THE GREAT WHITE WHALE IS BLACK

An exhibition of work spanning five decades by Painter/Architect Tony Candido

Through a selection of work spanning over the past five decades, Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture Professor and Painter/Architect Tony Candido presents his visionary idea of the interplay between humanity and the contemporary environment and what the future of architecture could be in the exhibition The Great White Whale Is Black (dates: 2/2-3/13, reception 2/5). After studying under Mies van der Rohe and working with I.M. Pei, Candido decided in 1957 to work independently in his painting studio, where he continues today. The exhibition focuses on Candido’s calligraphic brush and ink paintings and drawings, which have been an important part of his output since1967. The Great White Whale Is Black, a bold expression of one man’s life vision, illustrates Candido’s commitment to art and architecture, and includes the following works selected by Candido:

Cable Cities- visionary paintings and drawings of broad sweeping structures which he views as part of the geography, and through which we can regain our landscape;

Asahikawa Heads- large calligraphic brush and ink heads, which will be on view for the first time in the U.S. (previously shown: International Design Forum, Japan in 1988);

Abstract Brush Strokes- for Candido, the brush stroke is the concrete formative element through which a reality far greater than the apparent is realized;

Double Images- paintings and drawings motivated by Candido’s sense of what he sees as the duality in man’s mind of nature and the abstract.

A selection of student designs for the Urban Farm, a project which Candido conceived and introduced at The Cooper Union in 1998, will be part of the exhibition.

Tony Candido received his Bachelor of Architecture from IIT under the directorship of Mies van der Rohe and training in City Planning under the directorship of Ludwig Hilberseimer. He made the first design for Konrad Wachsmann’s Air Force Hangar’s longitudinal elevation under Wachsmann’s supervision. He was an Architectural Designer with I.M. Pei from 1954-57 and amongst other projects, designed a single support 180-foot diameter steel and glass structure – a first. Candido also made a major contribution to the design of the U.S. Pavilion for Expo ‘70 by Davis and Brody Architects and went to Japan in 1969 to supervise its design and construction.

Exhibition on view: February 2- March 13, 2010
Opening Reception: Friday, February 5, 2010, 6-8 pm
Gallery Hours: Monday-Friday 1-7 pm, Saturday 12-5pm
Gallery closed: February 12 – 15, 2010

Free and open to the public.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: 212.353.4220, www.cooper.edu, architecture@cooper.edu

The contemporary ruin—in all its various incarnations across the spectrum (from the abandoned auto factories in Michigan to the World Trade Center’s footprint in NYC, from Saddam Hussein’s elegant compounds in Baghdad—that have since been converted into temporary barracks for the U.S. military—to the vacant half-built towers in Dubai or the one billion squatters around the world who inhabit recycled ruins, just to name a few) hints at spatial configurations of power that, in one way or another, offer a kind of forensic evidence not only of neoliberalization’s false claim of flattening the playing field of economic opportunity around the world, but also of the ongoing failures in our social and political institutions themselves which have adopted a strategy of secrecy and deception in order to wage not just a War on Crime, or a War on Poverty, on Drugs, on Illegal Immigration,or Terrorism, but what I see as a War on Space itself—what I see as ruin on a brand new and unprecedented scale.

If you consider the number of ways in which architecture is of essential value to humanity as a medium through which democracy can be spatially organized and practiced—primarily as a platform for the drafting of utopic visions of what the city could be as a space for everyone, through cooperative models of ‘community design’ and spaces for ecologies of self-organization to resist the hierarchies of corporate consumerism (even if on the smallest of scales) — what appears to be gaining momentum in the urban environment today is a landscape that aggressively stands affront to the most basic tenets of our ability to publicly participate in the production and utilization of space.

But, whereas once the public realm was hailed as the triumph of the ‘democratic city’ that prided itself on diversity and the openness of civic life, our cities now seem to be subject to a process of radical adaptation, mainly in the form of a process of intensive fortification and security makeovers which recast public space as the locus of incubation for conspiracy, hidden threats and violence.

The sacrosanct notion of ‘democratic space’ has fallen out of equilibrium with public space’s own ability to trust—and police—itself.  The irony is that the more the “free world” tries to secure itself from this new threat, the more it transforms itself as an even more attractive target—not to mention the sacrifice of freedom that comes hand in hand with this process.  To try to use, much less create, public space almost seems like a criminal act; it’s as if ‘being public’ is increasingly becoming synonymous with‘being illegal’: just consider how Central Park was put off-limits for protestors during the presidential elections. In my view, we have entered into a new geopolitical era of ‘urban and institutional ruination,’ in which architecture is an agent of civic corrosion instead of civic empowerment.

Despite the mesmerizing visual effects of ruins being swallowed by nature that we are so prone to aestheticize, I’m more curious about the ‘production of ruins’ and new notions of ‘architecture’ and ‘nature’ that might be emerging behind the great façade of what writer Steven High calls the “deindustrial sublime.”  I fear our ongoing romance with “staring into the ruin” might just be creating a greater ‘blind spot’ to another form of urban geopolitical ruin that is in my view for more insidious and worrisome than any other concept of ruin up to this point — one we should be taking serious note of since it’s not simply ‘an object on the landscape left to decay’. Rather, it manifests itself through new and more subtle spatial products and architectural hijackings which directly threaten the powers of public agency.  I’m talking about the cultural, economic, and political commodification of ruins that is creeping up in the shadows of democracy, taking form in things like secret detention camps, ominous landscapes of surveillance, floating prisons, ‘designated protestor zones’, secret spaces of ilk, ubiquitous fortress urbanism.  These covert spaces of erosion of human rights are threatening the definitions of what actually constitutes both ‘democracy’ and ‘architecture.’  Here, we have a new typology of ruin that deploys our fascination with the aesthetics of decay in order to disguise a more quintessentially postmodern “geopolitics of decay” that is seeping into the foundations of society elsewhere, in the periphery, beyond the scopes of public scrutiny.

Anyone can marvel at the texture of a dilapidated factory, fetishize the crumbled walls, have beautiful rust patterns grafted onto the door of your loft, but, what do ruins really mean today, precisely—and what is the larger process at work that is implicit in them?  Do ‘ruins’ carry the same symbolic weight and meaning through out history, or do those that emerge within each era signify something new?  In other words, are ruins truly epic in nature or do they just offer fleeting reflections of their contexts?

To put this in slightly different terms: how have ruins come to represent a deeper political process at work that all of this gawking and staring may only serve to mask?  Perhaps what is ruin today is not so much represented by these objects of obvious architectural demise as they are now by the types of dubious political spaces forming and operating in the lesser visible niches just outside public view.  I would suggest, for example, the proverbial backroom where dirty political deals are done is a critical example of the ruin today.  Not that this space hasn’t always existed in some form or another, but this seems like the kind of precursory space that pre-empts the subsequent, inevitable abandoned factory and the layoffs of thousands of jobs that go with it.  The ruin actually began long before these visual correspondences of broken architecture made themselves apparent to us, by which time it is unfortunately too late.  To inspect the ruins of today is not simply to idle in front of the ‘dead shopping mall,’ but to go back to the root that links the spatial litter of the corporate wasteland with the political machinations that hatched it in the first place.

Perhaps the real ruin is less in what is fading physically from the landscape before our eyes than in what is cropping up and percolating unbeknownst to political transparency well beyond our capacity for scrutiny.  You might only consider Guantanamo Bay to be a ruin in so far as the lush Cuban landscape has begun to overtake some of the camps that are no longer in use.  But I would suggest to you the very existence of Guantanamo Bay itself as it has been constructed through excessive legal verbiage to exist outside the scope of both U.S. and International law constitutes a deep ruination of our environmental and political landscape. This bit of extra-territory wherein no law technically applies illustrates an extreme process of “ideological de-industrialization” precisely because there is no assurance that any sort of human rights violations won’t occur. Guantanamo Bay has also become a locus of attention on the topic of torture;its ongoing existence may only help to draw public attention away from other practices of torture elsewhere.  One should question why it has not yet been shut down even though the Obama administration said that it would be.

To what degree is our obsession with “physical ruination” on the surface suggestive of a deeper denial of the systemic deterioration of our political optimism, a phenomenon which we so dread to face?  Why do we fixate so intensely on the architectural manifestations of ruins, the very textures of disrepair, with myopic lust and incredible attention to detail, but then fail to observe even the most vague and glaring erosion patterns of our culture of fear and consumption, of our discriminatory social practices, our relative morality and the perishibility of our ideals?  Why are we willing to romanticize the beauty of a fallen building but are then desperately make every attempt to turn away from the cracked walls of our government’s integrity?  Is there a connection?

For example, Detroiters are often accused of being in a state of denial about their situation (they are perceived as being victims of nostalgia by longing for what was once a booming city and by operating under the illusion that one day those factories will return operative and a prosperous life will resume.) Yet the media’s predisposition is to reduce the conversation around Detroit to photo ops of abandoned buildings and glossy infographics highlighting the statistical extremities of vacancy achieved by the city.  How hypocritical is this?  Who is perpetuating nostalgia here?

When you read about the shrinking cities of the “Rust Belt” in mainstream media, for the most part they only refer to these places generically, in terms of the uniformity of their abandonment. There is occasionally some brief analysis given to the harsh realities of deindustrialization and the corporate logic of global capitalism that has left places in utter ruin, but rarely is any proper attention given to the history of de-unionization in this country or the exploitative cogs that neoliberal capitalism still depends on – and, so again, the coverage is usually so biased by its romantic affair with the aesthetics of urban decay that it often fails to incorporate any kind of critical analysis of the ethical struggles against runaway capitalism that these de-industrialized monoliths of decay actually memorialize.

Is it really fair to accuse Detroit of being in denial when we are ourselves so desperately stare into the ruins with forlorn fascination and ideological abandonment that we have excluded any kind of deeper insight into the greater forces (and system of corruption) that are hollowing our most important national foundations––like social welfare, equal opportunity, public health care, a right to education, racial equality, environmental justice, foreign diplomacy, fair taxation, immigrant rights, and so forth?  It seems clear to me that our love affair with ruins only serves to perpetuate this visual language for nostalgia that we like to see in others.  Further, it depicts an America that appears completely oblivious to the mass ruining of its own political fabric – so, I ask, are we actually reeling in a state of shock over the impending demise of our own legitimacy?   Or is it just plain ignorance that makes our ‘gaze of the ruin’ so blindingly selective?

