Issue 5

Rhapsody in Blue Insights into City Life Issue 5: Winter 2006

Rhapsody in Blue: Barnard and Columbia’s Urban Studies Journal Winter 2006 • Issue 5

Editors-in-Chief Genevieve Rose Sherman and Daniel Rinzler Publisher Christopher Simi Art Direction and Illustration Elle Marrone Publicity Director Genevieve Rose Sherman Associate Editors Rhiannon Pimentel Remy Monteko-Sherman Elizabeth Case Emma Jacobs David Vega-Barachowitz Copy Editor Christopher Simi Contributing Writers David Vega-Barachowitz, Remy Monteko-Sherman, Genevieve Rose Sherman, Alexander Sackeim, David Mazzuca, Michelle Kang, and Kirsten Eiler Contributing Artists Ian Mactavish and Amy Mascunana Cover Art Alexander Sherman Special thanks to the Center for Urban Research and Policy for their generous support

www.columbia.edu/cu/rhapsody Printed by Hartco Printing. Carlisle, PA All content © 2006-2007, Rhapsody in Blue and contributors

Window Ian Mactavish

Letter from the Editors From the perspective of an urbanist, theory only goes so far. The attempt to comprehend the built environment and all of its complex inner workings must begin with experience. Only through interactions with the people, things, and forces that comprise a city will our viewpoint become as multidimensional as the city itself. The city is not monolithic.

In his essay “Here is New York,” E.B. White wrote, “Every event is, in a sense, optional, and the inhabitant is in the happy position of being able to choose his spectacle and so conserve his soul.”

Rhapsody in Blue encourages its writers to challenge such a limited observation of the city and engage their subjects from different positions. Colorful hillside communities in Rio de Janeiro become an environmental blemish and new apartments in Cape Town become a visual barrier, concealing a segregated city. It is not always obvious to acknowledge a pedestrian exchange with a bus in Staten Island, a political statement sprayed on a wall in Ecuador, or a crowd on a Harlem corner rendered statuesque from the vantage point of an evening run.

But at what point do these experiences become meaningful? To what extent are they representative of our lives and a city’s life? How, as urban planners and thinkers, will we approach the city with this kaleidoscopic vision in mind? In this issue of Rhapsody In Blue, we hope to encourage an approach to answering these questions.•

Rhapsody in Blue Insights into City Life

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Running in the City • David Vega-Barachowitz Desert of Opportunity • David Mazzuca Putting Its Best Face Forward • Genevieve Rose Sherman Guarding Public Spaces • Alexander Sackeim Tangle on the Hillside • Remy Monteko-Sherman Drive at Your Own Risk • Michelle Kang Book Review • Kirsten Eiler

Running in the City David Vega-Barachowitz

I am the conqueror of cities, plunderer of streets, sweat and fury stomping upon the pavement, and I am running to the end of the world. I am subjugator of this mass of humanity, weaving, dancing, water-drop gushing through every open crack until it rains upon the endless tundra of infinite: My City. Step left, twist, shimmy round the old fellow ambling to the right, dawdle down and wheel around that kiddy drawn to the shiny silver purse on the curbside. This is my dynamic obstacle course, my rushing river flowing through the streets.

This is my jazz, my rap, my ragtime, my feet moving to the beat of the music as I pass the boom boxes blaring in Spanish Harlem. I am predestined to dance round them, drifting into my path in their distractedness, their reckless choreography. This is my city and I am its preeminent pedestrian, drawn inexorably towards its skyline, my soaring trophies, my battlefield, that huddle of steel giants conversing in the distance. This is my grid, twenty blocks to a mile, order versus chaos and Broadway, oh Broadway, wild, boisterous waterway, the mangled spine of the Manhattan. I am Broadway, I won’t relent, I am weaving chaotically to the end of the earth. I am this city, and I won’t stop until I’ve been to the end and back, but then it’s all too late, and it’s changed, and I’m running forever. So out of my way.

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David Vega-Barachowitz

Rhapsody in Blue

Winter 2006

I am running in New York because the streets never end, they don’t give way to forests or highways, they don’t fade and die that slow, painful suburban fringe death.

It’s overbuilt, dynamic, it’s endless entertainment, diversion, distraction. So I came here because I hate loops, and I’m tired of running in circles, watching that same convenience store, gas station, church, baseball field sequence pass by me. Ten miles in New York is shorter than three on the old loop, my senses overwhelmed by the buildings, the people, the construction, decay, rot, and magnificence of the city. I’m not running at all, I am an explorer searching for new land, discovering new places, happening upon Sugar Hill, Wards Island, and Fort Washington Park. I’m a dreamer, suspended in flight in the middle of George Washington Bridge, caught between the grand green cliffs holding the mighty Hudson at bay and the man made mountainous skyline of Manhattan, forest of concrete and steel. I’m a warrior, navigating, weaving, ravaging street life. My feet and speed are my weapons. Excuse me, I’m running and I can’t stop.

I’m running through Harlem, this harbinger of gentrification, gushing guilt as I pass each person, detached, uncomfortable. Am I running away, a terrible racist? Am I afraid? Do I smile, do I stare confidently beyond, detached? Or maybe I’m just a runner, running down an empty street, observing, curious, invisible. Cultural patronage of the elite. I am running down the Upper East Side. It’s everything I expect, assume­—tiny dogs, botoxed old ladies, haughty pedestrian entitlement, and its crest-jacketed offspring.

Move out of my way, I say, and I’m flying above them. And then, at the last second, I move.

I am running downtown, waiting at the stoplight for five minutes, bottling up my energy, until I burst forth with a rush of momentum—sprint...Charge—and I feel free and I’ve left them all behind. I am the preeminent, on some divine mission, drawn to something and yet open to everything. I watch myself migrating on this map, running to Brooklyn, to Queens, to the Bronx, to Yankee Stadium. I am crossing these great bridges, rusted messes of steel, stone, concrete, and cables all in elegant suspension. The Brooklyn, The Queensboro, The Triboro, Macomb’s Dam, 145 St., Hell’s Gate. So I’ve run to Brooklyn and now it’s mine. The Great Bridge has been conquered.

This is my city and I run for the majesty of it all. And I won’t stop until I’ve conquered every street, every river, every landmark, building, park, and person it holds. My legs won’t stop pounding the pavement until I can see all this city in my mind’s eye, until I’ve weaved my tapestry of streets and mankind, until I’ve found my Northwest Passage.

