The Powers of Religion: Varanasi and Mecca

Darcy Bender, Shibani Jadhav, Alexander Valencia

Photographs of present-day Varanasi, alongside the Ghats, and of Saudi Arabia, Mecca. Varanasi and Mecca are two of the highest populated sites people pilgrimage to for the religious aspects. (Image 1, 2)

Religious public spaces are often regarded as timeless artifacts unchanged over time. However, they can undergo substantial changes as new pow-ers take control of the space. In this paper we will examine two religious cities - Varanasi, India and Mecca, Saudi Arabia - to understand the powers that shape the physical space around the most re-ligious sites. Though their spaces contain very dif-ferent ritual practices and hold distinct meaning for each religion, both host many pilgrims every year and are considered to be the holiest of places for their respective religions. For Varanasi, the eigh-teenth and nineteenth centuries saw the massive development of its riverfront and today it is again on the precipice of significant change. In Mecca, since 2000 the space around the Great Mosque has un-dergone major changes as the Mosque expands and new buildings rise to host an influx of pilgrims. We will analyze these religious spaces by looking at those in power and their motives for changing the sacred spaces. We will also examine the treatment of the city’s historical importance and whether changes to the physical space look to the past or attempts to break ties and why. Finally, we will try to understand for whom the changes were made, examine what the spaces are used for and who can access them.

POWER

According to legend, the Hindu god Shiva found-ed the city of Varanasi (known as Kashi in ancient texts) and the river Ganga has long held spiritual importance for pilgrims who flood the Ghats (stone steps) and temples along the riverfront every year. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centu-ries, the riverfront in Varanasi underwent drastic physical changes under its Hindu Maratha and Brit-ish colonial leaders. Prior to this, the city had been under Muslim Mughal rule for nearly 500 years and in 1656 emperor Aurangzeb ordered the de-struction of all Hindu temples in the city. After the decline of Mughal power in the eighteenth century, the riverfront in Varanasi was “an expanse of san-dy beach, with a few distinct privately owned stone embankments facing the riverfront” and the Alamgir mosque. (1) In the mid eighteenth century, Maratha leaders came to Varanasi in pursuit of territorial ex-pansion and their patronage provided “legitimation through sacred sponsorship”. (2) Within a context of religious regeneration and an influx of pilgrims, the riverfront also became the ideal location to dis-play personal wealth and power. As British power grew throughout the subcontinent, Varanasi be-came a site of resettlement for displaced Maratha and Rajput political elites.(3) Although they lacked real political power, they continued to transfer

large amounts of capital to Varanasi because the patronage of buildings on the riverfront could en-hance honor and status in the eyes of the colonials.(4) Many mansions, temples and Ghats were built along the riverfront at this time and by the early nineteenth century the riverfront near the center of the city was almost completely inhabited. To the Marathas, “the riverfront was a space for the dis-play of status and authority through the medium of buildings, rituals and festivals.”(5) In the late eighteenth century, Varanasi emerged as a commercial capital with trade and ag-ricultural activity that produced substantial revenue for the East India Company through imposed taxes. (6) For the British colonials the riverfront served as a theater of Hindu ritual and public life. In 1893, the colonial government formed the Committee for the Local Improvement and began controlling the main-tenance and development of the riverfront. (7) Varanasi today is at the threshold of anoth-er makeover. India’s current Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi’s ‘Kashi Vision’ is a plan to create an elevated future for the ancient city of Varanasi. His aim is to convert Varanasi into a ‘smart heritage city’ while retaining its rich culture, tradition and her-itage:It is my firm belief that once we are able to give the required impetus to tourism, it will not only bring more tourists but also enhance the livelihood of the poorest of the poor. More tourists means more in-come for those associated with temples, those who are living on the Ghats, those who ride the ferries on the Ganga…the entire town and surrounding ar-eas will receive a much needed facelift. (8) The Ghats along the holy river being the city’s cultural and economic lifeblood are a vital component of the development plan. The PM in-tends to engage the leading private companies in India, such as Tata and Lalit groups, to work in co-ordination with the city of Varanasi to take the re-sponsibilities of the Ghats. As part of their Corpo-rate Social Responsibility (CSR), these companies may “adopt “ a Ghat for cleanup, restoration and maintenance. Ghats like Dashashwamedh near the Kashi Vishwanath temple and known for Ganga aarti (a Hindu ritual in which a light wick is offered to the deity in this case the holy River Ganga), and others which are most frequently visited by foreign tourists will be the first few trial sites to come un-der the private-public association in Varanasi. By handing over the maintenance to corporations, the city is giving up their power over the aesthetic and physical condition of the Ghats.

Mecca, located in Saudi Arabia, is the ho-liest of Muslim cities. For Muslims, it is mandatory by religion to visit the Holy City at least once in their lifetime in a pilgrimage called the Hajj. During the Hajj, Muslims reenact a series of rituals highlight-ing the life of the Islamic prophet Muhammad and

during this time, Mecca receives between two and three million.(9) The pilgrimage to the city of Mecca has consistently been a crucial aspect of the Saudi Arabian economy since the unification, under one ruler, in 1938. King Abdul-Aziz was the first king of Saudi Arabia after its unification and since then his successors have all been his sons. (10) Shortly af-ter the unification, Saudi Arabia also fortified their political and economic power with the discovery of oil. With the quantum jump in revenues, Saudi Arabia has been, and is still, one of the wealthiest countries in the world. The wealth of Saudi Arabia becomes obvious while analyzing Mecca today.(11) The Saudi rulers have carried out multiple develop-ments to expand the Grand Mosque and holy sites to increase capacity to serve the pilgrims. In 2012, King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud called for a master plan for Mecca and its surroundings despite the fact that vast developments were either com-plete or were under way by then. (12) One of the major developments is the Jamarat Bridge Project, which is a 950 meter long and 80 meter wide bridge of five floors, designed to accommodate up to five million pilgrims. This development also allows for

Detail of panorama of Banaras from late 19th century. (Image 3)

future, larger, projects to be constructed in Mecca. (13) However, the King’s vision of Mecca also includes a purposeful erasure of historic sites be-cause his particular sect of ultra-conservative Islam believes that they “encourage sinful idolatry.” (14). In its place, “the government is promoting an eco-nomic sector based on the commercial (not spiritu-al) consumption of time, space, culture.”(15)

1988 and current photo of Mecca and the Holy Kaaba in the Grand Mosque. Every year, Pilgrims come from all over the world, to a city undergoing the biggest transformation in its history.

(Image 4 i,ii)

CONNECTING OR DISCONNECTING FROM THE PAST

In order to revive Varanasi as a symbol of Hindu-ism, Maratha sponsors along with Brahmin priests developed it with a strong link to its religious past. Puranic (Ancient Hindu) texts were consulted to construct temples as close to their former geo-graphic sites as possible and to create pilgrimage maps that would take visitors along the same path as their ancient predecessors. The city’s connec-tions to its puranic past were seen as vital to its development because it gave legitimacy to the pa-tronage of the elites and brought more pilgrims who contributed to the economy of the city. (16) Eventually, precision and authenticity in connections to the ancient texts became less im-portant. For example, “Someswur temple on Man Mandir ghat [was a] nineteenth century addition to the city’s fabric, and [was] incorporated into pilgrim-ages, departing from textual prescriptions.”(17) The pilgrimage routes that were thought to be the same path walked for centuries were slowly adjusted as new temples and Ghats were built along the river-front. For creating the image of a Hindu icon, it was important that representations of the city promoted its ancient connections even if it meant creating an inauthentic or inaccurate portrait. Varanasi is still trying to create connections with its past by historicizing its present. The PM stresses the need to preserve Varanasi’s “Pauranik Swaroop” (ancient ethos) while implementing his “Kashi Vision.” $2.9 million (18) have been allocat-ed by the government of India for upgrading tour-ism infrastructure at the Ghats in Varanasi which will include rehabilitation and conservation of the architecture of the Ghats, an attempt to reconstruct history. One example of adaptive reuse for a struc-ture along the Ghats is the Balaji Ghat Palace. The Scindia Devastha Trust who owns the palace with Varanasi Development Authority (VDA) - a private public partnership - commissioned the Indian Na-tional Trust for Art & Cultural Heritage (INTACH) to preserve and reciprocate to the needs of the city. INTACH proposed to set up ‘Banaras Gharana of Music’ (a center for music) and museum, which would attract students, researchers and tourists. Mecca is rapidly going through extreme transformations but unlike Varanasi, adaptive reuse of historic structures is not being considered. King Abdullah has his aim set high the development of Mecca. This in turn is causing the rapid destruction of the historical sights in Mecca, such as columns and entire sections of the Grand Mosque that date back to the time of construction in the early 14th century. (19) Through the modernization of Mecca, the religious aspects of Mecca are being altered to fit the new vision the King has of Mecca. (20) Specif-ically, the performance of Sa’I during the hajj calls

for pilgrims to run back and forth between the hills of Safa and Marwah. (21) This ritual has been tak-ing place outside since the beginning of the Hajj, but now this ritual takes place within a newly de-veloped, state of the art, building housing air con-ditioning and other amenities. The idea behind the Hajj is to create a parallel between the pilgrim and the historical figures they praise. Pilgrims do this by recreating the histories of these figures, while in the same historical site. But, if the site is altered, there is no longer an absolute parallel, thus resulting in the deterioration of the ritual. (22)

FOR WHOM

While the majority of the eighteenth century devel-opment along the Ganga in Varanasi consisted of private mansions, it had a decidedly “public” feel. Only Dashashwamedha and Manikarnika were meant as ritual public Ghats but they extended a

feeling of public space all along the riverfront. (23) With the railroads of the late nineteenth century, many more pilgrims were able to travel to Varanasi and the influx of people along the Ghats reflected this. Despite the mix of privately owned residences, semi-public temples and public Ghats, the entire riverfront was a “civic” space. The Ghats of Varana-si allowed for a diverse range of everyday, religious and leisure activities and provided space that could be used by locals, pilgrims, Hindu elites and colo-nials alike. Today, the historic ritual of evening aarti along the holy river Ganga that was once a subtle offering to the river is now used as a spectacle to attract tourists in search of a spiritual experience. While many tourists in Varanasi assume this ritual has taken place in this way forever, historian Mad-huri Desai noticed in 2003, “that the Ganga Aarti was then just three years old,” and that it “occurred only at the Dashashvamedha Ghat. By 2005, the ritual had become more elaborate and then took place at several sites.” (24)

View of Balaji ghat palace and the Alamgir mosque in the background. (Image 5 i)

What was once a place for the common pilgrims and locals to practice their rituals like taking a holy dip in the river and cremation to daily activities like bathing is now being transformed to focus on tour-ism and to capture the western gaze. Desai aptly states, “Directed at pilgrims and tourists alike, this ritual is positioned as being part of the city’s eternal spiritual traditions.” (25) With the current emphasis on creating spectacle for tourists and the public-pri-vate partnerships, the accessibility of Varanasi could be at threat. In Mecca some new developments are definitely not for everyone. New hotels construct-ed directly outside of the Great Mosque, can cost up to $7,000 per night. (26) These places are out of reach for most of the pilgrims. The word “hajj” means effort and completing the tasks of the pil-grimage is supposed to be a humbling experience. The shopping malls and hotels are inserting inter-actions that are not focused on the actual Hajj. In fact, Ziauddin Sardar an expert has said that be-cause of the changes of the recent king, the Hajj has been “drained of history and religious and cul-tural plurality… It has been reduced to a mundane exercise in rituals and shopping.” (27)

CONCLUSION

In both Mecca and Varanasi, the focus of new developments are the holiest sites, the ‘Kaaba’ and ‘the River Ganga’ respectively. It is the power of religion through which these cities were con-ceived and then preserved or altered. However, to understand the power of religious spaces today, we must study them within the context of the po-litical influence that those in power have to make decisions for the city to produce space in their own image. In the case of Varanasi, the predominant attempt by the Hindu elite and the colonial rulers in the 18th century and by the current Prime Minister is to retain its appearance as an ancient religious space as if frozen in time to gain political influence and attract pilgrims and tourists. “The appeal to primordial images simultaneously offers a legitima-cy born of ‘tradition’ with a reservoir of values to be drawn on when negotiating change under modern circumstances...It is precisely these characteristics that most often become linked to political move-ments.” (28) In Mecca, the Saudi rulers have ex-erted efforts to provide infrastructure and services to pilgrims to facilitate the performance of Hajj rituals properly and in ease and comfort. However, they have also allowed the destruction of historic sites and the new construction specifically targets those with disposable income. It is imperative to understand the potential political motives behind all changes made to religious sites because as we have seen through Varanasi and Mecca, no physi-cal space is completely unchanged or “timeless.”

Endnotes pictures:

image 1: Pete Mcbride . National Geographichttp://proof.nationalgeographic.com/2014/08/08/kissing-the-bay-of-bengal-celebration-rever-ence-and-mystery/

image 2: Emanuelle Degli Esposti, International Business Times, “Saudi Arabia is a Represive State, Warns Amnesty”, 2011. http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/saudi-arabia-repressive-state-warns-amnes-ty-259572

image 3: Neils Gutschow, “Panoramas of Banaras” Visualizing Space in Banaras, 200

image 4 (i,ii): Associated Press,Mic network, April 21,2014. http://mic.com/articles/88061/then-and-now-photos-of-mecca-show-what-s-happening-to-islam-s-most-sacred-site

image 5 (i,ii): Architectural Heritage Division, Indian National Trust for Art & Cultural Heritage,“-Detailed Project Report, Conservation and Devel-opment of Heritage Site- Balaji Ghat Palace, Vara-nasi,” Varanasi Development Authority, November, 2009.

Endnotes texts:

1. Madhuri Desai, “Resurrecting Banaras: Urban Space, Architecture and Religious Boundaries” (PhD Diss., UC Berkeley, 2007), 288.

2. Sandria B Freitag,”Visualizing Cities by Modern Citizens: Banaras Compared to Jaipur and Luc-know”, Visualizing Spaces in Banaras,(Harrassow-itz Verlag 2006), 242.

3. Michael S. Dodson, “Banaras: Urban Forms and Cultural Histories,” (Routledge,New Delhi, 2012), 6.

4. Desai,2007, 307.

5. Ibid., 285.

6. Dodson, 2012, 6.

7. Desai, 2007, 318.

8. Narendra Modi, “Varanasi: A glorious past, an even glorious future for the ancient city that is India’s pride,”April 24, 2014. http://www.narendra-modi.in/varanasi-a-glorious-past-an-even-glorious-future-for-the-ancient-city-that-is-indias-pride/

9. Basharat Peer,”Modern Mecca,”The New York-er, April 16, 2012. http://www.newyorker.com/mag-

azine/2012/04/16/modern-mecca/. 10. Helen Chapin Metz, ed. “Saudi Arabia: ACountry Study. Washington: GPO for the Library of Congress,” 1992.

11. Ibid

12. Riazat Butt,”Mecca’s mega architecture castsshadow over hajj,”The Guardian, October 23, 2012. http://www.theguardian.com/artandde-sign/2012/oct/23/mecca-architecture-hajj1

13. “Hajj and Umrah”,Saudi Government, updatedon August 1, 2012.http://www.saudi.gov.sa/wps/portal/!ut/p/b0/04_Sj9CPykssy0xPLMnMz0vMAfGjzOId3Z2dgj1NjAz-8zUMMDTxNzZ2NHU0NDQ1cDfULsh0VAZoX-D7w!/

14. Butt, October 23, 2012. http://www.theguard-ian.com/artanddesign/2012/oct/23/mecca-architec-ture-hajj1

15. Peter Burns, “From Hajj to Hedonism? Par-adoxes of Developing Tourism in Saudi Arabia”, Tourism in the Middle East Continuity, Change and Transformation,(Channel View Publications, 2007), 234.16. Sandria B Freitag,2006, 244.

17. Desai, 2007, 95.

18. Akshay Deshmane,“Top corporates like Taj &Lalit groups to ‘adopt’ Varanasi ghats for cleaning, maintenance,”The Economic Times, ET Bureau, June 2, 2014. http://articles.economictimes.india-times.com/2014-06-02/news/50272676_1_varana-si-municipal-corporation-ghats-first-100-days

19. Jerome Taylor,”Mecca for the rich, Islam’sholiest site Turning into Vegas,” The Independent, December 6, 2014. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/mecca-for-the-rich-islams-holiest-site-turning-into-vegas-2360114.html.

20. Basharat Peer, “Modern Mecca. The trans-formation of a holy city,”The New Yorker, April 16, 2012 http://www.newyorker.com/maga-zine/2012/04/16/modern-mecca

21. David Edwin Long,“Hajj Today”, 1979,18.

22.Taylor, December 6, 2014. http://www.inde-pendent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/mecca-for-the-rich-islams-holiest-site-turning-into-ve-gas-2360114.html.

23. Desai, 2007, 293.Madhuri Desai, “City of Negotiations: Urban Space and Narrative in Banaras, Ed. Banaras: Urban Forms and cultural histories. (Routledge,New Delhi, 2012.),17.

24. Ibid

25. Butt, October 23, 2012. http://www.theguard-ian.com/artanddesign/2012/oct/23/mecca-architec-ture-hajj1

26. Ziauddin Sardar,“The Destruction of Mecca,”The New York Times,September 30, 2014.http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/01/opinion/the-destruction-of-mecca.html?module=-Search&mabReward=relbias%3Ar%2C%7B%222%22%3A%22RI%3A18%22%7D

27.Sandria B Freitag,2006 ,247

Bibliography 1. Burns Peter. “From Hajj to Hedonism? Para-doxes of Developing Tourism in Saudi Arabia”. Tourism in the Middle East Continuity. Change and Transformation.(Channel View Publications, 2007). 234.

