Monday 30 June 2014

BOOK REVIEW: "What is a Social Movement?" by Hank Johnston

socialmovementby Mark Carrigan, Impact of Social Sciences: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/06/29/book-review-what-is-a-social-movement-by-hank-johnston 

Focusing on movement organizations and networks, what they do, and how they articulate their ideas of justice and collective interests, What is a Social Movement? aims to lay the essential groundwork for understanding this significant and exciting field of research, where it came from, and where it is headed. 

What makes this book so useful is how thoroughly it maps the topography of social movement research. 

It not only summarizes particular approaches and tendencies within the literature, but also draws out the points of contention between them and illuminates the fault lines upon which social movements research has grown and changed over the previous century, writes Mark Carrigan.

Something very odd happened at the end of 2011. Time Magazine nominated ‘The Protestor’ as their Person of the Year. How did such a once reviled and satirised figure come to receive this mainstream acclamation?

The magazine themselves invoked the End of History thesis, suggesting that the protesters who had shaped liberal democracies in the ’60s and ’70s had become passé with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ascendency of capitalism to untrammelled status across the globe.

But with this era drawing to a close and finance capitalism seemingly struggling for survival, the “protester once again became a maker of history”.

The Arab Spring protests that inspired this choice have since led somewhere altogether darker than was hoped by commentators in the upswell of breathless optimism that accompanied them. The Occupy movement, towards which liberal opinion was decidedly more ambivalent, no longer enjoys the prominence it briefly did.

It would be silly to suggest that Time’s endorsement had any role in the subsequent perceived decline of these movements, if indeed this is the correct term for them, but I nonetheless found it hard not to ponder the correlation.

It seemed to indicate something interesting about the significance of contemporary social movements but also the contradictory nature of their relationship with the media, in part seeking the publicity the media afforded, but also at risk of being pacified by it.

Against this backdrop Social Movement Studies comes to seem one of the most significant areas of interdisciplinary research within the social sciences.

Developing alongside the social movements which have been its object, contemporary social movement studies has become a vast and multifaceted tradition of inquiry.

Speaking as someone who has been making a concerted effort to familiarise myself with the area over the last six months, the sheer size of this detailed and interconnected literature can be a barrier to new readers, whether they are aspiring social movements researchers or those with a more casual interest in the field.

It is for this reason that Hank Johnston‘s book What is a Social Movement? is so valuable, offering a broad and accessible overview of this field by someone who has been at the centre of it through both his own research and position as founding editor of the journal Mobilization.
social movement featuredImage credit: Great Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common (Wikimedia, Public Domain)
The weakest chapter comes at the end of the book.

This is a shame because it is in this chapter that Johnston tries to draw out the contemporary relevance of Social Movement Studies. The chapter feels somewhat rushed, lacking the measured pace which plays such an important role in ensuring the clarity of his exposition elsewhere in the book.

He addresses topics like digital mobilisation and tactical occupations but does so rather briefly, in a way which makes it hard not to wonder if he secretly wanted to write a longer book than this.

The final chapter simply doesn’t cohere as well as those that preceded it.It’s difficult to choose particular chapters to focus upon from this book, reflecting both its consistent excellence and its affable brevity.

I found the second chapter particularly useful, offering a perspicuous overview of this expansive literature. It identifies a series of influential approaches and explains them clearly while nonetheless avoiding the sort of irritating simplification that routinely afflicts text books about theory.

Beginning from Gustave Le Bon’s now largely rejected social psychological account of crowd behaviour, Johnston adroitly demonstrates how the social movements literature has been recurrently structured around a conflict between those researchers who, like Le Bon, conceive collective action as exceptional and irrational and those who see it as a rational extension of ‘normal’ politics.

The clarity with which Johnston draws out these tendencies across the literature reflects the depth of his own engagements over his career. I found this immensely useful, almost equivalent to having a jovial senior academic volunteer to sit down and talk you through a literature you’re unfamiliar with.

What makes this book so useful is how thoroughly it maps the topography of social movement research.

It not only summarizes particular approaches and tendencies within the literature, but also draws out the points of contention between them and illuminates the fault lines upon which social movements research has grown and changed over the previous century.

The relative brevity of the book makes this achievement all the more impressive. It is a short book, well under 200 pages, which nonetheless offers an admirably panoramic perspective upon a complex and detailed field of research.

What is a Social Movement? is an invaluable book, sign posting a vast literature in an accessible way likely to appeal to students and academics alike.

While some of the contents may be challenging to those without a social scientific background, Johnston’s prose is nonetheless clear enough that the book could be of interest to a more general reader seeking to better understand the ways in which social movements have shaped the world in which we live and are currently reshaping our collective futures.
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Mark Carrigan is a sociologist based in the Centre for Social Ontology at the University of Warwick. He edits the Sociological Imagination and is an assistant editor for Big Data & Society. His research interests include asexuality studies, sociological theory and digital sociology. He’s a regular blogger and podcasterRead more reviews by Mark.

Thursday 26 June 2014

CivicLab: The Coworking Space for Civic Hacking


Something extraordinary is happening on Chicago’s West Side.

CivicLab, a coworking space dedicated to collaboration, education and innovation for civic engagement, is building community around citizen participation in government. 

Featuring a number of social change, policy and organizing projects, CivicLab also builds and deploys tools for government accountability and civic involvement.

Shareable caught up with CivicLab co-founders Tom Tresser and Benjamin Sugar to find out what inspired the project, the importance of DIY democracy, and what kind of response they’ve received to the project. Here are the highlights of that conversation.

Shareable: CivicLab is a co-working space, a hub for civic engagement, and an event venue. What’s the big picture here? What’s your grand vision for CivicLab?

Benjamin Sugar: CivicLab is a community space devoted to supporting DIY democracy.

We do this by building a community of practice through affordable coworking, meeting, and event space; holding educational master classes and workshops at the intersection of civics and DIY culture; and developing original tools and research to mobilize networks of change agents.

CivicLab combines Chicago’s emerging DIY culture and its rich history of community organizing to create new tools and solutions for the common good.

Our grand vision is of a world where solutions to our problems are developed from the bottom up and can bypass the slow bureaucracy whose decisions are often based on the ideas of a select few that benefit a select few.

In the medium term, we hope to see CivicLabs on a ward-by-ward basis, and perhaps as a model that can translate to other cities as well. 

What was the inspiration for CivicLab?

Tom Tresser: My inspiration was born from my decades-long experience in community organizing and working on social change efforts and seeing the lack of progressive infrastructure that supports and nourishes change agents.

We've also had a set of circumstances in Chicago where massive corruption, coupled with a loss of community-championing civic organizations and the hollowing out of the daily press and the arrival of massive privatization efforts by big business, has led to a perilous state of local democracy and social justice here.

I felt that no one was really looking out for grassroots community interests and so felt compelled to help create a new instrument for strengthening civic engagement work here. I believe in the power of a physical space to spur community and innovation and in the blend off offline and online technologies to accelerate social change.

Benjamin: My inspiration for CivicLab came from a number of ideas and spaces I encountered during my time in the Boston area.

Early on I was exposed to the ideas of the MIT Media Lab's Lifelong Kindergarten Lab whose students showed me that learning how to use technology was not only empowering, but given the right pedagogy, could be learned by anyone regardless of background.

This led me to a community space called Sprout which is dedicated to support learning and investigation and provide the necessary tools to do so including things such as precision machining equipment, 3D printers, and even a wet lab for biology.

My final influence came from working on a project called Between the Bars, a paper-based blogging platform for people who are incarcerated. This led me to the Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab where I found people creating tools for empower people in the civic space using low-tech devices to create high tech impact. 

What kind of community has emerged at the space? What are some of the projects and organizations that have come on-board and how do they utilize the space?

Tom: It's a wonderful and dynamic space with co-working, classes, meetings, and events, happening almost every day, sometimes all day. Our co-workers have developed personal and professional relationships. People care about one another and their issues and problems.

