Life Is A Dream is a photo diary by French photographer Pierre Bureau that examines those strange times when life is terrifying and magical.
In the summer of 2016 Pierre suffered a long derealisation episode in India. He bought a camera to help him reconnect with reality and himself.
This book is a perfect read during our current situation, enabling us to dream of other places.
Hardback / 150 copies – 30 first signed Order your copy of Life Is A Dream
A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America Paperback / 368 pages / Liveright / May 2018
If we are ever to dismantle systemic racism, it will require aggressive remedies to make that victory sustainable.
That is Richard Rothstein’s suggestion for the United States in “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.” The book was first published in hardcover in 2017, but seems evermore relevant now with the protests against anti-Black racism that have occurred in cities worldwide. “The Color of Law” is often cited as a must-read book for those who want to understand the history of racial inequality in America, and how systemic racism continues to impact African Americans today.
In the book, Rothstein argues that for generations, the U.S. government promoted policies that prohibited, and at the very least made it extremely difficult, for African Americans to purchase or rent proper housing, contrary to the country’s constitution. It is a bold claim, but one which he supports with an abundance of evidence that few could deny.
Government sanctioned racial discrimination did not end with the abolition of slavery in 1865. Rothstein reminds us that almost 20 years later, the U.S. Supreme Court interpreted civil rights for African Americans as not including housing discrimination. In what only can be described as a miscarriage of justice, it would take until the Civil Rights Act of 1968 for that interpretation to be corrected. After more than a century of African Americans as a group having difficulty freely choosing where they wanted to live, building home equity, and missing out on the so-called “American dream,” by 1968 the damage had already been done. The wealth gap between African Americans and white Americans continues to increase, and many U.S. cities have racially segregated neighborhoods and suburbs. This is why Rothstein writes that if the United States fails to recognize that the effects of government-sanctioned housing segregation continue today, it will avoid any constitutional obligation to remedy it.
Backed by empirical data, a decade of research, and interviews with housing experts, Rothstein demonstrates that the sins of the past were not subtle nor impossible to find.
He proves that African Americans were unconstitutionally prevented from integrating into middle-class, usually white, neighborhoods, and that the U.S. federal government is responsible. This happened even in very liberal and progressive cities, such as San Francisco and Chicago. Since he demonstrates that the U.S. government’s actions were explicit, he believes that same government has a duty to atone for those actions.
Why does he believe that the U.S. government is responsible? For generations, they never enforced the civil rights of African Americans with respect to housing, and never penalized states, cities, financial institutions, insurers, builders, city planners, or other professionals who did so. In 1917, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racial zoning ordinances were discriminatory, cities would find ways to circumvent the law to impose segregation anyway, sometimes as per the recommendations of the federal government. City planners would designate land as industrial only if it was near or within an African American neighborhood. If too many African Americans moved into a neighborhood that was zoned residential, the zoning would be changed to industrial. Such racial zoning ordinances were almost never applied to white neighborhoods. The poorer quality of the African American neighborhoods was then used as a justification against integration. It was so commonplace for U.S. urban planners to use economic zoning as a means to strengthen racial segregation, that they would say this openly during speeches at professional conferences. It was a dirty little open secret. National leaders in real estate would also write industry papers with similar pro-segregation views, sometimes cloaking their comments in race-neutral urbanist jargon, but sometimes overtly revealing their motives.
Rather than promote the integration of races, the U.S. government promoted segregation, allowing states and cities to exclude people from newly developing areas based on race, especially from the 1930s onward. For example, real estate agents would go into some white neighborhoods where a few African Americans had moved in to convince the white residents to sell their homes at a discount before more African Americans decide to move in. Insurers would never issue mortgages to white Americans who wanted to move to African American areas. Neighborhoods or blocks with even a small percentage of African Americans were coded as areas with the highest risk of defaulting on loans, an assessment known as ‘redlining.’ While this practice trapped African Americans into specific areas, many white Americans were given loans to move to newly built suburbs. Also, where neighborhoods were already segregated, the U.S. government-imposed segregation.
Rothstein brilliantly details the systemic racism that African American face in housing, and how blatant the government’s actions were. The first federal housing projects for civilians were segregated from the beginning, with no African Americans allowed. When public housing was eventually built for them, they were crammed into high-rise projects where they lacked social services, access to employment, child care, access to reliable transit, and general wellbeing. Contrast that to white public housing projects that had quality services, maintenance, and amenities. In the private sector, builders who wanted to develop housing for African Americans rarely received financial assistance from the government, resulting in lesser quality buildings, but builders who developed white suburbs like Levittown, New York, could always get financing.
