Simon Nielsen 10/21/22 Simon Nielsen 10/21/22

Basketcolor Project: Placemaking, art and play for resilient communities in Juarez, Mexico

“After the first waves of COVID-19, we observed how public spaces (streets, squares, parks) in various cities around the world began to become allies for both economic and sociocultural reactivation. From spaces for outdoor commerce to places of physical activity and recreation, of course, prioritizing the new rules of the game: social distancing, face masks and constant sanitization.” Miguel Mendoza and Nómada Estudio Urbano uses placemaking and a participatory approach to reactivate public space.

By Miguel Mendoza & Nómada Estudio Urbano

As a result of the pause in public life caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, people have had to develop new adaptation mechanisms in the way we approach our cities, communities and, above all, our public spaces.

Nowadays, it is said that we live in a "new normality". However, in a border city as complex as Juarez, Mexico, it is difficult to measure such normality.

For example, in Juarez it was not possible to experience safe confinement in the most critical times of the pandemic. The majority of the population had to be exposed to this new adversity in order not to lose their jobs and remain economically active.

After the first waves of COVID-19, we observed how public spaces (streets, squares, parks) in various cities around the world began to become allies for both economic and sociocultural reactivation. From spaces for outdoor commerce to places of physical activity and recreation, of course, prioritizing the new rules of the game: social distancing, face masks and constant sanitization.

Inspired by these urban adaptations, we began to map spaces in Juarez with the potential to be transformed into multifunctional temporary places for community reactivation processes. That's how we found an interesting common denominator: basketball courts in community parks.

Although Juarez has historically suffered from a deficit of public spaces and the existing parks need to improve their conditions, it is common to find preserved basketball courts in them. In general, the courts in community parks have become bastions of play and one of the most used infrastructures.

Based on these opportunity areas, the Basketcolor Project arose. This project aimed to use placemaking and asphalt art to make basketball courts flexible and adaptable public spaces where play and neighborhood activation coexist.

You may be wondering, "Is it possible to change the traditional context of a basketball court?" The answer is yes, as long as you understand the needs and wishes to be resolved around the space and its users. This is where placemaking and participatory design gain ground.

Through placemaking workshops and co-design, we worked with various communities to generate floor mural proposals that could provide the opportunity to also use courts as smart meeting spaces for activities such as flea markets, health fairs, open-air cinema and neighborhood committees. All this, without sacrificing the original purpose for play and recreation.

Throughout the first and second year of the pandemic, the Basketcolor Project allowed the activation of 6 multifunctional basketball courts. As the health situation improved in Juarez and once vaccination was accessible for all, the meaning of the project slowly migrated to the revitalization of courts for recreational use. Now, using placemaking and co-design to consolidate floor murals that make visible the identity and sense of appropriation of the community in which they are located.

Currently, the Basketcolor Project has activated 15 courts in various communities in Juarez and is perceived as a benchmark for citizen participation in the recovery of public spaces. Beyond being an urban art project, Basketcolor is today defined as a community placemaking project that seeks to enhance resilience and generate more humane and playful spaces that reflect the values and uniqueness of the people who inhabit them.

Simon Nielsen 10/18/22 Simon Nielsen 10/18/22

Public Space Is a Learning Place

“Any public space is a learning ground. We get to meet strangers and interact with them and learn something from them, we get to experience nature and all its glory and lessons, we get to experience and face different challenges as well. We get to meet people of different races and backgrounds and share the place with them without feeling any threat, and there's a chance of becoming a friend with them even if it's just a “salam dua friend" meaning someone you just greet on a daily basis.” Peacemakers Pakistani ask us to look around and cherish the shared learning of public space.

By Peacemakers Pakistani

The behavior of people in public spaces brings to light the issues that the nation or citizens are facing not only on surface level but on a deeper level as well.... If only one has time to focus, observe and analyze. After that when an issue is brought to surface one must try to help solve them in a compassionate manner instead of sitting there and criticize and complain about things. And what one must remember always, the change starts with one human, let that human be you!

So being an observer here is what I have to share with you....

1. We often observe intolerance and impatience in people on road, everyone wants to pass through first, not allowing other person to move ahead or waiting for their own turn. Well, "waiting??", what does that term mean! Unfortunately, we seem to be ignorant of this term. Here in Pakistan, it is sarcastically said "tu lang ja saadi kher" meaning "you can walk over us, we are okay with that". These kind of sarcastic remarks come from deep disappointment I believe and it is becoming our limited belief with time, unconsciously, which is not good. The reason being consumerism culture to me where everything is available at just one click that people have forgotten the habit of waiting for right time and instant gratification being one big disastrous mindset due to that as well. Also, the rat race in which everyone is rushing blindly.

So next time you are outside, observe.... Not only others but yourself as well.... Are you rushing? Are you part of the rat race everyone is? Is it hard for you to wait for your turn? How does it feel in your body? Where can you sense it within you? How is it showing up in your behavior? Then, observe in others, around you, how can you see it happening around you? Is it worth being a part of and keep on practicing daily? If not, what else would you like to practice daily so you may become that human who is tolerant and patient and going with the flow of nature. InshaAllah.

2. People have lost respect for each other including themselves. You can see it in the ways people treat each other on road or any other public space. The way they address each other, the name calling, the harassment cases particularly with girls/women, the bullying with boys, even the abusive behavior and language very frequently seen around. I find some signages and quotations on vehicles as disrespectful and sarcastic as well, there is no need for that but it is frequently seen because sense of humor is being misunderstood and an excuse for disrespect. I wonder why people have forgotten that respect is a fundamental need and moral value of a human being. Allah has given a human being great respect, why people have forgotten their value and position?

So, do you think that those who disrespect strangers would respect those at home? Do you know that the relationship we have with ourselves is what we reflect on the outside with others? How is your relationship with others? How do you treat others? How is your relationship with yourself? How do you treat yourself in times of tension and stress? How do you show yourself self respect? Is it all making sense to you?

3. I see adults (mainly homeless people and drug addicts I am referring to here) showcasing disgusting habits and activities in public and open spaces and living their lives as very discouraging and pitiful state, and then I wonder when I see children around them, (also homeless) not addicts yet but what else would they be if they see no good example around them? Children follow the steps of elders, what are they seeing, what are they copying? Unfortunately I have seen 2 children once mimicking how to smoke hiding from the elders, I have also seen children name calling and harassing girls older than them, I have also seen children laughing at lame jokes just like how elders would with different understanding and intention though, I have seen lot... I wish I was ignorant but I am not....

So what do you think how can this situation be minimized? Do these adults need to be schooled or these kids? What future do you see for them? What might be the cause of their homelessness and drug addiction? What would our kids be learning from them as they see them frequently on roads on daily basis? What mindset and behavior do we need to teach our children towards these people they encounter directly or indirectly? What could be our role as responsible citizens? Do share with me.

4. Leisure, rest and play are rights of all human beings. As we all work daily, either being a student or working person be at home or at office or any profession, the homemakers are included as well... But do we have time and space to rest play and have a leisure time? Is it for free? Are we given the opportunities to enjoy and rest? Are we availing those opportunities? I mainly see people, now, spending their free times in restaurants or in markets.... Consumerism alert! Spending money isn't my kind of rest, play or leisure activity, i mean spending money now would mean me being disturbed to earn money again for more free time or my responsibilities. For me that's double the pressure and stress. Isn't it true? For me, leisure walk on street or in the park that's more relaxing and relieving, the interaction with nature even for few minutes is a source of energy booster but I find it difficult because of the security concerns mainly due to lack of facilities and vehicles on road and yes creepy people lacking mannerism... But, why other people are not outside? I mean if there are more people out for rest and leisure wouldn't it feel secure, the natural surveillance would be such a great support. But do we have time for that, is it a priority for us? Why not? Is rat race and consumerism culture is again a culprit here? What do you think? Do you go out or not? Why yes or no?

5. Any public space a learning ground, we get to meet strangers and interact with them and learn something from them, we get to experience nature and all its glory and lessons, we get to experience and face different challenges as well. We get to meet people of different races and backgrounds and share the place with them without feeling any threat and there's a chance of becoming a friend with them even if it's just a salam dua friend meaning someone you only meet to greet and part ways (on daily basis) how amazing that is.... But for quite some time we haven't been allowed to be outside especially children and women to experience the outside world so we see lot of children and women lacking social skills and having self esteem issues because they weren't allowed to grow and fulfill their developmental needs. No wonder why our nation lack leaders...!

So I want to ask you now, what else have you been able to observe in public spaces around you and what other people behaviors teach you about the crisis in your country? What sort of crisis are there? I have only mentioned 5 but there are many that I have observed. What solution do you have to mitigate these crisis? Do you think if we reclaim our public spaces being a responsible citizen and being a better human (not just supposing that we are but becoming one) and set new examples rather good examples of how a society should behave and be and inspire our children as responsible adults and showcase good moral values, can that be a sensible step to transform our communities and the behaviors around us? There is nothing to prove to anyone just to be... Just to live a healthy life for ourselves. Just a lifestyle that's not only good for me or you but for everyone... Do you think that it can be done? Do you want to do it? Share your feedback. I am here listening.

Simon Nielsen 10/13/22 Simon Nielsen 10/13/22

‘It is not the right moment to try and understand Russians.’ Sophia Andrukhovych In Dialogue With Orhan Pamuk

In order to comprehend the events of recent days, PEN Ukraine has launched a series of conversations entitled #DialoguesOnWar. On July 8, Sophia Andrukhovych, Ukrainian author and translator, held a conversation with Orhan Pamuk, author and Nobel Prize winner in Literature.
This conversation is supported by the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine.

This conversation is supported by the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine.

By PEN Ukraine with Sophia Andrukhovych and Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk: Hello, I am very pleased to have this conversation. I am here, in my summerhouse, in Istanbul, away from the town. I want to ask you, Sofia, where are you now? Where were you when the war started and what were you doing at that moment?

Sophia Andrukhovych: Hello Orhan, hello everyone, thank you so much for having me. I was living in Kyiv when the war started. I have been for 17 years. I was born in Ivano-Frankivsk, a little town in the western part of Ukraine. And after the first week of the war, my family and I fled there. It all started when I woke up at 5 in the morning. I never wake up that early. I had this awful feeling I could not explain. I was just lying in my bed listening to silence. Then suddenly I heard an explosion and felt trembling.

Orhan Pamuk: Were you expecting something like this to happen when you went to sleep that night?

Sophia Andrukhovych: Yes. We were warned by the American and British governments. We knew that Russian forces were near our border. In a way, we were somewhat prepared, but you can never really prepare for something like this. I woke my husband up and told him that the war had started. Then immediately I thought, is our daughter going to school that day? Probably it was my conscience trying to make everything normal. Only then I understood: nothing will be the same anymore.

Orhan Pamuk: Did you immediately wake your daughter up?

Sophia Andrukhovych: Yes, I started packing things because we were hoping to flee on the first day. That’s when she woke up, and I tried not to scare her and to explain what was happening. She’s 14, so she was aware of the news.

Orhan Pamuk: And the explosions were continuing?

Sophia Andrukhovych: Yes, every 20 minutes or so. Although my memory may have changed a little. The sirens were on. We were told to hide in the bomb shelters because staying at our flat was dangerous. One of the shelters was the Kyiv Metro. I think you have been to Kyiv and have seen it yourselves before.

Orhan Pamuk: Yes, how far away was the subway station from you?

Sophia Andrukhovych: About 5 minutes. It was so unrealistic. This huge underground space is filled with hundreds of people. They were sitting so close to each other, with their cats and dogs. They were shocked. However, when I started to watch the people, I was surprised to notice how calm they were. They came with their suitcases, bags, and chairs, but they were very composed.

Orhan Pamuk: Back then, how long did you think the war would last?

Sophia Andrukhovych: I had somewhat naïve thoughts. I could not imagine that now, in our times, something like this could happen. When it started, I hoped that the world would not allow this. I hoped that other countries would interfere and influence the situation in some way. I hoped such an atrocity would be stopped. Now I see how naïve I was.

Orhan Pamuk: What did your husband say? If you were writing a novel set in that particular moment, what would the conversation between the two of you be like?

Sophia Andrukhovych: I asked my husband’s opinion on the situation. We talked about the Ukrainian troops, the people who volunteered and joined the Armed Forces, who took up arms to fight for our country. We also talked about what we had to do to stay alive. Those first days were mainly about surviving.

Orhan Pamuk: How long did you stay in the subway station that day?

Sophia Andrukhovych: About 6 hours. It became very tiring and depressing. We saw elderly people, sick people, and little crying children. So we decided to return home.

Orhan Pamuk: Sorry to ask, but were there toilets or food in the Kyiv Metro?

Sophia Andrukhovych: There was one toilet for this huge crowd of people. So, it was not very convenient. Every family had its food. But from the very beginning the desire to help each other, to make this situation easier, was obvious. Sharing food and helping people next to you with medicines felt like saving lives. It started then, and it is still going on, this willingness to help and to support.

Orhan Pamuk: It is so great to hear about this solidarity. But were there people who were acting egotistically, on their own? Sorry for this question.

Sophia Andrukhovych: I am sure there were, but I have not met them. I saw only kindness.

Orhan Pamuk: What did you learn about humanity throughout this process?

Sophia Andrukhovych: I have learned that humanity is kinder than I imagined it to be. But at the same time, I saw these horrible things going on: Russians killing, raping Ukrainians, ruining our cities. Of course, this radicalises Ukrainians. People cannot simply be kind when something like this is going on. We become tougher. We see everything in black and white. It is a survival mechanism working like that. When you are in danger, when it comes to life and death questions, you cannot perceive shades.

Orhan Pamuk: You are telling us very interesting things. Are you keeping a diary?

Sophia Andrukhovych: I am writing essays, and those essays are my diary. I did it every couple of weeks and I noticed that every essay was like a chronicle of what was happening to me.

Orhan Pamuk: During this whole time, including the moment just before the war, did you regret not doing something?

Sophia Andrukhovych: I do not think I have regrets about the time before the war. But, possibly, I have regrets about not doing enough during it. At the same time, I know it has to do with the radicalisation I mentioned before. You always demand from yourself to be the best, to be like the people you see and read about in the media. You constantly feel like you are not enough, and this is a humbling experience. You have to remind yourself every day that you can do only what you are capable of doing.

Orhan Pamuk: I understand. Besides the aggressive Russian army, what are you most angry about?

Sophia Andrukhovych: Maybe I am angry at the Ukrainian government for not doing enough before the war. They were warned about the situation and they could organise things more efficiently to save more human lives. But I also understand that these people were also experiencing something like this for the very first time. So, even though I am angry, at the same time I understand that it could be worse. They do what they can.

Orhan Pamuk: Do you have any family members or friends who died in the war?

Sophia Andrukhovych: Fortunately, I do not. I know many people who lost their homes, fled the country and were injured. But no one among my relatives and friends was killed. Except for Roman Ratushnyi, about whom you have probably heard. He was the son of my friend, a Ukrainian writer Svitlana Povalyaeva. I have known him since he was a kid.

Orhan Pamuk: Are you a different person now? Or are you the same person who has been through a radical experience?

Sophia Andrukhovych: I would not say I am different. It is rather a question of trauma. I am fortunate not to be traumatised in a way that would make me a different person. I am the same person, just with a much deeper experience and a constant feeling of death being close to me, to my loved ones, to everyone in Ukraine. Our life will never be the same anymore. Ever.

Orhan Pamuk: What is the side of your life that you miss the most?

Sophia Andrukhovych: I miss not having innocent dreams about the future anymore. I am sorry Ukrainians are so traumatised now that I do not know how we will manage this trauma. How much work do we have to do to overcome it and how long will this work take. Children who lost their parents and vice versa. People who lost their homes. Raped women and children. I cannot imagine how we, as a society, can cope with it. Although I believe that we have to do it eventually. There is no other choice.

Orhan Pamuk: What do you dream of most now?

Sophia Andrukhovych: I dream for the war to end.

Orhan Pamuk: Of course. And after it does, what do you dream would happen?

Sophia Andrukhovych: I suppose the best thing would be to see that my country is not endangered anymore. And to see that all of us have embraced our Ukrainian identity. This war is against our identity. It has been going on for hundreds of years. It has traumatised us before, and we have not worked through those traumas. Trauma is an awful thing, it does not allow us to live our lives fully. But at the same time, it can bring a new realisation of who you are, a new understanding of this particular moment in your life, and the things you cherish.

Orhan Pamuk: How come Russians are seemingly ignoring this war?

Sophia Andrukhovych: Russians see Ukrainians as second-class, lower-quality Russians. When they started this war, ironically, they made many Ukrainians realise that we are not the same. We do not want to be with them. We are our own people. While this war is an unnatural and awful thing, it made many of us realise, on a deeper level, our path. It strengthened our identity. I know for sure that for many Ukrainians at the moment it is better to die knowing who you are than to be with Russia.

Orhan Pamuk: Do you have strong negative feelings against the Russian people?

Sophia Andrukhovych: I do. I think it is natural. It is not the right moment to try and understand Russians. For me, it is way more important to analyse processes that are going on within ourselves, and in our society.

Orhan Pamuk: Who do you blame the most in the international community? Who is the most cynical? We are addressing writers, intellectuals, and journalists.

Sophia Andrukhovych: I would rather not name the exact people whom I blame. But the support we have now is not enough. The war is going on, and we cannot see the end of it. But at the same time, I realise that the world is united around Ukraine. I see this huge sincere help, and I feel it.

When the war started, the Russians wanted to destroy us completely. If Ukrainians did not want to be close to Russia, it was better for them not to exist at all. But it did not work the way the Russians wanted it to.

The huge interest in Ukraine brought by the full-scale invasion is very important. Everyone who has some kind of influence should try and learn more about us. To translate Ukrainian authors, to find out more about our history, to understand us better. The main thing is that we are noticed now. I hope this interest will only grow in the future.

Orhan Pamuk: I am shocked that such a war, just like WWII, is happening so close by. Due to this war, I now observe the Ukrainianness of the Ukrainian people. Besides the war, the nation is flourishing.

Edited by Cammie McAtee

Simon Nielsen 9/13/22 Simon Nielsen 9/13/22

Neighborhood Revitalization Without Gentrification

“Most communities don't think about gentrification until it is too late. The best time to counter gentrification is when it is still unimaginable, and the real estate is still affordable. So, in addition to working on immediate projects and issues to make their neighborhood more livable, the residents need to create a plan for keeping it affordable. Here are some thoughts on what might be included in such a plan taking an ABCD approach.” Community activator, Jim Diers, explores the collective power of neighborhoods.

By Jim Diers, community activator

Where we once dreamed of livable cities and revitalized neighborhoods, we now bemoan gentrification and displacement. As neighborhood conditions have improved, the small businesses and low-income residents, typically people of color, have been driven out. The neighborhood is only livable for those who can afford it.

The blame for gentrification is justifiably placed on institutional racism, young middle-class whites seeking starter homes, corporations attracting highly paid employees from elsewhere, speculative developers, and government programs such as urban renewal and policies promoting growth. But we fail to recognize that well-meaning neighborhood activists are often unwitting partners in gentrification.

Gentrification is the last thing on their mind as activists work to make their neglected neighborhood a better place. They focus on the immediate challenges of blight and crime. They work hard to paint out graffiti and create public art, clean vacant lots and build community gardens, renovate substandard housing and revitalize the business district, and lobby the government for new and enhanced parks, better transportation, good schools and other public infrastructure that more affluent neighborhoods take for granted. As conditions improve, however, the value of the real estate increases and some of the very people who worked so hard on behalf of their neighborhood can no longer afford to live there. Such is the nature of our market-driven economy.

I believe in taking an Asset-Based Community Development approach to neighborhood revitalization. That involves building on the neighborhood’s strengths and doing so in a way that is community-driven. Every community has abundant resources that it can mobilize to strengthen social capital and improve the neighborhood. These assets include the gifts that every individual has to offer, the collective power of the neighborhood’s many formal and informal associations, and the positive identity that comes with the local history, culture and stories. However, it is important to acknowledge that many communities lack sufficient ownership or control over two assets that are key to preventing displacement – the neighborhood’s real estate and its economy.

Confronting economic challenges in the Canadian Maritime Provinces in the 1930s, Father Moses Coady pronounced: “They will use what they have to secure what they have not.” He helped lead the Antigonish Movement that resulted in producer cooperatives and credit unions. Coady’s dictum still makes good sense for community development work today, especially as we seek to revitalize neighborhoods without gentrifying them.

Neighborhood planning can be a great way to coalesce local associations and tap the knowledge, skills and passions of their members in developing a strategy for gaining greater control over the neighborhood’s real estate and economy. To the extent that there is broad-based participation in the development of the plan and ownership of its vision and recommendations, the neighbors will likely take action to implement their plan and push city hall to do the same.

It’s essential that neighborhoods plan ahead, way ahead. Unfortunately, most communities don’t think about gentrification until it’s too late. The best time to counter gentrification is when it is unimaginable and the real estate is still affordable. So, in addition to working on immediate projects and issues to make their neighborhood more livable, the residents and local businesspeople need to create a plan for keeping it affordable.