Groups that have used the space so far include our anchor tenant Chicago Votes, the Raise Your Hand Coalition of parents of students in public school, the Working Families Party, the Young Invincibles, the Roosevelt Institute, Move To Amend, the New Organizing Institute, the Chicago Area Fair Housing Alliance, and Moms United Against Violence and Incarceration.

Groups are collaborating formally with major projects, such as a youth summit in the fall of 2014, and also informally, sharing resources, leads, knowledge and contacts.

We've had nearly 50 classes including Design for Empowerment Extended, Privatization 101, Storytelling 2.0, How to Run for Local Office, DIY Hydroponics, Art for Social Change, How to Investigate Elected Officials and The Commons 101.

Some of the meetings at CivicLab are Restore the Fourth Chicago who meets here on a weekly basis to advance mobilizing against mass surveillance; the Chicago New Leaders Council; Chicago Techno-activists; Chicago Meshnet and {She Crew}.

CivicLab projects or those we support include The TIF Illumination Project; I, Citizen, the Activists Board Game; MY PLACE (Media for Youth, Participatory Learning, and Civic Engagement); Workshop for Parental Engagement in Welcoming Schools; and Secure Drop. 

Teaching civic literacy is one of the stated goals for CivicLab. What does this mean to you and how does it inform the space and community?

Tom: Scholars of civic engagement often talk about civic engagement consisting of four aptitudes or dynamics:

1. Appetite or disposition for engagement - how likely are you to want to do public work, volunteering, etc.
2. Knowledge - what do you know about government and civics.
3. Intellectual Skill - what are your critical and strategic skills?
4. Participation - what do have you done around public life - volunteering, protesting, helping campaigns, running for office?

We aim to offer classes and opportunities for engagement and building/ making to address all these domains.

Benjamin: Additionally, computational and DIY methods are becoming part of the fabric of civic literacy so we aim to expose people to the the new ways these tools are being used and instruct them in how to design and use them.

Part of what you do at the lab is to research why people do and don’t involve themselves politically. Are there any interesting insights you’ve gleaned from your research and how do you integrate what you’ve learned into the lab?

Benjamin: Admittedly, we haven't had the capacity to reflect on this in a formal way since we've been too busy doing the actual engaging of people.

Tom: This is an area of intense interest and we plan to spin up original research tapping into the constituents of all our stakeholders and allies to address that question. I’m obsessed with making engaging in public life as compelling as Farmville or Halo.

Benjamin: Our most successful draw for audiences have typically been things that involve learning how to "stick it to the system" or how the "system is sticking it to us.” Engaging people in the actual creating of things has also been successful and we will be expanding these opportunities in the near future. 

Education is another aspect of CivicLab, with workshops and classes on a variety of topics, giving the lab a makerspace feel. What are some of your favorite workshops so far and why do you think having this hands-on aspect is important?

Tom: We have a wide range of subject matter experts sharing experience and information on policy, the state of affairs in Chicago, and how to topics. We've had workshops on how to run for office, how to start and run community gardens, the history of civil rights in Chicago, coding for teens, design for empowerment, how to start a nonprofit and much more.

I’ve taught classes on TIFs, privatization and the commons and one coming up on Servant-Leadership. Benjamin has taught classes on design and he co-organizes a monthly event called What's Possible, Chicago?

Benjamin: I often tell an anecdote about a time I walked into Sprout to find a red knob on a box fan. The fan had broken and instead of going out and buying a new one, they fixed it by printing a knob of their own with red plastic.

The DIY, hands-on part is important because introduces people to the fact that their world is malleable, the means to do so are available in everyday objects, and those objects can be combined to form solutions to everyday problems. We hope that these activities serve as a microcosm for printing new knobs to the broken box fans in our civic life.

CivicLab has created several initiatives including the Tax Increment Finance (TIF) Illumination Project. What is the project and how does it reflect the lab’s goals and priorities?

Tom: Tax Increment Financing is a scheme where property taxes are extracted from an area and sent into a slush fund controlled by the local mayor. These funds can then be given to private developers with no strings attached.

This is done in the name of economic development and eliminating "blight" but the program is widely abused and is beyond public scrutiny or recall. In Chicago 154 TIF districts extract almost $500 million annually.

TIFs are in 47 states and extract as much as $10 billion in property taxes across the USA annually. Large companies such as Wal-Mart, Target, UPS, Coca-Cola, United Airlines and major downtown developers have collectively received hundreds of millions of public dollars.

All this money should've gone to the units of local government that rely on property taxes for operation. Our public schools are the primary recipient of Chicago property taxes and therefore the agency most harmed by TIFs. Across Illinois 550 municipalities contain 1,220 TIFs.

The TIF Illumination Project combines data mining, investigative reporting, graphic design and community organizing to reveal the impacts of TIFs on our communities on a ward-by-ward basis. We share this data with the community in TIF town meetings or "Illuminations."

In the past year we've done some 26 meetings across the city in front of over 2,000 people. We distribute a graphic poster that displays all the information. No one else can supply this complete picture. The next one is in the 48th Ward on June 18.

The TIF Illumination Project revealed that there was $1.7 billion in property taxes sitting in TIF accounts at the beginning of 2013. This has significantly changed the tenor of civic debate here and is being used to counter the mayor's position that the city is broke and essential services must be cut and scaled back.

Our work has also led to TIF impacts being placed on the Cook County property tax bill for the first time, starting in July. This will cause a major disruption in peoples' conception of how money is allocated as in their current form, the figures of property tax bills of those residing in a TIF are completely inaccurate.

The TIF Illumination Project is a great example of civic data and tool-making blending with design and old school community organizing and popular education work.

Over 60 people have come forward as volunteer researchers to help us with TIF and related work as a result of the community meetings and the some 40+ stories written about them. This work was profiled in the July 22, 2013 cover story of The Nation, "Chicago Rising!". 

What kind of response to the lab do you see among local activists, politicians and city leaders?

Tom: We are operating on a shoestring budget so we have not been able to advertise but all the same, our space and work is becoming recognized across Chicago's civic engagement community.

We have relationships with five local universities for research and internship placement and our work has been used by the Chicago Teachers Union, parents groups and other citizen advocacy efforts. We are just getting started.

Benjamin: I think it's been hard for people to understand what we're doing. It's a new approach for people in Chicago. Once people get it, they love it.

Community organizers have had difficulty embracing the serendipitous approach that you often find in maker culture. I've found that activities for them need to have clear goals and outcomes. [...] For designers, process is a valuable thing that can lead to better strategies and tactics which can lead to better outcomes.

I have found it challenging to engage the traditional makers/hackers in Chicago to the activist side of things. It's important to note that there are healthy emerging pockets of this combination for sure.

However, it's not fully saturated into the culture as it has in other cities I have spent time in such as Boston or Detroit. I don't think there has been a lot of exposure to the benefits that community organizing can play in gathering people in co-design, and deploying new tools once they have been created.

In other spaces where civic hacking is vibrant, I think there has been a tension between representing data about the city in a clearly agnostic way. This is very understandable as some of the best work relies upon partnerships with the city.

As one colleague enlightened me: one can view the city as a product, and improving the product with transparency and accountability will make it more likely that people will use it, hence engaging civic engagement. This brought up a question which was, what if the product itself is fundamentally flawed in some areas. How do you work with the city to force a recall of the product? 

Anything you’d like to add?

Tom: Come work at the CivicLab. Our desks are only $200/month! Email us at cowork@civiclab.us. Take a class.

On Friday, June 8, CivicLab will be presenting at PDF 2014 in NYC. As Tresser says, “We'd love to meet with civic coders, designers, investigators, organizers and people interested in operating co-operative spaces or maker spaces for social change.”
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Wednesday 25 June 2014

How To Convert a Business Into a Worker-owned Cooperative

by Cat Johnson, Shareable.net: http://www.shareable.net/blog/how-to-convert-a-business-into-a-worker-owned-cooperative

Cooperatives represent a growing segment of the economy with an estimated 30,000 enterprises and 100 million members in the U.S. alone

A great way to bring democracy into the workplace, coops can be built from scratch, but they can also be created by converting existing businesses into worker-owned cooperatives. 

