Alternative Other Cities: San Francisco's Mission District Murals

In the heart of San Francisco's Mission District, between Valencia and Mission lies Clarion Alley, a sketchy service alley fronted by the sides of buildings and fences. Yet it's one of the most visited places in the neighborhood by locals and tourists alike. This is because Clarion Alley is one of a number of alleys in the Mission that are lined with mural art.

The semi-legal art of the alley is of varying quality. Some of it is obviously very purposefully inspired by the mural art movement of Diego Rivera, some of it is more akin to the well done graffiti of urban taggers. Most of it is highly political or social in nature. It's the kind of stuff that in more conservative cities would be totally unacceptable. It's freeform, tacky, occasionally offensive, and always critical of the status quo. It's also beautiful, daring, and incredibly popular.

The alley is loosely and organically organized like an outdoor gallery. Artists claim space, marking the area of wall or fence or asphalt that they intend to use, begin chalk outlines of their work, and inscribe (also in chalk) the apparently uniform statement "Mural in progress. Please respect." And, for the most part, people do. There are clearly some rivalries and grudges between artists occasionally at play, since a couple of these in-progress murals have been tagged with "cop lover," an obviously pejorative title in this context. But otherwise, it is a very democratic and open space, where artists work and others respect it. No one is paying for ad space, or being invited by a curator. Instead, artists contribute what they will on whatever space happens to come available.

A panel on the west end of the alley (which has, unlike the murals, been tagged prolifically) explains the purpose of the alley in both English and Spanish.

Inspired by Balmy Alley [another alley in the Mission] and determined to build more autonomy, a group of us got together, spoke to our neighbors, went to City Hall and Clarion Alley began its journey as a place that wants to be free. A place where culture and dignity speak louder than the rules of private property.

Embedded in such a statement is the understanding that the buildings and fences that line the alley may be private property, but they are public space. Thus, this is where local urban artists carry on a pubic discussion in a rather subversive aesthetic style.

As I looked over these murals, and took the time to consider their aesthetic quality and their messages, I couldn't help but to mourn the loss of the now gone "Legal Wall" in Oklahoma City's Automobile Alley district. Most people in OKC likely never even knew about it. It was well hidden in an unnamed service alley running between NW 10th and Park, just east of Broadway.

My understanding of the history of the Legal Wall is a bit apocryphal, a mixture of what I've heard from police detectives and street artists. It started, supposedly, when the building owner of the corner building at 10th and Broadway, apparently out of philosophical conviction,  agreed to allow some graffiti artists to work on the back of his building. The art soon spread to the other building that lined this alley, the other building owners either deciding to go along with it, or just not seeing the point of complaining.

A panorama of OKC's "Legal Wall"

When the building changed hands, the city quickly and quietly covered the graffiti up before the new owner took possession of the building. Where the bright colors, strange graphics, and curious text used to be, there are now only walls painted a brick red color. The artists, most of whom considered themselves serious and law abiding (though some where not) and a few of whom in fact had gallery shows at other location have respected the new owners, so the walls remain the drab false brick color.

Curiously, not long after the art on these walls was covered, the front of the very beautiful former Oklahoman building a few blocks away was tagged with South Town Barrio gang graffiti. Although one did not cause the other, for me, the incident highlighted was was tragic about the end of the Legal Wall.

The graffiti in the alley, artistic and in its own way subversive, may have been cluttered and tacky, and it certainly didn't represent the canonized aesthetic that conservative cities like OKC are willing to call "art," but it gave the alley a sense of place.  While the Legal Wall was there, there was the feeling that people cared about this place. Artists were coming to work on their pieces, interested hipsters were coming to look at the work, high school seniors were coming to use the cool, gritty urban setting as a backdrop for their senior pictures, and so on. The wall turned an empty and neglected alley into a pubic space with a life.

