation that combines agronomy with forestry, through the mixing of differing combinations of species whose proximity to one another reflexively accelerates productivity. The consolidation of plots also enables the removal, or “deboning” of the fishbones of roads whose proliferation is associated with deforesting activities. All but the most necessary of these rights-of-way are removed; the remaining ones constitute only the necessary links in the new global transport axis through the region. It also preserves the indigenous economy’s supply chain, connecting locally-owned micro-enterprises to the market. In this way, the plan for Providencia enables the indigenous economy to ride the coattails of the global economy through its proximity to the port instead of being overrun by it; as importantly, it makes it possible for the population prosper because it preserves the forest, not at its expense.

I encountered a similar problem in the vastly different context of northeast Haiti. There, the RN6 highway extends east from Cap Haitien to the border of the Dominican Republic, connecting four villages: Limonade, Caracol, Trou du Nord, and Terrier Rouge. This rapidly urbanizing area possesses fertile soil and grazing land, unspoiled coastal beauty and marine life, a new industrial park (PIC), and a university. These assets are, however counterveiled by poor land-use practices, an absence of regulation and enforcement on informal construction; and the lack of any record of land tenure. There is minimal to no utility service (solid waste, sewer, water, gas), contributing to slow economic growth and high unemployment; a low standard of living, including a plethora of health problems; and environmental degradation, from erosion due to lack of flood control, to contamination of soils under both farmland and habitable areas.

Both large international lenders (World Bank, EU, InterAmerican Development Bank, etc.) and NGOs have invested in infrastructure in the region, but these projects are dispersed. With little to no integration or consolidation of uses, they are seldom transformative in their cumulative impact. To the contrary: The scattered nature of infrastructure investment there has exacerbated as many problems as it has solved, increasing traffic and accidents along the highway by requiring greater and longer trips for people to meet their daily needs, from commuting to taking kids to school to fetching clean water to shopping. A grander, more ambitious infrastructural plan is not the answer, because the government cannot be relied upon to execute projects of any complexity.

I was a part of a team charged with developing a prioritized strategy for infrastructural investment. We eschewed a single comprehensive plan in favor of a series of opportunistic, targeted (site-specific), catalytic interventions that could be executed in any order, as the unstable political climate permitted. Rather than being of single purpose, as past investments have been, these bundles, as we called them, are comprised of a robust combination of facilities designed to attract people simply by consolidating and reducing the number of trips required of them to accomplish their daily routines. The infrastructure bundles include differing combinations of: a transit center, market, health center, job training center, agricultural processing facility, and municipal services such as water supply and green waste station.

Since the region uniformly suffers from a lack of services, bundles were located not on the basis of need, but by proximity to existing infrastructure assets. The bundle approach is acupunctural: Each is precisely located, on ”known” unclaimed land adjacent to the RN6 highway, within reasonable walking or biking distance of existing population (residential/educational/employment) centers. Accordingly, one bundle is located adjacent to the industrial park at Caracol, the region’s largest employer; another is in Limonade, near the University, and a key transfer point between public transit to and from Cap Haitien and private transit services eastward. By consolidating development around a few select hubs of activity, the daily itinerary of area inhabitants is simplified and made more convenient, with the net effect of reducing and easing travel on existing infrastructure. True to acupuncture’s counterintuitive principle—that the point of intervention may not be coincident with the locale of its effect—one bundle, which includes a cold freight terminal, is not even located within the study area. Yet its impact is expected to significantly alleviate traffic congestion from PIC to Cap by allowing export trucks to travel at night, when the RN6 is empty.

As the United States debates the nature of badly-needed infrastructural investment, my experiences working in Ecuador and Haiti have led me to ask whether less might sometimes be more. For instance, might it be more efficient to have targeted, place-based infrastructure rather than large networks that connect places? Can we use infrastructure not in blind service to the manifest destiny of unmitigated urban expansion, but rather as a way of delimiting and shaping it? And is infrastructure best planned as a top-down enterprise, or might it be better to learn from these examples from the Global South and use infrastructure to solve local problems tactically?

The rise of digital communication and transitions in the technologies of mobility requires new thinking, not just new infrastructure. That new thinking might do well to place less emphasis on the insufficient supply of infrastructure, and more on how we utilize, recover or reduce the excess capacity we have now.