And until I’m done, I’ll be running, or else dreaming that I’m running to the end of the earth, forever looking for the edge, the forest, but never finding it, as the warrior finds only more war at the edge of sea, and never makes it home. Such is the futility of plundering cities.•

David is a freshman at Columbia College. dev2103@columbia.edu Running in the City

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Desert of Opportunity: Peopling Las Vegas, 1970-2005 David Mazzuca

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he Las Vegas Valley of southern Nevada is a dry, barren place that would have little to offer the world if not for its exhilarating barrage of neon lights, themed casinos, and luxurious hotels.

This ultimate entertainment destination, once a sleepy railroad junction, has also become an ultimate bastion for the American dream: a rapidly growing, polyglot metropolis where people from all over the world migrate to earn a respectable living. Since the 1970s, Las Vegas’ casino industry has evolved into a well organized, financed, and developed corporate enterprise. While opportunities in Las Vegas’ leisure economy have always attracted newcomers, the last thirty years have brought fundamental economic changes, which have transformed city physically and spurred an ethnic revolution. "Today, Las Vegas is home to communities of people representing virtually every nation, a striking manifestation of global migration," writes Eugene Moehring. "On any shift today’s tourists will encounter waiters and waitresses from Thailand, Iran, Bolivia, and Pakistan sharing trays and aisles with European American and African American workers from California, New Jersey, and Mississippi." Most of the population is starting anew in this desert city. What New York was to millions one hundred years ago, this dry desert valley serves as today—a land of second chances, a new life, a desert of opportunity.

Thousands of migrants to Las Vegas are actually Americans from across the country seeking what every migrant seeks—some form of a life better than the one they left. Las Vegas is unique in that it still provides blue-collar jobs at a salary that grants a middle class standard of living. Las Vegas historian Hal Rothman says "…they are paid more than they could ever expect to receive for similar jobs in the places they left behind." He calls the city "the last Detroit…where unskilled workers can make a middle class wage and claw their way toward the American dream." Few other American cities can provide blue collar workers with such a lifestyle today. Las Vegas is arguably the only city in the United States where 7

one can not only get a second chance and a decent paycheck without an education, but also be surrounded by a population that almost entirely revolves around one industry: serving and building the resorts of Las Vegas. These conditions have caused Las Vegas to develop as a different kind of melting pot city, one not only of immense diversity but that also promises equity.

Prior to the 1970s, the Las Vegas had a significant African American population. Over the last thirty years, the percent of African Americans living in the valley has decreased, while numerically the African American population has exponentially increased. Prior to the civil rights movement in the 1960s, black Las Vegans were excluded from employment opportunities in casinos and hotels, thus ensuring that the African-American community would exist in a relatively sub par economic state. Employers continued to discriminate against African Americans until a 1971 US District Court decision. By fighting for civil rights in the 1960s and early 1970s, the African-American community set the stage for various other racial and ethnic groups to enjoy the freedom of a discrimination-free Las Vegas post-1971 and laid the foundation for Las Vegas’ growth over the next thirty years. Today African Americans from across the country come to live and work and, like their European American counterparts, make a better life for themselves and their families.

Like much of the United States, and espeDavid Mazzucca

Rhapsody in Blue cially the Southwest, Las Vegas’ largest minority group is its Hispanic community. During the last decade of the twentieth century, Nevada witnessed the second highest percentage growth in its Hispanic population when compared with the 49 other states. Prior to the 1970s, many Las Vegan Hispanics were actually from the Caribbean. Many former employees of Havana casinos immigrated to the United States and made Las Vegas their new home after Fidel Castro took power in Cuba in the late 1950s. Starting in the 1990s however, the majority of Hispanics moving to Las Vegas have come from southern California, Texas, Florida, and New York. When concentrating on Mexican Americans in Las Vegas specifically, it is important to distinguish between new immigrants, which make up 80% of the

Winter 2006 Philippine Chamber of Commerce, there will be 300,000 Asian Americans in the county by 2010. Recently, developers under the direction of James Chen, a Taiwanese American who came to the Untied States in the 1970s, opened a commercial-only Chinatown. This development has led to "the development of other Asian businesses along Spring Mountain Road so that ‘Asian Town’ is now several blocks long east and west of Chinatown," writes Sue Fawn Chung. But the rise of Chinese culture does not mean that the Asian-American population is Chinese dominated. Filipinos are the largest Asian community in Las Vegas today.

Unlike Hispanics, Asian Americans were effectively nonexistent in Las Vegas twenty years ago, but today their population is growing tremendously.

While opportunities in Las Vegas’ leisure economy have always attracted newcomers, the last thirty years have brought fundamental economic changes, which have transformed city physically and spurred an ethnic revolution.

Mexican-American population, and the Mexican American who is second or third generation American. Much of the second and third generations are a part of the middle class Las Vegas population, and while they maintain the ancestral ties to the homeland, they do not exhibit the cultural affinity exhibited by newer, younger Mexican immigrants. According to Moehring, the "willingness of many Las Vegas employers…to waive the requirement for a high-school diploma" increases "the town’s appeal to Latinos." The variety of jobs with varying educational requirements not only makes Las Vegas appealing across the population spectrum, but also encourages an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse population to develop.

Asian Americans are predicted to surpass African Americans in the early twenty first century, making them the second largest minority group in Las Vegas. To illustrate the rapid growth of the Asian population, one must only note that in 2000 there were 78,959 Asian and Pacific Islander Americans in Clark County, and according to the Las Vegas

Desert of Opportunity

The explosive growth of Las Vegas has led to a rapid diversification of the population. Through the 1980s, the population of Las Vegas remained heavily European in descent. In 1980 the population was 82.5% Caucasian, 9.8% African American, 7.4% Hispanic, and less than one percent Asian American and American Indian/Native American. By the year 2000, however, Las Vegas’ demographics had changed drastically. The 2000 census found that the city grew by 83.5% from 1990 to 2000 and exponentially more since 1980. The census also found that Hispanics, constituting 21.9% of Las Vegas’ population, were for the first time the largest racial minority in the city, ahead of African Americans. In 2000, Las Vegas was 9% African-American and 5.7% AsianAmerican. The African-American community, due to slower growth rates, is expected to fall below the Asian-American community by 2010. It can be expected that approximately 40% of population in Las Vegas will be minority by 2010. As for internal migration, the most common area of origin for Las Vegas residents is California at 39.1%, followed by the northContinued on page 24

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Putting Its Best Face Forward:

Experiencing the built environment of Cape Town, South Africa at the 2010 World Cup Genevieve Rose Sherman

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or any city, hosting a major international sporting event is a tempting, double-edged sword. While developers, planners and city officials groan at the thought of abandoned ‘white elephant’ stadiums littering the metropolis, they grin at the rare opportunity to cut through that perpetual red tape that strangles development projects. Zoning codes, budgets, and public review processes are dramatically altered or simplified to fast track the city toward completing its makeover in time for the event. While many argue that mega-events allow cities to prioritize development trophies over urban welfare, wise leaders turn this criticism on its head by demonstrating how mega-events can rejuvenate cities by garnering jobs, investment, infrastructure, and tourist dollars.

