What does the city comprehend?
SUMMARY
I write summaries for people who have to carefully marshal their effort or attention.
Where’s Kate? Two interviews and a benefit
The mutability (or lack thereof) of borders
The comprehensiveness (or lack thereof) of city planning
One exercise from the book and one from the city government, sort of
WHERE CAN YOU FIND KATE?
Anytime after now: In an interview with Erika Howsare, and another interview with Twilight Greenaway
On June 22, 2-6pm (come and go as you please), 481 Van Brunt St, Door #7A Brooklyn, NY: Talking with Tiffiney Davis about climate anxiety and community care, at a benefit art show and event for the Red Hook Art Project. Free to attend; a $30 donation to RHAP on-site gets you a book! Snacks for free, drinks to buy, all ages.
On July 10: In Seattle at the Bloomberg Green Festival—details coming soon.
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Late in Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth, there’s a meditative drawing exercise called “Softening the Landscape.” Based on a practice developed by printmaker and papermaker Rejin Leys, the exercise asks people to draw the outline of their country, from memory and without looking at the paper. Rejin then asks them to reflect on the mutability, porosity, and inventedness of borders: the ones that seas will erode and the ones that governments could choose, or be compelled, to treat differently.
Plenty of people in the US could probably take a stab at drawing the national outline, whatever “the border” has done for them or to them, and if they went to primary school here they might be able to draw the shape of the state where they live. But how many of us could draw our city or town limits (or township or hamlet or county…)? Those lines too are often used for defense, exclusion, hoarding and pretexts for violence. But city limits are also a way to say: what happens here is our responsibility. It’s possible to say that, I think, without hardening power relations and locking up assets in the same old hands—but it needs a great deal of intention and work.
For the past several years, the city government of Providence, Rhode Island has been working on their “comprehensive plan” for what they want to make it easier, or harder, to build. As a major public hearing for the plan approaches, I’ve been part of a “reading group” for it, with the intention of creating a commenting guide (available to readers of this newsletter upon request) for those who don’t have the time or energy to read 142 pages, but do want the city to be livable for all its people, present and future. Who probably shouldn’t get tax breaks? Of several utility systems that need updating, which should be updated first? What are the best ways to make and keep housing available and affordable?
This chance to weigh in on the shape of the city comes around every ten years or so. Since there’s some money and some logistical muscle to put behind sweeping changes, it’s worth taking advantage of that chance. But of course it might not work, or the most important parts of it might not work, or the city government might agree to something good and then back out. But it’s still worth it, to weigh in:
To expand and deepen our sense of the questions people have to answer, in order to live together.
To explore who might answer them differently, and how and why, than they’ve been answered recently.
To figure out who might meet the needs of the city’s people if the city won’t.
To become one of those people (the needs you meet may be your own), or one of the people who tries to change the city’s course.
The “Softening the Landscape” exercise’s title is a riff on hardening the landscape, which describes climate responses like seawalls and hurricane barriers that protect one place by pushing the rising water into another. Not here, not here. Let other people deal with it, as long as we’re protected.
It will come as no surprise to you that I don’t like this. More to the point, though, it doesn’t even work that well for the people it’s supposed to protect—the waves beat on the concrete and the salt corrodes it. Areas with wetland and saltmarsh fare better, especially if there’s room for the marsh to spread inland as the water rises. What walls of this kind do second best is break. But what they do best is kill.
The marsh has limits: there are certain ways you can’t do things there, things you can’t grow, structures you can’t build. The marsh offers a limit that isn’t a wall, but an edge; the edge changes. In part, we change it by accepting that people, like water, come and go; building our structures and our systems with that in mind; recognizing that the limits might not be where we always thought they were, and that many of them were never real in the first place.
QUESTIONS:
How can a city or town behave more like a marsh?
How can we erode our own hoarding and gatekeeping to make room for everyone who needs to be here—remembering that everyone has to be somewhere—while still maintaining our area of responsibility and interaction?
PRACTICE:
If you have my book, find someone to do “Softening the Landscape” with! It starts on page 183. If you don’t have it yet, do an internet search for your city or town’s Comprehensive Plan. When was it last revised? Any chance another time of revision is coming up?
SHORT READING: Matthew Haugen and Joanna Bozuwa, “We Have to Own the Grid”
I wrote a book, LESSONS FROM THE CLIMATE ANXIETY COUNSELING BOOTH: HOW TO LIVE WITH CARE AND PURPOSE IN AN ENDANGERED WORLD (Hachette Go, 2024). This newsletter holds the ways that what's in it has branched out: new reflections, events and workshops, unresolved questions, further reading, ways to connect and act. I'm glad to be here on earth with you.