tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13267878603842156372024-02-02T07:56:10.393-08:00Urban AdoniaSituated knowledge from a Chicana urban anthropologist.urbanadoniahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11368148568918195706noreply@blogger.comBlogger291125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1326787860384215637.post-81790906304037416552016-09-15T15:09:00.000-07:002016-09-15T15:09:43.664-07:00The Bike Justice Book
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUoAVVENfaGKpfot8QwUBY_4seVkphKDjeIuQc3fb8GYZym9dlZW7SoTQzaXRa3skTKmqA38KebcnA7whEZbYp15TA14Uz1xv3XOj_gy4XdkGSw2kDABtVeQAexL3xKSulRFJGgrSyKXM/s1600/Bike+Justice+Book+Cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUoAVVENfaGKpfot8QwUBY_4seVkphKDjeIuQc3fb8GYZym9dlZW7SoTQzaXRa3skTKmqA38KebcnA7whEZbYp15TA14Uz1xv3XOj_gy4XdkGSw2kDABtVeQAexL3xKSulRFJGgrSyKXM/s320/Bike+Justice+Book+Cover.jpg" width="211" /></a></div>
This summer, Routledge released <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Bicycle-Justice-and-Urban-Transformation-Biking-for-all/Golub-Hoffmann-Lugo-Sandoval/p/book/9781138950245" target="_blank"><i>Bicycle Justice and Urban Transformation: Biking for All?</i></a> The book's 18 essays explore
marginalized communities and bicycle advocacy, planning, and policy.
The editorial team consists of Aaron Golub (Portland State
University), Melody Hoffmann (Anoka-Ramsey Community College and
author of her own recent book, <i><a href="https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Bike-Lanes-Are-White-Lanes,677153.aspx" target="_blank">Bike Lanes Are White Lanes</a></i>),
me, and Gerardo Sandoval (University of Oregon).<b> </b><br />
<br />
<b>The Backstory</b><b>
</b><br />
A little less than two years ago, editors Stephen Zavestoski and
Julian Agyeman published a collection of essays called <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Incomplete-Streets-Processes-practices-and-possibilities/Zavestoski-Agyeman/p/book/9780415725873" target="_blank"><i>Incomplete Streets</i></a>.
The book argued that the “complete streets” policy and design
trend could benefit from an environmental justice approach to social
inclusion. It was right up my alley because at the time, in my
day job as Equity Initiative Manager at the League of American
Bicyclists, I felt caught in a gulf between the bike movement I’d
been part of for years and the transportation justice field that had
inspired me to work on race and sustainable transportation in the
first place.<br />
<br />
Practitioners in transportation justice, which has roots in the
1964 Civil Rights Act that made it illegal for federal funds to be
distributed in a way that led to racial discrimination, tend to focus
on public transit systems. Before I got into bike activism I’d been
a member of Los Angeles’ Bus Riders Union, a groundbreaking
grassroots effort that has for decades made the case that transit
systems like Metro need to do a better job of serving their majority
people of color and low-income users. I thought that because I was
aware that the bike advocacy world did not match the diversity of who
actually rides, other people working in transportation knew about
this gap too. But when I brought up bicycling in transportation
justice circles, I was told to take my shilling for a white man’s
pastime elsewhere.<br />
<br />
I could see why bicycling seemed beside the
point. For many families, bicycling for transportation is something
that you work hard to get away from, rather than a desirable end in
itself. When people have a hard enough time even gaining access to
driver's licenses and dealing with the issue of tickets turning into
debt, I can see why owning a car is still central to civil rights
projects. I’d moved to D.C. because I thought that building a
racially inclusive bike movement would help transform the symbolism
of bicycling, making it something more positive for more people. But
instead I grew to feel invisible within my own movement, where it was
controversial to simply state that infrastructure couldn’t fix the
vulnerability that different people face in our unequal streets.<br />
<br />
There are plenty of people of color working in environmental
professions who sit with me in this space between ecological
commitment and knowing how hard our communities have worked to
achieve middle-class consumerism. Wasteful living is a sign of
success. Environmental movements still have a long way to go in
co-creating visions for a better world that empathize with people
scarred by the hatred of poverty and racism, rather than judging them
for not “going green.”<br />
<br />
When I learned that Zavestoski and Agyeman were also on the
editorial team for Routledge's series on <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Equity-Justice-and-the-Sustainable-City-series/book-series/EJSC" target="_blank">Equity, Justice and the Sustainable City</a> and they wanted to include a book specifically about bicycling,
I signed on to be an editor of what became <i>Bicycle Justice and Urban
Transformation</i>.<br />
<br />
<b>The Book</b><br />
Our introduction explains the gap between transportation justice
and bicycle advocacy, and how this gap contributes to the public’s
association of bike infrastructure with gentrification. We make the
case that situating bicycling within a transportation justice
framework will require addressing the blind spots of what we call
“organized bicycling.” To get away from the dehumanizing term
“invisible cyclist,” we argue that most bicycling takes place
outside of the advocacy movement and planning efforts to promote it.
Differentiating bicycling in general from “organized bicycling”
provides an alternative to othering people of color and/or low-income
bicycle users. Then the project becomes expanding organized bicycling
to encompass more kinds of users, rather than putting the onus on
those users to make themselves visible to organized bicycling. In the
second chapter, co-editor and transportation justice scholar Aaron
Golub goes more in-depth about whether bicycling can be a civil
rights issue.<br />
<br />
Since it’s the first book to define bicycle justice, the
collection goes in a lot of directions from there. The common thread
(besides bicycling) is that we asked our authors to present solutions
that would make sense for practitioners.<br />
<br />
Major themes:<br />
<ul>
<li>The everyday vulnerabilities that
overlooked bicycle users experience in their racialized bodies</li>
<ul>
<li>“<a href="http://bikingpublicproject.tumblr.com/post/148008097156/delivering-injustice-food-delivery-cyclists-in" target="_blank">Delivering In(Justice): Food Delivery Cyclists in New York City</a>”
by Do Lee, Helen Ho, Melyssa Banks, Mario Giampieri, Xiaodeng Chen,
and Dorothy Le</li>
<li>“No Choice but to Bike: Undocumented and
Bike-Dependent in Rust Belt America” by Joanna Bernstein</li>
</ul>
<li>Bicycling in particular regional and cultural contexts </li>
<ul>
<li>“Freedom of
Movement/Freedom of Choice: An Enquiry into Utility Cycling and
Social Justice in Post-Apartheid Cape Town” by the great thinker
Gail Jennings</li>
<li>“Rascuache Cycling Justice” by Alfredo Mirandé
and Raymond L. Williams</li>
<li>“Civil Bikes: Embracing Atlanta’s
Racialized History through Bicycle Tours” by Nedra Deadwyler</li>
</ul>
<li>Barriers to inclusion embedded in emerging data tools </li>
<ul>
<li>“Advocating
through Data: Community Visibilities in Crowdsourced Cycling Data”
by Christopher Le Dantec, Caroline Appleton, Mariam Asad, Robert
Rosenberger, and Kari Watkins</li>
</ul>
<li>Grassroots programs such as rides and
repair co-ops </li>
<ul>
<li>“Aburrido! Cycling on the U.S./Mexican Border with
Doble Rueda Bicycle Collective in Matamoros, Tamaulipas” by Daryl
Meador </li>
<li>“Community Bicycle Workshops and ‘Invisible Cyclists’
in Brussels” by Simon Batterbury and Inès Vandermeersch</li>
</ul>
<li>Community tensions around bike planning </li>
<ul>
<li>“Is Portland’s Bicycle
Success Story a Celebration of Gentrification? A Theoretical Analysis
and Statistical Analysis of Bicycle Use and Demographic Change” by
Cameron Herrington and Ryan Dann</li>
<li>“Community Disengagement: The
Greatest Barrier to Equitable Bike Share” by James Hannig</li>
<li>“Mediating the ‘White Lanes of Gentrification’ in Humboldt
Park: Community-Led Economic Development and the Struggle over Public
Space” by Amy Lubitow</li>
</ul>
<li>Scholarly analyses of traffic and social
justice </li>
<ul>
<li>“Advancing Discussions of Cycling Interventions Based on
Social Justice” by Karel Martens, Daniel Piatkowski, Kevin J.
Krizek, and Kara Luckey</li>
<li>“Theorizing Bicycle Justice Using Social
Psychology: Examining the Intersection of Mode and Race with the
Conceptual Model of Roadway Interactions” by Tara Goddard</li>
</ul>
<li>Efforts
to transform the bike movement </li>
<ul>
<li>“Decentering Whiteness in
Organized Bicycling: Notes from Insides” by yours truly </li>
<li>“Collectively Subverting the Status Quo at the Youth Bike Summit”
by Pasqualina Azzarello, Jane Pirone, and Allison Mattheis</li>
</ul>
<li>Bicycling programs as public health interventions </li>
<ul>
<li>“No hay peor
lucha que la que no se hace: Re-Negotiating Cycling in a Latino
Community” by Martha Moore-Monroy, Ada M. Wilkinson-Lee, Donna
Lewandowski, and Alexandra M. Armenta.</li>
</ul>
</ul>
My chapter in the book chronicles the othering that I experienced
while working in bicycle advocacy at the national level and suggests
directions for changing the movement’s agenda to include more
people’s perspectives.<br />
<br />
<i>Bicycle Justice and Urban Transformation</i> is a first step toward
creating an interdisciplinary conversation about bicycling and
inequality. I hope it can be a resource for students, scholars, and
practitioners alike. Thanks again to all our authors who made it
possible to get the collection out there on a really short timeline!<br />
urbanadoniahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11368148568918195706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1326787860384215637.post-77122400568853587922015-09-30T09:47:00.000-07:002015-09-30T09:47:34.796-07:00Unsolicited Advice for Vision ZeroLast week I spent time in Los Angeles City Hall for the first time in almost five years. I moved back to LA at the beginning of September, returning after living in Seattle, Portland, and Washington, DC. To be perfectly honest, I'm a little shell-shocked and unsure of how to answer friends who ask me what I'm doing next. <br /><br />
I've been studying the bike movement and professional bike advocacy since 2008, and I spent the last two years working to operationalize that research to further equity, diversity, and inclusion in the field. It wasn't until about eight months ago, though, that I recognized my peculiar position: I wasn't just raising awareness about exclusion in bicycle advocacy, I was experiencing it. As a woman of color, I didn't have the power to solve the problem I'd been hired to fix. In fact, taking on that task had made me the target of more resentment than I'd ever experienced. I found that in bike advocacy people like me were being tokenized. We were expected to use our non-threatening otherness to promote a vision of the world that was determined before we came in the door. Accepting that I couldn't accomplish what I'd set out to do was a big
step forward for me personally, because it helped me to see that I
shouldn't be living a life where colleagues treated me like something to
be feared. That treatment takes an emotional and even physical toll,
and the only thing I could do to make it stop was leave.<br />
<br />
Now, as new ideas march forward in bike networks, I've been wondering if I should even keep trying to share my thoughts about how to embrace diversity in the bike movement because all I see is the dominance of white norms and my inability to change that dynamic. I don't see the point of offering advice to people who see me as an interloper, an attacker, rather than as an ally. At the same time, I think it's baffling that a closed group could claim to speak for everyone. A seasoned social change strategist recently told me that lessons learned in a particular movement usually can't be applied in that same movement by that same person. It was a relief to hear that I am not going through something unique. But the question remains, what do I do with my bike activist self now? Can she exist in this world? <br /><br />
One place I've been seeing white norms dominate is in the policy trend Vision Zero, which is what the event at LA City Hall was themed around. I happened to have a peculiar bird's eye view of the spread of Vision Zero around the United States last year, while I was managing an equity initiative at a national bike advocacy organization. I remember the meeting in summer 2014 where my boss told us that Vision Zero would be the policy framework the organization furthered from then on. With my inclusion filter on, it sounded like another example of white bike advocates looking to Northern Europe for solutions instead of turning to urban communities in the U.S. to find out how they've managed to get by walking, biking, and using transit all these years. The urgency of adopting the language at the national level illustrated another familiar phenomenon: advocates looking to impress their like-minded peers rather than vetting strategies with a diverse range of thought partners (there's some foundation-speak for you). While I was working in DC, the groups that the nationals wanted to impress were Transportation Alternatives in New York City and the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, the origin point for Vision Zero in the United States. And then, over fall 2014, I saw the third sign of a bonafide bike advocacy trend: a developing intercity competition where bike advocates try to get politicians on board with their projects by naming the other cities that are supporting it. These three tendencies within bike advocacy draw attention away from local community realities and have helped turn bike projects into symbols of gentrification and change imposed without local input. (Bike share is another example of these tendencies in action.)<br />
<br />
Beyond questioning the inequitable tendencies of these familiar bike movement traits, I was alarmed that a pillar of Vision Zero was increased police enforcement of traffic violations, in the same year that multiracial groups were filling streets across the United States to call attention to the deadly effects of racial profiling in policing. When I raised these concerns at work, nobody connected me with the national Vision Zero organizing committee. Due to a fearful organizational culture, I was ostracized for bringing up these blind spots. It added to my growing awareness that I was allowed to write inspirational blog posts and host webinars about “bike equity,” but I wasn't supposed to have an opinion about the organization's strategy work such as forwarding the Vision Zero trend. I decided to leave my job in early 2015.<br />
<br />
But I couldn't get away from Vision Zero. There was the Twitter pile on where NYC Vision Zero activists called me a supporter of street violence. There were the job announcements that showed that resources were already flowing in this concept's direction. Vision Zero became a symbol of my powerlessness to address the exclusion I was disappointed to find when I reached the national level in the advocacy movement I thought I'd been part of for years. It became a symbol of my own dilemma. This is what it is to be a woman of color in this world: you're in demand based on what boxes you can check, but when your expert recommendations go against the grain, you can be dismissed as a nuisance. They want my exotic face but not the brain shaped by living in this skin. The ups and downs are enough to make you seasick. You find yourself hoping that they just dislike you personally because that cuts less deeply than knowing that others' racism/sexism keep you invisible as an individual. <br /><br />
As for Vision Zero, I have a lot of friends in the bike movement who are supporting it, which made me think I needed to ignore my personal experience of hurt and exclusion. As an activist, it's become important to me to remain open to ideas that I react to on a personal level because this can have effects on a movement level. The bike movement is a subcultural network trying to redesign streets for everyone. Some participants want it to be more open to diverse perspectives; others are comfortable claiming that broader social issues are irrelevant to their own bikey desires. I want to be as open as possible to a range of ideas. So, my experience aside, and regardless of the coincidence that Vision Zero emerged just as I was becoming aware of how far from diverse national bike advocacy was ready to be, I know that Vision Zero will mean different things in different places and will surely make good strides in addressing traffic violence. That's why I decided to attend the Vision Zero meeting at City Hall, eager to see old friends and learn how the concept might be more tied to local realities in Los Angeles. <br /><br />
The main speakers were Leah Shahum, who is the national Vision Zero strategist, and Seleta Reynolds, the general manager of LADOT. Malcolm Harris of T.R.U.S.T. South LA joined them on a panel at the end. What I heard was promising, but also isolating. I heard a lot about Europe and San Francisco. I sat there among an audience that was soaking up every word, the same things they'd been telling each other for years. These events feel like church to me at this point, with the opulence of council chambers heightening the effect, and I felt once again in the throes of my crisis of faith. There were a number of people of color in the room, involved at many levels, which made me think I shouldn't trust my instincts in hearing a white-centered strategy for Vision Zero. Afterward, walking to the metro with a friend, I was surprised to learn that I wasn't the only person with misgivings. She encouraged me to share my thoughts. <br /><br />For what it's worth, here are four themes that I know from investigating exclusion in bike advocacy that sound out loudly to me in Vision Zero. There's more to Vision Zero than bike advocacy, but I saw it develop through that particular network, so the analysis I'm offering here situates it in that movement. <br /><br /><b>1. Dismissal of concerns about influence of eurocentric thinking. </b><br />A woman in the audience asked whether a model from Sweden made sense in Los Angeles, and the response from Shahum was that she tries not to overemphasize the European origins because that bothers some people. It's important to recognize that what ruffles feathers isn't a “perception” of eurocentric thinking; it's a real domination of eurocentric thinking in bicycle policy, planning, and advocacy. Eurocentric thinking is the norm in those circles, with PeopleForBikes taking politicians on study tours to Copenhagen and a number of planning schools doing the same with their students. Over and over, in many ways, advocates tell themselves and the public that European cycling is best, and we'd better follow suit. This reinforces the invisibility of people making bicycling work around the United States today, people who don't have the privilege or resources to offer competing visions centered in their own realities. We are all affected by eurocentric thinking, just as we are all affected by racism. It'd be great to see more bike advocates display some self-awareness around this. <br /><br /><b>2. Racial profiling as a street safety afterthought.</b><br />
