Max Eternity - To often the role of cultural arbiters, civic activists and community workers is portrayed as a position of emotional engagement, not sensibility. From direct experience I have come to see that there is a tendency for in-power administrators, politicians and real estate speculators to prioritize their lust of recognition and new revenue above the bread and butter needs of those they should serve--retaining existing communal integrity and existing communal wealth. Fom this position of pie-in-the-sky optimistic idealism, these powers-at-large become blind, myopic to anything except for what they want to see and hear. Thus ignoring the very real truth that bulldozing structures, optionally and not out of real necessity, which function both in a historical context and purpose of utility is a process and methodology, is doomed to fail from the start.
You don't harvest lumber by digging up and throwing away the trees you've already got, only to plant new ones. And you don't grow communities by tearing them down first.
That kind of thinking is beyond ridiculous--it's insane. And I challenge anyone to prove me wrong.
Today on Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman--host-- nterviews a coalition of people whose entire neighborhood was bulldozed in order to build a new corporate location for the mega-corp Pfizer, which after nearly a decade of back-and-forth struggle and fighting that went all the way up to the Supreme Court, the project ended up getting built, but now finds itself being dissolved...not lasting long at all. But it is too late for those in that Connecticut town, as they have already lost their homes and livelihoods--erased from the city's landscape, literally and metaphorically. Watch video here [1].
Links:
[1] http://maxeternity.blogspot.com/2009/11/failed-urban-planning-emminent-domain.html