In the heart of the Deep South, Jackson Free Press has resurrected the alt-weekly tradition of maverick investigations and cultural provocation.
by Casey Sanchez

(From Issue 18: Living under peril, Spring 2008)

Klansman James Ford Seale had long been presumed dead by The Clarion-Ledger, Los Angeles Times, Associated Press and others. The FBI had a 1,000-page case file on Seale as the prime suspect in a civil-rights-era murder-drowning of two black men in Franklin County, Mississippi, in 1964. But four decades later in the summer of 2005, a team of Jackson Free Press (JFP) reporters, a Canadian filmmaker, and the brother of victim Charles Moore—Thomas Moore—unearthed a bombshell: Seale was “still alive, and lived in Roxie, near the intersection of Highways of 84/98 and 33 in a Winnebago-type trailer on land believed to belong to his brother”; the report appeared in JFP’s July 26, 2005 edition. In January 2007, the FBI would indict Seale on federal charges of kidnapping and conspiracy stemming from the murders.

“We as Mississippians must tell our own stories,” wrote Jackson Free Press editor Donna Ladd, who couldn’t be more proud that her investigative team, a crew of black and white journalists all under 25, all hail from her native state. The JFP, as its known, is a free newspaper that has resurrected the alt-weekly tradition of maverick investigations and cultural provocation in the heart of the Deep South. It’s an old-school “alternative.” There is little snark, no sex advice columns, no escort ads and not even a single tobacco ad. Started in 2002, it has cultivated an audience uncommon in the South and practically nonexistent among alt-weeklies — young, white conservatives and black professionals, many of whom are lifelong Jacksonians. When she started the paper with Todd Stauffer, Stephen Barnette and Jimmy Mumford in 2002, Ladd was often told Jackson wasn’t ready. “They told me, ‘You’ll never do a newspaper that black people and white people will read in any significant way.’”

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(From Issue 18: Living under peril, Spring 2008)

Dr. Julian Chambliss is professor of history at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla. His work has recently appeared in Encyclopedia of the Great Migration, Studies in American Culture and the Florida Historical Quarterly. He is the president of the Florida Conference of Historians and co-chair of the Social Science History Association’s Urban Network.

Roughly a quarter of the United States’ 10,000 “Irish Travellers” are in Murphy Village, S.C. Why have so many set up camp there?

The “Irish Travellers” in the United States are related to Irish horse traders that roamed Ireland for centuries. Often associated with gypsies, they are not technically defined as such. While they do self-identify as a distinct cultural subgroup, their status is contested (recognized by the United Kingdom, but rejected by Ireland). The Irish Travellers who first came to the United States left Ireland in 1850. Attracted to gentler climates because of their lifestyle, the Irish Travellers were well known in the South as wandering peddlers. The Murphy Village settlement was created in 1966 by Father Joseph Murphy, a Catholic priest who believed the Travellers’ traditional lifestyle could not continue in the modern world. The settlement serves as a permanent base for women and children, while male Travellers continue to roam for work. A closed society, the group maintains a clannish structure based on intermarriage and learning family trades (most Traveller children do not attend high school). South Carolina’s Murphy Village cluster is the largest enclave in the U.S. Some 350 families have been linked to the settlement. The group has drawn attention from law enforcement in Georgia, North Carolina, Alabama and South Carolina for years because of organized fraud allegations against group members. 

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At Sea in Thames Town
by Mariana Mogilevich

(From Issue 18: Living under peril, Spring 2008)

When Thames Town, a new community for 10,000 residents outside of Shanghai, was inaugurated in 2006, foreign journalists took special notice. Thames Town, a place “in pursuit of a wonderful time in classic Europe,” was designed by a British architecture firm to replicate English town living in the suburbs of Shanghai. Thus the arrival of a Tudor town center, a gothic church on a village green, and even red phone booths amidst Songjiang’s high rises and as-yet undeveloped lots. Matters only got more interesting when the owner of a pub and fish and chips establishment in the English town of Lyme Regis came across photographs of the recently inaugurated Thames Town on the Internet and recognized her own establishments, their façades copied down to the last detail. A pirated city! In the land of bootleg DVDs and fake Rolexes, what more fitting form of urban growth than a counterfeit town? The proprietor sought legal recourse to no avail. The media, from the Guardian to NPR, latched on to the story as another parable of China’s idiosyncratic (and inauthentic) Westernization.

