Tag Archives: Boston

Sustainable Communities, Environmental Justice

September 30, 2017 Andrea Gibbons Leave a comment

Having worked for an organization for so long that organized for environmental justice, it is interesting coming to grips with this breadth of literature and various academic framings brought to it. Wonderful, also, to have time to think, to read theory, to better learn the history I have only heard in snippets and reminiscences. And ‘sustainability’ is, of course, n even bigger buzzword that everyone must at least pretend to care about, so this book seemed a valuable addition.

Julian Agyeman looks at the different framings between environmental justice and sustainability, sees the two as essentially sitting at the opposite ends of a continuum. This is because EJ organizations have mostly risen from grassroots activism in the civil rights movement, fighting to expand the traditional environmental discourse. Sustainability is in many ways the traditional environmental discourse. It needs a lot of expanding. So on the one hand there is the Environmental Justice Paradigm (EJP) as outlined by Taylor (2000), and on the other, the New Environmental Paradigm (NEP) of Catton and Dunlap (1978).

Apologies for these acronyms, but typing is work, right? And apologies I haven’t dropped the citations, but I think I will need them.

While far distant from one another, Agyeman argues there exists a nexus between the two of cooperative endeavours (drawing on Schlosberg 1999) to work together on common issues, but it needs to be developed. Agyeman argues that the Just Sustainability paradigm is one way to do so.

I quite love the term cooperative endeavours. It is really in working together towards a common goal that common ground is built and paradigms shifted. It takes time of course.

So in building a paradigm that can bridge the two, Agyeman uses a ‘discourse analytic and interpretive approach’ to look at EJP and NEP. He cites Brulle (2000:97) in a quote I particularly liked:

the discourse of a movement translates the historical conditions and the potential for mobilization into a reality that frames an organization’s identity. This identity then influences the organization’s structure, tactics and methods of resource mobilization.

I like how this highlights just how important our words are in shaping our organizations and the struggle they undertake, though I’m not too sure how much ‘reality’ and our understanding of reality and how we act to change that reality overlap. That seems to carry a weight of philosophy in it. Carmin & Balser come from a slightly different interpretive approach, where ‘experience, core values and beliefs, environmental philosophy, and political ideology contribute to interpretive processes that take place within environmental movement organizations that in turn shape the selection of repertoire’. Agyeman is combining the two here to look at these paradigms, the discursive with the interpretive. I’m still not quite sure I get the difference as these are approaches I am unfamiliar with. Anyway.

Environmental Justice

So a brief history recap of EJ — I feel like collecting these, they all highlight slightly different things: EJ concerns have been around since 1492, but the seminal struggle in the current EJ movement as self-defined really was the battle in Warren County, NC to stop the dumping of PCB-contaminated dirt into a local landfill. Cole & Foster (2001) describe EJ’s foundations as the civil rights movement, antitoxics movement, academia, Native American Struggles, labor movement & traditional environmental movement. Really, it is a focus on environment from a social justice frame. I’m not sure how well it captures the richness of it, but I am partisan.

He goes on to cite Laura Pulido, whose work I admire immensely, and who sought to broaden out understandings of racism and how these undergird privilege. He doesn’t much mention how she situates this geographically — the spatialities of white privilege are so key to EJ, but I know I am a geographer.

Back to the theorisation of EJ, and some useful definitions — Agyeman and Evans (2004) argue that it has two

distinct but inter-related dimensions… a vocabulary of political opportunity, mobilization and action. At the same time, at the government level, it is a policy principle that no public action will disproportionately disadvantage any particular social group. (19)

It has been (somewhat) successful in fighting top-down knowledges, in challenging experts and opening up the research process to be ‘more transparent, accountable, and democratically informed’ (21). It has redefined environmental issues to not just include wildlife, recreational and resource issues, but issues of justice, equity and rights. It has both procedural justice aspects and substantive justice aspects.

I’m always a bit wary of framing as anything more than a tool in a box full of other tools, I feel that this kind of approach needs some level of suspicion, self-awareness, so I feel the need to look more closely at Dorcetta Taylor’s 2000 article, also Devon Pena’s critique of it. But later. For now, the other end of the spectrum.

The Sustainability Discourse and Sustainable Communities

There is a growing consensus, Agyeman argues, that:

sustainability is at least as much about politics, injustice, and inequality as it is about science or the environment. (43)

I hope that’s true.

