On Hatred and Continuums: DeSean Jackson and GK Chesterton
July 11, 2011 § Leave a comment
Apparently Philadelphia Eagles’ wide receiver, DeSean Jackson, said something stupid on satellite radio last week, using homophobic slurs to shut down a caller. He later apologised on Twitter, but followed that up with a stupid comment about himself being the victim of people trying to take him down, though he has since deleted that tweet and replaced it with more apologies. Big deal, right? Well, sort of. See, Jackson has done a lot of good work in the world on behalf of bullied children, and bullying a belligerent caller makes him, well, a bully and therefore a hypocrite.
But the larger issue is the gay slur. Dan Graziano of ESPN comments that this hardly makes Jackson a homophobe, it just makes him stupid. “Gay” is a multi-faceted term, and is often used as a putdown or a dismissal in much the same way “sucks” is. That doesn’t make it right, however. In fact, it makes it offensive. For sure, Jackson wasn’t thinking of the deeper significance of the slur when he used it, but the very fact that “gay” is used in a negative connotation to note something sucks is problematic. “Gay” is a negative term in this sense, and that, I would argue, connects it to homophobia, even though it might not actually be homophobic. Either way, there is a continuum here.
I read all of this this morning after having read the most recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement I have received, due to the Canada Post strike. It’s dated 10 June. Anyway, the feature review is a discussion of two recent works on G.K. Chesterton (it’s behind the Times’ paywall, so I haven’t linked it here). I am no expert on Chesterton, in fact, I have never read him, nor am I all that likely to do so in the future, so take this for what it’s worth.
In discussing Ian Ker’s new biography of Chesterton, G.K. Chesterton: A Biography, reviewer Bernard Manzo discusses the charges of anti-Semitism against Chesterton. First, let it be clear that Chesterton lived during a time when anti-Semitism was fashionable in the European and North American world. Second, anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism. Both Ker and Manzo attempt to downplay Chesterton’s anti-Semitism, to qualify it. I’m not so sure.
Both Manzo and Ker point out that Chesterton did not believe Jews to be capable of being Italian, English, French, etc., due to the simple fact that they were Jews, and that “Jews should be represented by Jews and ruled by Jews” and that they should have their own homeland. Indeed, Chesterton argued that all Christians should be Zionist, though, ironically, he also argued that no Christian should be an anti-Semite. Ironic because he was one.
Chesterton also argued that those Jews who lived in other countries should be sent to homelands, not unlike that imagined by Michael Chabon in his novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. Or perhaps, more to the point, not unlike the “homelands” for black South Africans during the Apartheid era, or reserves for aboriginals in Canada, or, ghettos for Jews in Nazi Europe. But Ker (and Manzo) think that this could not have been the logical outcome for Chesterton, who was “perfectly sincere” in his suggestion that Jews be excluded from mainstream society.
Both Ker and Manzo play down this anti-Semitism, arguing that it needs to be cast in light of Chesterton’s deep abhorrence of Nazism and its vicious anti-Semitism in the years before his death in 1936. I remain unconvinced. Certainly, Chesterton’s anti-Semitism did not advocate the extreme ends of Hitler and the Nazis. But that doesn’t make it ok. It doesn’t mean that Chesterton was not an anti-Semite. Qualifications such as that made by Ker and Manzo are problematic, in that they simply point to complications of character.
Certainly, we are complicated creatures, we have internal contradictions and ambiguities, that’s what makes us human. But it should not let Chesterton off the hook anymore than noting that he lived in an era when anti-Semitism was fashionable. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has argued that Nazism was the logical outcome of this pan-Atlantic world anti-Semitism (he is less successful in arguing Germans were complicit in the Holocaust). If this is indeed the case, then Chesterton belongs on the continuum of Atlantic world anti-Semitism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And attempts to discount it like those of Ker and Manzo are simply intellectual gymnastics and reek of intellectual dishonesty.
Globalised Montréal
May 12, 2011 § Leave a comment
In the past few years, there’s been a new trend in Montréal History and historiography that has seen us seek to place the city within a global context. This is a welcome change from our usual navel-gazing, as we sought to explain developments in Canada solely within a Canadian context. Certainly, the local context is important, but Canada did not develop in solitude. It was always a colony and nation tied into global political and economic currents, closely related to goings-on in Paris, London, and Washington. Indeed, scholars of Canadian foreign policy have long framed Canada within the North Atlantic Triangle, along with the UK and USA.
But, culturally and socially, while historians have noted the impact of British and/or American ideas in Canada, we have gone onto explain and analyse the Canadian context separate from the global. In Québec, though, perhaps due to political exigencies. Back in undergrad at UBC, Alan Greer’s masterful book, The Patriots and the People was the first study I ever read that attempted to internationalise Canadian history. In it, Greer re-cast the 1837 Patriote rebellions in Lower Canada within the revolutionary fervour that had swept Europe and the United States since the late 18th century. Seen in this light, the Parti Patriote wasn’t just a nationalist French Canadian political party, but part of an international of liberal revolutionaries that had corollaries in England, Ireland, France, the German territories, the Italian countries, the United States, and so on.
