Neighborhood by Neighborhood: Reclaiming Our Cities
John Friedmann
School of Community and Regional Planning
University of British Columbia, Vancouver
As a young student at the University of Chicago, one of the first planning books I read had attracted me by what I thought was its curious title: “The City is the
People.” Its author was Henry Churchill who had published it at the end of World
War II. At the time, I knew nothing about the architectural origins of city planning practice, and I thought to m yself: “How odd: Of course, without people, cities would be nothing but hollow shells. Isn’t that obvious? Cities are made by people.” But once I started reading his book, I discovered its author had used this title to focus attention on neighborhood planning, which was concerned with the fine social grain of the city and with people’s participation in improving their own habitat. That’s what Churchill meant by “the city is the people.”
Seventeen years after its first publication, at the height of the frenzy of neighborhood destruction that was erasing inner-city neighborhoods across the
United States, the book was republished with a new introduction and an epilogue. In the Preface, Churchill wrote: “I have changed my mind about a good many things I said i n 1945….[But] I have not changed my mind about the basic thesis, that it is the people who make a city. On the contrary, what concerns me
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today is the perversion of planning methods and processes from democratic community organization to authoritarian cont rols for the benefit of a few.”
This was written in 1962, the same year that Jane Jacobs published the book that made her name famous, “The Rise and Fall of Great American Cities.” It was as if Churchill had passed on to her the Olympic torch of planning for local neighborhoods. Jacobs, unlike Henry Churchill, was not a professional planner.
Besides being a writer, she was what we would now call a community activist.
As her citation puts it, “By stimulating discussion, change and action, she has helped to make Canadian city streets and neighborhoods vibrant, livable and workable for all.” Jane Jacobs died at the age of 87 in 2006, and I would like to dedicate this small talk to her memory.
In the half century since Churchill and Jacobs, the world’s great cities have undergone a sea change. Nearly four billion people, more than half the world’s population, are now living in cities, and we are in the midst of what must surely count as one of the great city-building epochs in human history. Most of the new cities are rising in Asia, especially China. As a result, China now has some twenty thousand city planners. Some of them are officials staffing municipal planning bureaus, others are professionals skilled in drawing up physical plans.
All around them, building after building is rising skyward, and as the city’s grid pushes ever outwards from the center gobbling up precious farm land and countless villages, planners have a hard time staying abreast of the actual
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changes that are happening on the ground. Trained in schools of architecture, planners understand the city chiefly as its buildings and expressways, people don’t usually appear in their drawings. Their plans are typically on a scale that renders neighborhoods
—the living heart of the city—invisible. Physical plans, in
China and wherever else planning is practiced, are two-dimensional constructs, so that people don’t show up at all, or if they do, are swept up into aggregate population statistics: so many people in 2000, so many more in 2010, while fail ing to count all those without the “right to the city”--that Henri Lefebvre, the great French urbanist and philosopher, argued is a right that all of us should claim--because in China, they are merely listed as transients, temporary workers and their families who, although they have come to work in the city, are not permitted to lay claim to it.
Chinese planners have yet to produce their own Henry Churchill or Jane Jacobs.
Basically they are architects working on the scale of districts and city-region, whe re everything now is called “mega:” urban populations of multiple millions, gigantic airports, high rise offices, Wall-Marts and other Carrefours, bridges extending for 30 to 40 km across the sea, 8-lane expressways, new container ports, housing projects rising thirty stories into the air, and on and on. Amidst all this citybuilding, China is undergoing its own frenzy of “urban renewal,” as millions of people are being uprooted from their neighborhoods and sent out into the suburbs and beyond, where they are re-housed at whatever level they can afford to pay. Thomas Campanella argues that China’s new city-scape is defined
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by speed, scale, spectacle, sprawl, segregation, and (on a hopeful note), sustainability. But one may wonder what, in this “revolutionary” context, sustainability might mean.