2. Chapin Helen Metz. ed. “Saudi Arabia: A Coun-try Study. Washington: GPO for the Library of Congress,” 1992.

3. Dodson S. Michael S. “Banaras: Urban Formsand Cultural Histories,” (Routledge,New Delhi, 2012), 6.

4. Desai Madhuri. “City of Negotiations: UrbanSpace and Narrative in Banaras, Ed. Banaras: Ur-ban Forms and cultural histories. (Routledge,New Delhi, 2012.)17.

5. Freitag B Sandria.”Visualizing Cities by ModernCitizens: Banaras Compared to Jaipur and Luc-know”. Visualizing Spaces in Banaras.(Harrassow-itz Verlag 2006) .247.

6. McMillan M.E.”The Meaning of Mecca: The Poli-tics of Pilgrimage in Early Islam”. 2011.

7. Pearson M.N.”Pious Passengers: The Hajj inEarlier Times”.1994.

8. Zafarul-Islam Khan and Yaqub Zaki.”Hajj inFocus”. 1986.

Bridging the Public/Private Divide

by Sascia Bailer, Gamar Markarian, Demetra Kourri, Jasmine Vasandani

Newspapers as Political Surrogates for Women on the Streets of Tehran during the Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911)

“the inside’ is inhabited mainly by the females, and [...] ‘the outside’ is used by the family males and their male visitors”

—Sadoughianzadeh, 2013:5

During the Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911), upper and middle class women in Tehran participated in public political events despite not having direct access to the public sphere. Their contributions to the Constitutional Revolution blur and contradict the boundaries that define the political, male-dominated public sphere and the seemingly dormant and

apolitical female private sphere. While demonstrations and political decisions were made in the public sphere, one way that women advanced the revolution was through the creation of women-run newspapers. It was during the early twentieth century that Iran’s first women-run journals and newspapers were established and circulated in the public sphere during the Constitutional Revolution. The circulation of these newspapers created a conduit through which women were able to engage in public dialogue from within the private sphere. The mobilization of women during the Constitutional Revolution was substantial enough to set the precedent for the women’s movement in Iran.

Illustration from the first publication of Shokufeh Newspaper, year 1911 (1330 Hijri)1

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Gender and Urban Form During the Constitutional Revolution

Iranian cities, like many Islamic cities, were built around physical structures like kasbahs, mosques and bazaars, which were connected to each other via a network of streets and squares. The strategic location of Tehran attracted Tahmasb, a Safavid king, to build a bazaar and a town hall, giving Tehran the status of a city in 1553. Tehran gradually grew in importance, becoming a trading center, a regional capital and finally the capital city of Iran in the hands of the Qajar dynasty (1785-1925) (Fig. 1). Predominantly occupied by men, these spaces comprised the public sphere of Tehran and provided a platform for lively social interaction and connectivity. During the Constitutional Revolution, the public sphere became a site of contestation between the government and (male) revolutionaries, for “men were the ones considered as fully responsible for all public activities in society.” Tehran’s socio-spatial organization presented “a sharp separation between the private and public life,” thereby “restrict[ing] women to the private realm, entirely excluding them from public presence and activity.” The social categorizations of the “public man” and the “private women” correspond to the spatial division of Tehran that physically confined women to the inside. However, due to political interactions with the West in the nineteenth century, Iran began to experience radical changes in its social framework. The process of Iran’s participation in the global commodity exchange not only instigated the country’s transition into capitalism, but also significantly restructured its society. The lower and middle classes of Iran’s population were dissatisfied with foreign economic control of their nation, which led to the rise of a multi-class, populist movement that eventually achieved the creation of a constitution and a parliament. A series of protests took place organized by

Figure 1. Tehran’s urban growth. The sequence of the maps illustrate the urban growth of Tehran around central elements such as the Kasbah and the Bazaar.

male political organizations that occupied the streets and squares of Tehran. Women too began to mobilize, albeit within the private sphere, and therefore challenged the notion that political activity in the public sphere was restricted to men and that the private sphere was an apolitical space.

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Newspapers as a Bridge Between Public and Private Spheres

As protests during the Constitutional Revolution began in the streets and squares of Tehran, upper and middle class women began to mobilize in their homes and girls schools. Iran’s first girls schools were established during the Constitutional Revolution and served as a space where women could freely learn and engage in dialogue about the larger global women’s movement, thus “raising women’s consciousness in Iran.” Despite having access to educational institutions, upper and middle class women were still absent from the public protests that took place during the revolution and continued to mobilize from within the private sphere. Advocates of women’s education thus established Iran’s first women-run newspapers and journals as a way of participating in the public political events taking place during the Constitutional Revolution. Danesh (Knowledge), published in 1910, was Iran’s first women-run newspaper that discussed women’s domestic issues such as how to care for the home in order to ensure “a blissful family life” in addition to “articles on health, childcare and managing the servants, as well as fiction and reports on girls schools.” Subsequent women-run newspapers to be published in Iran directly addressed the contributions Iranian women could make towards national decision-making. Established by Mozayan al-Dowleh (Fig. 2), founder of three girls schools in Tehran, Shokufeh (Blossom) was published in 1913 and ran articles that were “entirely dedicated to the question of women’s education; it was outspoken and often attacked the ministry of education [sic] for neglecting girls.” Some articles published in Shokufeh were addressed to the general public and discussed how men should treat women with respect. Symbolic of women’s voices, Shokufeh engaged a wider public audience in a dialogue about

women’s rights in Iran. Shokufeh can therefore be read as a printed surrogate for the missing physical presence of women in the public sphere during the Constitutional Revolution.

Shokufeh, published twice a month from 1911-1915, was a four-page newspaper written in Old Persian. It followed a systematic structure with a text-only cover page, followed by two spreads with text and images. Since we did not have access to original copies of Shokufeh that could only be found in two national archives in Germany, we have shown here scans of its second issue provided online by the Institute for Iranian Contemporary Historical Studies (IICHS). Little is recorded of the production technology and the funding of these newspapers; we can only assume that they were financed through the incomes of their well-established husbands. Shokufeh was printed in black and white with hand-drawn images and did not contain photographs. Whether this was an aesthetic choice or one dictated by financial constraints remains unknown. In spite of the paucity of logistical information regarding Shokufeh’s publication, a close visual and textual analysis of its second issue (Fig. 3-5) can aid in understanding and contextualizing the political contributions women made during the Constitutional Revolution.

The articles published in Shokufeh address the potential women had to reorganize the public sphere from within the domestic private sphere. Written in stylized calligraphy in the top center of the front cover (Fig. 3-4) is the word “Shokufeh.” The logo is embedded in a column with the names of the female editors on the right side and a list of prices of the newspapers on the left. The text directly below the newspaper’s name discusses the importance of providing education for women, who were advised to follow the example of women in the “modern world” while also maintaining a sense of Islamic values and national pride. The free-flowing text on the second

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Figure 2. Mariam Amid, also known as Mozayan al-Dowleh casually sitting on a chair with blossoms (Shokufeh) on her veil. She is the founder of Shokufeh newspaper and three girls’ schools in Tehran.

spread of the newspaper (Fig. 5) discusses the importance of mothers educating their children, claiming that the development of a child’s personality can influence the independence of Iran from foreign control. The text also places emphasis on the impact women can have in not only educating their children, but also their entire family. The text on the third spread of the newspaper (Fig. 6) continues to activate and politicize the private sphere. The text on this page encourages women to maintain a keen sense of nationalism in order to be active and fruitful members of society. Their potential as contributors to the movement for independence was juxtaposed with Iranian men who introduced the unwanted foreign powers of Russia, England and Germany into local affairs. These articles all address ways that women could mobilize from within the private sphere, therefore contradicting the notion of the apolitical and dormant private sphere.

The images that appear on these spreads (Fig. 5, 6) echo the content of the surrounding articles. That is, these images portray women who are mobilizing within the private sphere while having access to the public sphere. Depicted are several women adorned in chadors who are engaged in conversations with other women and girls. While it can be assumed that these women are in the public sphere because of their chadors, they could have also just entered a private space after having left a public one. Nonetheless, the open door in the far corner in both images signifies a conduit to or from the public sphere that these women have access to.

The free-flowing text in these images mimics the movement that the circulation of Shokufeh would have had in the public sphere. It also alludes to the symbolism that these newspapers had in representing not only the voice but also the presence of women in the public sphere. Women infiltrated the male-dominated public sphere in the form of text in the same way that the text in these images occupies space in the foreground. The women

Figure 3. Shokufeh newspaper logo. The word Shokufeh (blossom) is written in calligraphic font and is surrounded by a blossoming brach.

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Figure 4. Shokufeh newspaper front page, year 1912 (1331 Hijri).20

Figure 5. Second spread of Shokufeh newspaper, year 1912 (1331 Hijri).

Figure 6. Third spread of Shokufeh newspaper. year 1912 (1331 Hijri)

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in these images and the newspapers themselves thus symbolically render porous the boundaries between the “male” public and “female” private spheres during the Constitutional Revolution in Iran. These newspapers and the mobilization that took place among women in order to publish them also contributed to the reappropriation of the private sphere as a space where effective political action could take place, thereby redistributing political power to women. Protests and effective political decision-making therefore became something specific not just to men, but to women as well. Additionally, protests themselves became actions that could take place within both the public and the private sphere. The publication and distribution of women-run newspapers during this time contradicts the notion that effective political activity and mass protests can only take place among men within the public sphere.

The Women’s Movement that Blossomed after Shokufeh

The women who were mobilizing during the Constitutional Revolution formed the beginning of Iran’s women’s movement. Women-run newspapers and the presence of women in journalism continue to challenge the normalized realms of the public, urban sphere and the private sphere in Iran. After the publication of Danesh and its successor Shokufeh, many more women-run newspapers were established, with some still in circulation today such as Zaba-Zanan (The Tongue of Women) first published in 1922. In 1971, a union was formed by and for Iranian women journalists called Anjuman-i Zanan-i Ruznama-nigar-i Iran (Association of Iranian Women Journalists), which would soon be followed by a “Spring of Freedom” for all Iranian journalists during the Iranian Revolution (1978-79). The year following the revolution, 500 newspapers were launched, out of which 30 were exclusively women-run. Most of these were affiliated

with left-wing organizations such as Bidari-i Zan (Woman’s Awakening), Paykar-i Zan (Woman’s Struggle), and Rahai-yi Zan (Woman’s Emancipation). While women-run newspapers continue to be published in Iran, the public/private gendered dichotomy perseveres. At the same time, our reinterpretation of Shokufeh allows us to reevaluate our preconceptions of what public and private means.

Endnotes

1. Shokufeh Newspaper Illustration, 1911 (Date of Archive Unknown) National Library and Archives of Iran , accessed 5 Dec. 2014 <http://www.nlai.ir/ (http://dl.nlai.ir/UI/e9e2d48c-712d-4d42-a053-4b02dafa1d10/LRRView.aspx)>

2. During the period of the Constitutional Revolution in the early twentieth century, lower-class women in Tehran typically worked as domestic slaves, servants, wet nurses, bath attendants, midwives, teachers of adolescents, and petty traders (Beck, 81). While they did have more access to the public sphere relative to upper and middle class women, lower-class urban women did not wield the same power and access to political tools as upper and middle class women. Beck, Lois and Guity Nashat, ed. Women in Iran, 81.

3. Beck, Lois and Guity Nashat, ed. Women in Iran, 82.

4. Madanipour, Tehran, 4.

5. Despite Tehran’s importance, Iran’s structure comprised of a number of loosely connected provinces, ruled by governors appointed by the central government. In addition, the majority of Iran’s population lived in rural areas, forming an important basis in the country’s economy. The size of Iran, as well as the diversity of communities with various ethnic origins, significantly limited the authority of the central government. Madanipour, Tehran, 7.

6. Sadoughianzadeh, “Gender Structure,” 7.

7. Ibid., 15.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Madanipour, Tehran, 8.

11. The foreign economic control by the Russian and British–mostly in external transactions but they had also gained partial control of internal markets–was the embodiment of the colonial situation imposed on the city by Western countries. Iran’s economy was restructured to the export of local raw materials and the import of finished goods. This had a disastrous impact on the accumulation of capital and led to a further social stratification. Madanipour, Tehran, 9.

25

23

24

Bibliography

Abdullah-Khan-Gorji, Bahram. “Urban Form Transformations –The Experience of Tehran Before and After the 1979 Islamic Revolution.” PhD diss., University of Southern California, 1997.

Ahrens, Peter Georg. Die Entwicklung der Stadt Teheran. Eine städtebauliche Untersuchung ihrer zukünftigen Gestaltung. Opladen: C.W. Leske Verlag, 1966

Ansari, Sarah and Vanessa Martin. Women, Religion, and Culture in Iran. New York: Psychology Press, 2002

Arasteh, Reza. “The Struggle for Equality in Iran”. Middle East Journal, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Spring, 1964): 189-205.

Beck, Lois and Guity Nashat, ed. Women in Iran from 1800 to the Islamic Republic. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004

Madanipour, Ali. Tehran. The Making of a Metropolis. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998.

Rose, Gillian.”Teaching Visualised Geographies: Towards a Methodology for the Interpretation of Visual Materials”, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, Volume 20, Issue 3, (1996): 281-294.

Povey, Tara and Elaleh Rostami-Povey. Women, Power and Politics in 21st Century Iran. Ashgate: Farnham, 2012.

Sadoughianzadeh, Minoosh. “Gender Structure and Spatial Organization. Iranian Traditional Spaces”, SAGE Open, Vol. 3, No. 4, (October-December 2013): 1-19. Accessed December 1st, 2014. doi: 10.1177/2158244013511258.

Shahidi, Hossein. Journalism in Iran: From Mission to Profession. London: Routledge, 1997.

12. Ahrens, Peter Georg. lskhfidugsirgu,1966.

Abdullah-Khan-Gorji, Bahram, Initial Formation of Tehran as a City Around the Bazaar, Tehran’s Neighborhoods, Wall and Gates in the 15th Century, and Map of Tehran During the First Half of the 19th Century, 1977.

13. Povey, 91.

14. Shahid, Journalism in Iran, 82.

15. Nashat, 91.

16. According to WorldCat the originals of Shokufeh are only available at the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek in Leipzig / Frankfurt am Main and the Universitätsbibliothek Bamberg.

17. IICHS provides a transcription of texts from the newspaper scans, which are in “Old Farsi” and hard to decipher due to the age of the artifacts. We have translated these transcripted text bites into English with the help of native speakers and online translating tools.

18. Author Unknown, Photograph of Mariam Amid, (date of photograph unknown), Persian Persia, accessed 5 Dec. 2014 <http://www.persianpersia.com/artandculture/adetails.php?articleid=22591&parentid=1&catid=175>

19. Detail, 1911 (Date of Archive Unknown), National Library and Archives of Iran, accessed 5 Dec. 2014 <http://dl.nlai.ir/UI/e9e2d48c-712d-4d42-a053-4b02dafa1d10/LRRView.aspx>

20. Front Cover of Shokufeh Newspaper, 1912 (Date of archive unknown), Institute for Iranian Contemporary Historical Studies (IICHS), accessed 5 Dec. 2014 <http://iichs.org/index.asp?id=709&doc_cat=9>

21. Second spread of Shokufeh Newspaper, Institute for Iranian Contemporary Historical Studies (IICH1912, (Date of archive unknown), Institute for Iranian Contemporary Historical Studies (IICHS), accessed 5 Dec. 2014 <http://iichs.org/index.asp?id=709&doc_cat=9>

22. Third spread of Shokufeh Newspaper, Institute for Iranian Contemporary Historical Studies (IICHS) http://iichs.org/index.asp?id=709&doc_cat=9 [last retrieved on December 5, 2014]

23. Arasteh, “The Struggle for Equality in Iran”, 29.

24. Ansari and Martin, Women, Religion, and Culture, 70.

25. Ibid, 70.

THE REGAL THEATER AND CLASS STRATIFICATION IN BRONZEVILLE, CHICAGO

BY Max Freedman, Samara Lentz, Tait Mandler, Sinead Petrasek

At its opening in 1928, the Regal Theater in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighbourhood was the first “deluxe” en-tertainment venue to cater specifically to a black audi-ence--not only in Chicago, but the entire United States.1 Though initially white owned and operated, by 1968, the theater and its adjoining commercial complex had transi-tioned to black ownership and management. Superficial-ly, this trajectory suggests a narrative arc bent towards racial progress and self-determination. However, such a neat ideation masks the competing class interests in Chi-cago’s “Black Belt.” The success of the Regal coincided with the rise of a black consumer middle class, and its history of proprietorship provides a case study for intr-

aracial class conflict. We argue that the fate of the Regal Theater reveals the fiction of collective benefit derived from upper middle class ascension through the accumu-lation of financial and cultural capital in Bronzeville.

In the early twentieth century, Bronzeville represent-ed a site of opportunity for black migrants from the South; this representation was mediated by those who aspired to move north and reinforced by the success of those already relocated. Articles from the Chicago Defender, the most successful African-American news-paper at the time, contributed to this vision of oppor-tunity. The Defender was founded in 1905 by Robert

A crowd outside of the Regal Theater in Bronzeville, Chicago in April 1941. The theater served a black audience and featured black entertainers but still showed popular white movies of the time, like “Philadelphia Story.” (Russell Lee “The movies are pop-

ular in the Negro section of Chicago, Illinois.” 1941, Black and white photographic print. Library of Congress Prints & Photo-graphs Division, Washinton DC. From: http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/ (Accessed December 5, 2014).