A good example is Boston’s Dudley Street neighborhood. The neighbors organized to address the immediate issues of poverty, illegal garbage dumps, and arson for hire. But, even then, when conditions seemed desperate, they were planning for the future. Their goal was to develop a strategy for revitalization without gentrification. That planning effort generated widespread participation and when the document was completed in 1987, a united community was able to convince the mayor to help them implement it. The plan called for the community to be given the power of eminent domain. Normally, eminent domain is a power exercised by government to take control of private land so that it can be redeveloped, typically at the expense of a low-income neighborhood. But the Dudley Street residents were able to use eminent domain to gain control of vacant lots owned by absentee landlords. Then, they secured City funding to redevelop the property through a community land trust, enabling them to provide permanently affordable opportunities for home ownership.

Eminent domain, community land trusts, and land banks are good examples of tools that neighbors can utilize to secure property while it is still affordable. The neighborhood plan might also recommend home sharing, accessory dwelling units, rent control, and property tax reductions or deferrals to keep the existing housing stock affordable and virtual retirement villages enabling elders to stay in their homes. In addition, the plan might urge the city to adopt inclusionary zoning that requires developers to make a percentage of their new housing units affordable.

Ideally, the goal should be more ambitious than keeping low income people in the neighborhood. The plan should also look at ways in which the neighbors can benefit from a more robust local economy by pursuing community-based economic development. The objective is to build a local economy on the strengths of the residents and their neighborhood in a way that contributes to the ongoing welfare of the community. Tools for community-based economic development could include provisions for credit unions, microlending, business incubators, timebanks, and worker or consumer owned cooperatives, and requirements for living wage jobs and the employment of local residents.

Of course, a plan can’t anticipate all the developer proposals and government policies and programs that might impact the neighborhood. That is why John McKnight, co-founder of the Asset Based Community Development Institute, has proposed that plans include a Neighborhood Impact Statement. While this tool could be used to assess all sorts of impacts, it seems particularly well suited to addressing gentrification. Specific and unanticipated developments could be evaluated by the neighbors against a set of broad values and guidelines included in the plan. Such impact statements could also provide a good basis for negotiating community benefit agreements with developers.

Revitalizing neighborhoods without gentrification will always be a challenge in a capitalist economy. Even in Dudley Street, displacement continues to be a challenge. But, unless neighbors organize, plan and take appropriate action at an early stage, gentrification will continue unabated.

Simon Nielsen 9/12/22 Simon Nielsen 9/12/22

Monitoring Violations Of Cultural Rights And Human Rights Of Cultural Figures. Belarus, January-June 2022

Since October 2019, the Belarusian PEN Center has been carrying out a systematic collecting of information on violations of cultural and human rights which impact culture workers. This document includes statistics and an analysis of violations from the first half of 2022. Material has been prepared on the basis of generally available information collected from open sources and direct communications with cultural figures.

By PEN Belarus

I. MAIN RESULTS

From January to June 2022, experts recorded 699 violations of cultural and human rights that impacted culture workers. Among them are:

529 violations impacting 332 culture workers and others whose general cultural rights were violated;
111 violations impacting 96 organizations and institutions;
41 violations related to objects of cultural or historical heritage and the Belarusian language [on a national level];
*In this document we have also included 18 instances which meet the criteria of our monitoring and are also recognized by the Republic of Belarus as extremist.

The general types of rights violations are as follows:

The following are also notable:

19 cultural figures were identified as “extremists,” 5 creative initiatives and media with content that is cultural in nature were recognized as “extremist organizations”, and 10 cultural figures were recognized as terrorists.
37 violations of the right of correspondence in penitentiary institutions were recorded.
33 frisk searches on cultural figures and legal persons in the cultural sphere were conducted.

II. POLITICAL PRISONERS — CULTURE WORKERS

According to the human rights organization Viasna, in Belarus there are 1236 political prisoners as of June 30, 2022.

98 cultural figures are among those recognized as political prisoners.

46 of them are serving time in prison colonies:

architect Arciom Takarčuk (serving 3.5 years); artist Uladzislaŭ Makaviecki (2 years); bard and programmer Anatol Chinievič (sentenced to 3.5 years); concert agency director Ivan Kaniavieha (3 years); artist Alaksandr Nurdzinaŭ (4 years of extra labor); documentary filmmaker and blogger Paviel Spiryn (4.5 years); writer and journalist Kaciaryna Andrejeva (Bachvalava) (2 years); artist and animator Ivan Viarbicki (8 years and one month of extra labor); UX/UI designer Dźmitryj Kubaraŭ (7 years of extra labor); artist, former academy of art student Anastasija Mironcava (2 years); drummer Alaksiej Sančuk (6 years of extra labor); culture manager Mia Mitkievič (3 years); writer and social-political Paviel Sieviaryniec (7 years of extra labor); dancers Ihar Jarmolaŭ and Mikalaj Sasieŭ (each 5 years of extra labor); Patron of the arts Viktar Babaryka (14 years of extra labor); actor Siarhiej Volkaŭ (4 years of hard labor); light artist Danila Hančaroŭ (2 years); musician Paviel Larčyk (3 years); poet and publicist Ksienija Syramalot (2.5 years); former students of the aesthetics department at Belarusian State Pedagogical University Jana Orobiejko and Kasia Buďko (each 2.5 years); former student of the Academy of Arts Maryja Kalenik (2.5 years); former student at the architectural department at Belarusian National Technical University Viktoryja Hrankoŭskaja (2.5 years); designer and architect Raścislaŭ Stefanovič (8 years of extra labor); musician, DJ Artur Amiraŭ (3.5 years extra labor); history teacher and social scientist Andrej Piatroŭski (1.5 years); poet, bard and attorney Maksim Znak (10 years of extra labor); musician and cultural project manager Maryja Kaleśnikava (11 years); musician Jaŭhien Piatroŭ (1 year); promoter of history and human rights advocate Taćciana Lasica (2.5 years); author of prison literature and anarcho-activist Mikalaj Dziadok (5 years); musicians Uladzimir Kalač and Nadzieja Kalač (2 years each); promoter of history and blogger Eduard Palčys (13 years of extra labor); author of prison literature and anarcho-activist Ihar Alinievič (20 years of extra labor); musicians Piotr Marčanka, Julija Marčanka (Junickaja) and Anton Šnip (1.5 years each); artist Alieś Puškin (5 years of enhanced regime); litterateur, musician and author of the journal Наша гісторыя (Our history) Andrej Skurko (2.5 years); author of musical projects and typography director Arciom Fiedasienka (4 years); history reconstructor and activist Kim Samusienka (6.5 years); non-fiction author and journalist Alieh Hruździlovič (1.5 years); author of texts in journals «Наша гісторыя» and «Arche» Andrej Akuška (2.5 years); philology and former Russian and Belarusian literature and language professor Mikalaj Isajenka (1.5 years); musician and activist Siarhiej Sparyš (6 years of enhanced regime); non-fiction internet author and blogger Paviel Vinahradaŭ (5 years).

5 cultural figures are serving time by means of «chemistry»:

Poet and director Ihnat Sidorčyk (sentenced to 3 years); designer Maksim Taćcianok (3 years); researcher at the Center for Belarusian Language and Literature Studies at the Academy of Sciences Alaksandr Halkoŭski (1.5 years); director of a web-design studio Hlieb Kojpiš (2 years); cellist Iĺlia Hančaryk (4 years).

46 cultural figures are in pre-trial detention centers run by the MIA and KGB, awaiting either trial or transfer to places of punishment:

Culture manager and blogger Siarhiej Cichanoŭski (since 29.05.2020); culture manager Eduard Babaryka(since 18.06.2020); documentary filmmaker and journalist Ksienija Luckina (since 22.12.2020); poet, journalist, and media manager Andrej Alaksandraŭ (since 12.01.2021); poet and member of the Union of Polish People Andrej Pačobut (since 25.03.2021); literary figure and translator Aliaksandr Fiaduta (since 12.04.2021); author, editor, and political scientist Valeryja Kaściuhova (since 30.06.2021); literary theorist, history researcher and human rights activist Aleś Bialacki (since 14.07.2021); street artist and IT-specialist Dźmitryj Padrez (since 15.07.2021); philosopher, methodologist, and publicist Uladzimir Mackievič (since 04.08.2021); former teacher of Belarusian language and literature Ema Stsepulionak (since 29.09.2021); musician Siarhiej Daliviela (since 29.09.2021); librarian Julija Čamlaj (since 30.09.2021); bass guitarist Viktar Katoŭski (since 30.09.2021); musician and violin teacher Aksana Kaśpiarovič (since 30.09.2021); photographer and journalist Hienadź Mažejka (since 01.10.2021); librarian Julija Laptanovič(since 13.10.2021); artist and interior designer Kanstancin Prusaŭ (since 28.10.2021); author and Wikipedia editor Paviel Piernikaŭ (since 03.11.2021); founder of Symbal.by and culture project manager Paviel Bielavus (since 15.11.2021); poet, translator, and journalist Andrej Kuźniečyk (since 25.11.2021); fantasy writer and journalist Siarhiej Sacuk (since 08.12.2021); sound operator Vadzim Dzienisienka (since 28.12.2021); literary figure and activist Aliena Hnaŭk (since 11.01.2022); theater actress Viera Ćvikievič (since 27.01.2022); jeweler and history reenactor Michail Labań (since 17.02.2022); ceramicist Anastasija Malašuk (since 25.02.2022); expelled MSU student in the Germanic-Romance language philology department Danuta Pieradnia(since 28.02.2022); sightseer and traveler Ihar Haluška (since 01.03.2022); musician Kryścina Čarankova (since 22.03.2022); director Dźmitryj Pancialiejka (since 28.03.2022); digital artist Viktar Kulinka (since 30.03.2022); admin of cultural-historical Telegram chanel Rezystans Mikita Śliepianok (since 06.04.2022); creative director of an architecture bureau Kanstancin Vysočyn (since 07.04.2022); musician Aliaksandr Kazakievič (since 09.04.2022); publicist, activist and author of prison literature Źmicier Daškievič (since 23.04.2022); craftsperson and administrator of the space «Alpha-business hub» Aliesia Kurejčyk (since 24.05.2022); commercial director of the theater group Silver screen Aliaksandr Dziemidovič (since 25.05.2022); musician Paviel Bialianaŭ (since 02.06.2022); former producer of event agency KRONA Siarhiej Huń (since 03.06.2022); musician Juryj Hryhier (since 03.06.2022); designer and photographer Dzianis Šaramiećjeŭ (since 14.06.2022); photographer Aliaksandr Kudlovič (since 16.06.2022).

Additionally, due to the repetition of several procedural actions literary person and journalist Kaciaryna Andrejeva (Bachvalava), poet and founder of the literary “Honey Prize” Mikola Papieka, ethnographer and activist Uladzimir Hundar has been transferred to the detention center from their places of imprisonment.

Anžalika Borys, a chairperson of the Union of Polish People in Belarus, was transferred from pre-trial detention to house arrest on March 25, 2022.

The sentences of the first half of the year 2022 and all criminal prisoners from cultural figures.

In the first half of 2022 there were 38 court decisions concerning cultural figures:

January 11: sound director Kiryl Saliejeŭ was sentenced to 3 years of ‘chemistry’;
January 14: author of musical projects and typography director Arciom Fiedasienka was sentenced to 4 years in a colony;
January 28: history re-enactor and activist Kim Samusienka was sentenced to 4.5 years in a colony;
February 4: cultural project manager, businessman, and author included in a fairytale collection Aliaksandr Vasilievič was sentenced to 3 years in a colony; scene designer Andrej Ščyhieĺ was sentenced to 2.5 years of ‘chemistry’;
February 7: cellist Iĺlia Hančaryk was sentenced to 4 years of ‘chemistry’; comedian and KVN participant Vasiĺ Kraŭčuk was sentenced to 2 years of ‘home chemistry’;
February 9: artist and interior desiger Kanstancin Prusaŭ was sentenced to 3.5 years in a colony;
March 2: history teacher Artur Ešbajeŭ was sentenced to 3 years of ‘chemistry’;
March 3: non-fiction writer and journalist Alieh Hruździlovič was sentenced to 1.5 years in a colony;
March 15: literary figure, musician and author in the journal «Наша гісторыя» Andrej Skurko was sentenced to 2.5 years in a colony;
March 15: street artist and IT specialist Dźmitryj Padrez was sentenced to 7 years of enhanced regime colony;
March 16: non-fiction author and blogger Paviel Vinahradaŭ was sentenced to 5 years in a colony;
March 23: sound operator Vadzim Dzienisienka was sentenced to 2.5 years in a colony;
March 25: Lyubitelskiy theater actor Kanstancin Šuĺha was sentenced to 3 years of ‘chemistry’;
March 28: director Dźmitryj Pancialiejka was sentenced to 1 year in a colony;
March 30: artist Alieś Puškin was sentenced to 5 years of enhanced regime colony; poet, blogger and producer Uladzislaŭ Savin was sentenced to 8 years of enhanced regime colony;
April 7: author and Wikipedia-editor Paviel Piernikaŭ was sentenced to 2 years in a colony;
April 14: bass guitarist Viktar Katoŭski was sentenced to 3 years in a colony;
April 18: former museum director Juryj Zialievič was sentenced to 1.5 years of ‘home chemistry’;
April 22: musician Vasiĺ Jarmolienka was sentenced to 3 years of ‘chemistry’;
May 5: graphic designer Halina Siemiečka was sentenced to 3 years of ‘home chemistry’;
May 6: theatre actress Viera Ćvikievič was sentenced to 1 year in a colony; former Russian language and literature teacher Anastasija Kucharava was sentenced to 3 years of ‘home chemistry’;
May 20: jeweler and history reenactor Michail Labań was sentenced to 4 years in a colony;
June 1: musical college student Taćciana Barysovič was sentenced to 3 years of ‘chemistry’;
June 7: cultural project manager and sociologist Taćciana Vadalažskaja was sentenced to 2.5 years of ‘chemistry’;
June 8: poet, translator and journalist Andrej Kuźniečyk was sentenced to 6 years in an enhanced regime colony;
June 10: former French teacher Iryna Jaŭmienienka was sentenced to 3 years of ‘chemistry’;
June 15: head editor of newspaper «Novy Čas» Aksana Kolb was sentenced to 2.5 years of ‘chemistry’;
June 17: literary figure and activist Aliena Hnaŭk was sentenced to 3.5 years in a colony; librarian and excursion leader Iryna Kovaĺ was sentenced to 3 years of ‘chemistry’;
June 21: comedian and art director Aliaksandr Talmačoŭ was sentenced to 3 years of ‘home chemistry’;
June 23: philosopher, publicist and methodologist Uladzimir Mackievič was sentenced to 5 years in an enhanced regime colony;
June 24: author, Wikipedia-editor and IT-specialist Mark Biernštejn was sentenced to 3 years of ‘chemistry’;
June 27: Literary figure Aliaksandr Novikaŭ was sentenced to 2 years in a colony;
June 29: musician and violin teacher Aksana Kaśpiarovič was sentenced to 1 year, 2 months in a colony.

III. CONDITIONS OF DETENTION

In January-June 2022, there were 66 cases of violations of the conditions of detention of cultural figures in closed institutions of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the KGB. Since the first arrests in mid-2020, “special” detention rules have been in effect for cultural figures detained or convicted under political articles, and this negative “practice” has continued. Solitary confinement cells, pressures from the administration, unhygienic conditions, overcrowded cells, poor-quality medical care or refusal to provide it, deprivation of visits, telephone calls, and a complete or partial ban on correspondence are just some of the ways in which political prisoners are subjected to pressure.

As of June 1, “due to the stabilization of the epidemiological situation”, Minsk Detention center No. 1, Mahilioŭ Prison No. 4, as well as penal colonies stopped collecting “vitamin packages” for prisoners – an extra package each prisoner could receive with a certain set of fruits and vegetables weighing up to 10 kg. It could previously be received once every 30 days. Inmates in the colony can purchase their own necessities in the prison store for a month for two basic units, which is currently 64 rubles (about 23 euros). As for working conditions in places of detention, human rights activists describe them as “slave-like”: the unequipped workplaces, high production standards, inability to choose the preferred type of work, the lack of an employment contract, and “penny” wages leave a lot to be desired. Thereby, the monthly salary of Maksim Znak in the penal colony in February “Vitsba” amounted to 56 kopeks (0.2 euro).

IV. “EXTREMISTS” AND “TERRORISTS” AMONG CULTURAL FIGURES. EXTREMIST FORMATIONS AND MATERIALS

One relatively new and actively developing practice of suppressing dissent is the application of anti-extremist legislation against opponents of the regime. Human rights organizations (Viasna, Human constanta, BAJ, Sova) have noted a trend of extremely broad interpretations of anti-extremism legislation in Belarus since the start of the protests in August 2020. Currently, law enforcement practice is purposefully shaped in such a way that “extremism” in Belarus means participation in peaceful protests, condemnation of violence by making comments on a social network, making emotional remarks about a representative of the authorities, etc.

The Ministry of Internal Affairs of Belarus maintains 3 lists: “List of citizens of the Republic of Belarus, foreign persons or stateless persons involved in an extremist activity,” “List of organizations, legal entities, individual entrepreneurs involved in an extremist activity” (recognized as such without a court decision) and “Republican List of Extremist Materials” (recognized as such by a court decision). Since 2021 all of them are being filled with new names of individuals and organizations with the intention of creating the atmosphere of fear and silence.

Thus, as of July 1, 2022, the list of persons “involved in extremist activity” consists of 426 names, including at least 19 cultural figures: Maksim Znak, Maryja Kalieśnikava, Paviel Sieviaryniec, Artur Amiraŭ, Mikalaj Dziadok, Eduard Paĺčys, Julija Laptanovič, Alieś Puškin, Arciom Fiedasienka (twice on the list), Andrej Ščyhieĺ, Vasiĺ Kraŭčuk, Maksim Šaŭlinski (pardoned back on September 16, 2021), Siarhiej Sparyš, Źmicier Padrez, Mia Mitkievič, Paviel Śpiryn, Ihar Alinievič, Uladzislaŭ Makaviecki and Paviel Piernikaŭ.

71 subjects compile The “List of organizations, formations, individual entrepreneurs involved in extremist activities.” In the first half of 2022, the list includes the Belarusian Council of Culture, an organization that supports Belarusian culture; the Nasha Niva publication (website and social networks, messengers), which has a “Culture” section on its website; the Homel publication Flagshtok (website and Telegram), which covers culture and preservation of historical heritage, etc.; Telegram channels about Belarusian history and culture Historyja and R E Z Y S T A N S.

The Republican list of “extremist materials” contains more than a thousand items. It includes symbols, articles, videos, Telegram and Viber groups, chat rooms and channels, etc. Of those listed for the first half of 2022 alone, we can distinguish 18 items that are related to the sphere of culture or cultural figures (although there would be many more upon closer inspection). In particular, these are media outlets with cultural content: Radio Racyja, Regiyanalnaia Gazeta, Viciebsk Kurier news, media-polesye.by, nadniemnemgrodno.pl, MOST; the YouTube channels Zhizn-malina and Ms. Anne Nittelnacht (a project for Jewish culture research) 4 books by Belarusian authors: Viktar Liachar, The Military History of Belarus. Heroes. Symbols. Colors,” “Belarus at the Crossroads. Collection of articles”, Aĺhierd Bacharevič “The Dogs of Europe” Źmicier Lukašuk, Maksim Harunoŭ “Belarusian National Idea”, and other materials.

“List of Organizations and Individuals Involved in Terrorist Activities” is maintained the Committee for State Security (KGB). Since the fall of 2020, the list has been actively updated with the names of Belarusian citizens and public figures, including cultural figures. Consequently, in the first half of 2022, the list includes Siarhiej Sparyš, Maksim Znak, Maryja Kalieśnikava, Danuta Pieradnia, Aksana Kaśpiarovič, Aliaksiej Parecki, Ivan Viarbicki, Julija Čamlaj, Paviel Vinahradaŭand Siarhiej Cichanoŭski. Ihar Alinievič, Uladzimir Hundar, Paviel Latuška, Anton Matoĺka and Vadzim Hilievič were included until 2022. This adds up to at least 15 people related to the cultural sphere.

