Unfamiliar Sights

Holidays afford a routine return to familiar territory that is the perfect opportunity to change perspective. Countless times I have zoomed up I-95 -- the interstate highway, the ultimate American non-place [link via this excellent repository] -- and into Baltimore. I mark my entrance by that smoke stack, this solitary remnant of heavy industry on life support that is as much a cultural symbol of the city, a tourism board's welcome sign, as it the machinery of a factory.

Swooping over the Middle River and either branching off into downtown or continuing under the harbor, this elevated stretch of interchanges and off-ramps dazzles the eye. The water, the shipyard, the Key Bridge, the neighborhoods fanning out from downtown, and the city's modest skyline all compete for attention. It is a microcosm of the northeastern city, serving up a feast for hungry urban eyes.

But with the encroachment of non-places like I-95 that funnel in suburbanites, dumping them at the city's faux-historical economic engine, the Inner Harbor, comes the shadow of the highway trusses looming over forgotten neighborhoods. What haven't I seen in all those years of traveling into Baltimore by car?

I've given up on private car ownership, and when coming from outside the city now feel reluctant to bring a new private automobile into it. Call it moral congestion pricing. So on Friday, I parked at the edge of D.C. and took the Metro, taking advantage of late night weekend service. On Saturday, I took that game plan to Baltimore, hoping to take transit in a state notoriously hostile to it.

My M.O. was the Baltimore light rail, which snakes from BWI Airport and southern inner ring suburbs through downtown, heading north to its terminus at ex-shopping mall/current "town centre" Hunt Valley. I swore allegiance to the MBTA for four years, am doggedly loyal to SEPTA, and even keep subway porn on my coffee table, yet never have I taken Baltimore's tentative steps toward effective public transportation.

As the train crept north, I was particulary interested in seeing the vast hive of concrete and waterways around the Middle River from surface level. The trip did not disappoint, as I discovered two neighborhoods hidden in the shadow of I-95 and I-295. The first, Westport, is in fact cleaved by the latter highway. It is a tiny, down on its heels enclave of rowhouses, now poised for massive redevelopment by the light rail stop. A developer plans a giant high-rise complex with hotel rooms, office space, condos, and retail, which strikes me as a contrast of urban luxury and poverty of Mumbai proportions. While I certainly favor transit-oriented development, as this surely will force heavier usage of the light rail at its doorstep, I'm left with grave concerns about how such a development will interact with the existing neighborhood. Job training? Or the equally likely gated entrances, private security, and surveillance cameras? If there even is a neighborhood left, given the money that starts being put on the table to feed the "insatiable demand for homes on or near the water."


Eerie overtones of the Johns Hopkins hospital in East Baltimore, which looms like a citadel over the struggling neighborhoods at its feet. Town-[hospital] gown tensions run constantly.

Next stop: Cherry Hill. In another overlooked corner by those of us whose itineraries are circumscribed by highway routes, I found the nation's first planned community for African-Americans, designed to house WWII veterans. Sadly, it experienced rapid post-war disinvestment and decay, with the veterans' homes becoming public housing. But just across the water from Westport, the planners have come back as more waterfront property becomes enticing. An active neighborhood group ("A great neighborhood -- getting even better!) catalogues the ongoing development of the Cherry Hill master plan, which remains contentious in the community.

Later that night, I was listening to the Audio Infusion on WEAA. The DJ announced a caller from Cherry Hill and I smiled in recognition. The next morning, on the road in the I-95 morass, I craned my neck to catch a newly familiar sight, the stately Baltimore Rowing Club on the Middle River, with Cherry Hill fanning out behind it. New routes lead to new discoveries.

From Nation to the Nationals

It's not month-long indigestion from too many half-smokes that has rendered me silent on the blogafront. Just a recent move to Philly -- more coming shortly -- from which I haven't shaken the disorder yet. But I'd still like to provide a coda to my stay on the homefront in and around D.C. The last couple months have been a bonanza of momentous baseball, from the curtain call at Yankees Stadium to the Fightin' Phils fall classic hopes to Thursday night's Fenway epic and tonight's do-or-die conclusion.