My biggest concern with Vision Zero stems from its overlap with but disconnect from the moment of Black Lives Matter. A remarkable amount of mainstream media and policymaking attention has gone to the issue of police violence against criminalized black and brown bodies. Here in LA, Sahra Sulaiman at Streetsblog has covered a number of recent instances of violence. People of color bike groups have organized memorial rides and other direct actions to recognize the effects on communities. And yet one of the pillars of Vision Zero is increasing opportunities for police to apply their biases to street users, aka increased enforcement of traffic laws. White people may look to police as allies in making streets safer; people of color may not. When a man in the audience brought up this issue, Shahum said Vision Zero strategists would need community help in addressing it. Asking affected communities to take on the burden of figuring out how to make Vision Zero work in a landscape of police violence is dismissive at best and insulting at worst. It really doesn't seem like Vision Zero was designed to admit the problems that are an unfortunate reality for many in this country, a reality that other groups are working very hard to bring to light. It'd be great to see the development of a street safety strategy that starts with a dialogue on what “safety” means and whose safety we have in mind, taking it for granted that we don't all face the same safety problems. The panel's moderator brought up this point as well. Vision Zero should put support for police violence reform front and center, pointing out that we need police officers to be sources of community help rather than harm. Traffic violence is a huge problem, but not everyone is ready to see policing as a solution. Why hasn't this element of Vision Zero been drastically changed by now? <br /><br />
<b>3. Combative issue framing.</b> <br />Bike advocates tend to see themselves as an embattled minority, to the point of leaving little room for diversity of experience and opinions within their own ranks. It's led to a lot of acrimonious infighting in the bike movement, such as the longstanding debate about vehicular cycling. I heard this defensiveness in the Vision Zero presentation as Shahum called VZ “the only ethical choice.” I'm guessing that this suggestion that disagreement with Vision Zero makes one unethical was designed to shame politicians, but I'd urge Vision Zero strategists to consider what silencing effects a combative tone might have on participation by oppressed groups. I've seen a worrying tendency among bike advocates to dismiss those who disagree with them as NIMBYs, flattening opposition regardless of whether it comes from community members who lived through the ravages of urban renewal or privileged homeowners concerned abut an influx of colored bodies into their suburban sanctum. Vision Zero strategists should show their respect for meaningful inclusion through welcoming intersectional perspectives. <br /><br /><b>4. Emphasis on top-down strategy for culture change.</b><br />
Since at least the early 1990s, the bike movement has shifted toward building political will for funding bike projects as a strategy for building public support for bicycling. Professional advocates now work to become political insiders more than they take the direct action approach of street demonstrations and organizing. Vision Zero reproduces this tendency toward “if you build it, they will come,” putting the agency for changing individual behavior in the hands of policymakers and planners. There's value in this approach, but it also creates well-known barriers to participation in agenda setting by the very users the projects being lobbied are intended to serve. It's strange to me that a movement so focused on rejecting car-dominated engineering would think that the solution is more large-scale, top-down planning. Again and again I heard the panelists reference the need for culture change, so I hope that means Vision Zero will fund culture change projects such as community events and bike co-ops where people can develop economic and personal relationships with bicycling. Or will Vision Zero dollars go to sending more politicians to Northern Europe? <br /><br />
Street safety is a subject that should be shaped by many people's realities. I hope it's clear that with this analysis I'm not saying that Vision Zero can't lead to good things; in fact, I hope it's great. Since it looks like that train has left the station and street safety in Los Angeles will have Vision Zero branding for the next few years, I'd love to see a strategy develop that is rooted in addressing inequality. It's more clear to me than ever, coming back to LA and seeing how many people are sleeping rough right now, that inequality is a huge problem in this region. Maybe if people weren't trapped in a cycle of competing for dwindling opportunities they wouldn't treat roads like a scarce resource they must compete for by being the fastest and strongest. It's hard for me to see how we'll fix our street culture without deciding as a society that we should care about each other at all. <br /><br />
There were a lot of enthusiastic people listening in council chambers on Thursday, some of them from Orange County and Long Beach. Most of us were professionals or longtime participants in this kind of advocacy. I hope the active transportation advocacy community can support intersectional perspectives being a part of setting the agenda earlier and earlier in the process. It's not good enough to use the people who aren't in the room as evidence for why a particular policy should move forward; we can all do a better job of including more realities from day one. This is what <a href="http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/environment/environmental_justice/ej_at_dot/dot_ej_strategy/index.cfm">full and fair participation</a> should mean, and as long as we're being asked to help accommodate serious flaws in a strategy that emerged from exclusive networks, we're not there yet. One day, instead of cramming our collective foot into a boot ordered for somebody else, it'd be great if a bigger group could lead the design process and end up with something we can really wiggle our toes in. Maybe it's early enough in Vision Zero's lifespan that it can be a vehicle for this change. I still want to believe it's possible for the bike movement to let people like me inside, with our hearts and minds. urbanadoniahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11368148568918195706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1326787860384215637.post-43453346579860344712015-09-23T08:18:00.003-07:002015-09-23T08:25:03.527-07:00The Methods of a Saint<i>Since 2004, I've been studying how different cultural groups define appropriate uses of space in Southern California. A prominent figure in the colonial period there, and a prominent figure in the landscape of San Juan Capistrano where I grew up, was the priest Junípero Serra. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/09/23/pope-francis-will-make-junipero-serra-a-saint-during-a-historic-canonization-today/">Today Pope Francis plans to canonize this man in Washington, D.C.</a> Here is an excerpt from my undergraduate thesis where I report what I learned about Serra and his time.</i><br />
<b><br />The Mission(s) of Father Serra</b><br />
<div style="line-height: 0.25in; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-top: 0.08in;">
This picture in the wilds of Baja California, one hundred years ago,
is a pleasant, peaceful one to contemplate. We can see the little
group of dusky natives squatting contentedly around their
friar-friend, while floating skyward, through the stillness of the
starlight rises a ‘tender song of the love of God'.</div>
<div align="right" style="line-height: 0.25in; margin-bottom: 0in;">
A.H.
Fitch</div>
<div style="line-height: 0.25in; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 0.25in; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;">
When Junípero Serra, a Spanish monk of the powerful Franciscan
order, traveled north from Mexico City to Baja California in 1768, he
had the protection of Mexico’s colonial government in the form of
soldiers under the military command of Don Gaspar de Portolá. This
group established a series of Catholic missions guarded by soldiers
along the California coast, beginning at San Diego and ending at the
San Francisco bay in Alta California. These missions intended to
convert the native "gentiles", as the padres called the
Californians, into good Christian souls while also protecting Spanish
territory from Russian encroachment (Fitch 1914: 57).</div>
<div style="line-height: 0.25in; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;">
The area had been explored by Spaniards, but at the time that Serra
and Portolá embarked on their journey there were no European
settlements in Alta California. However, a number of indigenous
tribes inhabited the region. Because of the primacy of missionaries
in establishing contact with these groups, we have very little
information about the pre-contact population and their practices that has not
been filtered through a Franciscan friar. In giving an account of the
natives in the area of the San Juan Capistrano mission, A.L. Kroeber,
an early twentieth-century scholar of native Californians, relies on
the work of one Father Geronimo Boscana, whose 1826 essay
"Chinigchinich" is the earliest resource on pre-mission
native life. Kroeber writes that, because of the sympathetic style
and comprehensiveness, Boscana’s “account of the religion and
social customs of the Juaneño is by far the most valuable document
on the California Indians preserved from the pen of any of the
Franciscan missionaries” (Kroeber 1976[1925]: 945). </div>
<div style="line-height: 0.25in; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;">
Unfortunately, understanding accounts of the California natives form
the exception, not the rule, of Franciscan writing on the subject
(Fitch 1914: 34, 102). Of the natives of the region, Serra biographer
A.H. Fitch says that, “this then was the object of their existence,
to eat, to drink, to dance, to have wives in abundance. Such briefly
were the savages, for whose sake Fray Junipero Serra had painfully
journeyed long stretches of desert country” (1914: 127). Fitch
characterizes the Californians as hedonistic folk worthy of contempt.
This heightens the missionary “sacrifice” of Serra, and also
reflects a belief in the basic inferiority of those natives that
persisted into the twentieth century.</div>
<div style="line-height: 0.25in; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;">
The Californians saw a new
form of life descend upon them forcibly when missionization began. To
start a mission one needed few things:
</div>
<div align="justify" style="line-height: 0.17in; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0.88in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
The business of founding a mission was usually a sufficiently simple
one. It was enough that a padre should consecrate some sort of a
shelter for a church, that he should be furnished with two or three
sacred vessels and a small stock of provisions for himself and the
soldiers who remained with him. Spiritual work was then at once
begun. (Fitch 1914: 185) </div>
<div align="justify" style="line-height: 0.17in; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0.88in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 0.25in; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The church was of
course the most important part of the settlement. Relying on
curiosity and the neophytes who had already joined the group to
attract natives to their traveling party, the padres began saving
souls right away. Fitch includes one interesting account of such a
conversion from Serra’s own journal. After traveling for several
days without blessing any “wild” Indians, the mission party
spotted some gentiles.</div>
<div align="justify" style="line-height: 0.17in; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0.88in; margin-top: 0.07in;">
“Two Gentiles were again visible on the same height, and our
Indians—shrewder than yesterday, went to catch them with caution
that they should not escape them. And although one fled from between
their hands they caught the other. They tied him, and it was all
necessary, for even bound he defended himself that they should not
bring him and flung himself upon the ground with such violence that
he scraped and bruised his thighs and knees. But at last they brought
him. They set him before me” …After making the sign of the cross
over him, Junípero untied him, still ‘most frightened and
disturbed’ (Fitch 1914: 90).</div>
<div style="line-height: 0.25in; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 0.25in; margin-bottom: 0in;">
By force the
Californians were subject to the shock of Catholicization, though
many came into mission life of their own accord. In order to retain
the converts the padres immediately gave them food. It was expected
that the natives would work in exchange for such support.</div>
<div style="line-height: 0.25in; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 0.25in; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>References</b></div>
<div class="csl-bib-body" style="line-height: 2; padding-left: 2em; text-indent: -2em;">
<div class="csl-bib-body" style="line-height: 2; padding-left: 2em; text-indent: -2em;">
Fitch, A.H. <i>Junipero Serra: The Man and His Work</i>. Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1914.</div>
<div class="csl-bib-body" style="line-height: 2; padding-left: 2em; text-indent: -2em;">
Kroeber, A.L. <i>Handbook of the Indians of California</i>. New York: Dover Publications, 1976.
<span class="Z3988" title="url_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fzotero.org%3A2&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook&rft.genre=book&rft.btitle=Handbook%20of%20the%20Indians%20of%20California&rft.place=New%20York&rft.publisher=Dover%20Publications&rft.aufirst=A.L.&rft.aulast=Kroeber&rft.au=A.L.%20Kroeber&rft.date=1976"></span>
</div>
</div>
urbanadoniahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11368148568918195706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1326787860384215637.post-35284728714316383772015-08-04T08:49:00.000-07:002015-08-04T09:02:54.066-07:00Time Travel in South Los AngelesA few weekends ago in Los Angeles, I rode the 210 bus down Crenshaw from Hancock Park to Leimert Park. I was on my way to facilitate a conversation on bike education in communities of color. This would be my first visit to Leimert Park in probably five years.<br />
<br />
I took a seat in the third row back from the accessible seats facing each other up front. For the first little bit it was an uneventful ride. A small Latina woman got on with three little kids in tow, two boys and a girl. Two of the children bounced around happily before they chose the first two forward-facing seats, and their mother settled into the seat in front of me with the third kiddo. Other seats in the front of the bus had women of color sitting in them. A Black teenage boy took the seat across the aisle from me, his headphones on as he sprawled comfortably.<br />
<br />
Then two Black men got on the bus at the same time, around Olympic I think. They weren't traveling together. The first man fumbled to pay his fare, looking anxious and holding a bulky object under one arm. He took a seat in the area up front. The second man announced himself loudly by starting a steady stream of vitriol that would not stop until he got off about thirty minutes later. He sat on the other side of the accessible area up front.<br />
<br />
The best I could figure from his somewhat incoherent rage was that this man had worked for a fast food chain, and some complaint from a Latino co-worker had cost him his job. Maybe this happened very recently, or maybe this was an old grievance. He felt that it was a racially motivated attack, and he was letting us "Mexicans" on the bus know that he was not afraid of us, he was not going to take it from us. He knew where to find a gun, he let us know. "I love em, but I don't like em," he said over and over to sum up his feelings about Mexicans. Maybe this was a compromise between a Christian belief in loving all people and the anger he felt about losing his job. "I'm from Atlanta, Georgia, and no Mexican is going to scare me."<br />
<br />
It's possible I was the only Mexican on that bus. The women and children around me could have been from El Salvador, Guatemala, the Philippines. There were no Latino men that I could see. It's also likely that the co-worker who had wronged this man had been a Central American immigrant. It's common for non-Latinos to assume that we're all "Mexican" or, as I hear where I currently live in DC, "Spanish."<br />
<br />
As the man continued, he punctuated his frustrated ranting rhythmically
with the repeated refrain of "now you know, now you know." The man across the aisle with the bulky package, who had been sitting quietly, suddenly started boxing the air. He mixed left and right hooks, bringing his fists close to his face between jabs. It seemed like the anger of the ranting man was upsetting an already troubled soul. I started to wonder if the boxer was going to punch through the window as his fists flashed close to it.<br />
<br />
The mother in front of me gathered all three children with her
into her seat, probably feeling safer having them behind the metal
barrier of the seat in front of them. I don't know what these babies
could understand in words, but no doubt they felt their mother's fear, the anger in this man's voice, and the energy in the fists displacing the air a few feet from their faces. I saw one little boy's eyes fixed on the ranter, wide and open. Maybe I was witnessing the birth of a traumatic memory.<br />
<br />
My friend James Rojas facilitates tactile workshops that
connect childhood experiences, both joyful and painful, with our adult preferences for public space. James wants to create a more inclusive urban planning process, one centered not in convenient assumptions but in complex lived realities. At one of James' workshops
last September, I listened to men from both Central America and Burma describe hiding
in the jungle from death squads. They smiled nervously as they explained what came out of their hands
when they were asked to build a childhood memory using the countless
objects James carries around the country in plastic tubs.<br />
<br />
How would that wide-eyed little boy remember this day on the bus? Was I a coward for sitting still and witnessing rather than intervening?<br />
<br />
The first intervention came from a Black woman behind us on the bus. She defended us "Mexicans" up front, saying we were hardworking people and there was nothing wrong with us. "You need to be angry with the white man," she proclaimed. "But you won't say that to him, because he'd kill you." There weren't any white people on the bus that I could see, though there could have been other half-breeds like me.<br />
<br />
The ranter was not okay with this bold woman's intervention, and left the Mexicans aside for a while to belittle her. <br />
<br />
As the yelling intensified, so did the air boxing. <br />
<br />
Eventually the bold woman came down the aisle, while the bus was stopped at a red light, and it looked like it would come to blows. The bus driver asked the ranter to consider that his words
were offensive to some people, but he did not kick him off the bus.