In this paper, I would like to speak primarily to the theme of the social sustainability of cities. Or to say it otherwise, I will speak of the right to the city by the millions of ordinary people who, for the most p art, perform the city’s heavy work. I want to do so in relation to the idea of neighborhood, which are the places where people are actually living, and which sociologists sometimes refer to as the places of social reproduction, that is, the small spaces of the city, where we learn to become full human beings and citizens who are also the bearers of specific civic rights.
People live in neighborhoods. Some of these neighborhoods work well, others do not. None of them are perfect. But what do we mean when we speak of neighborhoods? I will try to sketch some elements of a “good” neighborhood to serve as a benchmark standard for comparison. To begin with, then, a neighborhood is a small urban space that is inhabited or lived-in. Henri Lefebvre called it un esp ace vécu, a place that is vibrant and alive, a life-space, with its own daily and seasonal rhythms. Neighborhoods are also places of encounter.
Walking down the streets of your neighborhood, you recognize people who, in turn, acknowledge you with a greeting, a wave of the hand, and may even know your name, stop, and chat for a while. The American-Canadian urbanist Jane
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Jacobs called this daily rhythm the “sidewalk ballet,” because of the way the pattern of life is repeated with small variations each and every working day, with a different pattern on holidays and Sundays.
Good neighborhoods also have places of gathering, that is, they have centers, where people come together for either ritual purposes or for some other reason.
It may be nothing more than a small park or an intimate city square, where people gather in the evening, and where from time to time festivities may be held.
I remember such a place in the small city of Tudela in the Province of Navarra,
Spain, where what seemed to me to be the entire t own’s population had come together to celebrate the annual San Fermines, dancing on the square until well into the night, while my friends and I passed through the crowd offering bunches of sweet-smelling basil to anyone as a gesture marking a joyous occasion that was shared by all. Such festivals are typical also of towns or neighborhoods in
China.
The British anthropologist Stephan Feuchtwang argues that what he calls
“centering” is a structural imperative for neighborhood places to come into being.
In a Chinese case study, he describes the processes of place-making as involving “gathering, centering and linking”. The entire passage is worth quoting:
The Chinese strategy of location that I have singled out celebrates the name of a village or a line of descent that is also a set of links and social connections….Through it, powerful leaders and donors make their mark by combining their own face with that of a locality in a process of indirection, that is via an ancestor or a temple that is the space where meetings, networks, and gossip are gathered. The leader is respected for his local loyalty. I am suggesting that there is a distinctively Chinese sense of public space as a tacit space of gathering, linking and centring.
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…As lived— he goes on to say —the time and space of modernity remains a space, not a place. In China, it is likened to the ocean….Everyone indeed fishes in the ocean of fortune. But it is nevertheless spoken about in China, including of course, by those that live by it, as chaotic. Modernity is the chaos of ordinary life, as out of abstract space and its lines to infinity, places and networks of trust, if not friendship, are made, imposing upon it a more sacred landscape of places, curved eaves, and homes by the three gestures of gathering, centering, and linking.
Feuchtwang’s language is allusive. What he calls the “chaos of ordinary life” is here counterposed to the networks of traditional practices and rituals, the building of ancestral halls, a temple dedicated to a local deity, all of which, in turn, become points of attraction for a village to talk, gossip, tell stories. Networks so formed are based on familiarity and trust and help to bring about a sense of what it means to live in this particular town or village, this specific neighborhood, which may ultimately lead to a sense of belonging or attachment, to a sense of place, and ultimately of one’s place in the cosmos. In Feuchtwang’s understanding, territorial places are centered but not bounded. Or rather, the boundary of centering is a ragged, dynamic, indeterminate edge that shades off into other territories or the unloved spaces of the place-less chaos that surround them.
We don’t have to accept the full implications of Feuchtwang’s version of placemaking to accept his criterion of centering, which refers to places both of encounter and gathering, where the former is the weaker term, while the latter suggests a coming together for a purpose. If the whole idea of “place” is of an environment conducive to sociality or, which is much the same thing, civility, then communication among people who are known to each other, whether repetitive and patterned or purposeful, is at the nub of this process.