Lost in October magic, however, is the relative ignominy of the Washington Nationals catastrophic 100+ loss season, coupled with the worst attendance in a new ballpark ever. There are ugly internal disputes with owners the Lerner family, which have spilled over into the worst crime off the field: deadbeat tenants. The Nationals have refused to pay $3.5 million in rent to the D.C. city government, claiming that the taxpayer-funded ballpark was substantially incomplete by opening day and continues to need a lot of work. The Lerners are thumbing their nose and neglecting their role as the anchors of the massive plan to redevelop the Anacostia waterfront, long the neglected waterway of Washington and an afterthought to Potomac symbolism. The ultimate goal is to integrate the Anacostia waterfront, and by extension the largely poor and black neighborhoods that lie along and especially east of it, with the rest of the wealth and vibrancy of D.C. The stadium, meanwhile, was supposed to be a crucial litmus test of whether such development could be done without displacement and disregard for surrounding neighborhoods. Withholding an already cash-strapped city -- whose previous mayor expended the last of his political capital to get the stadium through the city council -- of millions of dollars in rent does not make for a good neighbor. And more to the point, their claims are simply untrue.

I was at opening day on a chilly night at the end of March, attended games throughout the summer, and even had tickets to the rained out final home game of the season. From a fan's perspective -- and the perspective that should matter, because it's ticket revenue with which the organization should be paying that rent -- the stadium is more than complete.

Without getting lost in those minutiae, however, I want to return to opening night and the very fact of that stadium. The mechanisms of urban redevelopment, high-powered private developers, and an economic engine as powerfull as Major League Baseball were a perfect storm. Granted, there was much wrangling for several years over whether the city would approve a stadium with public monies when many of the fans would be coming from neighboring Maryland or Virginia -- states whose jurisdictions were not contributing. But MLB made it clear that no stadium meant no team, which pro-business mayor Anthony Williams could never have let happen, especially when Northern Virginia way vying to host the team out in the suburbs.

Contentious city politics aside, the stadium was assured, the team came to Washington (as the Nationals, not the Senators, their previous incarnation, because D.C. has no senators), the Nats played three seasons at RFK Stadium, and then Nationals Park arrived this year. As a baseball fan whose father can remember attending Senators games at RFK, I was actually rather fond of the old retro spaceship down East Capitol Street. But as a comparison between old and new points out, Nationals Park was likely to follow the generic lead of casino ballparks that suck away your dollars and sprawl over far more land than charming 8-acre postage stamps like Fenway or Wrigley.



For opening night heroics, I admit you can't beat the president throwing out the ceremonial first pitch -- politics aside, a Washington tradition that dates back decades -- and the star of the team winning it in the 9th with a walk-off home run.

But when the dazzle fades and I extract my sentiments from the matter, there is still a hard critique to be made, both architecturally and from an urban planning perspective. The Post's architecture critic definitely took the stadium to task, sounding a dissenting note on the front page of the Style section the next morning while the rest of the paper trumpeted the new ballpark. Philip Kennicott's conclusion is worth quoting at length:

From the top of the stadium, look out at the skyline, toward the Capitol Dome. At first, it seems like a happy accident that it is most visible from the cheapest seats. But now look down into the neighborhoods where public schools have become dilapidated brick bunkers, their windows covered in forbidding metal mesh. It's enough to make you weep. Not about the stadium, which is as generic as it goes. But rather the cynical pragmatism that governs our priorities, socially and architecturally. Washington is a city where people can stare straight at the most powerful symbol of their democratic enfranchisement, and still feel absolutely powerless to change the course of our winner-takes-all society.

And it didn't have to be this way. It's not just a matter of misplaced priorities, which we can all argue about. It's also a matter of inept bargaining and bad planning.

"The city had Major League Baseball over a barrel if they wanted, because baseball had nowhere else to put the team," says Neil DeMause, co-author of "Field of Schemes," a look at the economics and politics of baseball. DeMause argues that Washington got one of the worst deals in recent history when it lured the Nationals here.

If the stadium sparks economic development in the newly revitalized South Capitol neighborhood, perhaps the fact that the city got hosed will be forgotten. But the architecture will remain, and it will remain mediocre. That failure isn't just a matter of bad negotiating on the city's part, or bland aesthetics on the part of HOK Sport, the architecture giant that designed the rush-job Nationals Park.

It is also a colossal symbolic failure with national and international import. At a time when the United States is losing a global argument about freedom and democracy, when China and countries along the Persian Gulf are proving to an attentive developing world that top-down leadership is the best and most efficient route to prosperity, the capital of the so-called free world built a monument to its national pastime that gets a C-plus.

It passes, barely. But as sports lovers know, sports is never just sports. And architecture, especially in a world capital, is never just architecture. Nationals Park might be a better experience than RFK, but it fails to say anything larger to the city, or the world.

