st louis academy of dance olivette mo

and i want to make surethat we give due justice to all the work that wasdone by the panelists in preparing thingsfor their presentation. so i do want to get started. we also are,unfortunately, going

st louis academy of dance olivette mo, to lose some of ourwashington university friends right after the conferenceis over, because they've got to catch a flight. so i do want tomake sure that we

don't roll too much over time. and i know there willbe people rolling in, because it's a thursday. there's lots ofclasses going on. students will becoming in later. but we can get started onour conversation among us. so good morning, everybody. i guess i don't needto reintroduce myself, because most of you, or manyof you, were here last night.

but i'm diane davis, thechair of the department of urban planningdesign here at the gsd. and these are welcoming remarksto our conference, which you all know the title of. it's right up thereon the screen. before beginning, i have justa few things i want to say. but i will begin withthanking our colleagues at washington university in st.louis for their participation, support, and collaborationin this event.

the idea for the conferenceand its evolution was hatched in a conversation withfaculty both here at the gsd-- [inaudible], [inaudible],myself, originally, and then adding tonigriffin and stephen gray. but it alsodeveloped in parallel with folks at the samfox school of design and the center for humanitiesat washington university, which is hosting what's calledthe divided cities initiative there about st louis.

and i'll say a little moreabout that later in my remarks. and i was out in st. louis. eve's been out in st. louis. we've had conversations. people like ericmumford here, who is here with the groupfrom washington university, have a bit of a history ofa relationship with the gsd. so it's my great pleasurethat we're working together on this project, andi'm hoping there'll

be more thingsdeveloping in the future. and that is that we're justbeginning the conversation and collaborationabout st. louis, and we want to think aboutways that, maybe, together, we can address the many social,racial, spatial, urban planning and design challengesthat st. louis faces, and that we heard aboutso eloquently last night from our keynote speakers. so today's presentationsbroadly span a range

of disciplines housed bothwithin and outside our school-- that is the gsd-- rangingfrom planning, design, and architecture to history,sociology, geography, anthropology and thelaw, among others. near the end of the day,and for most of tomorrow, we will also thenmove more directly into practice-based work. so we have activists, also,involved in our panels today, but as well, tomorrow,with the student work that

has been interrogating raceand design in st. louis and other american cities. so i'm hoping thattogether, the kind of mix of disciplines that we arestarting to unfold today, and then movinginto more practice and activism latertoday and tomorrow, will evoke the natureof the challenge that we're trying toaddress in convening all these voices together.

i think, also, you'll seetomorrow the sheer commitment of our studentsand their faculty advisors to directlyaddressing issues of race and spatial injustice inamerican cities more broadly. but i'm getting ahead of myself. we will hear a little more aboutthe objectives of our students and what they'llbe doing tomorrow. later today, i'm goingto ask professor stephen gray to say a little more.

he said somethinglast night, but later, at the end of the conference,before the reception, just to give you a prelude aboutwhat the students are doing. but overall, we havethree general aims in this day and a halfthat we have left. one is to raise questionsabout the history of st. louis, particularly in terms ofpatterns and practices of race space and design. second, to ask how thesepatterns and practices

came to be, and how theywork, now, in st. louis. and three, to link thosequestions and processes to the current developmentsand the future of st. louis, thinking aboutdisinvestment, dispossession, extreme racial segregation,forms of policing, pervasiveness of poverty andsocial exclusion for the city's poorest citizens, manyof them african american. and even to potentially thinkabout restorative planning and design practices.

and i really want to emphasizethat latter objective. even though we're startingout with an amazing panel, with the kind of history andthe evolution of the city, the aim of theconference is not merely to establish theorigins and nature of the terribleurban conditions that have come to define contemporaryst. louis, many of which hit the headlines with themichael brown shooting, but those who livein st. louis have

been knowing and living infeeling these conditions for a long time. but my point here is that we areengaging these issues in order to produce new, and hopefullymore innovative and creative ways of remedying orreversing the conditions. stated anotherway, our aims here are both analyticaland prospective. we hope to use the knowledgeand dialogue produced today by the experts in this roomin the service of producing

new practices that mighthelp address some of the most fundamental problems in st.louis and other american cities today. in methodological terms,with today's event, we're trying to break downlongstanding interdisciplinary silos in the study of cities. not just between thedifferent humanities and the socialsciences and the design fields, butparticularly-- and this

is my key objective--within the latter, within the design fields. as we know very well from, atleast, the halls of the gsd. urban designers do notalways engage urban planners when it comes to city building,just as urban planners, designers andarchitects may fail to articulate their aimswith the view to larger historical conditions,and how they produced particular social,spatial, political,

or ecological landscapes. these differentperspectives all must be acknowledged as producingthe urban condition. and with a focuson a single city, as we do here withrespect to st. louis, it will be moredifficult to maintain a narrow disciplinary view. and that's, in a way, whatwe're trying to do today, is blast out of thatnarrow disciplinary view.

having written a bookon a single city myself, i have long been an advocatefor deeply grounded study of particular places. not just becausethis type of exercise allows one to understand themultiplicity of factors that produce the built natural andsocial environment of a city, but also because,by deeply grounding the study of a place infacts, the relationship between the universal and theparticular will reveal itself,

or at least hopefully. so, reframed in thecontext of st. louis, we have the opportunityto see whether and how the specificities of thisparticular historically contested city, with its uniquepolitical, social, economic and spatial history, has producedthe problems and challenges of racial injustice thatcapture our attention today in a unique way. or is it really followingprocesses and patterns

that we would see anywhereacross urban america? so we are compelledto put the arguments that we will see andhear about, with respect to the evolution of st. louis,in the context of larger political dynamics anddevelopments in urban america, and ask, what's unique,and what's universal? and if that's not in theparticular presentations, it will be part of theconversation, i'm hoping. and in a few minutes, thepanel that i'm moderating,

the history panel,that's kind of one of the overarching questions. so hopefully, we'll beable to come back to that. i do have to admit that much ofthis ambition is very personal, and it comes from myown work and the issues i've been struggling with asa historical urban sociologist at a planning and design school. most of my work has beenon conflict cities-- cities with lots ofviolence-- and police

corruption,social-spatial exclusion, an array of urbaninjustices, but outside of the united states. i'm a latin americanist,becoming a st. louis specialist, i'mhoping, in the future. and in particular, asyou saw in the bio, i've done a lot on the historyof policing in mexico city at the 20th historypolicing, and that's my next project on st. louis.

but my own curiosityabout these questions about the universaland the particular was piqued by the fact that,as a native st. louisan, i have been, for a while,working on questions of the city's role in thelarger processes of us state formation, understoodboth in terms of geographic territory-- aswith the louisiana purchase-- and in terms ofpolitical membership, citizenship, as withthe missouri compromise,

and civil war. these are questionsi've been looking at in the context ofa place like mexico, which had a revolution, andstruggled over sovereignty for much of the-- and manyother latin american countries-- over the late 19th andearly 20th century. so the themes about stateformation and citizenship and membership, and how citiesand national imaginaries unfold, and the relationshipwith each other,

has been a common question inthe latin american literature. but i haven't seen it asmuch in the us literature. so when i started thinking moreabout my hometown, st. louis, through the lens of the workthat i'd done in other places, i began to see that i hadnew questions about st. louis that i really wanted to pursue. so there's an example oftaking the opportunity, or an occasion to break down thedevelopmental or global divides in the academic study of cities.

i myself am thinking, what doi know about the latin american context that informswhat's happening in st. louis and its rolein the national imaginary, and vice versa? now, it's not the job of thisconference to think globally. yes, maybe that'll besomething we do in the future. but i do want to say thatthe concept of the divided city-- which is the title of themellon initiative at washington university-- isexactly a concept that

allows us to think globally. we think about belfast. we think about jerusalem. we think about nationalconflicts between the urban and the national inother parts of the world, and it's really time to thinkabout that here in the united states, as well as inst. louis, in particular. so back to st. louis. well, anyway, i do wantto say that i'm hoping--

and if anybody who's hereis interested in continuing the conversationbeyond st. louis and thinking about the back andforth between a particular city and other cities in theus where we can frame it in terms of these questions ofcitizenship, sovereignty, state formation. i think maybe that's somethingthat we can also pursue down the road. i know when i spoke to jeanallman at the divided cities

initiative atwashington university, she had mentionedexplicitly that many of the team atwashington university are interested in south africaand other parts of the world, not only st. louis. so i do see that as apossibility for the future. but back to st. louis. we're here today to reflecton the forms of knowledge production andpractice that may come

from a focus on a singlecity by a wide range of disciplinary experts. what can we learn aboutst. louis' past, present, and future by introducing awide range of voices and visions into the debate,among historians and lawyers, designers,planners, geographers, environmentalists? and that's kind of aprelude to our next panel. but before i introduceour first panel,

let me just givesome more thanks. there is mentionedin the program, you'll see that theinterdisciplinary ambitions of this conference arereflected to a large degree by its financialsupporters, that range from the mellonfoundation, which has funded the divided city initiative. but also, we have aprogram here at harvard that eve blau isdirecting, looking

at the relationship betweenthe humanities and the urban. so the mellon foundationhas supported us from both institutions. we're also supported bythe urban planning design department's interdisciplinaryurbanism initiative, something that we've unfolded herein the last couple years. it's a group of facultyfrom across the university who are interested inurban questions, sociology, public health, law, politicalscience, anthropology.

they are sponsors of thisprogram, as well as the gsd, and i do want to thank[inaudible] for giving us funds to help pulloff this conference. so again, final thanksto shantel blakely, who does everything withrespect to these events, and has been working like amaniac the last couple weeks on corresponding with youall, and getting dinner reservations, and airfare. and without shantel, itwouldn't have been possible.

