DISTRESS ROAD TOURS: BUILDING EMPATHY ONE CONVERSATION AT A TIME Wes Janz Department of Architecture Ball State University Muncie, Indiana USA wjanz@bsu.edu Olon Dotson Department of Architecture Ball State University Muncie, Indiana USA odotson@bsu.edu
Abstract The Rust Belt is a place of extremes. There is too much crime and too little neighborhood organization. High drop out rates lead to low incomes. Poor access to health care exists alongside easy access to low nutrition foods. While differences occur, these conditions can be compared to the informality and poverty typically associated with Africa, Latin America, and Asia. What is most relevant is that people living difficult lives remain, whether in Johannesburg, Buenos Aires, Mumbai … or Detroit. As educators, we feel a responsibility to connect our students with those who stay. We do this because the students have little awareness of our most determined citizens. We do this to build empathy in our young people. And we do this one conversation at a time in order to humanize our profession. We explore realities and potentials in multiple venues. Two six-day road trips were conducted--the Midwess Distress Tour (2006) and Distress Too Tour (2008). Along the way, urban pioneers introduced themselves: Grace (Detroit), Antoine (Indianapolis), Michael (Camden), Brian and Rhonda (Flint), Myra (East St. Louis), Hunter (Youngstown), Louis (Pittsburgh), and Violet (Philadelphia). A “Fourth World” seminar considers disparities that were, are, and always will be present for the “other.” To better focus our colleagues in the department of architecture, we recently authored an undergraduate minor and a graduate certificate program in social and environmental justice. And one of us constructed the first permanent structure in the U.S. to be authorized with a building permit and built almost exclusively with pallets--a material system inspired by self-builders worldwide. As we offer these journeys for consideration, we stand by our efforts to open the economic foundation of the architecture profession to broader social and cultural influences, as we reveal more meaningful work for our students. Keywords Empathy, Rust Belt, post-industrial, [r]evolution, abandonment
Michael ... Camden New Jersey, October 2008. We found Michael Orange sitting on the stoop leading to the only intact block of brick row houses we had observed in the entire city of Camden. As we approached, he leaped to his feet and stood his ground in a defensive yet salutary posture. Upon inquiring about why the block (Mechanic Street between 4 th and Broadway) appeared to be in better condition than its surrounding context - a context of utter physical devastation - he responded, talking loud. “Do you know where you are? DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE? You’re in the heart of Camden. YOU’RE ON THE WORST BLOCK IN THE WORST CITY IN THE UNITED STATES!” Our acknowledgement --“Yes, we understand” -- fueled a rapid fire exchange: his ten years in the Army, an eight-year prison hitch on his resumé, three brothers murdered here, another claimed by cancer, and the goose bumps he gets while describing Camden, which he demonstrated. A thought: If this man scares himself describing his neighborhood, how afraid should we be? Trained to “walk point” (the front position of a military foot patrol, sometimes drawing enemy fire) helped his survival. Soon, Michael’s mother returned. She climbed up the stairs, then executed a 180° pivot to back through the front door. Eyes scanning, she walked point into her home. Everybody but us was walking point. As we stepped off, Michael said: “There’s serious creatures here, in these buildings. Don’t be fooled.” ---------The Rust Belt is the colloquial name given to the scarred landscape that stretches from central New York State, eastern Pennsylvania, and western New Jersey westward across the coal mining industry’s mountain top removal in West Virginia, what little remains of abandoned steel mills in Ohio and Indiana, some of the country’s largest toxic landscapes in Michigan where “The Big Three” auto plants once hummed, to Illinois and into Wisconsin. This region, along with the most remote cities of the former Soviet Union and parts of Eastern and Central Europe, is one of the three areas on the planet considered to be the site of “shrinking cities” – dense metropolitan areas that have experienced significant population loss. In an earlier installment and for several earlier generations, the Rust Belt was known as the industrial heartland of America. However, industry declined in (and departed from) the region starting in the mid-20th century, set in motion by the transfer of manufacturing to low wage workforces in other regions of the U.S. and the world, increased automation, the decline of the labor union movement, white flight, and the institutionalization of racial discrimination. Many of the country’s most influential companies founded there now flounder there (if they remain) – among them Campbell’s Soup (Camden, New Jersey), United States Steel (Pittsburgh and Braddock, Pennsylvania and Gary, Indiana), General Motors (Detroit and Flint, Michigan), Bethlehem Steel (Youngstown, Ohio), and the long gone Cramp’s shipyard and Baldwin Locomotive Works (in Philadelphia, formerly the “Workshop of the World”). Today, these are cities with worn out infrastructures, architectures, and residents. The people who remain do so in places no longer of interest unless your curiosities include (in alphabetical order): abandonment, arson, bankruptcy, broken public school systems, chronic unemployment, corruption, declining tax base, demolition, despair, drop-out rates, early death, environmental justice issues, fear, felonies, food deserts, foreclosures, historic segregation, homicide, “most dangerous cities in the U.S.,” nihilism, political scandal, prostitution, receivership, ruin porn, sideways drift, and vacancy.