Abbott, the son of former slaves who had migrated north to Chicago from Georgia.2 The success of the Chicago Defender not only alluded to the growing mi-grant population in Chicago’s South Side, but also sig-naled an emergent site-specific black consumer market.3

While this segregated consumer base allowed upward-ly mobile black entrepreneurs to ascend into the mid-dle class, it also presented an economic opportunity for existing economic elites in the area, thereby creating an incentive for the persistence of such racial segrega-tion in Bronzeville.4 The migration of European Jews to Chicago in the 1840s and 1870s meant that many Jewish-operated businesses were well established by the time the South Side was becoming a predominantly black neighbourhood, putting these Jewish developers in a position to employ newer immigrants.5 Harry and Louis Engelstein were two such developers, and in 1926 the brothers opened a commercial entertainment com-plex on the corner of East 47th Street and South Park-way, offering the black communities of the South Side numerous employment opportunities that were other-wise unavailable at the time.6 The South Side complex included the Savoy Ballroom and South Center Depart-ment Store, but the focal venue was the Regal Theater, which opened its doors on February 4th, 1928, operating under local impresarios Barney Balaban and Sam Katz.7

With roots in the Jewish ghetto on Chicago’s West Side, Balaban and Katz founded their luxury theater chain in 1916 and found rapid success by targeting the peripher-al neighbourhoods of the emerging middle class as they were newly connected to mass transit.8 Balaban and Katz exemplified their strategy to appeal to the upwardly mo-bile – “those striving for riches” – with the construction of the Regal Theater; the venue’s design and materials promoted an upper-class experience for middle-class

patrons, prescribing and appealing to class aspirations.9 Though the Regal seemed to demonstrate the then-pro-gressive concept of “separate but equal,” by offering black performers to a black clientele in a venue as opu-lent as any other luxury theater, and by employing blacks as ushers and cashiers, the Regal was exceptional within

Southern view of the South Center Building that housed the Regal Theater and built by the Englesteins in 1926. This image was taken when S.B. Fuller purchased the enitre building nearly four decades later. The structure contains 54 office units, 7 retail spaces,

and 15,000 square feet of loft space. (“Fuller Buys Million $ Building” Chicago Defender, January 27, 1964, A5.)

the Balaban & Katz empire in this regard. At their mov-ie palaces in white Chicago neighborhoods, only whites could be ushers; blacks were relegated to lower-tier ser-vice positions, and even then, only a deracialized image of blackness acceptable to white customers was permit-ted. In a 1926 manual written for managerial staff, Bal-aban and Katz describe their ideal messenger boy as “the smaller type of negro boy, not over five feet four, of slight or slender build, well formed and in good proportion, not markedly of the negro type with heavy features.”10 Opening the Regal in Bronzeville and employing blacks

The Regal Theater ushers. The exact date and original source of the photo are unknown but based on “The Greene Murder

Case” banner this was likely taken in 1929 or 1930 shortly after the opening of the theater. The young black ushers were able to find work at the Regal that they could not have found

at other white theaters in Chicago. (Accessed December 5, 2014: http://msoldschool.ning.com/group/bigbandswing/fo-

rum/topics/i-remember-the-regal)

Ida B. Wells Homes (1939-2011)

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as white-gloved ushers there promoted community pride, but belied the owners’ racist policies elsewhere, and allowed them to profit from racial segregation.11

In 1936, assistant managers Myron Wright and Ken Blewett—who had started at the Regal as an usher in 1929—were asked to temporarily fill a leadership va-cancy. In 1939, Blewett was officially appointed to manage the Regal, inaugurating black stewardship.12 During Blewett’s tenure (1939-1959), the Regal hosted such black entertainment legends as Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Louis Jordan, “Moms” Mabley, Joe Wil-liams, Dinah Washington, Cab Calloway, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the tap-dancing Nicholas Brothers, Duke El-lington, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan, Pearl Bailey, T. Bone Walker, and Nipsey Russell – among many oth-ers. During the same period, Chicago’s black population increased dramatically: 77 percent from 1940 to 1950, and 65 percent from 1950 to 1960.13 Mass migration from the South contributed to overcrowding in increas-ingly dilapidated housing in the area surrounding the Regal.14 Affluent black homeowners looked to expand south, rather than staying in Bronzeville, which meant that capital did not get invested in improving conditions for working-class blacks.15 The Supreme Court struck down restrictive covenants –the contracts that legal-ly barred blacks from access to certain properties and neighborhoods – in 1948. This was good for blacks with the capital to move into previously all-white areas, and highly profitable for white real-estate speculators who purchased homes at a discount from whites fleeing to the suburbs and sold them to blacks at a steep markup.16 The

end of restrictive covenants did little, on the other hand, to address the poor quality of housing for wage-earning blacks left behind in Bronzeville, except for that expan-sion of the Black Belt temporarily – and unintentionally – relieved some of the overcrowding.17 The black polit-ical and economic elite’s focus during the 1940s on the fight against restrictive covenants demonstrates, as Pres-ton H. Smith argues, their “embrace of class stratification in housing as a means of achieving racial democracy.”18

Meanwhile, Ken Blewett had become a celebrity in the community, but when the money moved south, Balaban and Katz followed the money, and Blewett followed Bal-aban and Katz.19 The Tivoli, opened in 1926 for a white audience, now served an increasingly affluent black com-munity clustered around the 63rd Street commercial strip, which was rapidly eclipsing 47th Street in both symbolic significance and profitability.20 Having noted Blewett’s success at the Regal, Balaban and Katz moved him to the Tivoli in 1959, and left the Regal to Harry Engel-stein’s care. For the Regal to remain competitive with the Tivoli, Engelstein poured money into repairs as well as improvements to the 47th Street business district.21 But the cost of talent was rising, and like other white busi-ness owners Engelstein was starting to see profit margins slip as the Regal’s customer base, previously constrained by tighter residential and commercial segregation, dif-fused. Upper-middle class ‘black flight’ from the area and the construction of a “new, vertical ghetto” along State Street (just a few blocks west of South Parkway) both demonstrated the different class interests within the black community and contributed to the concentration

Map of Chicago’s Bronzeville showing the location of the Regal Theater, Robert Taylor Homes, Stateway Gardens, and Ida B Wells Homes. (Max Freedman 2014)

of black poverty in Bronzeville.22 Black elites were ear-ly supporters of slum clearance and large-scale public housing, not only to relieve the chronic shortage of af-fordable and adequate housing, but to “reinforce norma-tive residential behavior” among lower-class blacks, and thereby legitimize their own social standing.23 At the same time, white homeowners and affluent black home-owners alike opposed the siting of Chicago Housing Au-thority (CHA) projects in their neighborhoods, leading to the concentration of public housing in Bronzeville: the Ida B. Wells Homes (1939; demolished 2011), State-way Gardens (1955; demolished 2007), and the espe-cially massive Robert Taylor Homes (1961; demolished 2007), which stretched all the way from 38th to 54th Street.24 Therefore, it was not in despite of, but because of the actions taken by Chicago’s black bourgeoisie in its own class interests that the Regal’s market fell away.

Nonetheless, the Regal’s transition to black ownership in 1963 was a watershed event. The mainstream success of the new owner, cosmetics manufacturer Samuel B. Fuller, was an inspiration to many black entrepreneurs; his purchase of the Regal and the adjoining commercial complex signified to many in Bronzeville the possibility of self-determination.25 Fuller told the Chicago Defend-er that he hoped to anchor “a general rehabilitation of the entire 47th Street shopping area, ultimately making it one of the top business sections in the entire city.”26

Celebration of Fuller upon his purchase of the Regal, and even after its subsequent failure under his watch, by the Defender and among his fellow black elites is consistent with the common, fallacious equation of up-ward class mobility and capital accumulation for some with racial progress for all.27 Many prominent civil rights leaders criticized Fuller, saying that he seemed to blame blacks for their subordinate social and economic

position.28 Addressing the Congress of American In-dustry in 1963, Fuller publicly castigated “the Negro” who “believes there is a racial barrier in America which keeps him from succeeding.”29 Fuller’s emphasis on work ethic and personal integrity promoted black par-ticipation in mainstream consumption habits initially shaped by white business interests. The financial via-bility of his complex had been tied to the commercial segregation of blacks, capitalized on by white entrepre-neurs who recognized a captive consumer base. Indeed, Fuller’s own previous financial success was contingent on racial politics; he secretly purchased Boyer Interna-tional Laboratories, a white-oriented cosmetic company whose domination of the Southern market only persist-ed as long as Fuller kept his identity hidden. White supremacists organized a boycott of Fuller’s products when they realized that a black man operated the com-pany.30 Despite his disavowal of any “racial barrier,” it was this boycott that triggered a series of financial mis-steps that ended in Fuller’s bankruptcy in 1968 – and signaled the end for both the South Center Department Store and the Regal Theater.31 The Regal Theater came down in 1973, to make way for parking facilities.32

Was Fuller’s business success to anyone’s benefit but his own, and perhaps a few others whom he inspired to join him in the upper-middle class? Was his brief ownership of the Regal ever anything more than an empty signi-fier of working-class Bronzeville’s otherwise illusory self-determination? Even those of Fuller’s social and economic class who believed in the racial barriers Fuller dismissed had agreed to challenge such racial barriers in the housing market under the conditions that no chal-lenge be mounted to class stratification more broadly.33

These questions continue to resonate today. “The suc-

S.B. Fuller and the Rev. Jesse Jackson at Fuller’s 80th birthday celebration in 1985. Republican Gov. James Thompson proclaimed it “S.B. Fuller Day” in Illinois (“S.B. Fuller Tribute Notes Rise From Mule Driver To A Multi-Millionaire,” Jet, July 8, 1985, 15-18.)

cess of contemporary entrepreneurs is seen as a source of racial uplift,” Michelle Boyd writes about Bronzeville entering the twenty-first century. “Once [lower-in-come] community members accept the need for eco-nomic revitalization, reinvestment by the black mid-dle class becomes the only appropriate mechanism for achieving it if they want the area to remain black.”34 Yet what is good for the middle class is not necessari-ly good for all, and the “shared assumption that the po-litical and economic gains of all blacks depend[s] on a custodial black elite and a muted black rank and file” can be destructive.35 Boyd’s research finds the black middle class prioritizes its own interests “in the face of real and arguably more serious threats facing Doug-las and Grand Boulevard’s low-income population.”36

Chicago Defender article by Red Saunders celebrating the history of the Regal Theater just before it was demolished in 1973. The article includes images of the facade, of Saunders, and of Ken Blewett. (“The Death of the Regal Theater,” Chi-

cago Defender, November 24, 1973.)

With the recent demolition of nearby public housing in-cluding the Robert Taylor and Ida B. Wells Homes, the need for affordable housing for displaced residents must contend with the middle and upper-income blacks moving into Bronzeville, whose preference not to have this hous-ing built near their own properties echoes their counter-parts of earlier generations.37 In this context, venerating essentially conservative middle and upper-class figures, latter-day S.B. Fullers, as saviors of an undifferentiated black community can have dire consequences for those on the lower end of the economic spectrum. Yesterday’s loss of the Regal is today’s permanent displacement.

END NOTES

1. Clovis Semmes, The Regal Theater and Black Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 15.

2. Robert Bone and Richard A. Courage, The Muse in Bronzeville: African American Creative Expression in Chicago, 1932 – 1950 (New Brunswick: Rutgers Uni-versity Press, 2011), 61.

3. Bone, The Muse in Bronzeville, 61.

4. Karyn Lacy, Blue-Chip Black: Division and Unity Within the Black Middle Classes, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 26-27.

5. “Jews,” Chicago Encyclopedia http://www.encyclo-pedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/671.html; Steven Gold, The Store in the Hood: A Century of Ethnic Business and Conflict (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.: 2010), 74.

6. Darlene Clark Hine and John McCluskey, The Black Chicago Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 49.

7. David Balaban, The Chicago Movie Palaces of Bala-ban and Katz (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2006), 40.

8. Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 44.

9. Gomery, Shared Pleasures, 48-49; 55.

10. Balaban and Katz, The Fundamental Principles of Theatre Management (Balaban and Katz Corporation, 1926), 20. Accessed at https://archive.org/details/funda-mentalprinc00bala.

11. Semmes, Regal Theater and Black Culture, 19.

12. Semmes, Regal Theater and Black Culture, 87.

13. Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1983), Hirsch, 17.

14. Preston H. Smith II, Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis: Housing Policy in Postwar Chicago (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 1.

15. Smith, Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis 132.

16. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 30; Smith, Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis, 191.

17. Smith, Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis, 200-207.

18. Smith, Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis, 192.

19. Semmes, Regal Theater and Black Culture, 117.

20. Semmes, Regal Theater and Black Culture, 90-93; 162-163; Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 3.

21. Semmes, Regal Theater and Black Culture, 165.

22. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 10.

23. Smith, Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis, 22.

24. Smith, Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis, 39.

25. Semmes, Regal Theater and Black Culture, 171.

26. “Negro Syndicate Buys South Center Store,” Chica-go Daily Defender, June 13, 1963, 10.

27. Smith, Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis, 7-8, 130.

28. Semmes, Regal Theater and Black Culture, 194.

29. “Fuller ‘Slanders’ Negro, Wilkins Tells Students,” Chicago Daily Defender, December 19, 1963, 2.

30. Semmes, Regal Theatre and Black Culture, 195.

31. Semmes, Regal Theater and Black Culture, 195.

32. Ted Watson, “Regal Theatre may yet survive,” Chi-cago Daily Defender, September 11, 1973, 3.

33. Smith, Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis, 297.

34. Michelle Boyd, “Reconstructing Bronzeville: Racial Nostalgia and Neighborhood Redevelopment” Journal of Urban Affairs Vol. 22, No. 2 (2000), 119.

35. Smith, Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis, 301.

36. Boyd, “Reconstructing Bronzeville,” 120.

37. Derek S. Hyra, “Racial Uplift? Intra-Racial Class Conflict and the Economic Revitalization of Harlem and Bronzeville,” City & Community Vol. 5, No. 1 (March 2006), 80.

REFERENCES

Balaban, David. The Chicago Movie Palaces of Balaban and Katz. Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2006.

Balaban, Barney and Sam Katz. The Fundamental Prin-ciples of Theatre Management. Balaban and Katz Corpo-ration, 1926. Accessed November 2014. https://archive.org/details/fundamentalprinc00bala.

Bone, Robert and Richard A. Courage. The Muse in Bronzeville: African American Creative Expression in Chicago, 1932 – 1950. New Brunswick: Rutgers Uni-versity Press, 2011.

Boyd, Michelle. “Reconstructing Bronzeville: Racial Nostalgia and Neighborhood Redevelopment,” Journal of Urban Affairs Vol. 22, No. 2 (2000).

“Fuller ‘Slanders’ Negro, Wilkins Tells Students.” Chi-cago Daily Defender (Chicago, IL), December 19, 1963.

Gold, Steven. The Store in the Hood: A Century of Eth-nic Business and Conflict. Maryland: Rowman & Little-field Publishers, Inc., 2010.

Gomery, Douglas. Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States. Madison: The Univer-sity of Wisconsin Press, 1992.

Hine, Darlene Clark and John McCluskey. The Black Chicago Renaissance. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012.

Hirsch, Arnold. Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Hyra, Derek S. “Racial Uplift? Intra-Racial Class Con-flict and the Economic Revitalization of Harlem and Bronzeville,” City & Community Vol. 5, No. 1 (March 2006).

“Jews.” Chicago Encyclopedia. Accessed November 2014. www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/671.html.

Lacy, Karyn. Blue-Chip Black: Division and Unity Within the Black Middle Classes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

“Negro Syndicate Buys South Center Store.” Chicago Daily Defender (Chicago, IL), June 13, 1963.

Semmes, Clovis. The Regal Theater and Black Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Smith, Preston H. II. Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis: Housing Policy in Postwar Chicago. Minne-apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

Watson, Ted. “Regal Theatre may yet survive.” Chicago Daily Defender (Chicago, IL), September 11, 1973.

THE WRITE TO THE CITY

A brief study on the manifestation of Graffiti in New York City’s subway system from 1970-1989 and its contribution to the argument over democracy in public space

By Renata Benigno, Alexa Jensen, Zanny Venner

New York City subway system from 1970 to 1989 undergoes a new way of experiencing a commonly shared public space. 1

Graffiti today, is widely considered to be any writing or drawing scribbled or sprayed on a surface; although, some might also understand it as the illegal or illicit act of writing on public space or even private space without consent. Rather than to discuss the illegality of the act or the legitimacy of Graffiti as public art, it is imperative to understand Graffiti manifestations in the subway as an insurgent act that began to enliven the dialogue over the democratic use of this public space.

In the years of 1970 to 1989, New York City experienced bold Graffiti manifestations all throughout the city and in the subway system. This specific image of New York City necessitates a critical analysis of the multiple narratives and tensions embedded in Graffiti symbology; as it could be understood both as an appropriation of the public space and as a modifier of the urban landscape. While Graffiti was an individual act inscribed in the public space, it is critical to analyze how Graffiti resulted in serious political interventions and what the City’s role was in eradicating subway Graffiti. Did the City have a duty to protect the subway system for other citizens and riders, rather than letting individual expression spread freely throughout? This question fosters the discussion over the creation of limits and barriers in urban conviviality as a way of reestablishing limits related to the discourse over democracy. The effort to understand an alternative view on how Graffiti could, perhaps, evolve into a democratic inclusionary practice is critical to interpret the symbolism of Graffiti

and how that led to its ‘formal’ demise in the subway system in 1989.

Writing On and For the City

New York City in the 1970’s was a place of tensions within the sphere of the city’s harsh fiscal crisis. From the end of 1969 through 1976, the city lost more than 600,000 jobs, a sixth of the city’s employment base, and the number of police officers dropped by about 6,000. 3 The 1970’s financial crisis was a contingent moment in history that enhanced the intensification of inequalities and social barriers.

In 1971, during the early stages of the subway Graffiti boom, there was no law in place against Graffiti, although, the ethics of scribbling or spraying on the interior and exterior of train followed the ethics of eating and drinking on the subway; it was a rule created by the Metropolitan Transit Authority that could be broken readily at one’s own risk. 4 By 1975, the height of the financial crisis set the stage for the City’s abrupt fall, while Graffiti proliferated further within the subway system. The extent of the City’s official policy changed and a “crack

The Financial Crisis hits New York and the city erupts into a period of socio-economic decline. 2

The right to the city is, therefore, far more than a right of individual or group access to the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change and

reinvent the city more after our hearts’ desire. It is, moreover, a collective rather than an individual right, since reinventing the city inevitably depends upon the

exercise of a collective power over the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake ourselves is [...] one of the most precious yet most

neglected of our human rights.