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(From Issue 18: Living under peril, Spring 2008)

Walking through Times Square today, amidst upscale chain stores and expensive office towers, it is hard to imagine that this area was once a very different place. Just 20 ago, before the large-scale redevelopment project that began under Mayor Koch had a chance to take hold, tourists and commuters alike avoided 42nd Street like the plague: The street was permeated with drug dealers, sex shops and venues for pornography. If Times Square was once about sex, it is now about money.

Recent critiques of this stark transformation, such as the literary theorist Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (2001) or the anthropologist Daniel Makagon’s Where the Ball Drops: Days and Nights in Times Square (2007), portray private development as a contaminating force responsible for ruining the uniqueness, authenticity and character of Old Times Square. By contrast, the anthropologist Benjamin Chesluk argues that redevelopers were not exclusively driven by a desire for economic profit. They also saw themselves as “ethical subjects” who used urban redevelopment as an opportunity to transform the lives of the many “undesirables” who occupied the spaces of Times Square and were responsible for much of the crime that deterred corporate investors. If the transformation of 42nd Street was the outcome of open and free economic competition, it was also the result of a large-scale effort toward social control and engineering, through both architecture and social programs. 

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(From Issue 18: Living under peril, Spring 2008)

Not surprisingly, no time at all was wasted in beginning the canonization process after Jane Jacobs’ death in April 2006. New York, the city with which she is most closely associated despite having left for good in 1968, has been a center of worship of the patron saint of urbanism — a cult taken up with pronounced urgency and righteousness in light of last year’s attempts to resuscitate the reputation of Robert Moses, Jacobs’ great nemesis in theory if not technically in practice. Leading these efforts was the Municipal Arts Society, with sponsorship of the Rockefeller Foundation, which originally underwrote Jacob’s Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961. The society, better known for championing quality of life campaigns against ugly newsracks, took up the Jacobs mantle with named internships, Jane Jacobs medalists, an exhibition, panel discussions, a publication and a Web site, all questioning the status of a rapidly changing city through Jacobs’ large round glasses.

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(From Issue 18: Living under peril, Spring 2008)

In The Option of Urbanism, Christopher B. Leinberger aims to present a happy alternative to the usual apocalyptic accounts of urban sprawl and its consequences. This developer and professor of real estate at the University of Michigan suggests that walkable urbanism, which he defines as a type of settlement in which “you could satisfy most everyday needs ... within walking distance from your home,” is absolutely attainable; we just have to choose it, like we chose “driveable sub-urbanism” in the ’50s and ’60s. He urges planners, architects, developers, and public officials to invest in this growing trend.

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Co-existence and the Merging of Civilization and Nature
by Domingo Milella

(From Issue 18: Living under peril, Spring 2008)

Photographer Domingo Milella travels the world, capturing images of the way people interact with the landscape around them.

“I go to these places and I want to know where the borders lie. I am interested in where the colonization — the Western influence of a place — meets the ancient culture that has always been there. In Mexico City, this was the spot where I saw this, where I felt this most clearly — the old and the new together.”

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On opposite sides of the country, Van Jones and Majora Carter try to parlay two lifetimes’ worth of social activism into a cleaner, greener economy to solve the problems of urban poverty.
by Robbie Whelan

(From Issue 18: Living under peril, Spring 2008)

On a sunny November afternoon, Van Jones strides into a vegetable patch on West Oakland’s 55th Street. A patch of green in an urban sea, the garden is run by the People’s Grocery, a non-profit funded by Jones’ outfit, Green for All.

Well over six feet tall with a crisp goatee and scholarly looking glasses, Jones cuts a striking figure as he wanders around the garden in a black business suit and patent leather shoes. All around him volunteers with rolled-up sleeves dig weeds from the patches of kale, chard, crookneck squash and lettuce. He gathers the gardeners and poses a question.

“What if someone were a cynic, and they said, ‘Oh, this is cute, but what is actually the potential?’”