Some cities and lives are in the process of adapting or have adapted to these new realities -including Michael Orange and his mother walking point -- while many others seemingly have not. In the 2012 book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, Chris Hedges & Joe Sacco profile four such American landscapes. According to Hedges, “These are sacrifice zones, areas that have been destroyed for quarterly profit. And we’re talking about environmentally destroyed, communities destroyed, human beings destroyed, families destroyed.” Camden caught the authors’ attention, again quoting Hedges: “It’s a dead city… There’s nothing left. There is no employment. Whole blocks are abandoned. The only thing functioning are open-air drug markets, of which there are about a hundred. And you’re talking third or fourth generation of people trapped in these internal colonies. They can’t get out.” ---------Myra … Once upon a time, East St. Louis, Illinois was a boomtown (the memory feels like a fairy tale). Then, it was home to Armour and Swift stockyards and meatpacking plants, with bustling brewing and baking industries across the river. In 2006 and again in 2009 we saw widespread vacancy and boarding, with ruins of houses not hauled away, some bounded by chain link fences, but more commonly open and available for scavenge and use as playgrounds for small, unsupervised children. These are house piles … houses so long abandoned that nature is pulling them back to the earth. In 2012 we returned and met Myra Coates, who led a volunteer effort to clean up the longgone Booker T. Washington Cemetery in nearby Centreville. Dedicated in 1903, the cemetery was once one of the only places African-Americans in St. Clair County could be buried. It holds the remains of 5,000 former slaves, veterans, and over 500 babies that died in a flu epidemic in the 1940s. Untended for decades, it became a dumping ground. We observed tires, appliances, and auto parts that had been indiscriminately tossed over the memories of loved ones, in a place historically defined by discrimination. Myra got involved. And she took us there, dedicated to her work, the families of those interred, and to common decency. "We have to do something,” added Jen Barr of nearby Belleville. “As humanity, something has to be done.” ---------The language of educators and education administrators is rich in titles for learning experiences outside the classroom: critically responsive community-based learning, directed field excursions, higher education ethics learning, incorporated experience, and social pedagogy in action among them. We prefer something simpler: road tour. We prefer 8-person vans to the conventions of the classroom. Starting up conversations on the sidewalk to lectures from a podium. Chats, not lectures. Maybe most importantly, we prefer empathy to sympathy. That is, we advocate for understanding over pity. Being on the road and being open to what we find and where we find ourselves foregrounds the people we meet. We initiate conversations, gain insights, thrust outside our comfort zones. We put people at the center of our work as architects and architecture professors.
This is counter to the values of much of the architecture profession and, it must be said, of schools of architecture in the U.S., and probably in most of the world. Because it is an economic creation, the profession of architecture (and its practitioners) most appreciates glamour and profit. Humans are dehumanized as concerns for per-square-meter costs, billable hours, occupant loads, and facility “users” are central. In addition, most architects are drawn to the material aspects of building; concerns for social or environmental justice -- for people -- are often secondary if considered at all. In our work, we consider people to be the primary source of our inspiration. We start with an individual, with one person. This is our simple idea: to extend a hand person-to-person and face-to-face. To offer our name, listen to the response, and know some one on a first name basis. And to ask: does this knowing matter to our work as architectural educators and architects? ---------John … Braddock was alive, 1875, in Pittsburgh’s shadow. This borough, then, was home to Andrew Carnegie’s first steel mill and the first Carnegie Library opened there in 1889. In the 1920s, the population was 20,000+. Today it is 2,000. Now, it is place gone, a place that was. Braddock is notable for being among the first to go. According to Mayor John Fetterman, by 2008 Braddock had “lost 90% of everything it once was and remains in a rapidly deteriorating state of disrepair.” Allegheny County’s poorest community also had the highest asthma rate in the region, maybe the country. Fetterman spoke directly: Braddock is “gentrification proof.” “How do you create something sustainable within a community that is not?” “We’re making the most of the hand that we’ve been dealt.” When asked what success in Braddock looks like, Fetterman said he’s not interested in “success or failure . . . [Braddock] is a work in progress with certain milestones . . . the only metric [is to reduce] the number of homicides to zero as a way to measure improvement in quality of life.” Among the mayor’s teachings was a new point of view: “Destruction Breeds Creation. Create Amidst Destruction.” John gave us a tour. 12:50, a new one-hectare urban garden. 13:06, conversion of an abandoned school and office building to live/work spaces, a 250-square-meter flexible space, and the city’s only downtown gallery. 13:11, building materials once destined for the landfill reconfigured as an outdoor oven for baking herb-spiced breads & pizzas and hosting open-air book readings. 13:13, thirty-eight trees planted by the Regent Square Civic Association. 13:36, “The Pond” mosaic by a local sculptor and local teenagers employed by the Braddock Youth Project. 13:41, John’s home, downtown, is a warehouse conversion, with a $2,000 purchase price, and living quarters placed on the roof and housed in two shipping containers. It takes less than one hour to appreciate the smallness of Fetterman’s approach. Leaving, we ask: “What do you need help with? What would you like us to work on?” Staying, John replies: “I’m not in a position to ask anyone to do anything. You tell me what you want to do, what you think needs to happen, and we can probably help you make that happen.” Asking ourselves, what should be done in a place where a mosaic, a grove, an oven are the answers, the solutions? Can we think this small? Act this small? Maybe the best questions are: Why get involved? Is there a role for architects in the Rust Belt? ----------
