Gentrification.
We need to think differently about gentrification if we want to combat it.
Spaces that are currently gentrifying have been spaces segregated by racist laws and customs and development. They have preserved these spaces as weak communities unable to mount continuous political resistance adequate to the task of liberation. We should not keep such spaces.
But we should not wash their members away, to be composed as an even more abused population, turned into the chaff of a global professional economy.
We need only do the following:
*keep the rates of change slow, so that communities have time to adjust and recompose gently
*provide mechanisms for communities to healthfully integrate new people moving in instead of being disrupted and displaced by them. Gentrification has become a battle between groups, when a respectful hybridity or mutually beneficial dialog is far preferable
This means that we do not need to "stop gentrification." We need to slow it down, and channel it into positive communal experience.
To do the latter, many simple methods are possible:
*encouraging new members of a community to network with established residents through neighborhood associations, community action groups, and civic and spiritual groups.
*making sure that economic growth benefits neighborhood people by promoting/requiring some portion of decent jobs to go to local people, and building small business capital and education for local people
*building an understanding in people that they are joining the lives of others, and that they must build respect and dialog with them. for instance, provision of incentives to frequent local small businesses and businesses that hire neighborhood people, instead of simply maintaining or recreating their habits and ignoring their actual communities.
To do the former, any array of options are viable, ranging from community organizing to more intensive housing in established areas.
3.3.07
Garden of Eden.
Perhaps not, but the Austin parks department maintains a community orchard in the Southeast Metro park. Twenty trees I hear, full of fruit, open for any to pick and eat from.
Maybe they will someday number 100. Maybe they will someday range across the city.
A world overflowing with life is the world we must build to battle against the death that rules unchecked so constantly.
I'll look for pictures, and links about this and also community orchard projects in other cities, to be listed below:
Philly Orchard Project
Perhaps not, but the Austin parks department maintains a community orchard in the Southeast Metro park. Twenty trees I hear, full of fruit, open for any to pick and eat from.
Maybe they will someday number 100. Maybe they will someday range across the city.
A world overflowing with life is the world we must build to battle against the death that rules unchecked so constantly.
I'll look for pictures, and links about this and also community orchard projects in other cities, to be listed below:
Philly Orchard Project
Parks,
We need parks and wild spaces to give us silence in the world, and reverence for the world's reveries in which we are invited to partake so long as we listen and sing with it, not "above" it, not screaming to ourselves.
In the wilds and in the country and in the pockets of wild and country within the city, man remembers the artifice in his arrogance, the pettiness of his grandest ideas and visions and ambitions. And in that remembrance, in the purity of that clear moment of understanding, we see the egality of our brothers and sisters living in this world. We understand that before the grandeur of the flowing world any act of Power is foolish, moving but weakly against the concrete infinities of spaces. The space for this understanding is open to all, at every moment, and offers each and all its naked flesh to caress with reverence. The majesty of the moving instant weaves any to another, and all may behold it. Wild spaces give us the strength to laugh at Power, and shame it into appropriate humility.
We need these free spaces to teach us the foolishness of borders and their provisional character, that any tree or stream carves and recarves a property line surer than any geometer, but that this property is not a question of rights but of attention and intensity. Parks show us the separation between will and understanding, and they allow us the peace and freedom to sense the integration of the two.
We need parks and wild spaces to give us silence in the world, and reverence for the world's reveries in which we are invited to partake so long as we listen and sing with it, not "above" it, not screaming to ourselves.
In the wilds and in the country and in the pockets of wild and country within the city, man remembers the artifice in his arrogance, the pettiness of his grandest ideas and visions and ambitions. And in that remembrance, in the purity of that clear moment of understanding, we see the egality of our brothers and sisters living in this world. We understand that before the grandeur of the flowing world any act of Power is foolish, moving but weakly against the concrete infinities of spaces. The space for this understanding is open to all, at every moment, and offers each and all its naked flesh to caress with reverence. The majesty of the moving instant weaves any to another, and all may behold it. Wild spaces give us the strength to laugh at Power, and shame it into appropriate humility.
