Radical Planners & the Revolutionary Imperative
Einat Manoff
I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving weekend,
Please deposit your commentraries on this week's readings:
Radical Planners & the Revolutionary Imperative
Goodman - After the Planners
Smith N - The Revolutionary Imperative
Ward - Streetwork (Parts 01+ 02 )
Looking forward to your thoughts and discussion points,
Einat
bradley brashears
We live in very interesting and challenging times. This week’s readings brought forth the need to develop alternative planning methods to help mitigate the damage that has been done from planning efforts of the past and the clear and present danger of capitalism that has become ever so apparent. “The Revolutionary Imperative” by Neil Smith explores the issues and problems of capitalism and how we are witnessing the downfall of neoliberalism. The worsening economic conditions since the economic crash of recent past has illustrated that it is possible that neoliberalism has run its course and that a new approach is needed to almost everything we have known in our capitalistic society. Smith, as well as Robert Goodman, Colin Ward, and Anthony Fyson, all support the need for radical changes that could be administered through the formation of advocacy planning, citizen participation and community-school educational cooperatives; all of which challenge the current conditions of capitalism that have benefitted mainly the elite few. Smith points out that it is difficult to run a complete and functioning democracy because only a few with the financial resources have the ability to shape and control their environments.
“With the Obama strategy, the optimistic mobilization that swept him to power failed to become a movement, at least in the first year of his administration, and as a result the kinds of policies emitting from his administration emphasized bailing out banks, bankers, and car executives, often providing failed CEO’s with multi-million dollar bonuses and severance packages, while workers suffered concessions and the victims of subprime mortgage corruption were generally faced with foreclosure, propelled back into poverty.” (p.61)
The housing market crash was just a harbinger of things to come. Since 2007 entire economies of major economic powers have been greatly weakened, some (as in the case of Greece) with collapse imminent. The bailout of major corporations was simply the foreshadowing of a larger economic crisis now being played out on a global scale.
“Heavily bound up in financial capital, the Icelandic economy crashed virtually overnight; banks in Britain and the U.S. have been nationalized; Citicorp alone had by early 2009 had received $60 billion in taxpayer money, with another $40 billion of loan guarantee on the table; meanwhile the Spanish bank Santander, broadly immune from the global banking crisis, is buying up smaller banks around the world including the U.S.A.; two of the three largest American auto companies have gone bankrupt, with the union and the U.S. and Canadian governments owning the majority of the restructured companies.” (p.59)
All of this has been on the burden of the hard-working public. No one was there to bail them out, and now it will be up to the very people hit hardest by this economic crisis – the so-called “99%” – to bail out the large corporations and pay the taxes that help reinforce this neoliberal boondoggle.
“… three foundational pillars of capitalism – class relations, private property and competition – creates a mode of social production in which capital accumulation, economic growth with no sense of the social or environmental cost, and outright individual greed are rendered the society’s highest social values.”
A few years later, in 2011, Occupy Wall Street broke out as the “99%” of the population was fed up with corporate greed and unequal distribution of resources, and are demanding that things change. People want to have more control over their futures and not have their lives planned out for them by the ruling class. In our lifetime we have already seen the fall of communism. Could the “fall of capitalism” be that far behind? We need radical planners who can completely upend current systems and replace corporate greed with systems that benefit everyone, not just one percent of the population. Massive restructuring needs to take place in many different realms of society, whether it is in government, community advocacy planning, primary education, and so on, in order to make possible the equal distribution of resources so that everyone can have a fair chance at success in our urban areas.
Bradley
Lea Dyrup
Radical planners
Will the crush of neoliberalism bring forth revolution?
Has the time come, where planning will change focus from economic growth towards quality of life – for everyone?
Is NOW the time where all the critiques of our current planning strategies will have their (well-deserved of course) golden age?
And HOW is it possible to develop planning tools that can take advantage of the current time we are in – the global economic crises?
These are some of the questions I was asking myself, while reading the texts for tomorrow.
Even though Robert Goodmans book “After the Planners” is from 1971 and Colin Ward and Anthony Fysons’ book “Streetwork” is from 1973 they both seem very relevant in the current context of society.
