Ttesting

by Wangũi Kamonji

An innovative urban development program is activating positive change in low-income neighborhoods across Mexico City. Despite winning the World Habitat Award in 2011, the city government's Programa Comunitario de Mejoramiento Barrial (Community Program for Neighborhood Improvement, or PCMB) is surprisingly little-known outside Mexico.

Socioeconomic inequality is deeply engrained in Mexico City's spatial structure, and neighborhood wealth generally corresponds with the quality of public services. The PCMB addresses this problem by funding revitalization projects in economically depressed areas. While living in one such area, El Pedregal de Santo Domingo, I noticed the program's impact on freshly painted buildings that were formerly concrete gray.



Inspired to learn more about the PCMB, I met with economist Manuel Luis Labra Illanes, a member of the Malacate Civic Association who has been actively involved in developing the program. Our conversation is transcribed below.

Can you tell us about how the PCMB came about?

The PCMB came out of the Programa de Mejoramiento de Vivienda (Home Improvement Program, or PMV), which the Mexico City government started in 2000. The PMV helped improve people's houses through loans repayable over eight years, but it didn't address public spaces and other shared resources. So we began planning the PCMB, which launched officially in 2007.

So the main difference between the two programs is that the PMV is for homes and the PCMB is for broader neighborhood projects?

Yes, and the PMV is a credit system while the PCMB is a public benefit program.

What are the core elements of the PCMB? How does it actually work?

The guiding principle is that neighborhood residents decide what to do, how to do it and who will do the work. They administer the government funding. That's what makes the program unique.

Another essential component is that it's a competition — community groups compete for available funds. In 2015, for example, there were 677 entries and roughly 200 projects funded.



Does the amount of funding vary each year?

The city government's Social Development Secretariat (SDS), which is responsible for the program, allocates funds that vary slightly from year to year and average around 100 million pesos. We carried out a study and found that, for a program of this kind in a city like ours, the base budget should be about 300 million pesos.

How many times can a neighborhood group secure funding?

Up to five. Applicants can receive a maximum of 500,000 pesos in the first year and a million pesos after that.

How do you evaluate applications, distribute funds and prevent irregularities?

There's a program committee made up of five civil servants and five civil society members who decide which applications to fund. The most economically disadvantaged neighborhoods take precedence.

The program committee releases funds to a neighborhood representative, and that person has to be on a project committee. Local assemblies elect the members of these committees. If there are no project committees in a given neighborhood, residents have to establish them in order to receive funding. Each project has an administrative committee that monitors project spending and other implementation requirements to prevent irregularities.

What specific issues do funded projects address?

There are three main focal points: public space, infrastructure and neighborhood image. Projects can, for example, establish open squares, community gardens and needed infrastructure. They can also attend to neglected parts of the urban fabric through maintenance and beautification.



Can you share your thoughts on the program's results so far?

About 1,000 projects have been funded, covering each of the neighborhoods most in need and improving government services after decades of neglect. We're especially proud of reaching communities like Tepito, which are known for severe blight and violence.

The Legislative Assembly of Mexico City recently approved a law through which the program budget is set each year and protected against rising inflation. This law also protects against threats to the PCMB's existence under new administrations. You see, there are politicians who don't like the program because grassroots administration makes it hard to control from above.

What's in store for the PCMB in coming years?

A few things. One is a problem with the current model: we have to figure out what happens when neighborhoods reach their funding limit. This is a discussion we're currently having.

We're also discussing ways to fund larger projects — libraries, cultural centers, schools — with broader impact on neighborhood identity. This has real potential for reversing cycles of marginality. Opportunities are often closed to people from high-poverty areas, but social stigma declines with visible signs of progress. So neighborhood improvement signifies many things. We'd like to fund 30 medium-to-large projects a year through the PCMB or create a parallel program for this purpose.

Another thing I'd like to see is a process for building relationships between neighborhoods with similar issues in different cities. There are nation-to-nation links and city-to-city links but I don't know if there are neighborhood-to-neighborhood links.

Do you have any advice for people who are interested in starting a similar program?

