Imagining a Better Block: Five Points, Denver

Posted by Dean Saitta on May 19, 2013
Denver, New Urbanism / No Comments

A week ago the Better Block project came to the Five Points neighborhood in Denver. Five Points is one of the city’s oldest and most colorful areas—both literally and figuratively.

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“Imagine a Great Community” (D. Saitta)

Five Points is a historically black neighborhood.  With a vibrant jazz and black culture scene it became known in the 1930s as the “Harlem of the West.”  The last half of the 20th century brought economic ups and downs—mostly downs.  In 2009 an effort to invigorate the local business economy  began with formation of the Five Points Business District.  A light rail line was established.  Coffee shops—what else?—were opened.  The Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library had opened a few years earlier as a way to preserve the area’s rich history.  Today the neighborhood’s old residences—which include a mix of mansions, row houses, and bungalows that bear testimony to the longstanding economic diversity of the area—are being re-habbed and new apartments are being constructed.

"Downtown" Five Points. The Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library is at left-center; Light Rail line is to the right (D. Saitta)

“Downtown” Five Points. The Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library is at left-center. Sonny Lawson Park is to the left. The light rail line is to the right (D. Saitta)

The neighborhood’s Sonny Lawson Park and adjacent baseball field are also being spruced up. Patty Calhoun at Westword locates the park and ball field in Five Points history:

Baseball has always been big in this part of Five Points; in On the Road, Jack Kerouac describes going to a game on Welton Street one night, among “all humanity, the lot.” The park at 24th and Welton streets was the first ball field in Denver to host Negro League games. And on August 9, 1972, it became the first park in the city dedicated to an African American: Sonny Lawson. Lawson was a Denver native who started the Radio Pharmacy at 2601 Welton Street and ran it for more than fifty years; he was also the district executive for the Democratic Party in east Denver for more than two dozen years.

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Ball Field at Sonny Lawson Park. Lawson Park is in background left. New apartments are in background right (D. Saitta)

Not surprisingly, the improvements begun in 2009 have ushered in significant demographic change. Today the black population is greatly reduced, down to 15 percent compared to 33% in 2009. The white population is up to 57 percent from only 9% in 2009. Latinos come in at around 23%.

The Denver Post has the Better Block story as well as a photo gallery.  Below are some other pictures of the Better Block event, including the white boards that solicited citizen suggestions for neighborhood improvement. Citizens suggest a farmer’s market, new street side seating (represented by hay bales in the pictures), food trucks (24th Street is the perfect place for them), a kid-friendly water fountain, and more street art.  At the same time, there are critics. One person suggests—not without reason—that the concept of Better Block is “elitist.”  Another suggests that the light rail line is actually keeping people from using Sonny Lawson Park, thereby serving as a de facto gate (in her Westword piece Patty Calhoun notes that Kerouac’s ball field had, until renovations began earlier this year, been surrounded by a twenty foot high fence and padlocked gate—something that Calhoun suggests is similarly non-conducive to “building a better block”).  Someone urges NO GENTRIFICATION in big block letters.  That ship seems to have already sailed, but it may not be too late to bring it back to port. Only time will tell.

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Food Trucks on 24th Street (D. Saitta)

Street art and Vendors (D. Saitta)

24th Street Art and Vendors (D. Saitta)

Seating Area (D. Saitta)

Makeshift Seating Area (D. Saitta)

Welton Street Light Rail. Entrance to Sonny Lawson Park is to the left (D. Saitta)

Welton Street Light Rail. Entrance to Sonny Lawson Park is to the lower left (D. Saitta)

Citizen Comments (D. Saitta)

Citizen Comments (D. Saitta)

"No Gentrification!!" (D. Saitta)

“No Gentrification!!” (D. Saitta)

 

If a City Existed in Ancient America Would Historians Notice?

Posted by Dean Saitta on May 11, 2013
General, Urban Studies / No Comments

Apparently not, according to Michael E. Smith in a review of the new Oxford Handbook of Cities in World History over at his blog Wide Urban World.  Smith argues—rightfully—that cities developed in many areas of Central and South America well before the time of the European conquest. And, that these indigenous urbanisms were substantial enough in their form, geographical reach, and cultural impact to warrant chapter-length treatment in any comprehensive compendium of cities in world history (if we understand “history” to include the entire time period of human existence on the planet and not just time periods for which we have written records). Yet, they go largely unrecognized and unappreciated by urban historians.