V. PERSECUTION FOR AN ANTI-WAR STANCE

On February 24, 2022, the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine. Belarusian authorities supported the actions of the Russian Federation by providing its territory for the deployment of military equipment and contingent. Citizens of Belarus, in turn, have opposed the war and displayed an anti-war stance since the first days of the invasion of Ukraine. Persecution for anti-war statements was most acute in the first months after the outbreak of the war, but detentions are still occurring today. According to the Human Rights Center “Viasna”, on February 27-28, the main day of the referendum on constitutional amendments in Belarus, and the following day, over 1,000 people were detained for saying “no to war” in various cities of the country. Among them were people from the cultural sphere. During the first half of 2022, Belarusian cultural figures who spoke out against the Russian armed invasion were tried for participation in anti-war actions, use of official Ukrainian symbols (having anything with yellow and blue colors), inscriptions in support of Ukraine, materials about the war, anti-war letters sent to state authorities, publications and statements in social networks, etc. One of the most high-profile cases was the 6.5-year imprisonment of Danuta Pieradnia, a student of Romance and Germanic Philology at Kuleshov Moscow State University [expelled], who reposted an anti-war text critical of the actions of Putin and Lukašenka and called to speak out against the war in Ukraine. Danuta Pieradnia is one of the cultural people who were put on the list of “persons involved in terrorist activities.”

VI. PERSECUTION OF THOSE WHO HAVE GONE ABROAD

The tendency to persecute cultural figures disloyal to the authorities, who were forced to leave Belarus but continue to publicly express their opinion about the situation in the country, is gaining momentum. Criminal cases are initiated against them, and their relatives are put under pressure. On May 12, 2022, actions were taken to introduce amendments to the Criminal Code of the Republic of Belarus, which would make it possible to prosecute citizens who are outside the Republic of Belarus.

To this day, at least 7 criminal cases have already been initiated against the former director of the Kupala Theater, Paviel Latuška. The last one was initiated in February of this year, and it concerns Latuška’s financial activities as Minister of Culture of Belarus in 2012. The pressure was also exerted on him through his daughter, who, according to employees of the Department of Financial Investigations, was also the subject of a criminal investigation and his apartment has been seized as well. In February the Ministry of Internal Affairs put the creators of the satirical duet “Red Green” – songwriter and blogger Andrej Pavuk, and opera singer Marharyta Liaŭčuk on the wanted list, against whom a criminal case had opened earlier for “desecration of the state flag” – based on one of the duet’s videos. The KGB wanted comedian Slava Kamisarenka, who had been living in Russia for a long time, for the “Defamation against the President of the Republic of Belarus”. Representatives of law enforcement agencies were looking for him in Moscow, calling and texting him, earlier they had shown interest in the parents of the artist who were in Belarus. Ihar Kaźmierčak, journalist and owner of the store of national symbols Cudoŭnaja krama at one point has found out that he “had been hiding from the investigation” and was put on the wanted list as well. An unknown person texted Kanstancin Šytaĺ on Telegram and invited him to return to Belarus and come to the regional KGB. It is known for a fact that law enforcement officers searched the domicile, former place of residence or investigated of parents of Andrej Pavuk, Marharyta Liaŭčuk, the owner of the store of national symbols “Admetnasc”, historian Voĺha Vieramiejenka, and documentary filmmaker Maryja Bulavinskaja; furthermore, they ransacked the apartment of mother of civil activist and photographer Anton Motolko. Not only that, Marharyta Liaŭčuk’s parents were detained and tried “for disobedience to the police”, fined 2,240 rubles (about 830 euro) each, and urged to record a video message to their daughter so that she would “stop engaging in politics.”

VII. LIQUIDATION OF NON-COMMERCIAL ORGANIZATIONS IN THE CULTURAL SPHERE

In the monitoring of the liquidation of Belarusian non-profit organizations [NPOs] conducted by Lawtrend together with the OEEC, as of early July 2022, the list contains more than 500 organizations subjected to forced liquidation since 2021. Of these, since the beginning of 2022, more than 170 NPOs in Belarus have been liquidated, most of which are Minsk-based organizations. At least 32 organizations from this list were directly related to the activities in the sphere of culture. The oldest NPOs [founded in the mid-1990s], such as Polish Cultural Society in Lidčyna, Club of Polish Folk Traditions, and Public Association of Former Young Prisoners of Nazi Concentration Camps in Hrodna region; Jewish Cultural Center of Polack and Viciebsk Musical Society in Viciebsk region; Belarusian Association of Architectural Students, Jewish Educational Initiative, and Polish Scientific Society in Minsk region.

As a result of the unfavorable socio-political situation in the country or pressure from the authorities, the list of NPOs that have decided to spontaneously dissolve is expanding. As of early July, Lawtrend monitored 336 organizations. 99 of them filed petitions for self-dissolution during the first half of 2022. 40% of the self-dissolved NPOs (40 organizations) were from the Brest region. Most of the organizations were focused on sports and at least 20 – on culture. For instance, the self-liquidation list includes the charity foundation Fortification of Brest, which dealt with the topic of preservation of historical and cultural heritage of the city; Brest cultural and historical public association named after Tadevush Kastsiushka, as well as the Ukrainian Scientific-Pedagogical Union Bereginya, whose leader Viktar Misijuk was detained on March 8 by law enforcement for laying flowers to the monument to Taras Shevchenko on the birthsday of the poet, and in April was a subject to searches.

Furthermore, on January 22, 2022, a new law came into force, according to which there is a responsibility for organizing a public activity or participation in the activity under a patronage of a public association that had been forcefully liquidated. Now anyone involved in such events can be fined, arrested for up to three months, or even imprisoned for up to two years.

VIII. CULTURAL LIFE IN BELARUS: WASHING OUT THE SPHERE AND THE „PURIFYING CULTURAL VISITS”

LITERATURE

As early as the first quarter of 2021 a tendency of pressurization and reprisals against the independent book sector of Belarus began to form: Publishers and their founders, book distributors, and authors. Such forms of pressure as seizure of books during customs clearance, suspension of bank accounts, searches and property confiscation, interrogations, publication of discrediting and defamatory stories and articles in the state media, removal of books of certain authors and publishers from the shelves of libraries and state bookstores, etc. were exerted on them. Repressions against “the Belarusian book” continue for the second year and intensify in the current timeframe.

At the end of March, “due to an urgent need,” the landlord demanded that the publishing house Januškievič vacate the office within three days – and immediately began looking for a new tenant: the owner published an announcement on a rental website that the office space is available.

The Ministry of Information suspended for three months the activity of four independent publishing houses that had been printing books written in Belarusian and by Belarusian authors: Medisont and Goliaths (since April 15), Limarius and Knigosbor (since May 16) for trumped-up reasons.

From April 18 to May 17, 2022, four books by Belarusian authors were recognized as extremist material (see Section IV). Distribution of these books is now criminally punishable.

On May 16, at the opening of a new bookstore named Knihaŭka (owner – publishing house Januškievič) representatives of the state media came and “have criticized” the range of available books, their content, authors, publishers and employees of the bookstore. The same day the store was searched, 200 books were confiscated, 15 of which were sent for ‘an examination’ to determine whether they had signs of extremism, whereas Andrej Januškievič, the founder of the publishing house, and the literature reviewer Nasta Karnackaja, an employee of the store, were arrested and spent 28 and 23 days in jail respectively, on trumped-up administrative charges. [Symbolically, a month later, on June 15, a pro-governmental store called Book Club of Writers was ceremoniously opened.]

The practice of discrediting writers disloyal to the authorities (as well as historians, artists, filmmakers, public organizations, etc.) has “proven itself” at the state level and is a full-scale “campaign” in the state media. Over time, state propagandists “went into the field” (as in the case of the Knihaŭka store, for example, or the Art-Minsk painting exhibition): in the course of their “purifying cultural visits” they completely distort the truth and slander certain [disloyal to the regime] authors and their works, which is then followed by administrative penalties and a ban on the distribution of the literature. At some point the propagandists were joined by pro-government bloggers-activists who would roam around the city and visit numerous exhibitions and bookstores in search of ideologically “harmful” materials.

For example, after an appeal by an activist, the OZ Books stores located in Trinity and Nioman shopping centers had to move “Summer in a Pioneer Tie” and other books touching on the LGBT topics to the storage rooms and the managements of the bookstore and the Trinity shopping center were invited for a “preventive conversation of a proactive nature”. Later, in Hrodna the Green store had to take off sale the following books: “Myths about Belarus” by Vadzim Dzieružynski and “Welcome to Belarus” by Alieś Hutoŭskahi. They were released by the same publishing house as the books written by Viktar Liachar of which one is considered extremist.

VISUAL ARTS

Pro-government activists Aliena Sidarovič in Minsk and Voĺha Bondarava in Hrodna control both the cultural landscape of the book market and art exhibitions. The letters they send to the departments of culture of the Minsk and Hrodna City Executive Committees result in taking down works of both recognized and young authors.

After the claim about the alleged distribution of pornography at the exhibition “Troubling Suitcase” (“Тревожный чемоданчик”) held from 10.12.2021 to 10.02.2022 in the gallery of the Union of Designers, the culturological examination of the art-object “Till death do us part” (“Пока смерть не разлучит нас”) by the artist Hanna Silivončyk was appointed. As a result, proceedings began not only against the exhibition itself, but also against the public association as a whole.

In March the personal exhibitions of Hryhoriy Ivanau “The Time of Screens” (“Час экранаў”) and Siarhei Hrynevich “Demography” (“Дэмаграфія”) in Palace of Arts in Minsk were closed before the schedule.

On April 29, the sculpture exhibition “SCULPTURE” was held for 4 hours in the gallery “400 squares” in Hrodna. The Hrodnian ideologists proposed to remove some works as a condition for the further functioning of the exhibition, to which the project curator Ivan Arcimovič and gallery owners did not agree, considering it wrong to exclude the works of individual authors “for absolutely far-fetched reasons”. The Belarusian Union of Artists, the members of which are the participants of the group exhibition, tried to defend the project and was ready to create an expert commission of famous art historians and sculptors, which was not supported by the administration of Hrodna. Thus, the exhibition with the works of 17 sculptors was closed immediately after the opening.

On May 12, the annual “Art-Minsk” exhibition opened at the Palace of Arts, announcing an exhibition of 550 works by 240 contemporary Belarusian authors. However, dozens of artists (according to unconfirmed information, this amounts to “over 40”) could not take part in it, and some had to withdraw their original works: a so-called “black list” was issued “from above,” while the content and quality of the works on display did not play any role at all. The PEN monitoring contains information about 19 authors who were censored in one way or another because of their “unreliability”.

On June 28, Irina Malukalova was one of the three participants involved in the art project that had taken place in Factory space in Minsk which she later described as “the fastest exhibition of my life.” The exhibit about criticism of creative work “This is a diagnosis” (“Это диагноз”) had lasted for several hours and then was promptly taken down. The reasons for such a rapid removal remain unknown.

ART-SQUARES AND FESTIVALS

After the events of 2020, the cultural sphere is largely paralyzed: many musicians, theater artists, promoters, DJs and other people of creative professions have left the country (unfortunately, there are no real statistics on the number of people who have emigrated). Many of interdisciplinary cultural venues have closed. During the first half of 2022 the decision about discontinuation of work has been announced by the cultural center Korpus (June) and Lo-Fi Social Club (March).

It is known that in the first six months of 2022 Minsk cultural center Korpus (June) and Lo-Fi Social Club (March) ceased their work and event space Miesca was forced to close (April). Since mid-May activities of Minsk music club Bruges have been suspended, the doors of which were sealed after one of the complex inspections of the building’s owner. The playbill of the theater The Territory of Musical, which at the beginning of the year twice failed to show the performance “Figaro” for reasons beyond the control of the theater, is not updated. In May, after the notorious incident with the closure of the exhibition of modern sculpture, the shopping center Trinity did not prolong the lease agreement.

This year there are significantly fewer traditional summer festivals and cultural events announced, which had been organized by private initiatives. Inter alia, Ukrainian and foreign artists refuse to tour in Belarus because of the war in Ukraine. Also, many Belarusian musicians have left their country or have no chance of getting a touring certificate for a concert. “Those things that worked like clockwork in 2019 (permits were issued, concerts were held, everything was moving), after 2020 by the confluence of all circumstances it turned out to be completely different. Now there are no criteria and notions of what can and what cannot be done.”

IX. GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS IN THE CULTURE SPHERE: DEBELARUSIZATION AND RUSSIFICATION

The problem of the consistent displacement of everything that is nationally oriented in culture, education, everyday life, and other spheres of Belarus is perennial and complex. It would not be possible to cover the topic in this research, however, it is of paramount importance to identify and note what is happening in the domestic policy of Belarus as a practice of debelarusization and russification – using examples of the first half of 2022.

DEBELARUSIZATION

In detention facilities, Belarusian-speaking detainees and prisoners are ordered to “speak in a normal language” – Russian. According to historian and publicist Alieś Biely, “people with ‘non-Russian’ cultural affinities are being systematically forced out of all educational and cultural institutions”. An increasing number of inscriptions with names of streets and places of interest in Belarusian cities are being changed from Belarusian to Russian. Belarusian authors disloyal to the authorities are discredited by pro-government propagandists and activists.

After some time, it became apparent that in November 2021 the publishing house “Belarusian Encyclopedia of Piatruś Broŭka”, founded in January 1967, ceased to exist. The formal reason is incorporation into the publishing house “Belarus”. In fact, it is liquidation of a specialized publishing house. The company website notes that this publishing house “specialized in the production of universal, regional and subject encyclopedias, all sorts of reference books and dictionaries, educational, children, and popular scientific literature. Furthermore, elite publications, unique photobooks, and anniversary editions were also issued there. Journalist and literary critic Siarhiej Dubaviec described the incident as an act of “denationalization” and the publishing house BelEN as “the intellectual center of the Belarusian identity” and “a powerful state institute”, which had been dying for a long time, and now it finally has happened.

Uladzimir Savickai, ex-managing director of the Belarusian Theatre for Young Audience had been dismissed in January of this year and replaced by actress Viera Paliakova, who is also wife of the minister of foreign affairs of Belarus. Paliakova announced that the theater would give up staging exclusively in Belarusian – which used to distinguish the playhouse as one of the few professional theaters with only Belarusian-language performances [only 6 theaters in Belarus out of a total of 29]. In June, the premiere of the play based on Vasiĺ Bykaŭ’s story “The Alpine Ballad”, originally written in Belarusian, took place. Thus, there is one less Belarusian-language theater in the country.

On June 27, by Lukašenka’s order, the former chairman of the pro-governmental Union of Writers of Belarus (2005-2022) Mikalaj Čarhiniec was awarded the title of People’s Writer of Belarus. After 27 years [the last time it was awarded was in 1995] and for the first time in its history, the award was given to a writer who had not written a single work in the Belarusian language, an author of detective stories and militarized literature; a person under whom the so-called “black lists” of writers appeared.

There are only four schools in Belarus teaching in the language of national minorities. The transfer of two Polish (Hrodna and Vaŭkavysk) and two Lithuanian (Pieliask and Rymdziunsk) schools to Russian language starting next school year is further pressure on Polish and Lithuanian minorities and continuation of the russification. Such decision of the Belarusian authorities is exclusively discriminatory against the rights of national minorities.

THE PROMOTION OF A “RUSSIAN WORLD” IDEOLOGY

On February 19, a gala concert dedicated to “national unity” was held in Minsk. On Sunday, June 11, there was another concert in Minsk, but this time in celebration of Russia Day [a state holiday celebrated in Russia on June 12 since 1992], which was sponsored by Russian state corporations. Events dedicated to this date were also held in other cities. At the Night of Museums in the National History Museum the program included the performance of Cossack songs and at the meetings with a Russian actor Minister of Culture Anatoĺ Markievič discusses the idea of cooperation between “two brotherly nations” in the sphere of culture. Russian flags are increasingly seen on the streets of Belarusian cities, at official institutions of the country and during public holidays. For instance, they were hoisted in flagpoles along a part of Victors Avenue in Minsk just before the Day of Unity of the nations of Belarus and Russia (in previous years they were not put up there), raised on the station building in Orša, were marked in Homiel and a number of other places. In Hrodna, the monument to Chapayev [a Russian historical character], dismantled in April 2019, “returned”; now it will be next to a military unit

The “Russian House” representative office of “Rossotrudnichestvo” actively operates in the territory of Belarus. The organization supports programs for kindergartens, schools and universities, actively collaborates (as can be seen from announcements of events in social networks) with schoolchildren, applicants and students, often acts as a partner of educational, cultural and entertainment events, holds exhibitions, cinema clubs, master classes, tournaments and conferences.

For example, the “Russian House” participated in the opening of an art exhibition marking the 75th anniversary of the Hliebaŭ Art College in Minsk. On June 2, the Center for Russian Language, History and Culture has opened in Polack with assistance of the “Russian House”. The goal of the center is to popularize Russian language, culture and traditions. On the page of the representation office it is mentioned that such centers already operate at the Belarusian State Univeristy (Minsk), the Belarusian-Russian Univeristy (Mahilioŭ) and other Belarusian higher educational establishments. One of the implemented programs – “Hello, Russia! – “cultural and educational trips for young compatriots to historical places of the Russian Federation,” according to the website.

On June 23, a joint Russian-Belarusian group was created to investigate criminal cases of genocide – the Prosecutor-General of Belarus Andrej Švied and Chairman of the Russian Investigative Committee Aliaksandr Bastrykin signed a resolution to collectively investigate “the circumstances surrounding the atrocities of the fascists.” At an Independence Day event in Belarus, Lukašenka officially expressed support for Russia in the context of military action against Ukraine, and Slavianski Bazar, the main state music festival to be held in July, invited artists who either spoke out in favor of the war or who did not speak out publicly against it.

X. GOVERNMENTAL AND POLITICAL TRENDS IN THE CULTURAL SPHERE

Suppression of all forms of dissent.
The severely expanded interpretation of extremism as a method of suppressing the freedoms of speech, assembly, and association. The purposeful formation of law enforcement practices with unclear criteria and the criminalization of public and civic engagement.. The practice is formed “behind closed doors” – in closed court hearings, which does not give the public any clear understanding of what actions and under what circumstances are considered crimes. This creates grounds for investigators, prosecutions, and courts to expand the interpretation of the law in the future.
Monopolization of cultural activities by the government. Thus, according to the decree of June 22, 2022, a register of the organizers of cultural and entertainment events is being formed in Belarus. The Ministry of Culture or a legal entity authorized by it will consider the documents for inclusion in the database and maintain the register. Organizers, eligible for inclusion, but not included in this list, will not be able to carry out cultural and entertainment events. In practice, this means that only state or regime-loyal organizers will be allowed to hold events. The decree came into force on August 1, 2022.
Debelarusization of Belarus through the means of Russification and promotion of the concept of the “Russian world”.
The Sovietization and militarization of routine.
The reduction of “cultural diversity” to the “cooperation of two fraternal nations” [Belarusians and Russians] and the suppression of the culture of Polish and Lithuanian national minorities.
The systematic implementation of the program within the framework of the Year of Historical Memory (2022), the purpose of which is to “develop the objective perception of the historical past of the Belarusian society…” One of the egregious events that took place last month – the destruction of the graves of The Home Army soldiers in Hrodna region – is a continuation of the erasure of historical memory about the underground military organization from The Second World War that opposed the German occupation. The question of historical memory and what is happening in this area requires additional attention and investigation.
Making foreign policy decisions that contribute to the cancel culture phenomenon – cases of boycotts of Belarusian cultural products and their authors.

You can support the work of PEN Belarus at their Patreon site.

Simon Nielsen 9/7/22 Simon Nielsen 9/7/22

Five Ways To Address Objections About Shopping Local

Deb Brown and SaveYour.Town highlight five opportunities for local residents and businesses to help create change and share a new mindset on how to think about community.

By Deb Brown and SaveYour.Town

I’ve heard business owners say things like “in this economic climate, it’s hard to get new customers” and “no one has any money to spend, we can’t afford to use new ways to advertise”.

I’ve heard customers say “they never do anything different” and “why should I shop local? I can get a better deal at the big box store?”

These comments are opportunities for local residents and businesses to help create change and share a new mindset on how we think about our community.

Here’s 5 things to consider:

1. Stop saying “in this economic climate” – people are still shopping, traveling, and talking about businesses/places they visit. Start looking at what people want. Where we live, there are more day travelers coming from around the state. What can you provide for them?

2. Don’t spend other people’s money. In other words – don’t prejudge people. You really don’t know what their priorities are and how they want to spend their money. People do have money to spend.

3. New ways to advertise don’t always cost money. They do cost time. Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, blogging can all be done for no cost or almost no cost. You do need to spend time on it to be effective. You wouldn’t just put up a billboard and expect people to flock to your store either. People need to see something 7 times before it sinks in!

4. If you’re not doing anything different, you’re become stale. Rearrange your store, change the windows, use new ads in the paper and on the radio – give people a reason to come visit you.

5. The big box store helps put small, local businesses out of business. Most of your dollars spent at big box stores don’t make their way back to your county/town. 57 cents out of every dollar leaves your community. 66 cents of every dollar spent in your local small businesses, stays local. Local businesses also know you, give much better customer service as a rule, hire people from your neighborhood, pay local taxes, and live where you live.

Simon Nielsen 9/7/22 Simon Nielsen 9/7/22

How Local Leaders And Officials Can Become Venture Capitalists Of New Ideas

“How can you protect your community from failure while being open to new ideas?” Becky McCray and SaveYour.Town answer an essential question.