I really love charts that summarize the literature by theme at a certain point in time and bring some clarity to an enormous field, even if I problematise it later. So first, Agyeman’s ‘Characteristics of a Sustainable Community’:

Then a summary of the differences between Broad-and Narrow-Focus environmentalism (from place-based environmental problems to both local and complex nature of problems but expanding on ideas of empowerment of citizens — parallels Gould et al’s (2004) distinction between biocentric and anthropocentric environmentalisms, without making any value judgements between the two)

Just Sustainability in Theory

So the hope is that the JSP can bridge the gap between the EJP and the NEP. The first is the framework emerging out of threats to local community and from popular, grassroots community movements, the second a sustainability discourse that is largely institutional and expert, the first communitarian discourse , the second individual knowledge and the skills to decipher academic jargon (81).

So. A summary of the Just Sustainability Paradigm, and some of the ways it might be measured and how we are doing by such measures. These are useful in the funding and policy world, but I kind of hate them. But I remind myself they are useful in the funding and policy world.

He starts with the existence of the Genuine Progress Indicator as apposed to GDP from Redefining Progress. I really do hate GDP, the drive for constant growth and all that is left out of it. Some of that is listed in this description of the GPI from their website:

The GPI starts with the same personal consumption data that the GDP is based on, but then makes some crucial distinctions. It adjusts for factors such as income distribution, adds factors such as the value of household and volunteer work, and subtracts factors such as the costs of crime and pollution.

As of 2004 we were stagnating…

We need something new and better. So what is this JSP then?

A central premise on Developing Sustainable Communities
A wide range of progressive, proactive, policy-based solutions and policy tools
Calling for, and has developed, a coherent ‘new economics’ (predicated on ‘sufficiency’ is happiness, not more stuff, see McLaren 2003)
Much more of a Local-Global linkage
More proactive and visionary than the typically reactive EJP

ooh, I bet that last point might rankle with a few folks.

For bullet pt 1, Agyeman builds on the Environmental Justice Research Centers’ 1997 conference and publication healthy and sustainable communities: Building model Partnerships, which is no longer to be found online, so I shall quote his bullet points. I really like these bullet points, but really they are just another reframing of the original declaration I suppose:

Grassroots community groups want to see sustainable development that is not only environmentally and ecologically sound but is also just.
They support a sustainable economy that improves the vitality and self-sufficiency of their community and its residents.
They view education as a key ingredient in long-term community health and sustainability plans
They advocate the right of all people to a safe and secure livelihood, including the right to education, safe and affordable housing, and adequate health care
They promote democratic access to and control over natural resources
They demand that all groups are included as equal partners in development decisions
They promote government and corporate accountability to the public for decisions about production and consumption
They support the acquisition and preservation of open space in our community
They promote respect for cultural diversity, Mother Earth, and the spiritual connectedness among all living beings.
The support the right of all workers to a safe and healthy work environment, without being forced to choose between an unsafe livelihood and unemployment
They support public policy decision making based on mutual respect and justice for all people, free from any form of discrimination. (100-101 EJRC 1997: 4)

So to compare the two in their theorists, their central premises and focus, their approach, their policy solutions, their planning practice, policy tools, attitudes towards markets — everything you need, in short, to think very practically about how implementation works and to fight for its implementation and to know where you stand vis-a-vis the other side, which is dead useful:

Just Sustainability in Practice

He develops a Just Sustainability Index, which ranks people on discourses around equity, justice and sustainability, then looks at range of issues being tackled. I confess, I most loved this as just a list of awesome work being done and the very broad nature of the issues:

Land-use Planning (Urban Ecology, Oakland; Bethel New Life, Chicago; The Bronx Center Project)

Solid Waste Management (The Green Institute, Minneapolis; NYC Environmental Justice Alliance; Reuse Development Program, Baltimore)

Toxic Chemical Use (use of Right to Know, Toxic Use Reduction, Precautionary Principle, Clean Production: The Silicon Valley Toxics Colaition; Alaska Community Action on Toxics; Toxic Use Reduction Institute, Lowell MA)

Residential Energy Use (National Centre for Appropriate Technology, Butte Montana; MA Energy Consumer’s Alliance; Communities for a Better Environment, Oakland CA)

Transportation Planning (LA Bus Riders Union; Unity Council, Oakland CA; Transportation Alternatives, NYC)