I find a similarly uninspiring lack of vision in what surrounds the ballpark, what came before it, and what semiotic messages are on display inside of it. While I applaud the city and the team's massive and successful PR campaign to get fans to ride Metro, the carefully managed block from the Navy Yard metro station to the ballpark entrance exudes a shopping mall feel.

Construction cranes loom over the horizon as the redevelopment initiative is in full swing, while street-level banner ads promise a new Half Street, turning a city block into a product to be delivered on a timeline. Half Street SE is not "coming 2009"; it has been there for as long as the grid has been there. But "half street. the whole experience." isn't so much a city block as it is a combined retail/luxury housing/office space theme park. After being shuttled along Half Street from the Metro into the ballpark, you are greeted by some even more perplexing advertisements:



As the rise of this new neighborhood is on display all around you, advertisers are encouraging you to leave the city entirely and go to shopping malls in Maryland and Virginia like White Flint or Dulles Town Center. It begs the question if the neighborhood -- what developers want to call the "Ballpark District" while the city insists on "Capitol Riverfront District" -- has more in common with its suburban counterparts than the nearby neighborhoods in the city itself.

Ultimately, I'm not expressing disdain at the prospect of luxury retail and condos, but at the fabrication of a neighborhood that may never even become a neighborhood. The "district" appelation is already an indicator and the distinction between the two names is telling. The developers are focusing on the cash cow, the structure on which they've economically hedged their bets but also the marketing tool that makes it attractive to their target audience. The city hasn't given up on the idea of a larger Anacostia redevelopment initiative, but that name remains a dirty word. I distinctly recall eavesdropping on a conversation at Nationals Park, where two attendees shuddered at the prospect of going one stop too far on the Green Line past the Navy Yard and ending up in the neighborhood of Anacostia, on the other side of the river, as though they wouldn't even be safe on the subway platform. Growing up, the green line was the "dangerous line." Anacostia's image problem is so bad that even the Metro line that serves it is considered suspect by white suburbanites. Consequently, developers are reluctant to associate their new district, which has far more in common with shopping malls 20-30 miles away, with neighborhoods less than a mile away.

West of the ballpark, across South Capitol Street, one wonders how the hulking behemoth next door has affected both the quality of life and property values/taxes of Southwest D.C., what the Washington City Paper is cheekily calling the Nats Flats while still leveling the straight dope on the history and prospects of the neighborhood, perhaps most notable for its mid-century modern urban renewal architecture. It may be the victim of urban renewal round two, as some housing projects have already been demolished, but I still think that stadium boosters are hoping South Capitol Street will remain a border between rather than a boulevard connecting two vastly different neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, the sides of the ballpark closest to the river recall the area's industrial past. The era of residential urban renewal is, one can hope, largely a thing of the past. No neighborhoods were decimated to make way for Nationals Park. Government Center, it ain't. But what remains -- a sewer pumping station and a cement factory -- occupy prime real estate, much to the stadium boosters' embarrassment.


The WASA pumping station is, I admit, a purely functional part of the city's infrastructure that could probably be moved elsewhere, but after capturing this shot of the cement factory between Nationals Park and the Anacostia River, I became increasingly fond of it. The Potomac may be the river of political power, where the presidential yacht plies the waters, but the Anacostia is a blue-collar river, a river that works. In the meantime, Half Street will continue to funnel fans directly from the Metro and into the ballpark's main entrance facing away from the Anacostia -- although there are still prominent entrances on both the pumping station and riverfront sides of the ballpark.

Most journalists were dismissive of the area prior to the arrival of the stadium. The New York Times takes the consensus view in its opening day story: "But everyone agrees that the change in the neighborhood in the 22 months since work began on the 41,000-seat stadium has been astounding. In what was an urban wasteland of trash-strewn lots, sex clubs, and taxi and auto repair shops, developers have invested in new offices, condominiums, rental apartments, stores and restaurants."

With such a scathing description -- "urban wasteland" -- it would seem hard to argue with redevelopment of any kind. But at the same time, I began receiving e-mails in the summer of 2006 about the imminent closure of Nation Nightclub, a D.C. mainstay of the electronic music scene, and arguably the incubator of house in the nation's capital as host to the Buzz parties. I didn't put two and two together, until I realized that the "urban wasteland" everyone was so excited to raze included Nation.

At that point, the construction of a stadium claimed a real casualty. Baseball may have deeper pockets and a wider fan base than house, but it's worth staking out the loss of such an institution. D.C. has a hard enough time establishing a unique urban identity, and the Buzz parties, while following the same national rave arc of underground to mainstream to oversaturated drug haven, was still the fulcrum of a local scene.