In the case of South Africa, the first African host of soccer’s World Cup in 2010, these expectations take on epic proportions. Formerly the economic and tourism pariah of the world, South Africa will now multiply exponentially the amount of money and people that have already poured into the country from all over the globe since apartheid ended and democracy was established in 1994. Entrenched and costly plans for major infrastructure projects, such as a national rapid transit system, civic centers, and

commercial districts will now be rushed toward completion in the next three years. South African cities are going to look different.

Putting a New Face on the Apartheid City The world cup is not only a singular occasion to score intense economic growth from tourism.

It is the opportunity to gain international prestige as an attractive and competitive tourist destination, embodying the emerging image of South Africa; an image that is literally cemented in its newly built environment. Table Mountain and Telkom Joburg Tower will join the London Bridge and the Statue of Liberty as marketable landmarks of global cities. Before tourists swarm into the cities and the rest of the world synchronically watches their televisions, South Africa must decide how to put its best face forward as a nation fifteen years post-apartheid and as a nation straddling the developed and developing worlds.

The World Cup must be what Organizing Committee CEO Danny Jordaan calls “African and world class.”

Yet South African cities are far from being ‘world class’ environs. While South Africa can saturate its sporty tourists with the music, cuisine, costume, and eclectic culture of the Rainbow nation, it cannot conceal its legacy of segregation, which is indelibly ingrained into the built environment. If cities are manifestations of the concurrent developed and developing worlds, then the rift may be too wide to veil with sport and spectacle.

The Divided City

The segregationist policies of the South African government in the twentieth century resulted in cities that are largely still racially and structurally divided.

White residents lived in mixed-use dense 2 center cities while black and colored resi1 dents lived in outly3 4 ing swaths of racially segregated residential villages called townships. Townships, first created for rural-toThis image is not drawn to scale urban migrants and A view of the Cape peninsula facing south. The N2 highway runs west into the central city of Cape Town, known later systematically as the ‘city bowl.’ 1) The city bowl 2) The Cape Flats 3) Cape Town International Airport 4) Langa Township

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Genevieve Rose Sherman

Rhapsody in Blue

Winter 2006

constructed under the apartheid system, were called ‘dormitory towns’ because they were completely comprised of small, standardized, single story homes, without the inclusion of commercial or industrial sectors. With few exceptions, the apartheid government strictly controlled economic endeavors and residents were expected to work, with permits, in the center city.

While most township residents still commute long distances for work, often on dilapidated or dangerous public transit systems, the transformation of the townships since apartheid has only cemented their pattern of residential primacy and urban sprawl. Intensified rural-to-urban migration has continued, filling in the gaps between formal townships with hundreds of thousands of squatters living in tents or self built shacks. The newly appointed government in 1994 responded to this housing crisis by building thousands of new homes, with more regard to quantity than quality or composition. The result is that townships, with their present spatial and compositional disadvantages, are an irrefutable construct of urban South Africa.

In the commodification of places and spaces that accompanies international tourism, to what extent will South Africa allow the presence of its townships to color visitors’ perceptions of the South African city? Will townships be included in the World Cup image of the South African city or are they built far enough away from the city not to matter?

Cape Town Tackles the Township Image These questions have come to roost in Cape Town, the Mother City, where center city and township seem worlds apart. Tucked into the confines of three imposing mountains, residents of the urban metropolis cannot see the vast expanse of single story homes and tiny shacks, which spread from the other side of the mountain for miles. But visitors driving into the city from the Cape Town International Airport on the N2 highway can. That is why Cape Town was selected as the location for the pilot program of the National Department of Housing’s New Human Settlements, which endeavors to deliver large quantities of quality, new urbanist housing along the N2 border in time for the 2010 World Cup. The ambitious 2005 pilot program, called the N2 Gateway Project, planned to deliver 22,000 housing units at six sites around the city within 18 months. So far, only 705 units have been built, all at the informal Joe Slovo settlement, which borders Langa, the oldest black township and closest one to the city bowl. Before 2006, people who came to Cape Town and never set foot in a township still maintained an image of the informal and formal dwellings they’d seen along the highway, which house millions of urban South Africans. Now, tourists heading into the city will see the ideal future of Cape Town: multi-story rental flats that break previous patterns and structures of apartheid era housing, limit urban sprawl, increase vehicle and pedestrian mobility, and integrate townships into mixed-use areas.

In order to shape the tourist experience of the built environment, it is logical that South Africa should want to put its best face forward. Yet while the completed units may hold promise for the future of Cape Town, their strategic positioning most certainly masks its present. The revamped transportation corridor tips the tourism scale in favor of a world-class veneer over the true encounter with the South African city.

On the level terrain of the Cape Flats, the newly erected two story walk-ups block the view of the townships from the highway, effectively creating an aesthetically pleasing façade facing the road. In this most obvious sense, the Gateway homes hide the visual presence of shacks, which act as an immediate visual cue of inequity. Moreover, the new buildings will hide the townships, the residential dormitory settlements, which are the true enduring structure of the apartheid city. Even the title ‘Gateway’ identifies the neighborhood as just a preliminary urban introduction, which will crescendo into the great metropolis behind the mountain. Not only Putting the Best Face Forward

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Rhapsody in Blue

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do the N2 homes hide the present state of housing, they create a corridor that hierarchically favors the city bowl as the focal point of the city, the true destination. No strong visual sign of township housing remains as a counterweight to that notion, thus excluding these areas from the tourist perception of the city.

Above: The townships on the Cape Flats Genevieve Rose Sherman Below: Informal shacks along the N2 highway www.sacities.net

The lack of a clearly defined and open procedure to choose the beneficiaries in particular has polarized groups hoping to obtain the housing.

