El tya’k’iñ, o “Caca del Sol” ¿Por qué el dinero no remunera socialmente?

The urban manager has a thankless task. Pushed and pulled in many directions, the problems he or she faces are interconnected and the role involves a series of intractable strategic dilemmas in matching individual desires with political, social and budgeting priorities. The urban manager’s problems include the following:

I Everyone wants a car, but without reinventing what a car is, the problem of pollution can only increase – not to mention ambient pollution like light, noise, traffic jams and parking problems.

I Developers’ demands can result in skyscrapers blocking out light or distorting historic townscapes.

I Lack of resources and carelessness can lead to degraded natural landscapes with earth submerged under miles of asphalt.

I Effluents souring the air or poisoning the water supply – the environmental list could go on.

As the city bursts out of its original confines, a response becomes almost impossible: in Manila just getting into and out of the suburbs can be an eight-hour round trip. Such extra stresses and burdens are largely borne by the worst-off who cannot afford to live near centres of activity. Such frustrations with poverty and unemployment can breed hopelessness, unfulfilled expectations, and boredom can change whole areas into ghettos with self-rein-forcing cycles of deprivation. Meanwhile the rich create their own ghettos, like Forbes in Manila, to protect themselves from the perceived or real threat of the poor. If this becomes more extreme in some areas than others, an increasing separation develops between the middle classes and employed working classes and those whom we now call the ‘socially excluded’, as is evident in large British cities like London, Manchester or Newcastle.

In areas like Queens or Brooklyn in New York, the favellas of Brazil and the townships of South Africa it is often the strongest or most violent who take hold. This collapse of established order can suffocate the generation of a civil society and independent action 26 Urban Groundshifts

from which many creative solutions may grow. Yet there are exam-ples across the world to show how even from such hotbeds of possible disintegration come positive answers. In almost all of these places are hard-working community leaders, youth workers, priests, men and women of vision who, given the opportunity and support, could begin to address their problems. But such possibili-ties are stifled by entrenched interests, inflexible bureaucracies, corruption or maladministration. When control lies in the hands of Urban Problems, Creative Solutions 27

L

, N

Y

, USA

The increasing loss of traditional community makes intergenera-tional understanding crucial for settled urban life. Elderly people have often lost employment, income, respect and authority and become isolated in cities. For over a decade the Elders Share the Arts (ESTA) project in Brooklyn, New York has been doing inter-generational work linking cultures and generations, its largest growth area, with astonishing results. One project is called ‘Why Vote?’. It brings together students from Brooklyn Congregational High School and seniors from the Bushwick Community Roundtable Senior Centre in a collaborative effort to create a play about voter education. The play, a series of songs and mono-logues, contrasts the history of voter education in the struggle for the right to vote in the rural South to urban apathy today. All the material is based on life experiences with elders and the young sharing true stories researched from authentic sources.

The Pearls of Wisdom are a group of older storytellers in ESTA selected by their communities to gather stories and tell them to others. The Pearls tour widely in New York City asking questions like ‘what is community?, how do you define it?, how do you make it viable?’. In their recent ‘Learning to see’ project a group of seniors and young people each drew a map of their neigh-bourhood contrasting the places that provided special meaning to them: the doctor’s surgery for one group, the video store and school for the other. Discussing their area they drew a composite map as part of a visioning exercise about the changes they wanted to see in the neighbourhood and which they then lobbied for.

Contact: www.elderssharethearts.org Source: Creative Communities

narrow interests and the public good falls prey to private greed the very solution causes further problems.

Since 1970 many cities have seen the arrival of large popula-tions from other parts of the world, sometimes at a pace which has bred insecurity, fear and racism in the original community. In other cases the sheer number of incomers has left them adrift in a new environment without a sense of place or identity, particularly where migrants have been catapulted from rural life into an advanced industrial society. Citizens of the North have experienced similarly rapid change as a result of recent technological advances. In this world, traditions – even those newly invented – are a backbone of healthy survival, but attention to cultural identity and expression is the last thing on the urbanization agenda. How individuals adapt, negotiate and make choices are cultural questions. In the past our cultural and social values had time to develop and mature; today, the pace of change can overwhelm people and lead to reactive, impulsive responses.

Finally, it must be possible to entrust governance to those directly affected. Outsourcing problem-solving leads to unsustain-able solutions because the essential learning process has not been 28 Urban Groundshifts

E

, M

, F

Small settlements like Mikkeli in Finland have been left outside recyclable waste collection schemes, because of the high costs, yet the region has set stringent objectives for waste recycling: 70 per cent of the waste is supposed to be utilized. The central idea is brilliantly simple: waste paper from households in sparsely populated areas should be collected by the postman. The purpose of the pilot project was to discover its logistical possibil-ities and how much paper waste could be recovered. Each household was given a cloth bag, which was taken from next to the mailbox once a week.

The pilot project was successful at the time of reporting: it seems that it is possible to recover almost 80 per cent of waste paper, and the system could be suitable for collecting other kinds of recyclable and re-usable waste. The main problem is cost.

Mikkeli does not yet pay for the services of the Post as the profit from the collected paper is not yet sufficient.

Source: Hall and Landry, 1997

understood. The primacy of education, of self-help and of working from within the community is self-apparent.

In this maelstrom stands the urban manager, generically identi-fied as a land use planner although these challenges involve overlapping issues. Some cities have mechanisms for integrated responses through joint decision-making structures or mixed teams, but most address problems individually. Employment, education, housing, crime, social welfare, health and culture are inextricably entwined, particularly since what people believe – for instance about crime – may be affecting their behaviour more than the reality.

Housing and land use present some of the most intractable problems. How well is the housing stock standing up? Is there enough? And are there sufficient resources to maintain quality?

There are endless negotiations from individual house extensions to major housing and retailing developments or changes in patterns of use. At one time, industry was considered dirty, and indeed created high levels of air and water pollution, with the result that there were environmental health reasons for keeping work, living and leisure segregated, but this is no longer always the case. The transi-tion from manufacturing to services brings new urban Urban Problems, Creative Solutions 29

I

: D