Just as my night out at the Paradox conjured up Baltimore Fever memories, the other half was down the BW Parkway in D.C., with Scott Henry at the helm. Hopefully musical metadata can hold the memories where bulldozers have already claimed the physical space.

A mix is the monument: A dancefloor once stood in the outfield.

Olympic Fury

The 29th Olympiad is underway and all I can do is reflect on an article from two years ago: the destruction of hutong. To Chinese authorities, it was a form of slum clearance, an all too likely prospect during the Olympics. But as the author explains, it was a close-knit, functioning community.

Rail about pollution, corporate collusion, human rights, Tibet, authoritarianism. But don't forget the hutong.

I'm So Bad, I Party in Detroit

For many, a city like Paris or London or Rome seems unreal -- how could the real thing possibly compare to the endless images and leitmotifs in books and movies? For me, that city is Detroit. Does it really exist? Does anyone live there at all? Hasn't the whole thing been abandoned by now?

There doesn't appear to be an online version of Jerry Herron's "I'm So Bad, I Party in Detroit," although there is one of "Everyday Survival." The two together gave me my impression of Detroit: devil's night arsonists burning the city to the ground, itinerant metal scrappers slowly stripping it apart building by building, and RoboCop fantasizing where it will all end up. I quoted both in an article I penned on shrinking cities. Detroit is the American shrinking city par excellence, the only one to exceed the magic 1 million mark and then dip back below it.

As the sun came up on Sunday morning, I gazed out at glistening, isolated casinos (MGM Grand, The Motor City) from the back patio of the TV Bar, an out of the way watering hole off from downtown hosting an after-after-party for the first night of Movement: Detroit's Electronic Music Festival (hereafter DEMF). I chatted up a couple Detroiters who gave me the apocalyptic facts: a city built for 3 million now housing less than 1. 70,000 vacant houses. "Fucking tumbleweeds man," a guy said, shaking his head.

The emptiness is everywhere, permeating downtown and any neighborhood you might pass through. Coming from the crowded northeast, this kind of vacancy is simply unsettling. Neighborhoods didn't seem "dangerous" in the conventional sense so much as eerily empty. Two blocks off from Hart Plaza, the central downtown festival location, you can easily find high-rises of boarded up windows. "For Sale" and "For Lease" seem to be the most popular phrases in the Detroit signage lexicon.

But amidst all that abandonment, there is some extra elbow room, the kind of space that allows an after-party to run until 6 am and an after-after-party to kick up right after at 7 am, outside, on a Monday morning. Who's going to complain? What neighbors? It's the hollowed out core of the inner city that, unexpectedly enough, has incubated culture. Thus techno, thus Inner City / Good Life, thus the collapse of the auto industry and thus Model 500's Night Drive.


The Renaissance Center hovers over the Renaissance City, as Detroit began calling itself in the 1970s. GM's headquarters shine over the horizon looking like cylinders ready to churn in a V8 engine. The ground floor levels house a shopping mall arrayed around GM's latest models.

But the auto industry is still failing, attendance for the Detroit auto show is still falling, and DEMF keeps soaring.

Another take on the Renaissance City motif by Coleman Young, the city's first black mayor: The renaissance of Detroit is the city being reclaimed by its black residents. The proof is in the fist, ostensibly Joe Louis', but more directly the fist of resistance, of black power, of pushing whites over to the other side of 8 Mile.


I'm still seeing the city's wounds freshly. More thoughts to collect & a promised article to Spannered. My own photos once I can get a new USB cable, a casualty of the weekend's debauchery. But DEMF did not disappoint, and the nexus of local/international/Detroit orbital music was top-notch. If anything will be Detroit's renaissance, techno makes for a leading contender.
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At least they've got some playoff hopes to keep spirits alive. I call Red Wings taking the Cup in 6 / Pistons going under to the Celts. Detroit's white/black divide continues. It's a cold, cold world.

Devastation Tourism

Much ink has been spelled about the unevenness of recovery in New Orleans from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Just yesterday, Bush wrapped up a NAFTA summit in the Crescent City, where the Central Business District (CBD) is intact and a few miles away there is still wreckage everywhere. Despite the platitudes he might have offered, I don't suspect he made a trip this time to New Orleans' other half. It's not far, difficult, or dangerous, and many people I encountered expressed how vital it is for any visitor not to see the city with rose-colored glasses.