David Harvey [2012]

Collage of Graffiti, Writers and their pieces on the subway in New York City. 5

down” on Graffiti was asserted to control the physical appearance of New York as a decaying city. This alone brings to the fore how Graffiti created political scenarios that animated Mayor Koch, the MTA chair, Robert Kiley and the Transit Authority President, David Gunn, to insert their ideologies and techniques of governmental authority to create an urban environment unhindered by subway Graffiti.

Eric Felisbret, who used to paint Graffiti, responds to the rise of the Graffiti movement as something that was born out of the 1960’s civil rights movement, but claims that, “it was never political...many people were brought up with that, and to express yourself by breaking the law became a natural process for them.” 7 However, the 1970’s in New York City’s public sphere was not only significant because of the ubiquity of subway Graffiti itself, but also because it reflected the socio-economic situation, which led to political interventions by people in power.

The Multiple Narratives of Subway Graffiti

The public and political democratic discussion allows for the illumination of the multiple narratives on Graffiti that provoked political interventions. The pioneers of the Graffiti expression called it “Writing” and considered themselves “Writers”. 8 Whether it was due to the astounding amount of Writings and Writers that had emerged, or because of the immense political repercussions that the Writers had induced, the city of New York came to be considered the cradle of the Graffiti

movement. [See collages 5 and 6]

The first manifestations of Graffiti were called “Tags”, which most often consisted of the names of the Writers and could be seen all around the city - on walls, signposts and infamously on trains. After some time, the Tags became larger and more elaborate pieces, known as Masterpieces, which could cover whole cars and, in some cases, an entire train. In order to write their names as many times as possible without getting caught, Writers had to be fast and they started spraying two or three letters that could identify them. These fast and easy Writings were called Throw-ups, an expression that was also used to describe names and drawings that lacked style. 9

Although Graffiti was visible to anyone who used the trains, some Writers claimed their work was for themselves and to other Writers. As one former Writer explains, “It’s for me… all the other people who don’t write or can’t read it, I don’t care about them - it’s not for them, it’s for us”. 10 Even if some Writers denied their intention to show up, a large number of Tags and Throw-Ups were moving through the city by train, which allowed Writers to be recognized across the city. Cost, former Graffiti Writer, admits his will to become famous: “Within the Graffiti community, I never cared about meeting Writers. I didn’t want to know everybody; I wanted to be known by everybody.” 11 According to TAKI 183, who became known by his Writing pieces, “You wrote it once and a hundred people saw it. You wrote it twice and a thousand people saw it. By your hand, you were known.” 12 There was exclusivity involved in

the Writers’ projection of their identity. This logic, as a statement of oneself, was the Writers code.

Graffiti Writers’ insurgent tactics became influential as they were a response to the feelings of marginalization and disempowerment that the fiscal crisis cultivated. The Writer COMET comments that “My childhood wasn’t peaches and cream. The trains were an escape to me - I could leave these emotions on the train. As you could see, I must have had a lot of them because I bombed a lot.” 13 Their expression was meaningful because they were using public space to express themselves, an act that could be understood as a claim for space in a hostile urban environment.

Subway riders sit on the train among the Graffiti Tags; an atmosphere that the public claimed had created fear and a sense of unease on the train. 16

For some, exterior Masterpieces meant something different and only the Tags were considered inconvenient pieces, but for others any kind of Graffiti simply meant vandalism. As one rider carefully reflects, “I’m not nostalgic for the sorry state of the system,” he says, “[there was] the element of danger, and I recall it well. [There was] the general feeling that the stations had been abandoned. I do recall that some of the cars were works of art, although most were not”. 17 The public counteracted against the Writers and felt that Graffiti represented the deterioration and decline of the city, which was a direct reflection of the economic crisis that had afflicted them.

The fear, anger and contention seemed to pour out of the debate on this use of public space. The patrons of the MTA paid a fare of 75 cents per ride and many of them strongly felt that Graffiti was a violation of their public property. Spokesman for the New York City Transit Authority, Jared Lebow, asserted that “the impression Graffiti gave was that the subway system was out of control… if vandals have a free reign, then criminals have a free reign”.18 Henry Chalfant, co-producer of the documentary Style Wars and one of the first filmmakers to document the height of New York’s subway Graffiti in the 70s and 80s, describes the Graffiti movement as a multiplicity of messages: “To some it’s art, to most people, however, it is a plague that never ends a symbol that we’ve lost control. They’re saying that the kids run the

To some it’s art, to most people, however, it is a plague that never ends a symbol that

we’ve lost control. Henry Chalfant

“”

Since the beginning of the New York Graffiti phenomenon there began resistance against it. Its exclusionary nature bred a fear amongst the public and the train riders. The majority of the cars were completely covered – the outsides donned mostly Masterpieces and occasional Throw-ups, and the insides were enveloped with broad-tip marker and spray paint Tags. As one rider candidly argues, “It gives a terrible impression of the city and if you think the outside is bad...the inside is just unbelievable.” 14 As most of the windows were entirely covered, the Writings in the interior of the cars felt intrusive and even aggressive to many subway riders - It made the public feel “uneasy when it became too difficult to tell which station your train was pulling into”. 15 But just as the Tags and Throw Ups became more prevalent, so did the question of public space produce a much larger argument over democracy.

Collage of Masterpieces on subway trains. 6

subways, that the system is outta’ control… that the 15 or 16 year old kids are running the system and Graffiti is the symbol of that.” 19 And in light of the arduous Financial Crisis, many viewed this urban decline as a bleak future for New York City, seeing Graffiti as a symbol that represented, what seemed to be, the neverending struggle of many New Yorkers.

Graffiti Writing was also highly contested by the New York City municipal government under Mayor Koch and the Metropolitan Transit Authority, who did not agree with the particular use of the subway as canvas. Taken from these perspectives, Graffiti and Writing came to be understood as a portrait of New York City’s financial collapse. This became a synonym used in conjunction with the lack of respect for the common use of the subway, thereby producing an argument over democracy.

Assessing Power Over Writers

The emphasis on the analysis of both the MTA and Mayor Koch is to understand how their role of leadership was driven to eradicate the “plague” and the “unsightly scar” Graffiti was to New York’s integrity.20 To deconstruct the language that the authorities ruled and lead on the subway system for nearly two decades, is to understand how their power ability informed certain decisions and regulations to ‘regain’ control of the subway system over the Writers.

From 1970 to 1989, Mayor Koch and the MTA treated subway Graffiti as a sanitation issue. 21 Even though NYC Transit Authority was facing an outstanding transit debt of $1.9 Billion in 1976, strategic, yet costly, efforts were pursued by the MTA to address the state of blight and loss of control over the city. 22 In 1980 and 1981, the MTA proposed to repaint 7,000 subway cars in white under the fleetwide repainting program, also known as the “The Great White Fleet”. Security fences were also

constructed around every train storage yard, while being patrolled by German shepherds. 24

Following these strategic proposals, which failed to come to full fruition, the Clean Car Program was created in 1985 for the MTA to quickly and more aggressively achieve a Graffiti-free subway across the city. Although it was considered a success, as it led to the ‘formal’ demise of Graffiti in the subway system in 1989, it was only to be achieved by costing $8 billion in taxpayer money. 25 Symbolically, this meant how important it was for the municipal government and the MTA to regain control of the subway and the rider’s experience in its environment.

Although the intentions held by Graffiti Writers were to inform rather than to physically harm, the authorities interpreted Graffiti as a real threat to the population. In

Mayor Koch and The MTA banned together to invest in new infrastructure to stop the Writers from going into the train yards. 23

Graffiti Writers resisted and continued to challenge the authority to represent their place within the city. 23

order to achieve a visible sense of order for the city, politics were shifted and molded to employ militaristic methods, such as toxic chemicals, razor wire fencing, attack dogs and sterile white paint, against Writers. By delving into the tensions on how power is manifested on the subway and by understanding the symbolism behind the Graffiti itself, people needed to see established barriers to feel safe and secure in the urban environment.

Possibilities for Democratic Writing

These conflicting moments of the historical phenomenon of Graffiti points to the mentality of an era. Historically, charged Graffiti emerged in and from dark socio-economic times, which inserted a negative connotation to this type of expression for those who were not creating it. The vast duality of pieces was a consequence of how Graffiti served to some as a scream against repression, while to others it had the opposite effect, which was a symbol of oppression.

This raises the question of how the urban environment reflected a deeply-seeded moment and influenced the way bold expressions were experienced by the society. If the urban environment in which Graffiti emerged was more positive, would

The public stands to claim graffiti-free subways. 26

there be any possibility that the practice of Graffiti and Writing would have been more constructive? Perhaps, such charged Graffiti expressions could have been more accepted as a democratic use of a public space. However, it also intrigues the thought if this movement would have emerged at all.

Endnotes

1. Big Appled, “24 Things You Didn’t Know About New York City Subways”, accessed December 1st, 2014, http://bigappled.com/2014/02/26/24-crazy-things-you-didnt-know-about-new-york-city-subways/.2. Swell Chan, “Remember the ‘77 Blackout,” The New York TImes, July, 9, 2009, accessed November 27, 2014, http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/07/09/remembering-the-77-blackout/.3. Samuel Ehrenhalt, “Economic and Demographic change: the case of New York” City.” Monthly Labor Review (1993):40- 50, accessed November 7, 2014, http://www.bls.gov/mlr/1993/02/art4full.pdf. 4. Maggie Dickson, “ The Making of Space, Race and Place,” Critique of Anthropology 28 (2008): 27-45, accessed November 26, 2014, doi. 10.1177/038275X07086556.5. [Collage from top left to bottom right]Herdiadesigns, “Lady Pink,” 33third, August 12 2013, accessed October 31 2014, http://www.33third.com/boards/t/4865/ladypink.aspxDavid Gonzales, “Street Art From the South Bronx to Soweto,” NY Times, October 23 2013, accessed November 12 2014, www.lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/23/street-art-from-the-south-bronx-to-soweto.RC, “The Truth About NYC’s Golden Age,” NY Pics,September 17 1012, accessed November 12 2014, www.nyc_pics.com/2012/09/the-truth-about-nycs-golden-age.Henry Chalfant, Martha Cooper, Subway Art, (New York: Thames and Hudson). 15.TAKI, TAKI183, October 23 2012, accessed November 12 2014, www.taki183.net/#gallery.Henry Chalfant, Martha Cooper, 5.Ibid., 40.Jen Carlson, Gothamist, September 24, 2014, accessed November 12 2014, www.gothamist.com/2014/09/24/1980s_nyc_haunted_house.php.Elizabeth Sackle, “Femenist Art,” Brooklyn Museum, accessed October 31 2014, www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/femenist_art_base/gallery/ladypink.Chris Summers, “ Great Art? The graffiti of the New York subway,” BBC News, August 9, 2014, accessed November 26, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28638691.

22. Edward I. Koch Documents Collection Departmental Correspondence Series [roll #124]. Transportation, Dept. of [NYC Transit Authority Presentation] August 1984- October, 1984. Accessed on November 7, 2014.23. Style Wars.24. Ibid.25. Joe Austin, Taking the Train, New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 207-227.26. Ibid., 222.27. Castleman, 404.28. Ibid., 231.

BibliographyDeutsche, Rosalyn. The Question of Public Space. American Photography Institute National Graduate Seminar Proceedings. New York: The Institute, 1999.Edward I. Koch Documents Collection. Departmental Correspondence Series [Municipal Archives Box # 0000260, Folder #02]. Transit Authority, Metropolitan Transportation Authority [Use of Electronic passes; Graffiti Problem] January 1983-December 1983. Letter to the MTA Chairman from Mayor Koch (Nov.21, 1983). Accessed November 7, 2014.Fein-Phillips, Kim. “The Legacy of the 1970s Fiscal Crisis.” The Nation, April 16th 2013. Accessed November 7 2014. http://www.thenation.com/article/17383/legacy-1970s-fiscal-crisis#.Freudenberg, Nicholas, Marianne Fahs, and Andrew Greenberg. “The Impact of New York City’s 1975 Fiscal Crisis on the Tuberculosis, HIV, and Homicide Syndemic.” American Journal of Public Health (2006): 424-434. Accessed November 7, 2014.Harvey, David. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London/New York: Verso, 2012.Gaventa, Jonathan. “Power after Lukes: An overview of theories of power since Lukes and their application to development.” First Draft August 2003. Accessed November 7, 2014.McCormick, Carlo. City as Canvas: New York City Graffiti From the Martin Wong Collection. New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2013.“‘Taki 183’ Spawns Pen Pals.” The New York Times. July 21, 1971. http://taki183.net/_pdf/taki_183_nytimes.pdf. Accessed November 10, 2014.

New York City subway trains completely covered by Graffiti pieces. 27

David Gonzales.Henry Chalfant, Martha Cooper, 43.6. [Collage] R. Gastman and C. Neelon, The History of American Graffiti (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2010), 100, 101, 108, 109, 116, 117, 130, 393.7. Chris Summers.8. Gastman, 5.9. Craig Castleman, Getting Up: Subway Graffiti in New York (London: The MIT Press, 1986) 26. 10. Style Wars. Tony Silver, Henry Chalfant. Public Art Films, Plexifilm, 1983.11. Gastman, 246. 12. Ibid., 56.13. Castleman, 96.14. Style Wars.

15. Dennant, Pamela. “Urban Expression. Urban Assault. Urban Wildstyle. New York City Graffiti”. American Studies Project 1997, accessed October 10, 2014. http://www.graffiti.org/faq/pamdennant.html.16. Alex Greig, “The City where greed was good: Atmospheric pictures that catpure the grit, grime and glamor of 1980s New York, “ November 10, 2013, accessed December 2, 2014, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2497751/Gritty-1980s-New-York-City-lens-renowned-street-photographer.html.17. JustAnotherNewYorker, “Looking Back at the Battle Against Subway Graffiti,” June 10, 2013, accessed November 15, 2014.--- http://secondavenuesagas.com/2013/06/09/looking-back-at-the-battle-against-subway-graffiti/.18. Dennant, Pamela. “Urban Expression. Urban Assault. Urban Wildstyle. New York City Graffiti”. American Studies Project 1997. Accessed 10 October 2014. http://www.graffiti.org/faq/pamdennant.html.19. Style Wars. 20. Edward I. Koch Documents Collection. Letter to the District Attorney, Hon. William L. Murphy (Oct. 2, 1989) and Edward I. Koch Documents Collection. Letter to the MTA Chairman from Mayor Koch (Nov. 21, 1983).21. Edward I. Koch Documents Collection Departmental Correspondence Series [Box #0000254, Folder #03]. Sanitation, Dept. of [Discipline, EEOP, Graffiti Removal, Landfills, Extended Operations] August 1984- October, 1984. Accessed on November 7, 2014.

An Architecture of AssemblagesThe interplay of spatiality, symbolismand security in Johannesburg’s Ponte City

By Fadi Shayya, Monica Gaura, Travis Bostick & Walter Petrichyn

In Johannesburg stands Africa’s largest and tallest residential tower, Ponte City. Besides its iconic cylindrical form, the tower is popular in media, film and photography due to its notorious reputation as a place for crime and informality in the mid-1980s and early-1990s. This inquiry investigates the conditions that resulted in Ponte Tow er’s emerging iconicity and it’s shifting meanings since it was built. Shifting “from an analytics of structure to an analytics of assemblage”1, we argue that Ponte City is what we call an architecture of assemblage that amasses and alternately disembeds socio-political, biopolitical and semiotic meanings over time. We observe this assemblage through shifts in strategies of maintaining security; specifically, we focus on such strategies along racial and class lines through policy and the built environment across three periods: the Apartheid period (before mid-1980s), the transitional period (mid-1980s till late 1990s), and the post-Apartheid period (after early 2000s). We use an interdisciplinary method drawing on research approaches from philosophy, social history, architecture and film to fully articulate the uniqueness of Ponte City.

Fig.1: Ponte’s windows to the city. Source: Subotzky.

The Apartheid Period (before mid-1980s) Ponte City is a residential building consisting of 54 floors and 464 flats for single and multiple occupants. The building is designed as “a small village to house from 1,500 to 2,000 people,” and it has a commercial base and multi-story car park2. Back in the early 1970s, the developers of the building designed it to be a self-sufficient gated community for white people in an apartheid city. Ponte was an exercise in icon-making; it was emblematic of South African economic robustness of the 1960s3. Mbembe puts it best when he describes the apartheid city as “a city of boundaries and contrasts [where] the role of architecture and planning was to trace partitions within well-defined spaces with clear protective boundaries so as to avoid the disruptive effects—real or potential—of race mixing”4. However, the socio-political threat of racial mixing and shifting perceptions of security posed major challenges for the strictly White community who resided at Ponte, and the late Apartheid era proved difficult for Ponte’s architecture to sustain its original desires and objectives of protecting and partitioning White from Black communities. One explicitly segregationist policy was the Group Areas Act of 1950 which “made it illegal for black workers to live under the same roof as their white employers”5. Security was the medium for preventing race mixing and ensuring White dominance at a time when the anti-Apartheid movement had been in crisis. The Apartheid regime was most effective at regulating the Black population by containing them in townships located at the urban periphery of cities: close enough to employ labor but far enough to prevent racial mixing. Such socio-political conditions in South Africa shaped the discourses and practices of many powerful groups including the developers of Ponte who conceived the

residential tower as an isolated and heavily securitized place. In effect, Ponte was a fortress. The threat of racial mixing—against separationist public policy—materializes in the spatial division of Ponte’s architectural layout. The developers and architects designed the tower to separate Black and White residents in two ways. One, Black domestic workers had their own rooms6 on the top floors to service the luxury apartments and penthouses where “internal service of flats was provided daily”7. Two, the circular/cylindrical design of the building meant the inner apartment-servicing corridor had a panoptic function, insomuch as it provided a regulatory gaze for the “inhabitants and cleaning staff…along the corridors”8. “Specially located ‘clock-in stations’” and “a full battery of [day and night] watchmen under the supervision of a Security officer”9 documented all Black domestic and maintenance workers’ presence in the building, instituting “a field of visibility and surveillance, hierarchies and inspections”10. Shortly after the construction of the tower in 1975, the early 1980s proved that such tactical security measures in the spatial and administrative architectures of Ponte are inefficient toward containing the growing Black population with pass laws. This was the time when the White population in Hillbrow, specifically highly-skilled labor, either emigrated or moved into gated northern suburbs physically removing itself from the threat of racial mixing and into more isolated living situations. The security failure to arguably prevent the most significant threat to the country’s progress—racial mixing—succumbed a transitional period for South Africa and Ponte.