For retiring business owners as well as entrepreneurs, selling a business to employees is a way to strengthen the business while getting a return on investment.

Melissa Hoover, executive director of the Democracy at Work Institute (DAWI), says that coop conversions are one of the most promising sources of new cooperatives as they already have customers, assets and employees, which makes it less risky than a startup.

She also notes that those coops created from conversions are among the most passionate members of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives.

“They’re the most engaged and the most attentive to the cooperative forum, principles and movement building,” she says. “I speculate that’s because ... to change something into a cooperative structure, they had to educate themselves about what that meant and connect themselves to movement organizations, models and peers.”

When converting an existing business into a coop, there are numerous questions that need to be answered.

Do the employees want to create a democratic business? Are funds available for a buyout? How will the business be structured? How long will the transition be? Does the selling owner want to stay on?

Though it takes time to work out the details, answering these questions is an essential part of the transition.

While every business has unique strengths and challenges, and there is no single way to create a cooperative, there is also no need to reinvent the wheel. Hundreds of worker-owned cooperatives have been created by converting existing businesses by following a series of steps.

How It’s Done

Shareable spoke with Joe Rinehart, Cooperative Business Developer at the Democracy at Work Institute to find out how to go from thinking about a conversion to opening the doors of a worker-owned business.

He provided the DAWI conversion timeline below which is based on previous versions created by the Ohio Employee Ownership Center.

As Rinehart points out, these steps provide an overview of what a conversion might look like. It’s not a hard-and-fast template. Some of the steps overlap, some may be unnecessary, and the timeline for every business will vary depending on how large the company is, how long the selling owner plans to stay involved, how much training is required and more. Here, he breaks down each stage of the process.



STAGE 1: Deciding to Move Forward

What it entails: research and reading, worker ownership succession options workshop (for owner and their leadership team), initial owner conversation with employees, Worker Coop 101 workshop for the employees, owner and workers decide to move forward, select steering committee, contact outside transition support team.

This stage is to get the ball rolling and for the business owner to decide if they’re interested in converting. It’s also about educating everyone involved about the cooperative model, determining if there’s interest in becoming a coop.

According to Rinehart, this is best done as a facilitated conversation with a skilled coop transition professional. If there is commitment on both sides, the next step is organizing the key players and moving the process forward.

One approach that Rinehart recommends is to start building a participatory workplace where leadership and management are shared as soon as possible. This can be done through practices including open book finances and letting employees have input in redesigning workflow.

“As you create a structure of participation,” says Rinehart, “you’re letting employees know they have a voice. [...] It’s a really powerful tool in creating a workplace that can transition.”

STAGE 2: Getting Ready: Employee Training and Business Valuation

What it entails: financial training for employees, business and industry training, cooperative trainings for employees, business valuation process, business valuation or owner’s price, determine financing options, review and revise current business plan.

This stage is where investment in the transition occurs. Employees receive training so they can understand the finances of the business, the business is valued and financial options are presented. Rinehart recommends having a professional determine the value then giving employees the opportunity to contest the valuation it if need be.

This is critical to clarify the process for the owner and employees, create a structure for moving forward, and give employees an opportunity to debate the valuation so they don’t feel like they’ve been taken advantage of down the line.

STAGE 3: Defining Structures

What it entails: document current management plan, draft cooperative by-laws, define post-transition management.

This is where the management plan, for both the transition and post-transition business, is laid out and those in management positions are trained in their duties.

“It’s important to note that [a worker cooperative] is not about making every decision democratic,” says Rinehart. “You want to open up the management process to be, not democratic, but participatory.” He continues, “It’s about deciding how you're going to make big decisions democratically, and management is one of those big ones.”

He explains that in most conversions the existing management structure is left in place but that the structure becomes about management and not about governance.

The important thing is to document the management structure. At this point, everyone should be very clear what the rules are and if they don’t like the rules, they have a voice in changing them.

“The people you’re engaging in participation know how to make the business better,” Rinehart says. “They have knowledge about the industry and the business and they know the impact of their decisions.”

STAGE 4: Finalize the Transition

What it entails: transfer business ownership, negotiate final price, seek financing, future members approve final price and financing, structure, complete the transaction, transfer governance and elect new board, transfer management as necessary.

This stage is all about dotting your I’s and crossing your T’s. It’s where you finding the financing if necessary and pull the deal together. You will elect a board and do a first board training.

“It’s about making sure everything is legal, and clearly and carefully done so that you’re able to move on,” says Rinehart. “You close the door on the transition and effectively move forward as a business.”

STAGE 5: Follow Through and Monitoring

What it entails: ongoing training with current employees

Once the worker coop has been launched, it’s important to have regular check-ins about the business and to maintain clear and open communication. The structures put in place are not only for current employees but for future employees as well.

You want to make sure there are processes in place for training those employees in what it means to be a cooperative and lay out plans for growth. All of this requires ongoing training and monitoring.

“No structure is perfect,” says Rinehart. “You’re designing a human technology for participation and democratic ownership and no technology is perfect the first time out the door.” He adds that you’ll want to be able to take time to evaluate it, refine it and get help from people who are experienced with worker cooperatives.

Among those are the DOWI and its associated organization the Democracy at Work Network, other cooperatives, cooperative developers, and members of Cooperation Works.


Photo: Infrogmation of New Orleans (CC-BY-2.0)

The Big Picture

Worker-owned cooperatives, whether created from scratch or converted from existing businesses, are a central part of the sharing movement. As Hoover says, they’re the “original sharing platform.”

For those considering converting to a coop, Hoover recommends talking with other business owners who have made the conversion to see that it’s possible and that there are huge benefits to doing it. She also encourages business owners to think about what they really wanted to build and where it’s going to go after they’re gone.
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Top photo: takomabibelot (CC-BY-2.0). Follow @CatJohnson on Twitter

Tuesday 24 June 2014

No-One Sits Here Anymore: How Spikes and Fences Erase Communal Life

anti-homeless spikes
Photo by Léonidas Martín, 2014
by Leónidas Martín, Creative Time Reports: http://creativetimereports.org/2014/06/16/no-one-sits-here-anymore-anti-homeless-spikes-anti-immigrant-fences-communal-spaces/

Since the day it first opened, the windows of my neighborhood gym have been a gathering point for neighbors.

They’re right at street level, and they’re big.

Lots of us had sat on their deep windowsills for many years, most of all the Pakistanis who live in the surrounding area.

Note that I wrote, “had sat,” because ever since Barcelona’s City Hall installed some giant metal plates, no one sits there anymore. The gatherings and chitchats are over. “Keep it moving!”

The phrase “metal plates” might make you think of something like those iron gates that restrict access to someplace, or the spools of barbed wire you often see along the borders. They’re nothing like that.

The metal plates they’ve installed at my gym are lovely. They’re designed by a young architect - one of the many young architects that work for City Hall - and they’re perfectly integrated with the structure of the building.

The window glass, the ledges and the plates complement one another like parts of a Franz Joseph Haydn symphony. In fact, I’m sure that if anyone passed by there today - anyone who didn’t already know what these windows had been, and what they were used for - they wouldn’t notice anything strange. And that’s what’s so interesting.

It’s a given that movement within city spaces has never been free; architecture and urban design have always directed it. But unlike the fences, bars and walls that were once used to restrict and channel our mobility, this contemporary urban furniture is all but invisible.

Previously, regulating the behavior of bodies in space required visible elements directing what they could do and how to do it.

Today, however, it seems that this kind of indoctrination calls for something altogether different - cues that go all but unnoticed. Urban furniture like the metal plates serves its repressive purpose while hardly changing the landscape.

anti-homeless spikes
Floral spikes in Barcelona. Photo by Léonidas Martín, 2014.

It isn’t always like this; there are still places where these urban elements controlling bodies in space are crystal clear. You only need to have a look at the southern border of Europe to get the idea.

In Ceuta, for example, the walls and the barbed wire aren’t hidden behind any pretense whatsoever; in fact, it’s just the opposite. In these places, the features of control are clearly visible. They have to be. Their effectiveness depends in large part upon their conspicuousness.