The post In the Amazon Jungle or a California Subdivision, Sometimes Less Infrastructure Is More appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Both” was the answer that emerged over the course of the hour-long exchange among Morain, editorial page editor and political affairs columnist for The Sacramento Bee, and a panel of civic, education, and community leaders before a packed audience at the Capitol Events Center in downtown Sacramento.

The lunchtime event, co-presented by Zócalo Public Square and The California Wellness Foundation, was built around the query, “Is the Central Valley Finally Embracing Its Urban Future?” Even as the Central Valley’s population swells in cities such as Sacramento, Fresno, Bakersfield, and Stockton, and officials grapple with characteristically urban challenges like air pollution, soaring housing costs, and sagging infrastructure, California’s San Joaquin Valley still retains its agricultural roots and clings to certain elements of its pastoral lifestyle.

Bridging that dual urban-rural character requires comprehensive regional measures, and problem-solving approaches that aren’t either/or, urban vs. rural, said Meg Arnold, managing director of Valley Vision, a regional leadership organization working on issues like transportation, air quality, and economic development in Northern California.

For example, Arnold said, developing more agricultural-based manufacturing across the Valley would be a way of “taking a strength and adding to and augmenting it.” Capturing a greater share of “value-added-income” in industries like agricultural technology will enable the Valley’s economy to “unify its assets” and “harness them to shared goals,” Arnold said.

Joseph Castro, who has served as president of California State University, Fresno since 2013, agreed that the Valley needs to build on its heritage as “the worldwide hub for agriculture,” even as it keeps urbanizing. “We should embrace our agricultural roots and invest more in that area,” he said.

Dirk Brazil, who has been Davis’ City Manager since 2014, said the region is underfunded in any number of key areas, including education and health care. Local and state governments are cautious about coughing up more money because they’re trying to figure out the spending and social priorities of the new administration in Washington.

“It’s all about the revenue, it’s all about, ‘How do we fund this stuff?’” Brazil said.

Several panelists were raised in the Central Valley, or have lived there for decades, so they were personally familiar with the complexities of its rapidly changing character. Moderator Morain introduced the topic of the region’s mass transportation shortfall and the desirability of high-speed rail by asking how many panelists had driven by car to the gathering. Everyone, as it turned out.

Gayle Garbolino-Mojica, who’s serving her third term as the Placer County Superintendent of Schools, and who said she arrived in her electric car, noted that high-density traffic in places like the Lincoln-Roseville-Rocklin corridor, where State Route 65 meets I-80, can cause bottlenecks that bedevil commuters and school-bound students.

Brazil said that California state officials and legislators must produce a comprehensive transportation plan and a bill to match, since individual cities lack the resources to prop up a strained transportation network all by themselves. That’s also important for forging ties between the Valley and adjacent high-job-growth regions like the Bay Area and Silicon Valley. “We would love to see Facebook spin off a division that’s based in Davis,” he said.

Meeting the Valley’s growing educational demands was a recurrent theme. Garbolino-Mojica said that a fair proportion of her district’s students go on to college; after graduating, some move back to the area and are able to find work locally with Sutter Health Care and other major employers. She stressed the need for more educational investment, including in public-private partnerships, and for more innovation in creating educational training programs.

Castro said that 70 percent of Cal State Fresno students are first-generation to college, and 60 percent receive Pell grants. The vast majority of students rely heavily on public transit, namely buses. “The difference between going to college and not going to college may be transportation,” he added.

Some of those students’ parents are migrant farmworkers, both documented and undocumented, and audience member Vanessa Richardson asked the panel how agriculture’s dependence on migrant labor factors in the Valley’s future.

City Manager Brazil said that shifting federal immigration policies will heavily impact local wineries and other labor-intensive industries, and also will have “a huge impact” on the movement of visiting scholars and international students at UC Davis. “There’s a lot of tumult and confusion on campus right now,” he said.

Morain brought the discussion full circle to whether the mega-region, somewhat monolithically known as the Central Valley, could cooperate across its many municipalities. The panelists concurred that it was necessary for communities to recognize their mutual inter-dependency even more in coming years.

Arnold said that regional jurisdictions will “have to attend to their own knitting” and take care of their own problems, but also work together to permit jobs, dollars and workers to flow across counties. As a resident of Davis, she said, she’d like to see any job stay in Davis. But she’d rather have it go somewhere else in the Valley than go to Austin, Texas.

