When I first moved to Boston, I became convinced the way we design houses needs to change. A persuasive editorial in the New York Times this week agrees with me. Building cookie-cutter houses for nuclear families has left us with houses that can’t adapt easily to hard economic times, changing lifestyles, and immigration.
In Chicago, one of my friends rented an apartment which was a former coach house and was built above a stable. The apartment was near the main house on the property, but detached from it. When recent graduates need to live with their parents, semi-detached apartments like that would give them autonomy.
Making housing modular – adding entrances and exits, providing small units that are partly detached from common spaces, and not assuming that everyone in the house will be part of a close-knit family – would add flexibility to home construction. If the traditional dream of owning a house is no longer families’ top priority, apartment buildings should be able to accommodate extended families and changes in their life situations.
The New York Times article talks about immigrant families sharing suburban houses. There are at least two more angles to that story:
Families of choice are rarely – if ever – a target market for housing construction. But many people who are distant from their families of origin may prefer to share space with their friends. Buildings that combine shared space with private sections or apartments could accommodate this social reality.
Since the recession, recent college and high school graduates often live with their parents. Since they are eager for autonomy and may even be in long-term relationships, this lack of privacy could cause family tension. Designing sections of houses with kitchenettes and independent entrances would make their lives easier.
The New York Times article recommends turning old industrial buildings into flexibly designed lofts that can accommodate larger families and changing work situations. A loft-style building would be one potential answer to the dilemma of families squeezing into small spaces in ways that may lead to conflict and stress.
Cohousing is another practical and relatively affordable model. In cohousing developments, shared spaces are surrounded by compact apartments or houses. Cohousing is usually designed for unrelated groups who share social values about common space. The same idea could be adapted for multi-generational families.
CommonWealth Magazine has reported the controversial funding and service cuts to Boston’s MBTA transit system hinge on an unlikely competition for dollars: snow removal vs. public transit. City leaders are concerned they will lack the resources to respond to a heavy snowfall and are considering cuts to public transit funding.
As far as I know, no one has seen the irony of this problem. Public transit reduces climate change, which is responsible for at least some of our increased snow and rain here in New England. Expanding and improving public transit should be part of our strategy for fighting climate change. In the face of increased weather risks, we should hurry to fund the MBTA and expand its routes and services.
Boston’s strategy for fighting climate change takes transit into account. The transit section of the city climate website doesn’t mention the MBTA, but the report A Climate of Progress mentions it repeatedly. Organizations like the T Riders Union have been struggling for years to improve the quality of services the MBTA provides. This fight would not be necessary if we saw the collective value of building a transit system that will outlast fluctuations in gasoline availability and price.
Nina Mukherji is the Director of Programs at the Real Food Challenge in Boston and is a graduate of the Conservation Biology and Sustainable Development program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Mukherji introduced herself and described the origin of her commitment to environmental and social justice.
…I grew up in New York City in the 1980s in a neighborhood that was between a lot of poverty and a lot of wealth. My father’s an immigrant from India. My grandparents had radical political views. I grew up with a strong sense of social consciousness and social justice.
I went to school in the Midwest and started to learn more about the resources that had been supporting me in the city. I started to see that corn was feeding cattle… I started to develop more of an awareness of ecology. It was my first time spending time in the country.
I got excited spending time [on] environmental issues, but my heart was in social issues. The world of environmentalism has been so far from the world of social justice organizing. It’s really hard to find the places where I think the things I really care about are happening and where my interest in social justice is there – where people care about dire poverty in this country and where food is going to come from in 50 years.
Q: What did you study in graduate school?
A: I studied Conservation Biology and Sustainable Development at the Nelson Institute. My advisor was in urban planning. I wrote my master’s thesis on urban agriculture policy. I looked at how zoning and comprehensive planning in cities affect the authority of how people want to grow food can do it. I focused on Boston, Chicago and Portland.
I was doing that thesis while working with the cities of Madison and Milwaukee. There was a zoning group looking at how the zoning in Madison could support more food in the city. I also went to some conversations about comprehensive planning in Milwaukee. It was cool because there was a blending of what I was doing professionally in a practical domain and what I was doing academically.
I found that cities are starting to reexamine their policies. There are many policies, both intentional and unintentional, that inhibit growing in cities. Because of the recession and there being more vacant land… people are seeing urban agriculture as a way to make cities better. I think that’s a trend across the board.
Urban vacant land in front of a construction zone. Source: stock.xchng.
