On the outskirts of some of the world’s largest cities exists an informal way of life. It’s unlike any other. To most, these spaces are defined as slums, shantytowns, or favelas. The list of stigmatized words associated with these settlements is never ending. Regardless of their delineation, the sheer mention of their existence conjures up an endless sea of negative associations—rampant crime, dismal infrastructure, impoverished communities, filth, and a severe lack of education. Yet the reality is not as simple as all that. While our assumptions are not wholly dishonest, they are wildly deceptive.

Heliopolis, the largest favela in Sao Paulo, grew out of a need for proximity to the amenities that the city had to offer. When this informal settlement was first established in the 1940s, the demand for it was low, thus the population was much smaller and much more spread out than it is today. Over time, as Sao Paulo expanded so did the desire to be situated within its reach. But housing within the urban area was not affordable to a large number of low-income residents. So they settled down on un-owned and non-delineated land areas, like Heliopolis. Today, the densely lined streets of this three-quarter square-mile favela, is home to roughly 100,000 inhabitants.

When we first see Heliopolis, all of the stereotypes we could imagine about an informal settlement are at play—the tin roofs are rusting, the streets are sprawling and unorganized, brick buildings are crumbling, and crime is rampant. There is no denying that these characteristics are a reality. What surprises us, however, is that an average home within the perimeter of Heliopolis costs $100,000 USD. As a matter of fact, one of the most prestigious hospitals in Sao Paulo sits along the edge of Heliopolis. Read more…

Last week community planner Ron Shiffman received the 2012 Jane Jacobs Medal for Lifetime Leadership, presented by the Rockefeller Foundation and administered by the Municipal Art Society. Ron’s acceptance speech, read parts of it below, evokes the “pivotal role” Jacobs played for Ron and urbanists everywhere, “in forging the way we think about people, cities, and the economy.”—SSS

The position I filled at Pratt fifty years ago was ironically created because of Jane’s advocacy against a Pratt planning proposal for an area of Brooklyn now known as Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens, and Cobble Hill—an action I will forever be grateful for. Brooklyn benefitted because a well intentioned, but misguided, plan was defeated and I benefitted because I got the job opportunity of a lifetime.

I had the honor to meet Jane a few times, almost always with my good friend Roberta Gratz. In the early 70’s, Roberta and I took Jane on a tour of the South Bronx where my colleagues and I were working with residents committed to rebuilding their communities [the Peoples Development Corporation and Banana Kelly among them]. Jane immediately sensed that this, not planned shrinkage as proposed by some, was the way to rebuild our vulnerable communities.

One of Jane’s greatest attributes was to give voice to those who struggled to preserve and revitalize their community, an effort [that] many others were engaged in [including] Elsie Richardson, Don Benjamin in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Jane understood the struggle of groups like Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn whose opposition to the misuse of eminent domain and the abuse of power by some pitted them against the some of the city’s most powerful entities. She inspired journalists like Norm Oder to put voice to their struggles. Read more…

Portrait of Neil McEachern, photo by Vasco Roma

“There are many, many really cool things about the house,” said Neil McEachern, retired Detroit public school principal, who has lived in Lafayette Park for 20 years. He is describing life at Lafayette Park, and how the residents there have turned this modern blank slate housing into their much-loved homes. “Lafayette Park was built on land that once was a densely settled, working-class, African-American neighborhood called Black Bottom. Classified as a ’slum’ by the city of Detroit in the 1940s, Black Bottom was razed and left vacant until the mid-1950s, when a citizens’ group led by labor activist Walther Reuther succeeded in attracting Chicago developer Herbert Greenwald to the project. Greenwald brought in Mies van der Rohe to serve as architect, and Mies in turn brought his colleagues urban planner Ludwig Hilberseimer and landscape architect Alfred Caldwell on board. Hilberseimer’s plan for the area called for rerouting or blocking off some of the streets to create a superblock, on which would be built housing, a large park, an elementary school, playgrounds and space for retail. By the early 1960s many elements of this plan had been completed,” notes the introduction to the recently released Metropolis Book, Thanks for the view, Mr. Mies: Lafayette Park Detroit, edited by Danielle Aubert, Lana Cavar, and Natasha Chandani. There are hundreds of stories that create the human texture of this special place. Here, excerpted from the book, is the story of one long time resident, Neil Mceachern.

We have been trying to get a sense of how this neighborhood came about and what was here before. It’s unusual to have an urban renewal project like this, where a large area of land in the middle of a city was cleared and an entirely new neighborhood was established. I always like to recognize the people who came before us in this area of Detroit now known as Lafayette Park. Before 1701 it was the home of the Huron, Ottowa and Potawatomi Indians. Then, after the arrival of Cadillac, this land east of the fort was divided into ribbon farms — narrow strips that started at the river and continued far inland. [1] Many of the streets still retain the names of those early farm families: Rivard, Chene, St. Aubin, Joseph Campau and so on. Then, as the city expanded, the farms were broken up and the area became home to many German families. Many of the old German churches still line the Gratiot corridor — Trinity Lutheran, St. John’s/St. Luke’s, St. Joseph’s, for example. Many of the side streets along Gratiot have German names because they were built out during this period. Then we get to post–World War II and the beginnings of what is Lafayette Park. Generally, “urban renewal” in this country meant tearing down big areas where poor people lived and building new housing. That’s basically what happened here. Black Bottom was home to a large part of Detroit’s black community at the time and also to the city’s emerging Syrian community. It was a very poor area. Mostly it was rentals — little wood houses. It was torn down as part of a plan to keep middle-class people living in downtown Detroit.