The more humanity has obsessed outwardly over the optics of ruins to the point of near cult worship, the more the political landscape has slowly come apart at the seams without proper notice.  From my point of view, it looks as though ‘institutional corruption’—having exhausted most of its usual conduits—is running out of room to hide.  But the irony seems to be: does anyone really care?   The statecraft of western superpower has already shown a blatant willingness to operate unilaterally above international diplomacy and debate in order to preserve its power through brute force. The irony is that in an era that has witnessed the fabrication of a political rationale for invading Iraq, held presidential elections under the highest degrees of duress and uncertainty, waived dozens of environmental laws and abused the right of ‘eminent domain’ to erect a border fence, dangerously revised—and in some cases outright dismissed––laws in order to secretly capture and detain thousands of supposed ‘terrorist suspects’ around the world, the media and the public are obsessed with promoting reruns of Die Hard and taking their families on vacations to New Orleans for a little Disaster Tourism.

Perhaps our preoccupation with places like Detroit and the urge to call it a “Dead City” makes for the perfect distraction to draw attention away from the other locations where late capitalism is still seen as providing substantial benefit, even though these places have also already begun to show signs of the system’s sheer lack of concern for any people or any place manifest in Detroit’s representation in the media.  You don’t need to look any further than the US-Mexico border, which is now riddled with polluted warehouses and toxic industrial sites left to rot from the corporate maquilladoras that were supposed to have liberated the Mexican laborer from indigenous poverty.

Perhaps Detroit, having become the epicenter of our fascination with urban abandonment, is but the ultimate disguise tactic for the same deregulated free-trade policies that are coursing through the capitalist landscape in other regions now (Beijing, Sao Paulo, Cairo, Bangalore), which have no allegiance to any nation anymore per se, and that are perfectly willing to put workers of any nationality (and that includes those within Empire now) on the slab until they can be disposed of for a cheaper ‘cost of labor’ elsewhere, later on.  And this is hardly any secret — this is predictably what corporations do.

Let’s not forget: deindustrialization is not ‘the end of industrialism,’ or just the removal of it.  Deindustrialization is just reindustrialization in the opposite direction.  It was economist Joseph Schumpeter 50 years ago who described capitalism as a “gale of creative destruction.” A force that stalks the planet through “the same process of industrial mutation” he said, “that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.”  This is the fact of capitalism, he wrote – that it can never be stationary.  That it must devour in order to persist.

That is to say, there is a whole other side to ruins, and the most significant ones of our times might not be about a process of “de-walling” (or, a natural collapse of outdated industrial buildings) but rather is one of fanatical “re-walling.”  In other words, the grand ruins of the neoliberal era are being constructed as we speak in the form of the world’s largest shopping malls, tallest skyscrapers, the bunkered paradises of the super-luxurious, down to the squatter settlements made of scraps and their disparity with the rise of gated communities. The ruins of today do not need to see “tomorrow” in order to symbolize the corrosion of their own past; they are ruins even before they are ever completed by virtue of their context, which is in itself an assault on the spaces of the global commons from their earliest stages of conception. The paradigm shift comes from observing ruin not just as a departure, or even as a consequence, but witnessing that ruins are in a constant state of reproduction.

Throughout the course of 1978-79, artists including Daniel Buren, Peter Fend, Dan Graham, Louise Lawler, Sean Scully and Lawrence Weiner were invited to install shows in the gallery space, without removing the work already there, responding to each other and to ‘existing conditions’; in this way the work shown in this space is a response to the existing conditions and/or work previously shown within the space redefines the exhibition as an entity capable of dynamic, cumulative evolution.

In 1978–1979, the Peter Nadin Gallery had a continuous exhibition titled The work shown in this space is a response to the existing conditions and / or work previously shown within the space. Artists included Daniel Buren, Peter Fend, Dan Graham, Louise Lawler, Sean Scully and Lawrence Weiner, and the artists directly responded to each others’ work, developing a cumulative environment.

The project began with the text “We have joined together to execute functional constructions and to alter or refurbish existing structures as a means of surviving in a capitalist economy”. The exhibition started with the ‘empty’ gallery space and newly constructed wall elements (by Nadin and D’Arcangelo) and was followed by the series of ‘solo’ projects which, responding to existing, and yet constantly changing conditions, were layered in time and space until the gallery was closed eight months later, following D’Arcangelo’s untimely death.

“Iron lungs in any space are strange, and also it didn’t stay there, but was just brought in to make a point that Peter wanted to make, about a room defined not by its walls, but by a pump. And the way sounds, and words, staggered on the way, imitating the way you’d breathe it if you were in an iron lung: “AROOM … DEFIN … EDNOT … BYITS … WALLS … BUTBY … APUMP”.

And you have all these ideas of space as stuff, and it was more or less an aesthetic exercise in what to think about space … Where space in this case is a solid, is a gas, is elastic; it can be inflated, it can be contracted; it’s in your body, you’re inside the space. It was actually quite important that there would be this Buren, and this Scully, that something had happened to the walls, that something was happening to the space … and you see the little chips … the vertical stripes of Buren, and the Scully’s horizontal stripes. The space has already been somehow ‘occupied’. In which case, the iron lung becomes an additional occupation practice.” — Peter Fend in conversation with Gavin Wade at Eastside Projects, 1 February 2008.

“There is something fascinating about the making of walls, and especially sheet rock walls. When you finish you have erased yourself from it, when you do a good job you leave no traces, and it is only when you do a lousy job that you have all these marks on it; this creates an interesting dilemma in relationship to making art, which should in a way be exactly the opposite: you need to be in the work. We were artists and we did construction work, this is just what we did, what we spent our time doing, and there was a great dignity to it. But walls don’t stay as walls, things happen to them, things are put on them. So why not let the thing evolve, let it continue, and see what happens? The space was my studio, but was also where I lived, so we built a showing space, and the first thing we showed, was just the space. That sentence we started with (‘30 days work …’) is a very straightforward measure of the work we did.

And then we invited artists — Daniel Buren first and then Sean Scully. I told them to do whatever they wanted, the idea being that there would be a succession of exchanges or interactions. The gallery situation seemed silly in a sense: why does everything always leave every month? What is it with the monthly cycle, of putting up work, taking it down, putting it up … Why not leave it there, and just put some other stuff in there? Why does it need to have this false sense of erasure?

Louise Lawler was very important in the setting up of the gallery and the evolution … In Sean’s painting, you can’t really see it in the picture, there is a peep hole, and through the hole what do you see? You see me! Living in the back. The peephole piece was the work of Jane Reynolds in Sean Scully’s painting. I think the brilliance of her response was taking the viewer through Sean’s painting into the room beyond so the surface was not the destination but part of a continuity. And then Fend brought the Iron Lung which in terms of a response to the space was great, because it used cubic volume, rather than the walls. And we also brought in Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham and a couple of other people, and what they did was, that the noise was so extreme, that it made the space appear to be solid. So it was like being in a solid cube of sound.” — Peter Nadin in conversation with Céline Condorelli at Nadin’s home in Lower Manhattan, 12 July 2009.

The text and images in this article are taken from ‘Support Structures’ by Celine Condorelli, published by Sternberg Press, released in December 2009.

Merve Unsal: I’m interested in the relation you draw between Scandinavian and Latin American countries as a way to expose contradictions or assumptions about democracy. Why these countries?

Carlos Motta: When I was growing up in Colombia it was almost commonplace to think of the “Swedish Model” as the only truly democratic system. This simple assumption always resonated in my mind and I wondered if, how and why would Scandinavian countries be “ideal” democratic societies. I developed a project titled The Immigrant Files: Democracy is Not Dead; It Just Smells Funny where I interviewed several Latin American immigrants living and working in Sweden specifically with issues of discrimination and xenophobia. You may know that during the 1970s and 1980s thousands of immigrants arrived to Sweden as political refugees escaping the brutal military regimes that prosecuted leftist ideologues and activists in Latin America. Such large numbers of immigrants, and not only Latin American but also Eastern European, Middle Eastern, etc. have become Swedes and part of the system. It is clear that the process has represented serious cultural and political challenges.

The political context that informs most of my work are the years of the Cold War in Latin America, roughly from 1950 onwards, The Immigrant Files: Democracy is Not Dead; It Just Smells Funny is a work about these “challenges” to the Swedish welfare state but it is narrated from the perspective of Latin American immigrants whose political background is inevitably entangled with the vast web of ideological conflicts that were a byproduct of the Cold War. This project layers two almost contradictory histories of democracy, the Swedish and that of certain Latin American countries, not simplistically, but strategically to expose fundamental historical, economic, cultural, political and ethnic conditions that have directed radically different understandings of democracy.

MU: I was struck by my own ignorance about some of the issues you raise in The Immigrant Files: Democracy is Not Dead; It Just Smells Funny. I knew about issues of immigration in Europe such as the plight of Muslims in France and Turks in Germany—stories that have resulted in violence and much reported international controversy. These issues in Sweden seem to be much more complicated but there is a conspicuous absence of violence. The presence of so many Latin Americans in Sweden is contrary to most people’s ideas about the ethnographic composition/make up of Nordic countries. Would you comment on the reasons why you think the general public does not seem to be aware of the issues that you were dealing with?

CM: I suppose that your awareness of these issues depends on your perspective, interest and location. If you live in northern Europe in countries such as The Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland, debates on immigration are now part of your everyday life. Norway and Finland have very closed borders. These countries have been skeptical and kept a firm hand in regards to immigration perhaps in an attempt to protect the Welfare State.

Sweden has been different. For example, as I started to mention above, during the 1970s they welcomed close to 30,000 political refugees from Chile after Allende’s defeat. During the 1980s close to 10,000 Salvadorians that escaped the civil war also sought refuge in Sweden. Sweden has a history of welcoming immigrants regardless of their ideology, and they have been invested in liberal human rights work. The notion of ‘open borders’ has been one of its key manifestations. Nowadays, things have started to change as the general political climate in that country turned right. The emphasis is less on collective and more in individual interests, neo-liberal style.

Since the beginning of the War in Iraq however, 30,000 Iraqis have arrived in Sweden. But Swedish society is very fearful of the impact of immigration in its traditions and on its societal system at large. I personally think that common Swedish citizens feel the stability of the Welfare State is threatened by so many immigrants (especially Arabs) coming in. They fear a big change in their culture. And in fact Swedish demographics, language and customs have changed.

A student of mine in Stockholm told me an anecdote that struck me as significant: One of her classmates had an Arabic newspaper. My student was unaware that her friend understood that language and asked her why she had that newspaper. Her friend responded that she was learning Arabic as a civic duty to adapt to the “new” Sweden. I can understand how a traditional mind may find these facts to be an “attack” on tradition, family values and culture. Although this may not be widely reported by the media in Southern European countries and the United States, it is a very pressing issue for the Northern European countries.