Fig.2: Typical floor plans of Ponte showing occu-pation by racial division during 3 periods: apart-

heid, transitional and post-apartheid. White color stands for White occupants; red color stands for

Black occupants. Source: authors.

Fig.3: A 3D model of Ponte showing its bound-ary of isolation in the urban landscape and its

original programatic divisions. Source: authors.

The Transitional Period (mid-1980s till late 1990s) The meanings and practices of Ponte’s spatial and surveillance architectures experienced their first shift during the racial integration era in the 1980s and the fall of apartheid in the 1990s, a time of radical demographic changes in Johannesburg’s white upscale Hillbrow neighborhood. The tower became a dangerous space of othering and fell into chaos resulting in crime, drugs, suicide, prostitution and housing illegal immigrants and dangerous ‘others’ from Nigeria, Cameroon and Zaire. The social failures of the tower became an archive for journalists, bloggers, photographers and filmmakers11, and Ponte’s architecture became symbolic of an informal insecurity that characterized the urban landscape of black South Africa. Ponte emerged as a symbol in popular media, film and photography of the tensions of apartheid, and it became a Lacanian Real of the absence of apartheid security, that is a traumatic experience of a terrifying and incomprehensible force ruling the city12. Cinematic representations of Ponte’s violence and loss of security during the transitional period from apartheid to the post-apartheid state manifested in the

late 1990s and in the first decade of the 21st century. For example, in Maseko’s 1997 The Foreigner the Ponte-residing protagonist’s benevolent acts did not spare him getting beaten up and killed by ‘locals’ when accused of possibly having AIDS and “talking funny”13. The film‘s opening scene depicts a globalized Johannesburg with the camera panning from Ponte City to a neon Coca Cola sign indicating the international modern environment14; still, the film portrays how the reality of Ponte—consequently Johannesburg and South Africa—is one of xenophobic attitudes and violence during transition from Apartheid. The protagonist was an African, yet a ‘foreigner’ to South Africa, among many who lived in Ponte when moving to Johannesburg in search for socioeconomic opportunities. Xenophobia and the prevalence of informal security—compared to the previous authoritarian apartheid rules and practices—are key in redefining Ponte’s architecture as one of open yet violent possibilities in the city. In a similar vein, popular media reporting reproduces the same discourse of Ponte as a locus of violence and degradation using pejorative vocabulary such as “commandingly hideous,” “eyesore,” “great

haunted house,” “home to gangs and prostitutes,” and “the suicide building”15 and negative titles such as “Anywhere but Here”16 and “Failed Architecture”17. These discourses form Ponte’s transitional period. Not only is it stigmatized as a place of doom in art and popular media, but conveys inherent disappointment in their expectations that the tower should be true to its intent as a residential and commercial building. In particular, this masking of apartheid’s violently-loaded division with a focus on the evils of informality and crime are in line with what Mbembe calls “an architecture of hysteria…while bearing witness to a demand that the past be forgotten, this architecture asks the spectator to forget that it is itself a sign of forgetting. But in so doing, it reiterates the pathological structure and hysteria inherited from the racial city”18. However, the return of security coincides with the increased emphasis on reviving the tower, especially when new owners bought the tower and renovated it in the mid-1990s into a once again formally secured, run and managed residential tower in the city.

The Post-Apartheid Period (after early 2000s) The second shift in Ponte’s security perception and architecture signaled a return of public order and a capitalist mode of control in South Africa. The Kempston Group19 bought the tower in the mid-1990s, converted it to “a safe, low-cost living space boasting a 97% occupancy” in 2001, and fully-refurbished it in 201120. The architectural layouts of Ponte’s floors and apartments did not change, while the renovation mainly supplied new electro-mechanical fittings and interior finishing21. Ponte became a celebrated icon of the post-apartheid city. Ponte was operational once again as a controlled, managed and secured money-generating asset; while the tower’s newly renovated spatial and administrative architectures expressed deep anxieties about the future of the tower and the city, and the country. Ponte’s current residents are predominantly Black; they formally and officially sublet the majority of the apartments, while a few white residents sublet some apartments on the upper floors. In this capacity, the tower operates on a main objective: to generate profit; it is one distinct capitalist attribute representative of architecture’s resilience to changing

Fig.4: The Johannesburg skyline. Source: unkown.

Fig.5: Installation, Le Bal, Paris, 2014. Source: Subotzky and Waterhouse.

Fig.6: Inside the hollow core of Ponte with debris from renovation. Source: Subotzky.

Fig.8: View of Ponte from Hillbrow. Source: Subotzky.

Fig.7: Installation, Le Bal, Paris, 2014. Source: Subotzky and Waterhouse.

politics and sociality. The owners of the tower prioritize profit-generation and sustaining the tower as an investment for as long as possible over race, nationality and class issues. However, Bloom’s film Ponte Tower22 and Martens film Africa Shafted: Under One Roof23 portray a deep anxiety of the daily reality in Ponte. From the heavy control and management of the Black residents to the continuing tensions and discursive notions of the tower as a place of urban legends, Ponte remains a repository of practices and traces of the city’s racial history, xenophobia and divisions. The mere class-rooted idea of white people renting at the top floors “where they “could…wake up and have the entire city laid out before [them] as [they] sipped [their] morning coffee”24 and thinking of how the few white residents eventually group on the same floors are enough evidence to question how racial and class divisions play out inside Ponte’s architecture. One can read such practices through contemporary security measures where access to the tower is highly-supervised25, and it is strictly managed with “round-the-clock security and diametric-fingerprint access points at all entrances to the building” and special protocols for visitors and fines for staying overnight without making prior arrangements26.

This image of Ponte as an icon of contradicting faces encompassing different layers and narratives of the city is also captured in the photography and installations of Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse. Through a series of art exhibitions in Amsterdam, Antwerp, Appalachia, Edinburgh, New Haven, Paris and San Francisco27, to a major 2014 publication Ponte City (Steidl, 2014), the photographic project documents the physical state of Ponte’s architecture since the late-2000s addressing the tower’s iconic form and notorious reputation and provoking questions about the failures of Modernity in devising technical solutions

for political problems. The focus on the architecture of Ponte in Subotzky and Waterhouse’s work incites Agamben’s work on the modern concern of biopolitics with a “constant need to redefine the threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside”28. The revival of Ponte’s architectural, symbolic and performative path brings us to interrogate future scenarios and meanings of architecture and security in a socio-political context of continuing division.

The Continuity of Apartheid

Today, Ponte is a massive residential and commercial building that will celebrate its 40th anniversary in 2015. Transitioning from an affluent economic era during apartheid, to a dilapidated building governed by informality, and back to a formally operating residential building in the recent post-apartheid period, Ponte’s spatial, administrative and security architectures continue to change as an assemblage while the robust building’s material structure maintains its form and layout. Even more, the tower’s feature in visual narratives of film and photography “is more than an assemblage of landmarks, although skyline elements such as the…Ponte City…are a shaping environment, shown to constrain and occasionally to enable rather than merely to house residents or migrants”29.

Ponte and its surrounding built environment constrains and enables social conditions that happen in Johannesburg. Blomkamp’s 2009 science fiction film District 930 imagines a Johannesburg plagued with various social problems, and Ponte—among other buildings—is a site of xenophobia of aliens and inner-city violence. Upon the arrival of aliens to earth in 1982, the film portrays isolated and secured encampments in Johannesburg where humans house the aliens. The aliens become ‘the other’, alluding to the past ‘other’ who endured through the

Apartheid era. “The film’s South African setting brings up inescapable parallels with its now-defunct apartheid system of racial segregation. Many of them are obvious, such as the action to move a race out of the city and to a remote location”31.

The ending of District 9 encapsulates Ponte in Johannesburg’s alien state. The story leads us to a more complicated chain of events: the city is destroyed, aliens escape aboard their spaceship (with Ponte in the background), and the white, South African, human protagonist turns into an alien. The isolated encampment is “the very paradigm of political space at the point of which politics becomes biopolitics”32 that is “the growing inclusion of man’s natural life in the mechanisms and calculations of power”33. As much as the encampment/city/country are territories of socio-political control, the unit to be governed and subjugated has always been and will always be the (human) body itself.

Fig.9: Ponte and the aliens in District 9. Source: Blomkamp.

The future of Ponte: death of a sign? In 1998, the South African Ministry of Correctional Services consulted U.S. architect and prison expert Paul Silver on turning Ponte into a jail34. Ponte’s inherent biopolitical Panopticon quality seems to always be its best selling feature, whether for residents or prisoners. Yet, the demolition of Ponte is inevitable and change is around the corner. The main question remains if at what human and material cost.

REFERENCES

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Bauer, Nickolaus. 2012. “Living the High Life in a Ponte Penthouse.” Mail & Guardian. November 23. Accessed November 13, 2014. http://mg.co.za/article/2012-11-23-00-living-with-my-head-in-the-clouds-and-loving-every-minute.

2009. District 9. Directed by Neill Blomkamp.

2012. Ponte Tower. Directed by Philip Bloom. https://vimeo.com/51295174.

Bremner, Lindsay. 2014. “Buildings Are Geological Agents.” Geoarchitecture: Recording Intersections Between Architecture, Geology and Politics. January 16. Accessed October 23, 2014. http://geoarchitecture.wordpress.com/2014/01/16/buildings-are-geological-agents/.

Ebert, Roger. 2009. “Reviews: District 9.” RogerEbert.com. August 12. Accessed 2014. http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/district-9-2009.

Goncalves, Shayna, interview by Fadi Shayya, Monica Gaura, Travis Bostick and Walter Petrichyn. 2014. Ponte Tower & Hillbrow Neighborhood (October 28).

Hartford, Anna. 2013. “Ponte City.” n+1 Magazine. June 14. Accessed 2014. https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/ponte-city/.

Hazlett, Thomas W. 2008. “The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics: Apartheid.” Libary of Economics and Liberty. Accessed 2014. http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Apartheid.html.

ENDNOTES

1. Collier and Ong 2005, quoted in Ong 2011, 42. Ponte – The Tallest Residential Building in Africa 19753. For more on South Africa’s economy, check Hazlett 20084. Mbembe 2004, 3865. Ibid. 3876. Labelled “servants’ quarters” on the original architectural plans in Ponte – The Tallest Residential Building in Africa 19757. Ponte – The Tallest Residential Building in Africa 1975, 358. Ibid. 279. Ibid. 3510. Mbembe 2004, 39211. Check the range of media sources in the references12. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology 1989 and The Plague of Fantasies 2008; quoted in Wilson 2014, 813. Maseko 199714. Kruger 200615. Read more at http://www.messynessychic.com/2013/04/08/anywhere-but-here-ponte-tower/16. Read more at http://failedarchitecture.tumblr.com/post/1102295757/ponte-tower-johannesburg-south-africa17. Hartford 201318. Mbembe 2004, 40219. Read more at http://kempston.co.za/properties20. Bauer 201221. Ibid.22. Bloom 201223. Martens 201124. Bauer 201225. Subotzky, Ponte City 201426. Bauer 201227. Read more at http://www.subotzkystudio.com/works/ponte-city/28. Agamben 1998, 7729. Kruger 2006, 15730. Blomkamp 200931. Ebert 200932. Agamben 1998, 9733. Foucualt; quoted in Agamben 1998, 7134. O’Loughlin 19

Kruger, Loren. 2006. “Filming the Edgy City: Cinematic Narrative and Urban Form in Postapartheid Johannesburg.” Research in African Literatures 37 (2): 142-159.

2011. Africa Shafted: Under One Roof. Directed by Ingrid Martens. http://www.africashafted.com/.

1997. The Foreigner. Directed by Zola Maseko.

Mbembe, Achille. 2004. “Aesthetics of Superfluity.” Public Culture 16 (3): 373-405.

O’Loughlin, Ed. 1998. “Skyscraper Jail for Sky-High Crime.” The Christian Science Monitor. April 27. Accessed 2014. http://www.csmonitor.com/1998/0427/042798.intl.intl.3.html.

Ong, Aihwa. 2011. “Introduction: Worlding Cities, or the Art of Being Global.” In Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, edited by Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong, 1-26. London: Wiley-Blackwell.

1975. “Ponte – The Tallest Residential Building in Africa.” Planning & Building Developments (Avonwold Publishers) 17: 15–37. Accessed November 7, 2014. https://geoarchitecture.wordpress.com/2014/01/16/buildings-are-geological-agents/#_edn2.

Subotzky, Mikhael, interview by Fadi Shayya, Monica Gaura, Travis Bostick and Walter Petrichyn. 2014. Ponte City (November 13).

Subotzky, Mikhael, and Patrick Waterhouse. 2014. “Ponte City.” Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa. San Fransico, California. http://archive.ybca.org/public-intimacy.

Subotzky, Mikhael, and Patrick Waterhouse. n.d. Ponte City. Subotzky Studio, Johannesburg. http://www.subotzkystudio.com/works/ponte-city/.

Fig.10: Ponte’s cosmological atrium. Source: Manners Magazine.

HOMEMAKING IN ZAATARI CAMP: HISTORY OF THE INFLUENCE OF SYRIAN WOMEN IN CITY SHAPINGFROM THE 18TH CENTURY ONWARDS

BY MARIANA BOMTEMPO, MASOOM MOITRA AND NADINE RACHID

Refugee Camps are spaces that begin in the form of temporary settlements claiming to offer protection to those escaping violent conflict in their home countries. Zaatari is one that was set up by the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) for Syrians fleeing to Jordan to seek refugee as a result of the ongoing Syrian Civil War that erupted in 2011. Giorgio Agamben describes a camp for refugees, as a space that is particularly challenging to politically define, as it is a state where the ambiguous condition of legitimacy allows for the permanent arrangement of temporary spaces that exists outside the order of regular citizenship1. When it was

first set up by the UNHCR, Zaatari camp was designed with a capacity of maximum 20,000 people to be located in tents. The population has since escalated to 81,321 and the tents have transformed into containers2. As it begins its gradual process of urbanization and permanence, Zaatari exists in a grey area of rights and legitimization that opens up a space for many fundamental issues of judicial and historically established values to be challenged3. In the camp, these zones have turned into modes of exchange, growth and reproduction- especially for the

Fig.1. Damascus 1934 - The growth of the Madine was “a complex process that overlaid political,

religious, economic, and social parameters” which were often guided by gender parameters.

(Radoine, Hassan).

Fig.2. A top view of the ‘homes’ in Zaatari Camp shows how by shifting the locations of the containers to allow for private family spaces, the

process of homemaking transformed the initial grid layout of the camp.

women who have moved from Syria, many of whom find themselves in the unfamiliar position of being primary breadwinners of their families. 50.4% of the population in Zataari is of women2, owing to the large number of men who either do not survive the war, return to Syria or look for work opportunities in neighboring countries. With the conflict seeming far from a resolution, the camp is gradually beginning to develop roots that exist within rules and boundaries very different from that of the homeland. Women in this newly redefined state find themselves stepping out of their domestic terrain into the public domain that was often inaccessible to them back in Syria. Small businesses, employment initiatives and skill- sharing models are mushrooming all across the camp and organized communities of home making women are beginning to gain power. Patterns of domestic influence on the public sphere from the past lives of this Syrian community- originally from Daraa in southwestern Syria, near the Jordanian border- appear to be reemerging. In this article we begin to raise questions concerning the transformative spatial nature of the refugee camp and its social reconstruction by displaced, Syrian women as well as the effect of the disoriented political status of the camp, on them.

Using Zaatari as a point of focus, we draw comparisons to Syrian cities of the 18th and 19th century and their shaping in response to where their women were placed socially and politically. Is Zataari becoming an unexpected space for Syrian women to transform and redefine the historical narrative that has been veiling their role in actively shaping the city through acts of home making? How do these acts that are now spilling outside the home itself, visibly impact the urban fabric of their new city and how has it invisibly done the same in history?

Gender Influenced Cultural City Shaping in Syrian History: 18th to 19th Century The role of women in Middle Eastern societies has historically been a subject of contention. A cursory look at the past offers a narrative of oppression and seclusion. A more comprehensive outlook reveals that the natural reproductive capacity of women in Syrian society was translated into their instinctive ability to act as the keepers of memory, “tradition, history, and genealogy” for the community4. The analysis of the everyday lives of families and their religious, cultural, political and economical placement as homebuilders, establishes the influence of women and their navigation through everyday life on the spatial quality of the city to a great extent. The same pattern can be observed to be unfolding in Zaatari, except that in this case, the women play a more visible and proactive role in shaping the blurring boundaries between private and public spaces. A camp in fact, has no distinctively public or private spaces. There is no state or government to define what is public and there is no formal private ownership of land. In this case, the more appropriate terminology would be that of common or collective space, which usually, are gendered by nature5.

