Category: Uncategorized

Inclusion and Neighborhood Resilience

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Catalina Freixas, Mark Abbott, Julie Cooper and Jill Mead

A city cannot be a successful city without a strong economy, without strong neighborhoods, and without a diverse, productive population with opportunities to improve their lives. The last, after all, was — and should still be — the traditional promise of the city.

— Alan Mallach, 2012

Post-industrial cities are characterized by population, economic and infrastructure decline. However, among the neighborhoods in these cities, there is a sample of stable communities that thrive. Resilience is a measure of the sustainability of a community to utilize available resources to respond, withstand, and recover from adverse situations. However, the literature in sustainability typically does not address long-term stability. The research team is particularly interested in understanding how diversity and inclusion contribute to health and vitality, especially in the face of spatial, racial, ethnic, gender, sexual orientation, political, economic, and social transitions.

This research intends to evaluate the long term sustainability of stable neighborhoods in post-industrial cities – cities that have experienced decline during the last generation due to deindustrialization i.e. “shrinking cities” – from the vantage point of design, policy, economics, and social composition. During the summer of 2016, the team conducted a comparative analysis of three neighborhoods in three post-industrial cities in the Midwest: Tower Grove Heights (St. Louis), Indian Village (Detroit) and Over-the-Rhine (Cincinnati). These neighborhoods were selected due to their ability to respond, withstand, and recover from adverse situations. They are not only representative of post-industrial Rust-Belt cities in America, but also of post-industrial cities in the developed world. The researchers evaluated the long-term sustainability of these neighborhoods from the perspective of history, design, planning, policy, demographics, and socio-economic composition.

The team’s research proposes a three-prong approach. The first step comprises a literature review of primary sources on neighborhood resilience in shrinking cities to determine what scholars identify as the variables of sustainability. The second involves an examination of sources of archival data (AD), including spatial analysis through GIS of the neighborhood context as well as explication of key primary and secondary source documents (TA) as suggested per the disciplines involved in this research. The last consists of field visits to the neighborhoods to conduct systematic observations (SO) and key stakeholder interviews (KII) as a means to identify the best planning and design practices that lead to the long-term sustainability of these neighborhoods. We hypothesize that the findings will constitute the framework of a best-practice document and an agenda for action that will enable communities to focus on cultivating these kind of conditions.

The ultimate goal of the project is to identify neighborhood resiliency indicators, and to determine the applicability of using those indicators to shape effective neighborhood planning practices for different contexts. Key findings to date indicate that resilient neighborhoods share the following attributes: accessibility to surrounding communities, active community-based organizations, diversity of housing stock and price points, influx of new generations of urbanites, mixed land use in proximity to a vital commercial strip, racial, ethnic, age, sexual preference, and socio-economic diversity, strong sense of place and community, educational options and walkability. It is expected that the effective implementation of the research into neighborhood plans will eventually redefine them as “metamorphic cities”, cities aimed towards environmental-socio-economic wellbeing of their community.

Mapping LGBTQ St. Louis

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Andrea Friedman, Miranda Rectenwald, Jennifer Moore, Steven Brawley, Sharon Smith, Chris Gordon, Aaron Addison, Ian Darnell, Bob Hansman, and Makiba Foster

How does sexuality divide cities? How do cities organize sexuality? Mapping LGBTQ St. Louis approaches the question of the divided city by centering the experience of sexual and gender minorities in St. Louis. Using GIS mapping to visually document sites of sexual transgression in historical time and space, the project identifies patterns of sexual segregation, analyzes how these reflect, reinforce and reproduce other axes of division, and asks what we can learn about the possibilities of resistance in the urban landscape. The final product—an interactive historical map available to the public via a digital portal on the Olin Library website, which will be launched in March 2017—aims to bring alive the experience of living in a city divided by sexual identity and practice, race, gender, and socioeconomic status.

Focusing on the greater St. Louis region on both sides of the Mississippi River from 1945 to 1992, the project approaches the question of the divided city in two main ways. First, we seek to document how urban spaces enact, consolidate, or challenge segregation between sexual communities. For example, when and how are LGBTQ individuals and institutions confined to spatially and economically marginal urban areas, and when and how do they exceed that confinement? Second, we ask how divisions among sexual and gender outsiders are replicated within, advanced by, or challenged by the built environment. How, for example, can mapping help us to trace the creation of a racially divided LGBTQ “community”? How are gender differences reinforced, or challenged, with the development of distinct gay, lesbian, or transgender spaces and institutions? And how do these patterns change over time? The fifty years after World War II allow us to trace the growth and development of LGBTQ social spaces during a period in which the metropolitan region was undergoing substantial transformations in patterns of racial and socioeconomic segregation. Mapping provides an excellent technology for visualizing how geographies of sexuality, race, class, and gender shift with and against each other in history.