Greer’s book fit into the larger work of the revisionist Québec historians, who often sought to put Québec into a global context, both to explain the colony/province/nation’s development, as well as to give credence to Québec’s claims to nationhood. The goal was to present Québec as a nation commes les autres. Perhaps the book that had the greatest impact on me in this sense was Gérard Bouchard’s 2000 monograph, Genèse des nations et cultures du Nouveau Monde: Essai d’histoire comparée, in which Bouchard examines the development of Québec in relation to other “new world” cultures in Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. Put this way, Québec’s (and Canada’s) development from the moment of European settlement is globalised and we realise that Canada (and Québec) is not really all that unique.
This tendency to internationalise Québec seems to be continuing with a younger generation of historians. My friend and colleague, Simon Jolivet, has just published his new book, Le vert et le bleu: Identité québécoise et identité irlandaise au tournant du XXe siècle. Simon and I did our PhDs together at Concordia, and in 2006, the School of Canadian Irish Studies there hosted a roundtable discussion that looked at connections between Ireland and Québec, in large part this grew out of the work our PhD supervisor, Ronald Rudin had done early in the decade. It was probably the most dynamic and informative conference I’ve been at, as ideas flew around the table. Both Simon and I gained a lot from that conference and it is clear in both of our work.
For my part, I am interested in the Irish in Griffintown, Montréal, over the course of the 20th century. What I look at is, of course, identity, but I’m interested in the shaping of a diasporic identity amongst the Montréal Irish, one that situates the Irish of the city within the global context of the Irish around the world, as well as the links (such as they were) with Ireland itself. To do so, I make use of post-colonial theory, which seems particularly à-propos for the Irish, descendents of a colonial culture in Ireland, living in Montréal, the largest city of the French diaspora and thus necessarily a post-colonial location.
And this is what Sean Mills picks up in his brilliant new book, The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal. Mills situates Montréal within that postcolonial framework, and examines the ideas of decolonisation and colonialism within activist circles in Montréal in the 60s. The activists were heavily influenced by what was going on in the world around them, in de-colonial movements in Algeria, Tunisia, and, especially, Cuba, as well as the Caribbean in the 50s and 60s. Certainly, they were well aware of their skin colour and Canada’s place as a first-world nation. But the ambivalence of Montréal (still the economic centre of Canada in the 60s) is something Mills excels at drawing out. As the decade went on, American activists, in particular African American activists like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, became influential in the de-colonial struggle of the French Canadian majority of the city. This was further complicated by Montréal’s own black population, which also identified itself with the ideas coming out of the United States and the Caribbean. And as Montréal became a more complicated city, ethnically-speaking, to say nothing of the actions of the FLQ in October 1970, ideas of decolonisation lost their appeal.
Nonetheless, what is clear is that Montréal is a global city, one that takes its cue from its global connections as much as its local ones. Indeed, this is the basis of my next project about layers of diaspora on the urban landscape of the city. In the meantime, it also gives me a way to situate my own work on the Irish of Montréal in a larger global context.
Community in Pointe-Saint-Charles
April 29, 2011 § 3 Comments
Pointe-Saint-Charles has historically been an inner-city working-class neighbourhood. And a forgotten one, hemmed in by the industrial nature of the Lachine Canal and the Canadian National Railway tracks and train yards. The inhabitants toiled away for long hours for low wages, often without security of tenure at work. And then deindustrialisation hit the Pointe hard in the 70s and 80s. Suddenly, all the people who worked long hours for low wages couldn’t work anymore for any wages. And the Pointe’s unemployment rate shot up, reaching something like 33% by 1990. Even today, with creeping gentrification, the Pointe still has shocking pockets of poverty, high unemployment, and high reliance on social services. Each week, the food bank at St. Gabriel’s Church across the street from my flat has a long line outside it. The Mission du Grand Berger on rue Centre and the charity shop in the back of the towering Église Saint-Charles are going concerns. As is the pawn shop and the dollar stores on Centre. Wellington, the former commercial hub of the Pointe, looks like a ghost town.
In short, the Pointe is a classic, inner-city, downtrodden neighbourhood. And yet, it has one of the strongest senses of community I have ever seen in a city. And it is an inclusive community, one that welcomes all: French, English, working class, yuppies, immigrants. The lingering tension that hangs over the sud-ouest of Montréal between French and English doesn’t exist here. The tensions surrounding gentrification is also more or less absent. The block I live on is a dividing line between the yuppies and the working classes. I live on the north side, the yuppified side. And yet, everyone is friendly. This is seriously a place where you go into the dépanneur and end up having a 20-minute conversation with the shopkeeper and customers about the Habs. Where you know your neighbours.
The sense of community is deeply-rooted in the Pointe. One of the focal points is the Clinique communitaire de Pointe-Saint-Charles on rue Ash in the southern end of the neighbourhood. The Clinic was founded back in 1968 when a bunch of radical medical students from McGill came down here and were appalled by what they saw in terms of public health. My favourite story involved a young girl who said that when she went to the bathroom at home, she had to pound the floor with her shoes so that the rats didn’t bite her. So they did something. They weren’t entirely welcomed by the people of the Pointe, it must be noted. Instead of picking up their marbles and going home, instead they invited the community to get involved. The Clinic was a radical organisation, grassroots in nature, and the medical staff there made the connection between poverty, ill health, and mental health. The Clinic has had a psychiatrist on staff since 1970.