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Monks Mound, Cahokia

An argument like Smith’s can also be made for North America. If Mesoamerica is Mars to urban historians then North America is Neptune—a place that lies even further beyond the orbit of world urbanism. As previously discussed on this blog (as well as by Smith himself), North America has good examples of both near-urban and fully-urban phenomena.  The ancient city of Cahokia (dating roughly AD 1100-1200) in the Mississippi Valley got some run recently in the pages of Science magazine with a consequent mention in Atlantic Cities.  This sprawling metropolis of huge earthen mounds and clearly differentiated public space attracted tens of thousands of people and created an impact felt hundreds of kilometers away.  The Mesoamerican archaeologist John Clark is quoted in the Science article as saying that if you found Cahokia in the Mayan lowlands its urban status would not be in doubt; indeed, “it would be a top 10 of all Mesoamerican cities.”  And, as reported in a Science sidebar, even earlier mound building cultures of the  lower Mississippi Valley may have had a role in actually shaping the origins and development of the great Central American civilizations described by Smith.

In short, for Smith urban history

…covers the entire world, through time from the earliest cities to the present. If we really want to comprehend cities and urbanism, a broad perspective is essential. Archaeologists have long appreciated the value of an inclusive comparative framework, and scholars of contemporary urbanization are starting to look to ancient and pre-modern cities as a source of ideas to better understand cities and their problems today and in the future.

This goes for me too, and probably John Clark as well. Smith suggests that scholars of “world history” are not yet clued into what we can learn about urbanism from the cities of ancient America.  They’d be well-advised to get a clue if they’re interested in better understanding the city’s role in imperial expansion, its virtues as a socially integrating and culturally creative force, and its limitations as a sustainable form of human settlement.

How Many Rules Are There For “Smarter” Smart Growth?

Posted by Dean Saitta on May 05, 2013
Intercultural City, New Urbanism, Placemaking / No Comments

Bill Adams identifies ten rules that incorporate some of the original Smart Growth Principles while punching up those that urge greater respect for the character, identity, and established planning processes of an existing community.  He also adds a “Bonus” 11th rule which is to preserve and enhance the existing density and urban fabric.

Responding to Adams, Kaid Benfield says there are 15 rules. These include Adams’ 10 plus another 5 that are about greening urban buildings and infrastructure and designing for age and family friendliness. Like Adams, Benfield adds a Bonus 16th rule:

Pursue communities suitable for a diversity of incomes, housing types, ethnicities, and old/new residents. That’s the future of America; surely it should also be the future of smart growth.

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Smart Growth (Credit: Maryland Department of Natural Resources)

 Of the 20 commentators on Benfield’s piece David W. Goldberg hits the nail squarely on the head:

Kaid, thank you for adding 16, though I would like to see it as #1. Every day I am surprised by how long it takes my planner colleagues to get around to talking about people… When we planners are at our best, we’re placing people and place together. Smarter, Smart growth matters because OUR lives depend on it.  A set of updated rules that did this might begin with “Communities where diverse households of all ages, types, culture and incomes call home, and have access to the resources they need to lead fulfilled lives, and share in the benefits of growth.”

Mr. Goldberg has it exactly right.  Diversity must become more than a “bonus” bullet point, or an add-on, or an afterthought. It should be Priority #1. And maybe it’s the only “smarter smart growth” rule that matters because the others have become so well-rehearsed and even—no pun intended—pedestrian.   They fail to directly address today’s and tomorrow’s most compelling demographic reality which is the growing ethnic diversity of urban populations.

To make headway in meeting this challenge we should problematize that which is held constant or taken-for-granted by both Adams and Benfield. Specifically, the concepts of “community” and “neighborhood identity.”   These are more complicated entities than most planners—and even most “community” members—think.  At least that’s my experience from watching the planner-developer-citizen dynamic at 9th and Colorado here in Denver.  Previously on this blog I’ve channeled the geographer David Harvey’s classic statement about the rhetoric of community that’s used by some planners and developers to justify a particular kind of “urban village” development.  The same can be said for those who frame smart growth in terms that emphasize a community’s “character and identity”:

Community has always meant different things to different people…the idea attracts, drawing support from marginalized ethnic groups, impoverished and embattled working-class populations…as well as from middle- and upper-class nostalgics who view it as a civilized form of real estate development encompassing sidewalk cafés, pedestrian precincts, and Laura Ashley shops.  The darker side of this communitarianism remains unstated: from the very earliest phases of massive urbanization through industrialization, “the spirit of community” has been held as an antidote to any threat of social disorder, class war, and revolutionary violence. “Community” has ever been one of the key sites of social control and surveillance, bordering on overt social repression. Well-founded communities often exclude, define themselves against others, erect all sorts of keep-out signs (if not tangible walls)… “Racism, ethnic chauvinism, and class devaluation…grow partly from the desire for community” such that “the positive identification of some groups is often achieved by first defining other groups as the other, the devalued semi-human.” As a consequence, community has often been a barrier to rather than facilitator of progressive social change… All those things that make cities so exciting–the unexpected, the conflicts, the excitement of exploring the urban unknown–will be tightly controlled and screened out with big signs that say “no deviant behavior acceptable here.”

Planners, architects, neighborhood associations, city leaders and others must start  attending to the underclasses who are left out of discussions of any kind of growth, smart or otherwise. These folks are silent and/or invisible because they usually don’t have the time or means to participate in the “community” conversation.  Moreover, they are not ordinarily targeted by official outreach efforts. It’s almost certain, however, that the urban underclasses desire better jobs, quality affordable housing, amenities that include value shopping alternatives, a variety of transportation choices, and perhaps other things that so far are known only to them.  It’s a good bet that our marginalized communities would also value a bit more variety in the design of private and public built spaces, as well as more flexibility to use these spaces in keeping with different cultural values and needs .

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Credit: Partners in Salford

In short, if Smarter Smart Growth Rule #1 (after Goldberg) is Pursue communities where diverse households of all ages, types, culture and incomes call home, and have access to the resources they need to lead fulfilled lives, and share in the benefits of growth, then “Bonus” Smarter Smart Growth Rule #2 (after Saitta) is Pursue conversations about the private and public built environments of communities that are socially and culturally inclusive. Lessons on how to do this are available if the purview becomes much more global and intercultural.

Is Anything Learned From the Kotkin-Florida Throw Down?

Posted by Dean Saitta on April 21, 2013
Intercultural City, New Urbanism, Placemaking, Urban Studies / No Comments
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Richard Florida and Joel Kotkin

Now that the dust has apparently settled from the exchange in The Daily Beast (Kotkin’s opening salvo is here and Florida’s response is here) it’s useful to ask what’s been learned.  I think the short answer is “not much.”  These sorts of confrontations usually generate more heat than light.  Both authors have passionate critics and loyal defenders.  Robert Steuteville at Better! Cities & Towns rushed to Florida’s defense before the ink on Kotkin’s essay was dry:

Do educated professionals contribute to the economy, to the tax base, to jobs, to the educational system? If the answer is yes, then an influx of the “creative class” does indeed help the entire city and offer some benefit, directly or indirectly, to most of the citizens.  How about the amenities that attract the creative class? Are they worth investing in and do they benefit a broad swath of the public? These amenities include: walkability, transit, culture, quality public spaces, historical architecture, high-end jobs, education, connection to nature, and housing in walkable neighborhoods. The answer, again, is yes, yes, yes.

On the other side, Jamaal Green at Sustainable Cities Collective wasn’t going to dignify the exchange by commenting on it.  But he couldn’t resist a piece in Rustwire suggesting that the attacks on Florida are “overblown and insidious.”  Here’s Green on the “amenities” question and Rustwire’s claim that the interests of the poor and of the “gentrifiers” are aligned more than one might think:

Frankly, this argument is pure neoliberal, trickle-down economics. Thirty years of local, state and federal policies that have favored the interests of economic and political elites have shown us that simply assuming that the success of an elite group will help non-elites is wrong. Amenity-based development, “placemaking” projects, the varied accoutrements of the sustainable city like farmers markets and bike infrastructure, the intense redevelopment of central cities, the conversion of industrial land, and any other array of city or regional policy decisions and priorities are NOT value neutral or apolitical and have a disparate impact on city populations… The way many of these policies have been rolled out in American cities have seeded and exacerbated displacement, gentrification, housing affordability crises, and increased income inequality. To say that the interests of “creatives” and the poor or communities of color are one and the same implies an overlap that in many cities simply does not exist. There are legitimate trade-off decisions and real winners and losers when it comes to policy and planning decisions and we should honestly interrogate the disparate impacts of amenity-based planning strategies instead of effacing the real conflicts and decisions that undergird creative class policy.

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A few other quotes from Kotkin’s and Florida’s interlocutors at The Daily Beast capture a bit more of the third party mood and suggest that patience for both men is wearing thin:

 “Jasperinboston” goes after Kotkin thusly:

It seems to me Kotkin…has of late become something of a shrill, reverse parody of Florida….Maybe the latter’s claims about the creative class are sometimes exaggerated.  But Kotkin writes as if we’ve seen ZERO improvement in the position of America’s cities…Kotkin seems to blend his often insightful observations with large-ish dollops of hippie-punching and resentment, and an overemphasis on the hipster phenomenon. But not everybody who trades in suburban living for life in an urban core does so in order to party with long-sideburned PBR drinkers. Clearly the amenities and lower crime available in many of today’s cities are highly appealing. And then there’s simply the shorter commutes for those lucky enough to walk to work… I mean, for all the growth in jobs found in suburban office parks, the urban cores of America’s cities are still home to vast numbers of  (often very high-paying) jobs in areas like banking/finance, business services, government, publishing, architecture/design, academia, medicine/medical research, tourism hospitality, etc. Simply living near one’s job is, again, appealing to many people. Also, by all accounts much of the boom in urban living is driven by empty nesters — so it’s not just young, in-their-prime knowledge workers who are driving the phenomenon. Anyway, at the end of the day perception drives reality, and indeed becomes reality. And increasingly for better or worse the perception influencing the decisions of consumers, businesses and elected officials is that city life is desirable, and advantageous. I think Kotkin’s fighting a losing battle.

Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Williamsburg, Brooklyn: Forbes Best Hipster Neighborhood #3

“QueensArt” offers this about Florida:

New York, especially creative class poster child Brooklyn, is hemorrhaging economic and racial diversity. The fact is that regardless of professed political beliefs, the effect of the so-called creative class is to make a place whiter and richer. It’s gentrification with city resources accelerating the exile of whole segments of its citizens, in favor of attracting upper class settlers. Without cities enacting policies that balance the needs of the wealthy with the working and middle classes, creative class policies are nothing more than an act of contempt of a city against its own people. In the end, this will historically be viewed as destructive on the same level as red-lining and Robert Moses.

Michael E. Smith goes after both of them and suggests that maybe these aren’t the guys we should be listening to:

It is interesting that Richard Florida chooses to counter Joel Kotkin by personal attacks and critiques of things that were not part of Kotkin’s article. And he ignores the critiques of his creative class theory by urban scholars (e.g. Jamie Peck) cited by Kotkin. On the other hand, Kotkin ignores many aspects of Florida’s argument. But then these two are cultural entrepreneurs and not scholars, and they make their points in popular books and internet journalism, not peer-reviewed scholarly papers. I’d be more interested to hear what Edward Glaeser and other scholars of contemporary urbanism have to say about the views of both writers.

LoHi Denver: Forbes Top Hipster Neighborhood #17

LoHi Denver: Forbes Best Hipster Neighborhood #17

 “Barabbas” is even more pointed:

Joel Kotkin and Richard Florida are both irrelevant. Kotkin’s little fetish for suburban sprawl and nuclear families is an obviously failed experiment if households have to commute. It’s amazing that Kotkin can’t figure that out while he resides in the North Hollywood area. But cities are also a relic of the industrial past. Whatever economy of scale can be achieved with urban density is quickly erased by housing scarcity issues. Why do cities need to cluster population anyway?…The effects of the digital revolution are unclear beyond the fact that it has rendered many traditional occupations obsolete as well as the necessity of clustering population in cities.  It would be more interesting, though less profitable, to prophecy the emergence of resource-based organic communities throughout these magnificent United States of America. We have the technology and we have the indomitable spirit of the American people. The genius of America is the cultivation of genius. Kotkin and Florida are shills. The painful residue of the intellectual class rendered irrelevant by technological innovation. The demise of capitalism from within, exactly as Schumpeter predicted…

These, as well as the many dozens of snarkier comments on both sides, suggest that there’s little more to this “debate” than entertainment value.  At the end of his essay—and perhaps to his credit—Florida seeks to re-direct the conversation:

Enough already with this tired and divisive debate about families versus hipsters, cities versus suburbs. We know that cities and skills power growth and we know that we’re facing real divides and real inequalities. Let’s get on with the critical task of drafting the new social compact that our urban age requires. Now that’s a debate worth having.

Agreed. Florida’s proposed new social or creative compact is wide-ranging and has its virtues.  But other urbanists whose work I’ve highlighted on this blog—Jamaal Green, Richey Piiparinen, Neeraj Mehta—are doing much more to advance the placemaking conversation.  Aaron Renn and Susie Cagle ain’t bad either.  Theirs are the voices most worth listening to.

Ludlow Tent City Featured on PBS’s “Colorado Experience”

Posted by Dean Saitta on April 19, 2013
Intercultural City / No Comments

Actually, it’s a program about the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, but readers of this blog know that I’m interested in the 1913-14 striker’s camp for what it can tell us about “tactical” urban planning in a multicultural society.  It might sound like a stretch to think that we can learn anything relevant for contemporary urban planning from excavations at a 200 tent, 1200 person striker’s camp located on a bit of windswept Colorado prairie.  However, this is how archaeologists have to think if they’re to wring as much contemporary relevance as they can out of their work.  Even granting the significant scale differences between Ludlow and, say, Denver, socially integrative principles are socially integrative principles no matter what the settlement scale.  How those principles shaped the built environment at a culturally diverse community like Ludlow under very challenging political and economic conditions is, in my view, a fascinating research question.  We have a long way to go to clarify principles of intercultural planning and design at the tent city given that only 1% of the area has been excavated.  But I’m still betting that there’s a whole lot more to learn beyond what’s reported elsewhere on this blog.  Click on this image of the tent city for the Colorado Experience broadcast:

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On a related note, today I was at the state capitol to witness Governor John Hickenlooper’s signing of  an Executive Order creating the Ludlow Centennial Commemoration Commission, of which I’m a member.  The signing formally kicks off a year of state-wide events–lectures, exhibits, interactive performances, and lots of other stuff–commemorating the 100th anniversary of the conflict that changed the course of American labor history.  The Executive Order is here:

Denver Urbanisms, Big and Small

Posted by Dean Saitta on April 11, 2013
Denver, Placemaking / No Comments

The big stuff is covered by a recent article in the journal Cities by geographers Keith Ratner of Salem State University and Andy Goetz of the University of Denver.  Ratner and Goetz provide a comprehensive look at transit oriented development (TOD) in Denver.  Eric Jaffe at Atlantic Cities summarizes some of their key findings, including documentation of a roughly 20 year trend of increasing population density in Denver’s urban core and, in the last 10 years, significant increases in residential, retail and office growth around new transit stations. Jaffe also suggests that TOD in Denver is changing the “character” of the city.  However, I’m not so sure about that. Urban land use and form is one thing; urban character is quite another. Character depends in large part on the kind and quality of available public space, its capacity for supporting different kinds of cultural activities, and the ethnic and class mix of the people who use it.  At present Denver is just as challenged as any other city where the character of its public spaces is concerned.

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Residential TOD, Louisiana & Pearl Street Station, Denver (D. Saitta)

Character building is the stuff of small urbanism.  The same week that Atlantic Cities reported on Denver’s TOD a new website dealing with tactical urbanism in Denver made its appearance.  Tactical Urbanism Here will, according to Steve Chester and collaborator Michelle Pyle, catalogue and map local, do-it-yourself interventions to show how small-scale change can have big impacts on the cityscape.  Examples of such interventions have been the subjects of previous posts on this blog, like ciclovías and food trucks. Coincidentally, around the time that Denver’s new tactical urbanism blog was launched two visiting speakers in the University of Colorado-Denver’s College of Architecture and Planning spring 2013 lecture series also broached the topic.  Candy Chang gave a great summary of her artistic interventions in multiple cities at home and abroad. This included the “Before I Die…” installation that currently occupies some space in Denver’s Civic Center Park.  Equally compelling was a talk by Terry Schwarz of Kent State University’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative.  Ms. Schwarz offered a nice overview of various “pop-up” projects designed to promote development and engage the public in that struggling post-industrial city.

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“Before I Die I Want To…” Installation, Colfax & Bannock Streets, Civic Center Park, Denver (D. Saitta)

The urban space artistry and ad hoc urbanism of Chang and Schwarz, respectively, are inspiring. I certainly think there’s something to the small stuff if it prompts citizens to think about their built environment in new ways and if it opens our eyes to new development possibilities.  The key challenge for tactical urbanism is sustainability; i.e., whether citizens, developers, and civic leaders can effectively collaborate to make permanent change in a way that’s sensitive to, and informed by, a broad cross-section of community desires.  In responding to a question about whether her work had practical as well as philosophical value Chang noted that real estate developers have used the results of her famous New Orleans “I Wish This Was…” project to make common cause with citizen activists.  But, as Schwarz’s talk made clear, all too often the feel-good fixes are fleeting or end up producing more gentrification.

The main point here is that Denver is becoming a city to watch as concerns both big and small urbanism. Eric Jaffe suggests that Denver has the potential to become “a  working model for other cities to emulate.”  I agree, but there’s a lot of work to do.  As Jaffe notes (drawing on Ratner and Goetz), over 75% of people in the greater Denver metro area still commute to work by driving alone.  Self-sufficiency (and self-interest) also rules on the local scale, if the behavior of citizens, developers, and city councilpersons involved with the very important infill project that we’re chronicling at 9th and Colorado is any indication.  This project could have used Chang’s wonderfully democratic “I Wish This Was…” treatment as part of its community outreach stage instead of relying on methods guaranteed to narrow public participation.  Schwarz’s ideas about how parking garages, pedestrian bridges, and other elements of the built environment can be activated to produce more and better social interaction might still come in handy once the project’s design plan is finalized.  Many other ideas are percolating out there.  Minimally, Denver’s realization of its potential to serve as a working model for other cities will require more imaginative design work on multiple scales, better solicitation of broad-based citizen input, some economic risk-taking, and the willingness to learn from little experiments in Cleveland, New Orleans, and elsewhere.

Balancing Green and Brown in Urban Design

Posted by Dean Saitta on March 22, 2013
Intercultural City, Placemaking, Sustainability / No Comments

My title is that of a public lecture I gave the other day at the Aurora History Museum. My first speaking visit to the Aurora museum was about underground archaeology at the Ludlow Tent City; this one was about “above ground” archaeology in Denver and its suburbs.

Aurora History Museum (D. Saitta)

Aurora History Museum (D. Saitta)

The lecture was my first opportunity to present, to a group of citizens, some ideas about what Denver area urban planners and architects might consider when designing for environmental and cultural sustainability.  The slide show (posted to the Presentations page of this website) draws on the Intercultural City ethos that informs many of the essays on this blog. It also synthesizes observations made by students conducting original fieldwork for my Culture and The City course.

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Denver Viewed from Red Rocks State Park (D. Saitta)

The lunchtime audience of “brown-bagging” seniors and folks on lunch break from local offices was engaged and animated. They appreciated the idea of designing public spaces to accommodate cultural diversity, even if this meant sacrificing serene, manicured, leafy parks and squares for the messy multi-functionality of “hard plazas” (like the one in Barcelona featured  in the slide show).  They seemed to like the idea that parking lots are not always visual blights and can be important mechanisms for sustaining informal urban economies.  They agreed that the Great Walmart War at the 9th and Colorado infill site in central Denver tragically derailed a potentially fruitful conversation about how corporations and citizens can make common cause to create better and more sustainable urban places.

In short, it was a lively and enjoyable event that reminded me why I love getting out of the ivory tower and into public arenas where you can learn from, and be inspired by, fellow citizens.

A Meditation on Universities, Interdisciplinary Teaching, and Sustainability Studies

Posted by Dean Saitta on March 03, 2013
Sustainability, Urban Studies / 1 Comment

Like many institutions of higher learning, the University of Denver is committing resources to greening our campus and encouraging teaching and research on sustainability. We have a Sustainability Council, a Sustainability Minor, and a nascent Center for Sustainability. Because of my interest in urban sustainability—and to mark the 100th post of this humble blog—I thought I’d reflect a bit on what’s happening on my campus and where we’re going.

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The catalyst for this essay was a recent panel discussion about sustainability initiatives on campus. Sponsored by the Sustainability Council, the event kicked off a series of cross-curricular dialogues about sustainability-focused teaching and research at DU. The panelists were from a variety of traditional academic units and professional schools (e.g., Law, Social Work, and International Studies).  The goal was to encourage discussion across disciplines and identify cross-cutting themes for future events, given sustainability’s inherently interdisciplinary character.

The event was both inspiring and depressing. Inspiring, because of the good work on sustainability that’s taking place within the academic units (e.g., on human-animal connections, business ethics and sustainability, global health). Depressing, because a common note struck by speakers and audience members alike is how hard it is to do substantive interdisciplinary team-teaching (i.e., something more than the typical dog-and-pony show) about any topic across academic units at DU.  Indeed, this was the main takeaway message of the event. The obstacles are structural, relating to the demands that individual units make on their faculty but also—perhaps more importantly—to the system for crediting team-teaching across units. Several participants noted that faculty with interdisciplinary teaching interests have to work in the “interstices” of what, at DU, is a very traditional academic structure.  This certainly can produce some good results, as the panelists demonstrated.  But a scattershot approach is no substitute for a broader institutional commitment that would better value this work and perhaps make DU more competitive in attracting top-flight faculty and students having interests in sustainability.

Academic territoriality is another serious obstacle.  Several years ago my colleagues within the arts, humanities and social sciences sought to create an Environmental Studies program.  They had a fully-justified proposal, courses ready and waiting, and participation pledges from faculty in a critical mass of departments. But the proposal was squashed because academic deans feared competition that would draw off students from the already established Environmental Sciences program. We’re trying again this year to get something going in the area of Environmental Humanities or Eco-Humanities.  However, the ancient survival impulse to claim and protect turf is apparently still alive and well on campus.  Last year DU’s Department of Geography received approval to change its name to the Department of Geography and The Environment.  It’s not clear how this was accomplished; it could be that all it took was submission of a self-interested request to the university’s Board of Trustees, a governing body that’s un-populated by professional scholars. At any rate, this is astonishing stuff because I thought we were beyond seeing the “The Environment” as an object of study to be owned by particular academic departments and divisions.  It also runs counter to the widespread recognition that sustainability—as something that’s intimately wrapped up with “The Environment”—is an inherently interdisciplinary concept. Anthropologists sometimes get territorial about the study of “Culture”, but I think we’re smart enough to realize that “Culture” is a complex phenomenon on which multiple disciplines can shed bright light.  “The Environment” is similarly complex, beginning with the fact that it is cognized and used differently depending on cultural context and history.  Any comprehensive understanding of human-environment relationships and, certainly, any effort to specify sustainable “best practices” for managing human-environment relationships requires exposure to theories and methods that span the natural sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities.

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Phoenix: A Model of Unsustainable Urbanism?

Promotion and tenure criteria can also impede the development of interdisciplinary teaching and research. Like many  institutions, a “star” mentality rules at DU, with the single-authored monograph and peer-reviewed journal article serving as coin of the realm.  The quest for star status can produce a certain insularity.  Over the last 25 years I’ve seen some very fine collaborative scholars and scientists leave the university because they ran afoul of the star system for evaluating faculty talent (for a particularly egregious case, see here). Others have left because of academic climate issues, like the particularly talented ecologist who, at a York University (Toronto) workshop on comparative urbanism in 2008, riveted a roomful of participants with a discourse on the importance of wildlife corridors to sustainable urban environments.  Stories like these relate to the challenge of building a faculty for 21st century interdisciplinary work on sustainability.  I’m not convinced that my institution knows how to meet that challenge, nor thought very much about it. Having star academics (whatever that means) in the fold is important, but so too is having the team-players who, because of their presence, make the whole much greater than the sum of its parts.  And it seems that holism and balance in all areas of academic life is what any institution looking to gain street cred in the area of sustainability should be aspiring to achieve.

Even the structure of the curriculum itself can hamper efforts to teach about sustainability.  One place in DU’s curriculum where team-teaching about sustainability might flourish is our Common (General Education) Curriculum.  The “Advanced Seminar” piece of that curriculum invites interdisciplinary and experimental courses.   However, the established requirement for these upper-level courses is that they be writing intensive.  This can work against courses with sustainability themes that might be better taught with pedagogies that are field or lab intensive like, say, a course on urban permaculture.

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Salt Lake City: The Next Big Thing for Modeling Sustainable Urbanism?

The parting shot to the Sustainability Council’s panel  discussion was a comment from one participant who declared that DU is positioned to do some “amazing stuff” in the area of sustainability.  I completely agree, but I don’t see how we can do this stuff without some financial and academic restructuring.  How hard can it be to produce a budgetary and credit-allocation model that actively supports interdisciplinary team-teaching across the traditional units and the professional schools?  Or, to structure a curriculum that allows pedagogy—whether writing-intensive, field-intensive, lab-intensive, performance-intensive, or some other intensive—to follow subject matter and course goals rather than being stipulated a priori?  Or, to combine programs with sustainability emphases—environmental science, eco-humanities, urban studies–under a single comprehensive umbrella?  We don’t have to go so far as to create a separate School of Sustainability Studies like they have at Arizona State University, although the ASU model of academic structure is producing some really interesting teaching, research, and public outreach initiatives. Something along the lines of the University of Utah’s program in Environmental and Sustainability Studies would do.  This program brings together scientific, humanistic, historical, and cross-cultural approaches to understanding the human-nature relationship. However, it’s not clear whether the University of Utah is doing better than any other institution in supporting interdisciplinary team-teaching or building a faculty for 21st century work on sustainability.

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Denver: A Natural Laboratory for Evaluating Models of Sustainable Urbanism

It’s probably not a coincidence that western cities provide the geographical setting for this progressive sustainability work.  Phoenix is a favorite poster child for unsustainable urbanism.  But that makes it an exquisite natural laboratory for thinking about, and testing, ideas about how to do things differently.  Salt Lake City is currently poised to get some run as a model of urban sustainability given that the Congress for the New Urbanism meets there later this year.  If some CNU leaders have their way, we could soon be talking up the 21st century relevance of 19th century Mormon town planning.  Denver has accumulated plenty of credibility as a place to watch for trying out different approaches to creating sustainable urbanism.  It‘s a shame that Denver’s university is not leveraging our faculty talent and unique location to create the amazing program in sustainability studies that, given a little structural and paradigmatic change, lies well within our reach.

Urban Imaginaries, American Infill, and Intercultural Place-Making

Posted by Dean Saitta on February 27, 2013
Uncategorized / No Comments

The papers presented at last year’s “Contours of The City” Conference held in Bologna, Italy are being prepared for publication. I’ve posted my paper on New Urbanist infill developments in Denver to the Papers page of this website.  It’s also available here.

Stapleton's Crescent Flats and Public Green, looking toward 29th Avenue (Dean Saitta)

Stapleton’s Crescent Flats and Public Green, looking toward 29th Avenue (D. Saitta)

Honoring an Archaeology of Tactical Urbanism

Posted by Dean Saitta on February 12, 2013
Intercultural City / No Comments

In a previous post on this blog I described a bit of  our archaeological research at the Ludlow “Tent City,” a 1913-1914 coal miner’s strike camp of 200 tents and about 1200 people in southeastern Colorado.  The relevance of this work to the topic of intercultural urbanism was established in the following way:

…there was no apparent ethnic segregation of families within the colony… Based on the stratigraphic positioning of artifacts within cellars dug beneath the tents it appears that colony residents attempted to forge solidarity through the everyday use of certain shared items of material culture. For example, use of plainware ceramics seems to have been preferred over finely decorated Victorian teawares, as the latter would have signaled different social statuses and/or social-climbing ambitions.  In other words, strikers sought in their daily practices to emphasize a shared working class identity.