Understandable, as bus drivers know they can be targets of violence. <br />
<br />
At some point during this altercation the boxer jumped up and fled the bus. The bold woman also jumped off the bus exasperatedly, but as the ranter crowed what he considered his triumph, she changed her mind, re-boarding through the back door, advancing toward him and shouting. As their arguing grew more vicious, she did leave the bus for a final time. A new crowd of Black passengers streamed on, and the ranter thrilled at his larger audience. That was the most sickening moment for me.<br />
<br />
I could see the Latina mother's relief when we made it to King Boulevard, and she grabbed the kids and hopped out the back door. I wonder what she said to them after they fled the bus. Did she explain in some dismissive way the man's upset? Did his behavior reinforce a stereotype she'd already held about Black people in this city?<br />
<br />
The loss of a few "Mexicans" did not stop the flow of hate speech. A Black man who had boarded after the bold woman gave up attempted to pacify the ranter, using a calmer approach and asking him to respect himself enough to drop the angry words. It didn't work, and the pacifier retreated.<br />
<br />
Finally the ranter got off the bus, and Black women who had boarded and seated themselves around me started clucking to each other about his bad behavior. "He needed some assistance," I contributed, "seemed like he was off his medication." I wanted them to confirm to me that this man was sick, not just speaking the truth others were too cowed to tell. The elderly Black woman in front of me said "I'd have grabbed onto this pole and kicked some sense into him," and that comforted me. The fog around me started to dissipate as we shared distaste for the unpleasant storm we'd weathered.<br />
<br />
But when I got off the bus at Vernon in Leimert Park, I still felt dazed. I was an outsider in a Black neighborhood, having just been confronted with how hollow it sometimes is to talk about "communities of color" as a unified front in a world where people on the bottom have to claw each other for scraps. I got a compliment on my sharrow tattoo from a Black man riding a cruiser on the sidewalk, which made me feel a little less like an intruder. My tattoo is often an entry point for conversations with strangers in public. I had time for some lunch, so I made my way across the park, where an African dance class had gathered women in colorful garments, and found a food truck.<br />
<br />
While I stood in a parking space and waited for my fish, two men approached me, one Black, one Latino. The Black man took my hand, kissed it, and called me an angel. "That is a LOT of affection," I said. "That's how I always am," he said as he sauntered off. The other man asked me about my tattoo, and asked whether it was okay for a police officer to have stopped him for riding on the sidewalk in Alhambra in East L.A. But he didn't really want to talk about bikes, he wanted to describe his loneliness. In a Chicano accent, he told me he was on methadone, having kicked heroin in jail. He had a medical marijuana card for harm reduction, whether his parole officer liked it or not. He had recognized a pattern where his sadness drove him to escape with the needle, he said, and he didn't want to fall in again. Around us in Leimert Park he saw people with families, people who weren't alone like him. He felt outside of it.<br />
<br />
He had a rolling suitcase and beads of sweat on his face. A teardrop tattoo by his right eye. He understood, he said, why his family cut him off, with all of his relapses and criminal behavior. He didn't have nobody, and it was terrible, but he understood. He told me about an ex-girlfriend in Colorado, and I think I must have reminded him of her, because she was half Mexican and half white like me. He told me about how he didn't think he'd be welcome in Mexico, a pocho barely hispanohablante. I sipped my can of soda and listened to his feverish rambling, willing to be a smiling female face for a few minutes.<br />
<br />
My food arrived on the truck's high shelf, and I parted ways with this man, Joseph, and went to look for a place to sit and eat. Once I was seated in the park, listening to the drums and watching the dancers, it occurred to me that I could have offered to buy him some food. Maybe that was a question on his mind when he first asked about my tattoo, and then he got too shy to let me know he was hungry. I don't know what methadone does to appetite. I looked around to see if he might want to share my fish.<br />
<br />
I spotted Joseph across the street, which was closed to car traffic but too hot for anyone to occupy. He was avoiding the sun under the marquee of a theater, he'd set his things on a table there. It looked like a security guard was asking him to leave, and when I looked up again he was gone.<br />
<br />
Maybe the little boy on the bus had grown into Joseph, burdened with invisible baggage much more unwieldy than the rolling suitcase which carried all his belongings during the day until he could return to the shelter at night. And one of his memories might be this day structured by the reality that the best job a Black man could get was working in fast food, and that if in-group racial belonging is all you have, you don't have room to care that you're frightening the children of another race as you vent your rage.urbanadoniahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11368148568918195706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1326787860384215637.post-37189310080725282222015-05-22T09:01:00.001-07:002015-05-22T09:01:41.529-07:00Loving The Coast And Destroying It: A California ConundrumThe little brick cottage my great-grandmother's second husband built in Corona Del Mar in the 1940s stood for decades up the street from CDM Main Beach in Orange County, California. The two queens of our family, Grandma and Great Grandma, reigned there through the early years of my childhood, offering a safe haven to their descendants, who all needed it from time to time. The family added a new wing to the back of the house in the early 1990s to expand its living space, but the matriarchs passed away soon after, Grandma in 1994 and Great Grandma in 1996. The house was then sold, this course of action having been laid out in their wills.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2xJgcEQEX00V1DWCxU2w-jkl5yX1gsLavukqcJ58-cCmCiPzi2Xchyf9dPmh9duyD6P33J_LEVQA7JuMpKUST48sc2QcJEPugKokCcDfVJQlQdeQUHzEZ_EJO7fO359MqT8Pxs9NgixM/s1600/Adonia+Great+Grandmas+House.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="219" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2xJgcEQEX00V1DWCxU2w-jkl5yX1gsLavukqcJ58-cCmCiPzi2Xchyf9dPmh9duyD6P33J_LEVQA7JuMpKUST48sc2QcJEPugKokCcDfVJQlQdeQUHzEZ_EJO7fO359MqT8Pxs9NgixM/s320/Adonia+Great+Grandmas+House.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tiny Adonia at Great Grandma's house.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
It hurt when we lost the family seat. The financial compensation wasn't a replacement. But over the years, we reclaimed our sense of place on that block and on the beach at the end of the street. All of us spend time there, though we don't live in the town adjacent anymore. In late 2013, Great Grandma's house became an empty patch of dirt, and now a modernist box takes up most of the lot. This has been the fate of many homes in the area. The process goes: raze the modest bones of a cottage, manufacture some stucco palace or other, and flip it all to make a tidy profit.<br />
<br />
When one of my cousins happened upon the patch of dirt and let the family know what he'd found, it hurt again, for some more than others. My sister put together a collage of family photos taken in front of the house with its distinctive brickwork, subtitled "the life of a well-loved house." I felt a sense of powerlessness, but when I went to the beach the next time after that and lay on the sand and closed my eyes, I heard the same buzz of planes overhead that I used to hear from Great Grandma's living room. The sidewalk on their street pushed the same roughness against my bare feet that it always had. The comfort we draw from places we made is sometimes separate from the emotional breaking and bonding that we subject ourselves to in our system where homes are commodities. One of those sources of comfort, in my life, has always been the beach.<br />
<br />
In Southern California, we love the beach. That's something that I think gets missed oftentimes when we decry the greed that drives destructive industries in the region. We recklessly endanger coastal habitats and beauty by allowing offshore drilling, overdevelopment of fragile
coastline, and today, short-sighted desalination plants that will have longterm effects. Because you don't have to be a progressive environmentalist to worship the beach. Members of mega-churches stage family portraits standing in the sand with their jeans rolled up and the family dog splashing in the waves. Central American evangelicals baptize each other en masse, robed in flowing garments and singing. Kids from Santa Ana whose parents can't afford to buy them bathing suits frolic in t-shirts and shorts. Surfers commune with the water early in the morning. We stand along the shoreline and gaze out as a pastime. It's a ritual in my family to pick up food from A's Burgers in Dana Point and drive out to the manmade island in the marina there, watching kayakers and dog walkers while we eat our dinner.<br />
<br />
For a long time I've grappled with the car dependence that underpins the Good Life in the place I can't stop thinking of as home. I've always taken it for granted that people embrace their lifestyle's oil dependence, but with the fresh spill damaging life off the coast of Santa Barbara, I started to wonder. I doubt most people think much about oil, even when they're idling their engines in line at Costco to refill their gas tanks. I don't think people spend a lot of time worshipping the oil that powers their status machines, that fuels their arms race to get the biggest SUV so they can be voted "most likely to survive the games of swerve-n-speed on I-5." People don't have reproductions of paintings of oil rigs and oil slicks and oil spills hanging on their living room walls. What they have is pictures of the beach.<br />
<br />
The fact that loving the beach is a normal fact of life there doesn't mean the coastline is safe. Sometimes it feels like the social contract in Southern California is<br />
1) Live here because it's beautiful; <br />
2) Ignore our role in degrading its beauty.<br />
This is such an ingrained fact of life in the region that people will react on an emotional level when you ask them to use less or use differently. These are often good-hearted people who consider it correct to close their minds to the damaging effects our everyday use of resources can have on the places we love. That's why I cried as I read about the oil spill this week. The beach is not mine, really, anymore than Great Grandma's house was. Maybe one day I'll walk over and it will be another empty patch of dirt.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZUdAmx4JmiSDiRkfg9rjX78HoEUammrJL9Xx1BGkwJ6x3FeWCfQ-ivI1jv9O1lT5XGvN9i00KCwyda99BBs88fics52Bk_vY6VR6odihdESRys7dKAyffuV9uJnmO6RnG-CcfDjOASXk/s1600/Pirate%2527s+Cove+Askew.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZUdAmx4JmiSDiRkfg9rjX78HoEUammrJL9Xx1BGkwJ6x3FeWCfQ-ivI1jv9O1lT5XGvN9i00KCwyda99BBs88fics52Bk_vY6VR6odihdESRys7dKAyffuV9uJnmO6RnG-CcfDjOASXk/s400/Pirate%2527s+Cove+Askew.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
When I was home last year, I took some time to bike down PCH, enjoying
the buffered space that had been created since the last time I'd
explored the area. I stopped at a beach between Capistrano Beach and San
Clemente, and I was horrified to find a huge number of spray paint cans
and colorful plastic spheres from a ball pit washing back and forth, back and
forth, tangled in seaweed at the water's edge. I grabbed a trash bag
from a nearby can and filled it with as much of the toxic garbage as I
could find. Then I rode away, slowly, hoping to find a cleaner stretch of sand. urbanadoniahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11368148568918195706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1326787860384215637.post-11448874389676150732015-04-25T17:34:00.002-07:002020-06-06T09:01:02.033-07:00For the People Protesting in Baltimore's Streets<i>Below are my notes from a talk I gave through LiveMove and the Center for Latina/o and Latin American Studies at the University of Oregon in Eugene on Thursday, April 16. The paper I read is a work in progress, but I'm posting it unfinished in solidarity with the protests in Baltimore for Freddie Gray, who died because of police violence.</i><br />
----<br />
<br />
I'm going to speak today about what I've seen as a bicycle anthropologist, that there are many unofficial ways of inhabiting our shared streets, even as these streets are shaped by institutions of power and expert knowledge. To start, I want to define “urbanism” really broadly. I see it as diverse and plural, many sets of norms for how people should and shouldn't act when sharing and moving through public space. When seen this way, we can differentiate between “urbanism” as ways of being in shared public spaces and specific expert systems that prescribe how those spaces should be, such as “bicycle urbanism” or “urban planning.”<br />
<br />
I got this distinction from planning scholar Bent Flyvbjerg. He distinguishes between individual experts and expert systems, arguing that, “the experts do not use rules but operate on the basis of detailed case-experience. This is real expertise. The rules for expert systems are formulated only because the systems require it; rules are characteristic of expert systems, but not of real human experts" (Flyvbjerg 2001: 85). The knowledge individuals gain from repeated experiences as they work informs their expertise, which is also shaped by the systems in which they structure the presentation and use of that expertise in codified ways. The point is that experts aren't objective; they form ideas, rather, from individual experiences that they feed back into shared expert systems.<br />
<br />
This matters, because transforming individual experience into expertise is a powerful act. We all have urban experiences; are we all urban experts? No. People access resources based on their ability to demonstrate knowledge of policy and processes, through shared language and social networks. <br />
<br />
As an example, let's look at opera. I've been learning about opera recently because my little sister is training to be an opera singer. In January, Vera visited me on the east coast and we went to New York City. We bought standing room tickets to see "Aida" at the Metropolitan Opera House. As we entered the splendid hall, we saw many people dressed up in their finest. Clearly a night at the opera is still a formal affair.<br />
<br />
The curtain rose and the performance began. In front of each of us we had a little scrolling screen with translations of the words being sung. I didn't really know what to make of it. I could tell that the performers onstage had some mad skills, but I didn't know how to evaluate them. At the intermission, Vera excitedly explained a few of the distinctions that would be easy for me to grasp. I had a greater appreciation for the singing after that first break.<br />
<br />
Think of urbanism as a plethora of musical genres, from classic rock to throat singing to opera. And then you have expert systems that train individuals to hear distinctions in some of those genres. When experts spend years learning to make sense to each other, adopting shared ideas of what's good and bad, a potential byproduct is transforming untrained voices into something that doesn't sound quite right. <br />
<br />
As an alternative to expertise as objective knowledge, I use as an anthropological concept called “situated knowledge.” Donna Haraway defined situated knowledge as “embodied objectivity” (Haraway 1988: 581). It's a way to understand how our individual experiences come to seem objective; because they're what we know, we project them onto the world around us, and for some of us the world reflects back that we are correct. This is one aspect of privilege; when your experience matches the world you inhabit and others around you do the work of accommodating your normal. <br />
<br />
As authoritative figures, experts have the power to place boundaries around what's relevant to a given problem and what's not. It is important to notice what an expert system takes for granted, and what has been cut off. <br />
<br />
I've spent years studying and participating in the expert system of bicycle urbanism, and I'm interested in the way that advocacy-oriented bicycle enthusiasts identify themselves as an oppressed group who will benefit from street change but do not necessarily encompass other forms of oppression in their scope. I've found that the boundaries placed in bicycle urbanism sometimes make it difficult to show the relevance of other social realities to street activity. The agreed-upon causal relationship between built environment design and how people get around tends to overlook those individuals who do not or cannot comply with the city’s normative demands. These other bicycle users exist even in hostile streets designed without them in mind. <br />
<br />
To me, this has shown that where we connect street activity to other areas, such as environmentalism or poverty, is culturally conditioned. Do we see streets as a Metropolitan Opera House, where only certain movements are deemed worthy of performance? The expectation that we'd only pay attention to certain kinds of street abuse when people who use streets are often oppressed in so many other ways shows that in bicycle urbanism certain situated knowledges give shape to the expert system. <br />
<br />
What are the other styles for using public spaces that currently don't fit into an expert system? Think about protest as an illustration of how street action relates to other areas, as outrage spills into streets, the place I've heard some bicycle urbanists claim does not relate to racism, classism, and other forms of oppression.<br />
<br />
There have been a lot of street protests since last summer, when Black Americans wouldn't take the silencing of their experience of police violence anymore. I don't know if any of you have been out in the street in one of these protests, but they are often much quieter than they're portrayed on TV. What gets portrayed in media is calculated to stoke fears of what a protest could become: a riot. I want to explore what a riot is a little bit, how this antithesis of "livability" has something to say about urban life.<br />
<br />
So we're going to visit what was on the radio when I was in high school in Southern California in the late 1990s, Sublime's “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1dPKfxRhk0">April 29, 1992</a>.” It's a song that lists the ways in which a riot offers the promise of fulfilling needs people have been denied the right to have. <br />
<br />