This digital humanities project is a truly collaborative effort, linking scholars, activists, information professionals and student researchers. Proposed by Professor Andrea Friedman in close collaboration with former Washington University librarian Makiba Foster, Mapping LGBTQ St. Louis relies on the work that has already been done by our community partners. The grassroots St. Louis LGBT History Project, founded by Stephen Brawley, has been exploring this history for ten years, and Mapping LGBTQ St. Louis both builds on and contributes to their efforts. The Missouri History Museum is providing access to artifacts and archival collections essential to the documentation of the LGBTQ past, as well as additional resources. Representing Washington University Libraries are Miranda Rectenwald, Curator of Local History, who is serving as Project co-director, and GIS specialists Jennifer Moore and Aaron Addison; Moore is primarily responsible for designing and creating the map. We are also benefitting from the expertise of our consulting partners who focus on the history and politics of the built environment and segregation in St. Louis, Ian Darnell (University of Illinois-Chicago) and Bob Hansman (School of Architecture and Gephardt Institute, Washington University). Darnell led our research team during the summer of 2016. Makiba Foster, now at the Schomburg Library, continues to contribute her extensive knowledge of oral history and the history of race in St. Louis. All of these connections further develop emerging synergies between the St. Louis LGBT History Project, Missouri History Museum, and Washington University Libraries in the recently established St. Louis LGBT Collecting Initiative.

In the six months since Mapping LGBTQ St. Louis began, we have made enormous progress towards documenting a history about which little is known. Mapping requires extensive information about the precise locations of LGBTQ life, and our research team of undergraduate, graduate and recently graduated students has focused on documenting those locations. Working from the data already gathered by our grassroots partners, they have combed through city directories, telephone books, newspapers and newsletters to identify the commercial, organizational, and social spaces in which LGBTQ people gathered, as well as the sites where they experienced discrimination and violence. As the sites of queer life are marked in time and place, we are also researching who used these spaces and how, what the experience of being lesbian, or gay, or transgender, or sexually adventurous meant and how it changed over time. When launched in March 2017, our GIS map will offer a rich description of the history of LGBTQ life in one divided city, illustrating the relationships between distinct forms of spatial segregation while illuminating and contextualizing location-based data with links to photos, archival documents, artifacts, publications, oral histories and short narrative essays. “Mapping” St. Louis LGBTQ history will make it visible in new, engaging, and accessible ways.

Oral Histories of Ferguson

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Clarissa Hayward and Jeffrey McCune

Since August, 2014 "Ferguson" has come to signify racial segregation in the very broad sense in which the Divided City Initiative uses that term. A majority-black community, the town of Ferguson is governed by a nearly all-white power structure. Like neighboring suburbs in North St. Louis County, its poverty and unemployment rates are high relative to other municipalities in the region, while its tax base is weak.

Much attention has been focused on these problems, and rightly so. Oral Histories of Ferguson expands the focus of much of the work being done on segregation and structural racism to consider grassroots political activism aimed at challenging and changing it. The project aims to explore how the activists associated with the Ferguson movement became involved initially; what their goals, strategies, and political identities were at the start, and how they evolved over the course of the year; what events, activities, and resources enabled and encouraged them to make progress toward their goals; what obstacles they faced; and how they dealt with these challenges.

To date, the Oral Histories of Ferguson project has collected seven oral histories, which are in the process of being transcribed.  The goal is to have 25-30 interviewees. The interviews, which have been with key participants in the movement, illustrate its complexity and dynamism.

Noon in the City: The Odunde Festival and the Shaping of South Philadelphia

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Gerald Early, Rosalind Early, Naomi Richardson and Tina Morton

"Noon in the City: The Odunde Festival and the Shaping of South Philadelphia" focuses on the gentrification of South Philadelphia’s historically black 7th and 30th wards. These wards were where blacks settled during the Great Migration, and it was in this part of the city that sociologist W. E. B. DuBois conducted his famous study that resulted in The Philadelphia Negro, published in 1899.

“Noon in the City: The Odunde Festival and the Shaping of South Philadelphia” includes both a book (of the same name) and a 15-minute film project. Both focus on the cultural struggle against the gentrification of South Philadelphia’s historical wards. The project centers on South Philadelphia residents Lois Fernandez and her daughter Oshunbumi Fernandez and their effort to establish the Yoruba festival of Odunde as a cultural marker of black identity in Philadelphia, in order to stake a claim against gentrification.

The book project was developed by Gerald Early and Rosalind Early in collaboration with Lois Fernandez, the Odunde festival founder and Oshunbumi Fernandez, current Odunde Festival organizer. Lois and Oshunbumi also worked with activists and filmmakers Tina Morton and Naomi Richardson to develop the documentary.

The book will focus on the cultural roots of the festival, which is based on the Nigerian Osun Festival in Osogbo, and is one of the most important cultural festivals for Nigeria’s Yoruba population. Rosalind Early and Gerald Early traveled to Nigeria in the summer to witness the festival and research Yoruba culture.

The two will also write about on the translation of the Osun festival into Philadelphia’s Odunde Festival and the community there. In the spring of 2016, Rosalind Early and Gerald Early will travel to Philadelphia to visit the architectural archives at the University of Pennsylvania and examine the papers of Edmund Bacon, Philadelphia’s chief city planner from 1949-1970. The goal is to gain insight into how urban planning shaped the city and how African-Americans responded to that planning historically.

In the meantime, Morton and Richardson have been working on a 15-minute film about Lois Fernandez and her activism in South Philadelphia. When Rosalind and Gerald visit Philadelphia, they will present a panel with Richardson and Morton, reading passages from their book, screening the film, and answering audience questions about where black life belongs in Philadelphia.

Charting the American Bottom

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Jesse Vogler, Angela Miller, Matthew Fluharty, Michael Allen and Andrew Theising

Few regions in the United States exhibit a social and spatial fragmentation as extreme as that of the vast flood plain of the East St. Louis region. As a coherent geographic interval stretching from the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers down to the confluence with the Kaskaskia River, this flood plain — known to geographers and anthropologists as the American Bottom — is site to the social and spatial aspirations of pre-contact Native Americans, 19th-century industrial expansion, 20th-century infrastructural consolidation and 21st-century ecological precocity. Yet, this is a region defined less by its inherent ecological and geographical continuities and more by the industrial patterns that have effectively fractured it into closed communities of extraction, production and displacement.

The American Bottom is a landscape of interruptions and strange adjacencies — but also a living landscape, where sites of the familiar and the extraordinary continue to shape the social and spatial processes of the present. It is a territory where UNESCO heritage sites abut Superfund sites, and where the first African-American incorporated town in the U.S. abuts the site of this country’s most notorious race riot. Through a traveling exhibition, publications and a symposium, this project seeks to tell a political, spatial, social and ecological history of the American Bottom as we theorize a broader landscape of displacement.

One needs only to a run a finger down the length of a map of the Mississippi to begin to uncover the complexity and variousness of this story. Alton was a flashpoint in the abolitionist movement (when the eastern banks of the river meant the difference between freedom and enslavement), the site of the final Lincoln-Douglas debate, and also the birthplace of both Miles Davis and James Earl Ray. A long red line on the ConAgra grain silos marks the height of the 1993 flood that submerged blocks of the city.

Moving south, we find the highest cluster of industrial suburbs in the country: A few include Wood River (built by Standard Oil), Alorton (formerly named Alcoa), Granite City (U.S. Steel) and Sauget (formerly named Monsanto). While these company towns occur in great number, this region also features a number of municipalities that were disincorporated and subsequently razed when industrial owners withdrew. This appears most forcefully in National City, the former home of the National Stockyards; at its peak, this was the site of the largest hog processing facility in the world. All that remains now of National City is the National Stockyards Building and an abandoned playground (another spatial theme across the bottomlands).

These social and economic legacies converge in East St. Louis, perhaps the most misunderstood area in the Midwest. Many of the political and economic challenges to the growth of East St. Louis are decades old, historically embodied in the most violent labor- and race-related riot of the 20th century, when, in 1917, white mobs infiltrated the city and murdered hundreds of its African-American citizens. While the structural causes of the issues facing East St. Louis often go unexamined in the region, the city holds a rich cultural heritage stretching from the emergence of ragtime and jazz, through to modern architecture and innovative community projects sparking new forms of engagement.

