On a hot summer day in New Delhi, a young resident of the posh area of Greater Kailash looked down from the window of his air-conditioned room.

“I don’t know how people tend to drink lemonade from these carts—it’s so unhygienic,” he said, referring to nimbu paani, a popular tart salty-sweet drink often served in earthen pots. He added that the street vendors’ carts were a nuisance for him when he went out for a drive in his luxury car.

In recent decades, diverse political parties, corporations, and elite citizens have shared a common goal of remaking New Delhi into a “world-class” city. They envision skyscrapers and highways populated by residents whose consumption habits mirror those of citizens of high-income countries. Their efforts are referred to as “beautification” in popular parlance, but they ignore entire communities—entire worlds—on the ground.

Rather than improving life in the city for everyone, the beautification projects funnel public resources into creating a cosmopolitan bubble for a few.

One of the major engines of this so-called beautification is international events. With each high-profile event, government at all levels suspends normal development and planning to focus energy and public money on the international visitors and local elite.

This week, New Delhi will host the G20 summit, the annual gathering of the “Group of Twenty” national leaders meeting to discuss opportunities for economic and political cooperation. It will be held at the modernist Bharat Mandapam, and its theme borrows from a Sanskrit text: “One Earth. One Family. One Future.”

In advance of the G20 summit, India’s federal and state governments have made active efforts to remove signs of “backwardness” in the city to present a “polished” image to the visitors. Their actions have ranged from relocating beggars to sites where their existence will be less visible, and therefore less of a “nuisance” for upper-class and upper-caste urban commuters. These eviction drives have targeted the city’s unhoused trans community and have demolished informal neighborhoods without prior notice or offers of alternative housing—a direct violation of Indian eviction law.

One domestic worker told us about her experience with one of the eviction drives in May 2023. She and her husband, a factory worker, had built a two-room brick house in the Tughlakabad area. When the eviction drive began, she was not at home and only learned of it from her neighbors. “I had to rush home at around 12:30 pm, but by the time I came back, it had already been razed to the ground. We would have left with our belongings had the government informed us of the date. Now, I don’t know what to do or where to go,” she said. Now, the couple and their two children are among some 2,000 people rendered homeless on that day.

These actions are repeating those taken in advance of past international events. Delhi previously hosted 1982’s Asian Games and the 2010 Commonwealth Games. While the Asian Games gave Delhi a much-needed infrastructural upheaval, it happened at the cost of the thousands of migrant workers who sold their rural lands to seek work in the nation’s capital. Similarly, though the build up to the 2010 Commonwealth Games gave Delhi its much-appreciated Metro transit system, the Games also claimed the houses of around 250,000 people through evictions on lands marked for infrastructure.

Although the figures for the G20 summit aren’t out yet, thousands of people have already lost their homes and thousands more are sure to suffer, rendered homeless in a city with a burning housing problem; women, infants, and older people alike.

In addition to the violence of eviction, the suspension of normal urban planning operations also comes at a cost for the working class. While the construction and redevelopment are justified by appeals to beautification and development, their investment is centered in the upper-middle class and elite neighborhoods to the neglect of other areas.

We asked a resident of the market complex and residential area Zakir Nagar in north Okhla, why, in his view, there has not been an effort to develop his neighborhood in the same way there has been with other market complexes in the city. He replied that there could be little to no development in the pockets of land on the banks of the Yamuna River like his because the city government has never formalized the area’s unplanned urban settlements. Because of that, Okhla, which lies around 10 kilometers from the main venue of the G20 summit, stands in stark contrast to New Delhi’s global city aspirations, greeting visitors with potholed roads and heaps of garbage—an unplanned, unsanctioned, un-beautified zone of the aspiring world-class city.

While lower-class Delhi residents are displaced, upper-class residents see the beautification processes as beneficial to the city. “I believe these development projects are good because they make the city look refined,” said the aforementioned resident of Greater Kailash. “We cannot have things both ways: development and ensuring everyone in the city gets a place.” But while he complained about how hawkers hogged space on the roads, he didn’t feel the same way about how he and his neighbors took up space parking their cars on sidewalks.

Governmental authorities condone this sense of entitlement. They often refuse to act when dealing with the elite but move quickly when it comes to the underprivileged. In both processes, they skirt legal processes. India’s Supreme Court noted in 2016 that orders that adversely affect the rich are often delayed in their implementation. Former Supreme Court Justice Madan Lokur remarked, “The Law is different for the poor and the rich.”

Famously, the red walls of Shahjahanabad, the former imperial capital of the Mughal empire, have a splash of the blood of the laborers that worked on them. It wouldn’t be far-fetched to say the same of the Delhi of today. Delhi has been built, developed, and re-developed with the blood and sweat of the very people it was supposed to serve as a home for. And there are reminders of their sacrifice everywhere.

As we beautify cities—dressing them up for a single event in vanity projects meant to attract and impress fair-weather foreigners—we need to be asking ourselves whether “world-class cities” live up to their moniker if they are not equitable and inclusive for all residents. If we are willing to let ourselves be blinded by the dazzle of shiny modifications and ignore everything that has been bulldozed in the wake of it, we are hardly engaging with the world at all.