Langa residents who have been on the waiting list for housing for over a decade may be supplanted by new rural migrants from the Eastern Cape or former residents of Joe Slovo, whose shacks burned down in a massive fire that obliterated over 3,000 dwellings in January of 2005. Even when all 22,000 units are completed, they will hardly make a dent in the housing backlog estimated to be as high as 360,000 units in the Western Cape. Many more homeless families settle in Cape Town each year than the housing budget, already doubled over the last three years, can possibly afford to build homes for.

The N2 fiasco is part of a much larger debate that will continue to rage as South African cities attempt to transform what President Thabo Mbeki calls “the spatial dimension” of apartheid. For the six million people estimated to pass through Cape Town International Airport in 2010, the loud debate may be muffled behind the attractive walk-ups that may or may not be the future standard of the built environment of South Africa’s cities. In the context of hosting an international event however, the N2 Gateway project appears to be less of an honest transformation than a disappearing act.•

Genevieve is a senior at Barnard College majoring in Urban Studies. gs2132@barnard.edu

Dyantyi, Richard. “Budget Speech.” Provincial Legislature, Western Cape. May 24, 2006 “Western Cape Provincial Spatial Development Framework,” Guidelines, Manuals & Instructions.

2003-2004. <www.capegateway.gov.za> Horn, Thyrza “The Netherlands Delegation Visit the Phase one of Joe Slovo Units.” Department of Local Housing and Government Newsletter. May 2006

It is not only the reality of urban poverty and spatial inequity that is hidden, but the reality of the local housing process, which is overstressed and racked by mismanagement and alleged corruption. The N2 project, past its deadline in the summer of 2006, had only built three percent of the total planned units, all in the Joe Slovo settlement, and they all stood empty. Miscommunication between the contractors and national and municipal governments led to huge overspending and continuous confusion over the price of units as well as the development’s intended beneficiaries.

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Paton, Carol. “Gateway Housing Development: Shaky Foundations.” Financial Mail Edition (South Africa).

June 16, 2006 Lünsche, Sven. “Soccer World Cup 2010: Goals and Reality.” Financial Mail Edition (South Africa).

August 25, 2006 Davids, Nashira and Philp, Rowan. “Jumping the Housing Queue.” Sunday Times (South Africa). May 8. 2005 “South Africa’s World Cup 2010 Vies for ‘World Class’ Event.” Agence France Presse. May 6, 2005

Genevieve Rose Sherman

Guarding Public Spaces: Quito’s Graffiti Alexander Sackeim Quito, July 17, 2006

“C

apitalism = Imperialism, Imperialism = War, Terrorism,” reads a spray-painted slogan on a wall in Quito, Ecuador. “Political art” is the polite name given to the graffiti etched across downtown façades. While the term “art” is naturally contentious, there is no mistaking the political nature of the graffiti. Taking the trip down Avenida Carolina, or cutting across town on 12 de Octubre, the sites of spray can affirmation are flush on the cement walls that fortify parking lots and hotel rooms from the street. There is irony in these acts that transcends the criticisms of the TLC (Spanish acronym of the Free Trade Agreement with the US) or the urban-rural inequalities that the graffiti engages. Where the messages are and how they are conveyed speaks volumes about the economic and political environment of Quito.

When it comes to graffiti, discussion is usually polarized between those who applaud the free form of expression it embodies and those who see it as a sign of blight and delinquency. New York City took a hard line on spray painting after a flurry of bombing (spray painting) in the 1970s by increasing police surveillance, erecting barbed wire fences, and prosecuting offenders. The rise in spray painting in New York accompanied a faltering economy and

growing municipal debt. By the mid-1970s, the city had reached a financial crisis that nearly culminated in bankruptcy. The tagged subway cars, colorfully defaced, were seen as signs of a deteriorating city and a lack of control on the part of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Subscribing to the “broken window theory,” in which smaller acts of vandalism precede larger crimes, Mayor Koch unleashed an aggressive anti-graffiti campaign. By the time New York City recovered from its debt, spray painted trains were largely a thing of the past.

The proliferation of graffiti is able to take place when city governments do not have the financial resources, manpower, or know-how to prevent bombers (spray painters, mostly youth) from plying their trade. Control is a necessary precursor to clean city walls, because the interests of the city and the interests of bombers are diametrically opposed. Spray painters want their work to be visible to the public, which requires the vandalism of public or private property. However, there is no strong economic incentive to perform their work, such as in the drug trade. Most of them do it for the thrill, the self-expression, and the challenge of accessing harder sites and executing more complicated designs. Those individuals that spray paint will only subject themselves to a certain amount of danger and hassle before the costs are no longer worth the rewards.

Quito political grafitti Alexander Sackeim

Guarding Public Spaces

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Rhapsody in Blue

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New York City graffiti Alexander Sackeim

Like the financially strangled New York City government of the 1970s, the municipality of Quito has limited economic resources and a large base of unemployed and underemployed residents. The number of underemployed residents was near 50% in 1999 and poverty grew in that decade to 63.6%. A destabilizing macroeconomic climate in the 1990s made attempts to halt expenses and inflation in Quito nearly impossible. In 2000, Ecuador defaulted on its international debt and implemented the US dollar as its national currency.

The prevalence of graffiti in Quito is, again, a symptom of a city that cannot control its public spaces. Despite recent economic progress and a relative return to stability since dollarization, control is still not

The walls that were intended to protect middle class residents from the harsh realities of the city have become the canvasses upon which these realities are exposed. concentrated in the hands of the municipal government. In the fancier tourist district of the Mariscal Sucre, better-known as “Gringolandia,” petty crime remains a common occurrence, despite increased police forces. And as one travels out of tourist areas, the police presence is mostly non-existent, with middle class residents choosing to encamp themselves behind concrete walls, broken glass barriers, and hired security guards, creating more or less prison-like gated communities. In the poorer favelas that creep up the surrounding mountains these safety measures are unattainable.

Yet the messages disseminated from spray paint slogans distinguish them from the graffiti on old New York subways, and explain why the broken window theory has not caught on in Quito. The large swaths of graffiti that filled subways in New York typically were collages of artists’ “tags,” short three-, four-, or five-letter non-deplumes 13

Alexander Sackeim

Rhapsody in Blue

Alexander is a senior at Columbia College majoring in Urban Studies. ads2106@columbia.edu

Soto, Alonso. “Ecuador Writer Takes Trade Protest to City Walls.” Reuters. June 4, 2006

Guarding Public Spaces

Winter 2006 like SEEN or DINDO. Rarely were overt political statements made, although the act of spray painting itself may have been politically motivated, giving a sense of power to largely marginalized youth. Tags were executed with a zeal for style and complexity, with extra credit going to those who pulled off a particularly challenging work.

The more visible Quito graffiti artists do not share the same devotion to the artistic qualities of spray painting.

Using plain block letters, no outline, and one or two colors of paint, their graffiti is created for a different purpose: political declaration. The statements and occasional images found in the central city are of peasant tears, treacherous national policies, and an expressly disgruntled populace. Unlike their New York predecessors, Quito bombers havn’t sought to fill up whole walls, cramming their designs into all available space. Their messages are neat and simple. Their different style parallels a different political climate in Ecuador.

In a country that has been accused of being a nation of protestors, the populace has a strong influence on national politics. Ecuador has had seven presidents in the last ten years, in which a standard term is four years. The last two deposed presidents, Jamil Mahuad and Lucio Gutierrez, were removed when protestors stormed the presidential palace.

The armed forces could have enforced the president’s safety and fired on demonstrators, but the absence of large-scale violence displays the power of popular opinion. In attempting to raise awareness and mobilize public opinion, graffiti artists fit well within populist demonstrations. Alex Ron, who has tagged the capital with more than 300 pieces about economic imperialism says, “This is my game, my beautiful protest.” Guards, who witness these acts of vandalism, exhibit a mixture of apathy and disgruntlement, but there is rarely outright condemnation.

Middle class homes, hotel walls, and parking lot fences of the central city tend to be the targets of bombers.

The concentration of graffiti in the neighborhoods of the wellto-do is no coincidence. Usually near major thoroughfares, the messages are designed to provoke controversy. In contrast, graffiti is a rare site in the surrounding favelas. Slum dwellers are not the intended audience. Many of them are already fully aware of the sentiments expressed in the graffiti.

They do not have the power to enact the changes necessary to alleviate poverty and improve education and healthcare.

These messages are intended for the middle class, walled up, guarded, and secure in the central city.

And so graffiti art in Quito is both a reflection of a lack of security through economic turmoil and an unpunished application of freedom of speech. In an odd twist, the walls that were intended to protect middle class residents from the harsh realities of the city have become the canvases upon which these realities are exposed. There is no need to read the paper to learn about the impacts of current developments such as the TLC between Ecuador and the United States. “To Kill Latin Countries” is already on the wall.•

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Tangle on the Hillside: The environmental justification for favela removals in Rio de Janeiro Remy Monteko-Sherman Indira Gandhi once cautioned, “poverty is the greatest polluter.” More recently, Manuel Castells, a contemporary urban theorist, has argued that “throughout the world, poverty has been shown, again and again, to be a cause of environmental degradation.” There is no doubt that they are both deeply precise: poor communities have not been the environment’s best advocates. Their shelter, nourishment, and health needs often take vital precedent. One billion people around the world currently live in squatted housing communities. They are forced to “fight for the right to pollute” because they must put their housing needs before the earth’s, not to mention their own health. Such a position is held out of necessity, not choice.

Throughout history the well-housed and provided-for have used both valid and invalid strategies to marginalize these poor communities. Tactics have ranged from racial to economic to environmental. The racist apartheid regime in South Africa limited native Africans’ capital by segregating them from nearly all possible sources of upwards mobility; the euphemized “urban renewal” of post-industrial American cities similarly isolated poor, largely non-white communities, setting in stone their downward spiral into urban poverty. The squatter communities of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, offer an insightful case study on the use of a different argument for limiting slum intensification: environmentalism.

The History of Rio’s Favelas

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nformal settlements exist globally. Today, one in every six people on earth lives on squatted land. Such a staggering statistic suggests an encompassing definition of what it means to be a squatter.

So-called “squatted” communities take different forms around the world. They range from pavementdwelling in India to mud-floored shacks in Africa to three-story, cement homes in Brazil. In 2004, 19% of Rio’s population lived in favelas, the city’s form of a squatter community. Rio’s 752 favelas are quite diverse but one thing they all have in common is a lack of title to the land. In other words, they are illegally developed communities. Some of the first favelas developed when African slaves were freed in 1888, but were not provided with housing. Most of the favelas existing today, however, developed in the 1970s when Rio’s richer areas went through a construction boom and recruited workers from the rural inland. As Brazil urbanized and the population left their farms for burgeoning cities (Rio grew from 4.3 million in 1970 to 11.5 million in 2005), the city was forced into 15

a housing crisis. With nowhere to go, the poor construction workers took their shelter needs into their own hands; brick by brick, pipe by pipe, they built their own neighborhoods on the steep, thus far undeveloped, mountain slopes of Rio. Professor Janice Perlman recorded the history of the Brazilian government’s approaches towards favelados while doing research for the World Bank’s Urban Development Group for Latin America and the Caribbean. She documented the Brazilian government’s effort to reclaim the squatted land in forceful ways. The 1970s and 80s were decades marred by the bulldozing of many entire neighborhoods under the pretense of removing a scar from the city. Between 1970 and 1973, 100,000 favelados were relocated. If they were lucky, favela community members were relocated to government-built housing on the outskirts of the city; Cidade de Deus (City of God) is a well known example of one such settlement. In more recent years the city has justified favela clearance with claims of attempting to curb their thriving drug trades.

Remy Monteko-Sherman

Rhapsody in Blue The New Favela Removal Justification: Environmentalism As one might imagine, there is little public support for literally bulldozing a mountainside in an effort to eradicate its illegal residents. What is

Winter 2006 of Rio, making the prospering hotel and restaurant industries possible. Hotels employ the favelados in anything from construction to janitoring, waiting to gardening.

Rio needs the favelados and the favelados need homes and communities. If where the favelados

Favelas in Rio de Janiero Genevieve Rose Sherman

much more acceptable to the public is supporting the favelas’ destruction for the sake of the environment.

The rugged jungle-covered slopes are in danger of mudslides, deforestation, and watershed destruction.

Furthermore, the environmental degradation of the hillsides mars Rio’s natural aesthetic grandeur. People who live in favelas, according to environmentalists, do not have the mountain in their best interest.

currently reside is environmentally degrading, how can the city best proceed? Alas, the age-old debate of neoliberal approach versus structural strategies arises. Should the city help favelados formalize their communities, supporting whatever organic environmental movement they form, or should it step in and place them in different, safer, more environmentallyfriendly housing?