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Feuchtwang goes on to argue that the counterpart to centering is what he calls interior ity: “Territorial openness is without walls,” he writes.
But it is not without interiority. It is identified usually by a name and by one or more centers: focal points that may well be buildings with enclosed places. It may contain smaller-scale places or differently defined places of the same name according to different mental or symbolic maps. But so long as it is marked and centred in addition to having extension, the open ground —the market place, the street, the square, part of a park, the neighbourhood, a territorial cult, the streets of a carnival or a village —is also an opening to a greater variety of interactions than more enclosed spaces. Interiority points to an inwardness, the identity of a place, even if for most of us this can only be one identity among others, and not necessarily the most important. Sense of place and place identity speak to this, but we need to remember that centered places are nevertheless open to the world, and therefore, subject to change and the passage of time.
And so we come to the last criterion of a good neighborhood, which is to be cherished by the people who participate in its daily life. A good neighborhood has a sense of itself in people’s minds, is part of the intimate sphere of their lives.
This cherished identi ty doesn’t make it into history books. It is part of the unremarked history of every city, one of its many unremarked histories that are secretly stored away in people’s memories. For those who were expelled from their neighborhoods, whether for political reasons across national borders or because urban renewal programs displaced them from the center of the city to the peri-urban metropolitan fringe, it is what these refugees among us who now live in strange places among strangers, talk about when they meet: the history that links up their lives and the history of the place from where they came. They recall its shapes, contours, and smells, particular locales and festivities, their common but usually separate struggles against displacement.
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This is not nostalgia; it is their way of grieving for the loss of social relationships that once signified home. The psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove calls the trauma of being thus uprooted from one’s home, root-shock: “a traumatic stress reaction to the destruction of all or part of one’s emotional ecosystem.” It is a trauma from which few ever fully recover.
You may note that in describing the good neighborhood, I never mentioned the quality of the built environment. It’s not that this is an unimportant detail. Rather, pride of place is ceded to the quality of the social relations in the neighborhood, which is cherished precisely because it stands for “neighborliness.” The
American writer Mike Davis, who, among his many other books, is known for his recent best-selling Planet of Slums, hopes that his readers will share his anger and fury at the deplorable physical conditions suffered by an estimated billion people in the world’s cities. He describes these conditions as indisputable fact.
What he does not realize, howev er, is that by labeling a third of the urban world’s population “slum dwellers,” he neglects the actual power of reciprocal human relations in the informal settlements of the Global South that make life’s hardships and deprivations bearable for many, if not for all. Davis is at a loss to propose solutions to their problems, which are portrayed as a combination of poverty and powerlessness. Slum eradication? Place-breaking? A shift in government priorities towards housing the poor? Already off on some other mission, Davis guards his silence.
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Now I don’t actually know why Davis stopped short of solutions—his closing sentences paint an apocalyptic scenario —but I can venture a guess. One reason surely is that when you are staring at one BIG PROBLEM that no one knows how to resolve, you have to break it down into more manageable parts. A Planet of
Slums has no solution, because, as we all know, not all so-called slums are the same. Not all are poor, nor are they all desperate. Their histories are distinct. If we accept this premise, we will have to proceed by recovering our cities, neighborhood by neighborhood. This is the only way, I would argue, to make our cities socially more sustainable. In the remainder of this essay, I want to outline some of the dimensions of this approach.
Before anything else, there is an all-important first step: responsible state actors, including planners and housing officials, have to acknowledge the social priority of people before profits and power in city-building, not only as h uman “targets” of planned interventions but as subjectivities and bearers of human and citizen rights. Among these rights, I would argue, is the “right to the city,” which includes the right on the part of all citizens to be taken seriously as potential partners in neighborhood improvement. This is a crucial first philosophical and ethical positioning of the local state visà-vis its citizens. Everything else flows from this first move.
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A second step would involve the discovery and making visible of the ci ty’s neighborhoods, not as bureaucratic abstractions but as living, organized entities which together comprise much of the urban fabric. Thirty-three years ago, Janice
Perlman exploded what she called The Myth of Marginality with reference to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.