Carlos Motta, The Immigrant Files: Democracy is Not Dead; It Just Smells Funny, 2008, publication, 189 pages, published by Konsthall C, IASPIS and Kulturradet, Stockholm

MU: You mentioned the cultural effects of the influx of immigrants. In particular, I’m wondering about the social dynamic resulting from an increase in immigrants who on average tend to be younger—and with less experience, they also tend to be cheaper labor.  As people become fearful of these changes, this shift can manifest itself in xenophobia. I’m also thinking about the US—in particular about New York—and the aftermath of the recession. As a New York-based artist, your home base is implicated or tacitly referred to in your work. Can you comment on how your work reflects on xenophobia in the United States and immigration/diaspora in New York?

CM: In 2005 I made a video essay titled Letter to my father (standing by the fence), a work narrated in first person in which I share my experience as an immigrant in New York in the aftermath of 9/11 and juxtapose it to audio testimonies I recorded from a wide range of visitors to Ground Zero. This work was born out of being astonished by the growing paranoia, both from the government and the people on the street, against immigrants.  The highly discriminatory attitudes certainly fueled the debates and policy shifts around immigration during the Bush Administration. I have experienced to a degree the struggle of becoming American both legally and in terms of cultural prejudice. I am now a legal permanent resident but I continue to follow in great detail the nonsensical hyper-conservative approach to immigration in this country and the growth of social movements around these issues.

Carlos Motta, The Immigrant Files: Democracy is Not Dead; It Just Smells Funny, 2008, Views of the 8-channel video installation at Konsthall C, Stockholm, Spring 2008

Carlos Motta, The Immigrant Files: Democracy is Not Dead; It Just Smells Funny, 2008, Views of the 8-channel video installation at Konsthall C, Stockholm, Spring 2008

MU: In your work, you use a variety of interview strategies. In some of your projects, you interview the ‘man or woman on the street’ and in others, you interview specialists and professionals. In your project The Good Life you interviewed a large number of people on the streets and made relatively short interviews while in the The Immigrant Files: Democracy is Not Dead; It Just Smells Funny you interviewed a select group of knowledgeable professionals that engaged in structured conversations with you. What prompted this change from work to work?

CM: In The Good Life my intention was to create an archive of public opinion composed of hundreds of responses to a set of questions gathered on the streets of 12 Latin American capitals. I was interested in conceiving a method to document the opinion of a non-specialized group of people that would respond without professional knowledge to questions on the relationship between US intervention and democracy in these countries. I was looking for “street” knowledge if you will. The Good Life proposes both in subject matter and methodology a specific critique of democracy from the perspective of its public perception and its effect on the formation of public and personal subjectivities, so I had to think of a pertinent way to facilitate this. The Good Life was critically informed by methods of sociology used to gather data and information, as well as from certain traditions of journalism that use the interview form in order to produce “public opinion.” This project however also wishes to question the very means that are used to produce this kind of information: surveys, questionnaires, video interviews, reporters and reports, etc.

In The Immigrant Files: Democracy is Not Dead; It Just Smells Funny, I wanted to speak to (Latin American) immigrants who were actively and professionally engaged in combating discrimination and xenophobia in Sweden. These individual’s work is critical to expanding the monolithic narrative on immigration in that country. An important aspect of this work is that it highlights the fact that the discourse on immigration and legislation as well as most work developed by State sponsored institutions and organizations is controlled by non-immigrant Swedes. Immigrants play a very small role in determining their own fate. By choosing to interview people who strongly reject this fact, I attempted to document their adamant work, which is often underreported. The interviewees in this project have very specific positions in regards to the need to shift power in order to gain inclusive democratic representation. In terms of the choice of method, my intention was to create a document of their practical and theoretical views in book form.

Carlos Motta, Video still, Interview with Karla López from The Immigrant Files: Democracy is Not Dead; It Just Smells Funny, 2008

Carlos Motta, Video Still, Interview with Carlos Diaz, The Immigrant Files: Democracy is Not Dead; It Just Smells Funny, 2008

MU: Your own role as interviewer is also different in the two projects. In The Good Life the viewer doesn’t hear you ask the questions. The questions appear written on the screen and you ask the same five questions to everyone. In The Immigrant Files: Democracy is Not Dead; It Just Smells Funny you direct the conversations and you are, in a way, more active in the work. What strategy did you employ for those videos?

CM: I would not say that I am withdrawn in The Good Life as an interviewer. Although you don’t hear me pose the questions you see them written on the screen and my voice conversing with the interviewees throughout the interviews. However I carefully decided not to call attention to my personality in the work. I did not want to use a “Michael Moore” style of interviewing because I didn’t want to be a protagonist in that way. The emphasis was on people and their specific responses. In The Immigrant Files: Democracy is Not Dead; It Just Smells Funny, the interviews are open dialogues and conversations between the interviewees and myself yet the flow of the narrative is definitely determined by my questions.

MU: What is the role of language in your work? Considering that language has often been used as a tool to repress different groups in society, how do you choose to employ language in your works?

CM: Language is foundational to my work. I am interested in exploring the way that the meaning of certain words may shift according to whom, how and when they are spoken. On the one hand my projects are ways to analyze discourses around specific words: democracy, power, intervention, etc. On the other hand the works are literally language based conversations and dialogues.

Regarding the issue of immigration in Sweden the issue of language is an important and controversial one. It is believed and implemented by authorities that learning Swedish should the first step to a healthy integration to Swedish society yet there is no effort to preserve and teach the immigrant’s mother tongue in school. This is a small example to show the complexity of these problems. “Becoming” a Swede shouldn’t mean obliterating you own language, culture and traditions. There must be a way to conceive of a pluralist, inclusive policy of integration.

MU: Could you talk about the project you are working on now?

CM: The work that I’m developing now is titled Pride Campaign: Somewhere Over the Rainbow. It is also an interview based work that attempts to give a detailed look at the development and history of LGBTQ (Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) rights in four countries with radically different legislations and cultures: Colombia, Norway, South Korea and the United States. I am interviewing dozens of activist, academics, politicians, legislators, historians, etc. on the current status of sexual and identity politics. I am interested in comparing the cultural backgrounds and political platforms that have (not) allowed a progressive outlook on the LGBTQ community. I am in Norway now, the country that has a most advanced legislation of the world. It has been very interesting to understand how this “paradise” has shaped and whether it is a paradise at all. Legislation and cultural acceptance in this country have been based on issues of “respectability” and “family values,” that is on an image of equality based pretty much on a heterosexual standard. It is indeed magnificent that LGBTQ people can marry, adopt kids, etc. but what happens at a cultural level when your identity defies categories for example? I was recently talking to Tone Hellesund, a researcher at the Stein Rokkan Centre for Social Studies in Bergen, researching the narratives of LGBTQ youth suicide in Norway. According to her research, young people complain about how they feel completely different and alienated from society. They do not want to be different. Will LGBTQ individuals ever belong? In a strict political sense it is a democracy, but oftentimes it does not feel that way culturally.

Carlos Motta is a Colombian born, New York based artist whose work has been individually presented at PS1/MoMA Contemporary Art Center, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Konsthall C, Stockholm; Fundación Alzate Avendaño, Bogotá; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn; and Art in General, New York and included in group exhibitions such as the X Biennale de Lyon 2009; The Greenroom, CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Soft Manipulation, Casino Luxemburg; 5×5 Castelló, Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castelló, Spain; System Error, Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena, Italy; and Democracy in America, Creative Time, New York, amongst others. He is a graduate of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, was named a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow in 2008, and received grants from the Art Matters Foundation (New York, 2007), the Cisneros Fontanals Foundation (Miami, 2008) and the New York State Council of the Arts (NYSCA) (New York 2010). www.la-buena-vida.info; www.carlosmotta.com.

The Freelancers Union was established in 2007 to offer a social safety net and political advocacy on behalf of independent workers who contract their labor to multiple employers. Though it is now the fastest growing union in New York, a city with far more than its per capita share of creative workers, its services model has not yet been fully acknowledged by the labor movement, not even as the national share of “non-standard employment” approaches 33% (almost certainly an undercounted figure). The union emerged from the chrysalis of Sara Horowitz’s Working Today, which earned its laurels in the late 1990s, at the height of the New Economy push to promote “free agency” among the city’s burgeoning digital workforce. A decade later, it remains the only real institutional effort to provide stability to the precarious lives of the city’s independent workers, many of whom were the first to fall into the deep hole of the current recession.

The needs of this workforce has attracted a good deal of commentary in recent years as part of a burgeoning analysis of the creative labor of artists (broadly defined) who were once considered marginal to the productive economy, but are increasingly profiled and promoted as the model workers of the new economy. Wherever their labor is organized into the formal silos of the so-called “creative industries,” it has garnered the attention of national statisticians bent on building the case for a new high-growth sector, irresistible to investors, politicians, and real estate speculators who know the presence of artists can have on land value. [1] But well beneath the statisticians’ radar there is a more telling story about the degradation of work that has occurred as part of the transition to a Internet-centered economy based on the widespread use of non-paid amateur or user labor. This short essay will review some of the features of that transition.

The Price Paid by Talent

Those of you who remember the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike of 2008-09 will no doubt recall the writers’ struggle to win a revenue share from residuals–or online versions of content to which they had contributed. In the public mind, this was generally seen as a fair claim. Why? Because surely creators of intellectual property deserve to enjoy the fruits of their labor. But how many will remember what was bargained away in return for recognition of the writers claim? Since 2005, one of the writers guild’s top campaign goals has been to organize employees of TV reality shows, and, while union leaders entered the strike vowing to achieve this goal, the media moguls’ ultimate condition for reaching an agreement over new media residuals was that the WGA take off the table its claim for jurisdiction over the reality (and animation) sector. The upshot? Concessions were made to those employees—the writers–who feed the copyright milkcow at the expense of the below-the-line employees who are shut out of the WGA.

This raw deal speaks volumes about the ongoing restructuring of the creative industries (or the copyright industries as they are more bluntly termed in the U.S.) Creative employees who are close to the prize of IP have a fair, though precarious, shot at lucrative returns, while those below-the-line, to use the term favored in Hollywood, are cut loose. Since 2001, the space allotted to reality TV and “challenge” game shows has ballooned to more than 20% of prime-time network programming. The production costs are a fraction of what producers pay for conventional, scripted drama, and the ratings and profits have been mercurial. From the outset, owners have insisted that producers and editors are not “writers” who pen scripts and dialogue, because they would have a claim on IP, and so the WGA was shut out of reality programming. As a result, the sector teems with substandard conditions—18 hour work days, chronic job instability, no meal breaks, no health benefits, and employer coercion to turn in time cards early. Wage rates are generally half of what employees on scripted shows are paid, and most overtime goes unpaid. When employees vote to join the union they are summarily fired or are threatened with blacklisting. Nor are the amateur contestants any better off. If they are paid, it is generally a minimal stipend, and the price for their shot at exposure is to endure conditions–sleep deprived and plied with hard alcohol–that are designed to spark tension, conflict and confrontation onscreen. A growing number of lawsuits, in the US, UK and France are aimed at establishing legal protections for amateur talent as well as for writers, editors, and production assistants.