<i>April 26, 1992<br />There was a riot on the streets, tell me where were you?<br />You were sitting home watching your TV<br />While I was participating in some anarchy<br /><br />First spot we hit, it was my liquor store<br />I finally got all that alcohol I can't afford<br />Red lights flashing, time to retire<br />And then we turned that liquor store into a structure fire<br /><br />Next stop we hit, it was the music shop<br />It only took one brick to make that window drop<br />Finally we got our own PA<br />Where do you think I got this guitar that you're hearing today?<br /><br />When we returned to the pad to unload everything<br />It dawned on me that I need new home furnishings<br />So once again we filled the van until it was full<br />Since that day my living room's been much more comfortable<br /><br />Cause everybody in the hood has had it up to here<br />It's getting harder and harder and harder each and every year<br />Some kids went in a store with their mother<br />I saw her when she came out, she was getting some Pampers<br /><br />They said it was for the Black man<br />They said it was for the Mexican<br />And not for the white man<br />But if you look at the streets<br />It wasn't about Rodney King<br />It's this fucked up situation and these fucked up police<br /><br />It's about coming up<br />And staying on top<br />And screaming 1-8-7 on a motherfucking cop<br />It's not in the paper, it's on the wall<br />National Guard<br />Smoke from all around</i><br />
<br />
A guitar to express yourself; liquor to lighten the mood; diapers to keep a baby clean; furniture for a gathering space. In the song, all of these reasonable material goods are the fruits of the riot, which symbolizes fear, disorder, and chaos. The play of the song is to suggest that riots are productive for some people. I'm not endorsing riots; what I'm pointing out is the song's message that there are hurts in this world that make riots seem better than the current order. The riot is pressure exploding outward, people screaming because they can't fit their lives into the system in which they've been told they must survive. You can hear this when you go to a protest, when people shout together in the street. Can you imagine people shouting in the Met?<br />
<br />
The riot is not so different from street life; it's just an extreme of street chaos. Our streets are already chaotic, because the world is not just. In bicycle urbanism there's a pervasive idea that the biggest insecurity we face is in interacting with hostile motorists. This denies the struggles that some people who use bicycles today face in many other areas. Housing insecurity. Food insecurity. Water insecurity. Job insecurity. These are global problems. And the streets are the place where the pressure escapes, a melting pot where hierarchies can be overturned. An unemployed Black man can drive a fancy car and assert his humanity; a woman driver can cut pedestrians off, attentive only to her own needs at least in this space. Streets are riotous everyday.<br />
<br />
What if we started defining what to include in an expert system through paying attention to all the ways people disrupt and reproduce hierarchy in the street? <br />
<br />
The singer for Sublime, Bradley Nowell, was a white man who grew up in a wealthy community on the edge of Los Angeles County. There are important questions we could ask about Nowell's fitness to speak for people participating in the L.A. Riots, or the Civil Unrest as it is called in L.A. activist circles. The song doesn't even get the date right, and there are <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots_in_popular_culture">plenty of other poetic interpretations of the unrest from artists who are people of color</a>. I don't know Nowell's intentions with the song. He had died of a heroin overdose before the song was released in July 1996. I'm not really interested in whether he rioted or not; what I'm interested in here is his role as an outsider, an observer, and a mouthpiece for the anger and pain (and yes, fun too) spewing out through violence during that week. What I'm interested in his decision to document marginal realities he saw in Southern California. More than anything, I see Nowell as a flâneur.<br />
<br />
Flânerie is a French word for urban wandering and observation. It is a mode of keen openness to the vibrating life of the city. To learn more, Simon Sadler's book <a href="http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/situationist-city"><i>The Situationist City</i></a> is a great starting point. You can also look at the work of <a href="https://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/b/e.htm#benjamin-walter">Walter Benjamin</a>.<br />
<br />
In my work, flânerie is a central method. I've based my findings about bicycling on ethnographic wandering on a bicycle. I see myself producing situated knowledge about streets through recognizing the situated knowledge of all street users as they move around and express what they see as street rights and street wrongs. There are many different perspectives, habits, and values co-present in shared public spaces. They're not all respectable.<br />
<br />
The urban observer is not confined to noticing what's respectable. She sees through her own eyes and can be deeply affected by what is going on around her, even when it's unclear where the lines should fall between right and wrong; there's a lot of sympathy in Nowell's words.<br />
<br />
Sometimes what urban observers find are ugly truths that the current status quo would rather ignore. This is what the line “it's not in the paper, it's on the wall” says to me. Realities that exist without recognition overflow into daylight at some point. I have tried to harness the visceral feeling of vulnerability on a bicycle as a way to observe negative experiences as well as more pleasurable ones. It's made me unsure that we already know how to fix our street problems, because there aren't necessarily readymade solutions for improving situations we haven't invested in understanding. <br />
<br />
A good starting point is opening our eyes to more forms of life in the street. This isn't a rejection of infrastructure or design; it is a call for further study of the diversity of street habits before making authoritative claims about how people should behave. Why must they change? According to whose standards? What is lost and what is gained, and by whom? Who defines the problems and who defines the solutions? Prescribing urban change can be done in more and less respectful ways, in tandem with struggling communities or in assuming things about them, cause we don't all define urban problems the same way. <br />
<br />
Anthropologists Rachel Breunlin and Helen Regis found an example of this in studying a once-segregated housing project in New Orleans. They documented how residents of the neighborhood saw the place as having positive aspects, which were overlooked by outsiders and city officials interested in razing it. What would it look like for those residents to decide how their neighborhood should be viewed? Interviewing a man named Troy Materre, they found that,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Although his trips were within the confines of the social and physical segregation of New Orleans, his telling of them recenters the black experience—young people in Desire did not necessarily believe their lives were marginal. And contrary to dominant assumptions, even young people without cars had considerable mobility in the city. Troy’s comment—“maybe </i>they<i> was cut off”—challenges liberal notions that black people are somehow deficient if they are not among white people. In this statement, Troy proposes a revisionist view of segregation: Through their own social practices and restricted spatial mobility, white people denied themselves access to Desire. </i>(Breunlin and Regis 2006:751)</blockquote>
The destitute also have an urbanism, though they may not have the resources and expert languages to create positive representations of their norms. As an expert observer, I see the city from my own mobile position, and I also recognize as fellow travelers the people who inhabit other urbanisms, other livabilities. In cultural anthropology we take it for granted that people follow differing logics, and I have found that to support sustainable culture change we must take the time to respect and understand them. Instead of speaking for or on behalf of the voiceless, we can use our expert status to let them start the tune, and then we harmonize, we find through a shared chorus a new song none of us knew before. We can be in respectful solidarity with realities we may not live ourselves, but it takes letting go of the idea that the way we see things is the right way forward. That can be easier said than done.<br />
<br />
I know from my experience as a bike user where the urgency in bicycle urbanism comes from. I know it starts with the surge of adrenaline and fear we get when motorists rev engines at us or honk. I know it is fed by the horrible pain of losing loved ones to street violence, and fears about climate disasters. But we need to learn how to situate ourselves and see the security we have in other areas that allows street security to be the biggest thing on our minds. Without that awareness, we uphold an expert system that is calibrated to serve certain groups' needs, when the population of bicycle users is really quite diverse.<br />
<br />
We are in an exciting moment right now where people across the country, from all racialized backgrounds, are organizing together to shed light on more realities of racial profiling in policing. I'm not involved in criminal justice work, but what I see playing out in street rallies and protests is the surfacing of more truths, truths that had been pushed down because they are unpleasant and come from a marginalized group. <br />
<br />
So for those of us interested in urbanisms and urban planning, let's take note: when are the expert systems that explain and manage urbanisms about transforming the city into a Metropolitan Opera House where only certain trained voices perform? And when are these expert systems modes for observing all the styles out there that people are performing, singing their pain and their joys out in the street? Let's challenge the idea that people need to learn our rules in order for us to pay attention to what they have to say.<br />
<br />urbanadoniahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11368148568918195706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1326787860384215637.post-28885012782395029372015-04-03T06:49:00.001-07:002015-04-03T06:49:37.780-07:00Street PainIn the summer of 2013, I was living in SE Portland on the corner of 32nd and Stark, a popular street for biking. One night a friend and I were inside watching a movie when a sickening crunch outside grabbed our attention. I felt a surge of panic and looked fearfully out of the window. It turned out we had heard a car colliding with a person on a bicycle. The bicyclist lay on the ground in the street a few feet from my building, his blood splattered over the broken windshield of the truck. Other people had already gathered, so there was nothing I could do to help. After an ambulance arrived and carried him away his blood left a stain on the street that remained for as long as I lived there.<br />
<br />
Last night around sunset, I had just returned to my home in Northeast D.C. after biking to the grocery store. As I pulled into my alley, I saw some kids playing around, one of them lying on the ground. I thought to myself, that's not a good place to lie down, but I didn't say anything. I feel like enough of an outsider in this neighborhood without running around and telling kids how I think they should behave.<br />
<br />
It was warm out, with just a touch of humidity to foreshadow summer. I opened the windows in my second floor apartment, and the kids I'd seen in the alley were hooting as they played. I could hear the sound of cars passing a little too quickly down our quiet street, as they often do. This is a town where people drive as fast as possible, I guess it makes them feel powerful. This is a town where feeling powerful is important.<br />
<br />
And then the sounds outside changed. A screech and a thud punctuated the cries of fun and turned them into cries of fear. I didn't want to believe that it was happening again. The surge of panic returned, and I started saying "oh God no" over and over as I made my way to the bathroom window. I looked out and saw people gathered around someone lying in the gutter. It was one of the kids who'd been playing in the alley. A white sedan was parked in the middle of the road with the driver's door open. "Don't touch him, don't touch him!" an adult barked at the kids surrounding their friend. I saw the prone figure move his arms, apparently conscious, thank God.<br />
<br />
I couldn't do anything to help, but I felt like I had to go wait outside until the ambulance arrived. People came from surrounding blocks to join the quietly waiting circle around the boy. I stood in my backyard, apart from them, remaining an outsider to this neighborhood where I represent the cure D.C. has chosen for poverty: rising rents.<br />
<br />
I want to be part of a street safety conversation where this little boy matters as a whole person. What are the stresses his parents face as they try to survive in this city? Is he going to be scolded for darting into the street, while the lady who hit him with her car maintains her sense that driving is the best way to get around? What do these street traumas mean for marginalized communities that know all too well the powerlessness of pain?<br />
<br />
I don't want to witness any more hurt in the road, but far too much of the "safety" work I see happening would cut off lives beyond the street. The insecurity that a Black family in D.C. faces goes far beyond the danger of a soccer ball rolling in front of a car. It's time to start bearing witness to the other ways in which communities are drowning. We are not going to break the back on driving by villainizing drivers, when driving matters so much to economic and social status.<br />
<br />
Who cares about that little boy more: me, the bike anthropologist looking out from the second story window, or the woman who hit him who waited by his side?urbanadoniahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11368148568918195706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1326787860384215637.post-43322289586760697022015-04-02T06:52:00.001-07:002015-04-02T07:04:40.493-07:00Maybe Bike Share Just Isn't EquitableOne of the biggest topics taking up airtime in the resourced part of the bike world is the development and expansion of bike share systems. I've been asked about "<a href="http://www.urbanadonia.com/2015/03/the-multiple-meanings-of-equity.html">equity</a>" and bike share many times. After about the 15th request for my expert opinion on the topic, it occurred to me that the believers in bike share see this as something that HAS TO WORK.<br />
<br />
Bike share is one of the current "silver bullets" of bike advocacy, the trends that become THE solution, THE intervention that is going to fix the United States' problem with biking. Bike share creates access to bicycles; boom, problem solved.<br />
<br />
The thing is, no matter how many vision boards y'all are creating to attract customers and resources to bike share, there is no silver bullet. And this groupthink around bike share seems to have made it difficult for folks to recognize something that matters: <i>maybe bike share just isn't equitable. </i>Where stations go, what kind of bikes are used, how you pay for them; all of these are interesting design questions that are hard to answer in a way that works for everyone in a given city.<br />
<br />
Maybe we'll find that these inherently limited bike share systems aren't a great use of
public resources. If companies want to invest in them as a lifestyle
amenity making certain neighborhoods even more desirable according to
"livability" standards, that's a different conversation than this idea
that bike share is somehow a public transportation resource. <br />
<br />
There's a lot of other more immediately equitable stuff to invest in if you want to spend transportation dollars on bicycling. Money could go to local entrepreneurs who want to start up bike shops in neighborhoods where there hasn't been one in many years. Money could go to youth education programs where kids learn to build bikes for themselves and for family. Money could go to community events where people find out that hanging around outside of cars in the street is pretty fun.<br />
<br />
Given the fervor and flurry of investment I've seen around making bike share equitable in recent years, I think I might be saying something pretty controversial right now. Well, that's on purpose. The bike world needs more controversy if it wants to grow bigger and make bicycling work for more people. It's important that people researching bike share as a possible use of public resources remain open to the potential conclusion that these systems simply aren't the best option.urbanadoniahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11368148568918195706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1326787860384215637.post-45962831500812431622015-03-25T08:55:00.002-07:002015-03-25T09:15:08.128-07:00The Multiple Meanings of EquityI've got a chapter in a new academic volume called <a href="http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/earth-and-environmental-science/environmental-policy-economics-and-law/sustainability-global-city-myth-and-practice?format=HB"><i>Sustainability in the Global City</i></a>, and recently another contributor, Professor Miriam Greenberg, invited me to participate in an online educational resource called <a href="http://critical-sustainabilities.ucsc.edu/">Critical Sustainabilities</a>. Talking with Miriam about the project reminded me of how many notions can be represented by a single term like "sustainability," and how a critical analysis of these multiple meanings creates a more democratic, shared change project.<br />
<br />
As a bike researcher, I've been engaged for years with the <a href="http://bicicultures.org/about/">Bicicultures</a> collaboration that has experimented with this multiplicity in "bicycling." There are many cultural practices assumed by different individuals when they hear that word, and anyone who wants to expand bicycling to more people should get curious about what bicycling means in different settings.<br />
<br />
I've also encountered this multiple meanings phenomenon with the term "equity." Here I'm going to discuss a few of the ways I've heard equity used in the transportation equity conversation at the national level and in bike advocacy networks. Each of these meanings represents a useful part of a larger equity strategy, but on its own has some limitations.<br />
<br />
<b>PR.</b> Some people think "equity" means changing who the public associates with a particular mode of transportation such as bicycling. They try to accomplish this through featuring people of more racialized groups, genders, and abilities in communications materials.<br />
<br />
In bike advocacy this has been a common tactic for a few years. It happens in two significantly different ways:<br />
1. An organization with a homogeneous staff and board starts using images of heterogeneous people in their communications materials. <br />
2. A group or individual who shares an identity with the marginalized group portrayed generates the images.<br />
<br />
What's the difference? Let's say a bike organization with all white leaders produces a booklet featuring people of color advocates. The reason this difference or similarity between the producers of the images and the people portrayed matters is that simply pasting more diverse faces on the same projects designed by predominantly white expert circles is tokenizing and does not set up a standard for including more people in decisionmaking. Are we trying to send the message that people of color do bike (true), so there's not a need for changed decisionmaking in bike advocacy (false)?<br />