Both books were written after the era of rational planning, which brought highways, displacements and huge profits to developers and industries. To set forth an alternative to the technocratic radical planning with focus on the build environment, they focuses on the people and their everyday life.
Not only does Goodman points out the undemocratic nature of societies based on the capitalistic model, he also calls for change: ”as people concerned about the creation of a better environment, we must see ourselves committed to a movement of radical political change”.
One could say that books from 1971 and 1973 are outdated when speaking of the current planning situation, but I think it is important to stress the fact that both books come up with concrete practical tools on how change is possible. A perspective that is hard to find, in a lot of the current planning theory, which basically agrees on the fact that most of the planning we see today is real estate development planning and not planning for social just and equality. But while they are giving all the right arguments for why change is necessary, they forget to write about how this change is possible in practice. Following Goodman and Ward we need to get planning back to the local streets, making citizen participation and community education the focus of planning.
A more up to date text is Neil Smiths ”The Revolutionary Imperative” from 2010, who is setting forth revolution as an option in the crises of global economy. When reading this, I found it impossible not to think about Occupy Wall Street as the beginning to a growing revolution against the power of capital. Thinking of Occupy Wall Street it is kind of ironic to read: “the very idea of revolution has, in the global North at least, not just fallen out of fashion but removed itself to the infinite horizon of never- never land—excepting of course those historical revolutions such as the American and French”. Maybe the idea of revolution isn’t in never– never land anymore?
Bonus info: Neil Smith will be discussing his book tomorrow evening - if anyone is interested check this out: http://www.nyu.edu/ipk/events/208
Tess Bath
Oh man – I knew I was going to love “Streetwork,” but I didn’t realize just how much. Growing up in the suburbs (I feel as though I’ve been starting all of my sentences with this phrase lately) I spend a lot of my time being frustrated by its astonishing lack of radical/critical education that resulted in the largely apolitical climate I grew up in . While I realize this experience is not unique to the suburbs (and if anything Ward’s text focuses on the urban vs. the rural due to its historic neglect in environmental education), I feel as though the lack of attention to the physical environment there is especially criminal, given the extremely racist, exclusionary and unbelievably recent nature of its trajectory. Consequently, I also spend much of my time fantasizing about going back to Florida, infiltrating the inept education system, (collectively) shaking everyone out of their comatose, and witnessing the suburbs rise up in arms. While I recognize this might not happen in my lifetime, Ward’s text is inspiring and works hard to get at the roots of overwhelming political apathy, in addition to providing accessible alternatives to counter it.
Growing up it never occurred to me to think of my education as anything but innocuous. I attended an arts middle school and high school with ‘liberal’ professors with ‘liberal’ perspectives. It’s only recently that I’ve begun to consider the fact that the structure of my school environment in itself taught me passive acceptance. I was given little to no responsibility for myself (aside from submitting homework), subordinate to a number of authority figures, and working within a framework that had already been established for me – and while the class material was up for discussion, that framework never was. Recognizing the long and short-term flaws of this system Ward promotes a number of alternative methods for fostering an educational environment that promotes active citizens as opposed to passive observers. These include blurring the line between school and community, promoting resourcefulness in seeking out and utilizing “wasted space,” and discussing and practicing relevant, student-directed activities.
Ward also highlights the many obstructions to ‘streetwork,’ often in the form of excessive paperwork and increased anxiety over liability issues. I found this particularly upsetting. The bureaucratic obstacle course debilitates all things spontaneous and most importantly, in my opinion, trust. I recognize that not everyone has time to go in and meet their children’s teachers but it seems ridiculous that that interaction has been replaced by a piece of paper guaranteeing they’re in good hands.
I could go on and on about this text but I’m gushing and I’ll stop. I thought that Neil Smith’s “The Revolutionary Imperative” was such a beautiful complement to “Streetwork” in lamenting the contemporary loss of political imagination that Ward so passionately exercises. Smith traces the waning imagination of alternatives to capitalism by the left under a neoliberal regime. By exposing this tragedy he stresses, and I wholeheartedly agree, how important it is to regain this imagination, entertain the impossible, and exercise one’s ability to envision alternative systems. Repeatedly. The one issue I had with Smith was his criticism of the presumption that we must “first and foremost change the discourse.” While I recognize that radical social change requires much more than this, it seems impossible for revolution to occur without a major awakening to the historic oppressive structures that one might revolt against. It is in this effort Ward’s piece again fits in beautifully. Although the process is long, arduous, and frustrating, you can’t get expect a mass movement if people don’t understand the reasons it’s important.