The post The Human Costs of Building a ‘World-Class’ City appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But will she stay? It’s no idyll. The housing she was promised is in disrepair, and the old town doctor feels threatened by her presence. And while sparks fly with the hunky Marine veteran who owns the only local bar, Mel finds that she can’t escape the loneliness, drugs, violence, economic struggle, and health care problems of L.A. All those same problems are present in rural California, too.

Don’t bother looking for Virgin River on any map. The town is the literary invention of the romance novelist Robyn Carr, who has made it the fictional setting for 20 novels that have sold more than 13 million copies since 2007. A 21st book arrives this fall.

I’m not the intended customer of the romance genre, but early in the COVID-19 lockdown, I started watching the recent Netflix adaptation of Virgin River. Despite the predictable plots and plodding dialogue, I couldn’t stop watching—Virgin River offers an intriguingly unconventional portrayal of a part of California that few Californians have seen with their own eyes. I find myself thinking even more about the show now, as the uprising against police violence spreads quickly from cities to rural settlements the size of Virgin River.

While the geography of Carr’s novels and the Netflix series are vague, Virgin River appears to be in a remote county which has no incorporated municipalities and sits among the rivers, trees, and mountains between coastal Eureka and inland Redding. The place best fitting that description is Trinity County, population just 13,000, and one of only four California counties that are considered fully rural. (Definitions of “rural” vary, but the U.S. Census defines rural as anything not urban, and defines urban as any cluster of at least 2,500 people.)

In California, America’s most urbanized state, this is a fraught but important time to think about places like Trinity County and Virgin River. All too often, Golden State urbanites ignore or demonize remote communities when we should embrace them as partners in addressing our state’s most serious problems.

Today’s conventional wisdom is that the Golden State, and the whole country, really, are badly divided between two different universes: the rural and the urban. Political narratives dwell on the alleged chasm between our bluer giant urban regions and our redder lightly populated places. Those narratives both polarize us (by exaggerating conflict and emboldening white racists to claim rural victimhood) and weaken democracy (by spreading the toxic idea that the country can’t be governed because it is just too divided).

Under COVID, our media has been obsessed with the differences between how more urban and more rural counties responded to the pandemic. Gov. Gavin Newsom, under pressure from the political right for not recognizing the purportedly different realities in rural counties, abandoned his statewide shelter-in-place in favor of a localized, county-by-county approach.

Political and media stories of rural-urban divide may keep audiences engaged and riled up. But these narratives so badly exaggerate the differences between small and large California that they constitute a dangerous form of misrepresentation. To the contrary, data and experience teach us that rural and urban California are remarkably similar, particularly in the challenges they face.

And on this highly relevant point, the romance novels about Virgin River—for all their clichés—understand California far better than most Californians do.

The Virgin River novels, like the television series, are all about the union of urban and rural. In most of Carr’s books, a struggling person—usually a middle-class professional from a bigger California city—ends up in Virgin River, looking for escape or healing. Most but not all are women. Among them are a Sacramento prosecutor, who was nearly killed by a criminal; a twice-divorced LAPD officer who was shot in the line of duty; a San Francisco sous-chef whose career has collapsed; a Silicon Valley public relations warrior who got burned out; Native American rancher from the urbanizing Inland Empire.

In Virgin River, their experiences are invariably mixed. On the plus side, these Virgin River arrivals always seem to find attractive local residents with military experience—Carr started writing romance novels four decades ago as an Air Force wife—and talents for heterosexual lovemaking. On the other hand, the new arrivals all must adjust to their disappointment that Virgin River, for all its natural beauty, can be just as difficult as the urban environments they left behind.

The plots emphasize domestic violence, post-traumatic stress, environmental damage, housing access, America’s healthcare failings, and the challenges of addiction, business practices, and criminality surrounding the area’s growing marijuana industry. Virgin River is mostly white, but there is growing racial and ethnic diversity, just like in the real rural California. Considered together, Carr’s books and the Netflix series make a convincing argument that in the 21st century, we are all so connected that you can never escape yourself.

“There’s a need for positive drama,” Carr, a former California resident who now lives in Las Vegas, told Entertainment Weekly. “Not just goody-two-shoes, everything-is-beautiful kind of story, but a kind of story where people have real problems and real issues and they have to resolve them.”

Carr, who has set other novels in the Sierra foothills, the East Bay and Half Moon Bay, has said that Virgin River could be a community anywhere. And in this, her novels match the data.

Indeed, poverty rates are remarkably similar in California’s most populous and least populous places, especially when one looks at statistics that control for housing prices and cost of living. Pre-COVID, unemployment rates were nearly identical—under 5 percent in both rural and urban California. Education levels aren’t all that different either. Rural California, including Trinity County, actually has a higher rate of high school graduates than urban California, while urban California has a higher rate of college graduates.

Our constant talk of urban-rural divides has obscured the real story: the way once-remote places have become more urban. As more people are priced out of our mega-regions, they move to previously rural places, where growing populations support more urban-style development.