also, my intrepid graduatestudent assistant catherine prater, who's also been incontact with many of you. and eve, dan, tonyand stephen, who will be moderating otherpanels later today. so without further ado, i wantto welcome to the conference and turn our attentionto the first panel, which i'm going to be moderating. and what we will dotoday is, we will have individual speakers comeup here, and then at the end,

we'll all sit on the tablefor questions and answers conversation. so today's panel, as yousaw in the description, this morning's paneladdresses history. and i do want to mention thatwe are going to slightly reverse the order of the speakersto be a little more true to the chronology,the historical chronology. so we will beginwith walter johnson. and after walterspeaks, we will move

to colin gordon and then kenrudin, and then jill desimini. i would like to say a littlesomething about our speakers. again, we have extendedbios in the program, so i don't want to repeatthose, waste time on that. but i do want to add,about walter, in addition to the existing bio-- whichyou can read if you have your magnifying glass-- that heis the director of the charles warren center for studies inamerican history, a research center for north americanhistory here at harvard.

the warren center has,over the past 50 years, brought hundreds of faculty andpostdoctoral fellows to harvard and awarded significantfunds to generations of harvard students, bothgraduate and undergraduate. johnson has served asan advising scholar for the award winningpbs documentary prince among slaves, producedby unity production foundation. and i might just adda little footnote. i saw in the boston globe todaythat our president, drew faust,

came out with a statement--harvard's statement-- on the issue of slavery. and maybe you'll have a chanceto say something about that, but i'm very proud that-- i know drew is a colleagueof walter's, and i think it's a greatday for harvard, her having made that statement. colin gordon, he's probablyknown as the historian of 20th century st. louis.

his book and extensive worksfocus on the transformation of metropolitan st. louisin the 20th century, particularly focusingon local regulation of land use, restrictivedeed covenants, et cetera. we'll probably hearmore about that. but for me, it's soimportant for a historian to be looking at these kindof planning regulations and techniques that many ofus are using now and dealing with in the contemporaryurban setting,

and understand their historicalrole in the creation of cities like st. louis. ken reardon, who has justmoved to the boston area, is an expert inneighborhood and community planning, participatoryresearch, community health and planning. he's written a lot about race,politics, and urban distress. and his focus, as wewill hear more about, is on east st. louis.

and we really wanted to beconscientious about thinking about the region ingeneral, not just-- as you all know,or will know soon, the st. louis region is veryfragmented, politically as well as ecologically. so thinking abouteast st. louis, on the other sideof the river, raises some of the samechallenges thinking about st. louis and itsrelationship to the county,

even if there aredifferent-- maybe social ecologies, notnatural ecologies, that creates that division. so it's greathaving ken with us. and then we'll endwith jill desimini, who is a professor here in thedepartment of landscape architecture. jill and i, when wordabout this conference started filtering aroundthe gsd, jill came up to me

and said, i'm doingsome work on st. louis, several different projectshaving to do with landscape. at many scales, bothmicro, and in particular, neighborhoods, butas well as a kind of understanding of the largermississippi basin region. and we're going to hearfrom jill about that. jill has a master of landscapearchitecture from pennsylvania, and she has a backgroundin urban studies from brown university.

so without furtherado, let's turn the mic over to walter johnson. thank you, diane. thank you, shantel, for allyour work in tracking me down. it's an honor for me to be here. i always say that. it's also humbling. i usually say that. sometimes it's not true.

sometimes i'mthinking, man, they're so lucky they got me out here. but in this instance, i amreally-- i'm a novitiate, and so it's a greatopportunity for me. when i started lookinginto the history of st. louis in the fall of 2014, thething that i was most struck by is how many of theevents that we consider to be the central events in thehistory of the united states, and particularly in the africanamerican history of the united

states, occurred in st. louis. and that spurred meto further research. i'm going to talk aboutthe 19th century today. i want to talk aboutthe compromise of 1820, the lynching offrancis mcintosh, the murder of elijah lovejoy. all of these events--and then finally, the dred scott case,of course-- all these were events that were nationallydeterminative of the debate

that we have considered tobe a debate about slavery. they all happened in thehistory of st. louis. but what i want to try tosuggest, as i go today, is that there'ssomething slightly more complicated than adiscussion of slavery that's happening in this. i want to try to pull out anobsessional concern with three people of color and to tryto articulate that to you as a commitment to whitesupremacy in excess

of pro-slavery, and sometimes,actually, in contradiction to pro-slavery. so i want to try and usethe terms "pro-slavery" and "white supremacy"as not equivalent terms. i'm doing somethingthat i promised myself i will never do,which is moving back and forth between awritten text and a sort of extemporaneous exegesis. so you'll have to bearwith my crappy performance.

the paper is entitledunconstitutional whiteness, and it has anepigraph from w.e.b du bois, black reconstruction. the epigraph isabout the lynch mob. before the wide eyes of themob is ever the shape of fear. back of the writhing,yelling, cruel-eyed demons who break, destroy, maim andlynch and burn at the stake is a knot, large or small,of normal human beings. and these humanbeings are desperately

afraid of something. of what? on the 28th of april,1836, frank mcintosh, a free black stewardaboard the steamboat flora alighted on thelevee in st. louis. the best as anyonecould tell, later, as mcintosh crossed thelevee and walked into town, he was overtaken bya pair of sailors who were running from the police.

whether he impeded the police,ignored their shouted commands to help them, or simplydid not understand what was happeningaround him, mcintosh was taken into custody. as they nearedthe jail, mcintosh drew a knife from his coatand cut the throat of one of the policemen. he then ran down fourthstreet toward market, passing as he did across thefront of the courthouse square

where, a decade later,dred scott would file suit against his owner. he made it as faras walnut street, where he was surrounded by asmany as 50 men, taken to jail, and locked in a cell. outside the jail, acrowd began to gather. finally, a group of men forcedtheir way into the jail, seized the key tomcintosh's cell from the overwhelmed sheriff,and pulled the black man

outside. the mob dragged him a coupleblocks up chestnut street, where they tied him to a tree. members of theneighborhood fire company stacked wood around his feet. mcintosh was silentas they worked. only as the flamesrose around him did he begin to pray and scream. the lynching of francismcintosh caught the attention

of the united states of america. one of those whoseattention it caught was abraham lincoln,who was at that time a state senator in illinois. and lincoln gave what is oneof his first famous speeches about the lynchingof francis mcintosh, and that's calledthe lyceum speech. and lincoln had, basically,one known political position at this time, whichis that he was

a fierce and passionate advocateof colonization, of taking free people of color andsending them to africa. and so one of the things iwant to try to bring out, as i talk about this, is the waythat different ideas-- actually global, continental, ideasof racial governance-- circulate through this history. so lincoln's lyceumspeech was on the theme of the perpetuation of ourpolitical institutions. and it remains one of the mostpointed and eloquent defenses

of the rule of lawin the annals of american intellectual history. lincoln argued that thelynching of mcintosh augured the, quote,"increasing disregard for law which pervadesour country, the growing disposition to substitutethe wild and furious passions in lieu of the soberjudgment of the courts on the worst and savage mobsfor the executive ministers of justice."

and he would 20 years laterin the house divided speech, lincoln invoked anotion of domestic space in order to explainwhat he meant. "let reverence forthe laws be breathed by every americanmother to the lisping babe that prattled on her lap." and then, most famously,"in short, let it--" i.e. respect forthe rule of law-- "become the politicalreligion of the nation."

the body of macintosh, whichwas left out after being burned, taught a different lessonin st. louis, at least according to thejudge who convened the grand jurymeant to investigate the lynching as a crime. the lynching of macintosh, ithink it's probably arguable, was the first lynching ofan african american man, a free man of color, in thehistory of the united states, of this sort ofclassic lynching form.

which is to say, somebody'staken from state custody and then burned by a mob. that judge, the judge whoconvened the grand jury, was, with a kind of grimirony, named judge lawless. when it came timeto instruct the jury about their legalresponsibilities, judge lawlessnoticed that a lynch mob was indeed a forceunauthorized by law, and that burning at thestake at the hands of the mob

was indeed a mode of deathforbidden by the constitution. but unlike lincoln, inthe burning of mcintosh, lawless discerned a principleof even higher import to the community, a higherlaw than the constitution. the mob had responded at onceto the murder of hammond. the piteous tears of his windowand orphans at the scene, and, quote, "similaratrocities committed in this and other states byindividuals of negro blood against their white brethren."

lawless continued. for him, mcintosh hadbeen the incendiary. he uses the word"incendiary." "the product of a doctrine ofabolition and the fiery unreasoning mindof a free negro." in the crowd, lawlessdiscerned, quote, "a mysterious metaphysicaland almost electric frenzy." that's the frenzy that iwant to call "whiteness." that's the questionthat i want to ask,

along with w.e.b de bois,is, what is that frenzy? understood that way,understood in the way that lawless understood them,the actions of the lynch mob were, in fact, concomitantwith the constitutional theory under which missourihad entered the union. the missouri compromisestarted in february, on february the 13, 1819, whennew york representative james tallmadge added a rider to themissouri statehood bill that came to consume congressfor almost a year, shaped

the legal history of slaveryand the constitutional history of the united statesfor the next 45 years, up until the timethe issues it raised had been adjudicated inthe shape of 600,000 dead on the battlefieldsof the civil war. "missouri should be admitted,"the tallmagde amendment read, "only provided that thefurther introduction of slavery or involuntaryservitude be prohibited, except for the punishment ofcrimes, whereof the party shall

have been fully convicted,in that all children born within the said stateafter the admission thereof into the union shall be freeat the age of 25 years." "this momentous question,like a fire bell in the night awakened andfilled me with terror," wrote thomas jefferson. a lot of his papersabout fire, right? so thomas jefferson,a slaveholder, what does a fire bell in thenight mean to a slaveholder?