These violations of work standards occur in the sector of old media that is most clearly aligned with the neo-liberal ethos of the jackpot economy. It’s an ethos which demands that we are all participants in a game that rewards only a few, while the condition of entry into this high-stakes lottery is to leave your safety gear at the door; only the most spunky, agile, and dauntless will prevail, but often at high psychic cost–witness Susan Boyle’s recent return to the spotlight after a long bout of medication and institutionalization. Yet the labor infractions I have been describing are only visible because they take place against the heavily unionized backdrop of the entertainment industries. In the world of new media, where unions have no foothold whatsoever, the formula of overwork, underpayment, and sacrificial labor is entirely normative. The blurring of the lines between work and leisure, the widespread use of amateur or user input on the social web or in open source, and the systematic expropriation of Tiziana Terranova first described as “free labor” has prompted some commentators to ask whether the experience of digital environments should direct us to rethink entirely our basic understanding of labor and enterprise. [2] While skeptical, I am certainly open to such inquiries and look forward to any such discussion.

Work You Just Couldn’t Help Doing

As far as waged work goes, I am inclined to see new developments in the digital workplace as a part of a continuum that stretches back to the managerial introduction in the 1920s of human relations to humanize the workplace and stave off workers’ forms of industrial democracy. This human relations movement was upgraded after the so-called “revolt against work” in the 1970s in response to widespread worker discontent with alienation on the job, and, in many ways, reached its apotheosis in the permissive work milieu of the dotcom era, where the template was also forged for digitally extending value-adding work far outside the physically bounded workplace and into every waking moment of an employee’s life. This combination of work gratification and time sacrifice established the industrial formula for self-exploitation among creative workers. As one of my informants for No-Collar (my ethnographic study of new media companies) put it, her job offered “work you just couldn’t help doing.” [3] Subsequent ethnographic studies of knowledge and creative industry workplaces show that job gratification still comes at a heavy sacrificial cost–longer hours in pursuit of the satisfying finish, price discounts in return for aesthetic recognition, self-exploitation in response to the gift of autonomy, and dispensability in exchange for flexibility.,

At the same time, however, there is another history of work to consider, and that is the story of how manufacturers and service providers have succeeded in transferring work from the producer to the consumer. My student Michael Palm has written a dissertation on the rise of self-service and he begins his story with the transition from the Bell telephone operators to customer dialing which required a good deal of persuasion and education for customers to take on the work. At this more advanced point in the history, we have more or less accepted the massive amount of time we are asked to devote to researching and assembling consumer products, not to mention the input that is considered mandatory for customer services of all sorts. These investments of personal time are only the most palpable expressions of what Italian post-operaiste theorists like Mario Tronti called the social factory, where a large share of the work of production is performed in the interstices of society, and because they are tangible–and because we continually weigh the benefits against the cost of these personal time investments– they tend to be the ones that irritate us the most, and so we end up venting our anger on robovoices or on hapless call center employees in Bangalore.

Value From the Social Web?

The more sophisticated techniques for extracting value from consumers or amateur users can be found in the digital platform economy where social participation on the web is more and more the raw material for engines of speculative profit. By far the majority of the users of social networking sites are unaware of how the volunteer content of their communications is subject to data mining, sold to marketers and advertisers, or is hoarded by entrepreneur hosts bent on getting bought out. Concomitant with the reality TV shows, the prize for users is to win attention, accumulate “friends,” score a hit, and draw some bankable or socially valuable advantage from the exposure. But for the business entrepreneur, the outcome is a virtually wage-free proposition. There are costs involved for bandwidth, hosting, and maintaining commercial platforms, but as far as the monetizable product goes, it is the users, or prosumers, as industry strategists call them, who create all the surplus value (which could be described as the difference between the value such free services offer to users and the value they create for business).

Those users who are aware of this economy are likely to consider this a reasonable trade–we have free access to your services and in return we surrender all rights to you over the use of our content and personal data. And, as for those for whom the web has opened up a whole new universe of information-rich public goods–including the potential for anti-capitalist organizing, really really free markets, peer-to-peer common value creation, and alternative economies of all sorts—the role the social web is currently playing in new modes of capital accumulation is simply the price one pays for preserving a free medium of exchange whose scope of activity is large enough to outpace any government or corporate surveillance. It’s another kind of trade-off, in other words, and the balance, for the time being, is still in favor of the commons. From this point of view, all of the interactive free labor that goes into user-generated value can be seen as a kind of tithe or tribute we pay to the Internet as a whole so that the expropriators stay away from the parts of it we really cherish.

Should we no longer view this interactive input as labor in any conventional understanding of political economy or should we see it as just another transfer of work from more regulated kinds of labor market? My instinct is to think along the lines of the latter, with the proviso that there is a great deal of overlap between the traditional economy of unpaid work (mostly in the home) and that of work transfer. Technolibertarians who have consistently viewed cyberspace as a haven of free being are notoriously oblivious to the impact of the cut-price labor economy that is its default mode. The flourishing of self-publication and amateur content has been a clear threat to the livelihoods of professional creatives whose prices are driven down by, or who simply cannot compete with, the commercial mining of the online, discount alternatives to their services. Print journalism is only the most recent, well-publicized example of a profession trampled underfoot as advertisers and owners switch to online assets. Indeed, it’s ironic to see how media critics who are more accustomed to proclaiming that the “press is free only for those who own one” have lately been defending these bastions of information gatekeeping as stable sources of valued livelihoods. Our regret that the amateur blogosphere can serve as a corrosive force against the payscales of professional labor may be only half the story one would like to tell about the blogosphere, but it is the half that is routinely neglected in the technolibertarian rush to portray the rapid flowering of Internet self-publication as a refreshing break from the filtering of the editorial gatekeepers. Those of us who were weaned on Media Studies’ classic eulogies (Benjamin, Enzensberger, McLuhan) to the concept of an active media audience (the audience as producer) might be forgiven for mouthing “watch what you wish for” when we review all of the ways in which interactive labor of the social web and the discount ethos of online enterprise in general have taken their toll on the formal labor markets of the brick-and-mortar world. (Academe, of course, has its own version of this with the digital diploma mills run by the University of Phoenix and all the other online institutions that are the network backbones of the new global university, and I won’t even begin to get into the topic of IT’s role in offshore outsourcing (about which I wrote a book called Fast Boat to China). The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest figures for the publishing industry show employment at 275,000, down by 36% from its peak a decade ago at 430,000. Internet employment has risen since the recession began, but since we are only talking about 5,000 jobs or so, it will take several decades for digital job gains to make up for the old media losses of the last year. [4] It can plausibly be concluded that much of the work accounted for by the gap between old and new media is simply being transferred into the interstices of the amateur/user economy that prevails on the web.

The Spirit of Braverman

I’ve been less than even-handed in my response to the question Whither Digital Labor? Why? because those who see the digital realm as a technology of de-skilling, outsourcing and work degradation are far outnumbered by those who see it as a medium of reskilling, innovation, and common value creation. And because the minority view needs to be expressed whenever there is an opportunity to do so. So I’m content to channel the spirit of Harry Braverman in this regard and for the purpose of this discussion. [5] But I will add this as final teaser. The emergence of this new mode of production that we sometimes call knowledge capitalism does probably require all of the good things we associate with the information commons in the same way as the emergence of industrial capitalism depended on free inputs like clean air, uncontaminated water, disposable animal species, and dirt-cheap underground mineral deposits.

1. Geert Lovink, and Ned Rossiter eds. My Creativity (Amsterdam: Insitute for Network Cultures, 2007); Richard Florida The Rise of the Creative Class, And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002); John Hartley, eds. Creative Industries (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
David Harvey “The Art of Rent: Globalization and the Commodification of Culture,” in Spaces of Capital (New York: Routledge, 2001): Ursula Huws, ed. (2007) “The Creative Spark in the Engine” special issues of Work, Organization, Labour & Globalization Vol. 1, No. 1. (2007); Andrew Ross, Nice Work If You Can Get It (New York: NYU Press, 2009).

2. Tiziana Terranova, “Free Labor” Social Text 18.2 (2000) 33-58

3. Andrew Ross, No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and its Hidden Costs (Basic Books, 2002)

4. Paper Cuts, Left Business Observer, #121 (September 2009)

5. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974)

Bibliomancy is the use of books in divination. Whenever one faces a difficulty or a fork in the road, or even if one has a general question, one holds that question in mind, and then asks the Oracle of Shiraz, Hafiz, for guidance. Traditionally, the first line upon which the eyes of the reader fall when opening the book give the answer to the direct question, and the rest of the Ghazal provides further clarification.

On July 30, 2009, people gathered to tell and hear stories with coincidental and unpredictable developments. The event culminated when the artist broke a hole through the adjacent wall, a participant came out of it, and started telling the story of what was happening at the moment, as it was developing in front of the eyes of the visitors.

It is true
I once got an ear that got sold to a fish.
Lean back: I will be glad to tell you all about
How it happened,
But first I must digress a bit . . .
—Hafiz of Shiraz

Susanna Bozhkov, My Great Aunt Gisele, 2009

My great aunt Gisele gave me this carnelian brooch about ten or eleven years ago. Being the only girl in her generation, a number of family jewels had collected in her jewellery box. She told me that our relative Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall had it made in Istanbul (then Constantinople) for his wife, when he was working in the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s diplomatic service at the end of the eighteenth century.

The engraving in Farsi reads: “The universe is transient and has no loyalty”, which I only recently learned thanks to my husband Daniel’s interest in these connections. I don’t suppose anyone in the family has known what it says for generations.

I grew up hearing about this Austrian great-great-great-great grandfather (or maybe he is only three ‘greats’ away) who was also known as “The Orientalist.” His story sounded like a romantic fairytale to my adolescent ears.

He was born Joseph Hammer and grew up in Graz, in the eastern part of present-day Austria. He studied Arabic, Persian (Farsi) and Ottoman Turkish in Vienna before being posted to the Middle East in his country’s diplomatic service. He spent eleven years in the East, traveling throughout the Ottoman Empire, on his job and for his own interests.