Unfortunately I left my copy of “After the Planners” at home so I was unable to read it before commentary, but I look forward to discussing it tomorrow!
dave ludwig
academia to arms in the name of creative imagination of new social
structure, and then offers not one building block, puzzle piece, or
picture of how things could be different, let alone a vision for a new
socio-economic system and how it could be brought about. He is thus
guilty of the laziness he invoked in quoting Kierkegaard at the
beginning of the article even though he offers some useful leading
thoughts to build on.
He asserts that too much capital has no social value and a fix to this
has to involve devaluing paper capital. To do this the
producer/worker relationship, the concept of private property, and the
role of competition as the driving economic force must all be
overhauled. In considering how to bring these changes about, two
nuggets of advisory guidance he offers resonate with me and add
plausibility for change in the U.S.:
1) revolution won’t/doesn’t happen with a change in dialogue or
discourse, it happens through action (adds credence to Occupy as a
good start)
2) People will revolt not only if they’re desperate, but also if they
think they’ll win and
3) A total destructuring won’t lead to a cohesive answer to the problem.
Taken together I think these three ideas are a prescription for
action. They lead me to the following ideas:
We don’t give up on representative democracy, but how do we get it
working better? The right accomplished an amazing feat when they
created a new puppet party (tea) and got many representatives elected
into the House. They spent a ton of money on this and it’s troubling
how so many Americans swallowed the story they were sold and voted
against their own interests.
I don’t know how to achieve a similar feat, but I think the answer has
to do with my belief that the majority of voters would like their
interests represented as opposed to those of the corporate elite. To
do this, we need a boost in local political participation, so what
tool/mechanism can we use to bring this about? What’s something that
everyone can do to get radical representatives in place? If our
system isn’t broken, just misused, can’t the action to fix it be more
focused and participatory than protesting? What platform or agenda
would the right representatives represent?
Goodman has great answers to those question in regard to planning.
His rejection of advocacy planning to achieve goals like creating
“vibrancy” through rubbing shoulders of mixed income residents speak
directly to the reluctance and skepticism many planners feel when
engaging in or thinking about advocacy planning. He hits on the
essential characteristic of revolutionary participation which is
localism; somehow empowering local government to arrive at “a local
balance between the size necessary to produce products economically
and the size at which people have an ability to actively participate
in governing themselves”. This type of localism can only come about
through experimentation in new ways to provide necessities such as
food, education, healthcare, etc. Anytime people achieve an new
self-sufficiency in one of these areas, it will allow more
experimentation. Streetwork is one example. Another would be local
collective farming that yielded enough free food to largely alleviate
the need to buy groceries. This would free people to become more
locally involved in any number of ways. This creates a chicken and egg
problem because getting started in experimenting requires some
combination of resources and community organization that doesn’t
currently exist. We need to outline the reasons for and goals of this
type of experimentation and vigorously elect local political
representatives that will make progress in fueling it. At some point,
the Occupy movement will need to spawn a version 2.0 that’s more
focused. This type of neighborhood experimentation toward
self-sufficiency could be the right message to latch onto. It has an
appeal that misled “freedom lovers” might latch onto.
Marc Pearce
Cindy Borrero
Streetwork: The Exploding School
In their book. "Streetwork: The Exploding School" by Colin Ward and Anthony Fison they discuss the fact that there is no school subject regarding environmental education. There are studies about environmental science but it deals with the physical and geographical aspect of our environment. By environmental education, they mean our interaction with our community. The field of environmental studies would be hard to define, an even harder to teach because it can mean different things for different people. Those who would teach it, might be biased towards what they feel is more important.
Teaching outside of the classroom is important because roughly 80% of school kids in England come from an urban background it is useful to help prepare the students for life in their community. However, there is a difference between what the teacher thinks is important to focus on, and what encourages the child. They propose that programs which look at schools as communities are particularly helpful.