I looked at how cities approach that process… whether it’s more of a grassroots or a top-down way. I’m volunteering for a working group that’s doing this in Boston… Boston has a very strong city government… As opposed to Madison, where the city delegated the task of making the zoning plan to a group of citizens who were interested in urban agriculture. In Boston, it’s driven by the city.
Q. How have your graduate school experiences informed your work since then?
A: I would say a lot of what I do in my professional work I learned through the organizing I did during school… That was an extracurricular activity. I’m not an organizer, but I do a lot of organizing. I train and supervise organizers on campuses.
I also work at the Real Food Challenge, where we work with students on getting more sustainable food on their campuses…I’m working on an assessment tool; I’m familiar with debates about certification and organic certification in general… and cage-free eggs. I use this knowledge as part of coming up with the assessment tool.
In a deeper way, the understanding I developed [about] the relationship between government and people and nonprofits and social movements, and what can be accomplished through the economy and what can be accomplished through policy, those questions about where responsibility should lie… Conversations in grad school have made me feel that the environmental movement has been co-opted by companies… [saying that] if we choose to buy fair trade, these abuses would not be happening. Through having discussions about that in grad school, I came to believe that to stop these really atrocious behaviors, individual choices are not going to be enough. Institutional change can shift the market.
My organization, the Real Food Challenge, we organize college students around the country to shift the purchasing at their schools from conventional industrial agriculture…. We’re having a mass procott. We’re creating institutional markets for responsible farmers, particularly mid-sized farmers. What’s exciting to me is that we’re engaging students who care about food to the point where they’re leaders in their communities….What we’re also doing is training thousands of people who are going to train thousands of more people. That’s what makes me hopeful.
There’s something about organizing that allows for a real level of integrity, because the people who are affected are the ones that are affecting the solution.
So far, we’ve shifted 50 million dollars in institutional food purchasing in the course of about three or four years. It’s through students advocating and organizing each other, working with the dining halls and learning about the food that they’re eating.
We have this Real Food Campus Commitment. We’re trying to get presidents to sign on. Our goal is to really ramp that up. We’re hoping it’s going to become the thing to do…. We want to see whole state systems making a decision to sign onto commitments like that.
The University of Vermont has just signed the Real Food Campus Commitment. The Intervale is an innovative urban agriculture incubator in Vermont. They’ve created a community-supported agriculture commitment in which they aggregate food from small- and medium-sized farms… They know for sure that they have a market. They know they will have someone to sell it to – like a university. That is helping them get the program off the ground. It’s boosting local agriculture in the area and improving the relationship between the university and the community.
The Real Food Challenge encourages colleges to buy locally grown vegetables. Source: stock.xchng.
Q: If you were going to give advice to current environmental studies students, what would you say?
A: I would say… think about the relationship between environmental issues and people. And both the impacts environmental problems have on people now, or will have, and the impact of those possible solutions on people. I think that’s the direction environmental studies is going, is more and more interdisciplinary. If we are actually going to solve environmental problems, we can’t do it justly without thinking about who is going to be affected and who’s in those conversations.
There was a story on the radio where a town that’s close to the ocean is subsiding and the ocean level is rising. Some people are having their houses flooded. The wealthier people are living higher up. The city is trying to think of a way to make wealthy people move within the city as opposed to recognizing the situation is extremely problematic for those who can’t afford to deal with it. I think the way many environmental advocates deal with problems tends to neglect the effect of the solutions on the community.
I am a big believer in public transportation. One of the biggest bus depots in the city of Boston is in Dorchester. The depot is uncovered. The fumes are giving people asthma. In Cambridge, they covered the bus depot so people won’t get sick from the fumes. The Harvard bus depot is well-ventilated. The city hasn’t prioritized the public health of [Dorchester].
The name “Data Day” may not conjure up visions of dramatic reversals of public policy. But the community advocates and data experts at the conference knew otherwise. Here are two stories they told about how data can change how we judge people and situations – both socially and legally.
Derrick Jackson, a columnist at the Boston Globe, said that data can bring “sanity” to public policy about justice and the environment. For example, he said, data helped to eliminate a double standard in sentencing urban and suburban young people who used cocaine. He said environmentalists should tell stories about climate change using data and use these stories to drive policy changes.
There are many ways environmental organizations can use data to change conversations. The Knight Foundation funded a data-sharing project which bridged divides between environmental justice groups. Projects like this one can yield local stories for both traditional and social media. What chemicals are in your neighborhood’s backyard?