Vicki Ramos, a People’s Grocery field organizer, speaks up. She says the folks who live on or near 55th Street in working-class West Oakland don’t have access to any healthy food. There’s not one grocery store from Rte. 580 all the way to the depressed region of West Oakland known as The Bottoms — a neighborhood that is home to about 40,000 people. But there are at least 40 to 50 liquor stores in that space, and 65 percent of the population there is eligible for food stamps. The kids eat fast-food burgers and processed foods that come in foil bags from corner liquor stores. Or they eat nothing at all.

Programs like the People’s Grocery, with the help of Van Jones and his Green for All initiative, intend to change all that.

As of now, only five to ten percent of the people who eat food produced in this small green patch participate in its production. The same is true of two other urban gardens in the neighborhood. Once Green for All’s program expands this spring, it will provide funding to allow the People’s Grocery to serve about 30 percent of local families.

Likewise, environmental job-training programs across the country will get a boost from federal money and Green for All’s resources to help low-income people rise into the middle class. And it will all be from the ground up.

“There’s a convergence,” Jones says after thanking the volunteers. “You have people trying to solve actual, practical problems, like how to get a healthy dinner, and they do it with incredible tenacity and innovation. Over the bridge in Marin County, moral outrage leads them to do the same thing. If you put those two wires together, you get a spark that produces real change.”

Providing a spark is what Jones and Green for All are all about. The organization works with federal agencies to distribute $125 million to green jobs, such as the ones these gardeners are doing. It’s doing job-training programs for 35,000 people. It’s working to amass $25 million yearly to create green “pathways out of poverty” for former prisoners. It’s trying to educate the uneducated. It also challenges people to rethink the green movement as something universally beneficial, rather than something “worth trying if you have the resources.”

And they’re not alone.

Similar work is being done 3,000 miles away in New York. There, Majora Carter, Green for All’s co-founder, has gained media momentum for her Sustainable South Bronx organization. Stories in Time and The New York Times, TV appearances, big-ticket speaking engagements and a laundry list of awards have made the careers of Jones and Carter into long advertisements for urban environmentalism. But are the efforts of their organizations viable, long-term? Is their mission realistic? Are citizens ready to believe the environmental movement can provide work for the jobless, boost a sagging economy and bring hope to those who need it?

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An interview with urban theorists James Howard Kunstler and Nikos Salingaros
by Lakis Polycarpou

(From Issue 18: Living under peril, Spring 2008)

James Howard Kunstler has written numerous books about urbanism and “the fiasco of suburbia,” including The Geography of Nowhere, Home from Nowhere and The City in Mind. In his most recent book, The Long Emergency, Kunstler explores the shocking implications of the imminent decline of oil and natural gas for the American way of life. His forthcoming novel, World Made by Hand, is set in a small upstate New York town in a not-too-distant “post-petroleum” future — a place where highways and suburbs have been abandoned and life has become “extremely local.”

Nikos Salingaros is a professor of mathematics at the University of Texas at San Antonio and a renowned urban theorist. The author of Principles of Urban Structure and A Theory of Architecture, Salingaros links mathematical, fractal and network theory to urban planning and architecture. Over the years he has been a close collaborator with numerous noted architects and urban planners, including Christopher Alexander, Andrés Duany, Léon Krier and others.

Next American City took some time to speak with Mr. Kunstler and Mr. Salingaros about peak oil, crime, Vegas, transportation and both the failures and successes of urbanism.

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After Hurricane Katrina hit, Dr. Vera Triplett played a major role in helping to rebuild her community, the Gentilly neighborhood, and the rest of New Orleans.
by Helen I. Hwang

(From Issue 18: Living under peril, Spring 2008)

On a Friday in August 2005, Dr. Vera Triplett flew with her family from her home in New Orleans to Washington, D.C., for what she expected would be a long weekend filled with sightseeing, relaxation and research into legislation on child abuse — the subject of her advocacy work. On Saturday morning, she turned on the television and watched her hometown battered and drowned by Hurricane Katrina. She knew she wasn’t going home anytime soon.

Hurricane Katrina hit the Louisiana coast on Aug. 29, 2005. Three weeks later, Hurricane Rita hit, compounding the devastation. Nearly, 1,500 people died as a result of the natural disaster. According to the Louisiana Recovery Authority, over 1.3 million Louisianans were displaced, and 200,000 homes and 40 schools were destroyed. Property losses are estimated at more than $100 billion. The 22 million tons of debris resulting from Hurricane Katrina was 25 times more rubble than the destruction of the World Trade Center.