To emphasize the racism involved in how the U.S. government, through the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) financed developments, Rothstein gives the example of a Detroit builder who was denied financing for a project for whites that just happened to be next to an African American neighborhood. The only way he got his financing approved was by building a half-mile, 6-foot high, 1-foot wide concrete wall between the two areas.
Rothstein also covers the impact of private agreements written into deeds called restrictive covenants between sellers and buyers that limited purchases to non-white people, as well as the destruction done to established African American neighborhoods in the name of urban renewal. He also writes about how the moving of schools based on race ensured that parents moved to areas where they would be segregated with people who look like them.
At the end of the book, he reluctantly suggests some possible remedies for the U.S. government to take. He suggests the repealing of exclusionary zoning ordinances so that affordable housing can be built in all suburbs, and that inclusionary zoning be more aggressively applied within cities. He also believes that the U.S. government should subsidize homeownership for African Americans in the suburbs where they were historically banned. The reason he only suggests remedies rather than prescribe them is because he is certain that for any remedy to be sustainable, the country has to accept the truth first. He argues that until the public sentiment shifts, when Americans begin to question white supremacy, and question the myth of de facto segregation, nothing will change. Until the public demands that the U.S. government remedies their unconstitutional imposition of housing segregation from the past, by taking aggressive steps in the present, America will continue to be racially segregated in its future.
“The Color of Law” is definitely a must-read book for architects, urbanists, interior designers, and anyone interested in housing as a human right. You do not have to be an American or live in the United States to appreciate this book. Racial discrimination in housing is an international issue that resonates, and though Rothstein details its American history, we who live in Canada, UK, France, Australia, and other countries should be aware that a form of it exists where we live too.
Review by Phil Roberts
Paperback / 208 pages / Verso / March 2019
Wherever you live, I am certain that you would agree with this one statement: It is terrifyingly hard to make ends meet. Specifically, when it comes to housing costs.
“Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State” by Samuel Stein is about how our countries have been captured by real estate capitalists, who inflate land values, evict tenants, and promote gentrification, all in the name of urban investment. Although city planners make decisions about land use, housing, transportation, environment, and other aspects, they are trapped in a difficult position, according to Stein. Even if planners want a more equitable city, they are instructed by the political class to find ways to increase property values and facilitate gentrification, which only widens inequality. Stein focuses on what real estate has done to the United States, but believes that readers all over the world will see the parallels between his country and theirs.
He gives us the early history of zoning laws in the U.S., describing them as instruments of racial segregation, and shows how this continues today. The political leanings of the people who shape cities might be different, but the results are often the same. Whether neoconservative or neoliberal, despite trying opposing strategies, we end up with rising housing costs. Stein sees cities as stuck between gentrification and disinvestment because ultimately real estate capitalists want to turn “places into products” to be sold.
Cities that become attractive to global real estate speculators are deemed good for investments, which gives them more money for public services. The cities that fail to make that transition suffer a decline which their citizens experience as a paucity of services. Stein does a good job of explaining the challenges that cities face, as they add value for their property owners, in order to raise money in property taxes. It is a flawed ‘rising tide lifts all boats’ strategy that puts pressure on planners to makes decisions that induce investment, even if that means displacing some residents.
To exemplify this broken belief that one solution solves all problems, Stein focuses on the real estate industry in New York City. He explains that in the last 20 years, despite New York having two mayors with divergent policies for solving the city’s problems, the solution was always luxury real estate investment. The Republican turned Independent, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and the current Democratic Mayor, Bill de Blasio, had opposite world views and priorities. What Stein shows that they had in common is the use of rezoning to increase real estate development. As a result, some areas in that city, like Harlem or parts of Brooklyn, have been gentrified to the point where they are barely recognizable to the residents who continue to live there, following the displacement of their neighbors.
Stein’s New York example underlines that the obstacles to affordable housing are so structural, that even politicians with good intentions cannot remove them. He also wants us to understand that New York is just one example of what is happening in many, if not every, major American city. It is why he calls the U.S. a “real estate state.” The first half of the book is the strongest because Stein explains the problem so clearly by showing us the motivations of the various actors involved. Politicians, city planners, real estate capitalists, and the financial services all making the country’s major cities less affordable.