<br />
Another example: the public discourse on bike share is really focused on the bad optics projected by a lack of diversity in who uses the systems. In my experience it's been harder to draw supporters' and reporters' interest to behind the scenes issues that might improve bike share (worker organizing, designing systems differently from the get go, and questioning why the systems were publicly funded in the first place).<br />
<br />
Building a diversity-focused PR strategy can be a good way to signal an intention to change, but on its own does not constitute that change. The case of <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/23/united-nations-uber-womens-safety">UN Women canceling their planned collaboration with Uber</a> is a recent example of a PR strategy being challenged because it was focused on image rather than equitable change.<br />
<br />
<b>Data Inclusion.</b> I've heard many D.C. professionals use "equity" to refer to a policy project to include more data about people of color, low-income families, and people with disabilities in legislative processes so that public funding reaches these marginalized groups. A great example is the <a href="http://nationalequityatlas.org/">National Equity Atlas</a>, a comprehensive resource designed to increase access to available information about inequality.<br />
<br />
Many people believe in the power of data, especially "big data" (<a href="http://www.datajustice.org/">another term with multiple meanings that is circulating widely</a>), to produce a more equal society. Of course, "data" on its own is not objective; it is a source of information that can be interpreted in many ways to many ends. Who is interpreting the data should be seen as part of the picture, and in this equity project, policy professionals remain in charge of speaking for community needs without necessarily explaining how those professionals earned their right to speak for community members. In practice, I've seen this meaning of equity become "train the white professionals to serve other groups' needs better through exposing them to data about those groups." This doesn't problematize a lack of diversity in leadership and professional positions.<br />
<br />
<b>Planning Together.</b> In my own work on the power divide between expert and community knowledge, I've used "equity" to mean changing who participates in decisionmaking. We need more professionals making decisions based on the skills they developed through surviving as a marginalized group; we need more community members standing up for their right to use shared urban spaces in ways that make sense to them. We need more people to decide what to decide, not just chase them down to choose from a list of options experts created to solve problems experts defined.<br />
<br />
Based on the tensions I've encountered as I've tried to move this strategy forward, it seems like this meaning of equity can be a bitter pill for current experts and leaders to swallow. It's tough to continue advocating for power sharing when people in power do not want to admit what's in their control. So a major limitation of this strategy is that it's a challenge to get authentic buy-in from leadership. <br />
<br />
<b>Gloss for Race.</b> If you're uncomfortable talking about the role that racializing processes play in our society, you can refer to the fact that you know there's a problem by using the term "equity." This vague meaning of equity has its utility, because admitting there's a problem is an important first step in any change process. It's an oblique approach, kind of like not wanting to look directly into the sun because it's too bright, so you shield your eyes and look to the side. It's a start, right?<br />
<br />
I do think that there's a danger of this imprecise approach leaving other marginalized groups' needs out of equity projects. When I was running an equity initiative for a national bike organization, I was reminded a number of times by other professionals and advocates that the "equity" picture needs to include individuals with disabilities, for example.<br />
<br />
<b>A Comprehensive Approach</b><br />
What are the effects of people using the same term but meaning different things by it? We could all benefit from more discussion about what we have in mind when taking on an "equity" project. Mapping out a comprehensive approach that explains how different meanings of equity support one another and build into a bigger picture would help many organizations and agencies focus their work.<br />
<br />
Perhaps most importantly, these kinds of mapping exercises would create transparent agendas for equity projects that new stakeholders could use to hold institutions accountable. The expectation that community members should trust groups simply because they've started to use the word "equity" is troubling.<br />
<br />
Personally I'm going to take a break from using "equity" and get back to challenging the divide between expert and community member more directly. There are great ideas and techniques for social justice and sustainability out there that don't fit in the current equity conversation, and I want to help make more room for those ideas in our planning and development processes. When people ask me for advice about "equity," I'll request that they be specific about what the term means to them so that I can give answers that explain my own commitments more clearly.urbanadoniahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11368148568918195706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1326787860384215637.post-7859548362024920942015-03-13T15:07:00.000-07:002015-03-13T15:14:17.292-07:00Bicycling Beyond Bike AdvocacyI often hear people describe me as leading change in bicycling, in the sense that I am championing the inclusion of something new. I'd like to clarify something: I'm not bringing anything new into <i>bicycling</i>. I try to use my anthropology training to bring more existing bicycling realities into bicycle advocacy, research, and planning.<br />
<br />
Many bike advocates refer to bicycling as though it's some isolated and singular phenomenon. Starting from this belief that bicycling exists as some sovereign thing, they assume they can choose whether to connect (their version of) bicycling to other issues through their advocacy agendas.<br />
<br />
But, to quote myself and other bike scholars, bicycling does not happen in a vacuum. It's not separate from the streets, the neighborhoods, the communities, the life and history of the places where we ride. When bike advocates deny or selectively recognize these connections, which are fundamental features of bicycling and other mobilities, it's no wonder headaches and misunderstandings result.<br />
<br />
I've been realizing lately, through conversation with some of the bike thinkers I know, that I bought into a myth that everyone who likes bicycling has something in common. I don't believe that anymore. I support bicycling because it's cheap, good for the environment, and a great metaphor for change. I've been lucky to find a particular bike movement that puts social justice at its center. But our perspective is not the norm in bike advocacy, as I'm reminded every time I see myself portrayed as some challenger.<br />
<br />
I know that for some folks, their advocacy starts from a very real experience of feeling less-than on bikes. They've seen bicycling excluded from certain road or trail spaces, or they've felt under attack because of hostile motorists. Some of these advocates then make metaphorical connections to other oppressed groups and appropriate the language that describes their struggles, using phrases like "second-class citizen" to describe what they see as a lack of rights for cyclists.<br />
<br />
The thing is, this step to claim through bike advocacy an oppressed minority status is itself very exclusionary. Since bicycle users are not a homogeneous group, many of us who bike are members of embattled racialized/gendered/classed/abled groups. For us, biking might be a liberating practice that encourages us in other areas of life. That doesn't mean biking is our only form of expression, or our most central one.<br />
<br />
There is no singular bicycling identity; there are lots of shared cultures where people agree about what biking means and how to do it properly. Bike advocacy is one of those cultures. It's been my belief that opening bike advocacy to more bicycling perspectives will lead to better results. I have to admit that my recent experience working for the League of American Bicyclists has shaken my conviction that bike advocacy is ready to lead a diverse bike movement. Some individuals are still held back by some personal issues that keep them from celebrating the mixed, jumbled, beautiful reality of our streets.<br />
<br />
For this reason, I think it's important to restate that bicycling is not the same thing as bicycle advocacy. If bike advocates want to speak on behalf of bicycling, they need to let go of the exclusionary fantasy that people like me are crashing some bike party.<br />
<br />
We are the party.<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/J2vo9VgIGDc" width="420"></iframe>urbanadoniahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11368148568918195706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1326787860384215637.post-12803440012921307112014-11-04T08:32:00.000-08:002014-11-04T08:40:02.763-08:00Bicycling, Above or Beyond Traffic Laws?I ride in a cycle track on my morning commute. This narrow strip of pavement, separated by parked cars from a one way street with three lanes of traffic, gets very busy in the direction of downtown DC. Some people ride a little wobbly, on bikes that don't fit so great. Others ride really fast, zipping between the slower movers. Sometimes it's both at once, a wobbler who thinks traveling asfastaspossible is the right way to go, and they swing around me with their gym bags flailing.<br />
<br />
I wonder if these riders know much about the politics of bike infrastructure, and that it took a considerable amount of effort and years of pushing to get this little bollarded avenue in place. I prefer not to pass people in the cycle track, because I view it as a space that's been created precisely to subvert the expectation that everyone on a bike will ride fast. At least, that's the message assigned to cycle tracks in bike advocacy circles. But it's pretty difficult to affix one group's definition onto shared public spaces that thousands of individuals define for themselves in how they use them over and over.<br />
<br />
Much bike advocacy today aims to convince the public to act in certain ways in public streets through changing infrastructure and enforcing laws. I've got a different approach as a bike anthropologist, acknowledging that the bicycle has a particular capacity for disrupting time and space and thinking about how to take this into account.<br />
<br />
Riding a bicycle encourages a remarkable trick: a person on a bike finds fissures in time and space, gaps between red lights and green, moments when drivers haven't noticed they can proceed. It's pretty ingenious, you can squeeze through small gaps in space better than a larger car can, and you can squeeze through small gaps in time better than a slower pedestrian can.<br />
<br />
In the U.S. today, squeezing through these gaps often involves breaking the law. And from the standpoint of Follow The Rules So We Are Taken Seriously, it means biking "wrong" because lawful behavior is supposed to legitimize us as road users. But as an observer of streets, I can see that many people out and about are less interested in following traffic laws than they are in squeezing through time and space gaps. They legitimize themselves as road users by just going. If getting to work quickly will be aided by riding a bike through an intersection against a light, they go ahead and do it.<br />
<br />
Based on the fact that I'm often the lone cyclist waiting at a red light
while others stream past me, I'm not even sure that the other pedalers are actively scoffing traffic laws. If they are, the hesitation while they
deliberate whether to scoff known laws must be measured in microseconds.
It's a pretty clear challenge to the goal I know many bike advocates
share of making streets safer through following standardized
rules. A lot of bike professional work is devoted to adapting European
bike-specific rules and designs, so that the way we move around
can fit into existing traffic engineering standards. The cycle track is
the fullest realization of this vision, an increasingly standardized traffic control device specifically designed to regulate the flow of bicycle circulation.<br />
<br />
Beyond controlling behavior through street design, us bike people also try to convince folks that being lawful is a good idea. In some places I've lived, especially Portland, Oregon, bike users take it upon themselves to police the behavior of others on bikes. I remember when I was finding my groove as a bike commuter there in 2005, I would yell at bikers who blew through stop signs. The feeling of self righteousness was like a drug, pumping some more adrenalin into my veins. When I moved to Los Angeles, I developed a more flexible approach: I would stop if drivers were around, but I wasn't going to put my foot down at a stop sign if there was nobody there. I no longer found it appropriate to tell other people how to use the streets, considering the pressure we all faced from hostile drivers. But riding against red lights remained anathema. Here in DC, I'm starting to crack, feeling like a fool as I watch others exploit the time gaps I'm letting slip by. <br />
<br />
And then, this summer, a man driving a car with a suspended license struck my mother and her partner as they crossed a street lawfully, in a crosswalk, with a walk signal. They were in Newport Beach, California, along a stretch of the beautiful Orange County coastline where people driving cars hurt people walking and biking with a frequency that speaks volumes about how little consideration is normally offered to bodies outside of cars in my home region.<br />
<br />
So now when I stand at red lights astride my road bike and feel the breeze of other bike users passing through the empty intersections, I think bitterly about how the law did not protect my mother. She was behaving in accordance with street infrastructure and legal regulations when another person chose to ignore multiple laws and break her bones in four places. What does the law protect? What does using the infrastructure properly ensure? I don't have that feeling of self righteousness anymore to keep me smug while other people get home faster.<br />
<br />
When people on bikes take advantage of time gaps and cut off
pedestrians, I'm troubled. To me, this is what it means to bike "wrong":
to make oneself into a threat to other road users. If there's a person approaching me on foot, I don't think of the space that person is about to occupy as up for grabs. I'd like to see more bike people espouse an inclusive message about "right" ways to ride that acknowledge others' rights to occupy space, even if it's going to mean letting go of one moment's forward motion.<br />
<br />
I'd like to see bike people get past acting above the law, and focus on moving beyond it. I don't see a lot of value in fighting so hard to create special laws and infrastructure for people on bicycles to ignore, just like so many people do when driving cars. I want to legitimize the existing and future social reality of shared streets, both in our own habits while riding and in our advocacy work.<br />
<br />
But who knows, maybe I'll just start yelling at the bicyclists who cut pedestrians off. Old habits die hard.urbanadoniahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11368148568918195706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1326787860384215637.post-62881094275976393922014-10-13T13:00:00.000-07:002014-10-13T13:00:46.137-07:00N-M-A-IThe other day I rode my bicycle<br />
To the National Museum of the American Indian<br />
<br />
I wanted to see with my own eyes<br />
What I've started to feel<br />
That other ways of living<br />
Pre-conquest, those were real<br />
<br />
Before the moment of contact<br />
And long after it too<br />
People made cosmologies<br />
And they looked like me and you<br />
<br />
Before the world turned to<br />
Where it's still stuck in time<br />
Where Cortés and Columbus are heroes<br />
And the ones already here, slime<br />
<br />
So I rode my bicycle down<br />
To the NMAI<br />
Because I needed to know<br />
There's more than just lies <br />
<br />
And there they were<br />
Facts out on display <br />
They wanted us dead<br />
And yet we're here today<br />
<br />
My sister ran our DNA <br />
To learn our antecedents<br />
Africa, las Américas, Europa<br />
Slave, indígena, peasant<br />
<br />
Norway, England, Germany<br />
Ireland, Spain, Mexico<br />
Other words are lost <br />
Those are the names we know<br />
<br />
Whose bodies absorbed contact<br />
Through everyday brutality? <br />
Annihilation visible in retrospect<br />
Eased through consanguinity<br />
<br />
<br />
Well if it were up to me it would crumble<br />
The view that puts white in the clouds<br />
That puts black in the ground<br />
Endless evidence in shrouds<br />
<br />
But there is no choice for me<br />
Of a self/other divide<br />
My cells are a remix<br />
I see through enemy eyes <br />
<br />
I confirmed the hunch<br />
That's pounding in my skull<br />
The clearer I can see<br />
The more my knife seems dull<br />
<br />
There is no other place<br />
In which to be this self<br />
Whipping my flesh<br />
Leaves you with welts<br />
I see myself at NMAI<br />
But I can't keep conquest at bay<br />
Mestizo irises light my eyes<br />
Always, forever, Columbus Dayurbanadoniahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11368148568918195706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1326787860384215637.post-16988878117700630042014-08-29T05:13:00.002-07:002014-08-29T05:13:43.542-07:00What Bike Equity Isn'tEquity isn't<br />
The width of a lane<br />
A couple extra inches<br />
That make us all the same<br />
<br />
Equity isn't<br />
A smiling brown face<br />
And hot pants on a bike<br />
Sex in an exotic place<br />
<br />
Equity isn't<br />
A list of easy steps<br />
That make our biggest problem<br />
Into boxes you can check<br />
<br />
Equity isn't<br />
Policing a divide<br />
Where some can travel freely<br />
Others, stand aside<br />
<br />
Equity isn't<br />
Settled by a report<br />
Every time I write<br />
I wait for the retort<br />
<br />
What equity is:<br />
A landscape we don't know<br />
It means a future world<br />
Where every child can grow<br />
<br />
If you deny how far we are<br />
From reaching that plateau<br />
Equity isn't<br />
Because you won't make it sourbanadoniahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11368148568918195706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1326787860384215637.post-4630030713705532722014-08-06T09:35:00.001-07:002014-08-06T11:23:58.210-07:00Don't Make a Chipwich Out of Me<br />
I'm a <a href="http://pocho.com/pocho-ocho-ways-to-tell-if-you-are-a-chipster-chicano-hipster/" target="_blank">chipster</a>, a Chicana hipster.<br />
<br />