There is a convergence here, for good and bad. California jobs, both rural and urban, are heavily skewed to healthcare, retail, tourism, and government. Wherever I am in California, rural or urban, I hear civic leaders worry about the same stuff: decaying infrastructure, housing affordability, healthcare costs, and a lack of skilled workers.

Cities, once seen as dens of crime and disease, have become safer and healthier, while urbanizing remote places have fallen in rankings of public health and safety. And police misconduct, now dominating the news in cities, also plagues California’s small towns, many of which have seen George Floyd-inspired protests. Even Trinity County saw protests.

The mixing of urban and rural is actually quite Californian. Most of the people in counties that are considered remote, from Inyo to Humboldt, live in urban clusters. And 32 percent of California’s rural population lives in counties that are at least 91 percent urban. San Bernardino County—our largest county by area, extending from the L.A. suburbs to the Nevada and Arizona borders—is becoming more urban (as its suburbs grow denser) and more rural (as its far-flung areas lose people) at the same time.

While our winner-take-all politics exaggerates divisions, a closer look at Trinity County, which appears ruby red on political maps, shows that 49 percent of the county didn’t vote for Trump. Meanwhile, polling shows that dark blue Los Angeles County has a few million residents who support the president.

Virgin River, especially in the Netflix version (which, alas, was shot mostly in British Columbia), testifies to the lack of borders between rural and urban. Its storylines wrangle with the myths around both places. The “old country doctor” with whom L.A. nurse practitioner Mel Monroe tangles turns out to be a onetime medical hotshot from Seattle. Mel’s love interest, that outdoorsy barkeep, grew up in Sacramento and spent his military career in the Middle East.

“Small towns can be nice,” the hunk, Jack Sheridan, tells Mel while he makes coffee after she complains about the lack of Starbucks. “And they can have their own brand of drama. And danger.”

Virgin River is not so far away from the rest of California after all.

The post What the Fictional Town of Virgin River Gets Right About California’s Future appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Going to college in the city seems so normal now that it’s difficult to comprehend that it once represented a radical shift not only in the location of universities, but also in their ideals.

From the founding of Harvard in 1636 onward, college leaders held a negative view of cities in general, and a deep-seated belief that cities were ill-suited to educating young men and women. In 1883, Charles F. Thwing, a minister with strong interest in higher education, wrote that a significant number of city-bred students “are immoral on their entering college” because city environments have “for many of them been excellent preparatory schools for Sophomoric dissipation.” “Even home influences,” he wrote, “have failed to outweigh the evil attractions of the gambling table and its accessories.”

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, higher education leaders believed that the purpose of a college education, first and foremost, was to build character in young people—and that one could not build character in a city. When Woodrow Wilson was president of Princeton University, he wrote that college must promote “liberal culture” in a “compact and homogenous” residential campus, explaining that “you cannot go to college on a streetcar and know what college means.” The danger of cities was so self-evident that even the president of the City College of New York, Frederick Robinson, lamented to a 1928 conference of urban university leaders that commuter students “do not enter into a student life dominated night and day by fellow students” and therefore “miss the advantages of spiritual transplanting.”

A 1950 photo of the downtown brewery that housed the University of Newark before and several years after it officially became part of Rutgers University in 1946. Image courtesy of Rutgers University—Newark Library.

Urban colleges struggled to overcome the handicap of their locations. Columbia University, for example, moved three times to escape the encroaching city. In 1897, the new campus at the then-largely-rural Morningside Heights area in northern Manhattan was bounded by walls, with many trees planted inside, to isolate students from the urban growth that would eventually surround the school. Campuses with large numbers of commuters initiated a range of programs to “Americanize” students and get them to move beyond the culture of their working-class and immigrant neighborhoods. However, universities in cities also took advantage of the opportunities the city offered for research, teaching, and collaborations with local museums and cultural institutions.

After World War II, federal and state governments increasingly saw college education as critical, a view reflected in the G.I. Bill and the massive expansion of state universities. College attendance in America grew dramatically, from 1.5 million in 1940 to 2.7 million in 1950, 3.6 million in 1960, and 7.9 million in 1970. By the 1960s, government officials and civil rights leaders also sought to expand access to higher education for low-income students in order to enable poor people to move into the middle class. Two-year community colleges opened across the country, largely in cities. City University of New York inaugurated “open enrollment,” guaranteeing that any high school graduate could attend a CUNY institution.

But even though the higher education landscape was changing dramatically, the term “urban university” still bore a stigma as low-status institutions that enrolled large numbers of local commuter students seen as socially unrefined and academically weak. As a result, “urban university” became a low-status label, which many universities in cities tried to avoid. In 1977, the Association of Urban Universities, which was founded in 1914, voted itself out of existence—reflecting the resistance of its members to its own name.

Then, in the last 25 years or so, higher education’s longstanding ambivalence about urban students and colleges evaporated. As many central cities have revitalized dramatically, growing numbers of upper-middle-class people have chosen to live there. In addition, cities appeal more and more to relatively affluent young people who grew up in homogeneous low-density suburbs. Cities are now “cool,” and the kind of worldly education they offer is in demand.