a fire bell in thenight, to a slaveholder, is an image of a fearfuluprising, of arson. jefferson went on then-- holysmokes, five minutes left. that was like a firebell in the night for me. jefferson went on to discussthe missouri compromise as articulating ageographical line coinciding with amarked principle of moral and political. and so, what jefferson says, isthat the missouri compromise,

resolved at 36 30 line, drawsa line between what's going to be slavery and freedom. that's not what they thinkit means in missouri, though. the missouricompromise is passed by the house and the senate. it goes out, and missourihas the opportunity to write a constitution. that is theconstitution of 1820. it's written in 38 daysat the mansion house hotel

in st. louis. the constitution thatmissouri sends back, in addition tosanctioning slavery, directs the legislature ofthe new state to, quote, "prevent freenegroes and mulattoes from coming to and settling inthis state under any pretext whatsoever." that provision reflectedthe particular sort of white supremacy that definedthe emergent non-slaveholding

and working classwhite population of the state of missouriand the city of st. louis. it reflected theinterests and perspective of the migrants who had cometo missouri in the years after 1816, seeking landand economic advancement. men whose hopes had beendiminished or dashed by the depression of1819, angry, entitled, wounded white menwhose own interests had an unsteady relationshipto those of slaveholders.

men who might hold out hope oneday of becoming slaveholders, but also men for whomthe political preferrment of slaveholders was anoccasionally galling constraint on their own skin privilege. "the cry has been rained. missouri for white men,"recalled the free black barber and chronicler of black life inst. louis, cyprian clamorgan. for these white men-and this is where i want to turn to akind of a global vision

of racial governance. because we have to understandthat these white men are the same white man whoturned william clark-- well, they don't turnhim out of office, but they vote againstwilliam clark in his effort to become the territory-- thefirst state governor in 1820, on the basis thatwilliam clark, who is the greatest indian removerin the history of the united states, is not removingindians fast enough.

for these white men, indianswere a barrier to cheap land, and free blacks abarrier to high wages. seen in this light, indianremoval and negro exclusion were politics ofa piece, projects of ethnic and racialcleansing designed to control the economic,political, and social development of st. louisand the state of missouri. so in closing, whati'm going to do is just simply race tothe end of the story.

the missouri sends theirstate constitution back to washington. there's a huge debatein washington about whether or not thisexclusion of free blacks is unconstitutional,which it patently is, on the basis of the interstate[? commerce ?] clause. you can't deny acitizen of one state their rights that theyhave in that state. you can't discriminate againstthe citizens of other states

under the interstate[? commerce ?] clause. they passed a kind of acovering clause, which says that nothing in themissouri state constitution shall be taken to meanthis, which missouri lives under as they pass a seriesof ever more punitive laws against free people of color. free people of color can't haveany weapons without a license. all free children of colorbetween the ages of seven and 21 will be apprenticedout under the supervision

of the county courts. free people of color need alicense to live in missouri, unless they're a citizenof another state. these are laws that arepassed in 1835, 1837, 1843, and then finally, in 1847,the state of missouri actually passeswhat everyone would take to be a reiteration ofthe constitution of 1820. free people ofcolor shall not be allowed into thestate of missouri

under any pretext whatsoever. so what there is in the yearsleading up to the dred scott case, i wouldargue, is a pattern of both implicitly and, finally,overtly unconstitutional commitments to white supremacythat are made in reaction, i would suggest, to theparticular situation of missouri, as a place righton the border with illinois. as a place where some people arebeing kidnapped and sold into slavery down themississippi river,

where others arebeing enticed away into the underground railroad. and a place that has thesort of commercial flows around free black seamen,and a black middle class formation that comes withthe capitalist development of the mississippi river valley. so there's a contradictionthere between the capitalist developmentin relationship to a slaveholdingimperialist society,

and then the sorts ofpeople that it creates, who are inimical to theprivileges of whiteness, to the claim privilegesof white supremacy. i'm sorry thatthat got so rushed, but i'm following the rules. i want to pick up on someof these essential themes, particularly the notion ofcitizenship as it plays out. i'm going to jump ahead intime quite substantially. and i'm interested not onlyin the fundamental divide

between white and africanamerican citizenship as it plays out in a borderstate, in a border city, but also the way inwhich that citizenship is sort of fractured andsegmented in space, in the metropolitan area itself. two years ago, august, michaelbrown was shot in ferguson. and i think, inone respect, we can see this as anepisode in policing, in addition to the roster thatincludes eric garner and tamir

rice and others. but i prefer to seeit in the context of the history ofgreater st. louis, both the city and its suburbs. and i prefer tosee it as a story, really, about citizenshipand fractured citizenship. as the civil rightspioneer john lewis wrote in the wake ofbrown's death, quote, "one group of peoplein this country

can expect theinstitutions of government to bend in their favor, nomatter that they are supposedly regulated by impartial law. in the other, children, fathers,mothers, uncles, grandfathers, whole families andmany generations are swept up like rubbish bythe hard, unforgiving hand of the law." so as lewis suggests, i thinkthe encounter between michael brown and officer darrenwilson rested, in a sense,

on this much deeper historyof uneven and fragmented citizenship ingreater st. louis. who does the state protect? who does it target? who are presumptivelycitizens, and who are considered insteadas threats, or nuisances, or subjects? so i want to illustratethis with some episodes from the history ofgreater st. louis,

and i'm going to startwith one that joseph touched on last night. and that is the racialzoning ordinance in 1916. this, i think, was fundamentallyabout the presumption that african americanswere not full citizens. as the real estate exchangeargued at the time, "do you realizethat any time you are liable to sufferirreparable loss due to the coming of negroesinto the block in which you

live?" now, as josephmentioned, the ordinance did not go into effect. but like the mechanismsof segregation, generally, in greater st.louis, what happened was the motives remainedthe same, and they migrated from policy to policy,irrespective of legal setbacks. in fact, the realestate exchange was nonplussed by thebuchanan v. warley decision

in 1917, just as theywere by their loss in shelley v. kraemerin 1947, because they knew there were othermechanisms of accomplishing the same thing. what the realtorsdid in st. louis was they established whatthey euphemistically called an unrestricted zone,meaning that realtors could sell inside this zoneto african americans, but if they sold outside,they would lose their license.

they girded thiswith over 380 schemes of neighborhood restriction,race-restrictive deed covenants, some coveringas few as four properties, some covering as many as 80. these took twoforms in the city. the newer developmentsin the south, these were original to thedeeds of the property. the sort of raggedquadrangle in the north is intended to sortof prevent the spread

of the africanamerican population from its historiccenter in the ville into north and west st. louis. importantly for the historyof the city, i would argue, is not so much the reach of deedcovenants in the city itself, which was largely built up--and these covenants were cobbled together after thefact- but the fact that these were absolutelyubiquitous in the st. louis suburbs as they were developed.

in fact, if you look atthe promotional literature for suburbs spillingoutside the city, they're almost alwaysadvertised as protected, and that's what this means. the enforcement ofrace-restrictive deed covancents is struck down inshelley v. kraemer in 1947, but importantly, itlives on another forms. when the federal governmentgets into the business of insuring home mortgagesand risk rate neighborhoods,

as this map shows. the most importantdeterminant for the appraisers who were walking throughthe neighborhoods-- and this is on their clipboards-- iswhether the neighborhood was covered by a race-restrictivedeed covenant. if it was, it was considereda high-grade neighborhood worthy of federal insurance. if it wasn't, or ifthe restriction was about to expire, whichwas noted explicitly,

it was coded red or yellow. and the spirit of these werealso incorporating in zoning. in fact, harland bartholomew,the city engineer in 1918 who went on as a privateplanner to write the zone plan for the entiremissouri suburbs spilling west of the city,noted as early as 1918, when st. louis was preparingto zone for the first time, that zoning was ameans of maintaining race-restrictive deed covenantsafter their expiration.

and this is, in fact, how theywere talked about explicitly in the suburbs. now, in my view, the mostimportant and most destructive part of this storyis not necessarily what happens in the city--although these institutions are invented there-- but the wayin which they are reinvented and replicated in thegreater metropolitan area, particularly given the sort ofpeculiar political organization of st. louis andst. louis county,

where the city isits own county, yet, as joseph mentionedlast night, it can't expand. so what happens is, you getthis dynamic of poaching from the st. louis suburbs. it's almost as if, if anyone'sfamiliar with the year of wildcat drilling,when people would say, oh, there's a pool ofoil there, and everyone would drill sort of on an angleunderneath to get the oil. that's what the suburbs at theedge of st. louis are doing.

their poaching the city ofits resources, and in the ways that i'll describe. but in order to get asense of the sort of deeply racial premisesof local land use, i want to jump to elmwood parkin st. louis county, which is the red spot therenestled between all of that in overland. this is a postage stampof unincorporated land between these twomunicipalities,

and its developmentlooks like this. so the boundaries thereare the current boundaries of all of that in overland. elmwood park is the bluepostage stamp there. this is in 1910. you can see the red. there are a few singlefamily houses being built. elmwood park is an oldfree black settlement dating from the 1880s.

as we move forward in time, wesee more houses being built. and not until 1930 iseither olivette or overland incorporated as a town. as you can see, not muchdevelopment at the time it's incorporated. move forward intime, '35, in 1939, overland is incorporated, buton a much smaller footprint. and then, what bothmunicipalities proceed to do, is, as new subdivisions arebuilt on unincorporated land--

so that private subdividersare making all the crucial land decisions-- andthen, after the fact, they're incorporated intothe municipality, with. a final incorporationcoming in the 1960s. so that by 1965,elmwood park remains and unincorporated postagestamp if underserviced development betweenthese two municipalities. conventionalsuburbanization flows around these africanamerican enclaves

like rocks in a stream. the sewer linesdon't go through, the water linesdon't go through, and the streets are blockaded. with developmentcomplete, st. louis county then looked aroundand said, blight. there's no water. there's no sewer. and elmwood park isslated for redevelopment.