The post It’s Time for the Central Valley to Grow Up appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Just ask its princes and princesses—those fortunate enough to be able to afford to live and vote there. Most of the time, the nearly 900,000 residents can pretend that they live in the country, even though they’re part of greater Los Angeles. Parks or open space or farmland is almost always within easy walking or biking distance. The Santa Clara River, the least developed of Southern California’s waterways, is being protected. The Kingdom of Ventura’s cities remain separate and distinct developments on the landscape—they haven’t sprawled and melted into each other, like cities do elsewhere in Southern California.

Their secret? “No other county in the United States has more effective protections against urban sprawl,” says the web site of SOAR, aka Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources, a family of growth-controlling ballot measures.

Those SOAR protections have been fixed in the laws of the county and its cities for two decades. SOAR permits development only within certain urban cores in the county and makes no allowances for population growth. And if a developer wants to change the boundaries or develop open space outside the areas where growth is permitted, that developer can’t buy off the county supervisors or a city council. SOAR requires any development in protected open space be approved by the voters.

Ventura voters like the results so much they are moving to make them all but permanent this November, when they vote on county and city measures that would extend SOAR protections through 2050.

In practice, this has made the Kingdom a mighty fortress. Those sprawling suburban housing developments that fill up the San Fernando Valley to the east and the Santa Clarita Valley to the north? They stop at the county’s edge. It’s almost as if Ventura County has built a wall against growth along its border—and made neighboring Los Angeles pay for it.

All of which makes SOAR worth celebrating. But there is a problem with those walls, and within the Kingdom. And that problem is not the wonderful things that growth restrictions have done. It’s what the princes and princesses of the Kingdom have failed to do.

A group of SOAR volunteers in Ventura County.

Smart growth strategies like SOAR are not merely supposed to preserve open space. At their best, they are designed to promote smart growth—to drive more creative, dense, multi-family, and transit-oriented development in the urban cores where growth is still permitted. But the Kingdom has been far from welcoming to this type of development.

Yes, you can find smart, denser growth in the city of Ventura, particularly around its downtown. But infill development in Ventura County has lagged far behind what’s needed to serve the Kingdom’s growing population and its housing needs. The same citizens of the Kingdom who back SOAR also have opposed multifamily and denser developments (Thousand Oaks even passed a ballot measure limiting density), and resisted investments in public transit to connect their urban cores.

The results are as obvious as the choking traffic on the 101 Freeway and the astronomical housing prices. Ventura County is one of the 10 least affordable places to live in the United States. It’s been very difficult for middle-class people, much less lower-income people, to make their homes there, and that makes it hard for companies to locate there. Many service workers have to commute from outside the county.

“We need to understand that there is an uncertain capacity within our urban boundaries to accommodate job growth,” Bruce Stenslie, president of the Economic Development Collaborative of Ventura County, said during a public conference earlier this year on SOAR. “Which doesn’t mean that we should tear down the urban boundaries, it means we need to be a little more mature about questions concerning in-fill development and higher density.”

Of course such immaturity about growth—and high housing prices and inequality and traffic—is not limited to Ventura County. What’s frustrating is that after 20 years, the Kingdom doesn’t seem to have learned its lesson. The current proposed renewal of SOAR doesn’t include any new flexibility to account for population growth—and it’s not linked to any broader effort to do more infill development in the cores.

This represents at best a missed opportunity—and at worst an example of mass public selfishness.

Matthew Fienup, an economist with Cal Lutheran University’s Center for Economic Research and Forecasting (who likes to talk about how much he loves living across the street from orchards), points out that there are myriad ways to require more regular analysis and adjustments of the boundaries, and to put management of the boundaries in the hands of planners, instead of the hands of people with the money to put questions to voters. Fienup suggests that the county would be better off establishing tradable development rights that would protect the same amount of land while bringing some flexibility to the boundaries.

But in its intransigence, Ventura is an example of the California disease—grab your piece of the Kingdom, and then keep out anyone who might come in after you. And few in Ventura seem to care that the county, like other urban coastal places in California, has seen such a decline in its number of children and young families that it might eventually resemble a well-off senior living community.

In California, local growth restrictions are only one small part of how the old block the young. State laws make housing development slow and costly. Prop 13 provisions keep their property taxes low, encouraging people to stay in their homes longer, which reduces the supply of homes on the market.