The second half of the book is disappointing. As an attempt to demonstrate how this real estate state works, Stein gives us a brief history of the Trump patriarchs, from the current President of the United States back to his grandfather. I was sceptical of the relevance of a chapter about the Trumps because surely there are other developers who are less polarizing that Stein could have used to prove his thesis. My concern was that it would be too topical. However, the more I read, the more I began to understand why Stein included it, but I was not wholly convinced. He details how the Trumps used real estate in a predatory fashion to take advantage of government housing programs, as a representation of how unscrupulous developers can act. Stein could have used other developers who did as much or worse, but he chose the Trumps. As well as Stein established how “the Trumps played planners for profit and walked away with the country,” parts of this chapter felt extraneous.
When it comes time for solutions, Stein believes that if current policies were altered that they would produce better results to create affordable housing, but I am not sure about that. He writes that cities should prioritize inclusionary zoning to subsidize affordable housing, tax luxury condos, tax non-primary residences, tax banks when they foreclose homes, and other initiatives to decrease speculation. That may cool the high-end of the housing market, but it was not clear how Stein believes that will cause more affordable housing to be built. To get that part done, he suggests that there should be public pressure in the form of disruptive mass protests centred around the core principles of public stewardship (increasing the amount of publicly managed assets), socialized land (turning land from “commodity to commons”), and reordered regionalism ( to “subvert political boundaries”). Despite elaborating on those principles, Stein concedes that they are “sketchy” and that there is no political climate in the U.S. to pull them off.
The point that Stein is trying to make is that change has to come from the bottom, and not the top. He concludes that the population has to forcibly demand affordable housing, and that the politicians and city planners will act accordingly. With multinational real estate investment trusts, financial institutions, and property owners still involved in the process, it is unclear that a radicalized population will be enough to force the creation of more affordable housing. Yes, small battles can be won here and there, but the war is likely never to be won. From the halls of government to the average homeowner, tested interests will prevent that from happening on a large scale.
“Capital City” is a substantive book, but it does not define the solutions as well as it defines the problems. The book is more informative, than inspiring, and is a good starting point for larger discussions about urban development.
Review by Phil Roberts
Flexibound / 128 pages / Laurence King Publishing / March 2020
With so many people struggling financially right now, and not sure what the future holds for their career, “Make a Living Living” by Nina Karnikowski is a book that was published for times like this. She includes the stories of 26 creatives who are making a living doing what they love, each sharing the setbacks and achievements along the way. The book gives practical advice to those looking to build a creative career, along with eight short exercises to follow. Each creative describes their journey, their challenges, their mistakes, and their living arrangements. It is advice for those looking to make a change, but are too reluctant or unsure how to start.
Karnikowski’s selection of creatives from around the world is diverse. There are singles making it on their own, and couples who are working on their passions together, some despite having kids. Each person featured are in different fields, businesses, life stages, and cultural backgrounds, but one thing that they all have in common is the overcoming of setbacks.
It is healthy to read about the resiliency of people and how they overcame their job loss, professional failure, career plateau, health problems, or even the loss of a relative. As you read about each story, notice how all of them took something that was negative, seemingly insurmountable, uninspiring, and turned it into something positive.
The overall themes throughout the book are things that we already know to be true, but linked to each individual featured, carries more credibility in this moment. There is something powerful about someone who is telling the world about their personal journey, including their vulnerabilities and insecurities, while giving advice. They are telling us what worked for them, their secret that is not so secret.
Enduring truths of life, such as we should never live in denial. Being honest with who we are, what we are capable of, and how we can grow is a vital component of each individual finding success. Often, they would tell Karnikowski about the time it took for that success to manifest itself, and for passions to become profitable. This is crucial, because it does not set up this false hope of people who quit their day jobs for their creative passions overnight.
The reason things take time, is because each individual invested in educating themselves. You will notice how each used these turning points as opportunities to learn new skills. Some went to universities, some found internships with creatives they followed on social media, and some taught themselves by watching videos online. The idea of a fluid, non-hierarchical approach to education is a reality that more people are beginning to accept. Too often, people limit themselves because they feel that they do not have the right credentials to become a photographer, baker, writer, and whatever craft they have always dreamed of pursuing. Each person in this book learned something new along the way, and makes learning part of their ongoing commitment to living the life that they want.
Many of the individuals also recognized that they cannot do it alone. They developed networks of mentors and peers to encourage them. The 26 creatives that Karnikowski writes about are people who are not afraid to ask for help, to pitch ideas, or ask them to become part of their journey.
“Make a Living Living” is an inspirational read for those looking to uplift themselves in the morning, or right before bed. It is a quick read, it will only take a couple of hours, but it will reinvigorate your desire to pursue your creative career at a time when you might need it.
