By Neal Peirce For Release Sunday, June 27, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
BALTIMORE — Forced “displacement,” “removal,” “resettlement” of peoples. Can it be made less painful?
The Annie E. Casey Foundation is working on a cure in the East Baltimore neighborhood beside the already huge and growing Johns Hopkins Medical Center, Maryland’s largest single employer.
There’s no doubt that forcing the breakup of neighborhoods is a global problem, whether triggered by civil wars, floods, fires, or just to clear prime city real estate for Olympic and World Cup-like events.
Yet for humans, displacement from their known settings may be exceedingly painful — a process Jane Jacobs highlighted in her 1961 book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” Research psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove more recently underscored the point in her book, “Root Shock,” likening the psychological impact of forced removal from a familiar neighborhood to a plant being jerked from its native soil.
But holding neighborhoods static isn’t practical — they’re always in some flux, and spaces often do need to be found to accommodate job-creating industries, university expansions or creation of new parks.
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By Mary Newsom For Release Sunday, June 27, 2010
Citiwire.net
ATHENS — Each city is a unique blend of history, culture and architecture. But put three dozen urban planners and scholars from around the globe into one room and you discover that their concerns sound astoundingly similar.
In June I spent three days in Athens with a group of former International Urban Fellows from Johns Hopkins University, holding their annual conference this year in the Greek capital city of almost 4 million. I asked those in attendance — most from Britain and Europe, but others from Mexico, India and Turkey — to pinpoint the biggest problem their city faces.
Despite major differences in history, urban form, customs and governance between their cities and U.S. metros, their answers might easily have come from planners in Atlanta, Cleveland, Charlotte or Chicago.
In the U.S., with our primitive rapid transit, our expensive — and expansive — large-lot suburban neighborhoods and our rapacious appetite for oil-based energy, we’re apt to imagine that other countries’ cities have found more effective solutions to problems that bedevil our urban areas. Europe is like a gigantic, well-planned Portland (though with better French fries), we think, while the U.S. is more like sprawling Phoenix.
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