"The chief merit of the city is that it allows a wide range of options for people to act out their own way of life," said Rene Dubois. "In this respect, it is important to note that, while a child is born and raised in the slums he is theoretically as free as the privileged child, his range of choices and his ability to move are so limited that he becomes almost a prisoner of biological determinism. The diversity of the environment is therefore more important than its efficiency or its beauty because it provides a wider range of circumstances for individual development. Environmental diversity helps each human being to discover what he is and what he can do, and what he can become. The great cities of the world acquired a great diversity from their historical past."
Never before have so many people been relatively well educated, fed, housed and clothed, nor enjoyed the blessings of freedom as those of us who live in the "developed world." To a large extent this has been made possible by the cumulative evolution of science and technology. But the world we have constructed in the image of our values and ideals is not necessarily one that can be sustained by the natural resources of our planet, at least not on the scale from the past sixty years of industrialization.
A recent U.N. Population Report noted that by the year 2050 there will be nearly 11 billion people on planet earth. The population bomb continues to accelerate exponentially against the finite resources available to support human and animal life. The impacts of this explosion take different forms in both the developed and underdeveloped world.
Humankind has always lived and adapted itself to overcrowded conditions. One difference today, however, is that people no longer have ready access to the countryside, which only a generation ago was available to the inhabitants of the largest cities. Another reason for the nervousness of life in the modem city is that people are less affected by their association with one another than by the unnatural stimuli generated by the machines that accompany them everywhere the industrial world. Each new convenience takes away a bit more of our freedom and spontaneity.
The racket of living in our cities dulls and erodes our natural capacity for joy and self-expression. Motor cars, motorcycles, telephones, radios, television sets, and other gadgets enslave us to an unnatural and anti-human environment. You can read this enslavement in the faces of people as they walk expressionless down the street attempting to protect themselves from contact with other passersby as they ignore their environment and other pedestrians who cross their paths. We are in danger of becoming a lonely people, isolated from ourselves and from the world that created and sustained us.
There are children in America's inner-cities that don't know that milk comes from a cow, "It comes," they say, "in a carton with a picture of a missing child on it."
Yet even in the darkest slum, within the shadowed shelter of a backlot, children play, laugh and smile and find excitement to ease the tenseness and indifference of their surroundings. If you listen you can hear a shop merchant sharing gossip with his customer as he fusses with his displays. An occasional church bell rings and echoes against the brick and concrete prisons, reminding us of the human element within us that sustains us against the turmoil that surrounds us.
Cities can still fulfill their ancient missions as civilizing forces if they create environments in which the human encounter is nourishing and releases the potentials and subtleties of human interaction. Reinventing our urban habitat to reflect the highest aspirations for personal and collective fulfillment means that we have to awaken from the technological trance that threatens our humanity and appreciation for life. Removed as we are from the natural world, our technological world cannot replace the humanity to which we aspire.
With less than five percent of the world's population, we in the developed world together consume more than sixty percent of the world's natural and manufactured wealth.
This has led to great economic disparities for millions of people in America's inner-cities and throughout the "underdeveloped" world who look to the richer nations with a mixture of hope and despair. Their hope too is that they one day may escape from their lives of poverty and malnutrition; their despair is that their journey may exceed their reach.
Dylan Thomas once wrote, "Do not go gentle into that good night, rage, rage against the dying of the light." Recently West Central Los Angeles and other communities across America suddenly flamed into violence this past April as the long time growing disparity between rich and poor exploded into the worst racial riots since the civil rights clashes of 1964.
More than fifty people were killed, three thousand people were injured, and nine thousand people were arrested for looting. Over half a billion dollars in damage was sustained by minority businesses as the fragile veneer of civilization was ripped asunder by more than two generations of anger with the injustice and hardship faced by inner-city residents.
Our inner-cities are mirror images of third world nations where continued poverty and bureaucratic neglect slowly erode and destroy the human spirit and human habitat. The plight of the inner-city is a human crisis of profound trauma and is one of our own making, a very real sign that we as human beings have still not understood or cared to live out the fundamental responsibilities that come with human rights and freedom.