Rio has found reasons to raze favelas for decades; environmentalism is only the city’s latest iteration of favela removal tactics.

Cheap Labor, Housing Shortage, and Environmental Degradation: the Neoliberal versus Structural Debate Middle-class aspirations to preserve wild land, especially in an urban area like Rio, is often at direct odds with supporting low-income communities that are forced to squat on that land. Why are there so many people forced to live in the favelas on the hill? Rio needs their work. Community members of the favelas sustain the growing service sector Tangle on the Hillside

Since 1994 the Brazilian government has decided that if it can’t beat the favelados, it should join them, a strategy that has manifested itself in the favela bairro program. This urban upgrading project focuses on providing key infrastructure and municipal services to 800 favelas and is meant to benefit 25% of Rio’s favela dwellers. By paving streets and hooking up homes to electricity and water, favela bairro transforms favelas into communities that can gain title to their land. In 2003 another one billion US dollars were invested into the acclaimed program.

But while the general discourse and action 16

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has evolved from favela removal to urban upgrading, the debate continually rages. Public prosecutors in Rio have selected fourteen favelas for removal and some people believe that as many as seventy could be at risk. One official reason behind the removals is protection of the environment. In the past fifteen years, more than 1,300 people have been killed as a result of mudslides in favelas across Brazil; the environmental hazard of communities on a hillside is a problem for environmentalists and favelados alike. But the potential displacees are clear on why their communities face complete obliteration, and it does not have to do with the city’s concern for their safety. Sebastiao Machado, a community activist and part-time laborer, stated that “it isn’t about land or trees or anything like that…nature has nothing to do with it…[the city’s] problem isn’t nature—it’s poverty.” Rio has found reasons to raze favelas for decades; environmentalism is only the latest iteration of these removal tactics. It seems that Rio wants to have its cake and eat it too by keeping low-paid workers close enough to perform vital tasks, but far enough to be out of sight.

Conclusion: Towards an Inclusive Environmental Movement So how can environmentalism be reconciled with social and economic justice for the favela dwellers? The answer lies in chang-

Rocinha (center background), Rio de Janeiro’s largest favela Genevieve Rose Sherman

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Remy Monteko-Sherman

Rhapsody in Blue

Winter 2006 ing the definition of environmentalism to be more inclusive. Educating and empowering people who live in endangered areas means caring for both the environment and the welfare of poor people who necessarily support the growing Cariocan economy.

Oftentimes, environmentalism in Brazil is not fueled by honest concern for the earth; it arises out of a tourism industry that will use any means to attract more visitors. Millions of visitors flock to the streets of Rio each year to enjoy the city’s renowned mountainous beauty. Favelas put this lucrative sector at risk.

The president of the Brazilian Association of Travel Agents said, “I am absolutely in favor of removal.”

He later argued that revenue from tourism could be used to fight poverty in the favelas.

Is this how Brazil should approach its most vulnerable population, by making them dependent on the good will of the tourism sector? Rio de Janeiro should consider sustainable methods of both reducing poverty and promoting a well cared-for environment, the most obvious of which is incorporating favela dwellers in the environmental movement instead of fueling their marginality.• Remy is a senior at Barnard College majoring in Urban Studies. rm2248@barnard.edu Neuwirth, Robert. Shadow Cities. New York: Routledge, 2005 Evans, Peter ed. Livable Cities. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002 Dhillon, Guch. “Issues in an Emerging Nation: Development in Brazil.” <www. ltscotland.org.uk/nq> Perlman, Janice. “The Chronic Poor in Rio de Janeiro: What has Changed in 30 years.” <http://web.worldbank.org> Taschner, Suzana Pasternak. “Environmental Degradation in Sao Paulo Squatter Settlements.” <http:// observatoriodasmetropoles.ufrj.br> Thorns, David. The Transformation of Cities: Urban Theory and Urban Life. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002 Phillips, Tom. “Shantytown clearance: More than a million of Brazil’s poor targeted in an attempt to ‘clean up’ the city: Blood, sweat and fears in the favelas of Rio.” The Guardian. October 29, 2005.

Meyer, Josh. “Garden of Hope on the Rooftops of Rio.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. October 14, 2005

Tangle on the Hillside

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Drive at Your Own Risk: A Staten Island experiment Michelle Kang

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don’t feel guilty about stealing. Stealing things from the store and performing acts of plagiarism, yes. But stealing energy? I’ve been doing it since the day I was born. Raised in Staten Island, New York’s least-known suburban member, I am guilty of a theft so common it is quite the norm: reckless energy use. When I add up the amount of gallons my SUV consumes, combined with the energy used to cool and heat my family’s multi-level spacious home, the results are disturbing—evidence that we are using borrowed energy of our future. The idea was disturbing enough to cut through my complacent suburban conscience, making me wonder what I should do to reduce, reuse, and recycle: Should I try to run my car on used vegetable oil?

Should I cancel the electric bill and read by candlelight? Perhaps my only alternative was to power my laptop with a solar panel while sitting in a cold dark room wearing three sweaters and thermal socks. Another idea occurred, however. Though I couldn’t control the thermostat at home, I could at least control my transportation and gas use. Even though I rely on the car at least twice a day to get to and from work, perhaps I could prove that it wasn’t impossible and that the country, or at least Staten Island, could curb its insatiable fuel appetite. I decided to take on this challenge: for one week I would live without a car.

At an architecture conference several months ago, I sat in a comfortable, air-conditioned auditorium, listening to writer and scholar James Kunstler explain why the world was in deep trouble. He had recently published a book, The Long Emergency, whose premise is that modern society has become overly dependent on fossil fuels without considering what will happen when that seemingly inexhaustible energy source runs out—which is not just a dot on the horizon to Kunstler, but a period perhaps only 100 years away. I left the lecture disturbed, especially as Kunstler offered no solutions to our supposedly doomed future. American society is run on a gasguzzling economy; we have upended our American dream with visions of SUVs and large single-family tract homes.

My own living situation in Staten Island reflects this. It is New York City’s most suburban borough, with half a million residents living within 60 square miles. Most residents depend on their cars to 19

get to work, go grocery shopping, send their kids to school, and generally perform the humdrum routines of life. It seems that to live in Staten Island requires the four basic necessities of shelter, food, clothing, and a car. Even with its 32 bus lines, there are neighborhoods that remain completely inaccessible without a private vehicle.