I did my best last month to take in something besides the usual tourist axis of the CBD/French Quarter/Garden District, all of which have their charms, granted. But there is an aching, suffering city where the notion of recovery seems intractable. For one, I spied a sprawling shantytown under an I-10 overpass near Tulane Medical School downtown (didn't have the heart to photograph it myself). American favela?

Like the impulse to favela tourism, visiting New Orleans is an increasingly awkward experience. No one with a conscience really wants to indulge in the Big Easy and engage in willful self-deception about the reality outside the tourist pleasure sites. There's a Hurricane Katrina Tour, a suspicious enough commodification of the disaster. But going out on one's own and gawking at the I-10 shantytown, or driving through the 9th Ward, the locus of devastation, what does that do? In Rio, I had research and volunteer work that brought me into favelas to stay and hopefully better the community. Am I no better in NOLA than the favela tourists I scoffed at? It's surely easier to volunteer in New Orleans than to get down to Rio to do the same if you live in the U.S., and that strikes me as the best answer. But, I'm afraid, circumstances didn't allow that for me.

The 9th Ward, the worst hit, then. By my rough estimate, I would guess less than half of the homes there appear reoccupied, debris covers countless lots, and the stigma of FEMA spray paint scars nearly every one. Date the house was checked, number of dead bodies, number of dead animals, and condemnation codes.


This house, while chained and boarded up in front, looks reasonably intact and freshly painted, but the morbid tag persists. I saw folks on their front porches, rocking back and forth with the ugly numeration behind them on the wall. Do they leave it up as a reminder? Warning? Public display of wounds? It seems too indelicate to ask anyone about.

One of the bright spots in the Upper 9th, however, is the Habitat for Humanity Musicians' Village. Among the countless great works Habitat is doing, this one is turning 8 acres into 72 single-family houses to provide a home to musicians who fled the city.




It's an endlessly admirable (and beautiful) housing project, hopefully a model as the city struggles over plans to raze older public housing. The subject of housing in New Orleans also calls to mind a provocative perspective raised by New Urbanist Andreas Duany that is worth quoting at length:

The lost housing of New Orleans is quite special. It was possible to sustain the unique culture of New Orleans because housing costs were minimal, liberating people from debt. One did not have to work a great deal to get by. There was the possibility of leisure.

There was time to create the fabulously complex Creole dishes that simmer forever; there was time to practice music, to play it live rather than from recordings, and to listen to it. There was time to make costumes and to parade; there was time to party and to tell stories; there was time to spend all day marking the passing of friends. One way to leisure time is to have a low financial carry. With a little work, a little help from the government, and a little help from family and friends, life could be good! This is a typically Caribbean social contract: not one to be understood as laziness or poverty—but as a way of life.

This ease, which has been so misunderstood in the national scrutiny following the hurricane, is the Caribbean way. It is a lifestyle choice, and there is nothing intrinsically wrong with it. It is this way of living that will disappear. Even with the federal funds for housing, there is little chance that new or renovated houses will be owned without debt. It is too expensive to build now. There must be an alternative or there will be very few “paid-off” houses. Everyone will have a mortgage that will need to be sustained by hard work—and this will undermine the culture of New Orleans.

What can be done? Somehow the building culture that created the original New Orleans must be reinstated...the professionalism of it all—eliminates self-building. Without this there will be the pall of debt for everyone. And debt in the Caribbean doesn’t mean just owing money—it is the elimination of the culture that arises from leisure.

The link to the full article is dead, but more excerpts (including Duany's proposed solution) here. In Metropolis Magazine, he paraphrased himself by urging us not to think of New Orleans as the worst-managed, poorest American city, but as the best-managed, wealthiest Caribbean city. While Miami usually gets the nod as the American metropolis most tapped into the Caribbean network, one cannot ignore New Orleans' vital historical role, from the slave trade to fleeing French planters from Saint-Domingue (Haiti). It's a vital part of the world that made New Orleans, a scholarly approach I'm hoping to dig into soon (thanks w&w for the suggestion).

Fortunately, these Musicians' Village homes are a start at providing the necessary leisure time to NOLA's lifeblood. Like this rough-and-tumble old bluesman, Little Freddie King, who I chatted up as he enjoyed a fine spring day on his porch. He was kind enough to show me inside, which had the fine smell of a brand new house. He couldn't be happier.


That Saturday night on Frenchman Street, I saw a sign advertising Little Freddie King in one of the countless divey jazz clubs. I hopped in and caught a luscious set of funky blues that set the dance floor ablaze. He was glad I dropped by.