Alternatives for Community and Environment (ACE)

It ends with a case study, this deep look at ACE in Roxbury that is wonderful because they are pretty amazing. Agyeman quotes the then ED (from 1995) Penn Loh on their EJ model, which he argues is:

not about surface solutions. Its always been about finding deep, systemic solutions, which means that if the movement wants to be grassroots led, really community driven, you can’t do anything but try to work with people so that they are building their own perspective, so the tools that we have around “how do you do that?” and “how do you do that and help folks develop strategies that end up with things that they can see as progress?” and that’s the continual challenge. I wouldn’t say that we’ve come up with the right formula. We’ve tried different things. (145)

Exactly. It then goes on to give their program selection criteria — always so useful! I wish I had read this years ago while selecting programs myself, though in truth it is not too different than our own:

Tier 1, Criteria for meeting ACE Mission: programs that address priority concerns derived by, achieved for, and led by the Roxbury and Greater Boston residents.

Tier 2, Criteria for an Effective Campaign: easily understood goals that can be achieved within a clear time frame. The program should also provide the foundation for future community partnerships, increase resident awareness of EJ issues, and allow future campaign development.

Tier 3, Criteria for sustaining ACE as an organization: builds ACE’s strengths, allows fundraising support, and creates unique programs that can be shared across the country. (146)

I love too Loh’s quote that coalition isn’t always useful — they decided not to be part of the MA Smart Growth Alliance, for example:

…we didn’t feel that the justice issues were front and center enough to make it worth it. We don’t want to spend time, even if there are some opportunities to be had there, fighting within the partnership itself to ensure that the approach is right. (178)

We knew that feeling all too well.

From Confrontation to Implementation

Short and sweet. Justice needs to be the focus (see quote above). And a final thought, organizations can be both EJP and SJP, which makes sense…SJP in some ways is just more of tactic, a practical way to find common ground with organisation and institutions who see the world very differently. But I’m still thinking about that.

[Agyeman, Julian (2005) Sustainable Communities and the Challenge of Environmental Justice. NY & London: New York University Press.]

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The Wilds

Queequeg’s room and Pinkletinks

April 19, 2017 Andrea Gibbons Leave a comment

Queequeg! Who could have guessed that he stayed — well, Amos Smalley, upon whom Melville based the character — in this very room (that top room, there at the sunlit end), in this very house where I first met Sam’s grandmother wearing a baseball cap backwards to dinner causing what I later realised was probably some level of disapproval. I stayed here the last time I came, when Queequeg’s room was Tas’s. Her family built this house long ago.

So exciting. Good to come back to a place that always feels a bit like home away from home, after Sam and me got ourselves through college commiserating over worries about our families, lack of funds, the love and loss of land, and missing wildness. We also both lived in in places inundated by seasonal tourists, though the ones on her island were of a slightly different sort. We would escape to the basement in Mary Lyons to drink tea in the evenings — escape everyone else — listen to music, talk about home and writing. We invented the happiness game. I wish we lived within at least a thousand miles of each other.

I love that it still feels wild here, and old. Surrounded by ocean:

Walking through woods full of lovely stone walls from when this place was once grazed flat by sheep:

Old iron wheels and the great tower from those (very semi)industrial times when this island once produced the bricks that helped build Boston’s Beacon Hill

The beginnings of spring (already in full daffodil flower here in Manchester, with crocuses being done), and the season of pinkletinks. I was invited to share the audible delights of peeper’s corner, and we sought them further here:

I am forgetting this pond’s name, black silver reflecting the last of the beech leaves before the new green begins. And now the pinkletink.

Imagine them so loud they can be heard for miles, through the glass car windows even. So loud that as you approach they hurt your ears. They remained invisible to us, escaping to obscurity and silence as we approached.

They are also reintroducing Cranberry bogs, amazing:

This island also has the best baked goods I have had in ages. But mostly, I loved the beauty of it. The emptiness of it. And I miss the whole of this family, who feel a bit like mine, except that they are always so very late. I was so sad to leave…yet I was leaving in the co-pilot’s seat of a tiny Cessna (look, it’s me!)

This made me feel like a flyer or a film star, and was an incredible view as we flew through crystal clear skies to Boston. I now know what some, not all, of those buttons, levers and gauges do.

It took the sting off, I confess. But I was still sad to go.

