The news from Baltimore has been sad and disturbing over the
past few weeks. Urban ecologists, like
all ecologists, I think, love the places where they work. So I must remark on what is happening in Baltimore
and what it means to me, as a scientist who has committed more than two decades
to research on the ecology of metropolitan Baltimore.
But this post is not the usual kind of thing for this web
log, which typically intends to note conceptual issues for the BES community,
or provide alerts and background for important project activities, or stimulate
interactions of BES with other projects conducting urban ecology research,
education and community engagement. This
post is more like an editorial, in which I explore my own reactions as a
scientist and as an African American to the troubling recent events in
Baltimore. Like the playwright Eugene
Ionesco, I write here “to find out what I think.” These opinions are my own and do not reflect
those of other researchers, educators, or funders of BES. Here goes.
The Science of Connection
Ecology can be thought of as a science of connections. In fact connections, in the form of interactions,
are enshrined in the early definition of the science: The study of interactions
between organisms and their environment.
A more fleshed out version expands this, but keeps interaction and
processes as key: The scientific study of the processes influencing the
distribution and abundance of organisms, the interactions among organisms, and
the interactions between organisms and the transformation and flux of energy
and matter.
This fundamental interest is sometimes trivially reduced to
the idea that everything is connected to everything else. But what makes the ecological world work is
not that everything is connected, but that things – organisms, processes,
places – are differentially connected.
That is, some connections are strong, others are weak, and some don’t
exist. Some connections are brief, some
persistent, and some change strength over time. Some connections happen through close
contact while others are transmitted by signals, materials, or cascades of
effects over great distances.
It is the job of ecological science to understand the nature
and effect of such differential connectivity and exchanges in the systems it
studies. The connectivity principles of
ecology might be better summarized like this: 1) everything is connected to
something else; 2) connections change over space; 3) connections change over
time including being created anew and disappearing; 4) connections are the glue
in ecosystems, linking organisms, biological processes, and physical
structures. In urban ecosystems, social
structures and processes, and infrastructures are included as nodes of
connection.
Baltimore as a Differentially Connected Mosaic
Baltimore, including the chartered city and several nearby
counties of equivalent jurisdictional level, is a hugely heterogeneous, patchy
ecosystem. The patchiness reflects the
underlying geology and soils, the vegetation types, and the contrasts between
wet and dry places. It reflects where
buildings and infrastructure have been installed, and where they have been
replaced or abandoned. It reflects the
things that people plant for agriculture or for decoration, as well as plants
that disperse, establish, and grow spontaneously. It reflects how and where all these plants
are managed – or not. Patchiness
reflects the habitats that people intentionally or accidentally make for
animals, and the fact that people move animals around. It reflects where people choose to settle and
live, and where firms locate or leave from, and where people with different
resources and social characteristics have access. It reflects policy that govern zoning, transportation,
financial investment, taxation, and public versus private expenditure.
Many more sources of spatial differentiation could be
mentioned. But key is the idea that such
patchiness sets up a field of differentials for connectedness in the Baltimore
region and in its subsystems. Like all
American urban regions, Baltimore’s heterogeneity appears in the form of contrasting
neighborhoods, social relations, wealth, and ecology. BES has spent 18 years applying interdisciplinary
methods to understand how this complex, differentially connected system works.
Disconnection in Baltimore
The sad fact and circumstances of the death of Mr. Freddie
Gray point to some of the deep and persistent disconnections that exist in parts
of Baltimore. Certainly, the kinds of
disconnection in evidence here are shared with many American urban systems –
old and new, majority African American or not.
And certainly, not all neighborhoods in Baltimore are disconnected.
Sandtown,the neighborhood where Mr. Gray was born and in
which he apparently suffered the wounds that led to his death a week later, is
one in which we work. It is a part of
Watershed 263, a watershed defined by a stormwater drainage catchment. Mr. Gray’s Sandtown is at the northern
headwaters of this drainage catchment.
We use the drainage network – the watershed – as a tool to study
connections between built infrastructure, household and institutional decision
making, community activities aimed at environmental quality, and the amount and
quality of the water draining different parts of the larger Watershed 263. We use the same concept of watershed throughout
the Baltimore region to understand how the rich diversity of patch types and
their social, built, and biological conditions affect the water quality and
flow across the entire Baltimore region.