The adoption of the courtyard house in Syria in the 18th and 19th centuries provides a clear instance for the spatial translation of the social position of women in the city and their domestic habits and circulation into collective space. The consistent architectural feature in a traditional Syrian house is a central courtyard that is surrounded by double storeyed rooms looking into it6. Privacy was an intrinsic motive for any element of residential architecture in the 18th century. This gesture resulted in high window sills and perforated screens that not only thwarted any visual interference from the outside, but also acted as markers to internally

divide living room spaces. As patriarchal as Syrian society can be perceived to have been, privacy was not often conceived as a symptom of oppression, but as a cultural heritage of sorts. According to some modernizing agents, the bayt ‘arabi (Arabic house) had always been a gendered house7. Families in Zaatari camp have reproduced these historical structures of organization in their immediate space. The camp residents are quickly manipulating the layout and topography of the camp, to suit their social and cultural needs, away from the gridded arrangement provided by the UNHCR. They have started moving around their caravans, in an attempt to mirror their memories of home in Daraa. Families, who were neighbors in their old localities, would try and become neighbors in the refugee camp. The closer they were to each other, the safer was the common space for the women and children. It is common to find

two or three caravans to be exchanged and moved around to form internal courtyards- a private inner haven. Concrete, another symbol of permanence, is being laid down to cover the dust and make the courtyard a safe space for children to play in and women to sit around and be comfortable, without having to wear their naqab. This is their domestic workplace- where they organize, plan and build up networks that would support their families through building skills and that would allow them to access the street, the marketplace and incubate entrepreneurships- thus moving into the public space that could only be possible in the redefined political position that the camp has placed them in8.

One of the significant common spaces for access and communication between women in Middle Eastern society and their zone of sanctity, safety and control, where decisions for the family were discussed and even orders dispatched,

Fig. 3. It does not matter if they are living in W camp, the meal still has the meaning of the family getting to-gether in this important homemaking process.

Fig. 5. The layout of the Damacian house was characterized by a central courtyard which was integral for ensuring privacy for the women and children in the family. Damascus, 1900-1920.

Fig. 6. The courtyards in Zaatari Camp was formed informally by the refugees mimicking the style of the Da-macene home that became popular in the region since the 18th Century.

Fig. 4. The community kitchen are spaces to gather and create networks of cooperation

was the kitchen. The existence of kitchens (matbakh) in the 18th century existed usually as individual rooms or annexes. Irrespective of socio-economical status, the methods for preparation of food was lengthy and involved much labour. Every meal consisted of a series of tedious, but necessary tasks even in the pre-preparation. Nearly every process involved creating ingredients from scratch, cleaned manually, and slowly cooked over the exposed flame. The domestic setup in this period were absolutely not equipped to make this method any less cumbersome9. This is the reason for the kitchen to have

become a space for different women from neighboring families to come together, share their work as well as communicate, exchange and network, outside their own domestic space. In Zaatari, small kitchenettes have been installed to create spaces where women from the same community have been learning new skills and rooting businesses like that of pickling. Wherever there exists communal kitchens in particular areas, the demographic arrangement is made such that caravans that belong to a particular family share it. Laundry around water tanks is also located strategically to remain a part of a single large family. This also ensures that the women of the family do not have to access areas of the camp that reside single men who have not moved with their families and tend to be a source of harassment. When women depend upon

one another for formulating friendships and companionships, they also set up mechanisms of initiation and introduction, simultaneously. These relations are the origin of seeds that are eventually responsible for the construction of formalized women’s groups and organized bodies of power and empowerment. Building this sense of community and trust is directly responsible for the reestablishment of ties that shape cities10. Gender influenced Political City Shaping: 20th Century To locate this in its political context, gender issues make for ideal studies to examine the complex historical interplay that characterized the development of Islamic law and subsequently, the city. It has been estimated that 80 percent of the legal material in the Quran deals with women and gender11. Syria was the first Arab country to grant educated women the right to vote in 194912. In 1967, the General Union of Syria Women (GUSW) was created- an organization compound by women’s welfare societies, educational organizations and voluntary councils that aims to achieve equal opportunity for all women13. With the rise of the socialist Baath party to governance in 1963, women were granted the right to education and later to vote. This had been widely known to have contributed to feelings of national unity under the authoritarian regime, though some construed it as a political strategy to project an appearance of progression14. In her research on gender in the Middle East, Ruth Roded addresses the topic of gender seclusion by questioning whether the measures taken to “guard women’s privacy and modesty in public” are a result of gender segregation or simple a matter of social status. With this, she refers to evidence of women participating in informal military combat between nomadic tribes and villagers15.

Fig. 7. Commercial street in the Damascus showing daily practices of homemaking

Fig.8. Street view of daily practiced in the Zaatari Camp replicated the practices of life in old Damascus

Fig. 9. A street view of the Salhieh Street in Damascus in 1890, showing the influence of the courtyard architecture on the street scape.

Fig. 10. A street view in Zaatari Camp showing the infulence of the homemaking process on the street scape, 2013.

In the case of refugee camps specifically, conditions of adaptability available in the host countries sometimes facilitate the ability of refugee women to claim independent control over their lives, if that is what they wish. In the case of Israel/Palestine conditions for instance, the struggle for independence of Palestine people have opened opportunities for traditionally homemaking women to move beyond the boundaries of home and play roles outside the domestic realm in society16. Their modes of reproduction thus expand from benefiting only their own home and family to benefiting the larger community that they form a significant part of17. Conclusion In her studies of women in refugee or migrant situation, Edith Sizoo (1997) argues that:

“Even under conditions of physical abuse and fear for the life and existence of their communities, whether in the southern or northern hemisphere, hardly any of the women describes herself as a victim. Without denying the presence of oppressive power structures, what these women saw as important were the forces that gave their life a meaning and a sense.”

“The camp is a space where everything can happen.”18 With disorientation in political status of the people, there is a space created for redefinition, especially for women. The struggle for survival has always been a mode for transformation19. When women have to fend for their families together, it creates a new sense of political subjectivity, new self-confidence, forms of subsistence, forms of communication, circulation and imprints strongly on the urban fabric of the camp. At some level, this would bring to surface and value what has always formed the hidden and invisible labor force that silently shaped the urban typologies of the Syrian City physically, socially, politically and economically.

Fig. 11. “Leaving home means packing one’s past experiences into a suitcase, unpacking them in another spot under the sun and discovering that they light up in a new way.” (Sizoo, 1997).

ENDNOTES

1 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 97

2. “UNHCR,” Syria Regional Refugee Re-sponse, accessed November, 2014, http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/regional.php

3. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 97ne has.

4. Chatterjee 1993, Galley 2004, 526, Mogh-adam 1994a, 4.

5. Petti & Hilal, Lecture, 2014

6. Grehan, James. Everyday Life and Con-sumer Culture in Eighteenth-Century Da-mascus. Seattle, WA, USA: University of Washington Press, 2007. ProQuest ebrary

7. Totah, Faedah M. The Memory Keeper: Gender, Nation, And Remembering In Syria. Jornal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Vol-ume 9, No.1 (Winter 2013)

8. Rania Abou Zeid, phone interview with journalist, November, 2014

9. Grehan, 2007, 172

10. Buijs, Gina. Migrant Women: Crossing Boundaries and Changing Identities. Intro-duction. 1993,1 - 19.

11. Roded, Ruth. Mainstreaming Middle East Gender Research: Promise or Pitfall? Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Summer 2001),15-23

12. Totah, Faedah M. The Memory Keeper: Gender, Nation, And Remembering In Syria. Jornal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Vol-ume 9, No.1 (Winter 2013)

13. Shaaban, Bouthaina. Persisting Contra-dictions: Muslim Women in Syria. In: Wom-en in Muslim societies: diversity within unity. Edited by Herbert L. Bodman and Nayereh Tohidi,1998, 101- 118

14. Totah, 2013

15. Roded, 2001

16. Sizoo, Edith. How women change plac-es and places change women. In: Women’s Lifeworlds - Women’s narratives on shaping their realities, 1997, 221 - 245, 1997

17. Federici, Silvia. “Cooperative Cities.” Lecture, New York, November 20, 2014.

18. Agamben, Giorgio, and Daniel Roazen. “What Is a Camp?” In Homo Sacer. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998.

19. Federici, 2014

REFERENCES

1. Abu Zeid, Rania, phone interview with journalist, November, 2014.

2. Agamben, Giorgio, and Daniel Roazen. “What Is a Camp?” In Homo Sacer. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998.

3. Bonar, Emma, phone interview with Youth Project Manager at the Norwegian Refugee Council, November, 2014.

4. Buijs, Gina. “Introduction.” In Migrant Women: Crossing Boundaries and Changing Identities. Oxford [England: Berg, 1993.

5. Exertzoglou, Haris. “The Cultural Uses of Consumption: Negotiating Class, Gender, and Nation in the Ottoman Urban Centers during the 19th Century.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 35 (2003): 77-101. Accessed November 15, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3879928. 6. Federici, Silvia. “Cooperative Cities.” Lecture, New York, November 20, 2014.

7. Grehan, James. Everyday Life & Consumer Culture in 18th-century

Damascus. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007.

8. Radoine, Hassan. “Planning Paradigm in the Madina: Order in Randomness,” Planning Perspectives 26:4, pp. 527-549.

9. Iyer Siddiqi, Anooradha. “Disappearing Cities & [Re]Emerging Spaces.” Lecture,, New York, November 20, 2014.

10. Ledwith, Alison. Zaatari: The Instant City. Affordable Housing Institute Publication. 2014.

11. Mann, Carol. “From Refugee Camp to Kabul - The Influence of Exile on Afghan Women.” In Muslim Women in War and Crisis Representation and Reality. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. pp. 52-76.

12. McDowell, Linda Ed. “Section Five: Gendering Everyday Spaces.” In Space, Gender, Knowledge: Feminist Readings. S.l.: Arnold, London, 1997. pp. 263-268. 13. Petti, Alessandro. “Spatial Ordering of Exile: The Architecture of Palestinian Refugee Camps.” Lecture,, , November 17, 2014.

14. Roded, Ruth. “Mainstreaming Middle East Gender Research: Promise or Pitfall?” Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 35 (2001): 15-23. Accessed November 13, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23063363.15. Shaaban, Bouthaina. “Persisting Contradictions: Muslim Women in Syria.” In Women in Muslim Societies: Diversity within Unity, 101-118. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998.

16. Sizoo, Edith. “How Women Change Places and Places Change Women.” In Women’s Lifeworlds Women’s Narratives on Shaping Their Realities, 221-245. London: Routledge, 1997.

17. Totah, Faedah M. Preserving the Old City of Damascus. Syracuse University Press. 2014.

18. Totah, Faedah M. The Memory Keeper:

Gender, Nation, And Remembering In Syria. Jornal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Volume 9, No.1. Winter, 2013.

19. “Home.” Field Office Jordan. Accessed December 6, 2014. http://jordan.unwomen.org/en.

20. “UNHCR Syria Regional Refugee Response.” UNHCR Syria Regional Refugee Response. Accessed December 6, 2014. http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/.

Images

Fig1 Écochard, Michel. 1934. Archnet. Damascus Album, Aga Khan Foundation. http://archnet.org/collections/29/sites/

Fig.2 MANDEL NGAN/ AFP/ Getty Images

Fig.3 Khamissy, Dalia, 2014

Fig.4 Khamissy, Dalia, 2014

Fig.5 Courtesy of Photographium

Fig.6 Khamissy, Dalia, 2014

Fig.7 Courtesy of Photographium

Fig.8 United Nations Multimedea, http://www.unmultimedia.org

Fig. 9 Écochard, Michel. 1934. Archnet. Damascus Album, Aga Khan Foundation. http://archnet.org/collections/29/sites/

Fig.10 Khamissy, Dalia, 2014

Fig.11 Khamissy, Dalia, 2014

Detroit’s re-emerging spaces: How Community Projects And Private-Public Partnerships Shape The City, From Post-WWII To The PresentBY Bernardo Loureiro, Maria Morales, Michael Stepniak and Silvia Xavier

Fig. 1. The Georgia Street Community Collective (GSCC), an initiative that uses vacant lots in Detroit for community gardens.

This study will investigate the roles of community projects and private-public partnerships that have shaped Detroit. Its focus is on the time period between the end of the Second World War and the present.

A genealogy links current private initiatives for “revitalizing the city” with Detroit’s history of depopulation, suburbanization and deindustrialization. For the purposes of this article, the term “private-public

partnership will be used when referring to endeavors in which private actors attain disproportionate influence and profit from public investment.

The same private capital that sponsored Detroit’s massive growth is responsible for its shrinkage. Private initiatives, associated with government, have initiated a long series of projects that seek to “revitalize” the city. In contrast to these large-scale

initiatives, there are community-based organizations that fill the voids created by massive, privately sponsored inflows and outflows of capital.

Detroit’s growth and shrinkage occurred within the context of private-public partnerships. In the following sections, this context will be provided, and two case studies will be analyzed: one private public venture, and one community-based initiative. The analysis will demonstrate that community-based initiatives are effective in providing more immediate responses to local problems, in contrast to Detroit’s long and problematic genealogy of private-public partnerships.

Growth: Detroit’s Industrial Booming

Private capital has always shaped Detroit. At the turn of the 20th century, the city was, in the words of Thomas Sugrue, “a second-tier commercial and industrial city,” known principally for stove making. The city was heavily influenced by outside money: the utilities were owned by East Coast syndicates and corporations in Chicago and St. Louis owned manufacturing facilities.1

In 1900, Detroit was a growing industrial city of 305,000. Within three decades, the city became the epicenter of the automobile industry. By 1930, automobile manufacturing was the largest industry in the United States, and Detroit had a population of over 1.8 Million, with vast industrial and public infrastructure to match.2

In the years leading up to the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, the culture of this capital began to shift from Detroit’s old money families to the nouveaux rich, the automobile executives.3

Deindustrialized and Depopulated: Detroit in Post-World War II

The shrinkage of Detroit began soon

after World War II. From the 1950s to the late 1990s, Detroit lost almost one million inhabitants and thousands of jobs. Both private companies and governments influenced the processes of deindustrialization and depopulation, through subsidies for factory relocation and policies that encouraged suburbanization.4

Supported by governmental incentives, much of Detroit’s population left the city for its suburbs. Government-funded mortgages, allocated by the 1949 Housing Act, provided subsidies for suburban homes. The power to award these mortgages was held by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). The FHA developed standards of suburban architecture and neighborhood design, and only awarded mortgages insurance to new construction that fit these standards, therefore incentivizing suburbanization.5

From the 1950s on, Detroit manufacturers became increasingly decentralized, and the city lost jobs. Industry followed low-wage labor markets in the American South, as well as tax cuts and incentives offered by suburban governments and the Sunbelt states. As a consequence, manufacturers found it cheaper to construct new factories outside of Detroit than to retool their aging facilities within the city.6

In addition, the federal government supported industry relocation by providing highway infrastructure and subsidies for plant construction in green-field sites. Therefore, governmental policies at local and federal level had an active influence in the relocation of Detroit industries.7 Consequently, many of Detroit’s massive industrial sites were abandoned, and their jobs relocated elsewhere.

The shrinkage of Detroit was not simply a product of “’natural,’ inevitable consequences of market forces at work, “ as put by Thomas Sugrue.8 In fact, public subsidy for private industry led to the outflow of capital, jobs and population.

Fig. 2. The neighborhood of Poletown seen before the construction of the General Motors Assembly Plant in 1981. The wide road at the top of the photograph is the I-94.

Fig. 3. The Poletown Plant in a 2011 satellite picture. The I-94 Highway is seen here at the top of the picture. Notice the massive scale of the plant in comparison to the residential grid.

There are two main genealogies of resistance to these processes of depopulation and deindustrialization. The genealogy of private-public partnerships is concentrated on bringing back investment and jobs to the city. This traces back to the 1970, when public funds began to be used to build new office towers and factories. The second genealogy is the community-based efforts of individuals and communities. In postwar Detroit, these community-based actions began to address issues caused by the flight of jobs and resources, and the depopulation of neighborhoods.

The Private-Public Genealogy

Private-public attempts to reverse Detroit’s crisis trace back to the 1970s, when Mayor Coleman Young laid the foundation for industrial redevelopment, seeking to attract new industries in order to replace lost manufacturing jobs. As the city faced continuous population loss, Young attempted to reverse to reverse the situation turning to the same strategy that promoted the city’s shrinkage: by giving incentives to support the expansion of the private sector.9

Many private-public projects have been done since the 1970s, although their results and social benefits have been frequently questioned. Sugrue writes that many private-public partnerships “have done little to enlarge the city’s employment base, and have drained city coffers of more tax money.” Others have pointed out an unfair tradeoff: the neighborhoods that comprise the majority of the city are neglected as public spending has been directed to large projects in the central business district.10

The General Motors Poletown plant provides a clear example of the magnitude, expectations, and actual results of private-public partnerships. This project promised to bring 6,000 new jobs, and was proposed by GM to the city in the beginning of the 1980s. GM selected the Poletown area and requested the City to provide and clear the

site. The Poletown neighborhood, however, was not an urban void, but a densely populated neighborhood. The development was the larges urban clearance project in American History at that time.11

The project was completed in 1985 and was notable in terms of investment, logistics and political interference on behalf of the private sector. For instance, the Poletown assembly plant project required a new state law that sped up the eminent domain process. This set a precedent for the seizing and clearance of land for corporate use.12

In spite of GM’s projections, the results did not meet expectations. The employment goals were not met and the expected spin-off supplier plants did not materialize. Besides the costs of land clearance and infrastructure, the city also leveraged tax increment financing and incurred huge costs through tax abatements given to GM.13

Poletown illustrates the costs and inefficient results of private-public partnerships in Detroit. These projects benefit a small group, but in general terms they have harmed more than helped those who should be the focus for the city: Detroit workers and residents. Clearances generated displacements, job numbers fell well below expectations, and government spending has been unequally distributed, leaving many neighborhoods politically and economically abandoned.

