Update on Project Activities
This week, as usual, involved a lot of small 2-3 person meetings – most were focused on preparing good feedback for chapter editors but we also spent time discussing and finalizing our plans to engage with the oral history part of the project. Christian and Lexi submitted their two-page memo with feedback on the Migration/Relocation chapter to Mary on Sunday, November 4th. After Mary thoroughly reads this memo, the three plan to chat again to answer any remaining questions. Similarly, Tony and Spencer have been working on their feedback for Erin about the Speculation chapter, and Elise has been working on the Transportation/Infrastructure chapter feedback for Deland. Lexi and Tony had a check-in with Magie about the Indigenous Geographies chapter on Thursday, November 11th, during which they discussed what types of feedback would be most useful and strategies for editing down oral histories. Lexi and Tony were worried about inadvertently inserting our own voices over the interviewees’ based on how we edited their stories and what we cut out, but Magie showed us ways to shorten individual sentences without removing large portions of the narrative. Christian, Spencer, and Lexi also attended the Ethical Research Training with Magie and Adrienne on Thursday, November 11th. Tony and Elise watched a video recording of this training in their own time. We reviewed several pieces of literature, such as the AEMP handbook, prior to this training so we could gain further insight to AEMP’s philosophy of mutual benefit and using academia for activism. We decided, given our time constraints and lack of connections to people with direct experience of housing displacement on campus, not do an oral history of a Stanford employee (as we had originally hoped to do). Instead, Spencer, Lexi, Magie, and Adrienne discussed the possibility of doing some background research about campus housing activism to serve as a starting point for next year’s cohort of students. We may begin by conducting an informational interview with student members from SCoPE (Stanford Coalition for Planning An Equitable 2035). SCoPE is a student organization that cooperates with Stanford’s workers union on campus and advocates for equitable outcomes in housing, transportation, labor provisions and GHG emissions. We also scheduled a meeting with Magie on Thursday, November 29th to go over our draft educational materials, which we will begin developing next week. We are hoping to create something that will be useful for AEMP as well as for the 2019 Listen to the Silence Conference. We are also tentatively planning to send two people (probably Christian and Elise) to shadow Adrienne as she conducts an oral history interview in San Francisco some time late November. This is dependent on the interviewee’s schedule. What We Observed and Learned One of the main objectives this week was to provide feedback for each of the chapters we were editing, and we discovered that many of the chapters were at different stages of writing. We noticed that much of our feedback depended on what stage of writing the author was currently at, and that we all gave very different feedback to our respective authors. For example, the evictions chapter was more or less finalized and in PDF format, so most of the feedback had to be tailored to more specific, easy fixes that wouldn’t require an overhaul of the finished product. Other chapters like the migration chapter had basically no text or layout, and was a compilation of figures, graphs, and interviews. For a chapter like this, weaving a coherent story was more the focus in addition to providing criticism or suggestions about any data, and the team was focused primarily on finding common threads to link bits of the story together. Altogether, it was difficult to think about the overall design of the publication as a whole given that, currently, they are at such different stages in the writing process. Looking forward, it is important for us to make sure we know how our chapters fit together through discussion with ourselves and our authors. By discussing the big picture concepts from each chapter and how they fit together, we can better provide feedback for our individual chapter editors and create a more compelling finished product. We also clarified the expectations for our project deliverables while completing the Ethical Research Training this week. Our impression of the oral history component of the project was that we should reach out to any individuals or communities we knew of that might be interested in completing an interview, and that we would conduct an oral history ourselves that would be included in the Atlas or on the AEMP website. What we learned during training was that completing an oral history was not an expectation, but rather something we should try to accomplish for our own understanding of the meaning of ethical research, the importance of the project’s goals of collecting and compiling stories, and the impact of having the voices of people most affected by the housing crisis heard in our Stanford community. In fact, we might shadow one of Adrienne’s contacts while they complete an oral history, and this would effectively be achieving our goals of learning about ethical research while maintaining an appropriate