[FAG id=8754]

We got more sunsets the last time I was here, seven years ago now… hope it’s not another seven before I get back.

[FAG id=8756]

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City Unseen, Walking

This tomb is the property of…

April 18, 2017 Andrea Gibbons Leave a comment

The amount of people I now realise are fascinated by graveyards makes my own fascinations rather less interesting than I once thought they were… still. I join the ranks of those who puzzle about their place (along with all of their practicalities and their meanings) in the city, who love how they often sit palimpsestic in familiar spaces suddenly rendered strange when you uncover what lies beneath, love how they also provide pockets of green, whether made open parks or retaining their gravestones. I love cities where they are integrated into the fabric like this, a reminder to live life well.

So I could hardly resist the Granary Burying Ground while walking past it in Boston. The grave of Crispus Attucks and four others killed in the Boston Massacre. Paul Revere, Sam Adams and others (where the tourists clustered and I did not).

I found this the most interesting.

‘This tomb is the property of Elizabeth Hickling and Mary Hooten heirs of Deac. John Lee’. A classical obelisk, and a startling conception of property ownership beyond life itself. A proclamation even. You can’t take it with you, but I suppose you can try to claim it with the presence of your bones. I also note they were not daughters, sisters, wives, mothers but only heirs.

No one else seemed to find this startling.

It made me wonder whether their lives were really self-defined by property and its relations. How cramped and sterile, how tragic, yet how little there would be to mourn. If it were true.

I confess I was also rather amazed at the memento mori on most of the gravestones (apart from the classical obelisks like the one above, and a handful of fat angels). Rarely found by me in English (or Irish) graveyards, I have only ever seen this abundance in Valleta’s St John’s Co-Cathedral, belonging to the Templars. The knights had dedicated themselves to ‘protecting’ Christendom and fighting the Moors (for pillage and plunder), I am wondering if it is this battle against the fierce ‘other’ they held in common with the protestants of Boston on their lands conquered and taken by force. Pure speculation.

Preoccupations with property, preoccupations with death. There is always such a very different glimpse into social relations that the ceremonies and geographies of death clarify. Like the importance of property ownership. Like the value of life.

Children become persons at the age of 6, men and women after 12. Blacks are buried more cheaply than whites. I have not yet read Chloe Spear’s narrative, but I have read Phillis Wheatley (the surname of the man who believed he owned her).

I suppose the reduced rates reflect the fact that they were only to be buried with those who claimed ownership.

I continued my walk to the north end to meet someone, a welcome break from the thousands of geographers and the mad networking of the AAG. Very shortly I saw this, by way of contrast yet also continuity as it was almost Easter.

Off to Katie’s neighbourhood, and a walk under the bridge past this haunting graffiti after some pizza, some coffee, some wine…

For a dinner of pupusas, glorious pupusas that I have not had for years, provided by the vibrant Salvadoran community there that I never knew existed, and flavoured more richly through memories of our time together at CARECEN. And old pictures.

Building Social Spaces, City & Country

Kevin Lynch: The Image of the City

November 1, 2016 Andrea Gibbons 5 Comments

Kevin Lynch — he’s been on my list of folks to read forever on architecture and cities and space, and with reason as The Image of the City is rather brilliant. He writes:

Looking at cities can give a special pleasure, however commonplace the sight may be. Like a piece of architecture, the city is a construction in space, but one of vast scale, a thing perceived only in the course of long spans of time. City design is therefore a temporal art… At every instant, there is more than the eye can see, more than the ear can hear, a setting or a view waiting to be explored. Nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surrounding, the sequences of events leading up to it, the memory of past experiences. (1)

I love this nod to the overwhelming — and mostly pleasurable — nature of the city, the ways it works in both space and time, and like Lofland, Whyte, Cullen, Gehl and others, he is clearly writing as someone with an appreciation for city life. It is a life that is in many ways collectively constructed:

Not only is the city an object which is perceived (and perhaps enjoyed) by millions of people of widely diverse class and character, but it is the product of many builders who are consonantly modifying the structure for reasons of their own… No wonder, then, that the art of shaping cities is an art quite separate from architecture or music or literature. (2)

In The Image of the City, Lynch’s focus is primarily looking at what he calls the ‘legibility’ of the cityscape — how we read cities and how understanding that can help us (re)build better cities. Why is legibility key?