By Becky McCray and SaveYour.Town

We’re living through a shift in power, to one that is more open to participation by people outside of our formal organization.

For local leaders and officials, it’s hard to imagine how this will work, being more open to ideas from outside the leadership. How you can protect your community from failure while being open to new ideas?

We have a simple way of thinking that can help. Think of yourself as the Venture Capitalists of New Ideas.

What do Venture Capitalists do? A really simple view of it is they find out about as many new ideas as they can, but they don’t invest in them all. They’re more likely to encourage entrepreneurs and help them build their networks than to invest money in their businesses. They only invest in business ideas that are working well in early tests.

You can adapt that mindset:

Find out everything that’s going on, and not just entrepreneurial ideas but all kinds of things people are doing for your community. Publicly ask people what new ideas they’re working on.

Encourage all of them. Help them Build Connections from your extensive network of resources.

And then invest your limited resources only in the ideas that are doing well in testing.

This is freeing for officials. You can refocus how you listen to people.

You become resources for people with ideas, instead of just listening and not being able to act upon it.

Local elected and appointed leaders can learn more practical steps in our video: Idea Friendly Officials and Boards. Learn the Idea Friendly secrets to:

Look at a new way to see your role as an official, one that puts you in the center of the network
Discover your superpower as an official and put your connections to work for you
Turn public gripe sessions into crowdsourcing events that mobilize people into action
Learn the one question that turns even bad ideas into something positive

Simon Nielsen 9/6/22 Simon Nielsen 9/6/22

Women In The City

“And for me to have a comfortable journey across my city I need safe zones and management in public transport services, and I need space to walk alone or with my kids, especially the one who is in the pram.” Peacemakers Pakistani challenge us to look at our cities and ask if they’re comfortable for all citizens. Do we really succeed in creating safe and inclusive places for everybody?

By Peacemakers Pakistani

“The vision ‘women in the city’ is beautiful. It depicts culture, harmony, open mindedness and freedom; when they are fearless and happy”, says Umaima Naeem.

Previously when I used to think about this topic, I used to research and find ways for making cities safer for women, but now for the first time, I want to experience the city from the perspective of providing comfort to the women. This means that I explore and re-imagine the city for myself as a woman for the sake of being comfortable in my city, rather than being safe.

Because this term ‘safety’ is no longer serving me to feel related to my city, rather it arises a feeling of insecurity and escape in the back of my mind. It brings barriers, cameras (cameras are only useful after something had happened, anyway), controlled movement, and all those things that force me to stay alert and formal rather than being me. It tells me that I can’t explore my city unless I am sure that I am safe, which is not the only way to do it. There is a possibility that I feel comfortable than I can go out and explore as well and relate to my city, its spaces and its people, hopefully.

This also tells me that in order to feel comfortable I have certain rights to be fulfilled, and I must know that what they are. Women are different from men and yes the gender thing counts and we must embrace that rather than denying that. We need more than what men need from their places and so let’s reclaim the places for us! Let’s learn today about what we as a girl/women rightfully need as I explore the city from the lens and need of a woman.

As I step out of my home, I prefer travelling through public transport or walk on foot more than men. Men use cars more. And that means I contribute to the sustainable travelling, more points on my side. But the problem is that the city is being designed for cars rather than what I prefer to use. And for that reason in order to travel comfortably I have to resort to private cars and uber services which clearly shifts the sustainable mode of travelling by me, not my choice though!

And for me to have a comfortable journey across my city I need safe zones and management in public transport services and I need space to walk alone or with my kids especially the one who is in the pram. I need space, I need footpath. I also need trees for shelter. And also, I need benches and a nice place to sit and relax and to wait. A sitting element that is comfortable as it is placed near trees, lights and shade and is visible during day and night time. It is not something that I need only, it is a basic necessity for active mobility, for people who are sick, disable, caretakers, child caretakers etc. We all need a comfortable place to sit as we travel across the city at whatever time.

Also, as a woman, I tend to use toilets more often than men for sake of myself or my children. Also if we analyze, women bathroom (toilet seat/wc) should be at least three times the size of men bathroom. Also, there should be a safe space for my children to wait for me especially the ones in the pram, if I ever travel alone with my kids. As an architect I can imagine the spatial requirements of a facility. And I must ask for more space and facility than men if I want more girls/women to use city spaces.

Also when it comes to designing spaces we tend to segregate spaces for boys and girls in a manner that is restricted to certain play or activity. It is mostly visible in playgrounds. The accessibility and movement of girls shouldn’t be hindered and restricted rather than facilitated in a fair manner. There must be the opportunity to have different types of play and activities in one place at same time.

And yes, comfort isn’t just a matter of providing amenities but also a psychological comfort is required to step into a place. That can happen if a girl/woman is sure that if any mishap happen, she can report to management and an action will be taken. Say no to sleaze! Campaign awareness and protection units must be placed and organized in public spaces. It’s time to provide girls/women the rights they have and make this city a place of pride for all.

All of this is possible if we start partnerships with architects, urban planners, transit authorities, landscape architects and planning agencies and educate the design professions about ways to build projects from the outset that consider women’s safety and comfort as a key element of their design program; this could set the stage for and induce the psycho-social, behavioral, and cultural changes that need to take place before women are truly able to enjoy public spaces and engage fully in the civic life of their cities. And it is being done by Global Placemaking Network in different countries.

These rights and demands of women in the city are from the findings in Barcelona, Spain as they lead their project called ‘Superblocks’ meant to reclaim the streets for pedestrians as cars occupy more space than any other road user, cyclists or just hangouts. Do check out how they are practicing and creating spaces that are built for women and other vulnerable citizens as well.

Simon Nielsen 8/31/22 Simon Nielsen 8/31/22

For My Daughter And Another & For One Song And A Hundred Songs

“To sing a song/The guard with an electric baton in his hand/Ordered me to sing 100 songs.” Liao Yiwu, a prominent poet, reportage writer and folk musician, was arrested for publishing his long poem Massacre and other works to commemorate the Beijing Massacre of 1989, and later sentenced to four years imprisonment on counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement.

“To sing a song/The guard with an electric baton in his hand/Ordered me to sing 100 songs.” Liao Yiwu, a prominent poet, reportage writer and folk musician, was arrested for publishing his long poem Massacre and other works to commemorate the Beijing Massacre of 1989, and later sentenced to four years imprisonment on counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement.

By Liao Yiwu with Independent Chinese PEN Center

For My Daughter and Another

Let me sit into a corner

In a prayer room in my fantasy

And with hands cuffed behind my back

Make the sign of the cross for you

Miaomiao, my daughter

A little thing constantly poking your head out

I eat you from the dust every day

The cement dormer splits the moon piece by piece

I have seen you

From the misty mountains or saddle

Falling

The rider falling down like a sharp axe

Hacks more, instant pain into me

The broken arms

My two boats bleeding like fountains

Where are they drifting tonight

Where are boats there is water

Water! Ah, water

Water cannot be held

Nor locked with shackles

Water cannot be beaten with the fists, boots, ropes

And sticks to get on the ground

Water

A substance of crafty nature

A statement unable to break through repeated attacks

A criminal unable to sentence

Ah, water

A semi-translucent dance

A freely relaxed body overflowing

A king’s knife

As a woman flooding over a man

Makes human rust

Coming to naught

Naught

Simmers my daughter’s amniotic fluid

Flowing from the internal organ of the universe

And from the bell of origin in swinging sheets

The humming iron gate is brimming with tears congealing on it

Rusty

Like the face of the grandfather buried long ago

When the cage is to submerge into the riverbed

Will a string of children

Carry the glistening grass on their heads and get up, or not?

My daughter

In the river mud you are chewing

Is there any scream from your father?

(1 July 1991)

For One Song and a Hundred Songs

To sing a song

I want to wear out my ears

To sing a song

The guard with an electric baton in his hand

Ordered me to sing 100 songs

Get out of the cell

The shadow

An unreliable lover

Leaped like a rabbit onto a large wall

My shaved head is the tumour growing at the foot of the wall

The rain is tears from the whole kingdom of Heaven

Drained from my eyes to blind me

My tongue was shaking a white flag

Tinnitus

I heard the screams of the spittle

Like a fish or bird put into a pan with boiling oil

The sun is sowing the garlic to the dark blue

Erupting in air the choking breath

Still want to sing

Forgive me

Let me be your earwax

To be taken out by you

Spread on your palm for your interest

I swore to make you comfortable

The pleasure of shivering

Was second only to ejaculation

In the golden blizzard

The earwax brayed

─ I would like to take off my pants to show you

I would like to be naked

To show Van Gogh huddled in the soul

The red-haired ghost guarding Hell’s door

Was bleeding from his ear cavity

I would like to become a carious tooth

To fuck your nerves to be swollen from within

I would sit and stare at your left cheek

To slowly bulge as the pregnant woman's belly

The dentist would use the midwife’s forceps

To pull me

From your noble mouth

At that time I would sing for you

And never stop singing for you

─ This world is

A wonderful spittoon

This world is

A bottomless spittoon

(1 December 1990)

Simon Nielsen 8/29/22 Simon Nielsen 8/29/22

You Can’t Build Community Without Doing The Bump

“My favorite bumping places are the ones that are designed and built by the neighbors. These places are most likely to reflect what is special about the residents and their neighborhood, and they are designed to work for the people who live there. Through creating the place, neighbors feel a sense of ownership. They are more likely to use, maintain and program it.” Community activator, Jim Diers, identifies the threats to public spaces and some of the creative ways people are finding to create inclusive gathering places in neighborhoods, suburbs, and rural areas.

By Jim Diers, community activator

Community is built on relationships and people develop relationships through frequent contact with others. So, if you want to build community, you need places to bump into other people. The closer those places are to where you live, the more likely you are to bump into the same people over and over again.

Most neighborhoods have an abundance of bumping places. There are public places such as community centers, libraries, schools, parks, athletic facilities, sidewalks and trails. Local business districts with their pubs, coffee shops, grocery stores and other bumping places can be equally effective. There are also collectively owned gathering spaces such as clubhouses and places of worship.

Unfortunately, neighborhoods have been losing their traditional bumping places. Benches have been removed and access to parks and other public spaces has been restricted out of a concern that the “wrong people” have been using them. Online shopping, big box retail and gigantic malls have led to a decline in many neighborhood business districts. Regional so-called community centers are replacing those that were neighborhood-based. The large scale of many new recreation and retail facilities leaves people lost in the crowd and anonymous. An increasingly mobile population often shops, works, recreates, worships, and attends school outside of the neighborhood where they live. People have many different communities, and in a sense, they have no community at all. They seldom bump into the same people in more than one place.

Some neighborhoods were never designed for bumping into other people. Bedroom communities are often more friendly to cars than pedestrians. There are no places to shop, eat or drink within walking distance even if there are the rare sidewalks. Residents drive in and out of a garage adjoining their house and have little opportunity to bump into neighbors. Likewise, there is a dearth of bumping places in rural areas, and long distances between houses make it difficult to connect.

People are social creatures, however, so there has been a growing interest in placemaking. Rather than trying to prevent people from using public spaces, the new thinking is that safety is better achieved by attracting more people from all walks of life. Business districts are being revitalized by creating a distinctive experience that malls can’t replicate – small scale gathering places, shops and restaurants with a local flavor, personalized service, and community-based events such as art walks, heritage days and parades. The local food movement is bringing us community gardens, community kitchens, farmers markets and other prime bumping places. At the block level, neighbors are reclaiming their streets by painting murals in the intersections, installing street furniture, and periodically closing the street for parties and play. Apartment buildings and condos sometimes have rooms for common use, but when they don’t, a sofa or a table with a teapot might be placed in the lobby or next to the elevator to spark interaction. Some people are turning their homes into bumping places by installing a little free library, moving their barbeque to the front lawn, staging concerts on their front porch, or hosting welcome dinners for new neighbors.

Creating bumping places in suburban and rural areas can be more challenging, but they also have homes and yards that could be used for gatherings of neighbors. Practically everywhere has a closed or underutilized school, church, grange hall, or other facility that could serve as a venue for community dinners, educational programs, concerts, dances, movies, swap meets, cider making, game nights, holiday parties and all sorts of other events that would attract the neighbors. Portable bumping spaces are another option; some communities operate a wood-fired pizza oven, tea station or espresso cart that can be driven or pedaled to a prominent intersection, popular trail, cul de sac, or other location where people are likely to congregate around it.

Sometimes, though, the only option is to start with virtual bumping. In new suburbs where the housing is being developed more quickly than the public infrastructure, communities have effectively used a Facebook page as their initial bumping place. Contact on the internet can lead to relationships in real life. I’ve heard many stories of Facebook friends helping one another in times of need even though they had not previously met one another physically.

If you want to develop an inclusive community, you need to have inclusive bumping spaces. While neighbors typically have all kinds of differences in terms of age, income, culture, religion, politics, interests, etc. they tend to gather with people who are like themselves. To be inclusive, a place should be accessible to those with differing abilities and incomes. To the extent that the place includes signage and art, it should reflect the full range of languages and cultures in the neighborhood.

A key reason why places aren’t sufficiently inclusive is because so many are single purpose. They only attract gardeners, basketball players, seniors or whomever the space was specifically designed for. An inclusive place will be multi-purpose. Project for Public Spaces, the premier placemaking organization, calls this the Power of 10. They assert that every place should accommodate at least ten different kinds of activities. Not only will this make the place more inviting to a wide range of users, but it will make it more likely that the place will be used more extensively, at all times of the day and during all seasons of the year making it safer for everyone.

Having an inclusive space isn’t sufficient, however. We’ve all experienced elevators, bus stops and other public places that are crowded with people doing their best not to make eye contact with anyone else. Sometimes an intervention is needed to get people off of their smartphones and interacting with one another.

Public libraries are a good example. They attract neighbors from all walks of life, but the diverse readers seldom interact except for families during Saturday morning story hours. Increasingly, though, libraries are trying to serve as the neighborhood’s living room. Many libraries have incorporated coffee shops or other spaces where people aren’t shushed. Some have living book programs through which a person can spend time getting to know someone who is different than themself. After hours, libraries have hosted sleepovers, concerts and even miniature golf where people putt their way through the stacks of the Dewey decimal system.

My favorite bumping places are the ones that are designed and built by the neighbors. These places are most likely to reflect what is special about the residents and their neighborhood, and they are designed to work for the people who live there. Through creating the place, neighbors feel a sense of ownership. They are more likely to use, maintain and program it.

Of course, it is critical that the design/build process is inclusive as well. All of the potential users, whether they are young or old, business or homeless people, have a valuable perspective to bring to the design process and everyone has contributions they can make to creating a place that makes it possible to do the bump together.

Simon Nielsen 8/14/22 Simon Nielsen 8/14/22

How Girls Disappear From The Public Space

“I believe that when girls/women start disappearing or hiding in the city, children disappear as well. And that’s how a downfall to community life or city vibrancy begins.” Peacemakers Pakistani share a crucial story of the use of public space.

By Peacemakers Pakistani

(These are brief findings from some personal experience and the stories girls told me in Pakistan)

In one of our articles previously, we have shared what public space means to us… public space can be interpreted as the public living room of a city, of which our houses are the bedrooms. A place where everyone, regardless of his or her background and ideology, can communicate with each other, share laughter and enter in to debate about anything. It is also a place in which people can sit and look at other people, while they can also be left unhindered if they want to be alone amongst strangers. Despite the public character, the place must ensure intimacy and give people the feeling of safety and comfort. In addition, a good public space must be able to emphasise a transition and interplay from the private domain to the public domain, whereby one for instance - while sitting at home - can look at a square from the window of his house and can let his thoughts wander for a moment.

It means that terraces, balconies and windows are a mode of transition from private to public domain and can play a vital role in forming the frame of urban space. But, do we see girls/women using it freely, like boys/men do? The answer is NO! Let me share a story here: Once there was a girl standing in the window of a home in the old settlement of Lahore. The window opened right into the street; it was her favourite spot to enjoy the hustle bustle of street life. She was just a little girl playing mindlessly with her bangles as she looked outside of her window. Right then, she noticed, a man on a cycle crossing the street again and again, and on paying attention she knew that he was looking at her, noticing her; he was a man old enough to be her father’s elder. She got scared and hid herself in disgust. Not only she closed the windows, she threw her bangles away as well.

This incident not only moved the girl from the urban frame but also hindered her movement and perception about the city spaces outside home and its people. Also, it encouraged the street being taken by boys as there was no reason left to scold boys for standing near a house where there is a possibility that a girl might appear in the window, because she won’t. This is not only a story happening in the old streets but in new societies as well. Because it’s the behaviours that are causing problem not the urban frame, it’s how people are using their spaces that matters not the way the spaces are connected to each other, because spaces and their connection differs from place to place, it’s human nature that stays the same. The only possibility for change is present if people change their way of perceiving things in their mind and how they react to it and also if people start giving value to other beings and their rights. That’s only how the change is possible.

Streets also come under the category of public spaces. When a girl steps out of her house, her eyes are wide open not out of wonder, anymore, but out of alertness about her surroundings due to the incidents of harassment, robbery, fast pace cars, insufficient space for movement etc. She feels like she has to be hyper alert to protect her. She feels unsafe when she is out alone, whatever the time might be.

Another story I would like to share here, about a girl, who had recently learned how to ride a bicycle. She went out one afternoon on her bicycle to explore her neighbourhood, after school hours, she was happy and then suddenly she realised she was being chased by boys on a bike. She somehow managed to escape them but they had seen her entering her home unfortunately. That night, her bicycle was stolen from her porch. And since then, the girl didn’t step out of her house alone, and also stopped enjoying the walk in her porch. The limitations incidents like these put on the child aren’t just about outside home but within home boundaries as well, these limitations take place within minds. Girls are more vulnerable to such incidents as they perceive and react in a sensitive manner, they either hide themselves or they go out violently, protesting or doing whatever they wish. Both of these reactions aren’t healthy for girls themselves or the children that might be under their care.

Women/ girls potentially use public transport more than men. But now they are adapting to personal cars or uber drivers which eventually add more cars to streets and fail the concept of sustainable public transport. The reason is clear…. Harassment and evil incidents happen in public transport and areas everyday and every moment, unfortunately. The reaction is an outcome of actions that are being overlooked by officials and city policy makers and management.

Let’s talk about parks, a place needed for leisure, picnics and for healthy connection with nature. Parks have trees for shade and comfort but, it also screens the inner park from outer roads or neighbourhood. Playgrounds are different, they are dominated with spaces for boys and their sports, which lead to girls feeling, left out, which is another story. But about parks, the threat is different, if there are not enough girls or women using the place at the same time, there is always this fear that something might go wrong at any moment. So, the interaction with nature that was meant to restore energy through restful activity is reversed as the energy spent on mental stress activity and alertness to keep oneself safe from the surroundings.

I conclude here that, all of these small factors lead to girls/women disappearing from the city fabric and also not owning spaces with freedom and joy. And I believe that when girls/women start disappearing or hiding in the city, children disappear as well. And that’s how a downfall to community life or cities vibrancy begins. Therefore, we must try to consider things to change, rather than subside and act passive to the happenings in the city. Because, the evil might come back grown stronger, or let’s just say it already did; look around what’s happening already. Don’t you agree with me?

Simon Nielsen 7/10/22 Simon Nielsen 7/10/22

Why Equity Is Key To Building Back Better

Dr. Mariela Alfonzo, founder of State of Place, discusses three pillars - data, community, and cooperation - needed to promote spatial justice to address inequitable disparities in access to good urban design and related quality of life outcomes.

By State of Place

Our Founder and CEO, Dr. Mariela Alfonzo, had the honor to be interviewed by Andrew Tuck, of Monocle’s The Urbanist podcast, about the need for a spatial-equity based recovery, which focuses on community-scale infrastructure that facilitates health, safety, environmental justice, and economic resiliency. The episode, which focused on how to build back more equitably, also included Sally Kneeshaw from URBACT (Chapter 1), a European exchange and learning programme promoting sustainable urban development, who discusses how Covid has highlighted the need for more gender-equal cities and Emily Hamilton, a Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Urbanity Project at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University (Chapter 3), who speaks about the need for zoning reform to ensure more equitable development.

Dr. Mariela Alfonzo’s remarks (Chapter 2) focused on her recent Slate piece, Building Back Better, but Better, in which she and her co-author, Sam Lubell, outline three pillars - data, community, and cooperation - needed to promote spatial justice to address inequitable disparities in access to good urban design and related quality of life outcomes. She also discusses State of Place’s project with the City of Philadelphia, which has tied the built environment (as measured by the State of Place Index) to Covid, various Covid-related comorbidities, environmental hazards, and neighborhood safety, and how evidence-based, data-driven citymaking can lead to more equitable, efficient, and effective planning, development, and policy.

We urge you to listen in to this important (female-led!!) discussion!

Simon Nielsen 6/27/22 Simon Nielsen 6/27/22

How Local Businesses Build Empathy, And What That Means For Rural Communities

“Our communities could use more empathy. Doing business with each other can help us build empathy.” Becky McCray and SaveYour.Town see potential in visiting the corner store.