It's important to design the program with local communities instead of trying to impose a prefabricated model. The process has to be participatory, emerging through strong relationships with neighborhood residents.

The original vision may be different from the way it develops in practice, and adaptability is key. When we began, we didn't imagine that we'd be attending to basic sanitation infrastructure, because that's the work of the central government. We were very theoretical in our conception of public space, viewing it as a kind of panacea for all the city's problems. When I visited Colonia La Cruz, part of the Gustavo A. Madero borough, I was surprised to see how residents adapted the program to their infrastructural needs.



It's really important to begin where you know people are interested — where there are community leaders and responsible participants. If you start out in a place where residents are apathetic, or where there are extreme social conflicts, the chances of failing increase exponentially. Start with a promising location, ensure the effectiveness of the program, and then you can move to more challenging situations. If not, funders will lose confidence in the project. Social programs come under a lot of fire, so it's critical to build a reputation for successful work.

Wangũi Kamonji is a recent graduate of Wellesley College who researches urban socio-environmental issues in countries worldwide, including Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania and Vietnam. She blogs about her experience at Sustainability from the Roots.

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by Tony Roshan Samara

There is no small irony in the fact that the most notable achievement of affordable housing policy in the United States over the past two decades has been the systematic demolition of affordable housing stock. To understand this upside-down world of housing politics, at least as it collides with the lives of the urban poor, we have to understand the moral panic that has developed around the concept of concentrated poverty. Over time, this panic has hardened into a consensus among the urban policy elite. For its members, most if not all social ills associated with cities and poverty stem from too many poor people being gathered in one place.


Cochran Gardens in St. Louis, demolished 2008. Source: Wikimedia Commons

As a result, poverty deconcentration has become the public policy hammer that defines as a nail virtually every problem related to urban inequality. And nowhere has this hammer been wielded to more devastating effect than against public housing. Public housing has long served as a convenient boogey man in debates about racial segregation and persistent, concentrated poverty in low income communities of color. It has been evoked repeatedly by conservative and liberal administrations over the past twenty-five years as they raced to dismantle the welfare state, achieving the status of conventional wisdom: "You don't think concentrated poverty is a problem? Just look at public housing!" Importantly, influential strands of academic research have provided intellectual firepower for the policy.

As a highly racialized metaphor, "the projects" have a power to reshape the urban landscape that their residents can only dream about. Since the early 1990s, in city after city, the alleged failure of public housing as social policy facilitated demolition, even as the affordable housing situation for very low-income city residents grew ever more grim. Between 2000 and 2008 alone, over 99,000 public housing units were lost — a rate of 11,000 per year — primarily as a result of the HOPE VI program, a legacy of the first Clinton Administration. At the same time, the market forces that were nominally intended to make up for the destroyed housing units instead replaced the people they had once sheltered.

This scorched-earth policy did not go completely unnoticed. In 2009, congressional representatives Barney Frank and Maxine Waters called for a moratorium on the demolition of public housing, referring to the losses as "epic." One year later, after a special mission to the US, the United Nations rapporteur on the right to housing repeated the call. However, demolition continues and public housing projects have virtually disappeared in some cities. In Atlanta, for example, the last units were torn down in 2011.

While the loss of actual housing for very low-income residents is the most obvious outcome of demolition, policies promoting deconcentration, mobility and mixed-income developments have a much broader impact. Tearing down public housing and dispersing its residents, for example, has broken up entire communities and cleared the way for widespread gentrification in many inner-city areas.

After decades of research, the failure of these policies to alleviate poverty or even maintain existing levels of affordable housing is impossible to ignore. Yet the consensus around poverty concentration and, to a lesser extent, market solutions to urban poverty remains — apparently oblivious to the devastation for which it is responsible.

There is a growing backlash against these trends among urban scholars that dovetails with the growing awareness of just how bad inequality has become. As part of this response, I recently co-edited, along with Anita Sinha and Marnie Brady, a special issue of Cities: The International Journal of Urban Policy and Planning on affordable housing. The issue, in turn, is an effort to engage with a report on public housing released in 2010 by the Right to the City alliance. [Disclosure: Each of the editors works or has in the past worked closely with the alliance.]