My no-car experiment, therefore, was meant to challenge what I thought was a given. Was there a way to get around town without reverting to the car?

Were the obstacles too great, or was there a possible future for Staten Island that did not require gallons and gallons of gasoline to sustain it? By the end of the week, I had my answer. I also realized another side of the argument that quite often gets shoved aside in support of environmental concerns—the social implications of a car-oriented lifestyle.

The first three days of my experiment were uneventful enough, if not tiring. From Monday to Wednesday, I woke up early in order to catch the express bus, after a walk of about 15 minutes. Normally, I am driven to the ferry, which takes only 15 minutes, with another half-hour ferry ride and then a 20 minute train ride. The total morning commute tops off at little over an hour. But not being able to drive forced me to find alternative routes. I was pleasantly surprised—the express bus service takes only half an hour to get from my house to downtown Manhattan.

And the bus had very nice, plush seats. I felt that I had saved time, except I hadn’t factored in the walking in the morning. Coming home, however, was not nearly as pleasant. The express buses do not run after a certain hour, and I was forced to walk from the bus to my house in the dark, uphill. It did not feel safe, and with the streets completely empty and the Michelle Kang

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Winter 2006

houses hidden behind trees and set back far from the even in the smallest of lots, it was obvious that homsidewalk, I was uneasy for the 25 minute walk back eowners were determined not to forfeit their right to home. a single family home with requisite postcard-sized In the daytime, however, the walks to the yard. I was reminded of a stinging observation Kunbus stop were pleasant. They were refreshing: I was stler made in his book, that the “single-family standgetting exercise and I also saw several of my neighalone house may have a tragic destiny in the years bors and spoke with them. I hadn’t expected to run ahead [because] the single-family house in a suburinto so many people, but throughout the week, one ban subdivision owes everything to cheap energy.” or two faces became familiar during the morning That accusation lingered in my mind for the rest of walk. It made me wonder what others were missing the ride and also as I rode my bike back home—a 45by jumping into cars and speeding through streets minute bike ride on sidewalks and streets that were to arrive directly at their destinations. Certainly the narrow and at times dangerously merged with trafcar-oriented lifestyle doesn’t give much opportunity fic. I doubted that residents of suburbia would ever to observe the street-level detail of your neighborbe willing to change their car-oriented lifestyles that hood nor does it allow for impromptu meetings with paired so well with the rows of houses and yards. It neighbors. It is an was too comfortable ironic fact of modern It’s an ironic fact of modern life that though cars and the alternatives life that though cars were impractical. increase how far we can travel, they limit our increase how far we What had can travel, they limit I learned from this understanding of what is closest to us. our understanding experience? That of what is closest to us. living in suburbia without a car is an almost useless It was also ironic that on Friday afternoon, notion. I think I knew it all along, but I wanted to the last day of the experiment, rather than drive to prove myself wrong. But even with the extensive bus the park for a jog, the only option I had was to walk system, bike riding, and preplanned schedules, there to the park. It was a strange reversal—instead of is no getting around the fact that the roads are long driving to run, I had to walk to run. The walk took and the distances are far to travel for even the most so long that when I got to the park, I had lost all deenergetic commuter. As for the benefits of the carsire to run. When I eventually did get home, I was free commuter’s lifestyle, I did note some interesting exhausted. Whatever plans I had for the rest of the things. By walking, you become more attuned to your day, I figured they weren’t worth getting out of the neighborhood in the tradition of Jane Jacobs, through warmth of a soft couch for. I mused that though I’d impromptu encounters with people you might not be willing to drive two miles to run two, I would balk normally get to see. You undoubtedly get more exerat the thought of walking all four miles. cise. But you encounter other feelings, including frusAs the week progressed, it became obvious tration at having to devise a schedule around a bus that Staten Island’s recent boom in development and timetable. Fatigue. Even danger, if you are traveling growth was planned with the driver foremost in through unknown neighborhoods in the dark. mind. The pedestrian would have to fend for herself The only conclusion I can draw is that if Kunin other ways—which led me to test out the Staten stler’s gloomy prediction is right about impending Island Railroad, a sort of above ground subway run chaos due to a rapidly diminishing oil supply, then on railroad tracks. The actual history of the SIR dates our suburban living patterns are due for an overhaul. back to 1900. It runs primarily through the eastern Both for ecological and social reasons, the living patpart of the Island, however, and is useful only if you terns of suburbia have been damaging by slow delive near one of its 20 stops. I biked to the station in grees. Will driving continue to be the preferred methten minutes, but since I had miscalculated the next od of transportation for the majority of Americans? arriving train, I ended up waiting another 20 minPerhaps. Or perhaps Kunstler is right when he posits utes for the train to come. After I squeezed my bike that in the future “there will be far less motoring. The in among the high school student crowds, I was able future will be much more about staying where you to get a great view of Staten Island from the train are than traveling incessantly from place to place, as windows. Part of the railroad is elevated and as we we do now.”• rode by, I saw neat rows of houses, each with an Kunstler, James. The Long Emergency. New York: amoeba-shaped swimming pool, porch, or swing-set.

Atlantic Books, 2005 Seen from above, the straight lines of homes with the square plots of backyards reminded me how preMichelle graduated from Barnard College in 2006. programmed and divided land is on Staten Island; kang.mb@gmail.com

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New York City photographs Amy Mascunana

Book Review:

Breach of Faith, by Jed Horne Kirsten Eiler

J

ed Horne’s Breach of Faith is a narration rather than an analysis of Hurricane Katrina and its effects on New Orleans. Taking the reader chronologically through the events of the hurricane as experienced by people who represent the city’s racial, ethnic, and socio-economic groups, Horne produces diverse personal accounts of Hurricane Katrina rather than a comprehensive examination of a singular event. This method of using anecdotes to illustrate the hurricane suggests that there is no single way to explain what happened when the levees broke. These personal stories introduce the concept that New Orleanians prepared for, responded to, and experienced the storm and its aftermath differently. Although this idea may seem obvious, it serves to dispel the myth that it was only the poor, indigent, and foolish who stayed behind. The initial anecdotes reveal how the responses of rich and poor, black and white, and old and young were remarkably similar while rooted in individual experiences. Many residents who remembered Hurricane Betsy left; others decided to weather another storm. Middle-class residents and business owners who could have left decided to stay in order to protect their property and serve the city in its hour of need. No clear-cut definition existed for how people made their choices.

