The post Sustainable cities need more than parks, cafes and a riverwalk. They need equity, too appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Originally published on The Conversation
Trina Hamilton, Winifred Curran: There are many indexes that aim to rank how green cities are. But what does it actually mean for a city to be green or sustainable?
We’ve written about what we call the “parks, cafes and a riverwalk” model of sustainability, which focuses on providing new green spaces, mainly for high-income people. This vision of shiny residential towers and waterfront parks has become a widely-shared conception of what green cities should look like. But it can drive up real estate prices and displace low- and middle-income residents.
As scholars who study gentrification and social justice, we prefer a model that recognizes all three aspects of sustainability: environment, economy and equity. The equity piece is often missing from development projects promoted as green or sustainable. We are interested in models of urban greening that produce real environmental improvements and also benefit long-term working-class residents in neighborhoods that are historically underserved.
Over a decade of research in an industrial section of New York City, we have seen an alternative vision take shape. This model, which we call “just green enough,” aims to clean up the environment while also retaining and creating living-wage blue-collar jobs. By doing so, it enables residents who have endured decades of contamination to stay in place and enjoy the benefits of a greener neighborhood.
‘Parks, cafes and a riverwalk’ can lead to gentrification
Gentrification has become a catch-all term used to describe neighborhood change, and is often misunderstood as the only path to neighborhood improvement. In fact, its defining feature is displacement. Typically, people who move into these changing neighborhoods are whiter, wealthier and more educated than residents who are displaced.
A recent spate of new research has focused on the displacement effects of environmental cleanup and green space initiatives. This phenomenon has variously been called environmental, eco- or green gentrification.
Land for new development and resources to fund extensive cleanup of toxic sites are scarce in many cities. This creates pressure to rezone industrial land for condo towers or lucrative commercial space, in exchange for developer-funded cleanup. And in neighborhoods where gentrification has already begun, a new park or farmers market can exacerbate the problem by making the area even more attractive to potential gentrifiers and pricing out long-term residents. In some cases, developers even create temporary community gardens or farmers markets or promise more green space than they eventually deliver, in order to market a neighborhood to buyers looking for green amenities.
Environmental gentrification naturalizes the disappearance of manufacturing and the working class. It makes deindustrialization seem both inevitable and desirable, often by quite literally replacing industry with more natural-looking landscapes. When these neighborhoods are finally cleaned up, after years of activism by longtime residents, those advocates often are unable to stay and enjoy the benefits of their efforts.
Tools for greening differently
Greening and environmental cleanup do not automatically or necessarily lead to gentrification. There are tools that can make cities both greener and more inclusive, if the political will exists.
The work of the Newtown Creek Alliance in Brooklyn and Queens provides examples. The alliance is a community-led organization working to improve environmental conditions and revitalize industry in and along Newtown Creek, which separates these two boroughs. It focuses explicitly on social justice and environmental goals, as defined by the people who have been most negatively affected by contamination in the area.
The industrial zone surrounding Newtown Creek is a far cry from the toxic stew that The New York Times described in 1881 as “the worst smelling district in the world.” But it is also far from clean. For 220 years it has been a dumping ground for oil refineries, chemical plants, sugar refineries, fiber mills, copper smelting works, steel fabricators, tanneries, paint and varnish manufacturers, and lumber, coal and brick yards.
In the late 1970s, an investigation found that 17 million gallons of oil had leaked under the neighborhood and into the creek from a nearby oil storage terminal. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency placed Newtown Creek on the Superfund list of heavily polluted toxic waste sites in 2010.
The Newtown Creek Alliance and other groups are working to make sure that the Superfund cleanup and other remediation efforts are as comprehensive as possible. At the same time, they are creating new green spaces within an area zoned for manufacturing, rather than pushing to rezone it.
As this approach shows, green cities don’t have to be postindustrial. Some 20,000 people work in the North Brooklyn industrial area that borders Newtown Creek. And a number of industrial businesses in the area have helped make environmental improvements.
Just green enough
The “just green enough” strategy uncouples environmental cleanup from high-end residential and commercial development. Our new anthology, “Just Green Enough: Urban Development and Environmental Gentrification,” provides many other examples of the need to plan for gentrification effects before displacement happens. It also describes efforts to create environmental improvements that explicitly consider equity concerns.
For example, UPROSE, Brooklyn’s oldest Latino community-based organization, is combining racial justice activism with climate resilience planning in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood. The group advocates for investment and training for existing small businesses that often are Latino-owned. Its goal is not only to expand well-paid manufacturing jobs, but to include these businesses in rethinking what a sustainable economy looks like. Rather than rezoning the waterfront for high-end commercial and residential use, UPROSE is working for an inclusive vision of the neighborhood, built on the experience and expertise of its largely working-class immigrant residents.