Social Disconnection
While our watershed ecology research uses a conceptual tool
emphasizing connection via water, it has become clear that Sandtown is a place
of profound social disconnection. There
are many people within Sandtown and the 10 other neighborhoods of Watershed 263
that are deeply committed to improving people’s lives, through access to
knowledge, gainful employment, healthy food, and a clean, stimulating, and
comfortable green environment. Seeing
these dedicated people at work, and being able to support them through
partnerships, including those with city agencies, public schools, private institutions,
community groups, and NGO’s such as the Parks & People Foundation, has been
one of the unalloyed pleasures of ecological research in Baltimore.
All these worthy activities and hard work can be seen as
antidotes to the profound disconnectedness that many of these neighborhoods
experience. I draw my roster of
disconnections from the writings of social researchers and journalists who have
summarized these especially forcefully in recent days. People in many old city neighborhoods, and in
older suburbs, are disconnected from jobs.
Baltimore was a magnet for unskilled but willing workers in its
industrial heyday. Such jobs are largely
gone. Families are disconnected due to
laws that stipulate incarceration for even some non-violent crimes. Students are disconnected from effective
learning by the social demands placed on public schools, and by the funding of
public schools by the local property tax base.
Homeowners and would-be homeowners are disconnected from access to capital
at reasonable rates by predatory lending and by the legacy of early 20th century mortgage restrictions. Lack of
capital or property-based profits affects ownership, repair and maintenance by
occupants, and the willingness of absentee landlords to invest in their
properties.
Of particular relevance to the situation in which Mr. Gray
found himself is a disconnection from the police. Other events over the past few years may have
left people with the idea that disconnections between the police and communities
is a matter of race. Clearly that is not
the case in Baltimore, given the demographics of the city’s population and its
police department. However, there is
disconnection nonetheless. Ta-Nehesi
Coates, Baltimore native, memoirist, and social critic, calls out the
difference between policing based on authority versus that based purely on
power. Authority would arise from mutual
respect and engagement (a rather Lincolnian – of, by, and for). Power, in contrast, resides in distance and
force. This is not to deny that
legitimate authority must sometimes draw upon force. Others, better suited than I, should be
consulted for the nature and significance of this kind of disconnection, which
is coming to wider attention these days due to a well publicized litany of harm
and mortality arising in the gap between power and authority. But it is the disconnection currently most
obvious on the nightly news beamed from Baltimore at convenient helicopter
height.
The Deep Roots of Disconnection
As researchers of the long-term, the deep history of
disconnection
.JPG) |
| An abandoned rowhouse in Sandtown. The graffito reads "Sadtown." |
First, of
course, is the long fact and persistent shadow of slavery. The period of slavery in the United States is
much longer than the period of emancipation.
The commodification and capitalization of individual humans of African
or mixed African and other descent, was simply the largest single source of wealth
in the Antebellum United States. The
brief hope of Reconstruction after the Civil War gave way to a retaking of
power (yes, power, as defined above), by those whose economic interests and
social status had been damaged by the Civil War and its outcome. The terrorism, legal exclusion, and absence
of opportunity in the South in part fueled the Great Migration, the largest
movement of people in the history of the United States. Lasting, according to some scholars, from the
1880s through the 1960s, the Great Migration saw the exodus of African
Americans from the South to cities to the north and west. Washington DC, and Baltimore, although thought
of as southern cities, were destinations in the Great Migration.
The resulting changes in urban demography,
employment patterns, and settlement patterns were major and sometimes long
lasting events in the receiving cities.
For example, the creation of American sociology at the University of
Chicago had as one of its foci the mechanisms and patterns of change occasioned
by the migration of new residents from the American South and Eastern and
Southern Europe. The previous experience
of cities and urbanists with such change had been with the relatively more
homogeneous and familiar immigrations from Northern and Western Europe. The unfamiliar arrivals, who were not
schooled in urban living, seemed to discomfit the Chicago scholars, whose early
writing embodied, to my reading a kind of racist reaction.
In Baltimore at the beginning of the Great Migration, the
city was, at the coarse scale, relatively integrated. African Americans did experience fine scale
segregation, being housed in meager alley houses, while their employers lived
in more capacious and well appointed dwellings fronting larger streets. The arrival of new migrants from the South
caused a disruption of Baltimore’s racial patterns. A series of policies and practices were put
in place to purposefully segregate the growing African American population. First, was the ordinance forbidding integration
at the city block level. Although the
ordinance was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court a few years after
it was established, the replacement activities were harder to dismantle. Among these was exclusionary zoning, in which
industrial zoning was concentrated in areas from which the removal of African
Americans or other recent immigrants was desired. Also in the tool kit were deed covenants
which forbade selling to African Americans or Jews. Neighborhood Associations were established to
help prevent “incursions” of African Americans.