Introducing the reader to the people of New Orleans, Horne illustrates his key argument—Hurricane Katrina may have been a singular event, but it was not experienced singularly. Thus, the disaster and its recovery are parts of an intensely fragmented process, which has forced a divided city to confront and solve its past conflicts that produced a landscape of inequality and mistrust; a condition that Katrina, both psychologically and physically, destroyed and reinforced simultaneously. From this premise, Horne shows how recovery and rebuilding is not a straightforward process, but a bitterly contested debate over what New Orleans was and how it should look in the future.

In the wake of a terrifying storm, these scattered stories show how the true Katrina disaster was man-made. Nature may have produced the storm, but people built and maintained the levees, people chose to stay or flee, and people decided to help or Book Review: Breach of Faith

stand aside. Horne devotes a section to the quest of an LSU hurricane specialist who seeks to assign responsibility for the disaster on faulty engineering by the Army Corps of Engineers. For Ivor van Heerden, the answer to Katrina is understanding why the levees failed, or at least locating the “smoking gun” that proves negligence on the part of the people in charge of the city’s flood defenses. For Patrina Peters, a life-long resident of the Lower Ninth Ward, her belief that the levee was purposely destroyed to flood her neighborhood and protect wealthy white areas has been shaped by her experience in a city scarred by racial and class tensions.

Horne does not assign responsibility for the disaster to one particular person or agency. He instead shows how politics and engineering collided and were compounded by human error and incompetence. He also suggests that psychology and sociology played a role by shaping how people understood their city, its risk, and the best way to survive it once disaster struck. These ideas are supported

by Horne’s discussion of the city’s minimal and incomplete evacuation plan, its inability to provide services and maintain order during the flood, and the political fragmentation that failed to see the levees as everyone’s responsibility. Horne’s discussion of the man-made Katrina disaster is an important part of 22

Rhapsody in Blue his description of the post-disaster political fights between different agencies and all levels of government.

The failure to rebuild is part of the same process that led to the failure to respond.

Given this variety of experience, how can planners, politicians, and residents create a common language for discussing and understanding Katrina?

Usually a common mythology makes it easier to discuss an unexplainable event. Horne’s combination of anecdotes, which all attempt to rationalize the confusion and conflict around the hurricane, in essence create a Katrina mythology. Most myths seek to explain an event and the Katrina mythology is no different. If the essential question of Horne’s book is how do you explain Katrina when it was experienced and understood so differently, then a comprehensive analysis of Katrina is surely not an appropriate strategy. The mythology forms the foundation of Horne’s argument that the post-Katrina recovery effort must incorporate all these understandings of what happened. Moreover, Horne’s book is only one part of an even greater Katrina mythology comprised of other testimonies recorded in books, documentaries, and news outlets.

Yet this multi-dimensional approach, while perhaps more authentic, may be fundamentally opposed to New Orleans’ ability to move forward together. The Katrina mythology actually makes it more difficult to discuss the hurricane and its aftermath because it highlights people’s different experiences and explanations. Was Katrina merely a hurricane, a flood, a conglomeration of human error? Or was it the plow that exposed and made intolerable the divisions that had always existed in New Orleans and in America? If difficulty exists in defining and creating a common experience for Katrina, Horne reveals that the road to recovery may be more difficult because the goals of rebuilding collide with previous understandings of the city.

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Winter 2006 Therein, a major weakness of Horne’s book is that there is little evaluation or analysis of the floodprotection or evacuation policies to counter the personal narratives. By focusing on the different stories of people affected by Katrina, Horne illustrates the events of the hurricane, but he does little to explain why it happened. He fits the disaster into the New Orleans landscape, yet he fails to analyze how so many things went wrong. Given this emphasis on personal stories, it is particularly frustrating that Horne does not provide his own opinion of the recovery plans or provide any opinion at all except for one condemning the Bush administration’s neglect of and subsequent contempt for the city. The book offers no conclusion, only a “this is where we are now” summation of the stories that he followed. Admittedly, conclusions are difficult in an on-going story, but the book would have benefited from a tighter ending that crystallized the problems addressed in the narrative.

Although the narrative style and anecdotal evidence provide good background for understanding the difficulties and divisions in New Orleans, they do little to suggest what should be done. Indeed they imply that an actual solution to New Orleans is as problematic as the city itself.• Kirsten Eiler is s senior at Barnard College majoring in Urban Studies. ke2106@barnard.edu

Kirsten Eiler

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Winter 2006

Continued from page 8 eastern United States at less than 20%.

These statistics beg the question of why did and why do so many Americans and immigrants alike head to the casino capital of the world? According to Moehring’s research, “a 1996 survey of why people moved to Las Vegas found that while 21.9 percent came because of a job transfer and 13 percent were retirees, 17.8 percent arrived looking for a better job and 11.6 percent sought a residence closer to relatives.” These findings confirm that employment represents a primary draw for new migrants, with over 40% responding that work was their reason for relocation. 7,000 new Las Vegans arrive every month. There seems to be no end in sight for the growth of this diverse population that continues to choose to begin their new lives in Las Vegas.

The United States has always been a land of immigrants.

Las Vegas did not develop to the modern standards of “resort destination” until the late twentieth century. As a result, it missed the onslaught of southern and eastern Europeans entering the country in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Now, those immigrants’ children and grandchildren together with new immigrants are streaming into Las Vegas at an unprecedented rate. These men, women, and families contribute to the ethnic makeup that make Las Vegas the diverse place it is today. Hulse believes that in Las Vegas Valley “…much of the future of the states of Nevada and the entire Southwest will be fashioned.” No one knows if that is true, but Las Vegas and the ethnicities that populate it have staked their claim, respectively, as a real city and real population.•

Desert of Opportunity

David is a senior at Columbia College majoring in Urban Studies. drm2103@columbia.edu

Land, Barbara and Land, Myrick. A Short History of Las Vegas, 2nd ed. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2004 Moehring, Eugene P., et al. The Peoples of Las Vegas: One City, Many Faces. eds Jerry L. Simich and Thomas C. Wright. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2005 Hulse, James W. The Silver State, 3rd ed. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2004 Collins, Claudia C., Gottdiener, M., and Dickens, David R. Las Vegas: The Social Production of an All-American City.

Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999

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ef

We would like to thank the Columbia University Center for Urban Research and Policy for its generous support. ef The Rhapsody in Blue staff

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Please contact Genevieve Sherman at gs2132@barnard.edu