level of participation. However, we are still interested in applying oral history work to workers’ rights on the Stanford campus. We do not feel as though we have the right knowledge and skill sets to create meaningful change in AEMP’s focus areas (San Francisco, Oakland, etc.), but we do know and understand Stanford’s community dynamics enough to get involved. Stanford is a major source of employment, as well as displacement, in the Bay Area, and AEMP has not yet begun to explore the stories of people affected by the institution’s regional dominance. Spencer had been to a SCoPE meeting earlier in the quarter and remembered seeing a map SCoPE compiled of the counties the workers were from – some several hours away. Clearly the problems we’d discussed in class around developers in the Bay Area not having sufficient incentives to build affordable housing, and lack of enforcement in ABAG’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation are reflected in the long commutes Stanford workers have to make to get from where they can afford housing, to where they have to work. Spencer, Lexi, Adrienne, and Magie began a discussion of what sort of work could be done on campus to help empower workers’ and motivate students to help push the university for workers’ housing. However, we believe that this work would require a lot more time than we have remaining in the quarter, so we brainstormed ways our group could help prepare materials for next year’s Sustainable Cities cohort. We are considering doing some preliminary research on Stanford housing activism to establish a “landscape” of what has been happening on campus and where there is room for AEMP/Sustainable Cities to get involved. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward At this stage in the quarter, we have been working with AEMP for quite a while, and have gotten a sense of the sheer complexity of the housing crisis in the Bay Area. As we have seen both in our field work with the organization and from readings in class, solutions to the housing shortage are not as simple as constructing more houses. Given legacies of gentrification, racial exclusion, and income inequality, the situation demands a holistic look at the issues affecting countless individuals in the Bay Area and beyond. This week was particularly informative in that regard, as it forced us to begin putting some of the Atlas chapters in conversation and begin drawing out the thematic arc of the text. The sheer difficulty of cohering a single atlas to depict the wide range of issues falling under regional displacement demonstrates the complexity of the issue at hand, as its narrative exists beyond single issues like AirBNB and the preponderance of Single Family Homes. Instead, each chapter has really begun to feel like single pieces in the collective “housing puzzle,” and conversations -- as working on chapter editing has shown -- are not relegated to particular sectors or even disciplines. They are complicated, interlocking, and often-times co-constitutive with other issues, requiring the earnest collaboration of all parties with something to contribute. Another idea that came up in this week’s readings that seemed especially relevant to the work we’re doing at AEMP is the idea of critical reflexivity. We were drawn to new metrics to evaluate urban change, as well as given case studies of several failed pilot projects, each of which providing context to many similar policies being debated today. Examples like Pruitt-Igoe and the high-rise developments following WWIgetting people off the streets and into better conditions, Pruitt-Igoe backfired, resulting in the proliferation of crime and “city-slums” throughout Saint Louis. This example seemed to be particularly poignant, as it forced us to consider practicality as much as ethicality, and to temper efficiency and moral exigence with reasoned analysis about how these problems might be solved. It also forced us to think about how space becomes amenable, safe, and accessible, especially with regard to development and changing urban landscapes. AEMP also exemplifies this goal, as their work on cutting-edge issues like “vacation rental homes,” and AirBnB seeks to problematize even superficially “unrelated” or even “beneficial” services. Perhaps most importantly, our work this week has provided us the opportunity to reflect on displacement not as a single act, but as an ongoing process of removal and erasure. During a conversation with Magie, we talked briefly about how settler colonialism resulted in the original theft of indigenous land. In thinking about indigenous displacement today, it became clear that colonization and displacement are not singular events with a defined beginning and end. Rather, displacement represents a logic that exists today in acts like the denial of indigenous sacred spaces, traditions, and family. Seeing social and physical location as the constellation of single acts has enabled us to think about these events in concert rather than in isolation, and be able to identity some of the persistent structural flaws inherent within the housing system. It has also enabled us to broaden our vocabulary when discussing events like eviction, migration, and racial displacement today. 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