1 Life in the favelas was and continues to be harsh.
Nevertheless, most favelado families tried to live decent, ordinary, upright lives whose ability to withstand hardship was strengthened by mutual help and standing together when their housing was threatened with eradication. Favelas, it turned out, had leaders who spoke for the rest and were dedicated to making everyone’s life a little better. Rio’s favelas have changed a lot since Perlman did her research in the early seventies, and some have become criminalized through the drug trade and its corruptions of power and violence. So I do not claim that all is well in today’s favelas. The sense of neighborliness is still there, however, though now constrained by fear of violence, as is the favelados hope for another future.
I am also aware of the practical difficulties of charting city neighborhoods that are at least in part an expression of people’s identities. I have been told of a recent effort along these lines in Toronto, where the Internet was used to self-identify
200 neighborhoods. Once the word has gone out through local information media that the mapping of neighborhoods is the beginning of an inclusive recovery
1 Favelas are settlements, often illegal, on unserviced urban land. In the case of Rio de Janeiro, favelas typically occupy hilly areas, many of them located immediately adjacent to luxury housing.
Their inhabitants are called favelados.
A more general name for these settlements is shantytowns.
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program, information leading to the construction of such a map is likely to be forthcoming.
Something like this effort was done as part of the well-known participatory budgeting process in Porto Alegre during the 1990s. It turned out to be a very productive effort, which over the last fifteen years has spread across Brazil to many other parts of the world. It began with getting people organizing and becoming involved. Along with the exercise of mapping their neighborhoods, a process was initiated to have neighbors identify their problems and needs through a process of self-study. Earlier, I identified five criteria of a good neighborhood, and these can initially be used to assess a neighborhood on a continuum from “very bad” to “very good.” In summary, we can say that a good neighborhood should:

be vibrant and alive.

be centered on one or more places of gathering and encounter.

have a sense of collective identity.

have a physical environment conducive to sociality and civility.

be cherished by those who partake in its daily life.
With a little effort, these general criteria can be made operational. But charting neighborhoods and ranking them on a scale of relative “goodness” is only a start.
The real work begins now, and it involves two steps: the first is to find out what human capacities, skills, and resources exist in the neighborhood that might be
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drawn upon in a collaborative effort at neighborhood improvement. The second involves the identification and prioritizing of collective needs in the physical environment such as basic infrastructure, public services, internal circulation, access to public transit, health conditions, sanitation, community gardens, sport facilities, and so on…down a long list of what may be needed, with some indication of relative urgency and an expression of willingness to contribute to such local improvements with labor and other voluntary efforts in partnership with the state and NGOs.
A document outlining these needs, both short-term and in the longer view, can be called a neighborhood plan. It is a plan drawn up by the very people who are living in the neighborhood, and for whom the neighborhood is home.
So conceived, neighborhood planning is a continuing process that goes on year after year, and if projects succeed in being implemented, if the process leads to the actual betterment of collective life, we can say that both the city and its neighborhoods are moving forward towards the ultimate goal of social sustainability.
Bibliography
Henry Stern Churchill, The City is the People. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock,
1945. (2 nd edition with new Preface and Epilogue, published by Norton 1962).
Mike Davis, Planet of Slums . London: Verso, 2006.
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Stephan Feuchtwang, ed., Making Place: State Projects, Globalisation and Local
Responses in China. London: UCL Press, 2004.
Mindy Thompson Fullilove, Root-Shock: How tearing up city neighborhoods hurts
America, and what we can do about it. New York: One World/Ballantyne Books,
2004 .
Jacobs, Jane , The Death and Life of Great American Cities . New York: Modern
Library, 1969 [1961].
Henri
Lefebvre, “The Right to the City,” in Eleonore Kaufman and Elizabeth
Lebas, tr. and ed., Writings on Cities. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
Perlman, Janice E., The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de
Janeiro. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976 .
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