By 2012 an NYU admissions administrator told a Chronicle of Higher Education writer that, “whereas 20 years ago the city was our Achilles’ heel, it’s now our hallmark.” Freshmen applications to NYU grew from 10,862 in 1992 to 43,769 in 2012. Two years later, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article entitled “Urban Hot Spots Are the Place to Be,” arguing that “a college’s location might be more important than ever to its long-term prosperity as a residential campus”—because college students seek “hands-on experiences” which are most available in the “vibrant economy of cities.”

As students and schools have changed, the once controversial innovations pioneered by colleges in cities have prevailed. City institutions pioneered the democratization of undergraduate education, and universities across the country now strive to enroll large numbers of the kinds of “urban students,” including immigrants and minorities, once viewed with deep skepticism by many in the academy. It was urban colleges, particularly municipal institutions like City College and Hunter College, that began the once-controversial practice of providing college to commuters who could not afford to live away from home while in school.

Today, the overwhelming majority of college students commute. Urban colleges also initiated programs, controversial at the time, for adults and part-time students, including evening classes. Today, adult, part-time, and evening courses are nearly universal in state universities and widespread in private institutions. The broad access to college that was initiated by innovative city institutions is now central to the overall mission of American higher education.

Urban colleges also changed curriculums and research agendas by developing a commitment to community-based research, taking advantage of the extensive resources of the city, and encouraging the study of local problems and policy issues. This kind of research is now widely practiced. The Engagement Scholarship Consortium, founded in 1999, encourages all universities to do research that is important to their communities. Its member institutions are located in cities, towns, and rural areas.

Relatedly, service learning and community engagement by college students has become a central focus of American higher education—vigorously championed by organizations like the National Society for Experiential Learning and federal government agencies like the Corporation for National and Community Service. This is another area pioneered by the so-called urban colleges.

Universities are also seen as key players in the economic development of their communities, a change that would not have occurred without the leadership of urban schools. In 1994, Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter founded the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City to “spark new thinking about the business potential of inner cities.” In 2001, CEOs for Cities and the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City released a study arguing that higher education institutions are well-positioned “to spur economic revitalization of our inner cities.”

The following year, Carnegie Mellon Professor Richard Florida published a book arguing that economic development depended on a “creative class” and that universities were “a key institution of the Creative Economy.” Florida re-envisioned the city as a fountain of economic growth and intellectual activity, placing the university—and its knowledge—at the center. Universities have become key entities for economic development in the post-industrial technology economy, not just in inner cities but also across the nation. Old prejudices about the urban university are effectively dead.

The purpose of colleges and universities—and undergraduate education itself—are still widely debated. Many people are deeply critical of American higher education. These conditions make it important to understand the history and value of college in the United States. Today, access to college makes it possible for millions of Americans to improve their socio-economic status and to live richer lives. Many do so while living at home, working, and attending part-time. Colleges teach traditional-aged students and adults of all ages, both full-time and part-time, including many minorities, immigrants, and people from low-income families, in degree and non-degree programs. Colleges play an ever greater role in our nation’s economy. And college students engage extensively in experiential learning, developing work skills and a commitment to civic responsibility.

All of these conditions began many years ago, in universities in cities. Whatever the deficiencies of American colleges, we must not forget how profoundly they serve society—and how those practices emerged initially in urban institutions.

The post How Universities Migrated into Cities and Democratized Higher Education 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.

As an artist and cultural activist in St. Louis, Missouri, I’ve long been interested in the relationship between physical space and the needs of people and communities—in what works and what doesn’t. About a decade ago, I began focusing this question on the site where once stood Pruitt-Igoe, one of America’s most notorious public housing failures.

The project, named for Wendell O. Pruitt, an African-American fighter pilot in World War II, and William L. Igoe, a white former U.S. Congressman, was completed in 1954. It was located just two miles northwest of the Gateway Arch, and envisioned as one of the nation’s most ambitious attempts to address urban squalor. Its 33 highrise apartment buildings, with 2,870 units, were designed by Minoru Yamasaki, who went on to design the World Trade Center in New York City.

But the project was plagued with problems from the start, both in its design and in its profound inadequacy in addressing the economic, social, and demographic needs of residents. By the early 1970s, most of the buildings were uninhabitable, their hallways vandalized and their windows broken. In 1972, they were demolished via a spectacular, widely televised implosion that soon came to epitomize the failed trajectory of public housing nationwide.

Left: an aerial view of Pruitt-Igoe. Right: a sculpture by Juan William Chávez referencing the housing development, built from abandoned beehives. Left image courtesy of Missouri History Museum. Right image courtesy of Juan William Chávez.

Over time, and years of neglect, the vast vacant lot that was once the Pruitt-Igoe projects transformed into what I came to think of as the Pruitt-Igoe forest. In 2009, I was working on community-based art projects in North St. Louis. On my drive to work, I regularly passed the Pruitt-Igoe forest. Viewing it from the street, I daydreamed about what might be inside. At first, the forest seemed intimidatingly abandoned and potentially dangerous, but before long it beckoned me. I entered on foot to take photographs. I walked on weather-worn asphalt and saw overgrown weeds sprouting from dirt mounds, with bits of gravel, brick, and crushed concrete. Mosses revealed the vague outlines of old streets. There were a variety of native plants, and oak and hickory trees. I saw hawks, owls, rabbits, and deer. I had thought I would find the remains of a past civilization, but to my surprise I saw the beginning of a new community. This undisturbed vacant lot had become a sanctuary for an entire ecosystem.