The Community-Based Genealogy

What hope remains in the city comes from the continued efforts of city residents to resist the debilitating effects of poverty, racial tension, and industrial decline. - Thomas Sugrue14

Alternatives to the “revitalizing” approach have developed in parallel to private-public projects. Community-based projects depend on individual and community efforts that make productive use of the

Fig. 4. The main GSCC garden, located beside their community center. The sidewalk located in front of the lot is in visible disrepair.

city’s depopulated spaces, which fill the voids left by vanishing city services and economic opportunities. Residents exercise agency and shape the city. Andrew Herscher writes that abandoned urban properties are “serving as site of and instrument for the imagination and practice of an informal and sometimes alternative urbanism.”15 One such effort is the Georgia Street Community Collective (GSCC).

The GSCC is working on utilizing vacant lots. Mark Covington started the organization in 2008. He began cleaning vacant lots, eventually planting small gardens, seeking to discourage illegal trash dumping. The gardens became small farms. The project has expanded, and is now Covington’s full-time commitment.

More recently, the GSCC expanded its efforts to education and creation of community spaces. It acquired an

abandoned building and rehabilitated it into a community center with a computer lab, library and kitchen.

Covington acknowledges the results and limitations of his practice. He emphasizes the importance of the GSCC’s influence in influencing others to become community activists.

In discussing the difficulties of the project’s growth, he says: “Even though it has been six years, we are still learning. We just learned that we could have been tax exempt, just learned this summer!” In regards to GSCC further expansion, Covington says that he does not compare the Collective to other, bigger, citywide nonprofit organizations, and that his intention is to continue to work within his limits, in his neighborhood. He is not trying to “save Detroit.’ Rather, the GSCC identifies a localized need, or void, and rushes to fill it.

ENDNOTES

1. Sugrue, Thomas J. Motor City: The Story of Detroit. (The Gilder Lehrman Institute, Mar.-Apr. 2007), par. 2.

2. Davis, Donald F. The Price of Conspicious Production: The Detroit Elite and the Automobile Industry, 1900-1933 (Journal of Social History, Vol. 16 No.1, Autumn 1982), p. 33,41.

3. Klepper, Steven. Disagreements, Spinoffs, and the Evolution of Detroit as the Capital of the U.S. Automobile Industry (Management Science, Vol. 53, No. 4, April 2007), 616.

4. Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 3.

5. Wilson, Hugh A. “President Eisenhower and the Development of Active Labor

in the United States: A Revisionist View” (Presidential Studies Quarterly

39, no. 3, 2009), 526.

6. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, 6.

7. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, 140.

8. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, xviii.

9. June Manning Thomas, Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1997), 161.

10. Thomas, Redevelopment and Race, 166.

11. John J. Bukowczyk, The Decline and Fall of a Detroit Neighborhood: Poletown vs. G.M. and the City of Detroit(41 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 49 1984), 61.

12. Thomas, Redevelopment and Race, 162.

13. Thomas, Redevelopment and Race, 165.

14. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, 271.

The GSCC shows how community-based projects can provide an immediate and locally successful response to a neighborhood’s emergent needs. Herscher writes: “the garden serves as a nexus for the formation of new social networks as well as new means of food security.”16

Although these projects are small and site-specific, they achieve a significant impact, addressing local problems and creating immediate solutions.

Conclusion

We have shown how private-public partnerships have not only been responsible for the industrial boom of Detroit, but have also led a major role in its shrinkage after WWII. In the subsequent period, private companies, mostly industrial, have continued to establish partnerships with the public sector, using the discourse of revitalization in order to expand their economic activities in the city. These private-public projects are characterized by large scale interventions, and generally supported by the city through financial incentives and provision of infrastructure.

The results that followed these projects were usually disappointing in terms of job generation and economic growth, as the Poletown case illustrates. At the same time, these developments have generated other negative impacts for the residents, such as displacement and uneven and inadequate spending of public resources. This has been one of the main reasons for why Detroit has been facing a major crisis, with high levels of unemployment, a bankrupt municipality and a lack of essential public services.

In contrast, community-based projects have been attempting to fill in the voids left by both the public and the private industrial sector. The GSCC illustrates how these projects can provide an immediate and local response to a neighborhood’s emergent needs. Projects like this are usually small in scale, have little funding, and are born

out of grassroots initiatives. Therefore, they are very different from most private-public endeavors. By addressing local problems and promoting immediate benefits to residents, we believe that community-driven projects like the GSCC comprise a significant alternative to the private-public initiatives that have long shaped the city.

15. Andrew Herscher, The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 8-9.

16. Hescher, The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit, 48.

Fig. 1. Georgia Street Community Collective. Web. 28 Nov. 2014. <http://www.georgiastreetcc.com/photos/>

Fig. 2. Wylie, Jeanie. Poletown: Community Betrayed. Illini Books ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990, 5.

Fig. 3. Aerial view of Poletown Hamtrack Assembly Plant. USDA Farm Service Agency, Google Earth. 2011. Web. 28 Nov 2014.

Fig. 4. Michael Stepniak. View of GSCC community garden. Nov. 2014.

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7. Herscher, Andrew. The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012.

8. John J. Bukowczyk, The Decline and Fall of a Detroit Neighborhood: Poletown vs. G.M. and the City of Detroit, 41 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 49 (1984), http://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/wlulr/vol41/

iss1/5

9. Klepper, Steven. Disagreements, Spinoffs, and the Evolution of Detroit as the Capital of the U.S. Automobile Industry. Management Science, Vol. 53, No. 4, Apr. 2007.

10. Lewis, Matthew. “Mark Covington.” Urban Innovation Exchange. July 25, 2013. Accessed November 21, 2014. http://www.uixdetroit.com/people/markcovington.aspx.

11. Power, Matthew. “Motown Revival?” OnEarth. OnEarth Magazine, 6 June 2011. Web. 28 Nov. 2014. <http://archive.onearth.org/article/mo-town-revival>.

12. Sugrue, Thomas J. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996.

13. Sugrue, Thomas. Motor City: The Story of Detroit. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. The Gilder Lehrman Institute, Mar.-Apr. 2007.

14. Thomas, June Manning. Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

15. Wilson, Hugh A. “President Eisenhower and the Development of Active Labor in the United States: A Revisionist View.” Presidential Studies Quarterly 39, no. 3 (2009): 519-548.

16. Wylie, Jeanie. Poletown: Community Betrayed. Illini Books ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990.

17. “Interview with Georgia Street Community Collective founder Mark Covington.” Personal interview by author. 12, 2014.

The Health of Commerce and the Built Environment:A Comparative Study of the Effect of Natural Hazards in Manila from 1880 - 1910.

By Denilyn Arciaga, Kieran Gannon, Ravi Govada and Tamara Streefland

The Philippine islandsfig 1 are located on the ring of fire,fig 2 a circuit of tectonic activity in the Pacific Ocean. Consequently, they are a hotspot for natural disaster. Diley identified six types of natural hazards that affect the region: floods, volcanic eruptions, droughts, typhoons, earthquakes and landslides.1 Although Manila, the capital of the Philippines, is not directly located on a fault line, it still experiences the effects of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. Furthermore, Manila’s low elevation and tempestuous climate make the city susceptible to typhoons and flooding.2

In a contemporary account, an English writer named John Foreman noted that typhoons sometimes caused immense destruction to property. “Ships were torn from their moorings, small craft laden with merchandise were wrecked, and the inhabitants fled from the streets to make fast their premises and

await in intense anxiety the conclusion of the tempest.”3 Luzon, the province in which Manila is situated, is one of the areas of the Philippines most prone to typhoons.4 Once described as the “Pearl of the Orient seas,”5 Manila’s geographic location also made the city a nexus for trade and a battleground for global power. Natural Hazards under Spanish rule

When Spain conquered Manila it was a small and underdeveloped settlement. Soon after, the colonial government began to mold the city into a Spanish ciudad. The economy was driven by external trade of Mexican silver with Chinese goods.6

In terms of urban form, Manila was similar to earlier Spanish colonial cities like those found

fig 2. Situated on the ring of fire, the Philippine islands are prone to earthquakes and typhoons.

fig 1. map of the Philippine islands

This research compares how natural hazards affected the health of Spanish and American colonial governments in regard to commerce and the built environment of Manila between 1880 and 1910. We aim to discover what practices were used to mitigate the impact of future hazards. We explore how the role of the port of Manila affected how colonial powers coped with the effects of natural hazards.

in Mexico. An almost perfect grid was laid out between the city walls that was organized around a central Plaza. The plaza was surrounded by the governmental buildings and a prominent church.7 Manila was not a city of entertainment. There were no cafes, theaters or opera houses. Only the church brought recreation to the city through numerous religious events and processions.8

In July 1880, the Philippines was struck by a series of earthquakes over a span of 11 days that caused great physical destruction to a large portion of Manila. Samuel Kneeland, witness to the destruction, recounted his observations that “On landing in Manila you cannot go far without meeting evidences of the earthquakes which have visited the city and vicinity, in ruined buildings, shattered churches, dilapidated walls, and heaps of rubbish-most the work of a few seconds in 1863 and 1880.”9 Only the houses that were made of wood and iron survived.10 The Spanish colonial government ordered a team of engineers to level the buildings that threatened public health.11 Furthermore, they established a rule that limited the increase in cost of construction material to 10 percent.12

In the wake of the earthquake, the Spanish colonial government instituted a new set of building codes to make Manila’s infrastructure more resilient to natural hazards. Instead of following previous standards of using stone on top of firm foundations to foster the permanence of the built form, new rules obligated the use of wood resting on stone foundations. This ensured that earthquakes would not destroy the entire buildings, but would only affect the lower story and leave the above stories comparatively uninjured.13 Additionally, the use of galvanized iron roofs was forbidden and the use of wood from the first story up was rigorously enforced.14

Although the Spanish did intervene after the earthquake of 1880 by implementing these building codes, they were often not very active in reconstruction after disasters. An earthquake in 1863 destroyed 46 public buildings and 570 private buildings as well as the Spanish government house and part of the city wall. By 1898 many of these ruins were still not rebuilt; construction of a new government building did

From top to bottom: San Agustin church before and after the

earthquake in July 1880. Having survived numerous hazards, it remains the oldest

religious structure in the country.

fig 3 (above and below)

fig 4

not commence until 1895.15 Furthermore the Spanish began to collect tax money to build a new port for Manila in 1880. However, by 1890 only a seawall of this harbor was visible which was then destroyed by a typhoon and never rebuilt.16

Manila’s urban form was not the only aspect of the city that was affected. Typhoons and tsunamis damaged the harbor, wrecked ships from different nations, and adversely impacted transcontinental trade that flowed through Manila. The typhoon of October 20, 1882 crippled many ships that sat in the harbor and set the prosperity of the islands back at least two years. The export of hemp and sugar in 1882 was considerably less than in 1881 due both to typhoons and to an outbreak of cholera.17

Spain mainly used the port of Manila, and the Philippines, for trade between the different focal points of the Spanish Empire.18 Spain had aspirations of greater city planning for Manila, but due to insufficient energy it was never realized during their time of rule. Major infrastructure works such as improvements to Manila’s waterways were never realized and the and port “remained for centuries unprotected from heavy winds and typhoons.”19

Shift in Power

There were many pockets of rebellion throughout Spanish colonial rule of the Philippines. However, in 1896, armed conflict broke out between the Spanish forces and a revolutionary organization known as the Katipunan. By 1898, the revolutionary army had acquired control of nearly all of the Philippines, but the Spanish colonial government was still in control of Manila. In the spring, the United States (U.S.) and Spain went to war due to tensions in the Caribbean. Hoping to expand its power into Asia, the U.S. took advantage of Spain’s weakness in the Philippines and attacked Manila, gaining control of the city. Soon after, Spain ceded the colony to the U.S.20

Natural Hazards under American Rule

American rulers of Manila focused on improving the port in order to enhance its efficiency and

accessibility. The fortifications were nearly completed by May of 1908 and cost over $4 million. Prior to the improvements of the port, ships too large for the Pasig river, which flows through Manila, had to instead use a longer route via Cavite. To create a direct passage to the inland areas of Manila, “a splendid port was formed by building an immense breakwater southward from the mouth of the Pasig, behind which the sea was deepened… Steel and concrete piers were constructed where the largest ocean craft in the Pacific [could] be docked.”21 The deepened port basin and the height of the newly built seawalls provided security for cargo and shelter for protection against typhoons.22 As a result of this enhancement, 200 acres of reclaimed land was added to the waterfront that transportation facilities and warehousing companies leased.23

During the construction of the breakwater and bulkhead, the port of Manila was subject to “numerous breaks during the year.”24 When a typhoon struck the port of Manila in July of 1903, 500 feet of timber from the bulkhead was destroyed. The Americans repaired this with 230,000 tons of rock and 261 cubic yards of concrete blocks.

During the last few decades of Spanish rule, attempts were made to modernize Manila’s urban form. For example, the Botanical Garden was planned and certain radial avenues were opened and the path between Paseo Azcarraga and its extension became the great circling thoroughfare. However, the road infrastructure largely consisted of narrow streets that were crooked and unplanned. During January 1899, US President McKinley created a small-scaled government body, the Philippine Commission, to rule over the archipelago. The Commissioners “outlined the significance of urban places to the process of governance.”25 In 1904, the Commision hired famed architect and city planner Daniel Burnham to submit a master plan for Manila. Burnham was an advocate of the City Beautiful movement, and envisioned a grandiose plan. His proposal contained five goals: development of the waterfront, parks and parkways to give means of recreation to every quarter of the city; creation of an accessible street system; construction of building sites for mixed activities; waterway development for

fig 5. 1898 Spanish plan for Manila.

fig 6. Plans for the development of Manila submitted to the Philippine Commission by Daniel H. Burnham in 1905.

transportation; creation of facilities for summer resorts.26 The comprehensive redevelopment was not only for infrastructural improvement, but also to encourage the economic growth of the city. Burnham planned for a population of 800,000 even though his report claimed the existing population to be 223,029.27

Discussion

The Spanish and American colonial powers had different approaches in addressing the impact of natural hazards on commerce and the built environment. This difference could be related to each country’s use for, and interest in, Manila and the Philippines as a colony. Spain had a slow approach to the Philippines and its development, which was reflected in the lack of reconstruction after natural hazards and lackadaisical approach to Manila’s planning and urban development.

The U.S. had a grander vision for Manila. It envisioned an Eastern base for its political influence. They addressed Manila’s vulnerability to such natural hazards through implementation and investment in the port, improvement of water-based infrastructure and protection against typhoons in order to nurture trade and commerce. Although Daniel Burnham’s 1905 Manila Plan had strong ambitions to create a monumental western capital city, it did not directly address the impact of natural hazards. However, the plan did improve in Manila’s capacity to mitigate the impact of natural hazards on the built environment and is evidence of the American’s investment in improvements.28

Furthermore, the built environment of Manila, in relation to disaster management, was illustrative of the health and power of Spain and the United States. The ruins that sat for decades after natural hazards were a reflection of the crumbling Spanish Empire. Whereas the bourgeoning new global force of the United States implemented infrastructural improvements under the Manila Plan to modernize the city that served as its gateway to the markets of Asia.

Epilogue

In present day Manila, the frequency and severity of natural hazards is increasing. Despite improved building standards and technology, a large number of residents, major public works, and informal settlements are even more susceptible to the the threat of natural hazards. Several international agencies have gravitated to the Philippines to reduce its risk of natural hazards. The US Agency of International Development (USAID) has been intimately involved in the philippines with its disaster risk reduction and has provided “over $190 million in disaster assistance to the Philippines over the last ten years.”29 Outside forces still have a strong influence in the Philippines, but how are Filipinos themselves working to mitigate natural hazards?

fig 7. A map of tectonic activity from 2003-2013

End Notes

1. Dilley, Maxx., 19.2. World Bank.3. Foreman, John., 355.4. Bankoff, Greg.5. First stated by Dr. Rizal. 6. Doeppers, Daniel F.7. Doeppers, Daniel F.8. Foreman, John., 3449. Kneeland, Samuel.10. Japan Gazette.11. Kneeland, Samuel.12. Japan Gazette.13. Kneeland, Samuel., 78.14. Foreman, John., 355.15. Foreman, John., 355.16. Foreman, John., 165.17. Kneeland, Samuel., 77 - 80.18. Kneeland, Samuel., 75.19. Barrows, David P., 19.20. Tucker, Spencer.21. Barrows, David P., 19 - 20.22. Philippine Commission., 39.23. Barrows, David P., 19 - 20.24. Philippine Commission., 39.25. Morley., 2.26. Palafox, Felino.27. Palafox, Felino.28. Barrows, David P., 21.29. USAID.

Bibliography

Bankoff, Greg. “Constructing Vulnerability: The Historical, Natural and Social Generation of Flooding in Metropolitan Manila.” Disasters 27, no. 3 (2003): 224-238.

Barrows, David P. “A Decade of American Government in the Philippines 1903-1913.” World Book Company, 1914.

Burnham, D and Anderson, P. “Report on the Proposed Improvements at Manila.” Report of the Philippines Commission, Washington, DC: United States Federal Government, 1904.

Dilley, Maxx. “Natural Disaster Hotspots: a Global Risk Analysis.” Vol. 5., World Bank Publications, 2005.

Doeppers, Daniel F. “The Development of Philippine Cities Before 1900.” The Journal of Asian Studies 31, no. 04 (1972): 769-792. Foreman, John. “The Philippine Islands: A Political, Geographical, Ethnographical, Social and Commercial History of the Philippine Archipelago, Embracing the Whole Period of Spanish Rule, with an Account of the Succeeding American Insular Government.” TF Unwin, 1906.