but to add insultto injury, this is what all of that inoverland do to zone the area. they not onlysurround elmwood park and have none of the crucialinfrastructure run through, but they quarantine itwith industrial zoning, and then redevelopment. this is elmwood park in 1955. the county proposesa redevelopment that calves off a thirdof the residential,

turns it into industrial use. this is it in the midstof redevelopment in 1967. and this is a map of wherethe residents of elmwood park end up. over 100 africanamerican families are removed bygovernment action. in the greater st. louisarea between 1950 and 1970, 75,000 are displacedby government action, 90% of them african american.

under federal urbanrenewal statutes, if you redevelop residentialland for residential use, the former residentsare supposed to have first dibsat coming back in. the residents ofelmwood park were given two packets of informationwhen their houses were taken. one was an application forpublic housing in the city. the other was a sortof multi [inaudible] redevelopment contract.

so if they wanted to build eighthouses, that sort of thing, actually coming backas in a developer. so as you can see, oneresident of elmwood park moves back afterthe redevelopment. one. most move into already deeplysegregated tracts in the city or in the county, as inkinloch, as you see at the top. so urban renewal in thecounty and in the city actually hardened thelines of segregation

that joseph talkedabout last night. the residents ofelmwood park, horrified at this stream ofevents, file suit against the land reclamationauthority of st. louis county. that suit goes to themissouri supreme court in 1968, brooks versus the lcra. the supreme court finds againstthe plaintiffs on the grounds that, because theyno longer live there, they don't have standing.

so what are theconsequences of this pattern of deeply segregatinginstitutions and patterns in the city, and oftheir replication, particularly in the innersuburbs and the central suburbs of the county? well, first of allis a dramatic pattern of municipal fragmentation. so this is the cityof st. louis, the sort of crescent on the missouri.

this is the municipalorganization of the greater st. louis region. somewhere between 90and 100 municipalities in st. louis county,depending on the year in which you count them. the important point being thatthese municipalities, very small, are developedfor the express purpose of accomplishing andsustaining racial segregation. many of them providevery few services.

they're really meant toaccomplish a couple of things. one is to zone the land, andthe second is for each of them to sort of play their partin this fragmentary municipal fabric. this is what themunicipal footprint of the ferguson-florissantschool district looks like. notable here is berkeley,which is this little donut around kinloch. berkeley was incorporatedlike that in 1937

in order to split thewhite berkeley school district from the blackkinloch school district. the second consequence, dramaticdecline and disinvestment, as the senator spoke of lastnight, in north st. louis. just a glimpse of that. so here's a sanborn fireinsurance map in northern st. louis, circa 1932. you see how denselydeveloped it is. all these houses are gone.

a dramatic racial wealthgap is another consequence. because africanamericans are left off the escalator ofwealth creation created by the federal government in the1930s, african american wealth, while wages and incomes gainduring the civil rights era, the wealth gap widens, andit's widened dramatically since the housing crisis. and then you get this pattern ofwhite flight and black flight, as summarized hereon these census maps.

and you can see, in migrationbefore the war, the beginnings of an emptying out of the city. so the orange swaths there isthe clearance of the mill creek valley, african americansmoving ahead of the bulldozer into west st.louis, whites moving further out into the suburbs. and the city largely,especially its north side, depopulating over thecourse of the 20th century. and the end result, bringingus back to ferguson,

is the phenomena of whaturban demographers call secondhand suburbs. ferguson is an older, innersuburb, small footprint land development. it becomes thelogical destination for african americanfamilies displaced by urban renewal, displacedby disinvestment in the city, and yet suffering adramatic racial wealth gap, which makes more dramaticinvestments in housing

impossible. and citizenshipremains fragmented. i like this quote fromthe 1970s hearings, because it echoes so muchwhat would happen in ferguson a generation later. who were the policethere to protect? and then, as we lookmore closely at ferguson, we see dramatic differencesbetween these inner suburbs and the larger county.

and so, this is home valuesin st. louis county as sales. here's ferguson. foreclosures as a share ofsales, ferguson, 20% to 30% of sales, through thecrisis and beyond. this fragmentation yieldsa nasty competition for a commercial tax base,partly reflecting missouri's peculiar sales tax system. so municipalitiessort of compete for big box retailin an insane fashion,

and then they give away the taxbase in order to attract it. and so, ferguson has taxincrement financing districts. spilling acrossthe town, you have enhanced enterprisezone that covers the campus of emerson electric. so what do you do if you cannotraise money with property taxes, and you cannot raisemoney with commercial taxes, and you are too smallto be fiscally capable? you engage in revenue policing.

you push fines andforfeitures up to the maximum the state willallow, in ferguson going up as high as 20% on theeve of michael brown's death. and this, i think, iswhat enables us to make sense of that tragic event. it's embedded inthis long history of fragmented citizenship, inwhich not only michael brown, but the innersuburb of ferguson, play a particular role.

thank you. well, good morning, cambridge. my name is ken rearden,and i'm a faculty member at the university ofmassachusetts, a new graduate program in urban planningand community development. and i'm delighted tobe here this morning. and i want to thank professordavis for inviting me, and also my former dean,[inaudible], who was with us at cornell for whileon his way to the gsd.

it was great tosee him last night. and we've heardan extraordinarily eloquent andpowerful description of the structural factorsthat have sort of, over time, undermined the overalleconomic vitality and created just breathtakinglydeep and painful divisions between the life chances ofthe dominant euro-centric population and people ofcolor in the st. louis region. and i don't think i could addvery much more to that story.

what i'd like to spend a fewminutes this morning talking about is something that,really, our speakers last night introduced. that throughout this entirehistory of the early 1800s up through to thispresent moment, there's an extraordinarycounter narrative that's occurring in bothsides of the river that rarely gets its attention. and that is the organizationof people of color,

often under the most difficultand challenging circumstances, to organize aroundbasic human rights. stories that are oftencompletely overlooked and, when told, are oftenviewed as unbelievable by folks who have only a distantrelationship with this region's history. and how does a nice irishcatholic boy from the bronx end up in east st.louis for a decade? what did i do along mylife's trail to end up there,

my father asked me. he said he had plentyof good explanations. but in 1990, i was the brandnew assistant professor of urban and regional planningat the university of illinois, where harland bartholomewtaught for many years. in fact, i took over introto city planning decades later from his tutelage. and as i walked in as theyoungest untenured professor, my chair said, hey, youdo community development.

you're now the director of theeast st. louis action research project. and being a new yorker, ididn't have a very good command of midwestern geography-- istill don't, in many ways-- and i said, i hadn'tnoticed the signs to east st. louisaround champaign urbana. where the hell is it? i found out it was 188miles down the road. and the reason why iassumed this lofty position

of leadership is that all thesenior faculty who had tenure did the reverse moonwalk wheninvited to come and participate in the east st. louis project. and the question is, howdoes a big state university 200 miles away find astruggling community of color along the riverso far from its campus? and like so many things inhigher ed-- but i'm sure not here at the gsd-- it's sortof the low road to morality. the longest-sittingafrican american woman

in any midwesternstate legislature was a remarkable, hellaciousvisionary civil rights activist by the name of wyvetter younge. and after decades of servicein every crappy committee in the state houseof representatives, she became, in 1985,the chairperson of the higher edfinance committee of the state legislature. and that's a big deal ina place like illinois,

where the land grant universityhas almost iconic and godlike stature. in fact, only twicea year does the house and the senate inillinois get together. one is for the state of thestate speech by the governor, and the second one is the headof the university of illinois system comes and talks about thestate of the land grant mission in the state of illinois. so in 1987, the then president--you couldn't make this up,

like lawless, my colleague--stanley ikenberry iii came to the joint house and senateto give his state of the campus speech, "why we shouldget more state aid, because our athletes run faster,our scholars jump higher, and the library has morebooks than anybody else." and as he was about ready tolaunch into his presentation, in the back of the room stoodup wyvetter younge and said, we'll be interestedin what your vision is for the future of theuniversity of illinois

when you can articulateto our satisfaction what your urban publicservice mission is as a land grant institutionin communities like east st. louis. and in a nanosecond-- we allknow higher ed moved slowly, glacially in some ways-- thepresident called together the deans of a variety ofschools and said, in the fall, you will go and do goodwork in east st. louis. so the first person to showup to do this good work, just

across the riverfrom the dred scott courthouse on the east st. louisside of the river, was myself. and i showed up as abright-eyed, bushy-tailed, recently minted ph.d.from uncle ezra's day camp in ithaca, betterknown as cornell. and i started my series ofcommunity-based interviews with folks in the healthcare sector, and education, and business, andcommerce, and planning, with hi, i'm fromthe university.

i'm here to help you. and i, again, saw peopledoing the reverse moonwalk, holding their vital organs,protecting themselves. and my favorite quotewas from the leader of a grassroots organizationwho said, quote unquote, while holding my hand--i thought this was going to be a greatrelationship building moment-- she's holding my hand. she starts squeezing it,squeezing it, squeezing it

until it turns pink,and then she says, the last goddamn thingwe need in east st. louis is another university-trainedacademic telling us what any sixth graderin town already knows. so my proposal,which was to support local community-based planningefforts with assistance from the landscape, architectureand planning program from university ofillinois, was not the first idea thatlocal residents had,

in terms of a path forward. and they needed a path forward. east st. louis has anextraordinary history. it was called thepittsburgh of the west. it had the largest rail assemblyyard in the united states. it had the second largeststeel production facility. as late as the 1940s, it had thesecond highest industrial wage rates in illinois, and hadthe highest home ownership rate in the state of illinois.

extraordinary. and it was a happening place. in fact, in the early 1950s,the national municipal league and look magazinepointed to east st. louis as an all-american city. people can't evenimagine that, right? all-american city mostlikely to make the transition from an industrial-based economyto a mixed sector economy, because of its highcompetence in business

and civic leadership. well, look magazineis no longer around, nor is the national municipalleague in the form that it was. so it's predictive qualitiescould be questioned. well, within a 20-yearperiod, east st. louis loses, between '60 and1980, three quarters of all of itsbusinesses, most of it high-paying unionizedindustrial firms. and with that, ofcourse, unemployment

skyrockets, meaning incomeplummets and poverty skyrockets, as well. in addition, theproperty tax value, which we've talked about asbeing the fundamental supporter of public education,property tax base of the city goes from nearly $700 millionto just over $100 million in a 20-year period. the city has to raise itsproperty taxes, the tax rate, in order to try to makeup some of the income.