I started thinking about Pruitt-Igoe’s mission. The development had been created to foster community. Could it somehow return to that function? Did any community exist at Pruitt-Igoe now? One day, as I photographed some bees pollinating a patch of native flowers, it hit me: These buzzing insects were Pruitt-Igoe’s new community. Bees and St. Louisans were in a similar situation. St. Louis’s population had fallen to its lowest in a century. At the same time—for reasons ranging from the use of pesticides and industrial farming to the loss of native plant habitats to illness caused by parasites—bees were dying off. This posed a threat to humans, since bees pollinate our food. Perhaps Pruitt-Igoe could provide a place to reinvigorate the partnership between bees and humans, creating a kind of sanctuary for both. Its story could end on a positive note, with one of the worst failures of public housing becoming a leading example of revitalization.

I thought I would transform the urban forest into a public preserve, cultivating community through on-site beekeeping and urban agriculture. The aim was to memorialize the past and provide opportunity for the future. But with Pruitt-Igoe’s fate tied up with controversial development plans—construction for a new “urban village” planned for the site still hasn’t begun—my scientific and artistic colleagues and I decided instead to initiate a one-acre pilot program that I called the Living Proposal, in the adjacent neighborhood of Old North. A Guggenheim fellowship and a Creative Capital artist’s grant provided funding to construct a sanctuary.

Working on a feral property surrounded by other vacant lots, we built our bee-friendly environment. We designed an apiary with two hives and garden beds, where we planted pesticide-free, pollinator-friendly native plants, vegetables, fruit trees and berry bushes so the bees would have a variety of food sources. Flowers bloomed, the pollinators arrived, and our beehives began to produce honey. Every season, the Living Proposal became more established, with strong and healthy hives. It became part of a bigger movement of urban beekeeping, committed to rebuilding the dwindling bee population. Scientists have found surprisingly high numbers of bee species in cities that are absent in nearby rural lands. According to St. Louis University’s Sustainability Science Lab, St. Louis is currently providing habitat for a third of Missouri’s bees.

Bees at the Living Proposal sanctuary in St. Louis, Missouri. Photo courtesy of Juan William Chávez.

As the bees flourished in the sanctuary, it became time to incorporate our human neighbors into the hive. We developed the Young Honey Crew, a summer youth program that teaches students the importance of bees to our health. The students wear bee suits to inspect the hives, maintain the garden from seed to harvest, follow recipes to prepare food from the garden for lunch, and create artwork celebrating their connectedness to bees, the environment, and each other. The Young Honey Crew became especially meaningful in 2014 after the death of Michael Brown, the unarmed teenager who was killed by police in nearby Ferguson. With overwhelming tension and protests throughout the city, our students sought space to think, create, and talk. The Living Proposal became their sanctuary, a place for constructive contemplation.

From that point forward, our workshops focused more on community and collective thinking. In 2015 we invited our North St. Louis neighbor, Paulette, to initiate a senior women’s support group, the Wise Women. These queen bees of the community gather weekly to share a meal, support, and celebrate each other. Last year, with backing from Artpace San Antonio, we built the “Honey Trailer,” a vintage trailer designed for bee advocacy, health education, and job training. Starting this summer, the Honey Trailer—which is outfitted with solar panels, a grow room, a small kitchen a flat screen TV to provide information about bees, cooking, and our program—will visit schools, parks, festivals, and farmers markets around St. Louis and other cities.

Back in 2009, soon after I first started venturing into the abandoned forest, I made a sculpture, stacking defunct beehives to create a scaled-down version of a Pruitt-Igoe building. There were pheromone residues in the hive boxes, and they started to attract new bees. I was surrounded by the time the sculpture was completed. Not wearing any protective clothing I moved with hesitation, but my nervousness dissipated as the bees became less curious about my activity and more focused on the sculpture itself.

I saw the bees work as a group, build a haven, and use ideas to make honey: the alchemy of the studio within an ecosystem. The experience led directly to building the bee sanctuary. By creating a healthier environment for bees, we’re making a better environment for ourselves and our neighborhoods.

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The tawny, golden-eyed, sharp-nosed wild dog of the American deserts is now our backyard predator, everywhere from Miami to Toronto and San Diego to Seattle.

The stories are already piling up. During a heat wave, in broad daylight, a coyote strolls into a Quiznos sandwich shop in Chicago and hops up on a freezer to cool off. Customers and staff flee for the street, where a shocked crowd gathers to peer through the windows as the coyote commandeers the store.

On the other side of the country, a California couple driving at freeway speeds plows through a pack of coyotes near Las Vegas. Hundreds of miles later, while unpacking the car near Nevada City, they discover a full-grown coyote snagged like a bug in the grill of the car. Their flying coyote ornament is fully alert, has one cut on a paw and another on its muzzle. Having hitchhiked to California, it is otherwise unhurt.