By Becky McCray and SaveYour.Town

I’ve been thinking lately how many large challenges we face as a society that come down to not thinking from other people’s perspectives.

Our communities could use more empathy. Doing business with each other can help us build empathy.

Selling something requires us to think about other people. We have to think about what other people will like, what they will buy. That is thinking from another person’s perspective.

In my years as retail store owner, I remember putting myself in my customers’ place, trying to understand what they might want to buy this week.

Buyers also can potentially improve their empathy when they realize that local sellers offer something that the buyers value enough to purchase. That’s even more important when the buyers and sellers come from different groups, like when a local farmer wanders through the Hispanic grocery and finds something new to try.

Businesses are essential third places where people can connect with each other. Your first place is your home, your second place is your work. Your third places are where you go to be with other people.

Retail businesses can be a third place, too. Ever go to the grocery store to buy 3 things but it took half an hour because you stopped to talk to people? Community happens when people talk to each other!

We’re rebuilding social capital while we’re chatting with friends or with a clerk over our purchase.

That doesn’t happen when people buy online. It has to be in person.

All good reasons why local commerce builds strong communities.

Simon Nielsen 6/22/22 Simon Nielsen 6/22/22

Practical Steps To Overcome Opposition To New Residents

“When you do hear complaints, it’s ok to gently point out that your town is open to everyone. People of all ages, all ethnicities, all backgrounds, all incomes. People who are new in town and people who have been here for generations. Our town is changing all the time because it is a living community of people.” Becky McCray and SaveYour.Town are open to newcomers.

By Becky McCray and SaveYour.Town

Welcoming new residents means dealing with those members of your community who are not so open to new people moving in.

Practical step 1: Magnify stories of people being welcoming

Because it’s uncomfortable when you hear complaints about new residents moving in, you remember it.

You don’t remember the thousand and one ways local people are being welcoming, because you never see most of them.

The woman who makes cookies for her new neighbor’s kids.

The man who stops to help someone carry their heavy moving boxes.

The people who go out of their way to invite a newcomer to an event, then stop by to pick them up.

When you do hear those stories, magnify them. Make sure everyone knows it’s normal and expected to welcome new people.

Practical step 2: Hold well-publicized welcome events

Another way to make sure everyone knows it’s normal and expected to welcome new people, is to hold welcome events for newcomers and publicize them.

Bennettsville, South Carolina, hosted regular gatherings of newcomers to learn more about them, and for the new residents to learn more about Bennettsville.

Officials answered questions like what to do with bulky garbage, how the electric bill works and how to submit articles to the local paper.

New residents shared their stories. They found places where they could volunteer and heard ideas about helping the downtown.

The secret to gathering the newcomers was to have the real estate agents who sold houses to them personally invite them. They could also ask the city to invite people who made new utility deposits, or check with the library so they can invite people who recently applied for a library card. Brainstorm more ways to find your own new residents.

When you hear complaints

When you do hear complaints, it’s ok to gently point out that your town is open to everyone. People of all ages, all ethnicities, all backgrounds, all incomes. People who are new in town and people who have been here for generations.

Our town is changing all the time because it is a living community of people.

And new people in your town are part of the change. They bring with them new ways of doing things, and new ideas.

We are valuing the people who are here now. Together, we’re creating the town we want to live in, one small step at a time.

Simon Nielsen 6/20/22 Simon Nielsen 6/20/22

Social Justice Is Not As Easy As ABCD

“It’s not enough to be community-driven; we need to ensure that those who are less privileged are in the lead. As many community organizers have observed, ‘It is those closest to the problem who are closest to the solution.’ Inclusive engagement won’t happen unless we are intentional. We need to engage people where they are – their networks, gathering places, language, culture and priorities.” Community activator, Jim Diers, calls for a people powered social justice.

By Jim Diers, community activator

As a proud practitioner of Asset-Based Community-driven Development (ABCD), I’m convinced that every person and every neighborhood has abundant and often underutilized strengths that can be mobilized to accomplish what is best done by community – caring for one another and the earth, promoting health, preventing crime, responding to disaster, creating great places, strengthening democracy and advancing social justice. But, I’m also aware that there is nothing inherently progressive about ABCD. In fact, unless an ABCD approach is accompanie by a strong commitment to social justice and an understanding of what that entails, it has the potential to exacerbate current inequities. Following are some actions to take and pitfalls to avoid on the road to social justice.

For starters, we need to stop talking about everyone’s glass being half-full. True, all people have valuable skills, knowledge and other gifts. But, the notion that everyone’s glass is half-full reinforces the myth that we all have the same opportunities. It ignores the fact that privilege based on race, class, gender and other identities gives some people an incredible advantage. The obscene concentration of wealth and mass incarceration of African Americans are two manifestations of the extreme inequity in our society.

It’s not enough to be community-driven; we need to ensure that those who are less privileged are in the lead. As many community organizers have observed, “It is those closest to the problem who are closest to the solution.” Inclusive engagement won’t happen unless we are intentional. We need to engage people where they are – their networks, gathering places, language, culture and priorities.

While emphasizing that there is no substitute for community, we need to acknowledge that there are some things best done by government, not-for-profits and other agencies. Portraying them as the problem aligns us with the right-wing. Similarly, a solely strengths-based approach echoes the conservative notion that people can and should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Appropriate professional services are needed, and agencies can be good partners. We must help them work in ways that are more strengths-based, holistic and community-driven.

At the same time, we must embrace the idea that a key role of community is to hold government and corporations accountable. Thus, we shouldn’t be content with organizing for mutual support. We must also organize for social and earth justice. The networks built through an ABCD approach could make a powerful impact on external forces, but typically, we miss that opportunity as we focus on self-help.

As we work to make our communities stronger and our neighborhoods more attractive, we must recognize that our actions are likely to make local real estate more desirable and thus less affordable for existing residents and businesses. That’s hard to imagine when conditions seem desperate, but that is exactly the time when we need to plan for the future. As we’re working on small projects, we should be consciously building the capacity to establish cooperatives, community lands trusts and other forms of community ownership. We must also organize for a living wage and ensure that government and developers act in the interest of the community, especially those at greatest risk for displacement.

Just as it is important for those practicing ABCD to be open to community organizing, my friends who are organizing for social justice would do well to encourage their members to engage in mutual support and other ABCD activities. I’ve found that this is a great way to develop a much stronger base, especially among those people who are averse to meetings and conflict. Then, when it comes time for the fight, the members of the organization don’t have to yell so loudly because they have the whole community with them. Including an asset-based approach also provides opportunities for members to sustain their relationships with one another during those times when they aren’t involved with an issue campaign. ABCD and issue-based organizing are incredibly compatible, but few organizations utilize both approaches.

And, just as communities need to find ways to partner with government and other agencies, it is incumbent on elected officials, civil servants and not-for-profit staff to step back and make room for community. Ironically, many of my progressive friends are some of the biggest obstacles. They seem to think that people’s welfare is tied exclusively to rights and services, and they fail to acknowledge the vital role of community. It is a grave injustice when people are treated only as clients and customers and not as citizens with gifts and capacity. Government officials often have a paternalistic attitude towards the community and don’t sufficiently value its knowledge or trust its judgment. They have a skewed sense of power and guard it selfishly while failing to recognize that power is infinite and grows as you give it away. Social justice has always depended on the power of the people. Now, more than ever, progressives need to act on that truth.

Simon Nielsen 6/15/22 Simon Nielsen 6/15/22

Celebrating the 30th Anniversary of Ostrom’s Governing the Commons: Traditions and Trends in the Study of the Commons, Revisited

“In an era where planetary boundaries are coming into sight or have been surpassed, we are glad to see that our field has embraced global and national issues, besides its tradition of applying local and community perspectives. Where we once started off by contrasting the market and the state on the one hand, with self-governance alternatives, on the other, we now see a tendency to look beyond this dichotomy and study co-management, co-production the role of markets and participation, instead.” The editors-in-chief of International Journal of the Commons examine how the study of the commons is gaining speed.

By Frank van Laerhoven, Michael Schoon, Sergio Villamayor-Thomas & International Journal of the Commons

Introduction

The very first contribution to the International Journal of the Commons (IJC) provided a bibliometric analysis of traditions and trends in the study of the commons (van Laerhoven & Ostrom, 2007). In this paper, we revisit and expand that endeavor and ask ourselves: Where do we stand as a scholarly community, thirteen years later, in the year that we are celebrating the 30th anniversary of Ostrom’s Governing the Commons (1990)?

The above question is relevant for several reasons. In 2009, two years after the first bibliometric analysis, Elinor Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for her institutional analyses on community-based natural resource management. This event put the study of commons on the spot and has seemingly driven a new wave of both enthusiasts and critics of the institutional approach likely affecting its boundaries.

The start of commons scholarship can be understood as growing out of a rejection of Hardin’s prediction of natural resource degradation unless managed by governments or through private property rights (Poteete et al. 2010). Over time, however the approach appears to have been evolving. That was clear from the 2007 assessment. How have we fared since then?

At the time of van Laerhoven & Ostrom’s (2007) review, applications to forests, fisheries, irrigation systems, rangeland and water resources (i.e. the Big Five) clearly dominated the field, but at the same time an interest in framing novel topics, such as biodiversity, climate change or knowledge in terms of commons appeared to be emerging, as well. Has what we all study changed and evolved since then?

Although institutional analysis was the approach of choice in a majority of the studies back in 2007, it appeared that the dominance of economics, legal and political science studies was increasingly – albeit modestly – being challenged by a growing number of interdisciplinary, environmental studies. Has this trend substantiated since 2007?

An important observation derived from the 2007 review was the scattered nature of journals that contained publications on the commons. While positive, such dispersion potentially hindered knowledge accumulation and learning. One of the stated objectives of the International Journal of the Commons was to facilitate such accumulation and learning. Compared to the 2007 review, we can now assess whether IJC has managed to consolidate its niche over the last 13 years of its existence.

Advances and changes in depositories and search facilities allowed us to expand our key word search and be more specific regarding the sources than in the 2007 study. That study used Google Scholar. For our analysis, we used Scopus, to identify relevant documents published between the appearance of Hardin’s The tragedy of the commons in 1968, and the 30th anniversary of Ostrom’s Governing the Commons in 2020. Scopus is much more rigorous regarding allowing peer reviewed academic publications into its data base than Google Scholar. We hold that although the number of hits in Scopus is lower, the relevance of the articles will be significantly higher due to the fact that only peer-reviewed papers are included. We set the search terms to: {common pool resource} OR {common pool resources} OR {the commons}. These terms were applied to the title, abstract and/or key words associated with the article. The range was set from 1968 to 2020. From the source (i.e. journal) titles we excluded Parliamentary history; Parliamentary affairs; Parliaments estates and representation. We then proceeded to manually remove all titles for which no author name was available. We also manually removed all titles related with the House of Commons (by using ctrl+f, ‘parliament’ AND ‘house of’). These proceedings resulted in a list of 3,819 titles, that were downloaded as a spreadsheet. For all titles we collected information on subject area, author, title, year, journal, times cited, author affiliation data, and the abstract.

Publish or perish?

How vibrant is the scholarly branch of the commons community? How does the current stock-taking effort compare to the 2007 measurement of publication trends? Firstly, there are many of us! Our data base contains roughly 6,500 unique names. We observe that all of us manage to get word on the commons out in great numbers. Additionally, 74% of all publications on the commons that appeared between 1968–2019 were published after the 2007 study. Figure 1 gives an overview of the number of commons publication per year between 1968–2019.

*Fig. 1: Number of publication per year (1968–2019).*

During the last 50 years commons scholars have published their work in 1,900+ (!) different journals, although only 40 published 10 or more articles on the commons (see Figure 2). Since our first issue in 2007, IJC has become the most popular platform for commons studies. The objective of the founders of the journal to create a focal journal on the commons has been clearly achieved.

*Fig. 2: Number of publications per journal (only journals with 10 or more publications) – 1968–2007 and 2008–2019 compared.*

The position of the International Journal of the Commons in terms of publications is even more obvious from Figure 3. In the last 5 years (i.e. between 2015–2019), 14 journals published 10 or more articles on the commons. We hope that our initial wish to remedy the fragmentation of commons scholarship hasn’t led to undermining the diversity that is essential to the progress in our debates.

*Fig. 3: Number of publications per journal since 2015.*

The take-away point for us editors is that we need to make sure that our journal is widely and undeniably considered as a safe place for all stances, and all views on, and approaches to the commons.

Does anyone take notice? We answer this question by looking at the number of citations for the articles in our data base, to date. We find that the average number of citations amounts to 21. The median lays at 3. Figure 4 gives an overview of the distribution of citations over the publications in our data base. We can safely conclude that what we write has had and continues to have relevance.

*Fig. 4: Number of citations (1968–2019).*

The distribution of the observations is heavily skewed to the lower numbers (i.e., 0 to 20). There are 1,114 publications in our data set (i.e. about a third of all publications analyzed) that had no citations at all. The number of citations accumulated in the spectrum ranging from 1 to 20 citations is 2,116. On the other hand, there is also a number of publications with more than 100 citations (106 in total). Of the articles in IJC, 15 were cited over 20 times, above the average of the other journals represented in spite of being a new entrant to academic publishing. Since IJC’s inclusion in Scopus in 2011, it’s articles have been cited 8.4 times on average. For all other articles in our data base published since 2011 this average lays at 6.

Figure 5 lists the most prolific authors – they all have 10 or more publications that appear in our data base. All authors are white, all but one are male, and all but one are or were affiliated with Universities in the USA or Europe. (All but two have a beard.) Through our editorial policies, we have attempted to mitigate such challenges of diversity through our explicit support of authors in developing contexts. It does not resolve them, but we can address them as a community of scholars. And we would like to congratulate these wonderful contributors to the field.

Table 1 lists all publications in our data set that collected 500 or more citations.

Elinor Ostrom is listed with no less than 5 titles. We suspect that among the 12,514 citations accumulated by Hardin – the #1 in this list – there will be a significant number that cites the source for disagreeing with it. Figure 6 shows the trends in citations for Hardin’s Tragedy of the commons and Ostrom’s Governing the commons, respectively. Both titles appear to be at the very core of the scholarly debate, still.

*Fig. 6: Hardin and Ostrom – number of citations per year (1968–2019).*

A field dominated by a comparatively low number of highly cited publications might prevent the emergence of new ideas and/or facilitate the ideologization of research. What we editors learn here is that these observations point to the continued need to improve the circulation of ideas and findings among the commons community. This would not only increase the visibility of new methods and make theoretical progress, but also avoid redundancy in our research endeavors (i.e. questions that have been already addressed).

What are our disciplines?

Based on the disciplinary affinity of the journals that attracted most of the commons studies between 1985–2005, the 2007 study revealed that at the time the study of the commons appeared mostly a social sciences affair. With better search facilities, and with the search period expanded to 1968–2019, what do we find in our analysis? Figure 7 depicts a trend that is based on the university departments that are mentioned under the affiliation data of authors and co-authors. Figure 8 is based on the subject areas that an article belongs to, as recorded by Scopus. Both figures confirm but also detail what the 2007 study established by cruder means. While our object of study is often a natural resource system, surprisingly few colleagues from the natural sciences frame their topic of study as a commons.

*Number of publications per discipline – 1968–2007 and 2008–2019 compared.*

*Number of publications per subject area – 1968–2007 and 2008–2019 compared.*

An editorial policy resulting from this observation is to pay more attention to submissions coming from authors with an explicit natural science background or to accommodate special issues that bundle natural science contributions that frame their object of study in commons terms.

Working together?

The 2007 study stated that “…researchers who studied specific commons before the mid-1980s were [..] less likely than their contemporary colleagues to be well informed about the work of scholars in other disciplines, about other sectors in their own region of interest, or in other regions of the world.” (van Laerhoven & Ostrom, 2007, p.3). With means that are a little bit more sophisticated than what the authors in 2007 had at their disposal, we assessed the validity of this statement. Are we any good – and did we become better – at collaboration, in the sense that we reach out to other disciplines, other sectors and other geographic regions?

Figure 9 shows the number of commons publications per year that are produced by authors from different types of departments. Figure 10 zooms in on trends in collaboration between authors from the social and the natural sciences, respectively. Figure 11 depicts the number publications per year that are the result of collaborations between authors working for universities in different countries.

*Fig. 9: Number of publications per year resulting from collaboration between different types of university departments (1968–2019).*

*Fig. 10: Number of publications per year resulting from collaboration between the natural and the social sciences (1968–2019).*

*Fig. 11: Number of publications per year resulting from collaboration between universities in different countries (1968–2019).*

Despite the increasing trends, we think the absolute numbers are rather embarrassing for a community that pays so much lip service to and prominently studies collaboration and collective action. We believe collaboration cannot only facilitate the circulation of new ideas and make theory progress, but also facilitate comparative work. As editors we will seek to encourage collaboration by paying special attention to it in submissions and through proactively looking for special issue ideas that stand out in terms of collaboration between disciplines and/or regions.

Where do we work?

The affiliation information for all unique authors in our data set allows us to assess where their workplaces are located. Almost 71% of all commons scholars work at universities in Europe or the USA. Figure 12 presents a list of countries where 50 or more publications in our data were produced. It compares the periods before and after the appearance of the 2007 assessment by Van Laerhoven and Ostrom.

*Fig. 12: Number of publications per country – 1968–2007 and 2008–2019 compared.*

We find that between 1968 and 1998 our domain was dominated by scholars affiliated with a university in the USA – they produced approximately 75% of all commons publications in any given year during that era. Since the new millennium this dominance is somewhat shrinking in favor of authors based in Europe. These produced approximately 40% of all commons publications between 2008–2018. The dominance of USA and Europe based scholars has remained intact for the entire 50 years that our analysis spans.

Although this observation is mostly symptomatic for processes that we cannot control, it is an editorial policy of IJC to give explicit support – both editorial and financial support (in the form of allowing extra rounds of review and author fee exemptions) – to authors from universities that are not based in Europe or the USA.

Where do we do our research?

There is a remarkable discrepancy between the places where we work and the places where we do our research (see Figure 13).

*Fig. 13: Discrepancy between the places where we work and where we do our research.*

Figure 14 provides a ranking of the number of times a certain country is mentioned in the abstracts of the titles in our data base – the list is limited to the countries that appear 10 times or more. India is the clear favorite.

*Fig. 14: Number of times a country is mentioned in the abstracts of the titles in our data base – 1968–2007 and 2008–2019 compared.*

An editorial policy that we have implemented and will continue to develop is allowing room for contributions on commons in countries that are not among the usual suspects, e.g. Central Asia (Special Feature in Volume 14), Myanmar (Kimengsi et al. 2019) or Kirgizstan (Kasymov & Thiel, 2019).

What do we study?

Arguably, commons studies grew out of concerns associated with the tragedy of the commons. Accordingly, typical studies of the commons have been associated with local contexts, particularly with common pool resources such as forests, fisheries and irrigation, and an interest in the opportunities and challenges of common property rights and rules. In this section we present a crude assessment of developments regarding the empirical and theoretical boundaries of our field.

The Big Five?

Hardin (1968) asked us to “picture a pasture, open to all.” Pastures, together with fisheries, forests, irrigation systems, and water management belong to what the authors of the 2007 study referred to as the “Big Five” in the study of the commons. Through 2007 these topics drew most of the combined attention of commons scholars. Overall, we find that this trend continues unabetted (see Figure 15). Over time, we see a relative increase in interest in water and fisheries since 2007.1

As editors, we have been encouraged with initiatives to push commons research in new directions, as scholars increasingly look at the digital commons (Special Feature in issue 7(2)), biodiversity conservation, genetics and microbial commons (Special Feature in issue 4(1)), technology (Special Feature in issue 5(1)), and other fields. We see great opportunities for the cross-pollination of other fields as commons scholars take commons theory to new arenas and bring insights new to the commons from these fruitful forays, which we discuss more in a section on ‘new’ commons. We will continue to support this expanded view of the field moving forward.

Institutions for collective action?

Institutions for collective action have always been at the center of our attention. Not for nothing, Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action was the full title of Elinor Ostrom’s seminal 1990 book (Ostrom, 1990). Figure 16 shows how trends have evolved.2 Directly after the launch of our domain by Hardin, institutions weren’t so much on our minds, but that changed quickly. A dominant interest in institutions continues and even increases after 2007.

Too local?

One of the common critiques of commons research is that its researchers and practitioners usually study at the community or local scale. While Figure 17 shows that this critique may be overstated, as editors we anecdotally feel that there is a surfeit of studies at small-scales and a dearth of broader-scaled studies. With some exceptions (e.g. Ostrom 2010), much of the work that we see is small-scale analyses of case studies.

There have been successful efforts for exchange between commons scholars and large-scale studies. As editors, we support efforts to address this shortcoming, as illustrated by IJC’s special feature on The Social-Ecological Systems Meta-Analysis Database (SESMAD) (Cox, 2014).

Between the market and the state?