Within the issues of our inner cities are the very ancient aspirations of all people for fundamental human rights, and human duties. Human freedom cannot prosper and grow with inequality in its midst. Too often the victims of our social neglect and indifference are the scapegoats of our failure to comprehend that each person is sacred, and endowed with dignity and purpose. Poverty and social inequity are thus symptoms of our own individual and collective selfishness and neglect. We live in a house divided against itself when we forget that for every right we claim, for ourselves, there is a coequal and corresponding duty to work for those rights for each and every person.
Building a Human Habitat:
Oakland, California was one city that should have joined the national nervous breakdown that affected cities across America following the recent Rodney King verdict. Oakland did not implode in anger and despair because in the late 1960's and early 1970's something special happened to awaken the people of Oakland and the city's fathers to the causes of inner-city alienation and poverty, and new options to meet those issues.
In 1970, the Futures Planning Council of the Episcopal Diocese of California (Now, the Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Information Science - IRIS), in conjunction with the Technology Transfer office at NASA Ames Research Center, began the development of a unique long-term interdisciplinary survey of the Bay Area using high altitude remote imaging photography from NASA's new Earth Research Aircraft to construct a demographic hologram o
f social indicators that helped us understand the physical environment as it affected the social, political, economic and human factors and to measure the quality of life of inner-city residents. The infrared imagery told us initially that Oakland was environmentally dead.
We then constructed a multi-layered demographic profile, using the 1970 census as our base and overlaid this information over the geophysical imagery we had collected. The purpose of the study was to develop a visual model of existing conditions, understand the underlying causes of mounting poverty and violence in the inner city, and project new options for human development within sustainable frameworks.
Private Urban Initiatives:
We began with a simple premise that environmental quality and human poverty were interrelated and that the growing symptoms of social neglect had their roots in the human spirit. By identifying the consequences of poverty we felt we could construct a poor health and well-being model to help guide our efforts to bring about beneficial change.
Our first challenge was to define a hierarchy of human needs. Our goal was to construct a "well-being" model around which we could define standards for human development and growth. These standards could then be used to create social indicators against which we could measure the quality of life of our people.
We began where the most immediate needs were, the mounting malnutrition and medical problems of the inner-city elderly poor.
For our poor health model we took the elderly inner-city poor. For our well-being model we took our astronauts. Both were coping in hostile environments and required new environmental habitats to survive. We began to look at the city as a habitat, it's ekistics (the art of human settlements), its networks of social, health, and employment services, its recreational and leisure aspects, its distribution networks, but most of all its heart: the hopes and dreams of its people.
The Home that NASA built:
NASA Ames Research Center Life Scientist Dr. Richard Haines, and Charles Kubokawa, Chief of the Technology Applications Office at Ames, established the Advanced Technology Applications Team to liaison with the downtown Oakland community and the nine NASA regional centers. Austin Thompson, Vice Chancellor of the University of California in Berkeley, and George C. Scotlan of the Chancellor's Community Relations office joined our working group to form a inter-disciplinary nucleus of helping agencies. We invited life scientists, architects and engineers, school teachers, social service workers, financial and medical professionals to broaden our interdisciplinary team.
Oblate Father Paul Maher, rector of St. Mary's, invited us to use the Church's facilities as our inner-city laboratory. At St. Mary's we began a breakfast and lunch program to help bring people together to construct and renew their sense of community. Around the meal programs we began to focus our educational programs. The average educational level of the seniors was about fourth grade, remedial at best. Clara Saunders, 85, spoke of her own situation. "I gets up in the morning, and the rats beat me to my food, I goes to sleep with the roaches." An elderly Latino woman spoke of how she selected her food for the day. "I reach for the red and white cans, but it's like a lottery game, I never know what I'll have for dinner." She referred to Campbell soups with their red and white logo, not being able to read all she could depend upon was the Campbell logo.