Although the EPA’s approach to reporting potential flooding may seem dry, reports on climate change indicators in the United States can also provide story ideas for journalists. If climate change produces floods or disrupts the growing season, superimposing those maps on maps of crop production could yield interesting results – especially for crops grown in low-lying areas. In some states, the answer to the question “What’s for dinner?” may be very different in a few years from what it is today.
By any cold-blooded measurement of pulse and heartbeat, cities are dead. Like shells, they provide a home for the living creatures who construct them.
Seashell by candlelight (Source: stock.xchng)
But an intriguing post at Treehugger.com links to a video which says cities are alive. Not in the literal, breathing sense of the term – but in the interconnected, fractal, neural network sense of the word. Cities may not live and die the way we do, but they do exist as vibrant, organized webs of activity. Here’s the video which inspired the original post.
This quote from Steven Johnson sums up the idea beautifully:
“Coral reefs are sometimes called ‘the cities of the sea,’ and part of the argument is that we need to take the metaphor seriously: the reef ecosystem is so innovative because it shares some defining characteristics with actual cities. These patterns of innovation and creativity are fractal: they reappear in recognizable form as you zoom in and out, from molecule to neuron to pixel to sidewalk. Whether you’re looking at original innovations of carbon-based life or the explosion of news tools on the web, the same shapes keep turning up… when life gets creative, it has a tendency to gravitate toward certain recurring patterns, whether those patterns are self-organizing, or whether they are deliberately crafted by human agents.”
No wonder reading about news tools online is so entertaining. I’m watching a city of knowledge being built.
Extrapolating this idea to other environments could yield fascinating results.
Urban visionary Majora Carter described her ability to reimagine cities and neighborhoods at the Boston Museum of Science on Nov. 2. She told the story of her work to “green the ghetto” by connecting young people with environmental jobs, her efforts to transform an abandoned dump and a jail into community-friendly spaces, and her plans to use civic spirit to spruce up the image of local food.
When some people visit a city, they fall in love with a scenic vista. Majora Carter fell in love with the view of brilliant sunlight on the Bronx River behind a garbage dump. After cleaning up the waterfront, she got married in the park she helped create. The park won the Rudy Bruner Award in 2009. Her work has received many awards and has also been the subject of a TED talk.
Hunt's Point Riverside Park before the redesign (Source: Majora Carter Group)
Hunt's Point Riverside Park after the redesign (Source: Sessions College)
Carter described the community where she grew up, the South Bronx, as “a war zone.” She grew up surrounded by poverty, white flight and arson; her father worked as a janitor at a local jail. Landlords torched their own properties instead of renting to low-income people of color.
Carter decided to leave the neighborhood and chose higher education as the best route. But her quest for education led her to move back to the South Bronx to save money during graduate school.
“The hopeful ones” leave low-income neighborhoods when it’s no longer legal for landlords to segregate by race, Carter said. The departure of entrepreneurial youth and lack of investment leave two types of businesses in poor communities – marginal businesses that are unwanted in other neighborhoods and exploitative companies such as payday loan businesses.
When she rediscovered the South Bronx, Carter was impatient to change her neighborhood. She began by cleaning up the riverfront. “Public space is the great democratizer,” Carter said. She is now making plans to convert the jail where her father worked into a business development center and apartment building. She described standing outside the former jail with posters of her ideas to get feedback from people in the community.
“Poor kids who do poorly in school go to jail in this country,” said Carter. She links pollution – specifically, fossil fuel pollution – to the learning disabilities which put children on the path toward a life of crime.
One solution to deepening poverty and frequent incarceration is to put people to work. Green jobs programs can increase workers’ income, integrate them into the community, inspire them to seek higher education, and keep them out of the prison system. Carter built the Bronx Environmental Stewardship Training (BEST), which taught green jobs candidates workplace skills and routed them into urban environmental careers. She said 85 percent of the graduates are still employed and 10 percent have gone to college. She believes this approach should be the norm, not an exception, in low-income communities. She showed a slide of her neighborhood covered with green rooftops; this is her goal.
“No one has to move out of their neighborhood to live in a better one,” said Carter. But to transform cities, neighborhoods need to organize around a vision of a better community. When Carter became involved in the environmental justice movement, she said, “we were good at fighting against stuff, but we weren’t really good at figuring out what we wanted to fight for.”
One answer: fight for your city. Civic pride is the motif of a new national brand of locally grown food which Carter is developing collaboratively. The brand has a simple label: Root for [your city]. Each participating city will have its own Root brand.