The Pointe Clinic predates Québec’s innovative CLSC (Centre local des services communitaire) system, a sort of front-line centre for health and other social services in the communities of the province. In fact, the Pointe Clinic was a model for Robert Bourassa’s Liberals when they created the CLSC system in 1974. The Pointe Clinic demanded that it’s autonomy be respected and the government left it outside of the CLSC system. Five years later, the Parti Québécois of René Lévesque was in power, and the government attempted to bring the Pointe Clinic into the CLSC system. Bad move, as the community mobilised and protested against the government’s decision. The government had no choice but to back down. Indeed, the Health Minister said: “Compte tenu de votre existence antérieure à l’implantation des CLSC, le ministère des affaires sociales a confirmé son intention de ne pas vous assimiler à ce type d’établissement mais bien de respecter la spécificité de votre organisme.”
And so the Clinic survived and thrived, as it continued to grow in terms of staff and importance in the community. Indeed, the Clinic is still run by members of the community, not the medical staff and certainly not the government. But this autonomy has not been easy to protect. Perhaps the greatest battle came in 1992, when Robert Bourassa and the Liberals were back in power. That year, the government proposed the Loi sur la santé et les services sociaux. As the Clinic explains on its website:
Le projet de loi C-120 menace la survie de la Clinique en la plaçant devant un choix qui n’en est pas un : soit la Clinique conserve sa charte d’organisme communautaire ‘privé’ et perd alors son permis de CLSC ainsi que le financement qui lui ai rattaché, soit elle devient un CLSC ‘public’ et renonce à sa charte et à son mode de fonctionnement communautaire.
Bad move, government. The community of Pointe-Saint-Charles mobilised on the streets. 600 people marched to protest the government’s plan. There was street theatre and delegations to the local and provincial politicians. Half of the adult population of the Pointe signed a petition protesting the government’s plans. The government had no choice but to back down.
A final battle in the middle of the last decade saw the Clinic brought within the larger system, but at the same time maintaining its autonomy. No one calls it the CLSC here in the Pointe. Instead, we all know it as the Clinique Communautaire de Pointe-Saint-Charles, or the Clinic.
A second branch was opened on rue Centre. One of the deepest ironies of a protest against the condofication of the neighbourhood came a couple of years ago when a condo development on Centre, next door to the CLSC went up in flames when it was still under construction. The developers returned, and rebuilt the condos. But those who suffered: the small drycleaner next door and the CLSC, which was closed for nearly a year as it attempted to recover.
The Clinic is a community centre in the Pointe, something for which the people here have every right to be proud. And because the people of the Pointe have been so successful in creating and protecting their clinic, the community here has been able to successfully protect itself from some forms of gentrification. I had the opportunity to spend a fair amount of time at the Clinic this winter due to some freaky health issues, and I was always blown away by the ways in which this community has mobilised to protect itself.
These days, the big issue is what is to become of the CNR yards at the southern end of the neighbourhood, the point for which Pointe-Saint-Charles is named. Rather than allow a bunch of condos be thrown up on the old rail yards , the Comité Action CN formed out of the Carrefour d’éducation populaire de Pointe-Saint-Charles on rue Centre to protect the community and to propose an alternative for the development of those lands. Last autumn, the Comité created a glossy publication, “Les terrains du CN de Pointe-Saint-Charles: Des proposition citoyennes.” Not wishing to be subject to expensive condos that will further alienate the residents of the neighbourhood and continue to put affordable housing out of reach, to say nothing of the pollution and noise caused by the construction condos on the site, the Comité proposes community gardens and a market, and to use the old buildings as a new community centre, as well as a housing co-operative. But before any of this happens, the Comité insists that the CN lands need to be decontaminated.
Too often I read of laments for community, or worse yet, the argument that community can only be forged by yuppies in their soul-less condos. Clearly, the Pointe says otherwise.
Planet of Slums or Arrival Cities?
April 28, 2011 § 2 Comments
It was with great anticipation that I opened Douglas Saunders‘ recent book, Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World. The reviews I’d read of the book praised its brilliance and Saunders’ regular column for The Globe & Mail suggested this was a book anyone who thinks and writes about cities themselves had to read. It is rare I have been so disappointed in a book.
I will write in greater detail about Arrival City on my blog at Current Intelligence in the next month or so, but for now, let me just say that this book is a massive disappointment. Saunders does little more than re-hash neo-liberal, whiggish arguments about progress and the city and how the city is the panacea to all that threatens humanity and the environment. The problems begin with what Saunders calls an “arrival city,” which is never properly defined. Could be a city, could be a neighbourhood, could be a slum, could be all kinds of things. But the rest of the book more or less dismisses the problem of the slum in the developing world. Saunders acknowledges that they exist, but then goes on to suggest they are just temporary dwellings for people on the rise into the middle-classes. He picks up Hernando de Soto’s argument that all slum-dwellers in the developing world need is security of tenure, to own their own homes and property. This is the solution to poverty in slums. To prove his point, Saunders, a journalist, puts a human face on the residents of the slums, but he tends to pick people who are successful, who do get out of the slums. He champions the spread of middle-class North American culture (and its attendant free-trade) around the globe as the solution to urban poverty. Of course, this proves his point, about how these arrival cities are just that, a sort of purgatory for migrants from the countryside, a way-station on their way to respectability and security in the city.
I read Arrival City in conjunction with Mike Davis‘ Planet of Slums. The contrast between the two studies could not be more shocking. Whereas Davis has often been criticised as being too harsh in his arguments about the problem of slums and development globally, the problem with Saunders is the exact opposite: he’s far too wide-eyed to the point where he seems to be ignoring the harsh realities of life in slums of cities in the developing world.