As our finger on the map progresses south, we find a transition from rural to urban already underscored by the rural diaspora who populated, and built, the industries and municipalities of places like East St. Louis. These connections stretch across cultures, geographies and centuries. For instance, our finger might trace a line from Brooklyn, the first African-American incorporated town in the U.S., to the Cahokia Mounds, once a city of 40,000 residents and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We might trace a line from the labyrinthine man-made cave system of the Rock City Business Complex (housing both the National Records and Archives Administration and, in the deeper cold storage facilities, the hops for Anheuser-Busch) to Valmeyer, a farming town submerged by the 1993 floods and subsequently rebuilt atop its neighboring bluffs.

Though these points of connection and divergence can be overwhelming, we find that a whole history of American settlement can be told here — through the beliefs, hopes, aspirations and failures of five centuries of civilizations. With the American Bottom project we focus on the specificity of place and storytelling to access what is at stake on a conceptual, historical and local level.

Over the first 12 months of this project, we will reach out to new partners and audiences and deepen our engagement with the region, its people and this cultural landscape. In concert with these collaborations, the project’s focus will turn to the production of publications, recordings, maps and additional events to further connect disciplines, cultures and forms of community practice.

Segregation by Design

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Catalina Freixas, Mark Abbot and Joseph Heathcott

"A city cannot be a successful city without a strong economy, without strong neighborhoods, and without a diverse, productive population with opportunities to improve their lives. The last, after all, was — and should still be — the traditional promise of the city." — Alan Mallach, 20121

“Segregation by Design: A Historical Analysis of the Impact of Planning and Policy in St. Louis” is the title for a new cross-university, transdisciplinary undergraduate seminar to be offered at Washington University in the fall semester of 2016. This transdisciplinary curriculum is aimed at studying segregation in metropolitan St. Louis and preparing students to explore the interplay between design and public policy. Beyond the ways design and public policy have contributed to segregation, the faculty instructors are interested in generating a discussion of the potential that design and public policy have in weakening the physical supports of segregation in American cities.

The development of the seminar is three-pronged, in preparation for the three phases of the course itself. The first part of the course intends to bring together literature about the history of segregation in America with the theoretical writings of architects and designers. Scholars in history and the social sciences such as Kenneth Jackson, Thomas Sugrue, Todd Swanstrom and Colin Gordon have studied the means by which zoning and housing policy have been used as instruments in causing segregation. In the architecture and urban design realm, critics such as Mike Davis and Charles Connersly have argued effectively that everyday features of contemporary urban design have been used to segregate urban Americans and have sought positive social change to reduce all disparities in American life. However, these two bodies of literature on segregation have seldom been brought together to examine the ways policy and design reinforce each other in producing the “Divided City.” The faculty instructors will conduct a survey of literature on segregation to explore avenues in which these two bodies of research can complement each other and will compile a syllabus of challenging reading material from historical and contemporary urban scholarship. To augment these readings, they will enlist scholars from across the region to join the seminar in discussing the role of policy and design have played in making St. Louis one of the most segregated American cities.

The second part of the course will explore ways in which segregation can be partially mitigated through policy and design practices. While segregation is widely viewed as the result of racial, culture and economic disparities, it is often policy and design that give it physical form, entrenching such disparities. Likewise, while policy and design are inadequate in eliminating the roots of segregation, they can produce an environment that can foster change. Approaching segregation from a triple bottom line sustainability (TBLS) comprehensive model, the faculty instructors, with other regional scholars, will evaluate various policy and design best practices to suggest means of producing a more integrated urban environment. By examining these mitigation strategies through the lens of TBLS, students should learn the strengths and weaknesses of such strategies as well as the role policy and design can have in fostering more integrated cities.

The third part of the course, a crucial component, will be planning for the service-learning projects students will undertake as the final assignment of the seminar. The intention is to pair students from Washington University and Harris-Stowe State University in cross-university teams mentored by one design professional and one policy expert. Each team will be assigned a community in metropolitan St. Louis and will prepare a report, including documentation on the dimensions of segregation, analysis on policy and design as causes of segregation, and recommendations of various strategies aiming to mitigate segregation in the community.

The first collaboration of its kind, the seminar intends to address the gap in research between urban studies and design by examining policy through the lens of social, economic and environmental sustainability (TBLS) to understand the physical manifestation of segregation during growth and decline. In addition, it aims to serve as a model for future inter-institutional curricula. In particular, it seeks to activate both universities’ roles within the community, building on the service-learning methodology traditional of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). The ultimate goal is to shape debates on planning, policy and sustainability to address segregation in the coming years.