Carter’s work encourages civic pride in low-income communities. There are many places like the South Bronx in the United States – neighborhoods that need vision, energy and optimism. “Good uses will drive out the bad ones,” Carter said. “It is going to raise the bar for what is beautiful and what is acceptable and what is needed in our communities.”
Should we fight global warming to save our urban infrastructure? Alexis Madrigal suggested this approach in an article for The Atlantic. In this article, I’m bringing that idea down to the ground level. Communities that deal with racial disparities in environmental health – also known as environmental justice communities – may become the places that suffer most.
Environmental justice health risks and global warming go hand in hand. For example, when sea levels rise, leaky storage tanks may yield their oily contents, disturbing the low-income neighborhoods where the tanks reside.
Scientists sometimes present global warming impersonally. This approach has led to criticism of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But scientists can also use data to make research relevant to audiences without biasing or oversimplifying their results.
This roadway support was removed during Boston's Big Dig. Credit: xianstudio
To set the stage for the tour, Torrey Wolff and Neenah Estrella Luna showed visitors maps of potential flooding in East Boston and Chelsea, two communities where activists are seeking environmental justice and sustainable development. The projected floods resulted from a combination of storm surges and sea level rise.
In a global warming context, sea levels increase for multiple reasons – including oceans warming, icebergs and glaciers melting, and ocean circulation changing to create massive waves. Luna referred to the highest waves as “wicked high tide.” (In Boston slang, “wicked” means “very.”)
The term “wicked” was well-chosen. Although there’s considerable uncertainty in the projected flooding, none of the scenarios look manageable for East Boston or Chelsea. The maps showed the lowest projected flooding, a sea-level increase of 2.5 feet by 2100, could lead to massive damage during storms. Wolff said these storms might occur bimonthly.
A homeless person sitting in downtown Boston. Credit: juliaf
Kim Foltz described the economic challenges of salvaging the shoreline. East Boston and Chelsea were built on landfills connecting smaller islands in the Boston harbor. These low-lying areas are being gentrified but are still home to a largely international population. Many of the recent immigrants are from Central America, South America, or North Africa. Foltz added that over half of East Boston’s population is Latino.
The hands-on demonstration showed the risk of sea level rise more powerfully than the maps could accomplish. Wolff asked the group to plant flags on Constitution Beach to discover the potential effects of storm surges in the year 2100. Near the beach, storm surges – estimated conservatively at 1 meter – could cover public transit tracks and reach houses and businesses that are hundreds of feet from the water now. The businesses near Constitution Beach include a Latino supermarket, a tool lending store, and a Burger King.
The tour leaders didn’t discuss what might happen to these neighborhoods if they are flooded. I’m concerned that these seafront properties, which developers eye with acquisitive interest today, could become tomorrow’s slums. If homeowners abandon the houses they cannot repair and buildings are sitting vacant, crime might increase. Given the stories that came from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, this idea is not farfetched.
Wolff painted a relatively optimistic picture, saying buildings could be built on piles or reconstructed so that they can lift up during storm surges. She said these innovations are becoming common in the Netherlands but are unusual in the United States.
The amount of capital required to complete this transformation of the shore would be immense, since many buildings in East Boston and Chelsea are former industrial sites. Building hills and sea walls would probably be more affordable than redesigning buildings, but either option could be costly. Foltz said that planting water-absorbing vegetation or introducing parks and wetlands could act as a stopgap measure to save some of East Boston and Chelsea.
Although few environmentalists might support the slogan “Save Burger King!,” it may be time to rethink how we talk about the resources low-income areas could lose. Global warming could wipe out our beaches, seaside restaurants, low-lying urban neighborhoods, and international grocery stores.
Although Chelsea and East Boston may never become high-crime ghost towns, curbing our appetite for the activities that cause global warming could help ensure those supermarkets will still be there for immigrants who may be escaping global warming elsewhere in the world.
Asking architects to demonstrate the effect of sea level rise on local beaches, stores and restaurants could help galvanize support for the changes we may be forced to make later – one way or the other.
With global warming, there is no “opt out” button. Either we face the situation or we don’t. Creative uses of data can help us see what could happen to our communities.
If we don't see our environment, that may be because we don't think it matters.
The road to forgetfulness is paved with good intentions.
If we know something is good for us, that is no guarantee we will take action. In the context of environmental and social issues, I’m interested in actions and results. Good intentions don’t mean that the rubber will hit the road.