Dr. Triplett is the assistant professor of counseling at Our Lady of Holy Cross College (OLHCC). She also runs the Thomas E. Chambers Counseling Center at the college. She works primarily with issues relating to children and adolescents, often dealing with kids who’ve been abused in the criminal justice system. After Hurricane Katrina hit, Dr. Triplett played a major role in helping to rebuild her community, the Gentilly neighborhood and the rest of New Orleans.

Next American City asked Dr. Triplett about her life before and after Hurricane Katrina.

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A former United States Civil Affairs officer shares his thoughts on the U.S.’s role in Iraq’s biggest city.
by Matt Stroud

(From Issue 18: Living under peril, Spring 2008)

Stacy A. Bare served with the United States Army as a Civil Affairs staff officer and team leader in Western Baghdad in 2006. His work outside the Green Zone gave him a first-hand look at the U.S.’ reconstruction methods and brought him into contact with many Iraqi civilians. The most rewarding part of his experience, he says, was working in direct support of combat units from the 1st Infantry Division and 82nd Airborne Division at Forward Operating Base (FOB) in Kadamiyah, Baghdad. A 2000 graduate in philosophy from the University of Mississippi, Bare received his commission as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Army Intelligence Corps and has served in Sarajevo and Bosnia-Herzegovina. He also served in Angola, Abkhazia and Uganda with an organization called HALO Trust. He says he is alive today because of the sacrifices of the amazing men and women he has been fortunate enough to work with. Bare is 29 and currently studying city planning at the University of Pennsylvania. Next American City caught up with him via e-mail to discuss his role in the reconstruction of Baghdad and what he sees as the failures and successes of the United States’ occupation there.

Next American City: Is there an overarching plan for Baghdad?

Stacy A. Bare: Someone in the Department of Defense would tell you yes. I would tell you no. I saw several different Baghdad plans, but what you need to understand is how Iraq is divided up militarily. Different divisions are given different geographic regions of Iraq. Baghdad has its own Division called the Multi-National Division Baghdad (MND-B).

Every 12 to 15 months a new U.S. Army Division would become MND-B. Each new MND-B created its own plan for Baghdad. At the Division level, the staff level is all referred to as G, as opposed to S, so the Civil Affairs bubba became the G9. Each G9 created a new plan that outlined guidance in different levels of vagueness and specificity. Different operations, such as Operation Baghdad Together Forward (OTF) and Baghdad Together Forward 2 (OTF2) each have different civil affairs guidance. These have to be in some way tied into the next higher level’s command plan for Baghdad, but this changes often as well. It is a very frustrating situation to work in.

As an example, during one phase of OTF, we emplaced all sorts of barriers throughout Baghdad neighborhoods; during OTF2 we took all those barriers down. A lot of OTF2 was done to remove a lot of the stuff that OTF did because it proved so counter-effective.

Furthermore, you have four different organizations working on reconstruction in Baghdad — the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), the United States State Department (State), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the various Department of Defense actors, which we were.

There is very little coordination among these organizations. The Iraqi government was also a player, but our interaction with them was limited by a number of different factors. Some of the higher American officers and State Department people did not want us talking to different levels of Iraqi ministries and would get quite upset about it if they found out a young captain was working directly with a deputy health minister, for example. Where I worked, there was a situation where hospitals were not getting supplies. The official line was that it was because of a hard-line Shiite health minister who would only support clinics loyal to him.

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A discussion with Tracy J. Brown and Dr. Steve Parson about black churches, investment, inner-city communities and the ‘Modern Day Pharaoh System.’
by Matt Stroud

(From Issue 18: Living under peril, Spring 2008)

Tracy J. Brown is an author, speaker and businessman focusing on urban development through what he calls “biblical stewardship principles.” His most recent book, A Moses for Urban America, tells the story of his poverty-stricken upbringing and how he “rose from adversity to prosperity.” In it, Brown writes that, “Our underserved communities are plagued with poverty by the design of a social economic system that I call [the] ‘Modern Day Pharaoh System.’ In the Old Testament, the Pharaoh kept the Israelites in bondage. Today, the Modern Day Pharaoh System keeps those who lack understanding of the economic system in bondage. I believe the black church must free our people from [today’s] Pharaoh.”

