THE JUST CITY ESSAYS 26 Visions for Urban Equity, Inclusion and Opportunity VOLUME ONE EDITED BY TONI L. GRIFFIN | ARIELLA COHEN | DAVID MADDOX ESSAYS Published by The J.Max Bond Center on Design for theJust City at the Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of New York, Next City and The Nature of Cities ©2015 All rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of The J. Max Bond Center, Next City and The Nature of Cities. Illustrations by Andrea Posada Thank you to the Municipal Art Society of New York for support in the production of this collection. The Just City Essays were produced with funding from the Ford Foundation. TABLE OF CONTENTS 4 Introduction DESIGNING FOR AGENCY Toni L. Griffin, Ariella Cohen 46 Karachi and the Paralysis of Imagination and David Maddox Mahim Maher TEARING DOWN INVISIBLE WALLS 50 Up from the Basement: The Artist and the Making of the Just City 6 Defining the Just City Beyond Black and White Theaster Gates Toni L. Griffin 53 Justice that Serves People, Not Institutions 10 In It Together Mirna D. Goransky Lesley Lokko 55 Resistance, Education and the Collective Will 15 Cape Town Pride; Cape Town Shame Jack Travis Carla Sutherland 18 Urban Spaces and the Mattering of Black Lives Darnell Moore INCLUSIVE GROWTH 21 Ceci n’est pas une pipe: 60 The Case for All-In Cities Angela Glover Blackwell Unpacking Injustice in Paris François Mancebo 63 A Democratic Infrastructure for Johannesburg Benjamin Bradlow REINVIGORATING DEMOCRACY 67 Creating Universal Goals for Universal Growth Betsy Hodges 26 Right to the City for All: A Manifesto for Social Justice in an Urban Century 70 The Long Ride Lorena Zárate Scot T. Spencer 30 How to Build a New Civic Infrastructure 72 Turning Migrant Workers into Citizens in Ben Hecht Urbanizing China Pengfei Xie 33 Turning to the Flip Side Maruxa Cardama 37 A Just City is Inconceivable without a THE BIG DETOX Just Society 79 A City that is Blue, Green and Just All Over Marcelo Lopes de Souza Cecilia P. Herzog 40 Public Imagination, Citizenship and an 82 An Antidote for the Unjust City: Urgent Call for Justice Planning to Stay Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman Mindy Thompson Fullilove 85 Justice from the Ground Up Julie Bargmann ELEVATING PLANNING AND DESIGN 88 Why Design Matters Jason Schupbach 91 Claiming Participation in Urban Planning and Design as a Right P.K. Das 96 Home Grown Justice in a Legacy City Karen Freeman-Wilson EPILOGUE 100 Cities in Imagination David Maddox CONTRIBUTORS Introduction TONI L. GRIFFIN, ARIELLA COHEN AND DAVID MADDOX ver the past decade, there have been numerous conversations about the “livable city,” “green city,” “sustainable city” and, most recently, the “resilient city.” At the same time, today’s headlines—from Ferguson to Baltimore, Paris to Johannesburg—resound with the need for frank dialogue about the Ostructures and processes that affect the quality of life and livelihoods of urban residents. Issues of equity, inclu- sion, race, access and ownership remain unresolved in many communities around the world, even as we begin to address the challenges of affordability, climate change adaptation and resilience. The persistence of injus- tice in the world’s cities—dramatic inequality, unequal environmental burdens and risks and uneven access to opportunity—demands a continued and reinvigorated search for ideas and solutions. Our organizations, the J. Max Bond Center on Design for the Just City at the City College of New York, The Nature of Cities and Next City, have built our respective missions around creating and disseminating knowl- edge, reporting and analysis of the contemporary city. All three organizations offer platforms for thought lead- ers and grassroots activists who are working to identify both aspirational and practical strategies for building livable, sustainable, resilient and just cities. Our shared values brought us together to produce the first volume of The Just City Essays. The outreach to our invited 24 authors began with two straightforward questions: What would a just city look like and what could be the strategies to get there? We raised these questions to architects, mayors, artists, doctors, designers and scholars, philanthropists, eologists, urban planners and community activists. Their responses came to us from 22 cities across five continents and myriad vantages. Each offers a distinct perspective rooted in a particular place or practice. Each is meant as a provocation—a call to action. You will notice common threads as well as notes of dissonance. Just like any urban fabric, heterogeneity reigns. Remember, this project began with questions, not answers. We hope this collection will inspire, and also be read as an invitation to imagine a city where urban justice may still be still unrealized, yet is urgently desired in the dreams of so many. The dialogue is only beginning and much work remains to be done in cities across the