Scalar approach to urban political ecology

From the consumer standpoint we often don't see what goes into the objects we purchase from agricultural products to housing materiality or even to the creation of asphalt on our streets that constitute the urban fabric. At what scale is it appropriate to introduce the consumer? A pic of an orange in your orange juice to verify it is grown in the US?

Linear distance of purchasing products in an urban store

What about a product nutrition label? Ecolect's response to consumer linear distancing.

In the urban political ecology perspective, we are experiencing a linear distance where the end-user is distanced from the production or complex systemic networks to create the world we live in today. I learned in Annie Leonard's lecture at Cornell in her Story of Stuff video on over-production and over-comsumption patterns of developed nations, that it is common to create waste in life-cycles of production patterns. It relates to linear distancing in that urban dwellers are separated from the life-cycle and since we don't know what it takes to produce a smartphone for example, so we keep demanding more products that require more production that contributes to more waste.

Story of Stuff

Although media has caught on to scientist's and economist's warning of climate change affects, we are even more unaware of the uneven distribution of our resources, talents and time. It's not that we will run out of water which has happened in multiple states and countries where they import water, it's who has access to water? Areas of the world are water rich, but rural areas do not have access to their own water, denied of the basic right of our human species to survive.

The bottleneck of consumption and production can be related to the 99% argument that the 1% is using the 99% of resources.

Do we really need to drink celebrity water while people use buckets to get water?

Am I buying the water or the image?

Resources:
Keil, Roger. (2003). Urban Political Ecology 1. Urban Geography. 24 (8), pp. 723- 738.

Urban theory manifests as urban form

What I took most from this week’s exploration on urban space and culture is how urban theories can manifest itself in physical form and spatial formation. For example, the idea of the creative class from Richard Florida manifests physically as a space-making tool, which cities have advocated and implemented spatially as art districts that cater to the creative class. It seems to me that a fixation occurs on the spatial result and the ideal of an economic engine driver or if you will, a growth pole-like strategy.

Creative community in Berlin- leaves a mark on the urban form and creates community. 

Does it encompass and welcome everyone or only artists?

My question then is: does the artist class create economic development or rather does the artist class follow development? I believe it is difficult to say and is context specific. In regard to an artist development I visited and stayed in with a friend who is a writer and her husband a fashion designer, in Providence, Rhode Island (most artists per capita in the US), I witnessed a positive change in their family in that they were able to relocate themselves into a community that was plugged with other artists. Through their collaboration with on-site artists that live in the development they were able to provide artistic programmatic events for their community and non-artist as well as live in the studio they produce work. In this regard the creative class creates a community, but it is difficult to say that the artists actually integrate themselves into the existing urban fabric that was previously there.

Reference:

Florida, Richard and Gates, Gary. (2001). Technology and Tolerance: The importance of diversity to high-technology growth (Survey Series of the Brookings Institution). Washington, DC: Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy. http://www.urban.org/publications/1000492.html
Picture:
http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/creative%20community

Global Citizenship and Right to the Urban Landscape

Main theme from this week's investigation on Political Agglomerations:

Global Citizenship: Doreen Massey refers to global citizenship from her article "Global Sense of Place" defining time-space compression as a "compression of movement and communication across space geographically" and its social experiences associated (2). From this I can see how people feel included in this speed-up of a global village but also feel visibly different. Cities are privileged sites for its infrastructure, opportunity and connections, but also with privilege comes the politics of difference where as a designer I should ask: Who am I designing this space for?

Politics of difference: As most people are privileged to enjoy the elevated landscape, a homeless person has taken refuge under the Highline, but is excluded to enjoy such a beautiful park with other people.

In the case of the ever popular elevated urban landscapes of New York's Highline or Singapore's Henderson Wave Park, there is a familiarity among the two in materiality and exclusive nature of taking you 15 feet above buildings and the street with fashionable people mainly in business, tourists or residents, who are there to people watch and get away from the "undesireables"you may encounter if you dare walk on the street instead.

Right to the Urban Landscape: Vancouver's bold initiative of gives all residents access to a park within a 5 minute walking distance.

Part of citizenship is access to rights. Although some designed spaces can heighten identity politics among users of the space, US cities across the nation are including daring goals in their climate change action plans of giving citizens the right to access the landscape. In the case of Vancouver's bold plan of being the Greenest City in the World by 2020, the plan hopes to give residents access to parks within a 5 minute walk which outcompetes New York City's 10 minute walk to a park goal.

My critique of citizenship in the urban landscape and giving rights to the public landscape is that although cities are addressing accessibility to green spaces in action plans, they fail to address the quality of the spaces that are accessible (so just because I am near a park doesn't mean it is safe for children or families). As a concluding remark, the city has become a system of economic and social re-production and landscapes are part of this discussion in the way parks and green infrastructure are narrating the story of the landscape, hopefully in the future with more attention to the locale or genius loci of the place and the design for all types of people.