Through his nonprofit organization, Urban Awareness USA (UA), he hopes to encourage the revitalization of inner-city communities by educating ministries about real estate and business investments. He holds seminars and workshops on topics ranging from “A 21st Century Leadership Model for the Black Church” to “How the Black Church can Take Back Urban America.” The following is a phone conversation between Brown; Dr. Steve Parson, Brown’s partner at UA; and Next American City.

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An ambitious plan to develop a Manhattan-sized brownfield highlights old power dynamics, a Southern struggle pitting black interests against white interests, and deep-seeded racism in a birthplace of American slavery.
by Hayley Richardson

(From Issue 18: Living under peril, Spring 2008)

When people talk about the Neck region of Charleston, S.C., they tend to mention its scale. It’s an area the size of Manhattan that holds enormous potential for the city’s growth. But it’s hardly a clean slate. Tucked away beyond the sea of port containers and past the clumps of scrubby oak trees, you’ll find two tiny neighborhoods: Rosemont and Silver Hill. Home to roughly 150 residents (a majority of which are African-American), they’re the Achilles heel of contemporary urban planning, reminding us that all have not benefited from the process called development.

The area’s future is currently in the hands of Robert Clement III, a 5’4” real-estate developer with ambitious plans. He speaks in sound bites, preparing for an anticipated catapult into national prominence. In 2001, his firm purchased an undeveloped tract of land that had long languished as a contaminated industrial site. Where others saw abandoned land too expensive to restore, he saw enormous possibility — a place where greenways could exist alongside affordable housing, mixed-use buildings and high-density development. Construction on the project has only recently begun, but in 10 to 15 years, Clement intends for the area to become an economically diverse, New Urbanist paradise — with crowded, safe streets, green buildings and renovated brownfields.

As with any major development project, there’s distrust. But even more so in Charleston — a place both burdened and buffeted by the grip of Southern history. Here, the past means slavery, and tradition means persistent and insidious racial hierarchies. Nearly half of the African captives first entered their new world through the Port of Charleston, and much of the city’s fabled architecture was built using slave labor. The past 300 years have been a constant narrative of land wrested away from the people who worked it. And the grievances are not relegated to textbooks; recent history is laden with developments that have ignored African-American rights. Urban renewal projects such as Gaillard Auditorium’s 1968 construction were undertaken with no consultation of African-Americans. In 1972, Interstate 26 was built using eminent domain, slicing through the neighborhood of Rosemont without any community input, resulting in wounds that have yet to be attended. The question becomes, Will this new development take residents’ homes? Can they expect the familiar melodrama that has historically pitted black and white interests against each other? Or will it be different this time around?

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In São Paolo, outdoor advertising has been outlawed as “visual pollution,” leaving the city’s landscape dotted with blank billboards and decayed frames. A year into the law, how has the city changed?
by David Evan Harrs

(From Issue 18: Living under peril, Spring 2008)

A little more than a year ago, São Paolo, Brazil, a sprawling metropolis of more than 11 million inhabitants, became the first major city outside of the communist world to put into law a radical, near-complete ban on outdoor advertising. Known for being the country’s cosmopolitan commercial capital, São Paolo put in place “Lei Cidade Limpa” or “Clean City Law,” and it was an unexpected political success, owing largely to the singular determination of the city’s conservative mayor, Gilberto Kassab. By casting public advertisement as “visual pollution,” Kassab struck a chord with much of the city, conjuring up images of a better, cleaner São Paolo, free from the daily visual assaults of the advertising industry.

Billboards, outdoor video screens and ads on buses and taxis were quickly removed across the city after the law took effect. Even pamphleteering in public spaces was made illegal, and strict new regulations drastically diminished the allowable size of storefront signage. Without its 15,000 billboards, the city felt like a battlefield, strewn with blank marquees, partially torn-down frames and hastily painted-over storefront fascias. São Paolo’s ads were often the size of the entire skyscrapers to which they were affixed. 

