Category: myurbanist international

should the ‘creative class’ be more rural in the developing world?

Posted by Chuck – October 27, 2011

Rural Africa, ripe for city skills, without cities

Microfinance—the practice of personal small loans to spur creativity in developing nations—had well-known rural roots. Of late, I had assumed that the practice had become a city-based endeavor, in concert with other programs, targeting the world’s burgeoning urban populations.

Time in Africa earlier in the year did not change that perception.

However, after following up with community economic development friends back home, I learned that fostering a rural middle class should spur reflection among those passionate about cities. Sometimes, finding a way to keep a meaningful rural existence trumps city life.

According to Cole Hoover, Director of Programs for Seattle’s Lumana, whose work focuses in rural Ghana:

Although there is an amazing potential for growth and innovation in cities and urban areas in Africa, I think it is important to recognize that it’s not for everyone. Many people do not have the resources or connections to migrate to cities and some, quite frankly, even when possible, do not want to do so.

Lumana is a small, Seattle-based organization founded by young, multi-national entrepreneurs. In Ghana, Lumana helps people reach their personal and financial goals through microfinance, business education, planning for savings and local mentorship. Lumana also employs four Ghanaians who work in rural areas, out of choice and for connection with their communities.

According to Hoover, these Ghanaians have affinity for their home villages, fellow residents and a slower pace of life. In addition, they take pride in helping to lead operations that can make rural areas more livable.

Hoover’s observations confirm Lumana’s rural-based initiatives:

There is an amazing amount of people who appreciate their traditional way of life and the slower pace that rural life allows. We initially got involved working in rural Africa because its people are some of the most underserved in the world. It is our goal to use our programs to do community economic development that increases opportunities for rural people and makes it easier for them to thrive in the villages they choose to call home.

Lumana's Cole Hoover, in Seattle

Today, microfinance work focuses on cities more often than not, leaving a huge amount of underserved populations in rural Africa, said Samantha Rayner, Executive Director of Lumana. Rural areas experience poverty based on disconnection from services and resources.

“Poverty does not just mean having no money,” Rayner explained. “It means having no opportunities”.

Hoover told the story of “Anna” from the village of Dzita.  ”Anna” was a case study of Lumana’s accomplishments since 2010, helping rural Africans get limited available resources, including access to basic services, such as health care, drinking water, education and a consistent income.

It was in rural Dzita, not a large city like Accra, that Lumana also helped villagers understand how to make their businesses more profitable and to prepare for unforeseen emergencies by creating specific savings plans for education, future businesses and emergencies.

In addition, in a three-day class, villagers typically learn to better understand supply chains, small and medium-sized businesses and how they influence and affect the total economies of the rural communities.

“Rural Africa is an amazingly beautiful place,” explained Hoover. “You see and feel it in the bright-colored clothing, laid back way of life and support of a close-knit community of hardworking and collectively minded people”

I queried Hoover on the fundamental precepts of urban poverty, something I saw firsthand in several instances overseas, and considered in recent writing about Gary Hustwit’s film, “Urbanized”.

Hoover acknowledged the shared burden of urban and rural poverty. But he cautioned that for many people in Africa, moving to the big city is not the goal:

Rural areas still have many endearing aspects that people are sad to lose when forced to move on when faced with a lack of opportunity. Rural Africans are some of the most amazingly resourceful people on earth. They live with a little, and do a lot. Despite the constant poverty many experience on a daily basis, they learn to get by, supporting themselves and those who they love.

Rayner elaborated on the limits facing older generations in rural areas:

They have been around and have deep roots in these communities, including families, established businesses and homes. However, many times, they struggle to make ends meet, because of the lack of opportunities. We try to help by addressing their limits on accessing capital and teaching better ways to save and make good business decisions with the money they earn. With many of these people, their life is in the rural villages, so we want to help make it easier for them to thrive there.

Based on Lumana’s learning about generational views of the city, the children often do not want to leave their villages. Both Hoover and Raynor contrasted American assumptions about their own “Gen Y”—often labeled as an increasingly urban-oriented cohort.

Rural communities appeal to younger Africans, at a fundamental level, said Rayner:

Many young people are not rushing to the cities because they want to, but because it is their only option. A growing number of young Africans are flooding the big cities in search of jobs, leaving behind a better quality of life at home. Many are there to advance their career, go to university or to make increased amounts of money with opportunities only available in the city so they can remit money back home to their families living in the rural areas.