I’m not sure at what point in his life – before or after his years of foreign services – he became friendly with an aging and childless baroness who lived in a castle – Schloss Hainfeld – east of his hometown of Graz. She must have admired and adored him and his family, since she left him all her property – castle and estate – in 1835, on the condition that he added her name to his – hence the family name became Hammer-Purgstall.

The idea that you could be given a huge moated castle, and acres of farmland by a real fairy godmother, seemed too good to be true. The castle was built to an Italian design (I think I was told), which though very beautiful and open, with its two-storey arcaded walkways enclosing a large inner courtyard, was more suited to Italy’s climes than the cold winters of Austria. It included a chapel and a large library, where Hammer-Purgstall wrote and translated many of his books.

Unfortunately Hammer-Purgstall’s work has been a closed book to me since I never learned German. My immediate family was more interested in the romance languages and cultures of Western Europe, when I was growing up, so I was steered towards French, Spanish and Latin.

His translation of the Persian poet Hafiz’ collection of poems The Divan into German was a groundbreaking work. It introduced Goethe to Hafiz’ works and he went on to create his own West-Eastern Divan in response to the original.

Hammer-Purgstall himself came from the edge of the western world of his day, and created a bridge to the east, to the land and peoples of what was then considered “the enemy.” His translations have been praised and criticized by contemporary and more recent scholars, but inspite of his many faults he did more for oriental studies than most of his critics put together.

Since meeting and marrying Daniel, I feel that we are also very caught up in this business of borders and translation. His native Bulgaria is now an edge of the western world – though Turkey, Bulgaria’s former occupying power, is working hard to become part of Europe, too.

And now Daniel has started this project, called “Divan … the universe has no loyalty,” which draws together a number of historic and imagined border crossings, and invites a whole lot more.

This conversation took place between Melanie Crean and Sean Gourley via email during the month of September 2009. Their discussion focused on notions of change as a physical, political and cultural phenomenon whose nature and impact, though sometimes measurable and predicable, still cannot be strictly defined. Crean is an artist and teacher, living in Brooklyn and teaching at Parsons The New School for Design. Gourley is a mathematician, political advisor, and current TED fellow who lives in San Francisco.

Melanie Crean: I am currently working a project called The Shape of Change <shapeofchange.com>, an online database of American and Iraqi perceptions of change to be used by artists and activists as the basis of art works and discussion. To begin our conversation, I would like to ask how you define change over time? How do you see it manifest in the world around you? How do you address it in your own work?

For me, the word change, as with any signifier in language, is tightly bound to its cultural context. To state the obvious: the meaning of change itself seems to be changing, in fact quite rapidly emptying itself of meaning. Recently, there has been a strange unspoken international agreement on change; it has become a self-replicating brand. In the last U.S. election, for instance, it was deliberately undefined. Used by both parties, the word appeared in information visualizations in the New York Times and you could see how often both parties used the term at their national conventions. But neither party defined it; it was deliberately left to loosely encompass whatever the listener considered desirable. Though deliberate ambiguity is a time-honored tradition in politics, I feel it has been noteworthy recently because the more powerful the “brand”of change becomes the more meaningless it seems to become.

The Shape of Change project brings up several questions: why and how does the nature of change change? Is it a predictable pendulum (change-stasis-change-stasis), or are there more complicating factors at work? How can it be quantified? Can it be predicted? And, if so, can change be seen to be at all fixed?

Sean Gourley: For me change is defined by “something being different.” In general, as time moves forward, something is always different. But then time is defined by difference. Time and change are inextricably linked. Change cannot happen without time moving, and time cannot happen without change. The very way we measure time is defined by the changing position (vibration) of Caesium atoms within our atomic clocks.

So your question, how do you define change over time almost answers itself. And yet even with all this change some things remain constant. The laws of physics remain the same, unchanged in the short term. The rules that govern the vibration of the Caesium atom, or the rotation of the earth around the sun, remain constant while the objects they act on change. In many ways too, change is dependent on the observer. Dependent on what is being measured. Hold a ball above your head and then drop it. The ball has changed position, but it is still the same ball. If you ignore its position relative to the earth it has not changed. But if position is important to you, then change has occurred.

From a personal perspective, I see change around me everywhere I look. From the people moving on the street, to the traffic lights flashing from red to green. And yet there is something constant. When viewed from a distance, people seem to move in a predictable fashion, every day exhibiting the same general behavior. The light changing from red to green every ninety seconds. Many of the rules that bring about change themselves remain constant. The interesting question then becomes, is something that is changing in a predictable way still changing?

I look at change in my work from the perspective of measurement. Measurement reveals change. We cannot know if change has occurred if we cannot measure it. This has been one of the difficult elements in the study of conflict, as conflict by its very nature is difficult to measure. Yet we can measure some variables, including the way people are dying, the type of attacks that are occurring, the size of the attacks and how all of these variables change through time. We even measure popular words that are used to describe wars like Iraq and see how these change with time – from WMDs to Shock & Awe, to quagmire and civil war. Yet, for Iraq, throughout all of the war, the laws that underlie the conflict seem to remain constant. The laws that govern how people die are predictable and defined by mathematical equations that we see repeated in war zones around the world. One person dies and for them and their family this is a massive change. The world for their relatives changes beyond belief. Yet as we step away from the case of the individual, we see that their death is part of a broader pattern that is repeated in wars around the world. A pattern that has not changed because of their death.

Economic indicators can be a driver of conflict. The unemployment rate amongst fighting age males is a significant predictor of future violence in a region. Increase this variable and probabilistically speaking you move a step closer to war. The link between financial markets and conflict is perhaps even stronger. An oil pipeline is blown up and the price of oil futures increases. The first plane is flown into the World Trade Center and within minutes large amounts of cash are moved to the Swiss franc.

Iraq is different now than it was in 2003 when the invasion occurred – it has changed. But is it better or worse, is America better or worse? Was the invasion good for some people? – yes. Was it bad for others? – yes. In many ways, this speaks to the ambiguity of change, of how our understanding of change depends on who you are and what you are measuring. It is difficult to say for any type of change, that the world is better or worse. When we drop a ball from above our heads, the world has changed but is it better or worse?

MC: Depending on the perspective of the observer, change is also valued differently. As a follow up to a question in your last email, I’d like to ask you now: How does change constitute a central challenge for the economy? How might American corporations have been better prepared for change? How might they incorporate some of those strategies now, in the midst of current economic restructuring? And to follow something that you wrote, how might our current economic situation both drive or respond to political conflict?

SG: With regard to American corporations being better prepared for change, it requires one of two things. Either a better ability to see where the world is heading (i.e. what is change going to look like), or being more flexible in their organizational culture so that they can respond to change.

We can learn a lot from insurgencies about how to create organizations that can navigate changing environments. Insurgent forces have to operate in constantly changing landscapes, both militarily and politically. They do this by creating hundreds of groups that continually mutate their strategies until a successful one is found. The unsuccessful strategies are then replaced as the groups fail to survive and the successful groups grow stronger. This process allows an exploration of a constantly changing space, it allows the insurgency to quickly find new ways to operate in the changed environment. Being allowed to fail is an important part of dealing with change. Implementing some of the organizational characteristics of an insurgency might help large corporations successfully navigate this changing landscape.

MC: We have been speaking about the psychological underpinnings of change as related to the structure of financial organizations. For people to adopt change, it seems they must both accept its potential benefits (or at least its inevitability), in addition to being able to envision living, working, or operating differently. The ability to envision change is a necessity that cannot be understated.

One exercise that beginning designers often do to test the usability of a proposed design is to construct something called a “value fiction,” to imagine an environmental situation very different from their own, possibly with different social and technological norms, to consider how their design might perform in this “extreme” situation. It’s surprising how difficult this exercise is, simply because people have been compelled to behave the way current social customs, prevalent technology and interactive interfaces have structured their thoughts and actions. In short, it is very difficult to conceive of true change. When asked, many students begin with proposing that the new design be smaller, faster, and easier to use for its current function, sort of the “predictable change” that you referred to. Considering an entirely new way of using a particular device, or working, or thinking, often takes a bit of unlearning.

So I would like to ask: What kind of creative approach or thought process is required by all architects of the future, whether involved in the fields of design, science, education, politics or economics? What kind of methodologies are helpful to promote unfettered thinking?

SG: For the “architects of the future,” I think they first have to develop a good ability to look backwards. But to look backwards over a long enough timescale so that they can get a good sampling of “unexpected” events! For something that is unexpected may well have just faded from memory.

Another methodology is the random mutation of ideas within a fitness landscape. This is done constantly as part of nature’s evolutionary process, and we can do a good job of simulating it in computers to solve new types of problems. In applying it to the technique of unfettered thinking, one should take an idea that you already hold and understand the core concepts that go into this idea. Then randomly change one of the inputs and see how the idea changes. So instead of trying to guess the future, you simply accept a random input and then see what happens to your theories and ideas.

Of course some things are more likely than others. So a third concept that is very important is to understand probability (what is the likelihood of something happening) and risk (what are the consequences). Probability can be determined both empirically (I have seen the ball fall to the ground 1,000 times therefore I believe there is a good chance it will happen this time) and theoretically (I know that gravity acts on all objects and as such the ball will fall to the ground). Probability also allows us to imagine different futures simultaneously. Schroedinger’s Cat is a well known example in quantum mechanics. For as the world exists today there is a future where the cat is alive, and a future where the cat is dead. But for now the cat is both dead and alive and I can only know the probability that one of these worlds will exist in the future.

MC: Your last email about system-based thinking reminded me of a recent talk by Tim Brown (CEO of IDEO), on occasion of his new book about designing for change. He spoke about the commonality of convergent thinking, taking a set of available choices, implementing the best choice and optimizing the results. The problem with this method is of course that if everyone else is working with the same set of choices, they will come up with similar answers, and progress will remain static. To create innovation, you would need to change the entire set of options, or basically redefine the system. In the commercial world, if a company is making money by doing the same thing, what would their financial incentive be for investing in redefinition?

SG: In short, there is no incentive to change what you are doing if you are making money: You are wildly profitable and all the senior decision makers have nice bonuses coming in. Taking risks becomes less attractive as you have more to lose. Management has to sign off on everything in order for it to be approved and you start attracting a different group of people to come and work for you – employees who want a safe paycheck and a stable environment. The classic examples of these dynamics are found in Silicon Valley, where the more established tech companies have steady income streams. But they also have large R&D divisions to try and stay ahead of all the new startups trying to take their business as the technology evolves.