Access to Vancouver's Greenest City in the World by 2020 Action Plan: http://vancouver.ca/files/cov/Greenest-city-action-plan.pdf

Massey, Doreen. (1991). A Global Sense of Place. Marxism Today.

Contested Cities in flux

Contested Cities in flux

Role of public space in Manila during EDSA Revolution

Cities are in constant flux. Economic, social and political influences dictate the urban form. Because cities are in constant change, the city is contested in nature. Spaces reflect power and lack of power, as most seen here in the EDSA People Power Revolution in Manila, Philippines. After a 20 year authoritarian (martial) rule, about two million people fought for democracy against regime violence and electoral fraud in a successful attempt to mobilize and reclaim public rights and democracy.

The highway space was not designed for protest like a large park or in front of a government building. The infrastructure was literally cut off, no access to transportation for four days along the main thoroughfare, EDSA. People decided what is in the public realm- communications, news space.

Organizing the contested city

Urban integrated mega-project the Global City, Fort Bonifacio

With Shatkin’s piece on urban integrated mega-projects, an example from Manila (Fort Bonifacio) that I have visited brought light to the idea of organizing the contested city. As evidenced in Saskin’s theory on global cities, urbanites are pressured to go global by being global. The Global City in Fort Bonifacio is an effort to re-situate power and organize away from the center core of Manila with its  dense and messy squatter areas. By designing ‘globally’ (in this case the plan was designed in from a US firm) the cultural character is lost, where the landscape becomes a placeless architecture and void of people, as seen below.

Segregation, Investment and Decline

In the discussion of segregation, investment and decline, the topic of shrinking cities and planning for smart decline calls to mind the relationship of shrinking cities to reclamation of post-industrial landscapes. In many shrinking cities, as Hollander suggests, people are emptying cities, causing a shrink in talents and jobs, leading to economic decline. But in smart city decline, one analyzes the decline as a lifecycle or natural process similar to the human body, where decline occurs and the ability to plan smart decline relies on, "whether residents have access to financial resources within an environment of community control (353)." Due to decline, segregation of resources and investment occur and it is difficult for communities to have access to economic opportunity people are seeking.

Transformation of a post-industrial landscape; Freshkills Park, NY

Landfill 1947

In regard to post-industrial landscapes, the goal of smart planning is to utilize brownfield sites or areas of the city's past industrial relics that are underutilized and do not provide little or no economic benefit. A case study of a post-industrial landscape that was once home to a 1947 landfill in operation until 2001, Freshkills Park in Staten Island was once a site for daily waste disposal of 5 barges with 650 tons of garbage each barge everyday. Although not located in a shrinking city, post-industrial landscapes occur in shrinking cities like Detroit among others. In the discussion of decline, post-industrial landscapes are a part of shrinking cities and the transformation of them into utilized places of production, aesthetics and public participation are a landscape approach to smart decline.

Resources:

Hollander, J.B., and Németh, J. (2011). The bounds of smart decline: a foundational theory for planning shrinking cities. Housing Policy Debate. 21 (3), pp. 349-367.

Socioeconomic and Spatial Polarization in Megacities- Transnational Landscapes and Ecologies

In the World City Syndrome by David McDonald, a major point that connects urban theory into the spatial realm is the idea of income disparities leading into socioeconomic and spatial polarization, translating as a work-space polarization we see in gentrified urban living spaces in central business districts (McDonald). The relationship of economy, user and space conglomerate and result in homogenized, designed spaces tailored to the transnational elite with its live, network and play themes.

Because the infrastructure exists, it doesn't mean it is accessible. I believe that along with architecture, landscape architecture is also experiencing a homogenization of urban public green spaces that exacerbate the inequality evident in the spatial form, alienating and polarizing the non-elite. These exportable architecture and landscapes creates a sameness within business districts across world cities, cities competing and cooperating with a similar aesthetic and program.

Running along with the –trans prefix, from transnational elites to transnational relationships to now transnational ecologies. In the emerging urban ecological landscape, an oversimplification of infrastructural systems have resulted in a loss of native ecosystems like plants, habitat and wildlife. With the homogenization of transnational landscapes, the embedded ecologies are oversimplified as well, evidenced in homogenized single-species row planting in corporate office landscapes lacking a diversified plant palette and overall habitat and human diversity. Similar issues of local disconnections arise, with developing projects as floating islands of urban elite paradise surrounded by periphery slum presence.

Global Cities/World Cities

A Main theme from Niel Brenner's, Global cities, glocal states: Global City Formation...in Contemporary Europe.