And perhaps most notorious of these prejudicial tools was the Federal
Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) rating of neighborhoods by credit
worthiness. Mortgages were not encouraged
in areas receiving low ratings. Low
grades were bestowed, by definition, on the presence or risk of incursion by
African Americans. Age and size of
housing stock were also included. Even
after World War II, with its segregation of the Armed Forces, the benefits of
service were effectively preferentially available to white veterans. The GI Bill, and access to mortgage tax
credits are two such benefits, and these benefits opened the suburbs with their
subsidized expressways, to those who qualified demographically.
The neighborhoods in Baltimore city clustered near downtown
are some of the most conspicuous loci of the disconnections sketched
above. I think it is legitimate to call
all of this the long shadow of slavery – the originally constitutional commodification
of most African Americans, and the purposeful and continual disconnection of
this group of persons from access to the organs of state, of policy, of
capital, and of mobility.
Seeing Connection
As desperate as the need for multifaceted connection in
Sandtown and other neighborhoods continues to be, what does ecology have to
contribute? Little on the list of
disconnection is under our control. But,
perhaps part of what ecology can do is honor the residents of all neighborhoods
in Baltimore with knowledge and experience in the kinds of connection that we
study and understand. This may seem like Gahndian idealism, and count for
little in the face of accumulated anger and fear, sudden death and riot. But perhaps the science of connection can
help people to envision change, to see how they are linked to a larger and
longer world, in which their future matters.
 |
| Analysis of potential areas available to plant trees (left panel), a scenario for increasing tree cover (right panel). |
Part of that larger world is the unseen urban ecology, that
is the underappreciated role of water, air, organisms, substrates – and differential
connections – in the urban matrix. Part
of that larger world is social and historical.
We have shared findings that can help people move beyond myths that
trees are associated with crime, and have documented how environmental
inequities were created by the zoning process when Baltimore city was majority
white, and have shown how amenities and hazards are currently differentially
distributed in Baltimore’s underserved white and African American neighborhoods. We have helped people understand the buried
streams in their neighborhoods, and the relationship of what they plant to a
milder local climate and the quality of water flowing toward their beloved bay
– and crabs.
Our contributions may help people whose horizons are
painfully close, to see some connections to the larger world. Maybe that’s a step in empowering people to
claim more of the roster of connections that can overcome the long shadow of
exclusion that falls so oppressively on people and places we love in Baltimore.
Some Background Sources
Boone, Christopher
G. 2002. An assessment and explanation of environmental inequity in Baltimore.
Urban Geography 23 581-595.
Coates, Ta-Nehesi. 2015. “The Myth of Police Reform”
Coates, Ta-Nehesi. 2009. The Beautiful Struggle: A Father,
Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood. Spiegel &
Grau.
Coates, Ta-Nehesi. 2014. “The Case for Reparations”
Friedersdorf, Connor. 2015. “Two States of Emergency in
Baltimore”
Geldenhuys,
Odette. 1995. “Housing Segregation:
Apartheid in Baltimore.” Baltimore Sun. Tribunedigital-Baltimoresun, March 17,
1995. http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1995-03-17/news/1995076191_1_racial-segregation-zoning-ordinance-apartheid.
Graham, David.
2015. “The Paradox at the Heart of
Police Brutality Protests”
New York
Times. 2015. “The Timeline of Freddie Gray’s Arrest and the Charges Filed”
Home to ‘Lot of Fries’
New York Times. 2015. “Hard but
Hopeful Home to ‘Lot of Freddies’”
Olson, Karen.
1991. Old west Baltimore: segregation, African-American culture, and the
struggle for equality. Pages 57-80 in
E. Fee, editor. The Baltimore book: new views on local history. Temple
University Press, Philadelphia.
Olson, Sherry H.
1997. Baltimore: the building of an American city. The Johns Hopkins University
Press, Baltimore.
Reid, Ira De A.
1935. The Negro Community of Baltimore:
A Summary Report of a Socal Study conducted for the Baltimore Urban League,
Baltimore.
Troy, Austin, J.
M. Grove, and J. O'Neil-Dunne. 2012. The relationship between tree canopy and
crime rates across an urban-rural gradient in the greater Baltimore region.
Landscape and Urban Planning 106:262-270.
Wilkerson, Isabel. 2011. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of
America’s Great Migration. Vintage
Books, New York.
No comments:
Post a Comment