An undocumented immigrant who wants to enter Europe must plainly see the material obstacles he’ll run up against, the barriers blocking his entrance. Presumably, one would think twice after seeing things like that.

But this piece of mine isn’t set in any of those locations. What I’m talking about here is other places, where the immigrants who already crossed those borders end up.

I’m referring to those cities where they come to seek their fortune - particularly those that profit from advertising themselves as if they were commercial brands. Cities like Barcelona, Paris or London.

In these places, the devices dictating behavior go virtually unnoticed. They’re integrated into the visual matrix of the city itself, hardly perceptible, serving to uphold the aesthetic values and morals associated with the city, while hiding their primary function, which is to constrain people’s mobility.

The plates installed outside the windows of my gym are far from the only example of this kind of urban installation designed to prevent unwanted situations and social behaviors.

The city-brands are full of these elements: low hedges and bushes, strategically located to prevent people from making themselves at home in public places; magnificent wrought iron fences blocking access to restricted areas; exquisite spikes preventing people from laying down where they shouldn’t; geometric forms in noble materials placed in corners to dissuade people from getting cozy where they oughtn’t … endless urban designs which, as in the Edgar Allen Poe story “The Purloined Letter,” are right in front of everyone yet pass unnoticed.

We come across these things a thousand times, but we never see them, or, at least, we never see their true, hidden purpose.

anti-homeless spikes
Elegant spikes in Barcelona. Photo by Léonidas Martín, 2014.

At first glance, these elements may seem irrelevant, just little urban bits not worth considering. But as I see it, these fragments represent - although slyly - the spirit of the economic and political model that created them: the spirit of the market. A spirit that sets everything (people, cities, countries, works of art) in motion under the criteria of the one and only law: extract the most profit possible from any human activity.

This spirit is everywhere; it affects us all and all that surrounds us. The immigrants themselves, as mentioned earlier, were driven here by this spirit. It’s what set them in motion, what pushed them over the walls, dodging barbed wire.

“Motion” here doesn’t imply freedom - far from it. All movement prompted by the spirit of the market must be conducted under the law it imposes. Otherwise, this mobility could deviate, resulting in a non-consumer-economy objective - and that’s a risk the market can’t take.

In this sense, the metal plates at my gym, or other similar urban elements, are the grease that helps to run the indoctrination imposed by the spirit of the market.

The behavior of the citizens, as with the identity of a city, is not something to be taken for granted. Instead, it’s one’s own actions, and the changes these acts make to the social fabric, that spur and shape further behavior patterns.

These actions and behaviors could be, a priori, infinite. To limit them, to make them respond to a certain spirit, takes a lot of creativity.

Here is where the role of artists comes into play - or has this not always been the artist’s task, to bring a touch of common sense to something that has neither preexisting logic nor order (as Oscar Wilde wrote, “to teach Nature her proper place”)?

It comes as no surprise, then, that it’s the artists, the architects and the designers who are in charge of translating into form (urban furniture, in this case) commercial law and its objectives.

They do it because it’s what they know how to do; it’s how they make their money. But they also do it because they’re more concerned with form, with those aspects that lie at the heart of art itself, than with the end-uses derived from their work. And they do it for one more reason.

In the world we live in, each of us goes it alone in society. No intermediaries. A stranger among strangers. This emboldens a “me” full of pride, ready to believe he’s almighty. But it also encourages a “me” ready to fall at the feet of any effigy that crosses his path. A “me” ready to take on the world, but beaten by fear and loneliness.

So this young architect designs the metal plates that later get installed by City Hall in the windows of my gym, because he feels lost in some incomprehensible hieroglyphs.

This young architect looks at life as characters in Kafka’s novels do. He knows not who decides things, nor to whom he may turn in search of justice or help. For him, to live is to be dragged along by a mysterious force whose sheer power and great size reveals his own utter helplessness. This is the starting point from where our young architect designs the metal plates that serve to prevent immigrants from gathering in the street.

anti-homeless spikes
Cacti in the entrance to a hotel in Barcelona. Photo by Léonidas Martín, 2014.

Each time I go for a swim at the gym, I wonder, what would it be like, an art that could break this damned aesthetic statute that prevents gathering? An art open to a dynamic concept of life, where our surroundings are created in direct relation to constantly changing behaviors?

What would it be like, an art that stood up to established forms of behavior, that was able to adapt to new ways of life, ones we’ve been seeking for a long time? And what about a form of urban design that, instead of concealing repression, visibly organized our shared world as a commons?

Because this, and nothing else, is a city: the organization of our shared world.

Translated from the Spanish by Jane Loes Lipton and Stacco Troncoso.

Wednesday 18 June 2014

Resilience: Eight Takeaways from Eight Resilient Cities

by Lizzy Chan, 100 Resilient Cities: http://100resilientcities.rockefellerfoundation.org/blog/entry/eight-takeaways-from-eight-cities

Around the world, our first 32 cities are kicking off their 100 Resilient Cities Challenge engagements with workshops, and we’ve had great conversations about the cities’ urban challenges and resilience opportunities.

There’s a lot more information to come from each of these cities, but eight overarching takeaways from some of our first workshops have stood out so far:



1. People from all walks of life are interested in resilience building. Byblos residents from all sectors and demographics attended their city’s resilience workshop. Attendees ranged from Lebanese Army and Air Force generals and members of the prime minister’s office to the city harbormaster, heads of universities, and local entrepreneurs. Even an elderly nun joined in the conversation!



2. Resilient cities turn tragedy into opportunity. Three years out, post-earthquake Christchurch still presents a block-by-block picture of the challenge of rebuilding a city. But the city’s residents, from the mayor to young activists, have seized this opportunity, and are demonstrating in real time the case for rebounding better and evolving stronger.



3. People’s preconceived definition of resilience varies widely. At the Glasgow workshop, most people came into the event thinking about resilience primarily from a psychological resilience or a disaster resilience vantage point. But true resilience - the ability to withstand shocks and stresses and bounce back stronger - encompasses a wider variety of areas, from environmental resilience to social resilience.



4. Many consider social resilience to be as important as physical resilience. Prone to floods, wildfires, and drought, Boulder is no stranger to the risks that nature poses. But workshop participants expressed concern about the resilience of the city’s residents, particularly the elderly, or those without access to affordable housing.



5. Community leaders have already started thinking beyond major shocks. Melbourne’s mayor shared his concerns about the stress of population growth and everything that radiates from it, from natural resources to civic cohesion. In Medellin, civic leaders have focused much of their resilience efforts on reducing violence. We’ve heard these social resilience concerns voiced in all of our city workshops.



6. Cross-city collaboration is key. The deputy city manager of nearby El Paso joined in on Mexico City’s resilience workshop - emphasizing the need and opportunity to collaborate among the 100 Resilient Cities network, and to learn from those who face similar challenges.



7. A city’s resilience work is never done. Rotterdam has done a lot of work to build its resilience over the past few years, creating a climate action plan and implementing it via the public and private sectors. But residents didn’t rest on their laurels; they used the resilience workshop to identify areas to improve resilience further, specifically around immigration and the city’s port. Similarly, Vejle faces less severe physical threats - facing only occasional flooding - and so focused their workshop on economic resilience and social resilience.



8. Many resilience measures are not capital intensive. Rome has many physical challenges - heat waves, floods, ancient infrastructure. Addressing these challenges will not doubt require significant resources, but almost all participants in our workshop mentioned an important resilience building step that could cost virtually nothings: improving communications between various silos of city government, and across sectors of society, including the private sector, NGOs, and civic society. Workshop participants said that this could vastly cut down on duplication of efforts, build a more integrated society, and help the city respond in the event of a serious shock.

Tuesday 17 June 2014

'Sharing': Self Employment and the Grey Economy

by Henry Thornton: http://www.henrythornton.com/blog.asp?blog_id=2787

English: Bike sharing system in Toronto
Bike sharing system in Toronto (Wikipedia)
There is a new way of doing business in the UK.