This approach illustrates a broader pattern identified by Macalester College geographer Dan Trudeau in his chapter for our book. His research on residential developments throughout the United States shows that socially and environmentally just neighborhoods have to be planned as such from the beginning, including affordable housing and green amenities for all residents. Trudeau highlights the need to find “patient capital” – investment that does not expect a quick profit – and shows that local governments need to take responsibility for setting out a vision and strategy for housing equity and inclusion.
In our view, it is time to expand the notion of what a green city looks like and who it is for. For cities to be truly sustainable, all residents should have access to affordable housing, living-wage jobs, clean air and water, and green space. Urban residents should not have to accept a false choice between contamination and environmental gentrification.
Header photo: Small tankers unload along New York’s Newtown Creek in 2008. Jim Henderson
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]]>The post Maru Bautista on the Platform Cooperative for Cleaning Workers in Brooklyn appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>She oversees all of the program’s scaling initiatives, and has been supporting Up & Go’s development, its overall strategy and cooperative member engagement. In this interview we talk about the Up&Go platform, the history, the challenges and their ambitions.
“What the cooperatives are doing on Up and Go is they’re sharing best practices, they’re learning from each other, they’re creating a space where they can see each other as professionals, and learn from each other…things like, the best recipes for organic soap, or, how to clean this one thing that is so complicated. They’re creating policies and standards, developing policies that are innovative. For the first time, cooperatives developed a cancellation policy that was able to be enforced via Up and Go, and everyone thought that was a great idea. So I think there’s more potential for collaboration and improvements of each others’ systems when they come together an operate under one umbrella. There’s also challenges, of course, right? But I think there’s more beauty in the collaboration than in the competition that we could see.” Maru Bautista, Up and Go.
Martijn Arets is an international platform expert, entrepreneur, and part-time researcher at Utrecht University. The last six years he explored the platform economy by doing over 400 interviews in 13 countries, addressing the drawbacks which need to be resolved in order to reach the platform economy’s full potential and establish a sustainable model. At the Utrecht University, he is doing research on chances and obstacles of platform cooperatives and on platform society: new chances for inclusiveness through platforms. Martijn shares his insights, analyses, and thoughts through articles, videos, and books, as well as through presentations at (international) congresses.
Maru Bautista is the Director of the Cooperative Development Program at the Center for Family Life in Brooklyn, New York. For the past 5 years, she has worked with her team and the Sunset Park community to strengthen immigrant-led worker cooperatives in New York City. She oversees all of the program’s scaling initiatives, and has been supporting Up & Go’s development, its overall strategy and cooperative member engagement. She is chair of the Board of the Democracy at Work Institute and a board member of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives. She has a M.A. in International Development from the New School in NYC. When not at work, she is in a park or a playground with her two year old daughter.
For more information, visit: Up and Go
Reposted from Youtube
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]]>The post ‘This land is your land’: Reclaiming public land for communities in Brooklyn appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>596 Acres: Here’s the problem: Located primarily in areas of the city where low-income communities of color live today, more than a thousand vacant public lots languish behind fences, collecting garbage. One such lot was in Paula Segal’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn. In 2010, she began talking to her neighbors about this lot. She gathered as much information as she could find about it and called a community meeting. That meeting led to more meetings, which led to Myrtle Village Green: an active, nearly 2-acre community space with garden beds, an outdoor movie screening area, a pumpkin patch, and an educational production and research farm. From then on, she thought, “How many more such lots are there in New York City?” She got access to city data and learned that, in 2001, 596 acres of public land were waiting for communities to transform them, and soon after, 596 Acres was born.
Here’s how one organization is working on the problem: The 596 Acres team starts by translating the data available about vacant municipal land into information that can be useful in context, using customized mapping tools. With that knowledge in hand, they put signs on the fences of vacant city-owned lots that say, “This land is your land,” in English and Spanish, and explain which agency has control over the property. The signs also say that neighbors, together, may be able to get permission to transform the lot into a garden, park, or farm. They list the city’s parcel identifier, and information about the individual property manager handling the parcel for the agency, including a phone number.
The signs also connect neighbors to an online map and organizing web-tool called LivingLotsNYC.org and to 596 Acres’ staff, who steer and support residents through a bureaucratic maze in order to gain access to the space.
596 Acres takes on a supportive and advocacy role during each campaign — but residents remain the leaders. Each space, ultimately, is managed autonomously, transformed and maintained by volunteers and local community partners to gather, grow food, and play.
Results:
- Since 2011, neighbors have begun campaigns to transform over 200 sites.