Based on Lumana’s three years of work in Ghana, young people who move to urban areas often do not get better jobs, a university education or more income for their families back home. Rather, many end up living in worse conditions than circumstances they left, in areas far away from those they hoped to help.

Ironically, concluded Hoover, “many are looking for ways to advance their careers, become educated and then return to the rural communities they love best.”

Sitting with Lumana representatives back home in Seattle, I could only wonder whether recent emphasis on cities risks losing sight of universal principles, easily forgotten in an all too competitive world.

Hoover and Rayner referred me to their lead Ghanaian loan officer, Eric Fiazorli, who spoke of helping the rural poor, his family and community. His closing words need no elaboration:

Working in my community is important and I want to find ways with my life to change the rural places I love so much. I want the future to be better for my family to grow up here.

For more about Lumana, click here, or see this recent video from Seattle’s PBS affiliate:

All photographs composed by the author. The KCTS-9 video is in the public domain.


Obama and the Middle East, urban sustainability and detente

Posted by Chuck – May 19, 2011

Could sustainability principles pave the path to peace?

President Obama’s strategic statements about the Middle East last Thursday (and as clarified to AIPAC on Sunday) were not city-specific, but took me back one year to Jerusalem and in-person perspectives on the city’s prospects.

My 2010 reflections, reproduced below, capture individuals still in the news, and the issues of today’s urbanism, boundaries and ecosystems in Jerusalem—considerations well worth heeding in response to the President’s focus on borders, and his call to embrace the choice “between the shackles of the past and the promises of the future.”

In Jerusalem, a municipal administration rides a pendulum between sustainability and geopolitics.

Greenbelts, light rail, complete street-making, and the storied demolition orders for Palestinian homes in a floodway: all live on a world stage.

Last week, addressing Pacific Northwest professionals visiting with Seattle-based i-SUSTAIN, Deputy Mayor Naomi Tsur prescribed the ultimate sustainable urbanism, drawing from a Hebrew phrase. Jerusalem must “emerge from its [many] walls,” old and new, she argued, and enhance the city’s diverse, public areas largely already shared by all.

The Jerusalem of gathering spaces and neighborhoods is already present, she claimed, and should no longer grow out in rings of settlements, but should preserve compact neighborhoods based on affinity, interlinked by public transit and defining connectors such as the Jaffa Road and the Street of the Prophets.

The tools? Public process, for one, even in areas annexed after the 1967 Six-Day War, to help define a collective local voice.

Her systemic analysis of the city is familiar and compelling, as she simultaneously seeks to avoid a Nicosia outcome (a reference to the divided Cyprus to the northwest). Arguably, she is peacemaking on a platform of the sustainable city.

For instance, Tsur thinks at night about the infrastructure lacking in East Jerusalem, and how the city should rise above the intractable and remedy untreated eastern watershed drainage, which flows directly to the Dead Sea. It would be feasible, she says, to pump this sewage to the state-of-the-art treatment plant that already treats the western watershed sewage, and create drinking water through sustainable technology.

Meanwhile, in the East Jerusalem village of Silwan, along the Kidron Valley, just below the City of David and Hezekiah’s water tunnel, Fakhri Abu Diab thinks at night about other things — like what to tell his children about the potential fate of the family house which still “carries the smell of his mother.” As recently reported by The New York Times’ Ethan Bronner, the Abu Diab house was one of several that received a demolition order, because it was expanded without a permit and is the potential location of an archaeological park at the base of excavations already mired in the complexities of political archeology — a search not only to document biblical events, but seen by detractors as a Jewish land-claim process in disguise.

In Abu Diab’s view, the post-1967 municipality has ignored him before, and he lacks confidence in the proposed relocation offer, which is under negotiation for a move to higher ground.

Walls, sleepless nights, conflict, water, and a future for children. The human condition speaks loudly in this most urban of cities, as the debate over the future of Jerusalem brings a reality-television aura to local land-use administration.

The original article also appeared in Crosscut, here.


streets in plain view from a distance

Posted by Chuck – February 13, 2011

A new trend features photographers’ translations of Google Street View scenes—accompanied by remarkable creative messaging—often topical to urban issues.

One such effort, Doug Rickard’s A New American Picture, focuses on challenged American cities such as Camden and Detroit, and displays a world remarkably opposite the technology used to depict his presented scenes. Click here to see his groundbreaking work.

Similarly, words are not always necessary to describe how public rights of way are used around the world, and travel is not a prerequisite of viewing the interaction of foot, wheel and pavement.

Here, without more words, are portrayals of a Sunday morning visit to Japan, Mexico, Brazil and Finland, with both familiar and novel interactions in plain view.