This is called 'sharing' - people my rent out a room, or their house, or call a non-cabbie car hire network, or rent a dress if they are a gorgeous young thing with a big date and a low budget. 

Phillip Inman of the Guardian wrote yesterday about this development, and Henry cannot wait for it to get to Australia.

It could be called monopoly busting, whether the monopoly is the taxi companies, who are unreliable, or the golden legion of real estate agents, or the department stores who extract massive profits from selling nice dresses to poor but attractive young women.

Naturally, there new economy forces are being fought by the pld economy monopolists in the UK, and no doubt the monopolists in Australia are watching and readying themselves for battle.

Elderly British survey fillers are against the new economy development already described, but younger Britains are more likely to embrace the idea.

Phillip Inman explains the economics behind this movement: 'This rising tide of self-employment accounts for two out of five jobs created in the past year, pushing the number of people who work for themselves to one in seven of the workforce. While many will be self-employed out of necessity and earning, on average, about 40% less than their employed counterparts, a sizeable proportion consider themselves entrepreneurs and are excited about being their own boss'.

'Analysis by the Royal Society of Arts shows that for every worker who loses out there are three who say they benefit. It is an entrepreneurialism that the RSA argued is indicative of an unstoppable shift'.

'Respondents [to a major survey] cited factors such as being able to live where they want and work around caring for older relatives or children. The rising cost of childcare was a key consideration, as was the escalating cost of commuting'.

Largely unspoken was the lack of pay, wage rises and decent pensions on offer in mainstream jobs culture.

'The tax system also encourages workers to look beyond the workplace for extra income. A combination of income tax and national insurance places a 32% marginal tax rate on standard rate taxpayers. Capital gains tax by contrast charges the basic rate taxpayer a rate of 18%, and a higher-rate taxpayer 28%. As such, gains on wealth are more lightly taxed  than earned income'.

Henry notes that an effective tax rate on conventional paid employment of 32% perfectly explains why people will accept 40% lower incomes in the self-employed sector - most of the self-employed income is from the black/gray economy and therefore effectively untaxed.

Henry knows of many young Australians with fine education, positive attitudes and no jobs in the standard economy or poorly paid jobs with little prospect of advancement. Crime is one solution for these kids, but being self-employed is the logical alternative.

In the UK, a peer of the realm, Lord Young, is reporting on this phenomenon and pressuring the government to relax rules that support the monopoly positions of entrenched enterprises like the London cabbies. One hopes that Maurice Newman can find the courage to address these issues as they affect Australia's struggling manufacturing economy.

Saturday 14 June 2014

Meet the Tenacious Gardeners Putting Down Roots in "America's Most Desperate Town"

Nohemi Soria harvests collard greens.
Harvesting greens in Camden, N.J. (Photo by Kristin Moe)
by , Yes! magazine: http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/meet-the-tenacious-gardeners-putting-down-roots-in-america-s-most-desperate-town

These are Pedro Rodriguez’s chickens, in alphabetical order: Bella, Blanche, Dominique, Flo, Flossie, Lucy, Pauline, Una, and Victoria.

Their coop occupies one corner of a vacant-lot-turned-garden in Camden, New Jersey.

It’s an oasis of abundance and order in a city of abandoned buildings, street trash, and drug deals that few attempt to hide.

Rodriguez, 50, grew up down the street. Near the chickens, he has planted neat raised beds of corn, tomatoes, cabbage, kale, asparagus, eggplant, onion, 20 varieties of hot peppers, and broccoli.

Fruit trees (cherry, apple, peach, and pear) line the perimeter of the lot, as well as two beehives. He’s considering getting a goat.

To say that Camden has a bad reputation would be an understatement. Indeed, Camden, just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, has about the worst of any city in America.

It’s been ranked at various times as both the poorest and the most dangerous. In 2012, it ranked as the number-one most dangerous city in the country.

Not surprisingly, Camden also gets a ton of bad press. In 2010 The Nation called it a “City of Ruins” where “those discarded as human refuse are dumped.”

Last year, Rolling Stone ran a devastating article by Matt Taibbi under the headline “Apocalypse, New Jersey: A Dispatch from America’s Most Desperate Town,” calling it “a city run by armed teenagers,” “an un-Fantasy Island of extreme poverty and violence.”

It’s also one of the worst urban food deserts in the country. In September of 2013, the last centrally located grocery store closed its doors, leaving the city to feed itself on Crown Chicken and junk from the corner bodegas.

One supermarket remains, at the very edge of Camden's city limits - but most residents would have to cross a river and travel along a major highway to get there - a difficulty in a city where many can't afford a car. Like in many other low-income areas, obesity is an epidemic.

Most kids in Camden talk about leaving - and many of them do. The population peaked in 1950 and has since declined by nearly 40 percent to about 77,000. Anywhere between 3,000 and 9,000 houses have been abandoned, although no one knows for sure. For residents who want a better life, getting out is the most obvious thing to do.

As so many flee the violence and crime, it may seem strange that Rodriguez is literally putting down roots. In fact, it’s precisely because of the city’s problems that its urban farms have grown so much in recent years.

A study by the University of Pennsylvania Center for Public Health Initiatives said in 2010 that Camden’s gardens may be the fastest growing in the country. Since then, the number of community gardens has more than doubled to roughly 130, according to a list kept by local gardeners.

The Penn study found that these gardens - belonging to churches, neighborhood organizations, and everyday backyard growers - produced the equivalent of $2.3 million in food in 2013 and, because most growers share their surplus zucchini with their neighbors, those vegetables have helped feed roughly 15 percent of Camden’s population.

The city needs fresh food, and residents are doing what it takes to grow it. It’s part of the untold story of Camden: a story in which the residents of this blighted city are the protagonists, quietly working to make Camden a place where, one day, you might want to live. 

Room to grow

The success of community gardens is thanks in large part to the Camden City Garden Club, which has been supporting the city’s gardens with organizing power, education, materials, and food distribution since 1985.

As you might expect, these are not your typical tea-drinking, flower-growing gardeners. These people are here to grow food. In a place where kids are said to bite into oranges, peel and all, because they’ve never eaten them before - this fills a void.

The club’s founder and executive director, Mike Devlin, ended up in Camden in the early 70s because of a paperwork mishap during his enrollment as a law student at Rutgers. Over time, however, he found that he was more passionate about lettuces than litigation.

He began building an organization whose programs now include the Camden Children’s Garden on the waterfront; Camden Grows, a program that trains new gardeners; a Food Security Council, which was soon adopted by the city; the Fresh Mobile Market, a truck that sells fresh produce in the neighborhoods and provides a place for residents to barter their surplus vegetables; a youth employment and training program that has lasted nearly two decades; and Grow Labs, a school program to teach kids about healthy food - in addition to supporting the growing network of community gardens.

And, in a city of 12,000 abandoned lots, there’s plenty of room to grow. While Detroit has garnered considerable positive media attention for its urban farm movement, Camden’s has been expanding more quietly.
Mike Devlin, Nohemi Soria, and Pedro Rodriguez.
Mike Devlin, Nohemi Soria, and Pedro Rodriguez (left to right). Photo by Kristin Moe.
Devlin’s hands are deeply creased, and there’s dirt lingering under his fingernails. For him, gardening is not a hobby; it’s a way of confronting the myriad issues that Camdenites face - poverty, food scarcity, and the increasingly frayed bonds of community.

And the best way to get at those issues, he says, is by giving the city’s children a place of safety and support. More than 300 youth have gone through the Garden Club’s employment programs, and countless more have spent afternoons in its leafy sanctuaries. 

A city in flux

It’s a sunny Tuesday in mid-May, and Devlin and Rodriguez are working at the Beckett Street Garden in south Camden. The garden straddles a single dilapidated rowhouse, now occupied only by squatters.

In the heaped beds are lettuce, collards, spinach, leeks, and nice broccoli crowns big enough to harvest. A Tiger Swallowtail rests for a moment on a tomato plant nearby.

The two met in the early 80s, when Devlin helped the young Rodriguez build his first garden in an empty corner lot just a block or two from here.

