Building Quality Community in Downtown OKC

I spent today at the Placemaking Conference hosted by the Institute for Quality Communities at OU. The highlight of the day, for me, was the presentation by Jeff Speck, one of the keynote speakers for the conference and author of Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time. Speck argues that improving downtown by improving walkability is the key to better communities. Toward the end of his presentation, he addresses the objections he sometimes gets from community members from poorer neighborhoods who ask why improvements should focus on downtown rather than on their neighborhoods. After all, they want improvements to the places where they actually live. Speck's answer to this is entirely reasonable.

Speck argues that, since any renewal plan can't improve every neighborhood, it is best to do one small area very well than to spread resources and make a large area mediocre. For this reason, it makes sense to focus first on downtown, since this is the one part of the city that belongs to everyone.

In Speck's vision of community space, this is certainly true. As a proponent of what is often called New Urbanism, Speck's vision of good public space is emphatically mixed use (I think I may be quoting Kunstler here), pedestrian friendly, and scaled to humans (rather than to automobiles). Its borders are permeable, it's buildings interesting, and its aesthetics welcoming. It is truly democratic space where members of all classes intermingle and watch one another.

In contrast to Speck's optimistic vision, however, Mike Davis, in the essay "Fortress Los Angeles" from his book City of Quartz, presents an alternate view of downtown as purposefully constructed space. In the picture Davis draws, downtown does not, in fact, belong to everyone.

Davis recounts the "urban renaissance" of Los Angeles in the late 1980s and early 1990s during which time the city underwent a serious makeover, mainly focused, it would seem, with making the educated middle class feel comfortable by insulating them from people they don't want to see. The most insidious of these "improvements" was the city's "experiments with community blockades." In a move that created de-fact ghettos (in the old meaning of the word), the city surrounded neighborhoods supposedly infested with drugs with concrete blockades in order to disrupt the flow of cocaine. But it also disrupted the flow of service industry workers into service industry jobs. It disrupted the flow of anyone living in the neighborhood to get out.

Though the blockades were being used in more suburban neighborhoods, moving downtown doesn't mean that the designs become less oppressive, just that the messages have to be a bit more subtle. There are without question, ways to make certain people feel uncomfortable in a place--to make sure they understand the signs that they are not welcome. Davis explains:

Ramparts and battlements, reflective glass and elevated pedways, are tropes in an architectural language warning off the underclass Other. Although architectural critics are usually blind to this militarized syntax, urban pariah groups--whether young black men, poor Latino immigrants, or elderly homeless females--read the signs immediately.

Disenfranchised groups have learned, often through bitter experience, the vocabularies of built space. They've learned to looks around and know that they are not wanted. For the homeless man, "No Trespassing" signs, blocked walkways, public park closing hours, and benches designed to make it impossible to sleep on them all work to tell him that he is not wanted.

Impractical "armrests" on OKC park benches make it impossible for homeless people to sleep.

If you are middle class and white, you may well find the huge police presence in Bricktown comforting. If you're young and not white, you likely find it a bit disconcerting.

There's great incentive for a city to make sure that the middle class will feel comfortable. After all, we have to pay for these improvements, and we pay for these improvements with the revenue that they generate. So, if a city allows the economics of building communities to take precedence over the human needs of all those living in the community, it becomes easy cater to those whose money is financing the improvements. The problem with the superblocks in LA, Detroit, and Atlanta that Davis mentions was primarily that they were designed to insulate the people they were designed for. A person working in one of these can easily leave home, seal herself in her car for the drive to work, park in a garage that is connected directly to the office building, and never cross paths with someone outside of her own socioeconomic milieu.

Such an arrangement is decidedly un-democratic. In such a model, downtown does not belong to everyone, but only to those whose comfort is profitable.

So, it's important for those of us who concern ourselves with social justice, and economic and racial diversity to remain closely involved and aware of public discussions of community building. If we see downtown as our most democratic public space (and I think Speck is right to), we must work to make sure that everyone is, in fact, invited.