Credit the wonders of Google for these street-oriented images, and Mr. Rickard for inspiring the myurbanist use of camera and software to enhance such virtual visits from afar.






enhancing solar urbanism: two postcards

Posted by Chuck – August 25, 2010

In the recent essay, “Reading the Evolution of Places“, Ana Maria Manzo and I argued for a collaborative, multicultural and multidimensional awareness of place as we move forward with urban reinvention.

Noting the universal interaction of human settlement with light, we asked “How to live amid the sunset?”.

Here are two postcards of Seattle on August 24, which embellish the magic of city and sun. How can we best design and regulate to enhance this blending of natural and built environments?



reading the evolution of places

Posted by Chuck – August 22, 2010

This article is a collaboration of two people who have never met, one, an architect in Venezuela, Ana Maria Manzo (reachable via her blog, the place of dreams), and the other, an environmental and land use lawyer in the United States, Chuck Wolfe, founder of myurbanist.

Below, they provide intercontinental guidance for reading urban evolution.

The evolution of place is far from a linear process. Rather, it is an interactive story which features the blending of many dimensions.

Time, of course, creates new and old approaches to the look and feel of habitation, workplace, and the transportation routes between. The elements of water and land interface and interact, sometimes together, with the built environment. Climate drives seasons and forms of building, access and the manipulation of light. And cultural approaches to ownership and stewardship modify these responses to climate, and create alternative forms of building on the ground.

Today, we are driven by a new sustainability ethic, necessarily systemic in scope. Carbon-neutrality is the rage, and location efficiency, clean energy and the return of neighborhood are the watchwords of change. Formulas and metrics, and new regulatory systems attempt results, and show the quest to measure how close we are to achieving ideal forms of location and development.

But as both of us have written in different languages, context is key, and adaptation to a multi-environmental sense of place, associated imagery and sensation is an essential element of building design, urban development and innovation going forward.  Creating beautiful buildings that are able to work for the environment, or crafting appropriate enabling regulations, should also be considered as part of a broader, holistic effort. There is no use in having architects, urban planners, developers and lawyers thinking in isolation about a better future.

This should be a movement of us all; a movement that evokes positive emotions in those who inhabit cities, and a movement which makes us dream.

What forces shape the look and feel of place? Above, the context of a water-oriented urban skyline in modern America (Seattle) compares with today’s view of biblical legend, adjacent to the “Valley of Death” (Silwan, East Jerusalem). Note the stark contrast created by available building space, history and the local ecology of water.

How to live amid the sunset? The interaction of urban space and the same sun shows historical variance in the United States and Montenegro.

How to accommodate population density? Through the advantages of a planned city as in the future Masdar in Abu Dhabi, or through the improvised Barrios of Caracas, Venezuela?

What are the bases of cultural inspiration and sense of place? A false town (Universal Studios) and a real town (Port Townsend, Washington) show how life can imitate art.

What is the relationship between natural resources and urban settlement at the shoreline? Here, in but one example, water, hills and towns blend together in form and function in Northern Italy and the Cyclades Islands of Greece.

How do people choose to “occupy” their familiar public spaces? Here, two young people enjoy public space in a plaza in Mexico, in contrast to a group of Venezuelan students, who, in political protest, spell with their bodies the word “freedom” in the midst of a major thoroughfare.

What is the contrasting look and feel of public street space based on cultural expression, local economies and changing transportation modes? Here, ironically, we see vitality amid economic duress in the Middle East, and economic challenges of removal of parking and loading for bike lanes in the new, multi-modal America.

What additional interfaces exist between commercial settings and public spaces around the world? Here, witness the role of music and dining against the backdrop of a grand, public square, and an eatery amid public streetside darkness.

How is space between new and old buildings used in different places? Here, we see access to a rear residence, compared with two modern towers flanking an older building which has fallen into non-use.

What becomes of mixed use development in areas with with different histories? Here, adjacent to Piazza Navona, we see the commercial path between emblematic public spaces in Rome, as compared to the current use of a street in Valletta, Malta, once reserved specifically for duels between storied knights.

In different contexts, how can bodies of water be used in urban areas? Here, American recreation contrasts with gondolas, now also arguably recreation in today’s Venice.

In conclusion, we reference more than history–we emphasize the need to access multidimensional memories of place to honor positive evolution in the design of new and redeveloped urban spaces. Hence, we must never forget the value of comparison, and of awareness and wisdom about the context of distant and romantic worlds which we often hope to mirror, or regain.