Was this area always considered part of downtown Detroit? By the time Lafayette Park was built it was on the edge of downtown. If you stand outside when there aren’t any leaves on the trees you can see the big buildings of downtown. You can see the Renaissance Center from my living room. We’re within walking distance of the Central Business District.

So was this on the west edge of Black Bottom? I don’t really know that Black Bottom had an actual defined boundary. Hastings Street was where the Chrysler Freeway is now, and that was the commercial street where the bars and restaurants and barbershops and stores were.

Top, a nighttime view of artwork hanging inside Neil McEachern’s unit, photo by Vasco Roma; above, a wall with prints at his house, photo by Daniel Aubert

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While evolution’s natural selection is about competing individuals, a broader perspective on our response to built environments, another set of genetic preparations for survival – another set of innate pleasures – is seen in the ways we mate and settle in communities.  Both the biology and practical survival benefits are compelling – cohesive family groups, strength-in-numbers, extended expertise gained by learning from each other, trading, collaborating and specializing – and we are powerfully motivated to merge our competitive interests into a cooperating population when we can find like-minded people.

Look again at the choice of a “good home.”  For those who can choose, it may well be on high ground, overlooking water and set in parkland.  But making choices based on limited resources, we most often live in clusters – compounds, hamlets, villages, towns, gated or not – where the comfort of refuge is in the presence of neighbors, and security is found behind a protective “wall” of social contracts – customs, laws, and patrols.

It’s a way we’ve been prepared to transcend the in-born human limitations that frustrate competitive success.  We volunteer to compromise our hard-earned independence of action – often enthusiastically – as we join in larger and more powerful alliances – friendships, a team, a community, a culture or ideology.  And those connections, like our connections to nature, tend to draw their power from the spiritual experience – the sense of entering into, belonging to – something larger than our own day-to-day material world.  We sense ourselves joining in time cycles that exceed our life, and the ultimate reward comes from surrendering to a super-natural ally and feeling our living essence achieve a form of immortality.

The significance of the commitment, submerging our own identity, what we are, into a group, can be read in the quick, often violent emotions evoked by – and the willingness to die for – such concepts as turf, ghetto, comrades, and fatherland and by the anxiety of personal separation or exclusion from the “refuge” of a group. These can be – they have been – life-or-death issues.  And forms of hospitality – of sharing food and warmth – are one of the defining customs of a family or a culture. Further, the most admired virtues in many societies are self-sacrifice, loyalty, and courage – deciding to overrule our other survival instincts on behalf of justice, fairness, “duty” owed to others – or instantaneously, without thinking, responding to people in distress.

The underlying biology is in the mix of hormones stirred first by an initial encounter and then validated by repetition. Natural selection has made us a gregarious species, and while we respond to a threat with the well-known “fight-or-flight” impulses – aggression or fear – we may instead, in the same instant, detect a level of warmth or welcome. We’re prepared for the nuanced, often involuntary messages we receive from faces, body language, words, and voices to trigger a different body chemistry, one that induces a “tend-and-befriend” openness, curiosity, empathy and, ultimately, altruism.

We are quick to search out and detect capabilities and competence in potential allies and mates; we want to experience the pleasures of trust, of aligning our feelings and beliefs with theirs, and the sense of bonding outside ourselves.  And while the ease and intensity of person-to-person connections – the chemistry – varies from gene pool to gene pool, introverts and extroverts, and with gender and age, we all tend to mirror – to attune ourselves to – each other’s feelings and behavior. The result is the kind of emotional contagion that underlies both person-to-person empathy and the behavior of crowds or mobs. In other words, our brain networks – its structure – can be shaped by what other people do around us.

“Water, food, and spiritual security – the working and symbolic
crossroads for a cluster of alliances.”

Relationships

In practice, social relationships are our primary “environment.”  We are born into them.  They are part of our identity and shape an experience of the places we build in two important ways.  First, in the constant overload of received information we tend to single out and give first priority to social information. And the resulting pleasure or anxiety of person-to-person connections is often the strongest emotion feeding our responses.  It may be an ephemeral interaction between people and a place – in rituals, trade, sports, or public promenading – or more permanent, like selecting the refuge of a home in a neighborhood of allies and the prospect out onto a reassuring village street.

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Valencia’s Green River, Photography by Brian Phelps.

Bold ideas are easy, implementing them is hard. This is particularly true as cities around the world want to use their landscape infrastructure to address the issues they face. How can interventions be woven into the existing urban fabric? Beyond simply mustering the financial resources or political will, one must seek opportunities to carefully insert or adapt landscape systems to the constraints of established urban communities. New York’s High Line, Atlanta’s Beltline, and Madrid’s RIO project all relied on abandoned or superseded rail or highway infrastructure to thread linear landscapes through the hearts of old cities. Valencia, on the other hand, relied on a crisis, and in the words of Rahm Emanuel, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

In 1957, Valencia experienced a devastating flood that forever changed the city’s relationship with the Turia River. Nearly three quarters of the city was inundated by floodwater and over 60 people lost their lives. The following year, the city embraced a plan to divert the river around its western outskirts to the Mediterranean Sea.

1957 Flood in Valencia: Photograph extracted from PereDrak’s Valencia Slideshow.

Re-routing the City’s River..

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