The Smithian

May 15th, 2013

We’ve kind of enlisted the help of the gangs…If your goal is not gang eradication, which none of us knows how to do, but instead violence reduction, and you enlist the gangs as aids, then you begin to change the physics of the neighborhood…We’re doing it with the cooperation of the gangs because they’re so powerful—they control some of the neighborhoods. We get them into classes and training, and we say, if you help us stop the violence, we’re not going to hold your past against you. Everyone agrees we should keep the kids safe… [bloodshed wasn’t just the result of gang identification and drug disputes, but also personal grudges and simply] the power of the barrel of a gun…If you don’t give them a way to exert power legitimately, they’ll do it another way.

Connie Rice, Los Angeles civil rights attorney

In 2003 police brass asked Rice to help them formulate a new strategy for coping with LA’s…gang violence. The effort resulted in the Office of Gang Reduction and Youth Development, an initiative housed in the LA mayor’s office that includes recreational programs at night in city parks, intervention with preteen youth in neighborhoods with high gang membership, and appeals to former and current gang leaders to stop retaliatory violence. There’s…an experiment underway to offer…children of gang members a…college education if the kids stay out of gangs.

April 30th, 2013

thesmithian

Zoom

…the world is full of abandoned buildings: factories left by companies…suburban subdivisions from the boom years, crumbling farms and churches in remote places. Italy has an estimated 2 million such properties; Spain, another 3.5 million; America, many more. Andrea Sesta, who lives in Milan, has been trying to find alternative uses for some of them. His…site, Impossible Living, allows anyone to map unused real estate, and act as champions for their renewal (even if they don’t own them).

more.

…the world is full of abandoned buildings: factories left by companies…suburban subdivisions from the boom years, crumbling farms and churches in remote places. Italy has an estimated 2 million such properties; Spain, another 3.5 million; America, many more. Andrea Sesta, who lives in Milan, has been trying to find alternative uses for some of them. His…site, Impossible Living, allows anyone to map unused real estate, and act as champions for their renewal (even if they don’t own them).

more.

April 26th, 2013

thesmithian

“The history of Greenwich Village…is littered with the corpses of those who drank themselves to creative ruin or death, overdosed on various drugs, committed alcohol- or drug-fueled murder or suicide, or partied themselves into oblivion.”

more.

“The history of Greenwich Village…is littered with the corpses of those who drank themselves to creative ruin or death, overdosed on various drugs, committed alcohol- or drug-fueled murder or suicide, or partied themselves into oblivion.”

more.

April 19th, 2013

thesmithian

Zoom

While apologists…may have seen Whitey as “a bad good guy,” Cullen and Murphy paint a different picture. He did not keep drugs out of Southie. He extorted money from dope dealers. He is charged with killing fellow gangsters and innocent bystanders alike. We are not talking Robin Hood here.

more.

While apologists…may have seen Whitey as “a bad good guy,” Cullen and Murphy paint a different picture. He did not keep drugs out of Southie. He extorted money from dope dealers. He is charged with killing fellow gangsters and innocent bystanders alike. We are not talking Robin Hood here.

more.

April 7th, 2013

thesmithian

New York.

April 4th, 2013

thesmithian

I can’t help but wonder what the best reflection of reality in America is. Is it living where discrimination is blatant and the lines of racism are clearly drawn? Or living where the line is more ambiguous and families operate as though racism doesn’t exist—only to find it swirling right in the neighborhood?

Leticia Clark George, at Jack & Jill Politics

April 2nd, 2013

thesmithian

Zoom

… the wealthy in Cairo are fleeing to “satellite cities” with aspirational names such as Hyde Park, Beverly Hills and Dreamland that promise cool, pollution-free atmosphere. Along the state-subsidized ring road surrounding Cairo, a surreal landscape of gated ostentatious pastel-colored villas and apartment complexes, impossibly green lawns, private leisure centers, and English language international schools has been propping up in once bleak and hostile desert…Cairo’s satellite cities represent not only a shifting urban development paradigm, but also a cultural one. Here clothing styles are more relaxed, and transnational fast-food chains and shopping malls predominate, serving as a nexus for entertainment, consumption, and identity. These iterations…reflect the aspirations and fantasies of Cairo’s elite, and embody the political and economic marriage of private developers and the Egyptian state.

more. plus more about New Cairo.