The Right to the City report is unique because it involved residents of public housing from seven metropolitan regions in both the design and implementation of the research. The result is arguably the most comprehensive study we have of what public housing residents actually think about the places in which they live — or once lived. The picture that emerges challenges the widely circulated racist, sexist and classist stereotypes that underpin the myth of public housing as a policy failure.

Against the view that public housing is the social and spatial epitome of an urban pathology, the report presents the views of residents who believe that public housing does and can continue to work, that repair and upgrading are preferable to demolition and that demolition destroys communities along with homes. It also argues that, to the extent public housing has fallen into disrepair, this is the result of decades-long neglect and disinvestment.

The idea behind the special issue of Cities is to advance a debate about urban poverty and inequality that has grown stagnant, even as it continues to provide ideological cover for ineffective and destructive policy. While we hope it contributes to an effort to put deconcentration advocates on the defensive, our real interest is in simply leaving behind the distorted framework it offers and participating in the more vibrant intellectual and political work being done by researchers, community activists and others to address the intertwined challenges of displacement, poverty and political marginalization.

Debates over the outcomes of deconcentration and mobility programs are important but, in our view, largely settled. Our introduction to the special issue of Cities refers to many related studies for those interested in exploring them in detail. We see deconcentration policies, however well intentioned, as expressions of austerity politics that convert homes and communities into real estate, driving former residents into a hostile and discriminatory market to individually chase "opportunity." We contrast this market-based mobility approach with a discussion of public housing and the right to place.

Our focus is on what is lost when homes are torn down and people are displaced. This view is largely absent from elite discourse, which reduces complicated communities to the policy-ready concept of the concentrated poor. The relentless demonization of public housing and its residents over many decades has made it extremely difficult to even discuss the positive social, economic and political histories of public housing, much less its potential for the future as the affordable housing crisis grinds on. In the distorted view that has come to predominate, the role of public housing in anchoring social relations and political mobilization for low-income communities of color is erased.

Articles in the special issue are part of an ongoing effort to reorient the research on poverty deconcentration toward the important history of public housing as a site of empowerment for people of color, especially for women. There is a relatively small but growing interest in crucial support networks that residents build over the years as a result, in part, of spatial concentration. From a research and policy perspective, these networks represent important challenges to the racist and dehumanizing rhetoric of "highrise hell holes" and other tired metaphors. Yet the centrality of public housing to these networks, and the consequences of its destruction, have elicited barely a whisper from deconcentration advocates in a rush to level the projects.

Contributors to the issue also analyze how the ideology of concentrated poverty works to obscure the relationship between demolition and neoliberalism, particularly the partnership between market and state that has been so effective in clearing neighborhoods of existing residents in preparation for redevelopment. Authors here and elsewhere have argued that popular and academic discourses on concentrated poverty, opportunity and mobility are heirs of older "culture of poverty" arguments deployed by conservatives and liberals alike to dismantle social welfare policy. Today, critical studies of market fundamentalism and social inequality reveal the extent to which the spatial politics of contemporary cities represent what David Harvey calls "accumulation by dispossession."



In this context, individualism, choice and mobility become mechanisms of dispossession that hinge to a great extent on dismantling stubborn concentrations of poverty — or what some might call poor and resilient communities. Rather than attempting to strengthen these communities, dispersion policies scatter their members to other poor inner-city areas or to increasingly race- and class-diverse suburbs. Poverty and segregation are not reduced, but are rendered less visible from certain social and spatial vantage points.

In the end, a fresh view of public housing demolition and the deconcentration of poverty suggests that these policies do not create opportunities for the urban poor. Instead, they represent new cycles of accumulation and attempted management of resulting inequalities. From social and political perspectives, poverty deconcentration functions primarily as a form of disorganization, making it much more difficult for low-income people to collectively mobilize. Rather than increasing the upward mobility of marginalized communities, it decreases their ability to assert a right to place.

Tony Roshan Samara is an associate professor of sociology at George Mason University. He also chairs the Cities and Globalization Working Group and serves on the national steering committee of the Right to the City alliance. Tony welcomes correspondence via Twitter (@CGWG2) or email (samar495@gmail.com), and many of his publications can be downloaded free of charge at Academia.edu.

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by Joe Penny


Brixton market traders, part of a program sponsored by Lambeth Council. Source: Young Lambeth

Most people wouldn’t call public-service commissioning exciting, if they even know it exists. Commissioning is the process of coordinating financial support based on assessment of local needs, aspirations and assets. It includes processes of contracting, procurement and outsourcing. It sounds dry and remote from our daily lives, but this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Commissioning is at the heart of how decisions are made about the services we rely on throughout our lives: when we are ill, when we need legal advice, when we want to do something fun in our area. As outsourcing becomes the norm, commissioning has turned into a booming industry. Each year, some $130 billion is spent on outsourced public services — all through a commissioning process of some sort. In other words, if you care about public services and how taxpayer money is spent, you care about commissioning.

Commissioning has great potential as a vehicle for local democratic engagement in urban renewal. Yet it is too often managed by public-sector employees who are too far removed from the people they serve. It doesn’t have to be this way.

At the New Economics Foundation, we’ve been working with a young people’s service-commissioning team in London’s Lambeth district to change the way they allocate funds. The aim is to co-produce the commissioning process. This means working in partnership with people who use and provide local services to decide what the council should be trying to achieve with the dwindling money it has to spend.

An early example of co-producing commissioning involved $32,000 earmarked for a service aimed at young offenders. In the past, a group of professionals would have decided what service they thought would be most effective. They would have then written up a tender that specified what the service would look like, how many people would benefit and how results would be evaluated.

The problem with this process is that it doesn’t incorporate much input from the target population. As a result, it misses out on an invaluable source of expertise. It also runs a high risk of failure because, as countless examples show, when the so-called beneficiaries of a service are not involved in its design and implementation they are far less likely to find it useful.

We did things differently in Lambeth. The first stage involved recruiting a small group of young offenders and paying them in Brixton Pounds for their time and effort. They were responsible for defining outcomes and helping to draw up a service tender. They also interviewed short-listed bidders and decided to fund a talent show organized by local youth. This was not the commissioning manager’s first choice.

What does this tell us about the future of commissioning? At a time when more and more public money is channelled to private companies, and democratic accountability is at risk, co-producing commissioning opens up the potential for inclusive decision-making at the local level.

Of course, this is far from easy. When trust is low, it’s hard at first to get people involved. When people do take part, it’s difficult to manage conflicts and ensure that the process isn’t dominated by the most vocal participants. Despite inevitable challenges, the potential benefits are too great to be ignored.

At its best, co-producing commissioning engages target populations in fair allocation of public funds. It brings people together around a common goal, fostering a sense of collective ownership over local services. In short, it can help kickstart a more democratic approach to urban renewal.

Joe Penny is a researcher at the New Economics Foundation, but the views expressed here are his own. His interests include the production of urban space, security urbanism and the right to the city.

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by Svetlana Samsonova

My home town, Moscow, has earned its reputation for abandoned industrial zones, flashy business districts and traffic jams. Visitors are often surprised to discover that it is also a green city.


High-rise buildings near the Khimka River in Moscow.

As Peter Sigrist mentioned in his series on public green space in Moscow, there are 96 parks and 100 square kilometers of forest within the city's borders. He describes some of these territories and considers how political processes influenced them over time. Some are now protected based on their acknowledged ecological or cultural value. Having recently completed a research project on protected areas, I'd like to add a series of posts on their current state and future prospects. This is the first, offering a brief historical overview.

Moscow's protected areas: 1. Tushino Park, 2. Izmaylovo Park, 3. Tsaritsyno Park, 4. Pokrovskoe-Stresnevo Park, 5. Sparrow Hills Park, 6. Setun River Valley Wildlife Preserve, 7. Teply Stan Park, 8. Moskvoretsky Park, 9. Ostankino Park, 10. Petrovsko-Razumovsky Park, 11. Skhodnya River Valley in Kurkino, 12. Kuzminki-Lyublino Park, 13. Kosino Park, 14. Skhodnya River Valley in Molzhaninovo, 15. Troparevo Park, 16. Sokolniki Park, 17. Zelenogradsky Park, 18. Bitsa Park, 19. Losiny Ostrov Park, 20. Degunino Park.