Where Hardin claimed that only the state or the market could prevent a tragedy of the commons, Ostrom dedicated most of her career to showing how there is a lot of room on the spectrum that ranges between these two extremes (e.g. Ostrom, 1994). Figure 18 presents a crude way to gauge our field’s attention to the market, the state, and self-governance over time.

As the graph suggest, commons scholarship has increasingly included the role of governments and markets in its discourse. We do not know, however, how these terms are used. Much of the commons scholarship grew out of a rejection of governments and market as the only solutions to natural resource management. There are signs that such an “adversarial” approach has reversed over time. Paradigmatic examples are the emergence of new co-management literature (Berkes 1994, Frey et al. 2016) or recent calls to dig deeper into the specifics of hybrid modes of governance (Lemos and Agrawal 2006, Driessen et al. 2012, Villamayor-Tomas et al. 2019). A question for further research is whether the trend unveiled here corresponds with a qualitative change in the way the trichotomy communities-government-markets is addressed.

The design principles?

Ostrom identified the following eight design principles of stable local common pool resource management (Ostrom, 1990; Ostrom 2005; Cox et al. 2010):

Boundaries: Clearly defined boundaries (i.e. of the resource and of the group of users);
Rules: Congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions;
Participation: Most individuals affected by the operational rules can participate in modifying the operational rules;
Monitoring: Effective monitoring by monitors who are part of or accountable to the resource users;
Sanctioning: Graduated sanctions: Appropriators who violate operational rules are likely to be assessed graduated sanctions;
Conflict resolution: Resource users and their officials have rapid access to low-cost local arenas to resolve conflicts among users or between users and officials.;
Autonomy: The rights of appropriators to devise their own institutions are not challenged by external governmental authorities;
Nested enterprises: Appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.

Figure 19 illustrates to what extent and in broad strokes our research seems to have a continued interest in these principles.3 The earlier mentioned solid interest in institutions is reflected in the interest in rules that is captured in this graph. The earlier mentioned shift towards co-management and governance seems to be reflected in the interest in participation, here. Something that this graph does not reflect is recent interest among scholars to move into a configurational approach to the study of the principles. While evidence clearly supports the empirical validity of the principles (Cox et al. 2010), this evidence is less clear about which sets of them are more relevant depending on the context, or the pathways through which the principles are more easily implemented and make a difference. Recent works have started to move into that direction (Baggio et al. 2016, Schlager 2016, Villamayor-Tomas and Garcia-Lopez 2019). We believe this is a promising approach to making progress.

*Fig. 19: Attention for the design principles.*

Only case studies?

Case studies appear to be in our genes. After all, Governing the Commons (Ostrom, 1990) was based on the analysis of a collection of case studies, aggregated in a meta-analysis. Historically, much of the work on the commons was comprised of case studies at the local scale. But is the impression that we may be spending too much time on producing yet another case study correct? Both before and after 2007 about 15% of all abstracts in our data base mention the word case (Figure 20). Both before and after 2007 only a minor part of all abstracts mentioning the word case also mention the word framework, theory and/or model (11% and 13%, respectively), suggesting that there is still room for improvement regarding the ability to extrapolate case findings in order to formulate generic claims.

We still value the importance of case studies. We have seen (as readers) and experienced (as authors) that the value of case studies is often unappreciated and underestimated by many journals (with clear exceptions such as Case Studies in the Environment). This observation strengthens us in our editorial ambition to continue to work with authors to publish case studies, particularly from underrepresented geographies. One vision that we would like to see come to fruition in the coming years is to provide some consistency in format and common meta-data required for all cases with a goal to allow for more effective cross-case comparison. We will start this within IJC, but we would like to see it shared by a suite of journals.

New commons?

The 2007 article hinted at a glimmering trend indicating a growing interest in digital commons (issue 7(2)), intellectual property rights (forthcoming issue), biodiversity (issue 8(2)) and climate change (issue 13(2)). There appears to be a growing interest in commoning, and urban issues, as well. Figure 21 illustrates how an interest in some of the new(er) commons has been developing between 2016–2019, and how this interest compares to attention for the more traditional topics during that same period.

*Fig. 21: Attention for some new(er) commons compared with attention for the “big five” between 2016–2019.*

As editors, we are encouraged by the appropriate usage of the commons and commoning in many new areas, and we will continue to support this. In particular, we would encourage special features in these areas. In part, we believe that pushing into new realms is not only appropriate, but it also increases our audience and brings new voices and perspectives into our community.

Traditions & trends?

In sum, this admittedly coarse and rather unsophisticated bibliographic analysis appears to reveal the following. We publish more and more (but so do all other fields and domains). During the last 50 years, we have found 1,900+ peer-reviewed journals willing to publish our work. Since 2007, the International Journal of the Commons appears to have become our favorite outlet. There’s an incredible number of scholars that publish or have published on the commons during the last 50 years – approximately 6,500. Publications get noticed and cited (21 times on average), an indication we think, of the fact that the debate on the commons is still ongoing and vibrant. Many disciplines are involved – we count 28 subject areas – but the social sciences, more particularly economics, dominate. There is remarkably little evidence of multi/inter-disciplinarity or across-country collaboration. We are mostly affiliated with universities in the USA and Europe, but we mostly do research, elsewhere (i.e. mostly in what some refer to as the global south). We seem to be consistently interested in ‘big five’ topics (i.e. forests, fisheries, irrigation, water and rangeland), and in an institutional take on the commons. We have always liked and continue to favor case studies, but there appears to be a growing concern about the lack of standardization for the sake of comparison, and subsequently, theory development. In an era where planetary boundaries are coming into sight or have been surpassed (Steffen et al. 2015), we are glad to see that our field has embraced global and national issues, besides its tradition of applying local and community perspectives. Where we once started off by contrasting the market and the state on the one hand, with self-governance alternatives, on the other, we now see a tendency to look beyond this dichotomy and study co-management, co-production the role of markets and participation, instead.

Consequences for our editorial policy?

The Focus and Scope section of the IJC portal calls attention to our interest in interdisciplinary work and the role of “institutions for use and management of resources that are (or could be) enjoyed collectively” such as natural resources or knowledge. Based on our observations here presented we derive the following as input for IJC’s editorial policies:

We will make sure that our journal is widely and undeniably considered as a safe place for all views on, and approaches to the commons;
We will attempt to mitigate challenges of diversity through our explicit support of authors in developing contexts;
We will attempt to improve the circulation of ideas and findings among the commons community, among other things by giving more attention to new methods, looking for theoretical progress, and avoiding redundancy in research endeavors;
We will encourage the submission of work coming from authors with an explicit natural science background;
We will seek to encourage collaboration in all sorts and forms, i.e. between disciplines, departments, and geographic regions;
We will allow room for contributions on commons in countries that so far have gotten less attention;
We will encourage and support initiatives that push commons research in new directions and that can complement our conventional interest in the governance of relatively small-scale, local natural resources;
We will support efforts to encourage the standardization of case study work in an attempt to facilitate cross case comparisons for the sake of theory development.
Although not the object of this first study, we recognize the importance of bridging the gap between practitioner, policy-making and scholarly communities. This has been an ongoing challenge for both IJC and the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC). We will keep supporting submissions and initiatives that move in that direction.

The tools at our disposal to accomplish these goals include

Proactively identifying and financing individual work and special issues that would help us achieving these objectives;
Offering editorial support (in the form extra rounds of reviews), and financial support (in the form of author fee exemptions) to authors from developing contexts;
Create an editorial board with the means, capacity and willingness to support these goals, and;
Encourage contributions that help moving us towards the accomplishment of these goals by means of the Ostrom Memorial Award for Most Innovative Paper.

Future analysis?

In this analysis, we zoomed out and took a closer look at the large number of publications that appeared over the span of 50 years. A shortcoming of this approach regards the fact that we cannot really appreciate and interpret the more turbulent developments that are taking place at the forefront of our field, right now, or outside peer-reviewed scholarly work.

As editors we have the privilege of being able to follow in real time what is going on at the very forefront of our community. After finalizing this analysis, we all three had the feeling that the sense we are getting from our familiarity with exciting, more recent approaches to the commons is not very well reflected in our data set. In an analysis of almost 4,000 titles, recent attention to for example gender (37 titles), inequality (60 titles) or environmental justice (80 titles) disappear under the volume of other writing, and subsequently remains below the notice of many. The same holds for the seemingly dominant grip that institutionalism keeps on our field. The numbers from this analysis don’t let us tell the more nuanced story of pioneering work that is being developed as we speak.

Therefore, in our next editorial we hope to counter the picture that emerges from the current analysis with an analysis that captures more accurately the turbulence and cutting-edge novel work of commons scholarship by today’s pioneers.

Notes

1. We used the COUNTIF function in Excel. For gauging the state of interest in fisheries, we searched all abstract for “fish,” for forestry, we used the search terms when applying this function to the abstracts in our data base: “timber” and “forest,” for irrigation we used “irrigate,” for water we used “lake,” “river,” and “groundwater,” and for rangeland we searched for the occurrence in the abstracts of the terms “cattle,” “grass,” rangeland,” “pasture,” “meadow,” and “pastor.”

2. We used the COUNTIF function in Excel. For gauging the apparent interest in these topics we used the following terms when applying this function to the abstracts of the titles in our data base: coordinat; collaborat; collective action; organi; cooperat; institution.

3. We used the COUNTIF function in Excel. For gauging the apparent interest in each one of the eight design principles, we used the following terms when applying this function to the abstracts of the titles in our data base: “boundar”; “rule”; participat”; “monitor”; “sanction”; “conflict”; “autonomy”; and “nested.”

Acknowledgements

We thank the approximately 6,500 colleagues who during the last 50 years have published on the commons.

Competing Interests

This editorial is authored by the EICs of the International Journal of the Commons.

References

Baggio, J., Barnett, A., Perez-Ibarra, I., Brady, U., Ratajczyk, E., Rollins, N., … & Anderies, J. (2016). Explaining success and failure in the commons: the configural nature of Ostrom’s institutional design principles. International Journal of the Commons, 10(2). DOI: https://doi.org/10.18352/ijc.634
Berkes, F. 1994. Co-management: Bridging the two solitudes. Northern Perspectives, 22(2–3): 18–20.
Cox, M. (2014). Understanding large social-ecological systems: introducing the SESMAD project. International Journal of the Commons, 8(2). DOI: https://doi.org/10.18352/ijc.406
Cox, M., Arnold, G., & Villamayor-Tomas, S. (2010). A review of design principles for community-based natural resource management. Ecology and Society, 15(4). DOI: https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-03704-150438
Driessen, P. P. J., Dieperink, C., Van Laerhoven, F., Runhaar, H. A. C., & Vermeulen, W. J. V. (2012). Towards a Conceptual Framework for The Study of Shifts in Modes of Environmental Governance – Experiences From The Netherlands. Environmental Policy and Governance, 22(3), 143–160. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/eet.1580
Frey, U. J., Villamayor-Tomas, S., & Theesfeld, I. (2016). A continuum of governance regimes: A new perspective on co-management in irrigation systems. Environmental Science & Policy, 66, 73–81. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2016.08.008
Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. Science, 162(3859), 1243–1248. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.162.3859.1243
Kasymov, U., & Thiel, A. (2019). Understanding the Role of Power in Changes to Pastoral Institutions in Kyrgyzstan. International Journal of the Commons, 13(2). DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/ijc.870
Kimengsi, J. N., Aung, P. S., Pretzsch, J., Haller, T., & Auch, E. (2019). Constitutionality and the Co-Management of Protected Areas: Reflections from Cameroon and Myanmar. International Journal of the Commons, 13(2). DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/ijc.934
Lemos, M. C., & Agrawal, A. (2006). Environmental governance. Annual Revies of Environmental Resources, 31, 297–325. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.energy.31.042605.135621
Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge university press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511807763
Ostrom, E. (1994). Neither market nor state: Governance of common-pool resources in the twenty-first century. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute.
Ostrom, E. (2005). Understanding institutional diversity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton university press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt7s7wm
Ostrom, E. (2010). Polycentric systems for coping with collective action and global environmental change. Global environmental change, 20(4), 550–557. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2010.07.004
Poteete, A. R., Janssen, M. A., & Ostrom, E. (2010). Working together: collective action, the commons, and multiple methods in practice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400835157
Schlager, E. (2016). Introducing the” The Importance of Context, Scale, and Interdependencies in Understanding and Applying Ostrom’s Design Principles for Successful Governance of the Commons”. International Journal of the Commons, 10(2). DOI: https://doi.org/10.18352/ijc.767
Steffen, W., Richardson, K., Rockström, J., Cornell, S. E., Fetzer, I., Bennett, E. M., … & Folke, C. (2015). Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet. Science, 347(6223), 1259855. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1259855
Van Laerhoven, F., & Ostrom, E. (2007). Traditions and Trends in the Study of the Commons. International Journal of the Commons, 1(1), 3–28. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18352/ijc.76
Villamayor-Tomas, S., & Garcia-Lopez, G. (2018). Social movements as key actors in governing the commons: Evidence from community-based resource management cases across the world. Global environmental change, 53, 114–126. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2018.09.005
Villamayor-Tomas, S., Thiel, A., Amblard, L., Zikos, D., & Blanco, E. (2019). Diagnosing the role of the state for local collective action: Types of action situations and policy instruments. Environmental science & policy, 97, 44–57. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2019.03.009

Simon Nielsen 6/15/22 Simon Nielsen 6/15/22

Caracas: Like No City In The Western World

“Despite setbacks, working in Caracas was a useful wake-up call. It raised the fundamental questions that we believe planners and architects must respond to in the 21st century: How does one deal with chaos and with the sudden and unforeseen shifts in the political climate? How do we respond productively to the particulars of time and place and to the problems of population growth and migration? If disorder and antagonism are the status quo, how do we exercise a discipline that imposes order and requires consensus?” Alfredo Brillembourg, architect and founder of Urban-Think Tank, explores the dense urbanism of Caracas in the light of some of the Western world’s most urgent challenges.

By Alfredo Brillembourg, architect and founder of Urban-Think Tank Design Group

*Photo: André Cypriano/Urban-Think Tank - Caracas Case*

Think of Caracas today as:

A city 1000 meters above sea level, in a 20-kilometer-wide valley,

A metropolitan area of 800 square kilometers,

A regional population of approximately 6 million, in a country where

more than 3.3 million Venezuelans—approximately 10 percent of the population—have fled the country in the past four years.

A maximum density of 573 inhabitants per square kilometer,

A built area of 50% informal settlement,

A community spending over $1 billion per year on private security,

A population that produces 4,000 tons of solid waste daily with no recycling plant,

A settlement with a permanent water shortage,

A territory with no common political base, consisting of five distinct municipalities sharing territory in three different states,

A country with a 10,000,000 % inflation rate

A place where gasoline is cheaper than water,

A place where 75% of the population has lost an average of at least 20 pounds in 2019 due to a lack of proper nutrition amid an economic crisis.

A society where more people live, work, and die in the informal city than in the formal part of the city,

Think of … “Blade Runner” in the Tropics

Informal Capital

Caracas has grown to dimensions unanticipated by planners a decade ago. Informal urban sprawl expanded the city to the east, covering an area four times larger than the city’s 1950s metropolitan boundaries – a growth limited physically only by the mountainous topography. East to west, the boundaries of metropolitan Caracas are 60 kilometers apart; north to south, the city stretches some 20 to 30 kilometers. Since 1967, the built area has nearly doubled, to some 900 square kilometres. While it is difficult to anticipate future patterns of expansion, we do know that today approximately one million families live in barrios. How many will there be in 2030? Where will they live?

To the extent that Caracas is known to the world at large, people are primarily aware of Venezuela’s crisis wrecked by hyperinflation, severe food and medicine shortages, soaring crime rates, and an increasingly authoritarian executive. In 1970, Venezuela had had a staggering economic growth for 50 years, but now as thousands of citizens leave, Latin America is seeing one of the largest refugee crises in its history. Venezuela's outpouring of refugees is only second to that of Syria. Six million Venezuelans have escaped their homeland since 1998.

If Architecture is Frozen Music, Urbanism is Frozen Politics

Both in its successes and its failures, Caracas exemplifies the ways in which cities are shaped and eroded by the explosion of laws, regulations, and agencies, and it illustrates the deplorable results that often result from good intentions when the middle-man is the government. In the 1920s, Caracas, was among the poorest cities in Latin America; but by the 1950’s it was the most prosperous city, with the most modern infrastructure of Latin America. Petroleum was the motor of this economic miracle, giving Venezuela 15% of the world petroleum market. Despite the 1950’s dictatorship, Venezuela chose a progressive capitalist mode of production, which promoted prosperity and economic freedom. The results were reflected in the upper class’ emulation of North American standards of life and in the stature of Caracas as a major metropolis.

After 1957, however, Venezuela confused democracy and development with socialism, in a reaction to the capitalism of the previous regimes. Governments from 1958 to the present have pursued a policy of populism, under the guise of social democracy. Venezuela’s political and economic system during the second half of the 20th century substituted private investment for public expenditure, and the state government became the principal employer. Furthermore, during the ‘60s and ‘70s, Venezuela slowly began to lose world market share, dropping to just 3% in 2002 [1]. Not surprisingly, the consequences of the country’s economic down-turn have been social crisis and the proliferation of barrios.

As Caracas’ rich became richer, housing prices rose, pushing the urban poor to the city’s fringes and into abandoned buildings. With the complicity of a weak government, the wealthy effectively promote sprawl, which, in turn, raises the cost of such services as transportation, water, and electricity. With each cycle of development, the barrier between rich and poor grows higher, segregation more intractable, and economic distinctions more pronounced: approximately 75% of Venezuela’s poor are urban dwellers.

All social classes in Caracas suffer from similar difficulties: lack of essential services like shops, schools, and hospitals; enormous distances between home and work, complicated by nearly perpetual grid-lock; unregulated work hours. But the problems are significantly greater in the barrios which have neither institutional buildings nor services: no postal delivery, no trash or wastewater collection, no supply of potable water. Electricity is almost exclusively “stolen.” There are, of course, no paved roads.

The Code of No Code

Unregulated urbanization has become the most significant, if misunderstood, force in the development of Caracas. On the one hand, official maps of Caracas until recently indicated the location of the barrios with blank white spaces, erasing them from formal recognition. On the other hand, the barrios of Caracas represent the largest illicit collective initiative and infrastructure built in South America. Consider, for instance, that between 1928 and 2004, the government managed to build only 650,000 units of public housing. With no government assistance, inhabitants of the informal city have themselves added 2.8 million squatter homes in the same reference period.

These settlements are both illegal – the squatters, by definition, lack title to the land – and extralegal, since existing zoning codes have no jurisdiction over building sites that lack any title of ownership. But the squatter cities are not without their own codes, following unwritten rules of self-organization. Despite the poverty, illegality of the settlements, and lack of property ownership, the informal city is a vital example of a free and creative housing market. The inhabitants have entrepreneurial skills, enthusiasm, and an astonishing ability to wring a profit out of practically nothing. The invention and commercial activity of these informal settlements strongly suggest that the poor are economically progressive and free-market oriented.

If the urban sprawl of the barrios appears chaotic, closer scrutiny shows clear criteria of purpose and economy. Indeed, they make a valid argument for self-organization and independent construction. The barrios are, in effect, a complex adaptive system, permanently recreating itself and open to all forms of adaptation. Structures are generally equal in size, employ the same materials and construction techniques, and differ little in style and decoration. Though conceived by an individual, each building is a component in an inseparable whole, a cell in the system of the barrio. The unofficial roads, stairs, and passages through the barrio create networks that bind the whole together, creating an internal logic that works well for its creators and knitting a myriad of small, overlapping communities into a large informal city. In the absence of architects or other professionals, the structures are nonetheless rational in form and method.

“In the absence of a conventional master plan, the barrio-dwellers have put their talents for organization, improvision, and inventiveness to the development of a mega housing project for 42% of the population of Caracas.”

Non Transit

Caracas - with the exception of the barrios - is a car city. Trains and trolleys have been destroyed; sidewalks are nonexistent, and walking on the street is difficult and dangerous. The oil-based economy inevitably favored cars, which, in turn, required a network of massive highways. The U.S. highway system, initiated in the ‘50s during the Eisenhower administration, was the model and ideal, imported to Caracas in the late 40’s, as the embodiment of progress and good government. In 1948, Robert Moses, New York’s chief planner and master builder, arrived in Caracas and proposed a new urbanism of highways. Moses, not only laid out the highway program in Caracas, but the program profoundly influenced the living conditions and changed the landscape of the city. The imposition of the Caracas Freeway system played an important role in the fragmentation of the post-colonial city. These roads arbitrarily and irrevocably separated entire communities. If you build it, they will come: building a freeway in a large city increases vehicular traffic; more highways or added lanes bring more vehicles.