There are a variety of reasons why schools don’t practice environmental learning. Reasons include little to no funds, lack of resources, safely and liability, responsibility of large groups of children outside the classroom, and feeling that money used for outings would be better served by purchasing books and other school supplies.
It is true that the streets aren’t such a safe place for children, but the same efforts should be placed on teaching about the streets, as is made on keeping kids off the streets. The streets should be used as an educational resource. There should be legal guidelines implemented so the children are as safe as possible when out in the field with their teachers, including limiting the amount of children per teacher.
When interacting with their environment, students and teachers have different views as to what is stimulating. That is because each experiences the environment in a different way. Where one adult will see an escalator as a means of transportation, a child will probably view it as fun ride, running up while it’s going down and vice versa.
One thing is for certain when it comes to environmental studies and students and that is regarding who is responsible. There needs to be a group effort on the part of the school, parents, the environment, and city planners in order to provide the best outcome for the child. As the years go by, and more urbanization is taking place, there is less resources within the community for children to interact with and explore.
The Revolutionary Imperative
The journal, "The Revolutionary Imperative" by Niel Smith is about revolutions of the past and present. Smith believes we need to take a look at a current revolution, especial in regards to our current economic crisis.
We don’t usually think about revolutions, unless in a historical context. In the past, there is an association of revolutions with violence and turmoil with prevailing social change. However, with our current troubling economy, he thinks we are due for a revolution, but one that will strengthen our country and bring forth crucial social and political change.
Degeneration of current neoliberalism was due to a number of global factors. These factors include the Asian economic crisis, long-term Latin American opposition of ideas proposed by the United States for social, economic, and political change, the anti-globalization movement of the late 90s to early 2000s, the Iraq War, and the economic crisis of recent years.
A revolution is not always a bad thing and should not always be met with resistance. It is clear that things do need to change if we are to survive this predicament and come out stronger on the other side. Change must start with us as citizens and not just the government.
Sara
in capitalism (whether actually or psychologically or both) and a
subsequent disillusionment that makes revolution seem impossible. Yet
he expresses an optimistic view that key elements for a successful
revolution are present. This article and the Goodman piece
collectively place planning in a broader political context. Smith
briefly identifies the architectural consequences of revolution when
describing creative bursts in Bolshevik Russia. Goodman instead
presents examples of interventionist planning that advocates for the
needs and desires of the community.
Where Smith primarily critiques capitalism and identifies the
interrelationships with policies, events, and revolutionary action,
Goodman concentrates on redefining the scale at which power is held.
His communes would create a physical environment that is daring and
responsive to the needs of users. I question, however, whether these
communes can truly have inspired and functional designs without
counterexamples of state- or designer-driven structures to test ideas
and serve as central models for spaces used by wider populations. Is
there room in a more functional architectural model for the artistic
components of architecture? Would the products of any particular
commune be easily interpreted by outsiders (in effect, usable to
them)?
Goodman also relates to Smith by providing examples of effective
advocacy campaigns led by locals. He ventures to adjust the role of
the planner to be an educator and facilitator but, in his description,
only sets weak limits to how marginalized the planner can be. I am
left to question whether Goodman wants planners to instead lead the
revolution by empowering the community to revolt and, in all, that
notion leaves me unsettled. Revolutions lead to unpredictable
circumstances and, as they arise, planners should endeavor to respond
to new conditions but I am not convinced that it is the role of the
planner to incite revolution.
Streetworks provide a specific ideological revolution for the
educational system. Planning and urban phenomena find relevance at
all levels of education, according to Ward. An extension of this idea
was attempted at the BMW Guggenheim Lab this fall where a temporary
outpost of the institution staged a space for engaging people in their
city. That program was physically contained while Ward’s proposal
could use a variety of venues for education. Many logistic and
conceptual hurdles will need to be cleared to implement Ward’s
proposal widely, but he does show that a solid, revolutionary concept
can begin to bend restraining elements to achieve that vision.
On Nov 28, 10:02 pm, Cindy Borrero <cct81...@gmail.com> wrote:
> *Streetwork: The Exploding School*
> *The Revolutionary Imperative*
Samuël Poisson
We can be glad to read texts from the 70’s that are still relevant today : both Goodman and Ward show a vast political imagination, and their idea are still stimulating today. But we may actually worry about this 40 years later relevance when we read it as a sign of the difficulty to think in the world as it has developed since then. Radicalism has been frozen by the shiny years of the neoliberalism. Planning is one of those fields in which radicalism is trying to find a way.