**
Note: Normally, I purchase the books that I review from a physical bookstore or their website. For this review, I asked Laurence King Publishing to send me a copy of this book to review, and they did. I like them as a publisher, and I often like most, but not all, of their books.
Review by Phil Roberts
My Quest to Improve the World’s Health and Wellness–Including Yours.
The hardest part about tackling a complex problem is getting people to believe in the solution, and then to collaborate toward a favorable outcome.
For Dr. Karen K. Lee, that was the key to seeing her initiatives come to fruition. “Fit Cities: My Quest to Improve the World’s Health and Wellness–Including Yours” is about her career path from public health researcher to highly sought-after advisor on ways cities can be healthier places. She has helped civic leaders around the globe to rethink how their cities have been built. Between all of the noise of experts and consultants wanting to improve cities, Dr. Lee has managed to capture the attention of cities who are eager to change what they are doing.
If science is the foundation of public health, “creativity and innovation” are what lead it to be effective, according to Dr. Lee. She learned this lesson in 2003 as a young researcher at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS). There she worked on how to encourage physical activity and how to lower rates of chronic diseases. For the following two years, she was on assignment in West Virginia as the EIS officer in that state’s department of health. The creative action that she did was this: to track non-communicable diseases with the same practices that are used to track infectious diseases. At the time, it had never been done before, but the EIS approved this West Virginia study of obesity, hypertension, heart disease, and diabetes.
Reading how she explains this process gives us an indication of the meticulous work of cobbling together information various sources across Clarksburg-Bridgeport and Gilmer County in that state. Everything from the number of calories on high school lunch menus, to the width of sidewalks, gave them the data that they needed. After months of research, Dr. Lee and her fellow researchers discovered that people in West Virginia wanted to live healthier lives, but their workplaces, schools, commercial spaces, and overall built environment made that outcome unlikely.
In 2006, when she became the deputy to the assistant commissioner of the New York Bureau of Chronic Disease Prevention and Control, Dr. Lee lead the push to promote low-calorie meals in the city’s food industry. West Virginia and New York City are two places that have very little in common, but as Dr. Lee describes, in terms of lack of healthy food choices, both places share similarities. She writes about “food deserts” in disadvantaged neighbourhoods of New York where residents do not live near a supermarket that they can get to by foot. For many of these residents, access to healthy foods is far away and out of their price range. To change this, Dr. Lee led initiatives that forced the labelling of calories on restaurant menus, incentivized bodega and convenient store owners to sell healthier foods, and got the state of New York to forgive sales taxes for supermarkets that set up in those neighbourhoods. As Dr. Lee writes, “the creation of something extraordinary does not happen without vision, way-above-average efforts, and innovative partnerships.”
This is also how Dr. Lee got involved in the start of the Active Design movement, which pushes for the design of buildings that encourage physical activity. She explains how Apple was unknowingly promoting Active Design with an elaborate spiral staircase in their early stores, and how it made people want to use them. As she points out, the tech giant thought that the staircase showed off their design sensibilities, but she saw them as examples for healthy living in the built environment. With the collaboration of other civic leaders, Dr. Lee began organizing Fit City conferences, where health professionals, government agencies, private sector companies, and the public could learn about Active Design. The result is that newer buildings in New York City have visible stairs in their lobbies or signs that dissuade visitors from taking the elevator that indicate “burn calories, not electricity.”
Through these events, Dr. Lee gained the experience and working relationships to produced the Active Design Guidelines, which she reveals ended in a moment of self-doubt and reflection right before publication. While she writes about what seems like success after success, there are moments where we get to see her vulnerability, which is refreshing to read. As the lead on the Active Design Guidelines, her healthy measure of nervousness soon turned into validation. The document was a hit. It was downloaded by architects and urban planners from all over the world and continues to make an impact on our cities to this day.
“Fit Cities” is another example that humility and collaboration can go a long way. It’s about the power of collaborating with different professional backgrounds, each bringing their expertise to solve the problems of the world’s cities, big and small. Hundreds of years of collective institutional and professional knowledge, tackling complex issues. It’s also about the importance of competent public servants and how initiatives that are needed can be widely adopted by others who “get it.”
For anyone interested in how income inequality, food insecurity, and the built environment affect public health with respect to chronic diseases, you will be inspired by Dr. Lee’s career. Her expertise and words of advice make this book a must-read
Hardcover / 288 pages / January 2020
Review by Phil Roberts
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