While every culture may provide different, contextual approaches, collectively these approaches should attempt a common goal: human life in a better urban landscape. All elements must be considered: sense of place, climate, sound, population density, geographic orientation and, of course, neighbor buildings.

When we are collectively able to consider all of these elements to envision the re-creation of urban settings, the evolution of place will take a new and positive direction.

(Initially co-published at the place of dreams and el lugar de los sueños. Republished in slightly different form in seattlepi.com and appeared in planetizen on August 23. Please scroll over photos for credits).


myurbanist international–guest blog: shutters and flying monkeys

Posted by Chuck – August 22, 2010

Through the blogosphere, I’ve had the pleasure of trading observations about the role and function of shutters with David Mathias, a well-known author on woodworking topics who now lives in Switzerland. David was kind enough to republish the myurbanist article, “shutters, placemaking and urbanism” today on his great blog, Poems of Wood & Light.

In return, here’s David’s August 18 take on shutters, “Shutters and Flying Monkeys”, indented below. David’s thoughts have currency here, as he continues to ponder evolution from the American suburb of his youth and researches the colorful role, history and function of shutters in Switzerland! Photo credits, of course, to David Mathias at Poems of Wood & Light.

I spent my childhood, as did many of you, in suburban tract houses. Built in the 1960s, these were typical American homes of the time. Well-built, unpretentious symbols of the American Dream. The second of these houses, which my parents purchased when I was 15, is a wonderful split level with 3 bedrooms, two-and-a-half baths, and a two-car garage. There is no marble in the bathrooms nor granite in the kitchen. The stairs are not 48″ wide. It was a simple, warm and inviting home for our family. My parents lived there for 29 years before heading south for warmer weather some years after retiring.

The two houses in which I spent nearly my entire childhood share a feature that caused me some confusion as a child. I believe that the first time I saw shutters that actually closed was in The Wizard of Oz (not one of my favorite movies — to this day, I hate those damn flying monkeys). The house we lived in from the time I was six had shutters. They were black and rigidly attached to the house. No hinges, no latches, no attempt at functionality. Until I saw The Wizard of Oz (I hate those monkeys), I thought nothing of it, I had no idea that there was a function for them.

As I lay there in my childhood bed, too afraid of airborne primates to sleep, at least I had something to ponder: Why did our house have immovable shutters? What was the point? Shutters, I had learned, were supposed to be closed during severe weather and subsequently smack young girls in the head allowing for development of acid-induced flights of writerly fancy and shows of Technicolor glory. Our shutters did none of those things.

I was too young to understand that modern storm windows had rendered shutters largely unnecessary. Of course, they couldn’t simply disappear. People were accustomed to seeing them; functional or not, they were essential. At some point in time, I figured that out and I assumed that functional exterior shutters were throwbacks to another time, present only on old houses (houses potentially filled with flying monkeys).

By the time my wife and I bought our first house there was no pretense of purely decorative shutters. Nor were there storm windows which had been supplanted by sealed, multi-pane units, but that’s a different topic. Shutters were officially dead. Mystery solved. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Then we moved to Switzerland. In this country, shutters are everywhere. They are on old buildings. They are on new buildings. I’m not sure that I’ve seen a building here without shutters. And they are all functional. Every last one of them. Hinges. Latches. The works. Which suggests a question: Who cares? I do and here’s why. They are fantastic. Perhaps the appeal is related to the childhood confusion or maybe it is purely aesthetic. Either way, I can’t get enough of them.

Buildings here tend to be more colorful than what I’m used to in the US. Shutters provide one source for colorful displays. In some cases, patterns, sometimes similar to sunbursts, are painted on. These appear to correspond with region though I still have much to learn about that tradition. Shutters can also convey a great deal of character. I have a particular affinity for the old, weather-beaten examples, colors faded by the sun and years of service. I find a certain dignity in them and am reminded that in some parts of the world, old things are not discarded simply because of their age.

Even old shutters are not mere artifacts. More than simply functional, they are both useful and used. With the exception of large public buildings, nothing in Switzerland is air conditioned. With air conditioning largely unnecessary due to the mild climate, we have rediscovered fresh air. At night, we often sleep with windows open. During the day, one can open windows to let in fresh air and close the shutters, at least partially, to keep out the sun. And flying monkeys. Those things are just creepy.


placemaking and ruins, redux–from Venezuela

Posted by Chuck – August 18, 2010

From Venezuela, an April 2010 myurbanist post has been revisited in English and Spanish, and embedded below. Thanks again to architect Ana Maria Manzo.