I grew up wearing vintage clothes and lying on brown shag carpet behind the ripped up screens of our 1970s stucco apartment in a Mexican ethnoburb, whose suburban lawns and pools didn't keep white outsiders from calling it a ghetto. I wore Converse two sizes too big for me for several years because they were the only kind on sale at Costco. I use my long brown legs to ride a 1980s Panasonic road bike.<br />
<br />
And, make no mistake, I fucking love the Smiths.<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/rsjevMbPqW0" width="480"></iframe><br />
<br />
In some ways, my existence has been charmed. I get to think across many worlds: bicycle advocacy, cultural anthropology, bicycle research, Latino urbanism, and I've been trying to find a place in environmental justice. My career has given me a ridiculously specific and exciting opportunity: I get to help show that while bicycling lives at the poles of "Entitled White Man's Toy for Running Red Lights" and "Invisible Person of Color's Mode of Last Resort," it also exists in the vast continents in between. Chipsters like me also use bicycles. Us in-betweeners know that the world is a complicated place, and we've got some pretty good ideas about how to make things better.<br />
<br />
For example, I understand why it is frustrating to see a lot of white men running red lights on their bikes. But you know what? My frustration doesn't stop there. As a woman of color, historically and structurally relegated to the role of observer, I know that
power and privilege fill our roadways. I know that you can be a jerk with a car, a bike, or just on
your own two feet. I know how cutting someone off on the street connects intimately to larger structures of domination and power. I know that the ability to influence infrastructure investment has a lot to do with power. That's why I've focused my energies on working with bike advocates to envision what equitable bike policy and planning should mean.<br />
<br />
In short, I don't need anyone to explain to me that white male privilege is at work in the street. I got this.<br />
<br />
What motivates me a lot of days is the knowledge that a lot of people in
this world have no voice, and the more conversations I join, the closer
(incrementally, infinitesimally, achingly tinily) we are to justice. But lately I've been feeling kind of compressed, like my existence isn't appropriate for mainstream consumption.<br />
<br />
The reality is, a lot of activism is still about white men fighting each other for dominance. This week I had the bizarre experience of a white man telling me that biking can't possibly be a space for social justice because (wait for it) all bicyclists are privileged white men.<br />
<br />
Where do people like me fit into that framework? If we've got white saviors running around yelling about white privilege, what are we for? Are we just puffy oppressed puppets you can put on your hand before you sock that jerk who dared to think differently from you? Are we just sand to fling in the eyes of your white rival on the playground?<br />
<br />
I may be a chipster, but I am not a chipwich. I'm not the filling in a sandwich where white men squeeze me into oblivion so that they can get at each other's throats.<br />
<br />
My troubled brown father didn't have much to give, but I will always be grateful for the freedom that comes from knowing that I don't need a white man to tell me right from wrong.urbanadoniahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11368148568918195706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1326787860384215637.post-56565742226601011902014-07-31T08:29:00.001-07:002014-07-31T08:29:08.828-07:00UndergroundI live underground.<br />
I seem to be whole.<br />
I have two arms, two legs,<br />
A head.<br />
I can move freely,<br />
If I stay down.<br />
<br />
Surfacing is tricky.<br />
Some people don't want to see all of me.<br />
They can accept<br />
My fingers, maybe some knuckle.<br />
Sometimes I can reach out as far as my elbows.<br />
Sometimes I go feet first, and make it to my knees.<br />
But emerging whole<br />
Is offensive<br />
It's dangerous.<br />
<br />
It makes the people<br />
Whose feelings matter more than mine<br />
Uncomfortable.<br />
<br />
They squirm, unaccustomed to seeing bodies like mine.<br />
My existence is an abstract to them<br />
Something to argue about, and dismiss when they're bored. <br />
<br />
The arguments happen because they feel they are to blame somehow.<br />
They do not seem to grasp<br />
That keeping me down,<br />
Underground:<br />
That is their culpability<br />
That is their contribution<br />
To the centuries of oppression<br />
To the history they find too ugly to reveal.<br />
<br />
That is when the fresh new hands <br />
Get dirty<br />
By shoving us down<br />
And telling us it's not time<br />
To exist.urbanadoniahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11368148568918195706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1326787860384215637.post-90971674939391475202014-07-02T07:54:00.001-07:002014-07-02T07:54:16.600-07:00Mobile Microaggression Machine[Let's say I managed to record the last time a man driving an SUV said "get off the road" to me as I rode by on my bike, and then I super slowed it down and this is what I heard]<i> </i><br />
<br />
<i>Hey you on the bike</i><br />
<i>What are you doing here?</i><br />
<i>Can't you see you don't look like us?</i><br />
<i>Can't you see we don't want you?</i><br />
<br />
But sir<br />
I'm not one of them<br />
I know what you're talking about<br />
I'm mad, too, that they don't seem to care<br />
I'm not here to challenge you<br />
But the system you bought into is really unfair<br />
<br />
<i>I work hard to buy myself</i><br />
<i>The nice things everyone wants</i><br />
<i>A car that I wash every week</i><br />
<i>That's why I get to own the road </i><br />
<i>And here you are</i><br />
<i>No car</i><br />
<i>Thinking you own the street</i><br />
<i>I have to wait?</i><br />
<i>Get out of my way</i><br />
<br />
Why does your car give you the right<br />
To treat me and others like dirt?<br />
<br />
<i>Because you've been winning and screwing us all</i><br />
<i>For centuries and I'm done</i><br />
<i>You think you can come out and just have a ball</i><br />
<i>In the street you just met yesterday</i><br />
<br />
But can't you see, it's not me<br />
I'm brown and I'm an activist<br />
I don't want things to go on this way<br />
But the car that you're driving<br />
Is a trap you bought into<br />
It's costing you more than it's worth <br />
<br />
<i>You don't know how it feels</i><br />
<i>To be king of the road</i><br />
<i>When you get treated like dirt</i><br />
<i>Everywhere else</i><br />
<br />
I get to be king?<br />
A Chicana like me?<br />
What the fuck happened<br />
To solidarity? <br />
urbanadoniahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11368148568918195706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1326787860384215637.post-86545616442439735512014-06-23T17:15:00.002-07:002014-06-23T17:16:27.021-07:00Marching to the Middle, Biking to the TopMarching to the middle<br />
Biking to the top<br />
How're we gonna get<br />
Obesity to drop?<br />
<br />
The health people say policy<br />
The bike folks say it too<br />
No one wants to spend their dough <br />
On street people like you<br />
<br />
Marching to the middle<br />
Biking to the top<br />
Top-down change will save us all<br />
Infrastructure's hott<br />
<br />
And you? You must be molded<br />
To fit their jargon scene<br />
A planning fad or Dutch idea<br />
Is better than your scheme<br />
<br />
Marching to the middle<br />
Biking to the top<br />
It's all about the image<br />
They make it, you just shop<br />
<br />
You, be a good consumer<br />
Of healthy food and place<br />
Don't ask us how we got it,<br />
But we'll sell you back your face<br />
<br />
Marching to the middle<br />
Biking to the top<br />
We're all living breathing farms<br />
But we don't reap the crop<br />
<br />
The passions that inflame men<br />
They call expert facts<br />
Cycle tracks will solve it all<br />
Even colored heart attacks<br />
<br />
Marching to the middle<br />
Biking to the top<br />
Their vision serves a precious few<br />
You be glad to gobble slop<br />
<br />
Something that is simple <br />
Like a bicycle <br />
Becomes a mark of good or bad<br />
An amenity that's tolled<br />
<br />
Marching to the middle<br />
Biking to the top<br />
It's cheap until it's trendy<br />
Then, duh, let's mark it up <br />
<br />
We pretend that health's for all<br />
Has it ever been this way?<br />
To live well is a privilege<br />
Not for you, José<br />
<br />
Marching to the middle<br />
Biking to the top<br />
When justice is just status<br />
You deserve the finest chop<br />
<br />
We can't all be middle class<br />
I'm sorry, labor folks<br />
Those who could, did, too much<br />
Our world has broken spokes<br />
<br />
Marching to the middle<br />
Biking to the top<br />
A car is worth more than the world<br />
Like they're ever going to stop urbanadoniahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11368148568918195706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1326787860384215637.post-32637508358293035352014-05-26T15:52:00.000-07:002014-05-26T15:52:00.746-07:00Street Ethnography: How Elastic Are Your Intersections?Here's what I've learned about streets: people disagree about how to use them. There are laws, there are stripes, there are bollards, and then there are all these randos doing what they think is best. As a street ethnographer, I have observed that some intersections are more "elastic" than others, and this flexibility comes from people's attitudes rather than road design.<br />
<br />
When I first started bike commuting in Portland, the heart of Law Abiding Cyclist Country, I got really jazzed about always stopping at stop signs and red lights. It made sense to me that I could make drivers take me seriously by behaving predictably. I'd grown up in a place where jaywalking meant running across the street, because pedestrians having priority was more theoretical than real. So it followed that, using this new mode of transport, I should do what the signs told me to do.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8INpibh4Tspck3ac0l195ctb2Sv4gzZji4679Vu7AZ_vI3H4zGIwNnV7e-epCE7oTfQoMdje5IXwj6yo5RGzd-MYIaZ9SfRs0BM_vswXWqZvihf6do0Ee6QMDxu5ekdnLqoz8kYU_OUo/s1600/inelastic+ideal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8INpibh4Tspck3ac0l195ctb2Sv4gzZji4679Vu7AZ_vI3H4zGIwNnV7e-epCE7oTfQoMdje5IXwj6yo5RGzd-MYIaZ9SfRs0BM_vswXWqZvihf6do0Ee6QMDxu5ekdnLqoz8kYU_OUo/s1600/inelastic+ideal.jpg" height="239" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">An inelastic or rigid intersection. The black line is the measure of elasticity.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Then I moved to Los Angeles, where my illusion of drivers taking cyclists seriously as road users dissolved in a hail of honks. I started thinking of riding as a fight, and playing dirty was the norm. I gave up stopping at stop signs, just making sure things were clear before I continued on. I still stopped at red lights, though. Signalized intersections seem a lot more rigid to me. Sometimes drivers would wave me on while I waited for them to pass, like they had in Portland, but here I took the offered right of way instead of using it as a "teaching moment."<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTXyGeXra4a93qGWN6DDdrqNZLRcJsE6tSpwkOR2Q9P5FomXya6k7rp6NhTcb8CrO-PI_p0ouFd7K8dXfGOpMdojL4rrUlQOCF1hejBU_UWFbi46NsYJoyiANbTwrP4l52YvrbMFud_tI/s1600/somewhat+elastic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTXyGeXra4a93qGWN6DDdrqNZLRcJsE6tSpwkOR2Q9P5FomXya6k7rp6NhTcb8CrO-PI_p0ouFd7K8dXfGOpMdojL4rrUlQOCF1hejBU_UWFbi46NsYJoyiANbTwrP4l52YvrbMFud_tI/s1600/somewhat+elastic.jpg" height="239" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A more elastic intersection. Note that the pedestrian has more freedom of mobility.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Now I'm in Washington, D.C, and wow, I look like a country mouse when I hesitate at intersections. Every time I pull up on a bike or on foot at a corner, others stream past me. The signals here seem to be more suggestions than anything else. Drivers, too, inch forward as much as they can, sometimes being halfway through the intersection before the light turns green.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjz8VH6EnCIR9VQvf3JdHWoVYvJT8r2oVZpKaxusZW0K4tqcAzuWYywM-u-JFIX7m2IbZqqGmAtikYCrsWGMyNqEAGQMTQesOqKKCwWgVdPoW7aTShxl5tk9pWXaDzpBGH8DmWMcHuAjs4/s1600/elastic+intersection.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjz8VH6EnCIR9VQvf3JdHWoVYvJT8r2oVZpKaxusZW0K4tqcAzuWYywM-u-JFIX7m2IbZqqGmAtikYCrsWGMyNqEAGQMTQesOqKKCwWgVdPoW7aTShxl5tk9pWXaDzpBGH8DmWMcHuAjs4/s1600/elastic+intersection.jpg" height="239" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A very elastic intersection, as is common in D.C.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Since I've observed so many other bike users and pedestrians, and as I noted, even motorists, making the point, it's hard for me to ignore the logic of pressing forward into empty space. Traffic signals should guarantee right of way, from a predictability standpoint, but should they impede the flow of people when there's no right of way to protect?<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-N01Le2FdmDhdet3yDSAWmUwgT1bxqyXYD2sCCZ5QOGHhW7lhcldoSiWS8UYuMVYkJebOWVwP0IC3pLK-MZhqtQC2Q7pmWsbSlU3gATGhk0KVUUxFluutDShDxN1vxbGne0LhWNUh2KY/s1600/traffic+in+intersection.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-N01Le2FdmDhdet3yDSAWmUwgT1bxqyXYD2sCCZ5QOGHhW7lhcldoSiWS8UYuMVYkJebOWVwP0IC3pLK-MZhqtQC2Q7pmWsbSlU3gATGhk0KVUUxFluutDShDxN1vxbGne0LhWNUh2KY/s1600/traffic+in+intersection.jpg" height="239" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pragmatic rigidity: honoring cross traffic's right of way.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I know that a lot of our road design standards have been developed through years of liability lawsuits and efforts to control safety. It's just weird to me that the reality, as seen from the everyday scale of ethnography, is a lot more pragmatic. If we really want to promote active transportation, shouldn't we legitimize the greater elasticity walking and biking afford? Does it really make sense to limit these modes according to the car-based paradigm of traffic engineering?<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUwX-wiBN4hhtYe6-aLQcCELCXsP0mMcp5QjtBk26uT4DxHTpxgGHqLzRvOUiNQB1x1h2a6RY4uzeOpdUw7DAQf9KJJkXxKMgQ-w-wIsUP0jjixJslB3uehw-fHQlzi9wJKzD20tlWzEU/s1600/elastic+after+traffic+passes.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUwX-wiBN4hhtYe6-aLQcCELCXsP0mMcp5QjtBk26uT4DxHTpxgGHqLzRvOUiNQB1x1h2a6RY4uzeOpdUw7DAQf9KJJkXxKMgQ-w-wIsUP0jjixJslB3uehw-fHQlzi9wJKzD20tlWzEU/s1600/elastic+after+traffic+passes.jpg" height="239" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">As the cross traffic clears the intersection, the elasticity returns.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
urbanadoniahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11368148568918195706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1326787860384215637.post-82368945938055930992014-03-08T14:41:00.000-08:002014-03-08T14:41:20.659-08:00Cycling in the City SymphonyA composition in music puts in mind two important lines: the thread of melody, and the spaces in between. The rests as much as the proper notes define to our ears the familiar. I studied the violin as a child, grappling like so many other eight year olds with a beautiful instrument I could not master. But even I knew about those spaces in between, and how long they could be. One second stretches itself to a roomy length when you know exactly where you've been and where you're going. You start to be able to toy with where you'll end the bow's upward or downward push and move the music forward. I remembered this when I tried again in college to find myself in fiddle music, that the spaces in between leave more room for interpretation than you might think. Then, even later, in another attempt to put into my hands the power to create music, I took guitar lessons with a blue eyed, white haired man who patiently dealt with my lack of practice and rewarded me by saying that I knew more about those fluid spaces in between than other students. It's the thing missing from some digital music based around a perfect repetition: swing, a groove, soul. <br />
<br />
A place puts in mind two important lines: the physical objects of a built environment and the way people treat each other there. They are both historical, in a way, because the first shows changing styles in façades and uses and the second shows changing norms in communication. On the same street, people enact different ideas of what makes home. To one, it is walking to the bus stop undisturbed; to another, it is a mumbled greeting whose presence matters less than its absence. They read in each other a welcome or a dismissal, and do not signal the same. We often strive for ideal places that foster ideal communication, where no gesture can render the built environment unfamiliar. But in places all the living happens, and living means stretching into those pauses between the recognizable markers of time and change. Humans have the ability to make the sometimes awful music laid out by the buildings and highways soaring overhead into something swinging and alive. Places are not just buildings and street, they're people gesturing and spitting and even littering and most often helping. They are not abstract zones of growth and development; they are durable creations that show our amazing ability to adapt.<br />
<br />
A bicycle puts in mind two important lines: the flow of traffic and your body-machine's trajectory within it. As much as I follow the advice of the infrastructure I ride through, I also find myself responding to the pulsing of other vehicles, which in some places do stay where the street lines and signs tell them they belong. We can see it when we ride together, that each of us approaches the intersection slightly differently. To one, there is plenty of time to cross before the light changes. To another, it's best to cross as a pedestrian using ADA curb cuts. To a third, it's best to follow what one of the others has started to do. I rode through Washington, D.C. yesterday with two friends, both experienced cyclists, and observed how we combined our different minds. It was hard to decide how we fit into the flow of traffic as a group, how our trajectory would intersect with others, because we had different styles of moving forward. There is a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin:_Symphony_of_a_Metropolis">city symphony</a> the bicycle allows us to join, even those of us without the stamina to master more conventional noisemaking devices. We know how many of those in between spaces we can occupy, swinging up onto sidewalks and down alleyways. Some of us choose to exercise this flexibility to a greater extent than others, but it's hard for me to think bicycle without thinking about the way it encourages me to adapt my movements in response to those around me. Is this flexibility something we want to extend to new bicycle users, or is it something we think must be designed out of our streets before people will use them properly?urbanadoniahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11368148568918195706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1326787860384215637.post-89433834431342707952014-02-28T14:06:00.000-08:002014-02-28T14:06:33.751-08:00Scenes from a Twitter Chat on Bike Equity<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-cards="hidden" data-conversation="none" data-partner="tweetdeck">
