Here’s a follow up from Jamie Kalven on the recent conference on Stateway Gardens:
Titled “The Stroll: A Blues Requiem for Stateway Gardens,” my words were intended to evoke the eight square blocks of the conference title and were accompanied by a presentation of photographic images by Patricia Evans and Jason Reblando orchestrated by David Eads.
Here are a few quotes from “The Stroll” … with my comments interspersed. Jamie Kalven’s writing is worthy of your full attention.
Stateway Gardens was not an isolated community. It was an abandoned community—abandoned by public and private institutions, near and far.
There is something to the focus on networks that evokes a sense of neutrality… there is a network or there isn’t one. You are isolated or disconnected, or you’re not, it’s a straightforward assessment. But the language of abandonment brings our attention sharply into focus. The social contract has been broken, or it was never intended to be carried forward on terms grounded in basic human decency and respect.
Equally important, we demonstrated in the rhetoric of action that conditions in public housing reflected not some monolithic, irreversible system failure, as the logic of abandonment would have it, but a mass of discreet patterns of neglect and disregard that could be corrected by sustained care and attention.
This too requires a sweeping shift in perspective… the logic of abandonment unfolded not by necessity. The systemic logic goes beyond the subsystem in which we’ve conceptually encapsulated the problems so that we may deny the deeper problems and our complicity.
We have a role in this. Our role is that of isolating ourselves from these circumstances and doing nothing but place a language of system between us and the other. We are speaking through the environment:
everywhere a resident looked the built environment reflected back contempt.
And further than that:
The ultimate expression of that contempt is the official diagnosis that attributes the conditions of the buildings to the moral failings of the residents rather than the criminal negligence of the landlord. This symbolic equation is the essence of “The Plan for Transformationâ€: the buildings are symbols of every urban ill, so their demolition is, in itself, progress.
Yet the community was not the buildings, any more than the handsome new bricks and mortar being built on former public housing sites by private developers constitute a community.
The promise of future community on these sites denies past community. It is not development of community that motivated this destruction. It is our failure to engage in community, it is our acceptance of a language of community as a screen for cold profit calculation to select interests. That too has been our role.
Let’s close with Jamie’s statement on political voice and isolation.
It was an intensely political place. I have occasionally been described as “a voice for the voiceless.†This formulation offends me. It misstates the problem. The point is not that residents of abandoned communities are voiceless; it is that no one is listening.
I’ve thought about the isolation of communities and the question of communities making their own media. But Jamie’s framing requires we reopen those questions. We’ll come back to that in another post.