Devlin walks over. “There’s something going on up the street,” he says, pointing. “Four cop cars up there by Pedro’s house.” Rodriguez walks to the curb, takes a look at the flashing lights, shrugs, and goes back to work. Normal.

In another corner of the garden, Nohemi Soria, 28, is gathering big armfuls of collards. Her hair is up in a loose bun and she wears sparkly daisy-shaped earrings and a bracelet with rhinestone hearts, despite the dirt.

As the USDA Community Food Access Manager, she does work for the Garden Club that’s funded through federal grants, including coordination of the Mobile Market.

Both Rodriguez and Soria are among the hundreds of Camdenites who have come through the Garden Club’s programs, either as volunteers or employees, and for whom the gardening scene is a little like family. Both will testify that growing food has profoundly shaped their lives.

Born 23 years apart, the two grew up in different versions of Camden. Rodriguez, one of 12 children, played handball with neighborhood kids and gleefully swam in the “swimming pools” that formed when the streets filled with water after a storm.

Many of the other Puerto Ricans he grew up with came to work in the Campbell’s Soup factory, which closed in 1990. By that time, the other major employers had also left town, including a number of large shipbuilding companies, as well as RCA Victor, which made phonographs and television tubes.

“Camden was once beautiful,” Rodriguez says, pointing to what is left of the houses facing the Beckett Street garden.

Originally owned by immigrants from Italy, he says, the apartments had marble floors, painted tiles, and ornately carved wooden fireplaces. Rodriguez remembers the Italians growing grapes in their yards and making wine in their basements.

But houses in Camden don’t last long after they’re abandoned. Stripped of anything valuable - marble, tile, wood, and copper - many of them now sit, gutted, awaiting demolition. “It breaks my heart to see these houses go down,” Rodriguez says.
Pedro Rodriguez.
Urban farmer Pedro Rodriguez. Photo by Kristin Moe.
Then came a major riot in 1971, when Rodriguez was a boy. An article in the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that “Bitter racial tensions exploded in the night, fueling fires that destroyed parts of Camden and hardened the lives of those who lived through it.”

In a story that played out in inner cities across the country, those who could afford to moved out and left a vacuum of empty houses, empty factories, and streets full of young people with nowhere to go.

The 2013 Rolling Stone article observed that, “with the help of an alarmist press, the incidents solidified in the public's mind the idea that Camden was a seething, busted city, out of control with black anger.”

By the time Soria was born, in 1986, the city was in full decline. Her house on York Street was also home to drug dealers who treated her front steps as their own. She remembers two guys getting shot in a car right out front.

“I always felt scared to walk outside,” she says. “You think of things that children shouldn’t really have to think about, and you experience things that children shouldn’t have to experience.”

She remembers a time, years ago, when her father tried to take her jogging in Pyne Poynt park. The two were stopped by a cop, who assumed they must be up to no good. “We had to convince him that we were just jogging for exercise,” Soria says. “He didn’t believe us.”

Although parks were mostly off limits, she and her younger sisters had fun doing normal kid things too - well, normal for Camden. They made mud pies, constructed obstacle courses in the abandoned building next door, and baked imaginary pizzas in ovens built from scavenged bricks.

At 13, Soria crossed the Delaware River into Philadelphia and had her first taste of what it might be like to live somewhere else. Alone, she walked under the tall trees and stately buildings of Chestnut Street. It was the first time she’d been in a neighborhood this nice, she says, so close to North Camden but so different. “I was like, oh my god,” she laughs. “I felt like an ant.”

The Philadelphia skyline is always there, hovering across the water. It shimmers on a hot day. Soria sometimes wonders: “What would my life be like if I didn’t grow up here?” 

Unexpected beauty

Soria is from North Camden, the roughest part of town. Back at the Beckett Street Garden, in South Camden, we’re in Pedro’s neighborhood, and the feeling is less post-war Dresden and more the fly-swatting listlessness of a hot almost-summer afternoon.

Rodriguez’s place, a light-blue rowhouse, is across the street from his garden and his nine chickens. The building was abandoned when he moved in, so he slept on the third floor while he gutted it and made it livable again - “I brought it back to life,” he says.
Sign in a Camden garden.
Photo by Kristin Moe.
The sounds are of distant cars, the groan of a lawnmower, birds. One empty lot features, unexpectedly, a miniature Christmas village on an enclosed platform, with tiny snow-covered houses. On a nearby block, someone has decorated the tree trunks with brightly colored butterflies.

An older couple hangs out in chairs next door, and some guys are sitting on a stoop farther up the block. Occasionally, a man will coast by on a bicycle, in no particular hurry.

Rodriguez seems to know everyone, and they all return his greetings. A neighbor stops by and asks in Spanish whether Pedro has any extra palitos, peach tree saplings. “‘Ta bien, ‘ta bien,” they both say. OK.

Rodriguez takes me to his first garden, the one he and Devlin worked on during the Garden Club’s first season, when he was just a few years out of high school. Sunflowers, the really tall kind, are just coming up along the perimeter, but there’s nothing planted there yet.

When the house next door was torn down last year, the demolition crews razed the garden and ruined the topsoil he’d spent 30 years improving. Now Rodriguez has to build it up again, starting from scratch.

Rodriguez grows his vegetables on borrowed land. He knows that if a landlord decided to build on the site he’d have to leave. “I wouldn’t fight it,” he says, because any development would be a sign of good things for Camden. Plus, he’s got a short list of other towns that might welcome an enterprising gardener. “You always got to have a Plan B.” 

"Two separate worlds"

For most kids in Camden, however, leaving town isn’t Plan B; it’s Plan A. But Nohemi Soria is different; she’s here to stay.

She’s had a couple of advantages: She went to a creative arts high school, and had some good teachers. She went to college, studied abroad. She had parents - both migrant farmworkers - who instilled ambition in their kids early on. And she had the garden.
Nohemi Soria
Nohemi Soria. Photo by Kristin Moe.
When she first came to work at the Camden Children’s Garden at age 14, it was a revelation. It was a little like Chestnut Street in Philly, she says, an oasis of safety and peace - but only blocks from her house.

“It was two separate worlds,” she says. We were seven minutes away from each other, but the difference was so drastic.”

The garden was part of Soria’s survival strategy. Being there, she says, has always been like hitting a pause button: so the bad stuff - the drugs, the crime, the violence - “doesn’t take control of your life.”

A lot of her classmates, she says, “didn’t make it.” If they were lucky, they found some positive influence - a teacher, an after-school program, a place where they could let their guard down and be kids. “But it was like living a double life.” Back out on the sidewalk, their guard would come right back up.

Sometimes, she says, kids try to pretend they’re not from Camden. “They say, oh, I’m from Pennsauken” or other nearby places. They don’t want the stigma of being from Camden, of being thought of as “uneducated, rude, lazy, violent.”

Soria and her boyfriend used to work birthday parties, making balloon animals. When potential clients heard they were from Camden, Soria says, their attitudes changed. “They’re like ‘Oh, we’ll call you back’ - but you knew.” They never called.

It’s a problem that’s reflected in the city’s media coverage. When the New Jersey Courier-Post asked readers their opinions of how Camden was portrayed, a resident named Joe Bennett said he didn’t appreciate news that was only about drugs, crime and violence and that it neglected some of the positive things about Camden. “Crime is not just in Camden,” Bennett commented on Facebook.

“It’s as though everybody from Camden are criminals,” Felix Moulier commented. “The image that is projected to readers outside of Camden instills a fear.”

And then there was the comment from George Bailey, a sentiment that may often go unspoken: “Maybe if you ignore Camden it’ll just go away.”

One Saturday at the Children’s Garden, Soria and I ran into Sonia Mixter Guzman, another Camden native who helped create the Goodness Project, which highlights work that’s being done by the city’s nonprofits.

It’s trendy now for places like universities, towns, and cities to make “Happy” music videos that show people grooving to Pharell’s hit song. So the Goodness Project found a filmmaker to make a video for Camden, to show that “happy” exists here, too, just like anywhere else. Soria’s in it, wearing a crown of flowers.