A good environmental image gives its possessor an important sense of emotional security. He can establish an harmonious relationships between himself and the outside world…(4)

I love this quote even more…

a distinctive and legible environment not only offers security but also heightens the potential depth and intensity of human experience. Although life is far from impossible in the visual chaos of the modern city, the same daily action could take on new meaning if carried out in a more vivid setting. (5)

This is not to go against the many authors who write about the unknown, Lynch emphasises that this not to deny the value of labyrinth or surprise, but under two larger conditions — where there is no danger of losing basic

orientation, of never coming out. The surprise must occur in an over-all framework; the confusions must be small regions in a visible whole…. Complete chaos without hint of connection is never pleasurable. (6)

Another important qualification, the power of human beings to shape the urban environment:

The observer himself should play an active role in perceiving the world and have a creative part in developing his image. He should have the power to change that image to fit changing needs… what we seek is not a final but an open-ended order, capable of continuous further development. (6)

So to understand how this all works, he book tries to get at the ways people understand and read cities, the

‘public images,’ the common mental pictures carried around by large numbers of a city’s inhabitants… (7)

I love maps, and so found this a fascinating way to examine people’s relationships to the urban form, splitting it into useful divisions to be examined:

The mental maps that are shared of streets and landmarks. These are analyzed in terms of identity (its recognition as a separable entity), structure (the spatial or pattern relation of the object to the observer and other objects) and meaning (for the observer, whether practical or emotional). (8)

Above all in understanding legibility is this:

imageability: that quality in a physical object which gives it a high probability of evoking a strong image in any given observer. It is that shape, color, or arrangement which facilitates the making of vividly identified, powerfully structured, highly useful mental images of the environment. (9)

A highly imageable (apparent, legible, or visible) city in this peculiar sense would seem well formed, distinct, remarkable; it would invite the eye and the ear to greater attention and participation. The sensuous grasp upon such surroundings would not merely be simplified, but also extended and deepened. Such a city would be one that could be apprehended over time as a pattern of high continuity with many distinctive parts clearly interconnected. The perceptive and familiar observer could absorb new sensuous impacts without disruption in his basic image, and each new impact would touch upon many previous elements. He would be well oriented, and he could move easily. He would be highly aware of his environment. The city of Venice might be an example of such a highly imageable environment. (10)

Venice again, but I think this is definitely how a city works best, and this imageablity is the center of his study of Boston, LA and Jersey City. What follows is a really interesting way of mapping out perceptions of the city through surveys and interviews. The maps are brilliant:

Particularly interesting is the look at problems, as in the ‘Problems of the Boston image’ (p 24 — though you won’t be surprised to find that Boston has fewer problems than the other two):

This marks what Kevin Lynch describes as the

confusions, floating points, weak boundaries, isolations, breaks in continuity, ambiguities, branchings, lacks of character or differentiation. (25)

Of course it beats both Jersey City and Los Angeles hands down as a memorable, enjoyably walkable and legible city. I do myself have a great soft spot for Boston. I thought I’d go into more detail on LA in a second post, as it is my own city after all. It also highlights Lynch’s limitations, but there is much to be mined from the book.

First, what development has done to the US city centre:

There is the same piling-up of blank office structures, the same ubiquity of traffic ways and parking lots (34).

This has made them almost indistinguishable from one another, Lynch notes Jersey City as the least distinguishable of all — funny that what people most loved about it was the view of New York’s skyline on their horizon.

Common themes between the cities:

…people adjust to their surroundings and extract structure and identity out of the material at hand. The types of elements used in the city image, and the qualities that make them strong or weak, seem quite comparable between the three…

In terms of broad themes, the key favourite aspects of all cities were space and views:

Among other things, the tests made clear the significance of space and breadth of view (43) … there was an emotional delight arising from a broad view, which was referred to many times. …

Natural landscapes:

The landscape features of the city: the vegetation or the water, were often noted with care and pleasure. (44)

Also a deep sense of the spatialities of class (race is not discussed at all, except in an oblique way, a truly blindingly un-scholarly way which the post on LA will deal with more)

Quite as apparent is the constant reference to socio-economic class: the avoidance of “lower class” Broadway in Los Angeles, the recognition of the “upper class” Bergen Section in Jersey City, or the unmistakable division of Boston’s Beacon Hill into two distinct sides.

Space and time: