All posts by Lisa Wong

Project Update # 6

The Future of Community Gardens

In response to our white paper presentation, we were asked why we picked the Melrose Commons for our project. If we look at its history, we can see that it has faced many of the issues that we are seeing today. A core issue with community gardens is that they are being redeveloped without considering the voices of the community. When we looked into the history of the Melrose Commons, we found that when the city was planning for the South Bronx’s redevelopment in the 1980’s and 1990’s, none of the residents of the community were consulted.

In 1991, the Bronx Center Project initiated the start of the Melrose Commons Urban Renewal Plan. This original plan was met with much disapproval from community residents when brought before the public in 1992, as it would displace thousands of current Melrose residents. Community resident, Yolanda Garcia formed the group Nos Quedamos in order to organize the community and keep them informed of planned developments. The group resisted large scale urban renewal plans and worked along with the City Council and consultants in order to shape the plan into something which benefitted the existing community and allowed for further growth. Since then, the Melrose Commons has been awarded praise from the ADPSR, the National Civic Council, and finally the LEED Gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. The ongoing success of the development is what makes it such a great role model for community gardens activists working with the city to achieve favorable outcomes for all parties involved. The development also shows how affordable housing and green spaces can and should be built together, not in opposition to each other.

This lack of political recognition seen here relates to another issue that was pointed out with our white paper, which was why we chose to include the history of NYC’s 1970 fiscal crisis. Throughout history, community gardens have gone through a cycle of being developed as a quick fix for people – particularly the poor – that are lacking food, and then being abandoned when political support dies. The government liked how people were beautifying blighted neighborhoods, so they let them build gardens. However, as soon as the opportunity for redevelopment – which was more financially beneficial for the city – came, they changed their minds. Essentially, the government sees them as expendable when it comes to the City’s plans for redevelopment. They have chosen to ignore the complaints of the people actually in these communities, in favor of drawing in more money.

In our previous update, we discussed the social benefits of community gardens. However, we can look not only at healthier diets, but also at the independence and sense of self that is gained from participating in them. During our presentation on Friday, someone asked us what would motivate low income residents to take part in community gardens when all they need already comes from food stamps. Again, we see an unquantified aspect of community gardens. Similar to how they provide residents with a sense of togetherness and community, they allow those that work in them a chance to work hard for their own food; a sense of responsibility. More tangible forms of responsibility that have sprouted from community gardens are community groups and organizing.

We also expanded more on what we did in class on Monday. We had started off by discussing where gardens fall into in terms of government. In New York City, most of the community gardens are under the jurisdiction of the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation. These gardens were generally formed on city or privately owned vacant lots, and were transferred to the Parks Department for administrative purposes. The Trust for Public Land (TPL) and New York Restoration Project (NYRP) are both private land trusts, and collectively own approximately 25% of the city’s community gardens. The distribution of land ownership within survey respondents is different from actual distribution in a number of ways. For example, NYRP gardens constituted 25% of survey respondents, while only 6% of the responding gardens were owned by the Trust for Public Land. The actual distribution is 11% and 14% respectively.

Community gardens in NYC may also choose to affiliate with any number of greening and gardening organizations, institutions, and agencies. These organizations provide everything from resources and a network to fiscal sponsorship and workshops. They are critical to helping gardeners increase membership, learn new skills, and access free materials. GreenThumb is the branch of the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation that registers community gardens. In return for registering with the city, gardens are identified as gardens instead of vacant lots, and may be eligible to receive resources such as lumber for raised beds and soil. Green Guerillas, GrowNYC, and Just Food work with gardens individually to help build infrastructure like chicken coops, rainwater harvesting systems, pathways, and sometimes help with building membership or community supported agriculture (CSA) programs. Brooklyn GreenBridge and Bronx Green Up are programs of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the New York Botanical Gardens respectively. These programs are enormously supportive with horticultural advice and educational resources. More Gardens! focuses mostly on advocacy and political activism around garden preservation. Most of the agencies, institutions, and organizations provide educational workshops that are open to the public.

Although we have not gotten a response from Ray Figueroa about connecting us to a Melrose Gardens local, we hope to gain a more personal account of how community gardens have helped people’s lives through this. We intend to find out how informed locals are about the situation with community gardens, how they feel about these problems, and how community gardens have affected their lives. Through what we gather from this, we can go about informing the public on community gardens. This will be done on a more formal level with the interview that we already recorded with Ray and more personally through everyday people and their thoughts. Hopefully, this will speak to audiences of all demographics. On another note, we have created the wordpress url for our website, although we have yet to finalize what information will actually go on it.

We also hope to attend an event held by 596 Acres and Public Space Party  named “Gardens Under Threat Ride.” The affair will include physically looking at the gardens that are endangered to be torn down by private developers. Starting from Grand Army Plaza, the group plans to travel through Brooklyn and into Manhattan. The gardens that will be seen include Maple Street, Roger That, Eldert Street, Children’s Magical and Siempre Verde Community Gardens. By visiting these gardens, it provides a humanistic and personal account of how the community actually celebrates these spaces. At each garden, gardeners will offer testimony about the importance of their spaces as vital tools for education, green infrastructure, and support for community development. The mission of the event is to gather more support to make the city recognize the community gardens as park spaces.

Reference:

http://www.maparchitects.com/melrose-commons-timeline/
http://www.plannersnetwork.org/magazine-publications/case-studies-and-working-papers/melrose-commons-a-case-study-for-sustainable-community-design/
http://www.grownyc.org/files/GrowNYC_CommunityGardenReport.pdf

Reading Response #5

The Right to the/Just City

Susan Fainstein argues that planning theory is flawed because it doesn’t take the urban space that it affects into context. Slapping rules and outlines onto a real, complex community doesn’t help the people that live in it. She introduces the ideas of Karl Mannheim, who aimed for an explicit theory in which experts could plan under guidance of the public through elected representatives. He wanted to make things more bureaucratic so that there would be no class-bias. Mannheim spoke of a new type of planning that was based on comprehensiveness. This sounded ideal, but did not take into account the differing priorities and views of people or organizations. Comprehensiveness is a system in which everyone’s values can be organized based on importance and planning can work based on those levels. I feel that such a clearly laid out system is impossible because the types of priorities that people have vary too much. Not only that, but there are some priorities like a sense of community that are hard to quantify and rank. This leads me to the approach that my group is taking with community gardens. Although gardens certainly provide food for the poor, lower crime rates, and increase property values, they also allow for a sense of community. There are some concepts that are too ambiguous and not quantifiable to simply be placed on a scale of importance.

Reminiscent of Jane Jacobs, Mannheim surmises that planning must be viewed more specifically, as the conditions in a certain area affect the people’s values. However, he is different from other communicative theorists because he still expects educated elites to lead this.

The next section talks about a call for democratic control that arose from the fact the people making policies didn’t understand the people that those policies were affecting. He introduces Sherry Anderson’s argument, which is that the results of planning will be more equal if the poor have more input in forming policies. This relates to DeRienzo’s idea of institutions allowing a community to have strength. Without the proper means or education, it is very difficult to make seemingly small matters heard. This concept also relates to David Harvey’s belief that we should aim for more democratic control over how surplus is created and used. Gradually, we see more privatization and power falling into the hands of the rich. Despite living in the city, the poor do not have a right to the city. Through this, we see the poor are at a disadvantage both in terms of institutions and government.

 

Discussion: How do we rank the importance of ambiguous concepts like a ‘sense of community’ in comparison to statistics like the amount of money a development project requires or makes?

Reading Response #4

Community, Part 2: Organizing and Planning

Harold DeRienzo’s chapter works on a technical level to identify what communities are and what problems they have. Essentially he defines communities, which relates to Alice O’Connors chapter in The Community Development Reader. O’Connor pointed out that community development is a term that holds various meanings. The interventions and federal policies that it encompasses are not comprehensive and coherent, thus leading to failing programs that do not learn from past mistakes. DeRienzo emphasizes that in order to tackle an issue, we must have a clear, precise understanding of what that issue means. If we are not specific about what we are doing, then it can harm the very people we are trying to help. In defining what communities are, he lays to foundation for addressing O’Connor’s issue with the notorious ambiguity of community development.

From his definitions, we sum that communities exist through common issues or circumstances that a group of people hold, economic interdependence and the capacity to tackle common issues through institutions. In the case of the poor, although the first two components seem reachable, the last one – which he calls collective capacity – does not. To be able to accomplish goals, they have to have control over their institutions. They simply do not have to resources, education, or skill to do so. This idea of power coming from within a community, rather than from external forces relates to Tom Angotti’s critique of the U.S. rational-comprehensive planning model. This is a very orthodox approach that essentially gives professional planners all the power and is too grand to take into account all the differences people and neighborhoods have. Without taking all this in, developers are not specific enough and thus harm the people of these communities. This specificity is seen in advocacy planning – the basis for progressive planning – that Angotti discusses later in the chapter. This type of planning addresses minority interests, it is not just one big plan for a whole city. It also encourages people within neighborhoods to create their own plans.

DeRienzo also introduces two models of community development: the Static Enhancement Model and the Transformative Model. The former does not fix problems; it only helps residents on a surface level by better equipping them to tackle problems. The latter is preferable as it acknowledges that people can make a change and not just subject to the changes of life. Again, this relates to O’Connor’s chapter because it aims at tackling issues at their core in order to prevent unnecessary and harmful attempts from reoccurring. The orthodox model mentioned in the Angotti chapter seems to be a Static Enhancement Model. It tries to use physical answers like public housing problems to solve the problem of urban poverty. This does little to tackle the fact that the poor are poor and only helps a select few. The point that Paul Davidoff made in his “Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning,” addresses this issue and how urban planning focuses on physical solutions too much. We should look at things from all perspectives: physical, economic, and social.

Discussion Question:  If professional planners have too much power and the poor are too under-equipped (money, education) to cultivate power, how should planning power be distributed?

Reading Response #3

Community, Part 1: Development and Control

James DeFilippis starts the first chapter off by explaining that communities shouldn’t exist today. This is because according to social theorists, capital urbanization disrupts smaller-scaled, interdependent relations that communities are made of. Over time, cities would become so complex that there would be no need for these smaller-scale units, or communities. However, communities undeniably exist and do matter because even in big cities, people act collectively – as a community – to battle things that threaten them. He explains that communities are important because they produce the labor power that capitalism needs to survive. Community is the realms for which workers take care of the health needs and childrearing that are necessary to keep the workforce alive. At a more basic level, communities are the places we live in. Even if there are billions of possibilities that are accessible via the Internet or social networks, communities are were people eat and go to school.

In the next chapter, Alice O’Connor points out that there is no concrete definition of community development. It seems that it is made of programs that keep failing and reappearing without learning from past mistakes. There is little that community development can do to tackle problems because they keeps repeating itself. She introduces the idea of policy contradictions between small-scale interventions and large-scale public policies. Today, this is seen in the way community-based interventions have been undermined by neoliberal policies. She criticizes the government for their policies that encourage the decline of poor communities, their inadequate efforts to save them and their cluelessness as to way they fail so often. Despite numerous place-based strategies, there is little effect because our nation generally looks at economic norms, not particular communities. It takes too much time and money to try to improve these communities that won’t provide them any profit.

Since the ghetto uprisings 1960’s the government has provided aid for poor neighborhoods as an easy way to mitigate any tensions. However, this is just a quick fix that doesn’t solve anything. This tendency to look at norms and take issues on at a surface level relates to last week’s Samuel Stein article about inclusionary zoning. The government thinks that because housing is priced below or around an Area Median Income (that does not actually target the area they are trying to redevelop), communities will somehow be better off.

The last trend that she tackles is that of race. Race is an issue in community development policy. Although these policies do not explicitly target certain races, it is obvious that they will harm poorer communities, thus harming minorities. Yet the government is blind to such problems and in the ever-progressive America. Today, we can clearly see this through the neighborhoods of Harlem that are being targeted for redevelopment.

Discussion Question: If there are trends throughout history that stunt community development, why do we keep following them? Is there a clear way to define community development so that instead of conflicting interests, there will be progress?

Reading Reponse #2

The Capital of Capital, Part 2

Scott Larson discusses the threat that New York City faces because they are slipping when it comes to dominance in the global economy and because of its need to improve sustainability because of increasing population. To ward this off, the Bloomberg administration introduced the agenda of building big and fast like Robert Moses, while still taking into consideration all the diversity and community that Jane Jacobs stood for. The idea seems very idealistic and convoluted. Although the city talks big, it is actually private developers that control the redevelopment of New York City. What they can do is provide the framework for development through zoning. The city created incentive zoning initiatives that led to developers creating public amenities so that they could build higher buildings. Often, these amenities were inadequate and were created simply for the purpose of keeping up pretenses. In the end, it comes down to business. These policies that were supposedly geared toward community and the public good were gilded.

Larson mentions that Seymour Mandelbaum argues that a way of bringing together the opposing perspectives of Jacobs and Moses is by combining select aspects of them into a story that vaguely makes sense. There is a theme of misinformation throughout the reading that is evident in Samuel Stein’s article as well. When he explains how inclusionary zoning would actually destroy more affordable housing than it creates, he laments that it would still be considered an achievement. This is because new housing is easily visible, whereas those that are displaced are not. This leads me to question: How much harm did the inclusionary zoning under Bloomberg’s administration cause?

Stein’s stance against inclusionary housing and his explanation of how it does more harm than good are clear, but I would like clarification as to how the loopholes in the city’s rent laws can be closed as easily as they were made. He states that the city does know how to create affordable housing, but they simply do not have the political will to. On the other hand, Amanda Burden from the Larson text states that all they can do is provide the framework for development and wait for developers to shape the city.

Discussion Question: Does the city have the means to implement all the public housing and rent laws that Stein speaks of? How greatly would this affect the city politically and economically? Is the city’s unwillingness reasonable?

Reading Response #1

Roots of Community Planning

It was interesting to see the similarities in the views America had of African Americans throughout the years. The Tom Angotti text starts off with a quote by Frederick Douglas that explains how during the 1800’s Black slaves represented the lowliest of conditions among modern laborers. In the Root Shock article, Fullilove explains that in the late 20th century slum areas were viewed as stains that had to be removed. To a lesser extent, but still true today, she also states that the white community’s knowledge of the ghetto community was based on stereotypes. They judged what they did not know.

Intriguingly, during the first part of the 20th century, although African Americans were generally not upper class, they had formed communities and accomplished something. There was a sense of culture as arts and institutions began to flourish. More importantly, there was a sense of community – people could depend on each other, laugh with each other, have a sense of pride over who they were as a people. This made me question what constitutes a good neighborhood. Although money will always be an issue, the sense of community that was seen in Roanoke, Virginia is quite different from the individualistic approaches that many urban cities have today.

Instead of helping these blossoming communities flourish, urban renewal kicked its people out of their homes, scattered them, and left them struggling alone. I see history repeating itself with the very controversial gentrification that has been going on in Harlem and the displacement of longtime residents. Once again, people feel that they are losing their culture and their sense of belonging. The Root Shock article also offers a more human look at what the displacement that comes with urban renewal does to communities and individuals.

Although America has made progress in the fight against racial stigma, stereotypes about African Americans living in squalor because they are lazy are still prevalent. When we look at the story of David Jenkins and the people of Roanoke, Virginia, we see that this is not the case. What can we do to tackle the stigma that the poor or homeless are the way they are because of individual shortcomings?

Angotti discusses black rage that occurred during the 1700s because of their “continuing exclusion from parts of the city and constant displacement to the periphery.”
Discussion Question: Is the displacement of African Americans due to urban renewal a type of modern-day exclusion from parts of the city?