but even with that, theycan't provide basic services. the first unit to go was thecity planning department. and nobody really missedit by the time i got there. but in addition, by1990, when i arrived, the city had been unableto put its municipal lights on since 1986. it couldn't payit's electric bill. it was unable tohave its traffic signals on majorintersections operating.

it couldn't pay traffic bills. and it didn't collect municipaltrash from '86 to '90. families would sendtrash to school with their childrenin backpacks, and they would dump it in thedumpster on the way to school. so they'd eliminatedall basic services, even though they had this very,very high tax rate, prompting one hud official to refer toeast st. louis as a beirut by the river, oramerica's soweto.

now, this is a storythat we've often heard, and it's not unique to aninner ring older central city like east st. louis. but beneath thesurface, there's really something extraordinarygoing on that's gotten very little attention. and that is the effortsof an amazing group of african american womenin a neighborhood called emerson park, which wasthe residential center

of the packinghouseworkers' movement. and this woman on thetop left, ceola davis, who, as a younggirl, went to a town called ruleville mississippias part of an naacp youth leadership effort to supportthe voter registration efforts of robert moses andthe great fannie lou hamer. so extraordinarily touchedby that experience, on the way back on a greyhoundbus from mississippi, these six women pledge toeach other and to their god

that they would create acivic movement not unlike what was happening in[inaudible] county to turn their cityaround and recapture it. this is in 1964. and they slowly began working. their first projectwas to identify three burnt-out buildings acrossthe street from a day care facility where theirgrandchildren went. and they went inand, hand by hand,

dissembled these buildings,deconstructed them, took down three three-storybrick buildings. took all of the bricks,had local african-american contractors take itover to cherokee street, where nice people inthose suburbs we just saw being built out likedthe patina of the brick. they raised $12,000. and then, for the next year,they ran a program called "don't cook tonight,call ceola,"

and they basically sold $5.00fried chicken and fried fish dinners. raised $20,000. and with that, theydesigned and built, with local labor, their firstneighborhood playground, the first publicspace of quality that had been built inthe city in 30 years. they called it shugue parkafter a great local civil rights leader.

and with that, thesewomen said, hey, we did three lots on a block. there's only 77 blocksin our neighborhood. there's only 22neighborhoods in the city. let's turn the wholegoddamn boat around. and they created somethingcalled the emerson park development corporation. they reached out to their staterepresentative wyvetter younge, top right, and said, can't youget the university's attention?

she found a pretty goodway in 1987 to do that, by challenging theuniversity to identify what their commitment was. so i showed up in 1990. there was already thisextraordinary group that had put togetherthe shugue park, and they invited us to workwith them in developing the first neighborhood plan. we did in a bottom up,bottom sideways manner,

doing lots of door-knocking,focus groups, [inaudible], et cetera. and within 90 days of thecompletion of the plan and its adoptionby city council, we implemented our firstelement with no money, which was a cleanup of themajor street going through the neighborhood,called 9th street. ceola picked it outbecause she knew that's where thecounty public works

director drove from hisoffice out to his home. and they knew that, ifthey cleaned up the street, they had no money to hire trucksto get rid of the garbage. so we collected 980bags of garbage, put red ribbons on them, stuckit in the middle of 9th street. so when this guydrove home-- they knew he was an anal retentive,nice italian-american guy-- he would immediately getthe public works trucks out to take it away.

that evening on the local tvstation, there's the headline, neighborhood leadersbreak law with the help of the university of illinoisto save neighborhood. within a week, we gota check for $15,000. and i thought peoplewould use the money to hire folks to clean upother sites of illegal dumping. they chose not to. they instead organizedlocal volunteer efforts, cleaned up hundreds oflots over the summer.

used the $15,000 topay the tipping fees. this was the beginning. the fact that they were ableto move from an idea and a plan to implementing somethingwith so little resources got the imaginationof a lot of folks, who wanted to believechange was possible, but had never seen ithappen in their lifetime. the cleanup reallywas the prairie fire, the spark that began toget people's imagination.

from there, we starteddoing scrape up cleanups, with local residents beingorganized by folks like ceola, and us at the universityorganizing student help. we did 60 homes, scrapedthem, painted them. we got free paint from theuniversity, the university colors. illinois are orange. nobody wanted theirhouse painted orange, so we painted alot of houses blue.

just as we started getting thatdone, the state treasurer said, we collect tax money which wegive to local banks to hold. and what they have to paythe state for the right to have those profits isquite low, those deposits. how about if we allow you todetermine which local bank will hold those profits, andthe difference between what the state requires and returnfor the tax investment, and what you can get thesebanks to compete to give you interest, in terms of theright to hold the money,

we'll allow you to useto do housing rehab. and that created ourfirst revolving loan fund. began doing some significantlocal, small, moderate rehab. with that, we then got a callfrom the new regional director of hud, who said, howabout a home grant? we then startedwriting home grants and began to mobilizelocal black contractors through the local church networkthat we were working with, helped by university students,and we began to do major rehab.

this is going along pretty well. and then, an extraordinarything happened. habitat came to us andsaid, how would you like to do infill, in between? we said, even with thereductions in cost of habitat by volunteer labor,our folks can't afford to pay the monthly mortgage. i said, well, how about ifwe begin to do something habitat hadn't done atthat point anywhere, which

is to take other donations andfurther write down the mortgage costs. and we began doing new housing. and then i got a phonecall on my birthday-- please write this down. this will be on the gsd examnext year-- september 15. my mother alwayscalls me at 5:15, which is when i came into theworld and ruined her life, she told me.

and that year, igot a phone call. my wife hands the phone over. it's probably your mother. it wasn't it was ceola davis. hey, they're going to build alight rail line from st. louis airport to the downtowncasino district to get those nice businessmenand women in and out of town. how about if we get it extendedthrough east st. louis, eight miles.

extend the rail line. and we've already determinedwhat the route is going to be. what do you think about that? i said, great. who the hell is this? it was miss davis. so we organized somethingcalled the 101 reasons why the regionaltransportation plan-- and then we had an expletive,which i can't stay,

because i've give my right tohave this put on the internet, and i don't wantto be brought up before the morals commissionof the roman catholic church. and we worked with ceoladavis to actually do the route with businessstudents, landscape architecture students,planning students. and we were able toput enough pressure on the regionaltransportation planning folks to actually extend themetro length into east st.

louis, which immediately gavepeople who had no automobile access to living wagejobs out at the airport or nearby theability to do that. and that also gaveus the ability, as more people got back intoemployment-- their income began to rise-- for us tothen be able to talk about a major new residentialdevelopment, which ended up being the parsons place project. we recruited richard baronsalazar company to do it.

they partneredwith us 175 units. it's around a drop-deadbeautiful central park. it also includesa charter school, which has one of thehighest attendance rates and school performanceimprovement rates in the metro region. why? because the entirecurriculum of that school is focused oncommunity-based planning

and development. the kids learn, experientially,their three r's, and lots of other things,by actually participating in a supportive way with thecommunity-building ongoing activities of the eldersin their neighborhood. in addition to that, we wereable to create the youth build charter school wejust talked about. and then, residentscame to us and said, we think it's greatthat this partnership,

but in order foryour students, who are among the brightest andmost privileged in our region, to be helpful inour efforts, you provide them with 10 to 12 hoursa week of the best graduate education in urban economics,urban design, community we, most of whom havenever had a chance to spend one day a universitysetting, are given no training. you think you're really engagingin an emancipatory approach to community planningpractice, but you're not.

you're reinforcing existingracist, sexist, and classist approaches to planning. we're not even thetail on the dog. we're not even the flea hopingto land on the tail of the dog, the way you're doing it. that was bad news, hard to hear. but the solutionthat they proposed was creating, in east st.louis, a highlander-like school for citizen education andresearch, a free adult school.

we then developed the curriculumwith community leaders. it offers 10 courses, and200 east st. louis leaders went through this school. i want to wrap up by justsaying, what were the outcomes? $40 million of newdevelopment in a neighborhood that no urban professionalin 1990 would have said would get a penny,and it happened because of the extraordinaryvision and leadership of these women.

it encouraged lots ofother neighborhoods to get involved in grassrootsresident-lead planning. it developed its own modelof community planning, which i'll just say a word about. it was replicated inseveral other major cities in the us and internationally. in 1994, we held a un urbandevelopment conference in east st. louis,the first conference held in east st.louis since 1974.

and this model,then, was replicated in several othercities in central and south america, africa andasia, all from east st. louis. and then, finally, anextraordinary impact on the young studentswho participated. top left is the recenthousing commissioner of the city of newyork, rafael cestero, trained in east st. louisat the feet of ceola davis. top right, juan salgado, arecent winner of the macarthur

genius award, founded a terrificcharter school and grassroots organization in thepilsen neighborhood of chicago, trainedin east st. louis by ceola davis andher colleagues. lower left, michelle whetten,runs the enterprise community partnership gulf coastinitiative, $300 million of post-katrinadevelopment, trained at the feet of ceoladavis in east st. louis. and then, finally,kirk goodrich,

who's currently runninga private company that does some of themost extraordinary special-needs housing. along the way, the communityworked with university folks to evolve its own approachto resident-driven planning and development, calledempowerment planning and design. and it combines participatoryaction research, where those mostaffected by the issues

at the local community, who havethat deep, local historical, cultural knowledge, anduniversity-trained folks engage in reciprocal learningand the process of collecting and analyzing data. it gives you betterplans, but it doesn't build thepolitical base of power to affect the very powerfulpublic and private interests that determine whereinvestment's going to go. therefore, wecombine that approach

with old fashioned alinsky-baseddirect action organizing. every outreach effortto collect data was a challenge, at theend, to encourage somebody in the community to get involvedin the grassroots effort that was moving the agenda. and finally, to make surethat we understood over time, for each issue, where to putthe maximum political pressure in order to really leverageand move the dial on policy, and to create a more evenapproach, balanced approach,

to development in east st.louis was the popular education proposal that theresidents offered us, in terms of the creation ofthe highlander-inspired center for neighborhood planning. and with that, i want tothank you, and turn it over to the next speaker. excellent. it's great to be here. i'm not from st. louis.