… the wealthy in Cairo are fleeing to “satellite cities” with aspirational names such as Hyde Park, Beverly Hills and Dreamland that promise cool, pollution-free atmosphere. Along the state-subsidized ring road surrounding Cairo, a surreal landscape of gated ostentatious pastel-colored villas and apartment complexes, impossibly green lawns, private leisure centers, and English language international schools has been propping up in once bleak and hostile desert…Cairo’s satellite cities represent not only a shifting urban development paradigm, but also a cultural one. Here clothing styles are more relaxed, and transnational fast-food chains and shopping malls predominate, serving as a nexus for entertainment, consumption, and identity. These iterations…reflect the aspirations and fantasies of Cairo’s elite, and embody the political and economic marriage of private developers and the Egyptian state.

more. plus more about New Cairo.

April 1st, 2013

thesmithian

‘House Republican districts are isolated in naturally homogeneous areas or gerrymandered ghettos…’

…so elected officials there rarely hear—or see—the great and growing diversity of this country and the infusion of energy and ideas and art with which it enriches us. These districts produce representatives unaccountable to the confluence. And this will likely be the case for the next decade.

more.

March 30th, 2013

thesmithian

Zoom

…three businessmen have latched on to the same dream at the same time: reviving a piece of vintage Harlem with a jumping, jamming jazz spot, that this time will outlive the past.

more.

…three businessmen have latched on to the same dream at the same time: reviving a piece of vintage Harlem with a jumping, jamming jazz spot, that this time will outlive the past.

more.

March 27th, 2013

thesmithian

'Thousands of Chicagoans filled downtown streets on Wednesday evening denouncing the city's plans to close 54 schools, most of them in African-American neighborhoods.'

March 25th, 2013

thesmithian

Zoom

[look of the hour]

March 24th, 2013

thesmithian

If they’re not going to talk about the economic violence that causes gun violence, then I’m not interested in the conversation.

Veronica Morris-Moore, community organizer, Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood

March 20th, 2013

thesmithian

Zoom

villagevoice:

Everybody Wants a Piece of Kimani Gray. How a boy’s death became street theater in Flatbush.

[look of the hour]

Reblogged from The Village Voice

March 20th, 2013

thesmithian

Like many poverty-related issues, transportation has a racial dimension. African Americans, on average, use public transit far more than whites do. Nearly 20 percent of black households do not have a car, in comparison to 4.6 percent of white households. Those cars ride on highways that cut through low-income neighborhoods, highways that were built by giving urban areas short shrift. Nationwide about 80 cents out of every federal transportation dollar goes toward highways—used disproportionately by more affluent drivers—and only 20 cents goes toward mass transit systems, which are heavily used by people of color and by lower-income workers. When it’s time to distribute that 20 percent, regional authorities often favor light-rail systems for suburban commuters over bus lines for city riders.

more.

March 19th, 2013

thesmithian

In Detroit, I heard so much that I used to hear just about every day in Jackson, [Mississippi], from the (false) meme that you have to “cure” all the crime before redeveloping the city, to suburban dwellers talking about how it’s not safe to even drive into the city. I also heard a lot of whining about Detroit’s leaders—including from people who don’t live in the city with the ability to run for office or vote for our elected officials. Sound familiar? I’m not naive enough to believe that Detroit’s problems are easy to repair…Just as Jackson does, the city suffers from intense poverty (worse than ours, in fact) resulting from a very difficult history that has left deep wounds and immense anger, not to mention distrust between the races. And just as in Jackson a decade ago, its locally-owned media tend to display either nearly all black faces or all white faces (an archaic media approach that is about as dated as land lines and black-and-white TVs as this point). But from being involved with Jackson’s effort to reinvent itself into a more inclusive, prosperous city, I know that it takes people willing to take chances, get to know people unlike them, be uncomfortable, and just get out and do cool stuff to convince others that it’s worth their time to live in and invest in a city that other people love to put down.

Jackson Free Press Editor Donna Ladd