Les Expos, Nos Amours: Gone, but not Forgotten
April 25, 2011 § Leave a comment
Last October, as the Expos should have been winning the World Series, I wrote a piece at the National Council on Public History‘s blog, Off the Wall, about the strange marketing after life of Nos Amours. This provoked a steady stream of comments, both on that site and into my inbox, as well, to a lesser degree, here at Spatialities. One of my readers, Sarah, pointed out Montréal rapper Magnum .357′s track “Expos Fitted.
It seems that rap has emerged as a key component to remembering our long gone baseball team here in Montréal. Aside from Mag .357, Anakkin Slayd, who is more famous right now for his viral hit, “MTL Stand UP”, also wrote a song about the Expos, “Remember”.
The Real IRA and the Royal Wedding
April 24, 2011 § Leave a comment
Oh, dear God. British security officials are apparently afraid that the “Real” IRA is going to try to attack the Royal Wedding this week, in part due to its proximity to Easter, a high point on the Irish commemorative calendar. The first real salvo of the wars in Ireland was fired over Easter 1916, as the Irish Republican Brotherhood seized the General Post Office in central Dublin and proclaimed the Irish Republic. Indeed, today marks the 95th anniversary of The Rising, which was put down in brutal fashion by the British in less than a week. Nevertheless, 1916 has long held a special place in Irish memory. And 5 May marks the 30th anniversary of the death of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands inside the Maze Prison.
The Real IRA (RIRA) grew out of the Provisional IRA (Provos), which carried out much of the activities of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, in 1997. The leadership of the RIRA, which included Bobby Sands’ sister, was frustrated with the Provos’ co-operation with the peace process in Northern Ireland. It was the RIRA which carried out the Omagh bombing of 15 August 1998, the single most deadly attack of the Troubles, killing 29 and injuring over 200 others. Since then, the RIRA has been somewhat ambivalent. Due to the outcry over Omagh, the RIRA was forced to declare a ceasefire in September 1998. This lasted two years.
The RIRA was unwilling to cause further deaths in Northern Ireland, no doubt worried about the bad PR that would result from such incidents, and instead focused its attention on England. The most significant of these events was the shooting of a rocket grenade at MI6 headquarters in September 2000. After a brief fallow period, the RIRA has continued to carry out attacks in both Northern Ireland and England since, as recently as last autumn.
It’s in this context that news that British intelligence officials are telling reporters that they have information that the RIRA is seeking to expand its base of operations from Northern Ireland to England seem odd. Indeed, Ben O’Loughlin at the Duck of Minerva wonders, amongst other things, that if British intel had information that an attack by the RIRA (or anyone for that mater) on the Royal Wedding, would it be made public in the first place?
John Lorinc, Cities: A Groundwork Guide
April 24, 2011 § Leave a comment
[Eds. note: Over the next few weeks, I will be re-publishing some of the articles I wrote for the Complex Terrain Laboratory, a precursor to Current Intelligence magazine. For the most part, these are articles I don’t want to lose, so re-posting them here is my way of creating an archive of them. Some are book reviews, a series of articles on cities and the slum, and some on landscape, memory, and archaeology.]
John Lorinc, Cities: A Groundwork Guide. Toronto & Berkeley, CA: Groundwood/House of Anansi, 2009. 140pp + index, $11.00 (CAN) $10.00 (USA)
2009 was a watershed for humanity. It was the first time that a majority of people, worldwide, lived in urban areas. This was fuelled by a process of urbanisation in the developing world; in western Europe and Canada, the majority of people lived in cities by the First World War. The United States reached this milestone shortly thereafter. But in the developing world, people remained primarily rural until the past couple of decades when industrialisation reached this part of the world, in large part because North American and European companies began to outsource and move production off-shore. This, in turn, had massive consequences for cities in this part of the world, as jobs dried up and industrial areas were abandoned. This has led to a paradoxical situation in terms of urbanism in the world. For example, Manila has grown by some 10.5 million people since 1951 to its present population of 12 million. Meanwhile, Detroit and other cities in the North American rustbelt have experienced depopulation in the past few decades.
Throughout all of this, cities, especially in the industrialised world, gain more power and influence, not just on the national scale (such as London, the British metropole), but on the global scale (London remains the financial capital of the world, a position it has held for centuries).[1] And in the process, cities, worldwide, continue to grow, becoming larger than some nations. For example, there are more people in Tokyo than in all of Canada. That is a mind-boggling thought, given the size of Canada’s geographic footprint (the 2nd largest nation in terms of landmass in the world) compared to that of Tokyo.
It is in this context that Canadian journalist John Lorinc has written a primer on cities for the 21st century, the appropriately titled Cities. Lorinc is a specialist on urban affairs, his work having appeared in several Canadian publications; he also currently contributes to the New York Times’ eco-business blog, “Green Inc.: Energy, the Environment, and the Bottom Line.” His last book, 2006’ The New City: How the Crisis in Canada’s Large Urban Centres is Re-Shaping the Nation (Penguin) was especially well-received and serves as somewhat of a basis for his argument in Cities, insofar as he notes the power of cities. In Canada, a full one-third of the nation’s population lives in the three largest cities: Toronto, Montréal, and Vancouver. In this sense, then, Lorinc is very well-positioned to ponder the plight, role, and impact of global cities in the 21st century.