i've never lived there. i haven't reallydone any work there, but i've loved my multiplevisits to the region. and so, i'm thrilled tobe a kind of interloper in this conversation--especially if it's in regards to historyas well-- and to offer a few broad reflections onthe st. louis landscape. i think of myself like henryshaw, who, as a first visitor, fell in love with this place.

he arrived from england to aland marshy ground, sinkholes, and indian burialmounds, and managed to find himself with distantperspective on the landscape. a man from a very differentterrain who, as legend had it, found an elevated plateauto overlook the prairie, and never turned away. so today, i'm going to betalking about this landscape, and maybe trying to imagineit as a continuum, rather than a fragment, looking atthe hydrologic, geologic,

and horticulturallegacies of st. louis. which button do i press? green. let's go with that one. in so doing, i will be exploringhow the physical-- yeah. i'll be exploring how thesephysical conditions cannot be separated from the culturaldefinitions of the territory, how these biophysicalcharacteristics overlay with the socioeconomic issues ofrace and poverty in the region.

should i try again? and how an expansiveunderstanding of the landscape bolsters the idea of a fragileterrain, fragile socially, economically, politically,and ecologically. is it playing? st. louis is a part of manyoverlapping and intersecting cultural regions, as wasmentioned last night, from the much maligned and notvery usefully-named rust belt, with its implications ofsocial and industrial decline,

to the bread basket,or corn belt, with its rich soils,advantageous climate, and political support that allowfor agricultural dominance. it's a pronounced part of themississippi river corridor. it's firmly in themidwest, but as also was mentioned lastnight, is sometimes considered on the northernfringes of the south or the easternfringes of the west. and it's one of anumber of cities

that claims itself as thegateway to the west, probably most pronounced. and, obviously, the only onewith a giant arch to do so. and in some senses, it isthe mississippi watershed that bridges these kindof cultural regions with some ecological regions. so here's the south. to add to thesecultural regions, st. louis is, again, partof this mississippi river

watershed, a part of the greatkarst region and ozark plateau, and a part of usdahardiness zone six, which descends fromnortheast washington to northern new mexico,across southern colorado, through kansas and missouri,and all the way to northeastern massachusetts andsouthern new hampshire. so here, you can sayboston and st. louis are actually nearly connected. so given st. louis' membershipin all of these regions,

i began to think of capturingthe identity of the city not as a gateway, but througha sequence of bridges. the city, of course, sitsbetween two major rivers, and is connected toits greater region through physical bridges. but it also operatesitself as a series of geographical,topographical, temporal, and conceptual bridges. here, the horizontalexpanse of the city

is seen as a meansof connection, a means of navigating betweendisparate conditions, a way to tell a story that extendsfrom the past to the future, and to build on legaciesto find strongholds within a fragile environment. so in my limited time,i'm going to try to focus on seven thematic bridges. the themes areprovocations, rather than fully-formed arguments,with the hopes

of raising interestingquestions for this symposium and the futurework on st. louis. so i'll start with the east towest, to mimic much of the way the city first developedfrom it's river bank inland. to test this idea of st.louis as a gateway, which has more resonancefor me in the past, because, inadvertently, ina way, we've gated our city and focused it intoclosed definition, rather than emphasizing itas a means of connection

across multiple territories. and yet, the gatewaymetaphor persists. i heard it stated veryrecently on some tv coverage of an event in st. louis. yet the region, despitethe real bridges that cross themississippi, there's this great divide perceptually,as we just heard about, between east and west. an unproductive divide thatsplinters and is reflected

physically in the widegap between each side, and in the differentialtreatment of the banks where each side,in it's unique way, has turned itsback on the river, either with a highflood wall or with land use decisions that push peopleaway from the river's edge. it seems nearly impossible tosee the water in either city, much less to find it orsmell it, or have a view across to the other side.

so this is definitely abridge needing repair. so what about thenorth to south? the idea that st. louis isstill on the edge of the south, at least from myoutside perspective, seems a little bitless of a stretch. i could find moremaps of the south that include missourithan maps of the west with the city in it. and these maps-- actually allof the continental contiguous us

maps have st. louis inthe center of the slide, so you can see thatthe city and its region does literally sit more in thecenter of the north-south axis than it does an east-west one. but of course, as we'vetalked a lot about today and yesterday, on amore zoomed-in scale, there's a perceptual dividebetween the north and south sides of the city, reinforcedby particular lines-- delmar avenue comes up alot-- that people consider

hard boundaries, onesnot to be crosses, ones reinforced byeconomics, by policy, and by development decisions. and if we zoom out again,there's also north-south break in way the mississippiriver itself is managed, with the st.louis district marking the divide between thenorthern and southern parts. between the northernriver, where navigation iscontrolled by locks,

to the open southern river,where engineered steps are not required for passage. past emphasis onthe northern river has been on maintainingand controlling navigation, where efforts tothe south focus more on flood control, which,as everyone knows, isn't to say that itdoesn't flood in st. louis, and that there isn't a heavyflood infrastructure-- decaying flood infrastructure--in the city.

so if we return to this section,we see agriculture and industry in the flood plain in theeast, and an outdated levee system that's outside of thisframe, and the high flood wall in the west, reinforcingthis artificial separation between wet and dry terrain. yet, historic crestdata indicates that the wet is oftensurging into the dry, and the frequency ofhigh water events, as you can see, overtime, like everywhere,

is only clearly increasing,so that the floods are happening often. and i would say the memoryof the last great flood has not quite faded whenthe next great flood occurs. and so, this is acontinuing condition. and further, water is notonly a surface concern. so while st. louis is nowa relatively flat city, it's built ground sits atopold clay quarries mined in the areas southof forest park

to produce thecity's famous brick, and even more notably,atop a porous karst topography-- that we sawearlier-- of limestone caves, sinkholes, andabandoned quarries. here is the pockmarkedtopography conditions around benton parkin the late 1800s. and so, development has filledthe holes in this ground, but it's still quitethin and fragile. you can see evidence of theshifting and subsiding terrain

as you drive throughthe neighborhoods, especially on thesouth side of the city. and there are pocketsunder the surface. there are still pocketsunder the surface with many undergroundstreams running through them. so, in addition to the threatof sinkholes on the surface, is the contamination ofthe groundwater, which further erodesboth water quality and the limestone substructure.

the significant ofkarst is exceptional in this city and region,as is the transformation of this terrain for development. the st. louis caves--of which 20 still exist in a non-accessibleand highly-altered form-- have been used historically forstorage, tavern states, beer cellars, commercial tours,and for the disposal of garbage, sewage,and stormwater. and in the county whereaccessible state caves still

persist, the practiceof converting these undergroundstructures into detention basins and culvertsfor stormwater. it's a crazy proposition,given the volatility of the intersection oflimestone and water, and urban runoff continues. the caves are very diverse ingeologic character, associated with many terrain, includingalong the mississippi river bluffs-- you can imagine henryshaw back there-- once creating

a dramatic landscape of cliffs,sinkholes, valleys, and caves, a landscape augmentedby man-made earthworks like the cahokia moundsthat once existed on both sides of the river. so this is near the stadium. but today, the highsand lows of the region are much more subtle. so st. louis is,again, relatively flat, and perhaps at thisregional scale,

little can be saidabout the relationships between topographic elevationand types of development. often, low ground is theleast desirable to develop, and the quickest toabandon in difficult times. but at this scale, thereare too many factors to consider, many of whichwe've been talking about. and while propertyabandonment has patterns, it is also extremely pervasive,and perhaps irregardless of elevation.

so we're going to zoom inand look at ferguson, which colin so eloquently described. there's, of course,many, many key things to say about the events there. but what i was first struck by,when i looked at the landscape, was the pattern of development. i've been to fergusonjust once, five years ago, so i can't say i know it well. but the area thati visited actually

looked nothing like this. here, i was struck by the lowground and the ways in which the fragile terrain,qualities of the ground, and often relatedpolitics contribute to a certain type ofdevelopment and quality of life. so i was immediatelydrawn to the idea of the local low pointsand a stream running across the terrain, andeven in colin's full photos, looking at how that sitsrelative to elevation.

so for me, there's a kindof strong image of those in pursuit on highground, and those being pursued on lowground, as well as something extremely unsettlingabout how development happens on these fragile grounds. but i don't actuallywant to end there. so the penultimatetheme focuses on how, even within a fragile terrain,things can be resilient, and on the undeniablyrich horticultural history

of the city. so we come back tohenry shaw's home, of one of the country'soldest and most preeminent botanical gardens. this is businessmagnate and lover of the landscape henryshaw's gift to the city. the shaw property includesthe botanical garden and tower grove park,his country estate, which, to this day, is awell-funded and maintained

public landscape in the city. the botanical garden openedto the public in 1859, and the shaw legacy continuedthrough the initial work of botanist dr.george engelmann, who pushed the public missionof the institution, and to the subsequent scientificgenius of botanist dr. peter raven, who directed thegardens from 1971 to 2011 and made the institutionscontemporary contributions on par with its historical ones.