However, I don’t see this as a question of lacking a sense of place or belonging. It’s a question of selective perception. Young people perceive the things they need to notice for survival and social approval (and for some other reasons). If something isn’t relevant, they may overlook it. They learn what matters by talking with their friends, families, classmates and teachers.
In the urban environment where I lived before college, I didn’t need to know about edible plants. I was aware of industrial pollution because I could smell steel mill exhaust. Occasionally, it was not safe to swim in Lake Michigan. So I needed to know about pollution when beaches were closed.
But the water advisories weren’t very important to me and other teenagers I knew in Chicago. We often thought about jobs, appearances, grades, friends and sports because those were the priorities of our communities. Street safety was also relevant. Edible plants were not part of the story.
Instead of regretting young people’s lack of connection to their ecosystems, we should look at the messages we give them. If they realize environmental knowledge is relevant to their lives, that’s when the story will change. If we talk with young people about environmental issues in a way that relates directly to their lives and interests, we can shift the story from “it’s good for you” to “it matters to you.” Making environmental communication relevant requires a shift in perspective.
Speaking of shifts in perspective, I decided to write this post after visiting the “Eye Spy: Playing with Perception” exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum. This exhibit, a series of optical illusions, includes a quote which summarizes the take-home message of this post.
“We perceive what we expect to perceive and what we think is expected of us.“ – Ray Moses
However, we should take the opposite approach. Specific details make writing come alive for readers. If you want to wake people up, you should get concrete – as fiction writers say, show, don’t tell. (This is a useful approach for teachers too.) Also, getting down to specifics helps people make connections between actions and their results – a skill not everyone learns in school.
People often don’t graduate from high school with a clear sense of what they are eating. I’m a graduate of an urban high school. Although I had some great teachers, I don’t remember any of them talking with us about the snacks we were buying in the vending machines down the hall. We learned about cell division, but we never learned why environmental issues mattered in our neighborhoods or at our grocery stores.
In my twenties, I lived and worked in two “food deserts.” A food desert is a neighborhood where healthy food choices aren’t available to most people – either because grocery stores have left or because they are too expensive. (Replacing a more affordable grocery store in Jamaica Plain with a Whole Foods would be a step in that direction, by the way. Whole Foods may have the best organic mangoes around, but that doesn’t mean everyone can buy them.)
Locally grown food has not traditionally been a luxury. In many parts of the world, it still isn’t. Community gardening is one way to rebuild local access to vegetables and fruit.
Communities that are interested in gardening should also have conversations about food preservation. Often, if you want year-round access to locally-grown vegetables, you have to know how to preserve them and have the equipment to do it. In Boston, you can’t pick tomatoes outdoors in winter. We just had a 17-inch snowfall last week.
Many people take a moral stance about eating health food, but this stance ignores the reality that convenience and access often determine our choices. Cooking takes time and effort, even if one plans ahead and cooks in bulk.
At the Be the Media conference last week, I heard about “third places” for the first time. A third place is a public place where people can spend time and get to know each other. But I’d never realized third places provide a balancing effect. Third places can strengthen community ties by bringing people out of their houses and apartments.
I am typing this blog post from a location where there are no coffee shops within an easy walking distance. If I wanted to sit in a public place and type this entry, I’d have to walk for half an hour to get to the library. At the library, I can type, but I can’t talk with people.
I think our over-emphasis on the importance of being at home, in the United States, mirrors our misconception that people want to spend all of their time with their families or roommates. Other cultures see this differently. For example, the Iroquois organized their communities around a central space.
An Iroquois community with shared space in the center
I’m interested in the question of whether or not there’s an inverse relationship between the size of people’s houses and the availability of coffee shops and other public spaces. From my experience, that seems true. Coffee shops and community centers tend to show up in areas where people live in apartments. I haven’t looked up any articles about this, though.
Why does it matter to build community interaction? Networking, mutual aid, friendships, local economic development, and offline social circles can begin in these third places. Websites like Meetup.com give people the opportunity to connect through shared interests. Meetups often happen at coffee shops. Book groups, music shows and other social events also happen there.
If your community lacks meeting places, that can encourage people who seek out social and cultural events to move away. This shift could change property values, reduce business development, and make the area less attractive to people under 35.
The perception that “responsible people are at home” also affects street behavior. I notice major differences between neighborhoods where people expect foot traffic and neighborhoods where they are surprised to see people using the sidewalk.
Kat Friedrich 