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Years after legislation criminalized one of the most famous informal skateparks in the country, a thoroughly planned predecessor, Paine’s Park, finally nears completion. Is this Shangri-La for skateboarders? Or an expensive cover-up for NIMBY-pandering city policies.
by Liz Marklewicz

(From Issue 18: Living under peril, Spring 2008)

Josh Nims stands on the 12th floor of his Philadelphia office building overlooking the future site of Paine’s Park, a skate plaza project he has dedicated himself to for seven years. Nims, 32, has a law degree — and lesions on both elbows from falls he’s taken during more than 20 years of skating. The grassy triangle of land he looks down on has the eerie silence of any other undeveloped riverfront patch on a rainy day. But Nims hears skateboards clattering to the concrete after aborted kick flips and axles grinding on metal handrails. “The greatest public skate spots that have ever been were spaces that were designed for anything but skateboarding,” he says. 

Like most skaters, Nims knew Philadelphia as a serious skate haven before he set foot in the city. Even non-skaters see evidence of the city’s skateboarding history. “Philadelphia has a unique position of being internationally identifiable with skateboarding,” says Tony Bracali, the architect behind Paine’s Park. “If you go to a skateboarding Web site in Japan you’ll see a picture of LOVE Park on the home page.”

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Is failing to plan with minority architects, in fact, planning to fail?
by Brentin Mock

(From Issue 18: Living under peril, Spring 2008)

Today, cities are experiencing radical redevelopment, especially in neighborhoods dominated by African and Latino-Americans. Yet, there are few black and Hispanic professionals with architectural
and planning experience involved in the destinies of the communities that produced them. Less than two percent of licensed architects are African-American and three percent are self-identified Latino-American.

Barja Wilson spent much of her youth in Mobile, Ala., watching her father work hunched over his desk. James E. Wilson was a black architect, a rarity in the ’80s, consumed in designing and drafting. He worked for the Army Corps of Engineers by day and ran a private practice at night. During his time with the Army, he was passed over for promotions by the same white employees he trained. Even in his own community, he was overlooked by black churches that trusted white architects to do work he was more than qualified to do.

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Nature will always challenge developers, but landmark studies of wildfire in California and flooding along the Mississippi are showing new ways of living in America’s most dangerous regions.
by Scott Gabriel Knowles

(From Issue 18: Living under peril, Spring 2008)

This past October, when the Santa Ana winds returned to Southern California as they do every autumn, they caused 18 devastating wildfires to rage through the region. The largest of these — the “Witch Fire” — charred 200,000 acres, consumed 1,125 homes, injured 40 firefighters and killed two people. And at the center sat Rancho Santa Fe.

With a median home price of more than $2 million, this unincorporated bedroom community — described by a local real estate broker as “the new pleasure ground of America’s landed gentry” — ranks among the most affluent in the United States. Its 2,400 homes on the frontier of San Diego County are situated on two-acre-plus lots where sidewalks and streetlights are banned.

But Rancho Santa Fe, despite its proximity to the fires, did not burn down. In fact, only one house in the community was lost. And the explanation is simple: A strict set of land use and construction codes called “shelter-in-place.”

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The U.S.-Mexico border zone and beyond
by Mariana Mogilevich

(From Issue 17: Art, Winter 2007)

Fernando Romero
Hyperborder: The Contemporary U.S.-Mexico Border and Its Future
LAR/Princeton Architectural Press, 2007

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(From Issue 17: Art, Winter 2007)

Stephen Wiltshire draws cities from memory. Friends, family, magazine editors, art gallery curators and television executives have taken him on helicopter rides — sometimes as short as a half-hour long, without a camera — and then watched in awe as he returned to his studio to draw a city, in detail, on a blank canvas. A 33-year-old British autistic artist, Wiltshire’s talents have been described as “faultless,” “extraordinary” and “mysterious.” Here, he discusses cities, music, imagination, abstract art and more.

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Marketing, industry, faith and folly in the United States' most (in)famous planned communities
by Greg Presto

(From Issue 17: Art, Winter 2007)

The term “utopia” gets tossed around at a rate that’s unfair to lovers of colorful language; the Container Store, called a “utopia for the organized,” probably wasn’t what Thomas More meant when he wrote about streamlining society. But the word still evokes fictional islands where puppy poop smells like roses and the threat level’s never orange. And while we might reserve the term for communities established by like-minded isolationist zealots, it remains an appropriate — and instructive — label for towns aiming to attract a certain citizenry, whether by concessions, amenities, architecture or shared faith. These five spots provide developers and urbanists with a study of design dos and don’ts.

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