Our Legal Wall certainly wasn't as developed as the thriving mural scene in San Francisco's Mission district. In the Mission, the murals are rather sophisticated--portraits of people and landscapes, rather than the text based train-car graffiti of the Legal Wall. The Mission murals, furthermore, are a mature, living, visual political conversation, unquestionably of a public nature. The legal wall was amateurish and immature by those standards. But what the Legal Wall shared with the Mission murals was an important assumption about public space. The open source, democratic space of graffiti art supports a sense of co-ownership over the public space it inhabits.  The artists own it because they do their work there. The viewer owns it because he comes and goes to look at something he admires or just finds curious. High school seniors come to get the feeling that they are street savvy city kids, and have the pictures to prove it. Once the legal wall was gone, however, the co-owners of the space were gone, replaced by the distant, faceless owner of the building--a person of whose existence we have no real concept of.

So the STB gang graffiti incident, to me, became a picture if what happens when the people who feel a sense of ownership of a place, the people who have some reason to care about it and thus who watch over it, leave.

A Caution to Urbanists: The Ethics of Gentrification

Each year, the FBI publishes (in several steps) comprehensive data from its UCR (Uniform Crime Reporting) reports. Media outlets gather the data and scramble to publish stories in which they produced rankings based on violent crime. Readers then eagerly look for their own cities on these notorious Top 10 lists. This year's lists (which use 2012 statistics) are showing an interesting reverse trend in which large cities, long regarded by suburbanites as dangerous, crowded, and dirty, are falling off the top lists. Perineal top seed Detroit has fallen to number 6 in violent crime per capita. Other usual superstars like Memphis, Atlanta (26th), and Washington DC (now 46th!) have fallen out of these lists entirely.

Over the past several years, these cities have been replaced on violent crime lists by old industrial hubs and suburban (but poor) cities on the outskirts of major cities. Memphis is gone, but West Memphis, AR is now number 4. Detroit is gone, but it's been replaced by Inkster, Flint, and Saginaw. Saint Louis remains on the top ten list, but number one on the list is East Saint Louis, IL (a horrifyingly polluted and poor city featured in Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities).

To those of us who grew up thinking about the suburbs as the upper-middle class, clean, safe havens defined by manicured lawns, pizza places, parks, and high school sports, this trend may seem strange. These are the images that the suburb brings to mind in the US, but in other countries, this is not the case. In large French cities, the banlieues (outskirts or suburbs) have long been the home of poor people in subsidized housing--the home also of crime, gangs, and political turmoil. They are more like what we here the in US would think of as the inner city--poor, under-served, and racially segregated. Such an arrangement, which seems a kind of reverse urban arrangement to us in the US, exists for easily traceable reasons. Large cities in France (and other parts of Europe) are old, beautiful, gentrified, highly walkable (which ensures a lot of people are always out, with their eyes on things), and well used. People want to be there, and people want to live there. This means that property values in the city are very high. As a result, undesirables in these cities, rather than being abandoned by white flight, have instead been pushed to the outskirts. In these cities, where there is high incentive to attract and keep tourists, public housing and social service agencies are built away from the core of the city--away from where tourists might see that Paris or Lyon have problems too.

In the US, on the other hand, the post-war industrial boom (namely in the automotive industry), cheap (heavily subsidized) gasoline, fear of the polluted industrial city, and good-old fashioned American spirit of expansion led to the opposite. People who could afford to fled the cities into the new suburbs, leaving behind the poor, undereducated, and minorities in the inner cities. When they left, they took all their resources (especially in terms of taxable property value) with them.

The result, in both countries, has been that large cities are highly segregated. Though the spacial arrangement is flipped, both countries have large cities divided into geographic areas whose residents know very little of the people in the other area. In both countries, this division is clearly drawn along lines that are class and race oriented. Here in the US, all respectable middle class children are taught that you are to stay away from a certain "side of town." Likewise, kids who live on that "side of town" discern quickly that they are not welcome on our side. What results from this geographical and social arrangement is a situation in which people in the inner city (in our case) are made to believe that the resources available to the affluent are not available to them, and the affluent, even if they are well meaning people, are not often acquainted with the plight of people living in the inner city. So people in the inner city live in squalor, while people in the suburbs live in affluence. The affluent especially are trained to see this as the natural way of things. It is, I would argue, a highly unethical arrangement. And it is, in part, perpetuated by geography.