<a href="https://twitter.com/youthbikesummit">@youthbikesummit</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/BikeLeague">@BikeLeague</a> Wondering about other movements that have tried to diversify their efforts? <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23bikes4all&src=hash">#bikes4all</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23UseYorVoice&src=hash">#UseYorVoice</a><br />
— Dorothy Le (@gohomedorothy) <a href="https://twitter.com/gohomedorothy/statuses/439477769932910592">February 28, 2014</a></blockquote>
<br /><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-cards="hidden" data-conversation="none" data-partner="tweetdeck">
<a href="https://twitter.com/gohomedorothy">@gohomedorothy</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/youthbikesummit">@youthbikesummit</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/BikeLeague">@BikeLeague</a> What does it take to start a movement (within a movement)? <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23bikes4all&src=hash">#bikes4all</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23useyourvoice&src=hash">#useyourvoice</a><br />
— Dr. Adonia Lugo (@urbanadonia) <a href="https://twitter.com/urbanadonia/statuses/439478413980864512">February 28, 2014</a></blockquote>
<br /><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-cards="hidden" data-conversation="none" data-partner="tweetdeck">
<a href="https://twitter.com/youthbikesummit">@youthbikesummit</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/BikeLeague">@BikeLeague</a> Who are we working with currently, who is missing at the table? <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23bikes4all&src=hash">#bikes4all</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23useyourvoice&src=hash">#useyourvoice</a><br />
— Dorothy Le (@gohomedorothy) <a href="https://twitter.com/gohomedorothy/statuses/439479604156579841">February 28, 2014</a></blockquote>
<br /><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-partner="tweetdeck">
Engage people who aren't normally at the table Q: What does it take to start a movement (within a movement)? <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23bikes4all&src=hash">#bikes4all</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23useyourvoice&src=hash">#useyourvoice</a><br />
— KidsWalk Coalition (@KidsWalkNOLA) <a href="https://twitter.com/KidsWalkNOLA/statuses/439479183425540096">February 28, 2014</a></blockquote>
<br /><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-partner="tweetdeck">
Here's a tough one: how do we engage ppl who aren't online? How do we translate virtual networks to IRL ones, and vice versa? <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23bikes4all&src=hash">#bikes4all</a><br />
— Dr. Adonia Lugo (@urbanadonia) <a href="https://twitter.com/urbanadonia/statuses/439481155776413697">February 28, 2014</a></blockquote>
<br /><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-partner="tweetdeck">
<a href="http://t.co/l9ZPQwR9RT">http://t.co/l9ZPQwR9RT</a> reminds me of our old bike map cover. It didn't represent Boston, so I changed it. <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23bikes4all&src=hash">#bikes4all</a> <a href="http://t.co/YKyswDWvKn">pic.twitter.com/YKyswDWvKn</a><br />
— Najah (@najahbikes) <a href="https://twitter.com/najahbikes/statuses/439481848675049472">February 28, 2014</a></blockquote>
<br /><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-partner="tweetdeck">
<a href="https://twitter.com/urbanadonia">@urbanadonia</a> Get off the computer & go outside. I spend A LOT of time hanging out at community events talking to people. <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23bikes4all&src=hash">#bikes4all</a><br />
— Najah (@najahbikes) <a href="https://twitter.com/najahbikes/statuses/439482626077118464">February 28, 2014</a></blockquote>
<br /><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-partner="tweetdeck">
<a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23bikes4all&src=hash">#bikes4all</a> How can we change societal consequences of forced dependence on cars without bigger transpo budgets? <a href="http://t.co/EozEkfkE5f">http://t.co/EozEkfkE5f</a><br />
— VA Bicycling Fed. (@vabike) <a href="https://twitter.com/vabike/statuses/439485884698992640">February 28, 2014</a></blockquote>
<br /><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>urbanadoniahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11368148568918195706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1326787860384215637.post-1842542052387306782014-02-07T04:32:00.002-08:002014-02-07T04:41:15.346-08:00California, the Dreaming and the Dead<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM7shmYDW2DlUK4670JHeA7ngFjFRjzeOIUWNH3JQiWMmG30D0Z4Vc7tIe1YMLBpOfpEqaX5j96L9y5nJwaSNP30F3wxfXqLJbZ3sMojLv_z8uAmsQ5Fxaim1tvNMFEp3Xrzmkt2KZCxU/s1600/sb+hills.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM7shmYDW2DlUK4670JHeA7ngFjFRjzeOIUWNH3JQiWMmG30D0Z4Vc7tIe1YMLBpOfpEqaX5j96L9y5nJwaSNP30F3wxfXqLJbZ3sMojLv_z8uAmsQ5Fxaim1tvNMFEp3Xrzmkt2KZCxU/s1600/sb+hills.jpg" height="372" width="640" /></a></div>
<div style="clear: both;">
</div>
One Saturday last April, my family made a pilgrimage to two places from our past. The first site lay in the San Bernardino foothills, near the old settlement of Verdemont. Here we met some local history buffs at the foundations of what was once the family home, where Otto and Vera Frances Meyer lived with Lawrence and Kathryn, their two children. Kathryn was my grandmother. After Otto died in 1929, Vera sent the children to stay with her mother while she worked as a housekeeper and eventually remarried. The family rented out the house until it burned down decades ago.<br />
<br />
Slowly over the next decades, Vera's land would be parceled off and sold to developers. The ranch house foundations today are on a suburban cul-de-sac, but more rugged-style for horse lovers.<br />
<br />
We traveled up from the ranch house into the chaparral foothills to look for the grave of Julius Meyer, Otto's grandfather, who died in 1912. We knew it was somewhere within a few acres, but we didn't know the exact location because the current owners of the land did not want the verified existence of human remains on the site to add another barrier to their development plans. The friendly neighbor who had brought us up here in ORVs explained that this developer planned to build over 400 single family homes on these scrub hills. I was shocked to hear that, considering we were in a region known for its wildfires and water shortages and in foothills fissured by the San Andreas fault.<br />
<br />
In addition to the seismic and climatological reasons not to develop on this land, we were nowhere near a source of employment. The nearest metropolis was San Bernardino, where we'd walked several miles that morning through the deserted downtown before finding an open restaurant.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE2oPcRkJRNUDhfVj5kfWmkmGdYQqJdDU7c4k1qS6GnsaBjFYb91n5gYcOf1lpTZhYD51Fitw1fXzy2-cuwaZa3aBQeLNkcH_SUl5vF-E35qgbGFgVjNRAtpUrixaprmJ18QOF10QzXQg/s1600/empty+sb.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE2oPcRkJRNUDhfVj5kfWmkmGdYQqJdDU7c4k1qS6GnsaBjFYb91n5gYcOf1lpTZhYD51Fitw1fXzy2-cuwaZa3aBQeLNkcH_SUl5vF-E35qgbGFgVjNRAtpUrixaprmJ18QOF10QzXQg/s1600/empty+sb.jpg" height="298" width="400" /></a></div>
<div style="clear: both;">
</div>
In that time we also saw a woman walking down the street clad only in underwear and a top, being led by a fully clothed man. Any development in those hills will be dependent on jobs and water obtained elsewhere.<br />
<br />
We fanned out looking for evidence of a grave site, but found nothing conclusive.<br />
<br />
Our next stop was a local history museum, where we saw pictures of our family members hanging on the walls. The Meyers had been a prominent family in the area. Then we headed to a site related to the other side of my mother's family, in Riverside. My other great grandfather, Lawrence Holmes Sr, had emigrated from Norway with his family at age 8 in 1881 as Lars Jensen. He became an actor and inventor. He designed and manufactured space-saving wall beds, which I've heard about all my life but did not see until I walked into a friend's studio apartment in Portland last summer and saw my great grandfather's name on an old metal bed frame.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUd10TPbHYv6BuQ0dkKLx5rVJWkbO5SxYlynoA3HgMbB3PpnSph_lr7A-DiysKsx7UI_MqithaboilQG6SX-qM_U_zCiShivDr5zx5wSw6M9E83ovGtcjO_ze93NZRpo4zfI_58rbB8YQ/s1600/patented+L+Holmes.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUd10TPbHYv6BuQ0dkKLx5rVJWkbO5SxYlynoA3HgMbB3PpnSph_lr7A-DiysKsx7UI_MqithaboilQG6SX-qM_U_zCiShivDr5zx5wSw6M9E83ovGtcjO_ze93NZRpo4zfI_58rbB8YQ/s1600/patented+L+Holmes.jpg" height="327" width="400" /></a></div>
<div style="clear: both;">
</div>
Lawrence appears to have been one of the early twentieth century utopians who saw in California a better future through experimental agriculture. He introduced carob cultivation to Riverside, and his ranch drew the interest of the Metropolitan Water District that wanted to expand water flowing into the region. He fought eminent domain for as long as he could, but he lost the case and his fortune. His land has been sitting underwater since the 1940s, and my great uncle, his last surviving child, who still holds mining rights to the land, <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2006/mar/04/local/me-tin4">in recent years revived that struggle through mineral tests</a>.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6Ax6L64KLT3ycnUhiA37SFzcKGDzvHQR1AUBAsPJ9usTbw96yoPBPa92z0twt53ND3rg7l6SY4B728qqyTnToKzUJgCpy_djdhqmJjJ94KY-R1ZRe9w3mlHY7TxZXndXoXjI8BHaVQU4/s1600/reservoir.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6Ax6L64KLT3ycnUhiA37SFzcKGDzvHQR1AUBAsPJ9usTbw96yoPBPa92z0twt53ND3rg7l6SY4B728qqyTnToKzUJgCpy_djdhqmJjJ94KY-R1ZRe9w3mlHY7TxZXndXoXjI8BHaVQU4/s1600/reservoir.jpg" height="298" width="400" /></a></div>
<div style="clear: both;">
</div>
That April day we had the opportunity to visit the reservoir and see the water sparkling over the once carob ranch. It was a heavily guarded facility, understandably, as the water laying before us served millions of suburban homes in Orange County. We were joined by some women who had co-authored a local history book that mentioned my great grandfather's struggle with the MWD.<br />
<br />
The heat of the day was starting to get to me, exacerbated by the usual stress of traveling with a caravan of people. I'd been concerned that I would feel trapped on this automotive excursion, and the news of the development plans for the Meyer Ranch didn't help. Then the very friendly employee, who had connected with my sister and given up his day off to picnic with my family on the bluff overlooking the reservoir, gave the company line that justified the flooding of this land, and the senseless development that has driven California to today's water crisis. I felt like I was entering the twilight zone. It was development opportunity, not populist survival, that led to these mega water projects, but he said that our great grandfather had sacrificed his land so that millions of people could live on the water funneled from the Colorado River to this reservoir.<br />
<br />
The acre feet filling the depths of the valley below us were framed not as a great human folly that turned this land into an exurban machine generating profits for a few <a href="http://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2012/finalwebsite/problem/coloradoriver.shtml">at the cost of millions of others</a>, but as a laudable symbol in our right to survive wherever we choose.<br />
<br />
I started hyperventilating and crying, and my mother rescued me and drove me to a train station. There I could head back into my sustainability bubble, return to the rail corridor that reassured me that not all is lost, that there are some shreds of reality in Southern California.<br />
<br />
I have not lived in California since 2011, and the major reason I have not returned is the water crisis. I miss the state. It is a place that I feel viscerally connected to, by living family and by my time in Los Angeles, but also because there are buried in the ground once beautiful women I loved, my grandmother facing the sea and my great grandmother facing the foothills.<br />
<br />
Will California wake up? Our land of dreams has been renewed over and over with new fantasies, in the American era starting with the health dream that brought people on the first rail lines, and the oil geysers, and the government subsidies that built the postwar nuclear dream homes, and the surf style that went far beyond those who actually learned to ride the waves, and the hippies, and the cultists, and the people who hate the immigrants who care for their children, prepare their food, and clean their homes. All of this makes it seem like it is not Californian to confront delusion; it is Californian to produce it.<br />
<br />
Two days before that Saturday expedition into my family's past, I gave a talk at UC Riverside, followed by a dinner with some faculty and the man who ran the college's sustainability demonstration garden. He gave me two ripe grapefruits.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyhV0F7H2_HOXKFKNkeyVj1TLrT0Mujz8g4BqT9wJyC_q6oY-71523wXQZUB1uMXBNQWRADuLMvR-Ax0sQHxrBkAd_PajR_fb3ahGPed1-dIrrfH-gIeXW9pJFSGGQtL1ByD2o0SK-m1Q/s1600/citrus+small.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyhV0F7H2_HOXKFKNkeyVj1TLrT0Mujz8g4BqT9wJyC_q6oY-71523wXQZUB1uMXBNQWRADuLMvR-Ax0sQHxrBkAd_PajR_fb3ahGPed1-dIrrfH-gIeXW9pJFSGGQtL1ByD2o0SK-m1Q/s1600/citrus+small.jpg" height="298" width="400" /></a></div>
<div style="clear: both;">
</div>
I hope this can be the end
of a blind era and the beginning of adaptation to the region's
underlying ecosystems. Is it really so terrible to envision cacti landscape
instead of lawns, greywater systems instead of water loss, built
environments that allow rainwater to seep back into the ground instead
of flushing it off the concrete into the waterways?<br />
<br />
The pungent scent of the
chaparral softened by the dewy air; for all their stucco subdivisions they've yet to overpower it.<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="http://www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/x67ynu" width="480"></iframe><br />
<a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x67ynu_pete-seeger-little-boxes_music" target="_blank">Pete Seeger - Little Boxes</a> <i>by <a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/jolysable" target="_blank">jolysable</a></i>urbanadoniahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11368148568918195706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1326787860384215637.post-46475576961572799912013-09-25T22:37:00.001-07:002013-09-25T22:43:13.288-07:00Bike Share and Body-City-Machines<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY8izbeUXOHPBOchiXur-xaXqK5M0Kz0PmeJ6INCGr6efoFYZw7mgmFZfZLi3Tj0k3RE5Qt-AqyfT6tCW4Rlx6bvWYE5ODoPMO300RNwh-bEUdnOgFb1ORa5jZ7AWaz5gQ5XCfXHytsfU/s1600/IMG_3636.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY8izbeUXOHPBOchiXur-xaXqK5M0Kz0PmeJ6INCGr6efoFYZw7mgmFZfZLi3Tj0k3RE5Qt-AqyfT6tCW4Rlx6bvWYE5ODoPMO300RNwh-bEUdnOgFb1ORa5jZ7AWaz5gQ5XCfXHytsfU/s320/IMG_3636.JPG" width="318" /></a></div>
Recently I got to use the new Divvy bike share system in Chicago.<br />
<br />
When I'm nervous on a bike, as I was in this case because I don't usually bike when I visit Chicago, I tend to ride as fast as I can. I found that I couldn't keep up with traffic on the three-speed Divvy cruiser; even in my silly cowboy boots I had greater pedaling potential than the little chain ring could realize.<br />
<br />
But
for the short ride, my limited speed didn't seem to matter. No motorists honked at me
or swerved dangerously close to me as they passed, even though I saw many examples of the kind of behavior that angry road users point to as evidence of bike users being jerks. I would stop at red lights, only to be overtaken by men who pushed forward, looking to see if the intersection was clear and proceeding through when it was. Traffic signals applied not to them, it seemed, but to the taxi drivers who similarly pushed forward and stopped only reluctantly when bodies passed in front of them. I had noticed before how people, whether on foot, on bikes, or in cars, push forward into intersections with more gusto east of the Rockies than they do in the west that I know.<br />
<br />
What I'm getting at is that bike share systems go into place in spaces where there are existing
standards of road behavior, and having access to the bike itself doesn't necessarily give you access to those standards. Not only do built environments suggest to us how to use a given road space, we carry with us ideas about what should happen there. I'm not pointing this out as some grand flaw in the bike share model, but rather to illustrate an academic concept. In processing my experiences as a bike advocate in Los Angeles, I started thinking in terms of the "body-city-machine" because I found that riding a bicycle involved at least three components: a human body with a particular worldview, specific kinds of technologies for riding, and a shared street. I came to the body-city-machine from theory about sociotechnical "assemblages," which describe how action happens in the world through more than individual bodies: we form "alliances" with objects. This is how many bike researchers, such as Zack Furness and Luis Vivanco, talk about the social life of bicycling. What I've tried to understand through the body-city-machine assemblage is what kinds of mobile places people create as they travel, building on the ideas of researchers like Justin Spinney that the street is not a space devoid of meaning.<br />
<br />
I developed the body-city-machine concept to suggest a more holistic perspective for mobility in general. But because I do most of my thinking through bicycling, I'm also interested in how the idea can help create more inclusive advocacy and programming. As activists, we usually focus on one aspect of this equation. In vehicular cycling, for example, the emphasis is on the body: making the body fit to use existing roads. Lots of bike advocates feel that this model excludes people who don't fit a certain type because they recognize that there are many kinds of bodies using bicycles.<br />
<br />
What I have seen in my years as a bike advocate is that most of my
collaborators focus on changing how people use streets through
changing the design of the street itself. In this paradigm, the emphasis is on the city: designing environments that are expected to stimulate behavior changes. I have concerns about this model because it has become part of a "creative economy" strategy that actually fails to provide economic opportunity for most people. As much as a Jane-Jacobsian vision of quality public spaces is a nice ideal, the reality is that our public spaces are surrounded by privately owned parcels and structures whose value fluctuates. What's good for the property owner may not be good for the unemployed or low-income bike user.<br />
<br />
In addition to these concerns, though, it could be that I am not as convinced by the need for infrastructure because I'm a very empowered urban cyclist, and while I prefer to
ride on quieter streets, I'm comfortable taking the lane in traffic.
