reflections

Investing in People + Place: Reflections on the Akron Roundtable

From September 14–15, Theaster Gates and Place Lab team members Lori Berko and Carson Poole participated in a series of events in Akron, Ohio, as part of the Akron Roundtable. Now celebrating its 40th year, the mission of the Akron Roundtable is to bring speakers to the city who inform, educate, and stimulate listeners on topics of importance to the region, the country, and the world. In this entry, Place Lab’s project specialist Carson Poole reflects on the conversations had at the September 14th discussion sessions.


A session-in-progress.

A session-in-progress.

On September 14th, the Executive Director of the Akron Art Museum, Mark Masuoka, and President of the Akron Arts Alliance, Barbara Feld, convened two groups of Akronites for discrete discussion sessions facilitated by Theaster Gates. These groups represented a diverse collection of artists, writers, leaders of community based organizations, representatives from anchor institutions, members of the philanthropic community, and other residents of Akron who were working to create change in their city. 

The discussions, a prelude to the following day’s Roundtable, touched on challenges that would be familiar to almost anyone in the field: a lack of affordable spaces for artists to practice and engage the community; restrictive and inflexible land use regulations that can delay projects for mixed-use, dense, and walkable development; siloed institutions and disconnected organizations; disparate information; and intense competition for funding. Though the groups met in separate sessions, both agreed that there was plenty of energy and interest in making change, but that these barriers prevented the work from happening at the scale they felt was necessary to drive impact. The groups agreed that communities are all “willing, but not able.”

Scale and impact are issues that I have found come up time and again. Why make investments in the arts, artists, and cultural spaces when resources are limited? How can creative, incremental development compete with transportation, housing, infrastructure, and traditional economic development?

While these investments are all important, the discussion sessions both hit upon the power of arts and culture to do things that other interventions simply cannot. Cultural spaces create generative platforms within communities that propel work forward in previously unforeseen ways. People are provided opportunities to gather and commune, access to one another begins to cross boundaries, and relationships expand. New possibilities can be imagined and realized, and novel economic prospects emerge.

VIDEO: The Grand Exchange: Understanding the Black and White

VIDEO: The Grand Exchange: Understanding the Black and White

The power of the arts to bring people together for critical conversations was echoed by Akronite and Ethical Redevelopment Salon Member Brent Wesley, who told the group about a community conversation that he and fellow Salon Member Jeremy Lile, of City Hope, held in Akron this summer. Wesley said that he and others felt the need to bring people together to discuss “race in America, how to better understand each other, what certain people go through, how we arrived at this point, and what we need to do as humans.” The Grand Exchange: Understanding the Black and White drew over 150 people. The attendees represented widely different views on social justice and race. The organizers were able to create a space for conversations to occur across race, class, and ideology.
    
The close of the Akron discussion sessions did not solve issues faced when trying to bring a vision to reality. Questions remain about “how to get there.” How can artists and like-minded small developers break through the challenges and barriers in front of them? One of the most prescient solutions involved a reimagining of the relationships between institutions, artists, developers, and stakeholders in city government that would drive substantive changes in policy and build solid foundations to support sustainable change. New coalitions were imagined that would collapse and blur the divides between artists and developers, funders and practitioners, as well as municipal government and the residents they serve. 

Ultimately, the discussions held in Akron drove home a fundamental truth about ethical, people-first transformation efforts: the drive is there, but it demands a wide-range of diverse partnerships and interdisciplinary working groups that can leverage the right mix of resources, knowledge, and power to effect lasting and meaningful change.


You can read more about the September 15th Roundtable discussion, led by guest speaker Theaster Gates, here.

Carson Poole: Reflections from 'Making the West Side'

Carson Poole, Place Lab's project specialist, attended the Making the West Side Public Forum and Reception on May 19 at the Hull-House Museum. In this SITE entry, Carson shares some reflections and takeaways from his experience at the event.


Carson Poole

Carson Poole

Richard Anderson, from the National Public Housing Museum (Chicago) and Princeton, talked about the history of University of Illinois at Chicago construction, and the well-known displacement that occurred. The chord that really struck with me, and I think many other people in the room, is the poisonous legacy that exists because of the negative impacts that top down planning and development projects, in Chicago and beyond, have had on communities. It brought to mind the construction, neglect, and demolition of public housing in America, and the CHA’s struggles with it’s Plan for Transformation [see notes at end for links to more about the Plan for Transformation].
 
Understandably, there’s a deep mistrust of large scale interventions in planning and development, which sometimes hinders progress and holds us back from making deep investments in communities. I think that this mistrust is an important piece of the picture, and one that calls for better community engagement + empowerment approaches from the various public and private entities involved in city-building.

All that modernist urbanism failed on both sides of the Atlantic. It was a tremendous intellectual crisis because of the extent of the social meltdown and because absolute power of design and implementation had been granted to the planners.
— excerpt from interview with Andres Duany

It’s interesting to me that this mistrust spans the political spectrum—from conservatives who tout limited government and little to no public spending, to progressives who draw upon the history of urban renewal and espouse a “tactical urbanism” by way of Jane Jacobs approach to planning. I thought back to this interview with Andres Duany, founder of the Congress for New Urbanism and an influential planner and urbanist. He championed the need for regional-scale, top down interventions in things like transportation infrastructure and renewable energy development, that will inevitably require compromise from residents, but must take a primarily resident perspective and design at the human scale in order to avoid the terrible mistakes and willful displacement that has occurred in the past. 
 
Basically, we can’t all be NIMBYs (Not in my Back Yard) and BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything), if we want to accomplish real, sustainable change— but we also can’t plow the Skyway through the South Side. It’s about finding that sweet spot for human scale interventions, and that happens through sincere engagement and providing people with real opportunities for participation and decision-making power.

