Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
Selected Reviews
Mindy Thompson Fullilove, 2004. Root Shock: How Tearing up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It. New York: Ballantine Books. |
Reviewed by Eva-Maria Simms
I first heard of Mindy Thompson Fullilove during a research project on childhood spaces that I conducted with my students in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, an ailing inner-city neighborhood. During our tour of the neighborhood and in discussions with activists and residents, Fullilove’s name came up frequently, always spoken with great fondness and awe.
In the Hill House Community Center, I saw the map of the 12 blocks of the Hill marked with colored tape: Fullilove’s Neighborhood Burn Index, a neighborhood map she created with the residents to examine and diagnose the amount of damage to each lot and block.
Like a medical burn index (which shows the amount of skin-damage caused by fire and indicates the patient’s chances for survival), the Neighborhood Burn Index map showed firsthand the destruction the Hill had undergone during urban renewal projects since the 1950s: abandoned buildings, empty storefronts, struggling churches, and many trashed and needle-infested empty lots.
But the map also revealed the hidden strength of the neighborhood: surprising business entrepreneurship in some blocks, some lovely historical structures, and flourishing well-cared-for homes and gardens of residents who refused to give up a neighborhood they had loved for decades.
Fullilove’s work helped to inspire the Hill District community to come together and articulate what they needed and wanted from their neighborhood, and gave them a tool for thinking about the development of their neighborhood as a whole so that they could work with Pittsburgh city planners more coherently and confidently.
In turn, the Hill District neighbors helped to inspire Fullilove to write her book Root Shock, which is a critical analysis of the historical process and emotional impact of African-American displacement in the wake of the Urban Renewal movement. Besides Pittsburgh’s Hill District, Fullilove also examines the history of black displacement in Newark, New Jersey, and Roanoke, Virginia.
An Archipelago Nation
During two great waves of immigration (1910—1930 and
1940—1970), millions of black rural people left the
South and settled in major cities in the Northeast and Midwest. While early in
the 20th century 90 percent of African-Americans were rural, one
century later 90 percent were urban.
Forced to settle in the dilapidated immigrant neighborhoods of the inner city, African-American families, unlike other immigrants, could not “move up” and leave the neighborhood. Segregation created “islands of black life”—black “archipelagoes” as Fullilove calls it:
The creation of the archipelago nation had two consequences for African-Americans. The first is that the ghettos became the center of black life; the second is that the walls of the ghetto, like other symbols of segregation, became objects of hatred. In this ambivalent love/hate relationship, it was impossible to choose to dwell. Yet people did choose to make life as vibrant and happy as they possibly could (p. 27).
And vibrant it was. Fullilove pays the greatest compliment to Pittsburgh’s Hill District when she says that “among the truly magic places on earth is the Hill District in Pittsburgh. I believe that pound for pound the Hill District was the most generative black community in the United States” (p. 29).
Next to New York and Chicago, Pittsburgh’s Wylie Avenue was the center for Jazz; civic organizations flourished and organized life in the ghetto; children were cherished, educated, and supported by the community; and neighbors engaged in the daily “sidewalk ballet” between home, shops, work places, and the entertainment venues of bars, clubs, sandlot ball fields, and picnic places.
The street was the stage for public life, and adults and children were outside all the time, sitting on stoops, playing in the alleys, walking to see and be seen, talking with neighbors and friends. The closeness of the houses created a strong sense of community and shared public life, and the inhabitants of a particular block knew each other well and watched out for each other’s children.
Above: "At Freedom Corner," a drawing by Carlos F. Peterson depicting the gradual collapse of Pittsburgh's Hill District in the aftermath of urban renewal. Pittsburgh civil rights marches began at this corner, hence the drawing's title. Reproduced with the permission of Carols F. Peterson.
Stages of Devastation
According to Fullilove’s estimates, between 1950 and
1980, 1600 black neighborhoods like the Hill District were demolished by urban
renewal. The process of destruction followed a similar pattern:
|
1. |
The inner city neighborhood, usually close to the desirable downtown business district, was declared “blighted” because of its old and cramped housing stock. Fullilove quotes the chilling statement of George Evans, a city councilman who laid the groundwork for Pittsburgh’s urban renewal plan in 1943:
Approximately 90 per cent of the buildings in the area are sub-standard and have long outlived their usefulness, and so there would be no social loss if they were all destroyed. The area is crisscrossed with streets running every which way, which absorb at least one-third of the area. These streets should all be vacated and a new street pattern overlaid. This would effect a saving of probably 100 acres now used for unnecessary streets” (p. 61).
African-American ghettos, social scientists concluded, were disorganized, which is another word for “no social loss.”
|
2. |
The city appropriated large chunks of the neighborhood by claiming “eminent domain,” which forced home owners to sell their properties to the city for minimal compensation. There are estimates that urban renewal in Pittsburgh caused the displacement of 15—20,000 people. In Detroit, Fullilove says, 8,000 housing units were demolished; in Newark, 12,000 families were displaced; and in New Haven, 6,500 homes were destroyed.
|
3. |
The cities promised new housing stock, but they set out to build the typical high-rise housing projects, often with years of delay between demolition and rebuilding, which forced the residents to leave their neighborhood:
The American planners… cleared broad swaths of land for Corbusian parks; had little control over rebuilding, which was sometimes separated by decades from the demolition phase of a project; and placed… unreasonable burdens on the poor and the people of color…. Indeed, in looking at American urban renewal projects I am reminded more of wide area bombing… than of elegant city design (p. 70).