i want to open a dialoguebetween the botanical garden, a highly-managed and containedhorticultural gem that costs to visit, and thespontaneous woodlands that emerge in places of abandonment. they're a testamentto the resilience of the fragile socialand ecological terrains and if we look atthe perspective, as well, the woodedexperience offers a moment of respite, aplace to cut through one

part of the city toanother, but also a metaphor for aspontaneous activity that emerges out of lackof resource and planning, which i think, actually,the last presentation really spoke to amazingly well. and for theoverlooked growth that happens amidst dominantnarratives of decline, and for things that areactually happening now, and have happened inthe past 40 years.

so a forest cangrow, for one thing, but many other thingscan also happen. and for another, we need tostart thinking differently about our investmentin the landscape. so as you can kindof see in this slide, if we built big parks at theturn of the last century, how will we address the manyacres of fallow and vacant lands as the century turns? how we think aboutthe spontaneous

will always be subservientto the cultivated. and more importantly, howwill move from the past, to the present, to the future? so for me, all of these bridgesinvoke these temporal shifts and demand a long view of theterrain and its evolution. plus, i wanted to endwith this idea of time and to come back to the gatewayagain, this time literally, with the current landscapeproject taking place on the gateway grounds,both to make parallels

between the pastand the present, between forest parkand the gateway, as to how we introduce canopyinto the urban condition with an effective robustness. so at the bottom, these are800 plain trees from the east that have acclimatizedthemselves in the outer regionsof the st. louis region before making their mark onthe river's edge in the city. there's a significant culturaland geographic story there,

but one that demands expanding. the gateway cannot be a symbol,or a gateway to somewhere else, and the investment cannothave a limited footprint. instead, we have to move beyondthe gates we have created in the past to focusinstead on a way to move beyond thesymbolic and monumental, the closed and territorial,towards a means of connection, towards bridges that support thefragile terrain on which they land, rather thanlanding heavily

and blind to the context. and so, really understandingthe particular hydrological, geological, andvegetal legacies. but even more so,i think, as we've seen in everypresentation, to support the people who rely on thisland and need its stability to endure. thanks. so why don't we haveall of our panelists

come and sit up in the front,and we have a few minutes, i would say 10 minutes,at least, for questions. joseph, do you want to start? would you like to use the mic? oh, i suppose so. phil donahue style. that dates me, doesn't it? anyway, sorry, students. so that was just an amazinggroup of presentations.

thank you all so much. i learned a lotabout the region. and actually, that'sthe word that i want to use in askingthe question, which is, what are theprospects for starting to think on a regional scale? because all of thepresentations really talked about st. louis not just interms of its local conditions, but how it's connectedto the region around it,

whether it's the t ecologicalor political region. and there have beenattempts over the course of the 20th century,as many of you know, to createregional governance structures, to try tobust through these kind of fragmented conditions. but what are theprospects, at this point, for creating more regionalgovernance structures or political systems?

not much. i mean, i think thechallenge is this. of all the episodes of effortsto stitch the county, the city, back together again,to establish more regional governments,my favorite is from the 1980s, when aplanner sits down and rather fancifully redrawsthe municipalities in the region likethe south pole, as pie slices thatgo from the river.

so everybody gets alittle bit of downtown, a little bit ofsubstandard city housing, a little bit of inner suburb,and a lot of outer suburbs. and then it's like,fund your schools, do economic development,that sort of thing. you know, it didn't go anywhere,but the idea was interesting. i think the challenge, inthis sort of fragmented setting that i described,it's this century-long game of musical chairs where everyonethinks they're going to win.

and the principalvillain in much of the story that i tell inmy book is st. louis county. st. louis county is now theprincipal victim, at least the inner suburbs of the county. and the fact that everymunicipality-- particularly in this sort of crazy, point oforigin sales tax competition-- thinks that they might win. and one even getsthe sense, reading the combined annualfinancial reports

of the city of ferguson,which is struggling throughout this entireperiod, but they always think, you know, if we[? tiff ?] a walmart, and we get a walmart, andjennings doesn't get it, maybe we'll be fine. and the sort of perverselocal incentives, i think, really act as a barrier to anysort of meaningful cooperation. so say again why the countymight be the victim in this. well, i think the--

you said [inaudible] first,but then [inaudible]. so i would saythe municipalities in st. louis county,which existed, as i described, largely topoach the city of its taxes resources and its peopleduring the middle years of the 20th century, is nowitself being poached by st. charles and outer counties. and if you look at variousmeasures of neighborhoods distress, and povertyand unemployment,

they simply migratefrom the city out into that crescentof communities that sit between thecity and the airport. and so, ferguson, whicheagerly hosted klan meetings in the 1930s, is now avery different place. so i think, in onerespect, what you see in the city of st. louisis both the sustained success of segregation and itsspectacular failure, the fact that it moved spatially in sucha way to sort of constantly

upset the possibilityfor political change. [inaudible], i'm going toask a question, because i didn't see anybody up there. but kind of following throughwith this idea of region, thinking about it ecologically,specially, politically, et cetera, as youput on the table. i guess the questioni have for the panel, i was really struck by thedifference between east st. louis and st. louis.

maybe we got a reallypositive picture from ken. but thinking a little more aboutthe physical location of east st. louis withrespect to governance in the state of illinois, itsisolation, part of that state, but it's isolation. it had, to a certainextent, the advantage of being out of thebig conversation about what's happeningin, possibly, the rest of thestate, in chicago.

and then, on theother side, you have this fragmented terrain,politically fragmented terrain in missouri,where you get the sense that that fragmentedpuzzle is really central to the conversationin the state of missouri about politics in thefuture of the region. well, this region of st. louis. it seems to me a lotof that goes back to the historicalstory that we have

about the legacy, the historyof missouri as a state, with the compromise, andhow that writes itself on the spatial fragmentation,on ideas of race, whiteness, et cetera. so i guess i'm trying to aska question about the kind of territorial place of st.louis in the state of missouri, and whether that's thereason why we might not see some of the successesthat ken has showed us in the east st. louis place.

in other words, the advantagesof so-called backwardness in east st. louisallowed the city to come togetherand do something in ways that i don't seemuch promise for the city or the metro region of st.louis to come together and claim a different identityfor that region in the state of missouri. i have a partialhistorical response. i didn't emphasize this,but one of the things

i've been struck by inmy study of st. louis is actually the radicalhistory of st. louis. and so, in a way,i'm not accepting the premise of the difference. i mean, the first generalstrike in the united states was in st. louis in 1873. the first sit down strike wasat emerson electric in 1836, i think. there was a vigorousradical labor community,

including african-americans--ambiguously including african-americans, neversuccessfully including african-americans. but, i think,persists to this day. so if you talk to percy green,who climbed the arch in 1964, percy green is somebody whowalked a picket line where hershel walker, whowas the black president of the communist party inst. louis in the 1930s. and percy green's somebodywho is in conversation

with tef poe, who wasone of the organizers, or one of the principles inthe uprising in ferguson. and so, i guess whati'd want to gesture at is the consequentialcharacter of that tradition, and the fact that it'snot simply what happened. and i think professorgordon said this, in a way. what happened in fergusonhappens a hundred times a year, hundreds of times a year inthe united states of america, a policeman shoots ayoung, unarmed black man.

but what was different wasthat people turned out, and they were organized,and they stayed out, day after day after day, asit got cold, as it rained. and that, to me, is theproduct of this sort of decades-long traditionof radical organizing. and then, i lookat what happened at the university of missouri. i'm from columbia. i am well aware ofthe rednecky character

of the central missouri. but what happenedto me there was also a product, then, of thatradical black tradition that has stayed alive in spiteof everything that's happened in st. louis. so i just want to holdonto that a little bit. i'm wondering, you all havedeep resources and knowledge about this area. it seems like we'remissing a thread, which

is the economic threat. and we heard lastnight, passionately, about what's neededis education and jobs. we talked aboutresources here today, physical resources of theland, and incredible people, the women in east st.louis, and the activists. but where's the moneygoing to come from? are you talkingabout the region? because if we stretched outthe responsible physical,

geographic area,there would actually be those resourcesout there that have some of them movedout along with people who've moved out of the city? or is there really need for awhole new injection of money into this area? what needs to be accomplished? i mean, you can pull it andpick it and reorganize it from the funds that might beavailable on a public nature,

but we need something thatfeeds itself and keeps it going and employs people. i didn't really hearthe economic story, except about the rust beltand maybe misnamed it. the potential, maybe, ofthe agricultural resources of the area. but are we going toput that together? and what might be out therethat could be harvested? i mean, i would just pointto two important elements.

one is that the st. louiseconomy is not strong, has not been strong for a century. and, in fact, city planners,harland bartholomew among them, started worrying about whiteflight at the end of world war i. they were saying, you know,we're-- it's a 19th century economy centered on the river. it's strugglingeconomically, and that's a big part of the story. and what's remarkable aboutthe sprawl of st. louis west,

into the missouri cornfields,is that the city has not grown in substantialways, economically or demographically. the population of st. louistoday is about one and a half, two times, of the metroarea, what it was in 1930, and it takes up 12times the land area. 10% of the population livein the city of st. louis. so you have that sprawl,despite the lack of growth, despite the lack ofeconomic prosperity.

the other thing that i thinkis notable about st. louis, and helps to distinguish itfrom more moderate successes like pittsburghand other places, is st. louis has a notoriouslyshortsighted business community that has notdone itself any favors. they're alwaysfighting the last war. they're always trying to savedowntown when downtown is gone. and they're playing inside thisfragmented political structure, in which to play thegame is to lose it.

it's a sort of beg yourneighbor game of musical chairs. i always think of in such away, if walmart is looking down at google earth of st.louis, their saying, we're going to have 10 stores. and then everyone competesas to who gets the 10 stores, and walmart doesn't pay anytaxes, or it gets-- you know, it's not like you've gotmore investment for the metro so i'm just suggesting, weneed to talk, in this day or in years that follow,about a major new injection

of something that reallybreaks through that change. when i was working in st.louis in the late '90s, it was fantastic to work there. it still seems to bethe case that it's supported by these foundations. there's fabulous foundations. they support thinkingand writing and research, but all of thosetogether can't get the number of jobs that areneeded for the amazing people

that are in st. louis. i had the sense,then, it's reached some limits of going out, andthere was a real sort of push that could bring people back. there's only so far peopleare willing to commute out. and there's hopefor that change, but it sounds like therehasn't been as much since then as i had thought. anyway, something to continue.