This local anti-growth bias is now a major statewide issue as California faces a crisis in housing affordability and availability—for anyone but the most affluent. To push back against anti-growth local communities, Gov. Brown is championing legislation that would exempt many urban housing developments from environmental or local government review.

Many localities have responded to this statewide push defiantly, via local ballot measures that block growth and housing, as the Voice of San Diego documented recently. The least responsible cities are going beyond growth boundaries to impose anti-density restrictions. The most reactionary of these ballot initiatives comes from Santa Monica, which was just connected to the L.A. rail system by L.A. county taxpayers. That rail connection should inspire denser, transit-oriented development. But anti-growth Santa Monicans want to derail all this by requiring a vote of the people on most developments taller than two stories.

The defense of those backing anti-growth measures is disingenuous: If you don’t like restrictions, you can go to the ballot. But that argument is an invitation for development to be determined by a showdown between NIMBY demagoguery and self-interested political money, as opposed to any rational long-range planning.

One lesson from Ventura County is that growth boundaries like SOAR shouldn’t be pursued in isolation. They need to be tied to rock-solid requirements for creating more housing, both for low-income and middle-income people. To put it another way, it’s great if your community wants to protect open space from development, but then you don’t get to block denser development, housing, and transit in your already developed spaces.

If Ventura County wants to wall off growth in its open areas until the end of time, fine. But it must be compelled to open gates in its walls big enough to bring much more progressive development into the Kingdom.

The post The Walls Are Too High in the Kingdom of Ventura appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Yet there was the city’s mayor, the state’s governor, the national legislature’s leader, and the country’s interim president all at the metro’s inauguration—a half-year late, way over budget, and only a week before the opening ceremony for the 2016 Games.

Michel Temer, the interim president standing in while elected president Dilma Rousseff faces impeachment, had flown in just to make the landmark ride. He stood among smiling faces as the sleek subway glided over 10 miles of fresh track from the line’s previous terminus at Rio’s famed Ipanema beach to the western suburb of Barra da Tijuca, which houses the main Olympic Park and Athletes’ Village—though those facilities are a full eight miles away from the last stop.

As his train screeched into the station, a youth orchestra struck up “The Girl From Ipanema,” perhaps in reference to how that tall and tan and young and lovely girl no longer has to go on walking, but can hop on the metro instead. In the press scrum, I asked a reporter why we hadn’t been allowed to ride the metro, too. She suggested it was because of the risk of lefty journalists chanting “Fora Temer!” (“Out Temer!). Most Brazilians want new elections, and the political instability continues to be a preoccupation for Brazil and Olympic organizers.

Inside the airy Jardim Oceânico station, Temer, who Brazilians are quick to note bears a striking resemblance to Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, took to a podium and promised that Rio would show “what it’s capable of.” In turn, the mayor, in his trademark jeans and untucked work shirt, and the governor, still weak from a recent cancer treatment but seemingly determined to be part of the hoopla, also heaped praise on the project. Their common message: the $3 billion transit project will unify disparate parts of Rio, just as the Olympics would unify a divided Brazil.

You don’t have to have been a Brazil correspondent for three years to recognize that overstatement. Moreso than forging unity, the rail project seems like yet another marker of Rio’s controversial, overhyped, and ultimately underwhelming haul toward hosting the first ever Olympics in South America.

Sure, it’s easy to hate on the Olympics. Predicting the myriad of things that will go wrong is an established tradition of the Games, as much of a ritual as the torch-lighting ceremony. In much of the media, the competition is fierce for the most dire prediction, the most alarming headline, the most damning criticism of “the disaster that is Rio.” The Athlete’s Village is not up to spec (it wasn’t in Sochi or London either). The military has taken over airport screening (again, as happened in London). The environmental pollution is alarming (as it was in Beijing, which was called the most polluted games ever). The doomsayers came out in force before the 2014 World Cup too, but were proven wrong when the tournament went off largely without a hitch.

Amid all the finger-wagging, it’s no wonder 60 percent of Brazilians believe the Olympics will do more harm than good—a far cry from 2009, when the bid was supported by 89 percent of the population.

But it’s still hard not to be cynical over the self-congratulatory glad-handing on full display during the inauguration of the new metro line. And perhaps the troubles surrounding this heralded project help explain the downbeat mood in Brazil right now. It’s just another of the scores of big promises made that have failed to come to fruition.

Built over six years by as many as 10,000 workers at any given time, Rio’s new Linha 4 line claims to be the largest modern urban infrastructure project in Latin America—a dubious claim, given it’s just 10 miles of track with five stations. It was originally targeted to open in January 2016, but construction repeatedly threatened to halt amid funding shortages from the cash-strapped state government, whose economic woes reflect the recession that rattled Brazil in recent years. Costs ran over. The federal government was forced to step in with an emergency aid package. The length of the line was halved. An investigation into contracts-related bribery was opened. And after all that, the line will only be open to Olympic ticket holders until September—so much for connecting the people.

Then there are questions about who this new metro will really serve when it opens later this fall. In contrast to public transportation projects in U.S. cities that are attacked for skirting wealthier neighborhoods exercising their NIMBY vetoes, the expensive metro expansion in Rio is being criticized for routing into more affluent neighborhoods at the expense of poorer ones. And it’s not even clear that the wealthy residents will take the metro. One transportation expert involved in the planning of Linha 4, Marcus Quintella at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, explained to me that changes to the original design, including the scratching of planned parking near the line’s final stop, mean that these more affluent residents may opt to stay in their cars.

Officials tend to sweep aside such criticisms. At an earlier metro station unveiling, I spoke with Rio’s state secretary of transportation Rodrigo Vieira, who was in charge of finishing the $3 billion legacy project. He said costs were on par with transportation projects elsewhere in the world. He also countered that the line connects people of all classes, including a new stop just outside the city’s largest favela and service that better connects poorer residents to the wealthy neighborhoods where many take service jobs. The upgrades will cut a commuter’s ride by up to two hours, meaning people “will have more time to be with their families, to work, to have pleasure, to live.”

“Of course it’s not cheap,” he added, “But it’s a way to change the lives and change the city.”

As we spoke, trains rumbled through the station conducting test rides, seats still covered in plastic wrap. The station itself was still unfinished: equipment needed to be installed at the ticketing counter, an emergency closet lacked its fire hose, and the ceiling-mounted security camera boxes had yet to be equipped with actual cameras. Vieira brushed off these concerns too.

“We will operate with all the security and safety that the Rio de Janeiro subway is known for all over the world,” he said, though it isn’t clear that the small metro system has any reputation outside Brazil, and the city’s not exactly known for safety.

The statement stands in contrast to a feeling of insecurity that seems to be permeating Rio right now. After the inauguration ceremony, I rode the newly inaugurated metro back to Ipanema with Mateus Araujo, the conductor of the youth orchestra that had played “The Girl From Ipanema.” He said they would likely use the new line during the Olympics to perform at venues around the city, but he was concerned about safety. He’s been robbed at gunpoint twice over the past two years, and kids in his orchestra sometimes miss practice because it’s not safe to leave their homes in favelas riven by gang violence and police reprisals.

It’s not limited to poorer neighborhoods either. To maintain security during the Olympics, some 85,000 military and police personnel have descended upon the city. Helmet-wearing commandos patrol the beaches and streets with their fingers ready on the trigger. Despite this, a gang was filmed last week pulling a man from his car and emptying his pockets within blocks of the governor’s palace. Tellingly, the government of France has issued an advisory to tourists suggesting they have a banknote ready to appease potential attackers, suggesting that in Brazil security is not a matter of avoiding robbery, but coping with it. The arrest of 12 suspects in an ISIS-pledged terrorist cell also did nothing to quell a city already on edge.

For residents and tourists alike, the first concern isn’t even about where the metro goes, but about getting there safely in the first place.

In this way, the Linha 4 line seems to underscore Brazil’s tendency to put the cart before the horse. Looking back, it’s clear that the 2009 host bid was made amid the hype of the country’s future prospects, but with no real plans for how to accomplish everything the investment promised to bring.

The city’s crime is down, but serious safety concerns remain because thousands of extra security units aren’t enough to combat deep-rooted violence. The bay remains horribly polluted with raw sewage because pledged water treatment infrastructure never appeared. Foreign capital is coming in, but won’t necessarily turn the tide of an economic crisis.

The new metro tracks were laid, but the city will remain disjointed.

Perhaps the best one can say is that at least the train runs. Given the country’s unexpected downturn and political upheaval, it is arguably a feat that Rio accomplished what it did. Sure, it’s disappointing—but maybe it was doomed to be.

The train will run, the Games will go on, and the country will likely get a boost. But will Brazilians be more united after their Olympic moment?

The post Even “The Girl From Ipanema” Can’t Save Rio’s Olympic Train appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The South Central corridor has long defined the larger region. It was a destination spot during the 20th century jazz heyday. Its struggles during the 1970s and ‘80s reflected struggles throughout South L.A. And today, the revival of S. Central Avenue, at the hub of this very dynamic corridor, demonstrates South L.A.’s progress and possibilities.

One of the corridor’s thriving institutions is A Place Called Home, a nonprofit that serves young members ages 8 to 21 with programs in everything from the arts to urban agriculture. Zócalo Public Square asked participants in the summer photography class to document life on the corridor.

Their images capture the improvements of buildings and businesses, and the constant traffic of an area where finding a parking space is often no easy feat. They also show a homeless population far more visible than in the past, a change attributed within the community to higher housing costs and the pushing out of homeless people from downtown, just to the north. Both trends are recounted in an essay by Vivian Bowers-Cowan, longtime owner of a dry cleaning store and retail complex on Central Avenue.

South L.A’s improvements have raised new questions for the corridor, as CVS and other larger retailers mull moving in. How can it accommodate bigger and broader businesses, without displacing smaller shops that have loyally served customers there through earlier, tougher times? The photos capture a signature Los Angeles thoroughfare, growing and adapting to a promising and challenging future.

The post Cruising South Central Avenue appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

So let’s retire the old query, and turn it upside down to pose a new and urgent question: How can South Los Angeles save us?

South L.A. is no longer a place apart. Today, it sits in the center of the California story, embodying some of our greatest possibilities and our greatest struggles. And in a particularly nasty and anxious time in the United States, when pessimism and angry nonsense spread faster than Western wildfires, the South L.A. of 2016 offers a tough-minded but optimistic narrative that ought to remind us just how much can be achieved—beyond mere survival—through gritty determination and small, steady improvements.

South L.A. is both the closest thing we have to an urban success story, and the furthest thing from a fairy tale. In today’s South L.A., crime, despite recent upticks, is less than one-third of what it was a quarter century ago, access to health care is improving, there are more and better schools, housing prices and home ownership are up, transportation and arts and food options are multiplying. And major new developments are arriving—with all their promise and peril.

Of course, it is dangerous to generalize about a place so large and diverse. South L.A. consists of about 30 very different neighborhoods, from pristine suburban-style historic tract to industrial precincts to college-town enclave to narrow boulevard-based corridors. South Los Angeles is comparable in size to San Francisco, California’s fourth largest city. Both are nearly 50 square miles and have populations of 850,000.

But today’s South L.A. is more often described as Los Angeles’ version of Oakland. It’s a poorer place that is being changed, for better and for worse, both by the work of its residents and by proximity to the wealth and spillover housing demand of Los Angeles’ booming downtown and Westside.

South L.A. has not shed its older challenges, particularly around poverty and jobs, while its gains have created new challenges. In particular: How do South L.A.’s people and businesses make sure they don’t become exiles from their own success, driven away by a higher cost of living?

That poignant question resonates across the state. South Los Angeles is the largest working-class place left in coastal California. If it can figure out a way to remain such, it could provide a crucial model of success for a state with a dwindling middle and a widening divide between its affluent and America’s largest population of poor people.

Part of South L.A.’s importance lies in its relative openness to new approaches in addressing this conundrum. There’s less of the NIMBYism that’s epidemic elsewhere in the state. I recently heard community planners call South Los Angeles “L.A.’s L.A.” They meant that in two ways. First, in the sense meant by Tom Bradley, modern L.A.’s greatest mayor and a longtime South L.A. resident, who once said that people come to L.A. “looking for a place where they can be free, where they can do things they couldn’t do anywhere else.” And second, in the technical sense: while so much of L.A.’s planning and zoning has already been settled, with overlays and districts for different areas, South L.A.’s plans remain relatively free of such obstacles.

So how can South L.A.’s example save us? The region has become a popular proving place for new initiatives.

It’s already the site of some of L.A’s most significant cultural investments these days—in Exposition Park alone, the Coliseum is being renovated, a new soccer stadium is scheduled to be built, the Natural History Museum has been recently renovated, and the Space Shuttle Endeavour now resides at the California Science Center.

Many of South L.A.’s bigger developments come with “community benefits agreements” and local hiring promises that are all the rage among labor unions and local economic development wise men. But it remains to be seen whether such agreements lead to enduring improvements, or whether this one-deal-at-a-time approach undermines efforts at more thoughtful and comprehensive planning and development. USC’s The Village, which combines student housing with a new Target and South L.A.’s first Trader Joe’s, opens next year and is being closely watched because it comes with some of the strongest community benefits in the city’s history, including hiring for disadvantaged people, local business assistance, $15 to $20 million for a new affordable housing fund, and the creation of a legal clinic to assist local tenants. A proposed $1 billion expansion of the Washington Boulevard high-rise for creative firms and artists known as The Reef, to include new housing units, retail, and a hotel, faces skepticism about its feasibility and opposition from neighbors who fear it could further drive up rents in the area.

In an L.A. where it’s hard to build housing, South L.A. is a relative hotbed of new homes—often fashionably close to transit and retail—but it’s far from clear whether it is affordable enough to serve local residents. Recent efforts to improve access to health care are being closely watched, notably Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital, located south of the 105 Freeway, which recently reopened in conjunction with expanding local health clinics. The just-completed Expo Metro rail line (which connects South L.A. with downtown and Santa Monica) as well as the forthcoming Crenshaw line will make South L.A. a key test of whether highly touted transit investments can improve neighborhoods.

And South L.A. is home to dozens of charter schools, billions of dollars worth of new and improved school facilities, and various other educational innovations, including the Partnership schools, a district within a district. So far, some of these school experiments are showing strong results, while others lag.

South L.A. is a fertile ground for experimentation, from efforts to help local businesses embrace technology, to a new approach in sidewalk repair. The city’s new trash franchise is supposed to curb illegal dumping in South L.A. and establish recycling facilities in the area. Private and nonprofit efforts to provide healthy and locally grown food are targeting South L.A. And if high-profile efforts to boost voter registration and turnout are to succeed, they’ll have to gain traction in South L.A., where people vote less frequently than in other Southern California communities with similar population profiles.

Statewide efforts to increase park access in poorer communities are being tested in South L.A., which has seen the opening of many small parks but has struggled to establish the mid-sized community parks it desperately lacks. South L.A.’s long street corridors are ripe for the redesigns promised by the “Great Streets” movement, which aims to make streets friendlier for bicyclists, pedestrians, and community gatherings.

In all these initiatives, the stakes are high. If any of these ideas can show results in reputedly hardscrabble South L.A., they are likely to find a receptive audience in struggling urban areas around the country.

Of course, the two most profound changes South L.A. needs involve not physical, but human, capital.

First, South L.A. stands to benefit tremendously from statewide efforts to ease re-entry into communities for people who have served time, as well as from efforts to help people clean up their criminal records by expunging or reducing non-violent felony convictions. Nonprofit groups are collaborating to make it easier for people with records to get hired and become eligible for housing and student benefits.

Second, there may be no greater advertisement for long overdue immigration reform than to spend time in South L.A. And if the undocumented workers and entrepreneurs behind so many small or home-based businesses had the legal status to come out of the shadows, South L.A., as both an economy and a community, would be unstoppable.

South L.A.’s reputation, particularly in mainstream media, hasn’t yet caught up with its new, improved, and more complicated reality. Its success has come too slowly and steadily, without a sole catalyst, and so it’s not easily told.

But that may be about to change. Two high-profile political campaigns could bring media scrutiny to South L.A. Steve Barr, founder of a charter school network with many South L.A. campuses, is challenging the incumbent mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, in 2017. And if former mayor Antonio Villaraigosa makes a strong run for governor in 2018, Californians should hear a lot about South L.A., the setting for the most significant policy initiatives of his eight years in office.

South L.A.’s people and institutions are understandably reluctant to tell their turnaround story, given the remaining challenges. And progress can have its costs. South L.A. was turned down at first for a federal Promise Zone designation, which brings all kinds of resources to the neediest neighborhoods, largely because it wasn’t poor enough to meet the program’s standards. But, in a demonstration of their collaboration and sophistication, South L.A.’s officials and nonprofits rallied, suggested changes to the program’s standards, and won the designation.

An updated narrative of South L.A. is vital to the region’s ability to protect itself and its people from developments and changes that might threaten its progress, or displace its people. Vast and diverse South L.A. is on the rise, and we shouldn’t let anything get in the way of the example being built there.

Because if South L.A. can make it, there’s hope for all of us.

The post South L.A. Doesn’t Need Saving appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.