Camden’s not a big place. But before she did the music video, she hadn’t met many other people, aside from gardeners, who were willing to invest in this city.

Seeing that she’s part of a bigger network of people who have all chosen to stay makes her bristle even more at the negative coverage. “It’s not just me - it’s a lot of us,” she says. “And we’re trying to do something.” 

“A tenacious lot”

The day after this conversation was Mother’s Day. While Soria and her sisters were at a barbecue with their mom, Mike Devlin’s greenhouse was burglarized for the second time in six months. It took him three days to clean up the mess.

I asked him if food had ever been stolen from the Beckett Street garden, and he says it has: someone once came in the night and pulled up a bunch of premature potato plants. It’s not surprising, he says, resignedly. “Conditions are getting worse.”

A few years ago, Soria’s mom moved out of the house with the drug dealers to a new place four blocks away where she thought it would be safer - but her new building, it turned out, was the center of one of the biggest drug trafficking rings in the city.

Soria has three younger sisters. The youngest, Diana, can tell you what to do if there’s a shooting: drop down, or hide somewhere that’s away from a window. “That’s sad to me,” Soria says. She wonders if Devlin is right, if maybe things are getting worse; she doesn’t remember knowing that much at age six.

Rodriguez imagines what an alternative city might look like: a monorail, maybe. A city of the future. Gardens on green rooftops, instead of in empty lots. “Will I ever get to see that change in my neighborhood? Maybe 30 years from now.”

Politicians, he says, are to blame for not having the people’s interests at heart. “Camden has such a bad rep. Who wants to invest in Camden?”

Instead, he talks about leaving, of traveling the world - Finland, maybe, or Ireland - and settling somewhere to build another garden. After 50 years, he says, “It’s time to move on.” His siblings all left Camden years ago. There’s always a Plan B.
Pedro Rodriguez with chickens.
Pedro Rodriguez with several of his chickens. Photo by Kristin Moe.
Soria recently moved, too - but to Fairview, a nicer section of Camden. “I feel like I moved up in the world,” she laughs. “It’s so quiet.” But back on York Street, her mother has built raised beds, and Diana already knows how to plant and weed. The Soria women decide together what to grow.

Change, she knows, is a process. There is nothing in Camden’s recent history to suggest that things will get better anytime soon. But - whether out of youth, stubborn optimism, or necessity - she has hope. Perhaps it’s because she knows from experience that it’s possible to grow up in Camden and still be OK.

“You don’t like going out and having a bullet in your car - like, you know, you go through things like this that kind of leave you angry. Like - ‘Ah, I’m tired of it, I just want to leave.’ But then you realize, well, I can’t leave. Because if we left everything that was hard in life, then where would we end up?”

Devlin, the oldest of the three, seems tired. After so many decades of investing in this place, his hopes for Camden have been tempered by experience. “I’m not sure you can save it anymore,” he says. “But you can save people.”

He says that most of the kids who have come up through the garden’s programs, like Soria, have gone on to college. “I used to try and convince kids to get through school, get through college, get a trade, and then stay in Camden,” Devlin says. But he’s let go of that, little by little.

“Right now it’s more like, get them on to a safe life rope, and let them go to another place,” he says. “I don’t try to talk them into staying.”

The hardest part, Soria says, is not knowing - not knowing whether her commitment to this place will matter in the end.

In the car, on her way back from the Beckett Street Garden, she gestures to the streets. “I’m not sugar-coating anything,” she says. “That is reality. But the part that’s beautiful is the resilience that children have, that families have, that people have. Growing up in this city, and still making some kind of life. That’s the part that’s beautiful.”
***
Last winter was the worst in recent memory. The hardy greens, herbs, and roots, everything that usually survives the winter, died - even Rodriguez’s bees froze to death. Spring planting was weeks behind.

But by late May, when I talked to Soria over the phone, she was gushing: Beckett Street garden was going gangbusters. They had so much extra produce they hardly knew what to do with it, and Rodriguez’s two brand-new hives were humming industriously.

Sometimes resilience means surviving long enough to get out, to build something new somewhere else. But sometimes, it means staying put. In Camden, that requires a certain grit, something the city’s gardeners have in abundance.

As Devlin says, “gardeners are a tenacious lot” - they work through rain, heat, and drought, hunkering down to weather each year’s winter, trusting that seeds will grow.

Correction: This article originally stated that Camden was across the Schuylkill River from Philadelphia. The river separating the two cities is the Delaware.


Kristin Moe wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media project that fuses powerful ideas and practical actions. Kristin writes about climate, grassroots movements, and social change. Follow her on Twitter @yo_Kmoe.

Wednesday 11 June 2014

Sharing City Seoul: a Model for the World

Mayor Park & Seoul citizens hear the call for a sharing city
by Cat Johnson, Shareable: http://www.shareable.net/blog/sharing-city-seoul-a-model-for-the-world

Citizens the world over are rallying around the sharing economy as a solution to the pressing challenges they face.

Cities, which are perfectly positioned to enact big changes on a human scale, have the potential to lead this movement.

Seoul, a city of 10 million people, is a shining example of how to do just that.

The city government has officially embraced the sharing economy by designating Seoul a Sharing City and is working in partnership with NGOs and private companies to make sharing an integral part of Seoul's economy.

Last year, Shareable reported on Seoul’s Sharing City initiative shortly after it was launched. Announcements had been made and initiatives were seeded, but Sharing City Seoul was brand new.

Now, over a year into the execution of the Sharing City project, we checked in to see how things are progressing. What we found is a city, led by Mayor Won-soon Park, a political independent who spent 30 years as a human rights activist, that is committed to the official implementation of the sharing economy.

Other city leaders take note: this mind-bogglingly dense city is creating an official sharing ecosystem and, led by the Seoul Innovation Bureau within the Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG), they are seeing promising early results.


Tool libraries are one of dozens of Sharing City projects.

Setting the Sharing Stage

Now one of the world’s most modern mega-cities, Seoul was leveled during the Korean War. But it has grown at a blazing fast rate to become a global leader in many dimensions since.

The rapid industrialization of Seoul, and the more recent economic slowdown, however, have come with a heavy price including high unemployment, housing costs, and air pollution. Within Seoul, there has been little peer-to-peer exchange of goods.

Like other economies marked by high levels of consumption, people tend to buy things new rather than share. This consumption mindset has led 49 percent of households into debt and created a massive waste management challenge as nearly 9,000 tons of trash is generated by Seoul every day.

Along with environmental problems, rapid growth also created social challenges. As Seoul expanded into a megacity, people became more and more isolated.

In the last 10 years, the number of seniors living alone in Seoul has grown from 90,000 to 230,000 and the suicide rate in Seoul has nearly doubled from 1,376 to 2,391, which has contributed to South Korea leading OECD countries in suicide per capita.

The fast pace of life in Seoul has contributed to South Korea ranking second in hours worked and having one of the lowest happiness scores among OECD countries.

Taken together, it's obvious there's a pressing need to reinvent the city. Seoul is certainly not the only city with these issues. It is, however, fertile ground for the sharing economy to take root.

Seoul has built world-class IT and civic infrastructure; it has the highest fiber optic broadband penetration and fastest Internet in the world; it offers free WiFi service in all outdoor spaces; and has the highest smartphone penetration rate in the world at over 67 percent. It also has one of the best subway systems, also wired for high speed Internet.

Using this infrastructure, in addition to strong public-private partnerships, the Sharing City project is working to connect people to sharing services and each other, recover a sense of trust and community, reduce waste and over-consumption, and activate the local economy.


Trying on suits at OpenCloset, one of the sharing company startups in Seoul

Inside the Sharing City

Mayor Park is leading a wave of social innovation in Seoul and opening a new chapter in the city's history.

The Sharing City is a sharp turn from the rapid growth of the last 40 years, but it’s one that the city government is fully embracing. And one that has the potential to transform "The Miracle on the Han.

Shareable’s co-founder Neal Gorenflo, who recently visited Seoul, points out that this ability to change quickly could catalyze their sharing economy. “If the South Korean people decide this is where they want to go,” he says, “I think they'll move quickly - just as they were able to move quickly to become a modern country.”