The good news is that influential, affluent educated people are moving back to the city in droves. The New Urbanists celebrate the fact that late Gen-Xers (like me), Millennials, and even aging baby boomers are packing up their advanced degrees and moving back into the cities. Those of us in this group desire walkable neighborhoods, mass transit options, shorter commutes, more night life and many other things that come with living in a rich urban environment. This is great news for a lot of reasons. But it also comes with a danger.

I am admittedly a novice (I'm a rhetorician who fell into New Urbanism through a love of the city and through researching rhetorics of space), but I sense a bit of a divide in the literature of New Urbanism. Architects and city planners, like Jeff Speck, often address the benefits of urbanism in terms of economics and conservation. Their focus tends to be the benefits of density, walkability/bike-ability, and mass transit options. To academics and authors, like Jane Jacobs and James Howard Kunstler (New-Urbanist doomsday profit), social ethics are more central. Kunstler talks at length (citing Jacobs often) about the potential for urban living to bring people closer together in space, thus forcing them into awareness of one another. For him, the mixed use, mixed income nature of naturally urban environments is a road to cure for many of the social ills brought about by the segregated communities indicative of sprawl. Though Kunstler is at times, I think, a bit reductive in his attitudes toward the poor (he believes a major benefit of mixed income housing is that the poor will learn how to behave by watching the affluent--an assertion that carries some problematic assumptions), he nevertheless understands that the way that we live in built space has important social-ethical dimensions.

I don't intend to suggest that urban planners and architects aren't interested in these concerns (many of them no doubt are), but their professions seem to make these concerns secondary in their writing. Further, since these are the writers who have the ears of public officials (and perhaps because public officials tend to listen to parts of things they like), it is possible for the economic progress promised by urbanism to become center stage in public discussion while the ethical dimensions of geographical space remain invisible.

This can very well lead to an inappropriate form of gentrification. As we invest in our rich urban environments (which we should and must do), it is possible to lose sight of the importance of mixed use, mixed income neighborhoods. It is possible that in our enthusiasm to attract well educated, relatively affluent people back into our urban cores, we may also drive others out. One of my few critiques of Jeff Speck's Walkable City (a current intellectual man-crush of mine) is his somewhat unqualified assertion that our downtowns should be the focus of our efforts because "downtown is the only part of the city that belongs to everybody (260). This certainly can be true, and should be, but it isn't necessarily true. As long as we keep social/geographical arrangements ethical, Speck's argument is unassailable: if we can't fix an entire city (we never can) we should start with the parts of city that benefit the most people. However, the work of Mike Davis in Fortress Los Angeles (and some of my own graduate research) suggests the ways in which space can and sometimes is effectually shut off from undesirable people. Davis's article is an extreme (but real-life) example of the ways in which it is possible to build a section of city for ourselves, then literally wall other people out.

As we move back into the city, we demand better schools, better security, and better housing. These are all good things and can, if done correctly, better the lives of both us and the people who already live in these areas. But they can also take the form of charter schools that can remove our kids from traditionally underserved inner city schools, police harassment of the homeless or addicted roaming the streets, and skyrocketing property values that drive out those who had lived there.

In other words, it's possible that our arrival can in fact make things much worse for other people. It's possible that, rather than bringing people closer together both in space and sentiment, we will instead just drive others out to make room for ourselves. It is possible for us to fail at changing the unethical arrangement of urban sprawl, but instead to simply to flip-flop it. If this happens, we have gone in the wrong direction, ethically, because we will have moved the poor out into the suburbs where the lack of viable public transportation and density of social services further isolates them. This may, I suspect, be part of what we are seeing in the crime statistics cited above. The popularity of urban living is creating a kind of reverse white-flight.

So, my charge here is that as we continue advocate for urbanism, we make a purposeful effort to keep the conversation balanced so that our city leaders see not only the economic benefits of urbanism, but the ethical dimensions as well. As we pressure them to allocate resources to attract the educated, we must also pressure them to stay attuned to the needs of those already living in the urban areas into which we are trying to move. We do this by making sure that they understand that part of what makes urban living attractive to us is the diversity of the city. In order to maintain a level of diversity, it will be important that housing options remain diverse, that schools serve privileged and underprivileged students equally, and that our downtown truly does, as Speck suggests, belong to everyone.