Radical planning means proposing, projecting, but in a way that tries to free itself from the dominant rules.
- First of all, to deconstruct each aspect of the activity, in order to understand how much it is determined by an ideological context. If capitalism and democracy are mutually exclusive, good will won’t be enough to build the latter within the rules of the former.
- Through concrete actions, concrete games, to propose new rules, letting experimentation give them some theoretical shape. Starting from their scale, those rules will shift the general context. These actions should aim at :
o The universal ability to act as a citizen on the creation and modification of the own environment
o Proposing intellectual and political tools that this action supposes. This includes an early field-oriented education, for an approach to environment that would include social and urban aspects.
o Define a more democratic use for professional skills, by throwing off the restraint professional context. (think as society member before thinking as a member of a profession).
o Subvert existing practices. Who defines the rules has de facto an advantage, before any confrontation.
o Allow enough room for physical actions on space, transformations, including those occurring through the presence of bodies (occupy…)
But when we focus on these ideas addressed to the new professional comes the question : where does it start ? How to propose new rules without being so far from all the existing games that one lose any influence ?
A good revolutionist is a living revolutionist, and has to survive in the current world. He has to play with (at least) two set of rules.
Taking our own example of planning student, the practical aspect of it can be hard to imagine. The environing system works as a whole to prevent any possibility of escape. We tend to consider our education as a professional tool, sometimes as an investment. When one buys it, gets into debt for it, it’s already with the idea of “selling” this knowledge later. We are trapped in the economical relationship.
But Goodman’s sentence is a call to something stronger: “we are the client for all our projects, for it is our own society we are affecting through our actions”.
What are the ways out ? “Ne travailez jamais”, Debord says. (never work! http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/1963/never-work.htm). At least, keep a space that do not belong to work and its economical imperatives.
The topicality of texts from the 70’s has also something to do with the end of an era. That is the optimistic aspect of Smith’s article. Whereas the apparent success of neoliberalism made imagination difficult (“I have almost lost the imagination of what a world that isn’t capitalist could look like. And that scares me” (Haraway 1995)), the premices of a crisis are reassuring. It enables to think other realities.
But the crisis alone should not be trust as a certain way of changing the world. We can not only further the crisis and hope for the great day, nor can we only let the discourse evolve to change the world. Still, Smith sees in the crisis of neo liberalism one of the promoting factor of a revolution; revolution that has to be fed with political imagination and living bodies.
Le 28/11/11 13:32, Einat Manoff a écrit :
A.Baruch Tauber
Ward and Fyson point out that urban pupil should not be confined to the classroom, yet this method should be taken -as anything- in perspective - its not the cure for all and doesnt always enhance the lesson. more importantly, according to W, is getting students involved in issues that really relate to them. As a member of the undergrad Urban Studies program, often it is to the discretion of the instructor if and how often the class is taken to the great laboratory of the city (studio work is rare). While I see it as imperative, it can also become superfluous if not fully thought out. But if Ward is making the case for all students, it should be a given for those of urban studies (or as Ward might prefer, urban science?)
Ward mentions that new ways of participatory planning should encourage teachers to involve students more than before. Perhaps what we are experiencing today is a level of interactive learning as result of advances in participitory planning, ie kids can relate to the city as “their” project more than in the 60’s and 70’s.