Glocal is messy and contradictory- Who takes care of environment and at what scales?

Similar to Sister cities program, in NYS, a state-level Climate Smart Communities program lets decision makers commit to a pledge of reducing GHG and climate adaptation measures at the city level. Combining power and knowledge of climate action plans create a larger network for cities to collaborate and harness new initiatives on climate change adaptation and city resilience. I believe this is a step in the right direction because it starts a discussion among cities, creating a scalar effect which is similar to the rescaling from large national to supernational in capital investments or the reduction of global to local, the city level becomes a necessary heartbeat to reducing the scale and giving responsibility at the city level to build knowledge on climate change and establishing a normative approach to planning for mitigation and adaptation strategies.

Uneven Geographies of Capitalism

Main themes from Globalization and the Spatial Fix, by David Harvey

In an attempt to bridge spatial connections and economic theories of the Spatial Fix, I gleaned two main topics in relationship to landscape spatial formation:

1)      1)     Capitalism is territorial and requires resources. Spatial fix is a geographic restructuring and similar to capitalism, the fix is territorial.

Spatial connection:

Colonialism is a form of capitalistic venture; for example, the British Salt tax in India derived 10% of its revenue from its salt monopoly in 1850’s. The spatial fix in this comparison is territorial and truly a geographic restructuring of market seeking a new geography to exploit the natural resources of another country.

2)      2)     Securitization and relationship to financialization or the idea of capital mobility. Capital moves and in efforts for more mobility, reduction of friction occurs in bargaining or advantages for resources or infrastructure, which results in homogenization of spatial locale.

Spatial connection:

Similar to futures trading which anticipates trade and is based on the perception of money in the future, plans, designs or policy are future perceptions based on the belief that the outcome will be better or more profitable.

Urban Agglomeration

            Agglomeration is a loaded term I found out today in class. A rather simple definition on my Mac dashboard says, “[to] collect or form in to a mass group.”

As discussed in class the major theme that arose for me is the question of WHO?

Who collects? Who forms? Who is the mass group?

Across the readings of Harvey Molotch’s, “City as a Growth Machine,” to Philip McCann’s, “Spatial Distribution of Activities,” prescribed models of urban growth or agglomerations have perceived assumptions that these spatial groupings are believed to be the best economic output for growth of development. The collector and form-giver is designed by developers, planners and top-down decision makers but the mass group who is collected to live or work in these agglomerations have little or no participation in what their space and time will become.

Sudeshna Mitra, our instructor mentioned the concept of discretionary budgeting or giving the people power to vote in hopes of a more inclusive community. I believe this is an opportunity to involve people that would not normally have any representation in these processes. In the US, this is especially important now with the growing elderly population and their need to be represented in time, space and access to the environment for elderly living with disabilities.

Urban Questions & Epistemologies

Urban spatial form as we know it has changed and is ever-changing. Spaces and what we do with them dictate large spheres of urbanism: distribution of wealth, segregation of classes and neighborhood typologies. As evidenced by Engels, his method of analyzing urban spheres was through a derive, or a wandering observational method, detailing the city through his experience. We have evolved our methods of analysis by way of the Chicago School, the social sciences and even the natural sciences with climate-change modeling.

Although we have developed further techniques, it is noteworthy to discover one main point gleaned from the derive of Engels: Making the invisible visible, particularly poverty in cities. A question that arises is who is responsible for poverty? Historically, poverty was spatially spread out invisible within the landscape fabric, where the church and the landed elite provided services and economy for the poor. Within cities, this is not the case, people in poverty are wage-dependent on market forces, lacking any methods to produce their own wealth.

With local cooperation, the everyday landscape can become modes of production for food security- from community gardens to vertical gardens. Increasing access to our urban landscapes for all people is becoming increasingly important in regard to the urban imagination. 

Urban Imaginations

The main theme I understood that is most relevant to my field of landscape architecture is the idea of planning as an abstraction or idealization set by the ideator. When Sudeshna showed the slide in class of urban theorists it showed the lack of representation of all people in the decision-making process throughout history who have been underrepresented. The question of who is theorizing comes to play. As a designer and architect I would like my landscape process to include the normative process of design but also include people in the process who are not normally represented.

We must realize that the ideas of family and roles of women and society are inherently prescribed in the planning process and must be realized and challenged as evidenced in the morphology of the earlier European bourgeoisie suburb to the later American post-war suburb. Even now we see the ramifications of the societal outputs from our physical design of big houses, large Escalades and the privacy of a 'quiet' life. As younger generations have a change in the urban imagination, I imagine our physical and spatial patterns will include taking back the city, re-introducing ecologies into urban landscapes and demanding more inclusive design.