Urban Alchemy

Restoring Joy in America's Sorted-Out Cities

Mindy Thompson Fullilove

• Publisher: New Village Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781613320105
• eBook ISBN: 9781613320129
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Mindy Thompson Fullilove presents ways to strengthen neighborhood connectivity and empower marginalized communities through investigation of urban segregation from a social heath perspective. "Fullilove passionately demonstrates how, through an urbanity of inclusion, we can heal our fractured cities to make them whole again. What if divided neighborhoods were causing public health problems? What if a new approach to planning and design could tackle both the built environment and collective well-being at the same time? What if cities could help each other?
Dr. Mindy Thompson Fullilove, the acclaimed author of Root Shock, uses her unique perspective as a public health psychiatrist to explore and identify ways of healing social and spatial fractures simultaneously. Using the work of French urbanist Michel Cantal-Dupart and the American urban design firm Rothschild Doyno Collaborative as guides as well as urban restoration projects from France and the US as exemplary cases, Fullilove identifies nine tools that can mend our broken cities and reconnect our communities to make them whole.

PART I

The Madness of the Sorted-Out City

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CHAPTER ONE

From Illusion to Solution

Mr. Darcy’s letter she was in a fair way of soon knowing by heart. She studied every sentence; and her feelings towards its writer were at times widely different. When she remembered the style of his address, she was still full of indignation; but when she considered how unjustly she had condemned and upbraided him, her anger was turned against herself; and his disappointed feelings became the object of compassion. His attachment excited gratitude, his general character respect; but she could not approve him; nor could she for a moment repent her refusal, or feel the slightest inclination ever to see him again.

—Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

In 1954, the US Supreme Court, in the decision of Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education, ruled that racially segregated schools were inherently unequal and therefore violated the nation’s Constitution. Of course, it was not just schools that were segregated and not just schools that were inherently unequal. Transportation, employment, housing—you name it—we had it segregated. Undoing the law and custom of segregation has been the work of decades. This book addresses the paradox that while we’ve been desegregating our society, we’ve also been aggressively partitioning it by race, class, age, religion, lifestyle, and sexual orientation through the use of a sorting process that has amplified rather than eliminated separate and inherently unequal conditions of living, working, worshipping, playing, and attending school.

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This situation is both morally repugnant and pragmatically dangerous. The sorted-out city, which is the focus of concern in this book, is a dysfunctional city, plagued by illness and paralyzed in the face of problems. These ills are not just the sorry fate of those at the bottom of the pyramid, but a trap for our whole society. Inherent inequality gives birth to universal problems. This is a surprise for most of us, as we tend to think that our “group” offers a protection from the problems of other “groups.”

Even the most oppressed groups are allowed to revel in the trump cards they believe they hold: African Americans can jump and dance; Jews are smart; gays are charming and well dressed; women are nurturing; and atheists are brave. And certainly, those who actually have power and wealth believe that they are outside of the problems. But scholars have attacked these concepts as false ideas putting us all at risk (Gilman 1996). They have explained that the system of inherent inequality creates problems for all. As shocking as it may seem, it turns out that even the most privileged people suffer in unequal societies (Wilkinson and Pickett 2010). For example, Sir Michael Marmot and his colleagues compared white, middle-aged American men to their counterparts in England. They found that English men with minimal education had better health than Americans with the most education (Banks et al. 2006).

It is bad that we have sorted our cities by race and class. It is even worse to know that we are continuing to do so, aggravating the inequalities rather than resolving them. Given the threat this poses to our well-being, what are we to do?

This is the question that has preoccupied me for more than two decades and taken me to cities around the world, searching for tools to fight sorting. But I didn’t start as an opponent of the sorted-out city. I started out demanding the right to remain segregated. I was seven. Here is the story of how I changed my mind.

Inherent inequality is not my problem

In 1957, I was a student in Oakwood Avenue School in Orange, New Jersey. I lived in a sea of learning. I learned to read, sing, play hopscotch, like boys, do arithmetic, love my teachers, and make art. I loved walking to school, playing in the playground, trying hard, and being great. I loved it when my mother invited the whole class to our house for a picnic and we all walked there together, but afterwards I didn’t have to go back to school because I was home! I loved the thank-you notes everyone wrote to “Dear Mrs. Thompson.” I hopped to school, skipped home, and reveled in my own magnificence.

Figure 1.1: Oakwood school days. MindyThompson as a kindergartner at Oakwood Avenue School.

At that time, the city schools were segregated by a line that wiggled through the south of the city in a weird design that collected up white kids for the “white” school and black kids for the “black” school. Though logically I lived in the district of the white school, as I was black, I walked across busy Central Avenue to Oakwood, the “black” school. Because my mom, Maggie, was white, she was able to get a copy of the map that showed this gerrymander. She handed it to my dad, Ernie, a great community organizer, and said, “Fix it.”

In the spring of 1958, my parents told me that they had won and I was going to go to a new school. I staged my version of a sit-in. I wept so bitterly at the thought of leaving my dear school that I caused myself to have migraine headaches. I hated being desegregated with all my heart and soul and I hated my parents for making this happen to me.

Later that year, when I was in third grade at Heywood Avenue School, the “white” school, my teacher, Ms. Hilda Portuguese, created an apartment house out of oaktag in which she had cut little windows, one for each person in the class. The oaktag was cut so it opened like shutters. Our photos were inserted in the windows. Every day, we were asked a series of questions about our comportment, things like going to bed by 8 p.m., eating citrus fruit, and brushing our teeth. If we had done all of these things, our shutters stayed open. We could see ourselves all day long. But, if not, our shutters were closed.

I took this lightly at first, but after a time or two of looking at my closed window, I realized it was no joke. My family was poor and having oranges every day was a stretch for the budget. I ate a lemon on one occasion. One time, my mother had taken me with her to solicit donations for the Mother’s March of Dimes. I realized we were going to get home after eight. I threw a tantrum and she finally hailed one of the police cars patrolling the streets to protect the canvassers. We whizzed home and I shot up to bed.

Maybe it is my problem

In 1970, when I was nineteen, and my dad’s health was failing, he asked if I would help him finish the book he’d been working on for as long as I could remember (Thompson and Thompson 1976). I started to write down his stories, using my own words and imagination. I read him what I’d written. “That’s awful,” he said. “That’s not what happened or what it was like.”

I was furious. Here I’d worked so hard and he was just trashing my artistic endeavor. But, unable to escape the project, I said (some hours later), “Well, then you better explain.”

He did. In bits and pieces, he showed me what it had been like growing up in the segregated South at the height of Jim Crow. The black farmers were powerless, which meant that whites could abuse them. To protest might mean death, so they handled the insults in a propitiating manner. Away from the eyes of the white population, life was eked out, short on food and other comforts. My father described the profound kindness of his mother and the harsh punishments of his father, the church that was filled with poetry and praise, and the school that was built on his grandfather’s land. I slowly realized that, whatever I had had to suffer because of the change in schools, to have accepted segregation would have been worse.

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Mad plagues

“Remember how God visited ten plagues on the Egyptians so that Pharaoh would let the Jews go? If a group of elephants is a parade and a group of lions is a pride, what’s a group of plagues?” I asked my daughter Molly one day.

“Mad plagues,” she said immediately. “That’s mad plagues.” She had learned the word “mad” in junior high school. The expression became very popular in Washington Heights during the summer of 2005 while Molly was leading our Family-to-Family teen filmmaking program. That was the year that the documentary “Mad Hot Ballroom” came out. It featured young people from the neighborhood who were in a ballroom dancing competition. “Mad” was synonymous with “a lot.”