I've observed quite often that bike experts speak from their own experiences and expect others to share their perspectives, and I'm certainly not immune to that. In my work this tendency is actually an explicit strategy because ethnographers work backwards from experience to try and identify underlying patterns to behavior. I've been an ethnographer among bike advocates for some years, and I can vouch for the fact that bike professionals, too, are body-city-machines.<br />
<br />
What I am seeing now, in my conversations with other advocates of color
as a member of the League of American Bicyclists' equity advisory
council, is what innovation can occur when people bring their varied experiences and cultures to bike advocacy. I realized in conversation with Eboni Hawkins
and Anthony Taylor that a shared identity across other
lines might help blur the lines between different kinds of bicycling. A
recreational cycling club, something I hadn't thought of as
an advocacy organization, could be interested in promoting more
transportation cycling among people who see having to use bikes as an indicator of low status.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNwhpTXq1T0-y4B5xafmyWlrBQTWmjkorMvhSocEzI16ZcqaDbWQKR1nzgyx2XQHQrh5WrWevgBq4CaDPOdYG0W5Y3NxteCilHwEOWHeubBndAUPktAbddKamvA5bog5if-Gt7DeDQvx4/s1600/IMG_3635_2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="298" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNwhpTXq1T0-y4B5xafmyWlrBQTWmjkorMvhSocEzI16ZcqaDbWQKR1nzgyx2XQHQrh5WrWevgBq4CaDPOdYG0W5Y3NxteCilHwEOWHeubBndAUPktAbddKamvA5bog5if-Gt7DeDQvx4/s400/IMG_3635_2.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
If the ultimate goal is to change human behavior, why should street design be our only option? Unlike environmental projects, such as bike lanes and cycle tracks,
bike share programs seem to focus more on the machine part of the equation: making bicycles available for use. Similarly, open street events also change how people share
streets through manipulating what technologies one can use to travel in
them.<br />
<br />
Of course, it's hard to really separate these elements; that's the whole point of the body-city-machine concept. For example, the placement of bike share stations is a spatial issue, and Chicago seems to have a lot of discussion going on around their bike projects seeming more symbolic than useful and a need for equity. But bike share does help illustrate how we can experiment with the constituent elements of the body-city-machine. I'd like to see more advocacy strategy that starts with bodies, not necessarily as effective cyclists, but as social actors in a
shared space. I'd like to see more incorporation of diversity at a
strategy scale, rather than hearing about campaigns that ask leaders of color to say yes to preconceived projects. I'd
like to see what happens when we make room for a diverse range of body-city-machines to participate in redefining what bicycling means. urbanadoniahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11368148568918195706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1326787860384215637.post-2003842251196801112013-09-06T12:19:00.000-07:002013-09-06T12:19:42.464-07:00Is the Bike Movement Too Cynical for Social Justice?There's a need for a wider range of voices in the bike movement, and I know
that at least some key people are working to create a social justice
space. However, I think the struggle for social justice is being impeded by political correctness. Not political correctness itself, but fear of it. Fear that working to build more inclusive institutions is a distraction from something more important.<br />
<br />
Flipping through a recent issue of the <i>New Yorker</i>, I came across an article about a white curator, Bill Arnett, who has for years pushed the art world to take African-American outsider artists seriously. The article focused particularly on the artist Thornton Dial, and the author, Paige Williams, commented that, "it can be tempting to ascribe Dial's rise to political correctness, but his work is strong enough to counter such skepticism." In other words, this artist's popularity might only indicate that his skin color makes admiring his art something laudable in the art world. Similarly, I have been told twice recently that gestures toward social justice made
by institutions must be hollow attempts to satisfy some perceived
demand for that sort of thing. The speakers in both cases were middle-aged, white men. One was talking about an institutional diversity initiative at a liberal arts college, and one was talking
about bike advocacy organizations. This is what people have thought it's
appropriate to say in front of me. Who knows how my reputation is dismissed
behind my back with words like political correctness. Do you know what it's like to hear that your concerns are unworthy of the attention some people can take for granted, simply
because you aren't the right color?<br />
<br />
I would call this not skepticism, but cynicism: a cynical belief that any people of color who gain the attention of powerful institutions must be a front for white people's interest in political correctness, and it's a problem. It's awfully demeaning, and has added yet another barrier to inclusiveness across lines of race/class. What is particularly weird about this cynicism is the way that it is espoused by seemingly liberal individuals, who would otherwise shrink from accusations of racism. It almost seems like an effort to show how un-racist they are, as though somehow the PC champions of POC are the racists for making room for difference. The cynics see past this to...what, exactly? To me, it sounds like a profound denial of the need for restructuring many institutions that have benefited whites over others.<br />
<br />
It might look unfair to attach a job or seat on a board of directors to somebody's skin color or gender. The key is that what might seem fair to you could be based on the
position you inhabit, as a raced, classed, and gendered individual. We're not standing on level ground; the way that our world has organized access to resources means that we're on
a hillside, and you may be closer to the top than some others simply
because of the conditions into which you were born. Not only did you get a head start, but maybe you've been aided by your uncle's
friend showing you the trailhead, or your classmate's father giving you a deal at
the trail supply store he runs. There are two questions about social position to consider, in any field:
how what you look like, how you act, and who you know got you to where
you are and, on the flip side, how <i>not </i>looking and acting and knowing the right stuff keeps others from getting there. Racial difference can be expressed in the most
subtle gestures, the most casual words, that reinforce the distance
between us. If you're already near the top of the peak, it might not
move you, but if you're down at the bottom you might be set back once
again.<br />
<br />
We're social creatures; we help our friends. Why is it a bad thing to recognize that one's circle is limited, and
that it might take work to make connections beyond it? Why would it be bad to have a wider network from which to draw help with advocacy projects? The thing is, if you have a pretty limited circle from which to draw, you're not necessarily going to craft a message or programming that's appealing to a wider audience, because you have no idea what that wider audience cares about. And for a social movement, which would seem to want to get more people on board, that's a strategy fail. It is not a distraction from something more important to discuss race and class in the bike movement because Americans are hardly a homogeneous bunch. If you're not interested in the different experiences of the people you're targeting, why would they care about this bike thing you're into?<br />
<br />
For far too long people without much interest in experiences other than their own have dominated the room, assuming that we all agree that aspiring to Copenhagen is best, or that all women want to wear heels on their bikes. They've been allowed to make their perspectives into THE perspective, leaving aside the social conditions that make Eurocentric visions of cultural supremacy seem normal, or that perpetuate expectations of gendered behavior. The philosopher Donna Haraway calls this the "god trick," a view from nowhere that allows particular people to claim that their experience is objective reality. <br />
<br />
The continued championing of one narrow vision of bicycling has had at least one real effect: instead of us all seeing driving and suburbanization as a common enemy, embattled communities see bicycling and other sustainable practices as unwelcome symbols of power and privilege. The return to the city of the
children and grandchildren of white flight is not a separate issue from
urban renewal's undemocratic subsidy of destroyed urban neighborhoods.
Bicycling is not a separate issue from oil dependency and superstorms.
Road safety is not a separate issue from racist and classist structures
of social status and the norm of expressing how wealthy you are through
the kind of car you drive. The unremarked deaths of immigrants using
bikes is not a separate issue from the outcries for safety that follow
white cyclists dying. The use of bike infrastructure as an economic
development strategy is not a separate issue from the lack of jobs with
decent wages. The status displayed through driving is not a separate
issue from social inequality. The anger some motorists express when
interacting with bicyclists is not a separate issue from gentrification.<br />
<br />
The segregation encouraged and enabled by the federally subsidized
suburbanization of the United States still impacts our cities today. We
have all been affected by it, negatively or positively, and belittling the importance of including the
concerns of the negatively affected groups in favor of carrying out the
desires of the positively affected groups sets us against each other
once again. It's time to address the social side effects, the
barriers to bicycling that show how it connects to wider frameworks of
race and class bias. It's time to confront the use of bike
infrastructure as a gentrification strategy, with the narrow vision of economic development that model suggests. If this stuff is a distraction from something more important in the bike movement, maybe the bike movement's not really that important.urbanadoniahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11368148568918195706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1326787860384215637.post-28439926094920780992013-08-08T13:19:00.001-07:002013-08-08T13:36:39.628-07:00Family Biking and Tacit Knowledge: The Ethics of Ethnography for HireDear bikey friends,<br />
<br />
Keep in mind that you are going to
be mined for data as a valuable source of knowledge as more of the
global corporate structure decides that biking for transportation is marketable.<br />
<br />
My friend Davey Oil, <a href="http://www.urbanadonia.com/2013/02/how-i-learned-about-human.html">who I've fangirled about on this site before</a>, lives in Seattle. He and his partner have two adorable children, and Davey has a lot of experience in the kids and family bike world. Davey writes a blog called <a href="http://www.daveyoil.com/">Riding on Roadways</a> where he frequently shares about his experiences biking with his kids, and he ran the adult and volunteer programs at the kids education organization Bike Works for many years. As a wildly charming and well-appointed gadabout, he is something of a mascot for this community. This morning I dragged myself out of my dissertation haze long enough to find out why Davey had contacted me yesterday, and saw that he had found a project online called "Family Bike Life." This project has a clean, stylish website that asks people who practice family biking to share their insights and tips. The website says that the people gathering this information are "obsessed" with family biking, framing themselves as thirsty for knowledge.<br />
<br />
Davey looked further into the project and found that it is part of something called the Lead User Innovation
Lab, which lists IKEA as a partner, and is housed within a larger firm
called Interactive Institute Swedish ICT. So is the design firm thirsty for knowledge because of personal interest, as the term "obsessed" would imply, or are they looking for family bike stories that they can deliver as a product to a client?<br />
<br />
A network such as the family bike folks shares ideas through its social events and active life online. And, being willing and able to experiment with something many Americans see as impossible, they want to share their knowledge with more people. More and more bike shops are opening with family biking as the focus. This is a community that wants to make it possible for more people to ride bikes with kids, and from what I've seen as an outsider, they're also pretty darn media-savvy about how to do that.<br />
<br />
But should the knowledge that they've formed as a community become a source of value to a firm with no social connections to the family bike network? On their website, under a tab entitled "Our Offer," Interactive Institute Swedish ICT gets down to business: "We explore future user experiences through human-centered information
and communication technology. With our unique expertise in visualization
and interaction design we create business opportunities in new and
existing markets." Based on this description of their firm's services, the Family Bike Life project seems to be asking family bike enthusiasts to give away information that Interactive Institute Swedish ICT can package and sell.<br />
<br />
This caught Davey's eye because he is about to open a shop, the <a href="http://familycyclery.com/">G & O Family Cyclery</a>. I got to hear about this project over the last year while it developed, and I know that Davey plans to create a space where knowledgeable people like him can make family biking more accessible for more families. Opening a bike shop is a strategy for achieving this. And I know that he in no way wants to keep others from family biking by guarding this knowledge; that is not the issue here. The issue here is framing one's corporate research activity as a feel-good "share your experience" survey, when the firm gathering the data plans to sell it as a product to some other entity.<br />
<br />
Of course, I'm an anthropologist, so I do think that there is a lot of value to using ethnographic methods to investigate the less quantifiable aspects of social and cultural life. I do want to see ethnography taken seriously as a means to make change. But instead of empowering
the family bike community to take their message further, Family Bike Life's firm
appears to be packaging the information people volunteer as a
deliverable. I am reminded, of course, of <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/03/anthropology-inc/309218/">Graeme Wood's article about ethnography at design firms</a> that made the rounds earlier this year.
But, closer to home, my mind also goes to my own research, which focuses on how
bicyclists become "human infrastructure" by sharing exactly the kind of
information that this firm is trying to mine.<br />
<br />
Jean Lave and Etienne
Wegner's very influential concept of the "community of practice" seems
to be at the heart of this firm's project, where they recognize that the
family bike subculture transmits information between its participants without necessarily sharing it with the public. The entry point for this firm has been the subculture's desire to share their knowledge with others
who appear interested. The anthropologist Julia Elyachar has been
doing fascinating research on what is made possible by "tacit knowledge" in Cairo. Her writing has emphasized the embodied nature of
these forms of knowledge, how people take action
through informal systems and social networks. And these forms of knowledge are increasingly being seen as something
valuable by the global development network.<br />
<br />
How do we claim the human infrastructure we produce, and then also share it more widely? It is part of our communicative ability as humans that material objects take on symbolism which can circulate beyond the original social contexts of production. We don't have to give consent for people to use our ideas or images in public spaces. It's much easier to find examples out there that show how to exploit subcultures rather than empower them, given our capitalist economic system where everything that isn't copyrighted is fair game to manufacture and sell. I'd love to hear others' ideas about how to keep tacit knowledge tied to making communities of practice by making them more inclusive.urbanadoniahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11368148568918195706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1326787860384215637.post-83366653934412962082013-07-15T23:09:00.001-07:002013-07-17T09:05:09.910-07:00The Distance Between Bike Economics And Social Justice<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgB8H9bY9L40weyD6GGe5Ircei3rBbEqMvNKsG3HngkT0clV7Aa5gKgNYJ265l8EIbvOcLBPN_Kw_QHPxeGCXqOuuMn6A8zHfDnyAseWrTxfH59E3HQ9sv1wOKYlorZXm1w11bFd3uiGps/s1600/IMG_3564.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgB8H9bY9L40weyD6GGe5Ircei3rBbEqMvNKsG3HngkT0clV7Aa5gKgNYJ265l8EIbvOcLBPN_Kw_QHPxeGCXqOuuMn6A8zHfDnyAseWrTxfH59E3HQ9sv1wOKYlorZXm1w11bFd3uiGps/s1600/IMG_3564.JPG" /></a></div>
<div style="clear: both;">
</div>
It's about four and a half miles from downtown Portland to Peninsula Park up north. I made the trip on Sunday after attending a "bikes and economics" panel at the Portland Art Museum, riding to North Portland for a justice rally and march in response to Saturday's acquittal of the vigilante who left his car to stalk an African-American teenager walking alone in Florida last February. He was found not guilty even though he shot and killed the unarmed kid. With this news on my mind I felt strange about going to the panel at all, but I'd spent thirteen bucks on my ticket and I wasn't getting them back. So I put on a dress and crossed the river.<br />
<br />
In the museum auditorium, a white crowd of about forty fanned across the many rows of seats. Onstage were an elected official, Congressman Earl Blumenauer, beloved by the bike movement for his openly bikey stance on Capitol Hill; a city planner, Roger Geller, the bicycle coordinator for the Portland Bureau of Transportation; Elly Blue, a writer and publisher about to release her second book, <i>Bikenomics</i>; and the panel's moderator, Professor Jennifer Dill, a prominent bike researcher at Portland State University and the director of the Oregon Transportation Research and Education Consortium.<br />
<br />
When I started reading about Richard Florida's creative class theory in 2008, I thought maybe it was a coincidence that the bike movement's emphasis on infrastructure matched Florida's core idea: if you build it, they will come. That is, if politicians want to attract desirable, talented residents/consumers to their regions in the post-industrial, idea/upscale consumption economy, they must invest in the urban design elements that are as honey to these worker bees. Naw, I thought, the bike has way too much democratic potential to be reduced to a marketing tool. But I keep hearing powerful people like Congressman Blumenauer characterizing bike projects as a strategy to "attract talent," bringing "the best and the brightest" to places like Portland. In March, I heard the mayor of Indianapolis make similar remarks at the League of American Bicyclists' National Bike Summit that was this year themed "bikes mean business." I'm hearing a lot of consensus that a good way to convert people to bikes is to convince them that bike projects will raise their property values.<br />
<br />
It seems like the bike movement, or at least its policy arm, has decided that their goal of getting more people on bikes is not in conflict with the goal of making urban neighborhoods more expensive, and I am baffled by how openly they make this claim. Aren't policymakers and lobbyists supposed to at least pretend that their pet projects have benefits for more than one group? And shouldn't livable neighborhoods be affordable? Because we're not all homeowners, and I don't see a lot of value in rents
that skyrocket because more people are choosing to ride bikes. Maybe the city should be compensating us urban cyclists for our contribution to the marketable landscapes they crave. <br />
<br />
If influential people have decided who, exactly, they want to attract to cycling, maybe the question we should be asking is if you build it, who will be replaced? The drive to bring in desirables leaves aside the question of who gets categorized as undesirable. I wonder if an unspoken goal of bike advocates uncomfortable with race, class, and cultural difference is to create urban zones free of these problems by simply vanishing, through the unquestionably objective means of the market, people unlike themselves. After all, using urban planning to rid cities of undesirables is nothing new. I hope, though, that folks will reconsider whether is is too hard to convince existing city residents that riding a bike is a good thing. Is it better that they be replaced by outsiders who already have that extra spending power to buy more bakfiets for the bicycle boulevard?<br />
<br />
I had a lot to think about as I rode up to North Portland, passing through the neighborhood around Emanuel Hospital that had been razed as an urban renewal zone in the 1970s, biking up the controversial lane on N Williams Avenue. I thought about Geller's comment that what we need here in Portland to really get more investment in bike infrastructure is an urban renewal zone. I believe he was referring to some local funding terminology, but why is such a loaded phrase still in official use? One community's Voldemort is another's Harry Potter, and it matters who gets to decide what is failed urban policy and what needs another try.<br />
<br />
At Peninsula Park, a group of several hundred people stood around a gazebo while speakers lined up to share their anger and concerns through a megaphone. One woman said that she saw a ride of 11,000 cyclists passing a few blocks away, but there were only a few hundred people here at the rally. I had seen the ride, too, and didn't put two and two together until later that it was Cascade Bicycle Club's Seattle to Portland ride arriving in the city. I thought it was a little unfair for her to single out cyclists as a group absent from the rally, considering how many people had biked there like myself.<br />
<br />
When we went out to march, we walked along Albina, then Killingsworth, then turned onto Vancouver. The stream of cyclists I'd seen earlier, and that the speaker had mentioned at the rally, was still trickling down Vancouver, against the flow of the demonstration. I was talking to friends when we heard shouting and saw a marcher using his body to block the path of a cyclist traveling in the bike lane. "Peace!" someone called out, as others intervened to end the altercation. "Peace!" In that moment, the distance between bike economics and social justice
shrank to the distance between one frustrated man and the mobile symbol of a
system stacked against him.<br />
<br />
Even if the city, the bike movement, the people in power who make funding decisions about street infrastructure, don't want to talk about the uneven politics of who gets to decide what transportation counts and who should benefit from improvements to public streets, the demonstrator blocking the path of the cyclist with his body made clear how this symbol of outside wealth stimulating the local economy, this "attractor of talent," the envy of Rahm Emanuel and other mayors who "want what Portland has," was too much to handle on a day when the country was mourning yet again the unequal treatment African-Americans can expect from our public institutions.<br />
<br />
It all comes together in the street, whether you're guiding the political machine and reaping the benefits or struggling as some undesirable who will soon be replaced by someone worth more. Because we all know that some bodies matter more than others.urbanadoniahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11368148568918195706noreply@blogger.com