in deference toprofessor gordon, i just want to put on atiny little footnote, which i think it is important tonot only imagine-- to not let the narrative ofdecline be the only way that we understandinequality in st. louis. so st. louis is a city whichhas, by some measures, two of the wealthiest suburbs inthe united states of america, out of 25. st. louis?

crappy in-decline st. louis? right? so the point being thatthere are thriving businesses within st. louis thatare not paying taxes, that are getting away with notcontributing to the community. and so, it may bethat, as well as a story of large-scalehistorical decline, we can find a story ofstructured inequalities of the businesses that areactually there, and are

actually thriving, andthe sorts of disadvantage that they are creating,rather than addressing. but i do think, also,that this is, again, where the fragmentationof the region is a part of the questionthat gets in the way. so you have thecompetition to the bottom. because of the history of thefragmentation of the region, that's a huge obstacleto kind of move forward, even toget people to talk

about economic development. but i don't wantto talk too much. i see there are three questions. we're going to pilethem all together, because we're already runninginto our coffee break, or whatever. so we'll pile thethree questions, then we'll let the panelistssay some final things, if they want.

oh, four? ok, four. oh, sorry. i have the microphone,so i get to speak. i just wanted to ask aboutthe longer legacy of missouri as a slave state. and colin was talking last nightabout how slave states have a tradition of low propertytaxes, which ties in, i guess, to the questionjust being asked,

so that missouricontinues to have this sort of long historyof low property taxes. and i guess i just wantedto hear how that plays out and how to respond tothat, especially given that it is something thatcomes out of missouri's longer i don't think there'stime for this, but i think it'sreally important. and i'd like to have allthe panelists respond-- but they won't havetime to do it--

to the idea of the complexityof the pattern of fragmentation and racism that you'veso eloquently outlined, and the other regional patterns. and that's class,income, occupation. the famous st. louispost dispatch series in-- was it 1950? progress or decay--there's a picture of the suburbs by price pointof five different little houses that you can getin different areas.

the other picturethat i saw, i think i saw miles davis upthere for a second. if memory serves, hisparents were-- his father was a doctor-- dentist. he was a dentist. so i'd like to get afeel for the diversity within these groupings. there is an africanamerican professional class. there are the whites.

i understandwhiteness, but you'd hate to stereotype a whole race. there are a lot of differentethnic, but particularly occupational incomegroups, and that plays out and makes the challenge ineast st. louis, everywhere, a little more complicated. so at some point, i'dlove to hear about that. remember, the morequestions, the less response. but i see two more, andthen we'll wrap it up.

hi. considering this fascinating,very troubling history of violence in st.louis, i'm just wondering-- myquestion has to do with your thoughtsabout urban history as a normative project onits own, in deciding, say, st. louis' future,politically and economically. my question iswhether there have been any federal orstate institutions that

have done anything touse historic preservation as a platform fromwhich to argue for st. louis' revitalization. considering whatwe heard yesterday about dilapidated housing. and the whole discussion beganwith the physical artifact of east st. louis. i'd love to knowwhat you think about whether historic preservationhas at all been a focus.

last question out there? yeah. the answer is yes. do you have a question? is somebody up there? just a quick comment. at what scale do you operate? i think, diane, you startedby moving from the universal to the particular.

and i think it was afascinating panel which started by a burned humanbeing hanging from a tree, ending with treesready for deployment. and in the middle, wevisited a neighborhood that was strangledand cut off, trash bags in the middle of the streetthat you can't drive around. so we'll get tothis in panel four. but at what scale do you grabpeople's attention to start at? because starting from theuniversal is difficult.

those particular moments seemeasier for people to latch onto, in terms ofhow to move forward. so just a thought. there will be plenty oftime for conversation as the day unfolds, so whydon't we take it at that and let all the panelistshave final comments, if they'd like, to thesequestions or anything else. colin, you want to startwith you down there? i just think it's importantto understand the region's

fragmentation. it's not a matter of, even inthe st. louis county suburbs, of relativelyequally-positioned postage stamps engaged in thissort of race to the bottom. but, in fact, you have verydiverse municipalities, some very wealthy,some very poor, all of which, or many of which,started with different motives, with different ideas ofhow they would develop and how they wouldgrab a tax base.

so we're going to avoidall commercial development, or we're going to bringon the big box retail. this changes over time withchanges in the state tax system. so at the time thesuburbs are developed, single family large lot zoningis your best fiscal ticket. after missouri's 1980hancock amendment, and which dampens propertyassessments, that's not enough, particularlyin settings like ferguson,

with very smallproperty footprints. so what you end up with isthese very differentially positioned municipalities,some of which are thriving, some of which are struggling. but they can generallyavoid each other in this sort of gameof musical chairs that goes on in the county. and to maggie's questionabout the property tax, yeah, i think thisis fundamental.

because slave states dampenedthe taxation of property, because slaves were property. so in missouri, unlike in mostother parts of the country, municipalities have never reliedvery much on property taxes. it's always been, like, 15, 20%. so a setting likeferguson, where they get 12% fromproperty taxes and 20% from municipal fines andforfeitures is not unusual. what do these states rely on?

they rely on deeplyaggressive sales taxes, and they rely heavily onintergovernmental revenues, which dry up. just to respond to justa couple of things. one is, it may be that thesuburbanization of poverty and the graying ofthe baby boomers may create a situation inwhich, increasingly, inner ring and second ring and third ringsuburban areas outside of st. louis begin to experiencemany of the same issues

that the central city has,maybe in different degrees. and there could be thepotential, out of that, of shared pain forreconsideration of their common interest inpotential regional, cooperative opportunities. memphis, which has sufferedmany of the same consequences in terms of fixed sizeof economy, fixed size population, and extraordinarilylow density development, now, it's beginningto see a very vibrant

regional cooperationmovement around planning open spaces, greenways,bike ways, et cetera. it was the low lying fruit thatthey could easily agree on. and as a result ofthat common ground, they're now having conversationsabout the more difficult issues, public schools,local job generation and economic justice. and who would havethought, in memphis? so that's exciting.

around the issue ofpreservation as a strategy, in east st. louis, one of thefirst really visionary plans was done by katherinedunham, the great dancer, choreographer,civil rights leader, with buckminster fuller,the old man river plant, putting the entire cityunder a geodesic dome. but the generator was goingto be the creative arts, and miss dunham spent the latterpart of her life, 30 years, trying to make thathappen in east st. louis.

really an extraordinarystory that also hasn't been givenits adequate attention. so those are just acouple of quick reactions. i think it's fascinating. i too am interested inthe question of scales, and scales which canbe actionable but also feel like there'ssome sort of change, and some sort ofchange over time or how you think aboutthings over time.

because i think, in asense, the fragmentation is, on the one hand, a resultof complex planning, but is also such a difficult--we don't really train ourselves to think aboutfragmentation, as designers and planners. we're much more comfortablewith things that are continuous and things that are largescale, and so, i think, also, just trying to hone ourtools to deal with something that is piecemeal.

because, more and more, weget that kind of condition. so i think that's somethingimportant to kind of tease out of these conversations. yeah, just a couple oflittle footnotes on one idea. by using the phrase"whiteness," i didn't mean to suggest thatall white people are evil, which i may or maynot actually believe. but the point wasactually to adjust you to a certain kindof class analysis,

where there are nonslaveholding white people whose claim to inclusion isa white supremacist claim, who are advancing thatin conflict with slaveholders. and that a mutedportion of this draft. i think the legacyas a slave state is really, really interesting. i mean, st. louis is the site ofthe first general emancipation in the united states,and that has partly to do with the radical traditionof germans in st. louis.

but what happens,then, is that there's no reconstruction in st. louis,reconstruction to the extent that it happens elsewhere, whichis, at moments, extraordinary, is largely rollback. but that neverhappens in st. louis. and st. louis isalso the heartland of what you could callliberal republicanism in the 1870s, which is thenotion that what we need to do is develop the economymore generally,

and not pay specific attentionto african american civil rights. so there's a reallycomplicated history that i think does serveas a foundation for this. the thing that iwant to finish with, though, is the scale of empire. we've talked quite a bit aboutcity scale, regional scale, state scale, a littlebit about national scale. st. louis is the heartlandof us imperialism

in the 19th century. it is the place. it's the western military post. all of the 19th century indianwars are run out of st. louis, including the seminolewar, which is in florida. so it is the designatedsite for us imperialism through the 19th century, andit becomes a defense city. and so, a lot ofwhat we talked about in relationship-- and if youtalk about the east st. louis

race riot, you can'ttalk about that without thinking aboutthe first world war. you can't talk aboutmill creek valley without referring tohiroshima flats, right? and so, there's a set of sortof enduring relationships that i think are worth thinkingabout, between the history of united states imperialism,the history of st. louis, and then the recalcitrantinequality and segregation within the city and the county.

well, just as a finalcomment, i would say, it was an amazing panel. i really love the way thatwe're thinking about-- well, the point that you can'tthink about the territory, territoriality, withoutthinking about the history. and the history writesitself, in terms of the patternsof territorially, including fragmentation. so one finalcomment i would add,

building on several of the priorcomments about scale, which is, it seems to me that,maybe we can be thinking, as the panels unfold today,not just about which scale to intervene in, but how dowe understand working across scales simultaneously? what does it take to be able towork across the fragmentation? is it a political movement? is it a kind ofhistorical identity? is it a project?

is it a vision? but how do we start movingbeyond the fragmentation that

has prevented someof the advances that we'd like tosee in st. louis? so i want to thankour amazing panelists, and invite you to stayfor the next panel.

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