Too rich in music to cover much at all here, but I hope New Orleans' Caribbean leisure time will return enough to allow some more of these sounds to percolate:

Second Line brass bands (parallel to minor samba schools, perhaps?) -- i.e. Free Agents - We Made It Through That Water

Nawlins bounce (heavy club choons post-Saints games) -- i.e. DJ Black'n'Mild - Beyonce / Work It Out (rmx)

Freshly Spannered

I've got some Rio reflections of the more journalistic variety up over at Spannered. They've written about and hosted music by such fine folks as Maga Bo, DJ Ripley, and DJ C.

Now check out: Gold-Plated Guns, Silver Linings, and Bronzing in Peace, some on-the-scene reporting that expands on my first impressions stateside of the 2007 Pan-American Games.

I'll admit though, I was excited to see Latin America's finest in the baseball competitions. Unfortunately, tickets were all sold out because the games are held in a small 5,000 seat stadium. I am locked in for the men's football gold medal game at Maracanã, however. If the Copa America was any indiction, Viva o Brasil!

The Ma[u/l]ing of Favelas

A piercing post from squattercity, cautioning against a plan by Rio's city government to provide titled deeds to residents of Rocinha and Vidigal and criticizing the American journalist's implied biases is finally spurring me back into a little blogging (as if there weren't mountains of leftover Rio stories to tell).

In particular, I'm wondering if the article's comment about plans to map Rocinna and Vidigal are related to the exhibit I visited in August at the Centro do Aquitetura e Urbanismo (Center of Architecture and Urbanism). Titled "Uma Cidade Chamada Rocinha" (A City Called Rocinha), I wasn't entirely sure what to expect, but it certainly surprised me.

Essentially, the exhibit was a polemic in favor of a city-sponsored development plan for the Passarela, the commercial strip along the highway in front of Rocinha that serves as the main gateway in and out of the favela.


You can see part of it there in the foreground. It's a wonderfully boisterous marketplace, full of merchants and food vendors selling everything from bootleg DVDs and music to soccer jerseys to snacks. Sort of a mini-Urguiana (the huge market downtown) that gets plenty of foot traffic, since most of the buses and vans passing by let off there.

But the plans by In!Rio would definitely wipe out the whole Passarela (in Portuguese only, I'm afraid, but enter the site and click "Explanadas plantas baixas" on the left to get an idea of what they're planning on building, then imagine it replacing what you see in the picture above). In exchange, Rocinha's new entrance could include anything from a shopping mall to a movie theatre to a sports complex with Olympic-sized swimming pools.

While I try hard not to ghettoize favelas in my mind, eschewing any kind of change, as far as I can tell this project deserves nothing but scorn. There are no indications that this proposal has been discussed with the Residents' Association or that there have been any other attempts at dialogue with the very people it will affect. And of course, the kinds of services it proposes don't appear to be in the price range of favelados any more than the São Conrado Fashion Mall across the street.



[from the home of Versace and Cartier, where I felt underdressed in just a tank top and shorts, you can turn 180° and you'll be looking at that Passarela shot.]

The site and the exhibit also talked about this esplanada plan as a way of increasing tourism to Rocinha. The economic benefits of tourism are undeniable, even if it can be culturally stultifying. Cf favela tourism, a phenomenon of dubious morality, in my opinion. Equating a statue of Jesus or a big hill with gorgeous views (Christo Redentor and Pão de Açucar, respectively) with somebody's neighborhood is a serious act of social objectification. Unsurprisingly, the companies themselves are also of dubious honesty. Matt, one of the other volunteers at Dois Irmãos, is working on a thesis about the gringo fascination with favelas, and discovered that the founder of the leading tour company who makes the claim of being local to Rocinha actually lives in São Conrado -- local geographically speaking, but a far cry from Rocinha socio-economically. And, I might add, it's not too hard to score some of those gorgeous views without paying a tour company. On my last day in Rio, I had one of the mototaxis (motorcycle instead of a car, but same concept) take me up the hill to some good vantage points for pictures.



















Getting back to Altere-Rocinha, even if tourists came to some gleaming new citadel of shopping, that doesn't necessarily translate into money being spent in Rocinha. It will probably just push back the (artificial) border beyond which one does not cross, carving out more space that "belongs" to the asfalta and taking away space from the morro. I don't want to perpetuate artificial borders, but they certainly do exist: At the Passarela you'll always see a few police loitering about; walk 20 feet into Rocinha, and you'll just as easily find a gun-toting traficante.