world. THE JUST CITY ESSAYS | VOL. 1 TEARING DOWN INVISIBLE WALLS 4 TEARING DOWN INVISIBLE WALLS THE JUST CITY ESSAYS | VOL. 1 5 Defining the Just City Beyond Black and White TONI L. GRIFFIN WHEN I THINK ABOUT THE JUST CITY, IT’S ALWAYS BLACK AND WHITE I was born in Chicago the evening before President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. Growing up on the south side of Chicago meant that on an average day, I rarely saw or interacted with a person who didn’t look like me. All of my basic needs were met on the south side of Chicago—schooling, shopping, summer jobs, recreation and entertainment. My teachers were predominately black, and my class- mates were 98 percent black. This environment did not make me feel isolated, segregated or unusual—I just felt normal. Television was my only reminder that I was a “minority.” While I did not regularly see people who looked like me on TV, this didn’t stop me from deciding at the age of 14 that I wanted to be an architect—just like Mike Brady, patriarch of “The Brady Bunch.” By the time I entered college at the University of Notre Dame—and the field of architecture—my context became the exact opposite. For the first time in my life, I actually felt like a minority. And today, professionally, I remain a minority in my chosen field. I am the only African-American full- time faculty member at the City College of New York’s School of Architecture, and one of less than 300 African- American women to be licensed in the United States. THE JUST CITY ESSAYS | VOL. 1 TEARING DOWN INVISIBLE WALLS 6 MY JUST CITY IS BLACK AND WHITE BECAUSE I GREW UP IN A RACIALLY SEGREGATED CITY I certainly did not realize how much of an impact Chicago’s urban form and spatial patterns would have on my perspective about cities. Nor was I aware of the profound impact that Chicago would have on my interactions with fellow urbanites and the work to which I would come to devote my career. My work in architecture, urban design and urban planning spans several cities in the U.S., including Chicago, New York, Washington, Newark, Detroit and Memphis. All of these cities have similar racial patterns of segregation, and all have similar urban conditions, thanks to the impact of segregation on people and place. I would eventually come to know these urban conditions as the environments of social and spatial injustice. I now simply call them the conditions of urban injustice or justice. I define urban justice as the factors that con- tribute to our economic, human health, civic and cultural well-being, as well as the factors that contribute to the environmental and aesthetic health of the built environment. There are three conditions of urban injustice that I always seem to confront in my work in cities—conditions that began to reach the height of national awareness at the time of my birth in 1960s Chicago. THE FIRST URBAN INJUSTICE CONDITION IS CONCENTRATED POVERTY On the ground, spatial segregation has created pockets of concentrated poverty in our cities that, in turn, have created spatial and social isolation of those cities’ residents. Over multiple generations, this isolation has had a devastating impact on family structures, social networks, educational systems and access to economic opportunity. For example, in Newark, N.J., where I served as the director of planning and community development for newly elected Mayor Cory Booker between 2007 and 2009, nearly 50 percent of all the people living in the central ward of the city lived in poverty, a condition that has persisted since a federal slum clearance boundary was drawn around the same area in 1961 and which suggests multiple generations of concentrated poverty. THE SECOND URBAN INJUSTICE CONDITION IS DISINVESTMENT, CRIME AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF FEAR In the mid-1960s, attempts were made to revitalize the center city through programs such as Model Cities, a federal program that brought funding for redevelopment into communities with the greatest social and physical deterioration. However, the civil unrest of 1967 deepened disinvestment, and the city’s reputation for high crime and political corruption limited its ability to attract widespread capital investment for many decades. At the height of disinvestment and the federal programs designed to reverse this trend, including Model Cities and Urban Renewal, developers and institutions that felt unable to control the disinvested and crime-rid- den environments around their land holdings directed architects to protect them from the adjacent urban decay via windowless recreation centers to keep children safe, elevated and enclosed skywalks from Newark Penn Station to the Gateway Center office campus that removed people from the dangerous streets, and a public community college constructed with uninviting, barrier-like building materials that created a fortress, protecting knowledge from the very public it was situated to serve.