- 596 Acres has steered groups through the process of creating new community organizations and helped these organizations get formal access to vacant lots to create 39 new community-managed spaces.
- Nearly all of them have become so valuable to their local and citywide communities that they have been permanently preserved as community spaces by the New York City municipal government. This strategy for activating the potential of vacant public land has been emulated in over a dozen cities around the globe, including Philadelphia and Melbourne.
Learn more from:
- 596 Acres
- Open-source version of the digital tool used by 596 Acres
This case study is adapted from our latest book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons.” Get a copy today.
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]]>The post From start-up to sellout: An inside look at MakerBot’s downfall appeared first on P2P Foundation.
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The author in front of one of the locations of the MakerBot store — which all closed. Photo via Isaac Anderson.
Once upon a time, MakerBot Industries was the darling of the Brooklyn start-up world. I’d know, because I worked there.
The company this week announced its productions are being outsourced to China, so it’s come a long way from a hackerspace in Boerum Hill. But let’s start at the beginning: MakerBot was the brainchild of a few 3D printing enthusiasts and unabashed nerds who wanted to contribute to an open-source hardware community founded by an eccentric British professor enamored with the prospect of self-replicating machines. It turned out a lot of folks wanted to get their hands on a thing that made things, and it also turned out that the community that made the original MakerBot possible greatly facilitated MakerBot’s rapid expansion, offering useful feedback and oftentimes original design work that was ultimately integrated into the company’s core product.
For a while, MakerBot was equally generous in giving back to this community. They embraced the spirit of openness and freely shared their ongoing improvements to the public. Demand skyrocketed for a product that was improving in real time, so it made sense to double down on Brooklyn, and MakerBot built a full-blown factory for its products in Sunset Park. It was whimsical! The impossible was possible! In the early days, nearly everyone built printers as a rite of passage. They learned the machines inside and out and became ideal candidates for promotion through the ranks to engineering, repair, customer support, and sales roles. In an emphatically post-industrial city in an outsourced 21st-century world, MakerBot fearlessly bucked the trend by building physical things locally, hiring from within, and committing to the mantra that sharing was caring. It was hard not to like them; their fan base ranged from the obvious, like geeks to geeks who like open-source stuff, to hipster geeks, to, uh, local artists previously involved in Occupy Wall Street? Whatever it was they were doing, it was working. Neither MakerBot nor their affable CEO could do any wrong… until they did.
Everyone thinks riding the start-up wave is the ticket to noble success, a mix of idealistic principles and the cutting edge profitability of the new economy. But sometimes that wave crashes, and this is one of those stories.
A year or two before I was hired, the company’s then-CEO Bre Pettis onboarded an outsider who “knew how to run a company,” presumably because the stress of running such a rapidly growing company was getting to him. (Foreshadowing alert: the running joke was later that this woman knew how to run a company into the ground. This outsider eventually maneuvered herself into the position of president of the company and eventually supplanted the very CEO that hired her before cashing out and handing the keys over to the grim reaper — but I digress! More on that later.) I joined MakerBot in May 2013, a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed grad school dropout hellbent on getting my hands dirty at a tech start-up that was changing the world. At that time, MakerBot was still riding high on their goodwill cache; but by the time I came aboard, the company had reached peak cool.
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Team MakerBot in front of their old headquarters (called the BotCave) in Boerum Hill.
A little over a month after I’d joined, everyone was called into an all-hands meeting in which it was announced that we’d been acquired by Stratasys, nefarious corporate overlords a company that effectively invented the process integral to the kind of 3D printing MakerBots did, in a deal averaging over $1 million in stock for every employee at the company. Pop the champagne! No, seriously, there were dozens of bottles of sparkling wine provided for us. And why not? This was great! We were one of the lucky startups that made it! We even got a couple of extra vacation days. And who were we to object?
The acquisition didn’t affect us much, or so it seemed at first. For a while MakerBot just kept being MakerBot, and Stratasys kept on being Stratasys, and we got to keep innovating away while the parent company took care of their own business affairs. There was an overarching collective feeling of conviviality and camaraderie between coworkers, who were as eager as ever before to geek out about what they knew and learn from fellow coworkers who knew what they didn’t know.
Come find us in 600+ @SamsClub stores around the US. That’s a lot of industrial revolution. http://t.co/DoXRgqydOy pic.twitter.com/chYkdremoI
— MakerBot (@makerbot) July 7, 2015
The better part of a year before the acquisition, MakerBot pivoted towards closing its source code and keeping its intellectual property cards closer to its chest, and we stayed the course after being bought out. Part of closing our source was scrapping the open-source platform we had previously iterated on every annual product development cycle. Instead of tweaking and improving on a design honed over the course of half a decade, we pulled out all the stops and redesigned our own proprietary hardware, electronics and software from the ground up over the course of a single year. We also decided, while we were at it, to jam-pack our 3D printers with more features than they’d ever had before—cameras, wifi, apps, “smart” everything. Rather than design, test, and build, it was design, design, design some more, and then quick — build!