My experience with mad plagues started in 1986. I was working as a psychiatrist in community mental health in San Francisco. The infamous real estate tax-cap, Proposition 13, had just been passed, and one of the effects was that it decimated mental health services. I decided to do research instead of clinical work, and I happened to get a job studying the AIDS epidemic in black and Hispanic communities. But just at that time, the crack cocaine epidemic was taking off. Soon, the neighborhoods where I was studying AIDS were convulsed by a wave of addiction that swept through the black neighborhoods. At the same time, the fight over the markets for selling crack triggered an explosion of violence. The violence, in turn, tripped an avalanche of mental illness related to violence. Just as I was beginning to understand all of those epidemics, an epidemic of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis broke out.

I followed the epidemics as they appeared. I talked to the people who were suffering from the illnesses piling up in their bodies. I visited the clinics where doctors were passing out pills with all the aplomb they could muster, but sore in their hearts over the great gap between what they knew and the kinds of new diseases and comorbidities that were arriving so fast at the clinic doors. I gained a bit of fame due to the dubious distinction of being the first public health professional to report a series of “the next bad thing” (see Selected Publications by Rodrick Wallace and the Community Research Group for more information on mad plagues).

In Harlem, I encountered patterns of despair I had never seen before or heard described. The environment was a wreck. A third of the buildings had been destroyed. Almost all of the blocks had lost one or more buildings. Some had lost nearly all. The empty lots were filled with rubble and garbage. There were strong smells and large rats. Nothing new was being built, and little was being fixed. The houses that were standing were ragged and sagging.

The people were thoroughly stressed. In focus groups and interviews, I encountered levels of discomfort that exceeded anything I’d previously encountered. On one occasion, I went to a drug treatment center where seven women joined me for a conversation. I was trying to understand the connection between crack use and the risk for HIV infection. Even before we got to the most sensitive part—trading sex for drugs—the women were agitated. When we started to talk about sex trading, one woman said she hadn’t done that; she just had sex with friends who gave her drugs. The other six started screaming at her that that was the same thing. She refused to consider this, and the screaming became even more frenetic, if you can imagine what that must have sounded like. I had never heard anything like it. The noise was so loud, it aroused the concern of the whole treatment center and a dozen people collected outside the door, wondering if they should come in and rescue us.

Looking at the broken environment and talking to the distressed people, I felt the same sense of confusion I’d had as a new psychiatric resident, unable to decipher the language of madness. It was my mentor and friend, Rodrick Wallace, who helped me get a handle on the geyser of pathology. Rod is thin and disheveled, with brilliant blue eyes that are intensified by his bright white hair. He loves his own jokes and insists on truth telling, however inopportune the moment. Rod has a love of words that I count on. He passes along great science fiction, gives thoughtful presents for big birthdays, and, as someone nine years ahead of me, has kind advice on aging. His research has focused on the ecology of disease in American cities.

When I first met him, he had just published a very major paper called, “The Synergism of Plagues: ‘Planned Shrinkage,’ Contagious Housing Destruction, and AIDS in the Bronx” (Wallace 1988). Rod showed in that paper that a New York City policy called “planned shrinkage” had triggered the mad plagues of the 1970s. It was a policy so evil that it seemed like something a science fiction villain like Dr. Strangelove would invent. At its heart was a decision to close fire stations and let the poor minority neighborhoods, including the South Bronx and Harlem, burn down. This would displace people, clear land, and allow the city to “shrink” its services. When I try to explain to students that this really happened in the United States of America, they look at me in total disbelief

Rod demonstrated that the buildings destroyed by the fires set off a domino effect called “contagious housing destruction.” This is a process of ecological catastrophe in which each lost building undermines the integrity of the buildings next to it or near it. One fire could eventually cause the loss of acres of housing. Indeed, in the South Bronx, some sections of the neighborhood lost 80 percent of their housing.

He estimated that the implementation of planned shrinkage caused a hundred thousand deaths or more—there’s never been an official reckoning. It triggered the epidemics of AIDS, crack addiction, violence, mental illness related to...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Table of Figures
• Foreword
• Introduction
• PART I - The Madness of the Sorted-Out City
• PART II - Align
• PART III - Create
• PART IV - Connect
• Conclusion: Give Me Your Hands
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Selected Publications
• References
• Index
• Copyright Page