MC: You mentioned insurgent power structures being based on evolutionary models, mutating until they succeed, or being allowed to fail. In our political system, maintaining power means avoiding failure at all cost. If both our political and our financial systems are not designed to facilitate change, where does this leave us? Organizations will eventually fail if they refuse to adapt. But what of predicting the fall of powerful nations?

SG: There will always be change. What is somewhat under our control is how frequently this change happens. But that control of frequency comes at the expense of having any control over the size of the change when it does happen. Think of it like an earthquake: There is constant pressure buildup between the earth’s tectonic plates – they push together and store energy. This energy can be released in lots of very frequent short bursts, or it can be stable for decades with nothing happening until one day it all falls apart.

With companies, the smaller the company is the more likely it is to fail, this is not due to an inability to change but instead it is because of an inability to control their environment. The larger the company you are the more power you have to control your environment, the less likely you are to fail. And because you are large you can put off having to confront change for a long time (it took record labels the best part of a decade before they were willing to accept digital music as a revenue stream at which point they were beaten out of the game by a computer company called Apple).

Should a government or nation then, instead of trying to control everything and stop the small changes, actually encourage change to occur? Would this provide more stability at the expense of total control? The analogy of forest fire policies comes to mind. It was deemed that forest fires were inherently bad and they should be stopped at all costs. A lot of money was put into this project and for the most part it worked very well. But when a fire did happen, it was massively destructive as all the old dead timber that would previously have burned in the smaller fires is stockpiled as fuel waiting to burn.

But then if you had power (or money) would you, too, try everything to protect it? It’s a difficult concept to grasp, the need to let some fires burn in order to save the forest in the long run. Can we predict the fall of powerful nations? Given enough data I think we could get fairly close. We already know some of the main predictors of conflict.

MC: If you could somehow give change some visual form, what would it look like?

SG: For me, the way that I visualize change is to go to the beach and watch the waves moving towards the shore breaking as they come to land. For me, waves represent many of the elements of change. No two waves are ever the same, yet every wave is in a sense the same wave. The place where they will break is determined by the sand or coral underneath the water, yet the waves act together to change this over time. They are also a product of a larger system of tides and the movement of the moon. And their very shape is dictated by a combination of gravity and electrical charge of hydrogen atoms. You also get to see the tipping point of change – before the wave breaks, the water is calm and the wave reveals itself as a simple vertical displacement of water. But just a few short seconds after this, the water turns white and violent as the wave crashes over the sandbar. This change is predictable, which is why we can surf – but it is always changing and never the same. And change, like the wave, is nothing more than the simple transference of energy from one particle to another.

Marisa Jahn: Why did you write this book? And why should activists write books?

Benjamin Shepard: That’s a big question. In terms of the first part of the question, there is an old expression that the last chapter of one book often finds its way into the opening salvo for the next. As I was finishing my first book, White Nights and Ascending Shadows: An Oral History of the San Francisco AIDS Epidemic in 1996, I started seeing a bunch of writing about the AIDS years with a very moralizing lens. Writers and commentators such as Andrew Sullivan had been writing that AIDS was over, the AIDS activism of ACT UP was counterproductive and irresponsible, and gay people needed to put the lessons of gay liberation behind them so they could grow up, fit into the system, join the army, get married, and become normal. As a person who drew a huge amount of inspiration from both the lessons of gay liberation as well as queer/AIDS direct action, this understanding felt abhorrent. And I starting writing about the dangerous uses of this moralizing in the end of the book.

By the time I moved to New York City in 1997, this debate had become a full scale culture war. While some asked queers to just grow up and act more like straight people, another cohort of activists argued that being queer meant embracing difference, sexual self determination, and the uses of pleasure in movements for social change. Dubbing themselves SexPanic!, these activists did it within a post-modernist, ironic, campy activist flair. They put flyers calling their opponents “Turdz” inside the book jackets of their political enemies, the Gang of Four, did fundraisers at sex clubs, held street actions at Show World, a strip club, and the like. I started going to meetings within a week of moving to town. And I was immediately taken by the culture of pleasure and politics and sex and a public commons in NYC. It was something I had never quite seen before. And I wanted to figure out what that was all about. This is largely the story I write about in the book. In between the fights, the demo divas, the cruising at meetings, the drinks afterwards, the prop making parties, work on press releases and so on, I was completely taken aback. Yet, throughout the process, we were wracking our brains to defend public sexual culture, and by extension public space, for debate and difference in New York City. In the end, the SexPanic! culture wars opened up a huge new space for me to think about culture, cities, pleasure, sex, urban public space, and social movements, even if we lost lots of those battles.

The strange thing is the group fell apart almost as immediately as it began. This probably brings the story to the second part of the question, why should activists write books? I’ll extend that to ask, why should activists reflect on their work? Saul Alinsky used to accuse young activists of being nothing but a bunch of undigested actions. He said we have to take the time to honestly reflect on what works and does not work. Without this, we doom ourselves to just doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results, while adding a few more failed movements to the garbage heap of history.

MJ: How do you see play as a germane lens for examining the gay liberation and queer activist movement? Said in other terms, why is it that play has so prominently figured in the gay liberation and queer activist movement?

BS: This is one of the few movements in history that actually conceptualized the idea of pleasure as an end unto itself for movement players. Certainly, Surrealists, Dada, and the Situationists recognized the liberatory potential of play as means to free thought and possibility outside of the social relations organized around work and production, which seemed to reinforce alienated social experiences. They valued the liberatory possibilities of play. Yet, it was the Gay Liberation and later the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power who declared that sexual self-determination, pleasure, and expression could serve as both means and ends of movements for social change. This is not to suggest that play was everything for these movements. And the play that was there, it was not without controversy. From the earliest days of Gay Liberation, queers have fought over the meanings of sexual self-determination. Yet, many were aware that embracing pleasure and play offered a stark contrast to the old left view that pleasure should take place after the revolution and the hard work of class politics is resolved. What both queers and the Situationists suggested was rejection of a life based on the drudgery of just punching the clock, paying rent, and going to and from a boring job. There had to be more than a means of necessity, argued Herbert Marcuse, who is perhaps the most important theorist of play and social movements.

Yet, to be clear, play is only one part of a larger organizing campaign, which includes a clear task or proposal, research on an issue, a communications strategy to move this issue, a mobilization strategy, direct action, a legal strategy, and a bit of play to sustain a movement. By the AIDS years, I was profoundly intrigued with the ways that queers sustained their movements in the face of the mass AIDS carnage, using combinations of queer aesthetics, camp, sex, research, direct action, and saavy representation of the issues. Right in the middle of this, play and social eros were large components of these movement practices.

MJ: What are inspiring historical antecedents to the way that play characterizes the gay liberation and queer activist movement?

BS: It’s hard to know how far back to trace the social and aesthetic movements associated with play, pleasure, and sexual freedom. Some of the first that I know were the Dionysus Cults, which so agitated the Romans with irreverent and steadfast dedication to drink and sex that tbe Roman leaders, the Carrie Nations of their day who were not part of the party, sought to prohibit their gatherings. That policy worked about as well as our 18th Amendment banning alcohol and starting prohibition. How queer was their subversive commitment to debauchery? Gay Activist Alliance icon Arthur Evans wrote his own version of the Bacchae by Euripides. Dionysus has been described in terms reflective of current understanding of trans expression. Caravaggio’s portrait of Bacchus [Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) - Bacchus (c.1595)] only highlights the gay and fierce quality of the Dionysus cult, which has inspired writers and poets through the centuries.

While it is usually expressed with bodies, play is also expressed with words such as in the topsy-turvy of Dada or in Whitman’s poetry, among other things. “I sing the body electric…” links an ageless impulse toward freedom of body and thoughts.

In terms of social movements, 19th and 20th century Free Love advocates, anarchists including Emma Goldman and company, were huge supporters of both play and sexual freedoms, which they saw as a refreshing contrast to the bondage of marriage and state-sanctioned social relationships. “No other Americans … devoted so much time and effort to exploring the social, moral, and ethical place of same sex love,” writes Terence Kissack in his fascinating new history Free Comrades: Anarchism and Homosexuality in the United States 1895 – 1917. “And neither did anyone else of the period develop a political understanding of the right of men and women to love whomsoever they wished, whenever and wherever they wished, in a manner of their choosing.” Over the years, anarchist queer activism has increasingly built on a recognition of the insurrectionary possibilities of free play.

In terms of art, you had Dadaists and Surrealists, who explored a world gone reeling from the generational mass suicide practiced on the West from 1914-18. They did it through new approaches to living, explorations in personal sexual freedom, word play, mind freedom, theatre, and gender bending. Duchamp’s ready-made submission of a toilet to the 1917 New York Society for Independent Artists show and his postcard of the Mona Lisa with a moustache with the graffiti – “she’s got a hot ass” —these works were thought to be early and potent examples of the power of a prank to get people to think. The Surrealists took an interest in the unconscious, psychoanalysis, approaches to play, freedom of sexuality, and the imagination, and applied it to a new movement in art. Yet, these experiments did not come without a cost. Magnus Hirschfield’s ‘Weimar Era Institute of Sex’ was burnt down during the first week the Nazis were in power in May of 1933. The Weimar Cabaret was theatre of transgression. The fate of Dada and Surrealism and the Sexologists helped inspire the formation of the Mattachine Society in 1948 in Los Angeles. From here, queer thinking overlapped and co-mingled with movements ranging from the Beats to Punk to current global justice movements.

In later years, the same psychoanalytic movement which influenced the Surrealists inspired Marcuse to write Eros and Civilization, perhaps the most important study of play. Many of the early proponents of this movement theorized about play and freedom of the mind. British gay activist Peter Tatchell argues that Sigmund Freud helped challenge sexual ignorance, while establishing a liberatory understanding of sex.

So the roots of the movement are many.

MJ: How can some of the tactics explored in this book inform the art and activist community in New York?

BS: Groups such as GRAN FURY, Group Material, and Diva TV have inspired and influenced current movements in any number of ways. For example, Diva TV and its approach to activists creating their own media directly anticipates the current approaches of DIY media production, the independent media movement, and the innovations of You Tube which has so profoundly changed the way we tell the stories about movements. There are so many examples. For queer activism, art has long been a part of telling a movement story. Here, art brought the movement’s aims to wide audiences, to publics who intuitively connected with the messages of the art and felt compelled to do something about it – a pretty tall order. This is common understanding. But it is easier said than done. That’s the hard part.

MJ: What in this book did you not get to write about that you would have liked to cover?

