THE HUMAN PARTY

The city is man's most consistent, and on the whole his most successful attempt to remake the world more after his heart's desire.  But if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live.  Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself.
- Robert Park, 1967

Space - cities, agricultural areas, regions, infrastructure, neighborhoods, and the relationships between them - plays an important and unique role in determining the social, political, and economic relationships among the people inhabiting and moving through those spaces.  The production of space - its programming through physical infrastructure and economic flows to serve certain uses - is a central tool of social reproduction. The way we structure physical space "locks in" or concretizes the choices we (democratically or not) make about how society should be organized. 

By embedding these choices in the physical environment, we reify them, making them both seem natural and irrevocable.  As such, physical space manifests the underlying logics of social organization and acts as a buffer against change.  While the built environment reflects and reproduces these logics, the radical, democratic, and local control of space can also act as a “foot in the door,” serving as an avenue for unworking destructive relationships that operate at the national and international scale.  

This is an abstract concept, so let’s look at a few examples.  Since the middle of the 20th century, America’s pattern of urban and suburban development has largely been automobile-centric. Shaped by federal housing policy, an explosion of middle-class wealth, and mounting racial and class tensions in central cities, America's vast suburban, low-density, highway-accessed neighborhoods necessitate high levels of automobile use, and cater almost exclusively to those who can afford to own and operate cars.  The largest public works project in history paved 46,000 miles of new interstate highways across the American landscape after the second World War, and people (mostly white, mostly middle-class) flocked to burgeoning suburban housing developments. 

These new suburban regions could only be accessed by automobile.  They were often intentionally exclusive of  the urban poor, as in the case of Robert Moses’s infamous low-hanging bridges, which prevented public buses from reaching the new beaches and parks that served as the romping grounds for the newly mobile segment of the American population.   A significant chunk of us now live in the housing developments and drive to work on the freeways that we inherited from that period of development, with little choice in the matter.  The logics of that particular stage of American capitalism, and the policy and cultural norms which accompanied it, now proscribe the daily actions of millions of Americans (where they work, how they get there, and the social and environmental impacts of these lifestyles), many of whom weren’t even born when these developments were taking place.

Now, faced with the increasingly urgent challenge of global climate change, this inherited development pattern militates against the types of behavioral changes that could play a crucial role in reducing carbon emissions.  A 2008 Gallup poll found that 66% of respondents were "highly worried" about global warming. But while 2/3 of us are concerned about global warming, most of us continue to enact relationships with the environment that contribute to climate change.   Because of our inherited built environment, few of us can choose to walk, bike, or ride public transit to work and other destinations.  How many of us can eat food grown by our neighbors, live in energy-efficient apartment complexes, or take a walk in a park without driving there first?

There are many other examples of how the built environment reflects and reproduces destructive relationships.  A crucial one is residential segregation, a tragic reality born of historically unequal rights to private property, racist lending practices, and whites-only federal housing programs. Geographically embedded in the American urban landscape, segregation works to perpetuate itself by disproportionately denying people of color access to areas where better job prospects and superior schools offer the kinds of opportunities that would allow them to escape or reshape segregated communities. 

Further, racial segregation only foments pernicious racist attitudes (themselves responsible for unequal access to opportunity for people of color) by discouraging meaningful social interaction between people from disparate backgrounds, ensuring that attitudes about other races are largely mediated by secondary sources like television programs and stereotypical cultural tropes.   The reality of residential segregation, manifested in geographic distance and established neighborhoods, works to reproduce its own causes.  The infrastructural decay of northern inner cities (SE DC, Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Newark, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Gary, Detroit, Buffalo, etc...) was, and is, very explicitly permitted as whites moved out of the cities and into the proverbial greener pastures of the suburbs.  Those left in the space abandoned (primarily African-American and Hispanic) see daily the funding priorities of local, state and federal government for additional development (expansion rather than refurbishment).  Aside from the lucky few who escape the realities of racial segregation, the majority are left in a built environment that increasingly mirrors a war-zone and rarely offers glimpses of opportunity.

In short : our cities (and suburbs), part of our inherited physical environment, effectively encourage certain types of relationship among people, and between people and the environment.  The programming of physical space “locks in” these relationships, and militates against change even where the collective will exists.  While the exercise of political power or the programming of space to achieve the highest possible exchange value traditionally determine the shape of our urban fabric, groups across the country, from community development corporations to community gardeners, are working to re-imagine and rebuild inner city neighborhoods according to the vision of their residents.  In this way, changes to the built environment, if only in the perception or use of said environment, can also act as an point of entry into a dauntingly all-encompassing system of social organization, simultaneously providing for the most pressing needs of a community while reserving space for democratic, collective control.  These efforts are worth studying and emulating, and the resources below are a good place to start for both local and national examples of new visions of existing space:

Critical Mass, an international biking event which seeks to make space for all roadway users, not just drivers, on publicly-funded roadways

Fenway Neighborhood Community Development Corporation (CDC), a CDC which leverages grants and loans to preserve and rebuild under-served communities

Green Guerillas, a network of community gardening organizations which improve New York City residents' access to fresh produce by rehabilitating abandoned lots and planting communal gardens

Detroit City of Hope, A collection of activists and organizations who wish to reimagine and reinvent the city of Detroit via local democracy, community gardens, and a variety of local initiatives.