Such is the life of the American continent’s native small wolf in the 21st century. Our task, because there is really no other option, is to understand them well enough to enjoy them as neighbors.

Exactly a century ago, Joseph Grinnell of the Society of American Mammalogists proposed we allow coyotes and wolves to live unmolested in the parks of the country’s new National Park Service. By the time the Park Service accepted that idea in the 1930s, wolves were already gone. But America’s parks became effective refuges for coyotes. Nonetheless, rural coyotes outside the parks are still shot and trapped—and even hunted from planes—in staggering numbers. And so coyotes came up with an even better refuge than the national parks: Cities.

Coyotes thus began an ongoing, unplanned predatory experiment. Los Angeles and Chicago are now home to thousands of coyotes, and Denver has at least a thousand in more than 125 packs. And city-dwelling coyotes, not unlike human urbanites, are living richer lives than their rural counterparts.

Coyotes have demonstrated amazing resiliency and adaptability in the presence of humans.

History is on the side of the urban coyote. For one thing, the species has a lot of experience as wild town dogs. Coyotes were living in Indian cities like the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan and the ceremonial Southwestern city now called Chaco Canyon a thousand years ago. They’ve been practicing in contemporary U.S. cities like Los Angeles for at least a century.

So to a coyote slipping along a rail line to enter a modern city, existing with humans in close proximity, is not a huge hurdle. Habitat for hunting and denning might be scattered because of asphalt, concrete, and structures, and coyotes must learn how to navigate around a massive number of cars. Those are challenges, to be sure, but coyote intelligence seems fully up to the task. Coyotes that are calm enough to tolerate noise, traffic, city lights, and the torrent of human sensory output tend to be the most successful at urban living. Some biologists argue that city life may be selecting for particular canid genetic strains—novelty-seeking, “super-genius” coyotes that can solve the riddles of being a predator in a modern metropolis.

Compared to rural America, where the average lifespan of a coyote is just 2.5 years, in cities the living is easy. Leash laws and municipal programs that curbed feral dog populations made city living even better for coyotes. Mice and rats, a coyote’s most dependable prey, are numerous around our houses, as are flocks of geese and ducks and exotic fruiting plants of all kinds. In the city, nobody is shooting at you, trapping you, poisoning you, or flying you down with an airplane. So town coyotes are living to 11, 12, or even 13 years old. Because urban coyote territories are also resource-rich, metropolitan coyotes often get more than 60 percent of their pups to adulthood. In the countryside that figure is commonly less than 15 percent.

The most dangerous element of modern urban life for coyotes is crossing highways teeming with cars. No Aztec coyote had to master 70 mph traffic, but modern coyotes are figuring it out. Biologists have watched them in Chicago rush hour crossing half a multi-lane interstate highway boiling with traffic, then sitting in the median until traffic thins enough for them to cross the other lanes. More than 60 percent of coyote deaths still come under the wheels of cars in Chicago. But with more generations of city experience in car-mageddon Los Angeles, coyotes have lowered that figure to about 40 percent. Angeleno coyote culture has even designated a highway they recognize as an absolute obstacle: U.S. Highway 101, running north-south through the state, is a barrier only the most intrepid California coyotes ever attempt.

The other half of the equation for city coyotes is human neighbors. When we began living in cities 5,000 years ago, we thought we’d escaped the world of predators. For us North Americans, these small wolves have changed that metric. A media out of its depth has tended to portray coyotes as invaders, as unnatural in cities, often describing them in language associated with criminals or gangs. But once we get over our shock at seeing them lope through our suburbs and accept their presence in town as normal, there are far more reasons to celebrate coyotes than to fear them.

While coyotes will guard their pups against our dogs in the spring/summer denning season, careful studies indicate the vast majority of city coyotes are upstanding citizens. Some of them see our dogs and cats as competitors in their territories, which requires some altered behavior on our parts. But fewer roaming cats also means more birdsong in town. Coyotes are not foraging from dumpsters behind fast food restaurants, though they can carry rabies. The prescription to co-existence is to keep them wild and wary of us, or at least thinking we’re too weird to trust, and never habituating them to associating humans with handouts. Then we’ll get to enjoy them as a wholly remarkable flourish of the wild and the ancient, smack in the middle of modern life.

As the Aztecs discovered long ago, coyotes are a fact of urban existence. Resistance is futile. Best to do what those Americans of a thousand years ago did: Adapt your behavior and take pleasure in coyote success, survivability, and in the wonders of having these small native wolves trotting down our sidewalks and through our yards.

 
*An earlier version incorrectly stated that coyotes do not carry rabies.

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“The ’90s,” as Zócalo Public Square publisher Gregory Rodriguez put it, “were rough” on Los Angeles. Rodriguez was moderating a Zócalo/Museum of Contemporary Art event at MOCA Grand Avenue provocatively titled, “Were the ’90s L.A.’s Golden Age?”

Tallying up the iconic Southern California disasters mentioned by the panelists over the course of the evening, the question might seem almost laughable. “But the reaction to the roughness was pretty extraordinary as well,” Rodriguez told an energetic crowd, many of whom clearly had lived through it. “There was this sense of vitality to the era.”