BS: Well, it is the first part of a much larger study of play and movement activity. One can only cover so much in one volume. Upcoming works include three more books on play as it overlaps with local and social movements: Play, Creativity and Social Movements: If I Can’t Dance, It’s Not My Revolution!, The Beach Beneath the Streets: Exclusion, Control, and Play in Public Space, and The Community Projects as Social Activism . Each considers play from a different vantage point. The first, Play, Creativity, and Social Movements considers the phenomena historically, from Surrealism to Dada, Situationism to punk, queer activism to squatting, links between neighborhood groups, such as Lower East Side Collective and global justice movements, in which I played a small part. The Beach Beneath the Streets considers tension between public and private spaces, play and social control. The final work, Community Projects as Social Activism considers play as a component of a holistic organizing strategy. It looks at the increasing need for mutual aid network to help support communities of care, especially as the social safety net bears more wear as the financial crisis churns forward. But there are so many topics I wish I had time to write about. Topics such as punk and queer activism, friendship in movements, immigration and global movements, there are so many amazing stories of heros out there. I write every day in an effort to make sense of and honor all the work of the amazing activism taking place every day, little of which garners mainstream media coverage. All this work involves a reflection of an action research approach, beginning with the interplay of actions we plan, participant observation of how the action goes, reflection on the action, generating more questions, research, actions, stories and so on. As the song line says, the road goes on forever and the party never ends.

http://www.routledge-ny.com/books/Queer-Political-Performance-and-Protest-isbn9780415960960

By Tom Angotti[i]

New York’s landed oligarchy boasts that the city is “The Real Estate Capital of the World.” This popular mythology helps to manufacture consent for the planning, zoning and housing policies that open the gates wide to real estate speculation, megaprojects, and Olympics-sized boondoggles. The myth treats the hundreds of diverse neighborhoods in the city as pawns in the giant Ponzi schemes run by real estate investment trusts, equity funds, mortgage lenders, and hedge funds that treat all land as raw material for speculative profit and not an essential element in of all life.

But real estate’s imperial rule, though still in force, is losing ground to the rising community-based, city-wide, regional and global efforts to take back the land. People are discovering new concepts of community land — land that is outside the speculative marketplace and subject to democratic control that respects principles of economic, social and environmental justice. Community land can include a wide variety of land tenure systems including ownership and control by non-profits, community land trusts, public agencies, and private households in a sufficiently regulated market. Community land may be secured by public land banking, rent and eviction controls, taxation and limits on equity gains from real estate, land use and zoning regulations, and participatory budget-making. New York City is a leader in community-based planning, with around 100 plans large and small, mostly initiated without the support of government. Together these plans reflect the aspiration of people to gain control over land in the places where they live and work.

Challenges to Community Land

Mayor Bloomberg’s West Side Stadium and Olympics 2012 bombs were defused, but there are likely to be many more explosive devices, like Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards, that will erode established neighborhoods, use public funding to expand private fortunes, and undermine community plans. In early 2007, Mayor Bloomberg announced a set of principles to guide long-term planning for the city, PlaNYC2030, but omitted any significant role for communities. Touted as a “sustainability plan,” it is really a blueprint for real estate development dressed up in green.[ii] Megaprojects, new luxury enclaves, and big box stores are still on the horizon. While the real estate bubble burst in 2008, this created new opportunities for the scavengers of the investment world whose fortunes rise with other peoples’ miseries. Neighborhoods with people of modest incomes are paying the heaviest price relative to their assets, as we saw in the wholesale abandonment of the 1960s and 70s. All of this may spur more protest and activism and increase the attractiveness of community land and planning as alternatives to real estate as usual.

I hope to contribute to the struggles for a better urban future by offering a brief summary of my ten-point strategy for uniting land and people in New York City.

1. Expand the public trust, consolidate community land
2. Connect land and people
3. Consolidate the urban commons
4. Land bank for the commons
5. Regulate the commons
6. Create More Community Land Trusts
7. Quality of Life Instead of Growth Machine
8. Think Locally, Regionally and Globally
9. Take Comprehensive Planning Back to the Future
10. Think of the Seventh Generation

1)  Expand the Public Trust, Consolidate Community Land

Community land is a powerful instrument for securing affordable housing and fighting displacement and gentrification. It can be a key element in securing long-term benefits for neighborhoods that are successful in reducing and eliminating the concentration of noxious facilities. It can be a powerful tool for environmental justice.

By helping to expand the commons, community planning will confront the global practices of privatization and budgetary austerity that have become the hallmarks of neoliberalism. If we start planning with the assumption that nothing can be implemented unless we find a big private partner (who usually turns out to be the senior partner), we will have relinquished the most powerful tools for controlling the use of land – public and non-profit entities that operate in the public domain. Let the experience with parks be a warning: we have a handful of park conservancies that are well-maintained playgrounds for the wealthy and host profitable concessions, and a Parks Department with a budget under siege that can not adequately maintain parks in most neighborhoods. PILOTs and TIFs, financing schemes like those proposed for West Midtown and Atlantic Yards that use public subsidies for private development, must be stopped; they are bonanzas for private developers and will impoverish public services throughout the city. It is time to revitalize the public sector so it serves the public.

2)  Connect Land and People

The City’s planning bureaucracy has been unable to make the connections between land and people. Environmental concerns are referred to the Department of Environmental Protection, sanitation concerns to the Sanitation Department, transportation to the Department of Transportation. In the real world of neighborhoods and urban living, these are indivisible, but there is no “Department of Neighborhoods” that looks at the whole and not just the parts. We need to plan our transportation network for cleaner air and safer streets, not just to move traffic. We need to plan to reduce waste and its impacts on public health, not just take out the garbage. Daily decisions in government should be informed by an understanding of environmental impacts on people and not just relegated to developer-sponsored environmental impact statements.

While in some ways New York City government has been ahead of the nation’s big cities – in mass transit and affordable housing, for example – it is far behind when it comes to planning for our air, water and food, three basic elements for sustaining life in the city. The federal government’s strict clean air rules for fuel and vehicles helped clean the air significantly since the 1970s, but the City itself did little to improve the air by limiting traffic and energy use. The high density and mass transit that make New York City a pioneer in the fight against urban sprawl are not the result of progressive environmental policy but rather unintended consequences of a dynamic real estate industry, and the City lags when it comes to maximizing the environmental benefits of high density because real estate exerts an inordinate influence on environmental policy.

Federal policy and funding, plus industrial flight, had more to do with securing clean surface water than City policy. The federal government forced the city to build 14 waste water plants – and put up the money for them. The federal government forced the City to stop ocean dumping. Entirely off the radar screen of planners are the polluted underground aquifers in the city — our many natural streams covered with concrete and asphalt. Stewardship of the land should value the water underneath us, in the bay and local rivers, and not just around the upstate reservoirs that supply drinking water, or when someone wants to enhance the value of their land with odorless waterfront views.

The city’s foodshed is tied to its land. But we treat land in the city as alien to the production and quality of food, as if it were external to urban life, the sole responsibility of food conglomerates and supermarkets. Community-assisted agriculture, community gardens, farmers markets, and urban agriculture strengthen our connection with land in and around the city. Foodshed planning is a public health priority because obesity and diabetes, especially among children, have reached epidemic proportions.[iii] Food shed planning plus planning for the transportation, recreational and educational systems can also encourage exercise and help make this a healthy and active city.[iv]

3) Consolidate the Urban Commons

Given the wealth and power of the Trumps and Vornados, isn’t the idea of building an urban commons a quixotic dream? In fact, if we take an inventory of the commons today, it is surprising how much urban land is already in the commons. What remains is to acknowledge it, guarantee its stewardship, and make it better. First, a substantial portion of land in the city is already under some form of public ownership or control and outside the circuit of commodity exchange. About 30% of all land in the city is publicly-owned streets and sidewalks. We can put the public on public streets and end the monopoly of private cars, and we can plan for our stoops and sidewalks so they are high-quality public spaces. Of the remaining 70% of land, about half is used for infrastructure, public institutions, community facilities, and open space, or remains vacant. The other half is already developed, and 5% of that is used for public or non-profit housing. Over half of the city’s developable vacant land is in peripheral areas, especially in Staten Island, where land prices are not yet high enough to produce pressures for significant numbers of new private housing units; some of this land can be put in the public trust (and not just as back yard green space for Staten Islanders). 30% of the city’s developable land is tax-exempt, and though the institutions like universities and hospitals that own much of this land do not necessarily operate in the public interest, and some of them are worse than private developers when it comes to addressing the public interest, a lot of this land will be kept off the market for a long time to come.

4)  Land Bank for the Commons

The good news is that a sizeable urban commons already exists. The bad news is that there is little space left to expand it. With so little land that is privately owned and zoned for development, the pressures remain intense to develop in these central locations and keep them out of the commons. This also increases pressures to shrink the commons, by converting low-cost housing to market-rate housing and upzoning selected outlying areas. The solution that has yet to be tried is for the City to plan in partnership with neighborhoods for a more sustainable, long-range growth strategy that meets local as well as regional needs and at the same time expands the commons.

In the long-term future, however, there is one instrument that could help expand the commons—land banking. The proportion of land owned by the City could have been higher if government had not foolishly divested itself of so many vacant lots over the last 40 years. The City could have retained ownership and leased its land to private or non-profit owners for public purposes, such as low-income housing. The City could have sold the land with deed restrictions that incorporated community objectives—for example, stipulations that housing remain affordable to people with modest incomes in perpetuity. Instead, the City sold much of the land without any serious land use planning. Good land in areas served by subways was given away so that low-density “ticky tacky” could be built following the Charlotte Gardens model. Individual lots in many neighborhoods were auctioned off to the highest bidder with no restrictions.

All of this was done because of an ideological rigidity, promoted by the real estate industry for its own obvious reasons, that saw land banking by the City as practically un-American. The next time around we will have to fight harder against the myth that the City should not land bank because it is bad for development, or because government can not possibly plan. Look at the city of Stockholm, where almost all land was land-banked. This was not a policy dreamed up by the socialists; the city was built on land ceded by the Crown and planned high-density neighborhoods in the suburbs were built around mass transit stops in one of the world’s best examples of orderly planned growth. If we just give away the land to the highest bidder, the bidders will control the future of the city, not the people who will live and work there and must live with the consequences. Community planners in New York City have already demonstrated that when challenged they have lots of good ideas about how to plan for growth, in their neighborhoods and beyond. Publicly-assembled land could, and should, be subject to democratically developed community planning.

5)  Regulate the Commons

Zoning and land use regulation can insure that privately-owned land is used and developed in ways that meet community needs, effectively placing it in the commons. Too often, however, local activists have to spend their time fighting against zoning changes to prevent the worst from happening instead of using land use regulations to make the best happen. In other words, land use regulation is too often reactive, not proactive.