We need these free spaces to teach us the foolishness of borders and their provisional character, that any tree or stream carves and recarves a property line surer than any geometer, but that this property is not a question of rights but of attention and intensity. Parks show us the separation between will and understanding, and they allow us the peace and freedom to sense the integration of the two.
Driving through north central austin.
Driving through a city the infinities of space that open before you become indistinct, a blur waving over action. There is an artistry of movement that is lost with a timid conservatism, but is absolutely obliterated with haste, speed.
Every yard past a small universe pregnant with meaning, an ecology opening up to those who wonder at the world and see in its actions mystery or beauty. To think as a child passing life through a small yard and smal house full of webs of force and transitions, flows of life and death. To think then as an army of children, a mob of them, each living out in this little pocket of focused intensity. When do we forget to think and feel as such?
When do we abandon understanding of this sort, intimacy with the world of this sort, in favor of something colder and simpler and falser, plainly falser? The child studying the behaviors of birds of the movement of wind through leaves, the little webs of life surrounding an old tree, even the boards rotting and breathing slowly in a house or the emotional bonds and tensions of a family, this child knows the world truer. We simply have lacked a world for it until we began to speak the name "ecology." We have lacked a way to express the limited, focused infinity opening in all directions of any space, and we still lack a metaphysics that allows this proposition of ecology to express itself fully.
Propositions are dependent upon their metaphysical milieu says Whitehead, that which allos them to exist and take on meaning, and we lack this understanding that might bring out the full breadth of this concept. Except in poetry and art and cultivating, but they have been forced to margins and held there. But enough of that.
These spaces of infinity, they are not simply individual affairs, but they are affairs requiring a stillness, a quiet and an attentiveness that we can no longer maintain if we act in the world as though it were a horror to be conquered and made livable.
We live in fear, the all-embracing fear of what may occur if for an instant we hold back out speech, hold back our guns and machines and cars and even our wills and desires and plans, and listen to what speaks unbidden. What moves through the world like a wind, what will we encounter when we allow the life-world to flow through us rather than force our Vision upon it? Will we hear it screaming in pain or laughing in easy and unconscionable forgiveness, pleasure at both our folly and guilt for that folly? Like waves of ether spilling from the sun will the sound dwarf us so absolutely that our minds shatter and recompose as the souls of angels?
Driving through a city the infinities of space that open before you become indistinct, a blur waving over action. There is an artistry of movement that is lost with a timid conservatism, but is absolutely obliterated with haste, speed.
Every yard past a small universe pregnant with meaning, an ecology opening up to those who wonder at the world and see in its actions mystery or beauty. To think as a child passing life through a small yard and smal house full of webs of force and transitions, flows of life and death. To think then as an army of children, a mob of them, each living out in this little pocket of focused intensity. When do we forget to think and feel as such?
When do we abandon understanding of this sort, intimacy with the world of this sort, in favor of something colder and simpler and falser, plainly falser? The child studying the behaviors of birds of the movement of wind through leaves, the little webs of life surrounding an old tree, even the boards rotting and breathing slowly in a house or the emotional bonds and tensions of a family, this child knows the world truer. We simply have lacked a world for it until we began to speak the name "ecology." We have lacked a way to express the limited, focused infinity opening in all directions of any space, and we still lack a metaphysics that allows this proposition of ecology to express itself fully.
Propositions are dependent upon their metaphysical milieu says Whitehead, that which allos them to exist and take on meaning, and we lack this understanding that might bring out the full breadth of this concept. Except in poetry and art and cultivating, but they have been forced to margins and held there. But enough of that.
These spaces of infinity, they are not simply individual affairs, but they are affairs requiring a stillness, a quiet and an attentiveness that we can no longer maintain if we act in the world as though it were a horror to be conquered and made livable.
We live in fear, the all-embracing fear of what may occur if for an instant we hold back out speech, hold back our guns and machines and cars and even our wills and desires and plans, and listen to what speaks unbidden. What moves through the world like a wind, what will we encounter when we allow the life-world to flow through us rather than force our Vision upon it? Will we hear it screaming in pain or laughing in easy and unconscionable forgiveness, pleasure at both our folly and guilt for that folly? Like waves of ether spilling from the sun will the sound dwarf us so absolutely that our minds shatter and recompose as the souls of angels?
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