While the first half of the decade “was horrendous,” said Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University, the second half marked a comeback that built the Los Angeles of today, and gave the city a greater sense of self. He recalled a UCLA professor telling him he was “parochial” for choosing the L.A. economy as the focus of his scholarship. But after watching the city nearly fall apart, almost every major institution of higher education formed a department dedicated to studying the city. “We rediscovered Los Angeles as academics in the 1990s,” he said, noting that today it can be hard to keep up with all the literature written about the city, a sharp departure from the early 1990s.

“For me, Los Angeles in the ’90s was all about culture,” recalled MOCA’s chief curator, Helen Molesworth. “When the needle dropped on NWA’s Straight Outta Compton, something shifted for me and a lot of my friends.” That was 1988, but for her it was when the ’90s began. “L.A. was all of a sudden a place where culture was made,” she said. MOCA’s 1992 exhibition “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s” was a landmark event, as was watching the emergence of artists like Mike Kelley and Catherine Opie, “artists to be reckoned with,” said Molesworth. “The birth of L.A. as a culture engine is really the 1990s.”

Why, asked Rodriguez, did L.A. begin to take itself seriously in the 1990s?

Hollywood had always been the producer of mainstream culture for most of America, noted Harold Meyerson, the current executive editor of The American Prospect who served the same role at L.A. Weekly throughout the ’90s. The change came thanks to growing cultural legitimacy, but also to a political evolution that resulted from the chaotic events of the first half of the decade. It was “a story of the rise of a kind of Latino working class finally finding itself, finding an identity, and finding some power,” he said. The backlash in response to Proposition 187—a ballot initiative that banned undocumented immigrants from using state services including public education and non-emergency health care—changed Los Angeles politics. It birthed a new generation of Latino activists and brought together Latinos, the labor movement, and progressives in a coalition that changed the city and eventually the state then the country, Meyerson said.

Guerra elaborated on the changes brought about by this new coalition, including bringing Latinos into positions of political power, helping Los Angeles pass a 1997 bond measure allocating $2.4 billion to the building of new LAUSD schools, and passing propositions that led to the building of mass transit for those who couldn’t afford cars.

Turning to University of Southern California race and pop culture scholar Dr. Todd Boyd, Rodriguez asked how these changes, both political and demographic—as Anglos left the city and a Latino majority emerged—manifested themselves in depictions of Los Angeles at the time.

Boyd listed a number of movies that showed “Los Angeles as a destination but also as a unique identity”: Boyz n the Hood, Menace II Society, American Me, Boogie Nights, and Short Cuts. West Coast hip-hop emerged as a major force in music during this period as well. Today, the gang activity of the time and the way it seeped into popular discourse is “safe” and “nostalgic”; Straight Outta Compton was a blockbuster movie last summer. “But at the time, the elements that make up that film were taking place in the streets,” said Boyd. “It’s one thing to sit here now and look back on it fondly. But it’s another thing to have lived in the midst of it.”

These changes weren’t necessarily in evidence in the contemporary art world at the time, said Molesworth. In “Don’t Look Back: The 1990s at MOCA,” on view at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA through July 11, 2016, only one work makes any mention of the 1992 riots. It was made, said Molesworth, by an African-American artist in New York who was depicting a white German critic’s obsession with these events. “This was still an extremely white institution concerned with problems of whiteness,” said Molesworth. And at the time, they would not even have been called “problems of whiteness … because they were just the problems of the culture.” She added, “When we look back on the ’90s, we look through the frame of the current moment.”

As the event drew to a close, Rodriguez asked the panelists to reflect on what is better and worse about the Los Angeles of today versus the Los Angeles of the 1990s.

“There was an edge, a sense of momentum, having been through these hells,” said Meyerson.“Recovering from all this there was a certain sense of bouncing back.” He added, somewhat ruefully (and with the caveat that he is only a visitor to the city and no longer a resident), “I don’t get a sense of a kind of momentum and edge today.”

Boyd recalled visiting downtown Los Angeles before he moved here in 1992. “I just remember how amazed I was at how barren downtown L.A. was,” he said. “It was not centralized, and there really wasn’t much going on at all.” A few years later, he decided to move downtown; people thought he was crazy. Not anymore. “This has become the hottest part of L.A. To go from it being barren and nothing to being crowded with traffic, multiple cultural options, multiple dining options, to have witnessed this and to have had it grow up around me—is one of the most interesting changes to L.A.,” he said.

Before turning the discussion over to an audience question-and-answer session that touched on the decline of Westwood as a destination and the problem of homelessness from the 1990s to the present, Rodriguez turned back to the central question of the evening: “I think we can conclude that while we had an edge and sense of momentum in the 1990s, it was not L.A.’s golden era.”

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I relate to the concept because I, too, grew up on the edge. I used to say that I’m “from L.A.,” even though I’m not really from L.A. I’m from Temple City, a suburb 12 miles east of downtown L.A. I thought I was alone in claiming the middle from the edges until I met my husband, who says that he’s “from São Paulo,” even though he’s from Hortolândia, about 75 miles outside of São Paulo.