Zoning devices like special districts, special permits, contextual zones, natural districts, mixed use districts, and inclusionary zoning can be used to implement planning objectives, but they are more often set up as defensive measures in reaction to proposed development. The City Planning Department is forever pressing for more “as-of-right” zoning because it follows the myth of market magic and gives greater freedom to developers. But as-of-right regulations only postpone the resolution of disputes over land use and fail to resolve them. Other tools for community planning that are already in place are landmarks preservation districts; city tax policies that now encourage conversions and new construction but could be used to stimulate other types of development or land preservation; tax benefits for elderly homeowners; and the list goes on.

The Department of City Planning aggressively upzones in areas of recent interest to real estate developers following a three-pronged approach founded on the neoliberal principle that social benefits must be tied to private development. The strategy involves: 1) mixed use (MX) zoning, which is applied in a way that instead encourages single-use residential development and produces a de facto residential zone; 2) waterfront zoning, which links the development of waterfront public access to private residential and commercial development and effectively privatizes the waterfront; and 3) inclusionary zoning (IZ), which in New York City is optional and not mandatory, and in practice provides a small number of affordable housing units while effectively displacing many more units. Community planners need to confront this three-headed monster and propose progressive alternatives that preserve and encourage mixed use, create public parks on the waterfront, and mandate new affordable housing while preserving existing affordable units.

6) Create More Community Land Trusts

The community land trust (CLT) is one of the most underutilized instruments for community planning in the nation’s cities. The CLT is a hopeful model for cities like New York because it is a powerful instrument for preserving affordable housing in perpetuity. There are some 160 community land trusts in the U.S., many of which provide low-cost housing in cities.[v][vi] Two land trusts in the city now protect low-income housing by providing low-cost long-term leases to tenant-run mutual housing associations.[vii] In neighborhoods struggling to stop displacement and the homogeny of gentrification, land trusts can be a powerful tool. When the housing is owned and managed by limited-equity cooperatives and government subsidies are used, the cost of the housing portion can also be written down drastically. The question now is how can we get this for everyone who needs it?

In Boston’s Roxbury, the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) started a community land trust. But it also achieved something that every neighborhood should have in its tool kit of land use controls. It got the City of Boston’s powerful Redevelopment Authority to delegate to DSNI its power of eminent domain. This enabled DSNI to assemble the vacant lots it needed to build new housing and stop dumping in the neighborhood, and insure that development met the priorities set out in the neighborhood plan.[viii][ix] Unlike its government sponsor, DSNI used eminent domain without displacing people. Our New York City housing agency (HPD), on the other hand, keeps a tight fist on its urban renewal powers, and has given too much away to developers who contribute more to the mayors’ campaigns than the neighborhoods they build in. While in some neighborhoods, HPD acknowledges the priorities of CDCs, community-based organizations should not have to beg for the land that should be theirs, and waste precious resources navigating the arcane land disposition process. The city should cede full control over city-owned vacant land to organizations that will use it in accordance with democratic, community-initiated plans.

7)  Quality of Life Instead of Growth Machine

Community planners need to develop alternatives to the growth machine orthodoxy that makes the number of new jobs and housing units the sole criterion for evaluating plans. We need to re-invent the concept of “quality of life” and define it in very concrete and specific terms, our own terms, not according to the slogans of angry politicians going after homeless people and squeegee men. Our quality of life has to do with the health and well-being of all individuals regardless of where they live and work. As Andre Gorz once noted, economic growth has stopped improving living conditions and higher wages alone will not improve the quality of life:  “Living better depends less and less on individual consumer goods the worker can buy on the market, and more and more on social investments to fight dirt, noise, inadequate housing, crowding on public transportation, and the oppressive and repressive nature of working life.”[x]

What good are more jobs and higher salaries if rents go up, people are forced to move and commute longer distances, and the poorest neighborhoods get dumped on? What good are more affordable housing units if they are overwhelmed by luxury units and force people out of existing affordable units when they neither need nor want to move? If “new jobs” includes low-wage, dead-end jobs without benefits, and moving them from one part of the region to another, how is that “development?” And if more jobs and housing does not also mean meeting neighborhood needs for schools, health care, transportation, and other services, they could instead result in greater burdens on an already stressed infrastructure.

8)  Think Locally, Regionally and Globally

The strongest local strategy is a global one. Nothing that we do in the city will have any durable value unless it is linked in our consciousness and organizing to the world beyond. The administrative boundaries of the City of New York contain less than a third of the population in the New York region, even though the city captures much of the region’s financial resources. Our greatest regional resource is people, not financial markets. Regional coalitions for affordable housing, public transportation, and environmental protection need to grow and challenge the fragmented governmental framework that is unable to plan in the public interest because local elected officials are wedded to narrow local property interests. New York City’s housing crisis is exacerbated by exclusionary zoning in the suburbs. There can be no resolution of the city’s traffic congestion as long as the suburbs continue to add lanes to the expressways that lead into the city. And as long as conservative state legislatures keep a throttle-hold on financing for the central cities, state expenditures will continue to reinforce local economic inequalities.

There is no neat divide between New York City and “the suburbs.” The dualistic central city/suburban, black/white contradictions of the 1960s no longer have much meaning. The majority of New York City’s working class neighborhoods have less in common with the city’s Silk Stocking districts than they do with the scores of smaller cities in the region and growing number of ethnically diverse working class suburbs. The community planning movement can help create the conditions that will break the institutional stagnation of local government planning, and cross the artificial lines of political jurisdiction that keep people from organizing for progressive change.

Urban planners have been looking in the wrong place for solutions to the fragmentation and lack of planning in the New York region. For all of its efforts and corporate support, the Regional Plan Association, working at the regional level, has been unable to unlock the key to regional planning after some 80 years of trying. As demonstrated by the Organization of Waterfront Neighborhood’s city-wide solid waste plan and Tri-State Transportation Campaign’s regional advocacy, for example, progressive community-based planning has every need to engage with regional efforts, and some of the strongest support for regional planning comes from community-based organizations. The race and class divisions in the region, however, are perhaps the most significant obstacle, and progressive community planning has done a better job of confronting these divisions than the professional planners. They are the best hope for regional planning.

9)  Take Comprehensive Planning Back to the Future

Putting all these elements together is still not enough because the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Community planning forces dialogues within neighborhoods that look at all aspects of life in the city, region and world. Community planning is resurrecting and transforming the discredited, orthodox rational-comprehensive planning approaches by making comprehensiveness an open, democratic process that is no longer the privileged domain for technocrats. I learned about the value of holistic approaches to planning in my decades of work as a community planner, mostly from community activists whose own daily lives force them to experience the many interrelated aspects of community life. To maximize their political effectiveness, they are also compelled to understand the relationship between their neighborhood and the urban region, national urban policies, and globalized trends. I have often found them more capable of thinking comprehensively, and about questions of global sustainability, than the technocratic urban planners whose sterile world views of cities are formed by looking at aerial photographs and color-coded maps. This is not the rational-comprehensive planning advanced by Baron von Hausmann in his 19th Century plan to wipe out the working class neighborhoods of central Paris. It is a new holistic, progressive community planning.

10) Think of the Seventh Generation

Community planning needs to break away from the narrow paradigms of “strategic planning” that migrated from a business model and is incapable of thinking past the next investment cycle. There are other ways to look at the future. The Great Law of the Iriquois Confederacy, for example, states that, “In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.”

Planning by corporations, City Hall, and communities rarely looks beyond five or ten years, a very short-term horizon in a city where major projects take at least that long from the time they are proposed to the time they get built. The bogus practice of environmental impact assessment, which at most looks ten years into the future, is thoroughly inadequate as a tool except for the planning firms and lawyers for whom it is bread and butter. With a global climate crisis, diminishing energy sources, the uninterrupted disappearance of natural species from the earth, and escalating global inequalities, it is time to change the way decisions about our living environment are made.

True, seven generations is a long time, much more than a century, and no one, including our highly trained professional planners and futurists, can predict how conditions will change or guarantee that their plans will remain valid over such a long period of time. But planning for the Seventh Generation should not be understood as yet another prosaic, modernist tool for “rational” planning based on simplistic linear cause-effect relations; instead, it is a way of thinking that should govern deliberation and decision-making. It means asking the question, “Will our plans meet the needs of the next seven generations?” even if our answers cannot be quantified and verified with any degree of certainty. Right now, no one bothers to ask the question. Had that question been posed before the launch of the oil economy and private automobile almost 100 years ago, we might not be facing global warming or urban environmental and health crises today.

Some cultures may well challenge the whole notion of planning because they do not share the view that the world is divided between past, present and future. If the world is timeless, what fundamental difference is there between human action in all three periods? While modern Western philosophy interprets such thinking as an invitation to paralysis, it could also be an entrée to a new, more humane approach to planning. It calls into question our traditional focus on land, which fetishizes future value, and devalues its past and present.

New York City’s community planning is insignificant if it is not understood as part of a long history of community organizing to gain control over land — both its production and reproduction — and life. The current struggles in post-Katrina New Orleans are an important signal of the resiliency of those who declare “We Won’t Move.” Working people and small businesses in New Orleans are organizing to prevent powerful real estate interests from evicting them permanently from their communities. They are attempting to build a process of democratic planning in which economic and racial justice are not compromised.[xi] To keep these uphill battles in perspective, perhaps we need to think seven generations ahead and ask the question: if the empire fails, as all empires have, then who will control the land?

[ii] See www.nyc.gov/Planyc2030; Angotti, Tom (2007) “Atlantic Yards and the Sustainability Test,” Gotham Gazette. June 2007.

[iii] Slightly less than half of New York City’s elementary school students are obese or over-weight, a higher rate than in the nation as a whole. The proportion of obese children is 24%, but the rate is 31% among Latino children. Pérez-Peña, Richard (2003) “Obesity on Rise in New York Public Schools,” The New York Times. July 9, B1, 6.

[iv] See Progressive Planning issue on “Planning for the Active City,” 157, Fall 2003.

[vi] Greenstein Rosalind and Suyngu-Eryilmaz, Yesim (2005) “Community Land Trusts: Leasing Land for Affordable Housing,” Land Lines. April, 8-10.

[vii] Angotti, Tom, with Cecilia Jagu (2006) Community Land Trusts and Low-Income Multifamily Rental Housing. Cambridge, Mass: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2006.

[ix] See Medoff, Peter and Sklar, Holly (1994) Streets of Hope. Boston: South End Press.

[x] Andre Gorz, Andre (1971) “Labor and the ‘Quality of Life’” in Ecology as Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1980, 133.

[xi] Hartman, Chester and Gregory D. Squires, Eds. (2006) There Is No Such Thing As A Natural Disaster. New York: Routledge.