Disorganized Musings On Urbanity

I've been thinking about communities a lot lately. Anybody who has ever spent more than thirty minutes with me has probably heard something about the summers that I've gotten to spend in rural communities in Latin America with a group called AMIGOS de las Americas. And maybe the single biggest impact that those experiences have had on me is how they've made me think about community. I've seen - I've gotten to be a part of - communities of people where a powerful sense of belonging and home and identity and mutual support comes wrapped up with the reality of growing up and growing old with certain people in a certain place where everybody knows everybody else.

But I guess I always assumed that community was something that only flourished in rural, quite likely impoverished, villages. It was only within a geographically confined group of people (of a manageable size, and in a remote location) that a real community could exist.

Now I'm feeling hopeful that I was wrong. There's something about the close proximity that cities create - the fact that people are pushed face-to-face and forced to interact with each other because of the sheer volume of humanity left with no other option than to coexist - that seems to facilitate distinct community identities, maybe even better than rural places do.

You can see this in the myriad community organizers of New York. Or in the passionate - perhaps zealous - perhaps obsessively over-invested - folks who show up to community board meetings to discuss the banal details of urban planning in their neighborhood. Or in the constant reevaluation of identity prompted by the urban juxtaposition of intense contrasts - rich and poor, old and new, black and white and brown - and the sense of camaraderie that emerges from the process of collective reevaluation.

I've got lots of questions and reservations about this trend I'm noticing. And maybe the rapid change that takes place in urban environments actually makes them destructive to communities, rather than supportive. But I still feel hopeful about what it might mean for a world in which (as IHP as reminded us a good dozen times by now) more than half the world's population now lives in cities.

Some ironic clocks in hipster Wiliamsburg

The change of cities is a major theme in IHP. Take last week, when we heard from a man at Friends of the Highline. He works for a fascinating project: during New York's industrial era, a railroad track was constructed along most of Manhattan (raised above the ground after one too many pedestrians got hit by the cars that carried sausage and steel and coal through the city). Left abandoned, it became an untamed urban forest during the 1980's. And in the last decade, the city was convinced to put up 100 million dollars to turn it into a beautiful walking park...under the assumption that the new attraction would raise surrounding property values more than enough to compensate in real estate taxes.

It is now a gorgeous structure - as much a park or trail as it as a sightseeing tourist trap that offers a unique way to see one of the world's great cities from what is literally a different point of view.

But later, we heard from a community organizer who explained that as property values go up around the Highline so will rent, and then lower-income families get forced out of homes they have always lived in but can no longer afford, putting the communities that define New York at the mercy of urban planners far removed.

Providing cheap public housing might be one way to keep those communities secure, but real estate developers don't like that method and the city seems ambivalent about their implications for crime.

Or, we could use rent control policies to preserve communities - but those are easily manipulated by landlords interested in driving out subsidized tenants for those who will pay New Yoirk's exceptionally high prices instead. And requiring more "affordable housing" is tricky: the definition of "affordable" is based on the median income of the entire city, about $90,000 a year. Some neighborhoods make more, and some less - in Chinatown, the median is $22,000.

"Save us from our perfectly fine middle class life" in gentrifying Chinatown

I struggled to write this first "in-country" blog post. I have enough material to write a hundred of them, but it's another thing to find enough coherence to tie all that material together. The questions of community and change have been two of many themes, and they seemed like the right way to frame the start of IHP - but wait a second, Seth. What is IHP?

Let me explain the program through the people who make it what it is. We are thirty-two students from American universities, traveling to four continents in four months (most of us are Americans, but Romania and Hungary and Zambia and China are represented as well). Three professors travel with us, each teaching a course - on politics, culture, and urban planning.

Add to that a Coordinator in each city; that's a local expert who curates an ambitious schedule of site visits and guest lectures. And top it all off with a Fellow, who helps with everything from logistics to counseling to coaching us on an independent study project (our fourth class this semester - and my topic will be "The Commute").

Put all those people together, and you get a program with the goal of teaching us to ask better questions and think more critically about the complex issues that affect cities and the people living in them. It makes for a busy, unpredictable, exciting, fascinating, self-professedly "intense" experience of seeing the world through an urban lens. We're the thirty-two lucky enough and masochistic enough to embark on this little adventure.

In New York, a few of the things we saw and did:

   
Canvassing with community organizers in the Bronx, Chinatown, and Harlem
   
Lectures on the history of police, the definition of gentrification, and the role of Wall Street in the financial crisis
   
Lots of orientation: bonding, talking about safety, thinking about travel and privilege, and playing an exorbitant amount of Trainwreck
   
Grand Central Station's 100th birthday party
   
A food tour of Brooklyn, plus a visit to Newton Creek - a superfund site with inches of toxic sludge remaining on the stream floor after decades of oil spills and pollution
   
Visits to the nation's second-largest urban farm, to the New York Stock Exchange, and to a panel of community organizers and advocates of squatting and one communist professor.

...plus one unplanned visit to the Museum of the Moving Image, which calls for a shout-out to my grandpa. Many of his immediate family members boast exciting and quirky credentials (one sibling in Ethiopia, another in Vietnam) but his post-retirement job probably takes the cake: Magic Lantern shows. The magic lantern, the Victorian-era predecessor to the movies, is (in my poor attempt to explain it) like a huge projector at uses painted glasss slides to used to tell stories. My grandpa goes around to schools and museums and China and Mexico and everywhere in-between to show off this old technology, and his own master storytelling skills. And sure enough, I found magic lanterns on display here in New York! Shout out to Grandpa.

Now let's see what there is to find in Delhi.