That the city would like to plunk a mall down in front of Rocinha (and in fairness, a mall is one of several proposals, but the concept is the same regardless) is, in the end, not surprising. One of the trends that I found most disturbing in Rio's adoration of American commercial and popular culture was the popularity of malls. In nouveau riche Barra da Tijuca (so wannabe American that, I've been told, residents pronounce the name of their neighborhood as if it were an English word rather than the Portuguese "Bah-ha"), a Southern California-style district of gated communities and guarded condo buildings, the crown jewel is the utterly terrifying Barra Shopping/New York City Center, replete with a mock Statue of Liberty. While Barra Shopping is one of the biggest in South America, I know malls are even more the rage in São Paulo (a common expression claims that what beaches are to cariocas, malls or "os shoppings" in Portuguese -- not too inventive -- are to paulistas). Supposedly they even have a mall entirely dedicated to punk rock.

I could vent for awhile about the deleterious effect of shopping malls, but I'll let the case be made by a much more articulate argument. If you can find it, check out Margaret Crawford's "The World in a Shopping Mall" from Variations on a Theme Park. (Here's a teaser: a Harvard Gazette piece on Crawford's favorable opinion of street vendors -- she's a Harvard Graduate School of Design prof, FYI).

To draw some concluding lines though, one of the main gripes with malls are their controlling effect: it's a managed, top-down environment (truthfully, not unlike a prison), one that tries to manipulate the customer because all interactions take place in the private space of the mall, rather than in the agora, the public space afforded by, say, shopping along a city street. It's that kind of imposed order that to me seems contrary to the nature -- and the successes -- of favelas.

And to bridge from bricks back over to beats, it easily parallels the spontaneous, uncontrolled nature of funk -- outside traditional, structured systems of copyright and industry, but popular and vibrant as a result (and more homogenized and exploitative when within that system, cf Marlboro's Link Records, as I've previously mentioned). I'm sure similar lessons can be glaned from another corner of the blogosphere that spurred me to put something new up here. Check out wayne&wax on "how reggae’s aesthetics emerge from a particular history of practice and technology and copyright law." I'm no expert on the minutiae, but I'm willing to bit the same can be said for funk.

First Night in Rocinha

[no, the picture has nothing to do with Rocinha. but as you'll read, I'm in a good mood and thought something leafy & green from the Jardim Botânico would be nice.]
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So all that negativity from a post back? Forget it, because right after that, just about all of my lobs into the dark came back golden. Shit is on from here out.

Let's start with Rocinha, Rio's largest favela (estimated at 150,000-300,000 residents). Rogerio, from the Fundação Dois Irmãos / Two Brothers Foundations finally got back to me on Tuesday. I called him that afternoon, and, presto: "Do you want to come see a class tonight?" All of a sudden, I was on a bus heading to Rocinha.

If I thought Rio was riotous, then I don't know what to call Rocinha. The entrance alone, a series of stalls called the pasarela, blanket access to the main road up the hill. They have the intensity of a bazaar, crowded & full of jockeying people, selling everything from food & drink to electronics to football jerseys to music -- didn't see any funk on a cursory glance, although I've been told even proibidão (funk that glorifies the drug gangs and as such is banned by the government) can be found there.

Entering Rocinha, I admit I only got a brief glimpse, as the school where the English classes are held was no more than 50 feet in. But it was enough of a glance to create plenty of first impressions. I noticed, for example, the tangles of wires running above the street, described as looking like "postmodern wire sculptures" in one article I read. Legacies of the gatos, those who pirated public services like electricity, they're still there, I imagine, because it doesn't make sense to remove infrastructure, however haphazard, once it's been put up (electric companies have since moved in to offer legal service).

The streets, too, pasarela aside, were a bustle of activity. Bars, lanchenetes, corner stores, kiosks, stalls. It was, all told, a vibrant community.

Compared to Leblon (five minutes -- a tunnel -- a mountain -- and utter separation), the sharpest contrast was definitely in layout. The asfalta (literally "asphalt," meaning middle- and upper-class areas, as compared to the morro, or "hill" of the favelas) is the world of landscaping, gated apartment buildings, 24 hour security, and other obvious luxuries. But it's also the world of right angles. Rocinha, by contrast, meets at any angle that's convenient. Sidestreets barely wide enough for two people to pass. A web as tangled as the wires that crisscross above them.