Cities is the latest edition to a series from revered Canadian independent publisher, House of Anansi Press, the Groundwork Guides. Previous volumes have examined topics as diverse as oil, empire, genocide, slavery, and sex. The series is meant to provide an overview of cultural and political issues, offering “both a lively introduction and a strong point of view.” [back cover]. Lorinc accomplishes both, this volume is a lively discussion of the role and plight of cities, and though his “strong point of view” is somewhat muted in his prose, it is very clear. Lorinc argues that we must be conscious and aware of the impact of cities on our wider culture, their economic, cultural, and political power, to say nothing of their environmental impact, and the plight of the poor in the megacities of the developing world. In making this argument, though, Lorinc isn’t really saying anything new, nor anything controversial. He covers the expected, and says the expected.
Rather than focus on the benefits and upside of city life, like other urbanists like Jane Jacobs and Richard Florida, Lorinc is more interested in problematising the city. And this is beneficial tact to take. Whereas as Jacobs and Florida focus on how the city is a creative force, a site of community, and so on, this is limiting argument and only deals with a minority of cities and a minority of people in cities worldwide. Lorinc’s more comprehensive approach to the city allows for a wider analysis, both in the developed and developing worlds. Indeed, the problem with Florida, in particular, is that he is not all that interested in slums and the poor in North American’s cities, which is troubling.
Nevertheless, while Lorinc travels down a road already well-travelled in Cities, his gift lies in the quick and coherent synthesis of the urban condition in the new century. Broken up into 7 simple chapters, he gives us an overview of the issues facing cities the world over today. He also moves easily from the developed to the developing worlds, between the historical and the contemporary. Each chapter covers a central concept of urbanism: the city in the 21st century, urban forms and functions, sprawl, the environment and energy, transportation, poverty, and crimes, epidemics, and terrorism. In addition to this division, the book is unofficially split so that the first half more or less focuses on the developed world, whilst the second half deals with the developing world. The division isn’t absolute, of course, as both halves of the globe fit into the discussion throughout.
Central to the analysis is the environment, and the city’s impact upon it, in both the developed and developing world. Each chapter serves as an introduction to the topic and hand, and whilst it is impossible for Lorinc to be comprehensive and exhaustive in the roughly 20 pages devoted to each chapter, he excels in introducing the problems and challenges facing cities to his readers.
Cities are incredibly complex and complicated socio-political structures. They require careful- and micro- management; problems arise from dense population structures, complicated landscapes, environmental degradation, communications and transportation, amongst other things. And Lorinc is best at pointing out that the problems that the megacities of the developing world face are problems that cities in the developed world are perpetually struggling with.
Most obvious here is the question of the environment. Cities are cesspools of pollution and toxicity. As noted, Lorinc’s discussion of the environmental impact of cities dominates this book; no fewer than 3 chapters (3: Sprawl Happens; 4: Environment and Energy; 5: Cities and Transportation) are dominated by environmental questions. Chapter 3 examines the environmental (and socio-cultural) consequences of urban sprawl, primarily in Europe and North America. Here, Lorinc touts cities that have managed to tout responsible development, vertical rather than horizontal. Manhattan and the west end of Vancouver are two such examples, as they provide high-density urban settlement of high-rise condo development. His argument is hurt, however, in a table that accompanies this discussion, a “selected” listing of the population density of the worlds 250 largest cities. The table, however, is ultimately meaningless, in part because we don’t know the overall population of the cities, and the neighbourhoods/boroughs that he points to in his text aren’t in the table. Manhattan is grouped in with the rest of New York City, which sees its density rating fall to 16th on the table (though whether that is 16th in the world or not is another matter entirely) and Vancouver isn’t listed at all. In short, this table is rendered ultimately useless, as it offers us no real basis of comparison. For example, while it is clear that Atlanta is much less dense than, say, London, this nugget means nothing to me without information on overall population size and geographic footprint of the two cities.
Lorinc also focuses on the degradation of the air we breathe in urban centres, offering a quick discussion of air-borne pollution in western cities during the industrial revolution. Here he notes that by the 1880s, London’s air was close to being a toxic soup. Oddly, though, he doesn’t mention the most obvious and famous example of air-borne toxicity in the developed world: Los Angeles. That being said, he notes the lack of political will in battling air-borne pollution, politicians were not all that keen on dealing with the problem because of the damage it would to do the local economy and business. Whilst London is his example, nearly every industrial city in Western Europe and North America has faced this problem. Indeed, this seems to still be the crux of the question of global warming and environmental degradation today, as politicians remain unwilling to show leadership and make hard decisions, out of fear of upsetting the populace and damaging the economy (despite the fact that many studies note that implementing the Kyoto Accord would not harm the economy in the way that its alarmist opponents suggest), to say nothing of their chances at re-election.
Lorinc then nicely segues into a discussion of “Environmental Degradation in the South’s Megacities.” Here, he deftly explores the problems facing these cities. For example, he points to Lagos, the largest city and capital of Nigeria, which is a bustling metropolis of around 8 million (Lorinc uses the metropolitan population of 15 million [ed.: see my post on the difficulty in using Metropolitan population statistics here]). Here he cites journalist George Packer, who has noted that the inner-city urban slums of Lagos are, in part, built on and around a heavily-polluted lagoon. (As an aside, it is interesting to note that Lagos’ entry on Wikipedia makes absolutely no mention of the city’s slums).[2] The polluted water of Lagos Lagoon is where the poor draw their water from, and where fishermen catch food. The consequences of this for the health of these slum residences are obvious. In discussing Lagos’ problems, however, it is interesting to note that Lorinc doesn’t point to the obvious source of the problem of pollution and a lack of regulation: there is no central urban government for the Lagos metropolitan area, the municipal government that does exist only serves a small core at the centre of the city.