Some 50,000 Hispanics at the time lived in fear in her neighborhood, many recent émigrés from Mexico, none of whom could cope in the Bay Area. Their parents, when they could, worked in the agricultural fields of Northern California, but their children were left alone and coped outside of the city services and programs. We established in East Oakland La Clinica de Raza, which served as a base for community medical care, and outreach to the community.
Due to the involuntary relocation of more than 13,000 people by the State of California Highway Department, and the City of Oakland who were involved in right of way demolition for the Grove Shafter Freeway and Oakland City Center Project racial tensions began to grow as dispossessed urban refugees now had to compete with newer immigrants and other ethnic groups for "turf." From time to time violent street gangs roamed the streets terrifying the elderly poor. It was not uncommon to find one of our meal program participants had been mugged, robbed or raped as they tried to reach the sanctuary of the Church. To disperse and soften the surrounding environment of alienation and fear was among our first concerns as we began to address each issue.
Identifying the Social Indicators:
By 1970, of Oakland, California's 66,422 senior citizens, 20,270 seniors had no means to get about their neighborhoods, 13,260 had no physical mobility, the economy was driven by fear. More than twelve trillion dollars were spent from 1945 to l990 by the United States to achieve nuclear parity with the Soviet Union. The myths and metaphors of the cold war began to define how we lived, what we celebrated, and how we looked at ourselves. Whereas our parents could remember coming to America free from the fears of despotism, their children's first memories were sirens that called each student to hide under their desks from nuclear missiles. A social ethic developed that one had better get everything one wanted, because there might not be a tomorrow. In only one generation consumption became the only goal in life.
The demand for products and services in turn created the need for mass distribution systems, transportation systems, and as people fled to the cities for the new opportunities and jobs, a formerly diversified agrarian society urbanized itself creating cities that could not carry or service the needs of their residents.
As the cities spread swiftly consuming rural outlying farmlands, fertile agricultural areas were paved over for housing tracts. Commuting distances became greater between where one lived and where one earned their income. The average commuter in California today spends one to two hours in his or her car to move from their home to the workplace.
The impact alone of automobiles and trucks has increased carbon dioxide emissions and increased pollution levels in all communities. To power the cities fossil fueled utilities began to consume prodigious amounts of energy. The new town and cities, instead of creating opportunities for freedom and culture, began to look like modern sweat shops whose only function was to produce more wealth.
In the alleyways and downtown hotels appeared those who by reason of age or poor health dropped out of the system by default. Welfare systems were invented and reinvented to try to attack the consequent poverty they endured. Health costs began to soar as a once healthy society began to suffer from the strains of stress and physical and mental deprivation that resulted.
This scenario obviously is not completely accurate for everyone, nor does it pretend to encompass all communities. But it does mirror some of the causes for the plight we are in as a society. What is becoming increasingly clear is that we have to begin to reinvent a quality of life that reflects the highest values and dreams that we once had for ourselves, and once re-centered in those values begin to chart a common future of hope for all people.
Only four decades ago the world's ecology was still relatively stable after more than 500 generations of human habitat. In only fifty years the world's population, now standing at five billion people, will double after years of exponential acceleration. At the present rate of consumption the gaps between the rich nations and the poor is widening faster than at any time before. The symptoms of civil violence and terrorism that come from despair and injustice are already the new barbarians at the gate. It has been said that man does not live by bread alone. It behooves us to take another look at what we are doing to ourselves, our neighbors and to begin to redefine our quest for a better quality of life.
democratic societies begin with the individual person, their family and community. In the emerging global society, we have to learn to begin to think globally, to begin to ask ourselves some basic questions about what we expect of our society and what we can each do to insure its success for ourselves and our children, and their children. Human rights are meaningless without their corresponding duties. The state of our cities as well as the state of our families and neighborhoods will always reflect the state of our souls. We become human by the quality of the choices we make. By making the choice to care, we become truly human. To reinvent America we need to begin to light the dark streets with our hope and commitment to make a choice for a change.
To those who say "I can't make a difference," we learned to say, "Do not go gentle into that good night, rage, rage against the dying of the light."
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