Over the course of our courtship and holidays, events and happenings, I’ve come to appreciate the similarities between the edgy outskirts of the two mega-cities, Los Angeles and São Paulo. These flat, temperate, nearly endless expanses of homes are new, are growing, and are housing the future.

Globally, city outskirts are considered dangerous places and here in the U.S., with the luxury condos being built in American inner cities, poverty is increasingly appearing on the fringes. As a double citizen of these suburbs—by childhood in Temple City and by marriage in Hortolândia—I have a more sweeping and more positive view. For me, the fact that these places are vira-latas, places that flip realities, is a sign of their strength.

Most of what we call the new urban culture, from the U.S. to Brazil, is really suburban culture. The trendy food eaten in downtown L.A. or downtown São Paulo is the food developed on the outskirts: ramen burritos, fried eggs in soup, arroz e feijao, spam tacos, yucca fries. In sprawling megalopolises like Paris and our hometowns, suburbs are often where you can find the most interesting graffiti and music. Suburbs are—away from the gentrified core of these cities—where many young people and ethnic minorities are. In the suburbs, the rent isn’t too high, but the possibilities can seem endless.

The author’s sister-in-law and brother-in-law at the top of their block in Hortolândia.

 
When my husband and I were growing up in Temple City and Hortolândia in the ’90s, both of our towns were lower-middle-class havens of young families and small public schools that had been built on agricultural land (Temple City on citrus orchards, Hortolândia on sugar cane fields). The São Paulo cities of Sumaré, Paulínia, and Jundiaí are comparable to SoCal’s Diamond Bar, Fontana, and Pomona: freeway off-ramp slates that grew to become hot real estate. Incorporated in 1960 and 1991, Temple City and Hortolândia saw whole neighborhoods pop up in uniform adobe. And then they appreciated in value. The Temple City house bought by an Okie 60 years ago for $50,000 will sell today—in cash—for $900,000. In Hortolândia, what sold for 30,000 Brazilian reais 15 years ago sells for 190,000 reais now.

Like many suburban families, both of our families are mixed race. My husband’s father was white Brazilian and his mother is black Brazilian. My father is Irish-American and my mother is Nicaraguan-American. It’s funny—in our wedding picture there is no way to truly tell who is an Oliveira and who is a Goulding. Or who is an Angeleno and who is a Paulistano.

For many in our edge cities, making it is to moving to the next big suburb over. Hortolândia is to Campinas what Temple City is to Pasadena. You go there to go out. You go there to work. Many people in Hortolândia work as domestic support staff in neighboring, more affluent suburbs. With the gridlock of the Sao Paulo region—which makes L.A.’s freeways at rush hour look like a carousel ride—a simple 10-mile ride takes an hour and a half, each way.

Growing up, my husband and I had little concept of places that weren’t as liquid as our cities of origin. We didn’t know those stable places where people weren’t from somewhere else. During my husband’s MBA program, we lived in Charlottesville, Virginia, in rural Albemarle County. That is, the middle of nowhere. After a couple months of barbeque and baked beans, we were going a little nutty. There is a comfort in the buzz of people you find on the edge.

And so we return to Hortolândia or Temple City as often as we can. There, people know about our lives. They know all about our baby boy, Caetano; they know his name, and his age. They pass him down the block like a football, and proclaim, “Que fofo!” How sweet! People even come and visit in the living room—in an era of Facebook and Twitter, that’s refreshing.

In Brazil, “suburban” is a derogatory term. Suburban skinny jeans have high, elastic waists to make room for bigger booties. Suburban shoes have glitter rhinestones, and sparkle. Suburban salons have deep conditioners for curlier, coarser hair. What suburban really means is favelado—from favelas, the slums on the urban outskirts of major cities. When they were first founded, favelas and their better-dressed cousins—small new satellite cities with paved roads and mayors—advertised their new cities with “Tem água. Tem luz.” There is water here. There is light.

People debate the future of the suburbs. Some still consider them the bright corners of the American and the Brazilian experiment. Others think that they’re boxy, and wasteful. That can be true. But with 53 percent of the world’s population already living in cities, and with the cost of living in urban centers rising, what happens as more people move out to the edges of the cities, to places like Temple City and Hortolândia, by de facto? The debate shouldn’t be whether or not people live on the urban edges, but how they live there.

Two years ago, my sister-in-law opened a corner shoe store in Hortolândia. Business has been slow. But there is hope that, as more and more urban dwellers move out, it will someday be busy. And that’s what makes the time pass. She sells shoes to her neighbors, and they all know her by name. This July, when our visit came to an end, a neighbor saw us leaving her store and yelled, “Deus te abençoe!”

God bless you!

The author’s sister-in-law with her son, Matheus.

 
What is a richer gift on these prodigal journeys? What else can we give to our son, besides that wild sense that he can be what he wants to be? That he can play under big, shady trees? That he can be happy, on his own terms? That he can come, and go, and be, and remain?

A hundred years ago, Brooklyn and Silver Lake were the suburbs of New York and Los Angeles. Who knows what will become of these new suburbs of suburbs. Now, as back then, they remain places for breathing deep, and dreaming big. In the suburbs, você pode virar a lata—you can turn the can over, and make a whole new life.

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