Emissions are also a problem in these megacities of the developing world. Even smaller cities are moving towards an environmental apocalypse. Recently, China eclipsed the United States as the world’s emissions leader; of the top 20 cities in terms of emissions worldwide, 16 are Chinese. The problem, in part, is due to the fact that the Chinese tend to incinerate their garbage, which causes serious emissions problems. But Lorinc misses the other side of the equation here: automobiles. And China’s streets and roads teem with automobiles belching emissions into the environment. Indeed, the picture of China Lorinc paints in Cities reminds me of Dr. Seuss’ iconic Lorax, who speaks for the trees. But the Chinese experience also points to another question of emissions and global warming, as the developing world is unwilling to be held to standards designed to ease the problems, arguing that such regulations would be handicaps to their own development. They quickly point to the fact that North American and European nations were not subjected to such regulation during their period of industrialisation.
The discussion about trash is important because garbage dumps are quickly emerging not just as environmental disasters waiting to happen, but because slums are developing in and around them in various cities, such as Lagos, Buenos Aires, and Manila, amongst others. In these cities, garbage is just piled up on top of itself in dumps (not that the developed world has a great record here, New York City has garbage barges floating in its harbour, and Toronto is engaged in an on-going battle with Michigan about where to put its garbage). Dumps in these developing world cities have become the site of labour-intensive recycling businesses. Scavengers, many of them children, dig through the dumps earning their keep, usually a few dollars a day, which they earn by selling what they find to scrap companies. The scrap companies themselves turn around and make a handsome profit by selling the goods to recycling companies. Not surprisingly, work conditions are brutal and dangerous, not to mention unsanitary. It doesn’t take much of imagination to visualise these scrap-pickers climbing over the mountains of garbage, trying to avoid cesspools of toxic runoff, lethal smoke, bulldozers, garbage trucks, birds of prey, and insects. Accidents can be fatal, Lorinc reports, such as in 2000 when the 20-hectare Pyatas dump in Manila capsized. The garbage has been piled up to 13-storeys high when it fell over, smothering several hundred trash-pickers who lived in shanties at the foot of the garbage.
But it’s not just these megacities in the global South that are leading us to environmental danger, writes Lorinc. Cities in the developed world are also intimately connected to our long-term survival in terms of climate change: “The reason is that wealthy nations are heavily urbanized, so the way these cities grow has a direct bearing on the pace of global warming, which in turn is already causing havoc in populous low-lying cities.” [p. 56]. Here, he points to Tokyo as a model. Tokyo’s housing requires less energy than is the case in Europe and North America; the city is more tightly-packed and the transit system is both cost-effective and efficient, making the city easier to navigate.
Lorinc spends some time discussing environmentally-responsible architecture, as well as the reclamation of brownfields for housing and other purposes. Brownfields are former industrial areas, located all over cities in the developed world, the consequence of the de-industrialisation of the developed world in the mid-20th century. Lorinc correctly points to the redevelopment of brownfields in city cores as a means of increasing density, as well as developing better transit systems. But he misses a prime opportunity to discuss the legacy of industrialisation in North American and Western European cities. For example, I live in a former industrial neighbourhood in Montréal, surrounded by former factories and other sorts of industrial concerns. My neighbourhood is like many around Europe and North America; cities like Pittsburgh have been left with massive brownfields that they have tried to redevelop to recover from deindustrialisation. Some of the factories in my neighbourhood have been reclaimed as condos and office space. Others, like the former metalshop that forms the backwall of my back garden, stand derelict and abandoned. Nearby is the Lachine Canal, on the banks of which the Canadian industrial revolution began back in the 1840s. In other words, I live in a neighbourhood that has been the site of almost continual industrial activity for the past 160 years (a few factories and railyards still exist). To this day, the leisure craft that ply the canal today (it has been reclaimed as a recreation site) cannot travel at speeds in excess of 15 km/h, otherwise they run the risk of stirring up the toxic silt on the floor of the canal. Redevelopment in my neighbourhood usually means cleaning the soil, but either way, there are serious environmental issues in neighbourhoods such as mine, ones that Lorinc doesn’t explore.
One way in which North American cities, in particular, can contribute to reversing climate change is through the implementation of viable public transit systems. Most of the major cities in Canada and the US have good public transit: New York City, Chicago, Boston, Montréal, Toronto, for example. Others, however, do not, such as Houston, or Calgary, or Atlanta. These three cities are also home to considerable urban sprawl. And Lorinc notes that this sprawl isn’t conducive to public transit:
there’s a powerful economic relationship between transit, population density and land-use planning. Transit agencies must make substantial investments in vehicles and other equipment, like signalling systems. They have hefty operating expenses, such as drivers’ salaries, vehicle maintenance and fuel costs…without a critical mass of riders, transit service becomes unaffordable and inefficient. In general, transit riders want convenience, reliable and efficient service, and value for their money. When a transit service doesn’t generate enough revenue, it often cuts back on service – for example, by reducing the number of vehicles running on any given route. And when that happens, commuters…are much more likely to rely on their vehicles. [pp. 72-3]
And whilst this is certainly true, what Lorinc overlooks is that two of his examples of sprawl cities, Houston and Calgary, are the centres of the oil industry in the United States and Canada. Another city with a shoddy public transportation system is Detroit, home of the domestic car industry in the United States. In the case of Detroit, the car companies made sure that the city didn’t have a viable and efficient public transit system; what would it say if the home of the car companies had efficient transit? It would hurt their bottom lines. Certainly, the fact that public transit in Calgary and Houston is a dodgy proposition is not all that surprising.