In the past, with our open-source platform, our customer base had been limited to a smaller group of capable hobbyists who provided tech-savvy feedback and suggestions for improvement. By the time this newest (and under-tested, according to my fellow employees) product had shipped, most people buying our product were largely incapable non-hobbyists with no useful feedback, only unrealistic expectations, and had little idea of how to fix things under the hood when they (inevitably) broke due to flashy new features malfunctioning and debilitating the printers. Customers were up in arms over their multi-thousand dollar paperweights, our repair team couldn’t fix broken printers fast enough, our support department was drowned in an onslaught of complaints, a class-action lawsuit from customers was threatened, and our parent company’s stock price started to decline.
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A 3D printed can exchange spotted in Bushwick was part of the dream that 3D printers like MakerBot could save the world. Photo by Isaac Anderson.
We just chalked this all up to startup craziness, rolled our eyes, and carried on. The work was still plentiful and engaging! I still felt incredibly productive, learning more than I ever had before as I pushed myself to design the most innovative and robust 3D printer subsystems I could dream up. I trusted my coworkers every step of the way, and we all had a good time shooting the shit while we encouraged and abetted one another along in our respective projects. I even got to play the part of mentor to some interns.
And then, seemingly out of nowhere, work dried up.
While we at MakerBot were distracted either putting out fires left and right or just taking care of business, Stratasys had been going through some mergers and acquisitions of its own, with some corporate restructuring. We were newly barred from making even minor changes to products that were very clearly broken in our eyes and therefore very rapidly damaging the reputation of our company. Morale was dropping fast across the company, and last-ditch efforts were made by management to retain talent they were afraid of losing; in what was in retrospect may have been an obvious bread-and-circuses tactic, my salary as well as those of a few select coworkers was suddenly bumped up by 30 percent, and yet while making markedly more money that I ever had before in my life, I was about the least satisfied I’d ever been with my job.
I started penning what I termed “therapeutic job applications” for positions elsewhere and once cried openly in front of my boss in a one-on-one meeting, telling her plainly that I feared for the future of our department and the company in general considering the course we were on. I was upset because MakerBot was more than just a workplace: it was a community I adored and a dream I’d fallen in love with. And the dream, I could plainly see, was dead.
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MakerBot: a pile of broken dreams.
Two months later, our former-president-turned-CEO (yeah, remember her?) handed the reins over to the hyper-privileged son of the chairman of the board of Stratasys. His first action as CEO, as shared on the company internal social network, was to learn how to use one of our printers. The second was to fire a fifth of the company. I still remember that Friday: I was ambling through the large glass doors de rigueur for any well-heeled tech company, half-asleep and bracing myself for the daily slog, when someone from HR approached me to tell me I had a meeting with the director of engineering. I made my way over to the cramped meeting room and found the director of engineering sitting next to the head of the company’s legal department. I was given the spiel, told it wasn’t a reflection of my performance, yada yada. Honestly, I couldn’t bring myself to care that much. Between the month and a half of severance and my total job dissatisfaction, I saw getting laid off at that point as getting paid to quit.
Firing a fifth of the company has since become a sort of semi-annual ritual at MakerBot, and this latest round of layoffs complete with outsourcing to China is reported to have cost 100 people their jobs, according to Gothamist. It shouldn’t come as a shock for a company that sold out to the corporate capitalist short-term profit maximization machine. Only a year ago, the company was heralded for opening a bigger factory in Brooklyn. Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams said then: “For many years folks in this community, instead of making screws, felt that they were being screwed.” Oh, the irony.
It is still, however, an affront to and inversion of the founding principles of the company, a place that put a premium on innovation, was willing to invest in its employees and infrastructure, and wanted to give back to the community from whence it came. As to the question of MakerBot’s continued presence in Brooklyn now that it’s repeatedly shed good chunks of its workforce and sent its manufacturing to China, don’t worry, it’s still here — for now. It’s just shirked back into its corporate shell near the top of a skyscraper in the part of the borough that fancies itself the next Midtown.
Stratasys’s corporate strategy hasn’t made itself more profitable: its stock price bled out in the wake of the first round of layoffs in April 2015 and has flatlined ever since. The majority of MakerBot employees never saw much of that million-dollar-a-head buyout, but then again, maybe Robert Frost — or was that Ponyboy? — was right. Nothing gold can stay: it just gives way to more gold. Gold to line the coffers of the fat cats who don’t give a fuck about dreams, anyway.
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