Looking back, it was the Midwess Distress Tour of 2006 that changed us, that changed our work as architects and as the educators of architectural thinkers. Conditions we saw in Detroit and Flint, Michigan; Gary, Indiana; Chicago and East St. Louis, Illinois: and Cincinnati, Ohio were more distressed than we could have ever imagined, lives being lived were more difficult than we anticipated, and many of the people who remained … well … they were still there. And that too was a revelation, to come to know individuals who did not leave, flee, or give up, who lived in the worst neighborhoods in the most dangerous cities in our country. As we built trust in each other and belief in our endeavors, another road trip was conducted in 2008. The Distress Too Tour visited Cleveland, Columbus, and Youngstown, Ohio; Braddock, Philadelphia, Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Camden, New Jersey. One hour after our group met with Michael Orange in Camden we were in downtown Philadelphia at Independence Hall, seeing the cracked Liberty Bell and reading about the Declaration of Independence as it was debated and adopted at this place on July 4, 1776, just yards from the excavated foundations of George Washington’s slave quarters. This most revered of documents in our nation’s history reads as follows: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” That day, and every day since, we wonder about Orange’s life, his liberty, and his pursuit of happiness. In the intervening years, we’ve led and taken dozens of additional road trips: to the Gulf Coast region five times since Hurricane Katrina, at least ten trips to Detroit, driving tours through the Deep South, two weeks in India and Sri Lanka, and more. We’ve expanded our agenda to include local officials, scholars, and architecture firms along our way. Professor Dotson offers a seminar titled “Fourth World Theory” and Dr. Janz teaches an “Architects of Hope” class. Both have offered design studio projects that were sited in Detroit and Flint, Michigan; East St. Louis, Illinois; and Gary, Indiana. Recent graduate thesis projects done under our care include: Sarah Aldroubi’s “Adaptable Refugee Camps for Women and Children”; “The Potential of the Forgotten” by Veronica Eulacio; Jesse McClain and “Actively Outside”; David Vallandingham’s “Homeless, Not Hopeless”; and “Untying the Veiled Knot: A place for change in the domestic service industries in Dubai, UAE” by Mary Walgamuth. Work is well underway that features critical scholarship, design studio courses, and conference presentations even as we are currently adding an undergraduate minor and graduate certificate program in Social and Environmental Justice to our department’s curriculum. And, as appropriate, we build, including construction of the first permanent structure in the U.S. to be authorized with a building permit and formed almost exclusively with timber pallets -- a material system inspired by self-builders. As we offer these journeys, outcomes, and imaginings for consideration, we stand by our efforts to open the economic foundation of the architecture profession to broader social and environmental influences, as we reveal more meaningful, empathetic work for our students. ----------
Keith … there’s an open jar of peanut butter on the porch’s top step, a white plastic knife the marker of a man disappeared mid-meal. Maybe he’s always mid-meal. Or between meals. Shopping carts, blue and red, nestle to the bottom step. Plastic milk crates, one upside down supports the peanut butter place setting. Blankets hang in the porch’s openings. 417 Second Avenue, Flint, Michigan. September 2006. Glenn says: “Don’t touch anything.” The squatter, though an illegal occupant, has rights. These are his things. This is his peanut butter, his white plastic knife. We can’t pack them up, throw him out. This porch is his, for now. We’re walking in his home, without his permission, checking out where he sleeps, what he eats, his furniture, his “I Am Me . . . I Am Okay” poster. What you keep to yourself, he doesn’t get to. Can’t. The neighbors are complaining, not to the police (there’s no longer enough of them and they’ve got more serious criminals to chase), but to the Genesee County Land Bank (the owners of the foreclosed property), and Glenn is sent to evict Keith from his squat. Wes happened to be there with graduate students. Unexpected, Keith walked up. We talked as he loaded a shopping cart with his belongings, on his way to a new squat. (This was the first time for all the students – originating from Egypt, India, Indonesia, and Nepal – to talk with a squatter.) People in the neighborhood, according to Keith, give him jobs. That’s how he survives. When he is too cold, they give him shelter and blankets. True story. When our group was on the porch, a man veered his automobile to the curb and demanded to know: "Is Keith dead?“ At one point, Keith said to us: “I know where to get food and water. I know how to hunt.” A student whispered to Wes: “Perhaps being an urban squatter is like living in the wild.” When we departed, Keith said -- a squatter said -- this us: “You can get as much as you want out of life. I believe in being positive.” So do we.