The discussion of epidemics and the city in the final chapter is quite timely, given the recent worldwide paranoia about H1N1. Our concentration in cities will make the transmission of H1N1 faster and more intense (though, of course, H1N1 remains less potent than common influenza, at least in Canada and the United States). Indeed, cities in the industrialised world used to be cesspools of disease and epidemics, even as recently as the late 19th century. Montréal was the site of the last smallpox epidemic in the industrialised west, in 1885. Epidemiology in 1885 was only starting to develop, but its successive advancement throughout the 20th century has meant that epidemics like the Spanish influenza in the wake of World War I have become increasingly a thing of the past. Governments, at all levels, have recognised their responsibility to protect the health and lives of their citizens. To that end, massive public health bureaucracies have grown in the industrialised north to protect us from disease. However, this doesn’t mean that we are no longer vulnerable. Lorinc reminds us of this when he points to the 2003 SARS outbreak in Toronto. SARS originated in the Guangdong region of China before spreading, primarily to Hong Kong, Singapore, and Toronto. Why an outbreak occurred in Toronto, rather than Vancouver, itself a major city of the Chinese diaspora, is instructive. In Ontario, the province of which Toronto is the capital, a right-wing, anti-big government administration came to power 8 years earlier, and proceeded to radically slash government spending in all areas, including public health. The consequences were disastrous, as hundreds were infected and quarantined, and 43 people died in Toronto from SARS, as hospitals lacked the resources to deal with the infection (in Walkerton, Ontario, a small city, government cutbacks led to a fatal outbreak of e.coli in the water supply in 2000). Meanwhile, in Vancouver, writes Lorinc,
provincial labor officials had trained health care workers in the proper use of special masks and other safety systems designed to protect them from catching contagious diseases while administering emergency procedures to ill patients.[p. 121].
All in all, Lorinc provides us with an instructive and lively introduction to the problems facing cities and, as a result, humanity in the urban century. That being said, however, his conclusion remains rather trite and does a disservice to the discussion throughout the book:
The twenty-first metropolis will be a concentrated place of nearly unfathomable diversity – ethnic, social, economic, environmental, religious. Large cities have become a microcosm of everything that’s taking place in this complex world. For good or ill, they are our future. [p. 128].
Old Hawley Town Commons Redux
April 24, 2011 § 2 Comments
Last October, I wrote a piece on the Old Hawley Town Commons in Massachusetts. Hawley is a tiny and sparsely populated township in the hills of Western Massachusetts. There isn’t more than 350 people in Hawley and there is no actual centre to the town, residents rely on neighbouring Charlemont for services.
The hills of Western Massachusetts are fascinating from an historical perspective, the landscape is dotted with abandoned homes and farmsteads. Up the hill from our home there, there is an ancient stone fence, designed to demarcate one farm from the next. Surrounding this fence is nothing but trees, there is no clearance, no evidence of there ever having been any agricultural, or for that matter, any human, activity there. At the bottom of our hill, there is an abandoned farmhouse, said to be haunted by the ghost of an old farmwife who lost her mind.
As I noted in October, when we think historically about the landscape, we tend to think of cities, of the archaeology of settlement and industry in urban centres. But the Old Hawley Town Commons reminds us that the wilderness also has stories to tell us. I am revisiting the Old Hawley Town Commons because of a comment I received on the October post from John Sears, the historian of the site. You can visit the website here, and you can take a virtual tour.
John also reports in his comment that:
Recently, the Sons & Daughters of Hawley received a new grant from MassHumanities to carry out an archeological dig at the site of the Sanford Tavern at Hawley’s Old Town Common in collaboration with Mohawk Trail Regional High School. Students from the school will participate in the dig under the supervision of an archeologist and a teacher. We hope to learn something new about life in Hawley 180 years ago!
Happy Failweek!
April 5, 2011 § 4 Comments
My Twitter friend, Emilie Wapnick, one, has a great website, and two, an interesting idea. She wants to celebrate failure.
But I object to the idea that failure is “feedback.” I don’t think so. Failure is failure. Calling it feedback just sounds like some touchy-feely way of making it feel like I never lose, of saving our self-esteem. We all win, we all lose, we all have successes and failures. That’s life. Indeed, Frank Sinatra made exactly that point in song:
That’s life, that’s what all the people say.
You’re riding high in April,
Shot down in May
But I know I’m gonna change that tune,
When I’m back on top, back on top in June.
To call our failures feedback, while an admirable idea in order to get us to learn from our mistakes, is wrong-headed. We need to learn from our failures, but we don’t learn from sugar-coating things, at least in my humble opinion.
But Emilie’s idea goes beyond this:
How about instead of denying the existence of failure (since it’s “all feedback”), we acknowledge that it exists and embrace it. What if we actually PRAISED people for failing? What if success were measured by ACTION rather than results?
I think that if we all took some time to praise failure and even encourage it on a regular basis, there would be much more experimentation, creativity and innovation in the world.
