Bulldozing your Neighbors: Development Plans in the Rust Belt

Across the Midwest, the stimulus package is encouraging very strange things: cities are using it to demolish capital instead of to build it.

The signs are everywhere if you know where to look. In the Polish Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, I’m pitching my tent in a vacant lot. Until a few months ago, an abandoned house stood in the space where I’ll be sleeping tonight. A journalist was squatting in this house, free of rent, much like artists who took over empty factories and abandoned houses in the 1990s. The landlord didn’t bother to evict her: times were hard and few tenants were available. The house was falling down, and the journalist was doing basic repairs and making sure that no one damaged the property. The agreement suited everyone. Valuable housing stock was maintained; meanwhile, a woman was able to keep a roof over her head.

Last year, however, the city seized the squat, which was $6,000 overdue in back taxes. Rather than leaving it standing, the city spent about $5,000 in federal funds to bulldoze the house. The vacant lot is not likely to be rebuilt anytime soon.

Bulldozing is an odd strategy for an economic downturn, but it’s the major urban strategy being pursued in the rust belt. The “shrinking cities” scheme started in Flint, Michigan in the 1980s. Instead of allowing vacant houses to stand, city officials would use federal, state, and local funds to bulldoze houses. The vacant lots would be turned over to favored development corporations or – more likely – left fallow. In the wake of the current foreclosure crisis, the strategy of “shrinking cities” is being adopted as a way of dealing with vacant lots in Cleveland and Pittsburgh; bulldozing is now the unofficial urban policy of the Obama administration.

Read the rest at the Commonweal Institute, where I'm a fellow.

In praise of surre(gion)alism

Max Cafard's Surre(gion)alist Manifest first appeared in Exquisite Corpse in 1990 and was afterwards republished with a preface by New Orleans poet Andrei Codrescu. Arguing for the eminence of the local as a point of view, the manifesto urged readers to consider their own perspective, political and culture, as the outcome of their existence at a certain place and time. It argued that only in radical utopian moments such as May 1968 do individuals become able to envision life beyond the bounds of their own history.

I had the great joy of getting to meet Max and hang out back in May while passing through New Orleans. We met for coffee in the afternoon and talked about landscapes till late at night. He told me about his ancestors, how they'd come to New Orleans trying to save the family farm back in France. I got to hear about Max's travels through anarchist experiments around Europe in the 60s. I got to hear about New Orleans' travelers who tack between racial neighborhoods, till the invisible boundaries break down and new worlds become visible. I got to hear about living in New Orleans in the breakdown around Katrina, when Max's son, intimate with the ghettos and slums of many races, ended up naked in prison for days, then housed in solitary for months, unbeknownst to his relatives.

Max's major opus, the Surre(gion)alist Manifesto, excavates radical European and Chinese philosophy for a new political philosophy appropriate to twenty-first century America. It looks back to the radical individual Taoism of Lao Tse, the utopian experiments of nineteenth-century Europe, the anarchist/individualist critique of Dada, and the radical Situationist Internationale of 1960s Paris, searching for a utopian logic that respects the radical difference of place and individual will. The intellectual roots here are serious: the analysis of psychogeography pioneered by Bachelard, Dubord, and De Certeau, combined with the Henri Lefebvre's critique of capitalism. Cafard reduces, engineering a new dialectic of liberation, a landscapey recipe, the navigation between the "utopian nowhere of meaning and the topian density of earth."

In the Manifesto, attention to local landscape offers a movement towards political and economic liberation. Cafard urges, Strive to reject the people who would manage you from another place far away, whether they are capitalists or teachers. Try not to be like them: try to live instead in the landscape of your journey, taking lessons from the cities and seasons where you find yourself.

This injunction to inhabit the local first, as a beginning of a radical politics, is explained more fully in another fine essay, "Deep Play in the City." Here Cafard applies radical psychogeography as an instruction set for looking at urban landscapes. Landscapeyness becomes the beginning of radical political freedom.

Back over on Landsploitation, the experimental film channel for all things landscapey, Max has let me put up the video version of the Manifesto, presented by Cafard's student Andrew Goodrich. If you'd prefer the text version, you can find it here.

I'd like to take this opportunity to remind readers that I curate two videocasts about everyday landscape. Landsploitation presents experimental videos and sound. Dilettantes and film geeks both welcome. The Landscape Studies Podcast presents work by my colleagues, typically papers that have been read already at conferences, excerpts of talks, or summaries of scholarly articles. Itunes listeners, subscribe to Landsploitation and Landscape Studies. Both are accepting submissions.