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Ludlow Tent Colony, Street Level View (Denver Public Library, Western History Collection)

In addition to the evidence apparently suggesting that different ethnic groups were living cheek-by-jowl, “tactical urbanism” is also evidenced by the fact that

…tents were arranged  to maximize security and impede surveillance of the interior by passers-by, especially coal company officials and professional strikebreakers.  A concerted effort was made to present a “civilized” face to the outside world as a way to combat early 20th century racist stereotypes about immigrants as unclean, ignorant, and naturally violent.  The tent city as portrayed in historical documents and photographs evince concerns for health, cleanliness, family, community, and civic order.

Materially, these concerns were reflected by formal street signage, tent numbering, and  prominent display of the medical and community tents.  Spatially organizing the community with both external and internal factors in mind—i.e., attending to both security and sociability—contributed to a surprisingly long-lived and effective strike.

The archaeological work at Ludlow helped win National Historic Landmark status for the site.  The icing on that particular cake came last week when History Colorado bestowed a Stephen H. Hart Award for Historic Preservation on the University of Denver’s  Department of Anthropology and our partners the National Park Service and the United Mine Workers of America.  Here’s an excerpt from the award program text:

History Colorado is proud to honor the Department of Anthropology at the University of Denver for their efforts at the Ludlow Tent Colony site in southern Colorado. During the late 1800s, the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad wanted a local steel source for their growing narrow gauge railroad system. By 1892, their various subsidiaries merged to form the Colorado Fuel and Iron Corporation, known as CF&I. Throughout most of the 20th century, CF&I was Colorado’s largest employer and the center of various labor and management disputes.

One of the most notorious incidents occurred at a tent colony occupied by striking workers, approximately 20 miles north of Trinidad, near the town of Ludlow. Tensions between labor and CF&I led to a prolonged strike in 1913 and 1914. On April 20, 1914, two women and eleven children died in a tent cellar when Colorado militia, battling with striking miners, set fire to the tent. Including the eight miners who were killed, the tragic events of the day resulted in 19 deaths. The Colorado Coal Field Wars are considered to be one of the most important events in American labor history. It is estimated that almost 70 people lost their lives in the Coal Field Wars.

The Ludlow Tent Colony Site was studied by archaeologists from 1997 to 2002…Between 1997 and 2005, the State Historical Fund awarded eight grants totaling almost $850,000 to the University of Denver’s Department of Anthropology to survey, test, excavate, analyze artifacts, and create interpretive displays and materials. The project yielded a wealth of knowledge about the physical nature of the site as well as what camp life was like during the strike… On January 16, 2009, the Ludlow Tent Colony Site was designated a National Historic Landmark by the National Park Service. Much of the information used to argue for the site’s national significance was gained from the archaeological investigations.

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Although the settlement tactics employed at Ludlow are not the kind that would draw immediate interest  from contemporary urbanists, they’re something that scholars dedicated to a comparative archaeology of urbanism (e.g., here) might find relevant.  So too might contemporary tactical urbanists having an interest in building the inclusive city.  To reprise the money quote from an earlier post about archaeology’s relevance to intercultural city-building:

… archaeology tells us that at least a few ancient cities were very successful in harnessing diversity’s advantages.  Today…we can use little tactics of habitat to accomplish the same goals. Housing can be designed in ways that better integrate marginalized and disenfranchised groups into community.  Preserved historic buildings can be turned into low-income housing instead of upscale lofts.  The hated (at least within New Urbanist planning circles) surface parking lot can be strategically located to help promote and sustain informal urban economies that, more often than not, have a minority ethnic flavor.  We can recognize and defend an aesthetic right to the city.  We can better democratize access to public space, markets and other spaces of day-to-day exchange. A variety of strategies for reclaiming urban space can be found within Tactical and Everyday urbanism.  Other spatial tactics and strategies for harnessing diversity’s advantages likely await discovery in the ancient [and, we might add, recent historical] urban world. 

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Hart Award Recipients for Ludlow Tent Colony Work

The partners in the work at Ludlow are of course gratified by the Hart Award honor, albeit for different reasons.  NPS can be gratified by the fact that their excellent work in spearheading the NHL nomination has added a rare “shadowed ground” to America’s commemorative landscape.  The UMWA can be gratified that federal and state recognition has finally been given to one of trade unionism’s most hallowed and sacred grounds. I’m personally gratified that historical archaeology—up until recently a pursuit that was considered little more than a “handmaiden” to written history—made a critical difference in establishing the Ludlow Colony’s national significance. This helps enhance archaeology’s potential to contribute to other areas of human endeavor—like, say, city-building. Today’s intercultural city theorists, community activists, and tactical urbanists might take note of that.

 

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