The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race. Carl C. Anthony
the issue that it can no longer be ignored.
Political Leadership in Architecture
In my final year at Columbia University, I grew interested in the urban design work being undertaken by Mayor John Lindsay’s administration in New York City. Our studio assignment was to produce designs for a new state office building in New York City. Civil rights leaders Wyatt Tee Walker and Bayard Rustin had visited New York State Governor Nelson Rockefeller and convinced him to move a portion of the state administrative functions into an office building in Harlem. The idea was to bring these services to a portion of the city that had not been well served, where new activity on the street could stimulate economic development. However, the project was very divisive. A small group of black students (I was the only one of us studying architecture) protested the intrusion of white people into Harlem and occupied the site, referring to it as Reclamation Site No. 1. Our studio masters seemed to have no awareness or understanding of the nature of the conflict. The situation frustrated me, and for my assignment, I chose an alternative site for an office building in the Bronx. In retrospect, I realize that the conflict could have been dealt with creatively if someone had employed conflict resolution strategies and helped the two groups listen respectfully and empathetically to each other’s point of view.
Paul Davidoff, an architect and lawyer, developed a theory of “advocacy planning” that became a national model during the second half of the 1960s. He argued that there is no such thing as the public interest. Projects are developed within settings in which various actors have conflicting goals. Advocacy planning asserts that disenfranchised communities have the right to professional help in developing plans that speak to their self-interest. Projects like the placing of state administration functions in a Harlem office building need to be vetted by all concerned parties—the older generation and the younger.
As a New York senator, Robert Kennedy brought together business and community leaders to found the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, the first community development corporation (CDC) in the nation. It had the power to acquire land and develop property for economic development and other purposes on behalf of the community. From that point on, CDCs became widespread, making it possible to apply the idea of advocacy planning to real projects.
In my final year at Columbia, I sought to resolve the conflict between the culture of the studio and the culture of the street through my thesis project. In 1968, the New York City Board of Estimate allocated $150,000 to plan a Harlem high school for three thousand students. This funding was to cover developing an educational concept, developing a building program, and selecting a site for the school.
I made this the focus of my thesis and developed a proposal for what I called the “Community-Controlled Harlem High School System.” Instead of locating the school in a campus-like setting, I proposed breaking it up into a series of small schools, each with a different focus, sited on a corridor threading through Harlem. These new examples of urban design would revitalize Harlem neighborhoods and provide facilities, laboratories, theaters, and athletic facilities that could be used by the community after school hours and on weekends. The school system would also have satellite facilities throughout the city in television studios, medical facilities, the financial district, and the airport to facilitate the students’ transition from high school to the world of work. Developing and writing the thesis helped shape my ideas about the value of creating institutions for community development.
Growing Interest in African Settlements
As I continued reading Lewis Mumford, Basil Davidson, and others, I began thinking about African settlements as a resource and model for modernity. Through Mumford’s books and essays, I had developed a deep appreciation for ordinary landscapes in addition to the more conventional focus on individual buildings as monuments. For three decades, Mumford had educated the public to think about the history of the built environment as a force shaping society. By then, he was writing a regular column on architecture called the Sky Line for New Yorker magazine.
My early interest in African settlements was an outgrowth of my desire to understand how African Americans came to live under such terrible conditions. Many writers had described those conditions, none more eloquently than James Baldwin. In his first published essay, “The Harlem Ghetto,” which was included in Notes from a Native Son, he wrote,
Harlem, physically at least, has changed very little in my parents’ lifetime, or in mine. Now as then the buildings are old and in desperate need of repair, the streets are crowded and dirty, there are too many human beings per square block. (Baldwin 1955, 57)
Yet, as a student of American architecture, I found within the classic literature of architecture and urban planning no mention of the disparity between white and black—neither explanation nor apology nor remedy. It was, as the song goes, “just one of those things.” I had set my sights on changing the conditions under which African Americans were forced to live. In order to do so, I would have to reach beyond conventional wisdom and begin at the beginning.
I wanted to know how we could gain better control over the environments in which we lived. I reasoned that a study of traditional African environmental design would provide a baseline from which to assess how our communities had become so alienated from the housing and neighborhoods where we lived. More importantly, we would be able to figure out what to do about it.
But where, exactly, was the beginning?
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