|
Fullilove on the "Undoing of Kindness" The kindness [in urban ghettos] had multiple sources. One source was the church, and particularly the churches imported from the South, which had a history of being the kindly bulwark against oppression…. But there were other sources of kindness. The gardeners who planted crops in small backyards, had produce to share. The men of many professions who managed the streets minded the wild children, to limit as much as possible their descent into harm. The musicians and dancers and athletes gave content to consciousness: ideas to think about and access to the tools of creation…. Kindness worked through the collective as both buffer and glue. It was a force for tolerance and respect: it was not a guard-all shield. Kindness did not stop child molesting, it did not stop wife beating, it did not prevent children from torturing each other, it did not prevent unemployment. It did ooze into the interstices to ease the pain of all these things…. Kindness declined after the rupture of community. Arleen Ollie of Roanoke noted that, when she graduated from college in 1995, no one was glad for her. In the old days her Roanoke neighborhood would have celebrated what she’d accomplished. What happened to the kindness? Why wasn’t it re-created? Certainly, after urban renewal, individuals remained kind, and organizations continued to nurture rituals of concern. The field of dispersion, however, appears to have altered substantially. In the compact space of the ghetto, a tight field of activity was created, through which acts and words might pass quickly. It was possible to know of someone’s pain or glory, and to respond as needed. Actions toward others were permitted and expected. They were extended with the consent of the community, and received in that same vein. This passage through the field of the community, with the consent of the community, meant that the sense of kindness was everywhere, at least within the community. The shattering of the field, which is a principal outcome of urban renewal, had an enormous effect on kindness because kindness was passed through the field. In the aftermath of urban renewal, individuals were preoccupied with making a new life, and perhaps they could not be as kind as they had been previously. At the same time, given the loss of the field, the kindness did not extend as far as it had before. The buffering effect of the kindness was lost, and the negative behaviors and attitudes that had always been present were given greater scope. Given the other difficulties that were to come, the decline in kindness, however small, triggered a downward trend in kindness over the ensuing decades (pp. 121-23). Reproduced with the permission of Mindy Thompson Fullilove.
|
A Staggering Social Cost
The social cost of urban renewal to the African-American
community was staggering. In Pittsburgh the whole Lower Hill, which was the
business and entertainment district for the residents, was bulldozed, an
action that displaced thousands of people into the already crowded Upper Hill
or into the few outlying suburbs where black people were allowed to live.
Urban renewal destroyed the economic and social structure of a vibrant, functioning neighborhood and left the inhabitants displaced and dispersed. Fullilove calls the psychological effect of this displacement root shock—the “traumatic stress reaction to the destruction of all or part of one’s emotional eco-system” (p. 11).
Places, as Fullilove argues eloquently, are not just bricks and mortar for providing shelter:
Buildings and neighborhoods and nations are insinuated into us by life. We are not, as we like to think, independent of them. We are more like Siamese twins, conjoined to the locations of our daily life, such that our emotions flow through places, just as blood flows through two interdependent people (p. 10).
The place we call home is inscribed into our bodies, the street we call ours is the setting for our communal longing and belonging, our neighborhood is the first world we know as a child. The bulldozing of the urban renewal projects did not merely destroy bricks and mortar but devastated the emotional landscape of African-American communities.
Root shock destroys the working individual’s model of the world and undermines trust; destabilizes relationships; creates anxiety; destroys social, emotional and financial resources; and makes people chronically cranky and sick by increasing stress-related illnesses like depression and heart attack. It disperses the community and destroys the web of familiarity and connection which are part of a healthy society.
Respecting
Human Rights
Fullilove tallies the cost of Urban Renewal not only in
the traumatic displacement of the African-American community, but also the
effects it has had on American cities in general: rioting ghettos in the
1960s; burned-out inner cities, drug and crime problems in the 1970s; poverty
and the destruction of many African American families in the 1980s; and, in
the 1990s, failing inner city schools that have to cope with the social and
emotional problems of children who grow up surrounded by poverty, drugs, and
violence without the protection of a caring community.
Deeply influenced by the work of the French urbanist Michel Cantal-Dupart, Fullilove has helped organize African-American neighborhoods into think-tanks of urban communal design. She brought together community residents and activists, architects, academics, and urban planners to empower the Hill residents to work for change in their neighborhood. Together they have formulated a call for respecting human rights in the city:
· Respect the common life the way you would an individual life. The net of human relationships is precious and helps each person survive and thrive.
· Treasure the buildings history has given us. New development has to connect and complement historical living structures.
· Break the cycle of disinvestment. Identify the weakest parts of a neighborhood and work to heal them so that more reinvestment will follow.
· Insure freedom of movement. All places must be connected to each other to ensure free movement; in short, break down the walls of the ghetto.
Making Grief Beautiful
Fullilove’s book powerfully shows the intersection between urban design and community life. As a psychiatrist, she is sensitive to the emotional dimension of individual and community life that urban places make possible. As an African-American woman, she can speak with authority about the plight of our inner cities. As an activist, she has earned the respect and love of at least one great city neighborhood, Pittsburgh’s Hill District.
Last spring I walked with some neighbors through the Hill District. Every empty lot seemed filled with memories of the structures and activities that had once been there: “Remember the store that was here… Remember the movies we watched here every Sunday afternoon… I wonder what happened to so and so who lived here…”
The loss of the old buildings meant the loss of one’s neighbors, the loss of the communal sidewalk ballet, and the loss of a co-living urban community. Fullilove has worked with neighborhoods like the Hill District to find ways of telling the story of displacement and grieving for the visible loss as a first step in healing inner city neighborhoods. “You can make something beautiful of your grief,” a former Hill district resident said to her.
Eva-Maria Simms is associate professor of psychology at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. simms@duq.edu