That is a nice thought, but apparently not in the opinion of Goodman, (Smith) et al. By et al I assume to the dominant voices that have helped shape post-Moses planning, (the non PC Jacobs’ of Planning) particularly in schools such as ours. According to Goodman, the “case against American capitalism” is that the mechanism cannot work without benefiting the few disproportionately. (aka the 1%?) Yet, he points out that the other end of the spectrum, socialist economic systems are not any more responsive to the public because they are “repressive”. In fact, “no political system” can succeed unless it is in touch with man’s innate need for “cooperation and a sense of love and joy in human experience”. Socialism will not create this but allow for this to happen. I agree that in ideology a government that imposes solidarity upon its people will cleanse them from materialistic self- absorption. From a physical/design point of view, the gentrified/”suburbanized” “villages” of lower Manhattan lie in agonizing sanitized barrenness compared to neo-marxist enclaves that preceded them. Yet, I don’t see how the community socialisms of the past have fared any better. To me, (and i’m just a spoiled capitalist), the soviet building-block apartments in the former USSSR or the fallow kibbutzim in isreal scream with the same soullessness because, precisely as Goodman point out, they failed to sustain the spirit of “cooperation and a sense of love and joy in human experience” as much as Mumford suburbs or Woodstock in 69. Once the ideology has rubbed off, the “repressive” human nature will drive the economy. Unfortunately we are witnessing this inevitable erosion today with regards to environmental ethics in popular culture. Is the advantage of socialism over capitalism in its moralistic preference to put ideology before reality?
Somewhere between the two extremes lies a balance. Such as Goodman’s model of neighborhood-scale planning, where “a way of life” is the focus of our production (perhaps a art of the New Urbanist inspiration? I like how G prophetically deflects them on 218) but can it work? I think its interesting to note how Spiro Kostof, in The City Shaped (160), describes Arcosanti, Soleri’s utopian commune/village of “arcology” in Arizona, one day, to be the home of a “classless” society. Yet, from the beginning, hierarchical tensions developed, with newcomers feeling alienated by the “aloof hilltop dwelling” regulars, who “seem to consider themselves upper class citizens.”
Is Western Europe of today or of Goodman’s day the sustainable model for socialist planning?
I think that just as Goodman says that “socialism is not a means towards itself” and cannot function without the altruistic spirit it is meant to inspire, the same applies to capitalism, which like socialism brought the world lots of good along with the bad. Capitalism often seen purely as a means towards making more money, and looking at the state of the world, understandably so. Yet, as seen with environmental initiatives, it can be a tool just as powerful if not more than any other ploy to trick the human mind into believing that a collective good is an individual’s good.
<Abraham Baruch Tauber>
mqu...@hunter.cuny.edu
Radical Planners & the Revolutionary Imperative
The profession of planing has profound effects on how the built environment is
used, perceived by the masses of residents. Yet, the planner's status as expert
prevent him/her from delving into public concerns in a profound way. Goodman
introduces the idea of "just outputs" as the true goal of planning, an outcome
valued by its improvement of the quality of life of residents and not improving
efficiency of production. While discussing alternative design solutions that
challenge the structure of domination, Goodman states that a politically
conscious public have engaged in Guerilla Architecture, direct action to force
existing power structures to address change. These are tactics that respond to
an insular decision-making process, a process where privileged knowledge by a
professional class is valued over that of the individual planned for. That access
to knowledge is key in the articulation of demands for change and the weight
their arguments carry. Planners must help break the dependency on experts in
creating built environments, change the relationship and the dynamic of power
in formulating plans.
A new pedagogical approach to teaching the public about the built environment
can be a more relevant method to engage people to issues of planning and
architecture. Ward's definition of environmental education emphasizes the built
environment as the prime educational resource, acting as an alternative to the
cloistered, bureaucratic system of teaching. I think this is a refreshing approach
in a number of ways: the student is placed in an infinitely more stimulating
environment than a classroom, providing a wealth of "teachable moments." Also,
this may be a positive way to make the curriculum more socially, culturally
competent by taking the close look at all areas of neighborhoods. What is
important to indicate is that this approach of environmental education is
oriented toward addressing problems, applying knowledge to critically engage
local issues.
This shift in educational priorities would entail a profound change in how we
evaluate our educational system, not to mention how we feel about child safety.
But, at least this approach lays out a clear map of how to lead students to
become educated individuals confident in their ability to enact change in the
built environment. To what extent can environmental educators expect to foster
the participation idealized in Arnstein's ladder? Will out-of-classroom
curriculums work in all built environments? at the scale of all educational
institutions?
Mario Quijano
Einat Manoff
minutes to talk about these Time covers.
Class, on another note -
Just to let you know that Professor Lynn McCormick of the Urban Affairs
department will be observing our class today to evaluate my teaching. I
wanted to give you a little notice, but you will have to do nothing
different, just be your usual wonderful selves.
See you soon,
Einat