Convenient, too, that I should see Rocinha for the first time just as I start Edward Said's Orientalism. In the opening chapter, "Knowing the Oriental," he quotes Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer, England's representatve in Egypt around the turn of the 20th century:

The European is a close reasoner; his statements of fact are devoid of any ambiguity; he is a natural logician, albeit he may not have studied logic; he is by nature sceptical and requires proof before he can accept the truth of any proposition; his trained intelligence works like a piece of mechanism. The mind of the Oriental, on the other hand, like his picturesque streets, is eminently wanting in symmetry.

I obviously don't want to analyze the differences between favela streets and the broad avenues of the wealthier parts of Rio in order to draw the same Orientalist conclusions, but they do reflect certain realities of urban development. The grid structure (which certainly doesn't hold everywhere -- it's plenty easy to get lost downtown) always comes from top-down planning, whether by a surveyor, landowner, or government. Easy to navigate, for commerce and convenience. But the sinuous network of the favela was built from the bottom-up, without land ownership or government planning, designed (or perhaps not designed, but naturally developing) like a code to be understood only by those who live there. Not welcoming to visitors because visitors usually mean bad news (police, rival gangs).

And, moreover, that insider knowledge turns into a tactical advantage, practiced the world over in similarly vulnerable urban communities. A lesson learned by the French during The Battle of Algiers as they tried to penetrate the Casbah (no wonder then, "Bonde de Casbah," the funk track that samples The Clash -- can be heard in Diplo's "Favela on Blast"; will have a stand-alone mp3 soon), Americans in Mogadishu and Baghdad, and police to this day across Rio's hillsides. Politics aside, the moral is the same: Such local communities are not to be fucked with.

So I tread lightly thus far, hope to be able to bring my camera along soon (although Google image search turns up a bundle). Rogerio is taking me to Rocinha's radio station this afternoon, where they broadcast funk, of course. On Friday night I will be going to my first real baile, at Cantagalo, c/o Maga Bo and Adriana Pittigliani (more on her later).

A Fortnight In: Rio -- Riotous

Rio is riotous. It grows everywhere. Flora erupts out of every crevice, and likewise people. The favelas, thanks to Rio's jarring juxtaposition of topography, are always proximal. Even if the social reality means that rich and poor, flatlander ("da asfalta") and hill-dweller ("do morro"), are worlds apart, they never are spatially, which makes the inequity all that much harder to ignore. A quick drive through town, especially via highway, and you'll spot the familiar outcropping of corrugated roof buildings, the daring architecture of making-do. From the incredible vantage points of the city's landmarks, Corcovador (site of the famous statue of Cristo Redentor, which I felt obliged to snap) and Pao de Açucar (Sugarloaf Mountain), it's easy to get mesmerized by the beaches, the ocean, Maracana, and the upward thrust of the city's lateral sprawl. But pay closer attention and you'll spot 20-35% (estimates vary) of the city's population precariously nestled on every spare hillside (even on the way up to Corcovar, where the train passes Morro do Ingles, Englishman's Hill).

A asfalta, too, is fascinating, a vibrant display of creativity in what is clearly a city with a hands-off government, at least when it comes to zoning (policing is another matter). Lanchonetes (snack bar counters) dot nearly every corner, even in posh neighborhoods. Street vendors well set up a table anywhere they like, from the sidewalk along the entrance to PUC-Rio, where I'm currently taking classes, to an absurdly long line outside of a club, offering partygoers the chance to drink outside and save a few bucks.

The buses, in particular, are a marvel to behold. Used to the monopoly of the MBTA, I was shocked that Metro Rio has competitors. Hell, in my neighborhood, where the actual subway doesn't even reach, Metro Rio hardly accounts for 5% of the buses I see. Instead, it's a flurry of different companies & prices, the number stew of bus routes, a placard in the window with a quick run-down of neighborhood stops. At certain times of day on Avenida Adaulfo de Paiva, which runs right below my window, there are far more buses than cars. And then there are the vans, which pull up alongside any cluster of people (actual bus stops, while extant, are by no means necessary -- simply hailing a bus as you would a taxi is typical), slide open the door, shout out a list of destinations, load any takers, and keep moving. Red lights, I might add, are merely a suggestion.

Riotous. Policeman carrying assault rifles and wearing flak jackets. Nothing like an AR-15 to wake you from an early morning daze.

Riotous. At night I stroll the praia de Leblon, populated after the beachgoers leave by runners & lovers. As late as ten, I've seen a girl's soccer camp in full swing. Returning to my host's apartment, the favela Vidigal looms large, ablaze with lights and looking for all the world like it will slide off into the ocean.

Riotous. I sleep with the windows open, city sounds I know & love punctuated by staccato bursts. Firecrackers or gunshots? I can't yet tell the difference.