Today, Caracas’ highway system resembles that of Los Angeles, and to similar effect: driving suburbanization and sprawl to the detriment of countryside and city. While Caracas inaugurated a subway system in the ‘80s as an alternative to the car, it is heavily used by commuters from the barrios. And in consequence, these commuters have flooded the city creating new informal markets around subway hubs and underneath the freeway structures in the city center.

Restoring the Ruins of Modernity

The cities of the world have each had their respective eras of wealth, major development, and great architecture. Barcelona grew to its unique form under Cerda in the 19th century, Vienna had its great expansion in the beginning of the 20th century, and Caracas had its moment in the 1950´s. Today in Caracas, the great architecture of that period is either in ruins or steadily decaying. Even as we make the case for the future of Caracas – for the value of the informal, the barrios, the unacknowledged structures and systems of the city – we argue, too, for preservation of its history.

We would like to recall the history of Caracas, where heights of city buildings rose from one to some twenty floors in about five years in the economic boom of the ‘50s. The lessons learned from revisiting boom-cities of the past like Caracas, Detroit, Glasgow, Berlin or Beirut can be invaluable. Cities never die, but often fall in and out of the spotlight rapidly.

Caracas has forgotten, if indeed it ever fully recognized, that it is home to exceptional and unique works of architecture, Roberto Burle-Marx’s metropolitan park, Wallace Harrison’s Avila Hotel, Gio Ponti’s Villa El Cerrito and Richard Neutra’s Gorrondona House among them. The recent designation by UNESCO of Carlos Raul Villanueva’s Universidad Central de Venezuela UCV as a World Heritage Site has called world attention to the city’s cultural treasures and to their ruinous condition.

Will this attention last, and will it make a lasting contribution to the preservation of modern architecture in Caracas? That remains to be seen. A great number of the 100 historic cities and nearly 200 sacred sites on the World Heritage list are located in the Third World, in countries whose limited financial resources make preservation a very low priority. Caracas and Venezuela overall are no different in that respect.

The historic central area of Caracas requires most careful study, not only for the architectural significance of many of its buildings, but their problematic counterparts: higher population densities, an active and large informal economy, and total traffic congestion. Some 250 thousand people and 50 thousand cars circulate daily through 9 city blocks immediately surrounding the Congress building in central Caracas, an area that is also home to 18% of all informal commerce in Caracas. The result of this confluence is the continuing erosion of property values in the city center and, as a corollary, decay of historic structures, problems that should be addressed and resolved. Traditionally, architects and urbanists have held that the preservation of cultural heritage and reduction of poverty are linked. If that principle still holds, then for Caracas and for similar cities around the world, we need new approaches to preservation that account for the realities of urban development in the 21st century.

How does one urban development affect the meaning of another when their diverse expressions are combined and how can the dynamics of informal urban developments contribute positively to the city?

Caracas: A 21st Century Cold War City

The only way to begin to grasp the singularity that is Caracas is to chart its post-WWII trajectory till now. It might disappear from flight maps by the middle of the 21st century due to political collapse and hyperinflation, but two decades ago it was a place of destination. Caracas is only four and half hours from New York City, the place where I was born, but the truth is now it is somewhere else.Many Caracquenos, as locals are called, have left the country. With the exodus of 5000 Venezuelans per day, Caracas is a shrinking city and a shadow of what it used to be. Don't get me wrong, the city is still there, the Avila mountain still stands tall in the Valley but the city is caught in a new proxy war similar to what happened in Havana, Cuba in 1964. Instead of Cold War I would call it the “slow death” of a country, and the political crisis is leaving indelible traces on the city of Caracas, where polarities on the global stage crystallize and intersect with political and social dynamics run by Cuba and Russia. It is a slow death for the city because there is no large-scale fighting directly between the two local opposing sides, but they each are supported by major regional global players, and the stage for this proxy war is the city.

If we look back, in the 1970s, Caracas was the hub for South America. Like Dallas’ oil barons, its newly rich businessmen met and made their deals at exclusive establishments, such as Le Club[2]; like their Parisian confréres, the intelligentsia of Caracas sat in cafés and discussed art, wreathed in the smoke of their cigarettes; and like the glitterati of Los Angeles, the Telenovela stars hid from paparazzi behind dark sunglasses. All of the continent’s power elite seemed to be concentrated between the hills of El Ávila and the river. The valley of Caracas was like New York City in Saul Steinberg’s famous map: everything beyond the city limits receded into tiny specks, while the picturesque Boulevard de Sabana Grande, with its cafés and upscale international stores like Cartier and Saint Laurent, occupied an oversized swath of the public imagination.

Now, nothing prepares the traveller from North America. When you walk out of Caracas’s Simón Bolívar Airport, you are hit by a degree of heat and humidity you can’t have imagined. Here at sea level, you might as well be in a sauna; only in the hills does the air become tolerable. It is a fantastic experience to make the transition from the familiar to the completely, overwhelmingly different: the sea, the sounds, the smells, the cars, the vegetation. To travel from New York City to Caracas is an even greater shock than it once was to cross the Iron Curtain into the socialist eastern bloc. Nothing prepares you for Caracas.

On the streets of Caracas today, the decibel levels are higher than we could have imagined. Honking—a practice that frowned upon, if not entirely forbidden, in North America and Europe—is just an expression of the driver’s mood and circumstances. There are happy honks, “I love you” blares, and little diddles when the driver turns into a parking spot[3]. Diesel and wood smoke assault you as you drive from the airport down the narrow valley where half of the nearly six million Caraqueños live stacked in towers and still others in hillside shacks called ranchos.

Conditions began to change with the election of Hugo Chávez in 1998. It wasn’t an explosive revolution, not like Tehran in 1979 or Saint Petersburg in 1917. The changes were gradual, like the rising temperature of the water in which the frog is placed: the initial warmth is deceptively comfortable[4]. Even insiders welcomed the reforms to a system that was sclerotic and dysfunctional. But within a few years after the election, the country was working itself into a rolling boil: a democratically manipulated dictatorship.

Chávez had come to power promising to disrupt the old ways, the “natural order of things”—what and how Venezuela had always been. There was a relatively small crowd of people with money, educated in world-class schools, who tacitly, even reflexively, affirmed the order of things. Caracas’ upper levels of society lived in houses in neighborhoods called Country Club, Valle Arriba, and La Lagunita; the poor worked in the kitchens and gardens, living in the barrios embedded in the city and sprawling up the hillsides.

Historically, barrios urbanos , what American’s call slums, were not considered a recognized part of Caracas. Official maps of the city showed the barrios as generous green reserves or blank spots on the map, even though seventy percent of the modern city is made up of informal shelters draped over the mountains. Even in the 1990s, politicians did not see the masses located in these areas as fully human, enfranchised Caraqueños, but as cheap labor. The barrios and their residents were a problem, best ignored—out of sight is out of mind, after all. The formal city was the only Caracas.

Of course, there were people who acknowledged and investigated the informal city: planners like Teolinda Bolívar, whose 1970 doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne cast light on the topic; architects like Federico Villanueva[5] and Josefina Baldó, professors of architecture at the Central University of Venezuela; and architectural historians like Oscar Olindo Camacho, who took a humanistic perspective on Caracas’s barrios. Others were anthropologists and sociologists. But their work, while creating a valuable foundation, consisted almost exclusively of statistics and inventories.

In the late 1990s, Consejo Nacional de la Vivienda (CONAVI) and a small team divided the sprawling informal swaths of Caracas into areas that could be quantitatively mapped and charted, so as to propose and evaluate development projects (partially funded by the World Bank)[6]. Here, too, the approach is useful, but we found it incomplete. We wanted to connect the social science research with the world of architecture and aesthetics and with action and intervention.

Actors on the ground—the barrio residents—were constructing the city without any awareness of or reference to theories and measurements and academic knowledge. They simply built what they needed when they needed it, using whatever they could scrounge. It was enormously important to us to understand the dynamics of these processes and to identify the embedded principles so these could be applied constructively to the empty spaces, borders, and holes in the urban fabric[7]. And we sought ways for common individuals, community leaders, researchers, and formally trained architects to come together to create new projects for those spaces, hoping that our work would slice vertically through the complex layers of city-making. All of this—the inquiries and research and relationship-building—was the creative wellspring for the efforts that would engage me for years to come.

Built around a colonial-era village with a stunning pink eighteenth-century church, Petare is home to established informal communities knit together by a dense network of hillside lanes, stairways, arches, and chutes. With a strong social network and cultural connections, it is home to thousands of micro-businesses that recycle materials, make handcrafts, and produce many kinds of food. When we came down from the aerial surveying, we realized we needed to learn about this community if we wanted to understand our city.

A popular tale has it that the mega-slum of Petare was born during the construction of the 23 de Enero Housing Development in the 1950s. Those displaced by the construction were promised new apartments in the eastern Sucre Municipality. But, as one Petare old-timer, Oscar Genaro[8], told us, “When we arrived we found only long grass and snakes.” He and his neighbors built their housing around the cathedral. In the years since, this peripheral site has been enveloped by a city hungry for land. This urbanizing initiative, though it would not be recognized as such by urban planners, created one of the largest communities in Latin America.

Saying that Caracas ran is really giving it too much credit: at this point, it barely sputtered along. The booming Caracas of the 1940s through the 1980s had slowed down and stalled out. In the 1950s, General Marcos Pérez Jiménez had run an ambitious modernization campaign. His government poured millions of liters of concrete into the Caracas valley to modernize the economy and build public works to rival those of North American cities[9]. Jiménez built huge roadways and started grand modernist housing schemes like the 23 de Enero Housing Development[10]. The infrastructure behind Caracas’s boom years also helped to disable it: although the wide boulevards, imported automobiles, and stacked interchanges initially helped facilitate the movement of a new class of entrepreneurs, eventually it made for a city with insane traffic jams, smog, and muggings. For a lucky few, among whom we must include ourselves, there was still a way out of the tangle of the city: the airport.

“In the developing world, the airport still serves the same function as Star Trek’s transporter: it beams you to another universe—or at least up out of whatever mess you are in. ”

You go to the airport, insert yourself into a metal tube, and emerge in a place where life is easier—where tap water was safe to drink, where car jackings never occur, and where automobiles need not be bulletproofed.

Everybody Has an Agenda

In 1998, the Venezuelan people, tired of a two-party regime rife with corruption, whose policies created and perpetuated insupportable social inequalities, voted Hugo Chávez into power. Much more than a just a populist, he was welcomed as a redeemer. His skill at and addiction to the persistent use of media were no small part of the persuasiveness of his message. “Alo Presidente,” his weekly live television program, was reality TV and soap opera at the same time. There was a dark side, of course, that became increasingly disturbing to many Caraqueños, who encountered the militia groups, enforcers of Chávez’s policies, and his “collectivos.” The latter were especially vicious: motorcycle gangs made up of ex-police officers and thugs. Although they were nominally autonomous, there was never any doubt that they were carrying out the government’s policies and edicts, as well as pursuing their own agendas. Among these was Lina Ron, perhaps the most faithful Chavista. Her enforcement of Chavismo was a form of street justice in which laws and lawlessness, far from being antithetical, are conflated.

Lina Ron was, and remains, a legend and folk hero among these gangs who spread terror throughout the city, even among the urban poor of the barrios, who most strongly supported Chávez’s version of socialism. She may not have looked much like an enforcer—short in stature and with masses of dyed blonde hair—but she certainly played the part: roaring into a neighborhood on her unmufflered motorcycle or in a Jeep with no license plates, accompanied by her tough-guy crew who had a penchant for cracking heads. A typical headline in the Caraqueño press of the early-2000s would read “Lina Ron” followed by “shots fired” or “sped away.” In our one encounter with her, she looked exactly as she did in the tabloid photos: red baseball cap, tight top with a low décolletage, a mobile phone wedged between her breasts, and a gun at her hip. She was María Lionza[11] gone rogue. At the height of her fame in 2009, she was symbolically jailed for three months for leading a violent attack on the offices of the pro-opposition television station, Globovisión.

Other fervent Chavistas worked to equal effect within the system, some adamant in their stance, others bending with the prevailing political wind. Even when we enjoyed influential support, our way forward was blocked by the will and power of the party.

Venezuela is an oil-rich state, and Caraqueños love their cars. The post-war building boom included vast ribbons of roadway, including the elevated highways that make Caracas—at least at a distance—resemble Los Angeles. Few roads of any size or condition reach the barrios, whose residents, in any case, very rarely own cars. The city does have a subway system, but given the steep incline of the hills, it stops short of the barrios.

Around the turn of the millennium, the city advanced a scheme to build a roadway to serve the barrio of San Agustín. It was a politically astute choice: close to Caracas’ central business district, with a formal street grid, and, at the time, relatively safe. The project would be an easy, highly visible win for the new Chavez government and a way to demonstrate the fulfillment of campaign promises.

Fortunately, unlike the seizing of private property, major infrastructure projects in Caracas unfold slowly. This gave us time to investigate the impact of the government’s plan and, more important, to spend time with the residents of San Agustín, encouraging them to voice their opinions and to tell us what they did and didn’t want. From their point of view, and ours, a roadway would destroy their community, physically and socially; our research showed that it would obliterate more than thirty percent of the houses in the barrio and tear its fabric in pieces.

The Closer You Get, the Worse the Smell

The beginning of the twenty-first century saw once again the rise of the “strongman”: Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, and—notwithstanding a tripartite arrangement of checks and balances—Donald Trump in the US. They all rose to power as game-changers: Erdoğan championed the increased political participation of observant Muslims; Chávez proclaimed the rights and supremacy of Venezuela’s poorer citizens; Trump announced his intention to “make America great again.” Democracy would triumph.

But ego is a strong incentive. In pursuit of power and acclaim, Chávez steamrolled the opposition, both within Venezuela and in the rest of the world. At the same time, he charmed, at least initially, a large segment of the international Left. The farther one went from Venezuela itself, the easier it was for him to pull the wool over the eyes, especially those of North American and European intellectuals, who saw only what looked like an amazing revolution and a glorious future. For those of us who lived through the early 2000s in Caracas, spending time in left-leaning circles in the US, especially with our Columbia friends in New York, was at best disconcerting. At worst, dinner party conversations turned into shouting matches.

Times have changed, of course, and so have opinions. Under Chávez’s chosen successor, Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela has sunk into a swamp of corruption, mismanagement, and an economy in crisis. The currency is all but worthless, the opposition jailed, and the very people Chavismo was supposed to benefit are rioting against the government. Maduro and his United Socialist Party nonetheless hold onto power by using the authoritarian measures beloved of all strongmen. When all else fails, they follow the example of Chavez: writing a new constitution and sidelining the opposition-controlled legislature. Venezuela has become a pariah among nations.

Despite setbacks, working in Caracas was a useful wake-up call. It raised the fundamental questions that we believe planners and architects must respond to in the 21st century: How does one deal with chaos and with the sudden and unforeseen shifts in the political climate? How do we respond productively to the particulars of time and place and to the problems of population growth and migration? If disorder and antagonism are the status quo, how do we exercise a discipline that imposes order and requires consensus?

We didn’t have all the answers for dealing with the complex political, social, and economic realities of Caracas. But we did learn that, to effect any change at all, our guiding principles must favor integration over analysis, relationships between things over things themselves, growth and change over stasis. Still more important, we recognized that the architect cannot rise above the fray, aloof and in isolation from conditions on the ground. To have any hope of real accomplishment, we must school ourselves in politics, economics, and sociology; we have to understand the forces that propel tectonic shifts in the fabric of a city.

During our years in Caracas, simple survival became an increasingly pressing issue. The economy suffered from hyperinflation and the plunging devaluation of the currency; Venezuela had no budget for quality infrastructure projects. Construction materials grew scarce. Drinking water was more expensive than gasoline, and it was easier to procure a bullet than a roll of toilet paper. Spurious charges we leveled against opposition leaders, who were then jailed, some for years on end. Protests were met with tear gas, bludgeoning, and bullets.

2002 was a watershed year for the city and for us. In April, during mass protests against the Chavez regime, twenty people were killed and more than 110 were wounded. Chavez was removed from office for 47 hours, returning to power stronger than ever. That same year, he “reformed” the national oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA), by appointing political allies to head the company, replacing the board of directors with loyalists with no experience in the oil industry. Whereas the take-over of the Metro Company was politically inconsequential, this seizure led to a two-month strike. The government responded by firing some 19,000 striking employees for abandoning their posts. They were replaced by foreign contractors and the military.

Falling Towers[12]

In the 27th episode of the American television series, “Homeland,” Torre David is emblematic and headquarters of a Latin American, Islamic, narco-terrorist group. That conflation of affiliations is matched in the episode by the juxtaposition of the call to prayer at the largest mosque in Latin America and a mural of a heavily bearded Chávez. In the series, the tower is both refuge and prison for the character of former US Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brady, on the run as a wanted Al-Qaeda terrorist and hiding among the villains in the apocalyptic tower. Once again, Latin Americans around the world went ballistic, as they had over our exhibit. But this time, they had some justification: the parallels between “Homeland” and the real community living in Torre David are superficial at best. Then again, it should be said that “Homeland,” like the telenovelas, is fiction.

As it happens, the real leader of the Torre David community, Alexander “El Niño” Daza, is the clean-cut pastor of an evangelical church located in the complex. Although he occasionally carries a gun, he is more likely to be holding a bible. In his article, “The Real ‘Tower of David’,” Jon Lee Anderson notes that “in ‘Homeland,’ there is no escape from the Tower of David,” while in real life people come and go daily through the gated entrance. In both articles—his earlier one was “Slumlord”—Anderson gives a terrifically insightful and incisive account of the socioeconomic and political drama in which the tower and its inhabitants are enmeshed.

For four years following the Biennale, we persistently, and unsuccessfully, lobbied the central government of Venezuela to allow the Torre David residents to continue to occupy and improve the tower. We even presented our detailed proposal for completing the tower in ways that were appropriate to the community, its limitations and its needs. We had in mind a cooperative housing scheme—essentially what already existed, supplemented by outside support and assistance; but the tower was far too valuable a piece of real estate, given especially its location. And the government of Nicolas Maduro needed to implement Chávez’s “Great Mission Project” of providing public housing for former slum-dwellers, to demonstrate that it was capable of fulfilling its promises.

The notoriety that our exhibit created for Torre David was a two-edged sword: as much as it drew attention to Venezuelan politics and to the plight of the unhoused, it also made it impossible for the government to sit on its hands forever. We knew, and the community knew, that all the visibility and debate would likely lead to eviction. Still, the community leaders hoped that they would not simply be thrown out onto the streets, but relocated to a new—and better—home. Finally, in 2016, the housing authority began moving the Torre David residents. The conditions in the new public housing was indisputably a considerable improvement. But from the point of view of the residents, there are two significant drawbacks. Some of the new locations among which they are now scattered are as much as 70 kilometers from central Caracas. Many of the new developments have no source of jobs, so residents commute daily, having to rise early to catch a 5:30 a.m. train and returning home very late. Still others have no supermarkets or secondary schools.

At least as important for the residents is the loss of community. Over the course of nearly a decade, the squatters, refugees from the barrios, had created order and security. They created their living spaces according to their respective choices and needs. Theirs was a cooperative and communal way of life, something their new neighbors neither knew nor appreciated. They lived in the middle of Caracas, in the midst of the messiness and liveliness they understood. Their lives in Torre David may have been precarious, physically and politically, but the tower was home.

When they are completed, skyscrapers often garner international recognition; their demise is rarely noted. Today, Torre David is empty. The government talks, with misplaced and spurious optimism, about redeveloping it as a cultural office complex. Meanwhile, the country suffers from hyperinflation, food insecurity, lack of medicine, political instability. People are fleeing the country, if they can; they are dying if they can’t. Poverty is endemic. The government’s approaches to the housing crisis—evictions, slum-clearing, relocations—have only exchanged one problem for another. What distinguishes Torre David is its representation of an alternative social reality that was enabled by the very fact of government abandonment and willful neglect.

We believe that the story of Torre David, from ground-breaking to desertion, offers a valuable learning experience. It advises everyone to ignore the simplistic extremes beloved of the media and of critics: we found that the tower is neither a hot-bed of violence and disorder, nor a romantic utopia. It does not represent the good or the bad, what should or should not be—it just is. An empty, incomplete building, it is a constant reminder of a deepening housing crisis, economic breakdown, and the unfulfilled promises of a government more interested in remaining in power than in improving the conditions of the people it purports to represent.

Torre David had the complexity of a city, compressed into an unprecedented, vertical format. It combined formal structure and informal adaptation to provide useful, appropriate solutions to the urban scarcity of space. It defied everything we ever learned about architecture and urbanism. We should not mourn its abandonment. The point was never to preserve what was improvised and destined to be temporary. One building should never be viewed as a panacea or an ideal model for architects to emulate. Everything depends on context—geographic, economic, political, cultural, chronological. The questions are global, the answers are local. There are many Torre David’s scattered around the world. Architects need to study and learn from each of them.