Oil painting from the exhibition As Cosmopolitans & Strangers, an exhibition that explores Mexican Art of the Jewish Diaspora and the complexities of diversity. Part of the permanent collection of the National Museum of Mexican Art. Image: …

Oil painting from the exhibition As Cosmopolitans & Strangers, an exhibition that explores Mexican Art of the Jewish Diaspora and the complexities of diversity. Part of the permanent collection of the National Museum of Mexican Art. Image: Gunther Gerzso (1915-2000), Yellow–Green–Blue / Amarillo–Verde–Azul, 1984, oil on Masonite, NMMA Permanent Collection 2009.45.

Another speaker, Rosa Cabrera, from the UIC Latino Cultural Center, talked about her work studying cultural institutions in Chicago, and the difficulties that these institutions face embracing the multitude of perspectives, values, and identities that exist within cultural communities, rather than viewing them in monolithic terms.
 
All communities, cultural or otherwise, are constantly in flux, as new waves of immigration, or in some cases, depopulation, create changes in values and in shared experiences. The challenge to cultural organizations is to explore intersectional identities and intergenerational differences in culture. Cabrera felt that many cultural institutions have a need for capacity building and training aimed squarely at this issue in order for these diverse viewpoints to be expressed.


NOTES

Chicago Housing Authorities Plan for Transformation

Official CHA site.

CHA report, The Plan for Transformation: An Update on Relocation [pdf]. April 2011. 

Urban Institute, CHA Families and the Plan for Transformation. A collection of research, articles, and papers the UI has produced over more than a decade of following CHA families during relocation.

 Sudhir Venkatesh and Isil Celimli, Tearing Down the Community. NHI.org, 2014


RSVP for the Public Convening on Ethical Redevelopment, a free and open public event at which Place Lab will explore and showcase how residents, artists, entrepreneurs, developers, and civic leaders are joining forces in a more equitable process for community revitalization.

Isis Ferguson: Reflections from 'Making the West Side'

Isis Ferguson, Place Lab program manager, attended the Making the West Side Public Forum and Reception on May 19 at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. In this SITE entry, Isis shares some reflections and takeaways from her experience at the event.


Isis Ferguson

Isis Ferguson

Alice O’Connor participated in the wrap-up portion of the program. It’s been more than a week since she made her remarks, and I am still moved by the notion of inevitability briefly mentioned by O’Connor.

Neighborhood development efforts often focus on thwarting rapid change, a kind of fundamental alteration that ushers in new amenities, tourists or “pioneering” new residents, resulting in the dislocation or displacement of neighborhood residents and entrepreneurs. In short, locals get priced out. Ironically, in this neighborhood development scenario, it is often the very same local people who made a place work—made it vibrant, attractive, and distinctive—that end up “choosing” to leave. The staying power of locals for as long as some are able to hold out, is extraordinary considering it is done against the crushing weight of redlining, restrictive covenants, de jure segregation and other policies or practices deployed to maintain systems of inequality.

CommunityAgency_quote.jpg

The evolution of a neighborhood does not have to follow a singular, certain path of transformation.

I’m interested in exploring with others the processes and strategies that have historically been enacted to preserve neighborhood identity, authenticity and resident agency while simultaneously embracing the fluidity and continuous development that is at the heart of vibrant communities.

Isn’t displacement avoidable? Can’t we find examples or create circumstances and policies so that development and redevelopment do not have to be synonymous with gentrification?

On May 27, The New York Times published The End of Black Harlem, an article by Michael Henry Adams lamenting the rapid gentrification of a section of NYC once considered the epicenter of black cultural life in America. Adams mentions a conversation he has with a group of neighborhood boys curious about a demonstration chant they hear, "Save Harlem Now!" Adam reflects, "It was painful to realize how even a kid could see in every new building, every historic renovation, every boutique clothing shop—indeed in every tree and every flower in every park improvement—not a life-enhancing benefit, but a harbinger of his own displacement.”

“These are people who, in saying ‘I don’t see color,’ treat the neighborhood like a blank slate. They have no idea how insulting they are being, denying us our heritage and our stake in Harlem’s future. And, far from government intervention to keep us in our homes, houses of worship and schools, to protect buildings emblematic of black history, we see policies like destructive zoning, with false “trickle down” affordability, changes that incentivize yet more gentrification, sure to transfigure our Harlem forever.”
— excerpt, "The End of Black Harlem"
Trumpeter Clark Terry (pictured) walks with his son Rudolph outside the Apollo Theater in 1955. Photo: G. Marshall Wilson/Ebony Collection/AP

Trumpeter Clark Terry (pictured) walks with his son Rudolph outside the Apollo Theater in 1955. Photo: G. Marshall Wilson/Ebony Collection/AP

Adam’s narrative about Harlem in the contemporary moment connects to a long legacy of urban policies which have had deeply felt material, social and financial consequences on people and place. Harlem’s own son, writer James Baldwin, famously stated in 1963 that federal 'Urban Renewal' policies were actually a not-so-thinly veiled practice of 'Negro Removal.' This observation has relevance and potency in the changing urban landscapes of Harlem in New York, Detroit, and Chicago in 2016.

For those of us committed to the dynamism of communities, what case studies can we be pointed to that provide tactics and approaches for resiliency that also include a space for change and variation? To push and mobilize for more equitable cities, people need more options than blight/stagnation on one end and investment/
gentrification on the other end of the spectrum. I look forward to the numerous Making the West Side community conversation programs that JAHHM has planned throughout the year.

— Isis Ferguson, May 2016


RSVP for the Public Convening on Ethical Redevelopment, a free and open public event at which Place Lab will explore and showcase how residents, artists, entrepreneurs, developers, and civic leaders are joining forces in a more equitable process for community revitalization.