The city’s density, its tech-enabled citizenry, and world-class infrastructure can support Seoul’s plan to become a global leader of the sharing movement.

As Su Jeong Kim of the Social Innovation Division explains, Seoul has a unique environment with 60 percent of its inhabitants living in apartment buildings. The city is leveraging this by catalyzing the formation of lending libraries in apartment buildings.

There are now 32 apartment building lending libraries. While this is a small number for a mega-city, apartment building lending libraries have the potential to become social hubs for Seoul's many vertical communities.

“Seoul is a very dense city,” Kim says, explaining that a quarter of all South Koreans live in Seoul. “You can imagine how dense our city is. As a result, there are lots of apartment complexes with 1,000-2,000 people living together. It’s a difficult situation for community-building, but at the same time, it’s a very nice environment to gather...”

In-dong Cho, director-general of the Seoul Innovation Department, stresses the importance of utilizing these densely-populated apartments in rebuilding a sense of community.

“In order to regenerate communities in apartment complexes,” he says, “we recommend people establish share bookshelves, share libraries, share gardens and common tool warehouses, and to organize community activities through subsidies or grants.” He adds, “These movements toward sharing will restore dissolved communities and revive sharing culture in citizens’ daily lives.”

Grassroots citizen-driven sharing is just one aspect of the Sharing City. Another is official support for tech startups and other organizations working to catalyze more sharing in Seoul. But rather than taking a top-down approach, the city is acting as partner for emerging sharing initiatives.

“It is not desirable for government to directly intervene in the market to promote the sharing economy,” says Cho.

“The city needs to build infrastructure such as law, institution and social trust capital - the city needs to pave the way and strengthen the ecosystem for the sharing economy to thrive.” He adds that the sharing policy model of SMG is not a top-down nor bottom-up approach. “This is a creative, private-public partnership model of Seoul’s own.”


Shared bookshelves are being created as a way to reduce consumption and build community

Seoul’s Sharing City strategy has three prongs: change outdated laws and systems; support sharing enterprises; and encourage citizen participation.

Dozens of programs have been launched to support the initiative. They range in size from small, shared bookshelves to large-scale carsharing. Here are the key programs, some with initial results.

Public Buildings: Since the launch of the Sharing City, 779 public buildings have been opened to the public during idle hours for events, meetings, and more. These buildings have been utilized over 22,000 times by Seoul citizens.

Startup Incubation: 20 teams were selected for the Youth Business Startup Incubation program where they were provided office space, funds, and training or consulting.

ShareHub: Run by Creative Commons Korea, ShareHub is the go-to place to find all that can be shared in Seoul.

Financial Support: 461 million won ($450,000) has been invested in 27 sharing organizations or businesses. Among these are platforms that facilitate Airbnb-style homesharing, children’s clothing exchanges, parking space sharing, and goods sharing. These projects resulted in 359 shared parking lots; a 68% increase in homestays; and a doubling of the amount of children’s clothing shared from 18,000 to 40,000 items.

Startup School: To encourage entrepreneurialism, officials launched a program to help entrepreneurs understand the sharing economy and support them in creating sharing businesses.

Housing and Inter-generational Connection: To address the housing crisis and reduce the social isolation of seniors, a program was created to match young people with idle rooms in seniors’ houses. There have been 28 matches to date.

Seoul Youth Hub: Another initiative of the SMG, Seoul Youth Hub is a place for young adults to come together face-to-face to design the future society.

Car Sharing: There are 564 car sharing locations in Seoul with over 1,000 cars that have been shared 282,000 times through companies such as Socar and Greencar.

Bartering for Goods: Using e-Poomasi, people can barter for goods or services without using money. There have been 21,052 sharing transactions by 5,685 citizens in 15 districts so far.

Open Data Plaza: 1,300 data sets have been released to the public for use in business or civil society.

Lending Libraries: 32 lending libraries have been opened for books, tool rental and repair (plus woodworking programs).

Public Wi-Fi: 1,992 wireless access points have been established at markets, parks and government offices.

Seoul Photo Bank: Nearly 250,000 photos have been uploaded to this platform that sources images from citizens and the government. The photo bank is due to launch in July.

While these may seem like modest results for a mega-city, Mayor Park has a plan to scale the sharing economy.


Creative Commons Korea is a partner in the Sharing City. Here, they give a presentation about data sharing.

How Mayor Park Plans to Scale Seoul's Sharing Economy

Sharing City Seoul supports both the creation of new sharing businesses and the growth of existing companies.

Some of the standouts of Seoul’s sharing economy are: Kiple, a children’s clothing exchange; SoCar, a carsharing service; Zipbob, a p2p mealsharing platform that has a lot of traction; Kozaza, which is like Airbnb for traditional Korean houses, known as Hanok, that Gorenflo describes as “very beautiful, cozy, human-scale houses”; home sharing platforms BnBHero and WooZoo; suit rental platform OpenCloset; and Wisdome, a knowledge-sharing platform. Several of these businesses have seen 100 percent growth since the launch of Seoul’s Sharing City initiative.

To build trust in sharing companies, the Sharing City Seoul project is being rolled out through its 25 boroughs known as kus. Seoul's kus are similar in size and budget. Each ku has its own mayor and local government.

Because government-endorsed businesses are trusted by citizens, SMG introduced the sharing economy to two kus by endorsing Kiple, the children’s clothing exchange. The experiment proved to be successful - Kiple doubled sales in one year.

With this success, more kus want to join the trial. To fuel growth further, SMG created a positive competition between kus for sharing-related government grants.


One of a growing number of goods sharing sites in Seoul

Sharing City Challenges

Like other cities, the sharing economy in Seoul chafes against outdated regulation that hampers sharing.

Familiar issues, including regulations around car insurance and home sharing, are being addressed as part of the Sharing City initiative. Leaders are working with insurance providers and regulators to develop solutions.

“The main reason why SMG has actively implemented the sharing policies initiatives is that we want to expedite and boost the sharing economy through public-private partnership,” says Cho. “The startup businesses need to overcome a lot difficulties and obstructions to establish themselves. They cannot avoid confrontation and conflicts with existing industries, laws and regulations.”

He explains that startups will have difficulty addressing these matters on their own and that this is why SMG is working to reform regulation and lay a foundation for a sharing economy ecosystem.

“In other words,” Cho says, “the city of Seoul helps the sharing companies to take root well and settle down successfully in their markets.”

Many of the key decisions for the Sharing City project are made by the Sharing Promotion Committee comprising 12 members from the private sector and three from government. This reflects the city’s strategy to grow the sharing economy through public-private partnerships rather than in a top-down fashion.

A Growing Movement

Seoul is the sharing leader in South Korea, but other cities, including Busan, the second largest city, and Gwangju, are following Seoul's lead with similarly ambitious plans.

Around the world, cities have tiptoed into the waters of the sharing economy, but too often, it’s little more than a gesture. Seoul is a shining exception.

“They’re serious about it,” says Gorenflo, pointing out that other sharing city projects that have been announced with little follow through. San Francisco’s Mayor Lee was recently criticized because he created, but did little to nothing with, his Sharing Economy Working Group.

Similarly, 18 mayors signed on to a Shareable Cities Resolution at the US conference of mayors in 2013, but there doesn’t appear to be any follow on activity there either.

“A big lesson is, if you’re going to publicly declare yourself a sharing city, you better do something substantial or you’re going to get criticized,” says Gorenflo. “Seoul’s effort has substance. There are significant resources behind it. It’s well-integrated into their plans, and with their large innovation department, they’ll be able to implement it.”

He continues, “Another lesson for cities is that you have to invest in social innovation; you need to experiment to find solutions to social problems, and you need resources to run experiments. That’s what the Sharing City is, it’s an experiment, and it may be the most important one in the world.” 

Top photo: Outside Seoul City Hall, there's a model of an ear that symbolizes Mayor Park's commitment to listening to Seoul citizens. Follow @CatJohnson on Twitter.