Thinking About The City

For much of the past 20 years, our research and design work has primarily concerned relatively discrete interventions: individual structures, from the vertical gym to Torre David; connective tissue, such as the cable car and the Avenida Lecuna metro; and neighborhoods, like Hoograven and Khayelitsha. But all the while, we were thinking and talking about the city, about what urbanism might mean and be in the 21st century. The rigid separation of formal and informal, planned and ad hoc, wealth and poverty, made no sense to us. Those distinctions are inherently unstable politically, economically, and geographically; marginalization is a social and physical phenomenon, a kind of illness afflicting the civic body.

The disconnect between formal and informal has at least two root causes. One is organic: cities grow outward, like the ripples in a pond when one drops a pebble in the middle. Like the ripples, the encircling neighborhoods grow weaker and less coherent the farther they are from the center. The other cause follows the law of unintended consequences: infrastructure, especially transportation, creates barriers between the haves and the have-nots, in the interest of improving vehicular movement. One sees this especially in the older US cities, like New York and Chicago, but also in the ring roads of cities like Rome, which inhibit migration. Even where public transportation and pedestrian bridges provide access across highways and six-lane boulevards, neighborhoods are still cut off from one another, preventing mingling and sharing.

“Just as we see verticality as a way of addressing the need for more residential space in the barrio, we also believe that the failure of conventional city planning lies in its two-dimensionality, its tendency to think only in a single, horizontal layer.”

At best, one finds an underground metro, connected to but not interlaced with the street level. What if, instead of burrowing underground, we were to build a new city on top of the existing one? What if we made multi-level interconnections, increasing density and relationships? Of course, this is a utopian vision, and we live in the real world. But utopia is like zero-defect manufacturing: you have to act as though it were possible, in order to make any progress at all.

And so we ask: if the city as we know it didn’t exist, what would we invent? “The city was not prepared for the people and the people where not prepared for the city.”[13]

Although the barrios of Caracas have managed themselves, in the absence of local official government, and have done so reasonably well, the fragmentation of the city administration overall is a major obstacle to progress. The authorities operate in a state of perpetual crisis: services and maintenance are lax at best; public employees go for months without pay; having “legitimated” the poor by enabling them to vote, the government continues to ignore poverty itself. The poor have given up on the promise that the barrio would be a way-station to a better life and have settled in for the duration.

The problems besetting the barrios cannot be solved independently of those from which the entire city suffers. Several municipal planning officials each told us independently that no joint projects can be realized among the five municipalities. The sidewalks in one borough terminate at a highway on-ramp in another. When one crosses the line from one municipality to the next, rather than a sign of welcome at the latter, at the boundary of the former one reads, “You are now leaving a secure zone.” Tax revenues are municipality-specific: commercial centres and banks cluster in the smallest municipality, which claims their tax moneys, while other boroughs simply fall apart. Each administration’s mandate is limited to an island within the city; there is no incentive to initiate cooperative endeavours with others. The creation of the Metropolitan District of Caracas[14] with its own mayor has proven an empty gesture.

Many in the various city governments are people of good will, but the ostensibly insurmountable obstacles in the path of change and improvement have defeated them. Most significantly, they lack the skills and knowledge to analyse and address the innumerable management, technical, and social problems they face; at best, they conduct a holding operation, trying to keep chaos at bay.

The View From Here

When we were still based in Caracas, we wrote what we called the No Manifesto. We were angry, disappointed, maybe disillusioned as well. The political and social conditions in Venezuela were intolerable, and we called for resistance and change by our colleagues. We embraced the notion of the architect-activist, but everywhere we saw obstacles the impeded transformation and progress.

Today, we have a complicated perspective. To be sure, conditions in Caracas are worse than ever with a 10,000,000 % inflation rate. There are two paths Venezuela can go down, one, an optimistic path of political transition with economic stability and the other a more realistic one of total collapse and dysfunction. But elsewhere in Latin America, as in cities and countries around the world, we see reasons for hope There is a tremendous amount of work to be done and as yet no broad consensus about how to shape the future. Nevertheless, I believe in that future, and I believe that architects must take the lead. Even If I have moved, in practice and in principle, from the margins of Caracas to the center of the world, I took Caracas with me; Caracas is everywhere, and we all are global architects.

[1] see Andrés Sosa Pietri, Venezuela y El Petróleo, Editorial La Galaxia, Caracas 2002

[2] Le Club is a high society bar created by El Catire Fonseca.

[3] Of course, honking is not exclusive to Caracas. In Mumbai and Delhi, for instance, it’s not only deafening, but actually required.

[4] In a much-cited experiment, a frog is placed in room-temperature water which is then heated gradually until it reaches a boil. Because the rise in temperature is consistent and slow, the frog doesn’t notice the impending danger and, instead of trying to escape, sits quietly until it is boiled to death.

[5] co-author of Premio Nacional de Investigacion en Vivienda. Caracas, 2008.

[6] See the Caracas Slum Upgrading Project, http://web.mit.edu/urbanupgrading/upgrading/case-examples/ce-VE-car.html.

[7] These areas, defined by Catalan architect and theorist Ignasi de Solà-Morales as terrain vague, are shifting entities that respond to a variety of internal and external pressures. They are places where top-down meets bottom-up and vice versa.

[8] Oscar Genaro was introduced to us by Teolinda Bolívar.

[9] Among those works in the U.S. were such initiatives as Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System and huge public housing projects like Chicago’s infamous Cabrini-Green. In New York City, Robert Moses’ urban renewal scheme required the razing of an entire district of tenement houses and the displacement of its residents for the construction of Lincoln Center.

[10] Originally named Urbanización 2 de Diciembre for the date of Jiménez’s coup, it was completed and renamed by his successor for the date of the former’s removal from office.

[11] María Lionza, the central figure in the Venezuelan religion that blends African, indigenous, and Catholic beliefs, is revered as a goddess of nature, love, peace, and harmony.

[12] T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land,” 1922: What is the city over the mountains/ Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air/ Falling towers/ Jerusalem Athens Alexandria/ Vienna London/ Unreal.

[13] Luc Eustache, CAMEBA Project Architect, Informal Conference UCV/CCSTT, 2003

[14] Special Law for Metropolitan District .Oficial Publication No. 36.906 ( Regimen del Distrito Metropolitano de Caracas Gaceta Oficial)

Simon Nielsen 6/6/22 Simon Nielsen 6/6/22

Leveraging Collaboration and Digital Technology to Solve Africa's Food Challenges

“The advent and growth of technology have enabled the transformation of traditional membership groups into online communities and platforms like Nourishing Africa to flourish. According to GSMA Intelligence, a source of mobile industry insights, more than half of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa had access to 4G network by the end of 2020.” Nourishing Africa is building a vast community of young agri-food entrepreneurs and works hard to secure a stronger, more sustainable, and resilient Africa.

By Henry Dieto & Nourishing Africa

Across the African continent, there are millions of small to medium scale agriculture and food businesses run by dynamic and resilient entrepreneurs, whom we call agripreneurs. According to a study by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), these agripreneurs contribute to the production of over 80% of the food we consume on the continent. Despite this, they face many internal and external challenges in an ever-changing environment.

David Mbuta, 36, returned to his native Zambia in 2015 after many years in South Africa and Australia, where he studied Information Technology (IT). He saw technology as a pathway to solving his community’s challenges, ranging from poverty, to food insecurity, to limited technological know-how. To him, these challenges have prevented Africa from realising its full potential despite being revered as the most naturally-resourced continent globally.

It was no surprise that he chose self-employment to the alluring opportunities his undergraduate and graduate degrees could offer him in the developing country. His passion for e-commerce, food, agriculture and logistics led him to his first venture, Ubuntu Meal Delivery Services, an experimental project that began in a tiny guest house before growing to become one of the most popular and sought after on-demand meal delivery platforms in Zambia's capital, Lusaka.

***Photo:*** *David Mbuta (L) receiving agricultural produce for cold storage and transportation from a Zambian farmer.* ***Source:*** *David Mbuta*

David would later establish Cold Storage Zambia to help smallholder farmers cut down their post-harvest losses. The agribusiness offers affordable solar-powered pay-as-you-go cold storage and transportation services.

"We realised farmers incurred many losses when transporting their produce from the farm. Financial constraints meant they had no choice other than to use transport services that operated like silos," he says.

David's success has not come easy. His first business, Ubuntu Meal Delivery Services, almost collapsed in its formative years because of limited finances and his lack of adequate skills to run the business. In establishing Cold Storage Zambia in 2020, David joined farmer groups and communities, which he credits as central to the survival of his new venture.

Another critical community to Africa's agriculture and food ecosystem is Nourishing Africa, a digital knowledge and membership hub focused on supporting African agri-food entrepreneurs to scale their businesses through collaborative models, peer-to-peer support, and provision of critical resources and tools and opportunities. Through the platform, agripreneurs like David access funding and capacity building opportunities, essential data and reports, information about events, e-learning resources, media showcase opportunities, and mentorship. The Hub also serves as a platform for them to accelerate their work, connect, and celebrate their successes on the continent.

The advent and growth of technology have enabled the transformation of traditional membership groups into online communities and platforms like Nourishing Africa to flourish. According to GSMA Intelligence, a source of mobile industry insights, more than half of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa had access to 4G network by the end of 2020; the very same year Nourishing Africa was founded, leveraging the power of technology to break geographical barriers that had previously prevented African entrepreneurs from working together towards the continent's unmet needs.

***Photo:*** *The Nourishing Africa hub enables African agripreneurs to connect and access the latest funding and capacity building opportunities, among other resources, to scale their businesses.* ***Source:*** *Nourishing Africa*

Ify Umunna, Co-CEO of Nourishing Africa, explains how communities are vital to the lives of SMEs in Africa. "Communities like Nourishing Africa are knowledge hubs, markets, funding sources, and the go-to places for any SME that wants to scale. They are critical to many aspects of growing a business in today's world. Failing to subscribe to a group where you can learn from peers exposes you to avoidable failures and blocks you from so many rewarding opportunities," she says.

Ify explains the importance of young entrepreneurs like David, who are in the agricultural sector, working towards scaling their businesses to solve Africa's challenges on a larger scale. "We must encourage African youth to see Africa's food challenges as opportunities. That's the only way to build sustainable, profitable and innovative businesses that have the potential to see us being food secure. At the same time, we must ensure that this sector is attractive to young people who thrive in change and innovation, which are not looking to do things the same way their forefathers did."

Ify's sentiments on unlocking Africa's potential and David's story on the power of a digital community point to the continent's dire need to use innovations to spur socio-economic development and accelerate its journey toward achieving the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The continent's push for youth inclusion in critical areas such as agriculture and private and public sector support for new innovations spearheaded by these young people are positive signs of a stronger, resilient, and more sustainable Africa.

Simon Nielsen 6/1/22 Simon Nielsen 6/1/22

Pro-Tip: Start Using “-Ing Lists”

“In rich environments, people are interacting with the environment and transforming it with their own actions – moving a chair into the sun, doing a chalk painting, posting a flier, bringing their own chessboard, etc. Our built environments are a result of this constant interaction between the social context and spatial conditions.” Phil Myrick, global placemaking leader, shares a tip on how to create meaningful places.

“In rich environments, people are interacting with the environment and transforming it with their own actions – moving a chair into the sun, doing a chalk painting, posting a flier, bringing their own chessboard, etc. Our built environments are a result of this constant interaction between the social context and spatial conditions.” Phil Myrick, global placemaking leader, shares a tip on how to create meaningful places.

By Phil Myrick, global placemaking leader

There’s a UPS ad campaign right now that asks “Can you believe all the ings we can fit under one roof?” It goes on to explain all the things you can do at UPS, like pack-ing, mailbox-ing, fax-ing, copy-ing, and so on. I’ve worked on several design teams over the years where my particular niche is to develop the space program that informs the design of a place. One question I always ask is, How many “ings” can we fit into this design? And that gets me started on creating an -ing list.

An -ing list is my way to center planning and design around a program of activities. It’s a method that draws a team into a deeper investigation of how people will use a space – and it’s a great predictor of how active that space will be. It gets us away from focusing too much on form – at least long enough to really explore the project in terms of its function, or program.

Creating places for people

If you look at the most active people environments, you’ll find they usually have the widest selection of things you can do in the space. Is it really that surprising that the kitchen is the room where we by far spend the most time at home? Of all our rooms, our kitchens have the longest -ing list, including cook-ing, eat-ing meals, eat-ing snacks, drink-ing, mak-ing coffee, wash-ing dishes, sitt-ing, socializ-ing, unload-ing groceries, work-ing at the kitchen table, and more. What other room in the house offers such a rich menu of activities to such a broad spectrum of people?

Ecological psychologists use the term “behavior setting” – the idea that people recognize specific settings in their environment for their utility, and this is a basic way we navigate the world. When we see certain things grouped together in a space, we know what it’s good for. So, you see a stove and some cabinets and counters and a fridge – your brain registers that as a kitchen, and you categorize it internally along with all the other kitchens you’ve ever seen. You instantly know what you can do in the space. Now, if the cabinets and counters were in a room without the fridge and stove, then we might be confused by the room’s design, or we might classify it as a completely different behavior setting, perhaps a workshop.

The power of this idea is that it links physical spaces with behaviors, as well as meanings that people carry around with them – some of which are mostly universal (everyone agrees on what kitchens are good for), and some of which are personal/cultural meanings and memories.

Placemaking and design

In the early stages of an urban planning or design project I spend lots of time developing -ing lists to think about how to create experiences and active settings within the project site – whether it’s a public park, a main street, a campus, or a retail environment.

I like to identify key audiences (are you serving mostly young college students, neighborhood residents, office workers?), and then develop an -ing list for each. Lots of the -ing list ideas come from stakeholder meetings and workshops. The initial -ing lists should be long. Have you considered children and the elderly? Are people of different income levels accommodated? Are there opportunities for people to be alone as well as in groups?

You can then start to cluster items from your -ing lists into places, and bring the design back in to conceptualize truly engaging experiences (behavior settings). At this point I make sure to combine activities that will draw diverse audiences together.

Things get even more interesting when we begin to layer in more social content – communing, exchanging knowledge, educating, building environmental awareness. In other words, this exercise can put us in direct contact with higher goals and outcomes. Thus, for some clients it can be very rewarding to use this process early in their planning process.

In rich environments, people are interacting with the environment and transforming it with their own actions – moving a chair into the sun, doing a chalk painting, posting a flier, bringing their own chessboard, etc. Our built environments are a result of this constant interaction between the social context and spatial conditions.

Decades of culture in a place brings additional meaning, as layers and layers of built features and memories accrete. It’s one reason that walking down Main Street, or along a street in SoHo is so much more soulful than a new retail development – even one that’s well-done.

The -ing list for Main Street will be quite complex and although commercial developers may attempt to reproduce the experience in a private retail environment, such as a mall, they carry over only a fraction of the -ing list to this simulated environment. You could say the term “strip mall” pertains very much to the stripping away of behaviors, and therefore of richness.

Occasionally I will see an urban space that looks to me not at all special or rich, but then I find out that a group of men gathers there daily for hours to play dominoes and talk – the social content is rich even if the physical setting is not.

When we match the social and behavioral content to a physical setting we create places of meaning. And each individual will add their own cultural interpretations so that although people may share some of the same experiences in a place, there will also be vastly different experiences for each person based on their own stories, backgrounds, and beliefs.

Pretty amazing how far an -ing list can take you!

More on how I work with -ing lists in planning and design:

Goal-setting and Visioning

· Consider the goals of the client, the goals of the community, and the site. After many deep conversations you will arrive at a vision statement. This is not a simple task.

· Identify key audiences and develop some basic user personas – are you serving mostly young college students, neighborhood residents, office workers? All of the above?

· Ask underlying questions relating to functional aspects of achieving this vision and solving these problems: Collect and analyze data, including contextual information about local cultural values, history, and markets. Do additional site reconnaissance.

· Identify form-related goals of the client and community – the high-level characteristics that will lead how the site and its context are treated from a design standpoint.

· Revisit your vision, break it down into sub-goals or themes. Fit in site-specific and environmental characteristics.

Preliminary programming

· Create an -ing list under each theme. What are people doing under each theme? Be generous, refer to your meeting notes with the client and community. The -ing lists should be long.

· Evaluate your -ing list by audiences – have you considered children and the elderly? Are people of different income levels accommodated? Are there opportunities for people to be alone as well as in groups?

· Cluster your -ing lists into places that consist of engaging experiences. Be sure to combine activities that will draw diverse audiences together.

Program concept development

· Test these abstract place ideas with the real-world context. Make them more concrete by matching them to specific locations and environmental characteristics. What are the space requirements? What are the management requirements, and do they fall within the capability of the client? Are there opportunities to bring in other partners?

· Once you have mapped some places that you think have real possibility, think about adjacencies, linkages and flow between them and the surrounding context, including important natural features. Evaluate existing and potential circulation patterns, entrances, and drivers of traffic. Do several user journey maps for different types of audiences (user personas), and arrange your places in ways that increase enjoyment and explorability.

· Finalize your program in a program diagram and with narrative text describing the detailed experience of each space and subspace. Add details about comfort and amenities; consider the need for flexible spaces that can hold events. Add any design criteria that are important to its function (e.g. shade, water, seating types, etc.).

Design Development proceeds from here.

Simon Nielsen 5/30/22 Simon Nielsen 5/30/22

Grief And Other Poems

“To stay alive, is a true miracle .” Shi Tao, a journalist, writer and poet, was sentenced to imprisonment for 10 years in 2005 for releasing a document of the Communist Party to an overseas Chinese democracy site after Yahoo! China provided his personal details to the Chinese government.

By Shi Tao with Independent Chinese PEN Center

Grief

I forget all languages

to start with a simplest word

memory is like a lamp in a slave’s hands

I am kneeing down before it to beg it everlasting

the dark night is approaching inch by inch

I have to make a living before daybreak

no message about ships anchored at piers

only a type of sea breeze blowing to my face

its taste is called

grief

Poetry

I, with my senile hand,

write down the sufferings:

gun in ears

salt in spit

and

gold upon hair

Afternoon, My Afternoon

afternoon, my afternoon

my own afternoon alone

I was smoking, and drinking tea

hands were dancing

the whole face was

an empty

stage

with blood colour

Song of the World

the fat head

of a strawberry is filled with

dreams of colourful clouds

(men stuffed in

a dreaming scene of Salvador Dali)

a book about Egyptian deceased souls

characters in the book

still have warmth on their skins

(I stretched out one withered finger

to touch my iced face)

oh, this world

it is full of enemies of the dead

and Song of the World chanted by enemies

Bad News

wheels torn to shreds

were parking

at the silent night

bad news

like cold spell, carelessly

kept away from body warmth

from cancer wards to

my ears

so many eyes

were making the same hint

what’s been spoken, is merely

”speaking”, a shell in mirror

To stay alive, is a true miracle

Evening’s Coming

eyes are the guests of evening.

food left dining table

to participate in a walking game

thoughts of snow-geese

lost in a spacious stomach somewhere else

dark night was reproducing dark lives

Reading

whose sights

cast farther

than bats in dark night?

whose life

is more broad and straight

than a ladybug covered with stains?

whose sufferings

are more hopeless

than a lonely pine tree at hill top?

crows at the altar are driven out of cemetery of the night

Freedom

that voice is right in my mouth

in my stomach

among the food undigested last night

between the fingers

putting into throat to cause vomits

in the sink

disgusting with mouth cleaning

in the abyss of a pipe stretching to

far away, in a pond by accident

leaked out

in the cruel palms of hungry

wild geese, in the whirls flying up the sky

but encounter cold current

in hard stone-crevices colliding with cliffs

in a warm nest somewhere else

with moisture of saliva, once again

slide into smooth stomach

in a clot of bird droppings flying over fields and villages

flying over cross-country cars on freeway

in the square, air-dried, bringing protestors in

along with rolling traffic

within the speech, plugged with power, shocked and

amplified---

its name is freedom

---from “Letters to the Dead Souls”

April 8-11, 2004, Taiyuan

Original texts in Chinese can be found here.

(Translated by CHEN Biao)

For My Daughter and Another

For One Song and a Hundred Songs

Practical step 1: Magnify stories of people being welcoming

Practical step 2: Hold well-publicized welcome events

When you hear complaints

Introduction

Publish or perish?

What are our disciplines?

Working together?

Where do we work?

Where do we do our research?

What do we study?

The Big Five?

Institutions for collective action?

Too local?

Between the market and the state?

The design principles?

Only case studies?

New commons?

Traditions & trends?

Consequences for our editorial policy?

Future analysis?

Notes

Acknowledgements

Competing Interests

References

Informal Capital

If Architecture is Frozen Music, Urbanism is Frozen Politics

The Code of No Code

Non Transit

Restoring the Ruins of Modernity

Caracas: A 21st Century Cold War City

Everybody Has an Agenda

The Closer You Get, the Worse the Smell

Falling Towers[12]

Thinking About The City

The View From Here

Creating places for people

Placemaking and design

More on how I work with -ing lists in planning and design:

Grief

Poetry

Afternoon, My Afternoon

Song of the World

Bad News

Evening’s Coming

Reading

Freedom

The Empty Square