The more we celebrate failure, the more we’ll all be encouraged to take action. So lets do it. Lets take this week and celebrate our most mortifying, horrific, soul-crushing failures!
Alright, so I’m never going to celebrate my mortifying, horrific soul-crushing failures. I don’t think that does anything, I prefer to grieve in private, lick my wounds, and figure out how to go forward.
But I love Emilie’s idea of measuring success by action foremost. Results are important, but sometimes we need to take action even if we’re going to lose, to “fight the good fight,” so to speak. This is part and parcel of the working-class Irish-Catholic culture I come from, immortalised in song by the Dropkick Murphys in their song for “Irish” Micky Ward (who, I must gloat, got his clock cleaned by my hometown boy, the late Arturo Gatti), “The Warrior’s Code”:
Failure works in many ways. It can work in the Mickey Ward sense of not giving up, or in the sense any good activist knows, of fighting the good fight whatever the results. But sometimes success comes from failure, too, as some of the people Emilie talked to on her blog point out. One of my favourite Simpsons moments (yes, there once was a time when that show was funny) comes when Lisa points out to Homer that the Chinese have the same word for crisis and opportunity. Homer, who had been down for some reason or other, immediately brightens up, allegedly recalling the word “crisitunity.” Ok, so we can laugh at Homer’s stupidity, but there’s a point to be made here.
And if we choose not to sink into the doldrums over failure, if we instead celebrate some forms of it, then perhaps we do get what Emilie wants, which is more creativity and experimentation and innovation. I’ve spent a lot of time of late reading about the Scientific Revolution and its aftermath, and one thing that is clear is that the brilliant successes and innovations of the likes of Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and Hawking, is that they are all built on earlier failures. But, in the spirit of scientific experimentation, they had no choice but to carry on. So perhaps we should engage with our inner scientists and take what we can from failure to figure out how to succeed?
So perhaps failure isn’t the evil we’re lead to believe it is, perhaps in failing we can continue to try to make the world a better place and we can learn from our mistakes, or we can recognise that our failures are the keys to our successes.
So, alright, it’s Failweek. The Twitter tag is #failweek. Rock on, my friends, celebrate your failures and figure how to gain from them. If anyone needs me, I’ll be licking my wounds and pondering my comeback.
The Real and True Story of the Birth of Rap Music
April 2, 2011 § Leave a comment
First, I have been MIA for a bit from here @ Spatialities and from my duties over @ Current Intelligence. I have been off on medical leave from work since February. Regular programming here and @ CI will resume shortly. In the meantime, I am spending a lot of my time recovering reading. I have been ploughing through books, taking advantage of all of this free time to read. I’ve been reading all kinds of things, both fiction and non-fiction, everything from paperback novels to philosophical ones, from philosophy to history and current affairs. The fruits of my labours will soon be appearing on my CI blog, “Advance Copy.”
Anyway.
I teach Western Civ every semester. Teaching the same course over and over again, well, I need to find ways to make it interesting. And for the students, too, they are forced to take the course, it’s a requirement in the Social Sciences programme at John Abbott College. So, we all need coping mechanisms. One is obviously humour. When we get to the Reformation, we get to that great anti-Semite, Martin Luther (who my students inevitably confuse with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King). And whilst explaining how the Lutheran Reformation came to be, I discuss the protection Luther received from Frederick of Saxony, who gave Luther shelter against the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. As an aside, Frederick was actually the pope’s choice to become the next Holy Roman Emperor in 1519. Turns out it was a good thing he didn’t become Holy Roman Emperor, since Frederick was instrumental in the Lutheran Reformation.
Back to the main point: there is this great picture of Luther and a bunch of other men standing behind Frederick, a rather large, portly man, who is standing in what can only be described as his b-boy stance, wearing some heavy gold jewellery around his neck (see picture below), with his posse (Luther is the sour-faced dude at Frederick’s right shoulder). I explain to my students that Frederick was actually the first gangsta rapper in history.
It turns out, however, I was wrong. Frederick was not the first gangsta rapper in history. Moreover, rap was not, as has long been thought, invented in the Boogie Down Bronx in the 1970s. Nope, rather, rap was invented in the early 7th century Before Common Era by the Assyrian emperor, Sennacherib, following his defeat of the Elamites in 691 BCE.
Sennacherib had his court historian record the events of the war, from the emperor’s point of view. The account of the war is pure braggadocio, hype, and chest-thumping, not unlike early hip hop. See, for example, KRS-One’s video for “Outta Here” from 1993.
Compare KRS-One’s lyrics with Sennacherib’s account, taken from a quote in John Keegan’s A History of Warfare, the quote itself taken from H. Saggs’ The Might That Was Assyria:
I cut their throats like sheep…My prancing steeds, trained to harness, plunged into their welling blood as into a river; the wheels of my battle chariots were bespattered with blood and filth. I filled the plain with the corpses of their warriors like herbage…[There were] chariots with their horses, whose riders had been slain as they came into the fierce battle, so that they were loose by themselves, those horses kept going back and forth all over [the battlefield]…As to the sheikhs of the Chaldaceans [Elamite allies], panic from my onslaught overwhelmed them like a demon. They abandoned their tents and fled for their lives, crushing the corpses of their troops as they went…[In their terror] they passed scalding urine and voided their excrement in their chariots.
Seriously, just throw a beat under that, and you’ve got a dope track. So, hip hop, it turns out, is approximately 2800 years older than we thought it was.
Matthew Barlow 