Precursors of today's protected areas have existed since the 16th century, when some territories were placed under special protection by the royal family and nobility as hunting grounds and private estates. These landscapes usually included not only houses and outbuildings, but gardens, farmland, meadows and woods.


A Russian estate in the painting "Grandmother's Garden" (1878) by Vasily Dmitriyevich Polenov. Source: Tretyakov Gallery

Losiny Ostrov (Moose Island) and Izmaylovo Park were strictly guarded hunting grounds for Grand Princes and Tsars. Other protected areas have estates or country houses within their borders.

Historic estates in protected areas: 1. Brattsevo (16th century), 2. Tsaritsyno (16th century), 3. Pokrovskoe-Stresnevo (17th century), 4. Vorobyovo (15th century), 5. Vasilevskoye, also known as Mamonova Dacha (18th century), 6. Troyekurovo, (17th century), 7. Troitse-Golenischevo (17th century), 8. Spasskoye-na-Setuni (17th century), 9. Kuntsevo (17th century), 10. Ostankino (16th century), 11. Petrovsko-Razumovsky (18th century), 12. Vlakhernskoye-Kuzminki (18th century), 13. Lyublino (18th century), 14. Kosino (17th century), 15. Uzkoye (18th century), 16. Znamenskoye-Sadki (18th century), 17. Yasenevo (18th century).

Due to limits on development, these territories have remained relatively unchanged since the 16th century. They are thus increasingly rare and valuable in today's rapidly growing metropolis.


A picturesque ravine in Tsaritsyno Park. Source: Sergey Vershinin

The first Russian Forest Act was adopted in 1804, when Emperor Alexander I issued a statute "On the Improved Protection of Forests and the Establishment of Forest Management in Moscow." Losiny Ostrov became the first official protected area in Russia.


Urban moose in Losiny Ostrov Park. Source: Lintas Tour

The modern history of Moscow's protected areas is based largely on the 1935 General Plan, which established a greenbelt 10-15 kilometers wide around the city limits. It included forests, meadows, fields, farms, gardens and towns, with a total population less than 270,000. The plan also included a ring of parks around the city center: Sparrow Hills, Fili, Serebryany Bor, Izmaylovo, Timiryazevo, Pokrovskoe-Stresnevo, Ostankino and Sokolniki. Today these parks are all protected. Wedges of greenery were to connect them to the greenbelt, creating comfortable microclimates and improving public health. Between 1940 and 1980, construction of factories, residential areas and roads significantly reduced the amount of green space in and around Moscow.

In the late 1980s, there were mass protests to protect green areas against increasing construction and neglect. The main problem areas were Losiny Ostrov Park, Bitsa Park, Teply Stan Park, Brateevskaya floodplain, Kosino Park, Tushino Park and several river valleys. Such environmental protest movements had never happened before in Moscow, and successfully captured the attention of public officials. In 1989, the Ninth Congress of People's Deputies focused on urban environmental problems. They released a report on environmental degradation, calling for action to preserve urban green space. Goals for the use of Moscow parks changed dramatically: urban development and environmental protection were given equal status.



Growth of protected areas in Moscow between 1973 and 2020.

The Moscow Soviet of People's Deputies (Mossovet) decided to set up a system of protected areas, and the second (Bitsa Park) appeared in 1992. Since then, the network has increased substantially. In 2004, the municipal government approved a plan for the "Development and Management of Protected Areas in Moscow" with a list of existing and planned sites up to the year 2025.

There are now 20 protected areas in Moscow, which comprised 14.4 percent of the city's 154-square-kilometer area before the 2012 expansion. Can these territories survive in a densely populated megacity? In upcoming posts, I'll focus on the mysteries of these territories, with detailed information on specific sites.

Sveta Samsonova is a junior research fellow in the geography department at Moscow State University and former president of the European Geography Association for Students and Young Geographers.

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