Kneeland, Samuel. “The Philippine Islands: Their Physical Characters, Customs of the People, Products, Earthquake Phenomena, and Savage Tribes.” Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York, (1883): 73-100.

Morley, Ian. “City Designing and Nationhood During the Early 1900s: Civic Design in the Philippines.” Department of History, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin NT,Hong Kong, 1993.

Palafox, Felino. “1905 Burnham Plan for Manila.” Philippine Daily Inquirer, August 22, 2005, Business Monday.

Philippine Commission (1900-1916). “Report of the Philippine Commission to the Secretary of War.” U.S. Government Printing Office, 1903.

First stated by Dr. Rizal. http://tagaloglang.com/Philippine-Literature/English-Poems/my-last-farewell-by-jose-rizal.html“The Earthquakes of Manila and the Provinces.” Japan Gazette, August 18, 1880, Vol. 26, The Outports.

“Terrible Earthquake at Manila.” Japan Gazette, July 20th, 1880, Vol. 26, The Outports.

“The Earthquakes in Manila.” Japan Gazette, September 11, 1880, Vol. 26, The Outports.

“The Earthquakes at Manila.” Colonist, October 18 1880, Vol. XXII Issue 2769, The Outports.Tucker, Spencer (2009) The Encyclopedia of the Spanish-American and Philippine American Wars Volume 1: A Political Social and Military History Library of Congress

World Bank. “Philippines - Natural Disaster Risk Management in the Philippines: Enhancing Poverty Alleviation Through Disaster Reduction.” Washington, DC: World Bank. 2005.

Figures

fig 1. Arciaga, Denilyn, M. Illustration of the Philippines.fig 2. The COMET Program. Ring of Fire map.fig 3. San Augstin Museum. Photo of church.fig 4. San Augstin. Photo of church. http://simbahan. net/2009/04/02/visita-iglesia-seven-old-manila- churches/ fig 5. de Gamaneda, Francisco J. Plano de Manila y sus Arrabales. http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/ historical/manila_and_suburbs_1898.jpgfig 6. Burnham, Daniel H., and Edward H. Bennett, Plan of Chicago, the Commercial Club, Chicago MCMIX 1909 fig 7. Mason, Virgina W., and Kelsey Nowakowski. A Nation at Risk.

THE MASDAR CITY MIRAGE: MARKETABILITY PRECLUDES SUSTAINABILITY IN THE TECHNOCRACY OF ABU DHABI

By Kartik Amarnath, Mateo Fernández-Muro, Drew Vanderburg

If humanity succeeds, its success will have been initiated by inventions and not

by the debilitating, often lethal biases of politics.

Richard Buckminster Fuller “City of the Fu-

ture”

“By 2030, 60 percent of the world’s pop-ulation – 5 billion people – will live in cit-ies.”1 This statement headlines the bro-chure of Masdar City, a new “eco-city” being constructed in Abu Dhabi. Masdar City is proposed as a “‘greenprint’ for how cities can accommodate rapid urbanization and dramatically reduce energy, water and waste.”2

This paper will debunk the claim that Mas-

dar City is a viable and replicable prototype for future sustainable cities. First we will locate Masdar’s place in the history of sus-tainability ideology. Then we will explore the historical context of Abu Dhabi which has enabled Masdar to exist. Thirdly, we will show historical precedents of techno-cratic planning and its effects. Finally, we will reveal ways in which Masdar’s sustain-ability goals are or are not actualized in practice.

1 Howard, Wright, and Fuller: Founding Fathers of the Eco-City

In 1898 Ebenezer Howard presented his Garden City concept to the world. An ide-alistic model of urban space blending city and country, this may be the first case of

Masdar City Rendering, 2010 Masdar Master Plan

the eco-city paradigm. Today a modern eco-city, Masdar City, rises in the desert 11km outside of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.

The ideals of Masdar’s design are clear-ly rooted in Howard’s Garden City vision. “Howard…hoped to have a natural and ag-ricultural zone - the greenbelt - around a town...Housing was planned to be a short distance from a city center in which com-mercial jobs were located and not too far from civic amenities and internal parks. In-dustries were to be located on the fringes, adjacent to the greenbelt.”3 In the Mas-dar City proposal the traits of convenience, mixed-use, and green infrastructure are present, as is a greenbelt cutting through the center of the complex with industry on the periphery.

Economic motivations behind sustainabili-ty ideology are also shared between Gar-den Cities and Masdar City. The Town and Country Planning Association was original-ly created to build Howard’s Garden Cities in Great Britain. (It still operates in the UK today). When the urbanist Peter Hall joined that organization in the 1960’s he advocat-ed economic development through “urban enterprise zones” which collided ecological goals with economic ones.

“Hall stressed the free movement of la-bor and capital, with a special emphasis on entrepreneurship and the creation of new enterprises.”4 This trend is embodied in Masdar’s status as an economic “free-zone”, boasting zero percent import tariffs and no taxes, intended to attract foreign business.5

Further precedent for Masdar City’s design is Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City, an-other technology-delivered utopian model cityscape, presented in 1932. While How-ard’s eco-city was presented as a hypothet-ical model that was misread as a physical schematic, Wright intended his Broadacre City as a prototype for future urban devel-

Broadacre City Model, 1935 Industrial Arts Expo

opment. Masdar, too, is intended as such a prototype. Though Broadacre City called for a more large-scale socio-spatial reconfiguration than the site-specific Masdar, the aesthetic similarity between a 1-acre square plan of Broadacre land and the rendering of Mas-dar is undeniable, as shown below.Yet the figure that has most irrefutably pro-vided the ideological framework for Mas-dar City is the architect and engineer Buck-minster Fuller. Not surprisingly, the lead designer of the Masdar project is one of his fervent disciples, the British architect Sir Norman Foster, who collaborated with Fuller during his last twelve years of life, until 1983..

Despite what some historians call “the dif-ficulty...to resurrect him from the dust heap of 1920’s ‘technotopias’”6, Fuller’s techno-logical designs and environmental analy-ses captured the interest of the British and American counter-culture of the 1970’s,

Bucky in action. photo © Tim Street Porter. Sir Norman Foster is the second from the right.

among which a young Norman Foster was included. According to the Norwegian his-torian Peder Anker, “Fuller was cheered among hippies preoccupied with spiritual thinking, environmentalism, and alterna-tive ways of organizing society”. In a peri-od marked by the threats of the Cold War, “he gave his audience apolitical hands-on solutions” that were considered “radical but not leftist”, thus ideologically accept-able during those highly contested times.7 Fuller’s schemes inspired the idea of an eco-utopia, an elitist world without politics in which designers and technocrats were at the helm, steering the planet away from ecological crises. This is definitely what Masdar City wants to be.

2. Centralized Wealth and Power in an Oil Rentier Sheikdom

The United Arab Emirates is uniquely po-sitioned to create a project like Masdar. The centralized power of the sheikh has historically enabled an almost impulsive allocation of national oil wealth to develop-ment projects. When oil was discovered on the Persian Gulf coast, the region was a protectorate of Britain with power spread amongst nine regional sheikdoms.

By 1971, the rulers of the emirates of Abu Dhabi and Dubai consolidated power on the promise of their new oil wealth and founded the UAE.8 Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan is its president and ab-solute monarch, and the chairman of the Supreme Petroleum Council.

In The Political Economy of the United Arab Emirates, Anne Louise Aartun de-scribes the UAE as an oil rentier state in which “oil revenues have provided a sub-stitute for democracy…where these reve-nues earlier had to come from the popu-lation...the rulers now received revenues independently…the elites that rulers de-pend on are not locals, but rather multina-tional companies.”9

Yet the historic dependence on foreign firms is at odds with Abu Dhabi’s desire to confirm its status as a self-sustaining glob-al financial power laid out in the “Abu Dhabi Economic Vision 2030”.10 “British oil com-panies were active participants in many of the [oil] producing concessions. This also meant that other British firms capitalized on commercial opportunities in the newly developing Gulf economies.”11

Masdar City exemplifies such “commercial opportunity”. “Capital circulates through the networks of the green technology mar-ket; it is magnetized by Masdar City (where part of it solidifies into the built environ-ment), and eventually flows into the emir-ate’s financial pool where it is again set in motion to diversify the local economy. This is why this ‘eco-city’ was conceived, and it is this purpose which defines its nature.”12

Evidently, Masdar strives to open new for-eign investment streams while oil money still flows, so that Abu Dhabi continues to thrive when the oil, inevitably, runs out.

3. Siemens and Technocratic Urban Vi-sions

A primary beneficiary of space, investment, and influence in Masdar has been the Ger-man corporation Siemens, whose regional headquarters are now located in the city.13 The task of developing Masdar as a model “greenprint” and export hub for sustainable urban solutions has fallen upon the com-pany.

Siemens, whose main trade is clean ener-gy technology, serves as the primary con-sultant in shaping the sustainability policy of the city. Siemens plays a technocratic role in Masdar’s development, where au-thority is asserted according to rational cal-culations of building specialists rather than broader planning processes engaging di-verse stakeholders.

From “eco-cities” to “smart cities” and “free

economic zones”, Siemens’ role in engi-neering Masdar’s sustainable agenda fol-lows a genealogy of private technocrats exercising unhindered influence in devel-oping urban crossroads of global trade, fi-nance, and communication.

Patterns of private and technocratic city-making have colonial precedents, as trading companies such as the Dutch East India Company (VOC) repurposed colo-nized cities for similar global exchanges of goods, labor, and capital. Similar to Masdar, urban crossroads of global ex-change were created primarily through the development of technologically-bound in-frastructural networks in colonized cities. However, as we will see in the case of co-lonial Jakarta’s infrastructural changes in the 19th century, such processes of devel-opment became problematic.

In the case of Jakarta, then known as Batavia, the development of its technolo-gy-based water supply infrastructure led to social-environmental segregation. With the dual pursuits of mitigating water-borne epidemics such as cholera and developing transportation to optimize the movement of goods, VOC embarked on technical inves-tigations of urban water flows.

These studies supported the notion that residents’ activities were to blame, and could be altered through technology to mitigate the problem while also expand-ing economic opportunities. VOC built the city’s first centralized water supply and transit system. However, their plan only focused on European neighborhoods in its study. As a result, the new infrastructure redirected water to these areas. Redirect-ed water flows reduced access to clean water for native residents, thereby causing epidemics to persist. Through technocrat-ic means, the incomplete urban vision of VOC reproduced the epidemics in a more stratified way, placing environmental bur-dens disproportionately on Batavia’s mar-ginalized populations.14

Recently, Siemens has been associated with similar patterns of social-environmen-tal destabilization with their involvement in the Belo Monte Dam. As of 2011, Siemens has agreed to provide vital electromechan-ical equipment for the dam complex. Cur-rently under construction, the dam is locat-ed on the Xingu River in the Amazon and is expected to be the world’s third largest. According to Amazon Watch, the project will displace at least 20,000 indigenous people representing hundreds of tribes.15

Furthermore, biodiverse river basin ecol-ogies that will be flooded, resulting in rot-ting vegetation, ultimately releasing large amounts of greenhouse gasses16. Con-versely, a significant portion of this specu-lated demand could be accommodated by investing in energy efficiency and avoiding environmental destruction and the dis-placement of thousands.17 Similar to co-lonial Batavia, the lack of local input and participation in Belo Monte’s development exposes the contradictions of Siemens’ technocratic visions of sustainability.

What Batavia and Belo Monte Dam teach us is that Masdar City comes from a lin-eage of technocratic urbanism that pro-duced unanticipated or unrecognized con-sequences. Without incorporating local knowledges and diverse perspectives, technocratic entities lacked more compre-hensive understandings of realities on the ground.

Conversely, Masdar is unique because there is no native population or non-hu-man life where it is being constructed. This makes the possible incompleteness of its technocratic vision something with poten-tially global socio-environmental repercus-sions. In the middle of the desert, Mas-dar City attempts to be a globally relevant sustainable urban model. But the model Masdar develops - its “greenprint” - will fall short of incorporating nuances of the landscapes to which it may be exported,

possibly destabilizing human-environment relations globally.

4. Norman Foster and the Place that Does Not Exist

A small driverless shiny car slides along the highways of Abu Dhabi towards its des-tiny: Masdar City. The unmanned vehicle is a smaller, sleeker version of the ‘Dymax-ion’ car, one of Buckminster Fuller’s most popular inventions. The scene depicted is a promotional video of Masdar, produced by its architects, Foster + Partners.18

The car, undoubtedly, means to Sir Nor-man Foster much more than what is ro-mantically displayed in the clip. In fact, not only the car, but all of Fuller’s ‘Dymaxion’ inventions embodied his optimistic view of technology’s capacity to solve problems by design.19 And so do they to Foster’s eyes. The architect’s vision was for Masdar’s streets to be pedestrian-only with pilotless vehicles running via magnets and fibre-op-tic cables, making Masdar the world’s first zero-carbon city.20 But as the global “cleantech” market stalls in the recession, Masdar promoters and designers have had to compromise their original plans. Now, even the driverless ‘Dymaxion’ is a white elephant.21

Not only have compromises been made on technology, but also on logistics. A former employee at Foster + Partners (who has requested to remain anonymous) explains that all the suppliers were constrained to

fulfill a long list of requirements in order to reduce carbon emission. One such re-quirement was the production of construc-tion materials at a short distance from the site. That, in many cases, meant that the supplying companies had to move their whole production plant in order to fulfill the requirement.

“Even though the transportation consti-tutes a big part of carbon emissions, and despite the fact that designers, in an ide-al world, should try to build with materials that are close at hand and avoid vehicle displacements, moving a whole produc-tion for accomplishing such goals does not seem too smart”, s/he states bluntly. “No doubt the desert does not offer too many materials. Perhaps,” s/he admits, “build-ing from scratch in the middle of the desert might not be the best option.” Nevertheless, Fuller’s “infectious opti-mism” and blind belief in design have been passed down to Foster’s collaborators.22 The worker interviewed claims that they carried out serious research and tried to make the project as sustainable as pos-sible. Beyond the transit system and the solar energy fields, Masdar’s buildings include a range of passive energy saving features, from housing ventilation to ther-mal insulation. Desalination plants and so-lar air-conditioning - invented by Fuller in the dawn of WWII - are being tested, too. “Proving that is possible to make zero-car-bon emission architecture in the middle of the desert is worthy of merit, and it shows that, if it is feasible under such conditions,

Norman Foster and his ‘Dymaxion’ recreation for the exhibtion Buckminster Fuller and the Space-

ship Earth.

Capture from Masdar promotional video. Masdar City Development ‘Dymaxion’ Car. 2013.

Foster + Partners Visualization Department.

could be more than viable anywhere else”, the worker admits with rational enthusi-asm.

Yet anywhere else means nowhere else specifically. As such, not only is Masdar City a technotopia of the 21st Century, but it can also be considered a literal u-topia, “a place that does not exist”. None of the buildings developed by our interviewee have been built. So far, Turner Construc-tion Company, responsible for making the project “real”, has only built the solar plant and the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, conceived in 2006, after three years’ work and a cost of $1.4 billion.

Phase two, which was supposed to be fin-ished in 2011, is yet unbuilt three years later.23 By now, no matter how rational, technological, optimistic, or ecologically sustainable are the designs for Masdar City, now they are nothing but a CAD file zealously saved on Foster + Partners’ hard drive.

Conclusion

“It is a test tube city”, our interviewee af-firms, “yet impossible to replicate”. The context of Masdar City disqualifies it as a viable model for urban sustainability that can be replicated worldwide.

The technology-delivered eco-city para-digm that Masdar imitates requires cen-tralized power and surplus capital to imple-ment, and unilateral power and massive wealth like those of the UAE’s sheikhdom exists in few other countries worldwide.

Historical precedent reveals that top-down, techno-rational approaches to city-making tend to disregard the complexities of local communities and ecologies.

The Masdar City project embraces idealis-tic logics of design and sustainability that are presented as technocratic, but are in fact entrenched in power politics and be-holden to economic agendas. Thus, Mas-

dar City’s marketability precludes its sus-tainability.

ENDNOTES

1. About Masdar City, Mubadala Devel-opment Company promotional brochure, http://www.masdar.ae/en/masdar-city/2. Ibid.3. Register, R. Ecocities: Rebuilding Cities In Balance With Nature. (Canada, New So-ciety Publishers, 2006).4. Davis, Otto A. and Pasquale, Denise. “Enterprise Zones: New Deal, Old Deal, or No Deal?”. The Cato Journal. Volume 2, Number 2, Fall 1982. The Cato Institute.5. About Masdar City, Mubadala Devel-opment Company promotional brochure, http://www.masdar.ae/en/masdar-city/6. Vidler, Anthony. “Whatever Happened to Ecology? John McHale and the Bucky Full-er Revival”. Architectural Design. Special Issue: EcoRedux: Design Remedies for an Ailing Planet. Volume 80, Issue 6, pages 24–33, November/December 2010. Web. November 2014.7. Anker, Peder “Buckminster Fuller as Captain of Spaceship Earth,” Minerva, 45:4 (2007), 417-434. May 23, 2011. Web. November 20, 2014.8. Al-Fahim, M, From Rags to Riches: A Story of Abu Dhabi, Chapter Six (London Centre of Arab Studies, 1995), ISBN 1 900404 00 19. Aartun, Anne Louise The Political Econ-omy of the United Arab Emirates, Univeris-ity of Oslo, 200210. Abu Dhabi Vision, 2030 The Abu Dha-bi Urban Structure Framework Plan http://www.upc.gov.ae/11. Peterson, J.E. Britain and State For-mation in the Gulf: The Case of Abu Shabi and Shaikh Zayid bin Khalifah 12. Cugurullo, Federico How to Build a Sandcastle: An Analysis of the Genesis and Development of Masdar City Journal of Urban Technology, 2013 Vol. 20, No. 1, 23–3713. “Siemens HQ in Masdar City / Shep-pard Robson.” ArchDaily. N.p., n.d. Web.